“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.
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, half 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.