Iron Council - China Mieville [40]
The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time—stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay—Cutter asked his name.
“And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?” Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.
Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.
They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh's. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.
He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.
They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.
“I rode,” he said to them. “On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter.” A brief terrible look went over him.
He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.
Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. “Let it go, Judah,” he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.
“Rest,” Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.
Cutter felt an urge to push it over and watch it break apart, to save it from being stuck like that in time, but he let it stand.
“Who’s Drogon?” Judah asked. The susurrator looked lost without his horse. He was busying himself, letting them discuss him.
“He’d not be here if I’d my way,” Pomeroy said. “For a whispersmith he’s got a damn lot of power. And we don’t know where he’s from.”
“He’s a drifter,” said Cutter. “Ranch-hand, tracker, you know. Some horse tramp. He heard you’d gone—gods know what the rumours are now. He’s attached hisself to us because he wants to find the Iron Council. Out of sentiment, I think. He’s saved us more'n once.”
“He’s coming with us?” Judah said. They looked at him.
Carefully, Cutter said: “You know . . . you don’t have to go on. We could go back.” Judah looked oddly at him. “I know you think you burnt your bridges with the golem trap in your rooms, and it’s true they’ll be watching for you, but dammit, Judah, you could go underground. You know the Caucus would protect you.”
Judah looked at them and one by one they broke his gaze, ashamed. “You don’t think it’s still there,” he said. “Is that what this is? You’re here for me?”
“No,” said Pomeroy. “I always said I wasn’t just here for you.”
But Judah kept talking. “You think it’s gone?” He spoke with calm, almost priestly certainty. “It hasn’t. How can I go back, Cutter? Don’t you realise what I’m here for? They’re coming for the Council. When they find it, they’ll bring it down. They came for the Teshi,