He looked at his watch.
Where was Tope? A minute perhaps was acceptable, though irritating, but Stade had waited now for ten.
Something buzzed at his desk and he grimaced.
The blasted intercom, the latest in long distance communication, though the distance involved here was no further than a few yards to his secretary Robert’s office. Cutting edge or not, it was already starting to drive him mad.
The door opened, and there was Tope, his arm bandaged, a little blood seeping through, his Cuttlefolk genes would see to that soon, blessed as they were with swift healing.
“You’re late,” Stade said, pouring Tope a cup of tea, from the pot Robert had hastily brought in.
“I had some bad news,” Tope said.
“And what news is that?” Stade asked softly.
“The Dolorous Grey is no more.”
Stade nearly dropped his cup.
“Chapman has fallen? God’s don’t tell me that, I’ve only one city to save, I cannot save two,” he said, quietly, and Tope raised his hands
“No, No. Not yet. But it is only a matter of time. The Roil has new tricks, Witmoths. They build an army of changed men.”
“I know about the Witmoths,” Stade said.
Mr Tope raised an eyebrow.
“Then did you know this?” He threw a wallet on the table. “We found it along the tracks, around a hundred miles from here. It belonged to Cadell, it stinks of him.”
The Penn boy, and Cadell.
“Well he can’t have survived that. We lost two Vergers to Witmoths.” He was almost apologetic. “They were lacking in caution.”
“This is bad news, indeed. But the Bureau of Information can deal with that.” He leant forward. “And the Project?”
“It goes ahead apace. Though the Interface may not last too much longer.”
“Really,” Stade said, his face betraying no emotion, his eyes as hard as stone. “I’ve read the reports, everything seems to be working smoothly down there.”
“Seems to be, yes, but there are secrets and lies in that place; too many to unpick. And I do not trust my mole. In the Roil everything is changed they say, including loyalties.”
Stade frowned at that, he had grown unused to plots and secrets that were not his own. It would be worthwhile having the Interface more closely scrutinised.
“Mr Tope. You are to go to Chapman, and the Interface. I want you to talk to Anderson. I want you to see what is going on down there and report back to me.”
Tope nodded, his face grim. “The Project’s time is done, don’t you think? It was, for a while at least, a successful experiment, enough that stage two’s implementation should not meet with too many problems.”
“That is if Medicine and his three thousand work as sufficient bait.”
“They will, of that I am certain.” Even to a hardened Verger like Tope, Stade’s grin was a terrible sight.
“Good,” He said. “For should the second stage fail we are all dead, and the whole human race with us.”
Mr Tope’s arm was stinging, and that pain put him in a black mood, all it did was remind him how he had failed.
Stade had punished him with this mission, and that angered him. After all without his aid the Dissolution would have never been affected. Stade’s plans possessed substance, and chance at fruition only because of Tope’s Vergers. The man was too quick to forget that.
The councillor had a new lackey now in Medicine Paul, even if the erstwhile Confluent didn’t understand why or that he was. After the dissolution, and the night of blood, Medicine had been spared simply because Stade knew he could use him. Milde had never been a popular leader, his pronouncements too stern and his warnings too bleak. Medicine on the other hand… if anyone was capable of carrying out what Stade had planned it was him.
But it would all come to nothing if Cadell wasn’t captured and contained.
Tope had hoped that the destruction of the Dolorous Grey would have achieved that, but no, neither Cadell’s nor young Milde’s body had been found in the wreckage.
Despite Stade’s opinion, Tope knew that they were still alive, and that he would find them in Chapman.
So he headed south, to Chapman, hungry for the Old Man’s death.
Chapter 26
Chapman, seat of the oldest council extant, and home to the Festival of Float, is perhaps most famous for that moment from which the Festival was born. A treaty signed between the earth and the sky. Eighty Seven years have passed since that signing. Eighty Seven years that have seen the peak of civilization, and its falling, Eighty Seven years of the Festival.
WILDERNESS 60 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL FACE
David left early that morning with Cadell, continuing along the train line as the rain clouds lightened, leaving the lonely cabin behind them.
Around nine o’clock Cadell stopped and turned his head.
“We need to get away from the line,” he said. “Now.”
David was about to say something, when he heard it. A distant whine, growing louder.
Something was coming, and quickly. They ran away from the tracks, finding cover behind lantana as a vehicle stinking of kerosene rushed past. The smoke from its vents was dark and so bitter it stung David’s nose. There was a Verger at the controls, one he recognised.
David shivered. Mr Tope was going to Chapman.
The engine turned a bend and Tope was gone.
“Interesting,” Cadell said. “I think we had better keep our distance from the tracks. Actually, it’s probably better now if we veer away from them altogether.”
David agreed.
“Nice countryside this,” Cadell said. “It has adapted well to the rain, but even it cannot adapt much further. I remember it from another time, a happier time for me.”
The ground was boggy, plants grown yellow and rotten. Everything had a sort of washed out appearance like a really bad watercolour painting.
“It’s starting to die, drowning in all this rain. The Roil,” Cadell said. “Let me tell you about it. There is much I know of that foul stuff. More than I would wish. It has rained and rained, but you have seen nothing yet. Mcmahon was different as would have been Tate, neither straddled rivers and sat beneath catchments for one. It will rain, without surcease around Mirrlees, for a month, two months, perhaps three. And not like it has before, but heavy rains, flooding rains. Fields will first sink beneath the water then rot. Outlying villages built on the hinterland will slide into mud. There will be death, and the rain will preside over it all, seemingly ceaseless.
“But it will stop, at last. It always stops. Can you see it now? The celebration in the streets, at that cessation, should any streets remain? But then, a drought will descend, heat and dry like nothing the folk of Mirrlees have ever encountered, though those refugees, if Stade opens his gates to them this time, from Chapman will know it and fear it. The black clouds will roll in, but these will not be rain clouds, no for they will extend from the ground a mile high, maybe more. A rolling cliff face of darkness and not a drop of rain in any of it, just chaos, and so the Roil arrives. A single Quarg Hound saunters down Main Street, then another and another. Hideous Garment Flutes turn the sky black with their wings and the deafening whistles of their fistulous bodies and to that music the already
