Roil (26 page)

The
Roslyn Dawn
’
s
bioengines growled and into the hot sky she powered. As she rose, Margaret, leaning in the doorifice, fired round after round from her rifle into the Roilings massed below. The air stank of endothermic chemicals.

With every hit she screamed out in triumph.

David grabbed her hand. “Stop! You’re wasting ammunition.”

Margaret swung towards him, her eyes wild. For a second, David thought she might actually use the gun on him, its tip smoked.

“Every dead Roiling is one we won’t have to kill tomorrow.”

“But how many are you killing? A single shot is not enough. Save your bullets for when we need them, when the Roil beasts are close enough to kill and might just kill us.”

David’s breath stopped in his throat. Mr Tope stood alone, on the edge of the field, away from the crowds, looking up.

The Verger caught his eye. He raised his hat and smiled, then walked away, back into the city.

“It’s Tope,” David said, pointing. “Shoot him.”

The Verger, like Margaret, moved almost effortlessly through the crowd. Someone ran at him, Tope kicked him in the face and continued on.

Margaret whistled. “Tenacious isn’t he? He’ll have to give up now.” She aimed her rifle at him, then lowered it. “He’s out of range, but I doubt he’ll escape.” She smiled, then the smile died as she looked upon what the Roil had made.

Fires raged from the deserted suburbs to the inner city. Smoke flooded the sky, a billowing fist of cloud darkened with Roil Spores that smothered everything. And yet it was insignificant compared to what lay just beyond Chapman’s walls. The Obsidian Curtain advanced, a second finger of dark as wide as the city, billowed out from the main front, the gap between it and the city’s fortifications disappearing at an incredible rate.

There was a distant thunderous crack and men and cannon tumbled from the walls. Soldiers were smothered in Witmoths.

“Those thermal sinks are driving it on. Spewing out heat from the world’s core, a primitive and gigantic engine of destruction,” Cadell said, and he couldn’t hide the shock from his voice. “The Roil has never moved so quickly.”

Chapman’s ice cannon fired ceaselessly, but with little effect, and soon they stopped. The transition from thunderous cannonade to silence was shocking. No one remained to fire the guns.

The Roil took the walls in minutes. There was no weaponry capable of denying it entry this time.

From the Northern Gates boiled a stream of refugees.

David wished them speed. Guilt and relief flooded him, and he had an inkling of what Margaret must have gone through.

From the east, carried on the Roil-cast wind and no longer drowned out by the cannon, came the shrieks of things terrified out of their minds.

Thousands of gulls flew above the beach: a huge twisting, skirling sphere of white in which darkness rippled like poison.

“Roil take us all,” he whispered.

Hideous Garment Flutes darted in and out of the flock – tearing the poor birds from the sky – their mouthparts lashing at the air, swallowing flesh, whistling and howling as they moved. They had penned the gulls in and were eating them one by one. Birds dropped to the ground, dead with terror, their corpses swallowed by a milling, yipping darkness of Quarg Hounds.

And that was just the beach. The ruptured walls of the city let the Roil in faster than anyone might flee it. Distance made it all feel so impersonal, but he well knew the terror that drowned the city. Four Quarg Hounds had chased him and Cadell just days ago, now there were more of the creatures than he could have imagined ever existed.

The Southern Wall was gone, swallowed by the pullulating darkness of the Roil. But that was the least of it. Vertigo filled him, and the world shifted in perspective. A huge hand of fire and stone reached out above the wall. For a few moments it hovered there, clenching into a fist.

Then it crashed down. All around the city buildings tumbled, rippling out from that point of impact. The hand rose again, and what looked like the tiniest fragment of some titanic shoulder, and struck the wall a second time. After that there was no wall, the stone and iron crumbled as if nothing but dust.

“Vastkind,” Margaret whispered from beside him, and David had never heard such terror in her voice.

Run, David thought looking down at the teeming thousands.

Run.

Cadell’s lean fingers clenched to impotent fists that he beat softly against the translucent walls. “What manner of Roil is this that controls you?” he said. He looked from David to Margaret and back to David again. And, where there was usually reassurance in Cadell’s eyes, or grim confidence, there was only doubt and disquiet. “What lies ahead will test all our limits.”

Cadell beat his hands against the wall, over and over again. “I’ve left this too late.”

“We’re out of it now,” Kara Jade said. “There is some solace in the winds at least. Up here they are fast, my
Roslyn
knows what to make of them.”

Kara Jade piloted the craft, her face composed and professional, even if sweat streamed from her brow and her hands shook. She looked to the others, David recognised her horror. It mirrored his. “We’ll reach the Free State of Hardacre in eighteen hours if this keeps up, twenty-two if the winds change,” she said. Her face twisted and she groaned. “We’ll make the bastards pay, won’t we?”

Margaret nodded, and David considered her resolute expression, and the way she packed away her weaponry with an efficiency at once beautiful and terrifying. Rather like the Roil.

“We’ll make them pay. We’ll wipe the blasted earth of them. I’ll not see another city fall,” Margaret said, as though she was capable of such things, as though she might single-handedly save the world.

That fantasy took him: that she and Cadell could do it. Here, with the sky crowded with airships and Aerokin rushing into the North, things might just turn out all right.

Until he looked back at the smoking, broken city of Chapman, the madness of the Roil looming behind it. All fantasies fell away, leaving only the ruin of hope and the flight of the damned, because the Roil wouldn’t stop with this city. The Roil wouldn’t stop until all the world was a ruddy darkness, and all that lived was its own.

Vergers possess loyalties as fierce as blood to ideologies little understood by the rest of us. Is it any wonder that we feared them, these that killed and laughed in the face of death.

CHAPMAN TOWER OF ENGINEERS

ROIL TRANSITIONAL ZONE

Order had abdicated the Tower of Engineers to madness. Outside, the twin Lights of Reason dimmed, flickered back to full luminance, and then failed completely. Smoke shifted in the dark in a way that smoke should not, drawn to the slightest movement, the smallest intake of breath.

But not all movement. Not all breath.

No one saw Tope enter the building. The door was unguarded, the locks broken.

Tope did not sneak or hurry, just walked, sucking on Chill, and was paid no notice. Tope was a showman, capable of making himself very noticeable indeed, but this day he moved as a ghost; apt, for the dead walked.

He strode to the stairs, eschewing the elevator altogether. Down three flights he walked, his steps so light that they failed to echo before or behind him.

He reached a narrow corridor, stinking of wet and ozone: at its end was a door. He studied the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, until he was sure it remained uncompromised. Sound and sealed, as far as he could tell.

Mr Tope pulled the door open.

He stepped into a cramped room, packed with all manner of machinery, the air hummed with science and shadows.

A man sat waiting for him, his hands curled into fists.

Tope frowned, the bastard smelt of Carnival; he hated drug addicts. After all, one had just evaded him for the third time.

But he needed this man.

“I’ve taken something for my nerves, Mr Tope,” the fellow said. One of his hands uncurled, revealing a tiny silver case. He’d clutched it so tightly that it left marks. “Would you like some?”

Mr Tope shook his head and the man gave a vapid sort of laugh. “Doesn’t surprise me, you Vergers are all alike. You have the information?”

Mr Tope nodded.

“Tell him of the Vastkind, and that the Old Man was here, and more. He fled to the North in the
Roslyn Dawn
.”

The ground shook, dust slid from the top of machinery.

The man crouched over his machine and tapped and whispered, his whole body shuddering with the strain of his craft. He had done this too many times that day, and the Carnival did not help. When he was finished he turned, his face pale, blood running thickly out of one nostril. He wiped at it stupidly, one of his eyelids twitched.

“Well, it is done? That is all?”

Tope nodded. “We are, of course, expendable. Do you think it worthwhile escaping?”

The man laughed and took a little more of his powder. His pupils narrowed to pinpricks, his shaking hands stilled and he tossed the empty silver case aside and took a deep breath. “The moths are everywhere, and they would love to sup upon our memories.”

“So we are agreed.”

“Follow me,” the addict said.

They left the room, locking the door behind them, and walked along halls and down steep and winding stairs – the addict shuffling ahead, the Verger flowing behind like a shadow – until they reached a large basement crowded with metal vats. Here, the air was cool and dry. The room loud with the steady hum of machinery.

Mr Tope shut the door behind them and locked it.

“Has its own power supply.” The man flicked a switch and one of the tubs opened with a hiss of hydraulics.

The door to the room cracked, wood splintered. Mr Tope turned towards the sound; people laughed and sang outside.

He looked down at those steaming tubs.

“Liquid nitrogen,” the man said, pale-faced. “It’s the only way.”

The Verger nodded. “We know too much.”

The door buckled, something slammed into it again.

“I’m frightened,” the man said.

“Of course you are.” Mr Tope slid his blade, almost gently, along the man’s throat. The body fell into the vat and was gone.

At least it will be quick
, he thought.

The door burst open. Mr Tope flicked his gaze back at the opening. Witmoths raced towards him, dying and falling as soon as they touched the cooler air.

Mr Tope tipped his hat, and stepped off into the cold.

He was dead before the liquid nitrogen reached his neck.

Stade looked down at the note and dropped his teacup.

It smashed onto the floor making everyone else in the room jump. He ignored it, ignored them; holding his saucer out before him like a half-wit or a supplicant. He stumbled to the window and the comfort of his city. He glared out at the dark river pregnant with distant storms, the sombre sky scarred with cranes and ships and smoke. To the south, Chapman was burning. Not that he would ever see those fires, the rain had sealed up that horizon. And yet, his mind’s-eye flared with the horror of it.

Stade blinked.

A dozen haunted, vapid faces, reflected in the window, stared at him.
Fools,
he thought and let his saucer drop as well.
But I share in that folly. Them to look to me for guidance, and me to think that I am up to the task of providing it.

Chapman was gone, the facade of its defence had been just that. So what?

But Vastkind, now that he had not wanted to hear at all. The surface seethed with tempests and wars, but they were as nothing to the fires below.

The Underground. If the Roil learnt of that, Vastkind would find it and every plan would be as dust.

But the Roil would not. He refused to let his mind stray down that awful path. Then the second message boy arrived, a fine lad who in other times probably would have become a Verger.

“Sir,” he whispered, as the other councillors drew closer, “there’s been a sighting in the North. The Cuttlefolk, they’ve massed an army. They have come around the Margin, two days, maybe three and the city will be under siege. Already their messengers are attacking dirigibles and Aerokin.”

Staid cleared his throat; fumbled in his pockets for a cigar. He needed time, but there just wasn’t enough of it. Had there ever really been?

There
, he thought, fingers clenching around the cigar. He found his lighter. They watched him, as though he could really do anything now.

“It’s beginning, as we always knew it would, for us as it did for all the metropolises of Shale.” He lit the cigar, clamped it between his teeth and puffed once, blowing out smoke. “And not at all the same, there will be no lovely view of the Obsidian Curtain for Mirrlees. The Roil’s reach has lengthened, as we feared. It is time to evacuate the city as best we can. Let the bastards have it. Ready or not, we’re going to the Underground.”

“What about the refugees?”

“If there are any, well, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise. Though, if they survived Chapman this little misadventure will be nothing to them. Gentlemen, we are all refugees now. Every one of us.”

Outside, it had stopped raining. Already the clouds were clearing. Yes, the end would come swiftly.

He looked to his Council and laughed, a hollow petulant sound that widened their eyes with shock. Stade glared at his councillors. Every single one of them would shoulder this burden. They had fought tooth and claw to reach these positions. Well, they had their power, now they would face, as he had faced, the consequences.

Responsibility.

Roil take them all. Roil take them all and him.

And, at that moment, he was almost certain it would.

One of history
’
s great surprises is that so many survived the hasty evacuation of Chapman. Such had been the violence of the city
’
s conquest that all previous plans of escape had been discarded. Though some reflect that the absence of Buchan and Whig had much to do with this, it is undeniable that there was no slow and steady progress, but mad flight.