Not tonight.
She had laid her guns and swords out on the bed before her. Two of the pistols were faulty and she doubted they would fire again. The chemical combiners were low in another pair. She couldn’t see when she might have the opportunity to recharge them or repair the others; Kara Jade’s tools had proven inadequate to the task. Her rifle too was running a low charge. David was right; she had been reckless with her ammunition in Chapman.
It struck her then that weaponry was all she had left of Tate, as though that was all that Tate had ever been.
Such bitter tools had ensured her survival, even as they had failed to shield her from pain. When the guns were exhausted, shells and chemicals spent, only memories would remain. However, the Roil had transformed those as well. She could not close her eyes without seeing fire, the body of the Sweeper shattered and ruined on the ground outside her parents’ house, the fourth cannon exploding, its blazing demise the penultimate breath of a wounded city.
The Roil’s true horror was not in the monsters that populated it (they were just beasts after all) but what the Roil had done to Tate; what she dreaded it had done to her parents.
As terrible as it was, she wished her mother and father dead, for if they were not…
She looked over at David.
Make this a good memory, David. Hold on to it as tightly as you can. They may be the last good memories you ever have.
“David,” Cadell’s voice was weak, yet urgent. “Wake up.”
David blinked. How long had the Old Man been calling him?
He was beginning to doubt he would get any rest that night. He toyed with the idea of pretending to be asleep. Such a selfish thought shocked him; after all the Old Man had saved all their lives.
David rolled from the bunk, looked over at Margaret. She was asleep and Kara Jade seemed lost in conversation with the Dawn. He stumbled to Cadell’s bunk.
Cadell was even worse than before. His right eye had shut completely and raised black veins ran down the right side of his face. A yellow fluid wept from his left eye leaving a crust down Cadell’s cheek. He was dying, David could tell that, he had seen enough of death to recognise it.
Dying or not, Cadell managed a smile, lifted a hand and motioned for David to come closer.
“I want you to have this.” Cadell pressed the Ring of Engineers into David’s palm. “Just for a little while. I’ll take it back when I can. You know their real name don’t you?”
David nodded. “Orbis Ingenium.”
Cadell patted David’s hand. “Yes, the ring ingenious, it’s a map and a key, but it’s also a machine. Its workings are very intricate – universes of clockwork folded in on themselves. Look after it for me.”
David tried to give the Orbis back. He didn’t want it. He didn’t deserve it. “I can’t take the ring. It’s yours. You know what to do with it. Without you it’s only a fancy piece of jewellery.”
“And now it’s yours.” Cadell said, gently but forcefully. “When you reach Hardacre, Buchan and Whig will help you. Indeed they may well be happier that it is you not me that they will need. I think there’s a chance the Roil can be stopped. I’ve wielded the cold for a long time and always feared it. Perhaps, once you’re done, there will be an end to that fear.” Cadell coughed. He wiped at his lips with a handkerchief. It came back thick with blood. He looked at it a little startled. “Well, I never, even the minnows would have a hard time repairing that. I’m sorry, I’m talking in circles, I’m so terribly tired, David. And I have no wish to argue with you. Look after it for me. Put it on. Please indulge an Old Man.”
“Why me?” David asked.
“I’d like to say that it was your destiny, that you, the son of a Master Engineer, were born to this. But the universe doesn’t work that way. The universe doesn’t care what happens. But I do, we do, that’s what makes us special and terrible all at once. You’ve seen the Roil, you know it to your core. And you’re all I’ve got. You have to do this if Shale is to have any hope at all. There’s no one else. My brothers in war would stop you were they not in their cages. They would strip the flesh from your bones.” He lifted himself up with a groan. “And there is another reason,” his voice lowered, “I don’t trust Margaret and you shouldn’t either. She fled her city, and she might flee this, too. You’re the best choice, the only choice, and she can help you without a doubt, but rely on her only as much as necessary, and no more. Now, please, put on the ring.”
David, hesitated a moment more, then slid the ring over the middle finger of his left hand. The ring stopped at his knuckle, then the metal warmed and loosened and passed over it.
“Look,” Cadell said. “A perfect fit. Fancy that. It might feel odd for a day or two, the ring lowers your core temperature, the minnows that generate its power do that: can’t have you being susceptible to Witmoths. The change will probably manifest itself as a head cold but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it and the benefits are many. I’ll get to those in a minute.” He lowered himself back onto the bed with the painful slowness of a man only just acquainted with his antiquity. “There is so much to be done. You are heading away from the Roil but there are other enemies, David. I wish I could help you.”
“But you already have,” David said. “You’ve kept the Carnival at bay. You’ve saved my life over and over again.”
“I only needed to because of where I had taken you. And, as for the Carnival, just why do you think I kept you supplied with the drug, David?”
David looked at him uncomprehending. “To spare me the pain of withdrawal?”
Cadell laughed. “Were it that simple. You’ve suspended your grief with Carnival, you have always kept it at arms length: not just the loss of your father, but that of your mother, too. When you finally pay that price, the cost will be high. I could not have you pay that now. I did not want you to die. I needed you sane, I needed you shielded as much as possible from edged truths that would otherwise cut you.”
“I’m all right,” David said. “I’ll be all right.”
“But I have been far too cruel. When the Carnival leaves you, then you will truly understand.”
“I understand now,” David said.
“David, right now you only think you do. Though it will come to you, and for that I am really sorry.” Cadell laughed. “Sorry! Everything about me is apology. Carnival’s absence may well be the making of you. That tune you whistled, on the train so long ago. You know it is old?”
David thought of his childhood, the memories that tune evoked and the pressures of them that the Carnival held in check. “Yes, my mother used to hum it. It’s almost all I can remember of her. I think it was popular when she was child.”
Cadell shook his head. “It is far older than that. I remember it from my childhood. It is called The Synergist’s Treason and now I understand that treason far better than I ought. It pains me to hear it, and yet I’d like to hear it again.”
David hummed the tune a while – his head buzzing – and Cadell seemed to relax a little. “Much better. Much much better when it isn’t whistled.” He groaned, and shifted in his bed. “I’m tired,” he whispered. “The sort of weariness only Old Men and rocks can know. Too much time. Too much damn time, and now it’s running out. You’d think that could bring some urgency to the flesh. Perhaps it has.”
He sat up with a violence unexpected and grabbed David’s wrist. What came afterwards, David regretted for the rest of his life. Cadell flipped David’s arm around and bit down, tearing at the flesh of David’s hand, something slid beneath his skin, something swift and cold. David howled.
Blood sprayed, as David tore his hand free.
“David?” Margaret’s voice seemed a long way away. “David?”
“Sorry, David.” Cadell’s lips were bloody, but there was an awful tenderness in his gaze. “Sorry that I couldn’t take you all the way to Hardacre. And sorry for this final gift, I’ll deserve your hate.”
David’s eyes rolled up in his head.
<
br /> Chapter 51
It can be said of the wars that followed, none of them would have occurred but for Stade’s plans. The Roil’s growth was certain, but the way it was met, the choices made, could have been very different.
None are more culpable than Stade. And yet, perhaps things may have been so much worse. Though it is hard to imagine outcomes more dreadful, nor lives lost greater.
Stade was a villain, but he was a villain of his time. And so history has judged him. After all, it was an age of monsters, a role that Stade embraced with gusto.
• Deighton Histories – Two Hundred Mad Men and Seventy Three Mad Women
Medicine looked at the iron thing, well what remained of it. He put aside the field glasses, rubbed at his gritty, aching eyes, and called ahead to Agatha and the driver.
The Grendel slowed to a walking pace as it approached the wreck.
Agatha signalled to the engineer and the Grendel stopped. She dropped from the train while it was still moving and strode towards the wreckage. Smoke billowed from it, though it was a smoke unlike any Medicine had ever seen. It did not dissipate, but hung low, following the sun.
“Keep your distance,” Medicine said.
Early this morning they had heard (and felt) it strike the ground. And now, just a few hours from the Narung Mountains, here it was.
The vehicle was as large as the Grendel, though designed for flight instead. Medicine for the life of him could not see how it might fly. Yet, obviously it had flown before ending up here. Out of its element it looked ridiculous, some poor joke in shattered metal.
As Agatha neared the ship, the smoke coiled up, away from the sun towards the woman. Medicine watched its stealthy movement. He shouted at Agatha to get away, that the smoke was shifting towards her, and the woman blanched. She turned on her heel, slipping something into her mouth, and ran from the crater.
“Stay away from that ship,” she commanded. “And everyone take your Chill.”
“What is it?” Medicine demanded on her.
“They’re called Witmoths. I’d been briefed on them a few days before we left. They’re dangerous, mind altering,” she said. “This thing came from the Roil.”
“Mind altering?” Medicine asked, wondering why he hadn’t been briefed on this as well.
“Let’s just say it changes one’s allegiances. If this came from the Roil then we can expect more of them. It doesn’t do anything by halves.” She handed him a small lozenge. “This is a kind of prophylactic. It’s horrid but it works.”
He slipped it into his mouth and grimaced as it stung his teeth. Medicine’s mind returned to the night in the compound, the sound of thunder in the sky. Every time he looked at the iron ship it made him uneasy. Wherever it had come from, Roil city or Mirrlees research station, he was certain that it did not bode well for them. Very little did.
Such thoughts were quickly forgotten when they came upon a blasted battleground.
Many thousands of Cuttlefolk corpses lay across the plain. The earth itself was blackened and ruined. An airship, this one of a more familiar design, lay in fragments, its ribs rising out of the earth like the burnt bones of a titan.
The air was thick with the choking reek of ash and burning Cuttleflesh. The Cuttlefolk had been beaten here and decisively. What kind of weaponry did the Underground possess that could so blithely defeat such an army?
“Something new.” Agatha mused. “And something powerful. At least we don’t need to warn our colleagues in the mountains about the Cuttlefolk. Let us hope they know we’re coming. I would hate to think of them deciding we were the enemy.”
She called to her troops to raise all the white flags they could and to lower the train’s guns.
“Better to look unthreatening,” she said. Medicine agreed with her, though he couldn’t imagine the Grendel being anything else.
Medicine wasn’t sure what the people of the Underground thought about their fast approaching train, but they did not fire upon it as they crossed those last few miles. Regardless, tension built amongst all those aboard it.
The Grendel reached the end of the line, stopping at a heavy set of gates before which were signs of further struggle, craters and a pile of Cuttlemen dead, though nothing to rival the destruction to the south. The gates opened slowly to admit the train. Ice-cold water washed over them, the train chilled. For the moths, Medicine thought. How long has this been going on?
The Grendel pulled at last into the Underground, tracks running all the way into the compound, buried in the mountain. And there was the Yawn, waiting on a parallel line. The mystery of the missing train solved, though another mystery had replaced it. Why hadn’t Stade known of its whereabouts?
They piled off the train and were met by hundreds of armed guards.
The place is a fortress, Medicine thought. He saw no salvation for humanity here. Just war. Men and women, armed with odd weaponry, lined the walls that bounded the caverns proper. Huge cannon too guarded the wall and two tall structures of dull iron and gleaming glass that looked like crooked necked lanterns.
Perhaps to light the underground at night, he thought.
Medicine walked warily at the fore with Agatha.
A man met them at the platform. “Welcome,” he said. “My name is Grappel, we were expecting you.” He gestured at the Grendel. “Though not for some days, and certainly not aboard this. You’ve proven yourself… resourceful.”
Agatha frowned. “I do not know you,” she said. “Where is Sam?”
“There has been some restructuring,” Grappel said. “After we restored contact with Mirrlees, Sam Asquin was moved to another area. It seemed he was a little slow in reacting to the problems we have been having in completing work on time.” Grappel smiled. “The addition of your thousands will aid us considerably.”
“We were going to warn you of the Cuttlefolk,” Agatha said. “But it looks as though you didn’t need it.”
Grappel laughed. “We dealt with them quite efficiently, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You did,” Medicine said. “But how?”
“New technology. While Mirrlees rots, we have been nothing but industrious here. The cannon above are coolant launchers, but those lanterns are prototypes, they launch nothing more than light, expressed as heat energy, though in an extremely concentrated form. I doubt it would do much against the Roil in the long term: the spores would find the heat quite invigorating, but the Cuttlefolk, they’re a different prospect altogether.”
“It was a massacre,” Agatha said.
Grappel bowed. “And one that we engineered as a warning. The Cuttlefolk will think twice before they attack the Underground again. The last bastion of humanity cannot be threatened before it is even completed. Now, please come in. You all must be very tired, and Councillor Aidan would meet with you tonight.”
Agatha glanced over at Medicine. She didn’t look happy, but it was her job to be concerned with such things.
Grappel sighed. “Now, we can all stand here chatting till the Roil comes or we can take you into the shelter of the Underground and you can have the rest which every one of you deserves after all those miles. I know which I’d prefer. First though, you will need to be checked for infection. Please, empty the train and take the first few steps into your new home.”
Agatha signalled to her troops and they disembarked. Once they were gathered outside the train and heads counted Agatha turned to Grappel. “All are accounted for. Now do what needs to be done, I would communicate with the Mayor.”
Grappel shook his head, and raised his hands towards the wall. The guns mounted there had turned upon them. Grappel bowed deeply and ironically. “Welcome again to the Underground, ladies and gentlemen. A new territory of the Free State of Hardacre.”
Medicine looked to Agatha, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Stade had lost before he had even begun. Agatha’s face was without expression, though Medicine could see the fear and anger bound deep within her eyes and a bleak resolve. She grab
bed the rifle from across her back.
“Find some cover,” she whispered at Medicine. He didn’t move.
“We can’t win this battle here,” he said. “We’ll be slaughtered.”
“I know.”
“And I, for one, have no wish to die.”
Agatha lowered her gaze. She reached for Medicine’s hand, squeezed it gently. “None of us do. But I have my duty, and it is to the city of Mirrlees and its people.”
“What of your duty to your soldiers?”
“Put down your weapons and you will be treated with respect,” Grappel said. “We’re not butchers, there is far too much work to be done to waste lives now.”
Agatha hesitated. Medicine watched her eyes flick from him to her soldiers, and the armed men on the wall. Her shoulders slumped and she dropped her rifle.
“Do as he says,” Agatha hissed at her troops. “We’ve not come all this way to die now.”
They were not quick about it, but there was no fight in their eyes. They were all too exhausted. The soldiers of Hardacre were much faster in their confiscation of the weapons.
This is not about loyalties, Medicine thought, but survival. He had learnt that lesson tied to a chair by Stade in Ruele Tower. He wondered if Stade could live by those rules. He thought of Stade’s arrival and the discovery that all he had laboured for was gone. Well, he’d created this mess, set it all in motion when he turned aside the refugees from the Grand Defeat.
There was a grim satisfaction to be found in that.
The Underground soldiery led away the workers to mess halls and people were simply pleased at the thought of real food (none of them had ever possessed any loyalty to Stade in the first place). Grappel took Medicine aside. Agatha made to follow and Grappel shook his head. “Not yet. You will need to be debriefed. Things are different here to what you are used to.”
Agatha nodded her head.
“See you soon,” Medicine said.
“Yes,” Agatha said, brushing his arm with her fingers. “Be careful.”
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