Something had halted the two engines, though. The Grendel and Yawn were big trains. They could have taken this lot up in a single trip. But that was not going to happen. Shanks pony was all they had, other than the horses for the guard and barely enough oxen drawn wagons for supplies. And the wagons, well he hated the things.
He looked up into the rain-smeared sky. What had he been thinking?
Three thousand people, just ready to up and leave, and looking to him to get them to safety. Well he had failed, David – and truly he had failed the first time he had seen signs of the young man’s addiction and done nothing about it – and Warwick, poor dead Warwick. Perhaps this really was a chance at redemption.
He was damned if he would fail these folk as well.
They left at last. The council guard on horseback making a rough perimeter. The wagons, Medicine had made go on first. The highway was not in the best condition; rain had devoured it in places. Medicine reasoned it was best to have the wagons through before everyone else. Six thousand feet could do a lot of damage.
Of course, he had underestimated just how much damage the wagons themselves were capable of causing. The road was a ruin, and a muddy ruin at that, as they followed in the wagons’ wake. And not all of the wagons were up to it. Half a dozen were lost in that first day and whatever could be salvaged was taken up to the remaining or redistributed amongst those on foot.
The loss of the wagons dismayed Medicine.
Broken wagons for a broken landscape of failed levees and drowned suburbs. Mirrlees’s undulations made too much work for the pumps and engines of the city, some parts had flooded from their own catchment areas. The highway kept to the hills and so they looked down on submerged houses and domestic debris drifting lost like small islands of hopelessness.
Twice that day, scouts reported to Medicine sightings of groups to the west. Small gangs, salvage crews and looters – though if truth were told there was little difference between the two. Shots were fired at them, but it was a half-hearted menace. Medicine was not too concerned, it would take an army to threaten his three thousand and their guard.
That night they made camp on the very edge of the city, where murky fields led right up to the Regress Swamps – now looking more like a lake, with only the grey thread of the road running through it. Beyond them was the Margin. Medicine peered into that dark forest. He would have preferred to simply go around it, but such a detour would have cost them a week, maybe more.
Medicine knew there was Hardacre to the distant North and Eltham and the Daunted Spur along the north eastern seaboard. But it was easy to imagine civilisation ending here. Mirrlees was the northernmost of the great metropolises. Beyond it were the trees and the Gathering Plains and the burrows of the Cuttlefolk, and so much space. Three thousand people could be swallowed whole by those miles, and leave barely a mark to show their passing.
He helped unpack the tents – let no one claim he had developed airs and graces.
Chapter 33
Immediacism was a movement built upon fear.
Its attraction to the populace, like Carnival, an escape. Where everything was only grey and dark, they fashioned worlds of colour. Their effects were striking but, truly, it was a last breath of decadence in an age possessed of resources far too limited to sustain such a thing.
But what art isn’t a glorious folly?
UHLTON 19 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
The meeting in Buchan’s parlour had gone on for another hour ending with something that had at once surprised and delighted David.
“I want you take David with you,” Cadell had said. “Where I am going… it’s too dangerous.”
“Of course we will,” Buchan had said, agreeing with Cadell for the first time that night. David went to bed with a feeling of such relief, to be at last out of the eye of the storm.
David woke to thunder.
No, it was gunshot, and a distant thudding. He sat up in bed. The next two shots came quick, one after the other.
Someone screamed, then moaned, another shot and the sound stopped. David stumbled out of bed. Dressed as fast as he could, not daring to switch on the lights. It was happening again, and this time his nerves were failing him. Fingers tapped against his door.
“David?” He relaxed a little, recognising Cadell’s voice.
“Yes,” he said.
The door opened, letting in a little light.
“We have to get out of here. Uhlton isn’t as safe as I thought. It seems Stade wants to finish the job.” Cadell’s eyes flashed. In one hand he clenched his travelling bag, in the other a water gourd. “Sorry, David, I was going to leave you with Buchan and Whig, but they’re going to draw the Vergers off. You’re safer with me.”
David looked at Cadell’s bag. The Old Man pulled it away. “Yes. Yes. I have plenty of your drug.”
Shame reddened David’s cheeks. “I didn’t say anything.”
Whig stopped at their door, looking quite ridiculous in a nightdress with a half dozen pistols strapped to his belt. “There’s tunnels beneath the hall,” he said. “Take the eastern passage, it will lead you out onto the edge of town.”
“We will see you in Hardacre,” Cadell said.
Whig nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen. We will be at a pub called the Habitual Fool. ” Whig winked at David. “An appropriate enough name, don’t you think, for those of us that keep banging our heads against the walls of tyranny?”
Whig led them both to a nearby wall, wincing every time someone fired a shot. He slapped his hand against the wall and it swung open onto a low tunnel.
“There you go, lads. Sorry about the smell, it’s less of an escape tunnel, more of a sewer,” he said.
“Good luck,” Cadell said.
“Good luck to us all,” Whig grinned tersely and shook Cadell’s hand. “It’s been in rather short supply of late, though this raid could have happened at a worse time. We’re ready. Be careful in Chapman, it’s a city on the edge, and dangerous because of that.”
Cadell ducked down and crawled through the tunnel. David threw one last glance at Whig. The giant waved him on.
“Hurry up, Milde, and be careful.”
“I will,” he said, and followed Cadell.
The wall shut behind him with a click. David found himself in a narrow corridor, dark but for a flickering chemical torch that Cadell held above his head. Stinking air enclosed them, and it was all David could do not to gag for that first moment.
“Come on,” Cadell said.
They crawled, furtive and fast, upwards over cool wet stone. David tried not to think why it might be wet. Soon the only sound was their quiet breaths or the soft scuffing of boot on rock.
Confluents weren’t the only ones who knew of this tunnel. Thousands upon thousands of cockroaches had gathered here, crunching under foot, the air loud with the papery sound of their flight. Worse were the things that preyed upon them. Spiders the size of David’s hand that brought back flashes of his experience beneath the bridge: only here it was darker and the spiders much bigger.
“Careful,” Cadell hissed. “They’re not afraid to bite.”
One chose that moment to run over David’s face. It was all he could do not to yelp at its firm yet feathery
