“It’s dark in there,” Buchan said.
“Yes, but it’s warm. When the Engine is engaged, there will be no safer place, you should survive here.”
“Should?” Buchan asked.
“Might, should, won't — I don’t know,” David snapped. “There are no guarantees any more. We are here. We have made it, and that is all. And that is all we have to understand.” David realised that he was shouting.
Buchan took a step back. “Then you can tell the damn pilot.”
“Of course,” David said, and he got to his feet.
Watson Rhig sat beneath the shade of his gondola. He smoked a pipe, offered some to David, who declined.
“Not my poison,” he said.
Rhig laughed. “No, I would imagine that it isn't.”
“You flew well,” David said.
“I'm a good pilot,” Rhig answered. “Not such a good compatriot. You know I was meant to take you back to the Underground.”
“Why didn't you?”
“I guess the question is: how could I? Let me tell you, David, that your aunt is safe, and Medicine Paul; well, they were when I left them. That should be some comfort to you.” Rhig gave his pipe a good hard knock, stuffed it with some new tobacco, tamped it down, and took his time as pilots do. “I saw what you and the girl did to those Old Men. Knew that I had no choice but to throw in with you lot. If anyone is capable of surviving Tearwin Meet, I’d imagine it's you.”
“You think we can do this?”
The pilot lit his pipe with a match, and puffed a moment. “I know you can, Mr Milde. And if you can't, then it wasn't possible in the first place.” He smiled. “And yes, I’ll move the Collard Green under that damn overhang.”
CHAPTER 42
Without good leadership, pride, a sense of destiny, and a little fear, a city will fail. A city will fall. As long as we keep strong, keep to our purpose, keep to my purpose, we will not succumb as the other cities have.
Should we falter, then we will all die.
MIRRLEES-ON-WEEP ROIL EDGE
Another bad day.
Business had been non-existent this last week. The city was emptying out, deflating like a burst tire. After the Chapman disaster everyone was heading north, most had already gone weeks ago with Mayor Stade’s fleet.
It was the Grand Defeat all over again, only this time much worse. There was little hope that the people of Hardacre would greet them with open arms. Stagwell Matheson had considered leaving but there was nowhere else to go, even if his staff had decided otherwise.
The door remained open only out of habit. No one had walked through it the last two days, and he doubted any customers would again.
At least the rain had stopped, as ominous as that was; the sun, even hazed with what people told him were Roil spores, was cheering. Though what the sun revealed was less so. The months of constant rain had scarred the city and there was no one left to heal it. The air stank of sewage and dead things and while the rain had hidden such smells — or at the very least dulled them — the sun lifted them up, seemed to take a delight in their acrid pungency.
And at night, and during the day, there could be heard always a distant screaming. And sometimes the sky grew slick and black with the Cuttle messengers. When that happened he kept inside his shop.
Once a Quarg Hound had passed by, its wide eyes taking everything in. It had yapped out something that might have been a kind of warning, and then it had bounded away. Stagwell had watched it all from behind his counter.
There were whispers of a sickness, a spreading madness; that people were not to be trusted. And while there had always been sicknesses, fevers and chills, such was the nature of modern city life, this was an altogether different thing.
The city had been left to the insane. So while he had not had any customers that day, Stagwell found some comfort in the solitude. The few people he had had in the bookstore over the past week had become increasingly desperate or desperately odd. Many times now he had locked the front door, and hid behind the shelves, rather than let some oddly shambling man or woman enter the shop.
Stagwell dusted the biography section, the presence of these collections of lives — simplified and analysed — calming him. At least here was something solid and unchangeable.
The shop jolted, a sudden terrible spasm. Mayor Stade's Brute and Noble Governance fell to the floor, his stern face staring up, and Stagwell almost tumbled down with it. The beams in the ceiling groaned and the building had another petit mal.
He ran to the front of the shop and stuck his head out the door. There were few people on the street and of those that were, fewer remained upright.
The earth quaked again, and Stagwell watched it ripple towards him along the street. He clutched desperately at the door frame and managed to keep his footing. Inside the store, shelves juddered and books crashed to the floor.
His line of sight extended down Main Street and where it ended on Harris Heights, across the River Weep. The earth rippled again and the ground flexed, then bubbled, and the air twisted and grew black with wreckage and broken buildings. A great fiery hand burst through the earth and with it fire and stone struck the sky, shooting up and arcing down. The nearby River Weep hissed, and steam crowded the air — and something else with it that was smokey and flitting. And that something was racing down the street, fanning out, hunting. People screamed, or laughed, or screamed and laughed — and fell down, before they rose on limbs shaky at first, but gripped with a new purpose.
From the top of Ruele Tower, something flared with a great cold light. The air chilled, the smoke fell from the sky, and the hand shuddered and dropped, smashing back through the earth. A bomb, some sort of miniature Engine of the World, Stagwell guessed.
Snow fell, the air chilled.
He rushed inside, but he wasn't the only thing that had fled the cold. Darkness rushed towards him on tiny dusty wings.
All he felt was relief, stronger even than the pain. Relief that it was all over, that he did not need to worry about what to do, that he did not need to care.
A hot old voice whispered in his skull, and suddenly Stagwell Matheson was laughing and getting matches and setting all those tumbled books alight.
By midmorning the retail sector was blazing, by that afternoon the whole city burned, and the sky was dark with ash and smoke.
And thus, before the Roil was even a smudge on the horizon, was the old city of Mirrlees-on-Weep finally taken.
But it wasn't without cost to the Roil.
The Witmoths, the nerves along which the Roil strung its thought, knew for perhaps the first time in twenty years a setback. And though there was no one there to see it, the Roil felt it nonetheless.
The currents beneath the earth were strong and deadly even to Vastkind, but deadlier still was the land above. Each time it burst through the earth, that cruel void, so absent of pressure, threatened to tear it apart. It
