Iron Council

CHAPTER ONE

A man runs. Pushes through thin bark-and-leaf walls, through the purposeless rooms of Rudewood. The trees crowd him.

This far in the forest there are aboriginal noises. The canopy rocks. The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun. He is trying to follow a trail.

Just before dark he found his place. Dim hotchi paths led him to a basin ringed by roots and stone-packed soil. Trees gave out. The earth was tramped down and stained with scorching and blood. The man spread out his pack and blanket, a few books and clothes. He laid down something well-wrapped and heavy among loam and centipedes.

Rudewood was cold. The man built a fire, and with it so close the darkness shut him quite out, but he stared into it as if he might see something emergent. Things came close. There were constant bits of sound like the bronchial call of a nightbird or the breath and shucking of some unseen predator. The man was wary. He had pistol and rifle, and one at least was always in his hand.

By flamelight he saw hours pass. Sleep took him and led him away again in little gusts. Each time he woke he breathed as if coming out of water. He was stricken. Sadness and anger went across his face.

“I’ll come find you,” he said.

He did not notice the moment of dawn, only that time skidded again and he could see the edges of the clearing. He moved like he was made of twigs, as if he had stored up the night’s damp cold. Chewing on dry meat, he listened to the forest’s shuffling and paced the dirt depression.

When finally he heard voices he flattened against the bank and looked out between the trunks. Three people approached on the paths of leaf-mould and forest debris. The man watched them, his rifle steadied. When they trudged into thicker shanks of light, he saw them clearly and let his rifle fall.

“Here,” he shouted. They dropped foolishly and looked for him. He raised his hand above the earth rise.

They were a woman and two men, dressed in clothes more ill-suited to Rudewood than his own. They stood before him in the arena and smiled. “Cutter.” They gripped arms and slapped his back.

“I heard you for yards. What if you was followed? Who else is coming?”

They did not know. “We got your message,” the smaller man said. He spoke fast and looked about him. “I went and seen. We were arguing. The others were saying, you know, we should stay. You know what they said.”

“Yeah, Drey. Said I’m mad.”

“Not you. ”

They did not look at him. The woman sat, her skirt filling with air. She was breathing fast with anxiety. She bit her nails.

“Thank you. For coming.” They nodded or shook Cutter’s gratitude off: it sounded strange to him, and he was sure to them too. He tried not to make it sound like his sardonic norm. “It means a lot.”

They waited in the sunken ground, scratched motifs in the earth or carved figures from dead wood. There was too much to say.

“So they told you not to come?”

The woman, Elsie, told him no, not so much, not in those words, but the Caucus had been dismissive of Cutter’s call. She looked up at him and down quickly as she spoke. He nodded, and did not criticise.

“Are you sure about this?” he said, and would not accept their desultory nods. “Godsdammit are you sure? Turn your back on the Caucus? You ready to do that? For him? It’s a long way we’ve got to go.”

“We already come miles in Rudewood,” said Pomeroy.

“There’s hundreds more. Hundreds. It’ll be bastard hard. A long time. I can’t swear we’ll come back.”

I can’t swear we’ll come back.

Pomeroy said, “Only tell me again your message was true. Tell me again he’s gone, and where he’s gone and what for. Tell me that’s true.” The big man glowered and waited, and at Cutter’s brief nod and closed eyes, he said, “Well then.”

Others arrived then. First another woman, Ihona; and then as they welcomed her they heard stick-litter being destroyed in heavy leaps, and a vodyanoi came through the brush. He squatted in the froggish way of his race and raised webbed hands. When he jumped from the bank, his body-head and trunk all one fat sac-rippled with impact. Fejhechrillen was besmirched and tired, his motion ill-suited to woodland.

They were anxious, not knowing how long they should wait, if any others would come. Cutter kept asking how they had heard his message. He made them unhappy. They did not want to consider their decision to join him: they knew there were many who would think it a betrayal.

“He’ll be grateful,” Cutter said. “He’s a funny bugger and might be he’ll not show it, but this’ll mean a lot, to me and to him.”

After silence Elsie said: “You don’t know that. He didn’t ask us, Cutter. He just got some message, you said. He might be angry that we’ve come.”

Cutter could not tell her she was wrong. Instead he said: “I don’t see you leaving, though. We’re here for us, maybe, as well as for him.”

He began to tell them what might be ahead, emphasising dangers. It seemed as if he wanted to dissuade them though they knew he did not. Drey argued with him in a rapid and nervy voice. He assured Cutter they understood. Cutter saw him persuading himself, and was silent. Drey said repeatedly that his mind was made up.

“We best move,” said Elsie, when noon went. “We can’t wait forever. Anyone else is coming, they’ve obviously got lost. They’ll have to go back to the Caucus, do what’s needed in the city.” Someone gave a little cry and the company turned.

At the hollow’s edge a hotchi rider was watching them, astride his gallus. The big war-cockerel plumped its breastfeathers and raised one spurred claw-foot in curious pose. The hotchi, squat and tough hedgehog man, stroked his mount’s red comb.

“Militia coming.” His accent was strong and snarling. “Two men militia coming, a minute, two.” He sat forward in the ornate saddle and turned his bird around. With very little sound, with no metal to jangle on wood-and-leather straps and stirrups, it picked away high-clawed and belligerent, and was hidden by the forest.

“Was that-?” “What-?” “Did you fucking-?”

But Cutter and his companions were shushed by the sound of approach. They looked in unsaid panic, too late to hide.

Two men came stepping over fungused stumps into view. They were masked and uniformed in the militia’s dark grey. Each had a mirrored shield and ungainly pepperpot revolver slack at his side. As they came into the clearing they faltered and were still, taking in the men and women waiting for them.

There was a dragged-out second when no one moved, when befuddled and silent conference was held- are you, are they, what, should we, should we-? -till someone shot. Then there were a spate of sounds, screams and the percussion of shots. People fell. Cutter could not follow who was where and was gut-terrified that he had been hit and not yet felt it. When the guns’ heinous syncopation stopped, he unclenched his jaw.

Someone was calling Oh gods oh fucking gods. It was a militiaman, sitting bleeding from a belly-wound beside his dead friend and trying to hold his heavy pistol up. Cutter heard the curt torn-cloth sound of archery and the militia man lay back with an arrow in him and stopped his noise.

Again a beat of silence then “Jabber-” “Are you, is everyone-?” “Drey? Pomeroy?”

First Cutter thought none of his own were hit. Then he saw how Drey was white and held his shoulder, and that blood dyed his palsying hands.

“Sweet Jabber, man.” Cutter made Drey sit (Is it all right? the little man kept saying.) Bullet had taken muscle. Cutter tore strips from Drey’s shirt, and wound those cleanest around the hole. The pain made Drey fight, and Pomeroy and Fejh had to hold him. They gave him a thumb-thick branch to bite while they bandaged him.

“They must’ve fucking followed you, you halfwit bastards.” Cutter was raging while he worked. “I told you to be fucking careful-”

“We were, ” Pomeroy shouted, jabbing his finger at Cutter.

“Didn’t follow them.” The hotchi reappeared, its rooster picking. “Them patrol the pits. You been here long time, a day nearly.” It dismounted and walked the rim of the arena. “You been too long.”

It showed the teeth in its snout in some opaque expression. Lower than Cutter’s chest but rotundly muscular, it strutted like a bigger man. By the militia it stopped and sniffed. It sat up the one killed by its arrow and began to push the missile through the body.

“When them don’t come back, them send more,” it said. “Them come after you. Maybe now.” It steered the arrow past bones through the dead chest. It gripped the shaft when it came out the corpse’s back, and pulled the fletch through with a wet sound. The hotchi tucked it bloody into his belt, picked the revolving pistol from the militiaman’s stiffening fingers and fired it against the hole.

Birds rose up again at the shot. The hotchi snarled with the unfamiliar recoil and shook its hand. The arrow’s fingerthick burrow had become a cavity.

Pomeroy said: “Godspit… who in hell are you?”

“Hotchi man. Cock-fighting man. Alectryomach. Help you.”

“Your tribe…” said Cutter. “They’re with us? On our side? Some of the hotchi are with the Caucus,” he said to the others. “That’s why this place’s all right. Or was supposed to be. This lad’s clan got no time for the militia. Give us passage. But… can’t risk a real fight with the city, so they’ve to make it look like it was us killed the officers, not their arrows.” He understood as he said it.

Pomeroy and the hotchi rifled the killed men together. Pomeroy threw one of the pepperpot revolvers to Elsie, one to Cutter. It w was modernistic and expensive and Cutter had never held one before. It was heavy, with its six barrels arranged in a fat rotating cylinder.

“They ain’t reliable,” said Pomeroy, harvesting bullets. “Fast, though.”

“Jabber… we better fucking go.” Drey’s voice went up and down with pain. “Fucking guns going off going to call them for miles…”

“Not so many nearby,” said the hotchi. “Maybe none to hear. But you should gone, yes. What you for? Why leave city? You looking for him come by on the clay man?”

Cutter looked to the others and they watched him carefully, letting him speak.

He said: “You seen him?” He stepped toward the busy hotchi. “You seen him?”

“I not seen him, but I know them as has. Some days, week or more gone. Man come through the wood on a grey giant. Running through. The militia come after.”

The light of afternoon came down to them all and the forest animals began to make their noises again. Cutter was locked in by miles of trees. He opened his mouth more than once before he spoke.

Cutter said: “Militia followed him?”

“On Remade horses. I heard.”

On Remade horses with hammered metal hoofs, or with tiger’s claws or with a tail prehensile and coated in poison glands. With steam-pistons giving their legs ridiculous strength or with stamina from a boiler-excrescence behind the saddle. Made carnivorous and long-tusked. Wolf-horses or boar-horses, construct-horses.

“I didn’t see,” said the hotchi. He mounted his cockerel. “Them went after the clay-man rider, south in Rudewood. You best go. Fast now.” He turned his fight-bird and pointed a smoke-brown finger. “Stay careful. This is Rudewood. Go now.”

He spurred his gallus into the undergrowth and dense trunks. “Go,” he shouted, already invisible.

“Damn,” said Cutter. “Come on.” They gathered their little camp. Pomeroy took Drey’s pack as well as his own, and the six of them went up out of the cock-fighting pit and into the forest.

They went southwest by Cutter’s compass, along the path the hot-chi had taken. “He showed us the way,” Cutter said. His comrades waited for him to guide them. They drove between rootmasses and blockages of flora, changing whatever they passed. Quickly Cutter’s tiredness was so profound it was an astonishing, alien sensation.

When they noticed darkness they fell where they were, in a pause between trees. They spoke in puny voices, affected by the undertones of the wood. It was too late to hunt: they could only pull biltong and bread from their packs and make weak jokes about what good food it was.

By their little fire Cutter could see that Fejh was drying. They did not know where there was any freshwater, and Fejh poured only a little of what they had on himself though his big tongue rolled for it. He was panting. “I’ll be all right, Cutter,” he said, and the man patted his cheek.

Drey was paper-white and whispering to himself. Seeing how blood had stiffened his sling, Cutter could not imagine how he had kept going. Cutter murmured his fears to Pomeroy, but they could not turn back and Drey could not make the return on his own. He stained the ground below him.

While Drey slept, the others pulled around the fire and told quiet stories of the man they were following. Each of them had reasons for answering Cutter’s call.

For Ihona the man they sought had been the first person in the Caucus who had seemed distracted, who reminded her of herself. His unworldliness, the quality that some mistrusted, made her feel there was room for imperfection in the movement: that she could be part of it. She smiled beautifully to remember it. Fejh, in turn, had taught him as part of some investigation of vodyanoi shamanism, and had been moved by his fascination. Cutter knew they loved the man they followed. Of the hundreds of the Caucus, it was no surprise that six loved him.

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.

CHAPTER THREE

On the second day out, in the grey waves of the Meagre Sea, Cutter’s party hijacked the Akif. Pomeroy held a pistol at the captain’s head. The crew stared in disbelief. Elsie and Ihona raised their guns. Cutter watched Elsie’s hand shake. Fejh reared out of his water-barrel with a bow. The captain began to cry.

“We’re taking a diversion,” Cutter said. “It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale River. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.”

The crew of six men sulked and surrendered their weapons. They were all casuals on a daily rate: they had no solidarity with each other or their captain. They looked at Fejhechrillen hatefully, out of some prejudice.

Cutter tied the captain to the wheel, by the dehorned sables the Akif carried, and the travellers took turns to menace him while the mounts watched. His blubbering was embarrassing. The sun grew harsher. Their wake widened as if they unbuckled the water. Cutter watched Fejh suffer in the hot salt air.

They saw the north shores of the Cymek on the third day. Merciless baked-clay hills, dust and sandtraps. There were scraps of plantlife: dust-coloured marram, trees of hard and alien nature, spicate foliage. The Akif churned past brine marshes.

“He always said this would be the only way to get to Iron Council,” Cutter said.

The minerals of the Dradscale estuary made lustre on the water. The brackish slough was full of weed, and Cutter gave a city-dweller’s gape to see a clan of manatees surface and graze.

“Is no safe,” said the helmsman. “Is with-” He gave some obscenity or disgust-noise, and pointed at Fejh. “Up farther. Full of riverpig.”

Cutter tensed at the word. “On,” he said, and pointed his gun. The pilot moved back.

“We no do,” he said. Abruptly he tilted backward over the rail and into the water. Everyone moved and shouted.

“There.” Pomeroy pointed with his revolver. The pilot had surfaced and was heading for one of the islands. Pomeroy tracked him but never fired.

“Godsdammit,” he said as the man reached the little shore. “Only reason the others haven’t gone after him is they can’t swim.” He nodded at the cheering crew.

“They’ll fight back with their fucking hands if we push this,” Ihona said. “Look at them. And you know we won’t shoot them. You know what we have to do.”

So in ridiculous inversion, the hijackers ferried the crew to the island. Pomeroy waved his gun as if carrying out necessary punishment. But they let the sailors off, and even gave them provisions. The captain watched plaintively. They would not let him go.

Cutter was disgusted. “Too fucking soft,” he raged at his friends. “You shouldn’t have come if you’re so soft.”

“What do you suggest, Cutter?” Ihona shouted. “You make them stay if you can. You ain’t going to kill them. No, maybe we shouldn’t have come, it’s already cost us.” Pomeroy glowered. Elsie and Fejh would not look at Cutter. He was suddenly fearful.

“Come on,” Cutter said. He tried not to sound wheedling or scornful. “Come on. We’re getting there. We’ll find him. This bloody journey’ll end.”

“For someone so known not to give a damn,” Ihona said, “you’re risking a lot for this. You want to be careful, people might think you ain’t what you like to think.”

The Dradscale was wide. Ditches and sikes joined it, channelling in dirty water. It was unbending for miles ahead.

On the east bank, dry hills rose behind the mangroves, wind-cut arids. It was a desert of cooked mud, and way beyond it was Shankell, the cactus city. On the west the land was altogether harsher. Above the fringe of tidal trees was a comb of rock teeth. A zone of vicious karst, an unbelievable thicket of edged stone. By Cutter’s imprecise documents it stretched a hundred miles. His maps were scribbled with explorers’ exhortations. Devils’ nails said one, and another Three dead. Turned back.

There were birds, high-shouldered storks that walked like villains. They flew with languid wingstrokes as if always exhausted. Cutter had never suffered in so brute a sun. He gaped in its light. All of them were pained by it, but Fejh of course most of all, submerging again and again in his stinking barrel. When eventually the water around them was saltless he dived with relief and refilled his container. He did not swim long: he did not know this river.

The man they followed must have been a vector of change. Cutter watched the riverbanks for signs that he had passed.

They steamed through the night, announcing themselves with soot and juddering. In the hard red light of dawn the leaves and vines dandled in the current seemed to deliquesce, to be runoff streams of dye, matter adrip into meltwater.

While the sun was still low the Dradscale widened and bled into a pocosin. The marsh-lake was met by the end of the karst, uncanny fingerbones of stone. The Akif slowed. For minutes, its motor was the only sound.

“Where now, Cutter?” someone said at last.

Something moved below the water. Fejh leaned up half out of his barrel.

“Dammit, it’s-” he said but was interrupted.

Things were surfacing ahead of the Akif, broad-mouthed heads. Vodyanoi bravos waving spears.

The captain came upright and shrieked. He shoved down on his throttle, and the water-bandits scattered and dived. Fejh upset his barrel, spilling dirty water. He leaned out and yelled in Lubbock at the vodyanoi below, but they did not answer.

They came up again, burst out of the water and for a moment were poised as if they stood upon it. They threw spears before they fell. Spumes of water arced from below their outflung arms so that their shafts became harpoons, riding it. Cutter had never seen such watercræft. He fired into the water.

The captain was still accelerating. He was going to drive the Akif onto the shore, Cutter realised. There was no time to moor.

“Brace!” he shouted. With a huge grinding the boat rode the shallow bank. Cutter pitched over the prow and landed hard. “Come on!” he said, rising.

The Akif jutted like a ramp. The antelopes’ pen had broken and, tethered to one another, they were hauling off in a dangerous mass of hooves and hornstubs. Fejh vaulted the listing rail. Elsie had hit her head, and Pomeroy helped her down.

Ihona was cutting the captain’s bonds. Cutter fired twice at oncoming swells. “Come on!” he shouted again.

A spire of water rose by the broken boat. For an instant he thought it some freakish wave, or watercræft of an astonishing kind, but it was more than twenty feet high, a pillar of utterly clear water, and from its top jutted a vodyanoi. He was a shaman, riding his undine.

Cutter could see the vessel distorted through the water elemental’s body. Its thousands of gallons pushed down on the boat with strange motion, and bucked it, and Ihona and the captain fell down the sloping deck toward it. They tried to rise but the water of the undine flowed up and lapped at their feet then broke, a wave, and engulfed them. Cutter shouted as his comrade and her prisoner were buffeted into the undine’s belly. They kicked and clawed, trying to swim out but which way was out? The undine gave its innards currents that kept them in its core.

Pomeroy bellowed. He fired, and Cutter fired, and Fejh let an arrow go. And all three missiles hit the elemental with splashes like dropped stones, and were swallowed up. The arrow was visible, vortexing in the liquid thing, coiling down to be voided like shit. Again Cutter fired, this time at the shaman atop the monstrous water, but his shot was wide. With idiot bravery Pomeroy was pummelling the undine, trying to tear it apart to get at his friend, but it ignored him, and his blows raised only spray.

Ihona and the captain were drowning. The undine poured itself into the cargo hold, and the shaman kicked down into its bowels. Cutter screamed to see Ihona’s still-moving body carried in the matter of the undine belowdecks and out of sight.

The vodyanoi were all over the Akif. They began to throw spears again.

Water poured up out of the boat, the undine geysering from the hold, and it carried within it engine parts-iron buoyed on its strange tides. And rolling like motes were the bodies of its victims. They moved now only with the water that bore them. Ihona’s eyes and mouth were open. Cutter saw her only a moment before the elemental came down in a great arch into the lake, water in water, carrying its loot and dead.

All the travellers could do was curse and cry. They cursed many times, they howled, and moved at last into the grasslands, away from the boat, away from the rapacious water.

At night they sat exhausted in a motte of trees beside their sables and watched Elsie. The moon and its daughters, the satellites circling it like tossed coins, were high. Elsie, cross-legged, looked at them, and Cutter was surprised to see her calm. She moved her mouth. A shirt was tied around her neck. Her eyes unfocused.

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.

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.

CHAPTER FIVE

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.”

“What you doing here?” said Cutter. “You come to help us bury-” He had to stop and could only gesture. “Why you been following us?”

“Like I told you,” Drogon whispered. “We want the same thing. You’re exiles now, and so am I. We’re looking for the same thing. I been looking for the Iron Council for damn years. I wasn’t sure of you, you know. And maybe I still ain’t. We’re not the only ones looking for the Council, you know that. You know why these fuckers are here.” He pointed at a militiaman supine and bloody. “Why’d you think I followed? I needed to know who you-all are looking out for.”

“What’s he saying?” said Elsie, but Cutter waved her quiet.

“I still don’t know I trust you, but I been watching you and I know the best chance I got’s with you. And I showed you your best chance is with me. I’d have gone with your man if I’d been able, after I heard he’d gone.”

“How do you know…?” Cutter said.

“You ain’t the only one with your ear to the ground, who knows what he is. But listen, we ain’t got time: it ain’t just him who’s being followed. This lot were after your man-they don’t know any more than we do already-and there’s others are after you. Been tracking you since Rudewood. And they’re gaining. And they ain’t just militia, either.”

“What? What’s coming?” And what Cutter heard he repeated in terror.

“Handlingers,” he said.

More frightened of dying alone than of the anger of their enemies, those militia still alive began to call out. They were without plan or intrigue-they cajoled not to any end but only eager to be spoken to as they lay in the heat.

“Hey, hey, hey mate, hey mate.” “Come on. Come on, then, come on.” “Jabber, my arm’s gone man, Jabber, Jabber it’s gone.”

They were mostly men in their thirties with expressions of pride and resignation that seemed scoured-on; they did not expect or even want quarter, only to be acknowledged before they died.

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.”