Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  She let her gaze roam over the fine furnishings on the opposite side of the ceiling: the soft gold curlicues of a table, an opaque blue vase, the leaves etched into a mirror. Beautiful, she supposed, and yet cold. She could not enjoy such objects. Mina imagined she could hear soft music over the insistent thump of the train, and she strained to see through the carriage roof to the stars beyond. Hasp had supposedly once been one of those stars; Ulcis and Rys, too. But the heavens were invisible from down here, obscured by a hundred aether lights. Wasn’t it funny how the most transient things could outshine the timeless?

  She slid her body even closer to the angel, and then rattled one of his pencils repeatedly against his shoulder-guard, trying to time each of her taps to the pulse of his blood inside the glass veins. Hasp blew through his teeth, then hunched further over his sketch, evidently trying his best to ignore her. But had his heartbeat quickened? Mina fancied that it had. “Please,” she whined, “I’ll make it worth your while…” Now there was something to think about. Could Hasp still—?

  “Get away from him!” The new voice had come from behind. Mina twisted round to see a female engineer unlocking the door to the slave pen. Beyond the woman, a gloomy corridor ran the length of the carriage; through its outer wall Mina glimpsed dark brickwork and steel blurring past.

  “He’s not some animal to be prodded,” Harper said. She briefly inhaled mist from a rubber bulb. “And he’s dangerous. Carrick should never have put him in here with the rest of you.”

  “He’s not dangerous.” Mina laid a hand upon the angel’s arm; his armour felt surprisingly hot. “Are you?”

  “Leave.” Hasp jerked his arm away from her. “I have warned you…”

  Harper ducked inside the slave pen. “They want you upstairs,” she said to Hasp. “Bring your shiftblade. Let’s go.”

  The blood pulsing within the angel’s glass armour seemed to quicken even more. He trembled, his eyes blackened, and he snatched up his weapon. “Odd,” he growled, frowning at the blade with an expression of distaste and confusion, as though he’d just picked up a river snake and was trying to work out why. “Odd that I should recognize your voice.” He stared up at her. “Menoa has changed your form since the last time we met.”

  The engineer nodded. “Alice Harper.”

  “You were a serpent.”

  Harper studied him a moment, then said, “I order you to drop the weapon.”

  At once, Hasp released the shiftblade. The sword cracked against the glassy floor. Most of the slaves flinched away from the sound—all except Mina, who was watching intently.

  Hasp winced. “I see nothing has changed.”

  “The parasite in your skull,” Harper said slowly, “will obey any of King Menoa’s servants. Even the weakest of them could order you to slay yourself—” she inclined her head “—or your woman there, and you would be forced to comply without hesitation.”

  Hasp glanced at Mina, but said nothing.

  “If you try to resist it,” Harper said, “it will eventually kill you.”

  The god’s massive shoulders bunched under two dozen plates of overlapping glass; tubes flexed; cords in his neck pushed against his transparent collar. “Before or after I reach Coreollis?” he said.

  The engineer looked away. “It’s agitated because it has been removed from Hell. That’s why it’s causing you so much pain. I can stop that from happening.”

  “My thanks.”

  “Then you’ll come upstairs with me?”

  Hasp snorted a laugh. “As long as you don’t order me to.”

  The engineer crouched down beside him. She rummaged in her tool belt, and after a brief moment brought out a slender silver device about the size of a pencil, which she twisted at various places along its length. The tool crackled and then made a high-pitched whining sound. “Lean forward,” she said.

  Hasp obeyed, and Harper inserted the device into a tiny slot at the back of his skull. “Tell me if this hurts,” she said, “or if you begin to feel dizzy.” She inhaled from her bulb again and then, gently, blew into the device. After a moment she paused and said, “You may experience a brief moment of confusion, some bright flashes of colour at the edges of your vision, unusual sounds or smells. If you think you’re going to pass out, tell me at once.”

  The god gasped, and then bared his teeth, “Get that…thing out of my mind!”

  Harper withdrew the device, and stood up. “It’s done,” she said. “The demon is calmer now. But you’re going to have to stop resisting it.”

  “Stop resisting it?” Hasp pressed his fist against his breastplate, at the place where the blood spread from his heart in a crimson web across his chest, and took several deep breaths. “If I don’t resist it I’m dead anyway. When Rys learns that his own brother has become a tool, a weapon to be used by any of his enemies…” He shook his head. “Tell me, Alice Harper, what would you do?”

  The engineer looked down at him with an expression that might have been pity. She shrugged. “I’d make friends with a Mesmerist.”

  Hasp’s grunt was almost a laugh. He reclaimed his shiftblade and stood up. “You want me to kill something, I presume.”

  From inside the slave pen, Mina Greene tried to follow the angel’s progress along the corridor and up the stairs to the lounge, but she soon lost sight of him among the confusion of glints and glimmers within the train. She glanced down at Hasp’s sketches, now strewn across the floor amidst the fragments of his broken pencil. She gathered up the sheets of paper, then flopped down and leafed through them.

  Each sketch was different, but of a similar subject: stone keeps and towers of every shape and size, round or square, tall or stubby; each with battlements and high turrets, narrow windows and thick iron portcullises, deep moats and stout drawbridges. Mina tossed the drawings away. Ultimately they were all boring. Hasp sketched nothing but castles.

  21

  FLOWER

  HASP STRODE INTO the music carriage, and into the center of a circle of cold stares. The humans fell silent as he entered. His armour shifted and clicked, the blood-filled plates rasping over one another and over his skin, splitting the light from chandeliers and reading lamps into a mirage of rainbows. Since Menoa had imprisoned him inside the suit, Hasp had learned to ignore the physical discomfort. His body had hardened and no longer pounded with infection. But he had yet to grow accustomed to the profound sense of vulnerability.

  He hated the Mesmerists for that feeling, and hated those who assisted them. Without his parasitic conscience he would happily have murdered every one of these odious bastards. They knew it, of course; he could read it in their flushed faces and their ridiculous affected postures of ease, in the way they toyed with their jewelry, soulpearls, or weapons. They were thrilled, frightened, entertained. The web of blood around the god’s heart seethed and boiled inside its glass prison.

  These people had sold their souls for power.

  All five of the men had armed themselves, two with crystal Mesmeric blades—the other three, including King Menoa’s chief liaison officer, with shiftblades similar to Hasp’s own. The women flocked behind in a breathless hush of fruit-coloured silk. Fans wafted over jewels and powdered necks.

  Easy enough for him to snap…

  A furious buzzing behind the angel’s ears sent spikes of agony deep into his cranium. Menoa’s demon had sensed the direction of Hasp’s anger. His left eye now flickered uncontrollably; his fist crushed the grip of his shiftblade. In a hot blur he saw the women back away, pressing themselves closer to their own reflections in the walls of the music carriage. Harper approached, an apprehensive frown creasing her brow.

  The chief liaison officer, Carrick, gripped his shiftblade like a man who wanted people to think he knew how to use it. But Hasp had never met a human with any real talent with the blade. It took a long time in Hell to master the necessary mental skills to use such a weapon. Carrick raised his chin. “Hasp,” he said, and then paused to moisten his lips. “Kneel.”r />
  Hasp fought to resist the man’s instruction. He bit down hard, summoned every shred of willpower, pushed back, struggled like a man trapped beneath a rockfall…

  …and found himself kneeling on the floor, gasping.

  “You see?” Carrick gave a theatrical wave to the assembled guests. “You are perfectly safe. Menoa’s parasite is irresistible.”

  A handsome man in a dark suit spoke up: “He doesn’t look particularly dangerous to me. He’s wearing slave skin, for god’s sake. One prod with a sword would crack that wide open.”

  “That’s true, Mr. Lovich. And yet the king was good enough to exhibit him at the Highcliffe Fair. Not one of the reservists who sparred with the archon survived the encounter. He showed remarkable skill with a shiftblade.”

  “This is a foolish idea.” This came from an older, more heavily built man with white whiskers. “We’ll reach the portal in minutes. Let’s put this monster back in his cage and let Menoa decide what to do with the intruder.”

  From somewhere Hasp found strength. He surged to his feet, his fist taut as iron on the hilt of his shiftblade, and bared his teeth at Carrick. “Try that again and I’ll rip your head off, reach inside your throat, pull your insides out and stuff them back into your empty skull.”

  Carrick staggered backwards, fumbling for his pistol. “Get away!” he cried. “That’s an order, an order!”

  Hasp halted, growling. He felt the demon’s teeth clench inside his skull. Pain like molten metal ran through his jaw. He tasted brass.

  The whiskered man’s brow furrowed. “He appears to be resisting his implanted conscience, and I rather suspect that the puff of smoke that just issued from the mechanism in his head was not an intentionally engineered effect. Take him back to the slave pens, Chief Carrick, before you lose the ability to control him altogether. I have no desire to cross swords with an angry god”—he gave the slightest nod of his head—“when there are so many ladies present.”

  Hasp studied the old man. This human had not glanced once at Carrick during his short speech. He was getting on in years, certainly, and portly, but he stood lightly on the balls of his feet, his hands resting just so at his hips. A good-quality rapier hung from a sash wrapped around his midriff, the blade sheathed in worn white leather. Hasp had no doubt that the old man well knew how to wield it.

  “He cannot harm us,” Carrick stammered. “He cannot. The parasite knows we serve its master.”

  Hasp noticed with a kind of derisive pleasure that the chief liaison officer’s shiftblade had turned the same colour as his suit. Its steel edges had already softened. Under Carrick’s ownership, the shape-shifting demon could not even assume the guise of a sword.

  “Very well,” Jones said. “But let’s dispense with the showmanship and be about this business quickly. We are running out of time.”

  Carrick faced the angel again. “We’ve had a manifestation,” he said. “We require you to kill it.”

  “Kill it yourself.”

  Carrick fingered the grip of his shiftblade, still apparently unaware of the weapon’s degradation. The sword’s guard was now wilting like butter in the sun. He said formally: “As the chief liaison officer between the Pandemerian Railroad Company and Hell, I order you to locate the intruder aboard this locomotive and destroy it.”

  Hasp could not stop himself from flinching. How could words cause so much pain? Each syllable felt like a drop of acid inside his skull. Before he knew what he was doing, he found himself marching towards the front of the train, clutching his skull, dimly aware of Harper following behind him. She was whispering, “Don’t fight it, Hasp…go with it, please.”

  But just as they reached the door to the accommodation section, it opened, and a small boy towing a travel bag along the floor behind him came through. A small dog poked his head out of one end of this bag—the pup had been zipped up inside.

  “Out of the way, son,” Harper said.

  The child stopped, and gaped up at the battle-archon. Behind him, his trapped pup growled. The rear end of the leather and cloth satchel oscillated wildly. “I wanted to see the angel,” the boy said. “Aunt Edith promised I could watch it kill something.”

  Hasp halted, still reeling, and looked down at the boy and his pet. “You want to see me kill?” he muttered. “Then order me to do so. You’re all Menoa’s fucking people on this train.”

  The boy brightened. “Do it!” he said. “Kill something now.”

  “As you wish.” Hasp kicked the dog with all of the strength he could muster.

  Had the animal been made of tougher stuff than flesh and bone, or had its bag been composed of something more substantial than woven thread, it might have made an impact hard enough to shatter the glass wall at the end of the corridor sixty feet away. Instead, the creature and the torn remains of its embroidered travel bag spattered against the opposite end of the passage in a series of wet smacks, more like a shower of red rain than anything resembling the corpse of a dog.

  The boy screamed.

  Hasp cricked his neck, then shoved the child aside and stomped away, his transparent armour swimming with rainbows.

  Harper paused, hardly able to believe what she’d just witnessed. In under a heartbeat, the entire accommodation section corridor had been transformed from neat opulence into a scene from a slaughterhouse. Gore covered everything: the lights, the walls, the floor. Somewhere behind her a child was screaming, men were yelling, women shrieking. Hasp did not halt; he stormed ahead like some demonic vision, an anatomical nightmare of surgery and sculpted glass.

  The engineer closed the door behind her, mindlessly hoping it might hide the gory scene from the passengers in the previous carriage. But it was useless: the corridor door was as transparent as the walls and ceilings. She ran after the angel, grabbed his arm, and tried to stop him. “Hold on.”

  Hasp shrugged her off.

  “Why did you do that?” Harper insisted. “What possible reason could you have had for killing that animal?” She felt suddenly woozy, and sucked in a breath from her rubber bulb.

  “I couldn’t resist,” Hasp snapped. He threw open the blood-spattered door at the opposite end of the passageway, and ducked into the second accommodation car.

  Harper followed. “You pressed that boy into giving you an order.”

  “Did I?”

  “You must have known what would happen. You must have—”

  “No!” He wheeled on her, his eyes black with rage. “I didn’t. I was ordered to kill something, and it was either the pup or one of you. Don’t you see what Menoa’s arrogance has accomplished? He’s turned me into a sword, a weapon for any of his own people to use at will. Is there really no one you would like to see killed? Ask that question to the next man and the next, and you’ll soon find out how dangerous this situation is.” He touched his breastplate. “This armour makes me vulnerable. Order me to punch my own chest, and I will happily oblige. But command me to slay another man and he’d better be damn quick to get out of the way. And that makes me a desirable commodity. Do you think those power-hungry bastards back there aren’t thinking about that right now?”

  Harper understood. Hasp’s presence on this world posed a threat to every man, woman, and child. All it would take was a word in his ear.

  “And what about you, Alice Harper?” The battle-archon grinned savagely. “Who hurt you?”

  Instinctively, Harper grabbed for the soulpearl hidden inside her blouse, then quickly dropped her hand. She could feel the empty jewel against her rapidly beating heart. Had Hasp noticed?

  He simply turned and marched ahead, whirring, clacking, and leaking smoke from the mechanism behind his head like some ghastly automaton. His shiftblade scraped the carriage floor. “This parasite Menoa put in my skull is such a fickle thing,” he snarled. “So fickle.”

  He threw open the door at the end of the corridor, ducked through, and stormed down the next carriage. No one had told him where to hunt for the demon. But Hasp had evidently dec
ided to start the hunt as far away from the passengers as he could get.

  The night outside smelled of rotting engines and old blood. Stars jostled with torrents of embers from the locomotive’s stack. Aether lights illuminated the embankment ahead of the train, exposing swathes of the black mud and wrecked shacks which had once been Knuckletown. To the south Harper could make out the shadow of Sill Wood, a low dark mass against the dark purple sky. She stood with Hasp on a narrow scaffold at the rear of the coal tender, buffeted by wind and noise: the rasping shovels of engineers feeding coal into the firebox, the Eleanor’s wheels drumming the tracks, the shuddering glass of the wagons curving away behind the engine like a string of jewel boxes.

  Harper aimed her Locator back along the length of the train, and wound its frequency range to its broadest setting. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. More worryingly, her Locator didn’t know. The soul trapped within the device now appeared to be agitated—its needle oscillated wildly between ideographs, until Harper whispered to it to calm it down. Then the needle became still. “Nothing,” she shouted to Hasp over the thumping engine. “We’ll have to get closer to the source, or get lucky. I doubt I’ll measure a reading until we’re right on top of it.”