Cadell pulled his hand away, looked almost apologetic.
“You were talking in your sleep.” Cadell’s breath stank of liquor, David blinked in the burning wash of it. “Bad dreams?”
“Yes,” David said. “Bad dreams.” Churning, horrible dreams that he’d fallen into every time he closed his eyes: knives and blood and Downing Bridge itself, drowning bridge in truth, with its dribbling levee-bed, its profusion of spiders and their hungers.
Cadell chuckled. “Curse of these times. The city’s rotting as the Weep swells, no one has pleasant dreams. Of course the lack of Carnival in your veins wouldn’t help.”
He nodded to the table. David’s breath caught in his throat, a small syringe of the disposable type lay there. Not more than a few feet away.
“I’ve powders for the journey ahead, better for travelling, less chance of breakage. But today you’ve need of the purer stuff,” Cadell said. “Much as I might wish it otherwise, we’ve no time for you to break free of the Carnival. It’s a maintenance dose, but a quality one.”
David’s mouth was dry. It was all he could do to stop himself from leaping out of the bed and driving that syringe straight into the fattest vein he could find. He already had three in mind. He’d shove it into an eyeball, if it meant he could have it now.
“I understand such hungers,” the Old Man said, drawing David’s attention back from the syringe, though his voice sounded distant.
David’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he worked it loose. “You were a user?” he said thickly.
Cadell shook his head. “No, but there are other addictions – believe me, and some much more harmful than sticking a needle in your arm or your foot. When you’re done, there are clothes in the bag by the dresser, they should fit.”
Cadell left the room then, and David did the one thing that he’d desired since he’d fled his father’s house into the dark and the rain. These were no sere old pills. This was the good stuff.
When he was done, and the Syringe disposed of, he slumped in the chair, breathing deeply a stupid smile broad across his face. Cadell hadn’t been lying about the Carnival’s purity. The tension left his limbs and the deep grief that had threatened to overwhelm him evaporated. It was almost as if none of it mattered, and it didn’t really. Not one little bit.
But he’d kick along with Cadell, of course he would. He didn’t want to die – unless it was right now. That he could handle
David finally dragged himself from the chair and looked through the bag. Cadell was a man of impeccable sartorial taste, and a good judge of size at that. David cleaned himself up, dried himself down, and dressed.
He winked at his reflection in the dresser mirror. He looked almost human.
“If you’re done…” Cadell said, startling him.
Everything had increased in clarity. Cadell’s bloodshot eyes gleamed. David blinked.
“You look better now,” Cadell said. “Much more the man about town than the fugitive fleeing through it.”
“Clothes and Carnival maketh the man,” David said, feeling stupid as soon as the words left his mouth.
Cadell sat down. “We’ve a while yet, and time to talk. Ask what you will.”
David nodded. “What do you know about the Roil? Your name always came up when father spoke of it.”
“More than I ought. More than what’s good for a man. And so will you, before this is done.” He reached over to the table, picked up his hat, ran his hands along its brim, turning the hat around and around, perhaps to keep his fingers busy and his eyes focused on something other than David. “But that’s the way of this decaying world, and I owe your father this much at least.”
This much? Was David, this much? “What do you owe my father?”
“Plenty,” Cadell said. “Just believe me, when I say this doesn’t even begin to square the debt, perhaps it even adds to it.”
To David this wasn’t much of an answer. “What would square the debt then?”
“I hope you never have to find out.” Cadell stood up, dropped his hat on the bed and walked to a cabinet near the mirror. He splashed something in a glass, swallowed it down in a gulp. Grimaced. “I should have warned him, more than I did. More forcefully, should have kept a closer eye on your house.”
“He knew this was coming?” A dark bitterness rose in him and raged. Why hadn’t he fled? Why had his father risked both their lives?
Cadell nodded his head. “He knew that as soon as he crossed the floor of Parliament, soon as he joined the Confluents, something was coming. He just didn’t expect it to be this. Thought they were all working towards the same thing. Stade proved him wrong. Oh, lad, there are secrets that layer Mirrlees and Shale, sediments of madness and lies more damning than you could believe. Missteps, and murders, from the First Ships down.” Cadell lifted his empty hands in the air. “There’s blood on these, as much as Stade, more.” Cadell stopped. “I’m sorry, David.”
“People die, Mr Cadell,” David said, and his voice was colder than even the Carnival could account for. “People die.”
And that was all he allowed himself.
Cadell took his time in responding. “But you’re not dead.”
David didn’t argue the point, but he knew Cadell was wrong. Something inside him was dead. Not too long ago, a few years no more, he’d been maybe fourteen or fifteen he had woken in the middle of the night, and realised that he was going to die, that the night was smothering him. He’d started screaming then.
His parents had rushed into the room. His mother had held him, and he had told her, that he didn’t want to die, that he didn’t want any of them to die. She’d kissed his brow, and assured him that he had a very long time indeed before he needed to worry about such things.
Well, it had turned out that they hadn’t had that long at all. The next day the rain fell, and it really hadn’t stopped. His mother was dead six months later, his father increasingly obsessive and cold. Was it any wonder he had succumbed to addiction by his seventeenth year?
“Stuffy in here,” Cadell muttered and opened a window, the rain had picked up a notch, it cooled the air but a fraction.
Better than nothing, David thought.
“I’m sorry, lad. Not least of all that I’m all you’ve got. You’re right there; people die, and most of your father’s allies died with him last night. The Engineers have played their dissolution and rule Parliament now. And the Vergers have taken sides. These are desperate times, and Stade really thinks he’s doing the right thing. But he isn’t.”
David was thirsty. He found a glass and filled it with water from a jug. A revolver sat on a bench nearby. He looked at it a long time, then considered the broad back of Cadell. Carnival made all things possible, steadied the shakiest hand, if he moved quick he could avenge at least one death in his family.
“Well, are you going to shoot me, Mr Milde?”
David shook his head. Something about Cadell changed then, and even though David could only see his back, he knew the Old Man was grinning. “Do you even know what I am, David. Did your father ever tell you that particular secret?”
“My father never told me anything. All we did was fight.”
“I guess that was all he knew at the end. How to fight. He told you I killed your uncle, but he never explained the circumstances. Oh, where to begin?” Cadell turned from the window, the rainy city behind him, dark and streaming, and him sharing some of that darkness.
Perhaps David should have used the revolver.
Cadell walked over to the table and flipped open the revolver’s drum, no bullets. “Never leave a loaded gun where an enemy might use it. Of course, we aren’t enemies. Have you ever heard talk of the Engine of World?”
What? David thought. Fairy tales?
“It’s a myth,” David said. “Tearwin Meet, Land Crash, the Battering of Gillam Hall, those I can believe in. But the Engine… an impossibility.”
“It’s not an impossibility. I was there. I helped build it.”
