China Miéville - Iron Council

“Them,” said Cutter’s ge’ain. “Militia. Is them.”

The tardy did not plan. They uprooted knotted trees of the prairie and made them bludgeons, then continued toward the murderers of their kin.

“Listen!” Cutter and Pomeroy and Elsie shouted, to persuade them of the sense in a strategy. “Listen, listen, listen.”

“Keep one alive,” said Cutter. “For Jabber’s sake let us talk to one,” but the tardy gave no sign that they heard or cared.

The veldt buckled; heat reverberated between stones like houses. Animals scattered at the ge’ain oncoming, loud as the fall of trees. The tardy stamped up a fold of land and became still. Cutter looked down over the militia.

There were more than a score, tiny figures in grey, and they had dogs, and something expressing the smoke: an ironclad tower as tall as the tardy pulled by Remade horses. Its summit was corbelled, and two men looked out from between battlements. It tore up the bushes and left ruined land and oil.

Very slowly the tardy put their passengers down. Cutter and his comrades checked their weapons.

“This is idiocy,” said Pomeroy. Some dusty bird of prey went over, sounding excitement. “Look at their firepower.”

“What do they care?” Cutter nodded at the tardy. “They only want revenge. It’s us who want more. I ain’t going to stand in the way of this lot getting what’s theirs. As if I could.” The tardy lumbered down the slope toward the militia. “We best get going.”

The companions spread out. They did not need to hide. The militia had seen the tardy, and could see nothing else. Cutter ran in the dust that the cactus-giants left.

A motorgun fired. Bullets purged from the rotating barrels. The militia were running their horses in panic. They had left the cactacae regions and thought themselves safe. Their bullets pattered like gravel against the tardy, with little bursts of sap, not even slowing them.

One ge’ain hurled her weapon like a trebuchet. It was a club in her hand, but as it spun it was visible again for what it was: a tree. It hit the minaret and bent its plating. Cutter lay on his belly and fired his repeater into the milling militia.

They fired; they showed impressive and stupid bravery, standing their ground so that a tardy could lift his leg high and stamp them down, crushing them and their mounts in a brutal two-

step. The cactus-man swept his huge sapper, cracked a man’s neck with the fringe of its roots.

The militia with rifles fell back behind those carrying rivebows and tanks of pyrotic gas. The tardy raised their hands. The fire-throwers made them dance back, their skins black and spitting.

The smallest ge’ain staggered as rivebow chakris of sharpened metal spun into his vegetable muscle and severed his arm. He held his left hand against the stump, kicked at the dismounted men and sent two dead or broken-boned; but his pain took him to his knees, and a marksman killed him with a chakri to his face.

Fejh’s arrows and the growl of Pomeroy’s blunderbuss uncovered them. The tower’s guns fingered at the copse where Fejh hid. Cutter shouted as the motorgun spun, its chains and gears loud as hammers, and a storm of bullets tattered the vegetation.

There were four tardy now in an ecstasy of murder, stamping and grabbing. The tower pitched and moved. Its motorgun took another ge’ain, a line of bullets perforating her hip to breast, so she staggered then hinged in gross unnatural movement along her new seam.

Pomeroy was standing. He was shouting and Cutter knew he was shouting Fejhechrillen’s name. Pomeroy rammed shot down and fired repeatedly. The dogs were frantic, snapping pointlessly with misshapen jaws.

From a long way off, there was a shot. Again, and a man fell from the top of the iron tower.

That voice spoke up close in Cutter’s ear. “Down. You’re seen.” Cutter dropped, and watched through gaps in the wiry grass and heard another of those far-off shots. A militiaman fell from his horse.

Cutter saw a captain-thaumaturge, watched veins and tendons score his skin while dark sparks dissipated from him. Cutter fired and missed, and it was the last bullet.

The thaumaturge shouted and his clothes smouldered, and a lance of milky energy spurted from the ground below the largest ge’ain ’s feet and punctured her right through, soared skyward and was gone. She flailed as her sap poured. Black flame immolated her. The thaumaturge stood bleeding from his eyes but triumphant, and he was shot down by the unseen marksman. The last two ge’ain were treading the militiamen to death.

One hugged the gun-spiked tower, wrestling it, twisting it violently. While his sibling crushed the last men and horses and mutant dogs, he shoved and grappled the column. It reared, grinding, overbalanced, panicking the horses that dragged it. It fell slowly, smashed and split, spilt men living and dead.

They ran, those who could, and the two tardy ran after them, stamping very much like grotesque children. A horseman was visible beyond the battleground, galloping toward them. Cutter heard his whisper again- “Keep the dogs alive, don’t let them kill the dogs for Jabber’s sake” -but it was not a command, he ignored it and was running, as his friends were, for the rough where Fejh had been. They found him spread across the green.

He went and went, the dangling man, he flew, and his stance was stiff and he sped through the air. Through the byways of the swampy estuary, between stubbish islands, past mangroves and through the arches of their vines, over banks of mulch and mud into karst, rock splints, a serrated landscape.

His companion was a bird, a hare, a jag-wasp the size of a dove, a rockling a fox a cactus-child, always with its tumour of mottlesome flesh moving upon it as it clung to the dangling man or kept pace with him, impossibly pushing whatever its body was from spire to spire of stone. The dangling man emerged into grassland. For a time the beast below him was an antelope that ran like none of its kind had ever run.

They went and went, they tore through the scorching scrubland in sped-up time. They went north through little trees and the burnt villages and onward north and their pace was up and whatever the animal was that followed the man or held to him or flew above him their speed increased and they hunted, watching signs in the earth and air that only they could see, narrowing in, following, coming after.

They gathered Fejh to bury. The strange dogs surrounded the militia bodies and howled for their masters.

The two tardy remaining stood with their legs locked, in slumber. Not all the militia were dead. There was a thin screaming, and fast breathing from those too broken to crawl away. There were no more than four or five, dying slowly but with all their energy.

As Cutter dug, the horseman came through the frantic dogs. The companions turned their backs on their dead friend, to face him.

He nodded at them, touching the front of his brimmed hat. He was the colour of the dust. His jerkin sun-bleached, his trousers of buck leather and the chaps smoking with dirt. He had a rifle below his shabrack. On each hip he wore a pepperpot revolver.

The man looked at them. He stared at Cutter, held his right hand cupped by his lips and muttered. Cutter heard him, close-up, as if the mouth was by his ear.

“Best hurry. And we’d best get one of the dogs.”

“Who are you?” Cutter said. The man looked to Pomeroy, Elsie, Cutter again, mouthing. When it was his turn Cutter heard: “Drogon.”

“A susurrator,” Pomeroy said with distrust, and Drogon turned to him and whispered something across the air. “Oh aye,” Pomeroy answered. “You can be damn sure of that.”