Embassytown - China Mieville [136]
“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.
“It can’t be,” Bren said, as if to himself, as we moved as fast as we could. “They were going to wait.” He said it more than once. When specks appeared far off on the lichened downs, we pretended that there were many things they might be, until we came too close to deny that they were bodies.
We looked down an incline to the aftermath of war. Thousands of metres of remains. I was breathing very hard, through my aeoli, in horror. At this distance the specificities of carnage were hard to gauge. I was trying to estimate Terre versus Absurd, but the death was too tangled. In any case, many of the Ariekene corpses I saw must be EzCal’s forces, like the humans with which they lay.
We led our not-quite-captive. It was in its collar but we hadn’t shocked it for kilometres. Spanish Dancer drummed its hoofs. It looked at me and opened its mouths. It pointed at the ruination. It opened and closed its mouths and said to me: “.”
“Yes.”
“.”
“Yes. Too late.” We had not taught it that.
“.”
Strung out, artificially, druggedly alert, there was an unpleasant drag to my senses, as if things I saw or heard left residue when I turned from them. My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead. Everywhere were men and women burst open. There were Ariekei dead with fanwings and without, strewn together. Innards evolved on opposite ends of space alloyed in compound decay. There were corpse-fires and rubbish.
Wrecks. The aftermath was scored by lines of char culminated in craters, where fliers had come down. Bren sifted through junk, hands wrapped in rags. I copied him. It wasn’t quite so hard as I’d expected.
This had all happened perhaps two days before. These scenes made me careful and cold. I didn’t look too close at the faces of the scores of Embassytowner dead. I was too certain I’d see one I knew. Picking through remnants between those smoke pillars I tried to learn the history of the fight. There were many more Embassytown-and-city dead than Absurd. Fighters lay midaction, in mouldering stasis, hands and giftwings and weapons still on each other. We read these corpse dioramas for the stories of their creation.
“They have corvids,” I said. Strategising without speech, the Absurd were driving biorigged weapons. “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus, it’s an army, I mean it’s an army.”
Shockingly few combatants were left alive. A few mortally wounded Ariekei cycled their legs in the air, craning eyes. One cried out in Language, telling us that it was wounded. Spanish Dancer touched its giftwing. The Absurd moribund were dying with too much focus to notice us. On some I saw the bleed from fanwings newly excised—there were new recruits to that force even among the dying.
Pinioned under Ariekene dead was a woman still just alive, her broken aeoli wheezing oxygen into her. She looked at Bren and me as we tried to calm her and ask her, “What happened here?” But she only stared, terrified or air-starved out of speech. At last we laid her back down and gave her water. We couldn’t move her; her aeoli was dying. We found two others alive: one man couldn’t be woken; the other was conscious only of his impending death. All we got from him was that the Absurd had come.
Bren indicated ripped uniforms. “These are specialists.” He pointed at runnels out of the battlefield. “This wasn’t … These were outriders, this was a guard group, around something, that came in first.”
“The negotiators,” I said. He nodded slowly at me.
“Of course, yes. The negotiators. This was supposed to be a bloody parley. They gave it a try. My God.” He looked at the remnants around us. “The Languageless didn’t even slow.”
“And now they’re heading for the rest.” For the main mass of the Terre-Ariekei army.
We had to double back. We took an abandoned vehicle, cleaned the mess of war out of it. We sped along the cut through the marks of thousands of hooves. I was pressed against the Ariekei. Spanish and Baptist were crowding around the