Iron Council - China Mieville [3]
“We were,” Pomeroy shouted, jabbing his finger at Cutter.
“Didn’t follow them.” The hotchi reappeared, its rooster picking. “Them patrol the pits. You been here long time, a day nearly.” It dismounted and walked the rim of the arena. “You been too long.”
It showed the teeth in its snout in some opaque expression. Lower than Cutter’s chest but rotundly muscular, it strutted like a bigger man. By the militia it stopped and sniffed. It sat up the one killed by its arrow and began to push the missile through the body.
“When them don’t come back, them send more,” it said. “Them come after you. Maybe now.” It steered the arrow past bones through the dead chest. It gripped the shaft when it came out the corpse’s back, and pulled the fletch through with a wet sound. The hotchi tucked it bloody into his belt, picked the revolving pistol from the militiaman’s stiffening fingers and fired it against the hole.
Birds rose up again at the shot. The hotchi snarled with the unfamiliar recoil and shook its hand. The arrow’s fingerthick burrow had become a cavity.
Pomeroy said: “Godspit . . . who in hell are you?”
“Hotchi man. Cock-fighting man. Alectryomach. Help you.”
“Your tribe . . .” said Cutter. “They’re with us? On our side? Some of the hotchi are with the Caucus,” he said to the others. “That’s why this place’s all right. Or was supposed to be. This lad’s clan got no time for the militia. Give us passage. But . . . can’t risk a real fight with the city, so they’ve to make it look like it was us killed the officers, not their arrows.” He understood as he said it.
Pomeroy and the hotchi rifled the killed men together. Pomeroy threw one of the pepperpot revolvers to Elsie, one to Cutter. It w was modernistic and expensive and Cutter had never held one before. It was heavy, with its six barrels arranged in a fat rotating cylinder.
“They ain’t reliable,” said Pomeroy, harvesting bullets. “Fast, though.”
“Jabber . . . we better fucking go.” Drey’s voice went up and down with pain. “Fucking guns going off going to call them for miles . . .”
“Not so many nearby,” said the hotchi. “Maybe none to hear. But you should gone, yes. What you for? Why leave city? You looking for him come by on the clay man?”
Cutter looked to the others and they watched him carefully, letting him speak.
He said: “You seen him?” He stepped toward the busy hotchi. “You seen him?”
“I not seen him, but I know them as has. Some days, week or more gone. Man come through the wood on a grey giant. Running through. The militia come after.”
The light of afternoon came down to them all and the forest animals began to make their noises again. Cutter was locked in by miles of trees. He opened his mouth more than once before he spoke.
Cutter said: “Militia followed him?”
“On Remade horses. I heard.”
On Remade horses with hammered metal hoofs, or with tiger’s claws or with a tail prehensile and coated in poison glands. With steam-pistons giving their legs ridiculous strength or with stamina from a boiler-excrescence behind the saddle. Made carnivorous and long-tusked. Wolf-horses or boar-horses, construct-horses.
“I didn’t see,” said the hotchi. He mounted his cockerel. “Them went after the clay-man rider, south in Rudewood. You best go. Fast now.” He turned his fight-bird and pointed a smoke-brown finger. “Stay careful. This is Rudewood. Go now.”
He spurred his gallus into the undergrowth and dense trunks. “Go,” he shouted, already invisible.
“Damn,” said Cutter. “Come on.” They gathered their little camp. Pomeroy took Drey’s pack as well as his own, and the six of them went up out of the cock-fighting pit and into the forest.
They went southwest by Cutter’s compass, along the path the hot-chi had taken. “He showed us the way,” Cutter said. His comrades waited for him to guide them. They drove between rootmasses and blockages of flora, changing whatever they passed. Quickly Cutter’s tiredness was so profound it was an astonishing, alien sensation.
When they noticed darkness they fell where they were,