The angel groaned and staggered back, clawing at the metal-and-bone mechanism at the back of his skull. Streams of smoke unfurled through his fingers. The parasite howled like a wild beast. Hasp closed his eyes. “You…” he gasped. “I…don’t…”
“Finish it,” Carrick snarled.
Hasp was still reeling as Flower stepped forward and swung its hammer hard at the angel’s chest. But the god raised his shield in time. The blow connected with a terrible thud. Hasp stumbled back a step, yet remained on his feet.
Carrick threw Harper aside and snarled at Hasp, “Kill it now, without that damned weapon. Use your bare hands.”
Abruptly the angel dropped his shield. He lunged at the demon, grabbed its head between both hands, and pulled it close to his chest. Flower tried to swing its hammer, but it had no room to move. Hasp hunched over the blistered thing and squeezed.
The demon gasped. “I do not…wish this.”
“Yes,” Carrick hissed. “That’s it. Break that skull.”
“I do…not…”
“Harder!”
“No, Jan, please. For god’s sake don’t make him do this. Order him to stop.”
“I do not wish…”
“Harder!”
“Hasp!”
“I…”
After it was done, Carrick ordered the angel to find a mop and bucket and clear up the mess. Hasp obeyed the chief liaison officer without a word, but his eyes stayed black for a long time afterwards.
Mina Greene was bored. She had pressed her nose against the exterior glass wall for three minutes, looking for ghosts in the bloody desolation beyond, but she soon grew tired of that. She had gathered up the god’s sketched castles, then set to work improving them, adding people in the windows and flowers and flags on the balustrades, until the last pencil lead had snapped. Finally she had crumpled all of the sketches into pellets and flung them at the other captives. They were all broad-shouldered Northmen with wheat-coloured hair and hard blue eyes. Once strong and proud Coreollis soldiers, they now slouched like broken men. They grumbled weakly as Mina threw her paper missiles. One of the older men even had the temerity to demand that she sit still and stop annoying him and behave like the goddamn human being she was supposed to be.
Now Mina ignored him. It wasn’t difficult: he was hideously scarred—all hunched over under his blanket with only his scorched hands visible. They looked like they’d been roasted in a steamship furnace before being plated with glass. She ignored all of the others, but she singled this one out for special indifference.
He had the cheek to feign relief.
The train’s steel wheels clattered on the tracks below: Coreollis, Coreollis, Coreollis. She wondered how Rys would respond to the return of these glass-skin warriors, now that they had been so thoroughly disfigured by Menoa. Would the god make a show of executing them? Would he inflict a second death upon these soldiers to punish them for dying on the battlefield the first time around?
The pumps in the corners of the slave pen puffed suddenly, blowing fine red mist into the air. The soldiers breathed it in deeply, but Mina just wrinkled her nose.
The Mesmerists’ one weakness. They could not survive for long without drawing power from bloodied air or earth or water. And this was why Rys would not dare to kill his own brother Hasp. The blood of a simple soldier might sustain an Icarate or dogcatcher for a while. But the blood of a god was a far more dangerous thing to shed.
Invigorated by the hellish air, the soldiers stretched and shifted like men aroused from a long sleep.
“The train’s slowing,” one of them said. “We’re pulling in somewhere.”
Another man opened his eyes. “The Larnaig ferry? Can you see Coreollis?”
“No.” The first soldier was peering through the carriage wall into the darkness beyond. “We’re still in Pandemeria. This is the Cog Portal.”
The second man grunted. “Then they’re sending us back to Hell. Lord Rys must have changed his mind about the handover.”
“Not a chance. This is just a temporary stop. The Red King is coming to meet his ambassadors.”
“Traitorous fucks.”
The soldiers had gathered along one wall to watch the train pull in. Mina could hear the locomotive slowing now, the thump of its engine, the hiss of steam, and the clack of rails under steel wheels.
Mina thought of her own painted wagon, so far way in Cinderbark Wood, and her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She turned and hid her face against the wall, ashamed to let the others see her like this, and found herself staring at her own grubby reflection. A sob found its way out of her throat.
“Quiet, girl.”
The old burned man had spoken to her. “I don’t want to listen to your bleating all night,” he went on. With his bent black limbs and crooked spine, he looked more like a ghoulish puppet than a man. She might have felt pity for him, if his grin hadn’t been so sardonic and cruel.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that!” she snapped. “I’m Mina Greene. I’m older than you.”
“I’m Mina Greene,” he mimicked in a singsong voice. “I’m Mina Greene, I’m Mina Greene.” His eyes narrowed on her. “Who is Mina Greene? Shall we take off your blanket and see?”
She exhaled sharply, composing herself.
He began to crawl towards her. “We’ll all be dead again in a couple of days anyway,” he said. “Why not enjoy ourselves now?”
“You’d better stay back,” she said. “I’m dangerous. I know spells.”
“Oh, yes?”
Mina looked to the other slaves for assistance, but none of them would even meet her eye. “Get away from me,” she cried. “I’ll scream.”
The old cripple sniggered. “I’ll enjoy that. I haven’t heard a woman scream in months.” He reached for her foot.
She kicked out. The glass scales on her heel clicked against those on his hand.
“Careful,” he hissed.
“I’ll kick you harder next time.”
He grinned. “Bad news for one of us.” Again he approached.
Mina sighed. “I did try to warn you.” She made a quick gesture with her hand, as if drawing a knot in the air. Then she bit her lip, drawing blood.
The cripple suddenly froze and stared at her uneasily. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He began to wheeze. “What…did you just do?”
“I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who got all hot.” It made her smile every time she used that line. “And look at where it’s got you now.”
The man let out a gasp. “I…”
“Can’t…” Mina said, mimicking him, “…breathe?”
Steam curled from the cripple’s glass scales, yet he remained rooted to the spot. The other men looked on in shocked silence as the scales glowed red. The smell of burning skin wafted through the slave pen.
“I told you I know spells,” Mina said. “This isn’t even a hard one.” She made another hand gesture, and the crippled man collapsed on the floor before her. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from him.
An hour later he had cooled enough to allow Mina to touch his scales. She pulled one of the glass plates off his shoulder and hid it inside the folds of her blanket. It would make a good addition to her collection.
22
IRON ANGEL
THE PRIDE OF Eleanor Damask arrived at Cog Portal station shortly after nightfall. Steam billowed along the platform and around the tall cloaked figure standing alone on the platform. An aether light popped and flickered overhead, illuminating the message someone had scrawled across the wall of a metal storage shed:
Platform Two for Hell
There was no platform two, for beyond the solitary tongue of concrete beside the line the land sloped away in a steep embankment. At the base of this lay the Pandemerian door to Hell.
Harper had seen this place twice before, once on her journey to the Maze, and once on her return. After Cog’s great plague, the ground underneath the burial pit had sunk
to form a vast basin. Over the subsequent years the steadily thickening Mesmerist Veil had turned this depression into a broad red lake.
Now as she filed off the train with Carrick and the Pandemerian passengers, Harper glanced down towards the pit again. Sections of one of the original steel tracks could be seen running along the base of the embankment, although the old station itself had been buried somewhere under their feet. Extra rails swept out to an engine shed, where Menoa’s old troop supply train had lain since the rains drowned these lowlands. Shades of grey and black defined the landscape down there; the low dykes and woodlands were as scrapes and smudges of charcoal on slate. Even in this weak light the engineer spied Portal Lake. Dark masses of misshapen figures were waiting around it, peering into the greasy waters.
King Menoa stood on the platform. He had wrapped himself in a long dark robe and altered his mask to resemble the visage of an elderly man with a strong, proud jaw and kind eyes—exactly the sort of benevolent ruler he wished his human ambassadors to see. The hem of his robe blew raggedly behind him, although there was no wind.
By his side was a child—a thin, sad-eyed girl of about nine or ten wearing a grey dress. Lines of script had been tattooed in crimson ink into her arms and face. Her small hand clutched one of the king’s glass claws.
“Chief Liaison Officer,” Menoa said to Carrick. “How good to see you again.”
“The pleasure is mine, Your Highness.”
The king turned to Harper. “And my engineer,” he said. “Are you enjoying your new position with the railroad company?”
“It allows me to serve you, Your Highness.”
“Of course. I trust Chief Carrick has looked after you well?”
This civility was all for show, Harper knew. The king was presenting a human facade. Nevertheless she nodded.
The passengers had by now noticed the legions waiting around the Portal Lake, and the smiles they had prepared for the Lord of Hell were failing under a growing atmosphere of uncertainty. They shifted uncomfortably, their gazes returning again and again to the darkness below the embankment where the king’s demons waited. The thick wet air was already beginning to stain their fine clothes.
Menoa reassured them. “Reinforcements for the front lines,” he said. “A display of our power. When Rys kneels before you, he will know that the whole Mesmerist army stands at your back.”
As Harper’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw that this great dark horde stretched far across the fields beyond the portal. And she could hear them—the legions of beasts snuffling under the stars, the rumble of war machines moving in the distance. Reinforcements? This looked more like an invasion force.
“Friends,” said the king. “Mr. Lovich…Mr. Ersimmin…dear Edith. Between you, you own most of Cog City—the factories, the railroad, even the lives of the citizens themselves. Without your help, the process of change in Pandemeria would have been long and bloody.” He spilled a fist of soulpearls onto the platform and waited while the passengers scrambled after them. These would contain the lowest caste of demons and perhaps the odd human, worthless to anyone who used such trinkets for power, but they were scooped up by the guests like diamonds.
“You helped to shape this world in preparation for my coming,” the king went on, “and I thank you for that. You assisted me throughout this long campaign and, again, I am grateful.
“Tomorrow you will reap the rewards I have promised. After Rys abandons his foolish war against us, Pandemeria will become the center of our new world.” He urged the little girl forward. “Here is your treaty,” he said. “An unspoiled soul. Her name, of course, is Peace.”
Jones and Lovich frowned. Clearly this was not what they had expected; Harper could see their minds working to unravel this unexpected twist.
But then the child looked up at Menoa, and the king nodded.
The girl began to change, shrinking rapidly until she was a fraction of her original size. Her hair whirled around her, and then her body itself began to spin. She became a blur of tattooed script. Her flesh turned the colour of parchment. One of the female passengers took a sharp intake of breath.
Carrick stooped and picked up the scroll that had appeared in the child’s place.
“Bring Rys’s signature back to me,” King Menoa said. “And I will return the treaty to the Ninth Citadel. May it last forever.”
A great howl went up from the waiting armies, like the sudden onslaught of a storm. The platform shuddered as ten thousand boots, hooves, and claws beat against the earth around Portal Lake. The passengers flinched. Mrs. Lovich buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as a cold gale tore across the platform.
King Menoa turned to face his horde.
Brands flared in the darkness below the embankment, tens of thousands of them, and Harper saw the king’s army clearly at last. There were ranks of Icarates and glittering Iolites and other, bulkier creatures with hammers for fists and great curling horns. The Blind composed a large part of this army, along with packs of dogcatchers and phantasms and Non Morai, and beasts like oxen or huge boars, and winged lesser demons and man-shaped gladiators in bronze plate. War machines covered the hills beyond the main force: great spiked spheres and smoking iron towers, lumbering armoured beasts carrying upon their backs cannon towers or crystal globes full of corpse mites and yellow flies. And in the middle of the plague pit stood an arconite.
A collective gasp came from the human onlookers.
Harper’s gaze roamed up from the creature’s skeletal feet, and up past its pelvis, and up to where the arcane engines thundered in its ribs, and up again to the skull still glistening red from the Portal Lake. The creature was colossal; its tattered wings, outstretched, could have enveloped a mountain. In one bony fist it clutched an oak tree pulled from the ground nearby. In the other hand it held a locomotive shed. It had lifted the building up close to its eyeless skull, and was peering inside the way a child might inspect a new toy.
King Menoa sounded like he was smiling, but his glass mask gave nothing away.
“His name is Dill,” he said.
23
MENOA’S ARMY
DAWN CAME: THIN and grey and flecked with puffs of lead and pewter. The skies lightened, and The Pride of Eleanor Damask began to climb out of the Pandemerian Lowlands towards the Moine Massif. Wheels thumping, stack blowing, whistle screaming, she followed a long snaking route up through the black volcanic hills that bounded the edge of the plateau. King Menoa’s reinforcements meanwhile followed the Red Road
two leagues to the southwest. A vast plume of smoke from the king’s war machines bent its way across the sky, while the troops marched in a long line behind. From this distance they looked like a river of ink flowing uphill from the portal basin. Only the arconite itself could be seen with any clarity. The giant had moved far ahead of its smaller brethren and now stood among the hills below the Moine Massif.
Even these highlands had not been immune to Rys’s torrential rain. The valleys and gullies below remained flooded, so that it seemed like they were now weaving through a chain of lagoons. Crescents of basalt rose from steaming pools, linked by causeways of metallic slag and cruel iron bridges. Fuels and oils left by the railway reconstruction effort made rainbow patterns on the waters, colourful skins that unraveled where the currents mingled. New maps named this place Callar Wash, but on old maps the land had been called Callowflower. The train followed the rims of hot calderas or plunged, shuddering, through dark defiles, or was carried between islands by spans of silt-and weed-clogged girders.
She clattered across bridges: Cutlass Bridge and Broken Temple Bridge where a thousand empty lanterns depended from hooks, out over the drowned farmland beneath Spinney Crag. Smudged by a shifting dawn haze, the summit of the crag itself still sulked above the waterline, diminished now from an imposing mountain to a meager sketch of dolerite and black pines. Other trees could be seen in the oily waters below, now dead and rimed with furs of crystal.
Harper
had moved out of Carrick’s room into a spare bunk in the stewards’ quarters. Uncomfortable in the unfamiliar surroundings, she had woken early and been unable to get back to sleep. Now she stood on the terrace of Observation Carriage Two and gazed down into the pools between the islands. Sometimes she thought she saw fish below: impossible black shapes, huge and motionless. There seemed to be faint green glimmers where the eyes ought to be, an ice-cream sheen underneath where the belly would be, but the objects never moved.
“Pike.”
Harper turned.
“The fish,” Carrick said. “They’re pike.”
“Pike don’t grow to that size.”
“They do now.” The chief joined her by the glass balustrade and peered down. Yellow sunlight slanted through the carriage under his feet. “There. You see?” He pointed at a long shadow hanging beneath the water. “They’ve changed.”
Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel Page 35