Trent Jamieson - Roil

Everything had increased in clarity. Cadell’s bloodshot eyes gleamed. David blinked.

“You look better now,” Cadell said. “Much more the man about town than the fugitive fleeing through it.”

“Clothes and Carnival maketh the man,” David said, feeling stupid as soon as the words left his mouth.

Cadell sat down. “We’ve a while yet, and time to talk. Ask what you will.”

David nodded. “What do you know about the Roil? Your name always came up when father spoke of it.”

“More than I ought. More than what’s good for a man. And so will you, before this is done.” He reached over to the table, picked up his hat, ran his hands along its brim, turning the hat around and around, perhaps to keep his fingers busy and his eyes focused on something other than David. “But that’s the way of this decaying world, and I owe your father this much at least.”

This much? Was David, this much? “What do you owe my father?”

“Plenty,” Cadell said. “Just believe me, when I say this doesn’t even begin to square the debt, perhaps it even adds to it.”

To David this wasn’t much of an answer. “What would square the debt then?”

“I hope you never have to find out.” Cadell stood up, dropped his hat on the bed and walked to a cabinet near the mirror. He splashed something in a glass, swallowed it down in a gulp. Grimaced. “I should have warned him, more than I did. More forcefully, should have kept a closer eye on your house.”

“He knew this was coming?” A dark bitterness rose in him and raged. Why hadn’t he fled? Why had his father risked both their lives?

Cadell nodded his head. “He knew that as soon as he crossed the floor of Parliament, soon as he joined the Confluents, something was coming. He just didn’t expect it to be this. Thought they were all working towards the same thing. Stade proved him wrong. Oh, lad, there are secrets that layer Mirrlees and Shale, sediments of madness and lies more damning than you could believe. Missteps, and murders, from the First Ships down.” Cadell lifted his empty hands in the air. “There’s blood on these, as much as Stade, more.” Cadell stopped. “I’m sorry, David.”

“People die, Mr Cadell,” David said, and his voice was colder than even the Carnival could account for. “People die.”

And that was all he allowed himself.

Cadell took his time in responding. “But you’re not dead.”

David didn’t argue the point, but he knew Cadell was wrong. Something inside him was dead. Not too long ago, a few years no more, he’d been maybe fourteen or fifteen he had woken in the middle of the night, and realised that he was going to die, that the night was smothering him. He’d started screaming then.

His parents had rushed into the room. His mother had held him, and he had told her, that he didn’t want to die, that he didn’t want any of them to die. She’d kissed his brow, and assured him that he had a very long time indeed before he needed to worry about such things.

Well, it had turned out that they hadn’t had that long at all. The next day the rain fell, and it really hadn’t stopped. His mother was dead six months later, his father increasingly obsessive and cold. Was it any wonder he had succumbed to addiction by his seventeenth year?

“Stuffy in here,” Cadell muttered and opened a window, the rain had picked up a notch, it cooled the air but a fraction.

Better than nothing, David thought.

“I’m sorry, lad. Not least of all that I’m all you’ve got. You’re right there; people die, and most of your father’s allies died with him last night. The Engineers have played their dissolution and rule Parliament now. And the Vergers have taken sides. These are desperate times, and Stade really thinks he’s doing the right thing. But he isn’t.”

David was thirsty. He found a glass and filled it with water from a jug. A revolver sat on a bench nearby. He looked at it a long time, then considered the broad back of Cadell. Carnival made all things possible, steadied the shakiest hand, if he moved quick he could avenge at least one death in his family.

“Well, are you going to shoot me, Mr Milde?”

David shook his head. Something about Cadell changed then, and even though David could only see his back, he knew the Old Man was grinning. “Do you even know what I am, David. Did your father ever tell you that particular secret?”

“My father never told me anything. All we did was fight.”

“I guess that was all he knew at the end. How to fight. He told you I killed your uncle, but he never explained the circumstances. Oh, where to begin?” Cadell turned from the window, the rainy city behind him, dark and streaming, and him sharing some of that darkness.

Perhaps David should have used the revolver.

Cadell walked over to the table and flipped open the revolver’s drum, no bullets. “Never leave a loaded gun where an enemy might use it. Of course, we aren’t enemies. Have you ever heard talk of the Engine of World?”

What? David thought. Fairy tales?

“It’s a myth,” David said. “Tearwin Meet, Land Crash, the Battering of Gillam Hall, those I can believe in. But the Engine… an impossibility.”

“It’s not an impossibility. I was there. I helped build it.”

It was then David knew without a hint of doubt that Cadell was mad.

The fourth cannon fired another three times before succumbing to gravity and sabotage like its siblings. Its last two blasts came perilously close to the Melody Amiss, clearing the path before her in great bursts of ice, but also striking the ground so hard that the carriage bounced, Margaret rattling around inside it as she struggled to gain control, the wheel jerking in her grip.

The falling cannon struck tanks of coolant on the eastern quadrant. A storm of flame lifted the carriage up and slammed it into the ridge.

Margaret blacked out and, for a moment, she was home with her parents in their library.

Here, alone in the Penn household, clutter ruled, books, notes, schematics in their most incubate form (iron ships of the air, scurrying many limbed walkers, a hand held device for the calculation of arithmetic), even political cartoons. On the wall was suspended the terrestrial Orrery, a map traversed by a metal band that depicted the Roil’s progress across Shale. The band had long ago crossed Mcmahon in the North and now looked ready to slide over Chapman. Many times Margaret had run her fingers over the Orrery, imagining lands and metropolises beyond the Roil. Places that had a blue sky not black, that saw the Sun, the Moon and the stars.

A huge wooden table, surrounded by plump leather-bound chairs, dominated the centre of the library, a grand Old Man deliciously besieged by books.

Margaret slumped into a chair, glancing over the books and papers stacked up high before her. On the armrests were her father’s plans for a system of pneumatic railways, and an old copy of the Shadow Council. The lurid cover showed Travis the Grave racing over a burning rooftop, sabre in his mechanical hand, proving even her father still liked to relax a little – though he had annotated it with stern pronouncements on the scientific and engineering flaws within the text.

Her mother had been reading Deighton’s treatise on the Engines of the World, and receiving much mockery as a consequence.