Iron Council (47 page)

Shapes began to organise around the militia as they approached, out of the air or the earth or the fire of the torches they carried. Close enough now to see. All the officers were moving their hands in invocation. Cutter could see the ruins of their uniforms, the split and splintered helmets, scratches and Torque-stains where leather had become something else. The horses were dappled with blood and slather. Their passage through the cacotopic zone had marked them.

There were scores, despite what depredations must have culled them. Made mad by what they had suffered, ready to revenge against these renegades whose flight had dragged them into the cacotopos. No wonder they were so light-armed, no wonder so few. They did not need equipment or ordnance when they called up their weapons out of the surrounds and the matter of the world.

Cutter saw their arcane whips. He saw them shaping the air. He knew it was luftgeists that had brought down the wyrmen and the dirigible, air elementals of tremendous power. This was a corps of invocators, whose weapons were the presences they raised. Beast-handlers, of a preternatural kind. A cadre of elementarii.

Cutter was shouting at his chaverim. He saw some understood. Some were startled into fear.

There were no elementalists in the Iron Council. One man had a tiny captive yag that lived in a jar, a fire-spirit no larger than a match-flame. Those few vodyanoi with undines were bound to them by agreement; they could not control them. But there were some who understood what they were facing.

The elementarii were ranging out, each subgroup preparing its calling.
It had to be,
Cutter thought.
People who could fight without hauling weapons. It had to be either elementalists or karcists, and dæmons are too unsure. Gods damn, a cadre of elementalists.
That New Crobuzon would risk losing these men showed how profound was the government’s desire to end the Council.

“Come on, let’s do it,” he shouted to Thick Shanks, and wound the metaclockwork engine as well as he could. He focused the
reflected light, levelled the beam, could not stop staring over his shoulder at the attack coming.

Which will it be?
Cutter thought.
Fulmen? Shudners? Undines?
Lightning or stone or freshwater elementals, but of course it might be others: metal, sun, wood or fire. Or one whose elemental status was uncertain or disputed: elements made by history, born out of nothing and become real. Would it be a concrete elemental, a glass elemental? What would it be?

He could see already the coils of dust moving against any wind, extending air limbs. The luftgeists. The militia began to bring into being other things.

Sun? Darkness?

They threw all their torches to the ground, and the fire enlarged as if each individual flame loomed much larger than it should, so the ground was impossibly alight, and from the prodigious fire, with a tremendous cry of pleasure, came things like dogs or great apes made of the flames. A pack of yags, fire elementals that bounded in a motion between loping and burning. Cutter saw unridden horses corralled and chanted over and giving out equine screams. One by one they shuddered and let out dying wet noises and unfolded from inside: out of their shuddering carcasses came leaping creatures of their sinew and muscle and their organs all reconfigured into bloody skinless predators: proasmae, the flesh elementals.

Air, fire, flesh ran and turned in animal excitement. A line of militia drew whips occult-tempered, and cracked them, sending
the elementals rearing in fear, delight and challenge. The whips snapped like heavy leather and elyctricity, like shadows. When they cracked the noise made dark light.

The elementarii cajoled their charges forward. Air and fire and flesh came. Councillors screamed. They fired and their shells burst among the elementals. Without strategy, pushed by panic, they triggered Judah’s golem traps.

With automaton motion golems unfolded out of the earth and the metal and wood debris of the railroad. There were not so many as there were elementals, and each of them drew on Judah’s powers. Wherever he was, he must have felt a burst of sudden draining.
And soon he’ll feel more,
Cutter thought, and tried to focus the mirror.

A bomb exploded in the path of the yags, and they disappeared amid its copse of high flames, and their cries were uncanny cries of pleasure. When the bomb settled, there were the fire elementals still running, bigger, through the smoke. A line of earth golems faced them.

Cutter felt the murmur of clockwork in the mirror, gears uncoiling in discombobulant dimensions. He felt the mirror moving as if it were a baby.

“Unlock your engine,” he shouted, and when Thick Shanks did Cutter felt another tugging. He held his mirror hard and saw Thick Shanks doing the same. The recombinant light their reflections made was waxing.

It was curling, growing around itself. It was something in itself, something real, with dimensions, something that moved. Cutter saw the fishlike swimming presence, a thing roaming out of nothing and made of the hard light, shining like a sun. He felt his strength haemorrhage from him. “We’ve got it,” he shouted. “Take it to them.”

Thick Shanks and he kept their mirrors angled at each other and moved them in time, and the presence of glutinous light followed, dragged over the ground as they turned to face the elementarii. Something terrible was happening. The militia whipmen had come forward, cajoling the elementals at the ends of their lashes, and though the outer lines of the Councillors were laying down fire with everything they had, the proasmae were coming.

Missiles tore into the creatures of slabbed-together muscle, burrowing into them so they refolded and spat out the nuggets
of lead and the honed flint or iron blades. The proasmae, the flesh elementals, called up out of the stuff of the horses, reached the earthwork barrier.

They rolled up it, they were amoeboid, they were urchinlike, studded with bones they made limbs, they made themselves suddenly humanoid or like some unskinned and baying wildebeests, and they scrambled the height of the rise and paused at its top,
then hurled down onto the screaming men, and Cutter saw what they did.

They dived into the men’s flesh. They dived and poured themselves through the Councillors’ skin, emptying into flesh-stuff, swimming in the innards while their victims, their new houses, looked suddenly stunned and grossly bloated, scrabbling for a brief second at their chests or necks or wherever the proasm had entered before exploding or infolding in a wet burp of blood and the flutter and flap of skin, and the proasm would run on again, its substance increased, built up with stolen flesh. They raced through the line, tugging the mens’ insides out of them and leaving gory skin rags, growing bigger and more bone-flecked as they came.

“Jabber preserve us,” Cutter said.

He pulled at the speculum, and felt resistance. He and Thick Shanks pulled their mirrors at different speeds and the thing between them began to pull apart, to split resentfully, strings of light-matter stretching out between its parts like mucus. Cutter shouted, “Back, back your end, pull it back together!” They struggled to reaggregate the light golem.

The strikes of the militia’s gnoscourges reached much longer than it seemed they should. Yards up the luftgeists screeched and were galvanised into aggression as the elementarii corrected them. They swept down, invisible. They forced the Councillors who shot and slashed pointlessly to breathe them, shoved into their lungs and burst them.

A salvo of attacks, bombs, a rush of weak thaumaturgy, and the militia regrouped. One was hit; one only was killed. The yags faced the first of the golems, a huge figure of stone and the stumps of iron rails. Yags wrestled it, hugged it, and their fire corpi re-formed and enveloped the golem and began to bend its hard black metal with the intensity of their heat. It spilled into a pool, trying still to fight as its matter collapsed. It ran in rivulets, streams of molten golem.

The Councillors fought, but the elementals were racing through them with effortless carnage, scampering like dogs, like children. It was a terrible dangerous strategy to call the elementals, these animals, substances made predatory and playful flesh: they could not be domesticated. But the elementarii needed only to control them for this one quick attack. The yags and luftgeists were heading on, leaving footprints of fire and trails of ruined air, toward the perpetual train. The golems tried to face them—interventions, the manifestations of sentient control against the animalisation of raw forces. The elementals were winning.

But though the air elementals might blow apart the substance of earth golems in a spew of particles, they had to work harder against air golems. It was a strange, near-invisible fight. Almost the very last line of Judah’s defences. Sudden gusts of unnatural wind came up and met the luftgeists, and there was a vague storm where they fought. The made and the wild, the intervention and the barely controlled, squabbled and tore each other apart.

Chunks of something dropped out of the sky and mussed the ground with impact. They were invisible, clots of air itself, Cutter realised, thrown down from the fight above, the torn-off meat of an air elemental discarded by an implacable air golem, the hands of a golem bitten through by a frantic luftgeist. The dead air-flesh lay and evanesced.

The yags were spitting flames. The proasmae were prowling, were sucking the last matter from corpses, grazing on the bodies of the dead. Cutter was very afraid.

From the sunken bed of a stream, way off on the militia’s flanks, emerged horse-riding men. With them, in a powerful loping run, came Rahul the Remade man: and on his back, a bolas spinning
in his hands, his hat pulled low, was Drogon, the ranchero, the whispersmith.

Gods,
thought Cutter,
here come the uhlans, to save us.
He felt delirious.

The riflemen on their horses, some on Remade horses, having come up unseen through the gorges of the waterways, having run all the way from New Crobuzon or gods knew where, emerged and began with great expertise to fire. There were many seconds when the militia were too surprised or could not pin down their new enemies.

Though they were not many, the horesemen took up positions like hunters and fired on the militia from protected places. Their weapons shot puissant bullets that roared like splits in the aether, that muttered as they flew. The gunmen took two, three, four, a handful of the elementarii fast, dropping them, and the Councillors who could see it cheered.

Then, oh, fast, some of the militia spun their whips, and the gnoscourges flailed much too long like serpentine presences momentarily alive and playing with space, flicked the rumps of the yags that squealed in voices like burning and came back at a terrible rate, headed for the newcomers. The Iron Council’s gunmen and bombardiers and thaumaturges attacked as they could, but the yags were coming fast.

“Control it. There,
there,
” Cutter yelled, nodding toward the wedge of militia, and with Thick Shanks he tugged the mirrors against the resistant light golem.
Be,
Cutter thought.
Fucking be.

He pulled against the drag of the half-born golem and watched the yags bear on the newcomers.
Who are they?
he thought.
Drogon’s friends?
As they grew close, Drogon reared up on Rahul and put his hand to the side of his mouth, and must have whispered something. One of the elementarii flailed suddenly with his whip, sending the tip lashing across the gathering yags, and the scream they sent up was not playful but enraged.

Drogon whispered again and another militiaman did the same, scourged the oncoming elementals, and the yags reared and tumbled into each other, gobbed wads of burning sputum at their masters. Drogon whispered, whispered, sent commands to one and another elementarius, had them perform provocations, confusing the animals. The militia had to defend themselves with expert whip-play from the elementals’ revenge.

The light golem was born. It existed. Suddenly. Cutter’s mirror shook as the thing moved. It stood, out of the foetus of light it had been. It was a man, or a woman, a broad figure made of illumination that was impossible to look at yet did not shed light but seemed to
suck in
what light was there and gave a violent hard glow that impossibly did not spread beyond its own borders. It stood and stepped forward, and the mirrors were tugged with it. Cutter and Thick Shanks were half-following half-dictating its movements.

“There,” Cutter shouted, and they twisted their mirrors so the golem strode forward with a construct’s motion, past the outlying ranks of the Councillors who cried out, was this some seraph come to save them? They looked at each other with eyes momentarily occluded by its brightness, looked to its footsteps, which glowed with residue. The light golem strode into the yags. The golem stretched a little like some dough-thing, gripped the yags and began to shine.

Cutter felt weak. The golem wrestled them, and their fire did nothing against its solid light, and it grew brighter and brighter as it fought, became a humanoid star, shedding cold luminance that effaced the heat of the yags and grew much much too bright to see. And then the yags that had fought it were gone, washed out in its glow, and it was stronger. It moved with an unsound, a stillness.

Yags panicked. There were some that ran away in their animal motion across the landscape, and some who rallied and flew again at the light golem to be erased by its phosphorescence. There were elementarii whipping hard at the frightened fire elementals, but that enraged them and some in passing snapped petulant and pyrotic at their handlers and burnt them to death.

The militia were rallying. Little luftgeists like arrows hunted down the new gunmen, piercing them and drinking their blood. Drogon whispered his instructions, and the militia could not disobey him, and he made their whips flail destructively. They knew by then that he was their main enemy. They sent the proasmae toward him.

Cutter and Thick Shanks sent the golem for the militia, toward a group gathered around some kind of cannon. They were butchering animals.
What are they doing?