The Engine. Even now I cannot say that I understand it. What a marvel it was, and what marvels were we to have made something so far beyond us.
THE OUTER WALL OF TEARWIN MEET 2120 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
Margaret took the last guard duty. She'd had an evening teeming with dreams of the Roil, Tate and its fall, or worse, a Tate unchanged, but empty of everyone but her, a city driven by clockwork — like her father's great Orrery that had mapped out the expansion of the Roil. And that clockwork had hunted her.
She was relieved to escape to the chill monotony of peering beyond the overhang — no one seemed to be sleeping — as though only bad dreams walked these stony fields. Buchan nodded at her over a steaming cup of tea, gestured at her to come and talk, but she shook her head. She wanted to be alone.
Margaret looked at the curving wall, spikes jutting from its surface. For all that it was constructed on a scale beyond anything she had ever seen before, it reminded her of the Steaming Vents of Tate. She wondered if it would prove to be a similar draw to the agents of the Roil.
Death lay ahead; she felt it in her bones. It had trailed her from the moment she'd heard the ringing of the bells that had signalled her parents' return, and then, somehow, it had overtaken her. But now, at last, she headed towards it directly.
Death, whether the city welcomed them or not, how else could it be anything but death? Perhaps she had never really been hunted by it, perhaps she had been hunting it instead, a great and glorious death that would take the whole world, too.
The wind had stopped some time ago, but it somehow felt colder. She looked into a sky as clear as glass, and bright, despite the twin moons having set an hour before. The stars were cold and distant. Instructive, she thought, in that a greater darkness bound them and that they burned, for all their multitudes alone.
She thought about Cam, felt a sliver of guilt, and hoped that the pilot was safe. Margaret thought of her kisses again, was stung by the memory, and her yearning. She let herself circle the memory, as the Dawn had circled Tearwin Meet. It was a good simple hurt, and she had too few of those.
At that moment she wanted everyone to die, and everyone to live; she wanted doom and joy in equal measure, and the cold dark, filled with the distant rumble of the icy sea, seemed to offer that.
She laughed, the sound startling her, and stared again across the dark and rocky plain.
“What a lonely world we save,” she whispered into the night. “But what else is there?”
There was no answer, of course, but she found something in the cold places of her heart. And if the answer was unsatisfying, still it was an answer. She pulled her coat around her shoulders and watched the night.
David found her a few hours later, while Buchan and his crew were still sleeping.
“Time to go up,” he said.
“Should we wake Buchan and Whig?”
David shook his head. “Let them sleep, who knows, it could all be over before breakfast.”
Kara Jade was already with her Aerokin. The Dawn stirred, shifting her body heat, breaking ice from along her spine. Coffee brewed in a great pot and Kara passed them both hot mugs of the stuff, black as the sky. Margaret curled her hands around the mug, and smiled.
“Enjoy it,” Kara said. “There's not much left.”
Margaret took a mouthful — it was good and strong and warm, and she suddenly realised just how cold she had been.
“So, this is it?” Kara said.
There was an excitement in the air, even Margaret could feel it.
David smiled at Kara. “Yes, it is.”
The Dawn shivered, more ice sloughed from her flesh, and suddenly they were in the air. Ten feet, twenty.
“Going to be a slow rise. Are you sure you wouldn't rather just get drunk?” Kara said. “I've plenty of rum for that coffee.”
“We'll leave that for when we're done,” Margaret said, and Kara laughed.
“I will hold you to that,” she said.
Margaret looked down. Whig and Buchan stood below, holding torches, waving them at the sky; they looked so alone down there, they could have been the last two men in the world. And she was reminded of the last time that they had left them by fleeing in the Pinch. Margaret found herself waving back, feeling a little stupid as she did so. When she stopped, she realised that Kara was looking at her, the smile on her face unreadable.
“You're all sorts of surprises,” Kara said.
Margaret put on her cold suit as they rose, stripping and redressing quickly, as though she were a gun to be broken and remade again. There was still a small charge left to the suit, though she didn’t activate it. She slid her clothes over it; her greatcoat she slipped into her bag, too dangerous to descend wearing that.
David could see the dark material of the suit jutting out at the wrists. He looked at her. “What are you doing wearing that? Where we’re going it will be cold, colder than cold.”
“It keeps me warm enough when it’s not activated. I left Tate in this suit, and I will finish what I set out to do while dressed so.”
“Fair enough,” David said. “Though if you expect me to take some Carnival, I will have to disappoint you.”
“You take Carnival, and I'll cut your throat.”
“I'd expect nothing less from you,” David said.
The Dawn stopped at the top of the rocky wall. The wind was building, just the first few gusts, but there was the promise of more. Far to the east, the sea glowed with the coming sun. The Dawn stayed steady, absolutely still, as though asserting her mastery over the sky. Margaret slipped her empty mug into the small sink at the back of the gondola, stared at it a moment.
Her gaze fell upon the east, and she wondered if they need perhaps wait for the sun to rise — that starting without seeing it one last time was wrong. After all, she had known so few sunrises, didn’t she deserve this last one? There was something so right in the idea that she opened her mouth to suggest it.
But David spoke first. “Are you ready?”
She nodded and he passed her a great coil of rope, the thin strong stuff of the Roslyn Dawn, grown by the ship herself. He had another looped around his shoulder.
“Yes,” she said, and walked to the doorifice, it opened and the cold rushed in, such bitter terrible cold. Her fingers ached at once, her lungs seemed to constrict and burn.
“It will be warmer below,” David said, touching her back gently. The coldness of him seeped through, she pulled away from his touch. “Not much, but a little.”
Not for you, she thought. “All the more reason to do this quickly.”
“Good luck,” Kara said.
“You too.” David kissed her gently on the cheek.
Kara hugged him tight, then did the same to Margaret, and Margaret surprised herself by letting her. “How will I know if you succeed?”
“You’ll know,” David said. “The world itself will draw a mighty breath. You hear that, you take cover.”
Kara looked at Margaret. “Keep each other safe.”
Margaret wanted to say that there was nothing safe in what they did. Instead she nodded, and leapt out through the doorifice and onto the edge of the wall.
David followed, landing lithely. He crouched on the narrow walkway, a hammer in hand, and drove an anchor into the wall. Three hard blows and it was done, to his apparent satisfaction.
Already the Dawn was sliding away and down, and already the dawn was breaking the horizon, a light washing over an icy sea. And so Margaret saw the sunrise as she'd wished. Somewhere distant a sea creature let out a cry at once mournful and triumphant, and Margaret knew how it felt. Another night survived, another day to endure, the world had yet to grind it down.
The wind grew then. It pulled at her hair, and her greatcoat, and snatched the sound away.
David grinned at her, and she grinned back at him.
He locked a karabiner into place, then played out the weighted line, down, down, down.
He sighed, and in a voice more Cadell than David declared, “The last time we used rope, it didn’t go so well at all. And yet, here we are.”
Margaret nodded, hardly listening, looking down at the city below, and the webwork of razor-sharp cold wire that protected it. For a moment, all she could think of was Tate, and its network webs and wireways.
“It’s like going home,” Margaret said.
“For both of us, eh,” David said, though Margaret could tell there was little of David here.
“Shall you go first?” David said. “You'll be safe, just don't venture too far from the wall.”
Margaret clipped her harness and her line onto the rope, and let gravity do what it always did. Within moments, as the muscles in her arms and legs worked at the wall, she felt herself grow warmer. She looked up; already David was a dot on the wall.
She dropped in leaps and bounds, and it was like she was back on the wireway. Ice shards fell with her, and she knew that she would have to get well away from the wall when she reached the bottom, or David was likely to kill her with the ice he'd bring down.
When she reached the bottom, she yanked on the rope three times; then ran from the wall, finding cover a few yards distant. She took her weapons carefully from her bag, checked their charges, and waited for David to descend.
And ice fell, such a rain that anything within the city surely knew that they were coming and would be waiting. She looked at her guns and her blades. She was ready, too.
When he made it down, he grinned a great grin: part delight, part terror. “Made it.” He looked past her shoulder, at the city beyond. “Finally,” he said. “Finally.”
Tearwin Meet drowned in the shadow of its walls. The sounds of ice sheets cracking echoed all around them. Tearwin Meet itself was no more than a mile in diameter, as wide as it was high. The tower that was their destination sat squarely in the heart of the city. And down here on the ground, Margaret couldn’t see the tower, but for the occasional glimpse, between this tower and the next.
She had to rely on David, that he knew what he was doing. But with every step into the city, it was as though a wall was rising between them, and like the Engine’s tower, she was only catching glimpses of David.
The buildings that lined the streets were tall, some ran to thirty stories, many were linked by narrow walkways, further reducing the light. Awnings stretched out from each building — they seemed at odds with the great structures from which they sprang, but Margaret could imagine tables laid out beneath them, people eating and laughing. People had lived here once, before the Engine had driven them away.
It looked to be a simple thing to walk to the heart of the city, but within that half-mile was a network of ring roads and dead ends, of roads sinking beneath the earth and rising again back at the wall, having curled without them even noticing. It was a maze as complicated as the Engine of the World itself.
But it was a maze that David said he understood.
“We follow the path laid out for us. We always do,” David said. “When we reach the tower, there will be a door at its base. We need to find that door.”
“And what do we do then?” Margaret said.
David’s eyes widened, and then he gave her a condescending smile, and patted her arm. “We step through it, of course, Miss Penn. Because that is what doors are for.”
Something snuffled in the distance. Margaret pulled her rifle from beneath her coat, but whatever it was, it did not reveal itself.
David looked towards the sound. “Let it be,” he said. “It will not attack unless it perceives us as a threat. That gun looks rather threatening, wouldn't you say?”
“It’s meant to look threatening,” Margaret said.
Again that blasted smile.
“We need to hurry,” David said.
And the road dipped, and led them into darkness, though David's Orbis glowed in the dark with a feverish light. The shadows around them grew long and danced, and it was suddenly very easy to believe in ghosts. Twice Margaret fired at what she took to be movement, but was only the flickering reflection of the ring.
“Calm down,” David said, after she had wasted another round. “We are not threatened. Not yet. I will let you know when we are.”
They came back out into the light again, and found themselves at the base of a low hill, though the road did not directly lead to the tower, they could see it up ahead.
They heard the iron ship’s approach as a thunderous drone, a ceaseless noise that they recognised almost at once. Ice showered from the walls behind them.
David's eyes widened. “No, they couldn't.”
But they had. She had. Margaret knew who had sent this ship. It crashed down at them, through the protective webwork, metal snapped and screamed, iron tore with the sounds of a million metal teeth grinding and scraping. And the ship itself did not stay together, but detonated overhead. David stood there, watching it all.
“Cover now,” Margaret said, throwing David towards the nearest of the awnings. Shrapnel fell.
A second craft shot through the opening, though it made it further before detonating. Then a final iron ship crashed down. This one passed overhead, and was gone from sight. The earth shook with what Margaret assumed was its landing.
“The bloody things cleared a path for it,” David said. “They’ll be on us in a few minutes.”
Margaret looked at the tower: at all she had fought for. “Then we’d best run,” she said. She pushed David in front of her. “Go, find us the way. I’ll be right behind you.”
And David ran. Margaret primed her weapons. Whatever was coming, whatever her mother had sent, she would be ready for it.