Iron Council Read Online Free

head. “I didn’t mean to,” he tried to tell them. “I heard something . . .”
    “Well, well,” the bandit chief was saying. “You’ve a long way to go. Even if you come past us—” And then he broke off. He worked his jaw, then spoke rhythmically in a different, declamatory voice. “They can go. Let them pass. The Caucus is no enemy of ours.”
             
    His troops stared at him. “Let them pass,” he said again. He waved at his fReemade, looking quite enraged. His men and women shouted in anger and disbelief, and for seconds looked as if they might ignore his order, but then they backed away and shouldered their weapons, cursing.
    The fReemade chief watched the travellers as they continued, and they watched him back until their route took him out of sight. They did not see him move.
    Cutter told his comrades of the whispered compulsion that had taken him. “Thaumaturgy,” said Elsie. “He must’ve hexed you, the boss-thief, gods know why.” Cutter shook his head.
    “Didn’t you see how he looked?” he said. “When he let us go? That’s how I felt. He was glamoured too.”
    When they came to the market town they found tinkers and traders and travelling entertainers. Between dry earth buildings were battered and half-flaccid gas balloons.
             
    On Dustday, as they ascended over the steppes of grass, stones and flowers, Drey died. He had seemed to be mending, had been awake in the town, had even haggled with the air-merchant. But in the night his arm poisoned him, and though he had been alive when they went up, he was dead not long after.
    The nomad tradesman tended the gondola’s droning motor, embarrassed by his passengers’ misery. Elsie held Drey’s cooling body. At last with the sun high, she extemporised a service and they kissed their dead friend and entrusted Drey to gods with the faint unease of freethinkers.
    Elsie remembered the air-burials she had heard of among northern tribes. Women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skyward through the cold air and clouds, to drift in airstreams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt-lands was a catacomb, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the aimless, frost-mummified dead.
    They gave Drey an air-burial of another kind, of necessity, hauling him with tenderness to the edge of the carriage, bracing him
between the ropes and letting him go.
    It was as if he flew. He soared below them and his arms seemed to spread. Air pummelled him so he moved as if dancing or fighting, and he spun as he dwindled. He passed birds. His friends watched his flight with awe and a surprise elation, and turned away while he was seconds from the ground.
             
    They went over swale and grass that grew drier as they went south. Rudewood receded. The wind was with them. Cutter heard Elsie whispering to Pomeroy, crying over Drey.
    “We can’t stop now,” Pomeroy murmured to her. “I know, I know . . . but we can’t now.”
    Three times they saw other balloons, miles away. Each time their pilot would look through his telescope and say whose ship it was. There were not so many of the aeronautic peddlers. They knew each other’s routes.
    The man had demanded a lot of their money to take them to Myrshock, but when they had heard that the militia had come past Pigtown not long before, a hussar unit on altered mounts, they could not turn him down. “We’re coming the right way.” And travelling now not quickly but with a relentless pace, for the first time they felt something like hope.
    “Hard to believe,” said Cutter, “that there’s a fucking war on.” No one answered. He knew his bile tired them. He watched patchworked land.
    On the third morning in the air, while he was rubbing water into Fejh’s wind-chapped skin, Cutter bellowed and pointed to where, miles ahead, he saw the sea, and before it in a