Iron Council - China Mieville [21]
As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse.
The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit.
“Get away,” Cutter said. “It wants another host.”
Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with arachnid gait.
They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.
It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.
“Dextrier,” the whispersmith said to Cutter. “Warrior caste.”
There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.
The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.
Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”
part two
RETURNS
CHAPTER SIX
A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.
New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.
What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.
In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.
Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.
There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.
“. . . and then the other op-er-at-or told the formal in-stee-gay-tor that his suit could not be heard the very thought was quite absurd . . .”
On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme, Aderly Gladerly), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause