Iron Council Read Online Free Page A

depression
of wheat-brown grass, the dirigible moorings and minarets of
Myrshock.
             
    It was an ugly port. They were wary. This was not their territory.
    The architecture looked thrown together, chance materials aggregated and surprised to find themselves a town. Old but without history. Where it was designed, its aesthetic was unsure—churches with cement facades mimicking antique curlicues, banks using slate in uncommon colours, achieving only vulgarity.
    Myrshock was mixed. Human women and men lived beside cactacae, the thorned and brawny vegetable race, and garuda, bird-people freebooters from the Cymek over the water, who dappled the air as well as the streets. Vodyanoi in a canal ghetto.
    The travellers ate street food by the seawall. There were ranks of foreign craft and Myrshock ships, steamers with factory towers, cogs, merchant ships with great bridles for their seawyrms. Unlike the river docks of their home this was a brine harbour, so there were no vodyanoi stevedores. Lounging against walls were the mountebanks and freelance scum of any port.
    “We have to be careful,” Cutter said. “We need a Shankell-bound ship, and mostly that means cactus crew. You know what we have to do. We can’t face cactacae. We need a small ship, and small people.”
    “There’ll be tramp steamers,” said Ihona. “Pirates, most of
them . . .” She looked vaguely around her.
    Cutter spasmed and was quite still. Someone spoke to him. That voice again, up close whispering into his ear. He was iced in place.
    The voice said:
“The
Akif.
Steaming south.”
    The voice said:
“Routine run, small crew. Useful damn cargo—sable antelopes, broken for riders. Your deposits are paid. You sail at ten tonight.”
    Cutter stared at each passerby, each sailor, each waterfront thug. He saw no one mouthing words. His friends watched him, alarmed at his face.
    “You know what to do. Go up the Dradscale. That’s the way the militia went. I checked.
    “Cutter you know I could
make
you do this—you remember what happened in the Mendicans—but I want you to listen and do it because you
should
do it. We want the same thing, Cutter. I’ll see you on the other shore.”
    The cold dissipated, and the voice was gone.
    “What in hell’s wrong?” said Pomeroy. “What’s going on?”
             
    When Cutter told them, they argued until they began to attract attention.
    “Someone is
playing
with us,” said Pomeroy. “We don’t make it easier for them. We don’t get on that godsdamned boat, Cutter.” He clenched and unclenched his bulky fist. Elsie touched him nervously, tried to calm him.
    “I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Cutter said. The close-up voice had exhausted him. “Whoever it is, it ain’t militia. Someone from the Caucus? I don’t see how, or why. Some free agent?
It was them who held off the fReemade: that backward horse-man got whispered, like I did.
I don’t know what’s going on.
You want
to take another boat, I ain’t going to argue. But we best find one soon. And seems to me we might as well find this one, just to
know.”
    The
Akif
was a rusted thing, little more than a barge, with a single low deck and a captain pathetically grateful for their passage. He looked uncertain at Fejh, but smiled again when they mentioned the price—yes, already half-paid, he said, with the letter they had left for him.
    It was perfect, and it decided them. Though Pomeroy raged against the decision, Cutter knew he would not desert them.
    Someone’s watching us,
thought Cutter.
Someone who whispers. Someone who says they’re my friend.
    The sea, then the desert, then miles of unmapped land.
Can I do this?
    Only a small sea. The man they searched for left trails, left people affected. Cutter could see his friends’ anxieties and did not blame them—their undertaking was enormous. But he believed they would find the man they followed.
    He went with his friends to search for rumours of a