Iron Council - China Mieville [51]
“You know where we are, yes?” Cutter said to Judah and to Drogon.
The woodland density was lessening. Rain kept coming, and it was cooler. The air was less like steam, more like mist. “We’re still on the paths,” Drogon said. Do you know where we’re going? Cutter thought.
When they heard something approach they held up their guns; but there was shouting, no attempt to hide, and Susullil answered excited and accelerated. When the others reached him he was slapping hands with Behellua, and behind him were two cowed-looking men in forest camouflage who nodded careful greeting.
The returned man smiled at the travellers. The wineherds talked.
When at last Susullil turned he spoke carefully to Judah, though they all understood some now. “He’s come from the forest town,” Judah said. “They want help. Something’s coming for them . . . wiping them out. Behellua told them about us, what we did for them. They think we’ve powers. They’re offering something. If we help them . . .” He listened again.
“If we help them their god will help us. Will give us what we need. They say their god’ll tell us the way to the Iron Council.”
Hiddentown was huts in a clearing. Cutter had visioned an arboreal metropolis, with raised walkways between boughs and children spiralling down vines from the leaf sky.
At the edges of the village were attempts at stockades. Hiddentowners in forest-coloured clothes stared at the travellers. Much of the village was tents tarred or painted with gutta-percha. There were some warped wood huts, damp fires, a midden pit. Most of the inhabitants were human, but several of the child-high insects scuttled through the mud trails.
They were making quarters of their own in the corners of the town. They were chitin gardeners. They herded millions of insects, arachnids and arthropods, nurturing them through quick generations till they had colossal numbers of pinhead-sized ants, foot-long millipedes, and crawling wasps of countless species. With strange techniques they turned their flocks into walls, pressing them gently together, merging them and smoothing them, squeezing the still-living, conjoined mass of chitin-stuff into a kind of plaster. They made bungalows and burrows of their living mortar, feeding it carefully, so the tiny lives that made it did not die, but wriggled, embedded and melted with others, become architecture, a ghetto of living houses.
The human Hiddentowners spoke Galaggi in various forms, and here and there Tesh, and made a mongrel language. The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.
Cutter supposed those refugees who could look after themselves would not waste time with this settlement. Hiddentown was a convocation of the hopeless. No wonder they were desperate. No wonder they were such simple meat-stuff for some beast.
Jabbered at and bowed to with cursory politesse, the travellers were hustled to a long-hut with a tower of stakes, a rude minaret in split wood. It was a church, symbols cut and stained in the walls. There were tables with blades of mirror on them, papyrus. A robe of fine black wool. The chief left them.
For some seconds there was silence. “What are we fucking doing here?” Cutter said.
There were echoes; shadows moved that should not have been there. Cutter saw Elsie shiver. They moved into a circle, back-to-back.
“There’s something,” Elsie whispered. “Something’s here . . .”
“I am here.” The voice was throaty and snarled. They dropped with bushrangers’ speed. They waited.
“What are you?” Judah said.
“I’m here.” It was accented, glutinous as if words were congealing in a throat. There was a movement they could not follow. “They brought you here for my blessing, I think. A minute. Yes, yes they did. And to tell you what to do. You’re here to hunt for them.”
Drogon pointed at the table. The woollen robe was gone.
“You speak our language,” said Cutter.
“I am a little god but still a god. You are champions. That’s the idea, you know. Did you reckon yourselves champions?” The voice