Free Roil by Trent Jamieson

until Chapman. Old tech, not even radios, Stade has been investing the city’s considerable sums in the Project, and the Project alone.” Cadell laughed, he patted his top pocket, and put his ear against the nearest cabin door. “I’ve got our tickets. I don’t think it matters how we board. As long as we present these.” He nodded his head. “Now, this cabin sounds empty. In we go.”
    Stade stood before the broken door.
    Halloween, what better time to be surrounded by these dead and whispering things, he thought. Well, not so dead. The Old Men were simply that… old. Very, very old. And hungry.
    Stade examined the door, as he had from time to time over the past two years. It was cracked through the middle, the locks shattered.
    He regarded the door next to it, its bolt was intact, the eight seals unbroken, the same for the other six doors but that first one. He put his hand against the heavy wood. It was cold. He put his ear against it and heard the endless muttering. Stay down here long enough and you heard it everywhere. After a while you could hear it throughout the tower. Though it was only here he had a chance of gleaning words from the noise. The Old Men never slept in their cages, or if they slept it was a restless chattering sleep.
    He’d had one of the doors opened once, the key that opened the lock was said to be protection enough from the room’s denizen. Though he’d held a revolver too. He’d seen the withered thing within the room, its eyes boiling with rage, lips moving, muttering. “Shut the door.” It spat. “Shut the door, or I’ll suck out your bones.” And Stade had, forgetting the protection of the gun and holding the key in his hands. He was swift, but not swift enough, for he had seen it. A little humility had infected him then, but not much.
    Stade ran a hand down the broken door. The metal was cold, even now, even after these past two years.
    The Mildes and Paul had done this. Two years ago, after they had freed the Old Man, Stade knew Dissolution was the only adequate response. And while he should have enjoyed it, even he quailed at such bloodshed. These were good capable men. Debate he could handle, but this had amounted to an utter betrayal of the Project. Warwick had sacrificed his own brother to this.
    The problem had been to deal with the Confluents without admitting to the general public that the Old Men existed. Stade would have acted faster, but Warwick’s caution had stayed his hand, there’d been no mad dash into the North, and the fact that Cadell had proven something less than an asset to the Confluents.
    Cadell had not destroyed the Roil, he had not reactivated the Engine, and Stade knew why: the same reason that the Project had to succeed. The Engine was a weapon of last resort, a weapon that the Old Men feared. After all, it had caged them here as punishment for daring to use it.
    “Cadell,” he said. “How did they get you out? What madness drove them to give you freedom?”
    The other question he did not ask. How Stade’s men had not managed to catch him. Stade had lost more Vergers to that task than any other, their cracked and cleaned bones more often than not left stacked outside his offices, sometimes with little effigies of Stade resting upon the heap and, one time, a single red rose.
    The broken door, of course, did not answer.

Chapter 13
    Who knows what darkness lurks in the heart of the Roil? Who knows what sleeps within its cities, and dreams?
    Travis knows.
AF Scott – Travis the Grave series introduction.
    The bleak landscape extended for hundreds of miles in every direction and every mile was crowded with such inimical life. This had been farmland for centuries, whole hundred mile long tracts of it, feeding the voracious hunger of the Twelve Metropolises. But those days, while but a couple of decades gone, had been wiped almost completely from the land. The Roil alone fed here; a single shadow ecology where no crops or livestock could