Iron Council - China Mieville [12]
“Go on,” he said. “Look after Fejh. I’ll see you later.”
He was astonished by how glad he was to be alone. Time was stilled. Cutter walked through a ghostworld, the earth’s dream of its own grasslands.
There were no nightbirds calling, no glucliches, nothing but the dark vista like a painted background. Cutter was alone on a stage. He thought of dead Ihona. When at last the lights were close he could see a kraal of heavy houses. He walked into the village as brazen as if he were welcome.
It was empty. The windows were only holes. The big doorways gaped into silent interiors. Each of them was stripped.
The lights were clustered at junctions: head-sized globes of some gently burning lava, cool, and no brighter than a covered lamp. They hung without motion, dead still in the air. They muttered and their surfaces moiled: arcs of cold pyrosis flared inches from them. Tame night-suns. Nothing moved.
In the empty alleys he spoke to the man he followed. “Where are you then?” His voice was very careful.
When he went back to the cliff, Cutter saw a light on its edge, a lantern, that moved slowly. He knew it was not his companions’.
Elsie wanted to see the empty village, but Cutter was firm that they had no time, they had to see the other lights, to see if there was a trail. “You picked up something,” he reminded her. “We better see. We need some fucking guidance.”
Fejh was better, his water renewed, but he was still afraid. “Vodyanoi ain’t supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m going to die here, Cutter.”
Midmorning, Cutter looked back, pointed into the brightness. Someone, some speck figure, sat on horseback on the shelf they had reached the previous night. A woman or man in a wide-brimmed hat.
“We’re being followed. It’s got to be the whisperer.” Cutter waited for a mutter in his ear, but there was nothing. Throughout the day and in the early night the rider tracked them, coming no closer. It angered them, but they could do nothing.
The second village was like the first, Cutter thought, but he was wrong. The sables wheezed and slowed through deserted squares and under the sputtering light-globes and found a long wall all bullet-scarred, its mortar punctured and stained with sap. The travellers dismounted, stood in the cold remains of violence. In the township’s outlands Cutter saw tilled land; and then he felt the moment still, realised it was not a field but was disturbed in another way, turned over and charred. It was the topsoil on a grave. It was a mass grave.
Breaking the soil like the first shoots of a grotesque harvest were bones. They were abrupt and blacked by fire, fibrous like dense wood. The bones of cactus-people.
Cutter stood among the dead, above their moulding vegetable-flesh. Time came back. He felt it shudder.
Planted scarecrow in the middle was a degraded corpse. A human man. He was naked, slumped, upheld by spikes that pinned him to a tree. Javelins pierced him. One emerged point-first from his sternum. It had been forced up his anus and through him. His scrotum was torn off. There was a scab of blood on his throat. He was leathered by sun and insects worked on him.
The travellers stared like worshippers at their totem. When after many seconds Pomeroy moved he still looked carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to break the dead man’s gaze.
“Look,” he said. He swallowed. “All cactacae.” He poked at the earth, turned up bits of the dead. “And then there’s him. What in Jabber’s name happened here? The war ain’t reached here . . .”
Cutter looked at the corpse. It was not very bloody. Even between its legs there was only a little gore.
“He was already gone,” Cutter whispered. He was awed by the brutal tableau. “They done this to a dead man. After they buried the others.” Below the corpse’s chin was not a clot but