Iron Council - China Mieville [64]
—One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.
After that kill the stiltspear become prey.
The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.
Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.
They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.
Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.
—Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.
They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.
—I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.
There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.
One day Judah rises and gathers all he has—notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings—and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.
There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.
The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, —This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. —Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.
Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.
Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.
—See? See? the foreman says. —This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.
This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the de-bris of spatterdock. It