Iron Council - China Mieville [10]
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