Iron Council

  “I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Cutter said. The close-up voice had exhausted him. “Whoever it is, it ain’t militia. Someone from the Caucus? I don’t see how, or why. Some free agent? It was them who held off the fReemade: that backward horse-man got whispered, like I did. I don’t know what’s going on. You want to take another boat, I ain’t going to argue. But we best find one soon. And seems to me we might as well find this one, just to know.”

  The Akif was a rusted thing, little more than a barge, with a single low deck and a captain pathetically grateful for their passage. He looked uncertain at Fejh, but smiled again when they mentioned the price—yes, already half-paid, he said, with the letter they had left for him.

  It was perfect, and it decided them. Though Pomeroy raged against the decision, Cutter knew he would not desert them.

  Someone’s watching us, thought Cutter. Someone who whispers. Someone who says they’re my friend.

  The sea, then the desert, then miles of unmapped land. Can I do this?

  Only a small sea. The man they searched for left trails, left people affected. Cutter could see his friends’ anxieties and did not blame them—their undertaking was enormous. But he believed they would find the man they followed.

  He went with his friends to search for rumours of a clay-rider or militia hunters, before they sailed. They went to send a letter back to the city, to their Caucus contacts, saying they were en route, that they had found tracks.

  The drifting man passed through arcane geography, between fulgurites and over alkaline pools. He stood still while he drifted, folding and unfolding his arms. He picked up speed, gliding full of wrongness.

  A bird was his companion but it did not fly, only clung to his head. It opened its wings and let the air spread its feathers. There was a growth on it, something that mangled its outlines.

  The man passed villages. What animals were there to see him howled.

  At the stub-end of the hills, in a drying landscape, the drifting man neared an interruption. Something embedded in the dirt, a star of rust-red and ragged brown-black cloth. A dead man. Come from very high and ironed down into the land. A little blood had soaked into the ground and blackened. The meat was tendered and flattened into outlines.

  The man who drifted above the earth and the bird who rode him paused above the dead. They looked down at him, and they looked up with unnatural perfect timing into the sky.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the second day out, in the grey waves of the Meagre Sea, Cutter’s party hijacked the Akif. Pomeroy held a pistol at the captain’s head. The crew stared in disbelief. Elsie and Ihona raised their guns. Cutter watched Elsie’s hand shake. Fejh reared out of his water-barrel with a bow. The captain began to cry.

  “We’re taking a diversion,” Cutter said. “It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale River. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.”

  The crew of six men sulked and surrendered their weapons. They were all casuals on a daily rate: they had no solidarity with each other or their captain. They looked at Fejhechrillen hatefully, out of some prejudice.

  Cutter tied the captain to the wheel, by the dehorned sables the Akif carried, and the travellers took turns to menace him while the mounts watched. His blubbering was embarrassing. The sun grew harsher. Their wake widened as if they unbuckled the water. Cutter watched Fejh suffer in the hot salt air.

  They saw the north shores of the Cymek on the third day. Merciless baked-clay hills, dust and sandtraps. There were scraps of plantlife: dust-coloured marram, trees of hard and alien nature, spicate foliage. The Akif churned past brine marshes.

  “He always said this would be the only way to get to Iron Council,” Cutter said.

  The minerals of the Dradscale estuary made lustre on the water. The brackish slough was full of weed, and Cutter gave a city-dweller’s gape to see a clan of manatees surface and graze.

  “Is no safe,” said the helmsman. “Is with—” He gave some obscenity or disgust-noise, and pointed at Fejh. “Up farther. Full of riverpig.”

  Cutter tensed at the word. “On,” he said, and pointed his gun. The pilot moved back.

  “We no do,” he said. Abruptly he tilted backward over the rail and into the water. Everyone moved and shouted.

  “There.” Pomeroy pointed with his revolver. The pilot had surfaced and was heading for one of the islands. Pomeroy tracked him but never fired.

  “Godsdammit,” he said as the man reached the little shore. “Only reason the others haven’t gone after him is they can’t swim.” He nodded at the cheering crew.

  “They’ll fight back with their fucking hands if we push this,” Ihona said. “Look at them. And you know we won’t shoot them. You know what we have to do.”

  So in ridiculous inversion, the hijackers ferried the crew to the island. Pomeroy waved his gun as if carrying out necessary punishment. But they let the sailors off, and even gave them provisions. The captain watched plaintively. They would not let him go.

  Cutter was disgusted. “Too fucking soft,” he raged at his friends. “You shouldn’t have come if you’re so soft.”

  “What do you suggest, Cutter?” Ihona shouted. “You make them stay if you can. You ain’t going to kill them. No, maybe we shouldn’t have come, it’s already cost us.” Pomeroy glowered. Elsie and Fejh would not look at Cutter. He was suddenly fearful.

  “Come on,” Cutter said. He tried not to sound wheedling or scornful. “Come on. We’re getting there. We’ll find him. This bloody journey’ll end.”

  “For someone so known not to give a damn,” Ihona said, “you’re risking a lot for this. You want to be careful, people might think you ain’t what you like to think.”

  The Dradscale was wide. Ditches and sikes joined it, channelling in dirty water. It was unbending for miles ahead.

  On the east bank, dry hills rose behind the mangroves, wind-cut arids. It was a desert of cooked mud, and way beyond it was Shankell, the cactus city. On the west the land was altogether harsher. Above the fringe of tidal trees was a comb of rock teeth. A zone of vicious karst, an unbelievable thicket of edged stone. By Cutter’s imprecise documents it stretched a hundred miles. His maps were scribbled with explorers’ exhortations. Devils’ nails said one, and another Three dead. Turned back.

  There were birds, high-shouldered storks that walked like villains. They flew with languid wingstrokes as if always exhausted. Cutter had never suffered in so brute a sun. He gaped in its light. All of them were pained by it, but Fejh of course most of all, submerging again and again in his stinking barrel. When eventually the water around them was saltless he dived with relief and refilled his container. He did not swim long: he did not know this river.

  The man they followed must have been a vector of change. Cutter watched the riverbanks for signs that he had passed.

  They steamed through the night, announcing themselves with soot and juddering. In the hard red light of dawn the leaves and vines dandled in the current seemed to deliquesce, to be runoff streams of dye, matter adrip into meltwater.

  While the sun was still low the Dradscale widened and bled into a pocosin. The marsh-lake was met by the end of the karst, uncanny fingerbones of stone. The Akif slowed. For minutes, its motor was the only sound.

  “Where now, Cutter?” someone said at last.

  Something moved below the water. Fejh leaned up half out of his barrel.

  “Dammit, it’s—” he said but was interrupted.

  Things were surfacing ahead of the Akif, broad-mouthed heads. Vodyanoi bravos waving spears.

  The captain came upright and shrieked. He shoved down on his throttle, and the water-bandits scattered and dived. Fejh upset his barrel, spilling dirty water. He leaned out and yelled in Lubbock at the vodyanoi below, but they did not answer.

  They came up again, burst out of the water and for a moment were poised as if they stood up
on it. They threw spears before they fell. Spumes of water arced from below their outflung arms so that their shafts became harpoons, riding it. Cutter had never seen such watercræft. He fired into the water.

  The captain was still accelerating. He was going to drive the Akif onto the shore, Cutter realised. There was no time to moor.

  “Brace!” he shouted. With a huge grinding the boat rode the shallow bank. Cutter pitched over the prow and landed hard. “Come on!” he said, rising.

  The Akif jutted like a ramp. The antelopes’ pen had broken and, tethered to one another, they were hauling off in a dangerous mass of hooves and hornstubs. Fejh vaulted the listing rail. Elsie had hit her head, and Pomeroy helped her down.

  Ihona was cutting the captain’s bonds. Cutter fired twice at oncoming swells. “Come on!” he shouted again.

  A spire of water rose by the broken boat. For an instant he thought it some freakish wave, or watercræft of an astonishing kind, but it was more than twenty feet high, a pillar of utterly clear water, and from its top jutted a vodyanoi. He was a shaman, riding his undine.

  Cutter could see the vessel distorted through the water elemental’s body. Its thousands of gallons pushed down on the boat with strange motion, and bucked it, and Ihona and the captain fell down the sloping deck toward it. They tried to rise but the water of the undine flowed up and lapped at their feet then broke, a wave, and engulfed them. Cutter shouted as his comrade and her prisoner were buffeted into the undine’s belly. They kicked and clawed, trying to swim out but which way was out? The undine gave its innards currents that kept them in its core.

  Pomeroy bellowed. He fired, and Cutter fired, and Fejh let an arrow go. And all three missiles hit the elemental with splashes like dropped stones, and were swallowed up. The arrow was visible, vortexing in the liquid thing, coiling down to be voided like shit. Again Cutter fired, this time at the shaman atop the monstrous water, but his shot was wide. With idiot bravery Pomeroy was pummelling the undine, trying to tear it apart to get at his friend, but it ignored him, and his blows raised only spray.

  Ihona and the captain were drowning. The undine poured itself into the cargo hold, and the shaman kicked down into its bowels. Cutter screamed to see Ihona’s still-moving body carried in the matter of the undine belowdecks and out of sight.

  The vodyanoi were all over the Akif. They began to throw spears again.

  Water poured up out of the boat, the undine geysering from the hold, and it carried within it engine parts—iron buoyed on its strange tides. And rolling like motes were the bodies of its victims. They moved now only with the water that bore them. Ihona’s eyes and mouth were open. Cutter saw her only a moment before the elemental came down in a great arch into the lake, water in water, carrying its loot and dead.

  All the travellers could do was curse and cry. They cursed many times, they howled, and moved at last into the grasslands, away from the boat, away from the rapacious water.

  At night they sat exhausted in a motte of trees beside their sables and watched Elsie. The moon and its daughters, the satellites circling it like tossed coins, were high. Elsie, cross-legged, looked at them, and Cutter was surprised to see her calm. She moved her mouth. A shirt was tied around her neck. Her eyes unfocused.

  Cutter looked beyond her through the canebrake at the veldt. In the night light the tambotie trees and ironthorns were silhouetted like assassins. Baobabs stood thickset with their splintered crowns.

  When Elsie stopped she looked defensive. She untied their quarry’s shirt from her neck.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It weren’t clear. I think maybe something that way.” She gestured at a distant rise. Cutter said nothing. She was pointing north-northeast, the way they knew they had to go. He had been relieved that Elsie had come, but he had always known she had only hedge-charms, no mirific strength. He did not know if she was sensing true emanations, and neither did she.

  “We’ve got to go this way, anyway,” said Cutter. He meant it kindly—nothing’s lost even if you’re wrong—but Elsie would not look at him.

  Days they rode through landscape that punished them with heat and plants like barbed wire. They were inexpert with the muscular mounts but made a pace they could not have done on foot. Their guns dipped in exhaustion. Fejh languished in a barrelful of the lake tethered between two sables. It was stagnant; it made him ill.

  They were made to panic by gibbering from above. A brood of things came at them out of the sky, snapping and laughing. Cutter knew them from pictures: the glucliche, hyaena hunching under bone and leather batwings.

  Pomeroy shot one and its sisters and brothers began to eat it before it reached the ground. The flock came together ravenous and cannibal, and the party got clear.

  “Where’s your damn whisperer, Cutter?”

  “Fuck you, Pomeroy. I find out, I’ll be sure to tell you.”

  “Two already. Two comrades dead, Cutter. What are we doing?” Cutter did not answer.

  “How does he know where to go?” Elsie said. She was talking about their quarry.

  “He always knew where it was, or thereabouts, he told me,” Cutter said. “He hinted he got messages from it. Said he heard from a contact in the city that they’re looking for the Council. He had to go, get there first.” Cutter had not brought the note, had been so hurt by its terse vagueness. “Showed me on a map once where he thought it was. I told you. That’s where we go.” As if it were just like that.

  They reached the base of a steep rise at twilight, found a rivulet and drank from it with vast relief. Fejh wallowed. The humans left him to sleep in the water, and climbed the shelf in their way. At its ragged cliff-edge they saw across miles of flattened land, and there were lights the way they were heading. Three sets: the farthest a barely visible glinting, the closest perhaps two hours away.

  “Elsie, Elsie,” Cutter said. “You did, you did feel something.”

  Pomeroy was too heavy to take the steep routes down, and Elsie had not the strength. Only Cutter could descend. The others told him to wait, that they would find a way together the next day, but even knowing it was foolish to walk these hostile plains alone, at night, he could not hold back.

  “Go on,” he said. “Look after Fejh. I’ll see you later.”

  He was astonished by how glad he was to be alone. Time was stilled. Cutter walked through a ghostworld, the earth’s dream of its own grasslands.

  There were no nightbirds calling, no glucliches, nothing but the dark vista like a painted background. Cutter was alone on a stage. He thought of dead Ihona. When at last the lights were close he could see a kraal of heavy houses. He walked into the village as brazen as if he were welcome.

  It was empty. The windows were only holes. The big doorways gaped into silent interiors. Each of them was stripped.

  The lights were clustered at junctions: head-sized globes of some gently burning lava, cool, and no brighter than a covered lamp. They hung without motion, dead still in the air. They muttered and their surfaces moiled: arcs of cold pyrosis flared inches from them. Tame night-suns. Nothing moved.

  In the empty alleys he spoke to the man he followed. “Where are you then?” His voice was very careful.

  When he went back to the cliff, Cutter saw a light on its edge, a lantern, that moved slowly. He knew it was not his companions’.

  Elsie wanted to see the empty village, but Cutter was firm that they had no time, they had to see the other lights, to see if there was a trail. “You picked up something,” he reminded her. “We better see. We need some fucking guidance.”

  Fejh was better, his water renewed, but he was still afraid. “Vodyanoi ain’t supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m going to die here, Cutter.”

  Midmorning, Cutter looked back, pointed into the brightness. Someone, some speck figure, sat on horseback on the shelf they had reached the previous night. A woman or man in a wide-brimmed hat.

  “We’re being followed. It’s got to be the whisperer.” Cutter waited for a mutt
er in his ear, but there was nothing. Throughout the day and in the early night the rider tracked them, coming no closer. It angered them, but they could do nothing.

  The second village was like the first, Cutter thought, but he was wrong. The sables wheezed and slowed through deserted squares and under the sputtering light-globes and found a long wall all bullet-scarred, its mortar punctured and stained with sap. The travellers dismounted, stood in the cold remains of violence. In the township’s outlands Cutter saw tilled land; and then he felt the moment still, realised it was not a field but was disturbed in another way, turned over and charred. It was the topsoil on a grave. It was a mass grave.

  Breaking the soil like the first shoots of a grotesque harvest were bones. They were abrupt and blacked by fire, fibrous like dense wood. The bones of cactus-people.

  Cutter stood among the dead, above their moulding vegetable-flesh. Time came back. He felt it shudder.

  Planted scarecrow in the middle was a degraded corpse. A human man. He was naked, slumped, upheld by spikes that pinned him to a tree. Javelins pierced him. One emerged point-first from his sternum. It had been forced up his anus and through him. His scrotum was torn off. There was a scab of blood on his throat. He was leathered by sun and insects worked on him.

  The travellers stared like worshippers at their totem. When after many seconds Pomeroy moved he still looked carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to break the dead man’s gaze.

  “Look,” he said. He swallowed. “All cactacae.” He poked at the earth, turned up bits of the dead. “And then there’s him. What in Jabber’s name happened here? The war ain’t reached here . . .”

  Cutter looked at the corpse. It was not very bloody. Even between its legs there was only a little gore.

  “He was already gone,” Cutter whispered. He was awed by the brutal tableau. “They done this to a dead man. After they buried the others.” Below the corpse’s chin was not a clot but blooded metal. Cutter looked away while he worked it from the dead man’s neck.