Night's Engines

by Trent Jamieson

  The Mechanism slammed the Quarg Hound hard against the nearest wall. The concrete cracked, and the Hound whimpered. Steam crashed from it, black blood spilled, and the Mechanism let the corpse drop from its jaw.

  Then the Mechanism turned towards David, and he could see where it had been injured: a long wound ran along the side of its face.

  Another Hound howled in the distance, and another. They appeared.

  “Run,” the Mechanism said. “Run. I will do what I can.”

  It shook itself once, and ice spilled from its great back. And then the Quarg Hounds were upon it, snapping and snarling and dancing.

  “Time to go,” David said.

  Margaret didn't argue.

  Into the heart of the city they sprinted, along wide streets, far too wide – so that they felt exposed, their backs an all too easy target for whatever might be following them, be it Quarg Hound or Roiling, or a Mechanism whose programming had gone wrong. The general direction they followed, the one that David's fragmented memory suggested, led them further uphill. And twenty minutes later, they found themselves much higher up, and closer to the central tower, its top gleaming with its mother-of-pearl brightness.

  Margaret didn't like leaving herself so totally in another's hands; not that she didn't trust him, just that she felt useless, even that she might be slowing him down.

  Several times he had stopped, turned left or right, rather than straight ahead, whispering, “Too dangerous for the both of us” or “They'll never let two through here.”

  It seemed that there were many ways to reach the heart of the city. Margaret wondered if they weren't taking the fastest, but the safest. David had stopped again. To catch his breath, he said, and here they had a clear view of the area that they had already travelled.

  From this elevated position Margaret, with the aid of her field glasses, could see back the way they had come. The ice beast lay there, a flopping mass of metal, greasy with fluid, and behind it she could see a single Roiling.

  A man, broad in the shoulders, strode across the ice, too distant to make out. Though there was something familiar about the Roiling. A little part of Margaret chilled at the sight of the figure, her lip curled. This wasn't like the lumbering mad things she had encountered at Chapman. Its steps were purposeful, and she knew its purpose was her and David.

  “Roiling,” she said.

  David smiled at her. “Then it’s a good thing that we’re almost there.” They sprinted now. Around another corner and another, and David started almost to run. “We're nearly there,” he said. “Nearly there. Around this bend, we'll come to a doorway.”

  And they did, they came upon the tower at last.

  David laughed. “See! See!”

  “I see,” Margaret said.

  And the door stood there, at the base of the tower. Such a tiny door, with no handle or keyhole, but a door nonetheless.

  “So how do we–”

  The Quarg Hound barrelled out at them from the shadows, knocking David to the ground, and leaping onto her, so that she fell upon the flat of the rime blade – the movement activating it and burning her back with cold.

  The beast snapped at her neck. Margaret reached into a pocket, her fingers closing over the lozenges of Chill. She grabbed as many as she could, swift as her hands would let her. The Quarg Hound stretched its jaws wide and Margaret threw the Chill into that dark maw. Its eyes blinked, pupils expanding until they looked like they might burst, and then it shook its head, and gagged. It rolled from her, making that dreadful gagging noise, loud enough to deafen her, and its mechanisms whined. Then it dropped to the ground, stood up and dropped to the ground again.

  Margaret got to her feet, unsteady, the ice-sheathed sword now in her hand, watching.

  When the Quarg Hound was finally still, Margaret ran to it and struck off its head with her rime blade. Three hard blows it took through armour and bone and muscle, and she howled as she did it. And then, when the head had fallen to the ground, she threw the dark mass away, ichor raining from the mouth and neck, down the street.

  “Let them know they've failed,” she said, turning to David.

  “Maybe they'll stop coming,” he suggested.

  “No, they'll never stop. Which is why we came here. They'll never stop until we're dead and they're dancing around in our corpses.”

  And then the door opened, light spilled out.

  David stood there as if mesmerised. Margaret fancied that she saw a figure beyond the door. She took a step towards the light, and David stopped her.

  “You can't go through here,” David said. “I'm sorry, I don't think Cadell wanted me to remember that, until now.”

  Margaret looked at him, almost brought the blade to his throat. They had come this far, and she couldn't go through.

  “I've just felt it,” David said. “A memory, a warning. You can't come through this doorway. It will kill you. It’s a final trap, a test you see. It will only recognise an Old Man.”

  A Quarg Hound bounded around the corner, its great eyes narrowed. Margaret could hear another approaching. David walked beside her.

  “We can take them,” he said.

  Margaret smiled. “I don't doubt it, but it's too risky.”

  She looked down at her weapons. Checked their charges, more than enough to do what was needed. They backed closer and closer to the entranceway.

  “Go through the door now,” she hissed. David opened his mouth to speak, but Margaret wouldn't let him. “We're not here for ourselves. Go, boy. Leave me to this, because I cannot do what you must. Believe me, if I could I would, and there would be no hesitation.”

  Then his face hardened and he nodded. “Margaret, I–”

  “Move!”

  “I can’t,” David said. “I won’t leave you here.”

  Margaret flashed her teeth at him, fired her rifle at the first Hound's head. It dropped on its arse, and clawed at its face. “I know what I'm doing.”

  And she had never felt wilder, or more confident.

  He stood there looking at her. Margaret could tell David was struggling with Cadell inside him, the fool, to struggle so now: just because he had grown a spine. He moved to stand beside her. “I won't leave you,” he said. “We fought the Old Men together, we survived the fall of Chapman.”

  “You damn well will,” she said, and then she turned swift and smooth and kicked him hard in the stomach.

  Not what David was expecting at all, obviously. He fell back through the door, and the door closed.

  CHAPTER 46

  Drift fell and faster than we could have feared. In the sky we had never felt threatened, had believed ourselves to be the threat. But we were so wrong.

  The Sky Is Falling, Raven Skye

  THE CITY OF DRIFT

  ROIL EDGE

  The Caress shattered, broke into great shards of stone that rained death upon the city. Cannon fired all along Drift's walls, but the iron ships were too fast. Mother Graine counted eight of them, and even as she watched another three scarred the sky with their incendiary flight.

  A hundred Aerokin guarded the skies, flagella clutching guns and incendiaries, but they were nothing compared to this. All they could do was fight and die. An iron ship was struck and it fell, diving into the woods, setting alight everything it touched. Trees that were hundreds of years old burned.

  Mother Graine hurried along Mina Street. Raven waited for her in the training hall. Her students were there, a hundred or so nervous pilots. Their clan parents were in the sky.

  “They want to fight,” Raven said. “We all want to fight.”

  Mother Graine didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at these children and their teacher, so desperate to meet their death. “No, the hangars are destroyed. The Aerokin within are dead.”

  “We must arm ourselves.”

  Mother Graine shook her head. “No. It’s too late for that. Raven, you’re going to have to take them deep into the Stone. You know what it’s like to lose an Aerokin, an
d survive, and this is far worse. You have to show them how.”

  Raven nodded, then her eyes widened. “And where will you be?”

  “I’ll try and follow, believe me. But there are things that I must attend to,” the lie came out of her mouth easily enough. “I must see to my sisters.”

  She left Raven to gather together the pilots, and as many others that still lived. She walked back up through the winding ways of the city, passing death and destruction. Helping where she could, though there was little that she could offer now.

  She reached the broken stub of the Caress. Hoping that the lower levels remained intact, she opened a reinforced door. She came at last to a familiar set of stairs and then down, until she reached the room near the heart of Stone where her sisters were imprisoned. Graine could hear them within, crying out with a dark joy. Perhaps sensing her outside.

  She still didn’t understand how she had managed to escape while the others had been taken. Luck, perhaps; she was neither the most cunning, nor the most skilled at governance. She knew that she had made mistakes. But what else could she have done? There was no time for general elections, no chance to build confidences and allegiances, other than those she had had already in place. It didn’t matter now. All of it was undone.

  Graine stared at the panel set into the wall a long time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and then she pressed it, just so, fingers drawing out the right patterns. She felt the stirrings of a mechanism deeper within Stone, then a sudden rising chill. There was a sensation of vast energies at work, peculiar forces grinding soft and vast against each other. The stone shuddered, Stone shuddered. And she knew that all across the city of Drift, people would be pausing, listening, disturbed by the motion of energies old and ill understood, even by her. The reasoning behind most of their technology, the old grammars of science, had been lost to the Roil.

  That’s what happens when children rule. All of them, Mothers and Old Men alike, had been scarcely in their twenties when the Roil had come. Sure, Cadell had been a little older – proud and oh-so-strong – but what is a handful of years? Nothing when faced with what followed.

  Her sisters screamed once, then were quiet.

  She waited ten heartbeats, then opened the door; the room within was empty, wasn’t even quite the same room.

  All at once, she felt more alone than she had believed possible. She leaned briefly against the wall, and took a single deep breath.

  Graine had seen the world shift and change beneath her. She had watched it expand, seen centuries of development as humanity and Cuttlefolk recovered from the Roil. But always she had watched at a distance. It was as though she had had two lives: one brief, a normal span, and then this endless passage of time. Well, it had never been endless; it was coming to an end now.

  She turned and climbed the stairs again. At one point she heard Raven and her charges descending. Graine took the next doorway, and hid until they passed. Her history and theirs was a different one now, and she didn’t want to muddy its beginning with her presence, or find herself tempted to follow. She couldn’t be a part of it. She had just killed her sisters. She didn’t deserve to be a part of it.

  She came out of the Caress through a different door, and walked the same path she had taken David along just a few days before. The grove of trees was almost completely alight, a great finger of flame, and smoke rising into the sky. Smoke hid Witmoths, and all around her were newly made Roilings.

  Graine looked at the sky, then the corpses of her kin. Dead now. Motionless, until the Wit smoke found them, and she could not bear to think of that, it hurt her even more deeply than the loss of her sisters.

  Punctured Aerokin tumbled screaming to the ground. Guns fired and were silenced. Men and women laughed the shrill mad laughter of the Roil.

  She hurried through chaos to the edge of Drift, here, above the Peek, where the drop was steep, no rough spurs of Stone jutting out just the sky. Cold air rushed past her, tugged at her clothes.

  And she stepped over the edge.

  A Cuttle messenger snatched at her, caught her as she was falling. Witmoths boiled from its mouth; she reached up, hands burning with the heat of them, and snapped the creature’s neck. Its wings stopped, though its limbs tightened around her.

  Down, they tumbled, spinning over and over. And the moths flew around her, but the air was cold and they fell so fast.

  The fall was a long one, just as her life had been long, but nothing is forever; the earth found her in the end.

  CHAPTER 47

  That something so small should forge something so big is the paradox of Minnow technology. Minnows are tiny machines. Smaller than the eye can see, I swear it. There is no doubt that once they did exist and in such abundance that they built a world. Consider these, the Hour Glass of Carver, Mirrlees' Ruele Tower, the Bridges of McMahon, all our greatest municipal structures and they are as nothing to the power of minnows. Mechanical Winter was a minnow-constructed thing, just as is the Engine of the world. I have seen it all. Drunk on visions, I have seen it all.

  The Engines of the World, Deighton

  THE ENGINE OF THE WORLD

  DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE

  The door closed in front of him. If David hadn't snatched his fingers from the door edge, they would have been cut off. As it was, it struck his head hard. He felt his nose break.

  He stared into his own face, and the reflection of the cloud of dust his falling had unsettled.

  Blood streamed from his nose, and dust coated the blood. I'm still here, he thought, Cadell's yet to–

  Then his reflection smiled.

  Not the sort of smile he even thought his face was capable of.

  You got what you wanted, David thought. You've won.

  “Didn't we both want this?”

  He whipped his head around. A hundred Davids stared back at him with a hundred smug smiles. He fished in his pocket, yanked out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his face. Blood disappeared a hundred times.

  All he could hear was his own breathing loud in his head, his heart beating hard in his chest. Neither was amplified.

  The air stank of ozone; it tasted of metal tangy as blood, or was that just his own blood, running down the back of his throat?

  He stood there, dazed, uncertain of what he needed to do.

  Shouldn't he know what to do?

  He took a step forward, and the dust puffed up. All the Davids repeated the movement. He stopped, only this time one of the Davids reached out and took his hand.

  “I'm sorry,” the mirror being said, “but this is going to hurt.”

  He wasn't wrong.

  David blinked; he didn't know how long he'd been on the floor. His tongue was swollen. He thought he might have bitten it, he couldn't remember. If someone had told him just then that he wasn't David, that he was someone else, he wouldn't have argued.

  A hand touched his shoulder. This time there was no pain. David scurried forward, slid along the floor and rolled, hands bunched into fists; no one was going to stab him in the back.

  Cadell smiled at him, that same smug smile David had seen reflected back at him.

  “You're not dead, you know,” Cadell said. “Death is quite unlike this, trust me.”

  “Then what am I?”

  “You're all manner of possibility.” Cadell gestured to a wooden bench beneath a tree of bone and cogs, on the edge of a great brass road that stretched into infinity.

  “What is this place?” David asked.

  “Convenient,” Cadell said. “It is the world contained within the Orbis. The Great Brass Highway. It's the infinite folded in on itself. It's convenient.”

  Cadell looked up beyond David, frowned, bit at his lip. “Oh, I really thought I would have more time. Infinity, even compressed into a ring, is a rather a lot.”

  David turned. Saw the figure running towards them across some impossibly vast space.

  “The Engine,” David said.

  “Yes, the En
gine. Well, part of it.” Cadell sighed. He almost looked embarrassed. “David, things aren't quite as you believed.”

  “What, we're not here to destroy the Roil?”

  “No, not that. Only it isn't we. It's you.”

  “What?”

  “I needed to get you here. Just you. I needed to make sure that you would survive the journey here and go through that door. But the rest is up to you. You and the Engine, of course.”

  “And you did this, why?”

  “Because I had no choice. I never expected to die on the Dawn. Don't look at me like that, David. None of you people do, and me, I had even less reason to; after all, I had managed not to die for thousands of years. I'd been so good at not dying that I believed it couldn't happen. Well, I was wrong. I'd always meant to take someone here, just not you. After all, I'd promised Medicine that I would see you to safety, and I meant it.”

  “Why didn't you choose Margaret?”

  “I meant what I said about her. I don’t trust her. Perhaps I was wrong not to. But I couldn't be sure. Just be happy that I didn't kill her.”

  “So what do I do?”

  Cadell opened his mouth to answer, and then he wasn't there any more.

  “That's not his role,” the Engine said. “That cannot be his role. He is gone. And you, the flesh and blood, remain. You have to choose.”

  The Engine moved sinuous and direct, not like ice, but something more fluid, light grown cool and slow.

  “You’ve made it to me, David,” it said. “You must be very pleased.” “My friend beyond the door. You have to let her in.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not how this works.” The Engine shook a finger in his face. “We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to do anything. You’ve choices to make, and that isn’t one of them.”

  “And if she dies…”

  “She dies. She dies, and you can spend your life grieving for her. If you are capable of grieving for anyone.”

  “Let her in.”

  “No,” the Engine said.

  David opened his mouth, and the Engine slapped him hard. Knocked David down with the blow, lifted him back up.