Iron Council - China Mieville [6]
“We’ve no choice. And this pig place must be bigger, maybe they can get us farther. Why ain’t you got pigs here?”
The villagers glanced at each other.
“Raiders,” said one. “That’s how you can help,” said another. “Protect the cart with them guns. You can get us to pig-town. It’s a market. Traders from all over. They’ve airships, can help you.”
“Raiders?”
“Aye. Bandits. FReemade.”
Two scrawny horses pulled a wagon, whipped on by village men. Cutter and his companions sat in the cart, among thin vegetables and trinkets. Drey lay and sweated. His arm smelt very bad. The others held their weapons visible, uneasy and ostentatious.
The rig jarred along vague paths as the Mendicans gave way to grassland. For two days they went through sage and greenery, between boulders overhanging like canalside warehouses. Rock took sunset like a red tattoo.
They watched for air-corsairs. Fejh took brief visits to the waterways they passed.
“Too slow.” Cutter spoke to himself, but the others heard him. “Too slow, too slow, too godsdamn slow.”
“Show your guns,” said a driver suddenly. “Someone’s watching.” He indicated the low rises, copses on the stone. “If they come, shoot. Don’t wait. They’ll skin us if you leave them alive.”
Even Drey was awake. He held a repeating pistol in his good hand.
“Your gun shoots widest, Pomeroy,” said Cutter. “Be ready.”
And as he spoke both the drivers began to shout. “Now! Now! There!”
Cutter swung his pistol with dangerous imprecision, Pomeroy levelled his blunderbuss. A crossbow quarrel sang over their heads. A figure emerged from behind lichened buhrstone and Elsie shot him.
He was fReemade—a criminal Remade, reconfigured in the city’s punishment factories, escaped to the plains and Rohagi hills.
“You fuckers,” he shouted in pain. “Godsdammit, you fuckers.” They could see his Remaking—he had too many eyes. He slithered on the dust, leaving it bloody. “You fuckers.”
A new voice. “Fire again and you die.” Figures stood all around them, raised bows and a few old rifles. “Who are you? You ain’t locals.” The speaker stepped forward on a table of stone. “Come on, you two. You know the rules. The toll. I’ll charge you a wagonload of—what is that stuff? A wagonload of crappy vegetables.”
The fReemade were ragged and variegated, their Remakings of steam-spitting iron and stolen animal flesh twitching like arcane tumours. Men and women with tusks or metal limbs, with tails, with gutta-percha pipework intestines dangling oil-black in the cave of bloodless open bellies.
Their boss walked with a laggard pace. At first Cutter thought him mounted on some eyeless mutant beast but then he saw that the man’s torso was stitched to a horse’s body, where the head would be. But, with the caprice and cruelty of the state’s biothaumaturges, the human trunk faced the horse’s tail, as if he sat upon a mount backward. His four horse’s legs picked their way in careful reverse, his tail switching.
“This is new,” he said. “You brought guns. This we ain’t had. I seen mercs. You ain’t mercs.”
“You won’t see anything ever again, you don’t piss off,” said Pomeroy. He aimed his big musket with amazing calm. “You could take us, but how many of you’ll go too?” All the party, even Drey, had a fReemade in their sights.
“What are you?” said the chief. “Who are you lot? What you doing?”
Pomeroy began to answer, some bluster, some fighting pomp, but something abrupt happened to Cutter. He heard a whispering. Utterly intimate, like lips breathing right into his ear, unnatural and compelling. With the words came cold. He shuddered. The voice said: “Tell the truth.”
Words came out of Cutter in a loud involuntary chant. “Ihona’s a loom worker. Drey’s a machinist. Elsie’s out of work. Big Pomeroy’s a clerk. Fejh is a docker. I’m a shop-man. We’re with the Caucus. We’re looking for my friend. And we’re looking for the Iron Council.”
His companions stared. “What in hell, man?” said Fejh, and Ihona: “What in Jabber’s name . . . ?”
Cutter unclenched his teeth and shook his head. “I didn’t mean to,” he tried to tell them.