Trent Jamieson - Night's engines

THE DREAMING CITY DEEP WITHIN (AND OF) THE ROIL

Tope opened his eyes. He’d failed.

He should have been dead. His last memory had been the leap into the liquid nitrogen in Chapman.

And yet, he could feel his own pulse, and deep beneath the surface on which he lay supine (breaths all a shudder) was an echoing beat, as though the earth itself was alive. Perhaps even more so. After all, he had spent his life containing his passions, honing them to such an edge that they might strike out at the enemy, wherever and whoever that was.

He had failed in that task, just as he had failed to die.

He felt a moment’s frustration at that failure, and a moment’s anger at the relief that followed, and the realisation that he had never wanted to die. But his life had never been about what he wanted. Whose life was?

“You are awake, then.” The voice that spoke those words was soft, but authoritative. Nearby curtains twitched. His gaze flicked towards the movement.

“Yes.” Tope knew there was no point in pretending otherwise. That voice denied deception. “Where am I?”

“You know where you are.”

And he did, he lay in the terrible dark of the Roil. His skin burned, the flesh itched. But all of it meant one thing, that he wasn't dead. That he was very much alive.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“Don't you wonder how you survived?”

Tope shrugged. “I’ve seen many wondrous things. Killed my share of them, too. I stopped requiring the whats and whyfors a long time ago.”

There was a sense of pleasure in the response. “You’re a Verger, for you the knife is all.”

“The knife is all.”

“And it’s knife work that we require.”

An image grew within his mind, possessed of that same beat: it flashed and flared and faded. He said, “The boy…”

“Is a boy no longer.”

Tope wondered just how long it had been since he had last opened his eyes.

“Weeks have passed, only weeks,” the voice whispered, gently mocking. “But for him, and this world, it has been an age — your home would be unrecognisable to you. And the boy, though he might not look it, has become a monster. The world is greatly changed. You say you have seen wondrous things. But you have not seen anything like this.” The curtains parted, and he realised that they hadn't been curtains at all, but winged creatures that went howling through the window — and the Dreaming City was revealed to him. He saw its engines, felt the rushing thought that informed it all, that was his thought and its thought. Here he was a single organism made up of many organisms, that were also part of this city, that were part of many cities. He felt in himself a deep yearning for that, to be part of it, part of the whole, because he wasn't, not yet.

“This was once known as Carver. It was the first metropolis to fall to dreams, now it is just one place of many. Here all is possible, here matter shapes to our dreaming. Though in truth we dream no more. We have woken. And when the dreamer wakes, dreams are realised.”

Tope realised just how foolish Stade had been, to think that he could resist this. One thing to hide and fight against a senseless force of nature, but this was vast thought, of a scale that no one man was any match for, schemes within schemes as tightly bound as any clockwork mechanism, and infinitely more cunning. This was the future, and it was beautiful.

“The boy would destroy this new world. He would wipe it from the face of the world, and with it the seed of all hope.”

Always the boy! Always the ruination of things. If only he had killed him that first night. The father should have been the one spared, the boy was always the danger. It amused him that the Roil — and Stade's desires — had boiled down to this one thing. He smiled.

“I will kill him,” Tope said.

“Yes, we believe you will.” The voice sounded very pleased indeed. “There is a vehicle waiting for you, a ship of fire that will burn as bright as any star. It will take you to the north.”

He looked about the room and saw it at last. The figure, obscured by Witmoths, they scurried about its flesh, slid in and out of its mouth and nose. Tope couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. All sense of that had gone. It was merely Roil.

“There will be a woman with him. Pale-skinned, tall.”

“I know her,” he said. “I have seen her. She tried to kill me.”

“But she did not. You are to give her this gift.” A single moth flew straight for him. He batted out at it, then realised that was exactly what it had wanted. He felt it slide into his skin, just beneath the wrist, a hot sliver of moth. Something that was quite different from the other creatures that filled his blood.

“You are to be kept of single mind, until this is done. Then we will decide whether or not you have earned our gift.”

The Roil lifted its hand, a fist now, clenched around a belt of knives. “You will need these,” it said, and tossed them to the ground.

“The knife is all.” Tope walked to the belt, scooping it up and strapping it around his waist — all his knives were there, the cutting and the driving, the thin slivers of steel that he was adept enough with to unpick locks. The knives that had been tools of his bloody art, the ones he had used to kill the boy’s father. “Yes, the knife is all.”

At least for a little while longer.

A door opened, another figure appeared, or perhaps it was the same one, because when he turned there was no one behind him. “This way, this way.” It gestured through the door.

Tope was led through the city. Saw those wonders up close, the mechanisms that bound it, and it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he was a part of it. Wherever he went he would take it with him.

An iron ship waited at the city's heart — the first less than beautiful thing he had seen, though it possessed an undeniable elegance — a door in its belly opened, and Tope stepped through it. The ship was ringed in seats: all taken, but the one closest to the door. Tope sat down in it. The ship shuddered, and began to rise. Windows — that Tope guessed were a vestige of when this ship might have been designed for humans — opened like eyes. The Dreaming City fell away. He felt the acceleration push at him, a weight against his chest.

“How long?” he said.

Eight hours until the city is reached.

Tope closed his eyes, and dreamed of killing the boy, and finishing his job.

THE OUTER WALL OF TEARWIN MEET 2100 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

Buchan and Whig waited at the base of the tower. Their airship, the Collard Green, bobbed hard against her lines, though she was in no danger of striking herself against the jagged wall. Watson was too good a pilot for that.

Whig was dressed in so many layers that he almost looked as big as Buchan. He slapped David on the back, hands thick with several pairs of gloves.

“You did it,” Whig said. “You got us here.”

“With a little help from the pilots, thank you,” Kara said. Watson — who stood by the Collard, checking the lines to see that they were secure — grunted. David couldn't help but smile.