As a young man, Stade had fought in the Cuttle Wars. So many of his generation had. They'd been men and women fighting a war of cultures — of misunderstandings driven to blood and death. His service and heroism in those wars had led to his election. Heroism, all he'd remembered was the horror. He’d seen troops stripped of their flesh almost before they could fire their guns. Aerokin devoured in the sky, their great cannon useless. He wasn’t the only one of his crew to remember such things, but none of them had ever witnessed anything like that which flew towards them.
“How can there be so many?” Captain Jones said.
“Because we didn’t do it right the first time,” Stade muttered, though he knew that was wrong, that these Cuttlefolk flew with a purpose that wasn’t their own.
Witmoths covered their flesh, and fell from them like an inky rain.
“Engage the cannons,” he said, and if his voice cracked with the fear of it, no one noticed. “It’s time we made the sky bleed.”
He reached in his pocket for a cigar, lit it, and unsheathed the knife at his belt, the same blade with which he had severed the fool Medicine Paul's fingers.
“Now, fire the damn things! Fire and fire and fire.” The airship bucked and shuddered, and the sky bled.
And still they came. Cannons were never enough. Of course, Cuttlefolk made it onto the ship, and cold-suited Vergers met them with ice guns and frozen blades of the Tate design.
Even Stade himself couldn't avoid the fighting. A Cuttleman broke through the gondola window, and it was Stade that struck off its head, the mayor grinning madly, teeth biting down hard on a lozenge of Chill. He folded his arms around the still twitching corpse and hurled it out in the sky.
Cannons fired. Ships fell in flame and smoke and detonations, but the Cuttle messengers took casualties too, and theirs were in far greater numbers. The battle was over within half an hour. Two ships gone down, plus another slowly sinking, and one without radio contact.
The slowly sinking airship veered to the west. The silent one followed. Stade had another airship pull alongside it, and it too grew silent. There had been five Vergers on that ship and none of them called back in. The three airships pulled away.
Stade took no chances on another ship, he had all three shot down. He sent out a directive for all crew to have Chill at the ready. He could not afford to lose more ships.
Nor was he prepared to abandon the masses that the airships themselves were protecting.
Two days at most and they would reach the Undergound. Stade only hoped that it was still there. Despite the lack of radio contact, he had no other destination. There was no other hope. They reached the Underground or they all died.
And word had finally come to him of an approaching Roil mass, a finger of the Roil itself, two miles wide by three. It was covering the ground behind them at an incredible rate.
If they didn’t reach the Underground in three days, this small finger of Roil would be upon them. And small though it might be, it was still enough to crush them.
CHAPTER 39
“Of course, Shale possesses a hollow core,” Travis the Grave said. He flexed his hand, the movement generating a short puff of steam. “Where else do you think all the monsters come from?”
“And where might we find entrance, Mr Grave?”
“Where all the curses and madness of this world originate. In the distant north, in Tearwin Meet.”
THE DEEP NORTH 2000 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Two days from the river and David became aware of the slow rise and fall of the world, and the landscape beneath them began its curious simplification. They reached the place where the last forests thinned and became nothing more than low wind-burned trees and grass, and these in turn gave way to clumps of some grey matter that seemed to sit halfway between grass and lichen.
After that landscape became raw stone, grey too — except when it rained, short icy showers that turned the stone blue or black. Three times they passed over Lodes — like the one David had used those weeks past — and each time, looking down, he could feel the Engine of the World staring back. David couldn't read the expression, but it was at best ambivalent, at worst disapproving.
Each Lode (as though they possessed transformative powers) brought a little more of Cadell to the surface, too. Memories waltzed through him that weren’t his own. Conversations, jokes and slights that made little sense to him, though he knew Cadell understood them. Certain unfamiliar mannerisms became less so; the way he walked sometimes felt wrong; even the way he looked out at the world, as though Cadell was trying to use his eyes differently from how David used them. Objects in the distance grew clearer, peculiar lights haloed the stony earth below. When he pointed it out, no one seemed to see it.
What he noticed most of all was an ever-increasing smugness. Cadell was getting what he wanted, or trying to hide behind it. He pushed away the disapproval, hoped that Kara hadn't seen it.
The world stopped its rising and falling, and just seemed to fall, as though the entire north was focussed on — and leaning towards — a single point. For two days, as they followed their slow flight, nothing changed below them, but for the stone, or the occasional animal, never larger than a fox, scurrying from sight, eking out an existence in what must be the harshest of environments.
David felt the great curvature of the world too, though here, yet again, it felt as though it was only curving in to one point.
Change came at last, a hint, revealed in increments, of a great upthrust of stone.
Tearwin Meet.
It grew on the horizon, and beneath them, that sensation of falling at first accelerated before shifting, as though the earth itself had stopped to crane its neck and look up. And still it seemed that they would never reach the city; that no matter how far they travelled against that terrible and monotonous gale, they could draw no closer.
And when David slept, Cadell was there, and that increasing sensation of falling: him falling into Cadell or Cadell falling into him. David had nothing to hold onto, it was happening whether he wanted it or not, and it was accelerating.
“I’m coming back,” Cadell said during one particularly deep slumber. They stood in the map room, Cadell circling the world like a moon.
“I know,” David said, wondering if he wasn't just substituting one form of powerlessness for another.
“The clouds are peculiar today, don’t you think?” Cadell tapped the panoptic map with his thumb.
David’s gaze was drawn towards a single dark finger of cloud.
“Peculiar, that’s no cloud.”
Cadell nodded his head smugly. “The Roil’s got its legs. Now it’s decided to go walking. And where would such a thing go walking?”
They both looked at the range, and the one mountain that contained the Underground.
“The cloud is moving swiftly, three days, no more, and it will reach the Underground.”
“Why not Hardacre?”
“It doesn’t see that city as a threat, it has already lost, as far as it is concerned. No matter how this turns out, Hardacre will cease to be.”
“And we can’t stop that?”
“You are doing your best to now. But it is better to think of what lies ahead. Tearwin Meet. The Roil itself is important, but we cannot influence it anywhere but here. And by we, I mean me.”
Cadell reached across the map, grabbed David's head and began to twist.
David’s eyes snapped open. He was in the Dawn, Margaret watching him from the other bed. “What curious
