No one chooses the north. It is almost as though, as a species, we have been bred with some deep antipathy for the ice and the cold. Just as the Mothers of the Sky find it an agony to step upon the land. Of course, it is not nearly as severe as that, and not acknowledged. For all industry, the coal and the oil fields, find themselves in the north. Here too are the Greater Forests (or what once were). We need the north. We work it, but we do not like it. Surely it is forced upon us.
THE UNDERGROUND 875 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Medicine Paul was in a delicate state of internal political upheaval — like a stomach bug, only much worse. Alliances kept shifting. He was nimble, a survivor, but every time he thought he'd found his footing, it had slipped away beneath him.
He'd found himself working for Stade, the man who killed almost all of Medicine's allies. He'd found himself leading Stade's people — though weren't Stade's people his too? — nearly a thousand miles to a secret stronghold in the mountains with the aid of his guard Agatha and her soldiers. Through the predatory gloom of the Margin they'd marched, leaving dozens of dead behind. Then they been captured by — and escaped from — Cuttlemen, fled across the sea of grass known as the Gathering Plains, and finally made it to the Underground.
Within thirty minutes of their arrival Agatha had been executed, and Medicine's authority stripped from him — by people that should have been his allies to begin with. The revolution had come, and he'd somehow been on the wrong side of it.
Since Agatha’s execution, Medicine Paul had been left alone. And it was easy enough in the long dark tunnels of the Underground, though that didn't mean he wasn't being watched, or that he wasn't busy. Just that Grappel required nothing of him, demanded nothing but what he demanded of all the citizens of the Underground, that they work and work hard.
Medicine was afforded a single room, a bed and a desk, a toilet in one corner and a door with a lock on it, of the sort that could be picked by even the most indifferent thief or assassin. Medicine had spent his share of time in prison cells, this was no different, even if he could lock and unlock it at will. He knew that wherever he went he was watched, and that for all the size of the Underground there really wasn’t anywhere to go.
Twenty thousand people lived and worked here. Medicine was just one of them, and while he worked hard, be it at the infirmary or helping in the construction of inner walls, or the smoothing out of the vent tubes to release heat (while ensuring that something more sinister couldn’t find its way back in), he also knew that he was being regarded with a much greater level of scrutiny, and that he would never be trusted.
And why should he? After all, he was from Mirrlees, and it was Mirrlees that had so failed the north and Hardacre in particular. It was Mirrlees that had sent on the refugees from the south.
Work was his only escape, but he didn’t have it for very long. Less than five days after their arrival, Medicine became ill.
A mild headache became a sweat, which became the worst fever he had ever known.
He stumbled halfway back to his bed, through the long dark corridors, then fell and kept on falling. When he woke next, he was in his bed, throat burning with thirst, not at all sure how he had made it to the lumpy mattress. He tried to rise, and his limbs shook with the effort, the sheets may as well have been made of lead.
His vision swam, and he found darkness again.
Time passed slowly in the dark. He slept, if such a painful broken thing could be called sleep. Sometimes he was torn from the black and cloying dark with a scream on his lips: Agatha and her soldiers looking on, faces burst asunder by gunshot, a constant horrible accusation.
Medicine had lost many allies in his life, and always he had managed to continue. But now, it seemed, he was paying the cost: dreams as intense as they were terrible, a weariness that seemed to crush him. Then would come the fever, he shivered and boiled. He mumbled at the dark.
“When you die, you can stand here too,” Agatha said.
“When you die, you can stand here too,” David said, and Cadell, and Warwick, and the boy named Lassiter, who he had sent to his death to save David.
Two whole days he didn’t rise from his bed, just lay there assailed with visions. Horrible blood-curdling things, great waves of darkness washed over him, punctuated by laughter, shrill and deafening in his ears.
Someone came to him, spoke him to in a gentle soothing voice, laid cold cloths against his brow. But when he woke — alone, weak — in the room hardly ventilated, stinking of his fever, his sickness, he wondered if that hadn’t been part of the fever, too.
When he finally left his room, it was as a man transformed. What weight had sat upon his bones had bled from him. His flesh was lean and hard, he felt weak, and yet, somehow, a deeper purpose possessed him.
But first he had to eat.
Medicine walked to the common room, guided as much by the smell of food as memory. Everything seemed different — changed as he had changed. He followed long corridors cut into the stone, the ground beneath him shuddering with the vibration of grand works. The mountain was always moving, tiny, almost imperceptible movements that cumulatively were hard to ignore. He’d ridden those vibrations like waves when he had been sick, they’d carried him in and out of madness.
In the common room he stood shocked by the sight of all these living people, he wanted to reach out and touch them, make sure that they weren’t a dream. He’d bathed, found some clean clothes in his room, but he knew that he must still stink, as he was left alone. He served himself a little food, meat of some sort, a few limp vegetables, some mashed potatoes. Not much of anything — his stomach must be the size of a pea.
The food was dry and stale, and the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten in his life.
He was just finishing when a boy approached him. The boy could scarcely meet his gaze, kept looking down at his hands. Medicine smiled. Tried not to think of David.
“It’s all right,” Medicine said. “I don’t bite.”
“I’ve a message for you,” the boy said. “Grappel would speak with you.”
Medicine wiped his plate clean with a slice of bread, chewed it thoughtfully. “Tell him I will be on my way once I’ve eaten.”
The boy hovered there.
“Yes?” Medicine said.
“I’m to take you to him.”
Medicine finished the bread. “Grappel the sort to punish you if you don’t?”
The boy shrugged, and looked away.
“Very well.” Medicine stood up, leaving the plate behind him. “Lead the way.”
“You have recovered, then,” Grappel said.
“I didn’t realise that I was sick. The stress, I’ve never taken ill that way. It-”
“No, it is to be expected. Almost all of us have suffered from it. It happens to those that come up north. Some weirdness, a contagion. The flesh melts away, and if it doesn’t kill you, you find yourself stronger.”
“I’m a doctor, I’ve not heard of it.”
“When did you last run a practice?” Grappel said, handing him a glass of Drift rum. “When did you last keep up to date with the journals?”
Medicine took a sip of the strong stuff, winced. “It’s been a while since I have actively chased the journals. But, surely-”
“It’s something that’s little spoken of here. A rite of passage. Why share it? No one would come this way.” Grappel cleared his throat, looked at his own rum, but didn’t drink. “Did the dead visit you?”
Medicine looked away.
“Of course they did,” Grappel said. “They always come. All that is death is in that fever, and you so close to it, you can’t even tell the difference. Some people lose themselves to it. Quite frankly, I thought you would be one of them.”
“So you called me, to see that I was hale and hearty, and that was all?”
Grappel shook his head. “I have bad news, I’m afraid,” Grappel said.
“Why am I not surprised?” Medicine said.
Grappel sighed.
“Well, out with it! I’ve people that need me in the infirmary. I doubt that my own fever has seen an end to illness in this place.”
“Cadell is dead,” Grappel said.
Medicine felt his heart constrict. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, and more than that, the Old Men have been released. They say they hunt the Milde boy.”
“David?” Medicine wanted to say that the young man had visited him in his dreams, but he kept quiet.
“Yes, the boy’s alive. Cadell, they say, saw him from Chapman to Hardacre. He is with Buchan and Whig. Our spies say that he has changed.”
“That’s the Carnival, surely.”
“No, this isn’t the transformation of an addict. There is no sleeping sickness, no madness. He seems more assured, more certain of himself. They still seek to travel north, with the support of Buchan and Whig. To Tearwin Meet.”
“Is that a good idea?” Medicine said. “With Cadell gone, what chance do they have?”
“From all reports they seem confident that they could achieve their objectives; the boy is wearing Cadell’s Orbis.”
Medicine found himself instinctively reaching for the place where his ring finger should be, where he had once worn his own copy of the Engineer’s ring, before Stade chopped ring and finger free.
“It doesn’t matter, none of it does,” Grappel said. “We have them in Hardacre, and they will not move.”
“Will you be bringing them here?”
Grappel seemed surprised. “A ship, the Collard Green, has been sent for that purpose,” Grappel said. “Now, the question is, what do we do with you?”
“If you’d wanted me dead, I’m sure you’d have killed me by now. What service can I be?”
“Politically, you’re a problem,” Grappel said. “Your links to Stade, no matter how transitory, have tarnished you. But there are other things that you can do.”
“I’m a doctor,” Medicine said. “And I am already doing that. I see to the sick.”
“Mr Paul, there are more than human sicknesses to attend to. There’s a darkness in the heart of the Project, and I would have you find it.”
Medicine looked at the man who had ordered the execution of Agatha and her troops, and was almost certain that he was staring at that very darkness. “Where do I begin?” Medicine said.
“I’ve heard rumours of something called the Contest. I want you to find it out.”
Medicine nodded. “I’ve one question,” he said.
“Yes, what is it?”
“Who did you see when the fever struck you?”
Grappel lifted the rum, considered it in the candlelight, gold, the ice cubes gleaming. “All of them,” he said. “Every single one. Oh, and don’t believe it stops. Every night they find me, and every night there is more of them.”
He finished his drink. “The blood on these hands, Mr Paul. The blood on these hands, you would think me a monster.”
Medicine nodded his head, but he didn't say a thing.