Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  The winged lizard swooped low over the Blind, and then thrashed its wings to slow itself. With a sound like the wind blowing through crystal chimes, it settled on the ground beside Harper.

  Call me Forgotten, it said. The king has sent me to direct this battle and supply him with visions of our victory.

  “He sent a spy to do that?”

  Forgotten clicked its beak. A spy who has seen much conflict. I carried the news of the Broken Peak skirmish to Menoa, and of the destruction of the Third and Fourth Citadels. I have observed Hasp on many battlefields, the Lake of Temples, the Garden of Bones.

  “Then you’re a harbinger of ill luck.”

  Luck is meaningless. I have Menoa’s authority, engineer. He required a leader with combat experience. You have none. The great glass lizard then turned its long head towards the doomed castle, momentarily turning a deep shade of red as a surge of blood passed through its clear veins. Then it sent a vision to the waiting demons.

  Harper registered the unvoiced command in her mind. Forgotten had conjured an image of a battlefield—this very same battlefield—in which the Legion of the Blind rushed forward to tear Hasp’s castle into fragments. They would assault the god’s soul in one powerful strike, relying on brute savagery to bring its manifested defenses down.

  And the Blind obeyed without question. As one, they charged across the open quadrangle, their claws reaching out towards the tired stone and battered iron facades.

  The castle shimmered and changed.

  Hundreds of doorways appeared along the base of its walls, stone portals leading into the bowels of the building. Hasp had dismissed his defenses with one sweep of thought, leaving his own soul exposed to the advancing horde.

  Why? Harper suspected a trap. What horrors were waiting to greet the attackers in those dark passages?

  But Forgotten’s thoughts still shrilled loudly in every mind able to receive them. Hasp has relented. He hopes for a quick death. He sent another vision to the Blind, urging them to pour inside and rip out the heart of the building.

  The demons streamed into the castle at a furious pace, hacking the living masonry apart as they went.

  “Wait!” Harper shouted to Forgotten. This reckless assault was foolish. Hasp must have preserved something of his power. What traps did he have hidden within that battered old castle? What could possibly repel so many invaders?

  A heartbeat later she received her answer. The Lord of the First Citadel possessed no secret legion, no manifested warriors to fight for his cause. All that remained of his power—of his very soul—stood naked before them now. Hasp had nothing left but his own tired castle.

  And he used it.

  The nest of passages he had conjured under his battlements now gave way under the great weight of the building. With a riotous crack and rumble of stone, the entire foundation of the castle crumpled. The whole fortress trembled and lurched and plunged thirty feet into the rubble of its lowest floors, crushing the Blind who had already ventured inside. Clouds of red dust erupted and rolled over the remaining demon hordes.

  He has diminished himself.

  Harper recognized an aura of astonishment in the lizard’s thoughts. What Hasp had just done was incomprehensible. He had destroyed a substantial part of his manifested soul. By doing so, he had crippled himself.

  All this just to destroy a fraction of the demon horde? Hasp’s actions would only quicken his inevitable defeat. Perhaps Forgotten had been correct after all? The god had simply chosen to die.

  The demons who had escaped this partial collapse now rushed forward with renewed vigor, as if they had suddenly tasted promised blood.

  The castle changed again.

  A second line of doorways appeared under the battlements, occupying what had formerly been the second storey of the building but had now sunk to ground level. He was trying the same trick twice.

  Forgotten sent a warning vision to the horde. There was no need to sacrifice more of the Blind. They must ignore this trap and remain outside. The winged Iolite ordered his army to attack the facing wall directly, thus denying Hasp the oblivion he sought.

  Harper stared at these new doorways. They were as numerous as the ones before, apparently identical, and yet there was something different about them—something odd about the shadows within.

  Suddenly it dawned on her what the god had done, but by then it was too late.

  This time Hasp had not simply conjured more passages into the heart of his fortress. He had willed away the bulk of the building’s remaining foundations. The facade had only appeared solid. In reality it had acted as a disguise to conceal what lay behind. Now the thin outer walls collapsed, revealing nothing but a vast cavern underneath the front of the castle. It looked as though a huge bite had been taken out of the lowest part of the building.

  With fully half of its foundations gone the castle tilted, precariously, towards the attackers. It balanced there for two heartbeats, its vast shadow looming over the Legion of the Blind. And then the whole building fell forward like a toppled tree. It slammed into the army, crushing innumerable demons to dust.

  Perhaps ten or twenty thousand of the Blind now lay beneath that rubble, while Hasp’s castle had received little damage beyond what the god had already done to it himself.

  Forgotten’s glass wings clashed. Its breast blushed red. This god is killing himself, it said.

  He would rather die by his own hand than let the Blind cut his soul out from within.

  The dramatic changes Hasp had been making to his manifested soul required a lot of will, but by diminishing himself each time, he had conserved his energy for each attack. Each transformation reduced the size of Hasp’s fortress, and thereby reduced the amount of power he required to hold the remains of the structure together. But this tactic was self-defeating. Like the serpent who ate its own tail, Hasp was consuming himself.

  To confuse his opponents? Or to delay them, to keep them here while the younger angel escapes?

  Forgotten now rose into the air with a mighty swoop of its wings, its beak snapping at the scattering demons to maintain order. The Blind had lost some of their eyes in the collapse of the fortress, and now the survivors were fighting over those that remained. The toppled building in their midst had been temporarily forgotten.

  The glass lizard reacted with fury, assaulting the horde with images of torture and punishment so savage that Harper recoiled and subconsciously raised her shield to ward them off. The terrible vision worked as intended, quelling the rebellion among the Blind.

  Hasp would die now, Harper was sure. His castle lay on its side in ruins. Its spires had sheared off and crumbled to the ground; the very backbone of the building had snapped. The trapped god could not hope to instigate another successful collapse from these remains. To do so now would not postpone his inevitable death, for millions of the demons still waited behind the vanguard.

  And yet the castle changed again.

  More doorways appeared along its buckled walls, scores of them.

  Was this simply arrogance or pride? Or was this a final desperate attempt to diminish the last of his soul and thus end his life?

  Destroy it! Forgotten raged. It showed Menoa’s army a vision of a single bloody heart, surrounded by a circle of teeth.

  The Legion of the Blind responded with savage lust.

  But this time they met resistance.

  Harper hissed, “Oh, god.” From out of the castle doorways poured those demons who had been trapped by the building’s collapse. Somehow, Hasp had protected them within his castle walls. By enveloping these fallen creatures within his own soul, he had temporarily consumed them. Their simple minds had become a part of his mind, and therefore subject to his will. The god needed no power to create a legion of his own. He had simply stolen part of King Menoa’s army.

  And now these briefly buried demons, compelled by the mind of a cunning god, set upon their simple-minded comrades. It was twenty thousand against a million—a battle Hasp could
not win.

  And yet he almost did. Those of the Blind under the god’s influence sought out the eyes of their former comrades. They attacked in organized packs while their opponents brawled for dominance among their own peers. Within moments Hasp’s demons had taken one eye, and then a second and a third. With each new acquisition their foes grew weaker and more disorganized. Soon they began to panic.

  Forgotten flew overhead, flinging down desperate visions of furnaces and boiling lakes of poison at the Blind who fled, or turned in confusion to fight against their own side. But Hasp’s demons were immune to such onslaughts. The god’s sheer force of will kept them firmly bound to his desires. After all, they were now a part of his soul.

  Twenty thousand against a million. They cut a path through Menoa’s army like a river of liquid obsidian across a field of cool rock. By now they had stolen almost all of the Blind’s eyes, and the bulk of the opposing army was in chaos.

  Menoa was losing the fight.

  Harper flexed her glass tail and slithered down into the quadrangle, using her shield to push her way through the panicked throng. Menoa had given her a spear, but she lacked the skill to use it. In Pandemeria she had served the Mesmerists as a metaphysical engineer. She had never been a warrior.

  But she understood the Mesmerists’ arcane technology better than anyone except Menoa himself. To control his stolen legion, Hasp needed to maintain a psychic link with them. This required a great deal of concentration. If the link could be broken…

  Her sceptre could be turned towards this purpose. The Mesmerists had developed Screamers, powerful psychic weapons designed to disrupt a soul’s grip of its manifested reality. Icarates sometimes used them to shatter Middens and reach powerful souls hiding inside. Such force would not be nearly enough to destroy an archon’s grip of his reality—she could not damage Hasp’s castle even in its current state—but she might be able to disrupt the link to his hijacked demons.

  As Harper neared the fallen fortress, she raised her sceptre and let the device taste the souls around it. Crystal lights sparkled within the glass orb and she saw a vision of the god, deep in his castle.

  —Alone, seated in a chair with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, his face lined with exertion—a young woman standing nearby. His woman? No visible sign of the second angel. On his way to the First Citadel?

  Harper activated the Screamer. At the high frequency to which she had coaxed it, it emitted a blast of psychic energy so powerful as to compress the air around it. There was a flash, and the engineer’s own thoughts blanked.

  Silence.

  It took Menoa’s army a heartbeat to recover from the shock, but much longer for Forgotten to force them back into battle. Hasp’s demons no longer reacted to anything. They simply stood motionless and died under the claws of their former comrades.

  Harper surveyed the battlefield. Menoa’s army had been mostly destroyed, with fully eight-tenths of the Legion of the Blind wounded or killed. Their corpses filled the quadrangle and all the surrounding canals. The survivors, perhaps no more than two hundred thousand demons, waded through the flooded channels, groping in the waters for lost eyes.

  Forgotten flashed a sudden warning at Harper, and she wheeled.

  The Lord of the First Citadel stood in one of the doorways of his ruined castle. Sword in hand, and clad in old battered armour, he gazed at the scene of devastation with an expression of weary sadness. Behind him, the remains of his fortress began to fade. In some places the fallen battlements and spires were already as thin as gas. In a nearby corner of the quadrangle a pack of twenty or so Blind sniffed the air, and then started to creep towards him. Hasp ignored them.

  He addressed Harper. “You set off the Screamer?”

  Slowly, the engineer tilted her glass head.

  “Then you saved me some honour,” Hasp remarked. “We archons generally like to fight our own battles. How many of the Blind remain for me to kill?”

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  The god grunted. “Enough to make a good song of this day.”

  “You know they won’t kill you.” Hasp would suffer a far worse fate than death. “Where is the angel who fell from Deepgate?”

  “I slew him. His soul gave me the strength to rattle this little army of Menoa’s.”

  She knew he was lying, but said nothing. Her sceptre would soon locate her quarry.

  The god extended his wings, now thin and ragged and clogged with grime. He took a step forward on trembling legs. He could hardly stand upright. Then he scratched the tip of his sword through the pile of rubble on which he stood, sketching a line in the dust.

  His eyes narrowed on Harper again. “I see a starving woman trapped inside that Mesmerist thing,” he said. “She wears the uniform of a Pandemerian engineer, but she doesn’t look happy to be in there.” With some effort he raised his sword. “Come here and I’ll set her free.”

  Harper didn’t move. All around her the Legion of the Blind clambered over piles of their dead comrades as they crept nearer to the diminishing castle and the solitary archon standing in its doorway.

  “Two hundred thousand!” Hasp yelled. Wincing in pain, he hefted his blade high over his head, spun it, and brought it crashing down through the skull of the nearest demon.

  Then he staggered back and leaned against the doorway, sucking in desperate gulps of air. “That’s one,” he cried.

  Clutching their rescued eyes, Menoa’s horde crawled closer.

  18

  THE SOUL COLLECTORS

  DILL’S FEATHERS WERE sodden and clogged with gore. He couldn’t now have flown even if he dared to risk it. He was slumped in a shallow pool, gasping for breath and gazing up at a black shape flitting across the sky.

  Another one of Menoa’s spies?

  Walls hemmed him in on three sides. He had found an alcove off one of the Maze’s countless canals. But there was no shade here. And no sanctuary. Faces peered out at him from the stonework.

  Trust the walls, Hasp had said.

  Dill found it hard to follow that advice. The Mesmerist dogcatchers seemed to pursue him wherever he hid. Most often they came when the mists grew dark, the time Dill had taken to calling night. He’d hear their clickety-clack teeth and he’d be forced to flee again, dragging his leaden legs through the sucking red fluid. It flowed always from the broken buildings, the ones the Icarates had smashed through.

  Sometimes Dill crawled through the rooms the Mesmerists had destroyed and left empty, the shattered, bleeding houses and apartments—but the memories he had in those places weren’t his own, and they frightened him.

  Where was Hasp now?

  In the seven days since he’d fled, there had been no sign of the god or his castle. Had it only been seven days? Time had no meaning here. Often the days lasted much longer than they should have. He might have been running for a month, or a thousand years. The Legion of the Blind had not pursued him. Had they captured Hasp or presumed Dill to be dead?

  Either way, there were other dangers.

  A doorway was following him.

  He had encountered it that morning. A rectangular gap between two square columns, it had seemed to offer a way through a wall separating two parallel canals. Pits in the stone lintel had the appearance of tiny eyes, while longer gouges opened and grinned like mouths. It had whispered to him as he passed.

  Step through. Quickly, little crow.

  Dill had stepped through only to find himself back where he had started. Somehow the doorway had turned him around. In his confusion, Dill had splashed a hundred yards along the canal before he realized he was retracing his own path. The doorway had laughed and slid along the wall until it was out of sight.

  But now, as the shadow in the sky moved out of sight, he heard the doorway’s voice again. And it wasn’t speaking to him.

  It’s up ahead. A hundred yards on the left. A little white crow. Follow me, hurry.

  Dill peered out of the alcove. Three Icarates flanked a sphere of huma
n bones which they rolled through the shallow waters between them. They were hurrying along the canal towards Dill’s hiding place. Their anemic armour fizzed and lit up faces in the surrounding dark stones, forcing ghosts to blink and look away. The doorway moved ahead of them, revealing flooded rooms and passages as it slid along the wall. Fluid gushed over its threshold like water over a weir.

  There he is!

  Returning to the open canal terrified Dill, but there was no other way out. He fled the alcove and ran from the Mesmerist priests and their sphere, thick fluids sucking at his feet.

  The doorway raced ahead of the Icarates, zipping along the canal boundary wall until it reached Dill. It kept pace with him, and through it Dill saw yet more roofless ruins, canals, and sumps beyond the wall.

  Step through me—I’ll help you to escape, it teased.