Something dropped heavily to the ground behind them. Margaret was ready with her rifle, but she did not fire.
The Quarg Hound squatted on its four legs, its head high as her waist. It splashed furiously in the water, then with a whine, rolled over dead.
The streets were still too cold, but not for much longer. The firestorm intensified, leaping from roof to roof, devouring houses and coolant in a terrifying quiet flame. Nothing crackled, everything hissed thin as a dying man’s last breath. Another Quarg Hound fell, landing on a Sentinel. Saved by his armour the man stumbled and swung to face the beast. It was already dead, slain with a single shot from Margaret’s rifle.
Howard blinked. “You’ve been practising.” He raised his gun and fired behind her. Another Quarg Hound died. “Good with the blade, but never so good with the gun.”
A wave of heat rushed over them, coming from the centre of the city. The ground rippled, Margaret fell.
Howard reached down to help her up, his mouth moved and she read his lips as much as heard him. “You all right?” Debris crashed all around; fiery shards of metal punctured houses and set tarred roofs burning. A nearby coolant tank caught alight. She could smell flesh burning, people dying.
But Margaret hardly noticed. Willowhen blazed, fires swirling around the ruin of two of the four Cannon. Tate’s heartbeat had grown wild and empty. She imagined the men and women up there, working frantically, desperately, because without the Cannon the city was lost. Screams echoed down to her, and laughter, human, but wrong, as though the Roil had warped it.
There wasn’t much time left. But for those distant cries, everything had grown silent. All around the crowded street people paused and stared at each other, weapons in hand. Margaret could feel their fear, and see it in their eyes. But then they got to work, they clambered onto the Wall Secundus and brought rime blade and gun to bear on Quarg Hound or Endym.
Perhaps it was her presence, what she represented, but Howard’s reaction was different.
“Another one, they’ve taken out another one.” Howard’s voice cracked. “This is no time for argument. Go back now or you-”
The third cannon exploded, its muzzle collapsing into the streets of the inner city, buffeting them with stinging heat. Margaret’s ears rang. Ash fell everywhere, squalls of darkness, buffeted by heat and cold. The remaining cannon launched its icy shells futilely into the beast-crowded sky. Far above, black shapes jeered and cackled.
Howard seemed smaller, his shoulders slumped and his hands shook. Then it passed almost at once. They’d been at this battle all their lives. When he looked to Margaret, his face shone with the light of some new kind of resolve… or madness.
“Tate is lost. Betrayed, there can be no other reason for its swift fall.” His words came hard and fast, he grabbed her hands. “In those early years no one believed we stood a chance, but then your mother fell pregnant and we knew hope remained. Please remember that. You were, and have always been, a symbol of hope to us.”
And there it was, that which hurt her the most. The thing she was supposed to be.
Howard led her to the Melody Amiss and signalled that the gates be opened.
Sentinels stepped into the breach and fired their rifles. Howard’s words came fast; he did not look at her. “Drive through, quickly now, I have to shut the gate behind you.”
“Come with me.” She reached for him.
Howard shook his head, changing his hold on the rifle and pulling back, almost as though her touch was all it would take. “No, my family is here. Go, find yours.”
Margaret clambered back into the Melody Amiss, its engine idling, and drove through the gateway into chaos and flame.
The inner city blazed behind her, throwing the road ahead into sharp relief. Most of Tate’s coolants had finished their shift of allegiance from ice to fire. What that fiery treachery revealed was a flowing, flickering image of madness. Throughout the city, ice cracked and melted, lit red and orange as though already given over to the flame. Quarg Hounds and other Roilings cavorted in streets that streamed with foaming bloody water, cold enough that they had to jump from claw to claw or prey to prey, hacking, slashing, feeding. And she had never seen them look so happy, nor seen before the dark cunning in their brute faces.
Here more terror bloomed than any lone ice cannon or armoured carriage could ever hope to halt. Twenty years it had taken them, but at last the siege was over and the Roil triumphant.
The Roil had always been a mighty fist wrapped around the city, biding its time. The fist was closing now, without pause, and she, just as horribly resolute, drove towards the Jut.
Where were her parents?
Just moments before the attack began, the bell had rung with news of their arrival. Perhaps the last thing Sara had done. Margaret tried to separate the bare facts from the deaths and found she couldn’t. Her thoughts were muddied by them. There was too much to consider and far too much to do. Surely, her parents had tried to enter the city, perhaps begun mobilising the defence. Yet she had seen no sign of such mobilisation, nor had any word reached her, as it most surely would.
Her thoughts returned to that first distant explosion, of the Jut disappearing in fire and black smoke. It had happened in an instant. She doubted anyone near it could have survived. A bleak chill overtook her and she forced it down. Down. Far deeper than her waking mind could follow.
Margaret needed the facts.
Until then, everything was speculation and possibility, and leanest possibility at that.
To find out required her driving on, through every cruel nightmare that had ever haunted her, racing towards what may be her worst fear of all.
The cockpit’s thick glass and metal shielded her from all but the loudest, shrillest screams, but it was a guilt- tainted mercy. She should be out there. She should be helping, but the city was lost, and her parents were before her. When she reached the outer gate, she found it a blasted ruin. The bridge beyond smouldered but remained intact.
She paused, not sure what to do. Margaret had expected to find her parents at the gatehouse, dead or alive, but there was nothing, just stony, smoking ruins. Few Roilings had gathered there, the gate’s defences had been engaged. Jets of cold slush shot over the bridge, the run-off flowing back down and around the gatehouse.
Sick to the stomach she drove the carriage slowly towards the ruin.
A sentry lay dead directly in front of her, and she could not make herself drive over the body. Arming all her guns, she leapt out of the Melody Amiss and dashed to the corpse.
It was Sara.
As Margaret approached, Sara sat up. Blood darkened her uniform, and the cold suit beneath. She lifted her rifle and aimed it at Margaret’s head.
Chapter 5
Cadell, where he fits in the Grand Narratives of Time grows ever more tenuous. Surely he is mere apocrypha, as likely a creature as Travis the Grave or Ray Normal.
Everywhere Cadell is mentioned there is chaos, blood and despair. Excise him from history and the fable of the past is pulled away. Excise him from history and hear the wind howl through the holes that are left.
That is the problem of Cadell. He makes no sense, but without him, nothing does.
MIRRLEES
David woke in the bolthole, under the bridge, as the spiders ran across his face, trailing silk. He couldn’t see the creatures, but he could feel them in the dark. He batted them away with a hand already sticky with web. It
