It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.

Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.

A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.

He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.

When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.