Monteroy Bleaktongue breathed raggedly. Though his wounds were not fatal, he had been worn down by them. His bones seemed anxious to break the surface of his flesh. He'd become a creature of angles and pained breaths — a caricature of geometry. “Mr Grave, don't you see? You have failed. We have failed. Everything is undone.”
Travis the Grave shook his head; blood stained his teeth, and bubbled in time with his breaths, and he knew he had too few of those left now.
“Monteroy, you’re wrong as usual. Endings, they are just beginnings. And until the great engines of the universe run down, it will always be so. And who's to say what will happen after that greatest ending of all? No, Monteroy, there are no endings. Not even the cage of our flesh can make it so.”
THE UNDERGROUND
It had been Grappel's idea to set up the floodlights in the snow: sweating beacons aimed into the sky.
“We've no reason to hide now,” he'd said to Medicine from his cot in the infirmary. “Let those who remain find us. The more bodies we have the better.”
It was sometimes hard to believe that the world had suddenly changed so much. Here in the Underground it was still all business, all struggle, but it had been that way for years. Though the urgency was gone from it, and the fear. The Engine had turned, the worst had come, and they were still alive.
Beyond the great iron gates the old world was gone. Sometimes, in the day-to-day business of the Underground it was a struggle to remember that. Thousands upon thousands had died, but it was still all so abstract. And when Medicine tried to bring it in, frame it with faces and friendships he had had, it became too painful. David was gone, and Agatha. There’d been no word from Hardacre, so they had to assume the worse there.
Better to focus on what lay ahead, on the many tasks that had to find resolution, so that many thousands more wouldn't die as well. But sometimes he took himself out to the lights. To remember and honour what had happened. Most nights there was a crowd at the outer wall, standing, craning their heads to watch the coruscating tubes, and wait to see just what might come out of the darkness.
Because, nearly every day, since the lights had been activated, things came.
Medicine lifted his head towards the dim sputtering and the sharp fingers of light caressing the horizon. An airship. The third that day. And this ship he recognised.
“It's them,” he said. “It's the Collard Green.” And he knew that they would be on it.
The Collard Green landed, in an ice field aswarm with airships at mooring masts. Medicine did not know how long the ships could last without hangars, and there was no way that they could broaden the cavern mouth to the Underground- facilitating flight had never been part of the idea behind it. They were doing their best to construct covers, but the weather was horrible, even now, some days after the Engine's activation. Though the mooring masts were made of reinforced steel, one of the ships had already been taken away by the wind.
He knew he would have to negotiate with Drift — word had just reached them that there were survivors in that city, too — or they might as well let the ships rot. One thing he did know with absolute certainty was these airships would be the last of their generation. There simply wasn't enough cow gut to make the gold-beater's skin. There'd soon enough be pilots and airfolk with no ships to work.
Medicine thought of all that pent-up energy, all those pilots's egos. Yet another administrative nightmare to add to the menagerie.
But before then, once the worst of the storms had passed, the ships would be sent out. To Mirrlees and Hardacre to Eltham, and all the other townships, searching for survivors or at the very least, bearing witness to what had happened.
David clambered out of the airship, shivering as the cold air struck him; his face stung. Twice the wound had grown so horribly infected that Whig had had to drain the pus from it with a syringe. Kara had held his hand through that ordeal.
The flight had been awful; several times he'd thought they were going to die, despite Watson’s assurances that he could survive anything. Indeed, the look of horror on Watson's face (and echoed in Kara's) was enough to make such assurances null and void. What's more, the ship had constantly required clearing of ice, around the clock, done in shifts that even David had been unable to avoid.
And all the while he had suffered the pangs of Carnival withdrawal. The screaming aches, the nightmares, more savage and cruel than he could imagine. Once on the ropes he'd actually let go, only to be grabbed by Kara and bundled back inside.
“You're not dying on me,” she said. “No one dies on me. Not now.”
And still, when his time came around again, he staggered out and worked on the ice. The hard work ground away his thoughts. The wind cut through them all with a dreadful indifference. And Kara — finding him as some sort of project — found relief from her thoughts, too.
Margaret alone had stayed in bed. Sometimes she would speak, but no one was ever entirely sure that she was speaking to them. Once she demanded her guns, another time her mother. Kara looked after her, too. With a kindness and a sensitivity that David found surprising and utterly wonderful.
No one dies on me.
And no one had.
And now, after that, here were so many people, unfamiliar faces one and all, until he came to Medicine. David nodded towards him and tried to smile. The former leader of the Confluent party looked at him and David thought he was going to cry. There was a hesitation there, perhaps a guilt, but not fear. “You're safe,” Medicine said.
David nodded. “I'm safe.” He moved slowly, every part of his body ached, his face burned. “But Margaret…”
“Your friend?”
Two of Buchan and Whig's men were carrying Margaret out on a stretcher. Solemn and slow.
Medicine looked at the woman. “Infirmary, now,” he said, and sent a man to lead them there. David made to follow, except Aunt Veronica was hugging him, squeezing him so tight he thought he might break a rib. She stepped back and grimaced.
“David, David! You look terrible,” Veronica said.
“Would people stop telling me that?” he said.
“I mean it. You look terrible, and if I can't tell you that, who can?” David put an arm around her, let her bear his weight. “You don't look so good yourself.”
Veronica huffed. “Look a damn sight better than you do! Though a scar is good on a man, and that will be a good scar.”
David touched his jaw, the wound still burned.
“I'm so sorry,” Medicine said. “This didn't turn out how I expected. Cadell was never meant to…”
“You did what you thought was right,” David said. “I'm here. I'm here now.”
“But if I hadn't…”
“If you hadn't, I’d be dead.”
“Time to get inside,” Kara said from behind him. “And not another moment on that bloody ship.”
His aunt looked from David to the pilot and back again, and gave him an enquiring look. He shook his head. Still, she raised an eyebrow.
“I've heard a lot about you,” Veronica said. “Raven Skye's sister, and just as wild.”
Kara stared at her blankly. “We're here,” she said. “We’ve made it.”
“Home for now,” Veronica said, and she didn't ask about Kara's Aerokin. David loved her for that.
“So are you letting us in?” Buchan boomed. “I'm tired and hungry and have spent far too many hours in the air. Let us in and be done with it.”
“Of course,” Medicine said.
They moved onto the gantry and David stopped, and his breath stopped in his throat.
“Here it is,” Medicine said. “I bet you never expected to see it.”
“No,” David said. “But I think we all expected things to end badly. And who could say that it hasn't? The Roil was coming, whether we did anything or not. All the denial in the world could not stop it.”
“A lot of people made it here, David. Because Stade had constructed this place, more people survived then we had a right to expect. Whatever I think of the cruel bastard, I have to give him that.” Medicine regarded David a little more closely, though David wasn't sure how the man felt about what he saw. “You look different, and not just that scar.”
“I feel different.” He looked down at the ring on his finger. It was just a ring now, its mechanisms worn out, soldered together by the final engagement of the Engine of the World. “It's the Carnival, I guess. I stopped taking the Carnival.”
David took it all in, the extent of the Underground. Surely this city was as big as Mirrlees, maybe bigger. Tunnels ran wider than football fields deep into the mountain, stretching further than he could see, scaffolding covering their walls, surrounding other tunnels, leading deeper into the belly of the world. Machines worked non-stop and everywhere there were people. Some paused to watch them curiously, then got back to their work. Life hadn’t stopped just because the Engine of the World had turned.
David, for all his exhaustion, watched them intently. Here was the seed of something. Not his own redemption, but a world’s.
Margaret’s stomach still pulled where the stitches had been, she was still weak. But finally they had let her see this Underground with David and Medicine Paul.
He'd prepared her a little for the world beyond the infirmary's walls. But, it still proved a surprise.
Margaret sighed, her eyes widening at what she saw, the curvature of streets, the whine of machinery, the distant glimmer of ice shields, the chaos of pipes — all with arcane uses, though ones she knew she could guess at. All of it familiar.
“I know this place. I know this place,” she said.
Medicine chuckled. “Of course you do, Miss Penn. Where do you think they got the blueprints? This last great project of Stade and the Council of Engineers would be nothing without the city of Tate, and the Penns. We have survived because of your family.
“It can be a dismal stink hole of a metropolis, too hot in some of the caverns, too chilly in others; and the lice, let me not start on them. But until the cold passes, when and if it passes, we can survive here,” Medicine said.
“No,” David said. “We must do more than survive. This must be the start of something new. I’ve seen what our people have done, what we’re capable of. And I know what we must do. Just how to do it? That's the question.”
“And what is that?” Medicine asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Build ships that cross the dark above,” David said. “And leave this place. All our industry, all our work, must be directed towards that one task. It is more than a lifetime's work, and we must complete it in less. We do not belong here, and every day that we remain is a continuation of an ancient evil. It must end.”
“Then where do we belong?” Medicine asked.
“Maybe we don't belong anywhere but up there. Cadell's people designed us for this world, or the world that they constructed at any rate. But that world itself was a lie, something they built on and from the bones of another.” He smiled. “And those bones will never rest, nor should they. This is the Roil’s world. If there is anywhere for us, it is out in the greater darkness. It is time to dismantle the Engine of the World, and build instead Engines to the Stars.”
“It’s a dream worthy of Travis the Grave,” Medicine said.
David smiled at Margaret, and it was a grin as patronising as any of Cadell’s, but she could forgive him it. “Not at all. This is no tale in which just a few face the perilous journey, this will be a story of an entire people. All of us have suffered, this whole world is a world of suffering, but we will see an end to that. We have to.”
When she was strong enough, Margaret spoke to the head horticulturalist — after all, she was well acquainted with the difficulties of subterranean agriculture — who was at first sceptical, then excited by her suggestions. They talked until she was exhausted. Margaret left him scrawled notes, only allowed to leave once she promised she would return the next day.
She'd already remembered and modified her parents' lighting system and she knew that they would be proud.
That afternoon Medicine had shown Margaret her room, it wasn't much, but it was hers. And she knew that she wouldn't be going anywhere for some time. She imagined the stark walls covered with her designs.
In a few months she knew she would travel with David to Drift. He was anxious to explore that ancient city's catacombs, perhaps study the workings of its grand engines.
David had changed and it wasn't only Cadell's influence there.
She sat in her room, holding her father's notebook. He had loved her, as had her mother. Even at the end she was certain of that, the Roilings had never attacked her as hard as they could. Perhaps even then her mother had had an inkling of what was about to happen. Perhaps they had seen the end and desired her survival. She found some comfort in the thought.
She looked at her guns, and that book: all that she had left of Tate. She closed her eyes and tried to visualise the city. It did not come to her as clearly as she would have liked. She could feel the memories fading, the horror of it all, but also the good things of that life. Sometimes she'd pause and wait for the rumble of the Four Cannon, but it did not come. But even that did not happen so often now.
Tate remained alive in her, and while she lived, she could not lose it completely. And if David was right, if the metropolis would grow again, then she would see it once more, though it would be different, it wouldn't be her city.
She should be resting; there was so much to do.
But being a Penn, she put her father’s book down, got up off the bed and sat at her tiny desk, so unlike her parents' grand table in the library. She took a deep breath and began to modify another one of her parents' designs — she was finding them so easy to remember now — and as she worked, thinking of her mother and her father and their old vast library, she began to cry.