Roil (17 page)

In Mirrlees nothing is done in a half-hearted fashion. Bridges, levees, floods all of them are gigantic. Excess is the order of the day, but admire the filigree of Channon Hall or the delicate structure of the Reeping Meet, with its thirteen clocks, and you realise that the human was never sublimated, merely overshadowed. It is there when you look into the dark.

MIRRLEES ON WEEP 200 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL.

“Mr Paul, these are your wards.”

They stood in the rain at the edge of Northmir where the suburbs gave out to the labyrinthine drainage systems and Ur-levees of the city. Before them rose the Northmir Bridge behind them the levee. The road running from it was called the Pewter Highway it gleamed a little in the cloud-dulled light. Three thousand workers waited by the bridge, men and women, skilled and ready to head into the North. And they were indeed his wards.

It stunned him that this was the response to just one call. These people had mustered in a single day, gathered their lives to them and come here. Looking down he could see that none of them had had much to gather. Things were bad, but only bad enough that the poorest folk were willing to leave. People who had nothing to lose, for whom Mirrlees had been a hellhole, even before the rains and certainly since Stade had put an end to all but the most urgent construction.

It would take the Roil itself to come boiling towards the city, before the wealthier denizens of Mirrlees began to consider such action.

All of them are fools
, Medicine thought.

He doubted Stade or the Council would stick around that long.

Stade stood beside him, a hand resting on Medicine’s shoulder. He resented the familiarity of the act, and wanted nothing more than to wrench his shoulder away. But they had to appear to be in partnership, to have put the past aside.
Just keep smiling
, he thought,
you
’
re in too deep to cut his throat
.

“Not much to look at, are they,” Stade said. “But these are the finest our Northern Suburbs can produce. And they are in your charge. Three thousand people, the merest drop in the ocean of our population, but it is a start. Just bring them safely to the Narung Mountains.”

“I’ll get them there. You just give your speech.”

“Of course,” Stade said, and walked to the microphone, and his voice reverberated out over the Northmir. “The time of secrecy has passed, the time of action has come and a place has been prepared for you. All of you. My grand work, my Project, the Underground. And there we shall wait out the Roil, there we shall prosper, there we shall survive.”

The next few hours passed intolerably slowly.
Grin and bear it
. Medicine just wanted to get going. There were several weeks of journey between here and the Narung Mountains. And who knew what on the way. Even if nothing happened, keeping this lot under control was going to be work enough. He had forty-nine council guard of doubtful loyalty. The only certainty he had was that their loyalties were not to him.

Something had halted the two engines, though. The
Grendel
and
Yawn
were big trains. They could have taken this lot up in a single trip. But that was not going to happen. Shanks pony was all they had, other than the horses for the guard and barely enough oxen drawn wagons for supplies. And the wagons, well he hated the things.

He looked up into the rain-smeared sky. What had he been thinking?

Three thousand people, just ready to up and leave, and looking to him to get them to safety. Well he had failed, David – and truly he had failed the first time he had seen signs of the young man’s addiction and done nothing about it – and Warwick, poor dead Warwick. Perhaps this really was a chance at redemption.

He was damned if he would fail these folk as well.

They left at last. The council guard on horseback making a rough perimeter. The wagons, Medicine had made go on first. The highway was not in the best condition; rain had devoured it in places. Medicine reasoned it was best to have the wagons through before everyone else. Six thousand feet could do a lot of damage.

Of course, he had underestimated just how much damage the wagons themselves were capable of causing. The road was a ruin, and a muddy ruin at that, as they followed in the wagons’ wake. And not all of the wagons were up to it. Half a dozen were lost in that first day and whatever could be salvaged was taken up to the remaining or redistributed amongst those on foot.

The loss of the wagons dismayed Medicine.

Broken wagons for a broken landscape of failed levees and drowned suburbs. Mirrlees’s undulations made too much work for the pumps and engines of the city, some parts had flooded from their own catchment areas. The highway kept to the hills and so they looked down on submerged houses and domestic debris drifting lost like small islands of hopelessness.

Twice that day, scouts reported to Medicine sightings of groups to the west. Small gangs, salvage crews and looters – though if truth were told there was little difference between the two. Shots were fired at them, but it was a half-hearted menace. Medicine was not too concerned, it would take an army to threaten his three thousand and their guard.

That night they made camp on the very edge of the city, where murky fields led right up to the Regress Swamps – now looking more like a lake, with only the grey thread of the road running through it. Beyond them was the Margin. Medicine peered into that dark forest. He would have preferred to simply go around it, but such a detour would have cost them a week, maybe more.

Medicine knew there was Hardacre to the distant North and Eltham and the Daunted Spur along the north eastern seaboard. But it was easy to imagine civilisation ending here. Mirrlees was the northernmost of the great metropolises. Beyond it were the trees and the Gathering Plains and the burrows of the Cuttlefolk, and so much space. Three thousand people could be swallowed whole by those miles, and leave barely a mark to show their passing.

He helped unpack the tents – let no one claim he had developed airs and graces.

Immediacism was a movement built upon fear.

Its attraction to the populace, like Carnival, an escape. Where everything was only grey and dark, they fashioned worlds of colour. Their effects were striking but, truly, it was a last breath of decadence in an age possessed of resources far too limited to sustain such a thing.

But what art isn
’
t a glorious folly?

UHLTON 19 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

The meeting in Buchan’s parlour had gone on for another hour ending with something that had at once surprised and delighted David.

“I want you take David with you,” Cadell had said. “Where I am going... it’s too dangerous.”

“Of course we will,” Buchan had said, agreeing with Cadell for the first time that night. David went to bed with a feeling of such relief, to be at last out of the eye of the storm.

David woke to thunder.

No, it was gunshot, and a distant thudding. He sat up in bed. The next two shots came quick, one after the other.

Someone screamed, then moaned, another shot and the sound stopped. David stumbled out of bed. Dressed as fast as he could, not daring to switch on the lights. It was happening again, and this time his nerves were failing him. Fingers tapped against his door.

“David?” He relaxed a little, recognising Cadell’s voice.

“Yes,” he said.

The door opened, letting in a little light.

“We have to get out of here. Uhlton isn’t as safe as I thought. It seems Stade wants to finish the job.” Cadell’s eyes flashed. In one hand he clenched his travelling bag, in the other a water gourd. “Sorry, David, I was going to leave you with Buchan and Whig, but they’re going to draw the Vergers off. You’re safer with me.”

David looked at Cadell’s bag. The Old Man pulled it away. “Yes. Yes. I have plenty of your drug.”

Shame reddened David’s cheeks. “I didn’t say anything.”

Whig stopped at their door, looking quite ridiculous in a nightdress with a half dozen pistols strapped to his belt. “There’s tunnels beneath the hall,” he said. “Take the eastern passage, it will lead you out onto the edge of town.”

“We will see you in Hardacre,” Cadell said.

Whig nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen. We will be at a pub called the
Habitual Fool.
” Whig winked at David. “An appropriate enough name, don’t you think, for those of us that keep banging our heads against the walls of tyranny?”

Whig led them both to a nearby wall, wincing every time someone fired a shot. He slapped his hand against the wall and it swung open onto a low tunnel.

“There you go, lads. Sorry about the smell, it’s less of an escape tunnel, more of a sewer,” he said.

“Good luck,” Cadell said.

“Good luck to us all,” Whig grinned tersely and shook Cadell’s hand. “It’s been in rather short supply of late, though this raid could have happened at a worse time. We’re ready. Be careful in Chapman, it’s a city on the edge, and dangerous because of that.”

Cadell ducked down and crawled through the tunnel. David threw one last glance at Whig. The giant waved him on.

“Hurry up, Milde, and be careful.”

“I will,” he said, and followed Cadell.

The wall shut behind him with a click. David found himself in a narrow corridor, dark but for a flickering chemical torch that Cadell held above his head. Stinking air enclosed them, and it was all David could do not to gag for that first moment.

“Come on,” Cadell said.

They crawled, furtive and fast, upwards over cool wet stone. David tried not to think why it might be wet. Soon the only sound was their quiet breaths or the soft scuffing of boot on rock.

Confluents weren’t the only ones who knew of this tunnel. Thousands upon thousands of cockroaches had gathered here, crunching under foot, the air loud with the papery sound of their flight. Worse were the things that preyed upon them. Spiders the size of David’s hand that brought back flashes of his experience beneath the bridge: only here it was darker and the spiders much bigger.

“Careful,” Cadell hissed. “They’re not afraid to bite.”

One chose that moment to run over David’s face. It was all he could do not to yelp at its firm yet feathery touch.

Cadell brushed it off, he hissed. “Bastard bit me.” He reached into his pockets, pulled out a small bottle topped with an atomiser, and sprayed a mist of something that smelt of vinegar and rosemary onto the wound. He hid the bottle away again.

“Not long now,” Cadell said between clenched teeth. “I can smell a change in the air.”

Sure enough, the crawl space widened, became a tunnel large enough for them to walk upright. A little further on the tunnel opened onto a deserted hillside, by a dead tree. The sound of gunshots echoed over to them, like a storm that had passed into the distance.

“What do we do now?” David asked, leaning against the white tree, and taking deep breaths of air that had never seemed purer.

“We walk again,” Cadell grunted, hefting his bag. “To Chapman.”

The journey to Chapman took a day following a winding hilly road that was never too far from the brown meander of the river. On the way, David noticed a distinct change overtaking the countryside. Where the land before Uhlton had been lush, too lush in fact, with flora almost drowning in the rain. Here plants were twisted, sere things, and the air dry and hazy. What winds there were blew predominantly from the south, and there was something of the furnace in them. It stung the eyes and dried the lungs. Seeing things here was painful. He perspired profusely though it did little to cool him, just brought on a thirst that rapidly depleted their supply of water.

A city boy, he had thought the country a universal green and found it wanting. The only green here that remained ran along the River Weep, and even that was dusty and failing. Animals had deserted the region as well. They’d left little to show of their passing other than picked-clean corpses.

A new sort of tension filled the air. A restlessness that mirrored David’s own.

It reminded David of a new artistic movement popular in Mirrlees called
Immediacism
, and whilst its bursts of colour and movement were incongruous with this landscape, its sense of things on the precipice of change matched it exactly.

It did not take too much imagination to see these lands turning to dust in the next few months, if the Roil did not take them first and transform them into something alien and cruel. David could see the Roil and its imminence in everything. More concretely, whenever they topped a rise, David would catch a glimpse of the Obsidian Curtain itself. There was no denying its inevitability.

Occasionally David noticed small drifts of what looked like ash or smoke. The closer they got to Chapman the more frequently they floated by.

“Are there a lot of fires down south?” he asked, pointing out yet another drift of smoke.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Cadell said. “But that’s not smoke. It’s something much more insidious: Roil spores.”

David cast his gaze suspiciously over the landscape. “The Roil’s here already?”

“Not quite, those spores are too exposed as yet, they need the full cover of the Roil – heat and shadow – before they can do their handiwork.” He shook his head. “Though it’s something I fear that may not be too long away.”

Cadell stared out into the dry lands, his eyes troubled and his brow furrowed. “It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “I know people think of the Roil and they think of the Obsidian Curtain and all that lies south of it. But the Roil doesn’t stop there. It’s the big wet in Mirrlees, and the drought here, and other more predatory things.”

Late in the afternoon, Cadell stopped and pointed along the dusty road. It tracked up a hill then disappeared beyond it. The road’s veil of wind-borne dust was the only indication that it continued beyond the rise. Just peeking over the hill, was a nest of silos or water towers, though even from this distance David could see that they were in ill repair, holes gaped from their walls, tin rattled and creaked in the wind.

“Over that rise and past that ramshackle bunch of buildings is Chapman. About half an hour’s walk. We’re going to need to split up. We can meet in the city.” Cadell named a place. “Wait for me there.”

“What if you don’t come?”

“I’ll come, but if I don’t, there’s a safe house on Chadwick Street.” He pressed something into David’s hands. “It’s an ice pistol, state of the art Mirrlees design, still has all its darts.” Cadell grinned. “Took it from a Verger.” He showed David how to work it. “Just in case you come across anything on your way into the city,” he said. “David, I’m not going to desert you.”

David believed him. But then no one had deserted him. They’d all been taken away.