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At least the rain had stopped, as ominous as that was; the sun, even hazed with what people told him were Roil spores, was cheering. Though what the sun revealed was less so. The months of constant rain had scarred the city and there was no one left to heal it. The air stank of sewage and dead things and while the rain had hidden such smells — or at the very least dulled them — the sun lifted them up, seemed to take a delight in their acrid pungency.

And at night, and during the day, there could be heard always a distant screaming. And sometimes the sky grew slick and black with the Cuttle messengers. When that happened he kept inside his shop.

Once a Quarg Hound had passed by, its wide eyes taking everything in. It had yapped out something that might have been a kind of warning, and then it had bounded away. Stagwell had watched it all from behind his counter.

There were whispers of a sickness, a spreading madness; that people were not to be trusted. And while there had always been sicknesses, fevers and chills, such was the nature of modern city life, this was an altogether different thing.

The city had been left to the insane. So while he had not had any customers that day, Stagwell found some comfort in the solitude. The few people he had had in the bookstore over the past week had become increasingly desperate or desperately odd. Many times now he had locked the front door, and hid behind the shelves, rather than let some oddly shambling man or woman enter the shop.

Stagwell dusted the biography section, the presence of these collections of lives — simplified and analysed — calming him. At least here was something solid and unchangeable.

The shop jolted, a sudden terrible spasm. Mayor Stade's Brute and Noble Governance fell to the floor, his stern face staring up, and Stagwell almost tumbled down with it. The beams in the ceiling groaned and the building had another petit mal.

He ran to the front of the shop and stuck his head out the door. There were few people on the street and of those that were, fewer remained upright.

The earth quaked again, and Stagwell watched it ripple towards him along the street. He clutched desperately at the door frame and managed to keep his footing. Inside the store, shelves juddered and books crashed to the floor.

His line of sight extended down Main Street and where it ended on Harris Heights, across the River Weep. The earth rippled again and the ground flexed, then bubbled, and the air twisted and grew black with wreckage and broken buildings. A great fiery hand burst through the earth and with it fire and stone struck the sky, shooting up and arcing down. The nearby River Weep hissed, and steam crowded the air — and something else with it that was smokey and flitting. And that something was racing down the street, fanning out, hunting. People screamed, or laughed, or screamed and laughed — and fell down, before they rose on limbs shaky at first, but gripped with a new purpose.

From the top of Ruele Tower, something flared with a great cold light. The air chilled, the smoke fell from the sky, and the hand shuddered and dropped, smashing back through the earth. A bomb, some sort of miniature Engine of the World, Stagwell guessed.

Snow fell, the air chilled.

He rushed inside, but he wasn't the only thing that had fled the cold. Darkness rushed towards him on tiny dusty wings.

All he felt was relief, stronger even than the pain. Relief that it was all over, that he did not need to worry about what to do, that he did not need to care.

A hot old voice whispered in his skull, and suddenly Stagwell Matheson was laughing and getting matches and setting all those tumbled books alight.

By midmorning the retail sector was blazing, by that afternoon the whole city burned, and the sky was dark with ash and smoke.

And thus, before the Roil was even a smudge on the horizon, was the old city of Mirrlees-on-Weep finally taken.

But it wasn't without cost to the Roil.

The Witmoths, the nerves along which the Roil strung its thought, knew for perhaps the first time in twenty years a setback. And though there was no one there to see it, the Roil felt it nonetheless.

The currents beneath the earth were strong and deadly even to Vastkind, but deadlier still was the land above. Each time it burst through the earth, that cruel void, so absent of pressure, threatened to tear it apart. It sank down, stunned and wounded by the upper world, by the cold thing that had flared in the sky.

Down. Down. Into the rushing heart and heat of the world.

Above the surface was a universe of which it desired no part. The forces were too soft, hardly forces at all, and its mind — so attuned to the ebb and flow of electromagnetic fields — could feel the emptiness, the thinning out. And it reacted to it in horror and agony one final time.

Let the chattering children play out their game.

Such pain drowned out their commands — her commands — and slowly, it sank back into the mantle: all glorious heat, all glorious pressure.

It sank and it dreamed its stony terrible dreams again.

The iron ships streaked across the sky. Six of them, though three turned to the east before the dawn, travelling somewhere that Tope did not know. Drift or Stade’s precious Underground, perhaps.

The other three followed precise coordinates, the fastest flight path to Tearwin Meet — and toDavid and the girl Margaret, to whom Tope felt a perverse paternal instinct, that, even as he knew it was not his own, had become almost as strong as that hatred he had possessed for decades. He struggled with the battling desires, the beating warmth, the chill disregard. He knew that if he did not possess that first command — to kill the boy, to crush out what it was that hid within the addict’s blood — then this new love would destroy him, would tear him open and make something so different that he would not recognise it at all.

He sat, face still, not moving a muscle. A belt was stretched tight across his chest, and the ship’s acceleration pushed him into the chair, a hand as certain and as strong as the Roil within him.

The fiery ball missed the first ship, streaked right over it and crashed into the second. It disappeared in a series of bursts, bundles of fire and flame knitted together with strands of smoke.

Tope didn’t even blink, as one last great explosion tore through the sky. Twice more they were fired upon. Neither ship was struck, and their companion’s wreckage became a ruddy blur on the horizon. A second barrage occurred an hour later and another iron ship fell, smoking and broken to the earth, landing with a boom that never quite caught up with Tope’s iron ship.

He watched the ruin of that craft fade into the distance and wondered if he would live to strangle David after all.

They were fired upon at hourly intervals, but this time the ship seemed prepared, or the weapons weren’t, because they managed to evade the flames. And when an hour and a half had passed since the last burst of flames, the iron ship slowed, mountains grew curled and cruel out of the earth, and a wall almost as high, and Tope knew that they had arrived.

CHAPTER 43

The Engine. Even now I cannot say that I understand it. What a marvel it was, and what marvels were we to have made something so far beyond us.

Engines, Deighton

THE OUTER WALL OF TEARWIN MEET 2120 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

Margaret took the last guard duty. She'd had an evening teeming with dreams of the Roil, Tate and its fall, or worse, a Tate unchanged, but empty of everyone but her, a city driven by clockwork — like her father's great Orrery that had mapped out the expansion of the Roil. And that clockwork had hunted her.

She was relieved to escape to the chill monotony of peering beyond the overhang — no one seemed to be sleeping — as though only bad dreams walked these stony fields. Buchan nodded at her over a steaming cup of tea, gestured at her to come and talk, but she shook her head. She wanted to be alone.