Trent Jamieson - Night's engines

Whig clutched his hat in one hand, firing a pistol at the Old Men below. “Well, answer him, man!”

“Yes,” David said. “Yes.”

Margaret tried not to smile. “Just don't get in the way.”

“So all is forgiven?” Buchan asked. He looked from David to Margaret and back again, and what triumph might have been in his face withered.

Do we look so beaten? David thought. “Only if you will forgive us,” David said.

“You don’t even need to ask.”

Whig reloaded his pistol.

“You’re late,” Margaret said.

Whig grimaced. “Did you just make a joke?”

The airship circled above, its great searchlights blazing.

“Ready, crew,” Buchan roared. “Ready!”

And those last Old Men were running up the hill, throwing cold before them. Guns fired. A wall of death: rifles and pistols all at once. And it took its toll. Still, the Old Men broke through their ranks, bringing their own death with them.

But they were outnumbered, weakened, under constant fire. They could not run fast enough, and always there was David, just out of reach. The first fell to a barrage of rifle fire. The second ran at David, only to be caught mid-air by Buchan himself. With a twist of his arms he broke the Old Man's neck.

And David felt the last of the Old Men go, and a great wave of sadness — that wasn't exactly his own — gripped him. An age was ended; a whole epoch of existence gone, and they had failed in their singular purpose. But already Cadell was fading, sliding beneath the surface of his mind like some leviathan of thought and memory.

“Well,” David said. “We've still breath in us.”

Margaret shuddered. “Yes, we do.”

“We thought you could use some help,” Buchan said.

David grinned a bloody smile and spat a little blood on the ground. “We've not much time,” he said. “We need to burn the corpses. All of them.”

The Old Men burned fast and almost silently: flesh melted from the bone, bones blackened and crumbled to dust. And these corpses burned much more quickly than Cadell's corpse had. Perhaps their vitality was greater, or just all those ancient bodies pressed up against each other quickened the flames. Oddly, they gave out little heat; instead they seemed to draw the heat from everything around them. A peculiar and disturbing fire, and one that only David and Margaret could bring themselves to stand close to.

David felt something should be said over their bodies, but he wasn’t sure what. These Old Men had lived since First Landing. They had defeated the Roil and been punished for it, given over to hunger and madness, and still they had tried to do what they thought was best — and what might have been right.

How was David to know, to judge right from wrong? All he’d known was that he didn’t want to die.

Maybe Mother Graine was right, too.

He shook his head, the only way he could see himself through this was to move as though those other opinions didn't matter. They'd all wanted him dead, in one way or another, how could they matter?

“You died for what you believed in,” David said. “There’s honour in that. Maybe in these times that is all that is possible.” He didn't know what else to say, he tried, but his voice faltered. The bodies burned.

Margaret stared at him from across the flames. She looked old, and tired, her skin too pale, even for her, too tight against her bones. “We’ve yet to see if we can manage the same,” she said.

Something rattled in the distance, and she turned her head towards the sound.

“What's that?” she said.

David got to his feet, and felt for a knife. A branch or a twig snapped, someone swore loudly.

Kara came clanking out of the shadows, a pack strapped to her back. A dozen guns flicked in her direction. She threw up her hands up in the air, palms out.

“Friend! Friend! Lower those bloody guns,” she cried, sounding breathless as though she had run miles, and perhaps she had.

David shouted at them to hold their fire. Buchan roared out with delight. Even Margaret managed something that approximated a smile.

“You did it,” Kara said, the swelling had gone down around her eye, though a bruise covered her jaw line.

“Yes, we did,” Margaret replied.

“I brought some rum,” Kara said, pulling a bottle from her backpack. “Half the reason I'm buggered. Too damn heavy, five bottles. Now, who wants some?”

“I might just,” Margaret said. And she wasn't the only one.

David declined, all he could think of was the Carnival hidden in his heel.

“The Dawn?” he asked.

“She will be fine in a day or two. She had no flight in her, I’m sorry. And I’m sure she’s mad at me for leaving her, but I had to come and do what I could, even if it meant just burying my friends.” Kara smiled, and David thought she was joking, until he saw the shovel jutting from her pack.

She looked over at Buchan and Whig, both hesitating a few yards away. “And I see you had help.”

“Yes, we’re all back together again,” David said. “The happiest of families.”

THE MARGIN FRAGMENT OF THE ROIL

It was a fog of darkness. That first looked like dust, if a dust storm could grow so black. Tornadoes of darkness danced around it, fed by the heat, and its contact with the cold.

And within it great machines walked upon metal legs, each step loud as thunder. Heating mechanisms sat upon their metal heads, round which the Roil spores clung. This was a hardier darkness, but still it required these great things, so far from the Roil. Always this outlier was aware of the darkness from which it sprang: felt its commands flashed along a chain of machines. Such communications were tenuous and fragile, but really all that was necessary. Who was there to disrupt it now?

It split into two great strands of darkness, ready to pinch out the last strongholds of humanity, shift them so that they would become something else, two more dreaming cities.

Those caught in their path were subsumed as a matter of course. Enemies changed to allies with a soft beat of wings, a transformation of neurons, and a new awareness of different imperatives.

To be one with the Roil. To be one with the glorious ending of the world.

THE NORTHERN WILDERNESS 1519 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

The Collard Green carried them away from the pyre and to the Roslyn Dawn. The Aerokin raised a flagellum sluggishly in greeting. Margaret could tell it was an effort.

“Still healing,” Kara said. “She’ll be all right in a day or so, it takes a lot of energy to recover from such a wound, even one that isn’t fatal.”

Since no one was going anywhere fast, they'd made camp.

They’d lit fires, enough for the Collard Green and her crew. Someone had gotten out musical instruments, and songs of the Confluents and victory had been sung, some to tunes that Margaret had recognised, if not the lyrics. Political activism had taken on a less combative form in Tate. But the singing and the drinking wasn't just that, they mourned their dead, and mocked the flight ahead of them.

They ate. And ate — Buchan almost matching David in the food he put away. And drank — Whig almost matching Kara.

Margaret worked slowly through her meal, still sore, and now, with some urgency fled, found her mind wandering again to darker things.