Cadell was always the show off. Of the Eight he couldn’t resist theatre, though he denied it most strenuously. It was in everything that he did. Which made him the worst of us all.
Air but moments before, bitterly cold, warmed. Rain fell devouring the ice, as though anxious to wipe the memory of Cadell’s… whatever it was he had done… from the earth. David wiped vomit from his lips, spat a last sickly spit, and tried not to think how much easier Carnival would make all this.
Everywhere there were dead things, frozen and fallen from the sky, it was in the air that the worst of this cold had struck. If it had reached that intensity where he stood, he knew he would now be as lifeless as the birds and the bugs.
Where was Cadell? David got to his feet, brushed himself down. The Old Man stumbled towards him, his flesh pale, his eyes ringed in dark circles.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Cadell cried. “It’s too much. I’m sorry about your Uncle. You must believe me.”
Cadell blinked, turning his head this way and that, and David was witness to an odd transformation, a swift strengthening of will.
“Are you all right, David? Are you all right?”
“I think I should be asking that question.”
Cadell wobbled to his feet. “I am fine,” he said. “See?”
He took a few shaky steps onto the grass. “Fine.”
David just nodded his head. The movement was too much, he bent over again and dry retched; his stomach had nothing more to give.
“There’s cover by that ledge,” Cadell said and together, dragging Cadell’s bag between them, they staggered towards it. The walking was all the harder for the lack of pursuit. Urgency and strength had bled from both men’s legs. But, both shaking and weak, at last they reached the stony shelter.
“That light around your hand,” David said. “That sad light. What is it?”
“Ah, the candlelight of hubris, boy, history is lit with it. Just one of a hundred ridiculous mistakes.” Cadell said with surprising gentleness. “But the past is done, in this place, in this time, we will find some warmth. Even the lodes generate a little.”
Grass grew under the rocky ledge. The air was warmer too though, surprisingly, not the cloying warmth of rain-battered Mirrlees, but sweeter like the summer evenings of his childhood, the mill fires challenging the stars and the moons, his mother singing and his father home from work. They were idyllic memories that he was not at all certain of, so distant that he could have substituted memory with dream. The past was dangerous that way and invited suspicion.
David dropped to the ground and Cadell followed, kneeling slowly, staring out into the darkness. At last, he grinned. His face relaxed a little, lost some of its bleak pallor. “We’re safe here, for the moment,” Cadell said. “Try and sleep.”
He handed David another syringe. Where had it come from? But he didn’t waste time trying to work it out. The drug in his blood settled him almost at once.
“Thank you,” he said. He knew he shouldn’t be so purely and completely happy but he was. “Thank you.”
Cadell was already asleep.