Iron Council - China Mieville [159]
Cutter stared. The face of the figure leered at him and came forward very suddenly, snapping up and down in a motion Cutter did not for some moments understand.
Taller than he but all torso, its trunk seeming to extend from the ground, its head twice the size of his, long arms scrawn and bone, hands splayed or knuckle-dragging, clutching as it moved. Near-human, its mouth opened by teeth black and long, spike-sharp. He could not see its eyes. Two sinkholes, a mass of wrinkled skin and shadows: if it saw it did so out of darkness. It turned and sniffed, throwing back its bald head and opening and closing as best it could that toothed mouth. And then it shifted and Cutter saw its hindquarters.
Colossal and grossly tubate, a caterpillar body studded with tufts, ventricles opening and closing sphincters, dun and specked with warning colours. The man torso congealed into the front of that yards-long body, hip bones into larval flesh. The inchman moved.
It had a clutch of little pulsing legs at its front below its pale torso, and two, three stubby pairs of prolegs at its very rear. It pulled its rear up in a great arch, vised its prolegs into the hard earth, took the weight of its forebody, and with a flail lifted it, straightening the tube of bodiness, the humanish torso high at the end of outstretched grub physiognomy that batted uncertainly at the air, then onto the spongy caterpillar forelegs.
It sniffed again. It arched again, gripped and opened itself out, put its forebody down closer. Inchworm motion. A groping walk, a spanning toward him.
Cutter fired and ran. The inchman accelerated. The Iron Councillors tried to fight. There were several inchmen at the camp’s corners. There was the bray of a mule, and shouting.
In the moon’s glare Cutter saw another of the loopworm men champing, blood black in the half-light all over its front and mouth, a huge hand pressing down on the shuddering animal beneath it. It made an open-mouthed parody of chewing.
One inchman emitted an elyctric roar. The others joined in, spilling grots from their mouths.
The mules and runt camels were screaming. Shuech fired and the fist of buckshot sheared off skull and brain mass, but the inchman hit did not drop, too stupid or stubborn to die. It lurched in with its grotesque larval swaying, and with a leather-skinned hand grabbed a man and punctured him. The man screamed but stopped very fast as the inchman took him apart.
Shuech threw flaming cacodyl, and the caustic spread over one of the caterpillar figures, which batted without urgency at the fire. It sounded again, that throat noise, and as it reared on its hind prolegs it became a torch, illuminating them all.
The things blocked them. They were caught by a shelf above a canyon, which went to scree too loose to run. Cutter backed against rock and fired. Someone cried. Judah was murmuring.
The rearmost inchman chattered slab teeth. Its head burst. Matter spattered its fellows. Pomeroy refilled his smoking grenade shot.
In the wake of one Iron Council thaumaturge Cutter saw simple plantlife growing in footprint shapes, the spoor of moss-magic. The mossist growled and a mass of blots mottled an inchman’s skin, a bryophyte coating clogging its mouth and the holes of its eyes. It reared, retching, clawing the plant pelt and drawing its own thick blood.
The Iron Councillors fired chakris, fat flat-blade disks or scythe-bladed arrows. The inchmen bled in gouts, but did not stop coming. Judah stepped up with a near-holy fury in his face. He touched the ground. His crooked hand spasmed.
For a second nothing and then the inchmen were padding on moving earth that began to unfold in the shape of a vast man, a somatic intervention in the rock and regolith—and then something stammered in the aether