Night's Engines

by Trent Jamieson

“Not at all,” David said, and the words were clearly a struggle. “But I am what I need to be.”

  David straightened, seemed to broaden across the chest, and flashed a smile at her that was both nightmarish and reassuring at once. “They’ll come at us in a rush, probably once the flare–”

  They didn’t wait that long.

  In a blur of movement they were upon them. Margaret managed two quick shots, caught a satisfying spray of blood, then her rime blade was unsheathed, a pistol in her free hand.

  She fired again, the bullet striking the Old Man in the side of his face. That slowed him, she swung out, and the Old Man closed his fingers around the blade. Margaret lifted her pistol, fired again. Blood sprayed from the Old Man’s neck.

  She didn’t see the fist that struck her.

  Only found herself on her back, ears ringing. She snatched out at her pistol, dropped it.

  A heavy boot kicked her in the chest.

  She felt something break, pain boiled across her chest, but she managed to pull free another pistol from her belt, and her free hand found the rime blade. Time stilled, she rolled backwards. Pain again, waves of it. She could taste blood, her nose streamed. The Old Man stood there, wounded and bleeding too.

  He took a step forward, the grass around his boot crackled. Margaret fired.

  Another wound, but he didn’t stop.

  Neither did she. She crouched low, and sprang out, straight towards the Old Man. There was something beautiful in her movements. She knew it, could feel the fluid grace of her limbs, the arc her blade described.

  The Old Man moved to block her, but she was already past his guard. She fired her pistol one last time, right into his chest, then cut off the Old Man’s head. It fell to the earth. She crouched down, grabbed her second rime blade, and looked at David.

  They were talking.

  The Old Man had David around the neck, lifting him with just one arm. The other he was using to punch him in the ribs. David’s limbs juddered. And yet they talked as if old friends.

  “Surely it would be in our interests to work together,” David said as blood streamed from his head. His hands were closed around the Old Man's wrist.

  “Doing what you do,” the Old Man said, swinging, swinging. “You have no idea whose interests you are working for. We cannot countenance the application of the sciences that made us what we are. If I do not succeed in destroying you, the others will try, until you or all of them are dead.”

  “But the Roil is building. There is so little time left.”

  “Let the Roil build, let it do what it will do. That is better, let it happen this time.”

  “I can’t and I won’t,” David said.

  The Old Man nodded. “You were always at the heart of the madness, Cadell. Leave the boy alone.”

  “You’re the one trying to kill me.”

  “Oh, you are so naive. Both of you are so naive. What does it matter?” the Old Man hissed. “What does any of it matter?”

  Her first blade she drove through his back and into his heart, the other she hacked into his neck. The Old Man dropped David and turned. She struck his neck again. The Old Man’s head fell one way, the body the other.

  “It matters a lot to me,” Margaret said.

  “Get up,” Margaret said, reaching down. David gripped her hand with fingers which had grown icy cold, and she almost dropped him.

  “The rest are coming,” David said.

  Margaret nodded to the nearby ridge. “Then we climb that.”

  She grabbed her bag of guns, wiped her blades free of blood. David was looking at her, one hand rubbing his throat where a dark bruise was forming.

  “You'd do well to hurry up,” she said and headed for the ridge.

  CHAPTER 35

  I can't say that I ever really knew David. He was too many things, too many faces. I don't know if anyone could ever really know him. I'm not even that sure he knew himself.

  Ice Storm, Raven Skye

  THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS

  1520 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

  The stone struck Margaret on the head. David caught the movement a moment too late. She turned, blinked at him once and tumbled. A few more steps and they would have been clear.

  Another stone flashed through the dark, but David was ready. He caught it, and hurled it back. Soft laughter sounded from the trees ahead.

  “Good throw.”

  David squinted and could see the Old Man there, half hidden in the branches of a great pine. It was dark, but the Old Man glowed.

  David checked that Margaret was still breathing. And she was, though a lump was fast growing on her forehead. The stone that had struck her had been about the size of a fist. David picked it up speculatively.

  “I could have shot her,” the Old Man shouted. “But I am merciful.”

  “You’re the very picture of mercy,” David said.

  “And how many men have you killed this day? Men as ancient as the stony moons. And you snuffed out their slow lithic lives just so you could breathe a few days more.”

  He sat in a lower branch, a coat about his shoulders, as if he could ever grow cold. The Orbis on David’s finger glowed and the one on the Old Man’s responded with a reflected light. A flickering luminescent dialogue occurred between the rings that David was only partly aware of. Like having a conversation smacked into the side of your head with a flashlight. The sensation passed quickly and the Old Man looked down at him with an expression that was almost avuncular.

  “Ah, you’ve led us a merry chase,” the Old Man said, and all at once, David recognised the voice. And it unleashed so much. He stood unsteadily, buffeted by all that memory.

  “Milton,” David said.

  Andrew Milton nodded his head. “Nice to be remembered.”

  “I remember you all.”

  Milton pulled up his coat, blood had darkened and stiffened the sleeves – none of it his own. But he didn’t come down from the tree. David could smell Milton from the ground, and despite himself, he felt a little hungry.

  Ignore it, a voice whispered.

  “Where are the others?” David demanded.

  “Not far away,” the Old Man said. “The fear was that you might be using explosives, or that a friend of yours might sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Sacrifice is something you never understood. I don’t need them to kill you.”

  “Rupert couldn’t. Nor could Michael or Carver.”

  “But now, you are alone. Be honest, you have hardly acquitted yourself well. The Old Man's there, but you've stripped away his teeth with that fancy drug of yours.” Milton dropped from the tree, landed on his feet easily.

  Milton was a good head taller than David, a foot broader across the chest.

  David took a couple of steps back. The Old Man matched them, lighter on his feet. He rolled his broad shoulders loosely, bits of dried blood dropped from the coat, onto the ground. David could feel his hunger, feel how it echoed his own. It made his mouth water, his tongue felt thick and heavy, and it stuck to his teeth.

  “Weeks we have hunted and devoured, weeks to build our strength to match our hungers. I am ready to tear you apart, it is all that we have wanted for months.”

  Weeks: had it really been that long since David had left Chapman? There had been slowly passing days, for sure, but hardly that many. He could still remember the great hand rising over the battlements. The Hideous Garment Flutes rushing down out of the dark, and devouring a swirling screaming cloud of birds.

  “Do we really need to do this, Andrew?” David said.

  Milton blinked. “You never called me that.”

  “I am different now. Things have changed.”

  “Which is precisely why you must die.”

  “What if I agreed not to do it?” the Old Man asked.

  “You would not. And, even if you did, your presence alone is enough of a danger. You are an Old Man, old no longer. You are not yourself, but nor are you Cadell.”

  “Then what am I?”


  “Everything that we once were given a new fierce life. Even if you do not realise it, David, you are the destruction of a world.”

  “But I want to save it.”

  “So did we. But what is left to save? Perhaps you would like a little of our history,” the Old Man said. “After all, you are part of that now. Whether we like it or not.”

  The Old Man was playing for time. Maybe Milton wasn't as confident as he appeared.

  “Can’t I just kill you?” David said.

  “If you’re fast enough, yes. But aren’t you curious as to what you are? After all, we have had aeons to come to an understanding. You, on the other hand, have had a few weeks. Don’t you want to know why you must die?”

  David shrugged. Milton smiled.

  He said, “When we did what you have done. When we released the Engine of the World, and sent the Roil back into the darkness, we thought we understood the cost. However, Cad… Mr Milde, we got it wrong. There was death, more death than you or I can comprehend. The Engine itself railed at the terror of its purpose. You may have changed, you may not have been the man you once were, but the Engine can never change enough. And it was as rigorous in what it did to us, as what it had done to the world.

  “It captured us. Contained us, and transformed us. Cursed us with hungers, cursed us with life endless (or near enough). And still we thought we could live as normal men. Those days there were twenty of our kind remaining – I am sure you remember them.” And David did, he could see their proud faces, hear their voices.

  Milton said, “But as the ice receded, as the world revealed itself to us, what we had undone and what we had made set a madness in our bones.

  “Some it affected more than others. Drove them to kill and kill, but we seven, we Old Men, destroyed those who would devour the world that they had saved; and banished ourselves and our hunger to the deep places beneath Mirrlees. We locked ourselves there so that we could not again do what we had done.

  “And there was not a day that I didn’t regret that decision, even as I knew it to be the wise one. Cadell, though, he was different. He knew that a time would come when the Engine would be required to work again.”

  “And so it has,” David said. “That time has come.”

  “Yes, but you need to understand. Time or not, it is the wrong path. We have no right.”

  “We have no right to save our world?”

  “No right to destroy this one.” The Old Man sighed. “To save it does not save a thing, merely forestalls.”

  “Isn’t that what everything is?” David said. “Merely a stalling action.”

  Milton smiled. His head dipped a little. “Then we’ve no more talking to do.”

  The Old Man crossed the space between them in an eye blink, jaw snapping closed on air. David was already out of reach. Milton's feet dug into the earth, he turned on his heel. David threw a punch, and the Old Man caught his fist and squeezed.

  David wrenched his hand free, but not without the Old Man raking his nails across the flesh. David closed the wounds at once. They circled each other.

  David’s cheeks burned, his limbs felt slow and heavy, despite his speed. The ground was hard beneath his feet. His breath did not plume as Margaret's did. He looked over at her, on the cold earth, forehead bloody and pale. She might as well have been dead. But there, in the cold and the dark, she looked at peace. He felt again the pangs of his addiction, a stabbing ache, at once sharp and hollow, as though it had already torn the flesh from him.

  “Caution will not save you,” Milton said.

  David knew he was right.

  What would it be like to let go, to lose himself completely?

  It doesn't hurt. Not any more than sadness, Cadell said. Not any more than that. It won't even sting.

  Milton moved lightly on his feet; his ruddy lips shone.

  “Goodbye, Margaret,” David said, and he took a deep breath, left himself to Cadell.

  David opened his eyes. Every bit of him was bruised, felt bitterly cold. He sat up.

  Margaret was saying something. They were on the top of the ridge, now. “What? What?” he said.

  “I–” her teeth chattered.

  “I'm sorry,” David said. “I went away.”

  He looked back, and there below them lay the scattered remains of Milton.

  David coughed, tasted his own blood; when he breathed, it bubbled thick and dark from his nose.

  “Two more,” he said. “What happened?”

  “You killed him. You tore him apart. And then you laughed. David, David, it was the most horrible sound I have ever heard.”

  “There's still more to come. I should have...”

  “You said they didn't matter. You passed me a syringe of Carnival. I don't know where you had gotten it from, and you told me to inject you with that or you would die.”

  “You shouldn't have.”

  “What – how could I say no to something capable of that?” She gestured down the hill.

  “You have a point,” David said. He could feel Cadell at a distance, but not that close inspection he'd felt before – as though Cadell was just leaning over his shoulder. David felt that what he had done was right. Felt, too, the grief. Cadell was wrong. Sadness could cut deeper than any hurt. Sadness could grind the breath from you.

  There was no time for grief though. At the bottom of the hill, they appeared: the last Old Men.

  Margaret sighted along her rifle. “Are you ready?” she said.

  “Of course I am. Margaret, we did all right. No one can say otherwise.”

  “We might still make it,” she said, but David could see that she was having trouble standing. Her breath was as laboured as a horse he had once seen die on a flooded Mirrlees street. She looked like she might at any moment stumble and fall.

  Why had Cadell put himself back into the box? Had David really been that close to death, did it really matter?

  Now, at least he felt calm, the anxiety had fled from his limbs. He took a deep breath.

  Margaret fired, cursed.

  “Missed,” she said, and slapped another shell into the rifle.

  The Old Men sprinted up the hill. Halfway to the top they paused and turned, looking behind them. Margaret fired again, this time striking one in the neck, then even she forgot to fire.

  It rose over the hill like a third moon, shining a brilliant light upon the field. An airship from Hardacre: green and grey flags swinging from its belly. Guns swivelled in their emplacements and fired at the Old Men below.

  The airship passed overhead Ropes fell to the earth, men and women jumped down lightly, Whig and Buchan with them. Men and women armed with guns and sabres.

  “We've some experience fighting these brutes,” Buchan said, one great hand clasped around a knife almost as thick as a cleaver. “I believe you could do with some help.”

  Whig clutched his hat in one hand, firing a pistol at the Old Men below. “Well, answer him, man!”

  “Yes,” David said. “Yes.”

  Margaret tried not to smile. “Just don't get in the way.”

  “So all is forgiven?” Buchan asked. He looked from David to Margaret and back again, and what triumph might have been in his face withered.

  Do we look so beaten? David thought. “Only if you will forgive us,” David said.

  “You don’t even need to ask.”

  Whig reloaded his pistol.

  “You’re late,” Margaret said.

  Whig grimaced. “Did you just make a joke?”

  The airship circled above, its great searchlights blazing.

  “Ready, crew,” Buchan roared. “Ready!”

  And those last Old Men were running up the hill, throwing cold before them. Guns fired. A wall of death: rifles and pistols all at once. And it took its toll. Still, the Old Men broke through their ranks, bringing their own death with them.

  But they were outnumbered, weakened, under constant fire. They could not run fast enough, and always there was Davi
d, just out of reach. The first fell to a barrage of rifle fire. The second ran at David, only to be caught mid-air by Buchan himself. With a twist of his arms he broke the Old Man's neck.

  And David felt the last of the Old Men go, and a great wave of sadness – that wasn't exactly his own – gripped him. An age was ended; a whole epoch of existence gone, and they had failed in their singular purpose. But already Cadell was fading, sliding beneath the surface of his mind like some leviathan of thought and memory.

  “Well,” David said. “We've still breath in us.”

  Margaret shuddered. “Yes, we do.”

  “We thought you could use some help,” Buchan said.

  David grinned a bloody smile and spat a little blood on the ground. “We've not much time,” he said. “We need to burn the corpses. All of them.”

  The Old Men burned fast and almost silently: flesh melted from the bone, bones blackened and crumbled to dust. And these corpses burned much more quickly than Cadell's corpse had. Perhaps their vitality was greater, or just all those ancient bodies pressed up against each other quickened the flames. Oddly, they gave out little heat; instead they seemed to draw the heat from everything around them. A peculiar and disturbing fire, and one that only David and Margaret could bring themselves to stand close to.

  David felt something should be said over their bodies, but he wasn’t sure what. These Old Men had lived since First Landing. They had defeated the Roil and been punished for it, given over to hunger and madness, and still they had tried to do what they thought was best – and what might have been right.

  How was David to know, to judge right from wrong? All he’d known was that he didn’t want to die.

  Maybe Mother Graine was right, too.

  He shook his head, the only way he could see himself through this was to move as though those other opinions didn't matter. They'd all wanted him dead, in one way or another, how could they matter?

  “You died for what you believed in,” David said. “There’s honour in that. Maybe in these times that is all that is possible.” He didn't know what else to say, he tried, but his voice faltered. The bodies burned.

  Margaret stared at him from across the flames. She looked old, and tired, her skin too pale, even for her, too tight against her bones. “We’ve yet to see if we can manage the same,” she said.