The Festival of Float; four hundred years of tradition, celebrating the cessation of hostilities between the metropolises of the ground and the city of the sky, and the beginning of a period of growth that had extended until the reappearance of the Roil. Some say that this growth itself was the progenitor of the Roil. Certainly there was an increase in production of carbon and methane gasses, and records do suggest a steady upturn in mean temperature over this period. But the data is uncertain.
Why hold a festival in the dying days of a city?
Why not? Consider this question rephrased. Why hold a festival featuring enough aircraft and Aerokin to evacuate a city entire, just as it faces its direst threat?
CHAPMAN FIELD OF FLIGHT, ONE MILE FROM THE ROIL EDGE
The Festival was over before it had even begun. The musicians lowered their instruments, gazing at each other uncertainly. The air stank of smoke and powder, and in the distance something crashed and shook the earth.
Even as the multicoloured balloons rose, all sense of merriment was dead. Shadows streaked through the air, hissing and caterwauling, and pieces of balloon rained down upon the crowd, and much worse things: Hideous Garment Flutes.
Even that was not enough for the crowd that filled the Field of Flight. They looked to each other questioningly, doubtfully. As though it had never crossed their minds that such a thing could happen on such a day. But it had, and the truth fell upon them with claw and maw.
And then, all across the field, the captains called and their crews came out.
“Into the ships,” Cadell yelled as he ran through the field towards the Roslyn Dawn. “There’s time yet for flight. Into the ships, if you want to live.”
The Roil burned within him like a hot lance. Terrible pressures built in his temple and the ring on his finger tightened and cooled, his hand throbbing in time with it.
Finally, the people stirred. Musicians jumped from their stages and the Drift folk started herding those nearby into their ships. Once the crowd started to get the idea the herding stopped and the pushing and pulling began.
There’s not enough, Cadell thought. Not nearly enough ships and Aerokin, but more than enough people for a riot.
He reached the Dawn, where Kara waited gripping one of Margaret’s rifles. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Wasting my time,” he said, then looked around. “Where are the others?”
Kara shrugged.
“I don’t know, was half asleep when they left. I’ve been working on the Roslyn Dawn’s wounds, the bio-engines weren’t running as well as I liked.”
Cadell cursed.
“Tell her to prep her engines then, and they had better be working now,” Cadell growled, his face twisting savagely with rage and fear. “Idiots, the pair of them, if they do not come soon they’re on their own. We’ve no time, absolutely no time.”
CHAPMAN ,ROIL EDGE
The shock of recognition in Mr Tope’s face was no doubt mirrored in his own. Tope flashed a grin at him, then shouted back along the wall.
David tugged at Margaret’s hand, she pulled away. “Stop doing that.”
“Verger,” he said. “Coming along the wall. He’s seen us.”
“Where?” Margaret said, then groaned. “Him again! Don’t we have enough trouble?”
David glared at her, his heart thumping loudly in his chest. A little Carnival now would do just the trick.
“In Tate we had no truck with Vergers, it was an antiquated and less than venerable tradition, and to hear what Stade did, mixing Cuttle and human blood. It’s monstrous.”
“I’ve no argument with you, but can we walk and talk? We can’t go the way we’ve come.”
The Verger drew closer, shoving soldiers out of his way. Men glared at him, affronted, until they realised what he was, then they pulled away, suddenly conscious of the knife in their midst.
Margaret signalled for David to stop and glanced around her.
“There,” she said, pointing at a nearby wire stretched taut from the wall down to the ground. She pulled the belt from her waist, and wrapped one end around her wrist.
“Hold on,” she said, and when David hesitated she grabbed him to her.
“What are you talking about?” David demanded. “What do you mean hold on?”
“My, you’re bloody skin and bones aren’t you,” she breathed into his ear. “Just shut up and don’t let go.”
David struggled in her warm grip. Her breath crashed over his face. She smelt of cloves and something else. Roses, David thought, she smells of roses. How odd to focus on that scent right now.
But that is what he did, which was, perhaps, a wise decision because Margaret stepped off the edge of the wall and into the air, taking David with her. They slid down the wire, the belt burning as it went, almost before David realised that was what Margaret had intended.
He was still trying to protest when they hit the ground, and the impact drove the wind out of him. Why did people insist on throwing him off things?
Margaret rolled to a crouch, standing slowly and buckling her belt back around her waist. She stretched her arms.
“Lucky you’re rather slim for a boy,” she said.
David reddened and was about to protest, when something gripped his ankle and squeezed.
David looked down, a scream choked in his mouth. It was a hand, sprung up from the ground, black bone showing through etiolated leathery flesh. He kicked out and the hand flew away, trailing what looked like ash but was, perhaps, dry old blood, or even clumps of Witmoths.
“Roiling,” he said, quietly, his voice pitched a little too high. He wiped at where the hand had grabbed him, then yelped and jumped when another one tried to do the same thing. “They’re coming up through the ground.”
Margaret nodded and tossed him a rifle, she unsheathed one of her swords, its edges gleamed and steamed.
“The charge is low,” she said. “Make every shot count. Oh, and suck on this.”
She threw a small slab of something cold at him. He slid it into his mouth.
“It’s called Chill, it will lower your temperature a little. Don’t know if it will make much difference, but…”
He almost dropped the rifle. David’s mouth burned with the cold. It was not ice but something frozen and bitter tasting. A hole in one of his teeth started throbbing violently.
Margaret grinned. “That was almost worth it, just to see your face.”
They ran, as all around Roilings pulled themselves from the earth. The creatures moved sluggishly, eyes blinking, Witmoths everywhere about them. They hardly noticed Margaret and David, something for which David was very grateful. There were so many of them, but their attention was focussed elsewhere.
Margaret, swung the rime blade before her and every Roiling flinched from its touch. They forced their way through the mass of Roilings without firing a shot. David doubted that those on the walls would find it as easy, for it was in that direction these creatures headed, David and Margaret were just something to push past, a distraction no more.
Clear of the Roilings and several streets from the wall, they paused for breath. David looked back the way they had come. “Margaret,” he said. “Tope’s coming.”
Margaret tapped David on the shoulder and pointed in the opposite direction. “And he’s bought some friends. You’d think they’d be trying to defend the city.”
“Vergers are like that,” David said. “Tope’s loyalties are to Stade, this city could burn and he wouldn’t care.”
“How very narrow minded,” Margaret said. “You Northerners are an odd lot.”
“Not everyone in Mirrlees is like that. Not at-”
The ground shuddered and the wall where they had been standing just minutes before collapsed; chunks of stone the size of the Roslyn Dawn’s gondola crashed by. Margaret pushed David to the ground. I’m a dead man, he thought. Dead.
When the dust cleared, he remained very much alive. They got to their feet. A long, strident cry echoed down the street, coming from the distant gap in the wall. David did not like the sound at all, it played at his nerves like fingernails run over a cheese grater. More bits of wall crumbled. The edge of the Roil filled the gap.
“What is that noise?” he shouted.
“Sappers,” Margaret said. “This battle is over before it’s even begun. We’ve got to get out of here. They will not have stopped at walls.”
The Vergers walked into the open, before and behind them, Mr Tope stopped.
“David, you’re coming with me,” he shouted. “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m going nowhere,” David said, waving his ice rifle in the air.
“Better somewhere than nowhere, surely?” the Verger said, taking in all the chaos around him with a single motion. “You’ve no choice, lad.”
“We should’ve stayed with the Roslyn Dawn,” Margaret said.
David shook his head, sweat rushed from him, the air was boiling, his guts were cold. “He’d have found us there anyway. We probably made it harder for him coming out to the wall.”
The Verger’s drew free their knives.
“I don’t think we can fight our way out of this.” Margaret lowered her rime blade. David thought back to the night that his running had begun, to the Verger’s knife that had sliced his father’s throat, Tope’s knife.
He pointed his rifle at Tope’s head and fired, the shot went wide. Tope didn’t flinch.
“No,” he said to Margaret. “I’m not giving up.”
Screams filled the air, mad and discordant. Margaret looked to the sky. “David, step back under cover. Now!”
David turned his head towards the noise. Margaret clicked her tongue and yanked him out of the way.
Darkness descended in a mass of bunching flight, a cacophonous surging of off-key notes. The Vergers screamed and thrashed; bled their cruel lives upon the street. As they lay dying, the ground itself fell away and black-eyed creatures, with fleshy mandibles snapping and spiracles hissing, bubbled out of the steaming earth.
Beyond them all stood Mr Tope, a look of quiet dismay upon his face.
David sighted along the rifle hoping to get in a shot, to halt the massacre. Margaret smacked his rifle towards the ground. Her face was hard and her voice when it came was strange and forced.
“Let them die,” Margaret said. She fired a shot at Tope. He ducked out of the way. “The things coming out of the ground are Sappers, I told you they wouldn’t stop at the walls.”
David looked back at the Verger. Tope appeared furious and horrified at once, impotently watching his men as the Hideous Garment Flutes enveloped them, the shrill whistles of their flight exchanged for the soft sounds of flesh being torn from bone. The Sappers had blocked off the path to David and Margaret. Tope snatched a pistol from his belt and started firing, bullets hissed around them.
“Time to go,” Margaret said, stabbing a Sapper in the eye, which screamed shrilly and scuttled back to the safety of the steaming hole.
David nodded and pointed to the heart of the city, not far away, bits of the green field were visible and some of the tents, but it was not to the ground he looked. The sky was filling with airships and Aerokin, all rising and racing north.
“We may have missed the Dawn,” he said. “The ships are leaving.”
“Cadell will wait for us,” Margaret said.
David wished he could be so sure. He remembered Cadell’s face, resolute, that was if Cadell had even made back from the Council Chambers. He turned back towards the Verger one last time, but Tope had already disappeared and only the monsters remained, feasting on pieces of Tope’s men.
Blood darkened the ground, and the sky grew black with Roil spores and beasts. The poplar trees that circled the field shuddered and bent beneath the weight of yowling Endyms and shrieking Hideous Garment Flutes.
The Field of Flight succumbed to anarchy in a series of confrontations and collisions, raised words and screaming matches. People fell, tripped and pushed by the crowd, and came up swinging or worse, they did not come up at all.
Terror held its rough court and bade all do as they would.
The Roil had come, the Roil at last; and there was no comfort to be taken in the distant thunder of the guns. It had been a beautiful day, but beautiful days do not care what they bring. The sun faltered and fled and the Obsidian Curtain began to close upon the city.
All around, airships and Aerokin, each one filled with passengers, now refugees, ascended. Guns were fired, a dangerous proposition around the older Hydrogen ships.
It was a nightmare journey across the field. Hideous Garment Flutes descended in a black cloud. Chill, was no defence against them, and he had to use the rifle as a club, swatting them out of the sky
He marvelled at Margaret’s deft sword strokes. With every step, it seemed, she’d strike another flute out of the sky. They squawked and battered around her rime blade, but soon the ice stilled them and Margaret never lost momentum, nor got too far ahead of David.
At last they reached the Roslyn Dawn to find Cadell and Kara waiting, their faces harried, Kara desperate with worry not for them, but the Dawn. “You were about to be left behind,” she said, as she ran for the controls.
“Not the best time to go sightseeing,” Cadell said.
David was too out of breath to speak.
He clambered with Margaret through the doorifice and into the gondola. His lungs were raw, his heart burned, and his whole body throbbed in time with its terrified beating. He dropped to his haunches and dry retched through the doorifice.
David looked up and saw the figure shambling towards them across the field. He squinted, not quite sure what his eyes were telling him.
Witmoths streamed from its lips and eyelids, drifting in the air.
“Is there a cemetery near here?” he asked.
Kara Jade pointed beyond the lumbering Roiling. “Just over that rise. A cemetery, yes, and a big one.”
The lone Roiling was more pathetic than terrifying.
Until David saw the others. Shambling undead creatures, flowing into the Field of Flight, grabbing those not quick enough to flee and drowning them in moths. And those that had been trampled and stilled, rose up cauled in shivering shadows.
“I think we’re in trouble,” David said.
“Great,” Kara Jade replied. “Because I was really beginning to think we were in danger of not meeting our trouble quota today.”
“Get us out of here now,” Cadell demanded.
It was not just Roilings but people that rushed at them now. Though they would not be people for much longer as the Witmoths made a mad turbulence in the air.
David felt sick to his stomach. “Can we take some more with us?”
“No,” Kara Jade said. “We’re too small. The Dawn’s overloaded as it is.”
Beneath them the Dawn released its docking flagella and a goodly quantity of liquid ballast, and began to rise.
A Roiling grabbed one of the Dawn’s limbs, slowing the Aerokin’s ascent. Others ran to its aid and the Roslyn Dawn’s flight halted. Kara Jade cursed, whispered something to her and reached beneath her control panel for an axe. Margaret grabbed her rifle, sighted along its length. Cadell moved to the doorifice, David could feel the cold coming off him in waves. David stepped back from the door, grabbed the pistol from his pocket in a shaking hand and aimed at the nearest Roiling.
Then another of the Roslyn Dawn’s flagella, its tip barbed, whipped savagely around and knocked the Roilings away.
Margaret fired at the creatures as they fell. The Dawn shot up into the sky, the Roiling hit the ground then slowly rose to its feet: one arm staying on the field, the fingers of its hands clenching and unclenching.
Margaret pursed her lips and fired again and the Roiling fell to the ground and did not move.
Cadell stepped from the door, looking over to David. “Finally, we’re away,” he said.
The Roslyn Dawn’s bioengines growled and into the hot sky she powered. As she rose, Margaret, leaning in the doorifice, fired round after round from her rifle into the Roilings massed below. The air stank of endothermic chemicals.
With every hit she screamed out in triumph.
David grabbed her hand. “Stop! You’re wasting ammunition.”
Margaret swung towards him, her eyes wild. For a second, David thought she might actually use the gun on him, its tip smoked.
“Every dead Roiling is one we won’t have to kill tomorrow.”
“But how many are you killing? A single shot is not enough. Save your bullets for when we need them, when the Roil beasts are close enough to kill and might just kill us.”
David’s breath stopped in his throat. Mr Tope stood alone, on the edge of the field, away from the crowds, looking up.
The Verger caught his eye. He raised his hat and smiled, then walked away, back into the city.
“It’s Tope,” David said, pointing. “Shoot him.”
The Verger, like Margaret, moved almost effortlessly through the crowd. Someone ran at him, Tope kicked him in the face and continued on.
Margaret whistled. “Tenacious isn’t he? He’ll have to give up now.” She aimed her rifle at him, then lowered it. “He’s out of range, but I doubt he’ll escape.” She smiled, then the smile died as she looked upon what the Roil had made.
Fires raged from the deserted suburbs to the inner city. Smoke flooded the sky, a billowing fist of cloud darkened with Roil Spores that smothered everything. And yet it was insignificant compared to what lay just beyond Chapman’s walls. The Obsidian Curtain advanced, a second finger of dark as wide as the city, billowed out from the main front, the gap between it and the city’s fortifications disappearing at an incredible rate.
There was a distant thunderous crack and men and cannon tumbled from the walls. Soldiers were smothered in Witmoths.
“Those thermal sinks are driving it on. Spewing out heat from the world’s core, a primitive and gigantic engine of destruction,” Cadell said, and he couldn’t hide the shock from his voice. “The Roil has never moved so quickly.”
Chapman’s ice cannon fired ceaselessly, but with little effect, and soon they stopped. The transition from thunderous cannonade to silence was shocking. No one remained to fire the guns.
The Roil took the walls in minutes. There was no weaponry capable of denying it entry this time.
From the Northern Gates boiled a stream of refugees.
David wished them speed. Guilt and relief flooded him, and he had an inkling of what Margaret must have gone through.
From the east, carried on the Roil-cast wind and no longer drowned out by the cannon, came the shrieks of things terrified out of their minds.
Thousands of gulls flew above the beach: a huge twisting, skirling sphere of white in which darkness rippled like poison.
“Roil take us all,” he whispered.
Hideous Garment Flutes darted in and out of the flock – tearing the poor birds from the sky – their mouthparts lashing at the air, swallowing flesh, whistling and howling as they moved. They had penned the gulls in and were eating them one by one. Birds dropped to the ground, dead with terror, their corpses swallowed by a milling, yipping darkness of Quarg Hounds.
And that was just the beach. The ruptured walls of the city let the Roil in faster than anyone might flee it. Distance made it all feel so impersonal, but he well knew the terror that drowned the city. Four Quarg Hounds had chased him and Cadell just days ago, now there were more of the creatures than he could have imagined ever existed.
The Southern Wall was gone, swallowed by the pullulating darkness of the Roil. But that was the least of it. Vertigo filled him, and the world shifted in perspective. A huge hand of fire and stone reached out above the wall. For a few moments it hovered there, clenching into a fist.
Then it crashed down. All around the city buildings tumbled, rippling out from that point of impact. The hand rose again, and what looked like the tiniest fragment of some titanic shoulder, and struck the wall a second time. After that there was no wall, the stone and iron crumbled as if nothing but dust.
“Vastkind,” Margaret whispered from beside him, and David had never heard such terror in her voice.
Run, David thought looking down at the teeming thousands.
Run.
Cadell’s lean fingers clenched to impotent fists that he beat softly against the translucent walls. “What manner of Roil is this that controls you?” he said. He looked from David to Margaret and back to David again. And, where there was usually reassurance in Cadell’s eyes, or grim confidence, there was only doubt and disquiet. “What lies ahead will test all our limits.”
Cadell beat his hands against the wall, over and over again. “I’ve left this too late.”
“We’re out of it now,” Kara Jade said. “There is some solace in the winds at least. Up here they are fast, my Roslyn knows what to make of them.”
Kara Jade piloted the craft, her face composed and professional, even if sweat streamed from her brow and her hands shook. She looked to the others, David recognised her horror. It mirrored his. “We’ll reach the Free State of Hardacre in eighteen hours if this keeps up, twenty-two if the winds change,” she said. Her face twisted and she groaned. “We’ll make the bastards pay, won’t we?”
Margaret nodded, and David considered her resolute expression, and the way she packed away her weaponry with an efficiency at once beautiful and terrifying. Rather like the Roil.
“We’ll make them pay. We’ll wipe the blasted earth of them. I’ll not see another city fall,” Margaret said, as though she was capable of such things, as though she might single-handedly save the world.
That fantasy took him: that she and Cadell could do it. Here, with the sky crowded with airships and Aerokin rushing into the North, things might just turn out all right.
Until he looked back at the smoking, broken city of Chapman, the madness of the Roil looming behind it. All fantasies fell away, leaving only the ruin of hope and the flight of the damned, because the Roil wouldn’t stop with this city. The Roil wouldn’t stop until all the world was a ruddy darkness, and all that lived was its own.