Roil Read online

  Chapter 11

  Lithdale Expedition Missing.

  Lithdale’s eighteen-man expedition into the Roiling Darkness has not returned. More alarming is the spread of the darkness itself. While authorities assure this paper that there is no real danger from the newly sprung equatorial phenomenon, they have requested caution.

  Rumours continue of things, as one local has put it, “Not right”, coming from the darkness.

  So far all reports are unsubstantiated.

  Lithdale of Lithdale Triumphant Industries, and of no little standing in Confluent circles was described as a man of alarming virtue. He will be...

  Mcmahon Times JB1287

  The Melody Amiss rolled past column after column of creatures – Quarg Hounds for the most part though there were other beasts there too, some humanoid – padding towards Tate. Few used the road and, though she came from the city, such was the intense focus of these Roilings that she went ignored.

  Tate blazed, its call far stronger than the draw of her tiny carriage.

  Every mile she drove was a mile away from her home, and every mile was another to add to her betrayal of it. For she had fled while the others remained.

  Not long after the city had passed beyond the horizon, with only a smudge of flame discernible, there was a silent blinding brightness behind her that lasted a heartbeat, and the earth shook as though one of the Vastkind had stirred then fallen again into sleep.

  Outside, dust-darkened flakes of snow drifted down and shrouded everything in white.

  Behind her, the Roil had thinned though not enough to reveal the stars, she was too far from the epicentre.

  In Tate, she knew, the sky would be clear for the first time in decades. But there would be no one to see it, just the shattered and frozen remains of the city for moon and starlight to pick over and wonder what had been? What might have happened here?

  Margaret knew.

  Someone had managed to ignite an I-Bomb, perhaps several of them.

  Tate was dead its suffering complete. The ice would melt, and the night would roll back in over lifeless, broken stone. Even as she drove, the snow faded like the faintest of dreams and the Roil closed over her again.

  Mechanism Highway had emptied of Roilbeasts and grown crowded with ghosts.

  Margaret could not escape the memory of her city aflame. She had time to think, and her thoughts plunged her lower than she had ever been. And always there were questions. Where were her parents? Who had set off the I-Bomb?

  She slipped between rage and fear, cold clinical plans and theories and deep, deep sadness.

  Most worrying of all was the question of the Roil’s new-sprung awareness. Its beasts had howled and battered against Tate’s walls and moats, not through any desire for conquest but because it occupied space in the Roil. Such dull-witted assaults had been relatively easy to resist. This though, this new cunning could not be stopped.

  If it had gained a kind of mind then it was a creature that covered half the world with a colossal consciousness.

  While she knew she could not even begin to understand its motivations, or the depth of its intelligence, growth must be one of them, growth as swift as possible. Humans were a threat to it. Out there somewhere to the north lay the Engine of the World. Did it know of this? She hoped not, but there was no way she could be certain.

  A dim flickering in her mirrors focused her attention. At first, she thought it nothing more than her imagination for it was so faint, so questionable in its existence, and the miles behind her were pure darkness. However, she embraced the diversion and found her attention drawn to the soft uncertain light, until she had to force herself to focus on the road.

  Over the next few hours the light increased in intensity and, finally, she recognised it for what it was – a drone. It had been set to follow the straight line of the highway. However, it had slipped a little off course. An hour or two further north and she would never have seen it.

  She slowed the Melody. Not daring to stop nor turn back. Not daring to hope it might be from her parents. The drone caught up at last and threatened to pass over her.

  Margaret shot the drone down.

  It hit the ground in a spray of dust and metal.

  Margaret charged up her cold suit, fumbling over its controls, her hands at once numb and feverish. She left the engine idling and scrambled out of her carriage, pistols at ready. Such was her haste that she almost tripped over her feet getting to the shattered drone.

  Her footsteps scarred the ground, the Roil spores that coated it, sliding away from the touch of her boots, and growing pale as bone.

  She kicked at the half crushed message pod’s door until it swung open. Smoke moths rushed out at her. Margaret stumbled backwards, batting at the air. The chill of her cold suit did its work and the moths fell away. Margaret stared into the pod.

  A book lay within, well-thumbed, curling up at the edges. Her father’s notebook! She snatched it out and flipped to the back.

  Be careful, and swift. They’ll be coming for you. She’ll be wanting you. Run and keep running.

  Trust no one. There is no one left to trust.

  Who wanted her, and why? Margaret desperately desired to read it now, glean whatever she could from its pages. But that note filled her with fear.

  She could not stay here. It was too exposed. A Quarg Hound yowled in the distance and far above some great winged beast churned through the Roil. She sensed things drawing in, closing around her.

  She had no time to dig into the wreckage. She snatched up the notebook and ran back to the Melody Amiss. The engine clicked into gear smoothly and Margaret drove away, picking up as much speed as she dared.

  She’ll be wanting you. Trust no one. There is no one left to trust.

  She had hoped for answers and found only more questions.

  Chapter 12

  To blame Cadell for what happened on the Dolorous Grey is to blame a wind for blowing, a storm for raging. Cadell is Cadell, disaster comes easily with him.

  He is the hungry man, the whisperer in shadow that comes just before the flutes descend. You see him, you run.

  Jaqi – Cadell: A Picture Book.

  A little down George Street a horse had fallen at harness, stone dead before the carriage, tipping the whole thing forward. The driver roared, then moaned. He jumped from his seat and beat at the beast’s scrawny rain-soaked hide with the handle of his whip.

  The sight struck pity into David’s heart. He turned away.

  “Horses are dying,” Cadell said. “Every day feed grows scarcer, what remains is often bad, rotten before it leaves the fields. And the best of that’s already earmarked for the Council. Not long for this city, lad.”

  A long low whistle echoed down the street.

  Cadell didn’t need to point, there was a curfew, post Dissolution, the streets were empty. David saw the Vergers at once.

  Cadell spat on the ground.

  “We are going to have to run,” he said, pulling his bag close around his shoulder. The muscles in his forearm’s flexing.

  And we were so close to the bridge, he thought. “Do you think they know where we are headed?”

  The Old Man flashed his teeth. “I hope not.”

  Perhaps the Vergers didn’t to start off with, but there wasn’t enough time for them to try and lose their pursuit. The Dolorous Grey would be crossing the bridge and soon. As they reached the nearest abutment of the Downing Bridge, and began to climb its superstructure, Vergers were coming from all directions. David followed Cadell, throwing himself up ladders, fingers burning as they gripped the rusty rungs. David could hear both the train in the distance and the Verger just behind them, his feet clanging loudly on the metal.

  Cadell looked down at him, and grunted. “That one’s Tope. High up as they go, he’s been after me a while now.”

  David recognised him as the one who had slashed his father’s throat. A cold anger filled him, and a fear. Both spurred him on, as they made their way high
er up the bridge.

  They reached the top of the Downing and a small walkway that ran over the tracks.

  David glanced down, a truly vertiginous experience, not because the bridge was so high, but because the water was so close, dark, angry, and on the verge of swallowing the city whole. The city had turned every contrivance, every levee bank and pump to taming the untameable. The river roared and engines bellowed ceaselessly, wounded by their industry; like the rain, they did not stop, whatever the hour.

  Above it all, the Dolorous Grey’s whistles blew shrill as some blood-hungry Roil beast.

  “Nowhere to run,” Tope said, from behind them, which was exactly what David had been thinking. If they missed the train they were done for. He could see its lights in the distance, crashing nearer. One man Cadell could probably handle, but other Vergers were converging on the spot.

  Cadell laughed. “Is that what you think I’ve been doing, chimera?”

  Tope hurled his knife. David didn’t even see the throw; just the blade in the Verger’s hand, and its absence, like a masterful piece of sleight of hand. Cadell was faster. Somehow he snatched it out of the air, and the knife buried itself to the hilt in Tope’s arm. The Verger snarled, wrenched the knife free, then stopped still, blood shot from the wound.

  “Major artery there,” Cadell said. “I wouldn’t do much if I were you. Wouldn’t want to bleed out.”

  The knife clattered on the walkway. The Verger clutched his arm to staunch the flow of blood, and slowly sat down.

  The Dolorous Grey whistled beneath them, smoke washed over them.

  “Time to go, David.” Cadell’s eyes burned with such fierce and rapacious delight that David wondered just who he was travelling with.

  “No time for doubts.” Cadell nodded to the train racing beneath them.

  “No time,” David repeated.

  But there would be time later. His blood raced, he wasn’t scared of the leap, not now. He glared at Tope, the Verger watching him, eyes shining in the bridge light. Not so much fun when you’re doing the bleeding, is it? I hope you die.

  They leapt from the bridge, and onto the Dolorous Grey.

  All David could hear and smell was the train, it enveloped him in choking smoke and clattering heat. His heart pounded in his chest. He looked back and could just see the silhouette of Tope, one arm thrown out to bear his weight.

  David wondered how anyone could remain conscious after losing that much blood. Other Vergers closed on the scene. A knife thunked onto the roof before his boots, then clattered away.

  Cadell yanked David down. An iron beam crashed overhead.

  “Watch it, lad. Or you’ll dash your brains out.” He jerked his head to the left. “This way.”

  They reached the edge of the carriage, where a ladder dipped over the rear, and clambered down it and through a door.

  “Won’t they throw us off the train?”

  “No stopping this train until Chapman. Old tech, not even radios, Stade has been investing the city’s considerable sums in the Project, and the Project alone.” Cadell laughed, he patted his top pocket, and put his ear against the nearest cabin door. “I’ve got our tickets. I don’t think it matters how we board. As long as we present these.” He nodded his head. “Now, this cabin sounds empty. In we go.”

  Stade stood before the broken door.

  Halloween, what better time to be surrounded by these dead and whispering things, he thought. Well, not so dead. The Old Men were simply that… old. Very, very old. And hungry.

  Stade examined the door, as he had from time to time over the past two years. It was cracked through the middle, the locks shattered.

  He regarded the door next to it, its bolt was intact, the eight seals unbroken, the same for the other six doors but that first one. He put his hand against the heavy wood. It was cold. He put his ear against it and heard the endless muttering. Stay down here long enough and you heard it everywhere. After a while you could hear it throughout the tower. Though it was only here he had a chance of gleaning words from the noise. The Old Men never slept in their cages, or if they slept it was a restless chattering sleep.

  He’d had one of the doors opened once, the key that opened the lock was said to be protection enough from the room’s denizen. Though he’d held a revolver too. He’d seen the withered thing within the room, its eyes boiling with rage, lips moving, muttering. “Shut the door.” It spat. “Shut the door, or I’ll suck out your bones.” And Stade had, forgetting the protection of the gun and holding the key in his hands. He was swift, but not swift enough, for he had seen it. A little humility had infected him then, but not much.

  Stade ran a hand down the broken door. The metal was cold, even now, even after these past two years.

  The Mildes and Paul had done this. Two years ago, after they had freed the Old Man, Stade knew Dissolution was the only adequate response. And while he should have enjoyed it, even he quailed at such bloodshed. These were good capable men. Debate he could handle, but this had amounted to an utter betrayal of the Project. Warwick had sacrificed his own brother to this.

  The problem had been to deal with the Confluents without admitting to the general public that the Old Men existed. Stade would have acted faster, but Warwick’s caution had stayed his hand, there’d been no mad dash into the North, and the fact that Cadell had proven something less than an asset to the Confluents.

  Cadell had not destroyed the Roil, he had not reactivated the Engine, and Stade knew why: the same reason that the Project had to succeed. The Engine was a weapon of last resort, a weapon that the Old Men feared. After all, it had caged them here as punishment for daring to use it.

  “Cadell,” he said. “How did they get you out? What madness drove them to give you freedom?”

  The other question he did not ask. How Stade’s men had not managed to catch him. Stade had lost more Vergers to that task than any other, their cracked and cleaned bones more often than not left stacked outside his offices, sometimes with little effigies of Stade resting upon the heap and, one time, a single red rose.

  The broken door, of course, did not answer.

  Chapter 13

  Who knows what darkness lurks in the heart of the Roil? Who knows what sleeps within its cities, and dreams?

  Travis knows.

  AF Scott – Travis the Grave series introduction.

  The bleak landscape extended for hundreds of miles in every direction and every mile was crowded with such inimical life. This had been farmland for centuries, whole hundred mile long tracts of it, feeding the voracious hunger of the Twelve Metropolises. But those days, while but a couple of decades gone, had been wiped almost completely from the land. The Roil alone fed here; a single shadow ecology where no crops or livestock could survive.

  Margaret passed the occasional ruin of a farmhouse or the shattered wreckage of a village. Round these remnants of civilisation Roil beasts tended to gather, as though commemorating past conquests.

  Endyms perched on silos and the fragmentary eruptions of barns, their huge eyes staring down. Packs of Quarg Hounds, that most ubiquitous Roil predator, circled beneath.

  All watched her passing with some interest. Though none followed or harried her. It was the intensity of their gaze that she found disturbing. Quarg Hounds, which she had always considered as little more than target practice, gazed at her with dark and too intelligent eyes. These were not the creatures she had slain from the ramparts of the Jut, here they were curious and cautious. It was almost as if the lands surrounding Tate had been seeded with lesser beasts, cannon fodder, smart enough to pose a threat but not enough to reveal the true quickening of the Roil.

  The hours passed slowly as the Roil flexed and rolled its livid bulk about her. It was hard now not think of the land and the air as one. A beast as cruel as it was opaque, and every ounce of that cruelty and hatred, for all that it held back, seemed directed at her.

  She thought of Tate, and what she had lost in a single night. Sadness and anger co
mpeted within her, becoming finally something cold and hard in her mind. Her emotions fell away, or hardened and grew as sharp as a knife blade and a terrible purpose filled her. She would destroy the Roil. No matter the cost, she would see this darkness broken and should nothing else remain, so be it.

  The city of Mcmahon did not come upon her all at once, but piece by piece. Deserted farms became villages, villages became towns and finally the city, well the corpse of one, swelled up around her. Though she had studied maps of this place since childhood, Mcmahon was at once an alien and all too familiar environment. Where Tate had been built upon a hill, Mcmahon sprawled and stretched in a scale that amazed her. Broken towers thrust out of the scarred ground, fire-gutted houses rose up like rotten teeth.

  At the edge of the city proper, where buildings thickened and reached high into the dark, sat Mcmahon’s Tower. It had been destroyed, but still a good third of it remained, jutting into the sky. And what was left was higher than the Willowhen, the Four Cannon and the vents.

  When whole it would have been an incredible sight. Still it stole her breath. Around its peak circled Endyms tiny in the distance.

  While not the capital of Shale (for Shale had never been a unified continent, regardless of the Council of Engineers. The Lands of the Council of Engineers would have been better called Lands of the Councils of Engineers. Each city had almost been a state on to itself) it had the bearing of a capital.

  In all the books of geography Margaret had read and the travel pamphlets written before the Roil had so much as stained the ground, Mcmahon was referred to as the Jewel of Shale.

  Ice Cannon far mightier than Tate’s were piled around the tower, broken and discarded as though they were little more than toys. They would have been awe-inspiring, launching their frozen munitions into the dark. But they had failed, vast and ponderous weapons swallowed by, and rotting in, the Roil.