Iron Council - China Mieville [11]
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