“As you wish,” Kara Jade said, and ran a hand along the inner wall of the cockpit. “If you’re going to die anywhere, my darling, it might as well be here, you know, somewhere bloody exotic.”
She crooned at her craft, and the Dawn descended into the furnace heat: shaking as it struck the violent wind, but never feeling out of control. Kara Jade and her craft were as good as she said they were.
David watched her, entranced. He looked over at Margaret. She was charging her guns. He felt like he should be doing something, but all he had was a handkerchief in his pockets and a wrap of powdered Carnival in his boot.
Could do with some of that now, he thought. He walked towards the sleeping compartment of the Dawn. Cadell stopped him.
“Not now, lad,” he said. “You’ll need your wits about you.”
David nodded. Didn’t even reach for an excuse.
“And close your mouth, you’re gaping like a fish.”
As they neared the ground, objects took shape through the murk. Memories returned unbidden to Margaret and she regretted for the umpteenth time her decision to go on this mad journey.
“The Interface,” Margaret said, pointing down at the long spine of the tunnel ending in the rectangular block of buildings. “They’re using the Interface.”
The Interface had been split open, its contents strewn over the ground, a cannon lay toppled next to a desk chair. A bed rested on Anderson’s carriage. The Melody was nowhere to be seen but still the sight shocked her, worse than she would have expected, remembering that place. Everywhere she went destruction followed and people were lost.
She thought of Anderson. Was he now a puppet of the Witmoths? And her Melody, she could not bear to think of it being used by the Roil. Not that it looked like they needed to.
Below, the earth seethed.
Quarg Hounds boiled into the tunnel, crowding around the Project. The lost Interface had been worn down and overrun.
Something slapped against the window by her head and Margaret started. She frowned when she realised what it was.
“Hideous Garment Flute,” she said, matter-of-factly and stared into its teeth-crammed mouths; row upon row of cartilage and bone snapping shut with every shudder of its flight membranes. Grey mucus slid down the gondola wall.
Beneath her she could see the Roslyn Dawn’s flagella striking out at a knot of the creatures, batting them from the sky. The Aerokin groaned.
“Be calm, my darling,” Kara Jade said softly. “Out soon. Out soon.”
Another flute joined it, and Margaret reached for her ice pistols.
A hand clapped down on hers. The strength and the awful chill in that grip – as though he had devoured all of Winslow’s lozenges – surprised her.
“Don’t be a fool,” Cadell snapped. “Break the gondola walls, if you could, and you let the Roil in, and I’m not quite ready for that.”
His voice trailed off as he looked down, beyond the ruined buildings and the maddening mass of Roil creatures, at the immense fuming structure there. Margaret followed his gaze and stared at what looked like some gigantic termitary.
“Heat sinks,” Cadell said, craning his neck to get a better view. “They have created heat sinks. There and there. I’ve seen nothing like it, not this close to the edge. Well, at least that explains the ground shaking. They’re building a dreaming city. This is not good, not good.”
The Roslyn Dawn continued its descent. Cadell put out a hand.
“Keep it steady, Miss Jade,” he said. “No lower than this, thank you. Just where we are.”
The engines whined. The Roslyn Dawn slowed its descent, then stopped.
“Well done,” Cadell said.
Down below, two huge pipes rose out of the earth, dark smoke poured from their cavernous openings, and around that heat swarmed rippling clumps of shadow.
Witmoths.
The sight reminded Margaret of the vents and chimneys that had once dominated Willowhen Peak. Only here, at the pinnacle of these boiling mouths, no battle raged, these were meant to draw the Roil, meant to sustain it.
Margaret stared over at David, eyes bulging in his head, his mouth wide open like some sort of idiot. He held a pair of binoculars in one hand but he did not use them, perhaps too frightened of what they might reveal.
Now you know, Margaret thought. You have seen the power of this place. What was once abstraction has become reality for you.
David was not the only one to whom this was all new.
Kara Jade had lost her cockiness. “So many,” she whispered.
“The Roil is getting ready for something,” Cadell said. “And that should not be. The Roil does not push, it shambles. It drifts, it dreams: it does not do this.”
“What about the Grand Defeat?” David asked.
“Freak weather conditions,” Cadell said. “A hotter summer, a low pressure system that became a storm that lead to a heatburst. But there was no thought to it, no strategy. This is different.”
“Things have changed,” Margaret said, and slapped a fist against the wall of the gondola, hard enough that one of the Hideous Garment Flutes slipped free and tumble-flew away. She followed its wild improbable peristaltic flight: all those membranes sliding and billowing frantically. She had seen clouds of these beasts fly, loud and shrill, over Tate.
“An I-Bomb. If we possessed an I-Bomb, we could halt this here and clear away the madness with a single detonation.”
“But we do not.” Cadell snapped. “Nor do we have your parents’ laboratories.” He pointed down. “Though it appears our enemy has something similar. Miss Jade, heave too. Now!”
On the Roilscape beneath them, what could only be described as a cannon turned towards them, though most cannon did not look as though they had been grown, nor did they have chambers that bubbled and spat liquid fire.
“Now!”
Kara Jade already had the job in hand, her face a mask of horror and determination. “Strap yourselves in,” she said.
Kara muttered over her controls, the Roslyn Dawn jerked sharply to the left and rose about a hundred yards in what seemed little more than a heartbeat. However, it wasn’t quite enough.
There was a flash of detonation, and the airship lifted on a wave of fire.
Chapter 42
The history of this world cannot be understood without a complete knowledge of the three forces that govern it. The Roil, the Engine and, of course, the Breaching Spire. We know of a Mechanical Winter, we have heard whisperings of the punishment meted out for that by whatever brute intellect rules Tearwin Meet. We know that the Roil is ancient that it has come before.
So what is it that we know?
Nothing.
Our history is but one of events, scattered and continuing, but never in the context that such knowledge would bring.
We stare into the great dark, little more than idiots playing out roles that we do not understand.
WITHIN THE ROIL
David scrambled to his feet, his nose bleeding, spots dancing before his eyes. Glad I have such a thick skull.
At least no one seemed to have noticed his tumble.
“Told you to strap in, idiot!” Kara Jade said, swinging from her controls to glare at him. David dropped into a seat, pulled the belts tight around him.
“Did we take a direct hit?” Cadell demanded. The Old Man hadn’t strapped himself in. He stood by Kara now, peering over her controls. David wondered if they made any sense to him at all.
“No, we’ve everything functioning. A direct hit and you’d hear it, a direct hit and I think we’d be hitting the ground not long after. But I’m getting us out of here, now. Thank the Mothers of the Sky for all this heat. There are thermals enough to lift us to the moons. The Dawn ’s straining for the sky. Strap yourselves in. David, I’m talking to you.”
“Already have,” he said.