History is a mess of argument. As though it's never quite what it should be. The pieces of a jigsaw cut crude and without thought of the future.
It's the historian's job to make them fit with eloquence and arrogance, and if that doesn't work, a sledgehammer will suffice.
TEARWIN MEET DISTANCE FROM ROIL VARIABLE
The Engine of the World held David’s hand.
It said, “Time and time again the Roil has been beaten back. But this time something different happened. This time the Roil grew so quickly — it was just forty years ago that the Roil conquered this world and was frozen from it. Normally centuries pass before I do what I must.
“And every time, I am activated by someone like you, driven by one of the Old Men, cast from their prison in desperation, just as unknowing as the rest of you. Last time it was Milton and a man called Stagwell Matheson.” The Engine smiled. “A humble shop clerk, would you believe. This time you came to me with Cadell.”
“And if I say no now?” asked David.
“You will walk back through that door, and die. But you will die knowing that the Roil can have its world, that humanity will be scoured from it, or fused wholly with it.”
“And if I walk into the cage?”
“You will be given this choice again. And you will know this world as you have never known it before.”
“And will I die?”
The Engine shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I don't want to die,” David said. “I don't want anyone to die.”
“Death is a given,” the Engine said. “But realise this. The Roil has already washed over Drift — the last Mother fallen from the sky.” David felt himself fall with that news too. Mother Graine was gone. It said, “Hardacre burns in the south, and a great army crashes against the Underground — that secret place that was never a secret place: a wave of claw, tooth, flame and shadow. And that stronghold will not long remain so.
“To do nothing is to kill all that remains of your world. Are you prepared to let that happen?”
David stood there, looked at the door, then the cage. Thought of the Underground and the people that still fought, and he realised that he wasn't. That he had come all this way for Margaret, for Cadell, for Buchan and Whig. He had killed Old Men. All of it feeling he had no choice, and now, now… he realised that he did have a choice, and that it was the same as theirs.
Without another word, David stepped into the cage.
The cage was dark: it smelt of the dark. Icy and smothering at once. David half imagined he could see stars, points of light that danced and circled.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said, but he knew that for a lie. From the moment he had fallen from his window ledge, choosing to run instead of lie still and die, he had wanted this. No, that wasn’t true, he’d wanted this even before that. When his mother had died, when his father had frozen him out, without ever meaning to. Carnival had offered solace, but this, this was true relief.
Here he could stop a world. Reset it, and make it what it should be. What a monstrous wonderful thing that was. He had a choice, and he had made it. He had no choice at all.
“I’m ready,” he said. The cage closed around him like a fist. A thousand tiny spear points drove into his flesh. Pain, a terrible jabbing pain, and then they began to move.
He shrieked and pushed his hands against the bars and hissed at their stinging energies. The world dropped on him from a great height and at a great speed.
His heart stopped, but the cage tightened further, energies fired and set it beating again.
Blood ran from his eyes and the cage fed the bloody teardrops back into his body. And he screamed — once his heart started beating again — and he could not hear his scream, though his throat threatened to tear itself apart.
The machine gripped him and he stretched, became something that was not him — that the borders of his being could not even begin to contain. Distant engines engaged, machineries more powerful than anything of which he could imagine. But he knew at once that his kind had imagined them, had engineered them.
All this catastrophic force.
And, suddenly, he wanted it to stop.
The machine stung him, ground him down, and ripped his being to shreds until all he could feel was the vast cold of the universe.
I am dead, he thought, ruined by this Engine.
The Stars of Mourning blazed distantly, disinterestedly — David realised that there was no mourning there — and dimmed. Weird masses were exchanged, great bodies vaster than this world circled each other faster, collided and did not collide, brushed past each other or flung away into space, gravity shifting their cores, and energies were stolen from their movement. He flew above it all, watching, though not really understanding, because the information crashing into him was too pure, and he realised what he had become.
Not dead. But Death.
And it was too late.
The machine unleashed its fury.
Margaret stared through the window; something was coming out of the darkness and at horrible rate. Instinctively she brought a hand up to the glass, covering her face. Around her the Roilings began to moan, and the ship increased its speed, pushing her back in her chair. But it was not fast enough.
Suddenly she could move again, totally of her free will. She slipped a lozenge of Chill into her mouth, felt it sting against a cracked tooth. The thing on her arm yowled and slid free, it shuddered on the floor a moment. Then the creatures holding her wound together, and released their grip.
The iron ship jolted as the ice front struck it, glass creaked and cracked. The craft itself began to flex, the pilots moaned, though they still kept up their flight. But there was a juddering uncertainty building within the ship’s movements.
As she watched, one of the pilots dropped to the floor and the iron ship tilted with it. Witmoths rushed from its mouth and ears. They hovered senselessly before falling dead. Andersonhad fallen too; his hands clutching at his ears, his mouth open and screaming silently, dark blood streaming from his cracked lips.
“Hold on,” Anderson groaned through gritted teeth.
“What's happening?” she asked, though she suspected she already knew the answer.
“We cannot take you to your mother,” Anderson said. “We failed. The Engine has been engaged.
“We are losing so much, so swiftly. All this wisdom and all of it dying,” Anderson said, and his voice grew thick with concern. “We must land, while we still have a mind to do it. I did not come here to kill you, Margaret. Nor would I see you dead even now.”
Margaret slipped another lozenge of Chill in her mouth and the iron ship came down hard, jarring her bones, tearing open her wound even more.
And this time she screamed.