A week before, they had received radio transmissions from Drift, fragmentary, and vague: something about an emissary. And now an Aerokin had been spotted.
Mr Buchan and Mr Whig stood with them on the landing platform, watching the wonderful flying creature arrive. This brought back such fine and horrible memories. The last Aerokin David had seen was dead, her pilot cradled in her flagella.
This one was larger, bulkier. Carrying what Kara described as winter ballast, extra layers of fat and what even looked like fur. The wind gusted towards them and David could smell the Aerokin, her familiar odours, evoking something that was once happy and sad within him.
“It's the Meredith Reneged,” Kara said, voice catching in her throat. David squeezed her hand again. “Shine Cam’s Aerokin.”
“And a fine ship she is, too,” Buchan said. Kara glared at him.
“I thought you were busy writing your memoirs and your secret history,” David said.
Buchan grimaced and waved his hands dismissively. “Not now, there's too much work to be done, what with overseeing the retail sector of this fine city. History is written and history is made, and I'm of a mood to make it, young man. After all, we hunted Old Men, all of us, and we survived. We journeyed to the ends of the world. I need time to let that sink in.”
Kara flashed him a smile. “Or you're just a lazy old bastard.”
Buchan snorted, patted her on the back. “There is that, too,” he said.
David considered Cadell’s words again, of what must come after the ice and the snow, and wondered what was happening down south, what perhaps stirred and grew beneath the snow. The thought of Mirrlees and all the cities remade by minnows filled him with no little terror — would he find himself back there an addict? Would he see his mother and father again?
But that lay in the future. A whole people with a whole fabricated history, one that started and stopped and stumbled and slipped, always coming against the Roil, always being beaten back by it.
But now they’d forced a change. There were so many possibilities, for the twelve metropolises lost, and for the Roil itself. It would return, after all, it had never really left, just been driven down again, and David had no doubt that it would come back faster next time, it had learnt a lot in this iteration. David knew that's what he would do.
But they had learnt a lot, too. The great wound of this world had to be healed and not with fire, ice or war.
They were being given another chance.
Margaret Penn stood across from David and he was startled by what he saw. She was smiling, and in her eyes there was something he had never seen before.
He saw hope.
