At the Shine Bridge, Medicine stopped and peered down into the white water of the Weep. A steamer, one of the sail-steam hybrids, was making its slow progress against the river. A snarl of logs struck the boat. In a puff of flame it was gone, leaving a brief pall of dirty smoke to be snatched away by the wind.
The water seethed and what could only be bodies, dim desolate shuddering shadows, passed beneath the bridge.
Portentous and terrible, he thought, somewhat hysterically, and continued on his way over the Shine. When the Verger was done with his games, Medicine was certain he would find a turbulent rest in the belly of the Weep. He was not Cadell, he could not fight these men with their Cuttlefolk blood, nor could he bribe away the edge of their knives.
Once across, he glanced back along the Shine and started. A single figure slouched there at the end of the bridge, he blinked and the figure was gone.
Medicine sprinted down the next few streets alone, and there were no whistling or solitary figures to disturb his thoughts, he cast glances behind him every time he reached a street lamp, most of them bearing his portrait. Nothing.
In the absence of obvious pursuit, Medicine sprinted first down one lane then another, through back streets as narrow as doss house corridors. The city reeked, stonewalls covered in a patina of fungus. Dead things floated, bloated and stinking, in the shallows of gutters. This was Mirrlees now. Death’s rotting signature scrawled everywhere.
When he made the secret entrance to the Ruele Tower, he threw furtive desperate glances over his shoulder and found some small relief in the empty lane and the silence – if pounding heart and pouring rain could be called silence.
He tapped the wall in five places, and in the right order, and the wall slid back and opened a crack wide enough to admit a grown man. He frowned at the darkness beyond, unsheathed his sword, and slipped through the gap, letting the secret door shut behind him.
Inside, he dropped to a crouch and reached for the torch hidden to the left of the door. Nothing. His fingers brushed the floor. Something ran over his ruined knuckles. He flicked it away.
Where’s the damn torch?
The Verger’s knife pushed into his neck not hard or deep enough to draw blood. Medicine breathed deep the stale air. This last air, obviously, once the Verger was done with him.
“What do you want?”
“Mr Paul,” the Verger said. “Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine.”
The Verger’s old friend hammered into the back of Medicine’s head and he fell into the merciful dark.
Chapter 19
The lodes were wretched, their master cruel. Locked here. Locked here. Locked here.
The Lode stung him with its rising awareness, its memory of his blood and his guilt.
The water conducted the Lode’s power and as Cadell walked further up the stream it focussed on him. The water grew dense around his limbs, began to defy its natural tidal inclinations. Shapes took form within its depths. Lights winked into being. And all around it was an odd and breathless sort of shock. You are here. Why are YOU here?
Cadell reacted to the Lode’s shock, its recognition, with a sort of shock and recognition of his own.
Strange, the things you forget, he thought. The power and the agony.
Old code words, old data flickered to life in his memory, dim at first, they increased in intensity, beacons of energy to which he was drawn.
But he also sensed a hesitancy, a distant doubt. Was it his own?
Ah, but he always had doubts. Always. They rang in his bones and rattled, ancient as fear, in his skull. The Engine merely magnified them, as did its cruel punishments.
The Quarg Hounds howled, no doubt about their hungers.
He glanced over at David then back to the Hounds, they were at the hill, racing towards the pale bare rock of its summit. Fierce as they were and deadly, this weather was still too cool for them, the run and the rain had taken their toll. The beasts whined between each howl; dark blood streamed from their jaws. They were weakened, but what strength remained was more than enough to rend David limb from limb.
Cadell clenched his teeth. He could not put it off any longer, already his stomach was cramping, his ears ringing in anticipation. He took one final breath and raised his hands.
This was going to hurt.
“Now,” he cried. “NOW!”
And his bones turned to ash. Pain hammered into his skull.
“Now.”
The Quarg Hounds had reached the summit. On that final “Now” they stopped, as though yielding to his command.
But it was not the Roilbeasts that Cadell’s words commanded. The Quarg Hounds’ bloody snouts rose up quizzically.
One of them opened its mouth, then shut it, swiftly, cocking its head, as though it were listening to something distant but racing nearer.
Silence. The air cooled, something hardened within it, became crystalline and deadly.
Ice enclosed Cadell’s skin, burnt and bit deep. His body shook with energies and their absence, because that was the wounding truth of it.
His power was an absence, a vacuum, and a slowing, and all that lived quailed from it.
Insects fell, dead and frozen, out of the air, an entomological hail.
At the top of the hill, the Quarg Hounds yawled, thrashing and screaming, as all that cold struck them. David had fallen forward, on to his hands and knees, in a field of frost-coated grass, his face a mask of winded agony.
The Quarg Hounds howled again, a beaten horrible sound that dropped at last to a whine. They crumpled in on themselves, all their menace, all their strength gone and only their blackened skeletons and brittle skin remaining. And that was somehow more horrible than claws and howls and hunger, perhaps stillness always is.
The ice around Cadell’s legs turned to slush, and his blood started stinging, singing and stinging, as it forced its way back into constricted veins. The stream began to flow again almost as it had done before. The icy skin on the stream cracked and drifted away.
The Lode continued to burble inside his head, its ache rising to freeze much more than it already had, to wake its siblings and blanket the land for hundreds of miles around with cold. But only the Engine was capable of unlocking all that ice, of slowing the shuttling atoms of the world, and he did not command it. In fact he could feel it, a distant and disapproving presence.
Yes, he did not command it at all.
Not yet.
He shivered. The thought of such appalling power filled him with terror. Perhaps it was better if he never did.
Chapter 20
Cadell was always the show off. Of the Eight he couldn’t resist theatre, though he denied it most strenuously. It was in everything that he did. Which made him the worst of us all.
Air but moments before, bitterly cold, warmed. Rain fell devouring the ice, as though anxious to wipe the memory of Cadell’s… whatever it was he had done… from the earth. David wiped vomit from his lips, spat a last sickly spit, and tried not to think how much easier Carnival would make all this.
Everywhere there were dead things, frozen and fallen from the sky, it was in the air that the worst of this cold had struck. If it had reached that intensity where he stood, he knew he would now be as lifeless as the birds and the bugs.