Unremarkables, before reaching another frozen sea and the southern tip of Shale.
“Do you think they would find us if we just set off over the sea?” David said softly.
Out there a dark shape breached the water, followed by another. David frowned, then realised that it was a pod of whales. The sight was somehow heartening and heartbreaking at once. The wind struck the Dawn again, and they were out of the city.
“They'll find us anywhere,” Margaret said. “Which is why we should turn the Dawn around and jump down onto the lip of the wall, and climb, and do it now.”
David shook his head. “We climb. But not today,” David repeated. “Today we land, Miss Penn. Today we rest, just outside the walls. I’m not quite ready yet.” He looked over at Margaret, and hardly noticed that she was looking at him not with anger, but curiosity. “You’ll have to use the flags again,” he said, and pointed to a space on the ground, just outside the walls. “We’re going to need to land there.”
The Collard Green already looked like she was making for the landing space, though Margaret did as she was asked.
“And fly carefully, Miss Jade,” David said.
Kara mumbled something, but David didn't hear her. The wall took up too much of his attention for that. Though as they descended, he felt a little less of the scrutiny of the Engine beyond it.
They sank slowly. Perhaps too close to the spiked walls of the city, as though Kara was making a point; David could see just how sharp those spikes were and he knew those edges could cut flesh with a touch.
Here at the boundary of Tearwin Meet, his sense of scale had to adjust constantly, it was like nothing he had ever seen before (and yet the part of him that was Cadell knew it too well); and he a citizen of a metropolis given over to excess. The grand levees of Mirrlees, the broad hulk of the Downing Bridge, these were nothing more than toys against the reach and span of Tearwin’s walls.
They rose spindly and tall, looking like stone, though constructed of something far stronger and lighter. You could swing an axe at those walls, David thought — if you could get past the dense mass of cutting edges, thrusting out at all angles like monstrous thistle heads — and not leave a mark. Though there were signs of decay and age, in places furred colonies of fungus marked the wall, or forests of some sort of hardy vine. David even fancied he caught flashes of graffiti, ridiculous drawings of men and women, and curious beasts. He rather hoped someone had climbed up here, just to mark the walls. Their size alone required some kind of magnificent defiance; the climb itself was something to be admired.
As they sank, the city’s walls only grew grander, thicker, more densely spiked. And looking up, at the top of the walls, it looked less like a walled city than a colossal smokestack. Indeed, wisps of cloud added to the impression as they trailed from its peak.
CHAPTER 40
And what was happening in the south? We only have speculation, rumours of dreaming cities, but no real indication of what such things might be like. The Engine hid behind its walls, and the Obsidian Curtain was just as opaque.
THE DREAMING CITY DEEP WITHIN (AND OF) THE ROIL
Tope opened his eyes. He’d failed.
He should have been dead. His last memory had been the leap into the liquid nitrogen in Chapman.
And yet, he could feel his own pulse, and deep beneath the surface on which he lay supine (breaths all a shudder) was an echoing beat, as though the earth itself was alive. Perhaps even more so. After all, he had spent his life containing his passions, honing them to such an edge that they might strike out at the enemy, wherever and whoever that was.
He had failed in that task, just as he had failed to die.
He felt a moment’s frustration at that failure, and a moment’s anger at the relief that followed, and the realisation that he had never wanted to die. But his life had never been about what he wanted. Whose life was?
“You are awake, then.” The voice that spoke those words was soft, but authoritative. Nearby curtains twitched. His gaze flicked towards the movement.
“Yes.” Tope knew there was no point in pretending otherwise. That voice denied deception. “Where am I?”
“You know where you are.”
And he did, he lay in the terrible dark of the Roil. His skin burned, the flesh itched. But all of it meant one thing, that he wasn't dead. That he was very much alive.
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Don't you wonder how you survived?”
Tope shrugged. “I’ve seen many wondrous things. Killed my share of them, too. I stopped requiring the whats and whyfors a long time ago.”
There was a sense of pleasure in the response. “You’re a Verger, for you the knife is all.”
“The knife is all.”
“And it’s knife work that we require.”
An image grew within his mind, possessed of that same beat: it flashed and flared and faded. He said, “The boy…”
“Is a boy no longer.”
Tope wondered just how long it had been since he had last opened his eyes.
“Weeks have passed, only weeks,” the voice whispered, gently mocking. “But for him, and this world, it has been an age — your home would be unrecognisable to you. And the boy, though he might not look it, has become a monster. The world is greatly changed. You say you have seen wondrous things. But you have not seen anything like this.” The curtains parted, and he realised that they hadn't been curtains at all, but winged creatures that went howling through the window — and the Dreaming City was revealed to him. He saw its engines, felt the rushing thought that informed it all, that was his thought and its thought. Here he was a single organism made up of many organisms, that were also part of this city, that were part of many cities. He felt in himself a deep yearning for that, to be part of it, part of the whole, because he wasn't, not yet.
“This was once known as Carver. It was the first metropolis to fall to dreams, now it is just one place of many. Here all is possible, here matter shapes to our dreaming. Though in truth we dream no more. We have woken. And when the dreamer wakes, dreams are realised.”
Tope realised just how foolish Stade had been, to think that he could resist this. One thing to hide and fight against a senseless force of nature, but this was vast thought, of a scale that no one man was any match for, schemes within schemes as tightly bound as any clockwork mechanism, and infinitely more cunning. This was the future, and it was beautiful.
“The boy would destroy this new world. He would wipe it from the face of the world, and with it the seed of all hope.”
Always the boy! Always the ruination of things. If only he had killed him that first night. The father should have been the one spared, the boy was always the danger. It amused him that the Roil — and Stade's desires — had boiled down to this one thing. He smiled.
“I will kill him,” Tope said.
“Yes, we believe you will.” The voice sounded very pleased indeed. “There is a vehicle waiting for you, a ship of fire that will burn as bright as any star. It will take you to the north.”
He looked about the room and saw it at last. The figure, obscured by Witmoths, they scurried about its flesh, slid in and out of its mouth and nose. Tope couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. All sense of that had gone. It was merely Roil.
