“What will you do? Conspire with the Roil?”
“Heavens no, Mr Cadell. That is not at all what I am suggesting. The Roil will not deal with me, I am too alien to it. The time will come when you understand me, that time is not now but soon, perhaps, it will all start to make sense.” The Engine bowed. “This is but a warning.”
Then the engine was gone, running down the hill and up the next in a series of precise distance eating steps that Cadell knew he had no hope of matching.
Still, Cadell made to follow (what other choice did he have?) but, at that moment, the door behind him opened with a ping. He turned towards it.
A nervous Gaffney waited at the doorway.
“You may not believe it,” Gaffney said. “But I am quite glad to see you. I am to take you to the meeting, sir.”
Cadell paused and turned to see the Engine disappearing over the hill.
Cadell scowled and Gaffney blanched. “I would hurry, sir. This portal is most unstable and heaven knows where here is, but I’ll wager it would take us sometime to reach Chapman.”
“All right,” Cadell said.
He stormed back into the elevator, cringing as he passed through the portal, the doors clanged shut behind him.
Chapter 44
The Gathering Plains remind us more than anywhere of the futility of war. What does it do but build resentment? It deposits rage for the generations ahead, and they pay its price with interest compounded.
• Mallix – A Brief Banker’s History
GATHERING PLAINS
Out on the Gathering Plains the grass grew tall and the rains were lighter than they had been in Mirrlees for months, and far less frequent. So, with no sodden earth to suck hungrily at their boots or the wheels of their remaining carts, they made good progress. And that was not the only difference. It was cooler here. Cloud cover was minimal in the evenings, releasing the heat and revealing stars and moons in all their glory.
Medicine had almost forgotten what it was like to feel cold, they all had. It didn’t take long to remember. There was little fuel for fires, so people crammed into tents, their body heat making do.
Medicine wondered if it might not lead to a population spike in the Underground. There was certainly a lot of sex at night. Moans and groans and giggles kept him up until late. More’s the pity, none were coming from his tent.
Medicine sat alone, with his map powder and cartography arrayed before him. There was the Margin, a dark patch in the middle of the map, above it the huge space that was the Gathering Plains, marked only by Carnelon, the Cuttlefolk’s city.
A cold cup of tea sat against one elbow, a half-eaten plate of beans obscured the Narung Mountains on the map.
He took a pinch of map powder, to see it more vividly. All it did was reveal space, trackless nothingness, best considered while hurtling north by train, or from above, warm in the gondola of an Aerokin.
Agatha popped her head through the tent’s opening.
He lifted his head towards her, blinking away the powder.
“You want those beans?” she asked, gesturing at the table.
“No, I’m not hungry.”
She didn’t ask twice.
“What are you doing?” Her mouth still full of beans. Medicine frowned at her. “You’ve studied those maps a hundred times with and without powder. We’ve the Margin behind us. The Gathering Plains all around. We follow the Highway and the railway another hundred miles, then the Hidden Line. Not much map reading required.”
Medicine nodded, but his lips thinned. He squinted at the map, the Gathering Plains vaster now the plate had gone. “I never wanted this job.”
“Ah, so you blame yourself for those we lost?”
Medicine nodded. “Of course I do.”
“You think you killed them?”
Medicine looked at her.
“Cause you didn’t.” Agatha brushed his face with her fingertips, startling him. “Don’t let their deaths weigh down on you. No one said it would be easy. The Margin’s ghouls and haunts are hungry bastards, Roil take them. Be grateful that most of us survived the journey.”
Agatha’s craggy features betrayed little emotion, some sadness and some weariness. She watched him calmly, and Medicine drew a little of that calm to him, though his heart beat the faster for her gaze.
“How do you do it?” Medicine said. “How do you keep leading your soldiers?”
“Not much choice. If I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I know they’d be worse than me. I follow my orders, to the best of my not inconsiderable ability, and make sure that we make it through. It’s not easy. It never is. But the hard part’s over.”
“And what was that?”
“Getting out of that damn drowned city in the first place.”
Surely that couldn’t be enough. “This was not how I imagined it. How could I anticipate this? I was certain I would never work for the Council and I knew Stade would be my enemy till the day I died. Why, I expected him to slice open my throat, perhaps gloat over my corpse. Yet here I am.”
Agatha sat down next to him. “Loyalties are fickle things. We are talking about survival of the species now, think of every human gone, every vestige of our race worn away, not in eons, but in our lifetime. Do we just let that happen?”
“No, but what-”
“We’ve set our course,” she said, sliding the empty bowl away from her. “Now we see it through, because there is no turning back.”
The Gathering Plains worked at Medicine’s mind incessantly, and he was not the only one. At least in the swamps and the Margin they had the illusion of being enclosed, shielded, even if it was by a cruel hand, from long vistas, from endless space. Here the land opened out, and once the Margin was out of sight there seemed no landmark to give it a beginning or an end, beyond the occasional rocky hillock or twisted old tree, and even these were oddly threatening, distance dissolving them, making them disappear and reappear with no respect for perspective.
And Medicine could feel the land doing that to his thoughts, dragging them out destroying his sense of space.
All they had were the railway tracks and the highway, two parallel lines that ran straight and long all the way to the Narung Mountains.
These were Mirrlees people, and the undulating city with its great walls, bridges and levees devoured such views, the most open ground they had ever known was the Grangefeld Parklands or the sporting fields of Crickham and Montry. The emptiness ate at them, stars had never seemed so bright and yet so distant, the darkness beneath so vast. And the sky, the sky was a great blue dome threatening to lift them up and up into nothing. Even the grass that swayed and hissed with the wind, building in volume, well before its first breaths arrived, was vaguely threatening.
Medicine took to searching out Aerokin and airships just to break the grim monotony of those empty skies. However, this time of year most of the aircraft were down south for the festival so there were few of those, and the most interesting of those was of Hardacre make: a spy ship flying low and fast across the horizon.
He pointed out the ship to Agatha, though he suspected she had already seen it. “What do you reckon they make of us?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Not much, I’d imagine. It’s the Cuttlefolk they’re interested in.”
“And should we be interested in them as well?”
“That remains to be seen. If the treaties still hold, it’s not a problem, but…”
“Yes,” Medicine said. “What ever happened to those trains?”
Four days from the Margin they found out in part.
The Grendel, and its carriages, sat hulking and motionless upon the tracks. The engine of the locomotive was intact, but for some minor damage. The carriages, too, were undisturbed, though blood stained one of the doors and a window or two had been shattered.
Agatha sent a dozen of her soldiers to search through the silent train. She and Medicine walked to the engine, the metal had been scored in places by gunshot.
<
br /> “There’s ammunition and food in here, but no sign of life. What could have happened to them?”
“I think I know,” Medicine said, and pointed beyond the train.
“Oh,” Agatha’s voice was soft
He did not like this one little bit.
Out of the grass they came, five hundred Cuttlefolk at least, every one of them armed. Guns and sickles gleaming like death in the air. Behind them hovered their aerial troops, messengers armed with grenades and pistols.
“We could take out a few of them,” Agatha said, though she did not sound hopeful.
Medicine looked at his people, gathered beside the train. As one they pressed back against the rising slope of the trackbed.
Alone, Medicine might have suggested a last ditch, backs to the wall, shoot out. But he owed it to them, they had trusted him, this was nothing about his allegiance to Stade, but to the people who had made it with him through the Margin.
“No more pointless deaths, eh.”
Agatha followed his gaze, and frowned.
“If there’s still a chance,” he said, “we must take it. Isn’t that what the Underground is about?”
“You’re right, too many have died already. But, what if we have condemned them to slavery…”
“Even in slavery hope remains.”
“Have you ever been a slave?” Agatha said quietly, then she raised her voice. “Lower your weapons,” she shouted to her men.
Medicine watched the Cuttlefolk, they did not relax, nor lower their guns, but neither did they fire. He had to take some comfort in that, surely.
Chapter 45
When the Roil finally made its move it was swifter than anyone expected, perhaps, even in those late days, swifter than could have been imagined.
When the Roil approached Chapman, it approached it definitively and in a way that made even the Grand Defeat seem like the smallest gambit, the merest assault.
• Deighton Histories
“All this sitting around is killing me,” Margaret said.
“Cadell told us to wait,” David said, but he didn’t sound too pleased with the idea. He’d packed his and Cadell’s belongings into the Roslyn Dawn and they’d been waiting hours. Dawn wasn’t far off.
Margaret got up from her seat and walked over to David.
“Waiting is what I did last time. I waited for my parents until it was too late. Cadell has been gone for hours, he may be in trouble.”
“And what are we going to do?” David asked.
“Be a little quieter,” Kara Jade yelled from the nearby bed. “I’m trying to bloody sleep.”
Margaret turned her gaze towards Kara. The girl was really starting to annoy her. It was not as though it were difficult to fly in an Aerokin. Kara was little more than a glorified and spoiled passenger. As for quiet, she was the one who’d been banging around inside the Dawn, driving any hope of sleep from Margaret. If anyone should shut up it was Kara.
“We’ll be quiet,” Margaret said. “David, you and I are going to the Council of Engineers.”
“Do we have to?”
“Cadell needs us, I’m sure of it.”
“You didn’t see the way he handled those Quarg Hounds,” David said. “Though I’ll admit that councillors are different.”
Kara Jade coughed and Margaret and David turned to her. She was out of her bunk and scowling. Margaret groaned inwardly at the pout she directed at David. The foolish boy did not even notice it.
“Whatever you’re doing, do it now,” Kara said. “If you can’t find him, or if he is in trouble, come back here immediately.”
“And you’ll help us?” David asked.
Kara Jade nodded. “Help us get the hell out of here. I’m nervous now, I’ve been through the Obsidian Curtain. I have no intention of sticking around when it comes rushing over the walls, besides you’ve paid your passage.”
“We won’t be long,” Margaret said.
“Good.” Kara Jade was already ducking back into her bunk.
“I can’t stand her,” Margaret said as they made their way through the Field of Flight.
“I don’t think she’s that fond of you either,” David said.
What? How could anyone not like me?
“I could strangle her in one hand with my eyes closed.”
“Exactly,” David said.
Seemed most of the city couldn’t sleep this night, the dry heat and the looming festival keeping everyone awake. Everywhere ships and Aerokin bobbed, Drifter’s voices boomed, boasts becoming ever more outrageous as the countdown to the Festival proper began.
“She’s all right,” David said. “For a Drifter she seems much more normal than I would have thought possible.”
Margaret put her back to him, taking the lead so he wouldn’t see her grinding her teeth. She was sick of such talk… of talk in general. It surprised her how, after yearning for conversation for so long she had quickly grown tired of it. Starved of it, more than a few minutes of conversation proved too rich for her.
“I know a shortcut,” she said, and kept up her pace.
She had gone to the Tower of the Council of Engineers several times over the last few days, pausing at its doorway, unable to enter. She had wanted to, but far too many doubts assailed her. Both Anderson and her father had told her to trust no one. The one person Anderson had suggested, this Medicine Paul, had long ago lost influence in Chapman. She’d actually come across several wanted posters with his face on them.
David stumbled behind her. Margaret heard him curse beneath his breath, he was always stumbling over things. She smiled. For some odd reason, she trusted David. He was so unlike anyone she had ever known. All her life capable people had surrounded her, certain of their abilities and certain of hers, David seemed anything but. However, she knew he would not let her down. His shot at the Quarg Hound had proven that to her. She could count on him.
That is if he did not trip over and kill himself.
She wiped her brow, and her fingers came away covered in soot-blackened sweat.
The morning was hot, particularly down on the dusty streets, not a breath of air and the walls looming above. Round the levies where small leaks dripped into the night, too fast for the sun to leach away all the water, sludgy green ponds gave birth to mosquitoes, clouds of them to compete with the flies, nipping and sucking at blood or sweat. She had left her cold suit back at the Dawn, there was little charge remaining and she did not want to waste it. Unfortunately what passed for women’s fashion in this city was uncomfortable and impractical, frills, long skirts and hats. She had borrowed some of Kara Jade’s clothes, flight leathers, a thin scarf and cape, beneath which she had concealed her weapons, except a couple of guns, because most Drifters walked the city armed. She had to look the part though her skin was too pale.
Looking like a Drifter did not appeal to her, but it meant that she did not stand out too much. No more than the usual Drifter, and they loved to stand out.
They reached the Tower of Engineers, by way of nearly every back alley and side-street in the city. The heat of the day had seeped into everything, and by the time they found a hiding space with a clear view of the tower both were hot and tired.
Margaret had already seen enough to know they had no chance of ever getting any closer to the tower. But, despite the heat and the relative danger, it had felt good to be doing something.
“I don’t like this,” David said. A gun cracked in the distance and he jumped, eyes growing terribly wide. Any other time and she would have found it amusing.
“Nothing to worry about. You’re with me.”
“A woman with something of a death wish, possibly wanted by every Verger in the city. Yes, the sort of person a man definitely wanted by every Verger in the city should be paired with. I couldn’t be safer, nor could you.”
“Well, you let yourself get talked into this.” She pointed behind him.
“What?” David asked.
“That way lies the Roslyn Dawn. You a
re certainly welcome to strike out for it alone.”
The air was thick with dust, as well as what Margaret suspected were Roil spores. She could taste them in the back of her throat: an irritating dryness.
The sky above though was clear and blue.
There was a lot of activity, some of it responsible for the dust, carriages carted coolants for the cannon to the walls. Regular cannon were dragged from the nearby barrack grounds, scarring the road with their passage. So much industry, but it lacked the discipline of Tate. Margaret could see it from here, just as clearly as she could see doubt and fear in the face of every soldier.
She remembered Mcmahon and the guns stacked in their piles, yards high, all those dust-caked bones for the Quarg Hounds and the Endyms to play with. The North had not been wrong when they called it the Grand Defeat.
Margaret saw how it continued to haunt these people. She did not blame them, Mcmahon haunted her as well. She had seen the Roil in all its strength. Night was coming to this city no matter how many cannon they set upon its walls.
Without warning, David grabbed her shoulder and Margaret jumped. She had to stop herself from spinning and punching him in the throat.
Hah! And she had thought David was jumpy.
“Don’t,” she said.
David’s hand dropped, and he gave her that hurt look again. She wondered if he’d developed that as an addict, a forced sort of helplessness. “What is it?”
“The Verger,” he whispered. “Tope, he’s over there.”
Margaret squinted out into the light, one hand shading her eyes.
“I can see him,” she said, keeping her voice low. She did not like what she saw. “Let’s get out of here, now. You’re right, David, Cadell can look after himself.”
“Back to the Field of Flight?” David asked.
“Yes, but not directly. If anyone is following us I want to make it difficult.”
“If we head towards the wall, we can swing around to the Field. At least I think…” David pulled out the map he had bought, almost losing it to the wind, as he folded it to the relevant section. Margaret nearly knocked it out of his hand, in her city someone checking a map would have stood out, an aberration, here though, even on the edge of the abyss, tourists abounded. In fact at least three other people on the street were looking at maps, and no one was looking at them.
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