Iron Council - China Mieville [197]
Cutter felt weak. The golem wrestled them, and their fire did nothing against its solid light, and it grew brighter and brighter as it fought, became a humanoid star, shedding cold luminance that effaced the heat of the yags and grew much much too bright to see. And then the yags that had fought it were gone, washed out in its glow, and it was stronger. It moved with an unsound, a stillness.
Yags panicked. There were some that ran away in their animal motion across the landscape, and some who rallied and flew again at the light golem to be erased by its phosphorescence. There were elementarii whipping hard at the frightened fire elementals, but that enraged them and some in passing snapped petulant and pyrotic at their handlers and burnt them to death.
The militia were rallying. Little luftgeists like arrows hunted down the new gunmen, piercing them and drinking their blood. Drogon whispered his instructions, and the militia could not disobey him, and he made their whips flail destructively. They knew by then that he was their main enemy. They sent the proasmae toward him.
Cutter and Thick Shanks sent the golem for the militia, toward a group gathered around some kind of cannon. They were butchering animals. What are they doing?
They were siphoning something from the air, as their proasmae at last reached the newcomer gunmen and began to swim through them. The light golem came on. What were the militia calling?
A drizzle of luminance seemed to be pouring from the sky, very concentrate, a fine shaft just visible. It fell to the mechanism they surrounded. The light came out of the moon. The day-moon, just visible, very faint in sunlight. Out of its half-lustre came the moonlight into the machine, and at the end of the barrel a hole seemed to be opening.
In its deeps, something made of glow was moving. Cutter stared.
It took long moments to make sense of it—while he tried to march the light golem over the damage of still-exploding bombs, the wreckage left by the Councillors, who were advancing now that the yags had gone, now the proasmae were distracted by the newcomers, now the militia had lost control of their luftgeists that caused damage and death but only randomly as they gushed over the heavily protected train—but Cutter saw something in the opening. Its parameters changed, defied taxonomy. He tried to make sense of it.
Its shape altered with the seconds. A fish’s skeleton, the ribs passing ripples along the length of a body like a rope of vertebrae or like some rubberised cord. And then there was something of the bear to it, and something of the rat, and it had horns, and a great weight, and it shone as if its guts and skin, its bones were phosphorus. As if it were all cold and bright rock. A firefly, a death mask, a wooden skull.
A fegkarion. A moon elemental.
Cutter had heard of them, of course, but could not believe that this onrushing skeletal insectile animal thing he saw only half a second in three and that was a suggestion or a fold of space was the moonthing about which there were so many stories. Oh gods, oh Jabber.
“Shanks . . . get the golem to that thing, now.”
But the golem did not walk so fast. It went through the militia at a steady pace, laid out its hands as it came. It took time to touch each man it passed, to smother their heads with its hands and pour light into them, so each burst with light, beams exploding their helmets, shining hard and for yards from their ears, their anuses, their pricks, through their clothes, making them stars, before the golem let them fall.
The fegkarion was crawling out of the nothing. “Come on,” Cutter said.
The elementalists were withdrawing, gathering around the moon-callers to protect them. They slashed at the golem now and drew its substance with each whip-strike, sent gouts of light spraying. Each lash snapped back Cutter’s and Thick Shanks’ heads. They bled. They kept the thing moving.
The proasmae were neglected. The last of them roared through