Iron Council - China Mieville [16]
That voice spoke up close in Cutter’s ear. “Down. You’re seen.” Cutter dropped, and watched through gaps in the wiry grass and heard another of those far-off shots. A militiaman fell from his horse.
Cutter saw a captain-thaumaturge, watched veins and tendons score his skin while dark sparks dissipated from him. Cutter fired and missed, and it was the last bullet.
The thaumaturge shouted and his clothes smouldered, and a lance of milky energy spurted from the ground below the largest ge’ain’s feet and punctured her right through, soared skyward and was gone. She flailed as her sap poured. Black flame immolated her. The thaumaturge stood bleeding from his eyes but triumphant, and he was shot down by the unseen marksman. The last two ge’ain were treading the militiamen to death.
One hugged the gun-spiked tower, wrestling it, twisting it violently. While his sibling crushed the last men and horses and mutant dogs, he shoved and grappled the column. It reared, grinding, overbalanced, panicking the horses that dragged it. It fell slowly, smashed and split, spilt men living and dead.
They ran, those who could, and the two tardy ran after them, stamping very much like grotesque children. A horseman was visible beyond the battleground, galloping toward them. Cutter heard his whisper again—“Keep the dogs alive, don’t let them kill the dogs for Jabber’s sake”—but it was not a command, he ignored it and was running, as his friends were, for the rough where Fejh had been. They found him spread across the green.
He went and went, the dangling man, he flew, and his stance was stiff and he sped through the air. Through the byways of the swampy estuary, between stubbish islands, past mangroves and through the arches of their vines, over banks of mulch and mud into karst, rock splints, a serrated landscape.
His companion was a bird, a hare, a jag-wasp the size of a dove, a rockling a fox a cactus-child, always with its tumour of mottlesome flesh moving upon it as it clung to the dangling man or kept pace with him, impossibly pushing whatever its body was from spire to spire of stone. The dangling man emerged into grassland. For a time the beast below him was an antelope that ran like none of its kind had ever run.
They went and went, they tore through the scorching scrubland in sped-up time. They went north through little trees and the burnt villages and onward north and their pace was up and whatever the animal was that followed the man or held to him or flew above him their speed increased and they hunted, watching signs in the earth and air that only they could see, narrowing in, following, coming after.
CHAPTER FIVE
They gathered Fejh to bury. The strange dogs surrounded the militia bodies and howled for their masters.
The two tardy remaining stood with their legs locked, in slumber. Not all the militia were dead. There was a thin screaming, and fast breathing from those too broken to crawl away. There were no more than four or five, dying slowly but with all their energy.
As Cutter dug, the horseman came through the frantic dogs. The companions turned their backs on their dead friend, to face him.
He nodded at them, touching the front of his brimmed hat. He was the colour of the dust. His jerkin sun-bleached, his trousers of buck leather and the chaps smoking with dirt. He had a rifle below his shabrack. On each hip he wore a pepperpot revolver.
The man looked at them. He stared at Cutter, held his right hand cupped by his lips and muttered. Cutter heard him, close-up, as if the mouth was by his ear.
“Best hurry. And we’d best get one of the dogs.”
“Who are you?” Cutter said. The man looked to Pomeroy, Elsie, Cutter again, mouthing. When it was his turn Cutter heard: “Drogon.”
“A susurrator,” Pomeroy said with distrust, and Drogon turned to him and whispered something across the air. “Oh aye,” Pomeroy answered. “You can be damn sure of that.”
“What you doing here?” said Cutter. “You come to help us bury—” He had to stop and could only gesture. “Why you been following us?”