Roil (5 page)

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.

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 with 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.

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.

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.

There was a furtive movement in the corner of her vision.

Grey moths, more winged smoke than insect, fluttered against the cockpit window closest to her head. There were at least a dozen of them, similar to the wisps that had tumbled from the lips of the dead sentries. They appeared too frail for flight; each brush of their wings against the glass diminished them. And yet they remained. They battered at the window a few more times then burst away and flew towards the city, joining a half-mile wide plume of their brethren, almost indistinguishable from the smoke boiling over the walls.

Margaret had had her first kiss on those walls, and in all that awfulness the memory rushed back to her.

An older boy, Dale, who’d gone on to become a full time Sentinel, had kissed her hard then looked out into the Roil, hiding his embarrassment or his excitement, Margaret didn’t know which, the blood pounding in her own head.

“Do you ever think we’ll see the sun?” he’d asked her.

“Some days, yes. Other days, I think those that don’t climb down the wall and walk will be overcome, and the Roil will grind out every light, and us with it.”

Dale’s eyes had widened and Margaret felt a thrill rush through her, almost as potent as that first kiss. A Penn could never admit doubt and yet she had.

“Kiss me again,” she had whispered. “If we’re doomed what does it matter? Just kiss me.”

But Dale was already walking away. He did not look back.

She wondered where he was now, then let the thought slide away from her. There could be no good answer to that question.

Margaret checked the
Melody
’
s
instruments. The carriage was designed to withstand extreme conditions but it had its limits. She studied the array of valves and meters, and exhaled slowly. Everything was as it should be, or near enough to it: no spikes in temperature or noticeable leaks. The
Melody Amiss
’
fuel remained contained. Of course if the fuel tanks had ruptured, there would not have been enough of Margaret left to know it. Margaret eased the carriage forward, nothing crunched or groaned or detonated. She looked back one last time at the city where she had grown up. An icy shaft of guilt drove through her heart.

How was she any better than a Walker?

She shook her head, whatever had so easily destroyed the Four Cannon and the Steaming Vents would tear apart the seals to the caverns beneath with ease. Tate was gone. Doomed, perhaps, to rise again as the bodies of the Sentinels had risen.

And she didn’t leave in despair, but rage.

All she had was the North. And the slim chance she could escape, and wreak some sort of vengeance upon this dark.

The Engine. She would find the engine, and she would turn it to her will.

She turned the carriage that way, onto the three hundred mile straight of road, and fled her city, its fires lighting the way for miles ahead, driving the shadow of the
Melody
before her.

Not far along Mechanism Highway she found one of the I-Bomb expedition’s carriages, crushed flat. She scanned around for survivors but failed to see a single body, nor what might have destroyed it.

She did not stop, nor try to think who might have been in the vehicle. Her parents were gone, the city taken and all she had left was the distant promise of the North, and that, for now, was all she could cling to. She dare not think of anything else, or she would stall and stop and never make it beyond the Roil.

When she passed the wreckage, she did not look back. She didn’t need to. Every time she closed her eyes she could see it all.