Iron Council Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 mutter 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