China Miéville - Iron Council

The little ape dangled from the man’s shoes, dropped to the corpses. Its adroit little fingers examined. It leapt back to the dangling legs and chittered.

They were as silent for a while as the rest of the night, the man knuckling his lips thoughtfully, turning in a sedate pirouette, the monkey on his shoulder looking into the dead-black forest. Then they were in motion again, between the trees with the fraught sound of their passing, through bracken torn days before. After they had gone, the animals of Rudewood came out again. But they were anxious, and remained so the rest of that night.

The village had no name. The farmers seemed to Cutter mean as well as poor. They took money for food with a bad grace. If they had healers they denied it. Cutter could do nothing but let Drey sleep.

“We have to get to Myrshock,” Cutter said. The villagers stared in ignorance, and he set his teeth. “It’s not the fucking moon,” he said.

“I can take you to the pig-town,” said one man at last. “We need butter and pork. Four days’ drive south.”

“Still gives us, what, four hundred miles to Myrshock, for Jabber’s sake,” said Ihona.

“We’ve no choice. And this pig place must be bigger, maybe they can get us farther. Why ain’t you got pigs here?”

The villagers glanced at each other.

“Raiders,” said one. “That’s how you can help,” said another. “Protect the cart with them guns. You can get us to pig-town. It’s a market. Traders from all over. They’ve airships, can help you.”

“Raiders?”

“Aye. Bandits. FReemade.”

Two scrawny horses pulled a wagon, whipped on by village men. Cutter and his companions sat in the cart, among thin vegetables and trinkets. Drey lay and sweated. His arm smelt very bad. The others held their weapons visible, uneasy and ostentatious.

The rig jarred along vague paths as the Mendicans gave way to grassland. For two days they went through sage and greenery, between boulders overhanging like canalside warehouses. Rock took sunset like a red tattoo.

They watched for air-corsairs. Fejh took brief visits to the waterways they passed.

“Too slow.” Cutter spoke to himself, but the others heard him. “Too slow, too slow, too godsdamn slow.”

“Show your guns,” said a driver suddenly. “Someone’s watching.” He indicated the low rises, copses on the stone. “If they come, shoot. Don’t wait. They’ll skin us if you leave them alive.”

Even Drey was awake. He held a repeating pistol in his good hand.

“Your gun shoots widest, Pomeroy,” said Cutter. “Be ready.”

And as he spoke both the drivers began to shout. “Now! Now! There!”

Cutter swung his pistol with dangerous imprecision, Pomeroy levelled his blunderbuss. A crossbow quarrel sang over their heads. A figure emerged from behind lichened buhrstone and Elsie shot him.

He was fReemade-a criminal Remade, reconfigured in the city’s punishment factories, escaped to the plains and Rohagi hills.

“You fuckers, ” he shouted in pain. “Godsdammit, you fuckers. ” They could see his Remaking-he had too many eyes. He slithered on the dust, leaving it bloody. “You fuckers. ”

A new voice. “Fire again and you die.” Figures stood all around them, raised bows and a few old rifles. “Who are you? You ain’t locals.” The speaker stepped forward on a table of stone. “Come on, you two. You know the rules. The toll. I’ll charge you a wagonload of-what is that stuff? A wagonload of crappy vegetables.”

The fReemade were ragged and variegated, their Remakings of steam-spitting iron and stolen animal flesh twitching like arcane tumours. Men and women with tusks or metal limbs, with tails, with gutta-percha pipework intestines dangling oil-black in the cave of bloodless open bellies.

Their boss walked with a laggard pace. At first Cutter thought him mounted on some eyeless mutant beast but then he saw that the man’s torso was stitched to a horse’s body, where the head would be. But, with the caprice and cruelty of the state’s biothaumaturges, the human trunk faced the horse’s tail, as if he sat upon a mount backward. His four horse’s legs picked their way in careful reverse, his tail switching.

“This is new,” he said. “You brought guns. This we ain’t had. I seen mercs. You ain’t mercs.”

“You won’t see anything ever again, you don’t piss off,” said Pomeroy. He aimed his big musket with amazing calm. “You could take us, but how many of you’ll go too?” All the party, even Drey, had a fReemade in their sights.

“What are you?” said the chief. “Who are you lot? What you doing?”

Pomeroy began to answer, some bluster, some fighting pomp, but something abrupt happened to Cutter. He heard a whispering. Utterly intimate, like lips breathing right into his ear, unnatural and compelling. With the words came cold. He shuddered. The voice said: “Tell the truth.”

Words came out of Cutter in a loud involuntary chant. “Ihona’s a loom worker. Drey’s a machinist. Elsie’s out of work. Big Pomeroy’s a clerk. Fejh is a docker. I’m a shop-man. We’re with the Caucus. We’re looking for my friend. And we’re looking for the Iron Council.”

His companions stared. “What in hell, man?” said Fejh, and Ihona: “What in Jabber’s name …?”

Cutter unclenched his teeth and shook his head. “I didn’t mean to,” he tried to tell them. “I heard something…”

“Well, well,” the bandit chief was saying. “You’ve a long way to go. Even if you come past us-” And then he broke off. He worked his jaw, then spoke rhythmically in a different, declamatory voice. “They can go. Let them pass. The Caucus is no enemy of ours.”

His troops stared at him. “Let them pass,” he said again. He waved at his fReemade, looking quite enraged. His men and women shouted in anger and disbelief, and for seconds looked as if they might ignore his order, but then they backed away and shouldered their weapons, cursing.

The fReemade chief watched the travellers as they continued, and they watched him back until their route took him out of sight. They did not see him move.

Cutter told his comrades of the whispered compulsion that had taken him. “Thaumaturgy,” said Elsie. “He must’ve hexed you, the boss-thief, gods know why.” Cutter shook his head.

“Didn’t you see how he looked?” he said. “When he let us go? That’s how I felt. He was glamoured too.”

When they came to the market town they found tinkers and traders and travelling entertainers. Between dry earth buildings were battered and half-flaccid gas balloons.

On Dustday, as they ascended over the steppes of grass, stones and flowers, Drey died. He had seemed to be mending, had been awake in the town, had even haggled with the air-merchant. But in the night his arm poisoned him, and though he had been alive when they went up, he was dead not long after.

The nomad tradesman tended the gondola’s droning motor, embarrassed by his passengers’ misery. Elsie held Drey’s cooling body. At last with the sun high, she extemporised a service and they kissed their dead friend and entrusted Drey to gods with the faint unease of freethinkers.

Elsie remembered the air-burials she had heard of among northern tribes. Women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skyward through the cold air and clouds, to drift in airstreams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt-lands was a catacomb, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the aimless, frost-mummified dead.

They gave Drey an air-burial of another kind, of necessity, hauling him with tenderness to the edge of the carriage, bracing him between the ropes and letting him go.