China Miéville - Iron Council

Cutter looked beyond her through the canebrake at the veldt. In the night light the tambotie trees and ironthorns were silhouetted like assassins. Baobabs stood thickset with their splintered crowns.

When Elsie stopped she looked defensive. She untied their quarry’s shirt from her neck.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It weren’t clear. I think maybe something that way.” She gestured at a distant rise. Cutter said nothing. She was pointing north-northeast, the way they knew they had to go. He had been relieved that Elsie had come, but he had always known she had only hedge-charms, no mirific strength. He did not know if she was sensing true emanations, and neither did she.

“We’ve got to go this way, anyway,” said Cutter. He meant it kindly-nothing’s lost even if you’re wrong-but Elsie would not look at him.

Days they rode through landscape that punished them with heat and plants like barbed wire. They were inexpert with the muscular mounts but made a pace they could not have done on foot. Their guns dipped in exhaustion. Fejh languished in a barrelful of the lake tethered between two sables. It was stagnant; it made him ill.

They were made to panic by gibbering from above. A brood of things came at them out of the sky, snapping and laughing. Cutter knew them from pictures: the glucliche, hyaena hunching under bone and leather batwings.

Pomeroy shot one and its sisters and brothers began to eat it before it reached the ground. The flock came together ravenous and cannibal, and the party got clear.

“Where’s your damn whisperer, Cutter?”

“Fuck you, Pomeroy. I find out, I’ll be sure to tell you.”

“Two already. Two comrades dead, Cutter. What are we doing ?” Cutter did not answer.

“How does he know where to go?” Elsie said. She was talking about their quarry.

“He always knew where it was, or thereabouts, he told me,” Cutter said. “He hinted he got messages from it. Said he heard from a contact in the city that they’re looking for the Council. He had to go, get there first.” Cutter had not brought the note, had been so hurt by its terse vagueness. “Showed me on a map once where he thought it was. I told you. That’s where we go.” As if it were just like that.

They reached the base of a steep rise at twilight, found a rivulet and drank from it with vast relief. Fejh wallowed. The humans left him to sleep in the water, and climbed the shelf in their way. At its ragged cliff-edge they saw across miles of flattened land, and there were lights the way they were heading. Three sets: the farthest a barely visible glinting, the closest perhaps two hours away.

“Elsie, Elsie,” Cutter said. “You did, you did feel something.”

Pomeroy was too heavy to take the steep routes down, and Elsie had not the strength. Only Cutter could descend. The others told him to wait, that they would find a way together the next day, but even knowing it was foolish to walk these hostile plains alone, at night, he could not hold back.

“Go on,” he said. “Look after Fejh. I’ll see you later.”

He was astonished by how glad he was to be alone. Time was stilled. Cutter walked through a ghostworld, the earth’s dream of its own grasslands.

There were no nightbirds calling, no glucliches, nothing but the dark vista like a painted background. Cutter was alone on a stage. He thought of dead Ihona. When at last the lights were close he could see a kraal of heavy houses. He walked into the village as brazen as if he were welcome.

It was empty. The windows were only holes. The big doorways gaped into silent interiors. Each of them was stripped.

The lights were clustered at junctions: head-sized globes of some gently burning lava, cool, and no brighter than a covered lamp. They hung without motion, dead still in the air. They muttered and their surfaces moiled: arcs of cold pyrosis flared inches from them. Tame night-suns. Nothing moved.

In the empty alleys he spoke to the man he followed. “Where are you then?” His voice was very careful.

When he went back to the cliff, Cutter saw a light on its edge, a lantern, that moved slowly. He knew it was not his companions’.

Elsie wanted to see the empty village, but Cutter was firm that they had no time, they had to see the other lights, to see if there was a trail. “You picked up something,” he reminded her. “We better see. We need some fucking guidance.”

Fejh was better, his water renewed, but he was still afraid. “Vodyanoi ain’t supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m going to die here, Cutter.”

Midmorning, Cutter looked back, pointed into the brightness. Someone, some speck figure, sat on horseback on the shelf they had reached the previous night. A woman or man in a wide-brimmed hat.

“We’re being followed. It’s got to be the whisperer.” Cutter waited for a mutter in his ear, but there was nothing. Throughout the day and in the early night the rider tracked them, coming no closer. It angered them, but they could do nothing.

The second village was like the first, Cutter thought, but he was wrong. The sables wheezed and slowed through deserted squares and under the sputtering light-globes and found a long wall all bullet-scarred, its mortar punctured and stained with sap. The travellers dismounted, stood in the cold remains of violence. In the township’s outlands Cutter saw tilled land; and then he felt the moment still, realised it was not a field but was disturbed in another way, turned over and charred. It was the topsoil on a grave. It was a mass grave.

Breaking the soil like the first shoots of a grotesque harvest were bones. They were abrupt and blacked by fire, fibrous like dense wood. The bones of cactus-people.

Cutter stood among the dead, above their moulding vegetable-flesh. Time came back. He felt it shudder.

Planted scarecrow in the middle was a degraded corpse. A human man. He was naked, slumped, upheld by spikes that pinned him to a tree. Javelins pierced him. One emerged point-first from his sternum. It had been forced up his anus and through him. His scrotum was torn off. There was a scab of blood on his throat. He was leathered by sun and insects worked on him.

The travellers stared like worshippers at their totem. When after many seconds Pomeroy moved he still looked carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to break the dead man’s gaze.

“Look,” he said. He swallowed. “All cactacae.” He poked at the earth, turned up bits of the dead. “And then there’s him. What in Jabber’s name happened here? The war ain’t reached here…”

Cutter looked at the corpse. It was not very bloody. Even between its legs there was only a little gore.

“He was already gone,” Cutter whispered. He was awed by the brutal tableau. “They done this to a dead man. After they buried the others.” Below the corpse’s chin was not a clot but blooded metal. Cutter looked away while he worked it from the dead man’s neck.

It was a tiny escutcheon. It was a badge of the New Crobuzon Militia.

The dangling man crossed the water. His hair and clothes gusted in his motion. The Meagre Sea chopped scant feet beneath him, and spume spattered his trousers.

A body like a bolt breached abruptly, a swordfish arcing up beside him, reaching high enough for him to touch at the keystone of its leap then curving down to stab back under with its body-spear. It kept up with him. It kept pace with his uncanny motion.

When it came up, when it vaulted into the sun, it caught the dangling man’s eye with its big sideways stare. Something dark clutched its dorsal fin. Something that shifted and dug under its fish’s skin.

They went off-map, toward the third set of lights. Beyond them was a wall of stone like spinal scales, through which they must find a way.