Iron Council - China Mieville [46]
It threw back a head with glass eyes, and its skin wings beat twice and it was airborne and careering down the hill toward the Galaggiites. Its limbs were not legs or arms but knifed extensions, insectan and agleam. They slid together with the sound of sharpening.
The ugly sculpture flew toward those cowering. Judah’s eyes were wide, and when he spoke he was choked with rage and contempt. “A prefab,” he said. “You use a damned ready-made?” He stepped up and onto the shallow hill, and Cutter stayed with him and aimed.
The militia’s gliding assassin passed over the wailing wounded and reached the trumpeter. He blew another thin note, but the thing had no life for him to disrupt. It rived him with its bayonets, and he screamed and bled out quickly.
Judah was growling. Cutter fired up the hill to protect him. Judah howled and stared not at the wired monstrosity but at the officer controlling it. The thing rose from the meat mess of its victim and beat its built wings. Judah puffed his chest like a pugilist.
No one fired. They watched—even the Galaggiites, astonished by this bizarre figure—while the cutting leather bird swept down on Judah, wings spread. Cutter fired and could not even tell if his bullet hit.
Judah picked up stones and dust. His growl grew louder and became a shout as the shadow rolled over him.
“On me?” His voice was splendid. “You use a golem on me?”
Like a child he threw his handful of charged dirt into the thing’s path. There was a stunning detonation of energy. The golem dropped instantly. It fell straight out of the sky, the momentum of its flight dissipated.
Judah stood over the collapsed metal, all its little borrowed life gone. For seconds there was no sound. Rage made Judah shake. He pointed up the hill. “You use a golem on me?”
The motorgun swung toward him but there were rifle-shots and the gunman barked and died at Drogon’s hidden hand. Suddenly there were scores of bullets in the air, from the whispersmith, Pomeroy’s blunderbuss, Elsie and Cutter and the appalled militia.
Judah strode through the fusillade. He was bellowing but Cutter could no longer hear what he said, only ran to protect him. The New Crobuzon militia, yards off, were shouting and firing blindly down the hill. Judah Low reached a pile of Galaggi dead.
The somaturge shoved his hand among the cadavers and barked. There was a fermentation as the world’s energy was channelled, the moment bowed and swelled and spat out strangeness. And the corpse-pile stood in a new configuration, a golem of flesh still twitching as the nerves within it died.
It was a shambles of the recent dead, gory and dripping. It walked in the base shape of a human: five, six bodies pushed together without respect for their outlines. The golem’s legs were stiffening corpses, one inverted, its dead head become a foot, crushed and made more shapeless with every step; the trunk a coagulate of arms and bones; the arms more dead; the head more of the Galaggi dead; the whole aggregate stamping at terrible speed up the hill, leaving a trail of itself. Leaving screams from the vineyard workers who saw their lost lovers and children reanimated into this grotesquerie. It walked quickly with Judah behind it, energies spitting from him, connecting him to his monstrosity with an uncanny funiculus.
The militia were pinned by gunshot, and the charnel golem reached them. The thing shed matter as it crested the hill, and the New Crobuzon soldiers who emptied their rifles and motorguns into it bloodied and desecrated it further. But it lasted long enough to smother and punch them to death. It beat them down with blows from the dead men and women that made its fists.
When the hilltop was quiet and the last of the soldiers had fallen, the flesh golem collapsed. It was carcasses again by the time it hit the ground.
The militia dead wore ragged, guerrilla versions of their uniforms, adorned with