Читать онлайн «Roil»
Автор Trent Jamieson
Trent Jamieson
Roil
PART ONE
DISSOLUTION
Chapter 1
Since the founding of the first city, with a few obvious exceptions (see Connor Mcmahon, also Julian Hardacre), two political parties have ever battled for dominance. The Engineers and the Confluents. The Confluents were always regarded as too emotive, too populist in their endeavours, the Engineers too focused on civic structures and their construction whatever the cost to their workers and their people (see The Levees Built on Blood: Milde and Whyte, page 125). A gross simplification, perhaps, but all such political narratives are (if they are to survive) and both parties played upon this perception in each of the twelve metropolises.
Throughout the centuries, Confluent and Engineer would have torn each other apart, and on several occasions almost did (see The Right Bank Insurgency page 878), but always the Vergers stood between them, the knife bearers keeping a brutal peace.
That ended with the Dissolution.
Considering the Roil’s rapid expansion, and the stinging memory of the Grand Defeat (and the flood of refugees it brought with it), a decade prior, it was surprising it didn’t happen much sooner.
THE CITY OF MIRRLEES-ON-WEEP 300 MILES NORTH OF THE ROIL EDGE
Midnight, and Council Vergers reduced the front door to splinters. They dragged David Milde’s father onto the street. Kicked his legs out from under him. And, their long knives gleaming in the streetlight, slashed his throat.
David watched it all from his bedroom window with a cold impassivity fed by Carnival.
He slapped his face, once, twice. Hardly felt it. He’d taken the drug, as he often did, after his father had accused him of taking the drug. The argument had been loud and wild, and of utterly no consequence now.
They’d be coming for him next.
David hesitated as his father bled to death down below, the rain washed the blood away: it never stopped raining in Mirrlees, blood was always being washed away.Run.
Run.
Run.
David’s hands shook as he gripped the windowsill.
He blinked a heavy Carnival-induced blink. The world lumbered into a brutal sort of focus.
Bundles of Halloween orbs, strung down the street just the night before, coloured everything in reds and greens. Windows from here to almost the next suburb banged shut. Lights switched off.
David’s father lifted himself almost to his feet, his head loose on his neck; barely on his neck at all. Oh, what kind of strength the man possessed! But it meant nothing now. The Vergers kicked him back to the ground, where he lay and did not rise again, and David knew his father was dead.
Footsteps and the hard voices of men not needing nor desiring to hide their approach echoed up the stairs. David considered crawling under the bed. But they would find him, and drag him kicking and screaming out into the rain, and they would slash his throat, and he would lie there with his father.
