Iron Council (4 page)

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

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.

Cutter held the blood-rusted badge. He felt sick, knowing the militia were ahead of them.
We could be too late.

There were sinkholes full of water, though it was dirty stuff. Fejh replenished his barrel, but his skin was scarring. They shot little jackrabbits and slow birds. They passed antelopes, went cautiously by coveys of tusked hogs the size of horses.

Cutter felt as if the path they left was an infection in the land. At dawn on their third day out from the cruciform militiaman, they approached the last village. And as they came nearer the sun crested and they were washed in roseate light and something moved, that they had thought a rock spur or a thinning tree.

They cried out. Their mounts stumbled.

A giant came at them, a cactus figure far greater than they had seen before. Cactacae stood seven, eight feet tall, but this one was more than double that. It was like an elemental, something base and made of the land, the grassland walking.

It jerked on twisted hips, its vast legs and toeless stump-feet ricketed. It swayed as if it would fall. Its green skin was split and healed many times. Its spines were finger-long.

The massive cactus staggered at them, fast for all its palsied gait. It held a cudgel, a slab of tree. It raised it as it came, and from a face that hardly moved, it began to shout. It called words they did not understand, some variant of Sunglari, as it lurched murderously toward them.

“Wait, wait!” Everyone was shouting. Elsie pointed, her eyes bloodshot, and Cutter knew she was trying to reach its mind with her feeble charms.

The cactus came in unstable strides. Fejh fired an arrow that hit it with a moist drum-sound and remained dripping and painless in its side.

“Kill you,”
the cactus crooned in its feeble voice, in an ugly Ragamoll.
“Murder.”
It heaved its enormous weapon.

“It weren’t us!”
shouted Cutter. He threw the militia insignia in the cactus-giant’s path, and fired his repeater at the badge, making it dance and ring until all six barrels were empty. The cactus was still, its shillelagh paused. Cutter spat at the badge until his mouth was dry. “It weren’t us.”

He was something they had never seen. Cutter thought he must be Torqued, cancered by the bad energy of a cacotopic zone, but that was not right. In the last empty village, the vast cactus-man told them of himself. He was
ge’ain
—between them they rendered it “tardy.”

By arcane husbandry, cactacae of the veldt kept a few of their bulbs nurtured in a coma for months after they should have been born. While their siblings crawled squalling from the earth, the
ge’ain,
the tardy, slept on below in their chorions, growing. Their bodies distended as occult techniques kept them unborn. When
finally they woke and emerged they were mooncalf. They grew prodigal.

Their aberrance afflicted them. Their woody bones were bowed, their skins corticate and boiling with excrescence. Their augmented senses hurt. They were the wards, the fighters and lookouts for their homesteads. They were tabooed. Shunned and worshipped. They had no names.

The fingers of the tardy’s left hand were fused. He moved slowly with arthritic pain.

“We not Tesh,” he said. “Not our war, not our business. But them come anywise. Militia.”

They had come from the river, a mounted platoon with rivebows and motorguns. The cactacae had long heard stories from the north, where militia and Tesh legions skirmished. Exiles had told them of monstrous acts at militia hands, and the cactus villagers fled the snatch-squad.

The militia reached one village before it was emptied. Those cactacae had sheltered northern refugees full of carnage stories, and they had determined to fight first. They met the militia in a fearful band, with their clubs and flint machetes. There had been butchery. One militiaman body was left behind, to be punished by the
ge’ain
amid the ripped-up cactus dead.

“Two weeks gone they came. They hunt us after that,” the tardy said. “They bring Tesh war here now?” Cutter shook his head.

“It’s a fucking mess,” he said. “The militia we’re following—they ain’t after these poor bastards, they’re after our man. These cactacae’ve panicked because of what they’ve heard, and made themselves targets.

“Listen to me,” he said to the leviathan green man. “They who done this to your village, they’re looking for someone. They want to stop him before he can give a message.” He looked up into the big face. “More of them’ll come.”

“Tesh come too. To fight them. Fight us on both sides.”

“Yes,” said Cutter. His voice was flat. He waited a long time. “But if he’s to win . . . if he can get away, then the militia . . . maybe they’ll have other things to think on than this war. So maybe you want to help us. We have to stop them, before they stop him.”

With misshaped hands to his mouth the tardy gave a cry as base as animal pain. His lament rumbled over the grass. The animals of the hot night paused, and in the still there was an answer. Another cry, from miles off, that Cutter felt in his guts.

Again and again the tardy sounded, announcing himself, and over the hours of that night a little corps of the
ge’ain
came to
him on huge and painful steps. There were five, and they were various: some more than twenty feet tall, some barely half that, limbs broken and reset, unshapely. A company of the lame, the crippled strong.

The travellers were cowed. The tardy mourned together in their own language. “If you might help us,” Cutter told them humbly, “maybe we can stop the militia for good. And either way, it’ll mean a reckoning, and that can mean revenge.”

The tardy spent hours in a circle, talking with brooding sounds, reaching out to each other. Their motions were careful under the weight of their limbs.
Poor lost soldiers,
thought Cutter, though his awe remained.

At last the convenor of the parley said to him: “Them gone, one militia band. They gone north. Hunting. We know where.”

“That’s them,” said Cutter. “They’re looking for our man. They’re the ones we have to reach.”

The tardy plucked handfuls of their spines and lifted Cutter and his comrades. They carried them, easily. The deserted sables watched them go. The cactacae took mammoth strides, swayed across terrains, stepping over trees. Cutter felt close to the sun. He saw birds, even garuda.

The
ge’ain
spoke to them. The feathered figures circled when they passed, with a sound like billowing. They jabbered in severe avian voices. The
ge’ain
listened and crooned in reply.

“Militia ahead,” said Cutter’s mount.

They staggered, resting rarely, their legs locked in the cactus-manner. Once they stopped when the moon and its daughters were low. At the very edge of the savannah, west, there was light. A torch, a lantern moving.

“Who is he?” said Cutter’s tardy. “Man on horse. Follows you?”

“He’s there? Jabber . . . get to him! Quick. I need to know his game.”

The
ge’ain
careened in drunken speed, eating distance, and the light went out. “Gone,” the tardy said. A whisper sounded in Cutter’s ear, making him start.

“Don’t be a damn fool,”
the voice said.
“The cactus won’t find me. You’re wasting time. I’ll join you by and by.”

When they continued the way they had been going, the light came back, kept pace with them to the west.

After two nights, breaking only for brief rests or to sluice Fejh with what water they found, the
ge’ain
stopped. They pointed at a track of pulped greenery and ploughed-up landscape.

Over miles of dried grass, before greener hills, a haze was ris-ing, what Cutter thought was dust-smoke, then saw was mixed with darker grey. As if someone had smudged an oily finger on a window.

“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.