Iron Council (5 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

They gathered Fejh to bury. The strange dogs surrounded
the militia bodies and howled for their masters.

The two tardy remaining stood with their legs locked, in slumber. Not all the militia were dead. There was a thin screaming, and fast breathing from those too broken to crawl away. There were no more than four or five, dying slowly but with all their energy.

As Cutter dug, the horseman came through the frantic dogs. The companions turned their backs on their dead friend, to face him.

He nodded at them, touching the front of his brimmed hat. He was the colour of the dust. His jerkin sun-bleached, his trousers of buck leather and the chaps smoking with dirt. He had a rifle below his shabrack. On each hip he wore a pepperpot revolver.

The man looked at them. He stared at Cutter, held his right hand cupped by his lips and muttered. Cutter heard him, close-up, as if the mouth was by his ear.

“Best hurry. And we’d best get one of the dogs.”

“Who are you?” Cutter said. The man looked to Pomeroy, Elsie, Cutter again, mouthing. When it was his turn Cutter heard:
“Drogon.”

“A susurrator,” Pomeroy said with distrust, and Drogon turned to him and whispered something across the air. “Oh aye,” Pomeroy answered. “You can be damn sure of that.”

“What you doing here?” said Cutter. “You come to help us bury—” He had to stop and could only gesture. “Why you been following us?”

“Like I told you,”
Drogon whispered.
“We want the same thing. You’re exiles now, and so am I. We’re looking for the same thing. I been looking for the Iron Council for damn
years.
I wasn’t sure of you, you know. And maybe I still ain’t. We’re not the only ones looking for the Council, you know that. You know why
these
fuckers are here.”
He pointed at a militiaman supine and bloody.
“Why’d you think I followed? I needed to know who you-all are looking out for.”

“What’s he saying?” said Elsie, but Cutter waved her quiet.

“I still don’t know I trust you, but I been watching you and I know the best chance I got’s with you. And I showed you your best chance is with me. I’d have gone with your man if I’d been able, after I heard he’d gone.”

“How do you know . . . ?” Cutter said.

“You ain’t the only one with your ear to the ground, who knows what he is. But listen, we ain’t got time: it ain’t just him who’s being followed. This lot were after your man—they don’t know any more than we do already—and there’s others are after you. Been tracking you since Rudewood. And they’re gaining. And they ain’t just militia, either.”

“What? What’s coming?” And what Cutter heard he repeated in terror.

“Handlingers,” he said.

More frightened of dying alone than of the anger of their enemies, those militia still alive began to call out. They were without plan or intrigue—they cajoled not to any end but only eager to be spoken to as they lay in the heat.

“Hey, hey, hey mate, hey mate.” “Come on. Come on, then, come on.” “Jabber, my arm’s gone man, Jabber,
Jabber
it’s gone.”

They were mostly men in their thirties with expressions of pride and resignation that seemed scoured-on; they did not expect or even want quarter, only to be acknowledged before they died.

The dogs still screamed and circled. Drogon corralled three
of the weird-skulled things, herding them with his big horse. He calmed the frantic animals with inaudible commands.

“Why’s he helping?” Elsie said. “What does he want?”

Pomeroy was for killing him, or at least constraining him and leaving him behind.

“Dammit, I don’t know,” said Cutter. “Says he heard what was happening. That he’s out for the Council, too. I don’t
know.
But look what he’s done—he could’ve killed us by now. He saved my life—took out the man who’d sighted me. You saw how he used them guns. And you said yourself, Pom, he’s a thaumaturge.”

“He’s a susurrator,” said Pomeroy with scorn. “He’s just a whispersmith.”

“I been whispered to by him, brother. Remember? This ain’t a little susurrus to make a dog lie down. He sounded across
miles,
put me and that fReemade highwayman in thrall.”

It was a petty field, subvocalurgy: the science of furtive suggestions, a rude footpad technique. But this man had made it something more.

The dogs were Remade. The olfactory centres of their brains had been hugely enlarged. Their crania were doughy and distended, as if their unshaped brains bubbled over. Their eyes were tiny, and at the end of their jaws their nostrils were dilated and set in flared and mobile flesh like pigs’. Their wrinkled snouts wore wires and they carried batteries, making thaumaturgic circuits. Each had a rag in its collar.

“Oh Jabber, those are his damn clothes,” said Cutter.

“These’ll track across continents,”
whispered Drogon.
“That’s how they were following him.”

They did not kill the militia left alive, nor spit in their faces nor give them water, only left them stone ignored. Drogon concentrated
on the dogs. He was whispering, and they were calming. They were eager to trust him.

“Them dogs is ours,” Pomeroy said. Drogon shrugged and held out the leash, and the distorted animal looked at Pomeroy and showed its teeth. “What’s your story?” Pomeroy said.

Drogon pointed at Elsie, whispered, and she walked toward him. He took her hands and put them on his forehead, and she went into her hexing state. He kept speaking, enunciating something only she could hear.

When he was done she opened her eyes. “He told me to read him. He told me to verity-gauge. And he said, ‘I want what you want, I want to find the Council.’ He said he’s from the city, but he sure isn’t bloody Parliament, and he isn’t militia. Says he’s a vaquero, a horseman. Lived nomad for twenty years.

“He says there are too many stories for the Council not to be real. And it’s precious to wilderness-men. Iron Council. Like a promised place. So when he got word what was happening—when he heard who’d gone to protect it—he had to come after him to help. To find it. He followed us. Till he was sure he could trust us.”

“You ain’t a truesayer,” Pomeroy said. “This don’t mean shit.”

“No I ain’t, but I’ve got something.” Elsie glowered. “I can feel. I was verity-gauging.”

The whispersmith replaced his hat and turned back to the dogs, subvocalising till they skittered for his affection among the bodies of their handlers.

“She ain’t got the puissance to be sure, Cutter,” Pomeroy said.

Why am I supposed to fucking decide?
thought Cutter.

Drogon held the cloths to the dogs’ absurd noses, and the animals slobbered and wheeled north.
“We have to go.”
Drogon spoke to Cutter.
“We’re still being followed. We’re close, now, we’re close.”

Elsie tried to thank the tardy, with no reaction. “You have to go,” she shouted. “Handlingers are coming.” But the
ge’ain
did not answer. They stood among their revenge and waited for nothing. The humans could only shout their thanks and leave the plant-
giants in stupor. Cutter saluted Fejh’s grave.

The dogs fanned on their leads ahead of Drogon, sniffing urgently. Sometimes he let them career through the hard vegetation, their outsized heads swinging. While Cutter and the others continued their trudging, he would ride out.

He whispered to the travellers each in turn, from miles ahead. He let the dogs run, their leads trailing behind them, and when they went too far he would whisper commands and they would come back.

“Keep walking,”
he told Cutter.
“Handlinger’s behind you.”

Handlingers. The malefic hands of history. Five-fingered parasites, come out now to the light.

Up through a col in the hills. Cutter thought of Fejh slowly baking in the earth. He looked at the mark they had left, the dead and nearly dead, the two tardy standing like trees, the ruins of the skirmish like a soot stain.

The land before them was more wooded, the ground become peaked, slopes of scree gripped in the roots of olives. Drogon’s dust scattered into a low cloud. He was ahead, his path visible like a seam. There was sage, and dog-rose. Each of Cutter’s steps dispersed a gathering of cicadas.

It was not the only moment of the journey when time clotted, and Cutter was stuck fast. A day was only an instant drawn out. Motion itself—the putter of insects, the appearance-disappearance of a tiny rodent—was an endless repetition of the same.

They did not sleep long that night for the sounding of the bloodhounds and Drogon’s whispers from his camp ahead. They were weighed down by weapons they had taken from the militia, and they left a trail of boot-knives and heavy rifles.

Once they saw a garuda way above them, stretched out like someone on a cross. They saw her dip, lurch earthward, veer toward Drogon, then break and ascend.

“He tried to whisper her,” Cutter said. “But she got out of it.” He was pleased.

Their rhythms were not the day’s: they slept for minutes while the sun was up, as well as at dusk and night. If the whispersmith slept it was in the saddle. On the sierra they passed smudged pebblebeasts, something between giraffes and gorillas, knuckle-walking and eating low leaves.

“You have to speed,”
the whispersmith told Cutter.
“The handlinger’s coming.”

By moonlight they followed Drogon and their quarry toward a hill-line topped by plateau. They saw dark, a corridor through the butte. They would reach it in daylight, and Cutter could imagine the relief it would be, the punishing hot sky just a band seething above lichened rock walls and stone stiles.

Elsie said: “Something’s coming.” She looked gaunt. She looked horrified. “Something’s coming from the south.” There was a disturbance behind many waves of landscape, beyond sight. Cutter knew that Elsie was a weak witch, but she felt something.

The east was weakly shining, and in the first light Cutter saw the dust of Drogon’s horse below the mesa. The whispersmith was almost at the entrance to the chine.

“Follow the way through,”
Drogon said to Cutter.
“Quick. The handlinger’s closing, but you can make it here if you
keep on.
The dogs’re howling. They can smell our man, he’s close, through here. Make it here, maybe we can . . . maybe we can face the handlinger, an ambush.”
A weak plan.

Drogon must have turned then and hauled behind the pack as they bayed and ran into the split rock path. Cutter thought of the overhangs they would pass and saw with clarity what he had seen in the room of his runaway friend, that had sent him here. Cutter saw the tripwire and the men dead and stoved in, lying under anthropoid outlines in random materials.

“Godsdammit.
Get back! Get back!
”

He shouted as loud as he ever had. Pomeroy and Elsie staggered; they had been sleeping as they walked. Cutter made his hands a trumpet and roared again.

“Stop! Stop!”
He fired his repeater into the air.

Drogon was in his ear.
“What you doing? The handlinger’ll hear you . . .”
But Cutter was speaking, and lurching on exhausted legs. “Stop stop stop!” he shouted. “Don’t go in, don’t go in. It’s a trap.”

Dust came toward him and reconfigured as if moulded by the growing heat, and became a man on a horse. Drogon was riding back. Cutter shouted.

“You can’t go in,” he said. “It’s a trap. It’s a golem trap.”

Drogon rode around them as if they were steers, and when they buckled he would whisper to them, to their underbrains, and
they could only obey.
“Run,”
he whispered, and they were helpless
not to.

By the raised plain were slippy scree paths, so they held onto boscage while they climbed toward the dark. Drogon took his horse at speed along a route that looked impossible. The dogs, tied by the crack’s entrance, pulled, imbecilic with their porcine eyes and bared teeth. They were in agony to enter, to reach what they could smell.

“He knows,” Cutter said. He leaned against his knees to cough up the stuff of the path. “He knows they’re coming for him.”

“Handlinger,”
said Drogon. A fleck at the edge of the plain.
“We have to go.”

Cutter said: “He
knows
they’re coming and he’s not tried to hide his scent. He thinks it’s the militia after him, and he’s
funnelled them here.
It’s a trap. We can’t go in there. We have to go over. He’ll be on the other side, waiting.”

They did not debate long, with the handlinger curdling the air as it approached. The dogs bayed and Drogon shot them dead inside the tunnel. The others followed him up a steep root-ladder to the rocktop plateau. Drogon whispered to them
“Climb,”
even suspended as he was himself, and they found their footing and their grip.

Drogon led them by the edge of the crack. They saw his horse and the carnage of dog-flesh below them. He whispered to the horse, and it snorted and turned as if to go through the conduit.

“What you doing?” said Cutter. “If you don’t keep it still I’ll shoot it, I swear. We can’t risk it triggering anything.” There was an instant when it seemed the whispersmith might fight, but he turned and ran again, and the horse was still.

Cutter looked back and cried out. What followed them, dangling, had the shape of a man. It carried a burden. It was scant miles off, arrowing with grim unnatural motion toward the wall and the shaft.

On the other side they looked down across sierras, a slowly rising landscape. In the full sun of dawn Cutter saw runt trees.

“We have to wait until that bastard thing’s gone,” said Pomeroy.

“We can’t,”
Drogon said to Cutter and Pomeroy in turn.
“It’s not tracking your friend, it’s tracking us. By our mind-spoor. We have to get beyond. Turn and fight it.”

“Fight it?” Pomeroy said. “It’s a
handlinger.
”

“It’ll be all right,” Cutter said. He felt a great and sudden conviction. “It’ll be taken care of.”

It was he, not Drogon, who found a way down. One by one they descended, the whispersmith last. “
Damn handlinger’s so
close,” he said to Cutter.
“He’s by the entrance, he’s seen the dogs, he’s going in.”