Roil

by Trent Jamieson

  He almost dropped the rifle. David’s mouth burned with the cold. It was not ice but something frozen and bitter tasting. A hole in one of his teeth started throbbing violently.

  Margaret grinned. “That was almost worth it, just to see your face.”

  They ran, as all around Roilings pulled themselves from the earth. The creatures moved sluggishly, eyes blinking, Witmoths everywhere about them. They hardly noticed Margaret and David, something for which David was very grateful. There were so many of them, but their attention was focussed elsewhere.

  Margaret, swung the rime blade before her and every Roiling flinched from its touch. They forced their way through the mass of Roilings without firing a shot. David doubted that those on the walls would find it as easy, for it was in that direction these creatures headed, David and Margaret were just something to push past, a distraction no more.

  Clear of the Roilings and several streets from the wall, they paused for breath. David looked back the way they had come. “Margaret,” he said. “Tope’s coming.”

  Margaret tapped David on the shoulder and pointed in the opposite direction. “And he’s bought some friends. You’d think they’d be trying to defend the city.”

  “Vergers are like that,” David said. “Tope’s loyalties are to Stade, this city could burn and he wouldn’t care.”

  “How very narrow minded,” Margaret said. “You Northerners are an odd lot.”

  “Not everyone in Mirrlees is like that. Not at–”

  The ground shuddered and the wall where they had been standing just minutes before collapsed; chunks of stone the size of the Roslyn Dawn’s gondola crashed by. Margaret pushed David to the ground. I’m a dead man, he thought. Dead.

  When the dust cleared, he remained very much alive. They got to their feet. A long, strident cry echoed down the street, coming from the distant gap in the wall. David did not like the sound at all, it played at his nerves like fingernails run over a cheese grater. More bits of wall crumbled. The edge of the Roil filled the gap.

  “What is that noise?” he shouted.

  “Sappers,” Margaret said. “This battle is over before it’s even begun. We’ve got to get out of here. They will not have stopped at walls.”

  The Vergers walked into the open, before and behind them, Mr Tope stopped.

  “David, you’re coming with me,” he shouted. “We have to get out of here.”

  “I’m going nowhere,” David said, waving his ice rifle in the air.

  “Better somewhere than nowhere, surely?” the Verger said, taking in all the chaos around him with a single motion. “You’ve no choice, lad.”

  “We should’ve stayed with the Roslyn Dawn,” Margaret said.

  David shook his head, sweat rushed from him, the air was boiling, his guts were cold. “He’d have found us there anyway. We probably made it harder for him coming out to the wall.”

  The Verger’s drew free their knives.

  “I don’t think we can fight our way out of this.” Margaret lowered her rime blade. David thought back to the night that his running had begun, to the Verger’s knife that had sliced his father’s throat, Tope’s knife.

  He pointed his rifle at Tope’s head and fired, the shot went wide. Tope didn’t flinch.

  “No,” he said to Margaret. “I’m not giving up.”

  Screams filled the air, mad and discordant. Margaret looked to the sky. “David, step back under cover. Now!”

  David turned his head towards the noise. Margaret clicked her tongue and yanked him out of the way.

  Darkness descended in a mass of bunching flight, a cacophonous surging of off-key notes. The Vergers screamed and thrashed; bled their cruel lives upon the street. As they lay dying, the ground itself fell away and black-eyed creatures, with fleshy mandibles snapping and spiracles hissing, bubbled out of the steaming earth.

  Beyond them all stood Mr Tope, a look of quiet dismay upon his face.

  David sighted along the rifle hoping to get in a shot, to halt the massacre. Margaret smacked his rifle towards the ground. Her face was hard and her voice when it came was strange and forced.

  “Let them die,” Margaret said. She fired a shot at Tope. He ducked out of the way. “The things coming out of the ground are Sappers, I told you they wouldn’t stop at the walls.”

  David looked back at the Verger. Tope appeared furious and horrified at once, impotently watching his men as the Hideous Garment Flutes enveloped them, the shrill whistles of their flight exchanged for the soft sounds of flesh being torn from bone. The Sappers had blocked off the path to David and Margaret. Tope snatched a pistol from his belt and started firing, bullets hissed around them.

  “Time to go,” Margaret said, stabbing a Sapper in the eye, which screamed shrilly and scuttled back to the safety of the steaming hole.

  David nodded and pointed to the heart of the city, not far away, bits of the green field were visible and some of the tents, but it was not to the ground he looked. The sky was filling with airships and Aerokin, all rising and racing north.

  “We may have missed the Dawn,” he said. “The ships are leaving.”

  “Cadell will wait for us,” Margaret said.

  David wished he could be so sure. He remembered Cadell’s face, resolute, that was if Cadell had even made back from the Council Chambers. He turned back towards the Verger one last time, but Tope had already disappeared and only the monsters remained, feasting on pieces of Tope’s men.

  Blood darkened the ground, and the sky grew black with Roil spores and beasts. The poplar trees that circled the field shuddered and bent beneath the weight of yowling Endyms and shrieking Hideous Garment Flutes.

  The Field of Flight succumbed to anarchy in a series of confrontations and collisions, raised words and screaming matches. People fell, tripped and pushed by the crowd, and came up swinging or worse, they did not come up at all.

  Terror held its rough court and bade all do as they would.

  The Roil had come, the Roil at last; and there was no comfort to be taken in the distant thunder of the guns. It had been a beautiful day, but beautiful days do not care what they bring. The sun faltered and fled and the Obsidian Curtain began to close upon the city.

  All around, airships and Aerokin, each one filled with passengers, now refugees, ascended. Guns were fired, a dangerous proposition around the older Hydrogen ships.

  It was a nightmare journey across the field. Hideous Garment Flutes descended in a black cloud. Chill, was no defence against them, and he had to use the rifle as a club, swatting them out of the sky

  He marvelled at Margaret’s deft sword strokes. With every step, it seemed, she’d strike another flute out of the sky. They squawked and battered around her rime blade, but soon the ice stilled them and Margaret never lost momentum, nor got too far ahead of David.

  At last they reached the Roslyn Dawn to find Cadell and Kara waiting, their faces harried, Kara desperate with worry not for them, but the Dawn. “You were about to be left behind,” she said, as she ran for the controls.

  “Not the best time to go sightseeing,” Cadell said.

  David was too out of breath to speak.

  He clambered with Margaret through the doorifice and into the gondola. His lungs were raw, his heart burned, and his whole body throbbed in time with its terrified beating. He dropped to his haunches and dry retched through the doorifice.

  David looked up and saw the figure shambling towards them across the field. He squinted, not quite sure what his eyes were telling him.

  Witmoths streamed from its lips and eyelids, drifting in the air.

  “Is there a cemetery near here?” he asked.

  Kara Jade pointed beyond the lumbering Roiling. “Just over that rise. A cemetery, yes, and a big one.”

  The lone Roiling was more pathetic than terrifying.

  Until David saw the others. Shambling undead creatures, flowing into the Field of Flight, grabbing those not quick enough to flee and drowning them in moths. And t
hose that had been trampled and stilled, rose up cauled in shivering shadows.

  “I think we’re in trouble,” David said.

  “Great,” Kara Jade replied. “Because I was really beginning to think we were in danger of not meeting our trouble quota today.”

  “Get us out of here now,” Cadell demanded.

  It was not just Roilings but people that rushed at them now. Though they would not be people for much longer as the Witmoths made a mad turbulence in the air.

  David felt sick to his stomach. “Can we take some more with us?”

  “No,” Kara Jade said. “We’re too small. The Dawn’s overloaded as it is.”

  Beneath them the Dawn released its docking flagella and a goodly quantity of liquid ballast, and began to rise.

  A Roiling grabbed one of the Dawn’s limbs, slowing the Aerokin’s ascent. Others ran to its aid and the Roslyn Dawn’s flight halted. Kara Jade cursed, whispered something to her and reached beneath her control panel for an axe. Margaret grabbed her rifle, sighted along its length. Cadell moved to the doorifice, David could feel the cold coming off him in waves. David stepped back from the door, grabbed the pistol from his pocket in a shaking hand and aimed at the nearest Roiling.

  Then another of the Roslyn Dawn’s flagella, its tip barbed, whipped savagely around and knocked the Roilings away.

  Margaret fired at the creatures as they fell. The Dawn shot up into the sky, the Roiling hit the ground then slowly rose to its feet: one arm staying on the field, the fingers of its hands clenching and unclenching.

  Margaret pursed her lips and fired again and the Roiling fell to the ground and did not move.

  Cadell stepped from the door, looking over to David. “Finally, we’re away,” he said.

  The Roslyn Dawn’s bioengines growled and into the hot sky she powered. As she rose, Margaret, leaning in the doorifice, fired round after round from her rifle into the Roilings massed below. The air stank of endothermic chemicals.

  With every hit she screamed out in triumph.

  David grabbed her hand. “Stop! You’re wasting ammunition.”

  Margaret swung towards him, her eyes wild. For a second, David thought she might actually use the gun on him, its tip smoked.

  “Every dead Roiling is one we won’t have to kill tomorrow.”

  “But how many are you killing? A single shot is not enough. Save your bullets for when we need them, when the Roil beasts are close enough to kill and might just kill us.”

  David’s breath stopped in his throat. Mr Tope stood alone, on the edge of the field, away from the crowds, looking up.

  The Verger caught his eye. He raised his hat and smiled, then walked away, back into the city.

  “It’s Tope,” David said, pointing. “Shoot him.”

  The Verger, like Margaret, moved almost effortlessly through the crowd. Someone ran at him, Tope kicked him in the face and continued on.

  Margaret whistled. “Tenacious isn’t he? He’ll have to give up now.” She aimed her rifle at him, then lowered it. “He’s out of range, but I doubt he’ll escape.” She smiled, then the smile died as she looked upon what the Roil had made.

  Fires raged from the deserted suburbs to the inner city. Smoke flooded the sky, a billowing fist of cloud darkened with Roil Spores that smothered everything. And yet it was insignificant compared to what lay just beyond Chapman’s walls. The Obsidian Curtain advanced, a second finger of dark as wide as the city, billowed out from the main front, the gap between it and the city’s fortifications disappearing at an incredible rate.

  There was a distant thunderous crack and men and cannon tumbled from the walls. Soldiers were smothered in Witmoths.

  “Those thermal sinks are driving it on. Spewing out heat from the world’s core, a primitive and gigantic engine of destruction,” Cadell said, and he couldn’t hide the shock from his voice. “The Roil has never moved so quickly.”

  Chapman’s ice cannon fired ceaselessly, but with little effect, and soon they stopped. The transition from thunderous cannonade to silence was shocking. No one remained to fire the guns.

  The Roil took the walls in minutes. There was no weaponry capable of denying it entry this time.

  From the Northern Gates boiled a stream of refugees.

  David wished them speed. Guilt and relief flooded him, and he had an inkling of what Margaret must have gone through.

  From the east, carried on the Roil-cast wind and no longer drowned out by the cannon, came the shrieks of things terrified out of their minds.

  Thousands of gulls flew above the beach: a huge twisting, skirling sphere of white in which darkness rippled like poison.

  “Roil take us all,” he whispered.

  Hideous Garment Flutes darted in and out of the flock – tearing the poor birds from the sky – their mouthparts lashing at the air, swallowing flesh, whistling and howling as they moved. They had penned the gulls in and were eating them one by one. Birds dropped to the ground, dead with terror, their corpses swallowed by a milling, yipping darkness of Quarg Hounds.

  And that was just the beach. The ruptured walls of the city let the Roil in faster than anyone might flee it. Distance made it all feel so impersonal, but he well knew the terror that drowned the city. Four Quarg Hounds had chased him and Cadell just days ago, now there were more of the creatures than he could have imagined ever existed.

  The Southern Wall was gone, swallowed by the pullulating darkness of the Roil. But that was the least of it. Vertigo filled him, and the world shifted in perspective. A huge hand of fire and stone reached out above the wall. For a few moments it hovered there, clenching into a fist.

  Then it crashed down. All around the city buildings tumbled, rippling out from that point of impact. The hand rose again, and what looked like the tiniest fragment of some titanic shoulder, and struck the wall a second time. After that there was no wall, the stone and iron crumbled as if nothing but dust.

  “Vastkind,” Margaret whispered from beside him, and David had never heard such terror in her voice.

  Run, David thought looking down at the teeming thousands.

  Run.

  Cadell’s lean fingers clenched to impotent fists that he beat softly against the translucent walls. “What manner of Roil is this that controls you?” he said. He looked from David to Margaret and back to David again. And, where there was usually reassurance in Cadell’s eyes, or grim confidence, there was only doubt and disquiet. “What lies ahead will test all our limits.”

  Cadell beat his hands against the wall, over and over again. “I’ve left this too late.”

  “We’re out of it now,” Kara Jade said. “There is some solace in the winds at least. Up here they are fast, my Roslyn knows what to make of them.”

  Kara Jade piloted the craft, her face composed and professional, even if sweat streamed from her brow and her hands shook. She looked to the others, David recognised her horror. It mirrored his. “We’ll reach the Free State of Hardacre in eighteen hours if this keeps up, twenty-two if the winds change,” she said. Her face twisted and she groaned. “We’ll make the bastards pay, won’t we?”

  Margaret nodded, and David considered her resolute expression, and the way she packed away her weaponry with an efficiency at once beautiful and terrifying. Rather like the Roil.

  “We’ll make them pay. We’ll wipe the blasted earth of them. I’ll not see another city fall,” Margaret said, as though she was capable of such things, as though she might single-handedly save the world.

  That fantasy took him: that she and Cadell could do it. Here, with the sky crowded with airships and Aerokin rushing into the North, things might just turn out all right.

  Until he looked back at the smoking, broken city of Chapman, the madness of the Roil looming behind it. All fantasies fell away, leaving only the ruin of hope and the flight of the damned, because the Roil wouldn’t stop with this city. The Roil wouldn’t stop until all the world was a ruddy darkness, and all that lived was its own.

&n
bsp; Chapter 47

  Vergers possess loyalties as fierce as blood to ideologies little understood by the rest of us. Is it any wonder that we feared them, these that killed and laughed in the face of death.

  Timmony – My Brother was a Verger

  CHAPMAN TOWER OF ENGINEERS

  ROIL TRANSITIONAL ZONE

  Order had abdicated the Tower of Engineers to madness. Outside, the twin Lights of Reason dimmed, flickered back to full luminance, and then failed completely. Smoke shifted in the dark in a way that smoke should not, drawn to the slightest movement, the smallest intake of breath.

  But not all movement. Not all breath.

  No one saw Tope enter the building. The door was unguarded, the locks broken.

  Tope did not sneak or hurry, just walked, sucking on Chill, and was paid no notice. Tope was a showman, capable of making himself very noticeable indeed, but this day he moved as a ghost; apt, for the dead walked.

  He strode to the stairs, eschewing the elevator altogether. Down three flights he walked, his steps so light that they failed to echo before or behind him.

  He reached a narrow corridor, stinking of wet and ozone: at its end was a door. He studied the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, until he was sure it remained uncompromised. Sound and sealed, as far as he could tell.

  Mr Tope pulled the door open.

  He stepped into a cramped room, packed with all manner of machinery, the air hummed with science and shadows.

  A man sat waiting for him, his hands curled into fists.

  Tope frowned, the bastard smelt of Carnival; he hated drug addicts. After all, one had just evaded him for the third time.

  But he needed this man.

  “I’ve taken something for my nerves, Mr Tope,” the fellow said. One of his hands uncurled, revealing a tiny silver case. He’d clutched it so tightly that it left marks. “Would you like some?”

  Mr Tope shook his head and the man gave a vapid sort of laugh. “Doesn’t surprise me, you Vergers are all alike. You have the information?”