Perhaps it was her presence, what she represented, but Howard’s reaction was different.
“Another one, they’ve taken out another one.” Howard’s voice cracked. “This is no time for argument. Go back now or you-”
The third cannon exploded, its muzzle collapsing into the streets of the inner city, buffeting them with stinging heat. Margaret’s ears rang. Ash fell everywhere, squalls of darkness, buffeted by heat and cold. The remaining cannon launched its icy shells futilely into the beast-crowded sky. Far above, black shapes jeered and cackled.
Howard seemed smaller, his shoulders slumped and his hands shook. Then it passed almost at once. They’d been at this battle all their lives. When he looked to Margaret, his face shone with the light of some new kind of resolve… or madness.
“Tate is lost. Betrayed, there can be no other reason for its swift fall.” His words came hard and fast, he grabbed her hands. “In those early years no one believed we stood a chance, but then your mother fell pregnant and we knew hope remained. Please remember that. You were, and have always been, a symbol of hope to us.”
And there it was, that which hurt her the most. The thing she was supposed to be.
Howard led her to the Melody Amiss and signalled that the gates be opened.
Sentinels stepped into the breach and fired their rifles. Howard’s words came fast; he did not look at her. “Drive through, quickly now, I have to shut the gate behind you.”
“Come with me.” She reached for him.
Howard shook his head, changing his hold on the rifle and pulling back, almost as though her touch was all it would take. “No, my family is here. Go, find yours.”
Margaret clambered back into the Melody Amiss, its engine idling, and drove through the gateway into chaos and flame.
The inner city blazed behind her, throwing the road ahead into sharp relief. Most of Tate’s coolants had finished their shift of allegiance from ice to fire. What that fiery treachery revealed was a flowing, flickering image of madness. Throughout the city, ice cracked and melted, lit red and orange as though already given over to the flame. Quarg Hounds and other Roilings cavorted in streets that streamed with foaming bloody water, cold enough that they had to jump from claw to claw or prey to prey, hacking, slashing, feeding. And she had never seen them look so happy, nor seen before the dark cunning in their brute faces.
Here more terror bloomed than any lone ice cannon or armoured carriage could ever hope to halt. Twenty years it had taken them, but at last the siege was over and the Roil triumphant.
The Roil had always been a mighty fist wrapped around the city, biding its time. The fist was closing now, without pause, and she, just as horribly resolute, drove towards the Jut.
Where were her parents?
Just moments before the attack began, the bell had rung with news of their arrival. Perhaps the last thing Sara had done. Margaret tried to separate the bare facts from the deaths and found she couldn’t. Her thoughts were muddied by them. There was too much to consider and far too much to do. Surely, her parents had tried to enter the city, perhaps begun mobilising the defence. Yet she had seen no sign of such mobilisation, nor had any word reached her, as it most surely would.
Her thoughts returned to that first distant explosion, of the Jut disappearing in fire and black smoke. It had happened in an instant. She doubted anyone near it could have survived. A bleak chill overtook her and she forced it down. Down. Far deeper than her waking mind could follow.
Margaret needed the facts.
Until then, everything was speculation and possibility, and leanest possibility at that.
To find out required her driving on, through every cruel nightmare that had ever haunted her, racing towards what may be her worst fear of all.
The cockpit’s thick glass and metal shielded her from all but the loudest, shrillest screams, but it was a guilt-tainted mercy. She should be out there. She should be helping, but the city was lost, and her parents were before her. When she reached the outer gate, she found it a blasted ruin. The bridge beyond smouldered but remained intact.
She paused, not sure what to do. Margaret had expected to find her parents at the gatehouse, dead or alive, but there was nothing, just stony, smoking ruins. Few Roilings had gathered there, the gate’s defences had been engaged. Jets of cold slush shot over the bridge, the run-off flowing back down and around the gatehouse.
Sick to the stomach she drove the carriage slowly towards the ruin.
A sentry lay dead directly in front of her, and she could not make herself drive over the body. Arming all her guns, she leapt out of the Melody Amiss and dashed to the corpse.
It was Sara.
As Margaret approached, Sara sat up. Blood darkened her uniform, and the cold suit beneath. She lifted her rifle and aimed it at Margaret’s head.
Chapter 5
Cadell, where he fits in the Grand Narratives of Time grows ever more tenuous. Surely he is mere apocrypha, as likely a creature as Travis the Grave or Ray Normal.
Everywhere Cadell is mentioned there is chaos, blood and despair. Excise him from history and the fable of the past is pulled away. Excise him from history and hear the wind howl through the holes that are left.
That is the problem of Cadell. He makes no sense, but without him, nothing does.
MIRRLEES
David woke in the bolthole, under the bridge, as the spiders ran across his face, trailing silk. He couldn’t see the creatures, but he could feel them in the dark. He batted them away with a hand already sticky with web. It could have been a dream, it had that light touch, and his dreams that night had been vivid and frequent.
“Go away,” he mumbled.
The spiders started to bite.
David hissed, awake all at once, and scrambled from the bolthole into the lesser dark: slapping his skin, scraping the web from the back of his hands.
The spider bites stopped, though the stinging did not.
Where was Lassiter?
David peered into the dark. “Lassiter?” He could just make out the boy’s legs, further in the bolthole. “Lassiter!”
Lassiter’s foot twitched.
David reached out and grabbed at a shoe. It was coated in silk and spiders, each the size of his little fingernail, started nipping again. But David clung on. He pulled Lassiter free. He scraped the web from the boy, ignoring the bites of the spiders. Then he remembered the electric lantern. He switched it on, and wished he hadn’t
There wasn’t much left of Lassiter’s face. The spiders had already devoured his eyes. David opened Lassiter’s mouth to check his breathing, as his father had taught him, and found it filled with the creatures, they poured out over Lassiter’s lips.
Lassiter had saved his life. They’d fed on him first.
David backed away from the corpse. But not before he saw the photograph. He remembered that one, his mother had paid for it to be taken. He picked it up. Who had Lassiter been working for? And where were they now?
He turned and ran.
Straight into the Old Man. “And where are you going, lad?”
“You!” David swung a fist, and the man caught it, gripped it in a hand that was shockingly cold. David’s knuckles stung, he wrenched his hand free, but had a sense that he had only been able to because the Old Man had let him.
“Good, there’s some fight in you yet,” Cadell said. He pulled the photo from David’s fingers and peered at it.
“How else could Lassiter find you?” he said.
“Lassiter’s dead.”
“I know that.” The Old Man’s voice cracked. “That’s another one to the tally. Mr Milde, you’re coming with me. Long as I’ve some conscience left I’m keeping you safe.”