That something so small should forge something so big is the paradox of Minnow technology. Minnows are tiny machines. Smaller than the eye can see, I swear it. There is no doubt that once they did exist and in such abundance that they built a world. Consider these, the Hour Glass of Carver, Mirrlees' Ruele Tower, the Bridges of McMahon, all our greatest municipal structures and they are as nothing to the power of minnows. Mechanical Winter was a minnow-constructed thing, just as is the Engine of the world. I have seen it all. Drunk on visions, I have seen it all.
THE ENGINE OF THE WORLD DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE
The door closed in front of him. If David hadn't snatched his fingers from the door edge, they would have been cut off. As it was, it struck his head hard. He felt his nose break.
He stared into his own face, and the reflection of the cloud of dust his falling had unsettled.
Blood streamed from his nose, and dust coated the blood. I'm still here, he thought, Cadell's yet to Then his reflection smiled.
Not the sort of smile he even thought his face was capable of.
You got what you wanted, David thought. You've won.
“Didn't we both want this?”
He whipped his head around. A hundred Davids stared back at him with a hundred smug smiles. He fished in his pocket, yanked out a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his face. Blood disappeared a hundred times.
All he could hear was his own breathing loud in his head, his heart beating hard in his chest. Neither was amplified.
The air stank of ozone; it tasted of metal tangy as blood, or was that just his own blood, running down the back of his throat?
He stood there, dazed, uncertain of what he needed to do.
Shouldn't he know what to do?
He took a step forward, and the dust puffed up. All the Davids repeated the movement. He stopped, only this time one of the Davids reached out and took his hand.
“I'm sorry,” the mirror being said, “but this is going to hurt.”
He wasn't wrong.
David blinked; he didn't know how long he'd been on the floor. His tongue was swollen. He thought he might have bitten it, he couldn't remember. If someone had told him just then that he wasn't David, that he was someone else, he wouldn't have argued.
A hand touched his shoulder. This time there was no pain. David scurried forward, slid along the floor and rolled, hands bunched into fists; no one was going to stab him in the back.
Cadell smiled at him, that same smug smile David had seen reflected back at him.
“You're not dead, you know,” Cadell said. “Death is quite unlike this, trust me.”
“Then what am I?”
“You're all manner of possibility.” Cadell gestured to a wooden bench beneath a tree of bone and cogs, on the edge of a great brass road that stretched into infinity.
“What is this place?” David asked.
“Convenient,” Cadell said. “It is the world contained within the Orbis. The Great Brass Highway. It's the infinite folded in on itself. It's convenient.”
Cadell looked up beyond David, frowned, bit at his lip. “Oh, I really thought I would have more time. Infinity, even compressed into a ring, is a rather a lot.”
David turned. Saw the figure running towards them across some impossibly vast space.
“The Engine,” David said.
“Yes, the Engine. Well, part of it.” Cadell sighed. He almost looked embarrassed. “David, things aren't quite as you believed.”
“What, we're not here to destroy the Roil?”
“No, not that. Only it isn't we. It's you.”
“What?”
“I needed to get you here. Just you. I needed to make sure that you would survive the journey here and go through that door. But the rest is up to you. You and the Engine, of course.”
“And you did this, why?”
“Because I had no choice. I never expected to die on the Dawn. Don't look at me like that, David. None of you people do, and me, I had even less reason to; after all, I had managed not to die for thousands of years. I'd been so good at not dying that I believed it couldn't happen. Well, I was wrong. I'd always meant to take someone here, just not you. After all, I'd promised Medicine that I would see you to safety, and I meant it.”
“Why didn't you choose Margaret?”
“I meant what I said about her. I don’t trust her. Perhaps I was wrong not to. But I couldn't be sure. Just be happy that I didn't kill her.”
“So what do I do?”
Cadell opened his mouth to answer, and then he wasn't there any more.
“That's not his role,” the Engine said. “That cannot be his role. He is gone. And you, the flesh and blood, remain. You have to choose.”
The Engine moved sinuous and direct, not like ice, but something more fluid, light grown cool and slow.
“You’ve made it to me, David,” it said. “You must be very pleased.” “My friend beyond the door. You have to let her in.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not how this works.” The Engine shook a finger in his face. “We don’t have to do that. We don’t have to do anything. You’ve choices to make, and that isn’t one of them.”
“And if she dies…”
“She dies. She dies, and you can spend your life grieving for her. If you are capable of grieving for anyone.”
“Let her in.”
“No,” the Engine said.
David opened his mouth, and the Engine slapped him hard. Knocked David down with the blow, lifted him back up.
“I could pull out your lungs before you opened your mouth to scream. There isn’t time,” it said.
David’s head pounded with what he would have considered, before today, to be the most horrible headache possible. He wiped his face and his fingers came away sticky with blood, much more than last time: it spilled from his nose, his lips, and his ears. His clothes were covered in blood, and vomit. His whole body had become a bruise or a wound.
“I'm sorry,” the Engine of the World said, helping him to his feet. “There isn't time to clean you up. There isn't much time for anything. You've done well to get here. Cadell did well to get you here, but that is not enough. This last great choice must be your own.” It pointed to a cage that sat in the middle of the room, dark metal, hooked and barbed as the walls to Tearwin Meet had been.
David looked at that cage.
“I guess I have to go in there,” he said.
The Engine nodded. “Most cages are a prison, this is a liberation. If you make the choice to enter it.”
David took a deep breath. “I'm ready,” he said.
“Are you? I think not. There is much you do not know, let me illustrate. The Witmoths are not of the Roil, at least, they weren’t at first.” The Engine paused. “David, this world was made with the raw matter of another. Minnow technology, microscopic machinery did the making. The Witmoths were just our most perfect creation. We designed them as a weapon to be used against the Roil itself, to link our troops more effectively, to bind them in strategy, and instead, it was absorbed, and after that the Roil began to think.
“There's all manner of secrets and secret histories and histories of secrets.”
David pulled himself together, got unsteadily to his feet and stared dubiously at the cage.
“And what does that do?”
The Engine laughed lightly. “It engages me,” the Engine said. “It releases all that I am. The memories in you and the memories in the ring.”
“It releases Cadell again?”
“In a way, yes,” the Engine said. “History is a very different thing in this world of ours, David. Not at all what you might expect of it. It bears a rather peculiar weight. Over and over the cities have been remade. The people rebuilt, the Roil beaten back. It is in this city that all your memories are stored, cleaned of all but a vague knowledge of the Roil, then returned to their cities — in bodies rebuilt by minnow machinery.
“It is history as a set of ever diminishing circles. Repeating and repeating, and I’m afraid to say, I don’t think it can contract any more.”