front pocket. “It’s a trap, obviously.”
“Certainly,” David said; he leant forward in his chair, eyes bright. “It can’t be anything but. And yet, if we stay here, you know the Old Men are coming. I can feel them, with Cadell gone, I can sense them even more, and they are not far away.”
“How far?”
“That, well, I’m not sure. A sense of foreboding rarely comes with a scale.
A day, a week, not much longer.”
“So, trap or not, you’re saying we don’t have much choice in the matter?” “Yes, and I know for one that Kara must really be in some sort of trouble.” “What? You don’t think she would betray us?”
“No, I don’t. But right now there is an Aerokin floating above the Habitual
Fool, and she’s waiting to take us away from here, to a person that saved both our lives several times.”
“You couldn’t take control of the Aerokin?”
“No, my skills don’t lie that way. I could kill her mid-flight, I could send her plummeting from the sky, but what is the point of that?”
“All right, we go.” She nodded to the bag beside her bed. “Everything I need is there. Shouldn’t we write Buchan and Whig some sort of letter?”
David grinned. “I already have.”
He opened the door, ran to his room and came back a moment later with a bag. “I think we were both expecting this, or something like it.”
Margaret nodded her head. “Yes, there has been something in the air.”
David smiled. “And now there is definitely something in the air, and it is waiting for us.”
Margaret grabbed her bag. “So whose window do we take, mine or yours?”
David dragged his bag inside and shut the door. “One window’s as good as another, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER 15
No one chooses the north. It is almost as though, as a species, we have been bred with some deep antipathy for the ice and the cold. Just as the Mothers of the Sky find it an agony to step upon the land. Of course, it is not nearly as severe as that, and not acknowledged. For all industry, the coal and the oil fields, find themselves in the north. Here too are the Greater Forests (or what once were). We need the north. We work it, but we do not like it. Surely it is forced upon us.
THE UNDERGROUND 875 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Medicine Paul was in a delicate state of internal political upheaval — like a stomach bug, only much worse. Alliances kept shifting. He was nimble, a survivor, but every time he thought he'd found his footing, it had slipped away beneath him.
He'd found himself working for Stade, the man who killed almost all of Medicine's allies. He'd found himself leading Stade's people — though weren't Stade's people his too? — nearly a thousand miles to a secret stronghold in the mountains with the aid of his guard Agatha and her soldiers. Through the predatory gloom of the Margin they'd marched, leaving dozens of dead behind. Then they been captured by — and escaped from — Cuttlemen, fled across the sea of grass known as the Gathering Plains, and finally made it to the Underground.
Within thirty minutes of their arrival Agatha had been executed, and Medicine's authority stripped from him — by people that should have been his allies to begin with. The revolution had come, and he'd somehow been on the wrong side of it.
Since Agatha’s execution, Medicine Paul had been left alone. And it was easy enough in the long dark tunnels of the Underground, though that didn't mean he wasn't being watched, or that he wasn't busy. Just that Grappel required nothing of him, demanded nothing but what he demanded of all the citizens of the Underground, that they work and work hard.
Medicine was afforded a single room, a bed and a desk, a toilet in one corner and a door with a lock on it, of the sort that could be picked by even the most indifferent thief or assassin. Medicine had spent his share of time in prison cells, this was no different, even if he could lock and unlock it at will. He knew that wherever he went he was watched, and that for all the size of the Underground there really wasn’t anywhere to go.
Twenty thousand people lived and worked here. Medicine was just one of them, and while he worked hard, be it at the infirmary or helping in the construction of inner walls, or the smoothing out of the vent tubes to release heat (while ensuring that something more sinister couldn’t find its way back in), he also knew that he was being regarded with a much greater level of scrutiny, and that he would never be trusted.
And why should he? After all, he was from Mirrlees, and it was Mirrlees that had so failed the north and Hardacre in particular. It was Mirrlees that had sent on the refugees from the south.
Work was his only escape, but he didn’t have it for very long. Less than five days after their arrival, Medicine became ill.
A mild headache became a sweat, which became the worst fever he had ever known.
He stumbled halfway back to his bed, through the long dark corridors, then fell and kept on falling. When he woke next, he was in his bed, throat burning with thirst, not at all sure how he had made it to the lumpy mattress. He tried to rise, and his limbs shook with the effort, the sheets may as well have been made of lead.
His vision swam, and he found darkness again.
Time passed slowly in the dark. He slept, if such a painful broken thing could be called sleep. Sometimes he was torn from the black and cloying dark with a scream on his lips: Agatha and her soldiers looking on, faces burst asunder by gunshot, a constant horrible accusation.
Medicine had lost many allies in his life, and always he had managed to continue. But now, it seemed, he was paying the cost: dreams as intense as they were terrible, a weariness that seemed to crush him. Then would come the fever, he shivered and boiled. He mumbled at the dark.
“When you die, you can stand here too,” Agatha said.
“When you die, you can stand here too,” David said, and Cadell, and Warwick, and the boy named Lassiter, who he had sent to his death to save David.
Two whole days he didn’t rise from his bed, just lay there assailed with visions. Horrible blood-curdling things, great waves of darkness washed over him, punctuated by laughter, shrill and deafening in his ears.
Someone came to him, spoke him to in a gentle soothing voice, laid cold cloths against his brow. But when he woke — alone, weak — in the room hardly ventilated, stinking of his fever, his sickness, he wondered if that hadn’t been part of the fever, too.
When he finally left his room, it was as a man transformed. What weight had sat upon his bones had bled from him. His flesh was lean and hard, he felt weak, and yet, somehow, a deeper purpose possessed him.
But first he had to eat.
Medicine walked to the common room, guided as much by the smell of food as memory. Everything seemed different — changed as he had changed. He followed long corridors cut into the stone, the ground beneath him shuddering with the vibration of grand works. The mountain was always moving, tiny, almost imperceptible movements that cumulatively were hard to ignore. He’d ridden those vibrations like waves when he had been sick, they’d carried him in and out of madness.
In the common room he stood shocked by the sight of all these living people, he wanted to reach out and touch them, make sure that they weren’t a dream. He’d bathed, found some clean clothes in his room, but he knew that he must still stink, as he was left alone. He served himself a little food, meat of some sort, a few limp vegetables, some mashed potatoes. Not much of anything — his stomach must be the size of a pea.
The food was dry and stale, and the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten in his life.
He was just finishing when a boy approached him. The boy could scarcely meet his gaze, kept looking down at his hands. Medicine smiled. Tried not to think of David.
