she was neither the most cunning, nor the most skilled at governance. She knew that she had made mistakes. But what else could she have done? There was no time for general elections, no chance to build confidences and allegiances, other than those she had had already in place. It didn’t matter now. All of it was undone.
Graine stared at the panel set into the wall a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then she pressed it, just so, fingers drawing out the right patterns. She felt the stirrings of a mechanism deeper within Stone, then a sudden rising chill. There was a sensation of vast energies at work, peculiar forces grinding soft and vast against each other. The stone shuddered, Stone shuddered. And she knew that all across the city of Drift, people would be pausing, listening, disturbed by the motion of energies old and ill understood, even by her. The reasoning behind most of their technology, the old grammars of science, had been lost to the Roil.
That’s what happens when children rule. All of them, Mothers and Old Men alike, had been scarcely in their twenties when the Roil had come. Sure, Cadell had been a little older — proud and oh-so-strong — but what is a handful of years? Nothing when faced with what followed.
Her sisters screamed once, then were quiet.
She waited ten heartbeats, then opened the door; the room within was empty, wasn’t even quite the same room.
All at once, she felt more alone than she had believed possible. She leaned briefly against the wall, and took a single deep breath.
Graine had seen the world shift and change beneath her. She had watched it expand, seen centuries of development as humanity and Cuttlefolk recovered from the Roil. But always she had watched at a distance. It was as though she had had two lives: one brief, a normal span, and then this endless passage of time. Well, it had never been endless; it was coming to an end now.
She turned and climbed the stairs again. At one point she heard Raven and her charges descending. Graine took the next doorway, and hid until they passed. Her history and theirs was a different one now, and she didn’t want to muddy its beginning with her presence, or find herself tempted to follow. She couldn’t be a part of it. She had just killed her sisters. She didn’t deserve to be a part of it.
She came out of the Caress through a different door, and walked the same path she had taken David along just a few days before. The grove of trees was almost completely alight, a great finger of flame, and smoke rising into the sky. Smoke hid Witmoths, and all around her were newly made Roilings.
Graine looked at the sky, then the corpses of her kin. Dead now. Motionless, until the Wit smoke found them, and she could not bear to think of that, it hurt her even more deeply than the loss of her sisters.
Punctured Aerokin tumbled screaming to the ground. Guns fired and were silenced. Men and women laughed the shrill mad laughter of the Roil.
She hurried through chaos to the edge of Drift, here, above the Peek, where the drop was steep, no rough spurs of Stone jutting out just the sky. Cold air rushed past her, tugged at her clothes.
And she stepped over the edge.
A Cuttle messenger snatched at her, caught her as she was falling. Witmoths boiled from its mouth; she reached up, hands burning with the heat of them, and snapped the creature’s neck. Its wings stopped, though its limbs tightened around her.
Down, they tumbled, spinning over and over. And the moths flew around her, but the air was cold and they fell so fast.
The fall was a long one, just as her life had been long, but nothing is forever; the earth found her in the end.
CHAPTER 47
That something so small should forge something so big is the paradox of Minnow technology. Minnows are tiny machines. Smaller than the eye can see, I swear it. There is no doubt that once they did exist and in such abundance that they built a world. Consider these, the Hour Glass of Carver, Mirrlees' Ruele Tower, the Bridges of McMahon, all our greatest municipal structures and they are as nothing to the power of minnows. Mechanical Winter was a minnow-constructed thing, just as is the Engine of the world. I have seen it all. Drunk on visions, I have seen it all.
THE ENGINE OF THE WORLD DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE
The door closed in front of him. If David hadn't snatched his fingers from the door edge, they would have been cut off. As it was, it struck his head hard. He felt his nose break.
He stared into his own face, and the reflection of the cloud of dust his falling had unsettled.
Blood streamed from his nose, and dust coated the blood. I'm still here, he thought, Cadell's yet to Then his reflection smiled.
Not the sort of smile he even thought his face was capable of.
You got what you wanted, David thought. You've won.
“Didn't we both want this?”
He whipped his head around. A hundred Davids stared back at him with a hundred smug smiles. He fished in his pocket, yanked out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his face. Blood disappeared a hundred times.
All he could hear was his own breathing loud in his head, his heart beating hard in his chest. Neither was amplified.
The air stank of ozone; it tasted of metal tangy as blood, or was that just his own blood, running down the back of his throat?
He stood there, dazed, uncertain of what he needed to do.
Shouldn't he know what to do?
He took a step forward, and the dust puffed up. All the Davids repeated the movement. He stopped, only this time one of the Davids reached out and took his hand.
“I'm sorry,” the mirror being said, “but this is going to hurt.”
He wasn't wrong.
David blinked; he didn't know how long he'd been on the floor. His tongue was swollen. He thought he might have bitten it, he couldn't remember. If someone had told him just then that he wasn't David, that he was someone else, he wouldn't have argued.
A hand touched his shoulder. This time there was no pain. David scurried forward, slid along the floor and rolled, hands bunched into fists; no one was going to stab him in the back.
Cadell smiled at him, that same smug smile David had seen reflected back at him.
“You're not dead, you know,” Cadell said. “Death is quite unlike this, trust me.”
“Then what am I?”
“You're all manner of possibility.” Cadell gestured to a wooden bench beneath a tree of bone and cogs, on the edge of a great brass road that stretched into infinity.
“What is this place?” David asked.
“Convenient,” Cadell said. “It is the world contained within the Orbis. The Great Brass Highway. It's the infinite folded in on itself. It's convenient.”
Cadell looked up beyond David, frowned, bit at his lip. “Oh, I really thought I would have more time. Infinity, even compressed into a ring, is a rather a lot.”
David turned. Saw the figure running towards them across some impossibly vast space.
“The Engine,” David said.
“Yes, the Engine. Well, part of it.” Cadell sighed. He almost looked embarrassed. “David, things aren't quite as you believed.”
“What, we're not here to destroy the Roil?”
