But that is what he did, which was, perhaps, a wise decision because Margaret stepped off the edge of the wall and into the air, taking David with her. They slid down the wire, the belt burning as it went, almost before David realised that was what Margaret had intended.
He was still trying to protest when they hit the ground, and the impact drove the wind out of him. Why did people insist on throwing him off things?
Margaret rolled to a crouch, standing slowly and buckling her belt back around her waist. She stretched her arms.
“Lucky you’re rather slim for a boy,” she said.
David reddened and was about to protest, when something gripped his ankle and squeezed.
David looked down, a scream choked in his mouth. It was a hand, sprung up from the ground, black bone showing through etiolated leathery flesh. He kicked out and the hand flew away, trailing what looked like ash but was, perhaps, dry old blood, or even clumps of Witmoths.
“Roiling,” he said, quietly, his voice pitched a little too high. He wiped at where the hand had grabbed him, then yelped and jumped when another one tried to do the same thing. “They’re coming up through the ground.”
Margaret nodded and tossed him a rifle, she unsheathed one of her swords, its edges gleamed and steamed.
“The charge is low,” she said. “Make every shot count. Oh, and suck on this.”
She threw a small slab of something cold at him. He slid it into his mouth.
“It’s called Chill, it will lower your temperature a little. Don’t know if it will make much difference, but…”
He almost dropped the rifle. David’s mouth burned with the cold. It was not ice but something frozen and bitter tasting. A hole in one of his teeth started throbbing violently.
Margaret grinned. “That was almost worth it, just to see your face.”
They ran, as all around Roilings pulled themselves from the earth. The creatures moved sluggishly, eyes blinking, Witmoths everywhere about them. They hardly noticed Margaret and David, something for which David was very grateful. There were so many of them, but their attention was focussed elsewhere.
Margaret, swung the rime blade before her and every Roiling flinched from its touch. They forced their way through the mass of Roilings without firing a shot. David doubted that those on the walls would find it as easy, for it was in that direction these creatures headed, David and Margaret were just something to push past, a distraction no more.
Clear of the Roilings and several streets from the wall, they paused for breath. David looked back the way they had come. “Margaret,” he said. “Tope’s coming.”
Margaret tapped David on the shoulder and pointed in the opposite direction. “And he’s bought some friends. You’d think they’d be trying to defend the city.”
“Vergers are like that,” David said. “Tope’s loyalties are to Stade, this city could burn and he wouldn’t care.”
“How very narrow minded,” Margaret said. “You Northerners are an odd lot.”
“Not everyone in Mirrlees is like that. Not at-”
The ground shuddered and the wall where they had been standing just minutes before collapsed; chunks of stone the size of the Roslyn Dawn’s gondola crashed by. Margaret pushed David to the ground. I’m a dead man, he thought. Dead.
When the dust cleared, he remained very much alive. They got to their feet. A long, strident cry echoed down the street, coming from the distant gap in the wall. David did not like the sound at all, it played at his nerves like fingernails run over a cheese grater. More bits of wall crumbled. The edge of the Roil filled the gap.
“What is that noise?” he shouted.
“Sappers,” Margaret said. “This battle is over before it’s even begun. We’ve got to get out of here. They will not have stopped at walls.”
The Vergers walked into the open, before and behind them, Mr Tope stopped.
“David, you’re coming with me,” he shouted. “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m going nowhere,” David said, waving his ice rifle in the air.
“Better somewhere than nowhere, surely?” the Verger said, taking in all the chaos around him with a single motion. “You’ve no choice, lad.”
“We should’ve stayed with the Roslyn Dawn,” Margaret said.
David shook his head, sweat rushed from him, the air was boiling, his guts were cold. “He’d have found us there anyway. We probably made it harder for him coming out to the wall.”
The Verger’s drew free their knives.
“I don’t think we can fight our way out of this.” Margaret lowered her rime blade. David thought back to the night that his running had begun, to the Verger’s knife that had sliced his father’s throat, Tope’s knife.
He pointed his rifle at Tope’s head and fired, the shot went wide. Tope didn’t flinch.
“No,” he said to Margaret. “I’m not giving up.”
Screams filled the air, mad and discordant. Margaret looked to the sky. “David, step back under cover. Now!”
David turned his head towards the noise. Margaret clicked her tongue and yanked him out of the way.
Darkness descended in a mass of bunching flight, a cacophonous surging of off-key notes. The Vergers screamed and thrashed; bled their cruel lives upon the street. As they lay dying, the ground itself fell away and black-eyed creatures, with fleshy mandibles snapping and spiracles hissing, bubbled out of the steaming earth.
Beyond them all stood Mr Tope, a look of quiet dismay upon his face.
David sighted along the rifle hoping to get in a shot, to halt the massacre. Margaret smacked his rifle towards the ground. Her face was hard and her voice when it came was strange and forced.
“Let them die,” Margaret said. She fired a shot at Tope. He ducked out of the way. “The things coming out of the ground are Sappers, I told you they wouldn’t stop at the walls.”
David looked back at the Verger. Tope appeared furious and horrified at once, impotently watching his men as the Hideous Garment Flutes enveloped them, the shrill whistles of their flight exchanged for the soft sounds of flesh being torn from bone. The Sappers had blocked off the path to David and Margaret. Tope snatched a pistol from his belt and started firing, bullets hissed around them.
“Time to go,” Margaret said, stabbing a Sapper in the eye, which screamed shrilly and scuttled back to the safety of the steaming hole.
David nodded and pointed to the heart of the city, not far away, bits of the green field were visible and some of the tents, but it was not to the ground he looked. The sky was filling with airships and Aerokin, all rising and racing north.
“We may have missed the Dawn,” he said. “The ships are leaving.”
“Cadell will wait for us,” Margaret said.
David wished he could be so sure. He remembered Cadell’s face, resolute, that was if Cadell had even made back from the Council Chambers. He turned back towards the Verger one last time, but Tope had already disappeared and only the monsters remained, feasting on pieces of Tope’s men.
Blood darkened the ground, and the sky grew black with Roil spores and beasts. The poplar trees that circled the field shuddered and bent beneath the weight of yowling Endyms and shrieking Hideous Garment Flutes.
The Field of Flight succumbed to anarchy in a series of confrontations and collisions, raised words and screaming matches. People fell, tripped and pushed by the crowd, and came up swinging or worse, they did not come up at all.
Terror held its rough court and bade all do as they would.
The Roil had come, the Roil at last; and there was no comfort to be taken in the distant thunder of the guns. It had been a beautiful day, but beautiful days do not care what they bring. The sun faltered and fled and the Obsidian Curtain began to close upon the city.
All around, airships and Aerokin, each one filled with passengers, now refugees, ascended. Guns were fired, a dangerous proposition around the older Hydrogen ships.
It was a nightmare journey across the field. Hideous Garment Flutes descended in a black cloud. Chill, was no defence against them, and he had to use the rifle as a club, swatting them out of the sky