About the Author
Trent Jamieson is an Australian Fantasy writer, and winner of two Aurealis Awards, whose Death Most Definite series is attracting rave notices.
Trent has been writing fiction since he can remember, and selling it since the mid-Nineties… quite a long while after he started.
He works as a teacher, a bookseller and a writer and has taught at Clarion South where he was described as "the nicest guy in Australian Spec Fic" shattering the reputation he was trying to build as the "Hard Man of the Australian Writing Community".
trentjamieson.com
Acknowledgments
Roil has been a long time coming, and now, here it is. And the reason it's here is well and truly due to the love and support of my wonderful ROR colleagues – the best writing group ever.
Thanks also to Deonie Fiford for having faith in it, and to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris for giving it a good home. And a big thank you to Sophie Hamley of the Cameron Creswell Agency, who's patient, funny, and a sure guide through the shadow of the valley of death. And, as always, thanks to The Avid Reader Bookstore, in particular Fiona Stager and Anna Hood, who continue to put up with the least available casual staff member ever.
Finally, thanks to Diana, my darling wife, without whose love and support I'd never get anything written.
Extras...
Darlings Killed
(Outtakes, Bloopers and a Bit of Book 2)
Roil has gone through many incarnations, and suffered (and gained) from many cuts.
Here's a few rough and ready outtakes from what might have been. Sometimes you cut scenes because they drag the story down, or reflect something that the character's already done, or they're just a bit shit. I'll let you decide which is which.
Here's a longer view of Tate (when it was Bishop). I'd named the city after KJ Bishop – in fact, in this draft, all the cities were named after authors I admired. It didn't work; only Mirrlees remained, because I really think Mirrlees should be the name of a city.
Margaret increased the night sight of her gear and swept the horizon, tracking the dim pale line of Mechanism Highway. No matter how she adjusted her field glasses, the convoy did not appear.
In the South Eastern Quarter, Sentinels fired at a drift of floaters blown in too close to the walls. The Sentinels' bullets punctured the creatures' gas sacks with a wet slap. Margaret turned towards the sound. The last floater, jaws snapping wildly, writhed as it fell to the ground.
Another threat efficiently dealt with, as all threats were here.
Boots crunched on the ground behind her, Margaret turned towards the sound.
"Go home," Lieutenant Sarah Varn said, her breath escaping in plumes from cracked lips as she spoke. "You're not meant to be here until tomorrow and I will not have a weary sentry on my wall. Get some rest."
Wrapped in the standard black cloak of Bishop's Sentinels. Her single concession to Halloween was a tiny silver skull pinned to her collar. She wore heavy spiked boots. Strapped to her back were two ice rifles, and a Rime Blade and ice pistols were holstered around her waist. Ice weaponry proved effective against the creatures of the Roil, but was inefficient. It took considerable time to charge up and reload each gun so Sentinels bristled with weapons, swapping and changing from pistol to rifle and (if severely pressed) to blade.
The city itself remained the best weapon.
Ice sheathed the Jut; refrigeration units lipped each merlon, pumping a chill into the air that transformed the cloying warmth of the Roil's winds into frigid gusts.
Sarah clapped her gloved hands together and, despite the futility of the gesture, blew on them.
"Of course. While you're here…" Sarah pointed east. "A nest of sappers, staying an inch or so out of range of the main guns."
Flares went up, breaking the darkness a little.
Margaret stared at the spot with her glasses. Six of the beasts disturbed the ruined earth. Their huge dark eyes shone in the flare-light. Dark bleak eyes that met the light fearlessly. Then Roil spores, drawn by the heat, smothered the flares and darkness drowned the Sappers again.
"Quite a large nest," Margaret said.
Sarah's eyes lit with a grim humour, she clapped her hands together again. "Already under control. We're sending drones out. Heavy endothermic bombing, ground breakers. You know, the standard stuff. Odd though, we haven't seen Sappers this close to the city in years, they nearly destroyed the North Wall. We got them then and we will this time, too."
Margaret kept her gaze squarely on the Sappers, they did not move. Just stared at the city walls like they were waiting for something. "When are the drones being launched?"
Sarah laughed. "Soon. Just go home and rest. Bishop can look after herself without you."
"All right, I'm going," Margaret said finally, and lowered her field glasses, slipping them into a case hung from her hip. Still she hovered there a moment longer.
"I'll send a message as soon as they arrive," Sarah said.
"The bells are set, so ring me. Three for the moment they drive through the gates."
"Three it is. It's always three, we've done this before, many times. Now go."
Margaret climbed to the top of the Wire-tower – the stairs creaking with her every movement – and opened a cabinet in which hung a half-dozen leather harnesses. She pulled out hers and hooked the harness around her chest and waist, making sure the tugs and collars fit snugly, then linked herself to the Wire.
Margaret flicked a switch by the side of the tower, smiling despite herself as gears clicked into place. Beam engines hummed, counterweights fell, and the tower rose another couple of yards making it the highest point of this section of the Wire-way, lifting her into a zone of hot winds. The whole structure shook slightly, then the wire tightened, lifting her even higher as it did so. Margaret made a final check of her harness; the hooks and wheels were in line, free of tangles and no cracks in evidence. Satisfied, she nodded to herself then let go. She hovered there for the briefest of moments, a final hesitation perhaps, but it was too late, gravity had its way and she flew, suspended by the humming wire.
Whatever you do, do not look down, someone had warned her once.
Such advice was absurd! Where else could you look? There were no stars above, just the netting doming the city, and the Roil. Down below, Bishop's lights shimmered, distant and comforting, beautiful in their constancy.
From here it was easy to imagine the streetlights as constellations. But these were constellations crowded with people, going to and from work, trudging home in heavy crampioned boots designed for the frozen roadways. Someone, looking up, saw her and waved. Margaret waved back.
Margaret adored the Wire-way. Of all her parents' inventions, she loved it most. The wind roaring in her ears, the wheels on her harness sibilant and swift, the city a sparkling microcosm below.
Pride for her parents' and her city's achievements swelled within her. When she had been younger, she was jealous of all the time they spent away from her. Until she realised her parents were not just protecting the city. They were protecting her.
A different sort of Introduction to Stade and Tope. I stripped this away when I realised that David's father wasn't alive after all. Writers can be far crueller than Vergers.
(i)
Word came out of the darkness.
First as something barely more than static along the buried lines beneath the Interface, hidden pathways of communication, so subtle as to be almost indistinguishable from the noise passing endlessly that way.
But it was heard.
Those trained and transformed to hear it, nodded and made notes in cipher.
Then it was flown into the air; the pilot's little ship conspicuous only because it was one of the few travelling away from Chapman, and the Festival. The Obsidian Curtain dominated his mirrors, black and vast. Anything that took him further from the Roil had to be good.
Away from one darkness and too soon into another. A hundred and fifty mile wide ribbon of dry air stretched between Chapman and Mirrlees, broken on the Mirrlees end by masses of dark storm cloud, beneath which the city languished like a beaten dog.
Mirrlees-on-Weep. Not as wondrous as the pilot's city of Drift, but impressive in its way. The river Weep had swollen, suburbs north and west of the central boroughs, right up to the old forest known as the Margin, were stained with it. Cranes worked ceaselessly along the levees, extending them, repairing damage, thickening their monstrous bases. But it was, ultimately, a pointless industry. For the rain fell not just around the city, but further west, in the catchment areas. And there seemed no end in sight to its fall.
He brought the ship down, descending by the monstrous levies, onto the landing yard, crowded despite the rain. A Verger by the name of Tope was waiting for him.
"Express delivery," the pilot said, his voice low, handing over a sheet of paper.
"What does it say?"
"I did not look," the pilot said. "Besides I've no skill with the codings."
"Nor I," the Verger grunted. He doubted the fellow was lying, but such secrets must be kept.
He led the pilot to the back of his craft and slit his throat.
(ii)
Councillor Stade lit the paper, then, face curled with disgust, threw it in the heavy bin by his desk.
"Once a Confluent, always a Confluent. His demands grow more extreme," Stade said. "He wants the boy taken north. He says the colder the clime the better. He wants it done now."
"Things are that bad, then?" Mr Tope asked.
"We know they are. Even in the north, the Grendel and the Yawn are missing." He sighed. "I am reluctant to do this. But what choice do I have? They're still making progress down there and we need all of that knowledge. Where would we be without Chill, for instance? At least this way the son will be completely under our observation. Bring him to me, Mr Tope."
The Verger nodded. "Tonight."
"And, Mr Tope, do not harm him."
"It's not in my nature." He grinned. "Wouldn't harm a fly."
And here was where we first met David (and he wasn't addicted to Carnival at that point, poor lad). But it was all a bit too close to home (I work in a bookstore). I do like the posters though.
The day began badly. It was a bad time of year for David. So he should have seen it coming. Not that, as he was later to realise, he ever saw any of it coming.
But ten minutes after helping Mr Matheson open the store, as the rain poured down outside, its animal roar drowning out the rumblings of traffic on De Pierres Street, someone stole half a shelf of books from right under David's nose; just grabbed them and legged it.
David did not suspect a thing until it was too late, which really stung. He considered himself rather good at detecting thieves and catching them on the cusp of the steal, the moment when it might still be regarded as some sort of innocent mistake to be laughed about as the books were handed back.
He ran to the door, glancing at the gap where the newlyarrived titles usually lived, and knowing at once what had been nicked.
Esoteric stuff, the valuable ones of course: Deighton and Brock; a volume on the City in the Snow just released through Dearborne publishers; and a series of chapbooks by Walter Price, scientific romances David had yet to read.
Damn.
Damn.
Damn.
The thief was already halfway down the street. As a rule, it was too late once they were through the door. But David could not let that many books out of the store, not if he wanted to keep his job.
"After him, lad!" Mr Matheson roared, and that was it.
David took off, through the rain, his first steps out the door startling sodden pigeons into wet flight, more spray than air beneath their wings. He splashed and stumbled down De Pierres Street – along greasy footpaths crowded even this early in the morning with pedestrians, umbrellas everywhere – almost to Central Station Markets, where, panting and blinking back rain and sweat, he slipped – or was tripped – and fell. By the time he made it to his feet the thief was gone and half a week's pay with him.
The bugger had dropped a couple of books, but the rain had damaged them beyond resale. Store shrinkage, as such loss of stock was called, was frowned upon by management – one Stagwell Matheson – and taken out of staff wages.
David stared vainly into the crowd. There were new posters taped to the lampposts, across from the greengrocers where people pushed and shoved, trying to get whatever fruit and vegetables were available. The posters were marked with Mirrlees' grey teardrop symbol, so they had to be official.
Rain is not Roil. Rain is Rain. The posters declared, in huge black type. Stop Dissent and Rumour-mongering. Information leading to the arrest of any Dissidents will be rewarded richly.
A little further along someone had altered the posters with thick black paint to:
Rain is Roil. Rain is Dissent. Information will be rewarded.
A Confluent, no doubt.
He looked up as something struck his neck.
The sky was the colour of slate, the only hint of brightness an airship, one of the Blake and Steel lines, advertising the Festival of Float down south in Chapman. Thousands of pamphlets, dropped from its guts and fell with the rain; bright coloured paper darkening with wet soot. Cleverly designed, they spun and danced in the air until the water soaked them through, then they just plummeted. In the west, by the dockyards, smokestacks gave billowing rebuttal to the rain. Of course it was short-lived; ash layered everything. It grouted the cracks in footpaths, limned the walls with a patina of industry. Another airship dipped down towards the landing fields, trailing its ropes like a millipede's legs. There was a dim suggestion of sunlight in the sky; a point in the cloud, just above Ruele Tower that was less murk and more pallor. A dead rat floated in the gutter, legs jutting up stiffly like a crooked four master. It drifted along till it reached a drain, spun a couple of graceful circles then went under and out of sight. Across the road a dozen pigeons had gathered, shuffling backwards and forwards along a ledge. One of them opened its wings and dropped dead to the ground below. The rest looked on, tracking the ledge, caged in the misery of rain.
Hmm, Cadell was a wee bit too Gandalf in this version.
On the long walk home, David regretted leaving his umbrella. Still there was nothing he could do, so he walked and whistled. An old, old tune that his mother had taught him.
"Who whistles on a night like this?" The voice, dry and gruff, came almost from inside his ear.
David had to bite his cheek to stop from yelping. An old man – wrapped in a sodden cloak as unfashionable as the one David had been forced to wear at work, possibly the same tailor – glared at him. A sharp beak of a nose, the point beaded with water, jutted out from underneath an equally sodden old hat. He looked like he was waiting for an answer.
"Well I for one," David said "Not everyone hates the rain, and it is always best to put a brave face on it."
"Ha!" the old man exclaimed, wiping the water from his nose with a drenched handkerchief, doing little more than making room for new raindrops to take the place of the old. "Whistling is for mischief makers and, as for brave faces, well, if that's your brave face you'd best never consider acting for a career, it barely passes for a grimace."
And it was all a bit faux Dickensian – like this Cuttleman (the description of which I love, but it just didn't fit any more).
A carriage waited out the front of the house, the driver bent over so that his hat, through some trick of perspective appeared to be coming out of his knees. David realised it was. He had never seen a Cuttleman before, they were rare in the city. The driver glared at him with dark and cruelly humorous eyes, and licked its lips with a long pointed tongue the colour of the bleak cloud-smothered sky. Three of his hands gripped the reins, the fourth was fishing around in a bag of slop. The Cuttleman shovelled slate worms from the bag into his mouth. David's stomach churned as the wriggling bloody mess tumbled from the driver's lips, though it didn't reduce his fascination.
Mr Tope slapped David on the back of the head.
"No time for gawking, lad. We've a very special and impatient gentleman waiting to see you."
An old man in an ancient cloak, stood on a street corner nearby, watching them. David's heart almost stopped. He recognised him: the vagrant who had abused him for whistling. His eyes though had lost their hardness, David could almost believe the old man was concerned.
Mr Tope glared at the vagrant, and brandished his staff threateningly. The old man hurried off.
"Street folk," Tope said. "Was a time we took the stick to them. But no more, curse it. No more. There's not time for even civil violence. Now, in the carriage, son of Anderson Crane. In with you."
David clambered inside, his father's name stinging him like a slap to the face. The Verger followed, then banged on the roof with his staff, flakes of dust or mould rained down around their heads.
"Off we go, Gus," Mr Tope shouted. "Off we go!"
Gus hissed back in cuttletalk and the Verger laughed, but offered nothing in way of translation.
The carriage jolted forward to the crack of the whip and the clatter-splash of horses' hooves. David, rubbing the back of his head where Mr Tope had struck him, watched his little house, crammed in with all the others. Its light still shone; he had not even possessed enough wits about him to turn it off. With that thought, something cold and wretched built in him. It bordered on frantic, but it was too sad, too pale; his terror drowned in lethargic, ragged resignation and his muscles grew leaden and still.
The Verger, as though sensing some of what David felt, smiled and patted him on the knee. "Are you sure you don't need glasses, lad?" he said. "You squint too much for a boy your age. Well we all know what makes you blind."
David shook his head. "I can see perfectly clearly," he said, his voice quiet.
They turned the corner sharply – almost too sharply, the carriage lifting and dropping with a crash, Mr Tope cursing the Cuttleman, and the Cuttleman cursing the horses in Cuttletalk – and his house was gone from sight.
Stade had his reasons and he used to go on about them a LOT.
Stade's face darkened beneath his top hat; cigar smoke wreathed his head. The councillor clenched one hand into a fist. David was queasy with fear. Stade was a big man, his fists almost the size of David's head.
Stade seemed to be grappling with something. He lent over David's chair, his breath almost medicinally strong. Drink of some sort, but nothing David recognised.
"I'm not a bad man. To desire power is not necessarily evil. I am ruthless, yes, but I know what is happening. The continent of Shale is contracting; every day the Roil grows and there is little I can do about it. I do not delude myself in the way the Confluence does. This Roil cannot be defeated, but we can hide from it, just as it has hidden from us.
Finally, here's a bit from Night's Engines (at least, I think it will be in there with a few of the rough edges polished away, hopefully). As you've seen, I change my mind quite a bit. Anyway, ten years before the events of Book One there was the Grand Defeat.
The Grand Defeat
"Victory is certain."
The words crackled and spat, sprung from loudspeakers all along the front line, and from crowdhailers built into the bellies of the military class airships and Aerokin above. General Bowen's voice possessed such conviction that, for a moment, it was true and not a single soldier could doubt it.
Behind them the city of McMahon emptied. Its great bridges and northern roads stained with refugees – all vested with no lack of doubt, all fleeing, now that this last battle for their city was to begin. Smoke darkened McMahon's sky, and everything stank of it: there had been riots that morning and into the afternoon. But as the Roil's approach quickened they'd quietened down. New laws (The Peace and Order Precepts, or as they were more popularly know the Laws of Knife) were coming aggressively into play, as the dark curtain closed. Still, riots continued in some quarters, perhaps a final expression of denial or rage at what was being lost to them.
When the battle was won those who had rioted would be dealt with by Verger's knife or hurled into prison to rot and consider their folly. But now thirty thousand soldiers, two thousand ice cannons, eighty battle Aerokin, and two hundred airships, the wondrous weaponry of the new age were perched upon the abyss of battle. All of that military force intent upon a single goal: the obliteration of the Roil.
"Victory is certain. We cannot fail. For to do so is to fail humanity. To enter that great darkness and become shivering meat for the creatures of the Roil. We will not fall as Tate fell, nor Chinoy or Carver. This time we are ready. This time we drive back the dark."
Surely Bowen was right, after all the Roil was a big dumb mass. It could not overwhelm this gleaming technology and its miles of soldiery, nor could it devour the grandest metropolis ever built. Yet, all it took was a turn of the head and the soaring terrible presence of the Roil and such arrogance was torn of its potency.
"Victory is certain," General Bowen said once more, and his voice echoed like a thundercrack into the sky and faded just as quickly.
"Victory is bloody certain all right," Beaksley mumbled, checking his ice-rifle for the umpteenth time, always checking his rifle, always. "Just not fer us."
Harper smacked her palm hard against his head. "Keep such sentiments to yourself, or you'll feel a knife in your spine. That is if you have one." She said it with some fondness.
"I've spine enough - standing here ain't I?"
She looked south. The Roil was almost upon them, it had moved swiftly that day, as though anxious to meet their forces in battle.
Two minutes, no more, and it would be in range, drowning out the sun with it, though it was already dark enough, a rank and bitter darkness. The air fleet overhead, made up of military class and converted merchant craft, hid the day almost as effectively as the Roil. Harper turned her attention, a moment upon that placid drifting industry, the various ships' banners flapping in the wind.
There was strategy at work. They were here to deal with any creatures of the Roil that approached. The airships themselves were to attack the Roil space itself. Endothermic jets and cannon. They would drive a wedge in the Roil, meanwhile a series of moats would be filled with ice, and coolant pipes running the perimeter of the city would be activated.
There was a furious signaling of flags across the sky; most of the airships were not fitted with the new radio technology. Endothermic weaponry had taken precedence over everything else; cannon protruded from the ship's bow sections like the bristles of a Cuttleman. They made her feel uncomfortable, she didn't like this close fighting, didn't like the idea of all those munitions suspended above her head.
Sergeant Harper spied a couple of Mirrlees dirigibles, the grey teardrop painted upon their cabins, and yearned a moment for the River Weep and her small carpentry business.
She wanted to build things; that was her real job, the making of things. She yearned for the smell of wood and lacquer, the soft murmur of the lathe. Thirty months ago her number had come up. Conscripted, she had seen a year in the north, stabilizing what the Council of Engineers called a "rupture of treaty" with the Cuttlemen. It had felt like war to her.
Somehow she'd lived and kept living, rising in the ranks to sergeant, this motley crew beneath her: glad to be in the company of someone who had the knack of not dying. And she could take no comfort that she had helped forge a peace, because before it had come to a conclusion her troops had been transferred down to Consolation City, and this new endeavour one that made little sense to her, how could an army face off the dark?
She was damned if she were going to let an idiot like Beaksley put an end to her chances now.
She glared at him.
The fool gazed south, his jaw wide open. He pointed and Sergeant Harper followed his shaking hands. The Roil raced towards them, not all of it, just the lower strata: a shelf of darkness some forty feet high. She could hear it, a snapping, clicking chitinous sound. A fierce and boiling wind rushed from the south almost knocking her to her knees. Guns and armour creaked, she felt her own gear being tugged by that wind. Sergeants swore, or bawled out orders. She blinked away dust and smoke, her eyes stung. She opened her mouth to speak and the sky exploded. Rolling detonations thundered in the heavens. At first she thought it the airships firing their cannon.
Then she realized it was the airships themselves, rupturing, being torn apart. By… she didn't know. Couldn't quite comprehend its quick bulk. Flaming remnants of craft, red-hot fragments of the rigid ship's skeletons, flailing screaming pilots and crew rained down, crashing onto the soldiers, killing those they struck.
And then the Roil hit them, washed over the chaos, with a deadening darkness.
For a second all was quiet, a soft intake of breath, a widening of pupil or a dripping of sweat.
"Fire, you fools," she shouted in the smothering darkness. "Fire."
But it was already too late. A mass of darkness struck her eyes and her mouth. And it burned.
"Out of here. Now!" General Bowen cried from the bridge of the Daunted Spur, and considered his terrible failure.
The army was gone. Four hundred thousand soldiers swept up in darkness as though they had never been, and the Roil rolled on, like a storm front if a storm could possess such dreadful silent majesty. Before the Roil, chaos bloomed everywhere, behind it only the quiet of the dark.
In the air, over half his ships were down, torn from the sky by the savagery of the two attacking Vermatisaurs, their many heads snapping and striking.
But Bowen had seen enough battles to know that, while showy, they were by no means the most of their problems. Endyms and smaller things, Hideous Garment Flutes, crowded so thickly upon neighbouring ship's hulls that their weight dragged them out of the sky. The older hydrogen ships hit the ground sedately then exploded, gas cells igniting one after the other, their fires darkening the zone before the Roil and raining death on the troops beneath them.
Aerokin too, struggled and screamed, consumed by the biting weight of all those Roilings. Flagella thrashed at the air.
Already thousands of creatures were racing towards the Daunted Spur. Gunners fired endothermic bursts towards the beasts. Unlike the front where all the airships had crowded, his craft had room to shower the Roilings with cold; they fell away in a black rain.
His pilot, a Drifter, brought the ship hard right. Alarms rang out. Then died down. The ship's control centre, built around a large diagram of the Daunted Spur, lit up, warning of nacelles overheating.
"Steady," the ship's captain hissed. "Steady or you'll burn out the engines."
"I've a lot of tail wind. The air's uncertain," the pilot said, between clenched teeth. Bowen could hear her mumbling beneath her breath something about Aerokin, and the uselessness of dumb machines. Drifters do not like being told what to do. Still he brought the engines back down.
Looking back the Roil appeared perfectly still, but Bowen knew that it was not. That it washed over the city as it had washed over Tate before it and Mcmahon.
And then, as he watched, the Roil came bubbling out of Magritte Gorge. Rising up and washing over those who were trying to flee, clawing up into the air and striking down more of his air fleet. Bowen brought a hand to his mouth. He wanted to scream, but he forced that need down. He wiped at his eyes and turned. His men were staring at him.
"What do we do now?" his captain asked.
"Signal retreat. Get as many ships out of there as we can."
"What about the troops on the front?"
Bowen jabbed south at the darkness crashing over everything.
"There are no troops," he said. "There is no front. All of it's gone."
The pain had fled, but with its passing had come the command.
Harper's eyes opened. The darkness obscured nothing from her, she could sense everything, and it was a glorious power. All around her, soldiers were getting up. Some had been ruined by the falling airships, their muscles and bones destroyed. They stayed still and the Witsmoke that had entered them, lifted and found residence somewhere else.
Rising in the darkness, eyes blinking, each man or woman that stood up broadened her mind and each mind echoed with a dry old voice. South, south, you must come where the furnaces burn, where the air is thick.
The Beaksley smiled. "There are dreaming cities down there, and heat."
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes. They slumber, but the time draws close."
Slowly they stumbled south, caressed and cajoled by the Roil knowing and not knowing that twelve years of preparations lay before them. Twelve years of transformation, in cities fast asleep, but dreaming furiously dreaming.
"Victory is certain," The Beaksley, Harper said.
All along the line the words were taken up, silently and whispered.
"Victory is certain."
PART ONE
DISSOLUTION
When you talk of great victories, remember, too, the defeats. I was there when McMahon fell. I was there for that Grand Defeat. And let me tell you, there was nothing grand about it.
RAVEN SKYE
PART TWO
CONFLAGRATION
Everywhere there was fire. Everywhere there was death, and what came after… No one thought to ask.
The Engine Dialogues, CASAGRANDE
CHAPTER 1
Since the founding of the first city, with a few obvious exceptions (see Connor McMahon, also Julian Hardacre), two political parties have ever battled for dominance: the Engineers and the Confluents. The Confluents were always regarded as too emotive, too populist in their endeavours, the Engineers too focused on civic structures and their construction whatever the cost to their workers and their people (see The Levees Built on Blood, MILDE & WHYTE, page 125). A gross simplification, perhaps, but all such political narratives are (if they are to survive) and both parties played upon this perception in each of the twelve metropolises.
Throughout the centuries, Confluent and Engineer would have torn each other apart, and on several occasions almost did (see The Right Bank Insurgency page 878), but always the Vergers stood between them, the knife-bearers keeping a brutal peace.
That ended with the Dissolution.
Considering the Roil's rapid expansion, and the stinging memory of the Grand Defeat (and the flood of refugees it brought with it) a decade prior, it was surprising it didn't happen much sooner.
Dissolution: The Bloody Avenues of Bloody Mayors,
DEIGHTON & BOGERT
THE CITY OF MIRRLEES-ON-WEEP
300 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL EDGE
Midnight, and Council Vergers reduced the front door to splinters. They dragged David Milde's father onto the street. Kicked his legs out from under him. And, their long knives gleaming in the streetlight, slashed his throat.
David watched it all from his bedroom window with a cold impassivity fed by Carnival.
He slapped his face, once, twice. Hardly felt it. He'd taken the drug, as he often did, after his father had accused him of taking the drug. The argument had been loud and wild, and of utterly no consequence now.
They'd be coming for him next. David hesitated as his father bled to death down below, the rain washed the blood away: it never stopped raining in Mirrlees, blood was always being washed away.
Run.
Run.
Run.
David's hands shook as he gripped the windowsill.
He blinked a heavy Carnival-induced blink. The world lumbered into a brutal sort of focus.
Bundles of Halloween orbs, strung down the street just the night before, coloured everything in reds and greens. Windows from here to the next suburb banged shut. Lights switched off.
David's father lifted himself almost to his feet, his head loose on his neck; barely on his neck at all. Oh, what kind of strength the man possessed! But it meant nothing now. The Vergers kicked him back to the ground, where he lay and did not rise again, and David knew his father was dead.
Footsteps and the hard voices of men not needing nor desiring to hide their approach echoed up the stairs. David considered crawling under the bed. But they would find him and drag him kicking and screaming out into the rain, and they would slash his throat, and he would lie there with his father.
The thought held some temptation.
He wasn't stupid. The Vergers would keep hunting him, and the realisation filled him with a great and awful weariness.
He didn't know where to run. He knew that if they had come for his father, they'd have come for everyone else. There'd be no one he could turn to. Not James Ling or Medicine Paul or the Cathcart Sisters. Any survivors would be running for their own lives.
All these considerations in under a second and, while he thought them, he opened his window and slid out, with just the clothes on his back, clinging to the slimy windowsill with his fingertips – the Carnival-calm in tatters – and knowing it might end here with just one slip.
It nearly did.
David lost his grip and dropped into the dead tree beneath his window, its rotten limbs snap-crash-snapped under his weight. He landed in a heap on the soft mud beneath and clambered to his feet – no bones broken as far as he could tell. He leapt a stone wall, almost tripping, and sprinted onto the road.
Someone shouted from his window. Whistles blew.
David did not look back, because if he did he would stop, and stopping would end him.
Such are politics in Mirrlees.
• • • •
MIRRLEES – DOWNING BRIDGE
David wiped the vomit from his lips for the third time in under an hour.
He knew what was coming, just as much as he knew he couldn't stop it, which was almost as terrifying as the Vergers that hunted him.
The Carnival's claws tightened. How could something get so bad, even as it left your body? It was just another awfulness to add to his collection, only this one would grow, and quickly.
He tried to occupy his mind with other thoughts, possible options of escape, the long term, anything but the drug and his body's rising hunger for it.
The north was his best choice now.
If he could make it to the city of Hardacre he would find refuge. He had an aunt who lived there, and she would take him in; they had always been close.
But the road to Hardacre was impossibly perilous; the Margin and Cuttlefolk, half wild and with long and bitter memories of war, lay between here and there. And the one bridge that crossed into those lands, on the edge of the Northmir, was heavily guarded. He may as well be striking out to the moon. But then again, he had proven himself more adept at survival than he had first thought.
All night he had been running, hiding, keeping to the shadows, moving only when the Vergers in their whistling packs had passed.
It had been surprisingly easy, perhaps because escape was all he could allow his mind to focus on. As he had run he had found himself instinctively heading to the one place he might hide. Once or twice he had scored Carnival there, though only when most desperate.
Usually, he'd not needed to look far to find people willing to supply him. After all, he was the great Confluent Leader, Warwick Milde's son. And if his father's currency had decreased in the last few months, well, he had never expected it to go so low.
Downing Bridge loomed out of the murk. David was familiar with it, had often come this way as a boy with his father. The master engineer would point out its various structural peculiarities, its size being the least of them, for Mirrlees was a city of excess; its levee banks blocking out the sun, channelling away the rain. Once the River Weep had been just a trickle between the embankments, a trickle two hundred yards across. Now it had climbed their walls to a height of nearly fifty feet and was rising every day.
The Dolorous Grey rattled overhead; David could just make out its plumes of smoke. That's what he really needed, to be on the train, steaming away from Mirrlees. Even though its destination couldn't be considered safe it was better than what faced him here, and he could lose himself in the colour of the Festival of Float.
But the train was beyond his reach now. All he had was the sanctuary of the bridge. Or, more correctly, what lay beneath it: Mirkton, the undercity.
Water streamed from the iron lips of the bridge. Through the falling water he could see a few dim lights, around which darkness lurked like a hungry dog.
He only hoped it was a darkness deep enough to swallow him.
THE CITY OF MIRRLEES – RUELE TOWER
302 MILES NORTH OF OBSIDIAN CURTAIN
"So the son escaped?" Stade's tone made it more of an accusation than a question.
Mr Tope nodded. Dry blood caked his grey suit; he picked at it with dark, cracked nails, and Stade wanted to slap those hands away even though they had just given him uncontested government.
"It's a minor setback." Tope's voice suggested he wasn't used to setbacks (minor or not); there was a kind of wonder in it, and dismay. "We'll find him: he is an addict, his options are limited, and only decrease with every hour he runs. He cannot go to ground, because without Carnival in his veins the ground will swallow him and spit out his bones. We have staked out his usual suppliers. We have eyes on all his friends and family allies, and there aren't too many of them now."
"If you can get to him, then they might as well. I don't like loose ends."
Tope's lips pursed. "We've few loose ends left, and the boy is the least of them. Both John Cadell and Medicine Paul have evaded us." Again that wondering tone.
Stade's gaze dropped to the withered fingers floating in the jar on his desk, the brass Orbis on one of them thick with verdigris. Medicine had acquired a new ring, of course, but Stade would always possess the first. He should have never been so lenient those decades past. Perhaps none of this would have happened if he had cut off Medicine Paul's head instead of his fingers. "You are right, and those are loose ends enough. The Confluents are broken, all credit to you and your Long Knives; fine and bloody work, indeed, but you have not removed the threat in its entirety."
"We will find him."
"Good. We have limited resources and not much time. Milde's death was unfortunate, but he let the Old Man out. Such open dissent could not be without penalty, and not just the death of his brother. The Engine… what he had proposed… actions with consequences far too dangerous. We could not let it continue, knowing what we know."
Tope's eyes were inscrutable. He never gave much away, and he certainly didn't now. "Knowing what we know, yes."
Stade sighed. "I should have killed him sooner. The day he defied me. The day he crossed the floor. I should have cut his throat, then the Old Man would not have been set free and none of this would be necessary. But I was a gentler soul in those days. And we had been friends. Ah, Tope; it's always the ones I don't kill that I regret. Blood and murder, how else do you reach the top of the Tower?"
He turned to the window, glared down at Mirrlees as though it might reveal his enemies if he scowled hard enough. Ruele, the Tower of Engineers extended into the sky, almost as high as the low layer of cloud from which rain fell and fell and fell.
Stade's offices had an unmatched view of the city, from the outer orbit of radio arrays, round which Aerokin circled – their flagellum twitching in ceaseless hungry jactitation from their underbellies, water tumbling from their flesh until they breached the cloud bank – to the vast bulk of Downing Bridge and the levees, nearly five hundred yards high, yet barely containing the River Weep. The Dolorous Grey crossed the bridge, bellowing smoke, the train making its way south to Chapman and the edge of the Roil.
Rain wormed along the office windows. Wind whistled through a crack in the lower edge of the window frame, bringing with it the smoky, rotten odours of the city and dribbles of water that pooled upon and stained the carpet. Stade grimaced at the mess. Such was the pace of work required with other endeavours he had no one to spare for even the simplest maintenance.
"Not long for this city," Stade said. "The bastard had to die. Now tie up those loose ends, Mr Tope. We're running out of time."
CHAPTER 2
That the city of Tate could have survived its absorption by the Roil was unthinkable. That Shale lost its brightest minds in the Penns was an absolute tragedy.
The Penns, though, had never been popular leaders outside their city, seen in the north by Confluents as too much in their sympathies like Engineers, and by the Engineers as far too much like Confluents. It could be argued that little effort was expended by the three Allied Metropolises of the North to aid their southern cousin, and that all parties were complicit in it.
The Roil baffles radio signals but, without a doubt, more energy could have been applied in trying to contact the city.
However, it must never be forgotten that those first years of the Roil's rebirth were madness, its creatures (outside popular fictions and fairytales) unfamiliar and terrifying.
Night's Engines, DEIGHTON
THE CITY OF TATE
600 MILES SOUTH OF MIRRLEES: WITHIN THE ROIL
Margaret's parents were late. She sat in the basement of the family home beneath the Four Cannon, seeking distraction in weapons prep and failing. It was a mindless sort of work (charging vascular systems, checking regulators, resetting clips) that set your thoughts wandering, and all her thoughts wandered in one direction.
Two days ago a bullet-shaped balloon drone flew over the Jut and the wall, passed beneath the Four Cannon of Willowhen Peak and the vast and twisting buttresses of the Steaming Vents, and landed on the forecourt of Tate's Breach Hold Chambers, meeting place of the Council.
Within the balloon's storage nacelle, along with various letters to Ministers and Engineers alike, had been a short note to Margaret written in her mother's crabbed hand:
Tests successful. The I-Bombs drove back the Roil and we saw the sun. Hah! Knew you'd be jealous, my child. This will be an end to it all. Combined with my iron wings we can destroy the Roil. A new age is begun!
A few things to conclude, then we'll begin the journey home. Your father sends his love. Back tomorrow, no later than six.
Both anxious to see you
A
Margaret read the note again, it was particularly jubilant for her mother, beginning of a new age or not.
Margaret had finished her sentry duty for the day – a twelve hour shift, dull, nothing to mark the time but the occasional opportunity to launch a cannonade at Quarg Hounds, or a dusty-winged Endym, or practice her marksmanship on Hideous Garment Flutes – though so many of them filled the skies it was harder to miss than strike one.
She hadn't even spied a Walker: those driven to despair who clambered down the spiked and ice-slicked Outer Wall of the Jut and walked into the dark, never to be seen again. Of course, such despair was unjustified now.
Margaret had barely slept the night before, and her superior officer, Sara, had ordered her off the Jut, promising to alert her as soon as her parents arrived with three rings of the intercom bells.
Margaret had agreed wearily, but her head was buzzing and soon there'd be no need for such vigilance. The I-Bombs had been successful. The Roil could be forced back. She would see the sky, the real sky, and its sun and moons and stars.
Her parents had achieved what many had considered impossible. No less than a means of destroying the Roil that did not involve the near mythical Engine of the North – the ancient saviour and scour of the world.
But it hadn't happened yet. She cleaned her guns, swapped the old fuel cells for new, and set to charging the drained ones.
She checked her watch. Her father had given her that on her seventeenth birthday. All it did was remind her of him. Why were they late?
Nearly six. As her watch reached the hour, the Four Cannon fired, launching endothermic shells out into the darkness of the Roil, driving its substance away from the Outer Wall – though it would quickly return. The Four Cannon – designed by her parents, like every other endothermic defence in Tate – were the city's heartbeat. Without that regular cannonade Tate would have long ago succumbed to the Roil.
Conventional weapons did little harm to the creatures of the Roil, other than encouraging them to fury. However, Roilings could not survive in temperatures below three degrees Celsius, and Roil spores themselves were killed by temperatures below freezing. All the city's weapons took advantage of this, creating a zone of cold around Tate that kept the Roil out.
Margaret stretched her arms, appreciating the quiet. As much as she looked forward to seeing her parents again, she knew that once they drove through the gates it would be nonstop, starting with her flight down the wireway to see them.
The bells rang three times.
Margaret sprinted up to the Wire Room and responded with three rings of her own. From here she could ride the wires down the slope of Willowhen Peak to the Outer Wall itself. She took a moment to admire the view before all the noise and fury of her parents' return.
Tate was about to change: the I-Bombs had been a success. She glanced from the Outer Wall and the Jut, and the beginning of the white thread of Mechanism Highway leading north, then back over the Wall Secundus to the ice sheathed inner walls and the Steaming Vents.