Iron Council (2 page)

Pomeroy said it aloud: “I love him. It ain’t why I’m here, though.” He spoke in terse little bursts. “Times are too big for that. I’m here because of where he’s going, Cutter, because of what he’s after. And what’s coming after that. That’s why I’m here. Because
of what was in your message. Not because he’s gone—because of where he’s gone, and why. That’s worth everything.”

No one asked Cutter why he was there. When it came to
his turn, they looked down and said nothing while he studied the fire.

A war-bird woke them, wattle rippling, blaring a cock’s crow. They were stunned by their uncivil wakening. A hotchi on his mount watched them, threw them a dead forest fowl as they rose. He pointed eastward through the trees and disappeared in the green light.

They stumbled in the direction indicated through underbrush and the morning forest. Sunlight flecked them. It was warm spring, and Rudewood became dank and heated. Cutter’s clothes were sweat-heavy. He watched Fejh and Drey.

Fejh was stolid as he moved by kicks of his hind legs, by lurches. Drey kept pace, though it seemed impossible. He leaked through his leather and did not scatter the flies that came to taste him. Blooded and white, Drey looked like an old meat-cut. Cutter waited for him to show pain or fear, but Drey only murmured to himself, and Cutter was humbled.

The simplicity of the forest stupefied them. “Where we going?” someone said to Cutter.
Don’t ask me that.

In the evening they followed a lovely sound and found a burn overhung by ivy. They hallooed and drank from it like happy animals.

Fejh sat in it and it rilled where it hit him. When he swam, his lubberly motion became suddenly graceful. He brought up handfuls and moulded with vodyanoi watercræft: like dough the water kept the shapes he gave it, coarse figurines shaped like dogs. He put them on the grass, where over an hour they sagged like candles and ran into the earth.

The next morning Drey’s hurt was going bad. They waited when his fever made him pause, but they had to move. The treelife changed, was mongrel. They went by darkwood and oak, under banyan hirsute with ropy plaits that dangled and became roots.

Rudewood teemed. Birds and ape-things in the canopy spent the morning screaming. In a zone of dead, bleached trees, an ursine thing, unclear and engorged with changing shapes and colours, reeled out of the brush toward them. They screamed, except Pomeroy who fired into the creature’s chest. With a soft explosion it burst into scores of birds and hundreds of bottleglass flies, which circled them in the air and recongealed beyond them as the beast. It shuffled from them. Now they could see the feathers and wing cases that made up its pelt.

“I been in these woods before,” said Pomeroy. “I know what a throng-bear looks like.”

“We must be far enough now,” said Cutter, and they bore
westward while twilight came and left them behind. They walked
behind a hooded lantern hammered by moths. The barkscape swallowed the light.

After midnight, they passed through low shinnery and out of the forest.

And for three days they were in the Mendican Foothills, rock tors and drumlins flecked with trees. They walked the routes of long-gone glaciers. The city was only tens of miles away. Its canals almost reached them. Sometimes through saddles in the landscape they saw real mountains far west and north, of which these hills were only dregs.

They drank and cleaned in tarns. They were slowing, pulling Drey. He could not move his arm and he looked bled out. He would not complain. It was the first time Cutter had ever seen him brave.

There were insinuations of paths, and they followed them south through grass and flowers. Pomeroy and Elsie shot rock rabbits and roasted them, stuffed with herb-weeds.

“How we going to find him?” Fejh said. “Whole continent to search.”

“I know his route.”

“But Cutter, it’s a whole
continent
. . .”

“He’ll leave signs. Wherever he goes. He’ll leave a trail. You can’t not.”

No one spoke a while.

“How’d he know to leave?”

“He got a message. Some old contact is all I know.”

Cutter saw fences reclaimed by weather, where farms had once been. The foundations of homesteads in angles of stone. Rudewood was east, weald broken with outcrops of dolomite. Once, protruding from the leaves, there were the remnants of ancient industry, smokestacks or pistons.

On the sixth day, Fishday, the 17th of Chet 1805, they reached a village.

In Rudewood there was a muttering of displaced air below the
owl and monkey calls. It was not loud but the animals in its path looked up with the panic of prey. The empty way between trees, by overhangs of clay, was laced by the moon. The tree-limbs did not move.

Through the night shadows came a man. He wore a black-blue suit. His hands were in his pockets. Stems of moonlight touched
his polished shoes, which moved at head-height above the roots.
The man passed, his body poised, standing upright in the air. As
he came hanging by arcane suspension between the canopy and the dark forest floor the sound came with him, as if space were moaning at his violation.

He was expressionless. Something scuttled across him, in and out of the shadow, in the folds of his clothes. A monkey, clinging to him as if he were its mother. It was disfigured by something on its chest, a growth that twitched and tensed.

In the weak shine the man and his passenger entered the bowl where the hotchi came to fight. They hung over the arena. They looked at the militiamen dead, mottled with rot.

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.

CHAPTER TWO

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.

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.