Bas-Lang 03: Iron Council by Miéville China

Author:Miéville, China [Miéville, China]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Steampunk, Fantasty, Second World Fantasy, Fiction, Dystopia
ISBN: 9780345478542
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2004-07-27T03:00:00+00:00

But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.

—They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. —Some of them was still on the other side.

Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.

Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.

The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.

They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.

The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. —We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. —Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.

They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.

One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.

They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.

—You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. —Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.

—It isn’t finished yet.

—No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle—I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.

—But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?

—I don’t know.

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