broken city dies.”
He paused and shook his head.
“Well that was how it was before the Witmoths. Humans have a way of magnifying disasters, speeding processes up. I wonder what madness lurks now deep within the Roil and its dreaming cities. And what its plans are.”
David shivered despite the warmth of the day.
The Obsidian Curtain contained secrets, certainly. No one from the various expeditions mounted to explore it had ever returned. But what came out was well catalogued. Quarg Hounds. Endyms. Beast Wings. Blood Crabs and Hideous Garment Flutes.
As a child, his uncle who perhaps should have known better, gave David a rather morbid picture book called “Roil: A Cautionary Tale for Boys and Girls.”
The book had been written before the Roil had become something of a taboo subject, and was about a naughty boy sent to the Roil as punishment and his encounters with the creatures there. Each and every beast that had ever come out of the Roil and some that the author had obviously decided to make up – so David hoped – had been drawn in painstaking and garish detail. The Quarg Hounds gnashing their bloody teeth, the Garment Flutes whistling deadly threnody.
David had loved that book – particularly the bit where the boy, and he really was a nasty child, was barbequed by a Vermatisaur – and had always been excited and terrified by the prospect of ever encountering such monsters.
Well, now he had and he was no longer excited, just terrified. Terrified and sore.
Surely legs that ached as much as his should be unable to take anything but shuffling steps. Until this day, David had no idea how much his body could ache and keep functioning. He catalogued those pains one by one and in time with the squelch of his steps, paying such little attention to the world around him that when Cadell stopped David almost collided with his back.
“Cadell?”
The Engineer turned towards him, frowning, having plucked a map from one of his many pockets. “The Dolorous Grey goes through Robert, Hillson and Grayville before veering east across the Lakelands. I don’t think there will be much left of those townships.” He wiped his face wearily, then took a deep breath, and reached a hand towards the north. “Yes,” he said. “I can feel a cold change coming on. Short lived, no doubt, but definitely something that will work in our favour.” He frowned. “You had a question?”
“Why did its creatures come up here in the first place?” David asked.
“Chance, as much as anything. Or perhaps not, perhaps they were looking for me. The Roil thrives on heat, and humans are warm and mobile. But not quite warm enough. Didn’t you notice that the passengers seemed almost feverish? Those were the Witmoths pushing their body temperatures up. In the days ahead it is best to not trust anyone with a fever.”
“So has the Roil killed these people?”
“No, no, just changed them. Though it’s not a particularly nice change. In fact it’s a rather nasty one. David, I dread what we will find in Chapman.”
David dreaded it, too.
Chapter 27
The Interface existed, that much we can be certain of. But its secrets remain just that… secrets.
THE INTERFACE WITHIN THE ROIL
Anderson had never expected to end up here. When he had been a boy there had not been a name for a place like this. When he had been a boy, the Roil had been but a rumour, and industry ascendant. He’d been destined for big business, running his father’s company in Mcmahon. How things change. The landscape of Shale, political and environmental, had drowned in the Roil’s madness, and so had he. Was he mad? Once he would have thought himself so, to even imagine such a place. Now he worked here.
Anderson’s footsteps echoed along the tunnel that made up the spine of the Interface, his movements a little stiff, the price of a uniform that was hopefully Roil-retardant. His guards stole around him like shadows. Only their weaponry made a noise, endothermic magazine pressurisation an odd counterpoint to his heavy steps.
Every day that Anderson walked to the Interface – which were most days now – he counted the number of steps required before he was under it. And every day that number decreased, sometimes by as many as seven, but never less than four. The title Interface was a misnomer. It had not been a true interface for nearly two months. The Roil had swept past it, with absolute disregard for such human boundaries, on the fourth day of spring, and it hadn’t stopped.
He walked under yet another emergency door, five-foot thick steel that would seal the tunnels should something breach the compound and, hopefully, gain him and his crew a little time to make their escape. He shook his head. Should something breach the compound.
Strictly speaking something had breached the compound an hour ago, and he and his guard walked straight towards it.
Part of him kept thinking, we’re going the wrong way. But he suppressed that tiny terrified voice and kept to the task at hand. This was his job and though he had spent every minute of it afraid, he had never turned away from his duty.
Nor would he now.
The tunnel ended at a pair of steel doors, their frames set solidly into the stone. Winslow waited there, his nervous face shining.
One of Anderson’s guards sprayed him with ice water from an atomiser at his belt. Winslow blinked, but that was all, no moans or smoky exhalations. Everybody relaxed, but only a little. What had happened with the Dolorous Grey was fresh in all their minds, things were not as they seemed.
“Are they here?” Anderson asked.
“Yes. They haven’t been waiting long.”
“Conference Room One?”
“Of course.”
“Good, we’ll let them wait a little longer.” Anderson turned to the guard nearest him. “At the first sign of trouble I want you to ice that room, regardless of my or Winslow’s discomfort. I’m tempted to get you to do it now, but I am in no mood for running today, or explaining why we gave up this installation so easily.”
The guard nodded, her eyes impassive through the thick glass of her faceplate. She left them, walking down a side chamber to the observation area.
Anderson fitted his own mask, Winslow following suit. The masks were claustrophobically tight, not at all conducive to such things as ease of breathing, and their effectiveness a subject of dispute, but Anderson believed himself marginally safer with it on and that was all he had.
He coughed once, took a deep breath through the stifling mask and opened the door. Go in strong. See if you can unsettle them for a change.
Four of them waited in the room, standing by the huge glass window that looked out on to the Roil. And he remembered immediately what he remembered every time he dealt with these creatures; that he could not unsettle them. They were too alien, too distant. Nonetheless he tried.
“That stunt you pulled with the Dolorous Grey. What was that all about? We have an agreement.”
One of the Roilings turned its pitch-dark eyes upon him and Anderson had to dig deep to control a shudder – how could any agreement be made with something that possessed those eyes? They had been human once, but now they could not be mistaken as such. The decrepitation of the flesh that the Witmoths engendered was well advanced. The Roil transformed all it had contact with, if it could touch it intimately enough, and these humans had
