The dogs still screamed and circled. Drogon corralled three of the weird-skulled things, herding them with his big horse. He calmed the frantic animals with inaudible commands.
“Why’s he helping?” Elsie said. “What does he want?”
Pomeroy was for killing him, or at least constraining him and leaving him behind.
“Dammit, I don’t know,” said Cutter. “Says he heard what was happening. That he’s out for the Council, too. I don’t know. But look what he’s done—he could’ve killed us by now. He saved my life—took out the man who’d sighted me. You saw how he used them guns. And you said yourself, Pom, he’s a thaumaturge.”
“He’s a susurrator,” said Pomeroy with scorn. “He’s just a whispersmith.”
“I been whispered to by him, brother. Remember? This ain’t a little susurrus to make a dog lie down. He sounded across miles, put me and that fReemade highwayman in thrall.”
It was a petty field, subvocalurgy: the science of furtive suggestions, a rude footpad technique. But this man had made it something more.
The dogs were Remade. The olfactory centres of their brains had been hugely enlarged. Their crania were doughy and distended, as if their unshaped brains bubbled over. Their eyes were tiny, and at the end of their jaws their nostrils were dilated and set in flared and mobile flesh like pigs’. Their wrinkled snouts wore wires and they carried batteries, making thaumaturgic circuits. Each had a rag in its collar.
“Oh Jabber, those are his damn clothes,” said Cutter.
“These’ll track across continents,” whispered Drogon. “That’s how they were following him.”
They did not kill the militia left alive, nor spit in their faces nor give them water, only left them stone ignored. Drogon concentrated on the dogs. He was whispering, and they were calming. They were eager to trust him.
“Them dogs is ours,” Pomeroy said. Drogon shrugged and held out the leash, and the distorted animal looked at Pomeroy and showed its teeth. “What’s your story?” Pomeroy said.
Drogon pointed at Elsie, whispered, and she walked toward him. He took her hands and put them on his forehead, and she went into her hexing state. He kept speaking, enunciating something only she could hear.
When he was done she opened her eyes. “He told me to read him. He told me to verity-gauge. And he said, ‘I want what you want, I want to find the Council.’ He said he’s from the city, but he sure isn’t bloody Parliament, and he isn’t militia. Says he’s a vaquero, a horseman. Lived nomad for twenty years.
“He says there are too many stories for the Council not to be real. And it’s precious to wilderness-men. Iron Council. Like a promised place. So when he got word what was happening—when he heard who’d gone to protect it—he had to come after him to help. To find it. He followed us. Till he was sure he could trust us.”
“You ain’t a truesayer,” Pomeroy said. “This don’t mean shit.”
“No I ain’t, but I’ve got something.” Elsie glowered. “I can feel. I was verity-gauging.”
The whispersmith replaced his hat and turned back to the dogs, subvocalising till they skittered for his affection among the bodies of their handlers.
“She ain’t got the puissance to be sure, Cutter,” Pomeroy said.
Why am I supposed to fucking decide? thought Cutter.
Drogon held the cloths to the dogs’ absurd noses, and the animals slobbered and wheeled north. “We have to go.” Drogon spoke to Cutter. “We’re still being followed. We’re close, now, we’re close.”
Elsie tried to thank the tardy, with no reaction. “You have to go,” she shouted. “Handlingers are coming.” But the ge’ain did not answer. They stood among their revenge and waited for nothing. The humans could only shout their thanks and leave the plant-
giants in stupor. Cutter saluted Fejh’s grave.
The dogs fanned on their leads ahead of Drogon, sniffing urgently. Sometimes he let them career through the hard vegetation, their outsized heads swinging. While Cutter and the others continued their trudging, he would ride out.
He whispered to the travellers each in turn, from miles ahead. He let the dogs run, their leads trailing behind them, and when they went too far he would whisper commands and they would come back.
“Keep walking,” he told Cutter. “Handlinger’s behind you.”
Handlingers. The malefic hands of history. Five-fingered parasites, come out now to the light.
Up through a col in the hills. Cutter thought of Fejh slowly baking in the earth. He looked at the mark they had left, the dead and nearly dead, the two tardy standing like trees, the ruins of the skirmish like a soot stain.
The land before them was more wooded, the ground become peaked, slopes of scree gripped in the roots of olives. Drogon’s dust scattered into a low cloud. He was ahead, his path visible like a seam. There was sage, and dog-rose. Each of Cutter’s steps dispersed a gathering of cicadas.
It was not the only moment of the journey when time clotted, and Cutter was stuck fast. A day was only an instant drawn out. Motion itself—the putter of insects, the appearance-disappearance of a tiny rodent—was an endless repetition of the same.
They did not sleep long that night for the sounding of the bloodhounds and Drogon’s whispers from his camp ahead. They were weighed down by weapons they had taken from the militia, and they left a trail of boot-knives and heavy rifles.
Once they saw a garuda way above them, stretched out like someone on a cross. They saw her dip, lurch earthward, veer toward Drogon, then break and ascend.
“He tried to whisper her,” Cutter said. “But she got out of it.” He was pleased.
Their rhythms were not the day’s: they slept for minutes while the sun was up, as well as at dusk and night. If the whispersmith slept it was in the saddle. On the sierra they passed smudged pebblebeasts, something between giraffes and gorillas, knuckle-walking and eating low leaves.
“You have to speed,” the whispersmith told Cutter. “The handlinger’s coming.”
By moonlight they followed Drogon and their quarry toward a hill-line topped by plateau. They saw dark, a corridor through the butte. They would reach it in daylight, and Cutter could imagine the relief it would be, the punishing hot sky just a band seething above lichened rock walls and stone stiles.
Elsie said: “Something’s coming.” She looked gaunt. She looked horrified. “Something’s coming from the south.” There was a disturbance behind many waves of landscape, beyond sight. Cutter knew that Elsie was a weak witch, but she felt something.
The east was weakly shining, and in the first light Cutter saw the dust of Drogon’s horse below the mesa. The whispersmith was almost at the entrance to the chine.
“Follow the way through,” Drogon said to Cutter. “Quick. The handlinger’s closing, but you can make it here if you keep on. The dogs’re howling. They can smell our man, he’s close, through here. Make it here, maybe we can . . . maybe we can face the handlinger, an ambush.” A weak plan.
Drogon must have turned then and hauled behind the pack as they bayed and ran into the split rock path. Cutter thought of the overhangs they would pass and saw with clarity what he had seen in the room of his runaway friend, that had sent him here. Cutter saw the tripwire and the men dead and stoved in, lying under anthropoid outlines in random materials.
“Godsdammit. Get back! Get back!”
He shouted as loud as he ever had. Pomeroy and Elsie staggered; they had been sleeping as they walked. Cutter made his hands a trumpet and roared again.
“Stop! Stop!” He fired his repeater into the air.
Drogon was in his ear. “What you doing? The handlinger’ll hear you . . .” But Cutter was speaking, and lurching on exhausted legs. “Stop stop stop!” he shouted. “Don’t go in, don’t go in. It’s a trap.”
Dust came toward him and reconfigured as if moulded by the growing heat, and became a man on a horse. Drogon was riding back. Cutter shouted.
“You can’t go in,” he said.
“It’s a trap. It’s a golem trap.”
Drogon rode around them as if they were steers, and when they buckled he would whisper to them, to their underbrains, and they could only obey. “Run,” he whispered, and they were helpless not to.
By the raised plain were slippy scree paths, so they held onto boscage while they climbed toward the dark. Drogon took his horse at speed along a route that looked impossible. The dogs, tied by the crack’s entrance, pulled, imbecilic with their porcine eyes and bared teeth. They were in agony to enter, to reach what they could smell.
“He knows,” Cutter said. He leaned against his knees to cough up the stuff of the path. “He knows they’re coming for him.”
“Handlinger,” said Drogon. A fleck at the edge of the plain. “We have to go.”
Cutter said: “He knows they’re coming and he’s not tried to hide his scent. He thinks it’s the militia after him, and he’s funnelled them here. It’s a trap. We can’t go in there. We have to go over. He’ll be on the other side, waiting.”
They did not debate long, with the handlinger curdling the air as it approached. The dogs bayed and Drogon shot them dead inside the tunnel. The others followed him up a steep root-ladder to the rocktop plateau. Drogon whispered to them “Climb,” even suspended as he was himself, and they found their footing and their grip.
Drogon led them by the edge of the crack. They saw his horse and the carnage of dog-flesh below them. He whispered to the horse, and it snorted and turned as if to go through the conduit.
“What you doing?” said Cutter. “If you don’t keep it still I’ll shoot it, I swear. We can’t risk it triggering anything.” There was an instant when it seemed the whispersmith might fight, but he turned and ran again, and the horse was still.
Cutter looked back and cried out. What followed them, dangling, had the shape of a man. It carried a burden. It was scant miles off, arrowing with grim unnatural motion toward the wall and the shaft.
On the other side they looked down across sierras, a slowly rising landscape. In the full sun of dawn Cutter saw runt trees.
“We have to wait until that bastard thing’s gone,” said Pomeroy.
“We can’t,” Drogon said to Cutter and Pomeroy in turn. “It’s not tracking your friend, it’s tracking us. By our mind-spoor. We have to get beyond. Turn and fight it.”
“Fight it?” Pomeroy said. “It’s a handlinger.”
“It’ll be all right,” Cutter said. He felt a great and sudden conviction. “It’ll be taken care of.”
It was he, not Drogon, who found a way down. One by one they descended, the whispersmith last. “Damn handlinger’s so close,” he said to Cutter. “He’s by the entrance, he’s seen the dogs, he’s going in.”
Cutter looked around them. Come see, he thought. Come look at your trap. He ran toward the tunnel exit. “What you doing?” his comrades shouted. “Cutter get back!”
“Stop,” the whispersmith said, and Cutter had to stop. He screamed in anger.
“Let me go. I have to check something,” he said. His feet were rooted. “Godsdammit, let me fucking go.”
The whispersmith set him free. He stumbled up to the breach. With terror and care he came closer to the opening strewn with stone debris, the trash of boulders. He leaned in. He said, “Come help me. Help me find it.”
There was a sound. He could hear air moving. An exhalation from the stone.
“It’s coming,” the whispersmith said. Drogon did not move, nor did Pomeroy or Elsie; they only watched Cutter as if they had forsaken any idea of escape.
“Come help me,” Cutter said, and peered into the dim. The crooning of what approached buckled him.
He saw a glistening of light. A wire taut across the threshold, extending into piled-up rocks at either side, tethered to batteries and engines Cutter knew were hidden within.
“I found it,” he shouted.
Cutter looked up and heard the dismal howling. Leaves and shreds of moss were pushed through the cleft. The noise of the handlinger was very bad. In the fissure Cutter saw swirls of leafmould gust. He could hear staccato, a snaredrum beating and a horse’s exhalations. He slid back to his companions. “Be ready to run,” he said. “Be ready to fucking run.”
It came. Loud. A horse galloped for them. Its legs moved with such mutant rapidity that they sounded like a company. Drogon’s mount. It tore itself faster than any horse had ever run, over jags and unstable ground that turned its ankles and splintered its hoofs but it ran on through these injuries, and sweat and blood from its abrasions streaked its body. Something clamped to it. A mottlesome thing grasping its neck, a stub-tail growing maggotlike and nosing into horse-flesh.
Behind it a man emerged. A man. He stood in the air, his arms folded; he guttered toward them at dreadful speed. He saw them. He angled down, his body motionless. They began to fire, and the man came at them so the tips of his toes bumped on the rock.
Cutter stood and fired and fell backward and slid on shale. They were all firing. The whispersmith had his feet apart and sent off rounds like an expert, a gun in each hand, Pomeroy and Elsie shot wildly, and their lead hit; they saw blood burst from the horse and the impassive man, but nothing slowed them.
The dangling man opened his mouth and spat fire. The searing breath licked the wire and made it glow, so there was an instant, a fragment of a second when the handlingers saw the metal, and their momentum took them toward it and man’s mouth and horse’s opened in alarm but they could not stop. They breached it, and came into the sun.
Rocks unfolded. The rocks turned to them. Coils unwound and sent thaumaturgic current through circuits, a stutter of valves, and a mass of pent-up energy released and did what it had been hair-trigger-primed to do, which was to make a golem.
It made with what was around it. The substance of the gap. All the matter in that puissant field was charged instantly into motion. The rocks unfolded and seemed always to have been shaped vaguely like a human, recumbent, twenty feet high, these slopes of stone-shard an arm and these brittle dried-up bushes another, and these great boulders a paunch with rock legs below and a head of baked earth.
The golem was crude and instructed with murderous simplicity. Moving with assassin speed it reached arms that weighed many tons and held the handlingers. They tried to face it. It took only minute beats of time for the golem to drive stone into the animal and break its neck, crushing the handlinger, the hand-parasite squirming in the horse’s mane.
The man was quicker. He spat fire that billowed without effect over the golem’s face. With impossible strength the man wrenched at the arm of coagulated stone and dislocated it, so the golem moved clumsily. But its grip held. Even with its arm falling off in grots, the golem pulled the dangling man down, gripped his legs with one pebbled hand and his head with another and twisted him apart.
As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse.
The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit.
“Get away,” Cutter said. “It wants another host.”
Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with arachnid gait.
They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.
It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.
“Dextrier,” the whispersmith said to Cutter. “Warrior caste.”
There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned
and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.
The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.
Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”
part two
RETURNS
CHAPTER SIX
A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.
New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.
What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.
In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.
Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.
Iron Council Page 5