Iron Council - China Mieville [55]
Cutter fired at the flanged body, hit and did nothing but burst a little piece with milky bleeding. A snare of arms crawled over each other for him like bickering worms.
“Kill it!” Qurabin spoke from somewhere. There were more shots.
Cutter heard Judah—“Wait, wait”—and then wood and leather and he saw the golem. It cut across the plait of tentacles, severed some right through. Others wrapped around it, ground into the golem’s neck. The ropy limb twitched. It shuddered for several seconds, flexed glands, spurted enzymes into the wood. It paused as if confused.
The golem attacked in its simple way, beating down with its knives and great hexed strength. Gouts of matter and the thing’s blood burst up and it staggered, and every one of its tethered creatures stopped eating. Pomeroy ran up, jabbed his muzzle into its fat. The explosion was muted by flesh, but the fist of bullets punched into innards.
Even then it did not fall, only staggered with its prim little steps and reeled, but the golem was on it again. Cutter watched Judah move. The somaturge moved his own body, a little, and the wood-and-knife golem echoed him. Handful by handful the golem took the predator apart.
The creature’s victims were dead or comatose. They had long been only eating machines for the insatiable thing.
Susullil and Pomeroy were wounded. Susullil let Cutter clean his gashes. Two of the Hiddentowners had been killed. One had fallen near enough to the unnaturally famished men and women in the animal’s thrall that they had reached for him weakly, and bitten.
The Hiddentowners took organic trophies, rooting in the creature’s flesh for its beaks or talons. Cutter was disgusted. He wished that he had a camera. He imagined a heliotype: Susullil by Judah by Elsie by Pomeroy with his blunderbuss, and he Cutter at the end beside the golem, all of them with the set-faced pride of the hunter.
That night there was rude conviviality in a Hiddentown long-hut. Men and women who had been gatherer-hunters and the inhabitants of chelonas danced, drunk on poteen.
The room was crisscrossed with the little beetle-people. They never spoke; they did nothing to get in anyone’s way. They came, silently picking up discarded food, gently fingering the cloth of clothes, sawing their antennae together.
Susullil was with Behellua. Cutter watched them and knew that night they would have the friendly encounter he could not but think of as sex, though he doubted they did.
Around the table, people were telling stories. To the Hiddentowners, Qurabin was a god become suddenly interventionist and earthly. The monk moved unseen among the diners, translated for them.
Through Qurabin, Susullil the wineherd told a story of the best harvest House Predicus had ever seen, of the culling of the vinhog bull prime, to let bull secundus, whose fruit was drier and better, stud. He told of the struggle it had been, the sadness he had felt at the bull’s passing. When the story was done, the New Crobuzoners applauded with everyone.
It was their turn, and it fell to Cutter. The Hiddentowners chanted softly, in a drumbeat, so when he spoke it took their rhythm. He stalled, looked down and up again and—contrary and drunk, with a pleasure of bravado—he spoke.
“This is a love story,” Cutter said. “That shouldn’t ever have been. It lasted a night and a morning.
“Five years ago. I found a man. We was in a pub in the docks. I asked him home with me. That night we was on very-tea and shazbah, and we did what we all want to do, you know, and it was fine.” There were laughs from the wineherds as Qurabin translated. Elsie and Pomeroy were looking down. “And then later while he slept I turned him over and went to the pisspot, and I saw his clothes. And coming out of his pocket was some little tiny pistol. I’d never seen nothing so clever, and though it weren’t my business I pulled it out, and with it comes a little sigil.
“It’s militia. He’s a militiaman. I don’t know what to do. What duty’s he on? Is he a drugsman? Is he on Depravity watch? Either way he’s got me. I even think of shooting him,