China Miéville - Iron Council

It was as if he flew. He soared below them and his arms seemed to spread. Air pummelled him so he moved as if dancing or fighting, and he spun as he dwindled. He passed birds. His friends watched his flight with awe and a surprise elation, and turned away while he was seconds from the ground.

They went over swale and grass that grew drier as they went south. Rudewood receded. The wind was with them. Cutter heard Elsie whispering to Pomeroy, crying over Drey.

“We can’t stop now,” Pomeroy murmured to her. “I know, I know… but we can’t now.”

Three times they saw other balloons, miles away. Each time their pilot would look through his telescope and say whose ship it was. There were not so many of the aeronautic peddlers. They knew each other’s routes.

The man had demanded a lot of their money to take them to Myrshock, but when they had heard that the militia had come past Pigtown not long before, a hussar unit on altered mounts, they could not turn him down. “We’re coming the right way.” And travelling now not quickly but with a relentless pace, for the first time they felt something like hope.

“Hard to believe,” said Cutter, “that there’s a fucking war on.” No one answered. He knew his bile tired them. He watched patchworked land.

On the third morning in the air, while he was rubbing water into Fejh’s wind-chapped skin, Cutter bellowed and pointed to where, miles ahead, he saw the sea, and before it in a depression of wheat-brown grass, the dirigible moorings and minarets of Myrshock.

It was an ugly port. They were wary. This was not their territory.

The architecture looked thrown together, chance materials aggregated and surprised to find themselves a town. Old but without history. Where it was designed, its aesthetic was unsure-churches with cement facades mimicking antique curlicues, banks using slate in uncommon colours, achieving only vulgarity.

Myrshock was mixed. Human women and men lived beside cactacae, the thorned and brawny vegetable race, and garuda, bird-people freebooters from the Cymek over the water, who dappled the air as well as the streets. Vodyanoi in a canal ghetto.

The travellers ate street food by the seawall. There were ranks of foreign craft and Myrshock ships, steamers with factory towers, cogs, merchant ships with great bridles for their seawyrms. Unlike the river docks of their home this was a brine harbour, so there were no vodyanoi stevedores. Lounging against walls were the mountebanks and freelance scum of any port.

“We have to be careful,” Cutter said. “We need a Shankell-bound ship, and mostly that means cactus crew. You know what we have to do. We can’t face cactacae. We need a small ship, and small people.”

“There’ll be tramp steamers,” said Ihona. “Pirates, most of them…” She looked vaguely around her.

Cutter spasmed and was quite still. Someone spoke to him. That voice again, up close whispering into his ear. He was iced in place.

The voice said: “The Akif. Steaming south.”

The voice said: “Routine run, small crew. Useful damn cargo-sable antelopes, broken for riders. Your deposits are paid. You sail at ten tonight.”

Cutter stared at each passerby, each sailor, each waterfront thug. He saw no one mouthing words. His friends watched him, alarmed at his face.

“You know what to do. Go up the Dradscale. That’s the way the militia went. I checked.

“Cutter you know I could make you do this-you remember what happened in the Mendicans-but I want you to listen and do it because you should do it. We want the same thing, Cutter. I’ll see you on the other shore.”

The cold dissipated, and the voice was gone.

“What in hell’s wrong?” said Pomeroy. “What’s going on?”

When Cutter told them, they argued until they began to attract attention.

“Someone is playing with us,” said Pomeroy. “We don’t make it easier for them. We don’t get on that godsdamned boat, Cutter.” He clenched and unclenched his bulky fist. Elsie touched him nervously, tried to calm him.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Cutter said. The close-up voice had exhausted him. “Whoever it is, it ain’t militia. Someone from the Caucus? I don’t see how, or why. Some free agent? It was them who held off the fReemade: that backward horse-man got whispered, like I did. I don’t know what’s going on. You want to take another boat, I ain’t going to argue. But we best find one soon. And seems to me we might as well find this one, just to know.”

The Akif was a rusted thing, little more than a barge, with a single low deck and a captain pathetically grateful for their passage. He looked uncertain at Fejh, but smiled again when they mentioned the price-yes, already half-paid, he said, with the letter they had left for him.

It was perfect, and it decided them. Though Pomeroy raged against the decision, Cutter knew he would not desert them.

Someone’s watching us, thought Cutter. Someone who whispers. Someone who says they’re my friend.

The sea, then the desert, then miles of unmapped land. Can I do this?

Only a small sea. The man they searched for left trails, left people affected. Cutter could see his friends’ anxieties and did not blame them-their undertaking was enormous. But he believed they would find the man they followed.

He went with his friends to search for rumours of a clay-rider or militia hunters, before they sailed. They went to send a letter back to the city, to their Caucus contacts, saying they were en route, that they had found tracks.

The drifting man passed through arcane geography, between fulgurites and over alkaline pools. He stood still while he drifted, folding and unfolding his arms. He picked up speed, gliding full of wrongness.

A bird was his companion but it did not fly, only clung to his head. It opened its wings and let the air spread its feathers. There was a growth on it, something that mangled its outlines.

The man passed villages. What animals were there to see him howled.

At the stub-end of the hills, in a drying landscape, the drifting man neared an interruption. Something embedded in the dirt, a star of rust-red and ragged brown-black cloth. A dead man. Come from very high and ironed down into the land. A little blood had soaked into the ground and blackened. The meat was tendered and flattened into outlines.

The man who drifted above the earth and the bird who rode him paused above the dead. They looked down at him, and they looked up with unnatural perfect timing into the sky.

On the second day out, in the grey waves of the Meagre Sea, Cutter’s party hijacked the Akif. Pomeroy held a pistol at the captain’s head. The crew stared in disbelief. Elsie and Ihona raised their guns. Cutter watched Elsie’s hand shake. Fejh reared out of his water-barrel with a bow. The captain began to cry.

“We’re taking a diversion,” Cutter said. “It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale River. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.”

The crew of six men sulked and surrendered their weapons. They were all casuals on a daily rate: they had no solidarity with each other or their captain. They looked at Fejhechrillen hatefully, out of some prejudice.

Cutter tied the captain to the wheel, by the dehorned sables the Akif carried, and the travellers took turns to menace him while the mounts watched. His blubbering was embarrassing. The sun grew harsher. Their wake widened as if they unbuckled the water. Cutter watched Fejh suffer in the hot salt air.