“It keeps me warm enough when it’s not activated. I left Tate in this suit, and I will finish what I set out to do while dressed so.”
“Fair enough,” David said. “Though if you expect me to take some Carnival, I will have to disappoint you.”
“You take Carnival, and I'll cut your throat.”
“I'd expect nothing less from you,” David said.
The Dawn stopped at the top of the rocky wall. The wind was building, just the first few gusts, but there was the promise of more. Far to the east, the sea glowed with the coming sun. The Dawn stayed steady, absolutely still, as though asserting her mastery over the sky. Margaret slipped her empty mug into the small sink at the back of the gondola, stared at it a moment.
Her gaze fell upon the east, and she wondered if they need perhaps wait for the sun to rise — that starting without seeing it one last time was wrong. After all, she had known so few sunrises, didn’t she deserve this last one? There was something so right in the idea that she opened her mouth to suggest it.
But David spoke first. “Are you ready?”
She nodded and he passed her a great coil of rope, the thin strong stuff of the Roslyn Dawn, grown by the ship herself. He had another looped around his shoulder.
“Yes,” she said, and walked to the doorifice, it opened and the cold rushed in, such bitter terrible cold. Her fingers ached at once, her lungs seemed to constrict and burn.
“It will be warmer below,” David said, touching her back gently. The coldness of him seeped through, she pulled away from his touch. “Not much, but a little.”
Not for you, she thought. “All the more reason to do this quickly.”
“Good luck,” Kara said.
“You too.” David kissed her gently on the cheek.
Kara hugged him tight, then did the same to Margaret, and Margaret surprised herself by letting her. “How will I know if you succeed?”
“You’ll know,” David said. “The world itself will draw a mighty breath. You hear that, you take cover.”
Kara looked at Margaret. “Keep each other safe.”
Margaret wanted to say that there was nothing safe in what they did. Instead she nodded, and leapt out through the doorifice and onto the edge of the wall.
David followed, landing lithely. He crouched on the narrow walkway, a hammer in hand, and drove an anchor into the wall. Three hard blows and it was done, to his apparent satisfaction.
Already the Dawn was sliding away and down, and already the dawn was breaking the horizon, a light washing over an icy sea. And so Margaret saw the sunrise as she'd wished. Somewhere distant a sea creature let out a cry at once mournful and triumphant, and Margaret knew how it felt. Another night survived, another day to endure, the world had yet to grind it down.
The wind grew then. It pulled at her hair, and her greatcoat, and snatched the sound away.
David grinned at her, and she grinned back at him.
He locked a karabiner into place, then played out the weighted line, down, down, down.
He sighed, and in a voice more Cadell than David declared, “The last time we used rope, it didn’t go so well at all. And yet, here we are.”
Margaret nodded, hardly listening, looking down at the city below, and the webwork of razor-sharp cold wire that protected it. For a moment, all she could think of was Tate, and its network webs and wireways.
“It’s like going home,” Margaret said.
“For both of us, eh,” David said, though Margaret could tell there was little of David here.
“Shall you go first?” David said. “You'll be safe, just don't venture too far from the wall.”
Margaret clipped her harness and her line onto the rope, and let gravity do what it always did. Within moments, as the muscles in her arms and legs worked at the wall, she felt herself grow warmer. She looked up; already David was a dot on the wall.
She dropped in leaps and bounds, and it was like she was back on the wireway. Ice shards fell with her, and she knew that she would have to get well away from the wall when she reached the bottom, or David was likely to kill her with the ice he'd bring down.
When she reached the bottom, she yanked on the rope three times; then ran from the wall, finding cover a few yards distant. She took her weapons carefully from her bag, checked their charges, and waited for David to descend.
And ice fell, such a rain that anything within the city surely knew that they were coming and would be waiting. She looked at her guns and her blades. She was ready, too.
When he made it down, he grinned a great grin: part delight, part terror. “Made it.” He looked past her shoulder, at the city beyond. “Finally,” he said. “Finally.”
Tearwin Meet drowned in the shadow of its walls. The sounds of ice sheets cracking echoed all around them. Tearwin Meet itself was no more than a mile in diameter, as wide as it was high. The tower that was their destination sat squarely in the heart of the city. And down here on the ground, Margaret couldn’t see the tower, but for the occasional glimpse, between this tower and the next.
She had to rely on David, that he knew what he was doing. But with every step into the city, it was as though a wall was rising between them, and like the Engine’s tower, she was only catching glimpses of David.
The buildings that lined the streets were tall, some ran to thirty stories, many were linked by narrow walkways, further reducing the light. Awnings stretched out from each building — they seemed at odds with the great structures from which they sprang, but Margaret could imagine tables laid out beneath them, people eating and laughing. People had lived here once, before the Engine had driven them away.
It looked to be a simple thing to walk to the heart of the city, but within that half-mile was a network of ring roads and dead ends, of roads sinking beneath the earth and rising again back at the wall, having curled without them even noticing. It was a maze as complicated as the Engine of the World itself.
But it was a maze that David said he understood.
“We follow the path laid out for us. We always do,” David said. “When we reach the tower, there will be a door at its base. We need to find that door.”
“And what do we do then?” Margaret said.
David’s eyes widened, and then he gave her a condescending smile, and patted her arm. “We step through it, of course, Miss Penn. Because that is what doors are for.”
Something snuffled in the distance. Margaret pulled her rifle from beneath her coat, but whatever it was, it did not reveal itself.
David looked towards the sound. “Let it be,” he said. “It will not attack unless it perceives us as a threat. That gun looks rather threatening, wouldn't you say?”
“It’s meant to look threatening,” Margaret said.
Again that blasted smile.
“We need to hurry,” David said.
And the road dipped, and led them into darkness, though David's Orbis glowed in the dark with a feverish light. The shadows around them grew long and danced, and it was suddenly very easy to believe in ghosts. Twice Margaret fired at what she took to be movement, but was only the flickering reflection of the ring.
“Calm down,” David said, after she had wasted another round. “We are not threatened. Not yet. I will let you know when we are.”
They came back out into the light again, and found themselves at the base of a low hill, though the road did not directly lead to the tower, they could see it up ahead.
They heard the iron ship’s approach as a thunderous drone, a ceaseless noise that they recognised almost at once. Ice showered from the walls behind them.
David's eyes widened. “No, they couldn't.”
But they had. She had. Margaret knew who had sent this ship. It crashed down at them, through the protective webwork, metal snapped and screamed, iron tore with the sounds of a million metal teeth grinding and scraping. And the ship itself did not stay together, but detonated overhead. David stood there, watching it all.
“Cover now,” Margaret said, throwing David towards the nearest of the awnings. Shrapnel fell.
A second craft shot through the opening, though it made it further before detonating. Then a final iron ship
