and punching him in the throat.
Hah! And she had thought David was jumpy.
“Don’t,” she said.
David’s hand dropped, and he gave her that hurt look again. She wondered if he’d developed that as an addict, a forced sort of helplessness. “What is it?”
“The Verger,” he whispered. “Tope, he’s over there.”
Margaret squinted out into the light, one hand shading her eyes.
“I can see him,” she said, keeping her voice low. She did not like what she saw. “Let’s get out of here, now. You’re right, David, Cadell can look after himself.”
“Back to the Field of Flight?” David asked.
“Yes, but not directly. If anyone is following us I want to make it difficult.”
“If we head towards the wall, we can swing around to the Field. At least I think…” David pulled out the map he had bought, almost losing it to the wind, as he folded it to the relevant section. Margaret nearly knocked it out of his hand, in her city someone checking a map would have stood out, an aberration, here though, even on the edge of the abyss, tourists abounded. In fact at least three other people on the street were looking at maps, and no one was looking at them.
David pinched a little map powder under his nose, and his eyelids fluttered, he traced a section of the map with a finger, seeing it far more clearly than her. ‘Ah, yes. All we have to do is walk a small part of the wall, look, here, near the sea, and come back on the field from the north. There’s a pub along the way, three in fact, we could-”
“Sounds good to me,” she said. “But we’ve no time for you to score your precious drug. Don’t look at me like that, David. I have been warned, and you really were talked into coming easily.”
“You don’t even-”
Margaret snorted at him.
David puffed himself up indignantly. Margaret clenched her jaw to stifle a laugh. “Look, I’m not taking, anymore. Not since… since you saw me last,” David said. “I don’t even think about it. And if I was going to, now would be… but I’m not.”
She let the lie hang there. David frowned.
“Can we save this for later,” he said. “Believe me or don’t, but we have to get going. We’ve stayed here too long as it is.”
“I’m no fool,” Margaret said, already making her way down the street.
David stood behind her for a moment, she could feel his eyes on her, but she didn’t clarify what she meant by that, or turn to see if he understood her. David may be an addict, but he wasn’t stupid.
Chapman was a noisy city, but it possessed a very different quality of noise to Tate. There were no hums and tintinnabulations for one. Radio signals still worked here, as did the phone lines. In Tate, the cannon were always firing, the coolers always running, generators always thrumming or rumbling from outer wall to the peak of the cooling vents. Tate had been a clockwork city all right, with a thousand bells and whistles, when one machine stopped another was already starting up.
This deliquescent thunder was a different thing altogether.
Margaret leant against Chapman’s eastern wall, on its southernmost corner, her fingers brushed against stone that was warm, not frozen, and alive to the movement of the crashing waters below. She glared out at the sea. It shone in the sunlight; she had never seen so much water in all her life. She breathed deep, enjoying the briny challenge of the wind. Here the air felt alive – not stale and cloying or bitter with gasoline and coolant – and the horizon was so distant that the world actually seemed to dip away into endlessness. Gulls cried in the sky above her.
This is what she had lost. This is what had been stolen from her.
It had been an easy task to evade the Verger, if he’d even been hunting them in the first place. Two streets from the wall and he was gone, and afterwards their pace had become more leisurely, as though this were just a simple morning’s walk along the wall.
Mounted against battlements next to her was an ice cannon, a much inferior design to her parents’ and poorly constructed. The welding was sloppy, the mounting plate already cracked in places. She examined it sadly, for all that it was not like the cannon of Tate; it reminded her of her home. Her eyes blurred with tears.
This cannon and its two-dozen siblings lined up along the wall would do little to stop what was coming, like the ocean’s waves the Roil was relentless and would not be denied.
She considered what she had seen yesterday. The resources of the Roil must be immense if it could build such a massive army and heat sinks in just the few days since she had left the Interface.
An intelligence was guiding it and the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that it was her mother.
She had always been the logistics specialist, the one who could manage Tate as a whole.
“Mother,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
“It’s building isn’t it?” David said, standing by her side eyes fixed on the Roil.
So you’re talking to me again, she thought.
“At least it looks as though Cadell has swayed the Council a little,” she said. “Something has obviously been put into effect. Look at the defences. Have you ever seen so many guards on the Southern Wall? And I’ve counted seven new cannon.”
“I still don’t know why people stay here. It’s crazy,” David said.
Margaret pointed back over the city. “This is their home. No one wants to leave their homes, their lives, people just don’t uproot that easily. That explains everything, the Festival, even the queues to get into the city. The North of Shale has always been about Mirrlees and Chapman and, to a lesser extent, Hardacre, even I know that. And while all three places survive they can imagine nothing is really wrong, and from what Cadell has told me your government has encouraged that. But soon it will be much harder. Soon and much, much too late.”
Margaret looked about her. As she saw it, it was already too late.
David glanced at his watch. “They’re about to launch the Festival. We have to get back. We have stayed here too long as it is.”
Margaret nodded, though she stared a little longer at the sea and the docks where seagulls massed in crying squalls around ships just in from the morning’s catch. From what she had heard it was a dangerous job, though the Roil did not extend too far from the coast, the areas of the sea over which it stretched seemed just as transformed as the land. And on those edges storms whipped up with a ferocity unseen on the land.
Increasingly ships set out and never came back. Discounting those that had chosen to flee north, there were still so many unreturned. The last few months had been dire indeed. However, the fisher folk were not unfamiliar with tragedy. The sea was both cruel and kind to those who made a living from it. People still had to put food on the table, world’s end nigh or not.
A cry rang out along the wall, and then sirens started their baleful lament.
“David,” she said, but he was already staring south at the horror rising there.
The Roil moved on the city, no slow and steady advance but a billowing rush. And out of it streamed, faster still, a swirling screaming mass of Flutes and Endym.
Of course, Margaret was not the only one who saw the Roil’s approach. All along the wall, bells rang out and ice cannon whined, charging up. I could be home, she thought. Maybe this time I don’t run.
And then, from the centre of the city, came a wild trumpeting and cheering. Ten thousand coloured balloons shot up into the sky. The Festival of Float had begun.
“Festival and war,” Margaret said yanking her guns free of their holsters. “The Roil has developed a wonderful sense of timing.” A cold certainty gripped her, she sighted along her pistols at the monstrous dark. “What do you say, David. Are you ready to die?”
CHAPMAN, DISTANCE FROM ROIL NEGLIBLE
David gripped her arm. “You can’t stay and fight. We’ve got to get to the Roslyn Dawn,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do here but be swallowed by the dark.”
Margaret’s gaze switched from him to Roil and back, and David was surprised by the sadness in her face, the battle being fought there. Finally, she slammed her guns back into their holsters.
