Trent Jamieson - Roil

But what art isn’t a glorious folly?

UHLTON 19 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL

The meeting in Buchan’s parlour had gone on for another hour ending with something that had at once surprised and delighted David.

“I want you take David with you,” Cadell had said. “Where I am going… it’s too dangerous.”

“Of course we will,” Buchan had said, agreeing with Cadell for the first time that night. David went to bed with a feeling of such relief, to be at last out of the eye of the storm.

David woke to thunder.

No, it was gunshot, and a distant thudding. He sat up in bed. The next two shots came quick, one after the other.

Someone screamed, then moaned, another shot and the sound stopped. David stumbled out of bed. Dressed as fast as he could, not daring to switch on the lights. It was happening again, and this time his nerves were failing him. Fingers tapped against his door.

“David?” He relaxed a little, recognising Cadell’s voice.

“Yes,” he said.

The door opened, letting in a little light.

“We have to get out of here. Uhlton isn’t as safe as I thought. It seems Stade wants to finish the job.” Cadell’s eyes flashed. In one hand he clenched his travelling bag, in the other a water gourd. “Sorry, David, I was going to leave you with Buchan and Whig, but they’re going to draw the Vergers off. You’re safer with me.”

David looked at Cadell’s bag. The Old Man pulled it away. “Yes. Yes. I have plenty of your drug.”

Shame reddened David’s cheeks. “I didn’t say anything.”

Whig stopped at their door, looking quite ridiculous in a nightdress with a half dozen pistols strapped to his belt. “There’s tunnels beneath the hall,” he said. “Take the eastern passage, it will lead you out onto the edge of town.”

“We will see you in Hardacre,” Cadell said.

Whig nodded. “Good luck, gentlemen. We will be at a pub called the Habitual Fool. ” Whig winked at David. “An appropriate enough name, don’t you think, for those of us that keep banging our heads against the walls of tyranny?”

Whig led them both to a nearby wall, wincing every time someone fired a shot. He slapped his hand against the wall and it swung open onto a low tunnel.

“There you go, lads. Sorry about the smell, it’s less of an escape tunnel, more of a sewer,” he said.

“Good luck,” Cadell said.

“Good luck to us all,” Whig grinned tersely and shook Cadell’s hand. “It’s been in rather short supply of late, though this raid could have happened at a worse time. We’re ready. Be careful in Chapman, it’s a city on the edge, and dangerous because of that.”

Cadell ducked down and crawled through the tunnel. David threw one last glance at Whig. The giant waved him on.

“Hurry up, Milde, and be careful.”

“I will,” he said, and followed Cadell.

The wall shut behind him with a click. David found himself in a narrow corridor, dark but for a flickering chemical torch that Cadell held above his head. Stinking air enclosed them, and it was all David could do not to gag for that first moment.

“Come on,” Cadell said.

They crawled, furtive and fast, upwards over cool wet stone. David tried not to think why it might be wet. Soon the only sound was their quiet breaths or the soft scuffing of boot on rock.

Confluents weren’t the only ones who knew of this tunnel. Thousands upon thousands of cockroaches had gathered here, crunching under foot, the air loud with the papery sound of their flight. Worse were the things that preyed upon them. Spiders the size of David’s hand that brought back flashes of his experience beneath the bridge: only here it was darker and the spiders much bigger.

“Careful,” Cadell hissed. “They’re not afraid to bite.”

One chose that moment to run over David’s face. It was all he could do not to yelp at its firm yet feathery touch.

Cadell brushed it off, he hissed. “Bastard bit me.” He reached into his pockets, pulled out a small bottle topped with an atomiser, and sprayed a mist of something that smelt of vinegar and rosemary onto the wound. He hid the bottle away again.

“Not long now,” Cadell said between clenched teeth. “I can smell a change in the air.”

Sure enough, the crawl space widened, became a tunnel large enough for them to walk upright. A little further on the tunnel opened onto a deserted hillside, by a dead tree. The sound of gunshots echoed over to them, like a storm that had passed into the distance.

“What do we do now?” David asked, leaning against the white tree, and taking deep breaths of air that had never seemed purer.

“We walk again,” Cadell grunted, hefting his bag. “To Chapman.”

The journey to Chapman took a day following a winding hilly road that was never too far from the brown meander of the river. On the way, David noticed a distinct change overtaking the countryside. Where the land before Uhlton had been lush, too lush in fact, with flora almost drowning in the rain. Here plants were twisted, sere things, and the air dry and hazy. What winds there were blew predominantly from the south, and there was something of the furnace in them. It stung the eyes and dried the lungs. Seeing things here was painful. He perspired profusely though it did little to cool him, just brought on a thirst that rapidly depleted their supply of water.

A city boy, he had thought the country a universal green and found it wanting. The only green here that remained ran along the River Weep, and even that was dusty and failing. Animals had deserted the region as well. They’d left little to show of their passing other than picked-clean corpses.

A new sort of tension filled the air. A restlessness that mirrored David’s own.

It reminded David of a new artistic movement popular in Mirrlees called Immediacism, and whilst its bursts of colour and movement were incongruous with this landscape, its sense of things on the precipice of change matched it exactly.

It did not take too much imagination to see these lands turning to dust in the next few months, if the Roil did not take them first and transform them into something alien and cruel. David could see the Roil and its imminence in everything. More concretely, whenever they topped a rise, David would catch a glimpse of the Obsidian Curtain itself. There was no denying its inevitability.

Occasionally David noticed small drifts of what looked like ash or smoke. The closer they got to Chapman the more frequently they floated by.

“Are there a lot of fires down south?” he asked, pointing out yet another drift of smoke.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Cadell said. “But that’s not smoke. It’s something much more insidious: Roil spores.”

David cast his gaze suspiciously over the landscape. “The Roil’s here already?”

“Not quite, those spores are too exposed as yet, they need the full cover of the Roil – heat and shadow – before they can do their handiwork.” He shook his head. “Though it’s something I fear that may not be too long away.”

Cadell stared out into the dry lands, his eyes troubled and his brow furrowed. “It doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “I know people think of the Roil and they think of the Obsidian Curtain and all that lies south of it. But the Roil doesn’t stop there. It’s the big wet in Mirrlees, and the drought here, and other more predatory things.”

Late in the afternoon, Cadell stopped and pointed along the dusty road. It tracked up a hill then disappeared beyond it. The road’s veil of wind-borne dust was the only indication that it continued beyond the rise. Just peeking over the hill, was a nest of silos or water towers, though even from this distance David could see that they were in ill repair, holes gaped from their walls, tin rattled and creaked in the wind.