Iron Council - China Mieville [108]
The Councillors fire arbalests made in iron council’s foundries. They light fuses and send rockfall down on the invaders. Judah knows this is his fight to win or to lose.
Judah stands. He stands on the rampart. Wires trail from him, to batteries, to a transformer. He trembles with bravery.
The men and women with him in his hide—all with some vestige, some trace, of hex, all joined together—cut their hands and wrap wire tight around the wounds. It is a crude engine that links them, to require so vulgar and literal a bleeding, something battered together from found materials. —Give it me, Judah shouts, and Shaun shoves the leads home, and the gutter-motor moans, and those amassed all stagger as it siphons out their strength and funnels it into the clips that puncture Judah’s chest.
A sound comes from him that is impossible to describe. His skin tightens and moves as if someone is pressing their fingers to him. From the dust, men stand. They are in the army’s path. Judah sweats. It spews from him. He moves his hands. The men, the golems, walk in ponderous stride.
There are a score or more. Bigger than humans. Premade and waiting. They walk toward the New Crobuzon Militia. Judah shakes. The weaker of his comrades are passed out. Judah is sweating blood.
The black golems stalk on. One is kicked apart by militia horses. Its torso twitches and tries to claw itself on farther, and Judah quivers as if hit with stones. He hauls on the air, pulls something immaterial into place. The dirt men-things walk into the melee, and the mounts shy around them. Bounty hunters and uniformed militia veer as the golems reach for them. Some golems stand cruciform. Some wrap their arms around struggling quarries. Where he can see to direct them, Judah has them push with their abnatural strength through bodyguards to embrace officers. Crowds of the fighters surround each one, hacking the mineral bodies, levelling their pistols.
—Shoot dammit! Judah gasps. And though his enemies cannot hear him they obey. A bullet grinds into one of the figures. The golem is made of flint and gunpowder.
There is a tremendous bay of ignition and the golem disappears in a pillar of explosion. It is a man-thing then a wind of dirt-coloured fire, the stones that were embedded in it suddenly outrushing and laying down the bounty hunters in a circle; and its heat touches one of its fellows and it too goes up, and when the smoke they have become is gone Judah sees soot-stains where they were, and around them ripples of dead men, black and bloody, becoming more solid, becoming more like bodies farther out, and those at the circumference of each crater still move, still shriek.
—Shoot, Judah says again. Gunshots, flaming arrows from ballistae. The hot missiles come in and transform the made figures into vortices of combustion.
One by one they stumble into the attackers, hug them, bury them in blackpowder and then in fire. The gunpowder golems, shambling bombs, sear holes in the army. Judah stands and hears a rhythmic roar that is his heart. His comrades shout in his honour. Blood drips from his face. The last of the golems runs into the invaders, scattering soldiers with every ungainly step. It is gone in the flame from some marksman’s arrow, and dusty fire is unrolling.
There are still hundreds of bounty-men and militia but they are reeling, their commanders screaming, their mounts’ hooves slipping on the mulch of their dead. And the wyrmen come back, and the Councillors make more rockfalls, and the arbalestiers send their huge bolts.
—Low! the men shout. —Yes! And Judah Low roars back at them.
Iron council raiders descend, the hugest Remade, cactacae braves with picks and heavy hatchets. Judah is tugged back and kissed. His comrades are sallow, trembling and cold from the energy he borrowed, but they are stronger than he. Judah closes his eyes.
He passes out, manhandled to safety. He dreams of gunpowder golems, and the sun, and then he is suddenly awake.
—What, what? he says, lurches up. —What, what?
Thick Shanks and Shaun point east,