Read Iron Council for Free Online

topsoil on a grave. It was a mass grave.
    Breaking the soil like the first shoots of a grotesque harvest were bones. They were abrupt and blacked by fire, fibrous like dense wood. The bones of cactus-people.
    Cutter stood among the dead, above their moulding vegetable-flesh. Time came back. He felt it shudder.
    Planted scarecrow in the middle was a degraded corpse. A human man. He was naked, slumped, upheld by spikes that pinned him to a tree. Javelins pierced him. One emerged point-first from his sternum. It had been forced up his anus and through him. His scrotum was torn off. There was a scab of blood on his throat. He was leathered by sun and insects worked on him.
    The travellers stared like worshippers at their totem. When after many seconds Pomeroy moved he still looked carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to break the dead man’s gaze.
    “Look,” he said. He swallowed. “All cactacae.” He poked at the earth, turned up bits of the dead. “And then there’s him. What in Jabber’s name happened here? The war ain’t reached here . . .”
    Cutter looked at the corpse. It was not very bloody. Even between its legs there was only a little gore.
    “He was already gone,” Cutter whispered. He was awed by the brutal tableau. “They done this to a dead man. After they buried the others.” Below the corpse’s chin was not a clot but blooded metal. Cutter looked away while he worked it from the dead man’s neck.
    It was a tiny escutcheon. It was a badge of the New Crobuzon Militia.
             
    The dangling man crossed the water. His hair and clothes gusted in his motion. The Meagre Sea chopped scant feet beneath him, and spume spattered his trousers.
    A body like a bolt breached abruptly, a swordfish arcing up beside him, reaching high enough for him to touch at the keystone of its leap then curving down to stab back under with its body-spear. It kept up with him. It kept pace with his uncanny motion.
    When it came up, when it vaulted into the sun, it caught the dangling man’s eye with its big sideways stare. Something dark clutched its dorsal fin. Something that shifted and dug under its fish’s skin.

CHAPTER FOUR
    They went off-map, toward the third set of lights. Beyond them was a wall of stone like spinal scales, through which they must find a way.
    Cutter held the blood-rusted badge. He felt sick, knowing the militia were ahead of them.
We could be too late.
    There were sinkholes full of water, though it was dirty stuff. Fejh replenished his barrel, but his skin was scarring. They shot little jackrabbits and slow birds. They passed antelopes, went cautiously by coveys of tusked hogs the size of horses.
    Cutter felt as if the path they left was an infection in the land. At dawn on their third day out from the cruciform militiaman, they approached the last village. And as they came nearer the sun crested and they were washed in roseate light and something moved, that they had thought a rock spur or a thinning tree.
    They cried out. Their mounts stumbled.
    A giant came at them, a cactus figure far greater than they had seen before. Cactacae stood seven, eight feet tall, but this one was more than double that. It was like an elemental, something base and made of the land, the grassland walking.
    It jerked on twisted hips, its vast legs and toeless stump-feet ricketed. It swayed as if it would fall. Its green skin was split and healed many times. Its spines were finger-long.
    The massive cactus staggered at them, fast for all its palsied gait. It held a cudgel, a slab of tree. It raised it as it came, and from a face that hardly moved, it began to shout. It called words they did not understand, some variant of Sunglari, as it lurched murderously toward them.
    “Wait, wait!” Everyone was shouting. Elsie pointed, her eyes bloodshot, and Cutter knew she was trying to reach its mind with her feeble charms.
    The cactus came in unstable strides. Fejh fired an arrow that hit it with a moist drum-sound