tent.
Medicine sat alone, with his map powder and cartography arrayed before him. There was the Margin, a dark patch in the middle of the map, above it the huge space that was the Gathering Plains, marked only by Carnelon, the Cuttlefolk’s city.
A cold cup of tea sat against one elbow, a half-eaten plate of beans obscured the Narung Mountains on the map.
He took a pinch of map powder, to see it more vividly. All it did was reveal space, trackless nothingness, best considered while hurtling north by train, or from above, warm in the gondola of an Aerokin.
Agatha popped her head through the tent’s opening.
He lifted his head towards her, blinking away the powder.
“You want those beans?” she asked, gesturing at the table.
“No, I’m not hungry.”
She didn’t ask twice.
“What are you doing?” Her mouth still full of beans. Medicine frowned at her. “You’ve studied those maps a hundred times with and without powder. We’ve the Margin behind us. The Gathering Plains all around. We follow the Highway and the railway another hundred miles, then the Hidden Line. Not much map reading required.”
Medicine nodded, but his lips thinned. He squinted at the map, the Gathering Plains vaster now the plate had gone. “I never wanted this job.”
“Ah, so you blame yourself for those we lost?”
Medicine nodded. “Of course I do.”
“You think you killed them?”
Medicine looked at her.
“Cause you didn’t.” Agatha brushed his face with her fingertips, startling him. “Don’t let their deaths weigh down on you. No one said it would be easy. The Margin’s ghouls and haunts are hungry bastards, Roil take them. Be grateful that most of us survived the journey.”
Agatha’s craggy features betrayed little emotion, some sadness and some weariness. She watched him calmly, and Medicine drew a little of that calm to him, though his heart beat the faster for her gaze.
“How do you do it?” Medicine said. “How do you keep leading your soldiers?”
“Not much choice. If I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I know they’d be worse than me. I follow my orders, to the best of my not inconsiderable ability, and make sure that we make it through. It’s not easy. It never is. But the hard part’s over.”
“And what was that?”
“Getting out of that damn drowned city in the first place.”
Surely that couldn’t be enough. “This was not how I imagined it. How could I anticipate this? I was certain I would never work for the Council and I knew Stade would be my enemy till the day I died. Why, I expected him to slice open my throat, perhaps gloat over my corpse. Yet here I am.”
Agatha sat down next to him. “Loyalties are fickle things. We are talking about survival of the species now, think of every human gone, every vestige of our race worn away, not in eons, but in our lifetime. Do we just let that happen?”
“No, but what-”
“We’ve set our course,” she said, sliding the empty bowl away from her. “Now we see it through, because there is no turning back.”
The Gathering Plains worked at Medicine’s mind incessantly, and he was not the only one. At least in the swamps and the Margin they had the illusion of being enclosed, shielded, even if it was by a cruel hand, from long vistas, from endless space. Here the land opened out, and once the Margin was out of sight there seemed no landmark to give it a beginning or an end, beyond the occasional rocky hillock or twisted old tree, and even these were oddly threatening, distance dissolving them, making them disappear and reappear with no respect for perspective.
And Medicine could feel the land doing that to his thoughts, dragging them out destroying his sense of space.
All they had were the railway tracks and the highway, two parallel lines that ran straight and long all the way to the Narung Mountains.
These were Mirrlees people, and the undulating city with its great walls, bridges and levees devoured such views, the most open ground they had ever known was the Grangefeld Parklands or the sporting fields of Crickham and Montry. The emptiness ate at them, stars had never seemed so bright and yet so distant, the darkness beneath so vast. And the sky, the sky was a great blue dome threatening to lift them up and up into nothing. Even the grass that swayed and hissed with the wind, building in volume, well before its first breaths arrived, was vaguely threatening.
Medicine took to searching out Aerokin and airships just to break the grim monotony of those empty skies. However, this time of year most of the aircraft were down south for the festival so there were few of those, and the most interesting of those was of Hardacre make: a spy ship flying low and fast across the horizon.
He pointed out the ship to Agatha, though he suspected she had already seen it. “What do you reckon they make of us?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Not much, I’d imagine. It’s the Cuttlefolk they’re interested in.”
“And should we be interested in them as well?”
“That remains to be seen. If the treaties still hold, it’s not a problem, but…”
“Yes,” Medicine said. “What ever happened to those trains?”
Four days from the Margin they found out in part.
The Grendel, and its carriages, sat hulking and motionless upon the tracks. The engine of the locomotive was intact, but for some minor damage. The carriages, too, were undisturbed, though blood stained one of the doors and a window or two had been shattered.
Agatha sent a dozen of her soldiers to search through the silent train. She and Medicine walked to the engine, the metal had been scored in places by gunshot.
“There’s ammunition and food in here, but no sign of life. What could have happened to them?”
“I think I know,” Medicine said, and pointed beyond the train.
“Oh,” Agatha’s voice was soft
He did not like this one little bit.
Out of the grass they came, five hundred Cuttlefolk at least, every one of them armed. Guns and sickles gleaming like death in the air. Behind them hovered their aerial troops, messengers armed with grenades and pistols.
“We could take out a few of them,” Agatha said, though she did not sound hopeful.
Medicine looked at his people, gathered beside the train. As one they pressed back against the rising slope of the trackbed.
Alone, Medicine might have suggested a last ditch, backs to the wall, shoot out. But he owed it to them, they had trusted him, this was nothing about his allegiance to Stade, but to the people who had made it with him through the Margin.
“No more pointless deaths, eh.”
Agatha followed his gaze, and frowned.
“If there’s still a chance,” he said, “we must take it. Isn’t that what the Underground is about?”
“You’re right, too many have died already. But, what if we have condemned them to slavery…”
“Even in slavery hope remains.”
“Have you ever been a slave?” Agatha said quietly, then she raised her voice. “Lower your weapons,” she shouted to her men.
Medicine watched the Cuttlefolk, they did not relax, nor lower their guns, but neither did they fire. He had to take some comfort in that, surely.
Chapter 45
