Trent Jamieson - Roil

Winslow nodded.

“It would be folly to trust them. They’re up to something. Great works, some sort of construction, all of it where we can’t go.”

“You’ve felt it too?” Anderson said. “The quivering earth? The distant murmur of old engines?”

“Yes,” Winslow said. “Our darkest nightmares seem ready to flower. And they’d have us make yet another concession.”

Anderson nodded his head, picking up his fast cooling tea and drinking it down. “And why her? What interest does the Roil have in this one person?”

“She is a child of Marcus and Arabella Penn. It does our cause no good to give the enemy what they want. Particularly when they demand a Penn.” He shook his head. “Remember when we were here to fight the Roil, not make deals with it? I think the time for deal making is over.”

The orders mocked him with their cruel simplicity. The single sentence:

“Let the Roil have her. We need more time.”

We have no more time, he thought. Whether we give them Margaret or not.

Anderson scrunched the paper in his hand, throwing it into the bin. “Did you see these orders, Winslow?”

“What orders?” Winslow asked.

Anderson grinned, though he frowned again quickly enough. “Give her another half an hour, she’s almost dead on her feet, and then you better wake her. They’ll be coming soon. Poor Margaret you must run again.”

MIRRLEES ON WEEP 200 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL.

“Mr Paul, these are your wards.”

They stood in the rain at the edge of Northmir where the suburbs gave out to the labyrinthine drainage systems and Ur-levees of the city. Before them rose the Northmir Bridge behind them the levee. The road running from it was called the Pewter Highway it gleamed a little in the cloud-dulled light. Three thousand workers waited by the bridge, men and women, skilled and ready to head into the North. And they were indeed his wards.

It stunned him that this was the response to just one call. These people had mustered in a single day, gathered their lives to them and come here. Looking down he could see that none of them had had much to gather. Things were bad, but only bad enough that the poorest folk were willing to leave. People who had nothing to lose, for whom Mirrlees had been a hellhole, even before the rains and certainly since Stade had put an end to all but the most urgent construction.

It would take the Roil itself to come boiling towards the city, before the wealthier denizens of Mirrlees began to consider such action.

All of them are fools, Medicine thought.

He doubted Stade or the Council would stick around that long.

Stade stood beside him, a hand resting on Medicine’s shoulder. He resented the familiarity of the act, and wanted nothing more than to wrench his shoulder away. But they had to appear to be in partnership, to have put the past aside. Just keep smiling, he thought, you’re in too deep to cut his throat.

“Not much to look at, are they,” Stade said. “But these are the finest our Northern Suburbs can produce. And they are in your charge. Three thousand people, the merest drop in the ocean of our population, but it is a start. Just bring them safely to the Narung Mountains.”

“I’ll get them there. You just give your speech.”

“Of course,” Stade said, and walked to the microphone, and his voice reverberated out over the Northmir. “The time of secrecy has passed, the time of action has come and a place has been prepared for you. All of you. My grand work, my Project, the Underground. And there we shall wait out the Roil, there we shall prosper, there we shall survive.”

The next few hours passed intolerably slowly. Grin and bear it. Medicine just wanted to get going. There were several weeks of journey between here and the Narung Mountains. And who knew what on the way. Even if nothing happened, keeping this lot under control was going to be work enough. He had forty-nine council guard of doubtful loyalty. The only certainty he had was that their loyalties were not to him.

Something had halted the two engines, though. The Grendel and Yawn were big trains. They could have taken this lot up in a single trip. But that was not going to happen. Shanks pony was all they had, other than the horses for the guard and barely enough oxen drawn wagons for supplies. And the wagons, well he hated the things.

He looked up into the rain-smeared sky. What had he been thinking?

Three thousand people, just ready to up and leave, and looking to him to get them to safety. Well he had failed, David – and truly he had failed the first time he had seen signs of the young man’s addiction and done nothing about it – and Warwick, poor dead Warwick. Perhaps this really was a chance at redemption.

He was damned if he would fail these folk as well.

They left at last. The council guard on horseback making a rough perimeter. The wagons, Medicine had made go on first. The highway was not in the best condition; rain had devoured it in places. Medicine reasoned it was best to have the wagons through before everyone else. Six thousand feet could do a lot of damage.

Of course, he had underestimated just how much damage the wagons themselves were capable of causing. The road was a ruin, and a muddy ruin at that, as they followed in the wagons’ wake. And not all of the wagons were up to it. Half a dozen were lost in that first day and whatever could be salvaged was taken up to the remaining or redistributed amongst those on foot.

The loss of the wagons dismayed Medicine.

Broken wagons for a broken landscape of failed levees and drowned suburbs. Mirrlees’s undulations made too much work for the pumps and engines of the city, some parts had flooded from their own catchment areas. The highway kept to the hills and so they looked down on submerged houses and domestic debris drifting lost like small islands of hopelessness.

Twice that day, scouts reported to Medicine sightings of groups to the west. Small gangs, salvage crews and looters – though if truth were told there was little difference between the two. Shots were fired at them, but it was a half-hearted menace. Medicine was not too concerned, it would take an army to threaten his three thousand and their guard.

That night they made camp on the very edge of the city, where murky fields led right up to the Regress Swamps – now looking more like a lake, with only the grey thread of the road running through it. Beyond them was the Margin. Medicine peered into that dark forest. He would have preferred to simply go around it, but such a detour would have cost them a week, maybe more.

Medicine knew there was Hardacre to the distant North and Eltham and the Daunted Spur along the north eastern seaboard. But it was easy to imagine civilisation ending here. Mirrlees was the northernmost of the great metropolises. Beyond it were the trees and the Gathering Plains and the burrows of the Cuttlefolk, and so much space. Three thousand people could be swallowed whole by those miles, and leave barely a mark to show their passing.

He helped unpack the tents – let no one claim he had developed airs and graces.