It was then David knew without a hint of doubt that Cadell was mad.
Chapter 8
If one event can be counted as the beginning of the final days, then, arguably, one need look no further than the fall of Tate.
Some equilibrium was upset, what had been expected to take decades, a slow and steady transition into the dark, became instead a sprint. The Roil, ever vast and ponderous, transformed, grew predatory, and found an urgent hunger to match its size.
The fourth cannon fired another three times before succumbing to gravity and sabotage like its siblings. Its last two blasts came perilously close to the Melody Amiss, clearing the path before her in great bursts of ice, but also striking the ground so hard that the carriage bounced, Margaret rattling around inside it as she struggled to gain control, the wheel jerking in her grip.
The falling cannon struck tanks of coolant on the eastern quadrant. A storm of flame lifted the carriage up and slammed it into the ridge.
Margaret blacked out and, for a moment, she was home with her parents in their library.
Here, alone in the Penn household, clutter ruled, books, notes, schematics in their most incubate form (iron ships of the air, scurrying many limbed walkers, a hand held device for the calculation of arithmetic), even political cartoons. On the wall was suspended the terrestrial Orrery, a map traversed by a metal band that depicted the Roil’s progress across Shale. The band had long ago crossed Mcmahon in the North and now looked ready to slide over Chapman. Many times Margaret had run her fingers over the Orrery, imagining lands and metropolises beyond the Roil. Places that had a blue sky not black, that saw the Sun, the Moon and the stars.
A huge wooden table, surrounded by plump leather-bound chairs, dominated the centre of the library, a grand Old Man deliciously besieged by books.
Margaret slumped into a chair, glancing over the books and papers stacked up high before her. On the armrests were her father’s plans for a system of pneumatic railways, and an old copy of the Shadow Council. The lurid cover showed Travis the Grave racing over a burning rooftop, sabre in his mechanical hand, proving even her father still liked to relax a little – though he had annotated it with stern pronouncements on the scientific and engineering flaws within the text.
Her mother had been reading Deighton’s treatise on the Engines of the World, and receiving much mockery as a consequence.
“It’s just legend and the whimsy of mechanics who should know better,” Marcus Penn muttered. “Deighton, little more than folklore dressed up as history and science. Mechanical Winter is just a way of explaining the Ice Age. Engines of the World! Why do you insist on stretching credulity so?”
Arabella Penn arched an eyebrow, her lips curling into something too scathing to be a smile. “Then how was the Roil stopped? How do you explain the fact that this world is colder than it ought to be, even with the Roil?”
“Hmm.”
Her father raised one hand vaguely, jabbing at the air. “For the latter, our astronomical mathematics are wrong, much as it chagrins me to admit. And, for the first, obviously it is a natural process. Perhaps a kind of tide. The Ice Age came, the tide turned.”
“Ha! I can’t imagine this tide turning. As for natural, I’m not quite sure the Roil is natural. If it is, it is nature gone wrong.”
“Bah, nature goes wrong all the time. One could say it is the very nature of nature to go wrong. What is wrong anyway? Just because it doesn’t agree with us doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But then again it’s not humanity’s nature to agree with nature, otherwise we’d all be living in trees, which wouldn’t be all that bad I suppose as I’m rather fond of trees myself. Natural or not there are no engines.” Her father glared at her. “Margaret, my dear, could you see to that damnable ringing.”
Ringing!
She snapped awake with a gasp and touched her stinging forehead. Her fingers came back wet with her blood. The cut was deep, but she barely felt it. She could hardly feel anything.
The firestorm had turned the carriage around so that she faced Tate. A howl cracked her lips.
Sheets of fire consumed the city, from the foot to the crown of Willowhen Peak, even the stony, spiked walls burned with coolant-fed, blue flame – a terrible ghost light. The Four Cannon were stumps of iron glowing with a white heat. The Swarming Vents, too, had mostly fallen, caved in on themselves or blown apart. In the blazing sky, the battle was nearly done. An Endym tore a Sweeper’s glider from the air. Another glider plummeted, weighed down by Hideous Garment Flutes.
There was a furtive movement in the corner of her vision.
Grey moths, more winged smoke than insect, fluttered against the cockpit window closest to her head. There were at least a dozen of them, similar to the wisps that had tumbled from the lips of the dead sentries. They appeared too frail for flight; each brush of their wings against the glass diminished them. And yet they remained. They battered at the window a few more times then burst away and flew towards the city, joining a half-mile wide plume of their brethren, almost indistinguishable from the smoke boiling over the walls.
Margaret had had her first kiss on those walls, and in all that awfulness the memory rushed back to her.
An older boy, Dale, who’d gone on to become a full time Sentinel, had kissed her hard then looked out into the Roil, hiding his embarrassment or his excitement, Margaret didn’t know which, the blood pounding in her own head.
“Do you ever think we’ll see the sun?” he’d asked her.
“Some days, yes. Other days, I think those that don’t climb down the wall and walk will be overcome, and the Roil will grind out every light, and us with it.”
Dale’s eyes had widened and Margaret felt a thrill rush through her, almost as potent as that first kiss. A Penn could never admit doubt and yet she had.
“Kiss me again,” she had whispered. “If we’re doomed what does it matter? Just kiss me.”
But Dale was already walking away. He did not look back.
She wondered where he was now, then let the thought slide away from her. There could be no good answer to that question.
Margaret checked the Melody’s instruments. The carriage was designed to withstand extreme conditions but it had its limits. She studied the array of valves and meters, and exhaled slowly. Everything was as it should be, or near enough to it: no spikes in temperature or noticeable leaks. The Melody Amiss’ fuel remained contained. Of course if the fuel tanks had ruptured, there would not have been enough of Margaret left to know it. Margaret eased the carriage forward, nothing crunched or groaned or detonated. She looked back one last time at the city where she had grown up. An icy shaft of guilt drove through her heart.
How was she any better than a Walker?
She shook her head, whatever had so easily destroyed the Four Cannon and the Steaming Vents would tear apart the seals to the caverns beneath with ease. Tate was gone. Doomed, perhaps, to rise again as the bodies of the Sentinels had risen.
And she didn’t leave in despair, but rage.
All she had was the North. And the slim chance she could escape, and wreak some sort of vengeance upon this dark.
The Engine. She would find the engine, and she would turn it to her will.
She turned the carriage that way, onto the three hundred mile straight of road, and fled her city, its fires lighting the way for miles ahead, driving the shadow of the Melody before her.
Not far along Mechanism Highway she found one of the I-Bomb expedition’s carriages, crushed flat. She scanned around for survivors but failed to see a single body, nor what might have destroyed it.
