Cadell was obviously mad. The Engine of the World, if it had even existed was at least two thousand years old. He’d said as much to Cadell and he’d corrected him. “It’s four, four thousand and eleven years and three months old.”
No one lives that long. Vertigo welled in him at the thought of all that time, and a dim anger. This man had lived that long, but David’s parents were dead. He stopped himself, how easy it was to fall into belief. Cadell was not four thousand years old, maybe seventy, and a well-preserved seventy at that. He’d seen young men less spry.
Cadell seemed to read his thoughts. “A lot of it hasn’t been living, not in the sense you’d recognise it. I’m one of the Old Men. You know, the Punished? Those that were cursed and locked beneath the Ruele Tower for their wisdom and their folly. The Engine’s my business, lad, and you’ll believe me by the end, or you won’t.” Cadell laughed.
“What’s your curse?” David asked.
“Hunger and sanity. You don’t know what that’s like all those ages, and to crave and crave and not even have madness to slide into.” Cadell’s voice fell away to a whisper. At last, he cleared his throat. “Now, we’ve got a train to catch.”
He slung the bag over his shoulder, as though it were nothing. David had tried, and found himself barely able to lift it off the ground. Strength of a madman, nothing more, he thought.
They walked out of the building and into the rain. David turned right, towards the crowded Shop Lanes. “Where are you headed, lad?”
“Central station.”
“Too obvious. We’re going to the bridge.”
“The train doesn’t stop there.” David regarded him quizzically, his opinion of Cadell’s sanity only confirmed.
Cadell opened his umbrella. “And it isn’t going to tonight, but that’s where we’ll board. Easy.”
It wasn’t.
Chapter 10
The railway had ever been the transport of the middle and lower classes: flight is not cheap.
When it declined the world shrank for many. So, too, did the threat of the Roil. That which is beyond the horizon may as well be another world.
SOUTHERN TERMINUS SOUTH OF CHAPMAN: ROIL EDGE
The stationmaster of the Southern Terminus despised the seven days of Halloween, the heat and the faux haunts, but he dreaded the nights, and night was coming, from the east and from the south. Night and the Roil were coming.
He stood upon the edge of the southernmost platform and stared south, through brass binoculars greasy with his fingerprints. He lifted his gaze past weed-drowned marshalling yards, crammed with carriages given over to dry rot and rust, focussing on the obsidian curtain, the point where the Roil rose into the sickly, luminous sky.
It flexed and bulged, ripples of concavity and convexity played ceaselessly along its face. The damn thing was hypnotic. But then, how could the end of the world be anything but hypnotic?
He fished in his pockets for the most recent letter from his wife, and when his hard fingers closed about the soft paper, he found some comfort. He did not read the letter. He had memorised every word. He yearned for her touch. But doubted he would ever know it again, nor hear his children’s laughter. Each letter had become a whispering domestic hope and a terrible rising fear.
Things had been different when he started this commission, no Southern Terminus then. Multiple lines had branched from here and, almost on the quarter hour, the tracks sang to a train’s approach. The Dolorous Grey, the Eastern Line Galvin, the Consolation City Four or the Southern and Western Suburb’s Clattering Eights.
Now they serviced the Dolorous Grey alone. By the time the eight wheeler reached the Southern Terminus all the passengers had disembarked and there were only empty carriages to clean and the dim hope of mail and the even dimmer hope of orders to return north.
The line extended south but ended in darkness and no train had come from there in years.
No train from the south, but over the last year, as the Roil closed the distance between itself and the station, other stranger, crueller rolling stock had followed the tracks. They did not come when the winds blew cold from the Ekalb Mountains in the north, but when the winds were hot and from the south, and those days were ever on the increase, they washed in; drear and dangerous driftwood carried on some bleak tide.
“Hot night,” came a voice from behind him.
Startled, the stationmaster jumped, his heart pounded and rattled in the cage of his ribs. But he did not turn around, just refocused the eyepieces of his binoculars. There was Chill in the office. He’d never thought to keep some with him.
“Where have you been, Jeremy?” he asked, his voice cracking. “We believed you dead.”
“I’ve been away. Hunting. Or so I thought. It’s the merest slip twixt cup and lip `til the hunter becomes the hunted.”
The stationmaster jerked around, raising the binoculars before him like a shield. “What are you talking about?”
Jeremy grinned, a wide and terrible grin. An actor’s grin, or a mask, for surely it was not his own. “Heat is the issue here, the draw and the reasoning; furnace heat, blood heat. The Roil told me, in its loud old voice. Can’t you hear it?” His smile grew and grew and it came spilling from his mouth, dark and frangible, a softly hissing shadow; moth-like they fluttered. So many of them, the man must be filled with them “Witmoths,” Jeremy whispered. “Thought and madness and command.”
The stationmaster stepped back. Too late of course, but it had always been too late. You can only watch the end of the world for so long before you get caught up in it. He took another step backwards.
“Don’t worry,” Jeremy said. “It hurts but briefly.”
The Witmoths struck at his eyes and ears and mouth, and where they touched burned with a pure and terrible agony. His head filled with noise, louder than the thick, stupid racing of his heart. He tried to scream. The moths poured through the useless split of his lips, crammed it with fire. He bit down on his tongue, blood rushed into his mouth and the moths found another portal to his brain.
The binoculars dropped from his fingers, and he dropped to his knees after them, scrambling towards the brass tubes. But no salvation lay there, only mindless grasping amidst the cloud of stinging moths that followed. His wife’s letter fell free and the stationmaster swatted it across the platform. He raised his head and howled. Or tried to.
No sound came, just darkness, from his mouth and eyes.
Cognisance fled, drowned out by a voice: dim, distant, and old.
Get to your feet. It’s still too cold here.
He rose unsteadily. The binoculars lay on the platform, one lens cracked, a dent marring the left barrel. He kicked it over the edge.
“You’re right,” the stationmaster said, bending to pick up the letter, and slipping it into his pocket. “Hardly… hardly hurts at all. Now, let’s get out of this cold.”
The clock had just struck two when the Dolorous Grey arrived at the Southern Terminus. Despite the late hour, it was still sweltering hot as the driver and his crew disembarked. The moons Tacitus and Argent were both low on the horizon, and the stars were dimmer than the driver remembered them.
He shook his head. No matter, they would drink their tea and eat their biscuits, stoke up the engines, clean the carriages and head North again, and the sooner the better. The Southern Terminus was one rest stop that his staff were happy to see truncated. He did not blame them.
He hated being this close to the Roil.
Deserted suburbs surrounded the station. Once these areas had been bustling and crowded and had names like Willingvale and Worryon. Now they were a ghost city, serviced only because the Council demanded appearances be kept up.