Iron Council - China Mieville [109]
Judah and Shaun ride on a horse reconfigured for speed. Judah is numb. The loud and random bounty-men-and-militia army was an unsubtle distraction.
What will you do, golemist? he asks himself. What will you do to stop them? You ain’t going to stop them; you’re going to die. To die with his council. You’re too broken to do anything now. Look at the blood come from you. But he does not think he will die. Judah would not go if he thought he would die.
There are men in the sky, militia swinging under taut spheres. He sees the smoke of the perpetual train and he can hear explosions. The aeronauts seep bombs, breaking apart the scud-sculptures of the smokestone in a line of craters, drawing a gully toward the council.
What will you do, golemist? Judah asks himself. He will do something. The thing in him, the oddity, the good in him flexes.
People are scrambling away. Refugees again: men, the old, the terrified and wounded, newcomers without loyalty to keep them, women carrying their children, running over the ridges of hard cloud. Judah and Shaun career past them by the tracks. They ride into the battle.
There is the train, firing from its riveted-together guntower. Militia and the Councillors who outnumber but are outfought by them. The sky ahead is unnatural, a matted pewter, stained with colours that should not be there.
Out ahead, protected by cactus and Remade guards, is a track-laying team. They move frenetic, in a sped-up mumming of their usual work, over a rubble of nimbostratus stone. They are picked off by militia targeteers, falling wounded or killed over the rails, and their comrades push them aside and continue their urgent work.
Judah comes in fighting.
The militia will not stop the train: they will kill many but there are only yards left, and even with the cull of track-layers (another man down with a blood-blossom) the train will go through. It is the oncoming aerostats that make Judah afraid. There is the sound of rain in the west, but no rain appears.
Shaun relaxes. Judah feels him lean backward and puts his arm around him and feels his front slick, too wet for sweat, and Judah knows his friend is dead. The horse stumbles and stops and Judah dismounts, dragging Shaun with him, his sternum all ruptured. Judah hauls him until volleys disturb him and he must let his dead friend go and run through the lines of his comrades and along the train, staying low, grabbing a bow from a pile as he goes. A rivebow it is—he curses its weight, its limited range, but he tries to level it as he runs the length of the battered cars, toward the steaming chimney where his golem trap is set.
He fires a scalpel-edged chakri; he hunkers by Remade and edges toward the cowcatcher. There are thaumaturges among the militia, and darts of baleful energy spit at the Councillors and do arcane damage. The wyrmen perform brave and dangerous raids on the militia, and the militia begin to withdraw.
—We make them run! We make them run! screams a wyrman, hysterical with pride, but she is wrong. The militia are leaving because airships are coming.
—Move! There is a shout. —We’re through! And the segmented edifice lurches and trembles and crawls through the stone mist and up, looking as if it will derail any second, on smokestone shards. The scree moves uneasy but holds, and the carriages progress, bullets typing on their iron skin. The train pauses at the apex of the shard hill, descends. The train finds a pothole—a track cracks, carriages list, but somehow the rutted wheels keep traction and shuddering like something wounded the train rolls into the land beyond.
—Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. —Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.
The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she