“We’re almost there,” David said. Cadell’s eyes opened.
“I know,” he said. “I can feel it. Is it too much to hope that it can’t feel me?”
David swallowed, another detail that he had not wanted to hear.
They entered the Roil all at once; it did not close about them in fragments like real mist did, but smoothly and completely as though the Roslyn Dawn had plunged into a vertical lake of darkness.
One moment light surrounded the Roslyn Dawn – sunshine and clear blue sky to the rear of them – the next, day was gone, swallowed up. The quiet dark transformed all at once.
Gales crashed up behind the face of the Roil and the Roslyn Dawn shuddered as she struck these, lifting up perhaps thirty or forty yards, then she was through the unquiet air.
David realised that he had been holding his breath.
He looked over at Margaret. Her face was pale. Cadell also bore a resolute expression, as though he could endure this and would; but only just. Kara Jade alone betrayed no emotion in those first moments, so intent was she on the task at hand.
Thunder, borne on spikes of green lightning, tumbled the silence. The dice rolls of giants. Again, again, again. David’s bones tingled.
Kara Jade grinned, her jaw clenched so tight her eyes bugged, as her hands hovered over the controls.
“Just nature’s spear shaking,” she said. “Impressive but of no real substance. The Roslyn Dawn is more than capable of taking multiple lightning strikes.” She turned a few dials and stared through the cockpit windows out into the storm. “Though I’d prefer she didn’t have to.”
“Bring her down,” Cadell said. “I want to get a good look at the surface. Are your floodlights charged?”
“Of course they are.”
They began their descent. The Roil increasing in density as they sank, a cloudy darkness heavy with spores. The Roslyn Dawn creaked and mumbled.
Kara Jade glanced over her readings. “The air pressure is higher than I would like.”
Something flared below and a wave of heat rushed up towards them. The Roslyn Dawn shuddered and lifted with the impact. Kara Jade cursed softly, a frown washing over her face. “I know. I know,” she whispered. The nacelles exhaled in response, the Roslyn Dawn swung out in a wider circle. The nose dipped, presenting a smaller target, David guessed.
“There’s a lot of heat down there,” Kara said.
“And hot air rises, yes,” Cadell said. “But we have to get closer, I need to see what is going on beneath.”
“As you wish,” Kara Jade said, and ran a hand along the inner wall of the cockpit. “If you’re going to die anywhere, my darling, it might as well be here, you know, somewhere bloody exotic.”
She crooned at her craft, and the Dawn descended into the furnace heat: shaking as it struck the violent wind, but never feeling out of control. Kara Jade and her craft were as good as she said they were.
David watched her, entranced. He looked over at Margaret. She was charging her guns. He felt like he should be doing something, but all he had was a handkerchief in his pockets and a wrap of powdered Carnival in his boot.
Could do with some of that now, he thought. He walked towards the sleeping compartment of the Dawn. Cadell stopped him.
“Not now, lad,” he said. “You’ll need your wits about you.”
David nodded. Didn’t even reach for an excuse.
“And close your mouth, you’re gaping like a fish.”
As they neared the ground, objects took shape through the murk. Memories returned unbidden to Margaret and she regretted for the umpteenth time her decision to go on this mad journey.
“The Interface,” Margaret said, pointing down at the long spine of the tunnel ending in the rectangular block of buildings. “They’re using the Interface.”
The Interface had been split open, its contents strewn over the ground, a cannon lay toppled next to a desk chair. A bed rested on Anderson’s carriage. The Melody was nowhere to be seen but still the sight shocked her, worse than she would have expected, remembering that place. Everywhere she went destruction followed and people were lost.
She thought of Anderson. Was he now a puppet of the Witmoths? And her Melody, she could not bear to think of it being used by the Roil. Not that it looked like they needed to.
Below, the earth seethed.
Quarg Hounds boiled into the tunnel, crowding around the Project. The lost Interface had been worn down and overrun.
Something slapped against the window by her head and Margaret started. She frowned when she realised what it was.
“Hideous Garment Flute,” she said, matter-of-factly and stared into its teeth-crammed mouths; row upon row of cartilage and bone snapping shut with every shudder of its flight membranes. Grey mucus slid down the gondola wall.
Beneath her she could see the Roslyn Dawn’s flagella striking out at a knot of the creatures, batting them from the sky. The Aerokin groaned.
“Be calm, my darling,” Kara Jade said softly. “Out soon. Out soon.”
Another flute joined it, and Margaret reached for her ice pistols.
A hand clapped down on hers. The strength and the awful chill in that grip – as though he had devoured all of Winslow’s lozenges – surprised her.
“Don’t be a fool,” Cadell snapped. “Break the gondola walls, if you could, and you let the Roil in, and I’m not quite ready for that.”
His voice trailed off as he looked down, beyond the ruined buildings and the maddening mass of Roil creatures, at the immense fuming structure there. Margaret followed his gaze and stared at what looked like some gigantic termitary.
“Heat sinks,” Cadell said, craning his neck to get a better view. “They have created heat sinks. There and there. I’ve seen nothing like it, not this close to the edge. Well, at least that explains the ground shaking. They’re building a dreaming city. This is not good, not good.”
The Roslyn Dawn continued its descent. Cadell put out a hand.
“Keep it steady, Miss Jade,” he said. “No lower than this, thank you. Just where we are.”
The engines whined. The Roslyn Dawn slowed its descent, then stopped.
“Well done,” Cadell said.
Down below, two huge pipes rose out of the earth, dark smoke poured from their cavernous openings, and around that heat swarmed rippling clumps of shadow.
Witmoths.
The sight reminded Margaret of the vents and chimneys that had once dominated Willowhen Peak. Only here, at the pinnacle of these boiling mouths, no battle raged, these were meant to draw the Roil, meant to sustain it.
Margaret stared over at David, eyes bulging in his head, his mouth wide open like some sort of idiot. He held a pair of binoculars in one hand but he did not use them, perhaps too frightened of what they might reveal.
Now you know, Margaret thought. You have seen the power of this place. What was once abstraction has become reality for you.
David was not the only one to whom this was all new.
Kara Jade had lost her cockiness. “So many,” she whispered.
“The Roil is getting ready for something,” Cadell said. “And that should not be. The Roil does not push, it shambles. It drifts, it dreams: it does not do this.”
“What about the Grand Defeat?” David asked.
“Freak weather conditions,” Cadell said. “A hotter summer, a low pressure system that became a storm that lead to a heatburst. But there was no thought to it, no strategy. This is different.”
“Things have changed,” Margaret said, and slapped a fist against the wall of the gondola, hard enough that one of the Hideous Garment Flutes slipped free and tumble-flew away. She followed its wild improbable peristaltic flight: all those membranes sliding and billowing frantically. She had seen clouds of these beasts fly, loud and shrill,
