It has been stated that it was the Drifters that halted the development of fixed winged aircraft. That their Aerokin tore them out of the sky, and their spies destroyed such installations capable of the construction of flying machines. Fickle, foolish, vain: Drifters may be all these things, but they were also as ruthless as any Verger, when they perceived it to be required. Drifters: A Brief History, Madeline Maddeer
THE CITY OF DRIFT 1402 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Kara Jade knocked on the door to David’s room. “You decent?” she called. “You better be.”
“I’m ready,” David said, scrambling to hide his syringe.
Kara opened the door.
He rose from his bed, affronted. “That was locked!”
“Not to me it wasn't,” Kara said, and grinned.
David looked at her. “You’ve dyed your hair. Are those feathers?”
“Yes, and yes. Don’t want to be outdressed tonight. New jacket, too.”
“Very smart,” Margaret said from behind Kara.
Kara studied her, and shrugged. “Well, at least you’ve bathed.”
Margaret was dressed in black pants, a black blouse, and her jacket had a hood. “What are you doing? Going to rob a house afterwards?”
“We go to this damn reception, and then we leave.”
Kara nodded. “Agreed. Sooner we get there, sooner this ends.”
The reception was held within the Caress itself, a hall extending onto a balcony on the eighteenth level. When they arrived the balcony was already crowded, it was a peculiar thing to see all those heads suddenly turn and regard them as they walked into the room. A peculiar thing, and very similar to an unpleasant experience David had had on the Dolorous Grey just a few weeks ago. A dining car filled with Roilings, all ready to turn him into one of them. David cast his eye about for Witmoths. Nothing. Why would there be?
Kara Jade elbowed him, for all the tension of the moment she seemed at ease. David glanced over at Margaret. Even she looked relaxed. What? Had they been at his Carnival?
He'd slept the afternoon away, but it had been a sleep of nightmares, of Cadell demanding he run, that Mother Graine wasn't to be trusted and just where were the other Mothers? What had she done to them? Twice he'd woken just as a Quarg Hound was ready to swallow him whole, only to sink back down, dragged there by Cadell's ever-increasing will.
Even here, he could feel the Old Man looking out at the world, studying the people at the reception, tasting their fear, and the sense that all they really wanted to do was forget themselves for one night.
“We’ll be out of here soon,” Kara Jade said. “Just work through it, and don't mention — oh, no.”
“What?” David turned to her; Kara wasn’t looking in his direction.
He followed her gaze towards the edge of the party. A woman stood there- almost as tall as Margaret, which made her stand out here. There was something oddly familiar about her, and not from Cadell’s memories. David caught her eye, and the woman nodded, before turning her attention back to the bottle she held in her hands. Drift rum of course, dark, glinting like a Cuttleman’s blood. She had to be a pilot, they all were here, and pilots drank nothing else.
“Who is that?” David whispered in Kara’s ear; she stiffened, turned David bodily in the other direction, before he could even protest.
“You don’t want to talk to her,” Kara Jade said.
“Why?” David asked.
“She’s Raven Skye.”
“Raven Skye?”
Kara’s eyes boggled. David felt that he had offended her. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to-”
“You must’ve heard of her.”
David shook his head.
“What cave have you been living in?”
A deep dark one, David wanted to say, but he didn’t. “Carnival, that’s a cave of a sort, I suppose.”
Kara’s jaw was clenched so tight it looked like she might snap a tooth. “She’s the pilot of the Matilda Ray.”
“What?” Now he had heard of her. “S he’s the pilot of the Tilly Ray?”
Yet again, David could see that he had disappointed her. “Typical groundling, knows a pilot’s Aerokin, but not the pilot. And don’t call the Matilda the Tilly in front of her. She’s a bit odd about it. In fact, I think we should-”
“Ah, Kara!” Raven called out, already walking towards them.
Kara winced.
Raven patted her arm. “What, you weren’t even going to talk to your sister?”
Sister? Now David looked, he could see the resemblance. Though Raven was a good decade or so older, and about a foot taller; she’d pulled her long hair back, revealing a scar that ran from her left ear, all the way down her chin.
The Tilly Ray had been the last ship to leave the Grand Defeat, she’d held the Roil back as the other Aerokin had escaped, and had even managed to pick up more refugees along the way. She’d also been the first Aerokin that Stade had turned away, and the first to land in Hardacre with her wounded. The heroic death of General Bowen and the actions of the Tilly Ray were the most famous incidents of the Grand Defeat.
It had been the Aerokin that had drawn the attention, while the pilot had kept a low profile, avoiding mention in all but the most thorough histories, and David rarely read those.
Raven must have been only Kara’s age when she’d performed her feats, and just as obstinate. David could understand why Kara might find her sister difficult to be around, two such personalities were never going to get along. And now Raven was coming over; wherever she walked, people got out of her way almost as quickly as if she were a Mother of the Sky. The whole party shifted around her like mice around a salivating cat.
Raven looked down at him. “So this is the addict, the one from the Sump?”
“The Sump?” he asked.
“Long story. But take it from me, it isn’t complimentary, addict,” Raven said. David smiled, of course it wouldn’t be; just looking at her he doubted Raven was capable of compliments.
“Raven!” Kara said.
David reached out a hand. “No, it’s true. I had my troubles, but those days are past.”
Raven gave him a tense sort of smile, and cracked her knuckles. “So, if I was to shake you, you’re telling me Carnival wouldn’t come spilling out of your every orifice, pocket, and shoe?”
David realised that everyone in the room was looking at them, at him in particular — the conversation had died down. It was the Carnival that allowed him to lie with such conviction. David lifted his arms. “If you’d like to, but I must warn you, I’m heavier than I look.”
Raven laughed. “I’m sure you are.” She studied him with eyes as dark as thunderheads. “You’re certainly a charmer, so was your father. Don’t look so surprised. I knew many Engineers and Confluents when I still visited Mirrlees, before it started to drown. I was sorry to hear he died.”
“He didn’t die. He was murdered.”
“And I am sorry for that.” She clapped her hands. “Now, what are you drinking?”
They were all a little drunk by the time Mother Graine arrived, alone. She walked straight over to David, ignoring Margaret as she did. Not that Margaret seemed to mind; she was having an animated conversation with another pilot. And she was smiling.
David thought Mother Graine looked harried, weary, as though she had already had a night of drinking. Raven drained her glass the moment Mother Graine appeared. Then Raven slid an arm over her sister’s shoulder, and pulled Kara away.
“There’s something we must talk about,” Raven said, leaving him alone with the Mother of the Sky. His head buzzing with drink, and some rather lewd memories of Cadell's; he felt his cheeks flush.
“Raven is so brave,” Mother Graine said, watching after the pilots. “It is a hard thing to lose your craft, to have it die. Many don’t survive that loss.”
“What? The Matilda Ray is dead? I'd heard-”
“The Matilda was old when Raven took her as pilot. Though she should have had another twenty years in her, she died not long after the Grand Defeat; an infection of the lungs, I believe. Raven hasn’t left Drift since.”
David thought of that, ten years alone. David thought Margaret would know at least a portion of that loneliness. He guessed he did, too. “People are torn from our lives,” he said. “Loves snatched away.”
Mother Graine patted his arm. “We’ve had our share of that, you and I. The dead far outweigh the living in our lives.” She sighed, looked around her pointedly. “I can’t talk here, and there are things that must be said. Things that only you and I can discuss.”
“I agree,” David said. “We need to talk, and you need to let us go. We've a long way to go.”
“Yes, I understand that. The Engine waits and you fear it as much as you desire it.” She touched his arm, and David felt his nerves react in a way that he’d thought was lost to him; or perhaps he had never really known, it seemed so foreign. The Engine wasn't the only thing that he feared and desired.
Mother Graine said, “I understand a lot of things about you. Come with me for a while, I promise people won’t mind, I have a bit of influence here.” She flashed him a smile, and David’s throat tightened, he knew at once, in that moment, he couldn’t deny her anything. Plans for an early night fell away; besides, he doubted she could stop him, or even hurt him.
The strength, Cadell’s strength, bloomed inside him. And he felt at last that he understood the true possibility of their binding.
“Where do you want to go?” he asked her.
They left the Caress together, the reception still going strong, and already beginning to look like it was going to get messy. Out in the night, David couldn't tell if it was cold, but he guessed it had to be. Mist was rising from the lake (a lake in the sky, that still struck him as so wonderfully odd). People gathered around small fires on the outskirts of the city, guards, he guessed, though they did their best to pretend that neither he nor Graine were there. Graine held his hand, and her grip was warm. She didn’t seem to mind the cold.
They walked for about twenty minutes in silence along an increasingly narrow path. The houses thinned out around them, the forest thickened and the stars grew bright. They reached an edge of Stone, and a viewing platform.
“Is this where you push me off?” David asked.
“Don’t spoil another night, Cadell,” Graine said. “Please.”
He gripped the rail to steady himself and an image struck him suddenly, a memory that was not his own: of a third moon rising above a dark and shivering city of stone, and a sea of ice rising and drowning the world, and he could see faces, eyes staring, faces in the ice and they were frozen, but not dead.
“David?” Graine reached out a hand. David stepped away from her. “A memory, something vivid and cruel. I saw — I don't know what I saw.” Graine nodded. “Sorry, I didn't mean to call him out of you.” David turned his back to her. “He's getting stronger,” he said, and looked over the edge, into the dark.
Drift moved in a rough circle over Shale, though its circumference had shrunk with the coming of the Roil, as though where that darkness was the mechanisms of the city feared to go. What the city might do once (if) the Roil enclosed the entire world was uncertain. But then, life in a city in the sky was full of uncertainties. For all that Drift’s residents claimed sovereignty of the air, there was much they did not know. For one, was the city capable of eternal flight, or would its engines one day run down and the city fall from the sky?
David felt as though he were falling now.
He turned and looked back at the city, he could just make out the balcony, and the party. Fireworks were being lit. More memories came unbidden, of ancient wars of a vast darkness, crawling, crawling towards towers higher than mountains. He thought, Enough! Enough!
Graine gestured at the sky. “The Roil's iron ships, they'll attack us. We've held ourselves apart from the troubles below for so long, but it was all for nothing. Ah, but the world isn’t as it was,” Graine said.
“The world never is as it was,” David said. “That’s the nature of the world.” “We should understand that better than anyone.” Graine touched his face.
“After all, you are the embodiment of change.”
“Seeing you, I’m beginning to understand that better than I could have thought,” David said. “Now, please tell me why you brought me here.”
“You were never going to be clear of Hardacre before the Old Men came. My spies could tell me that much. Buchan and Whig, they were dithering so, when they should have been more certain, more… commanding. As they were when they ran Chapman. Hardacre's politics are complicated, I guess. And my actions are with precedent. I've once freed you before, long ago. Is it too much for you to remember?
Though the touch of the earth stabbed at my feet, I went down to your prison and let you out.”
And David realised that she was addressing Cadell. Perhaps she had been addressing him all along. He felt Cadell rise a little within him, as though all the Carnival in the world couldn’t keep the Old Man suppressed. It was like drowning, and here, with this strange woman, he let himself drown. David nodded. “It was a mistake.”
Graine sighed. “One never knows until one fails. And it wasn’t a mistake to free you, just the others.”
“If I remember, forty people died as a result of that freedom.”
“What did it matter? So many had died already.”
David blinked, felt Cadell slide away, as though banished by the memory of that long-ago freedom. “Why didn’t you just throw us into prison the moment we arrived?”
Graine gestured at the city around them. “You do not see it? This is Drift. The city in the sky, you cannot run from here unless I say so. Where is your airship? What Aerokin do you pilot? I did not want to frighten you unduly. The frontal approach, that struck me as too dangerous, not for you, nor for your warrior-guardian woman, but for my people. How many of my kind would die before Margaret was overcome? How many could you kill?
“And do not tell me that you didn’t expect some sort of assault on your arrival,” she said.
“I might have.”
“Yes, well, for the first time you were greeted with open arms here. Coercion isn’t necessarily the best solution. And it worked. Still, sometimes it’s required.”
She held his hand. “Let me take you back to the Caress, to my rooms. We have so much to discuss, you've need of strategy now. Old Men hunt you, the Roil hunts you, but I've a way that you can be done with it, and in Tearwin Meet before the week is out.”
David let her lead him away from the edge.
In her rooms, they did far less talking than David had been led to expect. Her lips pressed hard against his. He felt no resistance, just an answering hunger, and this so unlike anything he had known before. It consumed him, made him weak.
She guided his fingers to her thigh, and he felt her racing pulse. They were naked in an eye blink. And then they were bound in each other, hot and cold combined, and it was hard and rough, and utterly unexpected. By the time they were done, David felt stripped away, worn out, and yet more alive than he could have believed. He traced a finger along the curve of her belly, kissed a nipple gently, and Graine pushed him away.
“That will be enough,” she said primly.
“Enough?” His face was slick with her, his senses filled with her. “Good heavens, madam, I thought we had only started.”
Graine smiled. “Cadell, my Cadell. I really am sorry.”
Her hand flashed out, striking him just above the eyes, and David fell.
“Not fair,” he breathed.
“Of course it isn’t,” Graine said, and kicked him in the face.