After each defeat in the south, Hardacre grew, and the capital of the north truly became that. More blood within the city’s veins meant more blood spilled. For when a population grows there are always elements of it ready to take advantage, to murder, and to steal. And as Hardacre’s population exploded, those elements thrived. The darkest of those flowered in the weeks after the fall of Mirrlees. The murders were gruesome. Death had never become so lurid.
Added to that were rumours of a Cuttle army massing in the south, driven north by the greater dark of the Roil.
It was a perfect time to be a good fellow such as I. Now let me take you to Miss Gentle's boudoir, where we did not go so gently at all.
Callahan, an Erotic Memoir,
CITY OF HARDACRE 972 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Something scratched at the window, and for an awful moment, David thought it was him. Not Sheff, who was most definitely dead, but Cadell, the Old Man who had cursed him just weeks ago onboard the Roslyn Dawn, with a bite, and the Orbis Ingenium: a ring that Cadell had claimed was a universe folded up on itself.
He was everywhere. Cadell was everywhere. Not just in his dreams. Why not a dark shape scraping its nails against the glass, or an Old Man’s memories building in David's blood and his bones? And like the Old Man, imprisoned for millennia, David was obsessed with the dimensions of the room that caged him. That was the bit of Cadell in him. Frequently he dreamt of a small room, windowless, with a single reinforced door, bolted shut with something that hurt his head. So often had he had this dream now, that space had come to overlay his own room.
It was three steps from the desk to the window and five from the bed to the window, or three to the door. David knew the dimensions of this little room too well. He’d spent too long in it.
There was another soft scraping against the glass.
David stood up from his desk — where he had been trying to write a letter to his Aunt Veronica — and holding his pen in front of him as though it were a Verger’s knife, took those three steps to the window. He wasn’t ready for this, didn’t know if he would ever be. His hands shook a little despite the Carnival in his veins.
Nothing.
The street below was empty. Perhaps it had been an auditory hallucination. In some people Carnival generated all manner of colourful experiences. David had never taken the drug for that, more its ability to calm. As Cadell himself had implied (well, more than implied), to shield him from the worst sensations of a life subsumed by tragedy. Carnival suppressed doubt, blunted terror’s edge. It was what allowed him to stand at the window considering the possibility of the Old Man, and what made it, ultimately, addictive. If David had grown wild with visions and terror every time he’d taken a dose, he wouldn’t have taken it.
Cadell was out there, somewhere. David had been expecting it, he couldn’t explain how, but he knew this was the consequence of the Old Man’s death, and the “gift” he had given him.
Tens of people already dead in the city of Hardacre, and David had yet to bring himself to search him out. He was frightened of what he might find, and what he had to do. There hadn’t been much in the way of serious investigation yet; all of these people had been refugees from Chapman, and even a couple from Mirrlees. He’d heard whispers that one of them had even been a Verger.
Carnival kept it at distance and allowed him to study his terror with a dispassion that he could never hope to attain without it.
A source had been easy to find. If you knew what to look for, and the signals were universal, Carnival dealers were never far away, particularly in these darkening days. And the refugees from Chapman’s destruction had flooded the market. David had thought that it would be harder to score the good stuff, but apparently a lot of the people who had been carried on the winds had taken it with them. Supplies might drop in the weeks ahead, particularly if the rumours about the exodus from Mirrlees were true. But right now, scoring Carnival was easier than finding fresh fruit.
Getting away from Margaret and Buchan and Whig had proven harder, but he’d managed it, and transactions weren’t a lengthy affair. How could he explain to Margaret, hardly a sympathetic ear at the best of times, that Carnival was the only thing that suppressed Cadell’s increasing influence within him?
And all it did was slow the process.
Perhaps if he had explained that today, she would have grown more sympathetic; then again, she may have regarded him with even more suspicion.
David’s finger brushed the Orbis on his right hand. It was cold, colder even than his fingertips. He’d tried to remove it several times, but it was not just the case of a ring too tight to drag over his knuckle, but that his flesh and the Orbis Ingenium had fused. Indeed it was growing inside him, filaments of that ring were doing things to him, and the more it did, the more he understood its process, and the less he liked it.
Twice he’d tried to cut it off, just beneath the knuckle, only to faint when he reached for a blade. That had occurred early in the transformation, a defence mechanism, he guessed. Now he was curious to see just what was happening, what endpoint lay ahead.
He’d grown a moustache as an act of defiance (in part, it also served to change his appearance somewhat); he couldn’t decide whether or not the moustache made him look younger or older.
David didn’t know if anyone else had noticed, but he’d also grown an inch taller in the last two weeks, and his shoulders and arms had thickened, which was quite a feat for a Carnival addict. All of it the better to accommodate Cadell, he supposed. He didn’t think the Old Man was going to come bursting out of him any time soon, changing the slope of his brow, or the curve of his lips, but he was there, and with every passing day there was more of him.
He stared out the window. Hardacre was so much smaller than Mirrlees; from here he could almost see to the edge of the city. Really, it was barely deserving of the name. Hardacre could scarcely be larger than the largest suburb in Mirrlees, though there everything was out of scale: its levees, its bridges beneath which a whole community could hide and rot. He missed his city, despite the rain, despite the fact that he had been hunted there. Somehow that vastness was easier to encompass than these narrow streets, and houses tacked onto other houses, tall and teetering. Thin curling streets gave out to broad squares, where you’d step from shadow to bright light in an instant, as though waking from a dream, and David’s life was becoming too dreamlike as it was.
But Mirrlees was gone now. He couldn’t go back, and soon this metropolis would be behind him too, if Buchan and Whig could get them moving again. All of a sudden he experienced a longing for another city, much more ancient and one that he would be going back to, even though he had never been there before. Tearwin Meet, the home of the Engine of the World. Not that he knew what he had to do beyond its high walls. The northern city remained a mystery to him.
A whistle blew in the distance, followed by others. Another body had been found. Guilt gripped him. While he did nothing, people died. He wasn’t Cadell; he never wanted that sort of guilt to consume him.
He turned from the window just as someone knocked at the door. Once again he swung the pen in front of him, mightier than the sword and all that.
“David,” came a soft voice.
Margaret.
“What do you want?” he asked, trying to inject more urgency into the request than the languid calm of Carnival would allow.
“You know.”
David looked at his watch. Midnight had died long ago.
“It’s late,” he said, trying to sound tired. “Tomorrow.”
Margaret sighed. “I’ve heard you pacing around in there. I know you’re as likely to find sleep as I am.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m in bed… you,” he yawned, “you just woke me.”
“Open this door, or I’ll kick it down.”
David walked to the door, hesitated, one hand reaching out towards the latch. He considered the veins, raised along his wrist, and the nails that he kept short with a pair of clippers that Mr Whig had provided. It was the arm of a gentleman, the son of a politician, a Carnival addict and a fugitive. His hand shook a little, and he steadied it, though all it did was seem to drive the shakes deeper into him, as though, at his core, all he contained was fear.
“Don’t just stand there,” Margaret said. “I’m not feeling patient today.”
When was she ever patient? She’d spent the last week arguing with Whig and Buchan, demanding why they hadn’t already set off into the north.
“You have a second, no more and then I-”
David opened the door because he knew that she would, and if she did it would be a damn sight harder to close again.
Margaret pushed past him, spun on her heel, in a movement as precise and swift as a dancer’s, and jabbed a pale finger into his chest. “You can hear them out there, can’t you? The whistles blowing?”
David considered her. Much paler than his brown skin, her hair a bone white that still surprised him a little when he saw her. She looked like she had been waiting for just this moment, to come springing from her bed, all accusation and sharp fingers. His jaw moved a little, but he found that he couldn’t quite manage to speak.
Margaret grimaced. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. David shook his head. “I’m tired. I’m just tired. I was ready to go to bed.”
And he realised that this time he wasn’t lying, he’d been sitting there with his pen in hand trying to think, just how to write what he had to write. Doubting the letter would even reach his Aunt Veronica.
“And sleep, eh. Rest for another day of doing nothing,” Margaret spat. She walked to the window and tapped the glass; more whistles blew, louder, closer together, beneath them David thought he could just make out shouts. “Waiting for another night of death.”
David felt sorry for her, almost as sorry as he felt for himself. “Another body will show up tomorrow.” said Margaret.
“I would say so,” David replied.
Margaret peered at him. “Are you all right? You really don’t look it.” David shrugged; honestly, he didn’t know. “What are you suggesting we do?”
“We both know it’s him,” Margaret said, turning from the window. “Don’t lie; I can see that you know. We need to find Cadell. Stop him before someone else dies.”
David nodded. “You’re right, of course. We need to hunt him down, and stop him. Absolutely.”
“Are you mocking me?” Margaret demanded. “Because I will not be mocked.”
“No,” David said, and so what if he was? “But it is too late tonight. I don’t think it would be good to find him in the darkness. But tomorrow, when the sun’s up, then we have a better chance.”
He smiled at her. “I’m surprised you haven’t gone off hunting him alone.”
Margaret shook her head. “I tried, I may as well have been hunting a ghost.”
David was shocked. How unlike her to admit a weakness, perhaps he wasn’t the only one changing. “And you think having me around with you will give you an advantage? Maybe you’re the one doing the mocking.”
“Once I’d have laughed at the thought of needing your help. But, David, you’re not yourself any more, you even move differently now.”
Really, David thought, do I? He came to the foot of the bed, and sat down.
Margaret’s eyes followed him intently, and not without a little suspicion. He grinned at her. Her lips thinned.
“Whatever Cadell did to you, it’s changed you. And not just because you’re wearing the Old Man’s Orbis.” She looked from the Orbis on his finger, to the pen that he still held in his hands, then over at the desk. “What have you been writing?”
“Nothing,” David said. Which was close enough to the truth. He’d tried to pen a letter to his Aunt Veronica and failed and failed and failed. All he’d ended up doing was scratching his name in the desk. Ten sheets of paper were scrunched up in the bin by the writing table, on two of them he’d written the word drown at least a hundred times. On another sheet he’d scrawled, Help. They’re coming. Hungry. He didn’t even remember writing the words, or whose words they were exactly. His psyche had become complicated of late. He was finding it harder and harder to tell just who he was.
David got to his feet. “You are right, we must do something. We must put an end to this, but we have to be careful. And you’re right, I think I can find him.”
He opened the door, gestured for her to go through it.
Margaret gave him a look that said, amongst other things, I’ve seen you tear iron ships out of the sky. You need fear nothing. But he did, that was exactly what he had to fear.
Instead, as she walked through the doorway, Margaret said, “So what is he, now?”
“He is what he always was,” David said. “An Old Man.”
“And what are you?”
He shut the door in her face.
The door jolted once, as though Margaret had struck it, or perhaps knocked her head against the wood. David jumped. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so rude. No, better she was angry than depressed.
Outside the whistles blew again, loud and shrill, and David could imagine he was home — where the Vergers’ whistling would echo like a threat through the dark, and where his father was still alive. And then he was remembering the shrill winds of the storms of Marger Pass, someone shouting at Cadell, and he knew again that his memory had become a chasm, far deeper than it should have ever been.
He slid a hand under the desk and pulled his Carnival from its hiding place.
Nothing better to paper over the abyss, he thought, and laughed.