Iron Council - China Mieville [5]
“I been in these woods before,” said Pomeroy. “I know what a throng-bear looks like.”
“We must be far enough now,” said Cutter, and they bore westward while twilight came and left them behind. They walked behind a hooded lantern hammered by moths. The barkscape swallowed the light.
After midnight, they passed through low shinnery and out of the forest.
And for three days they were in the Mendican Foothills, rock tors and drumlins flecked with trees. They walked the routes of long-gone glaciers. The city was only tens of miles away. Its canals almost reached them. Sometimes through saddles in the landscape they saw real mountains far west and north, of which these hills were only dregs.
They drank and cleaned in tarns. They were slowing, pulling Drey. He could not move his arm and he looked bled out. He would not complain. It was the first time Cutter had ever seen him brave.
There were insinuations of paths, and they followed them south through grass and flowers. Pomeroy and Elsie shot rock rabbits and roasted them, stuffed with herb-weeds.
“How we going to find him?” Fejh said. “Whole continent to search.”
“I know his route.”
“But Cutter, it’s a whole continent . . .”
“He’ll leave signs. Wherever he goes. He’ll leave a trail. You can’t not.”
No one spoke a while.
“How’d he know to leave?”
“He got a message. Some old contact is all I know.”
Cutter saw fences reclaimed by weather, where farms had once been. The foundations of homesteads in angles of stone. Rudewood was east, weald broken with outcrops of dolomite. Once, protruding from the leaves, there were the remnants of ancient industry, smokestacks or pistons.
On the sixth day, Fishday, the 17th of Chet 1805, they reached a village.
In Rudewood there was a muttering of displaced air below the owl and monkey calls. It was not loud but the animals in its path looked up with the panic of prey. The empty way between trees, by overhangs of clay, was laced by the moon. The tree-limbs did not move.
Through the night shadows came a man. He wore a black-blue suit. His hands were in his pockets. Stems of moonlight touched his polished shoes, which moved at head-height above the roots. The man passed, his body poised, standing upright in the air. As he came hanging by arcane suspension between the canopy and the dark forest floor the sound came with him, as if space were moaning at his violation.
He was expressionless. Something scuttled across him, in and out of the shadow, in the folds of his clothes. A monkey, clinging to him as if he were its mother. It was disfigured by something on its chest, a growth that twitched and tensed.
In the weak shine the man and his passenger entered the bowl where the hotchi came to fight. They hung over the arena. They looked at the militiamen dead, mottled with rot.
The little ape dangled from the man’s shoes, dropped to the corpses. Its adroit little fingers examined. It leapt back to the dangling legs and chittered.
They were as silent for a while as the rest of the night, the man knuckling his lips thoughtfully, turning in a sedate pirouette, the monkey on his shoulder looking into the dead-black forest. Then they were in motion again, between the trees with the fraught sound of their passing, through bracken torn days before. After they had gone, the animals of Rudewood came out again. But they were anxious, and remained so the rest of that night.
CHAPTER TWO
The village had no name. The farmers seemed to Cutter mean as well as poor. They took money for food with a bad grace. If they had healers they denied it. Cutter could do nothing but let Drey sleep.
“We have to get to Myrshock,” Cutter said. The villagers stared in ignorance, and he set his teeth. “It’s not the fucking moon,” he said.
“I can take you to the pig-town,” said one man at last. “We need butter and pork. Four days’ drive south.”
“Still gives us, what, four hundred miles to Myrshock, for Jabber’s sake,