David shook, his teeth chattering.
“I thought you could handle the cold.”
“It’s not the cold. It's the Carnival, well, the lack of it. It’s the Carnival that holds him back,” David said.
“So,” Margaret said. “You keep him that way.”
David shook his head. “No, I can’t. We need him now. We need Cadell. This will cost me dearly. To bring him forward is to drive me back.”
“I know which I would prefer,” Margaret said, and squeezed his hand.
“It doesn’t matter what you would, what you want or what I want. We need to do this. We have to, and if that means there is no me after this, then scary as that is, I accept it.”
“Is that you or Cadell saying that?”
David smiled at her. “Still time for you to run.”
To be so hunted, the both of us, Margaret thought. David stood there, his shoulders straight, one hand clutching the sword that he had taken from the umbrella. He cocked his head to one side and smiled. “Ah, and here they come.”
A noise built. A great clattering of engines, a wheezing of machines pushed to their limits. This was an airship dying. Finally, it came into sight, its surface ablaze, passing low over the trees, almost touching the tallest ones.
The dirigible passed overhead, and for a moment they were in shadow. Shots stung the air around them. Margaret dropped to a crouch and fired at the sky. The dirigible was already sliding over the ridge.
“Don’t let it distract you,” David shouted into her ear. “They’re on the ground. They’re here!”
David fired the flare.
The land filled with light. He jerked a thumb to the right, near the tree line. A tall man stood there, dressed in a ragged morning coat, hands flung up against the light.
“To the left, too,” David said. “By the rocks.” He fired his pistol there, at another man dressed in little more than rags.
“Where are the rest of them?” Margaret said, firing to the right. The Old Man had already moved to cover.
“Some always move faster than others. They'll be here soon enough, Miss Penn.”
Margaret blinked.
She asked, “Are you all right?”
“Not at all,” David said, and the words were clearly a struggle. “But I am what I need to be.”
David straightened, seemed to broaden across the chest, and flashed a smile at her that was both nightmarish and reassuring at once. “They’ll come at us in a rush, probably once the flare-”
They didn’t wait that long.
In a blur of movement they were upon them. Margaret managed two quick shots, caught a satisfying spray of blood, then her rime blade was unsheathed, a pistol in her free hand.
She fired again, the bullet striking the Old Man in the side of his face. That slowed him, she swung out, and the Old Man closed his fingers around the blade. Margaret lifted her pistol, fired again. Blood sprayed from the Old Man’s neck.
She didn’t see the fist that struck her.
Only found herself on her back, ears ringing. She snatched out at her pistol, dropped it.
A heavy boot kicked her in the chest.
She felt something break, pain boiled across her chest, but she managed to pull free another pistol from her belt, and her free hand found the rime blade. Time stilled, she rolled backwards. Pain again, waves of it. She could taste blood, her nose streamed. The Old Man stood there, wounded and bleeding too.
He took a step forward, the grass around his boot crackled. Margaret fired.
Another wound, but he didn’t stop.
Neither did she. She crouched low, and sprang out, straight towards the Old Man. There was something beautiful in her movements. She knew it, could feel the fluid grace of her limbs, the arc her blade described.
The Old Man moved to block her, but she was already past his guard. She fired her pistol one last time, right into his chest, then cut off the Old Man’s head. It fell to the earth. She crouched down, grabbed her second rime blade, and looked at David.
They were talking.
The Old Man had David around the neck, lifting him with just one arm. The other he was using to punch him in the ribs. David’s limbs juddered. And yet they talked as if old friends.
“Surely it would be in our interests to work together,” David said as blood streamed from his head. His hands were closed around the Old Man's wrist.
“Doing what you do,” the Old Man said, swinging, swinging. “You have no idea whose interests you are working for. We cannot countenance the application of the sciences that made us what we are. If I do not succeed in destroying you, the others will try, until you or all of them are dead.”
“But the Roil is building. There is so little time left.”
“Let the Roil build, let it do what it will do. That is better, let it happen this time.”
“I can’t and I won’t,” David said.
The Old Man nodded. “You were always at the heart of the madness, Cadell. Leave the boy alone.”
“You’re the one trying to kill me.”
“Oh, you are so naive. Both of you are so naive. What does it matter?” the Old Man hissed. “What does any of it matter?”
Her first blade she drove through his back and into his heart, the other she hacked into his neck. The Old Man dropped David and turned. She struck his neck again. The Old Man’s head fell one way, the body the other.
“It matters a lot to me,” Margaret said.
“Get up,” Margaret said, reaching down. David gripped her hand with fingers which had grown icy cold, and she almost dropped him.
“The rest are coming,” David said.
Margaret nodded to the nearby ridge. “Then we climb that.”
She grabbed her bag of guns, wiped her blades free of blood. David was looking at her, one hand rubbing his throat where a dark bruise was forming.
“You'd do well to hurry up,” she said and headed for the ridge.
CHAPTER 35
I can't say that I ever really knew David. He was too many things, too many faces. I don't know if anyone could ever really know him. I'm not even that sure he knew himself.
THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS 1520 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
The stone struck Margaret on the head. David caught the movement a moment too late. She turned, blinked at him once and tumbled. A few more steps and they would have been clear.
Another stone flashed through the dark, but David was ready. He caught it, and hurled it back. Soft laughter sounded from the trees ahead.
“Good throw.”
David squinted and could see the Old Man there, half hidden in the branches of a great pine. It was dark, but the Old Man glowed.
David checked that Margaret was still breathing. And she was, though a lump was fast growing on her forehead. The stone that had struck her had been about the size of a fist. David picked it up speculatively.
“I could have shot her,” the Old Man shouted. “But I am merciful.”
