beasts. Unlike the crowded front, his craft had room to shower the Roilings with cold; they fell away in a black rain.
His pilot, a Drifter, brought the ship hard right. Alarms rang out, and died down. The ship's control centre — built around a large diagram of the Daunted Spur — lit up, warning of engines overheating.
“Steady,” Bowen hissed. “Steady or you'll burn out the engines.” “I've a lot of tailwind. The air's uncertain,” the pilot said, between clenched teeth, and mumbled beneath her breath something about Aerokin, and the uselessness of dumb machines. Drifters dislike like being told what to do. Still she brought the engines back down.
Looking back, the Roil appeared perfectly still, but Bowen knew that it was not. That it washed over the city of McMahon as it had washed over Tate before it, and Carver.
As he watched, the Roil came bubbling out of Magritte Gorge. Rising up and crashing down over those who were trying to flee, clawing up into the air and striking down more of his air fleet. Bowen brought a hand to his mouth. He wanted to scream, but he forced that need deep. He wiped at his eyes and turned. His men stared at him.
“What do we do now?” his pilot asked.
“Signal retreat. Get as many ships out of there as we can.” Though it appeared that those who could had followed the Daunted Spur ’s example. Bowen noted it was Aerokin, mostly; they were faster, their allegiance to the Great Cities slighter.
“What about the troops on the front?”
Bowen jabbed a hand towards the south, at the darkness crashing over everything.
“There are no troops,” he said. “There is no front.”
The pain had fled, but with its passing had come the command.
Harper's eyes opened. The darkness was no longer that, she could sense everything, and it was a glorious beautiful power. All around her, soldiers were getting up. Those who had been ruined by the falling airships, their muscles and bones destroyed, stayed still. The Witmoths that had entered them, lifted and found residence elsewhere.
Rising in the light, eyes blinking, each man or woman that stood up broadened her mind and each mind echoed with a dry old voice. South, south, you must come where the furnaces burn, where the air is thick. She wanted to share this with those that she loved, the brilliance, the joy, the complete unification of will and action. But the voice was insistent.
The Beaksley smiled. “There are dreaming cities down there, all the way to the Breaching Spire, and heat.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes. They slumber, but they’re soon to wake.”
Slowly they stumbled south, caressed and cajoled by the Roil, knowing and not knowing that ten years of preparations lay before them. Ten years of transformation, in cities fast asleep, but dreaming — furiously dreaming.
“Victory is certain,” the Beaksley/Harper said.
All along the line the words were taken up, silently and whispered.
“Victory is certain.”
When Bowen reached the city of Chapman, Stade's Vergers waited for him. How Bowen hated the mayor's knife men. Their faces revealed nothing, which ultimately said everything he needed to know. Even old Sheff — Stade’s right hand killer — wasn't grinning, how could a habit so maddening become by its absence the very essence of terror?
They led Bowen from the landing field, away from his men — all of them were too shattered to offer any resistance, and perhaps they blamed him for what had happened — swiftly across the empty field, which, just two days before, had been crowded with airships. From what Bowen had gathered, amongst the garble of radio transmissions from the command craft, maybe six of the two hundred craft would be coming home. The vast hangars of the landing fields would remain empty. No fleet as grand as his had ever been gathered before, nor was one likely to exist again — who would pilot them? Who could afford to finance such a thing now?
That deserted landing field made it seem real in a way that the flight from the battlefield had not. As their boots rang out on the scarred asphalt, Bowen's defeat rose in him like a fever; his face burned, he wanted to be sick. He turned his head and looked back at the Daunted Spur, its banners being torn down, the crew dragging it into the hangar. Vergers walked with them as well.
Bowen turned back to his crew, and a hand gripped his shoulder forcefully. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” Mr Sheff said.
Victory had been certain and they had lost. He had seen the end of the world. Whatever came next, whatever the following years held, it would be a pointless prelude to the end, to the darkness that was coming.
Stade stood in the hangar, by the offices at its far end, his face haggard, the bags beneath his eyes were dark, though lit with a callous humour. The mayor had been smoking a cigar, the remnants of which lay on the ground; puddles of ash that made Bowen think of his fleet, of the burning ships falling onto the troops.
Five days ago Stade had won the election in nearby Mirrlees. As Bowen's soldiers had formed a front along McMahon, Stade and his cronies had gained nearly as many seats as the Council possessed when it had been the only party. In one single election their rivals, the Confluents, had been gutted. The people of Mirrlees had given Stade almost absolute power.
Bowen did not like the man Stade. He was too much the chameleon. Too much of what people seemed to want. Stade's persona did not possess nearly enough substance.
But he would see the substance now. Clarity has come to him at last. The mayor cleared his throat. “So we failed,” Stade said. “Well, you failed. No matter, I had little faith in all that wondrous weaponry, clever though it might have been. Tate is different from McMahon, and this idea was the grandest of folly.” He folded his hands in front of him. “But you did your best. I truly believe that.
“There are dark days ahead, my friend. And for those dark days our people need a hero, a martyr. But what they do not need is a coward.” Stade led Bowen into the nearest office. “When people hear that you fled, rather than stayed and fought, what do you think that will do for this city's morale? And more important, how do you think our allies in Drift will feel? After all, their Aerokin died. Screaming, I believe. You’ve simplified things for me.” Stade allowed himself a smile. “And I must say it’s nice to be rid of those progressive Councillors from McMahon: apologists and Confluents one and all.”
“What are you talking about?” Bowen asked. “Flight was the only option.”
Stade patted him on the back and the general fought the desire to flinch. “Bowen, my friend, and I'd like to think you are my friend, you never made it back. In fact you died most heroically, I will give you that, on another airship.” He looked at his notes. “The Raised Admire, I believe, which crashed — all her great guns firing until she struck the ground. It was a defeat, but a grand defeat.”
Stade drove a blade into the general's neck, and tugged it back out, ripping and tearing as he went. The knife's passage hurt in its awful taking of his thoughts and breath. Its blade was cold, a thing of ice. All that was hot and thinking and urgent gushed from him.
Bowen dropped, blinking, to the floor, fingers clenched around the wound in his throat. On his belly, dying, all he could see were Stade's shoes — scuffed old boots coated in ash — and his blood gliding towards them, as the Roil glided over Shale. The boots shuffled backwards and the mayor sighed.
“Now, Mr Sheff, clean this mess up, if you will,” Stade said.
My fingers stiffen. The wind howls. The past is broken.
We snatch at our histories like the tattered storm-wrenched rags they are.
All those victories and ruins, those scattered fleeting dreams. Shale is a world undone. Ten metropolises devoured; only two remained. One way or another, this is a Nightbound Land.
Let me write now of David Milde of the metropolis of Mirrlees-on-Weep. He was a Carnival addict, a drug whose comforts were popular in those last days. It cocooned him through the horrors of a city crashing towards oblivion, but not enough that he could stand and wait to be murdered by the Council Vergers that assassinated his father. He fled from his father's house — from murder to murderer, as it was Cadell, the Old Man that found him.
Cadell, what there is to know of him, a hundred volumes could but contain the merest whispers. Old Men are old as the world of Shale is old, the Old Men ruled, the Old Men fought the Roil once (perhaps more than once) and
