Cadell. Cadell. Everything returns to Cadell. Were he to walk into this room I would shoot him dead without hesitation.
Of course, he would kill me `ere I reached my gun. Or draw out my death, in the manner of a Verger. Yes, he might just at that.
Cadell is the monster. The black heart beating at the core of our grim history.
“You like to read, boy?” Cadell asked, pulling something from his bag.
“Yes,” David said. “I like to read. And would you stop calling me boy.”
“If you wish, though this is a world of infants to me. Children scrambling about in their own shit and fear. You’ve felt life’s whiplash enough to be called a man, I guess. But if I call you boy again, I don’t want you thinking it’s through any rudeness. I’ve the memory of a sieve these days, a weight of years poking holes in the fabric of my mind,” Cadell said. “Here.”
He held a Shadow Council novel. On the cover, Travis the Grave fought some sort of beast, maybe a Quarg Hound, though it was the size of a bear. David looked at Cadell, the man before him was no less fanciful than Travis, and yet here he stood, quietly handing over a book. “For the train ride.”
“Thank you,” David said.
Cadell was already at his bag, packing the last of his things – hopefully he wasn’t lying about there being Carnival in there, too. “Don’t be so quick to thank me.”
“Sorry, I-”
Cadell grunted. “Don’t be so quick to apologise either. This isn’t a Sunday trip. We’re going into danger, but, if we’re lucky, safety after that, safer than here for you, anyway. When we reach safety, if we reach it, then you can thank me, and Medicine Paul.”
“He’s alive?”
“Was the last time I saw him. He sent me to get you.”
David was disappointed that Medicine hadn’t come to get him himself.
“He thought it safer that you come with me. Yes that is how grim things are.” Cadell shut his bag. “How old are you, lad?”
“Sev- Eighteen,” David said.
“Do you not know your age? There’s no shame in that, I’m a bit fuzzy when it comes to my own.”
“I know how old I am,” David said. “It was my eighteenth birthday last week.”
A whole range of emotions passed across Cadell’s face. David thought he saw pity there, and it made him angry.
“Happy birthday then.” Cadell said, and closed his bag.
David realised that he barely knew the man, other than that he had killed his uncle Sean. Which, until these last twelve hours, was all David had ever thought he needed to know.
“How did you meet my father?”
“Your father was a very wise man. He’s the reason I’m free. Well
… maybe not wise, but clever. Knew a lot about the Roil. “
“Taught me a lot, too. Well, before we started fighting,” David said, except when it came to you. In the weeks after his mother’s death, his father had been most attentive and that attention had expressed itself in lessons concerning the Roil. In David’s mind he’d just exchanged one horror for another.
“I don’t doubt it,” Cadell picked up the bag. “But your father didn’t know as much as me. Nobody does, and as sincerely as I wish it were otherwise, that’s no idle boast.”
Cadell was obviously mad. The Engine of the World, if it had even existed was at least two thousand years old. He’d said as much to Cadell and he’d corrected him. “It’s four, four thousand and eleven years and three months old.”
No one lives that long. Vertigo welled in him at the thought of all that time, and a dim anger. This man had lived that long, but David’s parents were dead. He stopped himself, how easy it was to fall into belief. Cadell was not four thousand years old, maybe seventy, and a well-preserved seventy at that. He’d seen young men less spry.
Cadell seemed to read his thoughts. “A lot of it hasn’t been living, not in the sense you’d recognise it. I’m one of the Old Men. You know, the Punished? Those that were cursed and locked beneath the Ruele Tower for their wisdom and their folly. The Engine’s my business, lad, and you’ll believe me by the end, or you won’t.” Cadell laughed.
“What’s your curse?” David asked.
“Hunger and sanity. You don’t know what that’s like all those ages, and to crave and crave and not even have madness to slide into.” Cadell’s voice fell away to a whisper. At last, he cleared his throat. “Now, we’ve got a train to catch.”
He slung the bag over his shoulder, as though it were nothing. David had tried, and found himself barely able to lift it off the ground. Strength of a madman, nothing more, he thought.
They walked out of the building and into the rain. David turned right, towards the crowded Shop Lanes. “Where are you headed, lad?”
“Central station.”
“Too obvious. We’re going to the bridge.”
“The train doesn’t stop there.” David regarded him quizzically, his opinion of Cadell’s sanity only confirmed.
Cadell opened his umbrella. “And it isn’t going to tonight, but that’s where we’ll board. Easy.”
It wasn’t.