“Come on,” Cadell said.
They crawled, furtive and fast, upwards over cool wet stone. David tried not to think why it might be wet. Soon the only sound was their quiet breaths or the soft scuffing of boot on rock.
Confluents weren’t the only ones who knew of this tunnel. Thousands upon thousands of cockroaches had gathered here, crunching under foot, the air loud with the papery sound of their flight. Worse were the things that preyed upon them. Spiders the size of David’s hand that brought back flashes of his experience beneath the bridge: only here it was darker and the spiders much bigger.
“Careful,” Cadell hissed. “They’re not afraid to bite.”
One chose that moment to run over David’s face. It was all he could do not to yelp at its firm yet feathery touch.
Cadell brushed it off, he hissed. “Bastard bit me.” He reached into his pockets, pulled out a small bottle topped with an atomiser, and sprayed a mist of something that smelt of vinegar and rosemary onto the wound. He hid the bottle away again.
“Not long now,” Cadell said between clenched teeth. “I can smell a change in the air.”
Sure enough, the crawl space widened, became a tunnel large enough for them to walk upright. A little further on the tunnel opened onto a deserted hillside, by a dead tree. The sound of gunshots echoed over to them, like a storm that had passed into the distance.
“What do we do now?” David asked, leaning against the white tree, and taking deep breaths of air that had never seemed purer.
“We walk again,” Cadell grunted, hefting his bag. “To Chapman.”
The journey to Chapman took a day following a winding hilly road that was never too far from the brown meander of the river. On the way, David noticed a distinct change overtaking the countryside. Where the land before Uhlton had been lush, too lush in fact, with flora almost drowning in the rain. Here plants were twisted, sere things, and the air dry and hazy. What winds there were blew predominantly from the south, and there was something of the furnace in them. It stung the eyes and dried the lungs. Seeing things here was painful. He perspired profusely though it did little to cool him, just brought on a thirst that rapidly depleted their supply of water.
A city boy, he had thought the country a universal green and found it wanting. The only green here that remained ran along the River Weep, and even that was dusty and failing. Animals had deserted the region as well. They’d left little to show of their passing other than picked-clean corpses.
A new sort of tension filled the air. A restlessness that mirrored David’s own.
It reminded David of a new artistic movement popular in Mirrlees called Immediacism, and whilst its bursts of colour and movement were incongruous with this landscape, its sense of things on the precipice of change matched it exactly.
It did not take too much imagination to see these lands turning to dust in the next few months, if the Roil did not take them first and transform them into something alien and cruel. David could see the Roil and its imminence in everything. More concretely, whenever they topped a rise, David would catch a glimpse of the Obsidian Curtain itself. There was no denying its inevitability.
Occasionally David noticed small drifts of what looked like ash or smoke. The closer they got to Chapman the more frequently they floated by.
“Are there a lot of fires down south?” he asked, pointing out yet another drift of smoke.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Cadell said. “But that’s not smoke. It’s something much more insidious: Roil spores.”
David cast his gaze suspiciously over the landscape. “The Roil’s here already?”
“Not quite, those spores are too exposed as yet, they need the full cover of the Roil – heat and shadow – before they can do their handiwork.” He shook his head. “Though it’s something I fear that may not be too long away.”
Cadell stared out into the dry lands, his eyes troubled and his brow furrowed. “It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “I know people think of the Roil and they think of the Obsidian Curtain and all that lies south of it. But the Roil doesn’t stop there. It’s the big wet in Mirrlees, and the drought here, and other more predatory things.”
Late in the afternoon, Cadell stopped and pointed along the dusty road. It tracked up a hill then disappeared beyond it. The road’s veil of wind-borne dust was the only indication that it continued beyond the rise. Just peeking over the hill, was a nest of silos or water towers, though even from this distance David could see that they were in ill repair, holes gaped from their walls, tin rattled and creaked in the wind.
“Over that rise and past that ramshackle bunch of buildings is Chapman. About half an hour’s walk. We’re going to need to split up. We can meet in the city.” Cadell named a place. “Wait for me there.”
“What if you don’t come?”
“I’ll come, but if I don’t, there’s a safe house on Chadwick Street.” He pressed something into David’s hands. “It’s an ice pistol, state of the art Mirrlees design, still has all its darts.” Cadell grinned. “Took it from a Verger.” He showed David how to work it. “Just in case you come across anything on your way into the city,” he said. “David, I’m not going to desert you.”
David believed him. But then no one had deserted him. They’d all been taken away.
Chapter 34
Not all that came out of the dark sought humanity’s destruction. But the Roil has a way of transforming even the highest of motives. And hers were never that high. We speak, of course, of Margaret Penn.
I knew her then, before she became such dark legend, and yet I would be hard pressed to separate truth from lie. She came out of the Roil, and what good ever had its genesis there?
The door opened and the light came on. Margaret’s hands were already gripping her pistols, their barrels pointed at Winslow’s head. Winslow’s eyelids fluttered with fear.
“I’m already awake,” Margaret said, she’d hardly slept at all.
“I can see that,” he said, slowly raising his hands. “Keep the guns, you’ll need them, but we have to get you out of here.”
Margaret nodded, she’d changed back into her cold suit an hour ago. Not feeling safe here, wondering if she would ever feel safe again.
“They’re coming aren’t they? Don’t look so surprised. I’ve been hunted since I left Tate. Why would I expect it to stop? So, where are you taking me? To them?”
Winslow shook his head, raising his hands palm out. “We’re not taking you anywhere near them,” he said, his voice low and calm. “Just put away the pistols. I’d even be happy if you just stopped aiming them at my head.”
“Enough,” Anderson growled and pushed past Winslow. “If there is anyone you should shoot it’s me.”
Margaret lowered her guns, though she did not put them away.
“Smart girl,” Anderson said. “If I was in your situation I’d do the same.”
He sat on the end of the bed. “There is so much that you need to catch up on, and I doubt we have time to tell you anything beyond the merest details.” Margaret was struck by how lined his face was, the dark bags under his eyes. He ran a hand through thinning hair, then looked at his fingers. “I have but the slightest inkling of the world in which you lived. But here there have been terrible defeats even in regions that are yet feel even the barest touch of the Roil. They’ve known loss of life and liberty to fear and a paucity of foresight – or at least a narrowness of it. We have sought to deal with the enemy, once we realised that we could not beat it but the Roil, while it plays at such things, does not parley. It grows because that is what it does, as a storm grows or a wave moves drawn on by the force of the tide.
“But you already understand that. Your existence has been so much more intimately involved with the Roil. What this boils down to is this: the Council demanded that you be given over to the Roil. You see, my employers are desperate for more time. However, they have failed to understand that the Roil would not ask for you if you were not considered important in some way. Extremely important.”