Iron Council (11 page)

It reeked of burning hair. Smoke rose from the walls in a thionic gush. Muck and gore dripped from its cave mouth.

Milling at its base were fastnesses on wheels and tracks, mobile guns—a New Crobuzon force. Crews rode two nashorns, the captains in sunk seats behind the rhinos’ heads, gripping controls
sutured directly to ganglia. The militia cannon must be more powerful than they appeared to have blasted such wounds.

Militia infantry were heading in the travellers’ direction. They followed a line of refugees fleeing the remains of their chelonatown.

Drogon and Judah led them on through scrub, until a sharp
coughcoughcough
sounded, and there was screaming, and the echoes of bullets. They lay where they had thrown themselves until it was obvious that they were not targets, continued, staying low, to the base of a hill where they bunkered behind a marl barricade. Above them, out of the tree-cover, was a line of broken-down families. Not all were human. Some were behind fallen trunks or in hollows; some were running. Their shouts of fear were like the sounds of scraping.

At the hilltop, a corps of militia took positions. They were just discernible. They kneeled before motorguns; there was a monsoon of noise and bullets and many of the refugees fell.

Cutter watched in rage. More bullets pressed down the earth, and the dying twitched and tried to crawl away. A chelonaman raised something to his lips, and there was a thin noise, and way above there were cries and some of the militia stumbled at some thaumaturgy in the trumpet.

Drogon was watching the hilltop through his telescope. Judah turned to him in response to a whisper, and said, “She’s unpacking
what
?”

From the hilltop unfolded a shape of wire and dark leather, taller than a man. It became in a stutter of extending metal. Like a music stand, it unfurled many times. A humming of thaumaturgy made the air thin as a militia officer made shapes on the thing, and there was crackling, and the wire-and-hide moved.

It threw back a head with glass eyes, and its skin wings beat twice and it was airborne and careering down the hill toward the Galaggiites. Its limbs were not legs or arms but knifed extensions, insectan and agleam. They slid together with the sound of sharpening.

The ugly sculpture flew toward those cowering. Judah’s eyes were wide, and when he spoke he was choked with rage and contempt. “A prefab,” he said. “You use a damned
ready-made
?” He stepped up and onto the shallow hill, and Cutter stayed with him and aimed.

The militia’s gliding assassin passed over the wailing wounded and reached the trumpeter. He blew another thin note, but the thing had no life for him to disrupt. It rived him with its bayonets, and he screamed and bled out quickly.

Judah was growling. Cutter fired up the hill to protect him. Judah howled and stared not at the wired monstrosity but at the officer controlling it. The thing rose from the meat mess of its victim and beat its built wings. Judah puffed his chest like a pugilist.

No one fired. They watched—even the Galaggiites, astonished by this bizarre figure—while the cutting leather bird swept down on Judah, wings spread. Cutter fired and could not even tell if his bullet hit.

Judah picked up stones and dust. His growl grew louder and became a shout as the shadow rolled over him.

“On me?” His voice was splendid. “You use a golem on
me
?”

Like a child he threw his handful of charged dirt into the thing’s path. There was a stunning detonation of energy. The golem dropped instantly. It fell straight out of the sky, the momentum of its flight dissipated.

Judah stood over the collapsed metal, all its little borrowed life gone. For seconds there was no sound. Rage made Judah shake. He pointed up the hill.
“You use a golem on me?”

The motorgun swung toward him but there were rifle-shots and the gunman barked and died at Drogon’s hidden hand. Suddenly there were scores of bullets in the air, from the whispersmith, Pomeroy’s blunderbuss, Elsie and Cutter and the appalled militia.

Judah strode through the fusillade. He was bellowing but Cutter could no longer hear what he said, only ran to protect him. The New Crobuzon militia, yards off, were shouting and firing blindly down the hill. Judah Low reached a pile of Galaggi dead.

The somaturge shoved his hand among the cadavers and barked. There was a fermentation as the world’s energy was channelled, the moment bowed and swelled and spat out strangeness. And the corpse-pile stood in a new configuration, a golem of flesh still twitching as the nerves within it died.

It was a shambles of the recent dead, gory and dripping. It walked in the base shape of a human: five, six bodies pushed together without respect for their outlines. The golem’s legs were stiffening corpses, one inverted, its dead head become a foot, crushed and made more shapeless with every step; the trunk a coagulate of arms and bones; the arms more dead; the head more of the Galaggi dead; the whole aggregate stamping at terrible speed up the hill, leaving a trail of itself. Leaving screams from the vineyard workers who saw their lost lovers and children reanimated into this grotesquerie. It walked quickly with Judah behind it, energies spitting from him, connecting him to his monstrosity with an uncanny funiculus.

The militia were pinned by gunshot, and the charnel golem reached them. The thing shed matter as it crested the hill, and the New Crobuzon soldiers who emptied their rifles and motorguns into it bloodied and desecrated it further. But it lasted long enough to smother and punch them to death. It beat them down with blows from the dead men and women that made its fists.

When the hilltop was quiet and the last of the soldiers had fallen, the flesh golem collapsed. It was carcasses again by the time it hit the ground.

The militia dead wore ragged, guerrilla versions of their uniforms, adorned with ears and teeth and obscure symbols for how many dead they had taken. They still wore their masks, every one of them.

Two were still alive. One whom the trumpet had struck down was delirious, raging with occult fever the music weapon had given him; the other had taken Pomeroy’s shot through his hands, and he screamed at his fingerless red messes.

Drogon went through the corpses. It would not be long before the main force at the chelona sent scouts after this little death-squad.

Judah was tired. The golem he had made—so big, so quickly—had taken energy. He searched the dead captain-thaumaturge whose fold-up golem he had so easily deactivated. He took her accoutrements: batteries, chymical vials, and hexstones.

He would not meet Cutter’s eye.
He’s shamefaced,
Cutter thought.
Because of his little display.
Judah stalking up the hill like some vexed spirit, infecting the dead with a kind of life. Judah was a golemist of extraordinary puissance and expertise: since the Construct War had forced the rich to replace their steam-driven servants, his skills had made him wealthy. But Cutter had never seen Judah Low acknowledge his power or revel in it until that deadly walk behind the corpse-giant.

You use a golem on me?
There had been an ease to his rage. Now Judah Low was trying to fade.

The refugees watched. There were people from the chelona, men and women with skins of varied colours and clothes of astonishing designs. There were beetles the height of a child, walking upright. They stared with iridescent eyes, and their antennae swung toward Cutter. Their dead were cracked open and smeared with their ichor.

Among the humans there were a few dressed in the natural colours of hunters. They were taller than the chelonans, their skin a stark grey.

“Wineherds,” Cutter said.

“Twice refugees,” Elsie said. “Must have run from the militia to the shelltown, and then run again.”

A wineherd spoke, and he and the travellers and the chelona renegades went through what languages they knew and found only a few cognates. There were trails of dust in the bush as refugees made for the warm forest while Drogon searched and Judah sat. Behind them, the surviving militiamen made sobby sounds.

“We have to move,” said Elsie.

They went on with the last chelonans, a few of the silent insect people, two exile wineherds. They walked into the forest. Behind them, the New Crobuzon militiaman spasmed and raved in his hexed sickness.

It was nothing like Rudewood. These selva trees were tougher, draped with vines and succulent leaves, hanging with dark foreign fruits. There were alien animal sounds.

The lost chelonans were cowed, and looked with open-eyed hopelessness at Judah. They tried to stick to the power they had seen save them. They walked, though, with a clumsiness Cutter and his companions had shed, and that now angered them.

They could not be delayed, and they left the refugees behind, simply by pacing with their lean, wood-hard muscles. Cutter knew the militia would follow them, and that those they left would not do well if they were found. He was too tired to feel much guilt.

Without ever speaking, the insect people found their own forest paths and went. When the warm night came, only the two wineherds had kept up. They moved with hunters’ stamina. Finally, far enough from the exhausted chelonans they had shed, the travellers stopped. They made an odd community, the wineherds and Cutter’s party staring at each other as they chewed, each grouplet counting the other’s oddities, companionable and unspeaking.

For the first two days they heard munitions behind them. For days after that they heard nothing, though they were convinced they were still followed, and they kept their pace quick, and tried to hide their trails.

The wineherds accompanied them. They were named Behellua and Susullil. They often became melancholy, weeping half ritually, lamenting the loss of their wine-beasts. In the evenings they would talk lengthily in singsong by the fire, untroubled by their companions’ lack of understanding. Judah could only translate snips.

“It’s something about the rain,” he would say, “or thunder maybe, and . . . there’s a snake and a moon and bread.”

Elsie had spirits: the wineherds got drunk. They told a story in dance. At one point they performed a complex little double slap and turned to their audience with new faces—clannish thaumaturgy made them playfully monstrous, splayed their teeth like uncouth tusks. They gurned and pulled out their ears into batwings while the charm lasted.

The wineherds asked where they were going. Judah spoke in pidgin and pantomimed, told Cutter he had said they were looking for friends, for a myth, for something missing, for something they had to save, that would one day save them, for the Iron Council. The wineherds stared. Cutter did not know why they stayed. In the evenings, the wineherds and the travellers learned and taught a little of each other’s languages. Cutter watched Susullil close, and saw Susullil notice him.

It rained warmly each morning, as if the jungle sweated with them. They cut through lianas and the chaparral, and batted off mosquitoes and vampiric butterflies. At night they fell where they dropped their packs, dirty and exhausted and flecked with blood. Pomeroy and Elsie would smoke, and use their cigarillos to burn off leeches.

Their elevation rose and the forest changed, cooled gently and became montane. The canopy lowered. Ibises and sunbirds watched them. The wineherds cooked tree crabs. Behellua was nearly killed by a pangolin rex that whipped at him with its poisoned tongue. Rarely, when one of them became very tired, Drogon would ask permission, which all but Pomeroy gave, and would whisper them, telling them
walk
so they had to obey.

“Do you know where we’re going, Judah?”

Judah nodded to Cutter, conferred with Drogon, nodded again; but Cutter saw anxiety in him. He checked his compass and dampening maps.

Cutter felt a sudden and very great weariness, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him and wherever he went he dragged it after him. As if every new place he saw became infected by where he had been.

Pomeroy and Elsie renewed their lovemaking. Judah slept alone. Cutter listened, and saw Behellua and Susullil listening too, and then watched astonished as they chatted quietly in their wineland language and sitting up began offhandedly to masturbate in time, touching each other. They saw him watching and paused, and then he closed his eyes hurriedly as Susullil gestured to himself like someone offering a glass of wine.

In the morning Behellua was gone. Susullil tried to explain.

“Gone to tree town,” Judah said, after a long attempt. “There’s a township. Where those who’ve been displaced by the militia go. All the remnants from a clutch of villages, chelona, nomads from the bushveld. An outcast town in the forest. Where they found a god who can tell you anything you want to know. He says . . . Behellua’s gone, to tell them about . . . us.”

About you,
Cutter thought.
About what you done. To the militia. You’re coming to be a story. Even out here.

“So why’s he staying?” said Elsie.

“Judah done inspired him, didn’t he?” said Cutter quietly. “Inspires us all.” He did not speak unpleasantly.

Cutter was close behind Susullil. With night they came into a clearing, and had Susullil not pushed him aside, Cutter would have trudged into the fringe of mossy bones that telltaled a wake-tree. The tree’s willowy tendrils were feathered and bracken-thorned. He could not tell what animals had given their bones, but he could
see that some were recent, without lichen.

A man—someone strayed from the deep forest—sat in the tree’s lower branches. His body and head disappeared into thicket. His legs dangled, swinging and kicking randomly from the attentions of the tree digesting him. Susullil stepped into the reach of the tree and Cutter wailed.

The wake-tree reached down with tentacle boughs that bloomed open with motion that might, almost, be nothing but the random waving of foliage. The wineherd rolled below the grab and flicked his sickle. He somersaulted and crawled back out of the anemone shadow. The legs of the caught woodsman shuddered.

“Oh that’s dis
gus
ting,” Elsie said. Susullil was holding up the fruit that he had cut. It was small and browning, lumpy skinned. It took the rough shape of a human head. Of all the prey-fruit on the tree, Susullil had taken one of the humans.