Night's engines nl-2

by Trent Jamieson

  “Not my poison,” he said.

  Rhig laughed. “No, I would imagine that it isn't.”

  “You flew well,” David said.

  “I'm a good pilot,” Rhig answered. “Not such a good compatriot. You know I was meant to take you back to the Underground.”

  “Why didn't you?”

  “I guess the question is: how could I? Let me tell you, David, that your aunt is safe, and Medicine Paul; well, they were when I left them. That should be some comfort to you.” Rhig gave his pipe a good hard knock, stuffed it with some new tobacco, tamped it down, and took his time as pilots do. “I saw what you and the girl did to those Old Men. Knew that I had no choice but to throw in with you lot. If anyone is capable of surviving Tearwin Meet, I’d imagine it's you.”

  “You think we can do this?”

  The pilot lit his pipe with a match, and puffed a moment. “I know you can, Mr Milde. And if you can't, then it wasn't possible in the first place.” He smiled. “And yes, I’ll move the Collard Green under that damn overhang.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Without good leadership, pride, a sense of destiny, and a little fear, a city will fail. A city will fall. As long as we keep strong, keep to our purpose, keep to my purpose, we will not succumb as the other cities have.

  Should we falter, then we will all die.

  Brute and Noble Governance, Mayor Stade

  MIRRLEES-ON-WEEP ROIL EDGE

  Another bad day.

  Business had been non-existent this last week. The city was emptying out, deflating like a burst tire. After the Chapman disaster everyone was heading north, most had already gone weeks ago with Mayor Stade’s fleet.

  It was the Grand Defeat all over again, only this time much worse. There was little hope that the people of Hardacre would greet them with open arms. Stagwell Matheson had considered leaving but there was nowhere else to go, even if his staff had decided otherwise.

  The door remained open only out of habit. No one had walked through it the last two days, and he doubted any customers would again.

  At least the rain had stopped, as ominous as that was; the sun, even hazed with what people told him were Roil spores, was cheering. Though what the sun revealed was less so. The months of constant rain had scarred the city and there was no one left to heal it. The air stank of sewage and dead things and while the rain had hidden such smells — or at the very least dulled them — the sun lifted them up, seemed to take a delight in their acrid pungency.

  And at night, and during the day, there could be heard always a distant screaming. And sometimes the sky grew slick and black with the Cuttle messengers. When that happened he kept inside his shop.

  Once a Quarg Hound had passed by, its wide eyes taking everything in. It had yapped out something that might have been a kind of warning, and then it had bounded away. Stagwell had watched it all from behind his counter.

  There were whispers of a sickness, a spreading madness; that people were not to be trusted. And while there had always been sicknesses, fevers and chills, such was the nature of modern city life, this was an altogether different thing.

  The city had been left to the insane. So while he had not had any customers that day, Stagwell found some comfort in the solitude. The few people he had had in the bookstore over the past week had become increasingly desperate or desperately odd. Many times now he had locked the front door, and hid behind the shelves, rather than let some oddly shambling man or woman enter the shop.

  Stagwell dusted the biography section, the presence of these collections of lives — simplified and analysed — calming him. At least here was something solid and unchangeable.

  The shop jolted, a sudden terrible spasm. Mayor Stade's Brute and Noble Governance fell to the floor, his stern face staring up, and Stagwell almost tumbled down with it. The beams in the ceiling groaned and the building had another petit mal.

  He ran to the front of the shop and stuck his head out the door. There were few people on the street and of those that were, fewer remained upright.

  The earth quaked again, and Stagwell watched it ripple towards him along the street. He clutched desperately at the door frame and managed to keep his footing. Inside the store, shelves juddered and books crashed to the floor.

  His line of sight extended down Main Street and where it ended on Harris Heights, across the River Weep. The earth rippled again and the ground flexed, then bubbled, and the air twisted and grew black with wreckage and broken buildings. A great fiery hand burst through the earth and with it fire and stone struck the sky, shooting up and arcing down. The nearby River Weep hissed, and steam crowded the air — and something else with it that was smokey and flitting. And that something was racing down the street, fanning out, hunting. People screamed, or laughed, or screamed and laughed — and fell down, before they rose on limbs shaky at first, but gripped with a new purpose.

  From the top of Ruele Tower, something flared with a great cold light. The air chilled, the smoke fell from the sky, and the hand shuddered and dropped, smashing back through the earth. A bomb, some sort of miniature Engine of the World, Stagwell guessed.

  Snow fell, the air chilled.

  He rushed inside, but he wasn't the only thing that had fled the cold. Darkness rushed towards him on tiny dusty wings.

  All he felt was relief, stronger even than the pain. Relief that it was all over, that he did not need to worry about what to do, that he did not need to care.

  A hot old voice whispered in his skull, and suddenly Stagwell Matheson was laughing and getting matches and setting all those tumbled books alight.

  By midmorning the retail sector was blazing, by that afternoon the whole city burned, and the sky was dark with ash and smoke.

  And thus, before the Roil was even a smudge on the horizon, was the old city of Mirrlees-on-Weep finally taken.

  But it wasn't without cost to the Roil.

  The Witmoths, the nerves along which the Roil strung its thought, knew for perhaps the first time in twenty years a setback. And though there was no one there to see it, the Roil felt it nonetheless.

  The currents beneath the earth were strong and deadly even to Vastkind, but deadlier still was the land above. Each time it burst through the earth, that cruel void, so absent of pressure, threatened to tear it apart. It sank down, stunned and wounded by the upper world, by the cold thing that had flared in the sky.

  Down. Down. Into the rushing heart and heat of the world.

  Above the surface was a universe of which it desired no part. The forces were too soft, hardly forces at all, and its mind — so attuned to the ebb and flow of electromagnetic fields — could feel the emptiness, the thinning out. And it reacted to it in horror and agony one final time.

  Let the chattering children play out their game.

  Such pain drowned out their commands — her commands — and slowly, it sank back into the mantle: all glorious heat, all glorious pressure.

  It sank and it dreamed its stony terrible dreams again.

  The iron ships streaked across the sky. Six of them, though three turned to the east before the dawn, travelling somewhere that Tope did not know. Drift or Stade’s precious Underground, perhaps.

  The other three followed precise coordinates, the fastest flight path to Tearwin Meet — and toDavid and the girl Margaret, to whom Tope felt a perverse paternal instinct, that, even as he knew it was not his own, had become almost as strong as that hatred he had possessed for decades. He struggled with the battling desires, the beating warmth, the chill disregard. He knew that if he did not possess that first command — to kill the boy, to crush out what it was that hid within the addict’s blood — then this new love would destroy him, would tear him open and make something so different that he would not recognise it at all.

  He sat, face still, not moving a muscle. A belt was stretched tight across his chest, and the ship’s acceleration pushed him into the chair, a hand as certain and as strong as the Roil within him.

  The fiery
ball missed the first ship, streaked right over it and crashed into the second. It disappeared in a series of bursts, bundles of fire and flame knitted together with strands of smoke.

  Tope didn’t even blink, as one last great explosion tore through the sky. Twice more they were fired upon. Neither ship was struck, and their companion’s wreckage became a ruddy blur on the horizon. A second barrage occurred an hour later and another iron ship fell, smoking and broken to the earth, landing with a boom that never quite caught up with Tope’s iron ship.

  He watched the ruin of that craft fade into the distance and wondered if he would live to strangle David after all.

  They were fired upon at hourly intervals, but this time the ship seemed prepared, or the weapons weren’t, because they managed to evade the flames. And when an hour and a half had passed since the last burst of flames, the iron ship slowed, mountains grew curled and cruel out of the earth, and a wall almost as high, and Tope knew that they had arrived.

  CHAPTER 43

  The Engine. Even now I cannot say that I understand it. What a marvel it was, and what marvels were we to have made something so far beyond us.

  Engines, Deighton

  THE OUTER WALL OF TEARWIN MEET 2120 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

  Margaret took the last guard duty. She'd had an evening teeming with dreams of the Roil, Tate and its fall, or worse, a Tate unchanged, but empty of everyone but her, a city driven by clockwork — like her father's great Orrery that had mapped out the expansion of the Roil. And that clockwork had hunted her.

  She was relieved to escape to the chill monotony of peering beyond the overhang — no one seemed to be sleeping — as though only bad dreams walked these stony fields. Buchan nodded at her over a steaming cup of tea, gestured at her to come and talk, but she shook her head. She wanted to be alone.

  Margaret looked at the curving wall, spikes jutting from its surface. For all that it was constructed on a scale beyond anything she had ever seen before, it reminded her of the Steaming Vents of Tate. She wondered if it would prove to be a similar draw to the agents of the Roil.

  Death lay ahead; she felt it in her bones. It had trailed her from the moment she'd heard the ringing of the bells that had signalled her parents' return, and then, somehow, it had overtaken her. But now, at last, she headed towards it directly.

  Death, whether the city welcomed them or not, how else could it be anything but death? Perhaps she had never really been hunted by it, perhaps she had been hunting it instead, a great and glorious death that would take the whole world, too.

  The wind had stopped some time ago, but it somehow felt colder. She looked into a sky as clear as glass, and bright, despite the twin moons having set an hour before. The stars were cold and distant. Instructive, she thought, in that a greater darkness bound them and that they burned, for all their multitudes alone.

  She thought about Cam, felt a sliver of guilt, and hoped that the pilot was safe. Margaret thought of her kisses again, was stung by the memory, and her yearning. She let herself circle the memory, as the Dawn had circled Tearwin Meet. It was a good simple hurt, and she had too few of those.

  At that moment she wanted everyone to die, and everyone to live; she wanted doom and joy in equal measure, and the cold dark, filled with the distant rumble of the icy sea, seemed to offer that.

  She laughed, the sound startling her, and stared again across the dark and rocky plain.

  “What a lonely world we save,” she whispered into the night. “But what else is there?”

  There was no answer, of course, but she found something in the cold places of her heart. And if the answer was unsatisfying, still it was an answer. She pulled her coat around her shoulders and watched the night.

  David found her a few hours later, while Buchan and his crew were still sleeping.

  “Time to go up,” he said.

  “Should we wake Buchan and Whig?”

  David shook his head. “Let them sleep, who knows, it could all be over before breakfast.”

  Kara Jade was already with her Aerokin. The Dawn stirred, shifting her body heat, breaking ice from along her spine. Coffee brewed in a great pot and Kara passed them both hot mugs of the stuff, black as the sky. Margaret curled her hands around the mug, and smiled.

  “Enjoy it,” Kara said. “There's not much left.”

  Margaret took a mouthful — it was good and strong and warm, and she suddenly realised just how cold she had been.

  “So, this is it?” Kara said.

  There was an excitement in the air, even Margaret could feel it.

  David smiled at Kara. “Yes, it is.”

  The Dawn shivered, more ice sloughed from her flesh, and suddenly they were in the air. Ten feet, twenty.

  “Going to be a slow rise. Are you sure you wouldn't rather just get drunk?” Kara said. “I've plenty of rum for that coffee.”

  “We'll leave that for when we're done,” Margaret said, and Kara laughed.

  “I will hold you to that,” she said.

  Margaret looked down. Whig and Buchan stood below, holding torches, waving them at the sky; they looked so alone down there, they could have been the last two men in the world. And she was reminded of the last time that they had left them by fleeing in the Pinch. Margaret found herself waving back, feeling a little stupid as she did so. When she stopped, she realised that Kara was looking at her, the smile on her face unreadable.

  “You're all sorts of surprises,” Kara said.

  Margaret put on her cold suit as they rose, stripping and redressing quickly, as though she were a gun to be broken and remade again. There was still a small charge left to the suit, though she didn’t activate it. She slid her clothes over it; her greatcoat she slipped into her bag, too dangerous to descend wearing that.

  David could see the dark material of the suit jutting out at the wrists. He looked at her. “What are you doing wearing that? Where we’re going it will be cold, colder than cold.”

  “It keeps me warm enough when it’s not activated. I left Tate in this suit, and I will finish what I set out to do while dressed so.”

  “Fair enough,” David said. “Though if you expect me to take some Carnival, I will have to disappoint you.”

  “You take Carnival, and I'll cut your throat.”

  “I'd expect nothing less from you,” David said.

  The Dawn stopped at the top of the rocky wall. The wind was building, just the first few gusts, but there was the promise of more. Far to the east, the sea glowed with the coming sun. The Dawn stayed steady, absolutely still, as though asserting her mastery over the sky. Margaret slipped her empty mug into the small sink at the back of the gondola, stared at it a moment.

  Her gaze fell upon the east, and she wondered if they need perhaps wait for the sun to rise — that starting without seeing it one last time was wrong. After all, she had known so few sunrises, didn’t she deserve this last one? There was something so right in the idea that she opened her mouth to suggest it.

  But David spoke first. “Are you ready?”

  She nodded and he passed her a great coil of rope, the thin strong stuff of the Roslyn Dawn, grown by the ship herself. He had another looped around his shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said, and walked to the doorifice, it opened and the cold rushed in, such bitter terrible cold. Her fingers ached at once, her lungs seemed to constrict and burn.

  “It will be warmer below,” David said, touching her back gently. The coldness of him seeped through, she pulled away from his touch. “Not much, but a little.”

  Not for you, she thought. “All the more reason to do this quickly.”

  “Good luck,” Kara said.

  “You too.” David kissed her gently on the cheek.

  Kara hugged him tight, then did the same to Margaret, and Margaret surprised herself by letting her. “How will I know if you succeed?”

  “You’ll know,” David said. “The world itself will draw a mighty breath. You hear that, you take cover.”

>   Kara looked at Margaret. “Keep each other safe.”

  Margaret wanted to say that there was nothing safe in what they did. Instead she nodded, and leapt out through the doorifice and onto the edge of the wall.

  David followed, landing lithely. He crouched on the narrow walkway, a hammer in hand, and drove an anchor into the wall. Three hard blows and it was done, to his apparent satisfaction.

  Already the Dawn was sliding away and down, and already the dawn was breaking the horizon, a light washing over an icy sea. And so Margaret saw the sunrise as she'd wished. Somewhere distant a sea creature let out a cry at once mournful and triumphant, and Margaret knew how it felt. Another night survived, another day to endure, the world had yet to grind it down.

  The wind grew then. It pulled at her hair, and her greatcoat, and snatched the sound away.

  David grinned at her, and she grinned back at him.

  He locked a karabiner into place, then played out the weighted line, down, down, down.

  He sighed, and in a voice more Cadell than David declared, “The last time we used rope, it didn’t go so well at all. And yet, here we are.”

  Margaret nodded, hardly listening, looking down at the city below, and the webwork of razor-sharp cold wire that protected it. For a moment, all she could think of was Tate, and its network webs and wireways.

  “It’s like going home,” Margaret said.

  “For both of us, eh,” David said, though Margaret could tell there was little of David here.

  “Shall you go first?” David said. “You'll be safe, just don't venture too far from the wall.”

  Margaret clipped her harness and her line onto the rope, and let gravity do what it always did. Within moments, as the muscles in her arms and legs worked at the wall, she felt herself grow warmer. She looked up; already David was a dot on the wall.

  She dropped in leaps and bounds, and it was like she was back on the wireway. Ice shards fell with her, and she knew that she would have to get well away from the wall when she reached the bottom, or David was likely to kill her with the ice he'd bring down.