“I used to, but he’s not the same god he was before. He’s much more fragile now.”
Turning the corner, they stepped over the network of rusted steel tracks that led out from the engine shed. Harper glanced inside the building’s wide door but there were no locomotives inside, just a vast cavernous space pierced by dusty shafts of sunlight. Weeds reached through glassless metal windows in the outer wall and spread out in green veins across tired brickwork. Ahead of them, the Eleanor waited on the main line behind the coal stage, her carriages aglow. A haze of fine black dust drifted from her tender and spread across the yard and the moor beyond.
The majority of the passengers had alighted and stood some distance from the train in groups of three or more, chatting or smoking clay pipes. Some carried porcelain cups of tea or flutes of white wine. Harper noticed Jan Carrick talking to a group of three ladies who were laughing and beating the air with their fans. Slightly closer, Ersimmin appeared to be engaged in a fierce debate with Jones. The pianist gesticulated wildly in Harper’s direction, although he hadn’t turned and thus could not be aware of her arrival on the scene. The older white-whiskered man shot a glance her way, and his face flushed.
“I should probably have helped him,” she said to Hasp, “the man on the wall.”
The archon grunted. “What kind of man asks a lady to carry him through a pool of sludge?”
“A lady?”
Hasp’s neck buzzed. “That was the demon talking,” he said.
A call came from behind them: “I say!”
They turned.
Isaac Pilby had evidently resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rescue himself. Shoeless and covered in tar up to his shins, the lepidopterist strode across the yard towards them, brandishing his folded parasol like a rapier, while his real sword swung in its white leather sheath at his side. He had been successful at keeping neither brolly nor blade entirely free of Moine’s pollution, for the tips of both now sported six inches of black gloop.
“You,” he said, jabbing the parasol at Harper, “abandoned me. And you,” now he jabbed the umbrella at the angel, “are an abomination in glass. Now both of you are completely responsible for and deserving of whatever amercement the Pandemerian Railroad Company sees fit to extract from you as a result of this incident. I have powerful friends!”
“If someone ordered me to kill him,” Hasp muttered, “I don’t think I’d resist too much.”
Either Pilby didn’t hear him, or he was choosing to ignore the angel. Chin thrust out, the little man strode on towards the train and her staring passengers, rocking his thin shoulders in an almost comical gait, as though desperate to squeeze every last shred of majesty from his sorely blemished appearance.
Jones was the first to approach him. “My dear sir,” he said, eyeing the other man with what appeared to be a degree of suspicion, “what on earth are you doing out here? Carrick, fetch a brandy for this man at once.”
Carrick looked up from his audience, a line of annoyance creasing his brow, then he saw Pilby and the frown deepened.
“I do not require alcohol,” the shoeless lepidopterist said, “merely a change of raiment and transport away from this foul place.” He planted the soiled tip of his parasol on the ground and raised his nose in an expression of haughty indifference. “I will compensate you handsomely for the inconvenience of returning this locomotive to Cog City. But know that I fully intend to write a severe—”
“We’ll take you with us,” Harper broke in, more to stop his endless prattling than from any great fear of reprisal. The sun was already making her feel nauseous and weak. “But we’re not heading back to Cog until the day after tomorrow. This train is bound for Coreollis.”
“Coreollis?” Pilby looked vaguely confused. “But they closed the Larnaig Ferry. There’s no way to reach the city by train now. And Coreollis is Rys’s stronghold.”
“The PRC have just reopened the ferry.”
“Well, that’s bold,” said Edith Bainbridge, moving through the crowd of onlookers. She was wearing a different peach-coloured frock from the one she’d worn earlier. If anything it was peachier. “You, sir, are interfering with a diplomatic mission,” she said to Pilby. “Besides, why should you have a free ticket when we are financing this whole event? The idea is ridiculous. We’ve little enough room as it is.”
“Madame—” the lepidopterist began to object.
But Carrick broke in. “Compensation, you say?”
Harper exhaled quietly through her teeth. Carrick had a familiar distant, calculating look in his eyes. She half expected him to ask how much. But, given the present company, she doubted even Carrick would be so crass.
“Well, yes,” Pilby remarked. “It’s only fair. Return me to the terminus at Cog City and we’ll discuss some payment for your services. I am a man of considerable means. Indeed, if I had known the Pandemerian Railroad Company had reopened the route, I would undoubtedly have bought a ticket myself.”
Carrick grinned. “Harper, find this gentleman some shoes, will you?”
But before the engineer could go and find Pilby some footwear, a cry came from one of the stewards. There had been a terrible accident. Edgar Lovich was dead. The passengers rushed back inside to discover the actor’s body lying sprawled in one of corridors. Lovich’s wife, Yve, let out a shriek of horror and dropped to stem the flow of blood from her husband’s body. But it was already too late. Edgar Lovich had died within the last hour. Someone had stabbed him in the chest.
Yet nobody, it seemed, had seen anything.
Harper gave instructions to the crew to mop up the spilled blood, and left the ladies to accompany the sobbing wife back to her bedroom. Then, ignoring Carrick’s quarantine, she told Hasp to follow her back to the slave pens. As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, she asked the god, “Did you kill Lovich?”
“Yes,” he replied without hesitation.
“Why?”
Hasp shrugged. “I can’t think of a plausible reason or motive.”
“Did someone order you to do it?”
“No.”
The engineer frowned. Not only was Hasp incapable of violence against any of Menoa’s ambassadors without a direct order, but if someone had ordered him to slay the actor, then couldn’t they also have ordered the god to lie so as not to implicate the real culprit?
She tried again. “I order you to answer my next question truthfully. Did someone order you to kill Lovich?”
Hasp winced. He reeled, staggering against the carriage wall. And then he dropped to his knees on the floor, clutching his skull and moaning.
“Forget that order,” Harper said quickly. “Hasp? Don’t answer my question.”
The tension left the angel’s face. “No more questions,” he breathed. “The parasite…”
Harper understood. Menoa’s parasite was punishing him for failing to answer her question. But it was also preventing him from answering that same question. The angel had been given two mutually opposing orders—he could not obey one without disobeying the other.
“If you were instructed not to reveal the identity of the murderer under any circumstances, then any question that threatened that order—”
“Might kill me,” Hasp finished in a despondent tone.
Harper was thinking hard. How could she get to the truth of this if Hasp could not speak?
If a passenger could get away with one murder, what else would they use the doomed god for? Would the engineer be at risk herself? She phrased her next question carefully. “If I asked you to detail your exact movements since Carrick released you from the slave pen, would you wish to answer?”
“No,” the angel said.
Of course not. Even that information would implicate someone. “Let’s get you out of the passengers’ way, then,” she said.
Back in the slave pen, Harper studied the remaining captives. After the cripple’s death, eight of Rys’s Northmen remained, together with Hasp’s young female companion f
rom his palace in Hell. The men sat apart from one another in silence, their scaly bodies wrapped in blankets. Not one of them would meet the engineer’s eye. “Did any of you see what happened?” she asked.
The girl spoke up. “Why? What happened?”
“A passenger was killed.”
“Someone was killed in here, too, but you don’t seem so bothered about that.”
Harper shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about it?” The truth was Carrick had actually threatened to put her off the train for pursuing the matter. He cared nothing for these people. Ten slaves or nine, it made no difference to him. Harper doubted that it made much difference to Rys, either. The handover was nothing more than a gesture of goodwill—intended to show the citizens of Coreollis that their new king was benign and just.
The presence of Menoa’s vast and terrible army at their doorstep would merely reinforce the point.
A low sky and ceaseless drizzle shrouded The Pride of Eleanor Damask’s arrival at the southern end of the Ialar Pass. Smoke from her stack boiled up between wet granite cliffs on either side, rock faces which still bore the pickax scrapes of those slave labourers who had widened the natural ravine here in recent years. Overhead the clouds bunched together in clumps like dirty sheep’s wool. The train slowed, the solid thump of her pistons reverberating in the narrower space. Then she sounded her whistle. Echoes bounced among the hidden, cloud-wrapped mountain peaks, before a horn blast from the Sally outpost answered the call. The soldiers stationed ahead, just beyond the pass, would now be preparing to wake the ancient steamer which would carry them across Lake Larnaig to Coreollis.
Another voice answered the whistle, this one a long low roar which rumbled across the heavens. Menoa’s arconite came into view, striding between the foothills at the base of Rael Canna Moor. Its skull and shoulders were lost above the clouds, giving it the appearance of a decapitated giant. Engines thundered behind its ribs, powered by some arcane system of blood and fuel the Mesmerists had developed in Hell. Its voice echoed like thunder over the hidden mountain peaks:
“I am ready to serve.”
It turned away and strode quickly into the mists ahead, shaking the ground under its feet.
To watch this spectacle of divine engineering, the passengers had gathered upon the viewing platform of Observation Car One. Rain dripped from colourful umbrellas as the party waited: the men in one group, smoking cigars while they discussed in layman’s terms the mechanics, torque, and forces about to be employed; the ladies in an excited huddle, whispering about some duke and his mistress and what she had said to so-and-so three months ago.
Harper stood back from the group in an attempt to avoid the occasional acerbic glances from both Isaac Pilby, who still blamed her for the loss of his brogues, and Edith Bainbridge, who held the engineer accountable for everything else that had gone wrong, including the weather. She breathed mist from her bulb whenever she felt her strength begin to wane.
Jones had given the lepidopterist a pair of shoes from his own wardrobe, while Ersimmin, being of a closer size to the newcomer, had donated several of his own crimson suits. Both the pianist and the elderly reservist seemed to have taken a special interest in Pilby, for they rarely left the small man’s side. The three of them together, in their dark red suits, reminded Harper of the fractured glimpse she’d seen of the pianist through the music car ceiling.
Did the trio have more in common than the white sword sheaths they each wore? She didn’t dwell on the matter. Whatever common ground they shared would be cinched by the social circle in which they moved—a closed world to someone from Harper’s background.
Yet Jan Carrick seemingly remained unable to see the gulf of this class divide. Pilby had come to some financial arrangement with Menoa’s chief liaison officer, who had evidently regarded this as the first rung of a ladder that would raise him to a position of equality with the very guests he fawned over. The passengers tolerated the chief, of course, but they would never welcome him into their fold. They smiled and chatted with him, but with a barely concealed contempt Carrick utterly failed to notice.
At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the Eleanor’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.
The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four hundred feet below. The new line was much shorter, and more dangerous.
Harper couldn’t drag her gaze from the red flag, which struck her as some dim portent of doom. They had a saboteur and a murderer aboard. Wouldn’t the perilous descent to Lake Larnaig provide the perfect moment for foul play? Harper studied the passengers carefully, searching for any emotion or expression which might betray a hidden agenda.
She saw nothing suspicious.
While the murderer was most likely to be one of Menoa’s own ambassadors, the saboteur need not be a passenger at all. She glanced back along the train. Stewards were busy inside each of the carriages, wrapping up loose and breakable items and stowing them away in preparation for the descent. The vague shapes moving inside the frost-walled accommodation cars would be more staff, performing this same task with the passengers’ belongings.
Finally the train huffed free of the ravine and out into the base of a quarry abutting the northern edge of the Moine Massif. Here the railway line which had brought them all the way from Cog Terminus finally came to an end, halted by a precipitous drop of four hundred feet down to Lake Larnaig itself. Crescent cliffs of ochre rock formed a basin between the slopes of Ialar Moor on one side and an ancient Arnic burial site in the shadow of Rael Canna Moor on the other. The unremarkable keep Harper had glimpsed earlier squatted to the left of the tracks among slopes of weatherworn scree, mud, and great wet mounds of anthracite. Opposite this, the flooded imprints of boots marked paths between hummocks of crushed limestone and shale, and sumps where old steam-diggers had been left to corrode in pools of orange rainwater.
The last excavations undertaken here had undermined the burial site itself, exposing the tunnels and chambers the ancients had burrowed in the clay subsoil. Someone had even packed these openings with lime to discourage Non Morai from gathering where the dead had once lain. Harper wondered vaguely what the workers had done with the bodies they’d unearthed. The remains of four cairns squatted above the cliffs, the tumbled mounds of stone patched with white lichen.
Ahead, the smoke cleared to reveal the end of the railway line. The Larnaig Ferry had already built up a head of steam; her funnels were pumping cords of white and grey smoke into the clouds. A pre-revolution eight-decked paddle steamer, the Sally Broom was a hulk of sepulchral metals. Ornate steel passenger decks clung to her superstructure like drapes of cobwebs, all lit by yellow oil lanterns which shuddered to the thump-thump-thump of her engines. Ten or so of her crewmen were busy at winches, lowering a wide gangway in the vessel’s stern which led into her hold. Chains rattled, and then the gangway boomed down, slamming neatly into an indentation in the quarry floor. The steel tracks now led all the way into the ferry’s hold—a cavernous space large enough to swallow The Pride of Eleanor Damask and all of her carriages.
Harper’s gaze traveled out beyond the lip of the quarry to where the bulk of the old steamship appeared to float, impossibly, in open air four hundred feet above Lake Larnaig, and it took her several moments before she was able to reconcile her preconceptions of the landscape with the sight of the four enormous skeletal fingers gripping the hull.
The arconite held the steamship in one bony hand, her stern pressed against the uppermost edge of the cliff.
With its feet lost somewhere in the swollen lake four hundred feet below and its skull hovering like a moon in the gauzy sky, the bone-and-metal colossus remained completely motionless, hunched low over the lip of the Moine Massif as though it had rusted solid while inspecting the connections between the railway line crossing the quarry floor and the steamship it held in its skeletal grip. Grease glistened on the cogs and pistons visible between its knuckles and on the many shafts and hydraulic rams in its forearms and spine. Countless souls swam in its chemically altered blood. It had two engines: one, the size of a locomotive shed, occupied its skull and controlled the movement between vertebrae and hence the flex of the spine; the second, much larger engine was housed within the ribcage and gave power to the automaton’s reinforced limbs. It had wings in proportion to its torso, yet they were tattered and useless, as thin as the clouds that now enveloped them.
There was a collected intake of breath from the passengers, and then Jones said, “Good grief.” The old reservist had taken an abrupt step back. “Up close it’s so…” he shook his open brolly at the sky, “…big.”
Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel Page 37