Trent Jamieson - Roil

All of a sudden the firing stopped. The Roilings pointed skyward, they lifted their guns to the sky and fired.

The beast tore into the carriages. A raging storm of wings and claws and mouths, its half dozen jaws crashed open and closed. It had been utterly silent in flight, now it shrieked a seismal shriek that was a nail in Margaret’s ears, but she did not stop.

Metal groaned then grew shrill in protest, and Quarg Hounds howled in terror. Cars fell into the chasm beyond the bridge, Roilings leapt for cover. The winged beast rose up, clutching one of the carriages in its claws, letting out a cry that rattled the Melody’s windows, it hurled the carriage back on to the ground. The vehicle exploded, illuming the attacker and astounding Margaret.

The beast was a Vermatisaur.

She could not believe it.

Might as well be staring at one of the Vastkind. Legends filled the air and the shadows, dark malevolent legends.

Several of its snake-like heads snapped at the air. Its huge eyes blazed, bright enough to cast aside the darkness and scatter shadows everywhere.

A terrible joy swelled within Margaret, and a sickening dread.

It roared from a dozen thunderous mouths at once, and dove back towards the carriages, snatching up another. Margaret did not pause, to see what it might do. A gap had formed and shaking, terrified of this sudden hope being snatched away, she drove through it and on to the bridge.

The Vermatisaur watched, through a spare set of eyes, the little human-thing race across the bridge, but did not follow.

There was no need (the creature would die soon enough) nor did it want to risk tangling its wings in the wires that webbed the bridge. Its mate had died that way, leaving it to its solitary angers, its mourning rage of decades.

The human-thing’s time would come. The Darkness was spreading and would not be stopped, what was rightfully the Roil’s would be reclaimed again. With the world retaken, it would fly wherever its will took it, through the boiling shadows and across the plains and ruddy mountains. Fly until another mate called, and the savage wonder of their hungers crowded the skies.

An ice pellet struck its wing, the cold burning enough to bring it back to the present. Wings shifted, curled, and carried it in lazy predatory beats towards these odd man things.

It owed them no allegiance. Furious, it snatched up another carriage and dropped it onto one racing over the hill. They exploded satisfyingly. The Vermatisaur’s pores swelled with the heat, deeper brains activated and with them deeper rages. Its eyes scanned the city.

There! Another carriage. The beast descended, swift and deadly.

By the time it was done, not a single carriage remained, and the little one had crossed the first span of the bridge and was deep in the tangles of metal where it could not follow.

All that activity after ten years made it hungry. It circled the city, eating what it could find, mouths gulping down anything that moved, its massive tail knocking over tower and wall. When it was done almost nothing lived in the city.

Sated and heavy, the beast clawed its way through the air, back to its resting place atop the tower, sinking down on the stone. Hot winds wafted around the Vermatisaur, fluttering the tips of its leathery wings and tail. It settled slowly, coiling its many limbs around the top of the shattered tower. Glass and metal detonated beneath its new fed weight, and the ruined floor groaned but held.

Pleased and full, lord of its domain once more, the Vermatisaur let out a manifold cry from its mouths that shook the city to its foundations and came back to him in a dozen pleasing echoes.

And then the city fell silent and still.

David dreamt of Cadell crouching in the snow, shovelling dead birds into his mouth. “Still hungry,” he whispered. “And all that’s left is you.”

Cadell turned and his lips curled hugely: a mouth that opened and opened. “Come inside, little bird.”

Someone shook David awake. He blinked, and looked up into Cadell’s face. The man appeared as wretched as David felt, his clothes were muddy, his lips cracked, bruises stained his face. “Time to go, David. We’ve got to keep moving.”

David’s head pounded, he was sure the sleep had done him some good but he couldn’t pinpoint how, other than to carry him from one state of wretched exhaustion to another. Cadell helped him to his feet. David blinked out at a day almost indistinguishable from any other, but for the occasional dead bird – David was sure there had been more of these, last night – and small heaps of shrivelled insects on the ground, there was no evidence of what had gone on the night before. No evidence but for dead bugs and birds and the sickening pounding in his head.

His back hurt from sleeping on the cold hard ground, another ache to add to his collection.

Rain fell, but only lightly: an early morning sun shower. Nothing new in that.

Cadell put a steadying hand on David’s shoulder and consulted some maps. The Engineer appeared at once exhausted by last night’s events and energised, as though they had given him new purpose. He scanned all that cartography then folded the maps away and jabbed a finger east, past the field and back at the scrub.

“We’re not too far from the railway and it would be best, I think, if we returned to it. Perhaps followed the line a while. It will get us to Chapman quickly. So we’ll keep it to our left until Lake Uhl, then we’ll take the road, where it veers west to Uhlton. The trip should take us two days, if we maintain a good pace. As we now have no transport, I believe I have business to attend to there.”

“What business?” David asked, splashing a little of the cold water on his face. The closer they got to the Roil, the more their plans went awry and the less this seemed to be about escape than plunging headlong into danger.

“What business?” he asked again, and Cadell rounded on him.

“The sort I don’t feel like talking about right now,” Cadell snapped.

David must have given him a shocked look, for the engineer’s gaze softened and he relented. “David, there is much I must tell you. A lot of it I am not proud of, I am afraid. It is not easy for me to give voice to this, but I must tell you, at least some of it, I guess.” Cadell’s eyes shone imploringly from a grimy face, and he sat down. “I’m trying to save this world.”

David laughed. “Cadell, people don’t save the world.”

Cadell nodded at this, though he failed to hide his disappointment, David couldn’t tell if it was with himself or David’s response. “But, you see, I am not a person. Not any more. Not in the way you would understand it. I am old, David, you know that, but do you have any sense of what that entails? I have lost count of the years that separate me from my first life, and time has dissolved so much of my arrogance and purpose – and the task that I must perform demands a surfeit of both. You will never understand what it is like to have all your friends, your family, not just dead, but as dust. Forgotten.”

David disagreed. He knew what that was like. Yearned for it. His friends and family were gone, taken from him, all he had left were the memories and they hurt. He did not know how he could take another step, but he did, and another, took another breath and another. He had lost everything and yet his heart kept on beating. It didn’t seem fair.

Cadell wasn’t looking at him now, but at the Lode: at the corpses of the Quarg Hounds. “Even I do not bear the task of remembering them well. I plunge into the past and it is little more than a ragged gloom about me. Faces have faded in the white noise that is my life. Reasons have grown dim and still I have lingered, hoping that it would not come to this, and arrogant enough to believe I could halt it. But live long enough and your worst fears are realised.