“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?”
Kara gave him such a dirty look that it was hard not to smile, even with his aching jaw. “I’m a pilot, I know when an Aerokin is coming.”
Medicine was already walking out into the snow, his footsteps tracking towards to the landing fields. A cold wind whipped his coat around his shoulders like an Endym's wings. David's coat was buttoned to his neck. The last of his meagre tolerance for the cold had gone with the ring.
The first Aerokin was coming.
Almost everyone that was not on duty was there to see its arrival. Margaret had even dragged herself from her work in the gardens, her hair tied back on her head, skin almost as pale as the snow. Her coat managed to stay tight around her, barely moving with the wind, as though she had fostered an iron discipline even in her clothes.
A week before, they had received radio transmissions from Drift, fragmentary, and vague: something about an emissary. And now an Aerokin had been spotted.
Mr Buchan and Mr Whig stood with them on the landing platform, watching the wonderful flying creature arrive. This brought back such fine and horrible memories. The last Aerokin David had seen was dead, her pilot cradled in her flagella.
This one was larger, bulkier. Carrying what Kara described as winter ballast, extra layers of fat and what even looked like fur. The wind gusted towards them and David could smell the Aerokin, her familiar odours, evoking something that was once happy and sad within him.
“It's the Meredith Reneged,” Kara said, voice catching in her throat. David squeezed her hand again. “Shine Cam’s Aerokin.”
“And a fine ship she is, too,” Buchan said. Kara glared at him.
“I thought you were busy writing your memoirs and your secret history,” David said.
Buchan grimaced and waved his hands dismissively. “Not now, there's too much work to be done, what with overseeing the retail sector of this fine city. History is written and history is made, and I'm of a mood to make it, young man. After all, we hunted Old Men, all of us, and we survived. We journeyed to the ends of the world. I need time to let that sink in.”
Kara flashed him a smile. “Or you're just a lazy old bastard.”
Buchan snorted, patted her on the back. “There is that, too,” he said.
David considered Cadell’s words again, of what must come after the ice and the snow, and wondered what was happening down south, what perhaps stirred and grew beneath the snow. The thought of Mirrlees and all the cities remade by minnows filled him with no little terror — would he find himself back there an addict? Would he see his mother and father again?
But that lay in the future. A whole people with a whole fabricated history, one that started and stopped and stumbled and slipped, always coming against the Roil, always being beaten back by it.
But now they’d forced a change. There were so many possibilities, for the twelve metropolises lost, and for the Roil itself. It would return, after all, it had never really left, just been driven down again, and David had no doubt that it would come back faster next time, it had learnt a lot in this iteration. David knew that's what he would do.