"China Mieville - Iron Council" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

“He’ll leave signs. Wherever he goes. He’ll leave a trail. You can’t not.”
No one spoke a while.
“How’d he know to leave?”
“He got a message. Some old contact is all I know.”
Cutter saw fences reclaimed by weather, where farms had once been. The foundations of homesteads in angles of stone. Rudewood was east, weald broken with
outcrops of dolomite. Once, protruding from the leaves, there were the remnants of ancient industry, smokestacks or pistons.
On the sixth day, Fishday, the 17th of Chet 1805, they reached a village.

In Rudewood there was a muttering of displaced air below the owl and monkey calls. It was not loud but the animals in its path looked up with the panic of prey. The
empty way between trees, by overhangs of clay, was laced by the moon. The tree-limbs did not move.
Through the night shadows came a man. He wore a black-blue suit. His hands were in his pockets. Stems of moonlight touched his polished shoes, which moved at
head-height above the roots. The man passed, his body poised, standing upright in the air. As he came hanging by arcane suspension between the canopy and the dark
forest floor the sound came with him, as if space were moaning at his violation.
He was expressionless. Something scuttled across him, in and out of the shadow, in the folds of his clothes. A monkey, clinging to him as if he were its mother. It was
disfigured by something on its chest, a growth that twitched and tensed.
In the weak shine the man and his passenger entered the bowl where the hotchi came to fight. They hung over the arena. They looked at the militiamen dead, mottled
with rot.
The little ape dangled from the man’s shoes, dropped to the corpses. Its adroit little fingers examined. It leapt back to the dangling legs and chittered.
They were as silent for a while as the rest of the night, the man knuckling his lips thoughtfully, turning in a sedate pirouette, the monkey on his shoulder looking into the
dead-black forest. Then they were in motion again, between the trees with the fraught sound of their passing, through bracken torn days before. After they had gone, the
animals of Rudewood came out again. But they were anxious, and remained so the rest of that night.

CHAPTER TWO
The village had no name. The farmers seemed to Cutter mean as well as poor. They took money for food with a bad grace. If they had healers they denied it. Cutter
could do nothing but let Drey sleep.
“We have to get to Myrshock,” Cutter said. The villagers stared in ignorance, and he set his teeth. “It’s not the fucking moon,” he said.
“I can take you to the pig-town,” said one man at last. “We need butter and pork. Four days’ drive south.”
“Still gives us, what, four hundred miles to Myrshock, for Jabber’s sake,” said Ihona.
“We’ve no choice. And this pig place must be bigger, maybe they can get us farther. Why ain’t you got pigs here?”
The villagers glanced at each other.
“Raiders,” said one. “That’s how you can help,” said another. “Protect the cart with them guns. You can get us to pig-town. It’s a market. Traders from all over.
They’ve airships, can help you.”
“Raiders?”
“Aye. Bandits. FReemade.”

Two scrawny horses pulled a wagon, whipped on by village men. Cutter and his companions sat in the cart, among thin vegetables and trinkets. Drey lay and sweated.
His arm smelt very bad. The others held their weapons visible, uneasy and ostentatious.
The rig jarred along vague paths as the Mendicans gave way to grassland. For two days they went through sage and greenery, between boulders overhanging like
canalside warehouses. Rock took sunset like a red tattoo.
They watched for air-corsairs. Fejh took brief visits to the waterways they passed.
“Too slow.” Cutter spoke to himself, but the others heard him. “Too slow, too slow, too godsdamn slow.”
“Show your guns,” said a driver suddenly. “Someone’s watching.” He indicated the low rises, copses on the stone. “If they come, shoot. Don’t wait. They’ll skin us if
you leave them alive.”
Even Drey was awake. He held a repeating pistol in his good hand.
“Your gun shoots widest, Pomeroy,” said Cutter. “Be ready.”
And as he spoke both the drivers began to shout. “Now! Now! There!”
Cutter swung his pistol with dangerous imprecision, Pomeroy levelled his blunderbuss. A crossbow quarrel sang over their heads. A figure emerged from behind
lichened buhrstone and Elsie shot him.
He was fReemade—a criminal Remade, reconfigured in the city’s punishment factories, escaped to the plains and Rohagi hills.
“You fuckers, ” he shouted in pain. “Godsdammit, you fuckers. ” They could see his Remaking—he had too many eyes. He slithered on the dust, leaving it bloody.