Cadell beat his hands against the wall, over and over again. “I’ve left this too late.”
“We’re out of it now,” Kara Jade said. “There is some solace in the winds at least. Up here they are fast, my Roslyn knows what to make of them.”
Kara Jade piloted the craft, her face composed and professional, even if sweat streamed from her brow and her hands shook. She looked to the others, David recognised her horror. It mirrored his. “We’ll reach the Free State of Hardacre in eighteen hours if this keeps up, twenty-two if the winds change,” she said. Her face twisted and she groaned. “We’ll make the bastards pay, won’t we?”
Margaret nodded, and David considered her resolute expression, and the way she packed away her weaponry with an efficiency at once beautiful and terrifying. Rather like the Roil.
“We’ll make them pay. We’ll wipe the blasted earth of them. I’ll not see another city fall,” Margaret said, as though she was capable of such things, as though she might single-handedly save the world.
That fantasy took him: that she and Cadell could do it. Here, with the sky crowded with airships and Aerokin rushing into the North, things might just turn out all right.
Until he looked back at the smoking, broken city of Chapman, the madness of the Roil looming behind it. All fantasies fell away, leaving only the ruin of hope and the flight of the damned, because the Roil wouldn’t stop with this city. The Roil wouldn’t stop until all the world was a ruddy darkness, and all that lived was its own.
Chapter 47
Vergers possess loyalties as fierce as blood to ideologies little understood by the rest of us. Is it any wonder that we feared them, these that killed and laughed in the face of death.
CHAPMAN TOWER OF ENGINEERS, ROIL TRANSITIONAL ZONE
Order had abdicated the Tower of Engineers to madness. Outside, the twin Lights of Reason dimmed, flickered back to full luminance, and then failed completely. Smoke shifted in the dark in a way that smoke should not, drawn to the slightest movement, the smallest intake of breath.
But not all movement. Not all breath.
No one saw Tope enter the building. The door was unguarded, the locks broken.
Tope did not sneak or hurry, just walked, sucking on Chill, and was paid no notice. Tope was a showman, capable of making himself very noticeable indeed, but this day he moved as a ghost; apt, for the dead walked.
He strode to the stairs, eschewing the elevator altogether. Down three flights he walked, his steps so light that they failed to echo before or behind him.
He reached a narrow corridor, stinking of wet and ozone: at its end was a door. He studied the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, until he was sure it remained uncompromised. Sound and sealed, as far as he could tell.
Mr Tope pulled the door open.
He stepped into a cramped room, packed with all manner of machinery, the air hummed with science and shadows.
A man sat waiting for him, his hands curled into fists.
Tope frowned, the bastard smelt of Carnival; he hated drug addicts. After all, one had just evaded him for the third time.
But he needed this man.
“I’ve taken something for my nerves, Mr Tope,” the fellow said. One of his hands uncurled, revealing a tiny silver case. He’d clutched it so tightly that it left marks. “Would you like some?”
Mr Tope shook his head and the man gave a vapid sort of laugh. “Doesn’t surprise me, you Vergers are all alike. You have the information?”
Mr Tope nodded.
“Tell him of the Vastkind, and that the Old Man was here, and more. He fled to the North in the Roslyn Dawn.”
The ground shook, dust slid from the top of machinery.
The man crouched over his machine and tapped and whispered, his whole body shuddering with the strain of his craft. He had done this too many times that day, and the Carnival did not help. When he was finished he turned, his face pale, blood running thickly out of one nostril. He wiped at it stupidly, one of his eyelids twitched.
“Well, it is done? That is all?”
Tope nodded. “We are, of course, expendable. Do you think it worthwhile escaping?”
The man laughed and took a little more of his powder. His pupils narrowed to pinpricks, his shaking hands stilled and he tossed the empty silver case aside and took a deep breath. “The moths are everywhere, and they would love to sup upon our memories.”
“So we are agreed.”
“Follow me,” the addict said.
They left the room, locking the door behind them, and walked along halls and down steep and winding stairs – the addict shuffling ahead, the Verger flowing behind like a shadow – until they reached a large basement crowded with metal vats. Here, the air was cool and dry. The room loud with the steady hum of machinery.
Mr Tope shut the door behind them and locked it.
“Has its own power supply.” The man flicked a switch and one of the tubs opened with a hiss of hydraulics.
The door to the room cracked, wood splintered. Mr Tope turned towards the sound; people laughed and sang outside.
He looked down at those steaming tubs.
“Liquid nitrogen,” the man said, pale-faced. “It’s the only way.”
The Verger nodded. “We know too much.”
The door buckled, something slammed into it again.
“I’m frightened,” the man said.
“Of course you are.” Mr Tope slid his blade, almost gently, along the man’s throat. The body fell into the vat and was gone.
At least it will be quick, he thought.
The door burst open. Mr Tope flicked his gaze back at the opening. Witmoths raced towards him, dying and falling as soon as they touched the cooler air.
Mr Tope tipped his hat, and stepped off into the cold.
He was dead before the liquid nitrogen reached his neck.
Stade looked down at the note and dropped his teacup.
It smashed onto the floor making everyone else in the room jump. He ignored it, ignored them; holding his saucer out before him like a half-wit or a supplicant. He stumbled to the window and the comfort of his city. He glared out at the dark river pregnant with distant storms, the sombre sky scarred with cranes and ships and smoke. To the south, Chapman was burning. Not that he would ever see those fires, the rain had sealed up that horizon. And yet, his mind’s-eye flared with the horror of it.
Stade blinked.
A dozen haunted, vapid faces, reflected in the window, stared at him. Fools, he thought and let his saucer drop as well. But I share in that folly. Them to look to me for guidance, and me to think that I am up to the task of providing it.
Chapman was gone, the facade of its defence had been just that. So what?
But Vastkind, now that he had not wanted to hear at all. The surface seethed with tempests and wars, but they were as nothing to the fires below.
The Underground. If the Roil learnt of that, Vastkind would find it and every plan would be as dust.
But the Roil would not. He refused to let his mind stray down that awful path. Then the second message boy arrived, a fine lad who in other times probably would have become a Verger.
“Sir,” he whispered, as the other councillors drew closer, “there’s been a sighting in the North. The Cuttlefolk, they’ve massed an army. They have come around the Margin, two days, maybe three and the city will be under siege. Already their messengers are attacking dirigibles and Aerokin.”
Staid cleared his throat; fumbled in his pockets for a cigar. He needed time, but there just wasn’t enough of it. Had there ever really been?
There, he thought, fingers clenching around the cigar. He found his lighter. They watched him, as though he could really do anything now.
“It’s beginning, as we always knew it would, for us as it did for all the metropolises of Shale.” He lit the cigar, clamped it between his teeth and puffed once, blowing out smoke. “And not at all the same, there will be no lovely view of the Obsidian Curtain for Mirrlees. The Roil’s reach has lengthened, as we feared. It is time to evacuate the city as best we can. Let the bastards have it. Ready or not, we’re going to the Underground.”