Roil (4 page)

The inner city blazed behind her, throwing the road ahead into sharp relief. Most of Tate’s coolants had finished their shift of allegiance from ice to fire. What that fiery treachery revealed was a flowing, flickering image of madness. Throughout the city, ice cracked and melted, lit red and orange as though already given over to the flame. Quarg Hounds and other Roilings cavorted in streets that streamed with foaming bloody water, cold enough that they had to jump from claw to claw or prey to prey, hacking, slashing, feeding. And she had never seen them look so happy, nor seen before the dark cunning in their brute faces.

Here more terror bloomed than any lone ice cannon or armoured carriage could ever hope to halt. Twenty years it had taken them, but at last the siege was over and the Roil triumphant.

The Roil had always been a mighty fist wrapped around the city, biding its time. The fist was closing now, without pause, and she, just as horribly resolute, drove towards the Jut.

Where were her parents?

Just moments before the attack began, the bell had rung with news of their arrival. Perhaps the last thing Sara had done. Margaret tried to separate the bare facts from the deaths and found she couldn’t. Her thoughts were muddied by them. There was too much to consider and far too much to do. Surely, her parents had tried to enter the city, perhaps begun mobilising the defence. Yet she had seen no sign of such mobilisation, nor had any word reached her, as it most surely would.

Her thoughts returned to that first distant explosion, of the Jut disappearing in fire and black smoke. It had happened in an instant. She doubted anyone near it could have survived. A bleak chill overtook her and she forced it down. Down. Far deeper than her waking mind could follow.

Margaret needed the facts.

Until then, everything was speculation and possibility, and leanest possibility at that.

To find out required her driving on, through every cruel nightmare that had ever haunted her, racing towards what may be her worst fear of all.

The cockpit’s thick glass and metal shielded her from all but the loudest, shrillest screams, but it was a guilt-tainted mercy. She should be out there. She should be helping, but the city was lost, and her parents were before her. When she reached the outer gate, she found it a blasted ruin. The bridge beyond smouldered but remained intact.

She paused, not sure what to do. Margaret had expected to find her parents at the gatehouse, dead or alive, but there was nothing, just stony, smoking ruins. Few Roilings had gathered there, the gate’s defences had been engaged. Jets of cold slush shot over the bridge, the run-off flowing back down and around the gatehouse.

Sick to the stomach she drove the carriage slowly towards the ruin.

A sentry lay dead directly in front of her, and she could not make herself drive over the body. Arming all her guns, she leapt out of the
Melody Amiss
and dashed to the corpse.

It was Sara.

As Margaret approached, Sara sat up. Blood darkened her uniform, and the cold suit beneath. She lifted her rifle and aimed it at Margaret’s head.

Cadell, where he fits in the Grand Narratives of Time grows ever more tenuous. Surely he is mere apocrypha, as likely a creature as Travis the Grave or Ray Normal.

Everywhere Cadell is mentioned there is chaos, blood and despair. Excise him from history and the fable of the past is pulled away. Excise him from history and hear the wind howl through the holes that are left.

That is the problem of Cadell. He makes no sense, but without him, nothing does.

MIRRLEES

David woke in the bolthole, under the bridge, as the spiders ran across his face, trailing silk. He couldn’t see the creatures, but he could feel them in the dark. He batted them away with a hand already sticky with web. It could have been a dream, it had that light touch, and his dreams that night had been vivid and frequent.

“Go away,” he mumbled.

The spiders started to bite.

David hissed, awake all at once, and scrambled from the bolthole into the lesser dark: slapping his skin, scraping the web from the back of his hands.

The spider bites stopped, though the stinging did not.

Where was Lassiter?

David peered into the dark. “Lassiter?” He could just make out the boy’s legs, further in the bolthole. “Lassiter!”

Lassiter’s foot twitched.

David reached out and grabbed at a shoe. It was coated in silk and spiders, each the size of his little fingernail, started nipping again. But David clung on. He pulled Lassiter free. He scraped the web from the boy, ignoring the bites of the spiders. Then he remembered the electric lantern. He switched it on, and wished he hadn’t

There wasn’t much left of Lassiter’s face. The spiders had already devoured his eyes. David opened Lassiter’s mouth to check his breathing, as his father had taught him, and found it filled with the creatures, they poured out over Lassiter’s lips.

Lassiter had saved his life. They’d fed on him first.

David backed away from the corpse. But not before he saw the photograph. He remembered that one, his mother had paid for it to be taken. He picked it up. Who had Lassiter been working for? And where were they now?

He turned and ran.

Straight into the Old Man. “And where are you going, lad?”

“You!” David swung a fist, and the man caught it, gripped it in a hand that was shockingly cold. David’s knuckles stung, he wrenched his hand free, but had a sense that he had only been able to because the Old Man had let him.

“Good, there’s some fight in you yet,” Cadell said. He pulled the photo from David’s fingers and peered at it.

“How else could Lassiter find you?” he said.

“Lassiter’s dead.”

“I know that.” The Old Man’s voice cracked. “That’s another one to the tally. Mr Milde, you’re coming with me. Long as I’ve some conscience left I’m keeping you safe.”

“There’s nothing safe about you,” David said.

“No, there’s nothing safe. But everything is relative, and I would suggest you swap certainty of death at spider bite or Verger’s knife for the uncertainty of me. I am dangerous, yes, but even more so to those that hunt you. Surely it is the obvious choice.”

“The obvious ones are hardest,” David said.

“Ah, as obstinate as your father.”

“It did him little good.”

“Exactly, but it might serve you better. Put that will into your flight with me, and you may yet live out the day, and those that follow it.”

“And where will you take me?”

“Away from here, for one.” Cadell peered into the bolthole. “Hurry, we can discuss the future at length where there are no spiders listening or dead boys to drive another nail of guilt into my heart.”

David didn’t say anything, just stepped a little further from Lassiter’s tomb. He felt another pang of addiction, bent over and was sick. Not much to bring up, but it came painfully nonetheless.

He wiped his mouth and looked up into Cadell’s face. It was too dark, even with the lantern, to know what he was thinking.

“Come on, Mr Milde,” Cadell said, and his voice was gentle, no hint of the danger of which he had just spoke. “We’ve such little time left to us. Oh, and I’ve your drug… your Carnival.”

Cadell turned and walked from the bolthole, not looking back, and David followed him, away from the electric lantern and Lassiter’s corpse, and into the dark.

“I don’t trust you,” David said.

They had been walking some time, the Old Man leading them on a path beneath Downing Bridge that kept well away from Mirkton, their only company being drops of rain and the occasional scratch and scurry of rats. Once a shape the size of a very large dog came lumbering out of the gloom at them, and the Old Man snatched a blade from the handle of his umbrella, but whatever it was wasn’t interested in them, it passed by quickly lost again to the dark. Twice they came upon the corpses of rats smothered in spiders, bringing back to David the image of Lassiter. David had been but minutes away from the same fate. Where he was headed now he had no idea, just the looming bulk of the Old Man before him. He realised that the Old Man was laughing.

“I wouldn’t trust anyone right now. Lack of trust is an extremely useful survival mechanism. But I am all you have,” he said. “I am sorry that your life has taken this turn, Mr Milde. I really am, but there is nothing for it, but to keep walking.”

Soon enough that walking led them to the eastern edge of the Bridge, it was wet and murky beyond, a typical sort of day. A fog had lifted from the levee and settled on the streets.

“Look, I brought you an umbrella.” He pushed it into David’s hands and David took it, wondering if it contained a sword as well.

“It doesn’t,” Cadell said. “See, I don’t trust you either.”

The sky was dark, with rain, and the deeper darkness of Aerokin and the Cuttlefolk’s messengers, swift racing smudges through the air. Looking back, he could see the pale lights of Mirkton. Stale air from beneath the bridge washed over them. “Where are we going?” David opened the umbrella.

“My room,” Cadell said. “Then we’re going to catch a train.”

“North or south?” David asked.

“South.”

David still wasn’t sure he’d heard him properly. There was only one train that went that way: The
Dolorous Grey
. The Roil was down south. Nothing safe was down south.

“Yes, South,” Cadell said. “We have to get you out of here. I will get you to Hardacre, I promise. But the direct route North is too obvious, and too dangerous, there’s the drowned suburbs, the Margin, Cuttlemen, and not the refined folk we have in the city, but the ones for whom the war is still fresh and bitter.” Cadell said. “We’re travelling to Chapman. We’re going to the end of the world.”

There was a slight sucking sound as the machine disconnected itself from Stade’s skull. Stade hated that noise, the wet extraction of filaments from his brain.

Stade blinked. He tasted blood in his mouth; he reached for the glass of water by the chair. Tope stood in one corner of the room and Stade glared at him. He didn’t like the Verger seeing him in such a vulnerable state. Stade spat the bloody water into a bowl.

He shivered. All that information, all those eyes. His skin crawled every time he entered that space, his teeth ground away at the inside of his cheeks. Old tech, it never really translated to these new situations. He’d caught flashes of other images, other spaces beyond the interface between him and the arachnids: a pyramid of skulls, a spherical particle accelerator, and his mother’s face.

“David got away. The spiders are hard to control, always have been, too many of them, too many thoughts; they settled on the other one.”

“Who has him then?”

“Cadell.”

Tope frowned. “Well,
that
is something of a challenge.” Stade spat out another mouthful of water, clearer this time. “Yes, chances are the Old Man will kill him before we ever find them.”

“I’ll find them, and I’ll kill them both.”

“You’ve Cuttle in your blood, Tope. But he’s an Old Man.”

“I’ll find them and I’ll kill them both.” Tope left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Stade laughed, he dug through the pockets of his coat for a cigar. “The thing is you really think you can, and you might just be right.”

Death, when it comes, is always unexpected. But a reawakening to something else, another shifting mental space, how peculiar that must be. When the churches speak of this, surely they do not mean the deathlessness of the Roil.

The Death cults, the Birthers and the Renewal, their resurrection could not be thus.

This was madness and hunger and dreams.

TATE

“Stay where you are,” Sara said.

“It’s me.” Margaret raised her hands above her head. “It’s me.”

“How can I be sure?”

“It’s me. What are you talking about?” She searched her friend’s face. Sara spat a little blood onto the ground. Her brow creased with some sort of decision and she lowered her gun. “Doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Dead bodies, coming back to life, I’ve seen them. You don’t want to stay here. You strike the heads from their shoulders. I die and you do that for me. Promise me now or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

“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.