BooksBarbecue
Back Iron Council
Chapters (48)
  1. Prologue
  2. Part One: Trappings
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Part Two: Returns
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Part Three: Wine Land
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train
  19. Part Four: The Hainting
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Part Five: Retread
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Part Six: The Causus Race
  28. Chapter Twenty
  29. Chapter Twenty-One
  30. Chapter Twenty-Two
  31. Part Seven: Stain
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Part Eight: The Remarking
  35. Chapter Twenty-Five
  36. Chapter Twenty-Six
  37. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  38. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  39. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  40. Chapter Thirty
  41. Part Nine: Sound and Light
  42. Chapter Thirty-One
  43. Chapter Thirty-Two
  44. Chapter Thirty-Three
  45. Part Ten: The Monument
  46. Chapter Thirty-Four
  47. Chapter Thirty-Five
  48. RUNAGATE RAMPANT. LUNUARY 1806.

And then at last Judah comes down from the sudden hills and stands quiet like an idiot. At last he comes forward and now he stumbles. Judah goes to his knees. It is cold. What seasons have passed? Judah crawls forward and touches the rails.

It seems impossible that he can touch this metal, these iron sashes that wind around the weather and geography, that for all the blood and salt he spilled on them, the bones of all the men and women they press upon, are nothing, are a nothing, are made nothing by time and dust.

They are scavenged. Imperfect. Sections are gone. The tracks look out from the dirt and hide again. It has been a time since any train came this way.

Judah looks north along the cut. He remembers the carving of the roadbed. He is a long way north of the swamp.

When he goes back Judah will learn why the rails are still. How the money at last choked up in its sluices and died when the malfeasances grew so great that to ignore them would have shamed the state too far. That the money faltered when degraded news of the revolt, of the iron council, reached the railway’s backers. And how after panicked attempts to salvage the TRT through raised wages and a merciless expansion of Remaking the capital flight was so great that Transcontinental Railroad Trust was punctured, and the tracks became bones.

Soon, when he reaches the city again, Judah will learn that. For now he only smiles. He picks up his fallen pack, and as he stoops he strokes a rail as if it were a cat. He strokes it with affection, even with a melancholy.

He steps up and walks on over the dead rails. Around him the angles of the banks enclose him. He cannot see the wider land. This road tunnels his vision and leads him back to New Crobuzon. It has been waiting for him.

-New Crobuzon, he says, he whispers. It is the first time he has spoken for days. -New Crobuzon, I’ll always come back to you.

Not a lover’s promise, not a challenge, not resignation or pugnacity. Something of all of them.

He walks on. Helios of the iron council are in his pack. The truth, escape, a new life, a rolling democracy, Remade arcadia. -I’ll make you legend, he says and the birds listen, -and it will be true.

Judah walks on the iron road, back, to the city, back to the towers of New Crobuzon.

Part Four: The Hainting

Part Four: The Hainting

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Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

The crowd were chasing a maimed man. One of the soldiers or sailors from the Tesh War. They seemed to be on every street: they had welled up as if from under stones.