He marvelled at Margaret’s deft sword strokes. With every step, it seemed, she’d strike another flute out of the sky. They squawked and battered around her rime blade, but soon the ice stilled them and Margaret never lost momentum, nor got too far ahead of David.
At last they reached the Roslyn Dawn to find Cadell and Kara waiting, their faces harried, Kara desperate with worry not for them, but the Dawn. “You were about to be left behind,” she said, as she ran for the controls.
“Not the best time to go sightseeing,” Cadell said.
David was too out of breath to speak.
He clambered with Margaret through the doorifice and into the gondola. His lungs were raw, his heart burned, and his whole body throbbed in time with its terrified beating. He dropped to his haunches and dry retched through the doorifice.
David looked up and saw the figure shambling towards them across the field. He squinted, not quite sure what his eyes were telling him.
Witmoths streamed from its lips and eyelids, drifting in the air.
“Is there a cemetery near here?” he asked.
Kara Jade pointed beyond the lumbering Roiling. “Just over that rise. A cemetery, yes, and a big one.”
The lone Roiling was more pathetic than terrifying.
Until David saw the others. Shambling undead creatures, flowing into the Field of Flight, grabbing those not quick enough to flee and drowning them in moths. And those that had been trampled and stilled, rose up cauled in shivering shadows.
“I think we’re in trouble,” David said.
“Great,” Kara Jade replied. “Because I was really beginning to think we were in danger of not meeting our trouble quota today.”
“Get us out of here now,” Cadell demanded.
It was not just Roilings but people that rushed at them now. Though they would not be people for much longer as the Witmoths made a mad turbulence in the air.
David felt sick to his stomach. “Can we take some more with us?”
“No,” Kara Jade said. “We’re too small. The Dawn’s overloaded as it is.”
Beneath them the Dawn released its docking flagella and a goodly quantity of liquid ballast, and began to rise.
A Roiling grabbed one of the Dawn’s limbs, slowing the Aerokin’s ascent. Others ran to its aid and the Roslyn Dawn’s flight halted. Kara Jade cursed, whispered something to her and reached beneath her control panel for an axe. Margaret grabbed her rifle, sighted along its length. Cadell moved to the doorifice, David could feel the cold coming off him in waves. David stepped back from the door, grabbed the pistol from his pocket in a shaking hand and aimed at the nearest Roiling.
Then another of the Roslyn Dawn’s flagella, its tip barbed, whipped savagely around and knocked the Roilings away.
Margaret fired at the creatures as they fell. The Dawn shot up into the sky, the Roiling hit the ground then slowly rose to its feet: one arm staying on the field, the fingers of its hands clenching and unclenching.
Margaret pursed her lips and fired again and the Roiling fell to the ground and did not move.
Cadell stepped from the door, looking over to David. “Finally, we’re away,” he said.
The Roslyn Dawn’s bioengines growled and into the hot sky she powered. As she rose, Margaret, leaning in the doorifice, fired round after round from her rifle into the Roilings massed below. The air stank of endothermic chemicals.
With every hit she screamed out in triumph.
David grabbed her hand. “Stop! You’re wasting ammunition.”
Margaret swung towards him, her eyes wild. For a second, David thought she might actually use the gun on him, its tip smoked.
“Every dead Roiling is one we won’t have to kill tomorrow.”
“But how many are you killing? A single shot is not enough. Save your bullets for when we need them, when the Roil beasts are close enough to kill and might just kill us.”
David’s breath stopped in his throat. Mr Tope stood alone, on the edge of the field, away from the crowds, looking up.
The Verger caught his eye. He raised his hat and smiled, then walked away, back into the city.
“It’s Tope,” David said, pointing. “Shoot him.”
The Verger, like Margaret, moved almost effortlessly through the crowd. Someone ran at him, Tope kicked him in the face and continued on.
Margaret whistled. “Tenacious isn’t he? He’ll have to give up now.” She aimed her rifle at him, then lowered it. “He’s out of range, but I doubt he’ll escape.” She smiled, then the smile died as she looked upon what the Roil had made.
Fires raged from the deserted suburbs to the inner city. Smoke flooded the sky, a billowing fist of cloud darkened with Roil Spores that smothered everything. And yet it was insignificant compared to what lay just beyond Chapman’s walls. The Obsidian Curtain advanced, a second finger of dark as wide as the city, billowed out from the main front, the gap between it and the city’s fortifications disappearing at an incredible rate.
There was a distant thunderous crack and men and cannon tumbled from the walls. Soldiers were smothered in Witmoths.
“Those thermal sinks are driving it on. Spewing out heat from the world’s core, a primitive and gigantic engine of destruction,” Cadell said, and he couldn’t hide the shock from his voice. “The Roil has never moved so quickly.”
Chapman’s ice cannon fired ceaselessly, but with little effect, and soon they stopped. The transition from thunderous cannonade to silence was shocking. No one remained to fire the guns.
The Roil took the walls in minutes. There was no weaponry capable of denying it entry this time.
From the Northern Gates boiled a stream of refugees.
David wished them speed. Guilt and relief flooded him, and he had an inkling of what Margaret must have gone through.
From the east, carried on the Roil-cast wind and no longer drowned out by the cannon, came the shrieks of things terrified out of their minds.
Thousands of gulls flew above the beach: a huge twisting, skirling sphere of white in which darkness rippled like poison.
“Roil take us all,” he whispered.
Hideous Garment Flutes darted in and out of the flock – tearing the poor birds from the sky – their mouthparts lashing at the air, swallowing flesh, whistling and howling as they moved. They had penned the gulls in and were eating them one by one. Birds dropped to the ground, dead with terror, their corpses swallowed by a milling, yipping darkness of Quarg Hounds.
And that was just the beach. The ruptured walls of the city let the Roil in faster than anyone might flee it. Distance made it all feel so impersonal, but he well knew the terror that drowned the city. Four Quarg Hounds had chased him and Cadell just days ago, now there were more of the creatures than he could have imagined ever existed.
The Southern Wall was gone, swallowed by the pullulating darkness of the Roil. But that was the least of it. Vertigo filled him, and the world shifted in perspective. A huge hand of fire and stone reached out above the wall. For a few moments it hovered there, clenching into a fist.
Then it crashed down. All around the city buildings tumbled, rippling out from that point of impact. The hand rose again, and what looked like the tiniest fragment of some titanic shoulder, and struck the wall a second time. After that there was no wall, the stone and iron crumbled as if nothing but dust.
“Vastkind,” Margaret whispered from beside him, and David had never heard such terror in her voice.
Run, David thought looking down at the teeming thousands.
Run.
Cadell’s lean fingers clenched to impotent fists that he beat softly against the translucent walls. “What manner of Roil is this that controls you?” he said. He looked from David to Margaret and back to David again. And, where there was usually reassurance in Cadell’s eyes, or grim confidence, there was only doubt and disquiet. “What lies ahead will test all our limits.”