Night's Engines Read online

  David nodded. “You’re right, of course. We need to hunt him down, and stop him. Absolutely.”

  “Are you mocking me?” Margaret demanded. “Because I will not be mocked.”

  “No,” David said, and so what if he was? “But it is too late tonight. I don’t think it would be good to find him in the darkness. But tomorrow, when the sun’s up, then we have a better chance.”

  He smiled at her. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone off hunting him alone.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I tried, I may as well have been hunting a ghost.”

  David was shocked. How unlike her to admit a weakness, perhaps he wasn’t the only one changing. “And you think having me around with you will give you an advantage? Maybe you’re the one doing the mocking.”

  “Once I’d have laughed at the thought of needing your help. But, David, you’re not yourself any more, you even move differently now.”

  Really, David thought, do I? He came to the foot of the bed, and sat down.

  Margaret’s eyes followed him intently, and not without a little suspicion. He grinned at her. Her lips thinned.

  “Whatever Cadell did to you, it’s changed you. And not just because you’re wearing the Old Man’s Orbis.” She looked from the Orbis on his finger, to the pen that he still held in his hands, then over at the desk. “What have you been writing?”

  “Nothing,” David said. Which was close enough to the truth. He’d tried to pen a letter to his Aunt Veronica and failed and failed and failed. All he’d ended up doing was scratching his name in the desk. Ten sheets of paper were scrunched up in the bin by the writing table, on two of them he’d written the word drown at least a hundred times. On another sheet he’d scrawled, Help. They’re coming. Hungry. He didn’t even remember writing the words, or whose words they were exactly. His psyche had become complicated of late. He was finding it harder and harder to tell just who he was.

  David got to his feet. “You are right, we must do something. We must put an end to this, but we have to be careful. And you’re right, I think I can find him.”

  He opened the door, gestured for her to go through it.

  Margaret gave him a look that said, amongst other things, I’ve seen you tear iron ships out of the sky. You need fear nothing. But he did, that was exactly what he had to fear.

  Instead, as she walked through the doorway, Margaret said, “So what is he, now?”

  “He is what he always was,” David said. “An Old Man.”

  “And what are you?”

  He shut the door in her face.

  The door jolted once, as though Margaret had struck it, or perhaps knocked her head against the wood. David jumped. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so rude. No, better she was angry than depressed.

  Outside the whistles blew again, loud and shrill, and David could imagine he was home – where the Vergers’ whistling would echo like a threat through the dark, and where his father was still alive. And then he was remembering the shrill winds of the storms of Marger Pass, someone shouting at Cadell, and he knew again that his memory had become a chasm, far deeper than it should have ever been.

  He slid a hand under the desk and pulled his Carnival from its hiding place.

  Nothing better to paper over the abyss, he thought, and laughed.

  CHAPTER 4

  It was a period of great confusion. The Roil infiltrating cities with ease, and the Old Men bringing fairy tales to life with their murderous hungers. Stade had released them, and he knew what he was doing (how rarely he did not). But that did not make it any less cruel an act. You do not let the old stories out: you do not let them trample the earth beneath their boots.

  We may not have understood quite what they were, but the outcomes were all too easy to comprehend. Blood and death, from the moment he sprang their cages.

  Remember this, Warwick Milde may have released John Cadell, but it was Stade who did it for the rest.

  Accusations, Adsett & Reyne

  THE VILLAGE OF COB

  682 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

  They arrived with the night – silent but for gunshots, and the screams of their victims, though the latter never lasted long.

  It was dangerous land, north above the flood plains of Mirrlees, caught between the edges of the Margin and the Gathering Plains, where the rains fall cold and hard, and death takes a myriad horrible forms. However, there was money to be earned there, salvaging the ruins of a war decades gone. And the people who made it their home were used to horror. After all they picked at its scab, found a living in all those deathly Mechanisms.

  Venin had worked as a scavenger and a guard for a dozen years, and he had lived through Cuttlefolk incursions, and a fungal murderous creature known only as the Meer; he’d even survived a night alone in the Margin. (One that had started with five other men. He still heard them calling, some evenings, on the wind – if it blew in from the west.) Rumour was he’d killed a Verger, long ago, had run for his life to Cob, far from anywhere, certainly far from any city justice. Well, there might have been some truth to that, but Venin had never expanded upon it, nor denied it anyway. And talk, as it did, died down.

  He’d stayed in the town, and risen in the community’s estimation. And if he’d not killed a Verger, there was no denying he had iron in him. Sort of man you could rely on.

  Even Venin had considered himself that.

  Not any more.

  He’d bolted the heavy door at the first screams, all impulse to aid fled. He held his gun in shaking hands, the weapon primed. They will pass me by, Venin thought. They will pass me by.

  He’d hardly breathed as first the Starlins next door screamed out their life– and them with a new babe and three younglings – the Wilsons two doors up followed (after the rapid-fire bursts of Caddle Wilson’s shotgun).

  The screams stopped. And for a few quiet minutes, he thought he might live out the night – until something sniffed at his door. Venin stepped backwards slowly, crouched down behind a table he had overturned, resting the rifle on its edge, slowly, slowly applying pressure to the trigger.

  The door shook against its hinges, once, twice.

  Silence.

  His breath steamed from his mouth, his fingers chilled. The door creaked,

  a crack streaked along the floor towards him. What forces could move the earth so?

  The bolt slid free, struck the floor and shattered.

  The door opened. A figure framed in the doorway, limbs delicate and long, and light that flowed from a hand as though it had turned to silk. Gave Venin enough light to get in a good shot.

  He fired twice, the rifle jumping in his grip, banging against the table, like he was new to shooting, like he was just a boy with years ahead of him, and no reputation to uphold.

  Boots slapped on the floor, not at all a graceful sound, but quick – like the swift turnings of some mechanism built for speed. Hands wrenched Venin to his feet. His own piss warmed his pants, then chilled in them. The grip that held him was bitterly terribly cold, and it spread to his limbs. He twitched, tried to lift the rifle – instead it fell from his fingers. His teeth chattered. His limbs shook.

  Venin looked up into a sophisticated face with pale watery eyes, lit with a fierce hunger. An Old Man’s face. The sorrow he saw there shocked him, almost enough that he didn’t feel the pain. But not quite.

  “It should never have been this way, but the boy, he gave his strength to the boy. Our flesh is cold, our punishment severe, and you must share in that. We need the strength, we need the speed,” the Old Man whispered in his ear. “Believe me, I am truly sorry for what I am to do.”

  But it didn’t stop him.

  The Old Men stood at the edge of the town, the grass around their feet dying, freezing. Once they had ruled Shale, directed all its energies to science and industry. And they had failed, and they had been punished. The whole world had been punished, and that punishment, in part, meant that no one could dwell on it.

  You mastered the
cold or it mastered you.

  Every town they passed through died. And those lucky few that came upon the remains knew nothing of what had happened there, but death and the quiet relief that it had passed them by. Once, perhaps, these Old Men would have been hunted, but no one possessed the resources or the knowledge to do so any more. And so they were left to race and to devour.

  “He’s that way,” they whispered. “He’s that way,” they spat, gripped with madness and a wild joy. “Far away, but always nearer.”

  Fed, but already growing hungry, they rushed from one darkness into another. Heading north, where the boy was. And the thing that Cadell had become.

  CHAPTER 5

  Things are always complicated.

  Hardacre was no paradise. It took a certain grim pride in its location, the cold winds that threw themselves down the mountains, the lazy blue and green curl of the aurora. From such flinty soil a city had grown. Its people were an odd mix of miners and artisans, and those many thousands of refugees. They had good reason to hate the south. In Hardacre they bred them tough and bitter. In Hardacre they liked to imagine that the south didn’t exist at all, unless they were looking for an enemy, and a reason to unite.

  Boothby’s Histories and Mysteries, Tolson Booth

  THE CITY OF HARDACRE

  971 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

  It was almost 11am before David came down the stairs into the pub. He’d barely slept at all, and what sleep he’d had was hardly restful, filled with dreams of a room that bound him, Old Men running, whistles loud and shrill, and the distant pleading screams of a half-dozen dead. He’d finally given up on sleeping and watched the morning illuminate his window, restless but refusing to move from his bed because that would mean doing things, and unpleasant things at that.

  He’d heard Margaret walk past his room twice, but she hadn’t knocked at the door again. Something for which David had been extremely grateful, even though he knew he would pay for it.

  He’d stayed away from the kitchens, too, to see just how long he could keep his hunger in check. Not all that long, as it turned out, and now, down here, he could feel the saliva building in his mouth. If he opened his lips too wide it would come dribbling down his chin.

  He ordered food, quite a lot of it, had it put on Buchan’s tab, then sat and waited. It was a struggle not to pick at the half-eaten food left behind by another guest. He managed it, but only just, and that by studying the other patrons.

  Not the most salubrious of people, but these were hardly the most salubrious of times.

  The pub had swollen with visitors, a lot of them scared and travel-worn. Every day brought new people to the Habitual Fool, and new rumours. Cuttlemen had been sighted moving south, an airship of the spying variety had not returned from the east, and a village three hundred miles from here had been massacred, though by what was a matter of some contention. There had been death, so much of it, and not just on the plains. It was easy enough for Cadell’s murders to disappear amongst the fatalities, unless you knew what you were looking for, and David did. Indeed, he had no need to look; he could feel it. More disturbingly, he found himself increasingly empathetic with the murderer.

  He was on his third plate of steak – raw as he could get it – and beans when Margaret arrived.

  “You’re late,” she said. David thought she looked as tired as he felt.

  David shook his head. “I’ve been here twenty minutes.” He gestured at the empty plates, took another swift mouthful of steak.

  “Two hours ago I was here looking for you.”

  “Yes, well, two hours ago I was asleep.” Two hours ago he’d been sliding a needle under his tongue, while the presence of Cadell tried to stop him.

  “Some people should be so lucky,” she spat.

  “We both know that sleep comes rare and ill to us. Don’t pretend otherwise. You take it when you can get it, and you hope for the best.” If you're me, you hope that Cadell won’t be sitting with you, he thought, demanding why he was still locked out, why you kept taking Carnival? When the answer was plain and obvious.

  Margaret nodded her head. “Well, if you’re rested and fed, perhaps we can go hunting.”

  David looked around the room. “Should we tell anyone?”

  Neither Buchan nor his companion Whig had entered the dining hall; David knew they wouldn’t be far away.

  Margaret smiled. “What, that we're off to stalk a dead man? It’s better that they don’t know.”

  “One less worry, I guess.”

  Margaret shrugged. “I doubt they'll even notice that we're gone.”

  They left the pub, someone taking their seats as soon as they got up from them, despite the teetering pile of plates.

  David took a deep breath of cool air.

  It had rained in the evening and the streets were still slick with it. The air smelt of woodsmoke and rain, but not the waterlogged and rotten odours of Mirrlees. Apparently it had been a peculiarly wet year, and while there were plenty of people prepared to swear, loud and angrily, that it had nothing to do with the approaching Roil, their protestations rang far too hollowly. The general consensus seemed to be that people did not talk about the weather.

  Every single weather pattern on the planet was driven by the Roil now, though David knew that the rains here would be nothing like those in Mirrlees. Hardacre was too far west of the sea, and shielded by two mountain ranges. To the south, though, the rain would be falling, and falling heavily, the hem of its skirts caught on the mountains. And, further south, where it was dry and hot, Quarg Hounds would be massing beneath shrill clouds of Hideous Garment Flutes, and metropolises would be waking from their slumber.

  David shook his head. Ah, how he wished for the days when all he knew about the Roil had come from children’s books, pulp adventures, and the drunken ramblings of his father.

  “Which way?” Margaret asked. Hands on her hips, suddenly looking her age.

  David blinked at her. “I have a sense of something, but not a certainty. The murders occurred in Easton. I suggest we go west, towards New Wall.”

  Margaret looked at him peculiarly.

  “Trust me,” David said. “He’s not going to kill near his hiding place. Too dangerous.”

  “And if anyone catches him on the way back from a kill?”

  “Then they’re dead too. Even now, even diminished, Cadell is more than a match for a couple of constables.”

  “You and I, though…”

  “Think of it as a test,” David said. “If we can’t manage this, then there never really was any chance that we’d survive to Tearwin Meet.”

  Margaret had little to say about that, just pulled her long coat about her. David caught a glimpse of rime blade, and rifle; Sheff’s knife was belted at her waist, too. He could understand why she had taken the guns, but the ice blade was good against little but Roilings; sure, she could hack and slash with it, but the thing they hunted would require something more than hacking and slashing with a weapon that turned the air cold.

  David took the lead, guiding them down Maddle Street, and onto Devine, where the pubs gave way to shops – bookstores and coffeehouses, haberdasheries and dress shops. The crowds grew around them, jostling, always on the edge of something that wasn’t quite despair or rage. The air was filled with the threat of violence, just waiting for something to set it off. The numbers of beggars had jumped in the past few weeks, many refugees, some just people waiting to take advantage. Margaret’s presence, though, was all it took to keep them away, and the one or two desperate (or stupid) enough to get in her way were pushed to one side.

  Devine broadened onto the market square, and here where produce was on display, fruits and vegetables from the gardens to the west, brought down by barge along the Chortle or Winebrook rivers, David could smell meat cooking, and even more enticing: freshly slaughtered animals. He had to close his eyes to their call – even though all that meat and fat had him salivating – and keep on walking. It wasn’t easy, but he
managed it. At the far end of the market, where Goodlin Street began, the crowds thinned out, though there were even more beggars, and these seemed darker more desperate – and some of the establishments concerned themselves with other pleasures of the flesh.

  If David was alone, he could have found Carnival here. Indeed, he recognised at least three vendors of the drug, though they were keeping a low profile, as several constables were walking their beat. Not that that stopped one of the dealers from tipping his hat to David (who subtly shook his head).

  “Look at them,” Margaret said, hardly keeping the sneer from her voice. She jabbed a finger at the nearest pair of constables, big men with clubs, dressed in pale blue overcoats. “Like Vergers without teeth, do they make you feel safe?”

  David laughed, relieved that she hadn't caught his headshake, or chosen to ignore it. “Do you think this street would be any louder without them? Not all threats require knives, for some watchfulness is almost enough.”

  Something prickled in the back of his neck. He turned and looked back at the square, just in time to catch a sudden movement, by the fruit stand. He looked over at Margaret, to whom a painted lady was gesturing furiously, until Margaret gestured something back.

  “We need to keep moving,” David said. “I can feel something.” He pointed away from the markets, no need to alarm Margaret just yet, not when they were in such a crowded part of the city.

  They passed through the street quickly, and the buildings closed around them again, grew circumspect. Here the roofs almost touched, leaning in against each other, as though sharing deepest intimacies or salacious gossip. Goodlin Street was so much shorter than Mirrlees' Argent Lane. As they turned into Backel Lane, David began to feel it, and not from whoever or what that pursued them, but a profound, darker awareness.

  The part of him that was Cadell responded, as though it felt its mirroring in the distance. David recognised its hungers, because they were his too. But also, for the first time he could feel its wrongness, he had to end it, to take it from the world. What they hunted wasn't Cadell anymore, and in a way that was more brutal, and fundamental, than the way that David wasn't quite David anymore.