The wind grew then. It pulled at her hair, and her greatcoat, and snatched the sound away.
David grinned at her, and she grinned back at him.
He locked a karabiner into place, then played out the weighted line, down, down, down.
He sighed, and in a voice more Cadell than David declared, “The last time we used rope, it didn’t go so well at all. And yet, here we are.”
Margaret nodded, hardly listening, looking down at the city below, and the webwork of razor-sharp cold wire that protected it. For a moment, all she could think of was Tate, and its network webs and wireways.
“It’s like going home,” Margaret said.
“For both of us, eh,” David said, though Margaret could tell there was little of David here.
“Shall you go first?” David said. “You'll be safe, just don't venture too far from the wall.”
Margaret clipped her harness and her line onto the rope, and let gravity do what it always did. Within moments, as the muscles in her arms and legs worked at the wall, she felt herself grow warmer. She looked up; already David was a dot on the wall.
She dropped in leaps and bounds, and it was like she was back on the wireway. Ice shards fell with her, and she knew that she would have to get well away from the wall when she reached the bottom, or David was likely to kill her with the ice he'd bring down.
When she reached the bottom, she yanked on the rope three times; then ran from the wall, finding cover a few yards distant. She took her weapons carefully from her bag, checked their charges, and waited for David to descend.
And ice fell, such a rain that anything within the city surely knew that they were coming and would be waiting. She looked at her guns and her blades. She was ready, too.
When he made it down, he grinned a great grin: part delight, part terror. “Made it.” He looked past her shoulder, at the city beyond. “Finally,” he said. “Finally.”
Tearwin Meet drowned in the shadow of its walls. The sounds of ice sheets cracking echoed all around them. Tearwin Meet itself was no more than a mile in diameter, as wide as it was high. The tower that was their destination sat squarely in the heart of the city. And down here on the ground, Margaret couldn’t see the tower, but for the occasional glimpse, between this tower and the next.
She had to rely on David, that he knew what he was doing. But with every step into the city, it was as though a wall was rising between them, and like the Engine’s tower, she was only catching glimpses of David.
The buildings that lined the streets were tall, some ran to thirty stories, many were linked by narrow walkways, further reducing the light. Awnings stretched out from each building – they seemed at odds with the great structures from which they sprang, but Margaret could imagine tables laid out beneath them, people eating and laughing. People had lived here once, before the Engine had driven them away.
It looked to be a simple thing to walk to the heart of the city, but within that half-mile was a network of ring roads and dead ends, of roads sinking beneath the earth and rising again back at the wall, having curled without them even noticing. It was a maze as complicated as the Engine of the World itself.
But it was a maze that David said he understood.
“We follow the path laid out for us. We always do,” David said. “When we reach the tower, there will be a door at its base. We need to find that door.”
“And what do we do then?” Margaret said.
David’s eyes widened, and then he gave her a condescending smile, and patted her arm. “We step through it, of course, Miss Penn. Because that is what doors are for.”
Something snuffled in the distance. Margaret pulled her rifle from beneath her coat, but whatever it was, it did not reveal itself.
David looked towards the sound. “Let it be,” he said. “It will not attack unless it perceives us as a threat. That gun looks rather threatening, wouldn't you say?”
“It’s meant to look threatening,” Margaret said.
Again that blasted smile.
“We need to hurry,” David said.
And the road dipped, and led them into darkness, though David's Orbis glowed in the dark with a feverish light. The shadows around them grew long and danced, and it was suddenly very easy to believe in ghosts. Twice Margaret fired at what she took to be movement, but was only the flickering reflection of the ring.
“Calm down,” David said, after she had wasted another round. “We are not threatened. Not yet. I will let you know when we are.”
They came back out into the light again, and found themselves at the base of a low hill, though the road did not directly lead to the tower, they could see it up ahead.
They heard the iron ship’s approach as a thunderous drone, a ceaseless noise that they recognised almost at once. Ice showered from the walls behind them.
David's eyes widened. “No, they couldn't.”
But they had. She had. Margaret knew who had sent this ship. It crashed down at them, through the protective webwork, metal snapped and screamed, iron tore with the sounds of a million metal teeth grinding and scraping. And the ship itself did not stay together, but detonated overhead. David stood there, watching it all.
“Cover now,” Margaret said, throwing David towards the nearest of the awnings. Shrapnel fell.
A second craft shot through the opening, though it made it further before detonating. Then a final iron ship crashed down. This one passed overhead, and was gone from sight. The earth shook with what Margaret assumed was its landing.
“The bloody things cleared a path for it,” David said. “They’ll be on us in a few minutes.”
Margaret looked at the tower: at all she had fought for. “Then we’d best run,” she said. She pushed David in front of her. “Go, find us the way. I’ll be right behind you.”
And David ran. Margaret primed her weapons. Whatever was coming, whatever her mother had sent, she would be ready for it.
CHAPTER 44
So Stade lived to see his life's work realised. That was a gift, you could say, and a punishment. I would feel sorry for him, but really, the man cut off my fingers. He deserved everything that he got.
Maybe we all did.
Confluent, Medicine Paul
THE MIRRLEES AIR FLEET
DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE
Stade stood in the radio room, hunched next to the nervous radio operator. The poor man had had only bad news to report until now. They had received at last a signal from the Underground. In Stade's darkest hours, he had grown to believe that they had travelled all this way and at such dire cost for nothing. And now, as they travelled within a few miles of the mountain that contained the Project, he’d been vindicated.
“We can see you,” a voice murmured over the radio.
Stade frowned. “As can we. Sam, is that you?” he said. “The bulk of the refugees will be at your gates within the hour. I'm afraid that we have the enemy behind us.”
“You are not to approach,” the voice said. “This is Grappel of the Underground, subsidiary of the free state of Hardacre. Our weapons are trained on you. You are not to approach.”
“But I made this,” Stade said. “All of it. I made this.”
“Yes, you did,” Grappel said.
The ships floated above the horizon. Thousands stood beneath them. And they had not moved for hours. Medicine and Grappel stood in the observation tower above the Underground.
“You have to let them enter,” Medicine said.
“These people killed my family,” Grappel said bitterly. “I owe them nothing but death.”
“Those are my people, not soldiers, not your enemy. You can’t leave them to die,” Medicine pleaded. “They don't even understand what's happening. Please don't repeat the crime of my city. Not everyone supported Stade's stance, for many it was a dark time in history, a terrible time.”
“And your people did nothing. The gates stayed closed to us, they trained their guns on us, and we marched. We marched into the north and
so many of us died.”
“But the Roil is approaching. You can't leave them there.”
Grappel shook his head. “I can and I will.”
“Think of them as what they are,” Medicine said. “Workers. Enough people to make the Underground what it must be, the last stronghold of the world. You leave them out there, and all you are doing is giving the enemy more troops. They are not your enemy now, but they will be.”
Grappel frowned, lifted a pair of field glasses and looked south. Behind them the horizon was darkening. He walked from the observation platform, and Medicine thought he had lost this argument, that his people were doomed.
A couple of hours later Grappel returned.
“Look,” Medicine said. “If you won't let my people in, then let me out there. Let me die with them.”
Grappel smiled. “You'd like that, wouldn't you? You are right. It doesn't sit well with me, but you are right. These people do not deserve to die, and we certainly do not deserve more enemies. There's a reason why I've elevated you, Medicine. Sometimes you talk sense.
“Let them in, though if one of those airships so much as dips towards the ground, shoot it down.”
Grappel stood at the iron gates, flanked by his guard, as the Mirrlees folk began to enter.
There was a flash of steel and the first guard fell, but not before he grabbed the Verger and tumbled with him.
“Shut the doors,” someone cried.
Medicine began to run to Grappel.
Then the second Verger rose above the crowd and hurled his knife at Grappel. The leader of the Underground crumpled.
Medicine reached Grappel and the Verger turned, another knife in his hands.
“Well, here I'm granted no small mercies,” the Verger said. “First a rebel leader and now a Confluent traitor.”
He pulled back his knife to throw it, then groaned, blood spilling from his throat, and fell to the ground. Grappel stood above the Verger, a bloody knife in his hand.
He looked at his guards. “Medicine is in charge. I transfer my powers to the cripple. It's the end of days, anyway, what does it matter!”
Then Grappel toppled and Medicine was calling medics, leading Grappel to his rooms, then sprinting back to make sure the refugees had entered and that there would be no recriminations. There was no time and too much to do. But later, he swore, they would hunt the Vergers down.
Outside, the refugees milled. They had nowhere to go.
“Get them inside now!” Medicine roared, thrusting his head through the portal, glaring out at the shadow approaching. He felt all the fear within him uncurl. And for a moment he stopped, and was certain that he would turn and run as deep into the mountain as he could go.
Instead, he ran down to the gates and began mobilisation of their heavy weaponry. The machinery already primed began its swift build to lethalness. Whatever happens, he thought, we will make them feel the cost of this conquest.
The Roil mass was already on the horizon and it raced towards them, but this Roil was different, it did not extend as far as the eye could see, east and west. It was a narrow band of dark, no wider than a mile, though that was wide enough. Above it floated huge airships, or creatures like Aerokin, from which were hung vast mirrors, and before it the ground blazed.
This was no scorched earth retreat, but a scorched earth assault. There was no secrecy now, neither his nor the enemy's. The word he'd been receiving – from the few spies they had left – suggested this was only a small finger of the Roil fuelled by these airship engines. In fact, it had broken off from the main body of the Roil, which remained on the outskirts of Mirrlees.
Medicine wondered if it had been Stade, bitter at the loss of his Underground, who had given the game away. Medicine would not have been surprised; he had left the Underground in disgust.
It was someone else who first saw the aircraft to the west of the Roil mass. A small fleet of airships: Mirrlees craft launching endothermic munitions into the guts of the darkness.
Even now, Stade was fighting to protect his refuge.
And then Medicine ordered the guns to be fired as the darkness came into range. And the ground shook as endothermic matter was launched into the Roil, punching holes in the darkness the size of houses, but the Roil did not halt in its progress, just kept up its march towards them.
The Underground doors opened and then, up out of the crowd, the Wit smoke lifted. Men calmly turned the hoses filled with icy water onto the crowd. All through the Roil mass, people fell screaming to the ground.
“In,” Medicine shouted at those still standing. “The rest of you in.”
“Damn it. Fire the cannon. Hurl ice out into the darkness,” Stade roared. “I did not risk all to see the Underground fail, and should we live out this battle, then you never know, the bastards might yet let us in.”
The first barrage struck a Vermatisaur, sluggish this far north of the Roil. It crumpled and fell from the sky.
The whole crew cheered.
And then the iron ships came and launched their fire into the Daunted Spur's great target of a balloon and gas cells ignited, raging in all that horrible heat.
And Stade fell with his ship, burning.
“Fire at the mirrors,” Medicine yelled. “They drive it on. Strike them from the sky!”
The cannons fired. One after another, blasting the huge mirrors. And as they tumbled dreadfully from the sky, the Roil itself began to diminish.
“Now, into the Roil. Into the Roil with everything we have.”
And all at once a hundred cannons fired ice and snow, and all manner of state-of-the-art endothermic matter – and the Roil stopped its forward progress.
Medicine allowed himself a smile.
“We might yet hold onto this place. We might yet have a chance,” he said.
CHAPTER 45
Big Engines and little, that's what it comes down to. That is what we have lost, the little and the big. And why did we lose them? I would gather that the answer is simply this: The little and the big are difficult things to hold onto. Think of sand, think of something finer than sand, it would slip through fingers no matter how tightly it was grasped. And how does one hold a world? It would take more than gloves and a large stick to do it properly. How could one do it and remain human? We are human and thusly we did not.
The Engine of the World, Deighton
TEARWIN MEET
2120 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Something howled from behind them, David jumped (was this what it was like, to feel engaged, to feel threatened by the world? He missed his Carnival!). The street behind was empty, well, the part they could see. Though David could see another street, crowded with memories; he blinked and they were gone.
“Stop doing that,” he whispered, and for once Cadell seemed to listen. “Can’t see it,” he said more loudly.
The Quarg Hounds had been hunting them, drawing closer, as they’d made their slow way up the streets of the frozen city. The central tower felt no nearer.
“It’s not quite close enough yet,” Margaret said.
Margaret slipped a rifle from her back and handed one of her pistols to David, who handed it right back.
“I don’t need it. Why let me waste bullets?”
Another howl, closer.
“Get ready,” she said, so calmly that David almost resented her. Even now, even with all that he had become, the sound held terror for him. Dragged him back to the Dolorous Grey and his woozy flight from the Hounds, made his bones grow spiky with fear, and lit the spark of all too recent memory.
And now he no longer had Carnival to keep it at bay. He closed his shaking hands into fists.
Something broke free of the nearby shadows, claws clattering on the ice, heavy enough that they pierced it with each footfall.
The creature was made of ice, around machinery of some sort. David recognised it at once, a Mechanism of the Engine. It snarled at them and Margaret swung her endothermic rifle towards it. David grabbed her wrist, h
alf expecting her to drive her elbow into his throat. She nearly did.
“That's not going to do much good now, is it?” he said. “The damn thing's made of ice. Besides it’s on our side, sort of.”
Margaret hissed at him, but lowered her weapon.
The Mechanism ran towards them, and crouched as though to leap. David lifted his hand, the Orbis flared and the Mechanism stopped, though its icy jaws clamped open and shut, and its limbs juddered.
“It's all right,” David said, and walked towards it.
Its great head shuddered a moment, then lowered. David reached out and touched its brow, and the Mechanism let him. It was cold to the touch, like him. He remembered these creatures now, remembered the great packs of them that had circled the city, fighting Quarg Hounds.
“Cadell,” a voice whispered in his skull. “The Old Man returns.”
“I know you,” David said, and the guardian made a deep rumbling that might have been a laugh.
Margaret stared at him, her rifle pointed at the creature’s skull. David shook his head.
“It remembers me. Trust me, it will ensure our safe progress through the city,” David said.
Something howled from behind them, as loud as a pistol shot, and Margaret and David turned towards the sound, almost colliding with each other in the process.
The Mechanism turned its head slowly, regarding the street behind them with heavy eyes.
This time Margaret fired her rifle.
The Quarg Hound was unlike anything David had ever seen: part animal, part machine. He knew at once that it had not been born, but made from a motley of living things and components. A Roil-beast engineered for the cold. Sheathed in iron, the Quarg Hound shook off the ice pellets, its huge eyes narrowed.
“Wasting my bullets there, too,” Margaret said petulantly, though she kept her gun raised.
The Mechanism leapt past them and crashed into the metal Hound, David stood and watched as the two monsters struggled, rolling and thrashing, jaws clamped around each other's throats.
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