At the top of the hill, the Quarg Hounds yawled, thrashing and screaming, as all that cold struck them. David had fallen forward, on to his hands and knees, in a field of frost-coated grass, his face a mask of winded agony.
The Quarg Hounds howled again, a beaten horrible sound that dropped at last to a whine. They crumpled in on themselves, all their menace, all their strength gone and only their blackened skeletons and brittle skin remaining. And that was somehow more horrible than claws and howls and hunger, perhaps stillness always is.
The ice around Cadell’s legs turned to slush, and his blood started stinging, singing and stinging, as it forced its way back into constricted veins. The stream began to flow again almost as it had done before. The icy skin on the stream cracked and drifted away.
The Lode continued to burble inside his head, its ache rising to freeze much more than it already had, to wake its siblings and blanket the land for hundreds of miles around with cold. But only the Engine was capable of unlocking all that ice, of slowing the shuttling atoms of the world, and he did not command it. In fact he could feel it, a distant and disapproving presence.
Yes, he did not command it at all.
Not yet.
He shivered. The thought of such appalling power filled him with terror. Perhaps it was better if he never did.
Chapter 20
Cadell was always the show off. Of the Eight he couldn’t resist theatre, though he denied it most strenuously. It was in everything that he did. Which made him the worst of us all.
Air but moments before, bitterly cold, warmed. Rain fell devouring the ice, as though anxious to wipe the memory of Cadell’s… whatever it was he had done… from the earth. David wiped vomit from his lips, spat a last sickly spit, and tried not to think how much easier Carnival would make all this.
Everywhere there were dead things, frozen and fallen from the sky, it was in the air that the worst of this cold had struck. If it had reached that intensity where he stood, he knew he would now be as lifeless as the birds and the bugs.
Where was Cadell? David got to his feet, brushed himself down. The Old Man stumbled towards him, his flesh pale, his eyes ringed in dark circles.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Cadell cried. “It’s too much. I’m sorry about your Uncle. You must believe me.”
Cadell blinked, turning his head this way and that, and David was witness to an odd transformation, a swift strengthening of will.
“Are you all right, David? Are you all right?”
“I think I should be asking that question.”
Cadell wobbled to his feet. “I am fine,” he said. “See?”
He took a few shaky steps onto the grass. “Fine.”
David just nodded his head. The movement was too much, he bent over again and dry retched; his stomach had nothing more to give.
“There’s cover by that ledge,” Cadell said and together, dragging Cadell’s bag between them, they staggered towards it. The walking was all the harder for the lack of pursuit. Urgency and strength had bled from both men’s legs. But, both shaking and weak, at last they reached the stony shelter.
“That light around your hand,” David said. “That sad light. What is it?”
“Ah, the candlelight of hubris, boy, history is lit with it. Just one of a hundred ridiculous mistakes.” Cadell said with surprising gentleness. “But the past is done, in this place, in this time, we will find some warmth. Even the lodes generate a little.”
Grass grew under the rocky ledge. The air was warmer too though, surprisingly, not the cloying warmth of rain-battered Mirrlees, but sweeter like the summer evenings of his childhood, the mill fires challenging the stars and the moons, his mother singing and his father home from work. They were idyllic memories that he was not at all certain of, so distant that he could have substituted memory with dream. The past was dangerous that way and invited suspicion.
David dropped to the ground and Cadell followed, kneeling slowly, staring out into the darkness. At last, he grinned. His face relaxed a little, lost some of its bleak pallor. “We’re safe here, for the moment,” Cadell said. “Try and sleep.”
He handed David another syringe. Where had it come from? But he didn’t waste time trying to work it out. The drug in his blood settled him almost at once.
“Thank you,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t be so purely and completely happy but he was. “Thank you.”
Cadell was already asleep.
Chapter 21
Of all the monsters that I saw
The ones come after, the ones before
The worst of them, the worst of all
Is the dread Vermatisaur
Brakes squealed, counter engines roared, and burning oil stung her throat and her nose. The Melody slid to a halt and the engines, fore and aft, wound down. Margaret scowled, she might as well drive off into the gorge. If she’d held off braking any longer, she would have.
Pascal’s Bridge jutted perhaps a hundred yards out above the chasm, ending in curled talons of steel, as though a titanic fist had slammed into the bridge from beneath. She directed her lights into the darkness, wary of the drain on the Melody ’s batteries, and could just make out the other edge of the break: more nubbly lengths of steel crawling with Hideous Garment Flutes.
Margaret sat there, shaking her head. She checked the map, ran it against the one she had in her mind. They concurred. The Caspian Bridge crossed the gorge a little east of here. Wheels spun in reverse, the Melody jerked backwards onto the road. She stopped. From the east, lights, moving fast.
The Perl Bridge then. She would just have to find a way to cross it. The Melody tore a wide circle around the road pulling a rough curtain of dust and smoke behind her and headed west fast as Margaret dared drive towards the Perl.
The cars were closing, their lights growing brighter every time she lifted her eyes to her mirrors. Quarg Hounds, excited by all this activity, ran beside her, their yawls shaking the thick glass of the Melody. She let off a few rounds of her ice cannon and they dropped back a little. Margaret felt tempted to give them a real blast of cold, but she was running low on coolant. So they kept their distance but kept up their pursuit and their howling.
If anyone lay in wait at the Perl Bridge they would know she was coming.
Margaret gritted her teeth, charging her ice pistols and rifles and engaging the preliminary protocols for her
