David, hesitated a moment more, then slid the ring over the middle finger of his left hand. The ring stopped at his knuckle, then the metal warmed and loosened and passed over it.
“Look,” Cadell said. “A perfect fit. Fancy that. It might feel odd for a day or two, the ring lowers your core temperature, the minnows that generate its power do that: can’t have you being susceptible to Witmoths. The change will probably manifest itself as a head cold but don’t worry, you’ll get used to it and the benefits are many. I’ll get to those in a minute.” He lowered himself back onto the bed with the painful slowness of a man only just acquainted with his antiquity. “There is so much to be done. You are heading away from the Roil but there are other enemies, David. I wish I could help you.”
“But you already have,” David said. “You’ve kept the Carnival at bay. You’ve saved my life over and over again.”
“I only needed to because of where I had taken you. And, as for the Carnival, just why do you think I kept you supplied with the drug, David?”
David looked at him uncomprehending. “To spare me the pain of withdrawal?”
Cadell laughed. “Were it that simple. You’ve suspended your grief with Carnival, you have always kept it at arms length: not just the loss of your father, but that of your mother, too. When you finally pay that price, the cost will be high. I could not have you pay that now. I did not want you to die. I needed you sane, I needed you shielded as much as possible from edged truths that would otherwise cut you.”
“I’m all right,” David said. “I’ll be all right.”
“But I have been far too cruel. When the Carnival leaves you, then you will truly understand.”
“I understand now,” David said.
“David, right now you only think you do. Though it will come to you, and for that I am really sorry.” Cadell laughed. “Sorry! Everything about me is apology. Carnival’s absence may well be the making of you. That tune you whistled, on the train so long ago. You know it is old?”
David thought of his childhood, the memories that tune evoked and the pressures of them that the Carnival held in check. “Yes, my mother used to hum it. It’s almost all I can remember of her. I think it was popular when she was child.”
Cadell shook his head. “It is far older than that. I remember it from my childhood. It is called The Synergist’s Treason and now I understand that treason far better than I ought. It pains me to hear it, and yet I’d like to hear it again.”
David hummed the tune a while – his head buzzing – and Cadell seemed to relax a little. “Much better. Much much better when it isn’t whistled.” He groaned, and shifted in his bed. “I’m tired,” he whispered. “The sort of weariness only Old Men and rocks can know. Too much time. Too much damn time, and now it’s running out. You’d think that could bring some urgency to the flesh. Perhaps it has.”
He sat up with a violence unexpected and grabbed David’s wrist. What came afterwards, David regretted for the rest of his life. Cadell flipped David’s arm around and bit down, tearing at the flesh of David’s hand, something slid beneath his skin, something swift and cold. David howled.
Blood sprayed, as David tore his hand free.
“David?” Margaret’s voice seemed a long way away. “David?”
“Sorry, David.” Cadell’s lips were bloody, but there was an awful tenderness in his gaze. “Sorry that I couldn’t take you all the way to Hardacre. And sorry for this final gift, I’ll deserve your hate.”
David’s eyes rolled up in his head.
Chapter 51
It can be said of the wars that followed, none of them would have occurred but for Stade’s plans. The Roil’s growth was certain, but the way it was met, the choices made, could have been very different.
None are more culpable than Stade. And yet, perhaps things may have been so much worse. Though it is hard to imagine outcomes more dreadful, nor lives lost greater.
Stade was a villain, but he was a villain of his time. And so history has judged him. After all, it was an age of monsters, a role that Stade embraced with gusto.
Medicine looked at the iron thing, well what remained of it. He put aside the field glasses, rubbed at his gritty, aching eyes, and called ahead to Agatha and the driver.
The Grendel slowed to a walking pace as it approached the wreck.
Agatha signalled to the engineer and the Grendel stopped. She dropped from the train while it was still moving and strode towards the wreckage. Smoke billowed from it, though it was a smoke unlike any Medicine had ever seen. It did not dissipate, but hung low, following the sun.
“Keep your distance,” Medicine said.
Early this morning they had heard (and felt) it strike the ground. And now, just a few hours from the Narung Mountains, here it was.
The vehicle was as large as the Grendel, though designed for flight instead. Medicine for the life of him could not see how it might fly. Yet, obviously it had flown before ending up here. Out of its element it looked ridiculous, some poor joke in shattered metal.
As Agatha neared the ship, the smoke coiled up, away from the sun towards the woman. Medicine watched its stealthy movement. He shouted at Agatha to get away, that the smoke was shifting towards her, and the woman blanched. She turned on her heel, slipping something into her mouth, and ran from the crater.
“Stay away from that ship,” she commanded. “And everyone take your Chill.”
“What is it?” Medicine demanded on her.
“They’re called Witmoths. I’d been briefed on them a few days before we left. They’re dangerous, mind altering,” she said. “This thing came from the Roil.”
“Mind altering?” Medicine asked, wondering why he hadn’t been briefed on this as well.
“Let’s just say it changes one’s allegiances. If this came from the Roil then we can expect more of them. It doesn’t do anything by halves.” She handed him a small lozenge. “This is a kind of prophylactic. It’s horrid but it works.”
He slipped it into his mouth and grimaced as it stung his teeth. Medicine’s mind returned to the night in the compound, the sound of thunder in the sky. Every time he looked at the iron ship it made him uneasy. Wherever it had come from, Roil city or Mirrlees research station, he was certain that it did not bode well for them. Very little did.
Such thoughts were quickly forgotten when they came upon a blasted battleground.
Many thousands of Cuttlefolk corpses lay across the plain. The earth itself was blackened and ruined. An airship, this one of a more familiar design, lay in fragments, its ribs rising out of the earth like the burnt bones of a titan.
The air was thick with the choking reek of ash and burning Cuttleflesh. The Cuttlefolk had been beaten here and decisively. What kind of weaponry did the Underground possess that could so blithely defeat such an army?
“Something new.” Agatha mused. “And something powerful. At least we don’t need to warn our colleagues in the mountains about the Cuttlefolk. Let us hope they know we’re coming. I would hate to think of them deciding we were the enemy.”
She called to her troops to raise all the white flags they could and to lower the train’s guns.
“Better to look unthreatening,” she said. Medicine agreed with her, though he couldn’t imagine the Grendel being anything else.
Medicine wasn’t sure what the people of the Underground thought about their fast approaching train, but they did not fire upon it as they crossed those last few miles. Regardless, tension built amongst all those aboard it.
The Grendel reached the end of the line, stopping at a heavy set of gates before which were signs of further struggle, craters and a pile of Cuttlemen dead, though nothing to rival the destruction to the south. The gates opened slowly to admit the train. Ice-cold water washed over them, the train chilled. For the moths, Medicine thought. How long has this been going on?