Iron Council - China Mieville [186]
Across the brickdust and savage weeds was Jacobs, the Tesh ambassador. He was drawing marks in the air, and he was singing.
“He’s hurried,” Qurabin said. His disembodied voice was close. “Has to move. He weren’t ready, but he’s moving now, early . . . He’ll try to force it, the thysiac, the murderspirit . . . feel! Quick,” and the voice was gone.
Ori ran. Across waste through dead thigh-high grass that cracked with cold, the plateau open and the lights of New Crobuzon splayed beneath him. The others followed, though no one knew what to do.
Spiral Jacobs tremored, and the air all around tremored with him. A hundred shapes began to solidify from nothing. Cutter saw a patch of milky air, a cataract, that took lumpy shape, peristalsed maggotlike and was a pale ghost stool, a three-legged kitchen thing hanging over his brow. Beside it was an insect, impossibly big, and a flower, a pot and a hand, a candle, a lamp, all the haints that had beset New Crobuzon. They looked undercooked, not quite fine, without colour, hanging and spinning. And as Cutter came closer the haints began to turn and move around each other in decaying orbits, an impossibly complex interpenetration of silent spiral paths. The things never collided, nor touched anyone. The apparitions moved fast, centring over Spiral Jacobs. A vortex of the everyday, the uncanny quotidian.
Ori batted at the things. They had not yet come full; they were not murderously sucking his colour. He reached Spiral Jacobs. The old man looked at him and said something: a greeting, Cutter thought.
He watched as Ori swung his fists, and kept missing Spiral Jacobs, kept always missing, each punch consistently mistimed, misjudged. Ori screamed and went onto his knees. Judah was just behind him, and the darkness golem stepped up.
The great thing swung its enormous shadow hands and unlight swept over Spiral Jacobs as it gripped him. It obscured him a long moment. Jacobs faltered, went obscure and dimmed, and all the ectoplasm shapes faltered with him, waning in time like dimming lamps. They came back again as he regained strength and light, and then he growled, showed anger for the first time.
He moved his hands, and the school of moving haints changed, came together, gusted suddenly through the golem, and where they passed they left a light in the core of the thing. It staggered like a wounded man and reached to throttle Jacobs once again, mimicking Judah’s motions. The light in the darkness golem’s core was growing.
It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its innards effaced it. Jacobs fought free of its shade hands. He bared dark-stained teeth. The haints swarmed. Jacobs was cobwebbed with darkness the golem had left; it was choking him. He retched up a gout of empty shadows. They spilled on the ground and crept away to their natural place below blockages of light. The darkness golem fell, and Judah fell with it, and while he lay flattened and unconscious for a second the golem disappeared.
Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spinning uncoloured shapes around her—a bowl, a bone, a scrap of cotton. Her face greyed instantly, choked off sudden, her eyes gone bloodshot but the blood without colour. She did not fall. With a care as if she were going to bed, she settled herself to the