Bah. Build a weapon with a conscience and what do you get? Trouble.
“You have no choice,” Cadell said. “You’re just a machine.”
The Engine’s face darkened. “I am no less human than you, Mr Cadell. And do not tell me you have not known doubt. Why, this conversation should have occurred earlier, but it did not. You have always submitted to my punishment. Just a machine, indeed.”
“That’s not an issue. You are the Engine of the World, you have no choice.” Cadell repeated. “None of us have any choice, we’ve gone beyond the time of choices. If we do not act, night will fall forever.”
The Engine shook its head. “No. The galaxy moves on. I understand what I am and why I am. I will not fail, should you require it of me. But I will not make it easy for you.”
“What will you do? Conspire with the Roil?”
“Heavens no, Mr Cadell. That is not at all what I am suggesting. The Roil will not deal with me, I am too alien to it. The time will come when you understand me, that time is not now but soon, perhaps, it will all start to make sense.” The Engine bowed. “This is but a warning.”
Then the engine was gone, running down the hill and up the next in a series of precise distance eating steps that Cadell knew he had no hope of matching.
Still, Cadell made to follow (what other choice did he have?) but, at that moment, the door behind him opened with a ping. He turned towards it.
A nervous Gaffney waited at the doorway.
“You may not believe it,” Gaffney said. “But I am quite glad to see you. I am to take you to the meeting, sir.”
Cadell paused and turned to see the Engine disappearing over the hill.
Cadell scowled and Gaffney blanched. “I would hurry, sir. This portal is most unstable and heaven knows where here is, but I’ll wager it would take us sometime to reach Chapman.”
“All right,” Cadell said.
He stormed back into the elevator, cringing as he passed through the portal, the doors clanged shut behind him.
Chapter 44
The Gathering Plains remind us more than anywhere of the futility of war. What does it do but build resentment? It deposits rage for the generations ahead, and they pay its price with interest compounded.
GATHERING PLAINS
Out on the Gathering Plains the grass grew tall and the rains were lighter than they had been in Mirrlees for months, and far less frequent. So, with no sodden earth to suck hungrily at their boots or the wheels of their remaining carts, they made good progress. And that was not the only difference. It was cooler here. Cloud cover was minimal in the evenings, releasing the heat and revealing stars and moons in all their glory.
Medicine had almost forgotten what it was like to feel cold, they all had. It didn’t take long to remember. There was little fuel for fires, so people crammed into tents, their body heat making do.
Medicine wondered if it might not lead to a population spike in the Underground. There was certainly a lot of sex at night. Moans and groans and giggles kept him up until late. More’s the pity, none were coming from his tent.
Medicine sat alone, with his map powder and cartography arrayed before him. There was the Margin, a dark patch in the middle of the map, above it the huge space that was the Gathering Plains, marked only by Carnelon, the Cuttlefolk’s city.
A cold cup of tea sat against one elbow, a half-eaten plate of beans obscured the Narung Mountains on the map.
He took a pinch of map powder, to see it more vividly. All it did was reveal space, trackless nothingness, best considered while hurtling north by train, or from above, warm in the gondola of an Aerokin.
Agatha popped her head through the tent’s opening.
He lifted his head towards her, blinking away the powder.
“You want those beans?” she asked, gesturing at the table.
“No, I’m not hungry.”
She didn’t ask twice.
“What are you doing?” Her mouth still full of beans. Medicine frowned at her. “You’ve studied those maps a hundred times with and without powder. We’ve the Margin behind us. The Gathering Plains all around. We follow the Highway and the railway another hundred miles, then the Hidden Line. Not much map reading required.”
Medicine nodded, but his lips thinned. He squinted at the map, the Gathering Plains vaster now the plate had gone. “I never wanted this job.”
“Ah, so you blame yourself for those we lost?”
Medicine nodded. “Of course I do.”
“You think you killed them?”
Medicine looked at her.
“Cause you didn’t.” Agatha brushed his face with her fingertips, startling him. “Don’t let their deaths weigh down on you. No one said it would be easy. The Margin’s ghouls and haunts are hungry bastards, Roil take them. Be grateful that most of us survived the journey.”
Agatha’s craggy features betrayed little emotion, some sadness and some weariness. She watched him calmly, and Medicine drew a little of that calm to him, though his heart beat the faster for her gaze.
“How do you do it?” Medicine said. “How do you keep leading your soldiers?”
“Not much choice. If I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I know they’d be worse than me. I follow my orders, to the best of my not inconsiderable ability, and make sure that we make it through. It’s not easy. It never is. But the hard part’s over.”
“And what was that?”
“Getting out of that damn drowned city in the first place.”
Surely that couldn’t be enough. “This was not how I imagined it. How could I anticipate this? I was certain I would never work for the Council and I knew Stade would be my enemy till the day I died. Why, I expected him to slice open my throat, perhaps gloat over my corpse. Yet here I am.”
Agatha sat down next to him. “Loyalties are fickle things. We are talking about survival of the species now, think of every human gone, every vestige of our race worn away, not in eons, but in our lifetime. Do we just let that happen?”
“No, but what-”
“We’ve set our course,” she said, sliding the empty bowl away from her. “Now we see it through, because there is no turning back.”
The Gathering Plains worked at Medicine’s mind incessantly, and he was not the only one. At least in the swamps and the Margin they had the illusion of being enclosed, shielded, even if it was by a cruel hand, from long vistas, from endless space. Here the land opened out, and once the Margin was out of sight there seemed no landmark to give it a beginning or an end, beyond the occasional rocky hillock or twisted old tree, and even these were oddly threatening, distance dissolving them, making them disappear and reappear with no respect for perspective.
And Medicine could feel the land doing that to his thoughts, dragging them out destroying his sense of space.
All they had were the railway tracks and the highway, two parallel lines that ran straight and long all the way to the Narung Mountains.
These were Mirrlees people, and the undulating city with its great walls, bridges and levees devoured such views, the most open ground they had ever known was the Grangefeld Parklands or the sporting fields of Crickham and Montry. The emptiness ate at them, stars had never seemed so bright and yet so distant, the darkness beneath so vast. And the sky, the sky was a great blue dome threatening to lift them up and up into nothing. Even the grass that swayed and hissed with the wind, building in volume, well before its first breaths arrived, was vaguely threatening.
Medicine took to searching out Aerokin and airships just to break the grim monotony of those empty skies. However, this time of year most of the aircraft were down south for the festival so there were few of those, and the most interesting of those was of Hardacre make: a spy ship flying low and fast across the horizon.
He pointed out the ship to Agatha, though he suspected she had already seen it. “What do you reckon they make of us?”