Cutter fired at the flanged body, hit and did nothing but burst a little piece with milky bleeding. A snare of arms crawled over each other for him like bickering worms.
“Kill it!” Qurabin spoke from somewhere. There were more shots.
Cutter heard Judah-“Wait, wait”-and then wood and leather and he saw the golem. It cut across the plait of tentacles, severed some right through. Others wrapped around it, ground into the golem’s neck. The ropy limb twitched. It shuddered for several seconds, flexed glands, spurted enzymes into the wood. It paused as if confused.
The golem attacked in its simple way, beating down with its knives and great hexed strength. Gouts of matter and the thing’s blood burst up and it staggered, and every one of its tethered creatures stopped eating. Pomeroy ran up, jabbed his muzzle into its fat. The explosion was muted by flesh, but the fist of bullets punched into innards.
Even then it did not fall, only staggered with its prim little steps and reeled, but the golem was on it again. Cutter watched Judah move. The somaturge moved his own body, a little, and the wood-and-knife golem echoed him. Handful by handful the golem took the predator apart.
The creature’s victims were dead or comatose. They had long been only eating machines for the insatiable thing.
Susullil and Pomeroy were wounded. Susullil let Cutter clean his gashes. Two of the Hiddentowners had been killed. One had fallen near enough to the unnaturally famished men and women in the animal’s thrall that they had reached for him weakly, and bitten.
The Hiddentowners took organic trophies, rooting in the creature’s flesh for its beaks or talons. Cutter was disgusted. He wished that he had a camera. He imagined a heliotype: Susullil by Judah by Elsie by Pomeroy with his blunderbuss, and he Cutter at the end beside the golem, all of them with the set-faced pride of the hunter.
That night there was rude conviviality in a Hiddentown long-hut. Men and women who had been gatherer-hunters and the inhabitants of chelonas danced, drunk on poteen.
The room was crisscrossed with the little beetle-people. They never spoke; they did nothing to get in anyone’s way. They came, silently picking up discarded food, gently fingering the cloth of clothes, sawing their antennae together.
Susullil was with Behellua. Cutter watched them and knew that night they would have the friendly encounter he could not but think of as sex, though he doubted they did.
Around the table, people were telling stories. To the Hiddentowners, Qurabin was a god become suddenly interventionist and earthly. The monk moved unseen among the diners, translated for them.
Through Qurabin, Susullil the wineherd told a story of the best harvest House Predicus had ever seen, of the culling of the vinhog bull prime, to let bull secundus, whose fruit was drier and better, stud. He told of the struggle it had been, the sadness he had felt at the bull’s passing. When the story was done, the New Crobuzoners applauded with everyone.
It was their turn, and it fell to Cutter. The Hiddentowners chanted softly, in a drumbeat, so when he spoke it took their rhythm. He stalled, looked down and up again and-contrary and drunk, with a pleasure of bravado-he spoke.
“This is a love story,” Cutter said. “That shouldn’t ever have been. It lasted a night and a morning.
“Five years ago. I found a man. We was in a pub in the docks. I asked him home with me. That night we was on very-tea and shazbah, and we did what we all want to do, you know, and it was fine.” There were laughs from the wineherds as Qurabin translated. Elsie and Pomeroy were looking down. “And then later while he slept I turned him over and went to the pisspot, and I saw his clothes. And coming out of his pocket was some little tiny pistol. I’d never seen nothing so clever, and though it weren’t my business I pulled it out, and with it comes a little sigil.
“It’s militia. He’s a militiaman. I don’t know what to do. What duty’s he on? Is he a drugsman? Is he on Depravity watch? Either way he’s got me. I even think of shooting him, but that ain’t going to happen. So I’m thinking maybe I can get away early, and maybe I can plead him away on the way to the jail, and maybe this and maybe that. And in the end, I see there ain’t nothing I can do. So I go back to bed. And on the way I wake him up. So we do it all over again.” Again the cheers. “And then early in the morning we do it again. ” I’m drunk, thought Cutter. He did not mind.
“And I’m waiting, and I’ll beg him, or bribe him-because I know what he likes, don’t I, by now? And I get up, and I run out and think maybe I just won’t stop. I’ll get to the ships, I’ll change my name, I ain’t going to jail, I ain’t going to be Remade. But then I pass a baker’s, and then a greengrocer’s, and I just can’t up and lose everything. I can’t just disappear. So instead of doing a bunk, I do some shopping. And then I come back.
“I wake him up. And we have breakfast together, over my shop in Brock Marsh… and then he goes. Big kiss good-bye, and gone. Never seen him again. And I’m left to wonder. Maybe he was never going to do nothing. But the way I see it, the way I like to see it, what with what I done for him that night and what with the beautiful breakfast I made-grilled fish, spiced hash and creamed fruit, with a flower in the middle of the table as if we was married-I think he fell in true love with me for a few minutes that morning. No, I mean it. I fell in love with him too. I ain’t never loved nothing like I loved him when he kissed me and said good-bye. Because I’m sure, I’m sure he knew that I knew. It was his present to me, that leave-taking, that good-bye. Just like breakfast was my present to him. I ain’t never loved anyone like that before or since, except one man.”
When it was obvious he had finished there was barking from the wineherds, and other applause sounds from here and there among the audience. Elsie and Pomeroy clapped a bit, though Pomeroy did not look at him. Watching the big man beat his palms together Cutter felt a blossom of affection. Gods bless, he thought, and to crown it Elsie even gave him a quick smile.
And then he saw Judah, and the smile on the golemist’s face was different-there was no effort or connection to it, it was like the smile on an idol, and through his passion for the older man Cutter burned.
Cutter was uninterested in gods. There were a few from New Crobuzon’s pantheons he felt some small affinity for, usually for heretic reasons: like Crawfoot, whose antics seemed not inept clownery but tactical subversions. You’re insurrectionist, ain’t you? he had always thought, while the priests affected patient indulgence with the fool-god on Crawfootfete E’en. But he did not worship. Such prayers as he offered were cynical or time-serving. But he could see the power of Qurabin’s devotions.
The monk could find the hidden and the lost, though it cost. But in Qurabin’s voice Cutter no longer heard the arrogance of that power. He could hear that something had shifted. The monk’s giving up, Cutter thought.
“Galaggi, they say it is… sobrech or sobrechin lulsur. It’s pun.” Qurabin’s voice came and went as the monk unhid the information. “ Sobresh is ‘hateful,’ and sobr’chi, is ‘captain.’ In my language it has no name. In Tesh… we do not classify so much as you.” And Cutter heard the disgust, the rage in Qurabin’s voice when Tesh came up.
He was not surprised the next day, when Qurabin came to them as they rose and told them that they would not be travelling alone. That the monk would not tell them where Iron Council was but would show them.
He wants to rest, Cutter thought. And to be alone. With us. Plucking up courage. The monk’ll unhide more and more, no matter what the cost. What does it matter? What does he-she-have to live for? To be loyal to?