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?
They were siphoning something from the air, as their proasmae at last reached the newcomer gunmen and began to swim through them. The light golem came on. What were the militia calling?
A drizzle of luminance seemed to be pouring from the sky, very concentrate, a fine shaft just visible. It fell to the mechanism they surrounded. The light came out of the moon. The day-moon, just visible, very faint in sunlight. Out of its half-lustre came the moonlight into the machine, and at the end of the barrel a hole seemed to be opening.
In its deeps, something made of glow was moving. Cutter stared.
It took long moments to make sense of it-while he tried to march the light golem over the damage of still-exploding bombs, the wreckage left by the Councillors, who were advancing now that the yags had gone, now the proasmae were distracted by the newcomers, now the militia had lost control of their luftgeists that caused damage and death but only randomly as they gushed over the heavily protected train-but Cutter saw something in the opening. Its parameters changed, defied taxonomy. He tried to make sense of it.
Its shape altered with the seconds. A fish’s skeleton, the ribs passing ripples along the length of a body like a rope of vertebrae or like some rubberised cord. And then there was something of the bear to it, and something of the rat, and it had horns, and a great weight, and it shone as if its guts and skin, its bones were phosphorus. As if it were all cold and bright rock. A firefly, a death mask, a wooden skull.
A fegkarion. A moon elemental.
Cutter had heard of them, of course, but could not believe that this onrushing skeletal insectile animal thing he saw only half a second in three and that was a suggestion or a fold of space was the moonthing about which there were so many stories. Oh gods, oh Jabber.
“Shanks… get the golem to that thing, now.”
But the golem did not walk so fast. It went through the militia at a steady pace, laid out its hands as it came. It took time to touch each man it passed, to smother their heads with its hands and pour light into them, so each burst with light, beams exploding their helmets, shining hard and for yards from their ears, their anuses, their pricks, through their clothes, making them stars, before the golem let them fall.
The fegkarion was crawling out of the nothing. “Come on, ” Cutter said.
The elementalists were withdrawing, gathering around the moon-callers to protect them. They slashed at the golem now and drew its substance with each whip-strike, sent gouts of light spraying. Each lash snapped back Cutter’s and Thick Shanks’ heads. They bled. They kept the thing moving.