could have been a dream, it had that light touch, and his dreams that night had been vivid and frequent.
“Go away,” he mumbled.
The spiders started to bite.
David hissed, awake all at once, and scrambled from the bolthole into the lesser dark: slapping his skin, scraping the web from the back of his hands.
The spider bites stopped, though the stinging did not.
Where was Lassiter?
David peered into the dark. “Lassiter?” He could just make out the boy’s legs, further in the bolthole. “Lassiter!”
Lassiter’s foot twitched.
David reached out and grabbed at a shoe. It was coated in silk and spiders, each the size of his little fingernail, started nipping again. But David clung on. He pulled Lassiter free. He scraped the web from the boy, ignoring the bites of the spiders. Then he remembered the electric lantern. He switched it on, and wished he hadn’t
There wasn’t much left of Lassiter’s face. The spiders had already devoured his eyes. David opened Lassiter’s mouth to check his breathing, as his father had taught him, and found it filled with the creatures, they poured out over Lassiter’s lips.
Lassiter had saved his life. They’d fed on him first.
David backed away from the corpse. But not before he saw the photograph. He remembered that one, his mother had paid for it to be taken. He picked it up. Who had Lassiter been working for? And where were they now?
He turned and ran.
Straight into the Old Man. “And where are you going, lad?”
“You!” David swung a fist, and the man caught it, gripped it in a hand that was shockingly cold. David’s knuckles stung, he wrenched his hand free, but had a sense that he had only been able to because the Old Man had let him.
“Good, there’s some fight in you yet,” Cadell said. He pulled the photo from David’s fingers and peered at it.
“How else could Lassiter find you?” he said.
“Lassiter’s dead.”
“I know that.” The Old Man’s voice cracked. “That’s another one to the tally. Mr Milde, you’re coming with me. Long as I’ve some conscience left I’m keeping you safe.”
“There’s nothing safe about you,” David said.
“No, there’s nothing safe. But everything is relative, and I would suggest you swap certainty of death at spider bite or Verger’s knife for the uncertainty of me. I am dangerous, yes, but even more so to those that hunt you. Surely it is the obvious choice.”
“The obvious ones are hardest,” David said.
“Ah, as obstinate as your father.”
“It did him little good.”
“Exactly, but it might serve you better. Put that will into your flight with me, and you may yet live out the day, and those that follow it.”
“And where will you take me?”
“Away from here, for one.” Cadell peered into the bolthole. “Hurry, we can discuss the future at length where there are no spiders listening or dead boys to drive another nail of guilt into my heart.”
David didn’t say anything, just stepped a little further from Lassiter’s tomb. He felt another pang of addiction, bent over and was sick. Not much to bring up, but it came painfully nonetheless.
He wiped his mouth and looked up into Cadell’s face. It was too dark, even with the lantern, to know what he was thinking.
“Come on, Mr Milde,” Cadell said, and his voice was gentle, no hint of the danger of which he had just spoke. “We’ve such little time left to us. Oh, and I’ve your drug… your Carnival.”
Cadell turned and walked from the bolthole, not looking back, and David followed him, away from the electric lantern and Lassiter’s corpse, and into the dark.
“I don’t trust you,” David said.
They had been walking some time, the Old Man leading them on a path beneath Downing Bridge that kept well away from Mirkton, their only company being drops of rain and the occasional scratch and scurry of rats. Once a shape the size of a very large dog came lumbering out of the gloom at them, and the Old Man snatched a blade from the handle of his umbrella, but whatever it was wasn’t interested in them, it passed by quickly lost again to the dark. Twice they came upon the corpses of rats smothered in spiders, bringing back to David the image of Lassiter. David had been but minutes away from the same fate. Where he was headed now he had no idea, just the looming bulk of the Old Man before him. He realised that the Old Man was laughing.
“I wouldn’t trust anyone right now. Lack of trust is an extremely useful survival mechanism. But I am all you have,” he said. “I am sorry that your life has taken this turn, Mr Milde. I really am, but there is nothing for it, but to keep walking.”
Soon enough that walking led them to the eastern edge of the Bridge, it was wet and murky beyond, a typical sort of day. A fog had lifted from the levee and settled on the streets.
“Look, I brought you an umbrella.” He pushed it into David’s hands and David took it, wondering if it contained a sword as well.
“It doesn’t,” Cadell said. “See, I don’t trust you either.”
The sky was dark, with rain, and the deeper darkness of Aerokin and the Cuttlefolk’s messengers, swift racing smudges through the air. Looking back, he could see the pale lights of Mirkton. Stale air from beneath the bridge washed over them. “Where are we going?” David opened the umbrella.
“My room,” Cadell said. “Then we’re going to catch a train.”
“North or south?” David asked.
“South.”
David still wasn’t sure he’d heard him properly. There was only one train that went that way: The Dolorous Grey. The Roil was down south. Nothing safe was down south.
“Yes, South,” Cadell said. “We have to get you out of here. I will get you to Hardacre, I promise. But the direct route North is too obvious, and too dangerous, there’s the drowned suburbs, the Margin, Cuttlemen, and not the refined folk we have in the city, but the ones for whom the war is still fresh and bitter.” Cadell said. “We’re travelling to Chapman. We’re going to the end of the world.”
There was a slight sucking sound as the machine disconnected itself from Stade’s skull. Stade hated that noise, the wet extraction of filaments from his brain.
Stade blinked. He tasted blood in his mouth; he reached for the glass of water by the chair. Tope stood in one corner of the room and Stade glared at him. He didn’t like the Verger seeing him in such a vulnerable state. Stade spat the bloody water into a bowl.
He shivered. All that information, all those eyes. His skin crawled every time he entered that space, his teeth ground away at the inside of his cheeks. Old tech, it never really translated to these new situations. He’d caught flashes of other images, other spaces beyond the interface between him and the arachnids: a pyramid of skulls, a spherical particle accelerator, and his mother’s face.
“David got away. The spiders are hard to control, always have been, too many of them, too many thoughts; they settled on the other one.”
“Who has him then?”
“Cadell.”
Tope frowned. “Well, that is something of a challenge.” Stade spat out another mouthful of water, clearer this time. “Yes, chances are the Old Man will kill him before we ever find them.”
“I’ll find them, and I’ll kill them both.”
“You’ve Cuttle in your blood, Tope. But he’s an Old Man.”
“I’ll find them and I’ll kill them both.” Tope left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Stade laughed, he dug through the pockets of his coat for a cigar. “The thing is you really think you can, and
