“Has it reached the Secundus?”
Howard shook his head. “Its agents are close though and getting closer. Look, I relayed Sara’s message. I know your parents were at the Jut. I need you here. I’ll send someone out for you, when we can spare them, once this is contained.”
Another explosion shook the earth, ice crashed from the Secundus and fiery steel shards hurtled overhead, searing the air, striking the wall and exploding again. White-hot metal showered the Sentinels, igniting their cold suits so fast it was as though they had instantly become flame. All along the wall people shouted and screamed, pointing back at the way Margaret had come.
“One of the Cannon!” Howard rushed towards a burning Sentinel, Margaret followed, though she daren’t get too close. Howard beat the flames away with his hands, then signalled to a stretcher crew.
“One of the Four has blown.” He said to her as the Sentinel was taken away. “Get back, Margaret. You’re a Penn, we need you safe.”
“I can’t, the Cannon sit above my home. And as to needing me, it’s my parents you need, and you know it.”
Howard said nothing. Margaret watched him look from blazing Cannon to blazing walls.
Fires everywhere.
Margaret knew the Penn home was gone. Where the cannon and the house had been was a wild ribbon of flame. The other three Cannon picked up speed, endothermic shells arcing out beyond the walls.
More ice smashed into the ground nearby. Gutters choked and water gurgled.
Her boots were soaked, as were the tips of her coat. The ice sheathes were failing and all that water freed.
In the middle of a firestorm the city began to drown.
Chapter 3
The Bridge was lost long ago, or won. Mirkton after all allowed such freedoms within the dark that no other suburb provided.
If Mirrlees was the beacon of the North, then Mirkton was its shadow. Life was cheap there, but still it was life.
Until the spiders came.
MIRRLEES – DOWNING BRIDGE
He’d been a fool to come here.
Mirkton crowded the gloom beneath the bridge. Its rough shanties were stacked precariously on and over each other, bound up in Aerokin-ropes, supported by rude poles, the shells of old carriages, whatever was solid and might bear weight. They sat in heaps that made them look more like midden piles than houses: gas lanterns and stolen electrics gleamed in the dark. David was surprised by just how many people lived in this small city beneath the bridge. And every eye seemed focused on him. He realised that he stood out here perhaps more than anywhere, and in Mirkton he had more than Vergers to fear.
The place stank of the river and rot, and too many people pressed too close together, a raw smell that lingered and stung the back of the throat. The dark sang with the noises of the enclosing Downing Bridge; groaning metal; the dim thunder of the run-off from the rain; and the chatter of Mirkton’s markets, of deals being made. People lived their lives down here, and to a large extent had dragged the world that they had sought to escape from with them. David could see that there was commerce of a sort; he just didn’t understand how it worked.
He found himself a quiet safe place, down a stinking, rubbish strewn alley where he could gather his thoughts. But every thought brought him closer to utter paralysis. There was nowhere he could go, no plan or direction that could provide him with more than a few hours life. Maybe he would have been better off just letting the Vergers take him. There’d be no worrying now.
Carnival’s pangs struck him again, a body-wide shaking that dropped him to his knees. He vomited loudly. Sobbed when he was done, a frail sound, the sort of weakness you didn’t want to project here.
He stopped almost at once, covering his mouth with his hands. But someone had heard him.
Heavy footfalls drew near, kicking their way through debris.
Quiet, safe place no longer, if it had ever been.
“You,” someone shouted in the dark. “I’ve need of your clean skin. I’ve a hungry piece of meat for you.”
A man, a good foot taller than David, two feet broader, at least, shuffled closer, his cock in his hand. “See how hungry it is.”
David backed away. Not far, rough, sweating bricks pushed against his spine. Dead end, kind of appropriate, he thought.
David clenched his hands into fists. “Come no closer,” he yelled.
“Oh, I’ll be coming closer, fancy boy.” The man grinned. “See it?” the man said. “Now feel it.”
David kicked at his groin, and the man caught his foot, throwing David off balance. David landed on his back, and choked as more vomit crowded his throat. “Now, let’s see what we can do with you, eh.”
He bent down, slapping David’s hands away. “Let me se-.” The man’s eyes rolled up in his head. He groaned, and fell, crushing David in a hot and stinking embrace.
The body lifted, an inch or two, and David stared into lifeless eyes. “Ah, he’s a heavy bastard,” someone muttered. The body dropped. “You know, the least you could do is help me get him off you.”
David pushed. The body rolled away, a knife in its back. A Verger’s knife. David looked into a boy’s face far younger than his own, but harder, even though he was smiling. “Ain’t no Verger, by the way. May tell you how I came by that knife one day, if you make it.” He reached out a hand and David grabbed it, scrambling to his feet. “You’re not going to last long down here, without help.”
“I’m not going to last long anywhere,” David said.
The boy crouched down and extracted the knife from the dead man’s spine. “Well, you’ve got a chance now, the name’s Lassiter.”
“David.”
“Well, David, you can come with me. I’ve a bolthole, away from all this noise. You’re welcome to share it.”
“And why would you do that?”
“Because two’s better than one here. Someone to watch your back. You wander through Mirkton alone and unknowing and… You want to be someone’s meat puppet, David?”
David shook his head.
“Then step to it. I’ve no desire for death tonight.” He kicked the corpse. “One kill’s enough, don’t you think?”
Lassiter led him away from the dim bulk of Mirkton and into the darker regions, where shanties lay broken and empty, and their boots crunched on glass, and kicked up a dust made of bone and death and desertion. Lassiter flashed a grin. “Here we’re alone, some parts of Mirkton even the scum avoid.”
Soon the paths they took were criss-crossed in gossamer threads.
David brushed past a web, and something stung his arm. He cursed, shaking out his hand to free it of the web, and was stung again. David slapped his palm down over the bite; whatever had bitten him smeared beneath his fingers.
“Spider,” Lassiter said. “Keep away from the webs. There’s a lot of them down here. Closer you get to the levee, and under the main part of the bridge. Mirkton was much bigger a couple of years back, but the spiders drove them out of the deeper parts. Some say that’s the Council’s doing, I don’t know about that, but it’s interesting that when the Vergers stopped patrolling this place the spiders started to swell in numbers. There’s still refuge to be found in a few of the spider territories if you know what you’re doing.” Lassiter puffed up his chest. “And I know what I’m doing.”
Another spider bit him. David snarled and squashed it definitively with his thumb. “Are you sure this place is safe?”
Lassiter laughed. “Nowhere’s safe down here, but it’s safer than most.”
They passed down long abandoned streets lined with dipping treacherous looking houses, their walls mould-black or furred with web, and finally reached Lassiter’s bolthole. There was some light here, a small electric lantern, the power taken, Lassiter told him, directly from the levee itself.
There were also a couple of paper-thin mattresses, and a few books stacked neatly in a corner, mostly pulp adventures: The Night Council , The Ragged Poet. David picked one up, a Night Council title. On the cover, Travis the Grave was fighting an Endym, its wing blades bloody. David stared at the lurid cover like it was a picture of home.