Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  Harper chose her words carefully. “It allows me to serve you.”

  The king made a sign in the air with his gauntlet. At this unvoiced command, a witchsphere rumbled out onto the balcony from one of the citadel doors, its metal panels shining dully under the bloody skies. It rolled across the floor towards the king, stopped, and then began to turn itself inside out.

  Harper looked away. She heard the click of panels opening, followed by a hiss and then the brutal sound of snapping bones. When she glanced up again, the sphere had become a tangle of hag’s skin and filthy hair, full of eager white eyes. “King Menoa,” it said with a sigh.

  “Consider the strengths of adaptation,” Menoa said to his engineer. “Your current form serves me well enough, yet another might serve me better. Take your own country for example.” He turned to the witchsphere and commanded, “Show us Pandemeria as it was.”

  At once the sphere began to change again. The witches untangled themselves from one another, their withered bodies flowing together to form a single membrane. This membrane began to expand across the living balcony. Flesh bubbled and became earth, a representation in miniature of the fields, hills, and mountains Harper had known so well. In other places the skin split apart to form arroyos, gullies, and wide valleys. Clear fluid seeped from pores into these many hollows, marking the Moine lakes and Sill River. Tiny black trees sprouted like hairs. Lesions swelled and hardened to become boulders or buildings or runnels of glacial scree.

  Harper identified the city of Cog, her home before the plague and the war and the great floods had transformed Pandemeria. She recognized the patchwork of streets and squares now forming before her eyes: Highcliffe and the Theater District. She saw the Sill River, and where it split into two branches that curled around the city like a moat. And still the witchsphere grew around her, filling her vision. Revolution Plaza solidified before her eyes, the great white cathedral shining in the twilight—exactly as it had done before the Mesmerist Veil. She located Canary Street

  , Minnow Street

  , and the Offal Quarter. And her own house—the house she’d bought with Tom.

  How long ago now?

  Ten years, or a thousand? Involuntarily she clutched her chest. How much of this was real? The witches were clearly drawing on Harper’s own memories to form this illusion. She was gazing into her own dream.

  “Now show us Pandemeria as it is today,” the king said.

  “No, please, my Lord.” Harper closed her eyes, but the scene before her did not change. She no longer had eyelids to shut out this changing vision. Menoa had made a simple alteration to her physical form. Now he was chuckling behind his mask. “You want to see this,” he insisted.

  Cog Island’s skies began to darken with red mist: the Mesmerist Veil. It seemed to Harper that she was watching from a great height as the shades of Cog’s plague victims rose from their mass graves out in Knuckletown Quarry and drifted towards the city in vast numbers. In moments they had crossed the Sill Bridge and were pouring into the city. Strange shadows flitted under the eaves of buildings while from the east could be heard the braying of hounds.

  “You remember this?” King Menoa asked. “You recall the improvements my Icarates made?”

  Harper remembered. Now unable to separate dreams from actual events, she saw the Icarates rise from the very ground itself. An army of warriors in queer ceramic armour, they moved from house to house, smashing down doors and dragging Cog’s citizens out into the glistening streets. The Icarates slaughtered the weak and the elderly, and herded the rest out towards their flensing machine beyond Knuckletown, where a great red funnel of vapor was now twisting slowly above the plague graves.

  The graves had crumbled inwards, leaving dark open pits in the red earth, and now the Mesmerists’ Maze-forged hordes crawled out: men of flesh and iron and glass, witchspheres, Iolites, and dogcatchers. Claws raked the wet soil, turning it into a bloody morass. White teeth flashed in the semidarkness.

  Out they came in waves, in impossible numbers, a seething tide which swept into the doomed city. Time blurred. Days and weeks passed in mere moments and the scene changed again. New constructions now towered over the city: the Plague Portal Collar, the Terminus, and the Great Wheel through which ten thousand slaves supplied power to the new Highcliffe Flensing Towers. The Mesmerist Veil covered Pandemeria as far as Harper could see. Recent rain showers had drenched the land and now the crimson fields and furrows around the island city glistened like open wounds. The vanguard had moved out of sight, far across the Merian Basin to the north, yet hordes of reserve warriors continued to pour out of Cog City. They moved like rivers across the landscape, drawing power from the red earth.

  Storm clouds were gathering in the north. Lightning flickered across the horizon among sheets of rain and great columns of black smoke.

  Rys!

  These fires heralded the approach of the god of flowers and knives. Rys had brought his armies down from the far north to meet the Mesmerist threat, and now the flames from his great war machines lit the horizon. The two armies had clashed on the northern shores of Lake Larnaig, outside the gates of Rys’s own city, Coreollis. Here King Menoa’s demons had been halted at last.

  The witchsphere would not dare to display that battle for fear of enraging King Menoa. The Mesmerist leader had been soundly beaten at Coreollis. Instead the view remained focused on Cog: that skewed mound of blood-drenched houses and spires crouched upon Sill River Island. Four bridges connected the heart of Cog to its outlying suburbs on either side of the two river channels: Knuckletown to the east, Port Sellen to the west. A steam locomotive had been left abandoned on Opera Bridge, its empty wagons now half full of water.

  For it was raining in torrents.

  “Rys brought this rain to cleanse Pandemeria’s blooded earth,” Menoa growled, his deep voice resounding like echoes in a cave. “Yet he underestimated the Mesmerist power to adapt. His deluge merely changed blooded land into a blooded sea.”

  Harper sensed time shift again in the scene before her. The Sill River swelled and quickly burst its banks. Both Knuckletown and Port Sellen disappeared under the rising waters. The river itself had become a raging brown torrent. Floating detritus and corpses snagged on the underside of Opera Bridge. And still the floodwaters rose, drowning the low-lying streets and plazas, and the wide plains of the Merian Basin, until only the highest city districts remained unaffected. Cog Island, once merely an outcrop of high rock between two branches of a river, had now become an island in the middle of a shallow sea.

  The Mesmerists made ships. Under the guidance of chanting Icarates, souls from the plague graves were allocated power from the Veil. These dead soon lost their own frail human forms. The Icarates changed them slowly, painfully, into great empty shells of bone, flesh, and metal. Each new vessel cried out in agony and despair until the Icarates stifled its voice within the living steel.

  And the troop deployment continued. Legions marched into the newly forged ships. Belching smoke and fire, the Mesmerist vessels sailed out over the flooded city and the plains beyond, while on the brooding horizon Rys’s storm of war flashed and rumbled.

  Menoa said, “I have shown you this for a reason.” At another of the king’s gestures, the witchsphere began to collapse and recover its normal form, sucking in the Veil, the land, and the waters like inhaled air.

  “Here in the Maze, Form is merely a manifestation of Will,” the king went on. “And yet you people choose to loll in your own dreary memories, assuming the forms you are used to, rather than exploring the unknown. There has been a glut of power in the Maze recently, and yet Hell has grown stagnant despite this potential.” The glass mask continued to flux in the crimson light, the features changing, always changing. “Your kind has no vision,” Menoa said. “So I must impose my vision upon you, and by doing so, set you free.”

  “Yes, my Lord.” Fear crept up Harper’s spine. She had seen the frightening things Menoa had constructed to take his war into th
e world of men.

  “Your fingers, for example,” Menoa said. “Are they suitably designed to fine-tune the mechanics of our ideas?”

  “I—” Before Harper could properly respond, her hands began to change. Her fingers stretched and thinned and turned to silver. She cried out as she felt her nerves die in painful bursts. Crystals formed on each of her fingertips: Mesmeric devices to measure and alter the soul harmonics of Menoa’s warrior machines. Her knuckles swelled into irregular metal lumps, then ticked and whirred as clockwork mechanisms began to move inside them. Her wrists hardened and began to turn black. “Please…” she gasped. “Stop this.”

  But Menoa did not stop. He stooped over her, his clawlike fingers directing the changes in her physical form. A hundred faces seemed to move behind his black glass mask. “Understand that you will become anything I desire,” he said. “If it suits my plans to alter any soul in my domain, then I shall do so without hesitation.” He frowned at her and made another sweeping movement with his gauntlet. The devices on her fingers began to retract and change shape once more.

  Harper heard the witchsphere hissing with pleasure, but she could no longer see it. Menoa was changing the composition of her eyes. Her vision became suddenly fragmented, like the view through the facets of a gemstone. She felt her back crimp and buckle, before she sensed something hard and flexible growing out of her spine. This protrusion split and then divided again and again.

  What was he changing her into?

  The world around her seemed to expand. Menoa’s mask loomed over her, black against the seething crimson clouds, as though peering down at her from a great height.

  “You are nothing but an insect,” King Menoa announced.

  The sound of buzzing filled Harper’s ears. She glanced down at herself to see a clutch of chitinous shards protruding from her newly developed thorax. Her limbs had gone, replaced by bushels of wire-like tendrils. Sparks of agony shot through her freshly altered nerves.

  Menoa scooped up his servant in one gauntlet and carried her to the balustrade. “Fly to the Processor,” he said, “and tell the Prime to prepare the Forming Ovens for another archon. I will delay the first strike until this angel has been suitably reinforced. Do this quickly and I might consider returning your arms and legs.” He cast Harper out into the skies over Hell.

  She was flying, buzzing, clicking—a whirlwind of new pains and perceptions, yet Harper no longer possessed lungs with which to scream. She was trapped in a thin shell, carried by wings as frail as paper. The Maze reeled around her; she witnessed it as a dozen subtly different views of the same terrible landscape. Behind her the towers of the Ninth Citadel rose up like a flayed figure, glistening and seething with transmuted souls. Canals looped around its base like red ribbons, through which Icarates plied their heavy black barges.

  In awkward fits, her fragile wings carried her through a bloodmist above one of the Icarates’ flensing machines. Harper felt a sudden surge of energy as her newly forged body drank in countless fractured souls. Thus enriched, she banked around Menoa’s citadel and made for the Processor.

  The great building at the heart of the Mesmerist War Effort towered over the surrounding canals, ziggurats, and creeping machines. It was an inverted pyramid, said to be built from more than a million souls transformed into black stone. Harper could well believe it, for to facilitate the arcane processes within its living walls the Icarates had not removed the voices from these souls.

  The Processor howled and screamed. Even the steady chanting of countless Icarates and the sound of the forges and bellows inside could not mask those unholy cries. Steam billowed from the open hatch to one of the Forming Ovens, while a stream of rock and ore rained down from the heavens and was collected in the Processor’s central depression. Evidently the Icarates were still gathering raw materials from the world of the living.

  As Harper flew nearer she saw the Mesmerist warrior priests backing away from the open oven. They hobbled across the smooth surface with their backs hunched under the weight of the white enamel armour that both shielded and powered their ancient bodies. Blue sparks dripped from mushroom-shaped protrusions on their heavy shoulder guards and back plates, striking the ground around their white boots in explosive bursts.

  Now Harper could see why the Icarates were retreating from the steaming hatch.

  Something was climbing out.

  Two skeletal hands rose out of the Forming Oven. Fashioned to resemble the hands of dead men, and yet larger than the mightiest of oak trees, the bony fingers gripped the lip of the building’s summit with enough force to make the entire Processor howl.

  Harper was about to witness the birth of an arconite: an iron-and bone-forged automaton built around an angel’s soul.

  Plumes of smoke hissed from the Processor’s innards as the skeletal giant continued to clamber out of the Forming Oven. Its skull and wings towered over the pit, the creature’s newly forged bones and tendons glistening with oil and plasma. Engines thumped heavily in its ribcage as they pumped arcane chemicals and blood through the network of pipes intertwined throughout the whole of its body. It was dragging hundreds of chains behind it, the links still glowing red from the ovens in which they had been forged.

  Now free of the Forming Oven, the arconite stood on the Processor summit, unfurled its vast wings, and roared.

  Even from up here, Harper could see that those wings were useless, naught but tattered grey flesh—an affectation the Icarates had created to help bind the archon’s soul into this mechanical body. Even months of torture could not entirely cleanse an angel of the memory of its living body. Of all Hell’s creatures, only an angel could not be altered by the sheer force of Menoa’s will. In death, they retained something more than ordinary mortals, something that resisted even the king’s formidable powers of persuasion.

  And so the Mesmerist leader had resorted to this barbarism, this fusion of the physical and the metaphysical that bound an archon’s soul to metal and bone.

  The Icarates took up the automaton’s chains and guided it to the edge of the Processor and down a ramp to join its eleven brothers in the vast holding area. This pen formed an open quadrangle amid the Mesmerist city, among those great black ziggurats and towers, rising like shards of obsidian, which stretched for as far as the eye could see. Red mists rose from a thousand flensing machines, while Menoa’s queer mix of slaves, warriors, and priests plied the deep canals in barges or crawled, limped, and rolled along thoroughfares. A pack of liver-skinned dogcatchers left a Ziggurat of Worship and splashed through one of the shallower canals, howling and clicking their teeth as their masters drove them onwards. Many such packs had been dispatched lately as King Menoa increased his hunt, not just for archons, but for pieces of the shattered god.

  Harper flew to the top of the Processor and down through one of the smaller Icarates’ doorways. She passed through corridors of blue wires and sulphurous pools from which hands reached up to clutch at her. Yet in this current shape she was quick enough to elude their grasp.

  In time she came to the Bastion of Voices.

  It was a high chamber constructed of translucent lozenges, each one forged from a soul of rare insight. In the center of the room the king’s twelve Prime Icarates sat motionless in a circle of thrones arranged upon a dais, listening solemnly to the whispers from the glass. Tubes ran from valves in their bone-coloured armour and disappeared into the black glass floor, where further ancient seals had been engraved. Unlike most Icarates, these lords did not wear helmets. Their ancient faces had the pallor and texture of dead fish-flesh, while their eyes and mouths had been sewn up with copper wire.

  Harper could not understand the whispers all around her, yet the voices became still more subdued as she approached. Her presence here had clearly not gone unnoticed.

  The engineer tried to find her own voice, but her current shape was still new to her. She made a startled clicking sound, and then settled on the floor before the dais.

  The arconite
s now equal the Prime, the voices of the chamber announced. We have achieved everything Menoa has commanded. Twelve giants will walk upon unblooded ground, each of them as powerful as a mortal army. Our thoughts are their thoughts. Relay the king’s message and retreat, insect. War is at hand.

  Harper tried to speak again, but no sound came out except a fibrillating scratch. Her bristled limbs twitched in frustration. Her carapace made a noise like dry paper rustling. Why had Menoa not issued her with a throat to declare his demands?

  He neglected to provide you with a throat, the chamber said, to prevent you from lying. Your mind is glass to us. It is enough to merely recall Menoa’s conversation with you.

  So Harper remembered her audience on the king’s balcony, and through her thoughts the Bastion of Voices came to understand what Menoa expected it to do.

  At last the chamber said, Tell the king we will construct a body for another iron angel, but warn him that there is much to do. Ore must be gathered from Pandemeria in abundance; a thousand souls will need to be re-formed; it will be necessary to harvest blood and bone from the flensing machines.

  Leaving the silent Icarates upon their thrones, Harper took to the air again and retraced her path through the Processor. Outside, the newly forged arconite, still glistening and steaming from the Forming Ovens, was being chained to the floor of the holding area among the rest of its kin. These twelve giants squatted on the ground, their bony arms wrapped around their knees, in complete subservience to their Icarate masters. Flocks of airborne shades had already come to feed upon their great tattered wings, attracted by the living blood within them.