Iron Council by China Miéville Read Free Book Online

were running their horses in panic. They had left the cactacae regions and thought themselves safe. Their bullets pattered like gravel against the tardy, with little bursts of sap, not even slowing them.
    One
ge’ain
hurled her weapon like a trebuchet. It was a club in her hand, but as it spun it was visible again for what it was: a tree. It hit the minaret and bent its plating. Cutter lay on his belly and fired his repeater into the milling militia.
    They fired; they showed impressive and stupid bravery, standing their ground so that a tardy could lift his leg high and stamp them down, crushing them and their mounts in a brutal two-
step. The cactus-man swept his huge sapper, cracked a man’s neck with the fringe of its roots.
    The militia with rifles fell back behind those carrying rivebows and tanks of pyrotic gas. The tardy raised their hands. The fire-throwers made them dance back, their skins black and spitting.
    The smallest
ge’ain
staggered as rivebow chakris of sharpened metal spun into his vegetable muscle and severed his arm. He held his left hand against the stump, kicked at the dismounted men and sent two dead or broken-boned; but his pain took him to his knees, and a marksman killed him with a chakri to his face.
    Fejh’s arrows and the growl of Pomeroy’s blunderbuss uncovered them. The tower’s guns fingered at the copse where Fejh hid. Cutter shouted as the motorgun spun, its chains and gears loud as hammers, and a storm of bullets tattered the vegetation.
    There were four tardy now in an ecstasy of murder, stamping and grabbing. The tower pitched and moved. Its motorgun took another
ge’ain,
a line of bullets perforating her hip to breast, so she staggered then hinged in gross unnatural movement along her new seam.
    Pomeroy was standing. He was shouting and Cutter knew he was shouting Fejhechrillen’s name. Pomeroy rammed shot down and fired repeatedly. The dogs were frantic, snapping pointlessly with misshapen jaws.
    From a long way off, there was a shot. Again, and a man fell from the top of the iron tower.
    That voice spoke up close in Cutter’s ear.
“Down. You’re seen.”
Cutter dropped, and watched through gaps in the wiry grass and heard another of those far-off shots. A militiaman fell from his horse.
    Cutter saw a captain-thaumaturge, watched veins and tendons score his skin while dark sparks dissipated from him. Cutter fired and missed, and it was the last bullet.
    The thaumaturge shouted and his clothes smouldered, and a lance of milky energy spurted from the ground below the largest
ge’ain
’s feet and punctured her right through, soared skyward and was gone. She flailed as her sap poured. Black flame immolated her. The thaumaturge stood bleeding from his eyes but triumphant, and he was shot down by the unseen marksman. The last two
ge’ain
were treading the militiamen to death.
    One hugged the gun-spiked tower, wrestling it, twisting it violently. While his sibling crushed the last men and horses and
mutant dogs, he shoved and grappled the column. It reared, grinding, overbalanced, panicking the horses that dragged it. It fell slowly, smashed and split, spilt men living and dead.
    They ran, those who could, and the two tardy ran after them, stamping very much like grotesque children. A horseman was visible beyond the battleground, galloping toward them. Cutter heard his whisper again—
“Keep the dogs alive, don’t let them kill the dogs for Jabber’s sake”
—but it was not a command, he ignored it and was running, as his friends were, for the rough where Fejh had been. They found him spread across the green.
             
    He went and went, the dangling man, he flew, and his stance was stiff and he sped through the air. Through the byways of the swampy estuary, between stubbish islands, past mangroves and through the arches of their vines, over banks of mulch and mud into karst, rock splints, a serrated landscape.
    His companion was a bird, a hare, a jag-wasp the