Roil Read online

  “It’s just legend and the whimsy of mechanics who should know better,” Marcus Penn muttered. “Deighton, little more than folklore dressed up as history and science. Mechanical Winter is just a way of explaining the Ice Age. Engines of the World! Why do you insist on stretching credulity so?”

  Arabella Penn arched an eyebrow, her lips curling into something too scathing to be a smile. “Then how was the Roil stopped? How do you explain the fact that this world is colder than it ought to be, even with the Roil?”

  “Hmm.”

  Her father raised one hand vaguely, jabbing at the air. “For the latter, our astronomical mathematics are wrong, much as it chagrins me to admit. And, for the first, obviously it is a natural process. Perhaps a kind of tide. The Ice Age came, the tide turned.”

  “Ha! I can’t imagine this tide turning. As for natural, I’m not quite sure the Roil is natural. If it is, it is nature gone wrong.”

  “Bah, nature goes wrong all the time. One could say it is the very nature of nature to go wrong. What is wrong anyway? Just because it doesn’t agree with us doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But then again it’s not humanity’s nature to agree with nature, otherwise we’d all be living in trees, which wouldn’t be all that bad I suppose as I’m rather fond of trees myself. Natural or not there are no engines.” Her father glared at her. “Margaret, my dear, could you see to that damnable ringing.”

  Ringing!

  She snapped awake with a gasp and touched her stinging forehead. Her fingers came back wet with her blood. The cut was deep, but she barely felt it. She could hardly feel anything.

  The firestorm had turned the carriage around so that she faced Tate. A howl cracked her lips.

  Sheets of fire consumed the city, from the foot to the crown of Willowhen Peak, even the stony, spiked walls burned with coolant-fed, blue flame – a terrible ghost light. The Four Cannon were stumps of iron glowing with a white heat. The Swarming Vents, too, had mostly fallen, caved in on themselves or blown apart. In the blazing sky, the battle was nearly done. An Endym tore a Sweeper’s glider from the air. Another glider plummeted, weighed down by Hideous Garment Flutes.

  There was a furtive movement in the corner of her vision.

  Grey moths, more winged smoke than insect, fluttered against the cockpit window closest to her head. There were at least a dozen of them, similar to the wisps that had tumbled from the lips of the dead sentries. They appeared too frail for flight; each brush of their wings against the glass diminished them. And yet they remained. They battered at the window a few more times then burst away and flew towards the city, joining a half-mile wide plume of their brethren, almost indistinguishable from the smoke boiling over the walls.

  Margaret had had her first kiss on those walls, and in all that awfulness the memory rushed back to her.

  An older boy, Dale, who’d gone on to become a full time Sentinel, had kissed her hard then looked out into the Roil, hiding his embarrassment or his excitement, Margaret didn’t know which, the blood pounding in her own head.

  “Do you ever think we’ll see the sun?” he’d asked her.

  “Some days, yes. Other days, I think those that don’t climb down the wall and walk will be overcome, and the Roil will grind out every light, and us with it.”

  Dale’s eyes had widened and Margaret felt a thrill rush through her, almost as potent as that first kiss. A Penn could never admit doubt and yet she had.

  “Kiss me again,” she had whispered. “If we’re doomed what does it matter? Just kiss me.”

  But Dale was already walking away. He did not look back.

  She wondered where he was now, then let the thought slide away from her. There could be no good answer to that question.

  Margaret checked the Melody’s instruments. The carriage was designed to withstand extreme conditions but it had its limits. She studied the array of valves and meters, and exhaled slowly. Everything was as it should be, or near enough to it: no spikes in temperature or noticeable leaks. The Melody Amiss’ fuel remained contained. Of course if the fuel tanks had ruptured, there would not have been enough of Margaret left to know it. Margaret eased the carriage forward, nothing crunched or groaned or detonated. She looked back one last time at the city where she had grown up. An icy shaft of guilt drove through her heart.

  How was she any better than a Walker?

  She shook her head, whatever had so easily destroyed the Four Cannon and the Steaming Vents would tear apart the seals to the caverns beneath with ease. Tate was gone. Doomed, perhaps, to rise again as the bodies of the Sentinels had risen.

  And she didn’t leave in despair, but rage.

  All she had was the North. And the slim chance she could escape, and wreak some sort of vengeance upon this dark.

  The Engine. She would find the engine, and she would turn it to her will.

  She turned the carriage that way, onto the three hundred mile straight of road, and fled her city, its fires lighting the way for miles ahead, driving the shadow of the Melody before her.

  Not far along Mechanism Highway she found one of the I-Bomb expedition’s carriages, crushed flat. She scanned around for survivors but failed to see a single body, nor what might have destroyed it.

  She did not stop, nor try to think who might have been in the vehicle. Her parents were gone, the city taken and all she had left was the distant promise of the North, and that, for now, was all she could cling to. She dare not think of anything else, or she would stall and stop and never make it beyond the Roil.

  When she passed the wreckage, she did not look back. She didn’t need to. Every time she closed her eyes she could see it all.

  Chapter 9

  Cadell. Cadell. Everything returns to Cadell. Were he to walk into this room I would shoot him dead without hesitation.

  Of course, he would kill me `ere I reached my gun. Or draw out my death, in the manner of a Verger. Yes, he might just at that.

  Cadell is the monster. The black heart beating at the core of our grim history.

  Molck – A Whinger’s History

  “You like to read, boy?” Cadell asked, pulling something from his bag.

  “Yes,” David said. “I like to read. And would you stop calling me boy.”

  “If you wish, though this is a world of infants to me. Children scrambling about in their own shit and fear. You’ve felt life’s whiplash enough to be called a man, I guess. But if I call you boy again, I don’t want you thinking it’s through any rudeness. I’ve the memory of a sieve these days, a weight of years poking holes in the fabric of my mind,” Cadell said. “Here.”

  He held a Shadow Council novel. On the cover, Travis the Grave fought some sort of beast, maybe a Quarg Hound, though it was the size of a bear. David looked at Cadell, the man before him was no less fanciful than Travis, and yet here he stood, quietly handing over a book. “For the train ride.”

  “Thank you,” David said.

  Cadell was already at his bag, packing the last of his things – hopefully he wasn’t lying about there being Carnival in there, too. “Don’t be so quick to thank me.”

  “Sorry, I–”

  Cadell grunted. “Don’t be so quick to apologise either. This isn’t a Sunday trip. We’re going into danger, but, if we’re lucky, safety after that, safer than here for you, anyway. When we reach safety, if we reach it, then you can thank me, and Medicine Paul.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Was the last time I saw him. He sent me to get you.”

  David was disappointed that Medicine hadn’t come to get him himself.

  “He thought it safer that you come with me. Yes that is how grim things are.” Cadell shut his bag. “How old are you, lad?”

  “Sev– Eighteen,” David said.

  “Do you not know your age? There’s no shame in that, I’m a bit fuzzy when it comes to my own.”

  “I know how old I am,” David said. “It was my eighteenth birthday last week.”

  A whole range of emotions passed
across Cadell’s face. David thought he saw pity there, and it made him angry.

  “Happy birthday then.” Cadell said, and closed his bag.

  David realised that he barely knew the man, other than that he had killed his uncle Sean. Which, until these last twelve hours, was all David had ever thought he needed to know.

  “How did you meet my father?”

  “Your father was a very wise man. He’s the reason I’m free. Well ... maybe not wise, but clever. Knew a lot about the Roil. “

  “Taught me a lot, too. Well, before we started fighting,” David said, except when it came to you. In the weeks after his mother’s death, his father had been most attentive and that attention had expressed itself in lessons concerning the Roil. In David’s mind he’d just exchanged one horror for another.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Cadell picked up the bag. “But your father didn’t know as much as me. Nobody does, and as sincerely as I wish it were otherwise, that’s no idle boast.”

  Cadell was obviously mad. The Engine of the World, if it had even existed was at least two thousand years old. He’d said as much to Cadell and he’d corrected him. “It’s four, four thousand and eleven years and three months old.”

  No one lives that long. Vertigo welled in him at the thought of all that time, and a dim anger. This man had lived that long, but David’s parents were dead. He stopped himself, how easy it was to fall into belief. Cadell was not four thousand years old, maybe seventy, and a well-preserved seventy at that. He’d seen young men less spry.

  Cadell seemed to read his thoughts. “A lot of it hasn’t been living, not in the sense you’d recognise it. I’m one of the Old Men. You know, the Punished? Those that were cursed and locked beneath the Ruele Tower for their wisdom and their folly. The Engine’s my business, lad, and you’ll believe me by the end, or you won’t.” Cadell laughed.

  “What’s your curse?” David asked.

  “Hunger and sanity. You don’t know what that’s like all those ages, and to crave and crave and not even have madness to slide into.” Cadell’s voice fell away to a whisper. At last, he cleared his throat. “Now, we’ve got a train to catch.”

  He slung the bag over his shoulder, as though it were nothing. David had tried, and found himself barely able to lift it off the ground. Strength of a madman, nothing more, he thought.

  They walked out of the building and into the rain. David turned right, towards the crowded Shop Lanes. “Where are you headed, lad?”

  “Central station.”

  “Too obvious. We’re going to the bridge.”

  “The train doesn’t stop there.” David regarded him quizzically, his opinion of Cadell’s sanity only confirmed.

  Cadell opened his umbrella. “And it isn’t going to tonight, but that’s where we’ll board. Easy.”

  It wasn’t.

  Chapter 10

  The railway had ever been the transport of the middle and lower classes: flight is not cheap.

  When it declined the world shrank for many. So, too, did the threat of the Roil. That which is beyond the horizon may as well be another world.

  Edwards and Leer – The Dialogue of the Tracks

  SOUTHERN TERMINUS SOUTH OF CHAPMAN: ROIL EDGE

  The stationmaster of the Southern Terminus despised the seven days of Halloween, the heat and the faux haunts, but he dreaded the nights, and night was coming, from the east and from the south. Night and the Roil were coming.

  He stood upon the edge of the southernmost platform and stared south, through brass binoculars greasy with his fingerprints. He lifted his gaze past weed-drowned marshalling yards, crammed with carriages given over to dry rot and rust, focussing on the obsidian curtain, the point where the Roil rose into the sickly, luminous sky.

  It flexed and bulged, ripples of concavity and convexity played ceaselessly along its face. The damn thing was hypnotic. But then, how could the end of the world be anything but hypnotic?

  He fished in his pockets for the most recent letter from his wife, and when his hard fingers closed about the soft paper, he found some comfort. He did not read the letter. He had memorised every word. He yearned for her touch. But doubted he would ever know it again, nor hear his children’s laughter. Each letter had become a whispering domestic hope and a terrible rising fear.

  Things had been different when he started this commission, no Southern Terminus then. Multiple lines had branched from here and, almost on the quarter hour, the tracks sang to a train’s approach. The Dolorous Grey, the Eastern Line Galvin, the Consolation City Four or the Southern and Western Suburb’s Clattering Eights.

  Now they serviced the Dolorous Grey alone. By the time the eight wheeler reached the Southern Terminus all the passengers had disembarked and there were only empty carriages to clean and the dim hope of mail and the even dimmer hope of orders to return north.

  The line extended south but ended in darkness and no train had come from there in years.

  No train from the south, but over the last year, as the Roil closed the distance between itself and the station, other stranger, crueller rolling stock had followed the tracks. They did not come when the winds blew cold from the Ekalb Mountains in the north, but when the winds were hot and from the south, and those days were ever on the increase, they washed in; drear and dangerous driftwood carried on some bleak tide.

  “Hot night,” came a voice from behind him.

  Startled, the stationmaster jumped, his heart pounded and rattled in the cage of his ribs. But he did not turn around, just refocused the eyepieces of his binoculars. There was Chill in the office. He’d never thought to keep some with him.

  “Where have you been, Jeremy?” he asked, his voice cracking. “We believed you dead.”

  “I’ve been away. Hunting. Or so I thought. It’s the merest slip twixt cup and lip `til the hunter becomes the hunted.”

  The stationmaster jerked around, raising the binoculars before him like a shield. “What are you talking about?”

  Jeremy grinned, a wide and terrible grin. An actor’s grin, or a mask, for surely it was not his own. “Heat is the issue here, the draw and the reasoning; furnace heat, blood heat. The Roil told me, in its loud old voice. Can’t you hear it?” His smile grew and grew and it came spilling from his mouth, dark and frangible, a softly hissing shadow; moth-like they fluttered. So many of them, the man must be filled with them “Witmoths,” Jeremy whispered. “Thought and madness and command.”

  The stationmaster stepped back. Too late of course, but it had always been too late. You can only watch the end of the world for so long before you get caught up in it. He took another step backwards.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeremy said. “It hurts but briefly.”

  The Witmoths struck at his eyes and ears and mouth, and where they touched burned with a pure and terrible agony. His head filled with noise, louder than the thick, stupid racing of his heart. He tried to scream. The moths poured through the useless split of his lips, crammed it with fire. He bit down on his tongue, blood rushed into his mouth and the moths found another portal to his brain.

  The binoculars dropped from his fingers, and he dropped to his knees after them, scrambling towards the brass tubes. But no salvation lay there, only mindless grasping amidst the cloud of stinging moths that followed. His wife’s letter fell free and the stationmaster swatted it across the platform. He raised his head and howled. Or tried to.

  No sound came, just darkness, from his mouth and eyes.

  Cognisance fled, drowned out by a voice: dim, distant, and old.

  Get to your feet. It’s still too cold here.

  He rose unsteadily. The binoculars lay on the platform, one lens cracked, a dent marring the left barrel. He kicked it over the edge.

  “You’re right,” the stationmaster said, bending to pick up the letter, and slipping it into his pocket. “Hardly... hardly hurts at all. Now, let’s get out of this cold.”

  The clock had just struck two when the Dolorous Grey arrived at the Sout
hern Terminus. Despite the late hour, it was still sweltering hot as the driver and his crew disembarked. The moons Tacitus and Argent were both low on the horizon, and the stars were dimmer than the driver remembered them.

  He shook his head. No matter, they would drink their tea and eat their biscuits, stoke up the engines, clean the carriages and head North again, and the sooner the better. The Southern Terminus was one rest stop that his staff were happy to see truncated. He did not blame them.

  He hated being this close to the Roil.

  Deserted suburbs surrounded the station. Once these areas had been bustling and crowded and had names like Willingvale and Worryon. Now they were a ghost city, serviced only because the Council demanded appearances be kept up.

  Like most people of Northern Shale, the driver preferred to give the Roil as little thought as possible. It was all too much. Of course, it was easier to avoid such dark thoughts in his offices in Mirrlees. However, this far south it was impossible.

  The Roil permeated everything and with every trip its presence increased, darkening not just the sky but people’s souls as well. Down and up down and up. He’d gone this way enough times to feel it there, that awful horror which would rise and build with him with every mile. For North or South, he was always coming here, always returning.

  He prayed he was not around when the Roil crossed that last mile. The Grand Defeat was still a fresh memory for him; he had lost his father there and an older brother. Damned if he was going to let the Roil take him as well.

  The stationmaster, dressed in his greatcoat, as though it was the middle of winter, came out of his office, whistling cheerfully. Odd, the fellow was at the best of times a grim duck.

  “Ted, why is the furnace blasting?” The driver asked, wiping sweat from his brow and pointing at the fuming chimneys.

  The stationmaster smiled a wide tenebrous smile and showed him.