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

vaulted the listing rail. Elsie had hit her head, and Pomeroy helped her down.
Ihona was cutting the captain’s bonds. Cutter fired twice at oncoming swells. “Come on !” he shouted again.
A spire of water rose by the broken boat. For an instant he thought it some freakish wave, or watercræft of an astonishing kind, but it was more than twenty feet high, a
pillar of utterly clear water, and from its top jutted a vodyanoi. He was a shaman, riding his undine.
Cutter could see the vessel distorted through the water elemental’s body. Its thousands of gallons pushed down on the boat with strange motion, and bucked it, and
Ihona and the captain fell down the sloping deck toward it. They tried to rise but the water of the undine flowed up and lapped at their feet then broke, a wave, and
engulfed them. Cutter shouted as his comrade and her prisoner were buffeted into the undine’s belly. They kicked and clawed, trying to swim out but which way was
out? The undine gave its innards currents that kept them in its core.
Pomeroy bellowed. He fired, and Cutter fired, and Fejh let an arrow go. And all three missiles hit the elemental with splashes like dropped stones, and were swallowed
up. The arrow was visible, vortexing in the liquid thing, coiling down to be voided like shit. Again Cutter fired, this time at the shaman atop the monstrous water, but
his shot was wide. With idiot bravery Pomeroy was pummelling the undine, trying to tear it apart to get at his friend, but it ignored him, and his blows raised only spray.
Ihona and the captain were drowning. The undine poured itself into the cargo hold, and the shaman kicked down into its bowels. Cutter screamed to see Ihona’s still-
moving body carried in the matter of the undine belowdecks and out of sight.
The vodyanoi were all over the Akif. They began to throw spears again.
Water poured up out of the boat, the undine geysering from the hold, and it carried within it engine parts—iron buoyed on its strange tides. And rolling like motes were
the bodies of its victims. They moved now only with the water that bore them. Ihona’s eyes and mouth were open. Cutter saw her only a moment before the elemental
came down in a great arch into the lake, water in water, carrying its loot and dead.
All the travellers could do was curse and cry. They cursed many times, they howled, and moved at last into the grasslands, away from the boat, away from the rapacious
water.
At night they sat exhausted in a motte of trees beside their sables and watched Elsie. The moon and its daughters, the satellites circling it like tossed coins, were high.
Elsie, cross-legged, looked at them, and Cutter was surprised to see her calm. She moved her mouth. A shirt was tied around her neck. Her eyes unfocused.
Cutter looked beyond her through the canebrake at the veldt. In the night light the tambotie trees and ironthorns were silhouetted like assassins. Baobabs stood thickset
with their splintered crowns.
When Elsie stopped she looked defensive. She untied their quarry’s shirt from her neck.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It weren’t clear. I think maybe something that way.” She gestured at a distant rise. Cutter said nothing. She was pointing north-northeast, the
way they knew they had to go. He had been relieved that Elsie had come, but he had always known she had only hedge-charms, no mirific strength. He did not know if
she was sensing true emanations, and neither did she.
“We’ve got to go this way, anyway,” said Cutter. He meant it kindly—nothing’s lost even if you’re wrong—but Elsie would not look at him.

Days they rode through landscape that punished them with heat and plants like barbed wire. They were inexpert with the muscular mounts but made a pace they could
not have done on foot. Their guns dipped in exhaustion. Fejh languished in a barrelful of the lake tethered between two sables. It was stagnant; it made him ill.
They were made to panic by gibbering from above. A brood of things came at them out of the sky, snapping and laughing. Cutter knew them from pictures: the
glucliche, hyaena hunching under bone and leather batwings.
Pomeroy shot one and its sisters and brothers began to eat it before it reached the ground. The flock came together ravenous and cannibal, and the party got clear.
“Where’s your damn whisperer, 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.