Roil

by Trent Jamieson

  “All of them are dead?” Cadell was almost certain they were being watched. Well, let them come. Right then he would have happily broken a few Verger skulls and indulged his less than savoury hungers.

  Medicine Paul nodded. His hands shook. Those hands, a perpetual reminder of what Stade was capable of. After all, Stade had ordered the severing of his index fingers ten years ago and ruined Paul’s career. He’d been a fine surgeon. Ultimately such punishment had merely strengthened Paul’s resolve. Stade had gotten that one wrong.

  A burst of wind rattled the windows to the rear of the house. Medicine jumped. “All of them, except David.”

  “Milde’s son? Where is he?”

  “Beneath the bridge. I’ve a man with him.”

  Cadell snorted. “Lassiter is hardly a man, he’s younger than David, scarce a tuft of hair on his chin. What is he, the last of your agents? The Council has its Vergers and we have boys and Old Men.”

  “We’ve got you,” Medicine said.

  “And you’ll jeopardise all of it for his son?”

  “Warwick’s boy.”

  “Hasn’t he suffered enough? He’s an addict for all that he’s barely a man. We’ve no use for him.”

  Medicine glared at him. “You know enough of addictions, one would think, to feel some sympathy.”

  Cadell nodded. Yes he did, though his were cruel and far bleaker than anything the boy was acquainted with. “You mock me and my purpose with this request, and you do nothing but ill to the boy. The son hates me, and with good reason. What happened with his uncle...”

  “Cadell, everyone is dead. And it is precisely what happened with Sean... you could make amends.”

  “Make amends! Make amends? This is no mere slight to be fixed with a kind word.” Cadell folded his arms. “I could refuse. Where I am going is dangerous. I’m dangerous.”

  “You could take him to Uhlton.”

  “My plans would have to go seriously awry before I ever did that. They hate me there.”

  Medicine laughed, a little hysterically to Cadell’s mind. “You do have a way of making enemies.”

  Cadell didn’t laugh with him. “I’ve already organised the Aerokin, the Mothers of the Air have agreed to my request, a miracle in itself. I could refuse what you ask of me. “

  “But you won’t. You will pick him up from Lassiter and you will take him safely to Hardacre. You owe him and his family as much.”

  Cadell had nothing to say to that, his hard eyes just stared at Medicine, and Cadell was surprised that Medicine held that awful gaze. “But you won’t refuse,” Medicine said.

  And, Cadell knew he was right.

  Chapter 4

  A city twice lost, and more than double the tragedy. Here what should have been a bulwark of civilization, a clarion-call to the Roil’s defeat, became nothing more than a sad footnote.

  What might have been becomes instead the thunderous ruination of a world. It is the historian’s duty to avoid hyperbole, but it is hard not to use such language in this case.

  Dark was the loss of Tate, but darker days were to follow for all.

  Minglee – Engine of Madness

  Something dropped heavily to the ground behind them. Margaret was ready with her rifle, but she did not fire.

  The Quarg Hound squatted on its four legs, its head high as her waist. It splashed furiously in the water, then with a whine, rolled over dead.

  The streets were still too cold, but not for much longer. The firestorm intensified, leaping from roof to roof, devouring houses and coolant in a terrifying quiet flame. Nothing crackled, everything hissed thin as a dying man’s last breath. Another Quarg Hound fell, landing on a Sentinel. Saved by his armour the man stumbled and swung to face the beast. It was already dead, slain with a single shot from Margaret’s rifle.

  Howard blinked. “You’ve been practising.” He raised his gun and fired behind her. Another Quarg Hound died. “Good with the blade, but never so good with the gun.”

  A wave of heat rushed over them, coming from the centre of the city. The ground rippled, Margaret fell.

  Howard reached down to help her up, his mouth moved and she read his lips as much as heard him. “You all right?” Debris crashed all around; fiery shards of metal punctured houses and set tarred roofs burning. A nearby coolant tank caught alight. She could smell flesh burning, people dying.

  But Margaret hardly noticed. Willowhen blazed, fires swirling around the ruin of two of the four Cannon. Tate’s heartbeat had grown wild and empty. She imagined the men and women up there, working frantically, desperately, because without the Cannon the city was lost. Screams echoed down to her, and laughter, human, but wrong, as though the Roil had warped it.

  There wasn’t much time left. But for those distant cries, everything had grown silent. All around the crowded street people paused and stared at each other, weapons in hand. Margaret could feel their fear, and see it in their eyes. But then they got to work, they clambered onto the Wall Secundus and brought rime blade and gun to bear on Quarg Hound or Endym.

  Perhaps it was her presence, what she represented, but Howard’s reaction was different.

  “Another one, they’ve taken out another one.” Howard’s voice cracked. “This is no time for argument. Go back now or you–”

  The third cannon exploded, its muzzle collapsing into the streets of the inner city, buffeting them with stinging heat. Margaret’s ears rang. Ash fell everywhere, squalls of darkness, buffeted by heat and cold. The remaining cannon launched its icy shells futilely into the beast-crowded sky. Far above, black shapes jeered and cackled.

  Howard seemed smaller, his shoulders slumped and his hands shook. Then it passed almost at once. They’d been at this battle all their lives. When he looked to Margaret, his face shone with the light of some new kind of resolve… or madness.

  “Tate is lost. Betrayed, there can be no other reason for its swift fall.” His words came hard and fast, he grabbed her hands. “In those early years no one believed we stood a chance, but then your mother fell pregnant and we knew hope remained. Please remember that. You were, and have always been, a symbol of hope to us.”

  And there it was, that which hurt her the most. The thing she was supposed to be.

  Howard led her to the Melody Amiss and signalled that the gates be opened.

  Sentinels stepped into the breach and fired their rifles. Howard’s words came fast; he did not look at her. “Drive through, quickly now, I have to shut the gate behind you.”

  “Come with me.” She reached for him.

  Howard shook his head, changing his hold on the rifle and pulling back, almost as though her touch was all it would take. “No, my family is here. Go, find yours.”

  Margaret clambered back into the Melody Amiss, its engine idling, and drove through the gateway into chaos and flame.

  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 foun
d 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.

  Chapter 5

  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.

  Guy Nurrish - Myths, Meanings and Memories – Letters to a Historian.

  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 th
em. “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.”