Roil (10 page)

Two enemies united, by a common, greater foe. Such alliances are fragile. The Vergers had been formed to ensure such alliances remained whole. Of course, it was open to corruption.

What isn
’
t?

The
Dolorous Grey
made its smoking, juddering progress out of the station, picking up speed on the slippery tracks as it clattered past the final gates of the platform. The driver released the horn and, all over Mirrlees, people paused and listened to that mournful sound. Medicine, in his hiding place in the shadows by Central Station, was one of them.

He crouched in a nest of iron beams and watched as smoke and the storm devoured the train.

“Good luck, David,” he whispered, and rubbed with aching fingers at the tension turned to knots in his neck. “You’re going to need it. At least the Council won’t have you now. Your father would be pleased with that if not the company that you keep.”

Desperate times demand desperate measures.

He slid from his hiding place onto the street, gripping his umbrella in both hands. The damn thing was heavier than his usual, a sabre hidden in this one’s wooden neck. When he moved too fast he could feel the blade rattling.

Medicine hurried down Argent Lane reflecting that while you could not see that bright moon in Mirrlees’ Sky, the downpour did little to obscure this street’s luminous stretch. Red lights glowed in every window, and the whistles of painted ladies, from doorway, corner and alley, pierced the crashing rain with their lascivious promises. Some of them calling out to him by name.

He was tempted, very tempted. Just to get out of the rain, he told himself, but his funds were dangerously low, most of his money had gone into Cadell’s wallet. Medicine still had his supporters, people he could call on, though every day that number decreased. And those remaining were, perhaps, suspect. Just who had they made deals with? A few more weeks and Medicine knew he would have to flee the city; but there remained things to be done. At least David and Cadell were gone.

He considered Cadell, and the two years it had taken before he was ready. So much had gone wrong, starting with Sean’s death. After which Warwick had discovered a mad recklessness within him, as first he lost his brother, his wife and then, finally, let his son float away from him into addiction. Medicine regarded this recklessness, as much as Cadell’s release, as the cause behind Stade’s Dissolution.

Their allies in Chapman, Lord Mayor Matthew Buchan and his advisor Whig, had been banished from that city and the Confluent party effectively broken there. Cadell had lingered in Mirrlees, drifting from safe house to safe house, indulging his hungers with any Verger that sought him out. The man had been afraid, an odd prospect, considering how terrifying Cadell could be in person, and that fear had kept him confined in the city. And, every day, the Roil moved north.

Medicine’s face flapped on a nearby lamppost (WANTED. DANGEROUS. DEAD or ALIVE), a terrible photograph, Medicine tore it down and hurled it onto the streaming street. If only everything could be that easy.

At the end of Argent Lane, after he’d ripped up another wanted poster, he realised he was being followed.

The painted ladies had stopped their whistling, and all along the lane, red lights died.

Not now.

He knew of only one thing that would silence the Ladies of Argent Street. Not coppers, nor thugs, nor gangs from the Northmir.

A Verger.

Medicine gripped his umbrella even more tightly, loosening the sabre it contained with a flick of his wrist.

He peered behind him: just rain and fog. The Verger filled the silence, perhaps in honour of Argent Lane, with his own whistling. Medicine felt the blood drain from his face, his lips thinned to a single nervous and angry line. The Verger whistled an old Confluence tune, a call to arms.

Bastard. Fucking Bastard. How dare he?
Do not take up the challenge. Just keep walking. Bastard. Fucking Bastard.

Once round the corner, he ran, heading for a safe house on Wisden Street: a place that he had held in reserve for years. Most safe houses had burned in the last few days, greasy smoke rising into the rain. This one remained, empty, but its windows were broken. Blood stained the living room floor.

Footsteps echoed from outside. His nerve broke, and he ducked through a bolthole hidden in the living room that led, via a narrow stone tunnel, to a street two blocks behind. All the way, he walked with his sabre unsheathed and held shakily before him.

No one was waiting in the back street, but he did not hang around. Soon enough, the Verger was whistling again.

One place remained and he made his way there, all pace, through slivers of broken suburbs, wading along half-drowned streets, clambering over walls and under bridges.

Little traffic came this way. Those roads that weren’t covered in water were potholed, devourers of cart and horse. Empty side streets coiled and wound away from the city and the river. The city here had clenched around itself like a wounded beast. Medicine’s wet boots slapped down Cove Street and over the Cove Bridge. If luck were with him, he might lose his pursuer in the northern district, then come back via the Shine Bridge and into the rear of the Ruele Tower. The Verger’s tune followed him all the way.

At the Shine Bridge, Medicine stopped and peered down into the white water of the Weep. A steamer, one of the sail-steam hybrids, was making its slow progress against the river. A snarl of logs struck the boat. In a puff of flame it was gone, leaving a brief pall of dirty smoke to be snatched away by the wind.

The water seethed and what could only be bodies, dim desolate shuddering shadows, passed beneath the bridge.

Portentous and terrible
, he thought, somewhat hysterically, and continued on his way over the Shine. When the Verger was done with his games, Medicine was certain he would find a turbulent rest in the belly of the Weep. He was not Cadell, he could not fight these men with their Cuttlefolk blood, nor could he bribe away the edge of their knives.

Once across, he glanced back along the Shine and started. A single figure slouched there at the end of the bridge, he blinked and the figure was gone.

Medicine sprinted down the next few streets alone, and there were no whistling or solitary figures to disturb his thoughts, he cast glances behind him every time he reached a street lamp, most of them bearing his portrait. Nothing.

In the absence of obvious pursuit, Medicine sprinted first down one lane then another, through back streets as narrow as doss house corridors. The city reeked, stonewalls covered in a patina of fungus. Dead things floated, bloated and stinking, in the shallows of gutters. This was Mirrlees now. Death’s rotting signature scrawled everywhere.

When he made the secret entrance to the Ruele Tower, he threw furtive desperate glances over his shoulder and found some small relief in the empty lane and the silence – if pounding heart and pouring rain could be called silence.

He tapped the wall in five places, and in the right order, and the wall slid back and opened a crack wide enough to admit a grown man. He frowned at the darkness beyond, unsheathed his sword, and slipped through the gap, letting the secret door shut behind him.

Inside, he dropped to a crouch and reached for the torch hidden to the left of the door. Nothing. His fingers brushed the floor. Something ran over his ruined knuckles. He flicked it away.

Where
’
s the damn torch?

The Verger’s knife pushed into his neck not hard or deep enough to draw blood. Medicine breathed deep the stale air. This last air, obviously, once the Verger was done with him.

“What do you want?”

“Mr Paul,” the Verger said. “Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine.”

The Verger’s old friend hammered into the back of Medicine’s head and he fell into the merciful dark.

The lodes were wretched, their master cruel. Locked here. Locked here. Locked here.

The Lode stung him with its rising awareness, its memory of his blood and his guilt.

The water conducted the Lode’s power and as Cadell walked further up the stream it focussed on him. The water grew dense around his limbs, began to defy its natural tidal inclinations. Shapes took form within its depths. Lights winked into being. And all around it was an odd and breathless sort of shock.
You are here. Why are YOU here?

Cadell reacted to the Lode’s shock, its recognition, with a sort of shock and recognition of his own.

Strange, the things you forget
, he thought.
The power and the agony.

Old code words, old data flickered to life in his memory, dim at first, they increased in intensity, beacons of energy to which he was drawn.

But he also sensed a hesitancy, a distant doubt. Was it his own?

Ah, but he always had doubts. Always. They rang in his bones and rattled, ancient as fear, in his skull. The Engine merely magnified them, as did its cruel punishments.

The Quarg Hounds howled, no doubt about their hungers.

He glanced over at David then back to the Hounds, they were at the hill, racing towards the pale bare rock of its summit. Fierce as they were and deadly, this weather was still too cool for them, the run and the rain had taken their toll. The beasts whined between each howl; dark blood streamed from their jaws. They were weakened, but what strength remained was more than enough to rend David limb from limb.

Cadell clenched his teeth. He could not put it off any longer, already his stomach was cramping, his ears ringing in anticipation. He took one final breath and raised his hands.

This was going to hurt.

“Now,” he cried. “NOW!”

And his bones turned to ash. Pain hammered into his skull.

“Now.”

The Quarg Hounds had reached the summit. On that final “Now” they stopped, as though yielding to his command.

But it was not the Roilbeasts that Cadell’s words commanded. The Quarg Hounds’ bloody snouts rose up quizzically.

One of them opened its mouth, then shut it, swiftly, cocking its head, as though it were listening to something distant but racing nearer.

Silence. The air cooled, something hardened within it, became crystalline and deadly.

Ice enclosed Cadell’s skin, burnt and bit deep. His body shook with energies and their absence, because that was the wounding truth of it.

His power was an absence, a vacuum, and a slowing, and all that lived quailed from it.

Insects fell, dead and frozen, out of the air, an entomological hail.

At the top of the hill, the Quarg Hounds yawled, thrashing and screaming, as all that cold struck them. David had fallen forward, on to his hands and knees, in a field of frost-coated grass, his face a mask of winded agony.

The Quarg Hounds howled again, a beaten horrible sound that dropped at last to a whine. They crumpled in on themselves, all their menace, all their strength gone and only their blackened skeletons and brittle skin remaining. And that was somehow more horrible than claws and howls and hunger, perhaps stillness always is.

The ice around Cadell’s legs turned to slush, and his blood started stinging, singing and stinging, as it forced its way back into constricted veins. The stream began to flow again almost as it had done before. The icy skin on the stream cracked and drifted away.

The Lode continued to burble inside his head, its ache rising to freeze much more than it already had, to wake its siblings and blanket the land for hundreds of miles around with cold. But only the Engine was capable of unlocking all that ice, of slowing the shuttling atoms of the world, and he did not command it. In fact he could feel it, a distant and disapproving presence.

Yes, he did not command it at all.

Not yet.

He shivered. The thought of such appalling power filled him with terror. Perhaps it was better if he never did.

Cadell was always the show off. Of the Eight he couldn
’
t resist theatre, though he denied it most strenuously. It was in everything that he did. Which made him the worst of us all.

Air but moments before, bitterly cold, warmed. Rain fell devouring the ice, as though anxious to wipe the memory of Cadell’s... whatever it was he had done ... from the earth. David wiped vomit from his lips, spat a last sickly spit, and tried not to think how much easier Carnival would make all this.

Everywhere there were dead things, frozen and fallen from the sky, it was in the air that the worst of this cold had struck. If it had reached that intensity where he stood, he knew he would now be as lifeless as the birds and the bugs.

Where was Cadell? David got to his feet, brushed himself down. The Old Man stumbled towards him, his flesh pale, his eyes ringed in dark circles.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Cadell cried. “It’s too much. I’m sorry about your Uncle. You must believe me.”

Cadell blinked, turning his head this way and that, and David was witness to an odd transformation, a swift strengthening of will.

“Are you all right, David? Are you all right?”

“I think I should be asking that question.”

Cadell wobbled to his feet. “I am fine,” he said. “See?”

He took a few shaky steps onto the grass. “Fine.”

David just nodded his head. The movement was too much, he bent over again and dry retched; his stomach had nothing more to give.

“There’s cover by that ledge,” Cadell said and together, dragging Cadell’s bag between them, they staggered towards it. The walking was all the harder for the lack of pursuit. Urgency and strength had bled from both men’s legs. But, both shaking and weak, at last they reached the stony shelter.

“That light around your hand,” David said. “That sad light. What is it?”

“Ah, the candlelight of hubris, boy, history is lit with it. Just one of a hundred ridiculous mistakes.” Cadell said with surprising gentleness. “But the past is done, in this place, in this time, we will find some warmth. Even the lodes generate a little.”

Grass grew under the rocky ledge. The air was warmer too though, surprisingly, not the cloying warmth of rain-battered Mirrlees, but sweeter like the summer evenings of his childhood, the mill fires challenging the stars and the moons, his mother singing and his father home from work. They were idyllic memories that he was not at all certain of, so distant that he could have substituted memory with dream. The past was dangerous that way and invited suspicion.

David dropped to the ground and Cadell followed, kneeling slowly, staring out into the darkness. At last, he grinned. His face relaxed a little, lost some of its bleak pallor. “We’re safe here, for the moment,” Cadell said. “Try and sleep.”

He handed David another syringe. Where had it come from? But he didn’t waste time trying to work it out. The drug in his blood settled him almost at once.

“Thank you,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t be so purely and completely happy but he was. “Thank you.”

Cadell was already asleep.