“Leave me alone.”
The doorway cackled wildly, then slid back along the wall the way it had come. Dill glanced over his shoulder. The Icarates were gaining on him.
The canal opened into a wide circular space. From here, dozens of narrower channels branched out in every direction. Dill chose one at random and hurried down it. The channel split in two; he took the right fork. A hundred paces further the passage divided again. Now Dill turned left. He tried to vary his route but keep his progress in the general direction of the First Citadel. Although he could not see the great building itself, the skies over it were dark with the smoke from King Menoa’s war machines.
Finally deep inside this labyrinth of channels, Dill ducked into another alcove, and slumped against the far wall, exhausted. For a long time he listened hard for the voice of the errant doorway.
Nothing.
But then he heard other sounds. From the other side of the wall came the rumble and splash of something rolling through shallow water, followed by the aetherlike crackle of Icarate armour.
Dill had taken a long and twisted route only to end up mere yards from his pursuers. Now only a foot of stonework separated him from the Mesmerist priests and their cage of bones. He heard them pause on the other side of the wall.
Dill froze.
Where was the doorway?
Something metal clicked. There was another pause. A low hum. And then Dill heard the bone-cage move on again. He breathed.
He turned around to find the doorway facing him. It occupied one of the side walls of the alcove, and its tiny dark eyes all seemed to be fixed on the angel. As soon as Dill saw it, it cried out:
Back here! The white crow is hiding here!
The doorway slid around the alcove, moving to the rear wall where it now formed an opening between the angel and the channel in which his pursuers were approaching.
They came through the doorway with tridents.
Dill backed away as two Icarates stepped into the alcove. Sparks burst from their armour and showered the waters around their boots, raising a smell like scorched meat. Their iron weapons hummed; their eye lenses and copper mouth-wires shone. The remaining pursuer rolled the bone-cage up close to the doorway, but that hideous sphere was much too large to pass through this narrow gap.
The doorway giggled.
The first Icarate raised his trident.
But Hasp had taught Dill how to fight. He had shown Dill how to manipulate his soul to create weapons and armour. And Dill used his new skills now.
He willed himself a shield. A light steel buckler flashed into existence, already strapped to his knuckles.
The angel punched, slamming the shield into the trident before the Icarate could complete his lunge. The buckler deflected the heavy iron weapon, forcing it wide. One of its forks connected with the shaft of the second Icarate’s trident.
And a concussion shook the air.
Dill took a step back as both tridents sparked violently. The Mesmerist priests’ bodies jerked once and suddenly became rigid. Smoke hissed from their armour.
Wicked crow! You’ve ruined their armour.
The doorway was shrieking, shuttling rapidly back and forth along the wall in agitation.
Dill studied the two Icarates. They remained completely immobile. They can’t move without their armour? He grinned and stepped closer to the doorway. “Let the other one through.”
The doorway hesitated, but then it began to race back and forth along the wall with an even greater urgency than before. No!
Dill changed his shield to a sturdy iron pike. He clutched the shaft in both fists and drove the weapon downwards through the moving doorway, forcing the point hard against the ground opposite.
With a loud clang, the doorway came to an abrupt halt against the shaft of the pike. It slid left, and then right, but it could not move its side columns past this new obstruction. Dill had skewered it. He beckoned to the remaining Icarate.
It approached the doorway with a hammer.
Dill felt pressure mounting on his pike as the doorway struggled to free itself. It was pushed hard to the left, trying to move the pike. Dill maintained his grip, using every ounce of his strength to hold the weapon firmly in place. The tip of the pike scraped across the ground, but he gasped and held on. Just a moment longer. His arms were shaking. The doorway shuddered and heaved against the pike.
The last Icarate ducked inside the doorway.
When the Mesmerist priest was halfway through, Dill willed his pike to disappear. Faced with a complete and immediate lack of resistance to its enormous efforts, the doorway abruptly shot away along the wall, carrying the hapless Icarate with it. Unable to shed its momentum, it struck the adjoining wall at tremendous speed. But while the doorway could pass through solid stone, Menoa’s priest could not.
Pieces of the crushed Icarate fell to the floor of the alcove, sparking briefly before they died.
Dill moved on.
The doorway continued to hound his every step. Enraged at being tricked, it shrieked and yelled and announced the angel’s presence to anyone who might have been around to hear it.
Dill couldn’t escape it, so he needed to find a way to destroy it. As far as he could tell, the Mesmerist creation consisted of nothing more than two upright stone columns with a lintel across the top. Yet it moved through the solid walls of the Maze like a bubble of air through water.
It seemed indestructible.
White crow, it yelled. Icarate slayer. It remained a few paces behind Dill, tracing the wall of yet another long, curving canal.
What would Hasp have done? Dill reached into his pocket and took out the apple the god had given him before they’d parted. The fruit looked even smaller and more rotten than before, but tasted surprisingly sweet. It boosted his energy and confidence.
And it gave him an idea.
During his journey through Hell, Dill had passed several ruined temples, quadrangles full of monoliths and arches and rotting black stonework. Icarate holy sites, Hasp had once told him—their ancient fly-infested facades rose higher than the surrounding canals and ziggurats.
A short distance away, Dill could see one of these structures now. Red light bled through the gaping windows of a crumbling black tower—a fanglike silhouette against the hot skies.
Dill changed his course towards the ruin.
As he drew nearer, the Maze began to show obvious signs of deterioration. The walls between canals were older here, much more dilapidated. In some places they had collapsed entirely, forming ragged gaps between the channels. Steps sank down into deep wells or spiraled up around fingers of dark stone with no apparent purpose. The ghostly faces within the walls looked different, too—something odd, almost inhuman about their eyes.
The doorway grew suspicious. Each time it came up against a broken wall, it was forced to turn back and find an alternative route.
You won’t lose me in this decaying labyrinth, it crooned. The Maze has countless walls. There is always a way through.
Finally Dill reached the ruined tower. It rose from the center of a spacious quadrangle full of spikes of black rock. A ring of gallows had been built around the building’s foundations, although none of the nooses were currently occupied. Several walls extended inwards from the quadrangle’s perimeter, like the teeth of a mantrap, but none of them reached the tower itself. Each ended in a pile of rubble, yards from the building.
Dill examined one of these partitions. The stonework was wet, rotting; it crumbled away under his hand. He set off again, following the wall towards the tower.
The doorway kept up with him. You won’t escape by hiding in that tower, it said. The Icarates perform their rituals in such places. Dangerous things lie within.
Dill reached the end of the wall, and stopped. The doorway could go no further.
You are still surrounded by walls, it snarled. Run and hide. I can wait forever for you to reappear. I’ll tell Menoa’s priests where you are.
B
ut Dill had no intention of hiding. He stared at the tower for a long moment, frowning, as he pretended to weigh his options. Then he strolled a few paces back the way he had come, halted, and regarded the tower once more. The doorway was waiting, watching him to see what he would do.
Dill willed himself a hammer—an enormous iron brute of a war-hammer. He swung it hard at the wall, and the fragile stonework crumpled under the blow. The top third of the wall teetered, then fell forward and crashed to the ground. He raised the weapon again.
By now the doorway had realized what was happening. It screeched and raced back towards the angel.
A second hammer blow took out another two feet of stonework. Dill had made a jagged rift in the top half of the wall.
It was enough to stop the doorway. The Mesmerist creation could move through stone, but not air. When it reached the gap Dill had made, it came to an abrupt halt, now trapped in an isolated section of wall—an island in the Maze.
Don’t leave me, it said urgently. Don’t leave me trapped here.
But Dill was already walking away.
Rebuild the wall, the doorway howled after him. Don’t you understand? I can’t stay here forever. I can’t die! I don’t know how to die!
“You don’t know how to shut up, either,” Dill called back.
The sound of splashing brought Dill sharply to his feet. Weeks—by his estimation of time here—had passed since he’d rid himself of the howling doorway. Glutinous liquid pulled at his shins as he waded across the pool. The walls felt sticky where he pressed his palm against them for support. Eyes opened deep within the glossy stone, like reflections in a mirror, and glared at him. Trust the walls.
Hasp had been right. No walls or steps had betrayed him. Sometimes when he listened closely to the stonework he could hear it whispering advice. Go left here…Avoid the three-tiered ziggurat…A Mesmerist vessel approaches… Dill wondered if they had begun to recognize the part of Iril he harbored inside. Or had the Shattered God himself found a way to communicate with the angel? Maybe it was simply that rumors had been spreading through the walls of the Maze?
Even those doorways he’d met since the Icarates’ temple had been strangely quiet and obedient.
One such doorway now led to the canal beyond the roofless room where Dill was hiding. He forced himself to stop and take a breath before peering out.
More soul collectors were coming.
A caravan was moving through one of the canals. Great steaming oxenlike beasts dragged a train of huge wagons and cages along the shallow waterway. In deeper waters the Mesmerists used barges, but these canals were plowed by caravans. Strange machines and lurching wooden towers rumbled along behind. Wheels creaked and hooves churned the red slurry into froth. Banners and flags of many colours bobbed among the throng. From somewhere behind came a riotous tumult: the sound of lashing whips, the clicking of stilts, and the howls of men. Over it all sounded the deep, sonorous groan of horns.
There was nowhere for Dill to escape to, so he slunk back into his hiding place, crouched down low, and waited for the caravan to pass him by. Silently, he willed a short-sword to appear in his left hand, and a punching-shield in his right.
The first cages were full of partially altered souls: hot-eyed louts who screamed and rattled their metal limbs across the bars; cackling hags with oddly shaped skulls; huge warriors clad in plate and helms of exotic design, sitting quietly, sharpening the blades on their fingers. These were escapees of some kind, Dill surmised, for their transformations had not yet been completed. A column of box-wagons followed behind, sending thick waves through Dill’s doorway. Queer hieroglyphs drenched their slatted sides; the running boards below were chipped and scraped. Next came one of the Mesmerists’ living machines: a spherical metal device crammed with chains, wheels, and needles. After this, a cage full of dogcatchers.
Dill slid lower into the bloody pool to mask his own scent. Dogcatchers had keen noses.
The demons resembled cadaverous men, and indeed they had once been men, but now their skin glistened as red as the canal beneath their coop. They turned their eyeless heads this way and that, sniffing the air, gnashing their long white teeth. They could not speak, Dill knew, but they could howl, and the one who shifted his blind gaze towards the young angel howled now.
With many creaks and bellows, the procession grumbled to a halt.
Dill readied himself for battle.
They came for him. Anemic and gibbous, these Icarate soul collectors wore stained ceramic armour spattered with black corruption. Pale discs mushroomed from their hunched backs, crackling and dripping blue sparks. Dill presumed these creatures to be a lower caste than the Icarates he had seen before, for there were subtle differences in their appearance. Fractured reflections glinted in their cracked eye-lenses when they turned their heads, and when they grinned, the copper wires in their mouths showed verdigris. They were larger, bulkier, than the Mesmerist priests he had seen before, but they wore similar ill-fitting armour and carried the same hammers and tridents.
And Dill was getting used to dealing with those.
He stepped out into the canal, and ducked as a whip lashed out at his head. The tip of the whip struck a prisoner who had been gripping the bars of his cage, severing the tip of the man’s finger. The prisoner howled and flinched away.
Dill stared at the owner of the whip—an obese Icarate in badly rotted armour. He was hunched over like a cripple, seemingly barely able to stand at all. Rust covered half of the priest’s face, obscuring one of his eye-lenses, while a green crust had obliterated the wires in his mouth. The ceramic obtrusions on his back looked like stained teeth. The angel’s heartbeat quickened. That attack had been fast.
The prisoners started to chant in their cages. “Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal.” One man whooped and cried out: “That was the testing stroke, boy. The next one will take your fucking head off.”
The Icarate swept his whip back again.
Dill willed himself a suit of spider-silk armour—a hauberk, chausses, and a camail to protect his neck. He considered expanding his punching-shield to cover his entire forearm, but decided not to encumber himself any further. He needed to be fast.
The lash struck out again.
Dill simultaneously raised his buckler to block and his sword to sever through the whip. But the thin leather cord twisted in midair and changed direction. It folded around the edge of the tiny shield and struck Dill’s knuckle. The tip of the lash bit into the angel’s flesh and stuck there.
A flash of pain surged up Dill’s arm. He cried out, shaking his fist and shield madly, but the lash would not release him. He swiped at the leather cord with his sword—again and again—but the whip danced around his blows like a living thing.
The caged prisoners were chanting faster now: “Fadder Carpal…Fadder Carpal…”
The tip of the whip began to burrow into Dill’s knuckle. He felt it crawling through his flesh like an insect—a sensation that made him freeze and stare at his hand in shock. A lump had appeared on the back of his finger; it was moving rapidly under his skin towards his wrist. Dill beat at it with the pommel of his sword, but it continued to push into him.
Half in panic, and half in desperate rage, Dill charged at the Icarate. The Mesmerist priest made a motion with his hand—the whip sang between them, formed loops in the air, and then coiled around the angel’s neck.
Darkness crowded Dill’s vision as his camail compressed around his throat. The Icarate’s rusted face and broken lenses loomed before him—a dreamlike mess of rotting metal. Dill fell forward, lashed out wildly with his punching-shield. His buckler connected with something.
He remembered struggling, gasping……the blare of horns, a lurch, and creaking wheels…
He was locked in a cage near the rear of the caravan with a drooling hag and a dwarf with hooks and needles for fingers. The dwarf sniggered and tried to pluck handfuls of feathers from Dill’s wings. He claimed to be the only thief in Hell.
“I stole from egoists,” he said, “until Fadder Carpal caught me.”
“Fadder Carpal?”
“You hit him with your shield. It was his impotent master that stung you, his Penny Devil. Not a bad fight, considering.” He leaned closer and crooned. “You lasted longer than those gladiators did. Even longer than that scabrous thing we caught grazing in the Garden of Bones.” He grinned. “But nobody escapes Fadder Carpal.”
“The Icarate with the whip?”
The dwarf snorted. “Fadder Carpal is the greatest soul collector in the Maze. And that was no whip. You felt the insect at the end of it, eh? The kiss of a Penny Devil?”
Dill’s knuckle still throbbed. “It burrowed into me,” he said. “Like an—”
“Insect?” The dwarf chuckled. “That was one of Ayen’s debased. Liria, they used to call her on earth, the Queen of Fleas. If you think Ayen gave her lover and her sons a hard time…” He paused to pick at his misshapen teeth with one hooked finger. “Consider what she did to the angels she really feared: Orus, Basilis, and Liria—all royally fucked for eternity.”
Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel Page 29