Iron Council - China Mieville [43]
They tasted carbon. Somewhere above the bluffs before them the sky was discoloured by more than summer. Lines of dark smoke were drawn up and dissipating. They seemed to retreat like a rainbow as the party approached, but the next day the smell of burn was much stronger.
There were paths. They were entering inhabited lands, and approaching the fires. “Look there!” said the whispersmith to each of them in turn. On downs miles off there was movement. Through Drogon’s telescope Cutter saw that it was people. Perhaps a hundred. Hauling carts, hurrying their meat-beasts: fat cow-sized birds, thick and quadruped, scrawny featherless wings stumping as forelegs.
The caravan was decrepit and desperate. “What’s happening here?” Cutter said.
At noon they came somewhere the earth had split, and they walked the bottom of arroyos much higher than houses. They saw something dun and battered, bound, like a giant brown-paper parcel in string. It was a wagon. Its wheels were broken and it leaned against the rock. It was split and burned.
There were men and women around it. Their heads were stove in or their chests opened up and emptied by bullets, the contents spilt down their clothes and shoes. They sat or lay in neat order where they had been killed, like a troop waiting instructions. A company of the dead. A child spitted on a broken sabre huddled at their front like a mascot.
They were not soldiers. Their clothes were peasants’ clothes. Their belongings littered the chine floor—irons, pots and kettles, all alien designs, cloth made rags.
Cutter and his companions stared with their hands at their lips. Drogon wrapped his kerchief around mouth and nose and went into the deads’ stench through the billows of insects that ate them. He took a wooden spoke and poked at the bodies so carefully he looked almost respectful. They were sunbaked, their skins cured. Cutter could see their bones in ridges.
The cart listed as Drogon leaned in. He squatted and looked at the wounds, probing them as the others watched and gave off sounds. When the whispersmith took gentle hold of the sabre that protruded from the child, Cutter turned away so he would not see the dead boy move.
“Days gone,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation. “One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade.”
It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.
“I told you.” Judah spoke very quietly.
Can’t we get out of here? Cutter thought. I don’t want to talk in front of them. He looked up, breathing fast, saw Pomeroy and Elsie holding each other.
“In my letter, Cutter. You remember?” Judah held his gaze. “I told you I was going because of this.”
“We’re near the outskirts of Tesh lands,” Cutter said. “This don’t mean the militia are onto the Iron Council.”
“They’ve a base by the coast, from where they send these squads out. This . . . work . . . This is only half of what they do. They’re going north. They’re looking for the Council.”
Beyond the dead was open country. They knew that the militia that had done this to these runaways might be close, and they moved carefully. Cutter saw those patient dead when he closed his eyes. Drogon took them on a path through the sagebrush. On the hills ahead were scraps of farmland, of a half-wild, scrubby kind, from where the smoke came.
It was a day to the depredation. The air was clogged with smouldering. They entered the first little field with their guns drawn.
Through ridges of turned-over earth into what had been a copse of olives. They trod over the spread claws of roots where the little trees had been torn down. Drying olives scattered like animal pellets. There were craters, where stumps were made carbon sculptures. There were bodies cooked down to skeletons.
There had been huts, and they were burnt. On a plain of scrub and drying creeks were mounds of black rubbish