Night's Engines

by Trent Jamieson

  He knew he would have to negotiate with Drift – word had just reached them that there were survivors in that city, too – or they might as well let the ships rot. One thing he did know with absolute certainty was these airships would be the last of their generation. There simply wasn't enough cow gut to make the gold-beater's skin. There'd soon enough be pilots and airfolk with no ships to work.

  Medicine thought of all that pent-up energy, all those pilots's egos. Yet another administrative nightmare to add to the menagerie.

  But before then, once the worst of the storms had passed, the ships would be sent out. To Mirrlees and Hardacre to Eltham, and all the other townships, searching for survivors or at the very least, bearing witness to what had happened.

  David clambered out of the airship, shivering as the cold air struck him; his face stung. Twice the wound had grown so horribly infected that Whig had had to drain the pus from it with a syringe. Kara had held his hand through that ordeal.

  The flight had been awful; several times he'd thought they were going to die, despite Watson’s assurances that he could survive anything. Indeed, the look of horror on Watson's face (and echoed in Kara's) was enough to make such assurances null and void. What's more, the ship had constantly required clearing of ice, around the clock, done in shifts that even David had been unable to avoid.

  And all the while he had suffered the pangs of Carnival withdrawal. The screaming aches, the nightmares, more savage and cruel than he could imagine. Once on the ropes he'd actually let go, only to be grabbed by Kara and bundled back inside.

  “You're not dying on me,” she said. “No one dies on me. Not now.”

  And still, when his time came around again, he staggered out and worked on the ice. The hard work ground away his thoughts. The wind cut through them all with a dreadful indifference. And Kara – finding him as some sort of project – found relief from her thoughts, too.

  Margaret alone had stayed in bed. Sometimes she would speak, but no one was ever entirely sure that she was speaking to them. Once she demanded her guns, another time her mother. Kara looked after her, too. With a kindness and a sensitivity that David found surprising and utterly wonderful.

  No one dies on me.

  And no one had.

  And now, after that, here were so many people, unfamiliar faces one and

  all, until he came to Medicine. David nodded towards him and tried to smile. The former leader of the Confluent party looked at him and David thought he was going to cry. There was a hesitation there, perhaps a guilt, but not fear. “You're safe,” Medicine said.

  David nodded. “I'm safe.” He moved slowly, every part of his body ached, his face burned. “But Margaret...”

  “Your friend?”

  Two of Buchan and Whig's men were carrying Margaret out on a stretcher. Solemn and slow.

  Medicine looked at the woman. “Infirmary, now,” he said, and sent a man to lead them there. David made to follow, except Aunt Veronica was hugging him, squeezing him so tight he thought he might break a rib. She stepped back and grimaced.

  “David, David! You look terrible,” Veronica said.

  “Would people stop telling me that?” he said.

  “I mean it. You look terrible, and if I can't tell you that, who can?” David put an arm around her, let her bear his weight. “You don't look so good yourself.”

  Veronica huffed. “Look a damn sight better than you do! Though a scar is good on a man, and that will be a good scar.”

  David touched his jaw, the wound still burned.

  “I'm so sorry,” Medicine said. “This didn't turn out how I expected. Cadell was never meant to...”

  “You did what you thought was right,” David said. “I'm here. I'm here now.”

  “But if I hadn't...”

  “If you hadn't, I’d be dead.”

  “Time to get inside,” Kara said from behind him. “And not another moment on that bloody ship.”

  His aunt looked from David to the pilot and back again, and gave him an enquiring look. He shook his head. Still, she raised an eyebrow.

  “I've heard a lot about you,” Veronica said. “Raven Skye's sister, and just as wild.”

  Kara stared at her blankly. “We're here,” she said. “We’ve made it.”

  “Home for now,” Veronica said, and she didn't ask about Kara's Aerokin. David loved her for that.

  “So are you letting us in?” Buchan boomed. “I'm tired and hungry and have spent far too many hours in the air. Let us in and be done with it.”

  “Of course,” Medicine said.

  They moved onto the gantry and David stopped, and his breath stopped in his throat.

  “Here it is,” Medicine said. “I bet you never expected to see it.”

  “No,” David said. “But I think we all expected things to end badly. And who could say that it hasn't? The Roil was coming, whether we did anything or not. All the denial in the world could not stop it.”

  “A lot of people made it here, David. Because Stade had constructed this place, more people survived then we had a right to expect. Whatever I think of the cruel bastard, I have to give him that.” Medicine regarded David a little more closely, though David wasn't sure how the man felt about what he saw. “You look different, and not just that scar.”

  “I feel different.” He looked down at the ring on his finger. It was just a ring now, its mechanisms worn out, soldered together by the final engagement of the Engine of the World. “It's the Carnival, I guess. I stopped taking the Carnival.”

  David took it all in, the extent of the Underground. Surely this city was as big as Mirrlees, maybe bigger. Tunnels ran wider than football fields deep into the mountain, stretching further than he could see, scaffolding covering their walls, surrounding other tunnels, leading deeper into the belly of the world. Machines worked non-stop and everywhere there were people. Some paused to watch them curiously, then got back to their work. Life hadn’t stopped just because the Engine of the World had turned.

  David, for all his exhaustion, watched them intently. Here was the seed of something. Not his own redemption, but a world’s.

  Margaret’s stomach still pulled where the stitches had been, she was still weak. But finally they had let her see this Underground with David and Medicine Paul.

  He'd prepared her a little for the world beyond the infirmary's walls. But, it still proved a surprise.

  Margaret sighed, her eyes widening at what she saw, the curvature of streets, the whine of machinery, the distant glimmer of ice shields, the chaos of pipes – all with arcane uses, though ones she knew she could guess at. All of it familiar.

  “I know this place. I know this place,” she said.

  Medicine chuckled. “Of course you do, Miss Penn. Where do you think they got the blueprints? This last great project of Stade and the Council of Engineers would be nothing without the city of Tate, and the Penns. We have survived because of your family.

  “It can be a dismal stink hole of a metropolis, too hot in some of the caverns, too chilly in others; and the lice, let me not start on them. But until the cold passes, when and if it passes, we can survive here,” Medicine said.

  “No,” David said. “We must do more than survive. This must be the start of something new. I’ve seen what our people have done, what we’re capable of. And I know what we must do. Just how to do it? That's the question.”

  “And what is that?” Medicine asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Build ships that cross the dark above,” David said. “And leave this place. All our industry, all our work, must be directed towards that one task. It is more than a lifetime's work, and we must complete it in less. We do not belong here, and every day that we remain is a continuation of an ancient evil. It must end.”

  “Then where do we belong?” Medicine asked.

  “Maybe we don't belong anywhere but up there. Cadell's people designed us for this world, or the world that they constructed at any rate. But that world itself was a lie, so
mething they built on and from the bones of another.” He smiled. “And those bones will never rest, nor should they. This is the Roil’s world. If there is anywhere for us, it is out in the greater darkness. It is time to dismantle the Engine of the World, and build instead Engines to the Stars.”

  “It’s a dream worthy of Travis the Grave,” Medicine said.

  David smiled at Margaret, and it was a grin as patronising as any of Cadell’s, but she could forgive him it. “Not at all. This is no tale in which just a few face the perilous journey, this will be a story of an entire people. All of us have suffered, this whole world is a world of suffering, but we will see an end to that. We have to.”

  When she was strong enough, Margaret spoke to the head horticulturalist – after all, she was well acquainted with the difficulties of subterranean agriculture – who was at first sceptical, then excited by her suggestions. They talked until she was exhausted. Margaret left him scrawled notes, only allowed to leave once she promised she would return the next day.

  She'd already remembered and modified her parents' lighting system and she knew that they would be proud.

  That afternoon Medicine had shown Margaret her room, it wasn't much, but it was hers. And she knew that she wouldn't be going anywhere for some time. She imagined the stark walls covered with her designs.

  In a few months she knew she would travel with David to Drift. He was anxious to explore that ancient city's catacombs, perhaps study the workings of its grand engines.

  David had changed and it wasn't only Cadell's influence there.

  She sat in her room, holding her father's notebook. He had loved her, as had her mother. Even at the end she was certain of that, the Roilings had never attacked her as hard as they could. Perhaps even then her mother had had an inkling of what was about to happen. Perhaps they had seen the end and desired her survival. She found some comfort in the thought.

  She looked at her guns, and that book: all that she had left of Tate. She closed her eyes and tried to visualise the city. It did not come to her as clearly as she would have liked. She could feel the memories fading, the horror of it all, but also the good things of that life. Sometimes she'd pause and wait for the rumble of the Four Cannon, but it did not come. But even that did not happen so often now.

  Tate remained alive in her, and while she lived, she could not lose it completely. And if David was right, if the metropolis would grow again, then she would see it once more, though it would be different, it wouldn't be her city.

  She should be resting; there was so much to do.

  But being a Penn, she put her father’s book down, got up off the bed and sat at her tiny desk, so unlike her parents' grand table in the library. She took a deep breath and began to modify another one of her parents' designs – she was finding them so easy to remember now – and as she worked, thinking of her mother and her father and their old vast library, she began to cry.

  CHAPTER 55

  From heat to cold, Shale was fury. And we are the first to know that. What a curious thing that is. And what a storm that change brought about, three years and only now is it ending. I write this in the anticipation of a spring. Forgive me my excitement. I never expected to live to see it, and yet I, and yet we, have.

  Recollections of a Storm, Deighton

  THE UNDERGROUND

  David's new room was small, far smaller than the one he had had in his father’s house, or even the room at the Habitual Fool. But it was his, and somehow, unlike the others, it did not feel like a cage. He'd already managed to find a few books he hadn't read and these were piled up, all wonderful potential, next to his bed.

  One day, David knew he would sit down and write his own story. It would be a rough-and-ready work, that writing, for he did not possess the finer points of art and history, but it might help the pain. That was the worst thing of all, the pain of what he had done and the guilt that came from wanting it gone. He'd destroyed a world: he didn't deserve to lose the way it had marked him.

  He’d worked all day, helping Medicine in the infirmary. It was little more than getting things when Medicine demanded them, but it was good work, and the sort that meant you met a lot of people. David was never going to be a doctor, but it was a start at building something. And, as they worked, he could talk to Medicine Paul. And they had. Catching up on each other's lives, both adjusting to just how much the other had changed in just a few months. With Medicine, Veronica, Margaret and Kara, it was like having a family again. Though that was only the beginning. He had a whole people to care for, and to protect.

  He crawled into bed, and slept. And one last time he dreamed a dream that wasn't.

  David knew this place.

  Cadell was there, or the shadow of Cadell.

  The panoptic map was dark, though David could see clouds swirling across the map's surface, wiping it clean. There was nothing to see here any more. No rain clouds over Mirrlees, no Mirrlees at all, just that scouring whiteness.

  “You did good, Mr Milde,” Cadell said, distracting him from the map. “Better than I could have expected.”

  “You lied to me,” David said.

  “Surely you're used to that.” Cadell patted him on the back. “Would you have done it if I hadn't?” His face split with something that might have passed as a smile. David could see that he didn't care, not really.

  “I might have questioned it more deeply,” David said, hearing the lie before it came from his mouth, then watching the words tumble down into the sky, the vowels in white, the consonants red and green – it was a dream, after all. “I might have found another way.”

  Cadell shook his head. “The Roil doesn't negotiate.” He looked at his pocket watch. “And it will come back. And, worse than that, the cities will be reborn, reseeded, the people there risen whole from the earth with new-sprung memories.

  “In a few years when the snows recede, you will find a new Mayor Stade. A new Council, all with memories and histories leading up to the Roil. The Engine will have edited those bits out. There will be many puzzles for you to solve, and histories for you to unpick, and I am sorry that I cannot be there with you. Except, of course, I will be, only I won't know you, and I will be in a cage with the other Old Men.

  “Remember, once, how I told you how you would never understand the things that I had seen and done, that I would rather that you didn't. I meant that. Not just because it put me in a bad light, but because of what it would do to you. And I was right. Now, I think it is time that we said our farewells, don't you?” He started folding up papers, turning down switches with his long pallid fingers, so that the light in the panoptic map room dimmed even further.

  David shoved his hands in his pockets. “If you want forgiveness, I can't give it to you.”

  Cadell laughed, as though that might just be the biggest joke in the world; he wiped at his eyes, then looked at David with a genuine fondness.

  “You and me share that, David. Regardless of how we have come to that sharing.” Cadell stretched and his bones cracked. The Old Man winced. “Neither of us expects to be forgiven. The universe continues regardless, it's a big old thing, the universe, and it doesn't give a damn.” He yawned, and started for the door.

  “When you slept,” David said, his voice stopping Cadell as he reached for the door handle, “there was always a tear, running down your cheek. Why were you crying?”

  “Why was I crying?” Cadell laughed again, softly, his eyes gentle, though they still possessed a terrible hardness. He dropped his hand from the door. “That song, the one I had you hum when I was dying, the one I hummed back at you: 'The Synergist's Treason' it was called.”

  “Yes,” David said. “I remember that.”

  Cadell patted David on the arm. “I lied when I told you I heard it in my childhood.” He smiled that smug smile. “I wrote that song, it was vanity – nothing more – that had me demand that you sing it to me. It is the memory of my life bound in music. Dear boy, after the things I've done, and not just once,
wouldn't you cry?”

  David woke, his face wet. It was dark; the lights outside had been dimmed in turn with the diurnal sequence. He lifted his watch to his face and the radium hands blurred into view. Three o’clock. He pulled his arm away, and it was as if the watch had never existed, he could be staring into the heart of the Engine's cage again. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could feel the ground trembling, another storm assailing the mountain perhaps, or heavy machinery – despite the dimmed lights, the Underground never really stopped, it was a mechanism almost as complex as the Engine itself.

  “It's over,” he said softly, his face aching with the movement. There were drugs he could take, to deal with the pain, but David refused them. He was done with hiding from the pain.

  “All done,” he said into the dark.

  But, of course, it wasn't.

  Something cold pressed against his side, he reached down, and found the Orbis, its edges rough and already flaking. He rubbed the finger that had borne it, and there was nothing to show the ring had ever been there. His thoughts, too, were less crowded, no longer wedded to the Engine of the World and its Mechanical Winter. The sadness that welled up in him was a surprise. Part of him had grown used to bearing all those memories, and now they were gone, it didn't quite know what to do. He'd become smaller, no need to contain Cadell anymore. But that didn’t mean his ambitions had shrunk.

  He put the ring on his bedside table. Perhaps Medicine or Buchan would like to study it, this last vestige of the Old Man. One thing he knew for certain, he would never wear the Orbis again.

  He stared into the dark a while and, in the dark, he fell again to sleep.

  It turned out he had little choice regarding the Orbis. He woke to find that all that was left of it was a circlet of dust.

  A universe reduced to nothing.

  David stood with Kara and Margaret.

  He touched his jaw with a gloved hand, and pressed at the ache. Kara squeezed his other hand.

  “I can feel her out there,” she said, and David squeezed her hand back.

  “Are you sure?”