Tope had hoped that the destruction of the Dolorous Grey would have achieved that, but no, neither Cadell’s nor young Milde’s body had been found in the wreckage.
Despite Stade’s opinion, Tope knew that they were still alive, and that he would find them in Chapman.
So he headed south, to Chapman, hungry for the Old Man’s death.
Chapter 26
Chapman, seat of the oldest council extant, and home to the Festival of Float, is perhaps most famous for that moment from which the Festival was born. A treaty signed between the earth and the sky. Eighty Seven years have passed since that signing. Eighty Seven years that have seen the peak of civilization, and its falling, Eighty Seven years of the Festival.
WILDERNESS 60 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL FACE
David left early that morning with Cadell, continuing along the train line as the rain clouds lightened, leaving the lonely cabin behind them.
Around nine o’clock Cadell stopped and turned his head.
“We need to get away from the line,” he said. “Now.”
David was about to say something, when he heard it. A distant whine, growing louder.
Something was coming, and quickly. They ran away from the tracks, finding cover behind lantana as a vehicle stinking of kerosene rushed past. The smoke from its vents was dark and so bitter it stung David’s nose. There was a Verger at the controls, one he recognised.
David shivered. Mr Tope was going to Chapman.
The engine turned a bend and Tope was gone.
“Interesting,” Cadell said. “I think we had better keep our distance from the tracks. Actually, it’s probably better now if we veer away from them altogether.”
David agreed.
“Nice countryside this,” Cadell said. “It has adapted well to the rain, but even it cannot adapt much further. I remember it from another time, a happier time for me.”
The ground was boggy, plants grown yellow and rotten. Everything had a sort of washed out appearance like a really bad watercolour painting.
“It’s starting to die, drowning in all this rain. The Roil,” Cadell said. “Let me tell you about it. There is much I know of that foul stuff. More than I would wish. It has rained and rained, but you have seen nothing yet. Mcmahon was different as would have been Tate, neither straddled rivers and sat beneath catchments for one. It will rain, without surcease around Mirrlees, for a month, two months, perhaps three. And not like it has before, but heavy rains, flooding rains. Fields will first sink beneath the water then rot. Outlying villages built on the hinterland will slide into mud. There will be death, and the rain will preside over it all, seemingly ceaseless.
“But it will stop, at last. It always stops. Can you see it now? The celebration in the streets, at that cessation, should any streets remain? But then, a drought will descend, heat and dry like nothing the folk of Mirrlees have ever encountered, though those refugees, if Stade opens his gates to them this time, from Chapman will know it and fear it. The black clouds will roll in, but these will not be rain clouds, no for they will extend from the ground a mile high, maybe more. A rolling cliff face of darkness and not a drop of rain in any of it, just chaos, and so the Roil arrives. A single Quarg Hound saunters down Main Street, then another and another. Hideous Garment Flutes turn the sky black with their wings and the deafening whistles of their fistulous bodies and to that music the already broken city dies.”
He paused and shook his head.
“Well that was how it was before the Witmoths. Humans have a way of magnifying disasters, speeding processes up. I wonder what madness lurks now deep within the Roil and its dreaming cities. And what its plans are.”
David shivered despite the warmth of the day.
The Obsidian Curtain contained secrets, certainly. No one from the various expeditions mounted to explore it had ever returned. But what came out was well catalogued. Quarg Hounds. Endyms. Beast Wings. Blood Crabs and Hideous Garment Flutes.
As a child, his uncle who perhaps should have known better, gave David a rather morbid picture book called “Roiclass="underline" A Cautionary Tale for Boys and Girls.”
The book had been written before the Roil had become something of a taboo subject, and was about a naughty boy sent to the Roil as punishment and his encounters with the creatures there. Each and every beast that had ever come out of the Roil and some that the author had obviously decided to make up – so David hoped – had been drawn in painstaking and garish detail. The Quarg Hounds gnashing their bloody teeth, the Garment Flutes whistling deadly threnody.
David had loved that book – particularly the bit where the boy, and he really was a nasty child, was barbequed by a Vermatisaur – and had always been excited and terrified by the prospect of ever encountering such monsters.
Well, now he had and he was no longer excited, just terrified. Terrified and sore.
Surely legs that ached as much as his should be unable to take anything but shuffling steps. Until this day, David had no idea how much his body could ache and keep functioning. He catalogued those pains one by one and in time with the squelch of his steps, paying such little attention to the world around him that when Cadell stopped David almost collided with his back.
“Cadell?”
The Engineer turned towards him, frowning, having plucked a map from one of his many pockets. “The Dolorous Grey goes through Robert, Hillson and Grayville before veering east across the Lakelands. I don’t think there will be much left of those townships.” He wiped his face wearily, then took a deep breath, and reached a hand towards the north. “Yes,” he said. “I can feel a cold change coming on. Short lived, no doubt, but definitely something that will work in our favour.” He frowned. “You had a question?”
“Why did its creatures come up here in the first place?” David asked.
“Chance, as much as anything. Or perhaps not, perhaps they were looking for me. The Roil thrives on heat, and humans are warm and mobile. But not quite warm enough. Didn’t you notice that the passengers seemed almost feverish? Those were the Witmoths pushing their body temperatures up. In the days ahead it is best to not trust anyone with a fever.”
“So has the Roil killed these people?”
“No, no, just changed them. Though it’s not a particularly nice change. In fact it’s a rather nasty one. David, I dread what we will find in Chapman.”
David dreaded it, too.
Chapter 27
The Interface existed, that much we can be certain of. But its secrets remain just that… secrets.
THE INTERFACE WITHIN THE ROIL
Anderson had never expected to end up here. When he had been a boy there had not been a name for a place like this. When he had been a boy, the Roil had been but a rumour, and industry ascendant. He’d been destined for big business, running his father’s company in Mcmahon. How things change. The landscape of Shale, political and environmental, had drowned in the Roil’s madness, and so had he. Was he mad? Once he would have thought himself so, to even imagine such a place. Now he worked here.
Anderson’s footsteps echoed along the tunnel that made up the spine of the Interface, his movements a little stiff, the price of a uniform that was hopefully Roil-retardant. His guards stole around him like shadows. Only their weaponry made a noise, endothermic magazine pressurisation an odd counterpoint to his heavy steps.
Every day that Anderson walked to the Interface – which were most days now – he counted the number of steps required before he was under it. And every day that number decreased, sometimes by as many as seven, but never less than four. The title Interface was a misnomer. It had not been a true interface for nearly two months. The Roil had swept past it, with absolute disregard for such human boundaries, on the fourth day of spring, and it hadn’t stopped.