Roil nl-1

by Trent Jamieson

  “I promise,” Margaret said.

  “There’s moths everywhere,” Sara’s eyes grew unfocussed, she clutched at her gun. “Even in their carriage.”

  “You saw them,” Margaret demanded. “My parents…”

  Sara shook her head. “Something happened. Whatever was driving your parents’ carriage wasn’t human.” She lowered her voice. “They’re dead, and if not, perhaps it’s better to consider them that way.”

  “I have to find them.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea. I don’t think you would like what you found. Margaret, believe me, what came through the Jut was no more your parents than the Quarg Hounds they guided to the wireway.”

  Sara rolled her head, towards the blazing heart of Tate. “But you can’t go back. There’s no way you can go back, there’s only death in the city for you now, for all of us.”

  “Get out of here, north, along Mechanism Highway. That’s an order. You might have a chance.”

  They let what they both knew was a lie stand there between them. Margaret shuddered, took great gulping breaths. Calm down, she thought. Slow your breathing down. She was her parents’ child. She was a Penn, and born of the city of Tate. Her breathing slowed, her mind stopped its flailing, she even managed a grin. “Well, you’re coming with me.” Finally, she had the comfort of her resolve.

  Sara stared up at her, silent. Dead.

  Margaret dragged the body to the side of the road, the trail of blood she left behind revealing the extent of Sara’s injuries. She brushed Sara’s face with her fingertips. The heat was already going from her flesh.

  She gripped her rime blade in her hands and cut her friend’s head from her shoulders. She had promised, she owed Sara that much at least.

  Margaret sprinted to the Melody Amiss; struck by a horrible epiphany. The first glimpses of an answer to what was going on; how the Jut had been obliterated just seconds after the alarm bells started ringing; and why the Four Cannon had fallen so quickly. The Roil was affecting people, transforming them as it had transformed the land beyond the Outer Wall.

  What had happened to her parents? She could not bear to think of them as changed.

  Margaret guided the Melody Amiss through the broken gateway. As she drove onto the bridge, she took it all in, not daring to get out, there was no one left standing, just human wreckage amongst the bare stone. More death than she had ever seen, sightless eyes and still, bloodless limbs. But that was not the worst of it.

  As the Melody Amiss passed them, they rose. Sentinels, faces wreathed with moths, their movements stuttery at first, as though their muscles were new to them. Soon they quickened, their shambling turned to sprinting as they shook free the cowl of their deaths. They rushed the carriage, their fingers reaching. Eyes not empty but alien and terrifying, black as the moths that crawled and tumbled from their wounds and their lips. But they were not as swift as the Melody Amiss ; she left them behind as she had left everything else.

  A hundred yards from the gate, rubble was all that remained of the Jut. Roilings massed there, some humanoid, others sluglings or crab-octopuses, and around them in their thousands, barking and baying, circled packs of Quarg Hounds. Into the monstrous clamour dived Endyms: huge eyes shining in the fire, their leathery wings showering the ground with dusty Roil spores as they scooped up creatures and dropped them over Tate’s walls. Above it all, the city’s nets blazed and fell in great fiery clumps. A few battle drones remained raining endothermic weaponry upon the enemy, but they were not enough. Even as she watched, Endyms dashed them from the sky, the burning remnants tumbling to the city, setting even more buildings alight.

  Margaret neared the end of the bridge. The whole structure shook and the valves that had before ejected icy slush now churned with a liquid fire.

  The moat beyond was still thick with ice, but it would soon grow warm as blood. Bodies floated on the surface, drifting backwards and forwards as more water rushed in. Margaret wondered how many of her people the Roil had infected.

  Not now. Do not think of it now.

  She was running out of time. The banks of the moat would not contain the rising water for much longer. She could already see dark cracks spreading across its outer edges; water seeped from them as blood from a wound.

  A crab-like Roiling, legs spiked and furious, almost as big as the Melody, scurried in front of her. Its fore-claws slashed out and its mouthparts flexed.

  Margaret slowed almost to a halt, gave her front cannon a full charge and fired, tearing the Roiling apart.

  Fingers tapped against the Melody’s side window: a little girl struggled frantically with the handle. Margaret popped the door open.

  “Get in! Quick!” A blast of cold air shot out into the night. The little girl screamed as the air crashed against her face. Her head folded back, unveiling grasshopper-like mandibles. Luminous eyes stared from the pit of the girl’s skull. The creature hissed at her then bound away on prickly legs that had been hidden by the little girl part of its body.

  Margaret slammed the door shut.

  Chapter 7

  Carnival. The sweetest dreams for the darkest times. No common opiate, it was wilder, crueller in its denial. It had appeared upon the streets of Mirrlees, in its dens and its parlours, only two years before the end.

  In those last days its use was commonplace, both lowlife and highborn drawn to its comforts. It did not discriminate. Only the most paranoid would suggest it was addiction as assault.

  • Doyle’s Drugs and Damages.

  Cadell shook him awake, the Old Man’s touch cold enough that David could feel it through the sheets. He shivered.

  Cadell pulled his hand away, looked almost apologetic.

  “You were talking in your sleep.” Cadell’s breath stank of liquor, David blinked in the burning wash of it. “Bad dreams?”

  “Yes,” David said. “Bad dreams.” Churning, horrible dreams that he’d fallen into every time he closed his eyes: knives and blood and Downing Bridge itself, drowning bridge in truth, with its dribbling levee-bed, its profusion of spiders and their hungers.

  Cadell chuckled. “Curse of these times. The city’s rotting as the Weep swells, no one has pleasant dreams. Of course the lack of Carnival in your veins wouldn’t help.”

  He nodded to the table. David’s breath caught in his throat, a small syringe of the disposable type lay there. Not more than a few feet away.

  “I’ve powders for the journey ahead, better for travelling, less chance of breakage. But today you’ve need of the purer stuff,” Cadell said. “Much as I might wish it otherwise, we’ve no time for you to break free of the Carnival. It’s a maintenance dose, but a quality one.”

  David’s mouth was dry. It was all he could do to stop himself from leaping out of the bed and driving that syringe straight into the fattest vein he could find. He already had three in mind. He’d shove it into an eyeball, if it meant he could have it now.

  “I understand such hungers,” the Old Man said, drawing David’s attention back from the syringe, though his voice sounded distant.

  David’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he worked it loose. “You were a user?” he said thickly.

  Cadell shook his head. “No, but there are other addictions – believe me, and some much more harmful than sticking a needle in your arm or your foot. When you’re done, there are clothes in the bag by the dresser, they should fit.”

  Cadell left the room then, and David did the one thing that he’d desired since he’d fled his father’s house into the dark and the rain. These were no sere old pills. This was the good stuff.

  When he was done, and the Syringe disposed of, he slumped in the chair, breathing deeply a stupid smile broad across his face. Cadell hadn’t been lying about the Carnival’s purity. The tension left his limbs and the deep grief that had threatened to overwhelm him evaporated. It was almost as if none of it mattered, and it didn’t really. Not one little bit.

  But he’d kick along wi
th Cadell, of course he would. He didn’t want to die – unless it was right now. That he could handle

  David finally dragged himself from the chair and looked through the bag. Cadell was a man of impeccable sartorial taste, and a good judge of size at that. David cleaned himself up, dried himself down, and dressed.

  He winked at his reflection in the dresser mirror. He looked almost human.

  “If you’re done…” Cadell said, startling him.

  Everything had increased in clarity. Cadell’s bloodshot eyes gleamed. David blinked.

  “You look better now,” Cadell said. “Much more the man about town than the fugitive fleeing through it.”

  “Clothes and Carnival maketh the man,” David said, feeling stupid as soon as the words left his mouth.

  Cadell sat down. “We’ve a while yet, and time to talk. Ask what you will.”

  David nodded. “What do you know about the Roil? Your name always came up when father spoke of it.”

  “More than I ought. More than what’s good for a man. And so will you, before this is done.” He reached over to the table, picked up his hat, ran his hands along its brim, turning the hat around and around, perhaps to keep his fingers busy and his eyes focused on something other than David. “But that’s the way of this decaying world, and I owe your father this much at least.”

  This much? Was David, this much? “What do you owe my father?”

  “Plenty,” Cadell said. “Just believe me, when I say this doesn’t even begin to square the debt, perhaps it even adds to it.”

  To David this wasn’t much of an answer. “What would square the debt then?”

  “I hope you never have to find out.” Cadell stood up, dropped his hat on the bed and walked to a cabinet near the mirror. He splashed something in a glass, swallowed it down in a gulp. Grimaced. “I should have warned him, more than I did. More forcefully, should have kept a closer eye on your house.”

  “He knew this was coming?” A dark bitterness rose in him and raged. Why hadn’t he fled? Why had his father risked both their lives?

  Cadell nodded his head. “He knew that as soon as he crossed the floor of Parliament, soon as he joined the Confluents, something was coming. He just didn’t expect it to be this. Thought they were all working towards the same thing. Stade proved him wrong. Oh, lad, there are secrets that layer Mirrlees and Shale, sediments of madness and lies more damning than you could believe. Missteps, and murders, from the First Ships down.” Cadell lifted his empty hands in the air. “There’s blood on these, as much as Stade, more.” Cadell stopped. “I’m sorry, David.”

  “People die, Mr Cadell,” David said, and his voice was colder than even the Carnival could account for. “People die.”

  And that was all he allowed himself.

  Cadell took his time in responding. “But you’re not dead.”

  David didn’t argue the point, but he knew Cadell was wrong. Something inside him was dead. Not too long ago, a few years no more, he’d been maybe fourteen or fifteen he had woken in the middle of the night, and realised that he was going to die, that the night was smothering him. He’d started screaming then.

  His parents had rushed into the room. His mother had held him, and he had told her, that he didn’t want to die, that he didn’t want any of them to die. She’d kissed his brow, and assured him that he had a very long time indeed before he needed to worry about such things.

  Well, it had turned out that they hadn’t had that long at all. The next day the rain fell, and it really hadn’t stopped. His mother was dead six months later, his father increasingly obsessive and cold. Was it any wonder he had succumbed to addiction by his seventeenth year?

  “Stuffy in here,” Cadell muttered and opened a window, the rain had picked up a notch, it cooled the air but a fraction.

  Better than nothing, David thought.

  “I’m sorry, lad. Not least of all that I’m all you’ve got. You’re right there; people die, and most of your father’s allies died with him last night. The Engineers have played their dissolution and rule Parliament now. And the Vergers have taken sides. These are desperate times, and Stade really thinks he’s doing the right thing. But he isn’t.”

  David was thirsty. He found a glass and filled it with water from a jug. A revolver sat on a bench nearby. He looked at it a long time, then considered the broad back of Cadell. Carnival made all things possible, steadied the shakiest hand, if he moved quick he could avenge at least one death in his family.

  “Well, are you going to shoot me, Mr Milde?”

  David shook his head. Something about Cadell changed then, and even though David could only see his back, he knew the Old Man was grinning. “Do you even know what I am, David. Did your father ever tell you that particular secret?”

  “My father never told me anything. All we did was fight.”

  “I guess that was all he knew at the end. How to fight. He told you I killed your uncle, but he never explained the circumstances. Oh, where to begin?” Cadell turned from the window, the rainy city behind him, dark and streaming, and him sharing some of that darkness.

  Perhaps David should have used the revolver.

  Cadell walked over to the table and flipped open the revolver’s drum, no bullets. “Never leave a loaded gun where an enemy might use it. Of course, we aren’t enemies. Have you ever heard talk of the Engine of World?”

  What? David thought. Fairy tales?

  “It’s a myth,” David said. “Tearwin Meet, Land Crash, the Battering of Gillam Hall, those I can believe in. But the Engine… an impossibility.”

  “It’s not an impossibility. I was there. I helped build it.”

  It was then David knew without a hint of doubt that Cadell was mad.

  Chapter 8

  If one event can be counted as the beginning of the final days, then, arguably, one need look no further than the fall of Tate.

  Some equilibrium was upset, what had been expected to take decades, a slow and steady transition into the dark, became instead a sprint. The Roil, ever vast and ponderous, transformed, grew predatory, and found an urgent hunger to match its size.

  • Deighton – Histories

  The fourth cannon fired another three times before succumbing to gravity and sabotage like its siblings. Its last two blasts came perilously close to the Melody Amiss, clearing the path before her in great bursts of ice, but also striking the ground so hard that the carriage bounced, Margaret rattling around inside it as she struggled to gain control, the wheel jerking in her grip.

  The falling cannon struck tanks of coolant on the eastern quadrant. A storm of flame lifted the carriage up and slammed it into the ridge.

  Margaret blacked out and, for a moment, she was home with her parents in their library.

  Here, alone in the Penn household, clutter ruled, books, notes, schematics in their most incubate form (iron ships of the air, scurrying many limbed walkers, a hand held device for the calculation of arithmetic), even political cartoons. On the wall was suspended the terrestrial Orrery, a map traversed by a metal band that depicted the Roil’s progress across Shale. The band had long ago crossed Mcmahon in the North and now looked ready to slide over Chapman. Many times Margaret had run her fingers over the Orrery, imagining lands and metropolises beyond the Roil. Places that had a blue sky not black, that saw the Sun, the Moon and the stars.

  A huge wooden table, surrounded by plump leather-bound chairs, dominated the centre of the library, a grand Old Man deliciously besieged by books.

  Margaret slumped into a chair, glancing over the books and papers stacked up high before her. On the armrests were her father’s plans for a system of pneumatic railways, and an old copy of the Shadow Council. The lurid cover showed Travis the Grave racing over a burning rooftop, sabre in his mechanical hand, proving even her father still liked to relax a little – though he had annotated it with stern pronouncements on the scientific and engineering flaws within the text.

  Her mother had been reading Deighton
’s treatise on the Engines of the World, and receiving much mockery as a consequence.

  “It’s just legend and the whimsy of mechanics who should know better,” Marcus Penn muttered. “Deighton, little more than folklore dressed up as history and science. Mechanical Winter is just a way of explaining the Ice Age. Engines of the World! Why do you insist on stretching credulity so?”

  Arabella Penn arched an eyebrow, her lips curling into something too scathing to be a smile. “Then how was the Roil stopped? How do you explain the fact that this world is colder than it ought to be, even with the Roil?”

  “Hmm.”

  Her father raised one hand vaguely, jabbing at the air. “For the latter, our astronomical mathematics are wrong, much as it chagrins me to admit. And, for the first, obviously it is a natural process. Perhaps a kind of tide. The Ice Age came, the tide turned.”

  “Ha! I can’t imagine this tide turning. As for natural, I’m not quite sure the Roil is natural. If it is, it is nature gone wrong.”

  “Bah, nature goes wrong all the time. One could say it is the very nature of nature to go wrong. What is wrong anyway? Just because it doesn’t agree with us doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But then again it’s not humanity’s nature to agree with nature, otherwise we’d all be living in trees, which wouldn’t be all that bad I suppose as I’m rather fond of trees myself. Natural or not there are no engines.” Her father glared at her. “Margaret, my dear, could you see to that damnable ringing.”

  Ringing!

  She snapped awake with a gasp and touched her stinging forehead. Her fingers came back wet with her blood. The cut was deep, but she barely felt it. She could hardly feel anything.

  The firestorm had turned the carriage around so that she faced Tate. A howl cracked her lips.

  Sheets of fire consumed the city, from the foot to the crown of Willowhen Peak, even the stony, spiked walls burned with coolant-fed, blue flame – a terrible ghost light. The Four Cannon were stumps of iron glowing with a white heat. The Swarming Vents, too, had mostly fallen, caved in on themselves or blown apart. In the blazing sky, the battle was nearly done. An Endym tore a Sweeper’s glider from the air. Another glider plummeted, weighed down by Hideous Garment Flutes.