had given him, but it hadn’t desensitised him to fear. He would snap awake — Margaret’s sleep (which was hitched with its own baggage) already broken — the Orbis on his finger gleaming, and sob, till tears and snot slicked his face.
He didn’t seem to care that Margaret watched him.
And despite the small space, and the fact that she hadn’t caught him, she was sure that he was still taking Carnival. How else could he remain so calm, when every bit of her was itching to be free of this cabin? All he did during the day was read from his small stash of Shadow Council novels. Margaret had tried to read one of them, and found it utterly unpalatable. The books hadn’t changed much in style or substance since the ones that her father had read, perhaps a little crueller, a little more violent. All they did was make her yearn for her parents’ library, and remind her again what had been lost. But the books kept David occupied, which in itself would be good, but it also made it easy for him to avoid talking strategy.
They had no plan for Drift, for what needed to be done when they arrived. Kara had said that there would be more information in the Pinch, but that had been little more than an inventory of supplies. They were going in blind, and as far as Margaret saw it, that was David’s fault.
She slid from her bed, landed on her feet lightly and walked towards the control panel — or what would be the control panel at some stage when Pinch had matured — as the Aerokin hummed to herself softly. Everything seemed all right — though Margaret really couldn’t tell.
Outside it was still dark. She touched the translucent wall and it cleared and she could see in the distance, through the murk, a fire burning down below. Then she realised that it was moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards them. She tapped the wall again and watched it shift, drawing the image into tighter focus. She couldn’t make out much, other than that it was not one fire, but three. Already they were drawing away from the fire.
Margaret couldn’t explain why, but the sight disturbed her. She released the focus of the wall, made the lights a single blur again.
“Worrying, isn’t it?” David said from behind her, making her jump. When had he ever been so light on his feet?
“What is it?”
“Who, you mean. The Old Men. They can’t get us here, but they can feel me. Just as I feel them, this is as close as we have ever been, them and I.” He hunkered down beside her, and smiled, though it was nothing like the smile of his sleeping. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we? Hunted by everyone. Far too popular for our own good.” He shook his head. “My dreams are always so dreadful these days.” He reached across the narrow hall and grabbed an apple, offered it to Margaret; she shook her head. He bit down on the apple, juice ran down his chin. “Horrible, horrible things.”
She turned away, looked back out as lightning streaked the sky. She felt the subtle shifting of the Aerokin, the way Pinch moved from a parallel path with the storm to a slightly westerly one.
Margaret said, “You didn’t look like you were having a bad dream.”
David sighed. “That’s Cadell. He and I have different opinions on what is good and bad.” He took another bite. “Tell me about your city, Margaret.”
“Funny, I was just-”
“I think I heard you call out in your sleep,” David said. “What was it like?”
And she did. Starting with great towers and the bells, the wireways webbing the city, and just how much like flying that was, only faster than an Aerokin, the air around you dark as night. The Four Cannon: the rhythm around which everything else was constructed. And then there were the caverns below, ever luminous, smelling of life, nothing like the frozen city above. Just talking about it made her ache.
“Sounds wonderful,” David said. “All I ever knew was rain, the smell of rot. The levee walls rising up and up. And everyone afraid that the Roil would come, that the levees would break, or the city just sink into the ground. Do you think there is a person alive in this world that doesn’t have a heart drowning in terror?”
“We all drown in something,” Margaret said.
“It’s all right,” David said. “We’re moving again. We'll do what we must.”
Yes, Margaret thought. Everything's all right. My parents are dead. My city is destroyed. Yes, everything is all right.
And maybe David saw that in her face, because he frowned and turned away.
“It’s all right,” he said once again, softly, as though to himself.
CHAPTER 19
Drift is everything that Shale aspires to. It's no wonder the bastards are arrogant, they're almost gods. Fly this, race this, lift this, they were always first and best, and quite frankly it was annoying.
They owned the blasted sky. Shame about what happened, none of us wanted that.
THE CITY OF DRIFT 1400 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
They approached Drift in the early morning, coming at it through a band of clouds. There was nothing secretive about their arrival. Flares went up, there was a fury of flight, Aerokin boiling from hidden hangars, but it was the great edifice of Stone itself that drew the eye. A mountain reversed, flat on the top and jagged below, reaching to a great inverted peak.
Stone's great plateau was thickly forested: houses poked out of the woods, obscured and protected by the forest. And at their heart was a small oval field, by a broad lake that reflected both the clouds and Aerokin above. It was a tinier version of the Field of Flight, though Chapman had modelled their field on this one. And in its exact centre was a single tower, a long finger of stone which David knew was called the Caress. He had always wanted to see it, and now he had. Though part of him, the part in which Cadell resided, remembered seeing it many times.
The hangars were all below, on the hollowed-out cliffs of the plateau, but it wasn’t there the Aerokin was taking them. They flew towards the jutting tower of the Caress itself.
Pinch passed over the edge of the city, the shift from open sky to forest, grass, and buildings a dramatic one. The hard light of the sky seemed to soften, as it washed over hard earth. Guns tracked their progress, aimed squarely at the Pinch ’s flotation sacks. David tried not to think about that too much. Beneath Pinch were a few farmhouses made of stone, smoke trailing from narrow chimney. David hadn’t expected such a rural setting.
As they headed towards the Caress, David looked down, the sky wasn't the only place that was crowded. A hundred people or more waited on the field below them. Some industrious folk had even started selling fried food on the periphery of the crowd.
“This feels wrong,” Margaret said, already walking back to the bag containing her weapons. “I told you it was a mistake to come here.”
David couldn't remember her saying any such thing.
“If Kara Jade says she needs our help, then she needs our help.”
Margaret snatched up a rifle. “And what hold does she have over you?”
“Nothing,” David said, with enough conviction to make it sound believable even to himself. “She saved my life, she saved both our lives. We owe her.”
Margaret wasn’t listening; she sighted down her rifle. “Nothing handier in a negotiation than a gun,” she said. “Except maybe a bigger gun.”
“Don’t you ever listen?” David put a hand on hers. “We are not to go in there, guns blazing.”
Margaret smiled. “You don’t know me very well, do you?”
David tilted his head towards her. “You know, you’re right. So, are you going to go in there, guns blazing?”
“Of course not,” she said, and even she thought she sounded convincing.
The first thing that struck her was the impossibility of it. Rock did not float, and here was a great mountain-
