“Tired is not the word for what I feel,” she said and stumbled.
“We have sleeping quarters nearby, though you’ll be the first to use them, none of us can sleep here. Not once we’ve crossed the Interface. But you, Margaret, you are made of sterner stuff. Rest now.”
“I can’t rest,” she said. “Not yet. There’s much you must know.”
Anderson’s face grew conflicted. She could see his concern for her but she could also see that he hungered for what she might tell him, for any information that might help them in their study of the Roil. Yet he hesitated.
“I’ll rest when I have shared what I know.”
“If you insist,” he said at last. “Come with me, but the moment you want to stop. We stop.”
He took her to a small room, with a table and chairs and a recording device.
“State of the art,” Anderson said. “It will take down your voice and return it to you. Much more convenient than note taking.”
He manoeuvred a large microphone in front of her. “Now if you’ll just speak into that, slowly and clearly.”
Margaret did. Telling him everything from her wait for her parents through to her flight from the city and her arrival here.
When she had finished, Anderson switched off the machine.
“If I hadn’t seen the Melody Amiss, your cool suit, your obvious parentage, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. And yet, here you are.
“Did you bring blueprints for your parents’ I-Bombs? The machine is off, you can speak with candour.”
Margaret shook her head.
Anderson could not hide his disappointment, though he tried valiantly, smiling. “It does not matter,” he said. “We are researching something similar at any rate. It is good to know we are on the right track. That you survived at all is remarkable. Now you must rest.”
This time Margaret did not argue. She let him lead her away to the showers, where she stripped of her cold suit and bathed.
Her flesh was swollen, and sore, but there were surprisingly few pressure wounds. She let the heat of the shower seep into her and tried to think of nothing but the relief it offered her body.
When she was done, one of the soldiers led her to a small room with a single metal-framed bed, and little more.
Clothes had been laid out, military fatigues, they fit her, reasonably enough. And, while it felt odd to be dressed in something that didn’t chill her or push tightly against her flesh (and when had that cold grip become a comfort?) she fell asleep almost at once.
No dreams haunted her. How could they? Her life was nightmare enough.
A few corridors away from the sleeping quarters was a small room, with a small table, a couple of hard wooden chairs and a door that backed on to the kitchen. There were well-thumbed copies of all the recent Shadow Council stories stacked neatly at one end of the table.
Anderson and Winslow both had offices crammed with notes and maps and memos from the Council, and filing cabinets with large locks, and some that were even fitted with alarms. But it was here that they made their decisions, in this little room, usually with nothing more than a cup of tea, some dry old biscuits and a lot of pacing.
Anderson put his cup of tea down. “This cannot be right. It’s made me uneasy from the beginning. She is a Penn. A Penn,” Anderson said. “Without them we would not have half the weaponry we do.”
Winslow nodded. “But we have our orders.”
Anderson walked the length of the hall, before turning back. “We have been following orders for the last year, even as they have grown less and less reasonable. Winslow, she escaped her city’s fall. She is a resourceful and strong woman, and even if she were not, I cannot in good conscience hand her over to the enemy.”
Winslow nodded.
“It would be folly to trust them. They’re up to something. Great works, some sort of construction, all of it where we can’t go.”
“You’ve felt it too?” Anderson said. “The quivering earth? The distant murmur of old engines?”
“Yes,” Winslow said. “Our darkest nightmares seem ready to flower. And they’d have us make yet another concession.”
Anderson nodded his head, picking up his fast cooling tea and drinking it down. “And why her? What interest does the Roil have in this one person?”
“She is a child of Marcus and Arabella Penn. It does our cause no good to give the enemy what they want. Particularly when they demand a Penn.” He shook his head. “Remember when we were here to fight the Roil, not make deals with it? I think the time for deal making is over.”
The orders mocked him with their cruel simplicity. The single sentence:
“Let the Roil have her. We need more time.”
We have no more time, he thought. Whether we give them Margaret or not.
Anderson scrunched the paper in his hand, throwing it into the bin. “Did you see these orders, Winslow?”
“What orders?” Winslow asked.
Anderson grinned, though he frowned again quickly enough. “Give her another half an hour, she’s almost dead on her feet, and then you better wake her. They’ll be coming soon. Poor Margaret you must run again.”
Chapter 32
In Mirrlees nothing is done in a half-hearted fashion. Bridges, levees, floods all of them are gigantic. Excess is the order of the day, but admire the filigree of Channon Hall or the delicate structure of the Reeping Meet, with its thirteen clocks, and you realise that the human was never sublimated, merely overshadowed. It is there when you look into the dark.
• Babbet – Babbet’s Mirrlees: A Tourist’s Almanac
MIRRLEES ON WEEP 200 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL.
“Mr Paul, these are your wards.”
They stood in the rain at the edge of Northmir where the suburbs gave out to the labyrinthine drainage systems and Ur-levees of the city. Before them rose the Northmir Bridge behind them the levee. The road running from it was called the Pewter Highway it gleamed a little in the cloud-dulled light. Three thousand workers waited by the bridge, men and women, skilled and ready to head into the North. And they were indeed his wards.
It stunned him that this was the response to just one call. These people had mustered in a single day, gathered their lives to them and come here. Looking down he could see that none of them had had much to gather. Things were bad, but only bad enough that the poorest folk were willing to leave. People who had nothing to lose, for whom Mirrlees had been a hellhole, even before the rains and certainly since Stade had put an end to all but the most urgent construction.
It would take the Roil itself to come boiling towards the city, before the wealthier denizens of Mirrlees began to consider such action.
All of them are fools, Medicine thought.
He doubted Stade or the Council would stick around that long.
Stade stood beside him, a hand resting on Medicine’s shoulder. He resented the familiarity of the act, and wanted nothing more than to wrench his shoulder away. But they had to appear to be in partnership, to have put the past aside. Just keep smiling, he thought, you’re in too deep to cut his throat.
“Not much to look at, are they,” Stade said. “But these are the finest our Northern Suburbs can produce. And they are in your charge. Three thousand people, the merest drop in the ocean of our population, but it is a start. Just bring them safely to the Narung Mountains.”
“I’ll get them there. You just give your speech.”
“Of course,” Stade said, and walked to the microphone, and his voice reverberated out over the Northmir. “The time of secrecy has passed, the time of action has come and a place has been prepared for you. All of you. My grand work, my Project, the Underground. And there we shall wait out the Roil, there we shall prosper, there we shall survive.”
The next few hours passed intolerably slowly. Grin and bear it. Medicine just wanted to get going. There were several weeks of journey between here and the Narung Mountains. And who knew what on the way. Even if nothing happened, keeping this
lot under control was going to be work enough. He had forty-nine council guard of doubtful loyalty. The only certainty he had was that their loyalties were not to him.
Something had halted the two engines, though. The Grendel and Yawn were big trains. They could have taken this lot up in a single trip. But that was not going to happen. Shanks pony was all they had, other than the horses for the guard and barely enough oxen drawn wagons for supplies. And the wagons, well he hated the things.
He looked up into the rain-smeared sky. What had he been thinking?
Three thousand people, just ready to up and leave, and looking to him to get them to safety. Well he had failed, David – and truly he had failed the first time he had seen signs of the young man’s addiction and done nothing about it – and Warwick, poor dead Warwick. Perhaps this really was a chance at redemption.
He was damned if he would fail these folk as well.
They left at last. The council guard on horseback making a rough perimeter. The wagons, Medicine had made go on first. The highway was not in the best condition; rain had devoured it in places. Medicine reasoned it was best to have the wagons through before everyone else. Six thousand feet could do a lot of damage.
Of course, he had underestimated just how much damage the wagons themselves were capable of causing. The road was a ruin, and a muddy ruin at that, as they followed in the wagons’ wake. And not all of the wagons were up to it. Half a dozen were lost in that first day and whatever could be salvaged was taken up to the remaining or redistributed amongst those on foot.
The loss of the wagons dismayed Medicine.
Broken wagons for a broken landscape of failed levees and drowned suburbs. Mirrlees’s undulations made too much work for the pumps and engines of the city, some parts had flooded from their own catchment areas. The highway kept to the hills and so they looked down on submerged houses and domestic debris drifting lost like small islands of hopelessness.
Twice that day, scouts reported to Medicine sightings of groups to the west. Small gangs, salvage crews and looters – though if truth were told there was little difference between the two. Shots were fired at them, but it was a half-hearted menace. Medicine was not too concerned, it would take an army to threaten his three thousand and their guard.
That night they made camp on the very edge of the city, where murky fields led right up to the Regress Swamps – now looking more like a lake, with only the grey thread of the road running through it. Beyond them was the Margin. Medicine peered into that dark forest. He would have preferred to simply go around it, but such a detour would have cost them a week, maybe more.
Medicine knew there was Hardacre to the distant North and Eltham and the Daunted Spur along the north eastern seaboard. But it was easy to imagine civilisation ending here. Mirrlees was the northernmost of the great metropolises. Beyond it were the trees and the Gathering Plains and the burrows of the Cuttlefolk, and so much space. Three thousand people could be swallowed whole by those miles, and leave barely a mark to show their passing.
He helped unpack the tents – let no one claim he had developed airs and graces.
Chapter 33
Immediacism was a movement built upon fear.
Its attraction to the populace, like Carnival, an escape. Where everything was only grey and dark, they fashioned worlds of colour. Their effects were striking but, truly, it was a last breath of decadence in an age possessed of resources far too limited to sustain such a thing.
But what art isn’t a glorious folly?
• Collingwood – Art at the Gates of Apocalypse: A Comic History.
UHLTON 19 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
The meeting in Buchan’s parlour had gone on for another hour ending with something that had at once surprised and delighted David.
“I want you take David with you,” Cadell had said. “Where I am going… it’s too dangerous.”
“Of course we will,” Buchan had said, agreeing with Cadell for the first time that night. David went to bed with a feeling of such relief, to be at last out of the eye of the storm.
David woke to thunder.
No, it was gunshot, and a distant thudding. He sat up in bed. The next two shots came quick, one after the other.
Someone screamed, then moaned, another shot and the sound stopped. David stumbled out of bed. Dressed as fast as he could, not daring to switch on the lights. It was happening again, and this time his nerves were failing him. Fingers tapped against his door.
“David?” He relaxed a little, recognising Cadell’s voice.
“Yes,” he said.
The door opened, letting in a little light.
“We have to get out of here. Uhlton isn’t as safe as I thought. It seems Stade wants to finish the job.” Cadell’s eyes flashed. In one hand he clenched his travelling bag, in the other a water gourd. “Sorry, David, I was going to leave you with Buchan and Whig, but they’re going to draw the Vergers off. You’re safer with me.”
David looked at Cadell’s bag. The Old Man pulled it away. “Yes. Yes. I have plenty of your drug.”
Shame reddened David’s cheeks. “I didn’t say anything.”
Whig stopped at their door, looking quite ridiculous in a nightdress with a half dozen pistols strapped to his belt. “There’s tunnels beneath the hall,” he said. “Take the eastern passage, it will lead you out onto the edge of town.”
“We will see you in Hardacre,” Cadell said.
Whig nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen. We will be at a pub called the Habitual Fool. ” Whig winked at David. “An appropriate enough name, don’t you think, for those of us that keep banging our heads against the walls of tyranny?”
Whig led them both to a nearby wall, wincing every time someone fired a shot. He slapped his hand against the wall and it swung open onto a low tunnel.
“There you go, lads. Sorry about the smell, it’s less of an escape tunnel, more of a sewer,” he said.
“Good luck,” Cadell said.
“Good luck to us all,” Whig grinned tersely and shook Cadell’s hand. “It’s been in rather short supply of late, though this raid could have happened at a worse time. We’re ready. Be careful in Chapman, it’s a city on the edge, and dangerous because of that.”
Cadell ducked down and crawled through the tunnel. David threw one last glance at Whig. The giant waved him on.
“Hurry up, Milde, and be careful.”
“I will,” he said, and followed Cadell.
The wall shut behind him with a click. David found himself in a narrow corridor, dark but for a flickering chemical torch that Cadell held above his head. Stinking air enclosed them, and it was all David could do not to gag for that first moment.
“Come on,” Cadell said.
They crawled, furtive and fast, upwards over cool wet stone. David tried not to think why it might be wet. Soon the only sound was their quiet breaths or the soft scuffing of boot on rock.
Confluents weren’t the only ones who knew of this tunnel. Thousands upon thousands of cockroaches had gathered here, crunching under foot, the air loud with the papery sound of their flight. Worse were the things that preyed upon them. Spiders the size of David’s hand that brought back flashes of his experience beneath the bridge: only here it was darker and the spiders much bigger.
“Careful,” Cadell hissed. “They’re not afraid to bite.”
One chose that moment to run over David’s face. It was all he could do not to yelp at its firm yet feathery touch.
Cadell brushed it off, he hissed. “Bastard bit me.” He reached into his pockets, pulled out a small bottle topped with an atomiser, and sprayed a mist of something that smelt of vinegar and rosemary onto the wound. He hid the bottle away again.
“Not long now,” Cadell said between clenched teeth. “I can smell a change in the air.”
Sure enough, the crawl space widened, became a tunnel large enough for them to walk upright. A little further on the tunnel opened onto a deserted hillside, by a dead tree. The sound of
gunshots echoed over to them, like a storm that had passed into the distance.
“What do we do now?” David asked, leaning against the white tree, and taking deep breaths of air that had never seemed purer.
“We walk again,” Cadell grunted, hefting his bag. “To Chapman.”
The journey to Chapman took a day following a winding hilly road that was never too far from the brown meander of the river. On the way, David noticed a distinct change overtaking the countryside. Where the land before Uhlton had been lush, too lush in fact, with flora almost drowning in the rain. Here plants were twisted, sere things, and the air dry and hazy. What winds there were blew predominantly from the south, and there was something of the furnace in them. It stung the eyes and dried the lungs. Seeing things here was painful. He perspired profusely though it did little to cool him, just brought on a thirst that rapidly depleted their supply of water.
A city boy, he had thought the country a universal green and found it wanting. The only green here that remained ran along the River Weep, and even that was dusty and failing. Animals had deserted the region as well. They’d left little to show of their passing other than picked-clean corpses.
A new sort of tension filled the air. A restlessness that mirrored David’s own.
It reminded David of a new artistic movement popular in Mirrlees called Immediacism, and whilst its bursts of colour and movement were incongruous with this landscape, its sense of things on the precipice of change matched it exactly.
It did not take too much imagination to see these lands turning to dust in the next few months, if the Roil did not take them first and transform them into something alien and cruel. David could see the Roil and its imminence in everything. More concretely, whenever they topped a rise, David would catch a glimpse of the Obsidian Curtain itself. There was no denying its inevitability.
Occasionally David noticed small drifts of what looked like ash or smoke. The closer they got to Chapman the more frequently they floated by.
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