Iron Council
China Miéville
Language: English
Pages: 576
ISBN: 0345458427
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later.
It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.
In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope.
In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . .
The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
Bodkin. Why him?” Curdin tapped his paper against his thigh. “I’ll tell you Miev_0345464028_2p_all_r1.qxd 5/18/04 8:23 Page 77 IRON COUNCIL 77 why, lad—whether you know it or not, he’s the one scares the powers. Because he was right. About factions, about war, about the plurality. And Bill and Poppy and Neckling Verdant, and them others—Toro, Ori, Toro and his band and all, even Jack Half-aPrayer—good people, chaverim, but on stuff like this their strategy’s for shit. Ben was right, and
miles away, from the crocodile double-city called The Brothers. And then the piracy had begun, hard, and New Crobuzon came slowly to understand that it was being attacked. The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased coming to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour that through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war.
did not know anyone. Spiral prattled to himself. Ori bought breakfast in a square below the Flyside Militia Tower, with the skyrails hundreds of feet overhead linking the tower to the Spike in the city’s heart. Spiral Jacobs ate for a long time without speaking. “Too much yammering, not enough hammering, Spiral. Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue. “—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist. “Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.
vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons. The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders. The Hiddentowners
longhaired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails. Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts,