Iron Council - China Mieville [13]
It was a tiny escutcheon. It was a badge of the New Crobuzon Militia.
The dangling man crossed the water. His hair and clothes gusted in his motion. The Meagre Sea chopped scant feet beneath him, and spume spattered his trousers.
A body like a bolt breached abruptly, a swordfish arcing up beside him, reaching high enough for him to touch at the keystone of its leap then curving down to stab back under with its body-spear. It kept up with him. It kept pace with his uncanny motion.
When it came up, when it vaulted into the sun, it caught the dangling man’s eye with its big sideways stare. Something dark clutched its dorsal fin. Something that shifted and dug under its fish’s skin.
CHAPTER FOUR
They went off-map, toward the third set of lights. Beyond them was a wall of stone like spinal scales, through which they must find a way.
Cutter held the blood-rusted badge. He felt sick, knowing the militia were ahead of them. We could be too late.
There were sinkholes full of water, though it was dirty stuff. Fejh replenished his barrel, but his skin was scarring. They shot little jackrabbits and slow birds. They passed antelopes, went cautiously by coveys of tusked hogs the size of horses.
Cutter felt as if the path they left was an infection in the land. At dawn on their third day out from the cruciform militiaman, they approached the last village. And as they came nearer the sun crested and they were washed in roseate light and something moved, that they had thought a rock spur or a thinning tree.
They cried out. Their mounts stumbled.
A giant came at them, a cactus figure far greater than they had seen before. Cactacae stood seven, eight feet tall, but this one was more than double that. It was like an elemental, something base and made of the land, the grassland walking.
It jerked on twisted hips, its vast legs and toeless stump-feet ricketed. It swayed as if it would fall. Its green skin was split and healed many times. Its spines were finger-long.
The massive cactus staggered at them, fast for all its palsied gait. It held a cudgel, a slab of tree. It raised it as it came, and from a face that hardly moved, it began to shout. It called words they did not understand, some variant of Sunglari, as it lurched murderously toward them.
“Wait, wait!” Everyone was shouting. Elsie pointed, her eyes bloodshot, and Cutter knew she was trying to reach its mind with her feeble charms.
The cactus came in unstable strides. Fejh fired an arrow that hit it with a moist drum-sound and remained dripping and painless in its side.
“Kill you,” the cactus crooned in its feeble voice, in an ugly Ragamoll. “Murder.” It heaved its enormous weapon.
“It weren’t us!” shouted Cutter. He threw the militia insignia in the cactus-giant’s path, and fired his repeater at the badge, making it dance and ring until all six barrels were empty. The cactus was still, its shillelagh paused. Cutter spat at the badge until his mouth was dry. “It weren’t us.”
He was something they had never seen. Cutter thought he must be Torqued, cancered by the bad energy of a cacotopic zone, but that was not right. In the last empty village, the vast cactus-man told them of himself. He was ge’ain—between them they rendered it “tardy.”
By arcane husbandry, cactacae of the veldt kept a few of their bulbs nurtured in a coma for months after they should have been born. While their siblings crawled squalling from the earth, the ge’ain, the tardy, slept on below in their chorions, growing. Their bodies distended as occult techniques kept them unborn. When finally they woke and emerged they were mooncalf. They grew prodigal.
Their aberrance afflicted them. Their woody bones were bowed, their skins corticate and boiling with excrescence. Their augmented senses hurt. They were the wards, the fighters and lookouts for their homesteads. They were tabooed. Shunned and worshipped. They had no names.
The fingers of the tardy’s left hand were fused. He moved slowly with arthritic pain.