“Why? They hardly know me.”
“You give them hope,” he said.
Margaret shuddered. The last thing she wanted to hear. How could she give anyone hope when she held none of it herself? Nausea threatened to engulf her. She struggled against it. Pushed it down, just as she had pushed everything else down.
Anderson must have seen some of this in her face for he led her gently from the loading bay.
“I do not wish to be anyone’s hope. If anything, I bring despair. My city is lost, destroyed. And if we have succumbed to the Roil how can you hope to defeat it?” Her voice was flat, she avoided Anderson’s gaze. “I did not ask for this. The things I have seen would extinguish anyone’s hope. I did not face my city’s attackers, but fled. All that I loved I have deserted.”
Anderson flinched at that. Margaret wondered what lay in his past. She had been driven away from the Roil. What might drive a man into it?
“And yet you are here, only a few hundred yards from the edge of the Roil,” he said. “You have survived. And survival is no small thing in these times. Now, you must be very tired.”
“Tired is not the word for what I feel,” she said and stumbled.
“We have sleeping quarters nearby, though you’ll be the first to use them, none of us can sleep here. Not once we’ve crossed the Interface. But you, Margaret, you are made of sterner stuff. Rest now.”
“I can’t rest,” she said. “Not yet. There’s much you must know.”
Anderson’s face grew conflicted. She could see his concern for her but she could also see that he hungered for what she might tell him, for any information that might help them in their study of the Roil. Yet he hesitated.
“I’ll rest when I have shared what I know.”
“If you insist,” he said at last. “Come with me, but the moment you want to stop. We stop.”
He took her to a small room, with a table and chairs and a recording device.
“State of the art,” Anderson said. “It will take down your voice and return it to you. Much more convenient than note taking.”
He manoeuvred a large microphone in front of her. “Now if you’ll just speak into that, slowly and clearly.”
Margaret did. Telling him everything from her wait for her parents through to her flight from the city and her arrival here.
When she had finished, Anderson switched off the machine.
“If I hadn’t seen the Melody Amiss, your cool suit, your obvious parentage, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. And yet, here you are.
“Did you bring blueprints for your parents’ I-Bombs? The machine is off, you can speak with candour.”
Margaret shook her head.
Anderson could not hide his disappointment, though he tried valiantly, smiling. “It does not matter,” he said. “We are researching something similar at any rate. It is good to know we are on the right track. That you survived at all is remarkable. Now you must rest.”
This time Margaret did not argue. She let him lead her away to the showers, where she stripped of her cold suit and bathed.
Her flesh was swollen, and sore, but there were surprisingly few pressure wounds. She let the heat of the shower seep into her and tried to think of nothing but the relief it offered her body.
When she was done, one of the soldiers led her to a small room with a single metal-framed bed, and little more.
Clothes had been laid out, military fatigues, they fit her, reasonably enough. And, while it felt odd to be dressed in something that didn’t chill her or push tightly against her flesh (and when had that cold grip become a comfort?) she fell asleep almost at once.
No dreams haunted her. How could they? Her life was nightmare enough.
A few corridors away from the sleeping quarters was a small room, with a small table, a couple of hard wooden chairs and a door that backed on to the kitchen. There were well-thumbed copies of all the recent Shadow Council stories stacked neatly at one end of the table.
Anderson and Winslow both had offices crammed with notes and maps and memos from the Council, and filing cabinets with large locks, and some that were even fitted with alarms. But it was here that they made their decisions, in this little room, usually with nothing more than a cup of tea, some dry old biscuits and a lot of pacing.
Anderson put his cup of tea down. “This cannot be right. It’s made me uneasy from the beginning. She is a Penn. A Penn,” Anderson said. “Without them we would not have half the weaponry we do.”
Winslow nodded. “But we have our orders.”
Anderson walked the length of the hall, before turning back. “We have been following orders for the last year, even as they have grown less and less reasonable. Winslow, she escaped her city’s fall. She is a resourceful and strong woman, and even if she were not, I cannot in good conscience hand her over to the enemy.”
Winslow nodded.
“It would be folly to trust them. They’re up to something. Great works, some sort of construction, all of it where we can’t go.”
“You’ve felt it too?” Anderson said. “The quivering earth? The distant murmur of old engines?”
“Yes,” Winslow said. “Our darkest nightmares seem ready to flower. And they’d have us make yet another concession.”
Anderson nodded his head, picking up his fast cooling tea and drinking it down. “And why her? What interest does the Roil have in this one person?”
“She is a child of Marcus and Arabella Penn. It does our cause no good to give the enemy what they want. Particularly when they demand a Penn.” He shook his head. “Remember when we were here to fight the Roil, not make deals with it? I think the time for deal making is over.”
The orders mocked him with their cruel simplicity. The single sentence:
“Let the Roil have her. We need more time.”
We have no more time, he thought. Whether we give them Margaret or not.
Anderson scrunched the paper in his hand, throwing it into the bin. “Did you see these orders, Winslow?”
“What orders?” Winslow asked.
Anderson grinned, though he frowned again quickly enough. “Give her another half an hour, she’s almost dead on her feet, and then you better wake her. They’ll be coming soon. Poor Margaret you must run again.”
Chapter 32
In Mirrlees nothing is done in a half-hearted fashion. Bridges, levees, floods all of them are gigantic. Excess is the order of the day, but admire the filigree of Channon Hall or the delicate structure of the Reeping Meet, with its thirteen clocks, and you realise that the human was never sublimated, merely overshadowed. It is there when you look into the dark.
MIRRLEES ON WEEP 200 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL.
“Mr Paul, these are your wards.”
They stood in the rain at the edge of Northmir where the suburbs gave out to the labyrinthine drainage systems and Ur-levees of the city. Before them rose the Northmir Bridge behind them the levee. The road running from it was called the Pewter Highway it gleamed a little in the cloud-dulled light. Three thousand workers waited by the bridge, men and women, skilled and ready to head into the North. And they were indeed his wards.
It stunned him that this was the response to just one call. These people had mustered in a single day, gathered their lives to them and come here. Looking down he could see that none of them had had much to gather. Things were bad, but only bad enough that the poorest folk were willing to leave. People who had nothing to lose, for whom Mirrlees had been a hellhole, even before the rains and certainly since Stade had put an end to all but the most urgent construction.
It would take the Roil itself to come boiling towards the city, before the wealthier denizens of Mirrlees began to consider such action.
All of them are fools, Medicine thought.
He doubted Stade or the Council would stick around that long.