“She was called back to Drift. I could no more stop a pilot from doing as she willed than I could wrestle a Vermatisaur. There was no money that I could offer her to make her stay. The pilots of Drift, they're loyal to the Mothers of Sky, and will be until the damn city comes crashing to the earth.”
“You could have tried harder.”
“I believe the same could have been said of you,” Buchan said.
He was right, but she didn't have to let him see that she knew that.
“Don't look to Drift to save us,” Buchan said. “The sky city is having troubles of its own.”
“What troubles?”
“There are rumours of a coup. The Mothers have been very quiet of late. Only one has been seen.”
Margaret shook her head. “You're talking about the most politically stable government in Shale.”
Buchan rubbed his chin. “But everything changes. Hardacre isn't where our journey will end.”
She turned without a word, made her way to the stairs and began to climb; not before catching a glimpse of David, his plate stacked with food, the Engineer's ring glowing ever so faintly on his finger. The boy was smiling, damn him. How could he smile? They’d just killed two men.
“Monster,” she breathed.
She knew all about monsters. She’d spent her whole adult life killing them. You didn’t negotiate with a monster, you couldn’t, and she wasn’t about to start trying.
And yet, she didn’t have any choice. After all, as Buchan had pointed out, David was the closest thing she had to a friend.
CHAPTER 3
After each defeat in the south, Hardacre grew, and the capital of the north truly became that. More blood within the city’s veins meant more blood spilled. For when a population grows there are always elements of it ready to take advantage, to murder, and to steal. And as Hardacre’s population exploded, those elements thrived. The darkest of those flowered in the weeks after the fall of Mirrlees. The murders were gruesome. Death had never become so lurid.
Added to that were rumours of a Cuttle army massing in the south, driven north by the greater dark of the Roil.
It was a perfect time to be a good fellow such as I. Now let me take you to Miss Gentle's boudoir, where we did not go so gently at all.
Callahan, an Erotic Memoir,
CITY OF HARDACRE 972 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Something scratched at the window, and for an awful moment, David thought it was him. Not Sheff, who was most definitely dead, but Cadell, the Old Man who had cursed him just weeks ago onboard the Roslyn Dawn, with a bite, and the Orbis Ingenium: a ring that Cadell had claimed was a universe folded up on itself.
He was everywhere. Cadell was everywhere. Not just in his dreams. Why not a dark shape scraping its nails against the glass, or an Old Man’s memories building in David's blood and his bones? And like the Old Man, imprisoned for millennia, David was obsessed with the dimensions of the room that caged him. That was the bit of Cadell in him. Frequently he dreamt of a small room, windowless, with a single reinforced door, bolted shut with something that hurt his head. So often had he had this dream now, that space had come to overlay his own room.
It was three steps from the desk to the window and five from the bed to the window, or three to the door. David knew the dimensions of this little room too well. He’d spent too long in it.
There was another soft scraping against the glass.
David stood up from his desk — where he had been trying to write a letter to his Aunt Veronica — and holding his pen in front of him as though it were a Verger’s knife, took those three steps to the window. He wasn’t ready for this, didn’t know if he would ever be. His hands shook a little despite the Carnival in his veins.
Nothing.
The street below was empty. Perhaps it had been an auditory hallucination. In some people Carnival generated all manner of colourful experiences. David had never taken the drug for that, more its ability to calm. As Cadell himself had implied (well, more than implied), to shield him from the worst sensations of a life subsumed by tragedy. Carnival suppressed doubt, blunted terror’s edge. It was what allowed him to stand at the window considering the possibility of the Old Man, and what made it, ultimately, addictive. If David had grown wild with visions and terror every time he’d taken a dose, he wouldn’t have taken it.
Cadell was out there, somewhere. David had been expecting it, he couldn’t explain how, but he knew this was the consequence of the Old Man’s death, and the “gift” he had given him.
Tens of people already dead in the city of Hardacre, and David had yet to bring himself to search him out. He was frightened of what he might find, and what he had to do. There hadn’t been much in the way of serious investigation yet; all of these people had been refugees from Chapman, and even a couple from Mirrlees. He’d heard whispers that one of them had even been a Verger.
Carnival kept it at distance and allowed him to study his terror with a dispassion that he could never hope to attain without it.
A source had been easy to find. If you knew what to look for, and the signals were universal, Carnival dealers were never far away, particularly in these darkening days. And the refugees from Chapman’s destruction had flooded the market. David had thought that it would be harder to score the good stuff, but apparently a lot of the people who had been carried on the winds had taken it with them. Supplies might drop in the weeks ahead, particularly if the rumours about the exodus from Mirrlees were true. But right now, scoring Carnival was easier than finding fresh fruit.
Getting away from Margaret and Buchan and Whig had proven harder, but he’d managed it, and transactions weren’t a lengthy affair. How could he explain to Margaret, hardly a sympathetic ear at the best of times, that Carnival was the only thing that suppressed Cadell’s increasing influence within him?
And all it did was slow the process.
Perhaps if he had explained that today, she would have grown more sympathetic; then again, she may have regarded him with even more suspicion.
David’s finger brushed the Orbis on his right hand. It was cold, colder even than his fingertips. He’d tried to remove it several times, but it was not just the case of a ring too tight to drag over his knuckle, but that his flesh and the Orbis Ingenium had fused. Indeed it was growing inside him, filaments of that ring were doing things to him, and the more it did, the more he understood its process, and the less he liked it.
Twice he’d tried to cut it off, just beneath the knuckle, only to faint when he reached for a blade. That had occurred early in the transformation, a defence mechanism, he guessed. Now he was curious to see just what was happening, what endpoint lay ahead.
He’d grown a moustache as an act of defiance (in part, it also served to change his appearance somewhat); he couldn’t decide whether or not the moustache made him look younger or older.
David didn’t know if anyone else had noticed, but he’d also grown an inch taller in the last two weeks, and his shoulders and arms had thickened, which was quite a feat for a Carnival addict. All of it the better to accommodate Cadell, he supposed. He didn’t think the Old Man was going to come bursting out of him any time soon, changing the slope of his brow, or the curve of his lips, but he was there, and with every passing day there was more of him.
He stared out the window. Hardacre was so much smaller than Mirrlees; from here he could almost see to the edge of the city. Really, it was barely deserving of the name. Hardacre could scarcely be larger than the largest suburb in Mirrlees, though there everything was out of scale: its levees, its bridges beneath which a whole community could hide and rot. He missed his city, despite the rain, despite the fact that he had been hunted there.
