No journey is without consequence. No pilgrimage without cost. Walk and you will find the road to be hard. Buy good shoes.
THE NORTHERN SUBURBS OF MIRRLEES 214 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL
The night passed without incident for which Medicine was truly grateful. Well, without too much incident; there were, what Medicine was soon to discover, the usual complaints: minor injuries, brawls and affairs. And each slowed the groups’ leaving. They did not get moving until almost ten o’clock. It took that long to get things packed back into the wagons.
Once on the horse, Medicine decided he needed to walk. Every step was agony, but nothing compared to getting back in the saddle.
“Was anything devised to torture a man more than a horse?” he asked Agatha, the head of the Council Guard.
“Bad poetry comes to mind first,” she said, her smile softening a hard face.
“My mother was poet. Not a bad one,” Medicine said. “She moved to Hardacre after my father passed away. A meddler, and I doubt she’s changed, there’s something of her style in that metropolis’ declaration of independence.”
Agatha laughed. “I’d have thought you’d come from good working stock.”
“Hardly,” Medicine said. “My father was a painter and an industrialist. But I had no interest in those things. I was a bit of a disappointment to him. And in families like mine disappointment soon becomes anger. I think I started my studies as a surgeon to annoy him, and then when I opened my surgery in the docks…”
He had never struggled harder than those first years. Respect was not easily earned. First he revelled in the terrible conditions, as a pure act of defiance. Then he made it his life’s work to improve them. He saw too much death, too many people’s lives ruined by the way their employers treated them, and the way the laws of the Council let them. It had been a natural progression into the Confluent Party. More study, gaining his engineering ticket and his Orbis. When he lost his fingers he’d thought he was finally making a difference. The violence had galvanised him to greater action, within and without the halls of government.
Now he worked for the Council. He had hated Stade almost from the moment he met him. Now he hated himself for working with the bastard.
We are damned. The pair of us.
But that did not matter anymore. The Roil’s reach extended every day and once the Obsidian Curtain closed, life as he understood would be gone.
What choice did he have?
He did not expect to live forever, nor hope to assume that even Shale had all that much time left to it. Everything ends, and every engine runs down or is superseded by another make; a different thing. But that did not mean he was prepared to lie down and let it happen. If it could be stopped then he needed to be part of that. He wanted to live as long as he could and he wanted to help as many others as he could. Though if a certain Councillor should choke on his own tongue…
As the highway passed through the Regress Swamps, creatures stared up at them out of the water. Huge eyed and, Medicine did not doubt, huge jawed. People peered over the edge of the highway to get a better look at the beasts.
Medicine pointed them out to Agatha.
“They’re called Factories. Don’t ask me why. That truth’s been lost a long time. Names have a habit of carrying on, long past the sense of them. Little’s known about them, no one’s done much in the way of study. But they’re big, bodies extend down a long way. How they move, how they mate, how they excrete, no one knows.”
“Not something that they write about in the travel guides. Are they dangerous?”
Agatha chuckled. “They look dangerous don’t they?”
Medicine nodded. Looks can be deceiving though, he thought. Just how dangerous are you?
He turned his attention to the Margin. All morning the forest had grown – devouring the horizon – from patch of darkness to worryingly tall and moss-drowned trees. In Medicine’s reckoning – and with this many people it was damn hard to tell – they would enter the Margin within the hour.
Agatha followed his gaze, then spat on the ground in the way superstitious soldiers have for centuries to ward off evil.
“Now that place is where the real dangers lie. Tough old bit of forest. Many times over the years has the Council pushed its way into that forest and every time the Margin’s pushed back.”
Screams split the air and Medicine moved fast enough to wish he hadn’t: a Factory was devouring some ducks. The water bubbled and grew bloody and more Factories moved to that space, without seeming to move, their huge, hungry eyes staring up; optimistic in the way such creatures are because something always finds its way into their mouths.
“Too big to be wholly carnivorous, but they’re not fussy,” Agatha said in an offhand way. “Anyone want to get a closer look?”
People kept away from the edge of the road after that.
The Margin closed around them, its mass of sky devouring trees arching over the highway, swallowing the light. The Council guards rode to the rear and front, a small army dwarfed by all that unthinking forest.
The road in the Margin was unlike anything else the Council had ever built. It did not stretch on straight and true, but wound crookedly through the Margin, as though its engineers had lost their way. Medicine was not surprised by this; he could imagine all their machinery failing here, compasses making soft circuits of their cases; determination and madness driving them on.
What it meant though, was that their scouts were rarely seen, the road and the Margin conspiring to hide them around the next curve.
The forest stank, trees dripped and rotted. Dank miasmic fog drifted through the trees like the tattered ghosts of diseases long ago lost to memory. The Margin clung to everything like a nightmare-haunted fever, wet and close and hot.
And always, scattered throughout the forest, were the decaying remnants of the Cuttlewar, a goodly portion of that battle had been fought here. Machines lay shattered and discarded, rusting leviathans, half overgrown. One section through which they passed was a graveyard. Here the trees had grown back through tombs. Medicine paused for a break and rested his feet upon a rock, only to discover it was a skull half swallowed by tree root. Eye sockets shadowy and dull stared up at him. He removed his feet and left the dead to its slumber.
The air in the Margin thickened, deadening sound but for the distant clatter-shriek of birds – blood wings most like, predatory and cunning – and the howl of beasts, as they made their passage through the muddy lower ground. And yet, at times the reverse occurred, noises were amplified, transformed. The most innocent sounds suddenly took on baleful significance.
Night was worse.
The wet heat was just as bad, the air just as stifling and still, but the forest shuffled in even closer. Creatures called out in the darkness, their cries at once distant and thunderous, brute and knowing, and always cruel. A shriek or a howl might echo, so close, that Medicine would spin, heart pounding, expecting to see a beast on top of him.
Inquisitive bats, their skin slippery and soft like a frog’s, flitted into the camp drawn by the lights.
They were stupid creatures, flying into campfires in such numbers that the campsite was soon thick with the stinking smoke of their burning bodies. Better the blinding smoke, for when they did not fly into flame they flew into people, biting and screeching as they tangled in hair or clothes. Those bites festered over the days ahead, the wounds darkening, the rot spreading like a contagion from the forest to people’s skin.
Many died, despite Medicine’s efforts. His medical training had ill prepared him for the Margin.
While it was bad that first night it was something that lingered and worsened.
The rain did not stop, just dripped down through the trees, descrying holes in tents and makeshift shelters and splashing on faces or skin; grey and greasy droplets, that stained or, if swallowed, caused nausea and stomach cramps.
Medicine was starting to miss the Factories.
“This place stinks,” someone complained to Medicine, as he treated a wound caused by one of the bats.
“Everything stinks,” he said.
The next day the mood was grim. And, though he was surly and tired, Medicine put on his brightest suit, his most cheerful expression and walked the length of the campsite. He spoke to as many people as he could. Showed them all that he was in good spirits, that he believed they were doing the right thing. And it seemed to work.
They packed quickly and were on their way before ten.
Halfway through the day, Medicine realised something was wrong. No one from the front had reported to him since early morning. He was worried enough to insist that he and Agatha ride up there.
They passed the wagons at a gallop and continued riding for another ten minutes.
There was no sign of them.
“Where did they go?” Medicine asked.
Agatha looked bewildered.
“I have no idea. No shots were fired that’s for sure or we would have heard them and there’s no sign of them having left the highway.”
“What on earth could take ten Council guards without so much as a peep?”
Agatha turned her horse around. “I would rather not find out.”
They rode back to the convoy and Medicine half expected them to be gone as well. Three thousand snatched away as easily as those ten. He was sure if he was relieved or disappointed to find them still there.
After that he drove them on, walking into the night but, at last, with everyone too exhausted and no end of the Margin in sight, they had to stop and make camp.
Another night of bats and other less savoury things that moved more silently than breath.
The next morning found one of the tents empty, but for a Verger’s knife, the blade partially eaten away by what looked like acid. Another tent contained a more grisly find, every single person sat dead, at a table made of some dark and alien wood, their blood drained, their eyes taken, tiny glittering stones put in their place. But for the fact that they were corpses, it looked like a party mid swing. The dead still held glasses, their mouths remained curled in smile or silent talk.
Indeed, the people in the tent nearest claimed to have heard laughter and song until the early morning.
Medicine, always curious, had wanted to examine the bodies and the peculiar method of exsanguination; it appeared they had been drained through the veins in their feet. But Agatha over-ruled him, and had the bodies and table (which had not been carried here or ever seen before) and chairs burned at once.
“I’ve heard dark tales about such things,” she’d said grimly. “Sometimes people come back.”
Agatha called in the guards from the rear, eschewed scouts and had everyone travel close.
It was a long and tense day’s travel, the forest closing in, the road almost lost twice, but at last, just as it looked like they would have to spend another night in the Margin, they reached the plains. Medicine had never felt so happy, still he held back until all had made it out, only then choosing to walk onto the open land.
He stared back at the Margin. What was most disquieting was that he was unable to shake the feeling that it was looking right back at him.
Once out they made a head count.
One hundred and forty people had been lost to that forest and, with that knowledge, any sense of triumph.