The cutthroat plummeted down towards the misty trees, his ridiculous dress flapping wildly about his ears—his screams now mingling with the feverish laughter of the madwoman in his mind. Green branches rushed up to meet him…
He hit sand.
Caulker opened his eyes to see John Anchor and a ring of Heshette riders staring down at him. A horse snorted nervously somewhere nearby.
Anchor grinned. “You ate the soul of an old midwife,” he said. “And you died her death at Rockwall Fortress.”
The cutthroat groaned. “I died her death?”
“Yes. With Cospinol’s soulpearls, you experience the soul’s death. Now, her…” He frowned, thinking. “What is the word? Essence. Yes, her essence lives inside you.” He laughed suddenly. “Makes you as strong as she was.”
Caulker’s arms and legs were trembling; his heart hammered in his chest. The scent of that cold mountain still seemed to linger around him. “It was horrible,” he said. “You killed her. You threw her off a cliff.”
“From the Rockwall battlements,” Anchor admitted. “Count Lat of Grenere asked me to dispatch this woman. So many infants had died in her care. All very suspicious.”
With some effort, Caulker rose shakily to his feet. He certainly didn’t feel any stronger than before. “I never want to experience that again,” he said.
“But you will,” Anchor said brightly. “Her last thoughts are yours now. When you sleep, I think you will dream this death many, many times. It is a small problem with Cospinol’s soulpearls—these nightmares.”
Caulker felt sick, trapped, beaten. Of all the gods and archons and warriors the giant claimed to have in his horde of ghosts, why had Caulker chosen that soulpearl? A murdering midwife! Had Anchor tricked him? The thought of reliving that fall again and again filled him with despair. Would he ever sleep peacefully again?
The Heshette declined to take soulpearls for themselves. Indeed, they now seemed to carry themselves with a degree of righteous aloofness.
Caulker silently cursed them all. The more he thought about it, the more sure he became that the big man had deliberately tricked him into choosing that worthless pearl. Anchor wasn’t nearly as stupid and garrulous as he pretended to be. He clearly had some plan for Caulker—and Caulker didn’t like that idea at all.
But if Anchor thought he could manipulate Jack Caulker, then he had seriously underestimated the cutthroat. Caulker hadn’t survived as long as he had without good instincts. He would find a way to turn the tables on the giant.
The seed of a plan began to take shape in the cutthroat’s mind.
The Heshette left their women with the elderly folk to steer the livestock around the eastern edge of Cinderbark Wood, while the mounted warriors accompanied Anchor and Caulker onwards, towards the trees. Soon the snarl of phosphorescent branches loomed before them in the fog like a toxic dream. At the very edge of the forest Anchor halted and addressed the others.
“I will go in first,” he said, “and clear a path for the horses, yes?” He bulled his huge shoulders then slammed his fists together. The huge rope quivered behind his harness.
And then he marched headlong into Cinderbark Wood.
A small smile tugged at one corner of Jack Caulker’s lips as he waited for the first poisonous thorn to bite the tethered giant.
Anchor’s rope snagged in the canopy above him, but he did not pay it any notice, dragging the rope onwards, further into the woodland. The petrified branches could only bend a little before snapping, showering down upon the big man like fragments of brightly glazed crockery. Anchor brushed this debris off his shoulders and harness without any apparent concern, kicking the larger branches aside.
Caulker watched and waited.
But the giant was unstoppable. He marched on into the fog, apparently immune to his toxic surroundings. His rope rent the canopy above him, snagging great colourful nests of branches, twigs, and thorns before ripping them free.
Caulker jerked backwards, just as the Heshette horsemen spurred their mounts forward after the giant. “Don’t take us in there,” he hissed to the rider in the saddle before him. “You’ll kill us both.”
“Where John Anchor goes, we follow,” the rider replied. “Hah!”
His gelding picked up speed, and a heartbeat later they were inside Cinderbark Wood.
The twelve riders formed a line with Ramnir in the lead. The Heshette leader kept a sensible distance behind the tethered giant to avoid the debris falling from the canopy, but he was often forced to leave the giant’s trail and choose a snaking route through the surrounding trees to avoid those tangles of painted stone which had already fallen.
Countless twisted branches reached out of the fog, but the Heshette riders guided their horses skillfully between them.
Anchor crashed on through the wood like a boar through a hedge, picking up pieces of the broken trees and tossing them aside. His hands and arms soon became stained with different-coloured gels, yet none of the poisons had any apparent effect on him.
Had the toxic forest lost its potency?
Caulker was soon to find out.
The party had traveled less than a quarter of a league inside Cinderbark Wood before they lost their first rider. He was one of the Rook Clan nomads the party had picked up during the previous night: a willowy young man with cynical eyes, barely older than a boy. Led onwards by Anchor, the Heshette had reached the apparent safety of a glade, an oasis amidst the riotous colours where thick dark roots wormed in and out of the cool white sands. The nomad’s little tan mare lost its footing in the soft sand and faltered, shifting two paces out from the Heshette column while it regained its balance. The beast’s front fetlock brushed momentarily against a glutinous dark blue root.
The poison acted quickly and violently. From the saddle of his own mount, two positions further back along the line, Caulker watched in fascination as the afflicted mare suddenly reared.
The young Heshette rider kept his seat while he fought to control his panicking horse. Somehow he managed to stop it from bolting, but nothing could be done to save the animal. Tiny red blisters swelled on its fetlock, turning black and hard even as Caulker watched. An odor like spoiled meat filled the glade, accompanied by the sound of crisping skin. The bucking mare let loose a hideous scream. With its eyes wild with fear and froth spraying from its mouth, it spun around and then lunged drunkenly towards a dense thicket of pale lemon-and-peach-coloured branches on one side of the glade.
Rather than leap free, the young rider remained in the saddle and tried to steer his mount away from the toxic trees. Hearing the commotion from his position at the far end of the glade, John Anchor turned and bellowed out a warning. He rushed forward to help the stricken horseman, but it was already too late.
Horse and rider plunged into the thicket.
The young Heshette’s mount collapsed, and both horse and rider fell amidst the sharp glowing branches. Black blisters now covered most of the mare’s forelegs and breast, corpuscles which burst and streamed milky fluids across its hide. It snorted and kicked wildly, smashing up the petrified thicket around it.
The rider had been thrown clear, but not of the thicket. He managed to stand, and then to stumble back out of the branches, shards of broken twigs protruding from his naked arms. He managed five steps before the poisons began to change him. Yellow-and-peach-coloured welts bloomed on both his arms, spreading across his skin more rapidly than Caulker would have believed possible. He gasped and fell forwards into the sand, clutching his throat as he struggled to breathe.
A bulky warrior with long black hair dismounted and rushed to aid his fallen comrade, but Ramnir barked a command: “Don’t touch him—his skin is coated with poison.”
The warrior hesitated.
Ramnir wheeled his own mount and took up his bow. He loaded an arrow, aiming it down at the gasping horseman.
Strangled screams came from the poisoned man. A black, swollen tongue lolled amidst yellow froth in his mouth. The sk
in on his arms hardened and began to split like cracked leather, revealing white nodules in the open wounds beneath.
Ramnir loosed his arrow, piercing the fallen man’s neck.
The young Heshette gave a pitiful gurgle, then went still.
The glade fell silent, but for the nervous snorting of the warriors’ horses. The poisoned man’s mount lay dead among the broken thicket, its corpse still steaming in the cold fog. Hard black blisters covered its hide like rook’s eyes.
“Don’t touch the corpses,” Ramnir warned.
John Anchor turned to him. “This place is no good for your horses. A man might still avoid the trees, but the animals are skittish and unpredictable—it is not so easy to warn them of the dangers, I think.”
The Heshette leader shook his head. “Our animals stay with us.”
“Then we must hurry.” Anchor pointed to where a faintly glowing bank of dense yellow cloud was drifting through the glassy trees towards them. “A mist approaches.”
With Anchor leading, the party of warriors tightened their grips on their reins and urged their horses deeper into Cinderbark Wood.
A soft growl greeted Rachel as she swung open the circus wagon door. There, on an empty sleeping cot, sat a small dog. A pathetic little creature with a scabrous coat and ragged, chewed ears, he glared up at Rachel with tiny black eyes.
“Poor thing.” Rachel scooped the dog up.
He tried to bite her, but lacked the strength to do any harm.
“Where’s your mistress?” Rachel ruffled the pup’s ears. “Has she abandoned you, eh?”
Of the puppeteer there was no sign, yet all of her possessions remained undisturbed within the gaudy carriage. The wagon was much more spacious than it had appeared from outside. The front half had been given over to living space: the narrow cot, some wall-mounted cabinets full of clothes and books and pots and pans, a small sink and a bucket, and even a neat little potbelly stove for heating and cooking. Beyond this, a door opened into a storage space at the rear where Mina Greene kept the treasures of her trade. Rachel moved towards it.
Trench took one look inside and said, “Check for provisions. There’s nothing to be gained by searching through that junk.”
“I saw this circus in Sandport,” Rachel said. “I just need to check on something.” She squeezed into a narrow aisle between a wall of packing crates on the right-hand side and shelves on the left. The shelves were crammed with all manner of strange objects—hound skulls and monkey paws, beads and carved wooden figurines, glass spheres and bottles, and bell jars in which floated bizarrely misshapen creatures. On display were dead fish with jaws full of needlelike teeth, tiny skeletons, and grotesque creatures with too many eyes or limbs. Some of them even looked partly human.
“Even in my day,” Trench observed from his seat on the cot, “Deepgate received its fair share of showmen and tricksters. These are nothing but the fetuses of camels and other beasts. There’s no magic here.”
“This wagon came to Sandport,” Rachel said. “The show-woman displayed something…” She shrugged. “Something I’ve never seen before. It looked like a living demon.”
Trench shook his head. “Unlikely,” he said. “Hell’s creatures can survive as shades for a while, if they keep themselves in darkness, but for them to physically walk upon the earth they require another source of power. That’s why I required your friend’s body to carry my soul beyond Deepgate, and why the Mesmerists must spread their Veil over the lands they plan to conquer…” He hesitated, as though considering another option, and then finally said, “No, this show-woman simply tricked the crowd.”
Rachel continued to search through the packing crates, looking for the one Greene had displayed to the Sandporters. And then she saw it, stacked on the top of the pile. “Help me down with this, will you?”
Between them they lowered the crate, and carried it back outside where they set it down upon the white sands. Rachel pried the lid off with her knife to reveal the wretched creature cowering within.
Trench hissed when he saw the contents of the crate. “I had hoped not to see one of these things here.” He rubbed a hand across his furrowed brow. “I would advise killing it quickly, but that won’t be easy.”
The creature in the crate was breathing in wet gasps. It had assumed the same form Rachel had first seen in Sandport: a knot of flesh and muscle and wood combined. White eyes peered up at them from a bulbous lump which might have been a head. It made a pitiful whimpering sound.
“Then it is a demon?” Rachel asked.
“The term ‘demon’ is meaningless—it applies to all of Hell’s creatures. All demons are simply physical incarnations of souls on earth.” His eyes narrowed on the creature. “By rights they require a bloodmist to survive in this realm, but this…no, not this.”
“What is it?”
“An abomination. A Mesmerist experiment. King Menoa has long been trying to construct a form for his warriors that could survive on earth without relying on the Veil. He had limited success with shape-shifters such as this one, part living and part dead. However, they lack the will to maintain a single physical shape for long because they are unable to resist persuasion.”
“Greene turned it into a chair before the mob.”
The angel grunted. “It will assume any shape you order it to, within certain limits. Smaller objects must be denser, larger ones less substantial, as it can only stretch its flesh so far.” He inclined his head at the thing. “Try it and see.”
“No,” the creature wailed. “It hurts. Send me back to Hell.”
“Mesmerist filth,” Trench spat. “Menoa sent you here to spy.”
The thing’s bulbous head shook. “No,” it moaned. “I have been the victim of sorcery. The mortal woman who owns this wagon summoned me here. I was powerless to resist.”
“Mina Greene is a thaumaturge?” Rachel asked.
“One of the greatest.”
Rachel cast an instinctive glance around the forest. “And where is she now?”
The demon’s many muscles flexed and glistened. “She left six days ago to look for a door into Hell. This forest is riddled with them: old doors through which many phantasms have passed.”
Trench scoffed. “Yes, phantasms. Portals like those are useless to anything except ghosts. No human could pass through such a vaporous gate.”
“But she has help,” the demon said.
The puppy in Rachel’s arms gave a low growl.
The shape-shifter’s eyes widened momentarily. “I have said too much,” it said. “Please change me into something small and quick—a hare, perhaps, or a bat. Let me go to the Veil.”
Rachel studied the puppeteer’s dog. Its growl had been…opportune, if nothing else. Could this mangy creature also be a shape-shifter? But the pup ignored her stare, lapping at the assassin’s thumb instead. Rachel sighed. This forest was making her paranoid.
Cinderbark Wood remained deathly still. Nothing moved among the painted boles and soft sands except a few wisps of fog creeping in from the north.
Fog?
In the desert?
“Ignore everything it says,” Trench said. “Menoa’s creatures can’t help but lie. If you don’t wish to kill the thing now, I propose we put it to use.” He leaned over the crate.
The demon cried out again.
Before Rachel could stop him, Trench had whispered a word into the demon’s ear. The thing in the crate screamed as its shape began to change. Its bones folded inwards with cracking sounds, and its flesh turned from pink and red to the colour of raw steel. With every heartbeat it grew smaller and its cries became more distant.
“What are you doing to it?” Rachel cried.
“We’ve walked far enough without a decent weapon,” Trench growled. He reached inside the crate, and then withdrew his hand.
He was holding a sword: a shining steel weapon with a plain leather-bound hilt and copper-coloured pommel. Rainbow colours swept across the blade as the angel examined it b
y the light of phosphorescent branches. “This is an example of one of King Menoa’s first experiments to fuse the souls of the dead with corporeal materials,” he said.
Rachel stared in horror. “Is the demon conscious? Does it still feel?”
“It does,” Trench replied. “But do not pity it. It is more deceitful and cunning than it appears. It has intimate knowledge of the shapes of many weapons and can change between them in a heartbeat. Such creatures were once given to Pandemerian nobles as gifts—they can be far stronger than normal steel or glass, and capable of adapting to any combat situation. Shiftblades, we call them in the Maze.”
Rachel dragged her eyes away from the strange sword. A thought occurred to her. “Menoa’s first experiments?”
Trench grunted. “He moved on.”
Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel Page 17