Roil

Since the founding of the first city, with a few obvious exceptions (see Connor
Mcmahon
, also Julian Hardacre), two political parties have ever battled for dominance. The Engineers and the Confluents. The Confluents were always regarded as too emotive, too populist in their endeavours, the Engineers too focused on civic structures and their construction whatever the cost to their workers and their people (see
The Levees Built on Blood: Milde and Whyte
, page 125). A gross simplification, perhaps, but all such political narratives are (if they are to survive) and both parties played upon this perception in each of the twelve metropolises.

Throughout the centuries, Confluent and Engineer would have torn each other apart, and on several occasions almost did (see
The Right Bank Insurgency
page 878), but always the Vergers stood between them, the knife bearers keeping a brutal peace.

That ended with the Dissolution.

Considering the Roil
’
s rapid expansion, and the stinging memory of the Grand Defeat (and the flood of refugees it brought with it), a decade prior, it was surprising it didn
’
t happen much sooner.

THE CITY OF MIRRLEES-ON-WEEP 300 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL EDGE

Midnight, and Council Vergers reduced the front door to splinters. They dragged David Milde’s father onto the street. Kicked his legs out from under him. And, their long knives gleaming in the streetlight, slashed his throat.

David watched it all from his bedroom window with a cold impassivity fed by Carnival.

He slapped his face, once, twice. Hardly felt it. He’d taken the drug, as he often did, after his father had accused him of taking the drug. The argument had been loud and wild, and of utterly no consequence now.

They’d be coming for him next. David hesitated as his father bled to death down below, the rain washed the blood away: it never stopped raining in Mirrlees, blood was always being washed away.

Run.

Run.

Run.

David’s hands shook as he gripped the windowsill.

He blinked a heavy Carnival-induced blink. The world lumbered into a brutal sort of focus.

Bundles of Halloween orbs, strung down the street just the night before, coloured everything in reds and greens. Windows from here to almost the next suburb banged shut. Lights switched off.

David’s father lifted himself almost to his feet, his head loose on his neck; barely on his neck at all. Oh, what kind of strength the man possessed! But it meant nothing now. The Vergers kicked him back to the ground, where he lay and did not rise again, and David knew his father was dead.

Footsteps and the hard voices of men not needing nor desiring to hide their approach echoed up the stairs. David considered crawling under the bed. But they would find him, and drag him kicking and screaming out into the rain, and they would slash his throat, and he would lie there with his father.

The thought held some temptation.

He wasn’t stupid. The Vergers would keep hunting him, and the realisation filled him with a great and awful weariness.

He didn’t know where to run. He knew that if they had come for his father, they’d have come for everyone else. There’d be no one he could turn to. Not James Ling or Medicine Paul or the Cathcart Sisters. Any survivors would be running for their own lives

All these considerations in under a second and, while he thought them, he opened his window and slid out, with just the clothes on his back, clinging to the slimy windowsill with his fingertips – the Carnival-calm in tatters – and knowing it might end here with just one slip.

It nearly did.

David lost his grip, and dropped into the dead tree beneath his window, its rotten limbs snap-crash-snapped under his weight. He landed in a heap on the soft mud beneath and clambered to his feet – no bones broken as far as he could tell. He leapt a stone wall, almost tripping, and sprinted onto the road.

Someone shouted from his window. Whistles blew.

David did not look back, because if he did he would stop, and stopping would end him.

Such are politics in Mirrlees.

MIRRLEES – DOWNING BRIDGE

David wiped the vomit from his lips for the third time in under an hour.

He knew what was coming, just as much as he knew he couldn’t stop it, which was almost as terrifying as the Vergers that hunted him.

The Carnival’s claws tightened. How could something get so bad, even as it left your body? It was just another awfulness to add to his collection, only this one would grow, and quickly.

He tried to occupy his mind with other thoughts, possible options of escape, the long term, anything but the drug and his body’s rising hunger for it.

The north was his best choice now.

If he could make it to the city of Hardacre he would find refuge. He had an aunt who lived there, and she would take him in, they had always been close.

But the road to Hardacre was impossibly perilous, the Margin and Cuttlefolk, half wild and with long and bitter memories of war, lay between here and there. And the one bridge that crossed into those lands, on the edge of the Northmir, was heavily guarded. He may as well be striking out to the moon. But, then again, he had proven himself more adept at survival than he had first thought.

All night he had been running, hiding, keeping to the shadows, moving only when the Vergers in their whistling packs passed.

It had been surprisingly easy, perhaps because escape was all he could allow his mind to focus on. As he had run he had found himself instinctively heading to the one place he might hide. Once or twice he had scored Carnival here, though only when most desperate.

Usually, he’d not needed to look far to find people willing to supply him. After all, he was the great Confluent Leader Warwick Milde’s son. And if his father’s currency had decreased in the last few months, well, he had never expected it to go so low.

Downing Bridge loomed out of the murk. David was familiar with it, had often come this way as a boy with his father. The master engineer would point out its various structural peculiarities, its vast size being the least of them, for Mirrlees was a city of excess; its levee banks blocking out the sun, channelling away the rain. Once the River Weep had been just a trickle between the embankments, a trickle two hundred yards across. Now it had climbed their walls to a height of nearly fifty feet and was rising every day.

The
Dolorous Grey
rattled overhead; David could just make out its plumes of smoke. That’s what he really needed, to be on the train, steaming away from Mirrlees. Even though its destination couldn’t be considered safe it was better than what faced him here, and he could lose himself in the colour of the Festival of Float.

But the train was beyond his reach now. All he had was the sanctuary of the bridge. Or, more correctly, what lay beneath it: Mirkton, the undercity.

Water streamed from the iron lips of the bridge. Through the falling water he could see a few dim lights, and darkness.

He only hoped it was a darkness deep enough to swallow him.

THE CITY OF MIRRLEES – RUELE TOWER 302 MILES NORTH OF OBSIDIAN CURTAIN

“So the son escaped?” Stade’s tone made it more of an accusation than a question.

Mr Tope nodded. Dry blood caked his grey suit, he picked at it with dark, cracked nails, and Stade wanted to slap those hands away even though they had just given him uncontested government.

“It’s a minor setback.” Tope’s voice suggested he wasn’t used to setbacks (minor or not), there was a kind of wonder in it, and dismay. “We’ll find him; he is an addict, his options are limited, and only decrease with every hour he runs. He cannot go to ground, because without Carnival in his veins the ground will swallow him and spit out his bones. We have staked out his usual suppliers. We have eyes on all his friends and family allies: and there aren’t too many of them now.”

“If you can get to him, then
they
might as well. I don’t like loose ends.”

Tope’s lips pursed. “We’ve few loose ends left, and the boy is the least of them. Both John Cadell and Medicine Paul have evaded us.” Again that wondering tone.

Stade’s gaze dropped to the withered fingers floating in the jar on his desk, the Orbis on one of them thick with verdigris. He should have never been so lenient those decades past. Perhaps none of this would have happened if he had cut off Medicine Paul’s head instead of his fingers. “You are right, and those are loose ends enough. The Confluents are broken, all credit to you and your Long Knives, fine and bloody work, indeed, but you have not removed the threat in its entirety.”

“We will find him.”

“Good. We have limited resources and not much time. Milde’s death was unfortunate but he let the Old Man out. Such open dissent could not be without penalty, and not just the death of his brother. The Engine ... what he had proposed... actions with consequences far too dangerous. We could not let it continue, knowing what we know.”

Tope’s eyes were inscrutable. He never gave much away, and he certainly didn’t now. “Knowing what we know, yes.”

Stade sighed. “I should have killed him sooner. The day he defied me. The day he crossed the floor. I should have cut his throat, then the Old Man would not have been set free and none of this would be necessary. But I was a gentler soul in those days. And we had been friends. Ah, Tope; it’s always the ones I don’t kill that I regret. Blood and murder, how else do you reach the top of the Tower?”

He turned to the window, glared down at Mirrlees as though it might reveal his enemies if he scowled hard enough. Ruele, the tower of the Council of Engineers extended into the sky, almost as high as the low layer of cloud from which rain fell and fell and fell.

Stade’s offices had an unmatched view of the city, from the outer orbit of radio arrays, round which Aerokin circled – their flagellum twitching in ceaseless hungry jactitation from their underbellies, water tumbling from their flesh until they breached the cloud bank – to the vast bulk of Downing Bridge and the levees, nearly five hundred yards high, yet barely containing the River Weep. The
Dolorous Grey
crossed the bridge, bellowing smoke, the train making its way south, to Chapman and the edge of the Roil.

Rain wormed along the office windows. Wind whistled through a crack in the lower edge of the window frame, bringing with it the smoky, rotten odours of the city, and dribbles of water that pooled upon and stained the carpet. Stade grimaced at the mess. Such was the pace of work required with other endeavours he had no one to spare for even the simplest of maintenance.

“Not long for this city,” Stade said. “The bastard had to die. Now tie me up those loose ends, Mr Tope. We’re running out of time.”