Roil (6 page)

Cadell. Cadell. Everything returns to Cadell. Were he to walk into this room I would shoot him dead without hesitation.

Of course, he would kill me `ere I reached my gun. Or draw out my death, in the manner of a Verger. Yes, he might just at that.

Cadell is the monster. The black heart beating at the core of our grim history.

“You like to read, boy?” Cadell asked, pulling something from his bag.

“Yes,” David said. “I like to read. And would you stop calling me boy.”

“If you wish, though this is a world of infants to me. Children scrambling about in their own shit and fear. You’ve felt life’s whiplash enough to be called a man, I guess. But if I call you boy again, I don’t want you thinking it’s through any rudeness. I’ve the memory of a sieve these days, a weight of years poking holes in the fabric of my mind,” Cadell said. “Here.”

He held a Shadow Council novel. On the cover, Travis the Grave fought some sort of beast, maybe a Quarg Hound, though it was the size of a bear. David looked at Cadell, the man before him was no less fanciful than Travis, and yet here he stood, quietly handing over a book. “For the train ride.”

“Thank you,” David said.

Cadell was already at his bag, packing the last of his things – hopefully he wasn’t lying about there being Carnival in there, too. “Don’t be so quick to thank me.”

“Sorry, I–”

Cadell grunted. “Don’t be so quick to apologise either. This isn’t a Sunday trip. We’re going into danger, but, if we’re lucky, safety after that, safer than here for you, anyway. When we reach safety, if we reach it, then you can thank me, and Medicine Paul.”

“He’s alive?”

“Was the last time I saw him. He sent me to get you.”

David was disappointed that Medicine hadn’t come to get him himself.

“He thought it safer that you come with me. Yes that is how grim things are.” Cadell shut his bag. “How old are you, lad?”

“Sev– Eighteen,” David said.

“Do you not know your age? There’s no shame in that, I’m a bit fuzzy when it comes to my own.”

“I know how old I am,” David said. “It was my eighteenth birthday last week.”

A whole range of emotions passed across Cadell’s face. David thought he saw pity there, and it made him angry.

“Happy birthday then.” Cadell said, and closed his bag.

David realised that he barely knew the man, other than that he had killed his uncle Sean. Which, until these last twelve hours, was all David had ever thought he needed to know.

“How did you meet my father?”

“Your father was a very wise man. He’s the reason I’m free. Well ... maybe not wise, but clever. Knew a lot about the Roil. “

“Taught me a lot, too. Well, before we started fighting,” David said,
except when it came to you
. In the weeks after his mother’s death, his father had been most attentive and that attention had expressed itself in lessons concerning the Roil. In David’s mind he’d just exchanged one horror for another.

“I don’t doubt it,” Cadell picked up the bag. “But your father didn’t know as much as me. Nobody does, and as sincerely as I wish it were otherwise, that’s no idle boast.”

Cadell was obviously mad. The Engine of the World, if it had even existed was at least two thousand years old. He’d said as much to Cadell and he’d corrected him. “It’s four, four thousand and eleven years and three months old.”

No one lives that long. Vertigo welled in him at the thought of all that time, and a dim anger. This man had lived that long, but David’s parents were dead. He stopped himself, how easy it was to fall into belief. Cadell was not four thousand years old, maybe seventy, and a well-preserved seventy at that. He’d seen young men less spry.

Cadell seemed to read his thoughts. “A lot of it hasn’t been living, not in the sense you’d recognise it. I’m one of the Old Men. You know, the Punished? Those that were cursed and locked beneath the Ruele Tower for their wisdom and their folly. The Engine’s my business, lad, and you’ll believe me by the end, or you won’t.” Cadell laughed.

“What’s your curse?” David asked.

“Hunger and sanity. You don’t know what that’s like all those ages, and to crave and crave and not even have madness to slide into.” Cadell’s voice fell away to a whisper. At last, he cleared his throat. “Now, we’ve got a train to catch.”

He slung the bag over his shoulder, as though it were nothing. David had tried, and found himself barely able to lift it off the ground.
Strength of a madman
, nothing more, he thought.

They walked out of the building and into the rain. David turned right, towards the crowded Shop Lanes. “Where are you headed, lad?”

“Central station.”

“Too obvious. We’re going to the bridge.”

“The train doesn’t stop there.” David regarded him quizzically, his opinion of Cadell’s sanity only confirmed.

Cadell opened his umbrella. “And it isn’t going to tonight, but that’s where we’ll board. Easy.”

It wasn’t.

The railway had ever been the transport of the middle and lower classes: flight is not cheap.

When it declined the world shrank for many. So, too, did the threat of the Roil. That which is beyond the horizon may as well be another world.

SOUTHERN TERMINUS SOUTH OF CHAPMAN: ROIL EDGE

The stationmaster of the Southern Terminus despised the seven days of Halloween, the heat and the faux haunts, but he dreaded the nights, and night was coming, from the east and from the south. Night and the Roil were coming.

He stood upon the edge of the southernmost platform and stared south, through brass binoculars greasy with his fingerprints. He lifted his gaze past weed-drowned marshalling yards, crammed with carriages given over to dry rot and rust, focussing on the obsidian curtain, the point where the Roil rose into the sickly, luminous sky.

It flexed and bulged, ripples of concavity and convexity played ceaselessly along its face. The damn thing was hypnotic. But then, how could the end of the world be anything but hypnotic?

He fished in his pockets for the most recent letter from his wife, and when his hard fingers closed about the soft paper, he found some comfort. He did not read the letter. He had memorised every word. He yearned for her touch. But doubted he would ever know it again, nor hear his children’s laughter. Each letter had become a whispering domestic hope and a terrible rising fear.

Things had been different when he started this commission, no Southern Terminus then. Multiple lines had branched from here and, almost on the quarter hour, the tracks sang to a train’s approach. The
Dolorous Grey
, the
Eastern Line Galvin
, the
Consolation City Four
or the Southern and Western Suburb’s
Clattering Eights
.

Now they serviced the
Dolorous Grey
alone. By the time the eight wheeler reached the Southern Terminus all the passengers had disembarked and there were only empty carriages to clean and the dim hope of mail and the even dimmer hope of orders to return north.

The line extended south but ended in darkness and no train had come from there in years.

No train from the south, but over the last year, as the Roil closed the distance between itself and the station, other stranger, crueller rolling stock had followed the tracks. They did not come when the winds blew cold from the Ekalb Mountains in the north, but when the winds were hot and from the south, and those days were ever on the increase, they washed in; drear and dangerous driftwood carried on some bleak tide.

“Hot night,” came a voice from behind him.

Startled, the stationmaster jumped, his heart pounded and rattled in the cage of his ribs. But he did not turn around, just refocused the eyepieces of his binoculars. There was Chill in the office. He’d never thought to keep some with him.

“Where have you been, Jeremy?” he asked, his voice cracking. “We believed you dead.”

“I’ve been away. Hunting. Or so I thought. It’s the merest slip twixt cup and lip `til the hunter becomes the hunted.”

The stationmaster jerked around, raising the binoculars before him like a shield. “What are you talking about?”

Jeremy grinned, a wide and terrible grin. An actor’s grin, or a mask, for surely it was not his own. “Heat is the issue here, the draw and the reasoning; furnace heat, blood heat. The Roil told me, in its loud old voice. Can’t you hear it?” His smile grew and grew and it came spilling from his mouth, dark and frangible, a softly hissing shadow; moth-like they fluttered. So many of them, the man must be filled with them “Witmoths,” Jeremy whispered. “Thought and madness and command.”

The stationmaster stepped back. Too late of course, but it had always been too late. You can only watch the end of the world for so long before you get caught up in it. He took another step backwards.

“Don’t worry,” Jeremy said. “It hurts but briefly.”

The Witmoths struck at his eyes and ears and mouth, and where they touched burned with a pure and terrible agony. His head filled with noise, louder than the thick, stupid racing of his heart. He tried to scream. The moths poured through the useless split of his lips, crammed it with fire. He bit down on his tongue, blood rushed into his mouth and the moths found another portal to his brain.

The binoculars dropped from his fingers, and he dropped to his knees after them, scrambling towards the brass tubes. But no salvation lay there, only mindless grasping amidst the cloud of stinging moths that followed. His wife’s letter fell free and the stationmaster swatted it across the platform. He raised his head and howled. Or tried to.

No sound came, just darkness, from his mouth and eyes.

Cognisance fled, drowned out by a voice: dim, distant, and old.

Get to your feet. It
’
s still too cold here.

He rose unsteadily. The binoculars lay on the platform, one lens cracked, a dent marring the left barrel. He kicked it over the edge.

“You’re right,” the stationmaster said, bending to pick up the letter, and slipping it into his pocket. “Hardly... hardly hurts at all. Now, let’s get out of this cold.”

The clock had just struck two when the
Dolorous Grey
arrived at the Southern Terminus. Despite the late hour, it was still sweltering hot as the driver and his crew disembarked. The moons Tacitus and Argent were both low on the horizon, and the stars were dimmer than the driver remembered them.

He shook his head. No matter, they would drink their tea and eat their biscuits, stoke up the engines, clean the carriages and head North again, and the sooner the better. The Southern Terminus was one rest stop that his staff were happy to see truncated. He did not blame them.

He hated being this close to the Roil.

Deserted suburbs surrounded the station. Once these areas had been bustling and crowded and had names like Willingvale and Worryon. Now they were a ghost city, serviced only because the Council demanded appearances be kept up.

Like most people of Northern Shale, the driver preferred to give the Roil as little thought as possible. It was all too much. Of course, it was easier to avoid such dark thoughts in his offices in Mirrlees. However, this far south it was impossible.

The Roil permeated everything and with every trip its presence increased, darkening not just the sky but people’s souls as well. Down and up down and up. He’d gone this way enough times to feel it there, that awful horror which would rise and build with him with every mile. For North or South, he was always coming here, always returning.

He prayed he was not around when the Roil crossed that last mile. The Grand Defeat was still a fresh memory for him; he had lost his father there and an older brother. Damned if he was going to let the Roil take him as well.

The stationmaster, dressed in his greatcoat, as though it was the middle of winter, came out of his office, whistling cheerfully. Odd, the fellow was at the best of times a grim duck.

“Ted, why is the furnace blasting?” The driver asked, wiping sweat from his brow and pointing at the fuming chimneys.

The stationmaster smiled a wide tenebrous smile and showed him.

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...

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.