There was no city quite like her. When I close my eyes, sometimes all I see are those walls, ice-slicked, and I half fancy that the earth moves to the beat of the Four Cannon. Tate haunts me still.
THE CITY OF TATE WITHIN THE ROIL BUT NOT OF THE ROIL
Margaret increased the night sight of her field glasses and swept the horizon, tracking the thin pale line of Mechanism Highway. No matter how she adjusted her field glasses, the convoy did not appear.
In the south-eastern quarter, Sentinels fired at a drift of floaters blown in too close to the walls. The Sentinels' bullets punctured the creatures' gas sacks with a wet slap. Margaret turned towards the sound and watched the last floater, its jaws snapping uselessly, crash to the ground like a burst balloon.
Another threat efficiently dealt with, as all threats were here. Footsteps crunched on the ground behind her.
“Go home,” Lieutenant Sara Varn said, her breath escaping in plumes from cracked lips as she spoke. “You're not meant to be here until tomorrow and I will not have a weary sentry on my wall. Get some rest.”
Wrapped in the standard black cloak of Tate's Sentinels, Sara’s single concession to Halloween was a tiny silver skull pinned to her collar. She wore heavy spiked boots. Strapped to her back were two ice rifles, while a rime blade and ice pistols were holstered around her waist. Ice weaponry proved effective against the creatures of the Roil, but was inefficient. It took considerable time to charge up and reload each gun, so Sentinels bristled with weapons, swapping and changing from pistol to rifle and (if severely pressed) to blade.
The city itself remained the best weapon.
Ice sheathed the Jut; refrigeration units lipped each merlon, pumping a chill into the air that transformed the cloying warmth of the Roil's winds into frigid gusts.
Sara clapped her gloved hands together and, despite the futility of the gesture, blew on them.
“Of course. While you're here…” Sara pointed east. “A nest of Sappers, staying an inch or so out of range of the main guns.”
Flares went up.
Margaret stared at the spot with her glasses. Six of the beasts disturbed the ruined earth. Their huge dark eyes met the light fearlessly. Then Roil spores, drawn by the heat, smothered the flares — and darkness drowned the Sappers again.
“Quite a large nest,” Margaret said.
Sara's eyes lit with a grim humour, she clapped her hands together again. “Already under control. We're sending drones out soon. Heavy endothermic bombing, ground breakers. You know, the standard stuff. Odd though, we haven't seen Sappers this close to the city in years, they nearly destroyed the north wall. We got them then and we will this time, too.”
Margaret kept her gaze squarely on the Sappers, they did not move. Just stared at the city walls, like they were waiting for something. “When are the drones being launched?”
Sara laughed. “Soon. Just go home and rest. Tate can look after herself without you.”
“All right, I'm going,” Margaret said finally, and lowered her field glasses, slipping them into a case hung from her hip. Still she hovered there a moment longer.
“I'll send a message the moment they arrive,” Sara said.
“The bells are set, so ring me. Three for the moment they drive through the gates.”
“Three it is. It's always three, we've done this before many times. Now go.”
Margaret climbed to the top of the Wire-tower — the stairs creaking with her every movement — and opened a cabinet in which hung a half-dozen leather harnesses. She pulled out hers and hooked the harness around her chest and waist, making sure the tugs and collars fit snugly; then linked herself to the wire.
She flicked a switch by the side of the tower, smiling despite herself as gears clicked into place. Beam engines hummed, counterweights fell, and the tower rose another couple of yards, making it the highest point of this section of the wireway, lifting her into a zone of hot winds. The whole structure shook slightly, then the wire tightened, lifting her even higher as it did so. Margaret made a final check of her harness; the hooks and wheels were in line, free of tangles and no cracks in evidence. Satisfied, she nodded to herself, then let go. She hovered there for the briefest of moments, a final hesitation perhaps, but it was too late, gravity had its way and she flew, suspended by the humming wire.
“Whatever you do, do not look down,” someone had warned her once.
Such advice was absurd! Where else could you look? There were no stars above, just the netting doming the city, and the dark blur of the Roil. Down below, Tate’s lights shimmered, distant and comforting, beautiful in their constancy.
From here it was easy to imagine the streetlights as constellations. But these were constellations crowded with people, going to and from work, trudging home in heavy cramponed boots designed for the frozen roadways. Someone, looking up, saw her and waved. Margaret waved back.
Margaret adored the wireway. Of all her parents' inventions, she loved it most. She felt ungainly and too tall, cramped in on all sides, anywhere but here. Here she was free, the wind roaring in her ears, the wheels on her harness sibilant and swift, and the city a sparkling microcosm below.
Pride for her parents' and her city's achievements swelled within her. When she had been younger, she was jealous of all the time they spent away from her. Until she realised her parents were not just protecting the city. They were protecting her.
She reached the next wall, and something slammed against the sky. The Four Cannon burned, and as she watched, the first one tumbled towards her. She tried to release herself from the wire and couldn’t.
“You’re dead, just like us,” a cold-breathed voice whispered in her ear. She turned and looked at Dale's face. Her first kiss. He had no lips now. He reached to stroke her face or scratch her eyes, and the cannon fell.
THE PINCH 1392 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Margaret woke, the last shadows of the dream clenched around her heart, to a distant detonation.
Where was she? She snatched at the rifle thatlaid beside her. They’ve found me, she thought, her legs already swinging over the bunk. She nearly cracked her head on the hard roof of the gondola — smaller than the Dawn. She blinked, no smell of the pub. And she remembered she wasn’t in the Dawn, nor her room in the Habitual Fool, but that she was in the air nonetheless.
Another rumble in the near distance; and she realised that it was no iron ship, just a storm, and she was still on the Aerokin named Pinch, flying to the city of Drift.
She yawned. For the first time in weeks, she had slept more than a couple of hours straight. And while she still felt a bone-deep weariness, it was marginally better. David was snoring in the bed across from her; she looked over at him. His eyes were closed, but his mouth had curved wide with a smile that was almost manic. It chilled her, she would not have been surprised to see Witmoths sliding over those lips, except David’s transformation was something utterly different.
He shifted between talkative and quiet. And sometimes he just stared at her, only the gaze possessed an intensity that David had never had. Margaret would glare back and David would shake his head and apologise.
Oh, and his dreams. The boy was always whimpering and crying out. He might possess the power that Cadell had given him, but it hadn’t desensitised him to fear. He would snap awake — Margaret’s sleep (which was hitched with its own baggage) already broken — the Orbis on his finger gleaming, and sob, till tears and snot slicked his face.
He didn’t seem to care that Margaret watched him.
And despite the small space, and the fact that she hadn’t caught him, she was sure that he was still taking Carnival. How else could he remain so calm, when every bit of her was itching to be free of this cabin? All he did during the day was read from his small stash of Shadow Council novels. Margaret had tried to read one of them, and found it utterly unpalatable. The books hadn’t changed much in style or substance since the ones that her father had read, perhaps a little crueller, a little more violent. All they did was make her yearn for her parents’ library, and remind her again what had been lost. But the books kept David occupied, which in itself would be good, but it also made it easy for him to avoid talking strategy.
They had no plan for Drift, for what needed to be done when they arrived. Kara had said that there would be more information in the Pinch, but that had been little more than an inventory of supplies. They were going in blind, and as far as Margaret saw it, that was David’s fault.
She slid from her bed, landed on her feet lightly and walked towards the control panel — or what would be the control panel at some stage when Pinch had matured — as the Aerokin hummed to herself softly. Everything seemed all right — though Margaret really couldn’t tell.
Outside it was still dark. She touched the translucent wall and it cleared and she could see in the distance, through the murk, a fire burning down below. Then she realised that it was moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards them. She tapped the wall again and watched it shift, drawing the image into tighter focus. She couldn’t make out much, other than that it was not one fire, but three. Already they were drawing away from the fire.
Margaret couldn’t explain why, but the sight disturbed her. She released the focus of the wall, made the lights a single blur again.
“Worrying, isn’t it?” David said from behind her, making her jump. When had he ever been so light on his feet?
“What is it?”
“Who, you mean. The Old Men. They can’t get us here, but they can feel me. Just as I feel them, this is as close as we have ever been, them and I.” He hunkered down beside her, and smiled, though it was nothing like the smile of his sleeping. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we? Hunted by everyone. Far too popular for our own good.” He shook his head. “My dreams are always so dreadful these days.” He reached across the narrow hall and grabbed an apple, offered it to Margaret; she shook her head. He bit down on the apple, juice ran down his chin. “Horrible, horrible things.”
She turned away, looked back out as lightning streaked the sky. She felt the subtle shifting of the Aerokin, the way Pinch moved from a parallel path with the storm to a slightly westerly one.
Margaret said, “You didn’t look like you were having a bad dream.”
David sighed. “That’s Cadell. He and I have different opinions on what is good and bad.” He took another bite. “Tell me about your city, Margaret.”
“Funny, I was just-”
“I think I heard you call out in your sleep,” David said. “What was it like?”
And she did. Starting with great towers and the bells, the wireways webbing the city, and just how much like flying that was, only faster than an Aerokin, the air around you dark as night. The Four Cannon: the rhythm around which everything else was constructed. And then there were the caverns below, ever luminous, smelling of life, nothing like the frozen city above. Just talking about it made her ache.
“Sounds wonderful,” David said. “All I ever knew was rain, the smell of rot. The levee walls rising up and up. And everyone afraid that the Roil would come, that the levees would break, or the city just sink into the ground. Do you think there is a person alive in this world that doesn’t have a heart drowning in terror?”
“We all drown in something,” Margaret said.
“It’s all right,” David said. “We’re moving again. We'll do what we must.”
Yes, Margaret thought. Everything's all right. My parents are dead. My city is destroyed. Yes, everything is all right.
And maybe David saw that in her face, because he frowned and turned away.
“It’s all right,” he said once again, softly, as though to himself.