He missed Mr Tope. Until the fall of Chapman he had always been so reliable. Stade really couldn’t blame the man for his own death. No one had expected the Roil’s great rush against the city’s walls, and his finest Verger had still managed to get one last message through. And yet, Stade couldn’t drive away the hard splinter of resentment that had settled in his heart.
He leant back in his chair, in the airship office where he had spent much of his last few weeks, organising the great logistical nightmare that was his people’s journey north. He knew it could be worse — that he could be down on the ground.
Stade considered his maps. Another week at least, and still no radio contact from the Underground, but he had to think of that as nothing more than a problem with their transmission tower, it had never worked reliably. The journey had been a long one. Of course the airships could have made it to the Underground in a couple of days, even against the headwinds, but they had a city’s population to protect. A city forced to travel by foot. They had avoided the worst of the Margin, travelling east, then north, but still there were patches of that contaminated forest that had to be crossed.
People disappeared into the night, and some reappeared briefly, drawing others away. The last gondola affected had been clean, but stank of blood. After that, Stade had ordered all airships to keep at least a mile clear of the Margin, and the airship itself was burned.
A small rearguard had stayed behind in Mirrlees; they’d lost contact with them two days ago. The reports up until that point had been one of a city falling frantically into chaos. Their cessation had been abrupt. He had been expecting it, but not so soon.
Stade felt the diminishment of his network with every passing hour. No more could he claim to know every movement of every enemy between Chapman and Hardacre. He was beginning to wonder if he had ever really known anything at all.
A knock at the cabin door startled him.
“What is it?” he growled.
“A problem, sir.” It was Moffel, the closest thing he had to a trusted advisor these days.
“I will be right out.”
He got up, slid a lozenge of Chill into his mouth.
“And the problem?” Stade said.
Moffel said, “One of the engines isn’t operating as it should be. They want your advice on it.”
Fair enough, he’d designed the engines after all.
At the outer edge of the airship, Stade, met two men, engines rumbling nearby.
“You called me here because?” he said.
“We thought you should see this.”
The Witmoths flew from their mouths towards him. He lifted his arms and sprayed the air with cold, from tubes beneath his jacket sleeves, blistering his wrists as he did so. The moths fell, and Stade yanked free his pistols and fired; both shots went true and the Roilings tumbled over the deck. “Do not take me for such a fool that I do not come prepared,” he said to their tumbling corpses.
Though he had been fool enough to come out here. He needed more sleep.
He walked back to the door. It was locked. Stade sighed, pulled the key from his pocket and opened the door.
Moffel was waiting by the door. Stade shot him dead, too.
They found two more Roilings in the crew. Both were thrown overboard. Stade returned to his rooms all rage and fear. He took a lozenge of Chill, just to be safe, and his hands shaking, grabbed the machine.
He let the mechanism fold over his face, felt its spikes slide through the plate of his skull, and into his brain. There was no pain, just a sick-making sensation, as though all this could go so badly, that his sanity, his personality lay on the thinnest, frailest sort of knife-edge.
He’d used this device to control the spiders under Downing Bridge. Ah, that bridge; briefly he was there, back in the city that he had fled, and that hurt him more than Stade had expected — after all, the flight from the city had always been part of his plan to lead his people to sanctuary. However, the gap between his plans and reality had grown wide.
He concentrated, brought his mind under control, shifted it from the city to the belly of his airship, and the airships around them. This fleet was the vestige of the Grand Defeat, and he’d filled the ballast of each with his spiders.
Already thousands of them had released thread to the air, and now he concentrated on them, gaining an image in bursts, and drifts, of the sky from horizon to horizon and beyond.
A drop of blood ran across his chin.
He couldn’t do this for too long, or it would tear him apart. But he needed to know what was happening. Stade just had to see where the Cuttlefolk were, if they were a threat, if they were following him, or merely flying towards the Roil- as the first cloud of them had proven to be doing.
And there they were.
There they were.
Not heading towards the Roil or to Mirrlees, but north. Flying north towards his great exodus: a cloud intent on shattering his plans for good.
The sound of Cuttle messengers in flight and en masse was terror scratched out of the air. It was as hard as the wind was hard, the sky had become solid and killing. A thunderous beating of wings and mandibles, and spiked limbs: a storm which had grown brittle and clawed. Such a storm was bearing down on him, and though he had been expecting it, Stade could not avoid the terror of the Cuttlemen's approach.
As a young man, Stade had fought in the Cuttle Wars. So many of his generation had. They'd been men and women fighting a war of cultures — of misunderstandings driven to blood and death. His service and heroism in those wars had led to his election. Heroism, all he'd remembered was the horror. He’d seen troops stripped of their flesh almost before they could fire their guns. Aerokin devoured in the sky, their great cannon useless. He wasn’t the only one of his crew to remember such things, but none of them had ever witnessed anything like that which flew towards them.
“How can there be so many?” Captain Jones said.
“Because we didn’t do it right the first time,” Stade muttered, though he knew that was wrong, that these Cuttlefolk flew with a purpose that wasn’t their own.
Witmoths covered their flesh, and fell from them like an inky rain.
“Engage the cannons,” he said, and if his voice cracked with the fear of it, no one noticed. “It’s time we made the sky bleed.”
He reached in his pocket for a cigar, lit it, and unsheathed the knife at his belt, the same blade with which he had severed the fool Medicine Paul's fingers.
“Now, fire the damn things! Fire and fire and fire.” The airship bucked and shuddered, and the sky bled.
And still they came. Cannons were never enough. Of course, Cuttlefolk made it onto the ship, and cold-suited Vergers met them with ice guns and frozen blades of the Tate design.
Even Stade himself couldn't avoid the fighting. A Cuttleman broke through the gondola window, and it was Stade that struck off its head, the mayor grinning madly, teeth biting down hard on a lozenge of Chill. He folded his arms around the still twitching corpse and hurled it out in the sky.
Cannons fired. Ships fell in flame and smoke and detonations, but the Cuttle messengers took casualties too, and theirs were in far greater numbers. The battle was over within half an hour. Two ships gone down, plus another slowly sinking, and one without radio contact.
The slowly sinking airship veered to the west. The silent one followed. Stade had another airship pull alongside it, and it too grew silent. There had been five Vergers on that ship and none of them called back in. The three airships pulled away.
Stade took no chances on another ship, he had all three shot down. He sent out a directive for all crew to have Chill at the ready. He could not afford to lose more ships.
Nor was he prepared to abandon the masses that the airships themselves were protecting.
Two days at most and they would reach the Undergound. Stade only hoped that it was still there. Despite the lack of radio contact, he had no other destination. There was no other hope. They reached the Undergroun
d or they all died.
And word had finally come to him of an approaching Roil mass, a finger of the Roil itself, two miles wide by three. It was covering the ground behind them at an incredible rate.
If they didn’t reach the Underground in three days, this small finger of Roil would be upon them. And small though it might be, it was still enough to crush them.
CHAPTER 39
“Of course, Shale possesses a hollow core,” Travis the Grave said. He flexed his hand, the movement generating a short puff of steam. “Where else do you think all the monsters come from?”
“And where might we find entrance, Mr Grave?”
“Where all the curses and madness of this world originate. In the distant north, in Tearwin Meet.”
Night Council 18: The Hollowing, JB Brickenhall
THE DEEP NORTH 2000 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Two days from the river and David became aware of the slow rise and fall of the world, and the landscape beneath them began its curious simplification. They reached the place where the last forests thinned and became nothing more than low wind-burned trees and grass, and these in turn gave way to clumps of some grey matter that seemed to sit halfway between grass and lichen.
After that landscape became raw stone, grey too — except when it rained, short icy showers that turned the stone blue or black. Three times they passed over Lodes — like the one David had used those weeks past — and each time, looking down, he could feel the Engine of the World staring back. David couldn't read the expression, but it was at best ambivalent, at worst disapproving.
Each Lode (as though they possessed transformative powers) brought a little more of Cadell to the surface, too. Memories waltzed through him that weren’t his own. Conversations, jokes and slights that made little sense to him, though he knew Cadell understood them. Certain unfamiliar mannerisms became less so; the way he walked sometimes felt wrong; even the way he looked out at the world, as though Cadell was trying to use his eyes differently from how David used them. Objects in the distance grew clearer, peculiar lights haloed the stony earth below. When he pointed it out, no one seemed to see it.
What he noticed most of all was an ever-increasing smugness. Cadell was getting what he wanted, or trying to hide behind it. He pushed away the disapproval, hoped that Kara hadn't seen it.
The world stopped its rising and falling, and just seemed to fall, as though the entire north was focussed on — and leaning towards — a single point. For two days, as they followed their slow flight, nothing changed below them, but for the stone, or the occasional animal, never larger than a fox, scurrying from sight, eking out an existence in what must be the harshest of environments.
David felt the great curvature of the world too, though here, yet again, it felt as though it was only curving in to one point.
Change came at last, a hint, revealed in increments, of a great upthrust of stone.
Tearwin Meet.
It grew on the horizon, and beneath them, that sensation of falling at first accelerated before shifting, as though the earth itself had stopped to crane its neck and look up. And still it seemed that they would never reach the city; that no matter how far they travelled against that terrible and monotonous gale, they could draw no closer.
And when David slept, Cadell was there, and that increasing sensation of falling: him falling into Cadell or Cadell falling into him. David had nothing to hold onto, it was happening whether he wanted it or not, and it was accelerating.
“I’m coming back,” Cadell said during one particularly deep slumber. They stood in the map room, Cadell circling the world like a moon.
“I know,” David said, wondering if he wasn't just substituting one form of powerlessness for another.
“The clouds are peculiar today, don’t you think?” Cadell tapped the panoptic map with his thumb.
David’s gaze was drawn towards a single dark finger of cloud.
“Peculiar, that’s no cloud.”
Cadell nodded his head smugly. “The Roil’s got its legs. Now it’s decided to go walking. And where would such a thing go walking?”
They both looked at the range, and the one mountain that contained the Underground.
“The cloud is moving swiftly, three days, no more, and it will reach the Underground.”
“Why not Hardacre?”
“It doesn’t see that city as a threat, it has already lost, as far as it is concerned. No matter how this turns out, Hardacre will cease to be.”
“And we can’t stop that?”
“You are doing your best to now. But it is better to think of what lies ahead. Tearwin Meet. The Roil itself is important, but we cannot influence it anywhere but here. And by we, I mean me.”
Cadell reached across the map, grabbed David's head and began to twist.
David’s eyes snapped open. He was in the Dawn, Margaret watching him from the other bed. “What curious dreams you have,” Margaret said.
David grimaced. “If only they were merely curious.” He stretched his arms above his head, yawned. “Are you rested?”
She shrugged. “All my weapons hold a charge,” she said. “All I want is to look down on the Engine of the World.”
David smiled. “You don’t look at all rested.”
“Neither do you.”
Yes, he thought. Maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea. Maybe you couldn’t rest before such a thing. Not when the drug you depended on for calm was leaching out of your body. But he had tried.
He yawned. “Where’s Kara?”
The toilet flushed in the cabinet nearest them, followed by the sounds of furious scrubbing. A half minute later, the door swung open. “Can't a person use the amenities without half the world talking about them?” she said.
David felt his face slip into a disapproving expression that wasn't his own. “I'm touched that you think I'm half the world,” David said.
Kara grimaced.
“We’re almost there,” David said. “I need you to be ready.”
“A pilot is always ready,” Kara said. “Ready or dead. Now, ready for what?”
Margaret peered north. “Just what is that fire?” she said quietly. David turned to her.
“What fire?”
“The one streaking towards us.”
David made a gagging noise. “Ready for that,” he said. “Kara, could you veer to the right, please?”
“Starboard, veer to the starboard. Why should I — oh.” She began her curious conversation with the Dawn, fast and furious, but not without its eccentricities. She touched the control panel twice, and the Dawn almost seemed to shiver, rather than fly, starboard.
The flaming ball swung past them, almost perfectly between the Dawn and the Collard Green, close enough that they could hear its screaming descent; the air smelt burnt.
“That makes no sense,” Kara said. “We're flying in the safe zone.”
David sighed. “I’d forgotten this,” he said.
Margaret sighted along her nearest rifle, pointing out into the void. “Forgotten what exactly?”
“Well, forgotten is probably the wrong word, Cadell had forgotten it, or I'd suppressed the bit that knew. This is the problem. This is the problem when you fight it. We're almost there, and I still only know half of what I need to,” David said. “But it doesn't matter now, this far north, and with the Roil expanded, the safe paths have changed.”
“What do you mean changed? Or have you suppressed that, too?” Margaret asked.
“There is only one set of coordinates that will have us reach the city by air without being shot down. Well, a range of coordinates.”
Another ball of flame cruised towards them. “I take it that we’re not exactly following those coordinates now,” Kara said.
David closed his eyes. Margaret wondered just what it was that he was considering.
“No,” he said. “No, we are not. But we're close. It's going to slow us down a little.”
“Fabulous,” Margaret said, “
when we have so much time to spare.”
“Won’t have any time if one of those bastards hits,” Kara said.
“Bear to the north-east,” David said. “Just a little more, and we will be safe.” He turned to Margaret. “And signal to the Collard Green, they have to follow us.”
“Watson’s no fool,” Kara said. “He’ll know to keep on our tail.”
“But just in case.”
“Ah, you risk offending him, but just in case.”
Margaret went for the flags. “Which ones?” she asked.
“The red, the green and the black,” Kara Jade said. “Means follow right on our arse.” She smiled. “Look, he’s doing it already. Clever little fellow. Flash those flags, Margaret, give the bastard something to complain about. Now, David, are you sure that this is the right way? I’m not too keen to die engulfed in flames as a result of your incompetence.”
David couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Believe me, I’m sure. It will add a half a day to our journey, but we’ll make it. The defence mechanism has tolerances,” David said. “As long as we travel within those, we will be all right.”
David’s memory proved better than he had thought. They were shot at several times more — each time Kara glared at him — but none came as close as that first shot.
Soon the great mountains, and the city between them, dominated everything. The path they followed kept them zigzagging towards it, drawing closer with painful slowness. Twice, they almost touched the mountains and the wall, though Tearwin Meet remained hidden; only the central tower of the Engine of the World was revealed, rising above the wall.
And here the winds grew fierce and twisted, curling around the mountains and the city's walls. The wind battered at them, the Roslyn Dawn struggled in its grip, but did not succumb.
“We can't stay up here long,” Kara said.
“We don't need to. Not today.”
“How do we get to that?” Margaret said, gesturing at the tower.
“Today, we can fly over it. Kara, don't drop below this altitude. Everything beneath the height of the walls is well guarded,” David said. “And even I am unsure of the path required to bring you to safety.”
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