“State of the art,” Anderson said. “It will take down your voice and return it to you. Much more convenient than note taking.”
He manoeuvred a large microphone in front of her. “Now if you’ll just speak into that, slowly and clearly.”
Margaret did. Telling him everything from her wait for her parents through to her flight from the city and her arrival here.
When she had finished, Anderson switched off the machine.
“If I hadn’t seen the Melody Amiss, your cool suit, your obvious parentage, I wouldn’t believe a word of it. And yet, here you are.
“Did you bring blueprints for your parents’ I-Bombs? The machine is off, you can speak with candour.”
Margaret shook her head.
Anderson could not hide his disappointment, though he tried valiantly, smiling. “It does not matter,” he said. “We are researching something similar at any rate. It is good to know we are on the right track. That you survived at all is remarkable. Now you must rest.”
This time Margaret did not argue. She let him lead her away to the showers, where she stripped of her cold suit and bathed.
Her flesh was swollen, and sore, but there were surprisingly few pressure wounds. She let the heat of the shower seep into her and tried to think of nothing but the relief it offered her body.
When she was done, one of the soldiers led her to a small room with a single metal-framed bed, and little more.
Clothes had been laid out, military fatigues, they fit her, reasonably enough. And, while it felt odd to be dressed in something that didn’t chill her or push tightly against her flesh (and when had that cold grip become a comfort?) she fell asleep almost at once.
No dreams haunted her. How could they? Her life was nightmare enough.
A few corridors away from the sleeping quarters was a small room, with a small table, a couple of hard wooden chairs and a door that backed on to the kitchen. There were well-thumbed copies of all the recent Shadow Council stories stacked neatly at one end of the table.
Anderson and Winslow both had offices crammed with notes and maps and memos from the Council, and filing cabinets with large locks, and some that were even fitted with alarms. But it was here that they made their decisions, in this little room, usually with nothing more than a cup of tea, some dry old biscuits and a lot of pacing.
Anderson put his cup of tea down. “This cannot be right. It’s made me uneasy from the beginning. She is a Penn. A Penn,” Anderson said. “Without them we would not have half the weaponry we do.”
Winslow nodded. “But we have our orders.”
Anderson walked the length of the hall, before turning back. “We have been following orders for the last year, even as they have grown less and less reasonable. Winslow, she escaped her city’s fall. She is a resourceful and strong woman, and even if she were not, I cannot in good conscience hand her over to the enemy.”
Winslow nodded.
“It would be folly to trust them. They’re up to something. Great works, some sort of construction, all of it where we can’t go.”
“You’ve felt it too?” Anderson said. “The quivering earth? The distant murmur of old engines?”
“Yes,” Winslow said. “Our darkest nightmares seem ready to flower. And they’d have us make yet another concession.”
Anderson nodded his head, picking up his fast cooling tea and drinking it down. “And why her? What interest does the Roil have in this one person?”
“She is a child of Marcus and Arabella Penn. It does our cause no good to give the enemy what they want. Particularly when they demand a Penn.” He shook his head. “Remember when we were here to fight the Roil, not make deals with it? I think the time for deal making is over.”
The orders mocked him with their cruel simplicity. The single sentence:
“Let the Roil have her. We need more time.”
We have no more time, he thought. Whether we give them Margaret or not.
Anderson scrunched the paper in his hand, throwing it into the bin. “Did you see these orders, Winslow?”
“What orders?” Winslow asked.
Anderson grinned, though he frowned again quickly enough. “Give her another half an hour, she’s almost dead on her feet, and then you better wake her. They’ll be coming soon. Poor Margaret you must run again.”
Chapter 32
In Mirrlees nothing is done in a half-hearted fashion. Bridges, levees, floods all of them are gigantic. Excess is the order of the day, but admire the filigree of Channon Hall or the delicate structure of the Reeping Meet, with its thirteen clocks, and you realise that the human was never sublimated, merely overshadowed. It is there when you look into the dark.
MIRRLEES ON WEEP 200 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL.
“Mr Paul, these are your wards.”
They stood in the rain at the edge of Northmir where the suburbs gave out to the labyrinthine drainage systems and Ur-levees of the city. Before them rose the Northmir Bridge behind them the levee. The road running from it was called the Pewter Highway it gleamed a little in the cloud-dulled light. Three thousand workers waited by the bridge, men and women, skilled and ready to head into the North. And they were indeed his wards.
It stunned him that this was the response to just one call. These people had mustered in a single day, gathered their lives to them and come here. Looking down he could see that none of them had had much to gather. Things were bad, but only bad enough that the poorest folk were willing to leave. People who had nothing to lose, for whom Mirrlees had been a hellhole, even before the rains and certainly since Stade had put an end to all but the most urgent construction.
It would take the Roil itself to come boiling towards the city, before the wealthier denizens of Mirrlees began to consider such action.
All of them are fools, Medicine thought.
He doubted Stade or the Council would stick around that long.
Stade stood beside him, a hand resting on Medicine’s shoulder. He resented the familiarity of the act, and wanted nothing more than to wrench his shoulder away. But they had to appear to be in partnership, to have put the past aside. Just keep smiling, he thought, you’re in too deep to cut his throat.
“Not much to look at, are they,” Stade said. “But these are the finest our Northern Suburbs can produce. And they are in your charge. Three thousand people, the merest drop in the ocean of our population, but it is a start. Just bring them safely to the Narung Mountains.”
“I’ll get them there. You just give your speech.”
“Of course,” Stade said, and walked to the microphone, and his voice reverberated out over the Northmir. “The time of secrecy has passed, the time of action has come and a place has been prepared for you. All of you. My grand work, my Project, the Underground. And there we shall wait out the Roil, there we shall prosper, there we shall survive.”
The next few hours passed intolerably slowly. Grin and bear it. Medicine just wanted to get going. There were several weeks of journey between here and the Narung Mountains. And who knew what on the way. Even if nothing happened, keeping this lot under control was going to be work enough. He had forty-nine council guard of doubtful loyalty. The only certainty he had was that their loyalties were not to him.
