Iron Council - China Mieville [45]
The land was full of scavengers. Dead-eating fox-things dug at the earth. That night Drogon woke the travellers with a shot. “Ghul,” he whispered to each in turn. They did not believe him, but in the morning its corpse was there: grave-pale and simian, its toothy mouth wide, blood drying on its eyeless forehead.
There was the start of a cooling as they went north, but only the very start. In the heat, among the ghuls and the dead and the dizzying smell of rotting fruit and the smoke, in a land become a torn-up memory of itself, Cutter felt as if he were walking in the outskirts of some hell.
In days through rugged transverse rises, a haze of forested hills became just visible to the north, and Judah was elated. “We’ve to go through that,” he said. “It’s the end of the veldt; it’s the far edge of Galaggi.”
Behind them the earth was broken by the tracks of militia. They had passed out of that crushed zone of husbandry and feral wine, those few score of miles once worth something. This was a wetter reach of hills all summered, copper and slick. It rained warm rain—virga that did not reach the ground.
They were in places only antique sages and adventurers had been. They had heard about these strange reaches—patches of ice in deep summer, the hives of dog-sized termites, clouds that fossilised into granite. On a Dustday, new smoke and a smell reached them. They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them. One by one they let out sounds.
A few miles off. A chelona. Its titan legs were splayed, its plastron flattened to the ground. Its sides rose vastly, and from halfway up were gnarls of carapace-matter coaxed over generations into overhangs and towers, the walls of a keratin village. The great tortoise was more than a hundred yards long, and over the centuries of its life it had accreted on its back a many-layered jag township. Brittle outgrowths of its scute had been grown and carved into blocks, ziggurats and spires, their planes and lines imperfect, cut with windows, belfries connected by rope bridges, coursed with horny streets and tunnels; everything made, paved and walled in the mottlesome tortoiseshell. The chelona was dead and on fire.
It reeked of burning hair. Smoke rose from the walls in a thionic gush. Muck and gore dripped from its cave mouth.
Milling at its base were fastnesses on wheels and tracks, mobile guns—a New Crobuzon force. Crews rode two nashorns, the captains in sunk seats behind the rhinos’ heads, gripping controls sutured directly to ganglia. The militia cannon must be more powerful than they appeared to have blasted such wounds.
Militia infantry were heading in the travellers’ direction. They followed a line of refugees fleeing the remains of their chelonatown.
Drogon and Judah led them on through scrub, until a sharp coughcoughcough sounded, and there was screaming, and the echoes of bullets. They lay where they had thrown themselves until it was obvious that they were not targets, continued, staying low, to the base of a hill where they bunkered behind a marl barricade. Above them, out of the tree-cover, was a line of broken-down families. Not all were human. Some were behind fallen trunks or in hollows; some were running. Their shouts of fear were like the sounds of scraping.
At the hilltop, a corps of militia took positions. They were just discernible. They kneeled before motorguns; there was a monsoon of noise and bullets and many of the refugees fell.
Cutter watched in rage. More bullets pressed down the earth, and the dying twitched and tried to crawl away. A chelonaman raised something to his lips, and there was a thin noise, and way above there were cries and some of the militia stumbled at some thaumaturgy in the trumpet.
Drogon was watching the hilltop through his telescope. Judah turned to him in response to a whisper, and said, “She’s unpacking what?”
From the hilltop unfolded a shape of wire and dark leather, taller than a man. It became in a stutter of extending metal. Like a music