Iron Council - China Mieville [160]
Cutter cried Judah’s name. Judah was holding his head. An inchman was one step away from him.
But Pomeroy was there, his blade in his hand. With a psychotic doomed bravery while Elsie screamed he hacked into the human-form abdomen of the inchman.
He was a very strong man. The inchman even stopped a moment at the impact, and Pomeroy let go the sword and stepped back, standing in front of Judah, who gathered himself, looked up as the inchman snatched Pomeroy’s head. Its enormous palm pressed over the man’s face, swung him by his head with the absent savagery of a baby.
Cutter heard the shearing of Pomeroy’s neck, and Elsie’s scream. The inchman flailed Pomeroy’s body. Judah was crouched again, drawing up the golem from the earth. This time it came all the way. It stamped, shedding its earth-self, swung at the nearest inchman. The enormous strike sent the thing off the rock, into the air. Its inchworm arse flexed; it dropped and hit the ground with explosive wetness.
Elsie was weeping. The other inchmen were closing, and Judah crooked his fingers and the golem interceded. It stamped with a walk that was Judah’s walk, Cutter would swear, performed by earth. It stood before the Councillors and tore into another of the geometrid things.
After a moment of indecision while the exhausted Councillors fired, the inchmen retreated from the towering golem. Two descended head-first down the sheer uneven rock. The third was trapped in a last ugly blood-mud wrestle, and the collapsing golem rolled with its opponent to the edge and over.
Judah kneeled by Pomeroy, and the Iron Councillors ran to help their comrades. Cutter, shaking, stared over the edge. He saw the inchmen descending the vertical surface. On the rock floor were the bodies of the two who had fallen, and the red earth of the golem.
Cutter went to Pomeroy and gripped his dead friend. He gripped Elsie, who was wailing, who sobbed on him. Judah was stricken. Cutter tried to grab him too, pulled him close. They hung on together. The three of them held as Elsie cried, and Cutter felt Pomeroy go cold.
“What happened?” he whispered in Judah’s ear. “What happened? You . . . are you all right? You stumbled . . . and Pom—”
“Died for me.” Judah’s voice was perfectly flat. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Something . . . A remote. I weren’t expecting it. A golem trap was triggered. I’m saving chymicals and batteries—it took its energy mostly from me, and I didn’t have the focus. It shook me, made me fall.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. He kissed Pomeroy’s face.
“It’s a golem trap I put in our path,” he said. “The militia triggered it. They’ve made landfall. They’re coming.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
On the coast hundreds of miles away (Judah said) an ictineo, one of New Crobuzon’s experimental ichthyscaphoi, must have come to land. A behemoth fish come out of the ocean crawling on fins that became leg-stubs that stamped forward until the stumpy limbs shattered under their own weight and the enormous Remade fish-thing lay down and shuddered. This was what must have come.
A mongrel of whale-shark distended by biothaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protuberant like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely. The fish-ship’s mouth (Judah said) must have opened with a grind of industry, anchored by chains, drawbridge-style, as the flange of lower jaw descended and the men of the New Crobuzon militia emerged, bringing their weapons, and coming for the Council.
“It weren’t so easy for us when first we came through. We found ourselves wandering, trying to get away from the stain, and then the path would coil and we’d be going straight into the Torque’s innards, sky like guts or like teeth. We lost so many to it then,” the man said.
He was, from long ago, a Dog Fenn Remade. His hands were gone, the