Iron Council - China Mieville [47]
Two were still alive. One whom the trumpet had struck down was delirious, raging with occult fever the music weapon had given him; the other had taken Pomeroy’s shot through his hands, and he screamed at his fingerless red messes.
Drogon went through the corpses. It would not be long before the main force at the chelona sent scouts after this little death-squad.
Judah was tired. The golem he had made—so big, so quickly—had taken energy. He searched the dead captain-thaumaturge whose fold-up golem he had so easily deactivated. He took her accoutrements: batteries, chymical vials, and hexstones.
He would not meet Cutter’s eye. He’s shamefaced, Cutter thought. Because of his little display. Judah stalking up the hill like some vexed spirit, infecting the dead with a kind of life. Judah was a golemist of extraordinary puissance and expertise: since the Construct War had forced the rich to replace their steam-driven servants, his skills had made him wealthy. But Cutter had never seen Judah Low acknowledge his power or revel in it until that deadly walk behind the corpse-giant.
You use a golem on me? There had been an ease to his rage. Now Judah Low was trying to fade.
The refugees watched. There were people from the chelona, men and women with skins of varied colours and clothes of astonishing designs. There were beetles the height of a child, walking upright. They stared with iridescent eyes, and their antennae swung toward Cutter. Their dead were cracked open and smeared with their ichor.
Among the humans there were a few dressed in the natural colours of hunters. They were taller than the chelonans, their skin a stark grey.
“Wineherds,” Cutter said.
“Twice refugees,” Elsie said. “Must have run from the militia to the shelltown, and then run again.”
A wineherd spoke, and he and the travellers and the chelona renegades went through what languages they knew and found only a few cognates. There were trails of dust in the bush as refugees made for the warm forest while Drogon searched and Judah sat. Behind them, the surviving militiamen made sobby sounds.
“We have to move,” said Elsie.
They went on with the last chelonans, a few of the silent insect people, two exile wineherds. They walked into the forest. Behind them, the New Crobuzon militiaman spasmed and raved in his hexed sickness.
It was nothing like Rudewood. These selva trees were tougher, draped with vines and succulent leaves, hanging with dark foreign fruits. There were alien animal sounds.
The lost chelonans were cowed, and looked with open-eyed hopelessness at Judah. They tried to stick to the power they had seen save them. They walked, though, with a clumsiness Cutter and his companions had shed, and that now angered them.
They could not be delayed, and they left the refugees behind, simply by pacing with their lean, wood-hard muscles. Cutter knew the militia would follow them, and that those they left would not do well if they were found. He was too tired to feel much guilt.
Without ever speaking, the insect people found their own forest paths and went. When the warm night came, only the two wineherds had kept up. They moved with hunters’ stamina. Finally, far enough from the exhausted chelonans they had shed, the travellers stopped. They made an odd community, the wineherds and Cutter’s party staring at each other as they chewed, each grouplet counting the other’s oddities, companionable and unspeaking.
For the first two days they heard munitions behind them. For days after that they heard nothing, though they were convinced they were still followed, and they kept their pace quick, and tried to hide their trails.
The wineherds accompanied them. They were named Behellua and Susullil. They often became melancholy, weeping half ritually, lamenting the loss of their wine-beasts. In the evenings they would talk lengthily in singsong by the fire, untroubled by their companions’ lack of understanding. Judah could only translate snips.