“Are there a lot of fires down south?” he asked, pointing out yet another drift of smoke.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Cadell said. “But that’s not smoke. It’s something much more insidious: Roil spores.”
David cast his gaze suspiciously over the landscape. “The Roil’s here already?”
“Not quite, those spores are too exposed as yet, they need the full cover of the Roil – heat and shadow – before they can do their handiwork.” He shook his head. “Though it’s something I fear that may not be too long away.”
Cadell stared out into the dry lands, his eyes troubled and his brow furrowed. “It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “I know people think of the Roil and they think of the Obsidian Curtain and all that lies south of it. But the Roil doesn’t stop there. It’s the big wet in Mirrlees, and the drought here, and other more predatory things.”
Late in the afternoon, Cadell stopped and pointed along the dusty road. It tracked up a hill then disappeared beyond it. The road’s veil of wind-borne dust was the only indication that it continued beyond the rise. Just peeking over the hill, was a nest of silos or water towers, though even from this distance David could see that they were in ill repair, holes gaped from their walls, tin rattled and creaked in the wind.
“Over that rise and past that ramshackle bunch of buildings is Chapman. About half an hour’s walk. We’re going to need to split up. We can meet in the city.” Cadell named a place. “Wait for me there.”
“What if you don’t come?”
“I’ll come, but if I don’t, there’s a safe house on Chadwick Street.” He pressed something into David’s hands. “It’s an ice pistol, state of the art Mirrlees design, still has all its darts.” Cadell grinned. “Took it from a Verger.” He showed David how to work it. “Just in case you come across anything on your way into the city,” he said. “David, I’m not going to desert you.”
David believed him. But then no one had deserted him. They’d all been taken away.
Chapter 34
Not all that came out of the dark sought humanity’s destruction. But the Roil has a way of transforming even the highest of motives. And hers were never that high. We speak, of course, of Margaret Penn.
I knew her then, before she became such dark legend, and yet I would be hard pressed to separate truth from lie. She came out of the Roil, and what good ever had its genesis there?
• Whig – A Memoir of a Man in Waiting
The door opened and the light came on. Margaret’s hands were already gripping her pistols, their barrels pointed at Winslow’s head. Winslow’s eyelids fluttered with fear.
“I’m already awake,” Margaret said, she’d hardly slept at all.
“I can see that,” he said, slowly raising his hands. “Keep the guns, you’ll need them, but we have to get you out of here.”
Margaret nodded, she’d changed back into her cold suit an hour ago. Not feeling safe here, wondering if she would ever feel safe again.
“They’re coming aren’t they? Don’t look so surprised. I’ve been hunted since I left Tate. Why would I expect it to stop? So, where are you taking me? To them?”
Winslow shook his head, raising his hands palm out. “We’re not taking you anywhere near them,” he said, his voice low and calm. “Just put away the pistols. I’d even be happy if you just stopped aiming them at my head.”
“Enough,” Anderson growled and pushed past Winslow. “If there is anyone you should shoot it’s me.”
Margaret lowered her guns, though she did not put them away.
“Smart girl,” Anderson said. “If I was in your situation I’d do the same.”
He sat on the end of the bed. “There is so much that you need to catch up on, and I doubt we have time to tell you anything beyond the merest details.” Margaret was struck by how lined his face was, the dark bags under his eyes. He ran a hand through thinning hair, then looked at his fingers. “I have but the slightest inkling of the world in which you lived. But here there have been terrible defeats even in regions that are yet feel even the barest touch of the Roil. They’ve known loss of life and liberty to fear and a paucity of foresight – or at least a narrowness of it. We have sought to deal with the enemy, once we realised that we could not beat it but the Roil, while it plays at such things, does not parley. It grows because that is what it does, as a storm grows or a wave moves drawn on by the force of the tide.
“But you already understand that. Your existence has been so much more intimately involved with the Roil. What this boils down to is this: the Council demanded that you be given over to the Roil. You see, my employers are desperate for more time. However, they have failed to understand that the Roil would not ask for you if you were not considered important in some way. Extremely important.”
Anderson gazed into her eyes, his own filled with a deep and urgent sadness and resignation. In Anderson, Margaret saw a man always on the verge of self-mockery -uncertain of why he was where he was, except that the reason was as important as it was ridiculous.
“What is it that you know, Margaret? What is it that you haven’t told me?”
Margaret opened her mouth to speak, to deny that she knew anything, when a soldier came to door. His eyes flicked from her pistols to Anderson and back again. Anderson turned and smiled at him, a distressingly calm smile.
“It’s all right, Daniels,” Anderson said. “What is it?”
“They’re here.”
Anderson considered this. “Then we have to get her out of the Interface now. Winslow, you and my guards will escort her to Chapman.”
Winslow did a double take that at any other time would have been comical. “And what of you?”
“I’ll stay here and see if I can distract them. They’ve been awfully good at distracting us. The time for negotiations is done. Winslow, report to Stade. Let him know how things have changed. Let him know that the Interface is finished. We’re closing it down. Time for us all to find new employment.”
“Surely you won’t be too far behind. There are still treaties intact.”
Something passed across Anderson’s face, a shadow of sadness or fear or just that bleak turn of humour that he seemed to possess. “Of course, Winslow, but do as I say, please.”
Winslow looked about to say something and Anderson silenced him with a glance. A bell rang, pitched high. Anderson’s eyes narrowed. Shots were fired in the distance. Margaret could taste the bitter exhalations of endothermic chemicals.
“Get out of here, now!”
“What about my carriage?” Margaret demanded feeling at once petty and childish for asking.
“You’ll have to leave it, I’m afraid.” He shook his head. “We’ve all had to leave things.” Anderson pulled her aside. “Once you are free of the Interface, do not linger and whatever you do, do not go to the Council. I cannot speak for your city, but the Council of Chapman and Mirrlees are corrupt. Believe me when I say they would have given you back to the Roil. Get out of here, get away from Winslow, he’s a good man but a Council man. Try and get in touch with a man named Medicine Paul, but do not do it openly. He has agents in the city, not as many as he once did, but so does the Council, it can be difficult to tell them apart.” Anderson whispered. “132 Chadwick, Street, there you might find help. Do you understand?”
Margaret nodded, then strapped on her ice pistols. “Good luck,” she said.
Anderson laughed. “Don’t speak to me of luck. I used that up long ago.” Then he gave her a wry look. “I’m sorry, maybe I haven’t used it all. Why, I met a Penn today.” He slipped a handful of dark lozenges into his mouth, and shuddered, dropping to one knee. He blinked, looking about him.
“That’s far too many of those, sir,” Winslow said.
Anderson glared at Winslow, though not without affection. “Are you still here. Didn’t I tell you to go?”
“You did, and we are.”
“Good,” Anderson said, snatching pistols from the belt at his waist.
“I’ve a crew to command. You make sure she gets to Chapman.”
As they left the sleeping quarters, Anderson heading deeper into the complex without looking back, Winslow passed around a handful of the same lozenges that Margaret had seen Anderson swallow. He gave Margaret several of them.
“Put one beneath your tongue,” he said. “It’s called Chill. It’ll cool your blood. We’ve catalogued a whole range of Witmoth apotropaics, but this works best. Saliva activates it.”
Margaret slid one of the lozenges into her mouth. They tasted foul, but the effect was almost instantaneous.
She grimaced as her body cooled.
Winslow grinned at her. “Pretty impressive isn’t it? One of my projects.”
He opened a door. “And this is the way out.” He gestured at a long, narrow corridor that extended out of sight.
Winslow and the two guards led her down the narrow spine of the complex. They walked for nearly ten minutes until they reached a point where the light globe above them shone red.
“What’s that?” Margaret asked.
“That’s the true interface, a step beyond it and you have passed out of the Roil. Over the last six weeks I have seen that red light shift from the beginning of the corridor to here. May not seem like much until you realise the Roil has moved that far forward all across Shale.”
They walked a little further on. Margaret stared back one last time at the Interface, hoping to catch a glimpse of something, not sure what. Anderson was back there somewhere, Winslow followed her gaze.
“He’ll be all right,” he said unconvincingly.
It was stupid, but guilt welled within her at leaving the Melody here. Without that carriage, she would have never made the journey, and now she had deserted it, just as she had deserted everything else she had ever loved
A flicker of movement caught her eye and her spine clenched with a cold deeper than anything Chill could create.
The red lights were coming on. Each new red globe lighting with a loud click.
Click, click, click.
Like someone running towards them in metal soled shoes.
Click.
Click.
“Look,” she said and pointed.
Winslow shuddered. “That’s impossible.”
The guards paled, but engaged their guns. There was a loud whine as they charged up. Margaret activated her weapons as well.
Click.
“How far until the entrance?”
Click.
“Another hundred yards.”
Click.
“I think we should run.”
Click
There was no argument. They sprinted down the hallway, weaponry clanging, the air electric with their terror. Margaret’s heart pounded in her chest, the Chill burned with a frigid bitter fire in her mouth.
Behind them the red lights picked up pace. Margaret reached the entrance.
As the last of them made it, the red light above the doorway clicked on. The hallway was lit with rubicund shadows. There was movement at the other end of the long hall. A boiling darkness filled with the susurration of wings.
One of the soldiers swore beneath his breath then launched a metal canister back that way. The canister clattered as it struck the ground and rolled forward a few turns. The soldier covered his ears and Margaret followed, barely in time. The explosion rippled along the hallway and the red lights nearest it burst. A backwash of cold rushed up to them. But it was quickly warmed, by a hot dry wind.
“Where’s that coming from?” Winslow hissed. “Why aren’t the doors locking? We’ve had a breach and the only locked door is the emergency exit.”
Something howled down the other end of the corridor.
Winslow cursed as he punched in the clearance code. The door swung open, onto a steep set of stairs. Winslow motioned for one of the soldiers to go first, then Margaret.
They reached the top of the stairs, just as beneath them firing started. The soldier entered in another code. The door below slammed shut.
“Keep your weapons ready,” the soldier said, but Margaret was already ahead of him, her rifle in her hands.
The soldier smiled grimly, and pushed on the door. “Of course, you’ve done all this before.”
Margaret wished that she had not.
The door swung open, the soldier leapt out, and Margaret followed. She stopped and almost dropped her rifle.
No, she had not done this before. She had never experienced this.
She could see stars, and the greater moon Argent giving off its dull light.
The stars, the glorious stars. Pinter, Swallow, the Burnished Kings and the Queens of Wondrous Storm, the constellation of Committee B. All of it she had known only in stellar maps, only in abstract.
Now here it was, spread out above her.
Winslow crashed into her back.
“Um,” he said, “I think we should hurry.”
Margaret blinked, behind her, beyond the doorway, a half-mile wide finger of darkness was bearing down, reaching out impossibly from the shivering wall of the Roil. Hot dusty air rushed at her, banging on the shutters of nearby residences. Dead trees sighed and creaked and Margaret could hear the first rumblings of transformation in them – soon they would be Roilthings.
“These are the Deserted Suburbs, though they were a lively place when we first started,” Winslow said. “Not far to go now.”
One of the guards fired into the darkness.
“Don’t be stupid,” Winslow snapped. “You’re wasting ice.”
Then he and Margaret saw what the guard was firing at.
Quarg Hounds, hundreds of them.
“Well that’s it then,” Winslow said quietly. He turned to Margaret. “There’s a secret entrance to Chapman, beneath the grey tower, two streets north of here, left and left again, past the stone arches. If you can make it there you will be safe.” He whispered a code at her, and started firing, methodically striking each hound in the skull. “When you reach the end of the hall, beneath an escutcheon embossed with the symbol of the Council, there are two buttons. A red one and a green one, push first the red then the green five times, and five times only. Then run. Don’t hang around once you have finished, run, and don’t stop until you are well within the city’s walls.”
He gripped her shoulders as his gun recharged. “Remember the order of the buttons, red then green. It’s imperative that you push them five times, and in that sequence.”
“Will it send help?”
Winslow nodded. “Now run, or all of this has been a waste. All of it.”
Margaret couldn’t do it. She had left enough people behind in the past few days. She fired off a round into the darkness, taking down a Quarg Hound, then another.
“Go. Now!” Winslow said, and there was such a bitter, awful resolution in Winslow’s eyes that run she did, towards the dim grey bulk of Chapman’s outer walls, down empty streets, broken windows and the stars her only audience.
She reached the hidden door just as the screaming began.
That was almost enough to call her back. Behind her a Quarg Hound snarled. Margaret turned smoothly, precisely, and shot it in the head, moving backwards as she fired.
She slammed into the door, her rifle aimed out at the darkness. Another Quarg Hound leapt towards her and she fired again. The beast dropped to the ground at her feet.
Margaret turned and entered in the code, she felt the Quarg Hound move behind her, and drove her rime blade, under her coat and into its skull. The wall opened, loud and sluggish. She yanked her blade free of the hound and spilled through into another long hall. The door shut behind her and she ran.
She reached the end of the hall, lifted the escutcheon by a metal door. The red and green buttons glowed dimly. She followed Winslow’s directions and a light in the wall beside her blinked on. The metal door opened.
She stumbled through the doorway and onto a narrow street, the door locked shut behind her. She ran from the door and the wall that it was
inset in.
A few moments later, the ground shook, and the door shot past her head. She fell to her chest and rolled onto her back. Dust billowed towards her, the hallway was destroyed, and the wall itself dipping down. There was no help coming for Winslow and his soldiers.
There had never been any help.
Margaret could still hear weapons firing in the distance. The gunshots all too quickly gave way to silence. The Interface was gone, her wondrous Melody Amiss with it, and she was in Chapman alone with no money or friends and the Roil was on its way, and it wanted her, and it would not stop.
Sirens rang out in the distance. They had rung endlessly in the hours since Margaret had destroyed the secret tunnel. Dark military Aerokin, a sight that still held her in awe, rolled overhead, they filled the air with their oily exhalations, and shone searchlights gripped by sinuous flagella into the deserted suburbs. Ice Cannon fired. Soldiers came and crowded along the wall. Then Engineers arrived.
Margaret did not like the look of them, nor those they made obeisance to. Tall sombre-faced men, all of them, chewing and chewing, on what Margaret guessed must be Chill. Anderson’s warning returned to her. They had to be Vergers.
They’d driven that particular cult of violence out of Tate well before Margaret’s birth, but she was familiar with them. As a rather ghoulish child she had read twice, from cover to cover Simmon’s Torture and Torment or the Road Cruel Travelled: Confessions of a Man and his Knife.
There was no way that she would give herself up to a Verger.
Instead, tired at last of that ceaseless, useless industry and wary of staying too long and being caught, she followed Anderson’s directions to the house of Medicine Paul’s allies. But there was no happiness there. It was a smouldering ruin. Someone had painted a red V on the footpath before it.
She left the burnt old house and found another place nearby, deserted and smelling of dust and urine and things, like hope, gone rotten. There she lay down and, fighting it all the way, fell asleep.
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