Iron Council

by China Miéville

  The forest wetness drip-dripped in the makeshift church.

  “Tell us where it is. I don’t damn well believe you don’t care. You care. You want to tell us. You want to look after them. You know it. So tell. We got your offer. They need us to kill this thing, and then you give us what you promised.”

  “I won’t take anything out of Vogu’s house for you—”

  “I don’t want to hear about your damn piety, when you’ll take snippets out of your god’s house to impress the damn natives. Tell us where the beast is, and we’ll fix it, and then you tell us where the Iron Council is.”

  “I don’t betray,” said Qurabin. “I buy. Everything I learn, I lose something. And it hurts. Vogu don’t give it up free. I unhid your man’s whore and daughter it stings, and I lose something. Lost and hidden by the Moment. I’m naked in front of you. I unhide this? Iron Council? It’ll cost me.”

  There was silence and the dripping again.

  “The beast,” Judah said. “Where is it?” There was long quiet.

  “Wait,” said the voice, and again there was relief under the resentment. Tired of being a god, thought Cutter. He looked at Judah, who stood trembling and splendid. Qurabin was lost, Cutter saw. Broken. Eager for something, deserted and newly eager, before righteous Judah.

  “I try,” said the voice, and gave a glottal retching. When Qurabin sounded again, it was with pain, in the voice of one used to pain.

  “Damnfire. Damn. It’s unhidden. The beast.”

  “What did you lose?” said Cutter.

  “Someone’s name.” Someone who mattered, Cutter could hear.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was dawn when they reached the dank place. Mud and dangerous paths, and stripped white trees. The marsh sweated. Trees rustled but barely.

  They came, the New Crobuzon outcasts, Susullil and Behellua, a tiny number of brave Hiddentown men. Qurabin was with them, unseen.

  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.

  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 any
one’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, but that ain’t going to happen. So I’m thinking maybe I can get away early, and maybe I can plead him away on the way to the jail, and maybe this and maybe that. And in the end, I see there ain’t nothing I can do. So I go back to bed. And on the way I wake him up. So we do it all over again.” Again the cheers. “And then early in the morning we do it again.” I’m drunk, thought Cutter. He did not mind.

  “And I’m waiting, and I’ll beg him, or bribe him—because I know what he likes, don’t I, by now? And I get up, and I run out and think maybe I just won’t stop. I’ll get to the ships, I’ll change my name, I ain’t going to jail, I ain’t going to be Remade. But then I pass a baker’s, and then a greengrocer’s, and I just can’t up and lose everything. I can’t just disappear. So instead of doing a bunk, I do some shopping. And then I come back.

  “I wake him up. And we have breakfast together, over my shop in Brock Marsh . . . and then he goes. Big kiss good-bye, and gone. Never seen him again. And I’m left to wonder. Maybe he was never going to do nothing. But the way I see it, the way I like to see it, what with what I done for him that night and what with the beautiful breakfast I made—grilled fish, spiced hash and creamed fruit, with a flower in the middle of the table as if we was married—I think he fell in true love with me for a few minutes that morning. No, I mean it. I fell in love with him too. I ain’t never loved nothing like I loved him when he kissed me and said good-bye. Because I’m sure, I’m sure he knew that I knew. It was his present to me, that leave-taking, that good-bye. Just like breakfast was my present to him. I ain’t never loved anyone like that before or since, except one man.”

  When it was obvious he had finished there was barking from the wineherds, and other applause sounds from here and there among the audience. Elsie and Pomeroy clapped a bit, though Pomeroy did not look at him. Watching the big man beat his palms together Cutter felt a blossom of affection. Gods bless, he thought, and to crown it Elsie even gave him a quick smile.

  And then he saw Judah, and the smile on the golemist’s face was different—there was no effort or connection to it, it was like the smile on an idol, and through his passion for the older man Cutter burned.

  Cutter was uninterested in gods. There were a few from New Crobuzon’s pantheons he felt some small affinity for, usually for heretic reasons: like Crawfoot, whose antics seemed not inept clownery but tactical subversions. You’re insurrectionist, ain’t you? he had always thought, while the priests affected patient indulgence with the fool-god on Crawfootfete E’en. But he did not worship. Such prayers as he offered were cynical or time-serving. But he could see the power of Qurabin’s devotions.

  The monk could find the hidden and the lost, though it cost. But in Qurabin’s voice Cutter no longer heard the arrogance of that power. He could hear that something had shifted. The monk’s giving up, Cutter thought.

  “Galaggi, they say it is . . . sobrech or sobrechin lulsur. It’s pun.” Qurabin’s voice came and went as the monk unhid the information. “Sobresh is ‘hateful,’ and sobr’chi, is ‘captain.’ In my language it has no name. In Tesh . . . we do not classify so much as you.” And Cutter heard the disgust, the rage in Qurabin’s voice when Tesh came up.

  He was not surprised the next day, when Qurabin came to them as they rose and told them that they would not be travelling alone. That the monk would not tell them where Iron Council was but would show them.

  He wants to rest, Cutter thought. And to be alone. With us. Plucking up courage. The monk’ll unhide more and more, no matter what the cost. What does it matter? What does he—she—have to live for? To be loyal to?

  It rained but it was a different rain. The sun’s rays were frozen in each drop like insects in amber, so it seemed to rain light. The Hiddentowners waved them gone.

  Susullil smiled at Cutter and nodded. “Never did understand each other, did we, boy?” Cutter said with true humour. Qurabin’s voice, the odd androgynous hooting, gusted good-bye. No one seemed distraught that their god was leaving.

  Of course Cutter had no notion of what Qurabin was saying. “You are your own people now, you have no need of gods,” he thought. Or “Be true to my memory or I’ll come back to blind you with my rage,” or “I was never a god, I’m a bloke like you, got lost because of an idiot religion.”

  The travellers went northwest and north. A day, and another, through the slowly cooling forest. The ground rose and the canopy fell.

  Trees became more sparse. By pools creatures like spindly bears and serrated wasps the size of cats came to drink. Cutter thought he saw things; he thought they were watched.

  In the unseen company of the monk, they moved very differently. It was Drogon who saw it first. “We’re travelling too fast,” he told Cutter. He pointed down, toward where an ancient Y-shaped tree poked clear of the surrounds. “Keep it in sight,” he whispered.

  Cutter tried to watch his feet but it disoriented him; the terrain changed uncertainly as if the path were skittish. Ahead a half mile he saw the tree by a river; he heard Qurabin move and speak loudly and Cutter ducked below a thorny branch and when he released it he walked on two more steps then stopped while Drogon whispered, “I told you.”

  The water was behind them. Cutter could see it through the growth, and there was the tree, black-barked, its boughs spread and thrusting skyward like supplicating arms. It was behind him too.

  There had been no dislocation. He had only walked. His companions looked consternated, except Judah. “What does it cost you?” the golemist said to Qurabin. “To find these ways?”

  “These are hidden ways, shortcuts—lost paths,” said the monk. “Sometimes the Moment’ll let me take them. Sometimes.” The monk sounded tired. “I said I’d take you.”

  Why so fast, monk? Cutter thought. You don’t have to travel like this. What’s this costing you, all these secrets?

  So they sped up though they walked, and shucked their packs and scrambled at the same pace they ever had. The everyday uncanny of the monk’s trails took them at increasing speeds. They passed pillars of rock in the middle of trees, and rounded them to emerge in dry plateau. The woods were threadbaring; it was as if the
y trod through an old and thinning tapestry.

  “Through . . . here I think,” Qurabin would say, and their compass needles yawed haywire as they crossed leagues. They went faster than horses.

  Qurabin’s efforts, Cutter understood, were apostate. Qurabin was wrenching things from the Moment’s domain of lost and hidden things. Every day Qurabin sounded lessened.

  “You want to disappear.” Cutter spoke it in a tiny voice. The monk was displaced, renegade, renounced by history and home. You want to disappear. Every lost route you uncover, you lose something—something’s hidden from you. You’ve had enough. And this is how you’ll do it. To make it mean something. Their journey was Qurabin’s protracted suicide.

  “You know what the monk’s doing,” Cutter said to Judah. “We better hope Qurabin don’t be all hidden or lost before we get where we’re going.”

  “It’s close,” said Judah. He smiled then, a look of such joy that Cutter could not help but smile back.

  The land was deep in grasses. Kettled glacial till, sloughs and dustbeds intermitted the low slopes. There had been so many weeks of journey. They saw mesquite copses and ruins. With the wind, the wild crops moved like sea. The monk grew weaker, more hidden, but cajoled and led them past water, past animal herds, python-sized centipedes wrapped around trees.

  One day they saw things leave a trail of pollen and dust and shake the grasses like whales in shallows. Borinatch, strider, the ungulate plains nomads. A family clan, young at the front, the queen behind. The striders stood much taller than a man. They careered by with their tottering gallop, their legs unbending and swinging like crutches.

  One of the sows turned a friendly bestial face and saw them, waved as she thundered past. Borinatch hands worked in strange ways. It looked as if her limb appeared and disappeared.

  The travellers had become a tough crew. Their muscles were bunched; they were expert shots. Pomeroy’s cuts had stained inside, so he wore splendid dark scars. Elsie fastened a bandana about her wild hair. The men’s beards were long, their shag tied back with leather: only Drogon defied this, shaving dry every few days. They husbanded their dwindling bullets, carried fire-hard spears. They looked, Cutter thought, like adventurers, the continent’s merce-nary freebooters.