David couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Believe me, I’m sure. It will add a half a day to our journey, but we’ll make it. The defence mechanism has tolerances,” David said. “As long as we travel within those, we will be all right.”
David’s memory proved better than he had thought. They were shot at several times more – each time Kara glared at him – but none came as close as that first shot.
Soon the great mountains, and the city between them, dominated everything. The path they followed kept them zigzagging towards it, drawing closer with painful slowness. Twice, they almost touched the mountains and the wall, though Tearwin Meet remained hidden; only the central tower of the Engine of the World was revealed, rising above the wall.
And here the winds grew fierce and twisted, curling around the mountains and the city's walls. The wind battered at them, the Roslyn Dawn struggled in its grip, but did not succumb.
“We can't stay up here long,” Kara said.
“We don't need to. Not today.”
“How do we get to that?” Margaret said, gesturing at the tower.
“Today, we can fly over it. Kara, don't drop below this altitude. Everything beneath the height of the walls is well guarded,” David said. “And even I am unsure of the path required to bring you to safety.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Kara said.
“And please, signal to the Collard Green. They're not to follow us.”
Kara whispered at the Dawn, and the Aerokin lifted, rising up over the wall. At its top was a narrow walkway. David was struck again with an ancient memory, of guards set at regular intervals along the wall, and a great dark storm building on the horizon.
The winds stilled, as they flew over the city, the tower to their right. David pointed at the tower, and the fine mist of wires that surrounded it. “We need to make for the door at the tower's base. We'll have to go from the walls and walk in, the tower is too dangerous to descend itself.” He smiled. “It's coming back to me. Bit by bit.”
Flying over Tearwin Meet, and looking down, David had the impression again of a vast consciousness, and one that was directed at him. Only this time, he wasn't looking at it via the panoptic map. There was anger and curiosity in that gaze, and strangely enough, amusement.
“Perhaps we should land now,” David said.
“I could try to land in there,” Kara said.
David shook his head. “Try and the Dawn would be torn apart, trust me, Kara. I know this. You might not see it, but the top of the walls are webbed with wires sharp enough to shear through her.”
“We could climb it now,” Margaret said. “Just drop us on the ridge. The narrow walkway circles the wall, and down we go.” Her face was pressed against the window, she'd tapped her section to complete magnification. David peered down with her, not that it revealed much, the city beneath the walls was hidden in shadow. Nothing but gloom, though it was a gloom that seemed to stare back.
“I'm used to the dark,” Margaret said.
David shook his head. “Not now. Not yet.” He looked over at the walls. “Kara, just how much rope do you have on the Dawn?”
“For climbing?”
“Abseiling,” he corrected. “It’s how we… they used to get to the ground.”
“I’ve got miles of the stuff. As fine and strong a thread as you could imagine.” She followed David’s gaze. “I hope you’re not scared of heights.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.”
The Dawn passed over the city and came to its edge. And David was reminded of one more thing, here they truly were at the end of the land. Beyond the northern wall of the city was a great dark sea, one that could be followed all the way north – until one headed south, seeing nothing but a small island chain known as the Unremarkables, before reaching another frozen sea and the southern tip of Shale.
“Do you think they would find us if we just set off over the sea?” David said softly.
Out there a dark shape breached the water, followed by another. David frowned, then realised that it was a pod of whales. The sight was somehow heartening and heartbreaking at once. The wind struck the Dawn again, and they were out of the city.
“They'll find us anywhere,” Margaret said. “Which is why we should turn the Dawn around and jump down onto the lip of the wall, and climb, and do it now.”
David shook his head. “We climb. But not today,” David repeated. “Today we land, Miss Penn. Today we rest, just outside the walls. I’m not quite ready yet.” He looked over at Margaret, and hardly noticed that she was looking at him not with anger, but curiosity. “You’ll have to use the flags again,” he said, and pointed to a space on the ground, just outside the walls. “We’re going to need to land there.”
The Collard Green already looked like she was making for the landing space, though Margaret did as she was asked.
“And fly carefully, Miss Jade,” David said.
Kara mumbled something, but David didn't hear her. The wall took up too much of his attention for that. Though as they descended, he felt a little less of the scrutiny of the Engine beyond it.
They sank slowly. Perhaps too close to the spiked walls of the city, as though Kara was making a point; David could see just how sharp those spikes were and he knew those edges could cut flesh with a touch.
Here at the boundary of Tearwin Meet, his sense of scale had to adjust constantly, it was like nothing he had ever seen before (and yet the part of him that was Cadell knew it too well); and he a citizen of a metropolis given over to excess. The grand levees of Mirrlees, the broad hulk of the Downing Bridge, these were nothing more than toys against the reach and span of Tearwin’s walls.
They rose spindly and tall, looking like stone, though constructed of something far stronger and lighter. You could swing an axe at those walls, David thought – if you could get past the dense mass of cutting edges, thrusting out at all angles like monstrous thistle heads – and not leave a mark. Though there were signs of decay and age, in places furred colonies of fungus marked the wall, or forests of some sort of hardy vine. David even fancied he caught flashes of graffiti, ridiculous drawings of men and women, and curious beasts. He rather hoped someone had climbed up here, just to mark the walls. Their size alone required some kind of magnificent defiance; the climb itself was something to be admired.
As they sank, the city’s walls only grew grander, thicker, more densely spiked. And looking up, at the top of the walls, it looked less like a walled city than a colossal smokestack. Indeed, wisps of cloud added to the impression as they trailed from its peak.
CHAPTER 40
And what was happening in the south? We only have speculation, rumours of dreaming cities, but no real indication of what such things might be like. The Engine hid behind its walls, and the Obsidian Curtain was just as opaque.
South of the Border, Deighton & Crux
THE DREAMING CITY
DEEP WITHIN (AND OF) THE ROIL
Tope opened his eyes. He’d failed.
He should have been dead. His last memory had been the leap into the liquid nitrogen in Chapman.
And yet, he could feel his own pulse, and deep beneath the surface on which he lay supine (breaths all a shudder) was an echoing beat, as though the earth itself was alive. Perhaps even more so. After all, he had spent his life containing his passions, honing them to such an edge that they might strike out at the enemy, wherever and whoever that was.
He had failed in that task, just as he had failed to die.
He felt a moment’s frustration at that failure, and a moment’s anger at the relief that followed, and the realisation that he had never wanted to die. But his life had never been about what he wanted. Whose life was?
“You are awake, then.” The voice that spoke those words was soft, but authoritative. Nearby curtains twitched. His gaze flicked towards the movement.
“Yes.” Tope knew there was no point in pretending otherwise. That voice denied deception. “Where am I?”
“You know where you are.”
And he did, he lay in the terrible dark of the Roil. His skin burned, the flesh itched. But all of it meant one thing, that he wasn't dead. That he was very much alive.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Don't you wonder how you survived?”
Tope shrugged. “I’ve seen many wondrous things. Killed my share of them, too. I stopped requiring the whats and whyfors a long time ago.”
There was a sense of pleasure in the response. “You’re a Verger, for you the knife is all.”
“The knife is all.”
“And it’s knife work that we require.”
An image grew within his mind, possessed of that same beat: it flashed and flared and faded. He said, “The boy…”
“Is a boy no longer.”
Tope wondered just how long it had been since he had last opened his eyes.
“Weeks have passed, only weeks,” the voice whispered, gently mocking. “But for him, and this world, it has been an age – your home would be unrecognisable to you. And the boy, though he might not look it, has become a monster. The world is greatly changed. You say you have seen wondrous things. But you have not seen anything like this.” The curtains parted, and he realised that they hadn't been curtains at all, but winged creatures that went howling through the window – and the Dreaming City was revealed to him. He saw its engines, felt the rushing thought that informed it all, that was his thought and its thought. Here he was a single organism made up of many organisms, that were also part of this city, that were part of many cities. He felt in himself a deep yearning for that, to be part of it, part of the whole, because he wasn't, not yet.
“This was once known as Carver. It was the first metropolis to fall to dreams, now it is just one place of many. Here all is possible, here matter shapes to our dreaming. Though in truth we dream no more. We have woken. And when the dreamer wakes, dreams are realised.”
Tope realised just how foolish Stade had been, to think that he could resist this. One thing to hide and fight against a senseless force of nature, but this was vast thought, of a scale that no one man was any match for, schemes within schemes as tightly bound as any clockwork mechanism, and infinitely more cunning. This was the future, and it was beautiful.
“The boy would destroy this new world. He would wipe it from the face of the world, and with it the seed of all hope.”
Always the boy! Always the ruination of things. If only he had killed him that first night. The father should have been the one spared, the boy was always the danger. It amused him that the Roil – and Stade's desires – had boiled down to this one thing. He smiled.
“I will kill him,” Tope said.
“Yes, we believe you will.” The voice sounded very pleased indeed. “There is a vehicle waiting for you, a ship of fire that will burn as bright as any star. It will take you to the north.”
He looked about the room and saw it at last. The figure, obscured by Witmoths, they scurried about its flesh, slid in and out of its mouth and nose. Tope couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. All sense of that had gone. It was merely Roil.
“There will be a woman with him. Pale-skinned, tall.”
“I know her,” he said. “I have seen her. She tried to kill me.”
“But she did not. You are to give her this gift.” A single moth flew straight for him. He batted out at it, then realised that was exactly what it had wanted. He felt it slide into his skin, just beneath the wrist, a hot sliver of moth. Something that was quite different from the other creatures that filled his blood.
“You are to be kept of single mind, until this is done. Then we will decide whether or not you have earned our gift.”
The Roil lifted its hand, a fist now, clenched around a belt of knives. “You will need these,” it said, and tossed them to the ground.
“The knife is all.” Tope walked to the belt, scooping it up and strapping it around his waist – all his knives were there, the cutting and the driving, the thin slivers of steel that he was adept enough with to unpick locks. The knives that had been tools of his bloody art, the ones he had used to kill the boy’s father. “Yes, the knife is all.”
At least for a little while longer.
A door opened, another figure appeared, or perhaps it was the same one, because when he turned there was no one behind him. “This way, this way.” It gestured through the door.
Tope was led through the city. Saw those wonders up close, the mechanisms that bound it, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he was a part of it. Wherever he went he would take it with him.
An iron ship waited at the city's heart – the first less than beautiful thing he had seen, though it possessed an undeniable elegance – a door in its belly opened, and Tope stepped through it. The ship was ringed in seats: all taken, but the one closest to the door. Tope sat down in it. The ship shuddered, and began to rise. Windows – that Tope guessed were a vestige of when this ship might have been designed for humans – opened like eyes. The Dreaming City fell away. He felt the acceleration push at him, a weight against his chest.
“How long?” he said.
Eight hours until the city is reached.
Tope closed his eyes, and dreamed of killing the boy, and finishing his job.
CHAPTER 41
We never developed an adequate defence against the iron ships. Fortunately their production must have required certain rare elements, for no more than fourteen seem to have been produced. But even that was an adequate number to conquer a world; there wasn't much of it left.
Machineries, Gaskell & Slight
THE OUTER WALL OF TEARWIN MEET
2100 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Buchan and Whig waited at the base of the tower. Their airship, the Collard Green, bobbed hard against her lines, though she was in no danger of striking herself against the jagged wall. Watson was too good a pilot for that.
Whig was dressed in so many layers that he almost looked as big as Buchan. He slapped David on the back, hands thick with several pairs of gloves.
“You did it,” Whig said. “You got us here.”
“With a little help from the pilots, thank you,” Kara said. Watson – who stood by the Collard, checking the lines to see that they were secure – grunted. David couldn't help but smile.
“What?” Kara said. “It's bloody true.”
She was shivering.
David realised they were all shivering, except him.
“You lot,” Buchan said, “time to get under cover. We'll die out here.”
Near the base of the wall was a sort of overhang. Their men had set up a perimeter facing the landscape of ice and stone. The stones were frangible and layered. They crumbled underfoot. David knew that this was why the single continent was called Shale. It had been the first thing those first people had seen, fields of rough stone in every direction, shale as unwelcoming as the dark between the stars.
There was little wind though, this low down. The sea could be heard clearly here. David could all too easily imagine all that bristled stone toppling over. He tried not to think about it too much, there was nowhere else for them to go, except over those walls. David considered the final minutes of his father's life, the time when David had to choose to run or to die. He'd chosen flight then, but had never expected it to lead to here.
“What's done is done,” he said.
Margaret smiled darkly at him. “I know what you mean,” she said.
Of course you don't, David thought, but he smiled back. They were here, he could reach out and touch the wall of Tearwin Meet – if he wanted it to tear open the flesh of his palm.
“I'm sorry,” David said. “We'll leave before morning. But I'm still not quite ready.”
“When will you ever be ready?” Margaret said.
“When I do this,” David said. “I don't know if there will be much of me left. When we cross that wall, and descend into the city, I don't know if it will be me that does it,
or if it will be me that will come back.”
“The Engine transforms everything, but so does the Roil,” Margaret said. “We've made our choice, we've settled on a side.”
David wasn't sure he had, but he nodded his head.
The air was salt-sharp and stinging, and it felt like just breathing could cut.
He felt Cadell's memories, too – of a childhood here, staring out at all that grey stone.
Shale’s beginning had been difficult, and cold. And so had Cadell's, but he had grown strong, and ageless, and the city had spawned twelve metropolises.
It seemed appropriate that whatever rebirth the world would have would begin here.
David glanced over at Margaret, as they walked beneath the overhang. “We will do this soon. Before the dawn,” he said. “I promise you.”
She nodded, but David could see the anger there. After all, she had been the one that had yearned for this moment. David had only been driven to it.
“So, what must be done?” Buchan asked. The big man wiped map powder from his nose; they'd been considering the one map of Tearwin Meet they possessed. David had refused the powder, the map itself was so folded and old that the creases had become shadow roads and buildings: it was too easy to get lost in them.
Besides, the map powder only made him crave Carnival more. “You've never told us what we can do once we were here.”
David shook his head. “I never told you because I wasn't sure. I still don't
know. It may be as simple as turning a switch, but I doubt it. The one thing that I am certain of is that the rest I need to do alone – well, with Margaret's company. I don't think she would ever let me enter Tearwin Meet without her,” David said.
“You can’t expect us to,” Buchan blustered. “We have come all this way.”
Night's Engines Page 21
