Iron Council - China Mieville [54]
Cutter was eager for sound. He wanted to sing or laugh. The landscape ignored him and he felt offended. He tried to think himself a presence, and could only be conscious of the parings of New Crobuzon left behind him. He befouled where he was with where he had been.
Judah walked in front. An enormous golem walked with him. Eight feet tall, of wood, and what blades Hiddentown could spare. Judah had hammered it together with hinged joints, a crude swivel neck. He could have manifested something with a touch on a woodpile, but with only thaumaturgy holding it it would have drained him quicker or fallen apart.
Judah had played the wax cylinder again. Don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family, the voice said. He’s dead, Uzman’s dead. Cutter saw Judah’s sadness at the old message, and wondered what Uzman had been to him.
“D’you know why I became a golemist, Cutter? Years before the Construct War. There was no money in it when I started. It was the arcane end of golemetry that was a draw. Not even in matter. D’you know there’s such a thing as a sound golem? It’s hard, but you can make one. You’ve never seen a shadow golem, have you? This kind of golem—” He indicated the wood. “All this is really a by-product, for me. This isn’t what it’s all about.”
Perhaps. But still, the thing they had made was powerful and fine. It swung its head so the faint sun touched its cheap bead eyes. Rusted knives made its fingers.
“The beast’s close,” came Qurabin’s voice. There was pain in it: he had exchanged something for the knowledge.
Cutter prodded his toe at a lump of sickly colours, cussed in shock. It was animal remains. They came unstuck with an unrolling of stench. He tripped, and Pomeroy turned and was shouting as Elsie said something.
“Here!” Elsie said again. She stood over a body. Cutter saw the sheen of decomposition. Most of the chest was gone.
“Dear Jabber,” Cutter said. “We’re in its godsdamned parlour.”
“Quick!” said Judah. “Quick, here!” He was at the swamp’s edge, reaching out toward a young man who sat flecked with leeches. The boy was hideously thin. He did not look up, kept his eyes on the greying meat he gnawed.
Cutter broke off a cry. He saw an emaciated man, camouflaged by weeds and knubs of wood. The man was chewing. Beside him was a deep-jungle tapir. Its jaws moved.
“Judah,” Cutter said. “Judah, get back,” and Judah turned. There were bodies all around in the water, motionless but for chewing. Men and women, a shivering dog. Each was smeared with old matter around their mouths, and seemed to trail a vine.
Gases moiled, and what Cutter had thought a coagulate of muck began to rise. It blinked. What he had thought stones or holes were eyes. A tight studding of black eyes. It rose.
Those were not vines but the thing’s sucker-studded limbs. One stretched from each scrawny figure—each adult or child, each animal, tethered by the back of their necks. What they ate was rerouted into those grotesque intestinal leashes, passing peristaltically. They were made mindless conduits for food. And suspended at the centre of the arms, and shaggy with others whipping free, was the thing that ate through them.
Corpulent as an obese man, vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons.
The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders.
The Hiddentowners ran, pursued by ghosts of warm fog and by the creature’s arms. It gripped trees with its bird claws and scobs of flesh budded from it like snails’ eyes. Cutter’s repeater felt tiny. He ran toward Judah. The creature’s appendages seemed to fill the air. Cutter saw little eyes at one limb’s end, a flexing orifice, concentric rasp-teeth like a lamprey’s.