Iron Council - China Mieville [169]
There was little movement on the militia side. Though they fired, burst holes in the stone, shearing off faces of houses to display subsiding rooms, the militia were waiting for something. The Collective began to advance, emboldened, and laid down suppressing counterattack while their scouts (hotchi, wyrmen, acrobatic humans) went rooftop or airborne to watch what was coming. Then the militia ranks parted and there were three men adangle, clots of handflesh clamped to their throats. Handlingers.
There was no washing on Cockscomb Bridge, but there were still lines drooped over the street studded with pegs like wizened fruit, and they shuddered as the shelling continued. At the sight of the flying men the line of Collectivists almost broke.
Parliament’s handlingers were dressed in suits and bowlers, their trousers a shade too short. A strange scare tactic. Were these the bodies of condemned New Quillers? Could they be volunteers, about whom there were rumours? Men and women whose loyalty to New Crobuzon’s government was so absolute they sacrificed themselves to be vessels for the handlingers? A holy rightist suicide. Probably these were just the executed dressed in costumes to cause foreboding.
Seeing them loom, thaumaturgicked and fire-spitting, stronger than cactacae, they seemed supra-Quillers, nightmares of reaction. The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood. After that attack, so frenzied that respectable uptown opinion was horrified, the militia had come in to protect those few khepri not fled or murdered. But the Quillers did not have to flee: they were allowed to leave in an orderly and triumphant way.
Now Quillers or what looked like them were bearing down from the sky. The Collectivists stepped quickly into the lees of the bomb-shaken houses. They coughed in the dust of millennium-old bricks.
From the south, running the length of the bridge unnaturally fast to join them, came a thin and naked man. Clamped not to his neck or his head but to his face, fingers spread over his eyes and nose, was a dark left hand. A sinistral.
Civil wars made for unlikely allies. There were those few handlingers that for whatever reasons opposed their brothersisters—whether odd altruism or a politic calculation, the Collective’s negotiators never knew. It may have sickened the negotiators to do deals with these symbols of corruption and parasite cunning, but they would turn nothing down now. Especially as several of the handlinger turncoats were sinistrals.
The three militia handlingers were dextriers, warriors, but for all their power they veered when they saw it was a sinistral on the man’s face. They tried to get out of range, but the Collectivist hand-linger jumped up higher than a human should and snapped his fingers. One dark-suited man spasmed as the sinistral shut down the dextrier’s assimilation gland. It became nothing but a blind five-fingered beast clutching a brain-dead man who fell out of the sky, his bowler hat a coda behind him, into the slow and dirty river Tar.
A second snap from the sinistral’s fingers and the nude handlinger sent another of the flying men palsied and down, to spread out red on the cobbles. The Collectivists cheered. But the third loyalist handlinger had flown in fast under eaves unseen, and as the sinistral began to turn its host away from its burst victim, the dextrier opened its man’s mouth and spatseared.
Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat