Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  “Hey, donkey man,” the first guard said to Ramnir. “Fetch me some hay for my beast.”

  His companion laughed.

  The Heshette leader made no reply, but his hand went to the knife at his waist. Trench stopped him.

  “That’s a threat,” the guard said. He was a foot taller than the Heshette and was twice his width. Sunlight blazed on his breastplate. “You don’t reach for a weapon in the presence of the Flower Guard. Someone needs to teach you fucking heathens a lesson.”

  The other guard was older. He grunted. “I think Anchor brought those bastards in to work in the stables. Have you seen their women? I’d rather sleep with my horse.”

  “Don’t let me stop you,” Ramnir said.

  The older guard paused, then straightened, frowning.

  Rachel had already pulled Ramnir out of one fight since they’d arrived, and she didn’t like the look of these two.

  “Please, gentlemen,” she said. “We’re guests here. We mean no offense.” She pulled the Heshette leader past the men and out between the Gate Towers. “They’re just nervous,” she said as the city walls fell behind and the landscape opened before them. “Because they know they have to face that.”

  They stood at the edge of the Larnaig Field, a gently sloping bank leading down to the lakeshore about half a league distant. Soldiers of the Flower Guard, the Knife Guard, and the City Guard had gathered on several of the dirt embankments before the walls of Coreollis. To the west Rys’s ballistae squatted on the rolling landscape. The city stables lay to the east, from where Rachel could hear the rhythmic metal clanks of a farrier working at his anvil.

  King Menoa’s armies waited on blooded ground by the water’s edge: a mass of queerly shaped figures and machines. There were ten thousand or more, and very few of them resembled men. Half a league away, a force ten times this size was moving north along Red Road

  to join them. From this legion rose a pall of greasy smoke.

  But the giant in the lake took Rachel’s breath away.

  “The arconite?”

  Trench nodded.

  Ramnir remained silent.

  The skeletal figure towered over the ship floating close to its shins, which listed badly, black smoke pouring from its toppled funnels. A few of Menoa’s troops had launched boats to rendezvous with the automaton and the ship. The sleek black craft plowed through the still waters of the lake without oars or sails, leaving dark trails behind them.

  Rachel hissed. “How do we kill it?”

  “With swords and axes,” Ramnir said.

  Trench shook his head. “The first arconite could not be killed. It still lies trapped in sapperbane chains below the drowned city of Skirl. More than one hundred thousand warriors died trying to subdue the beast. I think this one…” He inclined his head towards the giant. “…is bigger.”

  “Look!” Ramnir said. “Something is happening.”

  The arconite stooped and picked up the entire ship in one hand. Then it strode towards the shores of Lake Larnaig, as if to meet the Mesmerist craft.

  It moved slowly, its bony legs propelling high waves before it. The afternoon sun glimmered on the lake behind it, and the vast expanse of water shone like silver. In the far distance rose the cliffs and misty mountains of the Moine Massif, appearing as thin as vapors.

  Three of the five Mesmerist boats had drawn near to the approaching giant, but now hesitated, keeping a short distance back.

  “Something is wrong,” Trench said.

  Rachel sensed it, too. Figures were moving hurriedly aboard the Mesmerist craft. She could imagine frantic orders given. The boats began to retreat.

  A warning horn sounded somewhere behind Rachel. Evidently the guards on the city walls had spotted the Mesmerists’ unusual behavior in the lake. She turned to see Rys’s soldiers racing across the top of the city battlements, shouting down orders to their comrades within.

  “It has begun,” Trench said.

  Harper stood on the hurricane deck, battered by the wind and three hundred feet above the surface of the lake, as Dill smashed his way through a flotilla of Mesmerist boats. The giant automaton did not require a weapon. His passage through the waters swamped the craft on either side. He stomped on those immediately ahead of him, reducing their living hulls to bleeding shards. Icarates fell into the lake, their weird armour pulsing with vivid blue flashes as they sank from sight.

  But some of the craft fought back. Directed by Icarate priests, the boats began to change shape. Their gunwales flowed into new forms: metal contraptions with barbed spinning discs, multijoined insectlike arms with claws, clusters of pipes and arm-thick whips designed to expel poisons. Clanks and whispers and whoomphs of air heralded these assaults. Fiery blue and red arcs of spitting fluid soared high above the lake and exploded against Dill’s chest. The missiles screamed on contact, for these had been souls ingrained into the fabric of the boats.

  Dill barely appeared to notice the assaults. He shrugged them off and kicked the boats aside, leaving a bloody wake behind him.

  Now Menoa’s encamped force was massing on the lakeshore. Driven by their Icarate priests and witchspheres, the demons swarmed over the bloody ground. A group of heavy armoured boar-like beasts made up the vanguard. They gouged their tusks into the ground and bellowed, and threw up clods of wet red earth. Their segmented-plate hides bristled with spines and steamed in the sunshine like hot lead.

  Dill reached the shore and crushed the first of them underfoot. Engines thundering in his chest, he kicked at a pack of the hapless beasts. Their broken corpses flew far across the Larnaig Field.

  The shadow of the steamer now fell across ranks of seemingly more human figures—the brawlers, murderers, and gladiators Menoa had left mostly unchanged but for sharpened metal limbs or patches of steel and iron skin. These attacked with hatchets, spears, knives, and long curved blades. But Dill’s ankles did not linger to receive their blows, and he left the field unscathed.

  War machines continued to spit fire at the arconite, and at the steamship he carried over the heads of Menoa’s forces. But Dill cleared the long thin battlefield in less than a dozen strides and set out across the upwardly sloping ground to meet Rys’s waiting forces at Coreollis. Hunting horns sounded among the horde, but they did not pursue the giant.

  Hasp watched grimly. “They’ll wait for all the reinforcements to arrive before marching forth,” he said to Harper. “They must first butcher slaves to bloody the battlefield in preparation for the assault, and they must steep themselves in the living earth. But the attack will come soon.”

  Menoa’s main force was already pouring into the encampment on the lakeshore. Harper had never seen such vast numbers arrayed against mortal men before. The ranks of adapted warriors and beasts stretched in a long dark curve around the eastern shore of the lake. Countless twisted metal weapons glinted in the late-morning sun. A vast pall of red vapor enshrouded them—the breath from their dead lungs, she realized. She heard their bones and armour clicking, and felt the ground tremble as boots and hooves and wheels churned the Red Road

  to bloody mud.

  “So many,” she said. “Can Dill possibly defeat them all?”

  “Easily,” Hasp said.

  “Then why would Menoa attack?”

  “Because to flee now would be madness. The arconite would simply crush them on the Red Road

  . He must try to cripple Rys while he still can, sacrificing his Mesmerists to slay as many as possible of my brother’s soldiers. Menoa cares nothing for these demons. He has all of Hell to harvest a new horde.”

  Dill halted outside the city gates and set the steamship down upon the green grass. The Sally Broom sank partly into the earth, listed, and came to rest with a groan.

  The vision of this giant had stunned the Northmen on the battlements to silence. But then, from within the city came a soft, thick fog; pushing through the gates and over the thick granite walls.

  Jack Caulker felt that his moment was near. As an o
utsider, he’d found no solace among these cruel northern men, who jeered and spat at him. And despite his demands, Rys and the other gods had not seen fit to grant him an audience. Indeed, he’d spent most of the journey here cooped up like an animal belowdecks along with the Heshette hags and their livestock.

  The nights had been tortuous, for whenever the cutthroat slept, his nightmare returned. Night after night he would become that same old woman in her flimsy gown, standing on the battlements of Rockwall Fortress. And night after night he would plummet to his death in the valley below, pushed by John Anchor. Caulker slept in fits and bouts, always waking to the sound of his own screaming. His eyes were constantly red and sore. He itched and twitched and felt insects crawling over his skin.

  But he kept close to Anchor’s side. The Adamantine Man remained jovial, laughing loudly at the news of the arconite’s defection from Hell’s armies. Caulker had been watching him carefully, keeping one eye always on the pouch of soulpearls tied to the giant’s belt. Anchor consumed one soul each day at noon when the sun had risen to its zenith. After examining the glass beads to find the strongest and most pure, he would swallow the imprisoned ghost and then slap his huge fists together and bull at the mighty rope to test his strength. Caulker had noticed that Anchor’s great strength ebbed and flowed around these repasts. He was weakest just before he feasted.

  The leather pouch of soulpearls never left the big man’s side, and yet he made no effort to hide this treasure from the eyes of others. And Caulker’s eyes feasted upon it. How many furious spirits resided within that bag? It would be so easy to smash their tiny glass prisons and release them. With the armies of the King of Hell so close by, it was time now, he decided, to make his move.

  “These Northmen seem capable,” he remarked to Anchor as they passed between the Coreollis Gate Towers. Archers in light, stripped-down plate and boiled leathers patrolled the city walls above them.

  “Capable, yes,” Anchor replied. “Veterans of many battles with Hell, these men. But they are not good men. The poison they drink to wear such cruel armour…it makes them cruel also.” His expression wrinkled into one of distaste. “I killed one of Rys’s soldiers once, but the soul was tainted. Very bad.”

  “What do you mean cruel armour?” By pretending to avoid a rut in the ground, Caulker moved to a position where he might best be able to reach the pouch of soulpearls at the big man’s side.

  “The breastplates,” Anchor said. “Wait, I’ll show you.”

  They were outside the city walls now, close beside the grounded steamship. Fog obscured the field sloping down to the lake, but Caulker could hear the howls and cries of King Menoa’s army nearby. So close! He gazed up at the dented hull, and back along the length of the ship. Her rear gangway had been lowered and now soldiers of the Flower Guard were inspecting her interior. A small group had assembled beside the vessel: various nobles in odd rich raiment, an official-looking couple in matching grey uniforms, and a strange old man and a young woman—both wearing what appeared to be red glass armour.

  A unit of cavalry thundering past distracted him. The horsemen disappeared into the mists to the west, heading in the direction of Rys’s ballistae. Caulker could not imagine how such ranged weapons could be effective in this visibility, but he assumed they had acted as a line of defense long before the arrival of Cospinol’s skyship. He looked for the arconite but saw nothing.

  How could something so vast remain hidden from view?

  “You!” Anchor boomed at one of the Flower Guard. “Yes you, man. Come here, please. I wish to show my friend how Rys makes such good warriors. You will help me, yes?”

  The man grinned and came over to join them, clearly pleased to demonstrate whatever superiority Anchor had perceived him to have. He was tall and handsome, with cropped fair hair and an angular jaw. He wore the same silvered breastplate and bracers as his fellows. As he approached, he loosened the leather straps at his side that held the metal plate across his chest. “Has this heathen not heard of knife armour?”

  Anchor shook his head. “No, he is from another land. They do not know Menoa’s forces like you.”

  The soldier snorted. “A soft breed, then? Not trained to resist the Deceiver’s persuasion as we have been.” He peeled away the breastplate and shuddered.

  Caulker felt sick.

  Beneath the soldier’s armour, the man’s chest was a red mess of scars. His skin had been punctured in half a hundred places. The metal plate, Caulker saw, was lined with four-inch knives, each pointing inwards.

  “You see?” Anchor said to Caulker. “Rys’s soldiers wear such armour from the age of seven years. The knives start small, then as the child grows, the armour plates are changed for ones with longer blades. The body adapts around the metal.”

  Caulker turned away.

  “Many die,” Anchor said.

  The soldier laughed. “But the survivors grow stronger.”

  They left the soldier and walked west around the city walls, passing legions of assembled men preparing for battle behind earth and timber palisades. Caulker stared at their silver armour with dread, imagining the torsos within.

  “The suffering makes them resilient,” Anchor said. “King Menoa finds it hard to sway men like this. It takes many years in Hell to break them. Ah, look, here is the iron angel now.”

  It was vaster than Caulker expected. From where he stood he could see nothing but a pair of monstrous skeletal feet and leg bones which disappeared high into the fog. A shadow filled the sky overhead.

  “Big, yes?” Anchor chuckled. “And strong. It has found a weapon.”

  Caulker looked again. Something huge and metal hung in the mists above his head. He peered harder. He could just make out a long, bulky iron object with a funnel and rows of metal wheels connected by couplings. It moved suddenly, and a shower of black stones fell from it.

  Coal?

  “Perhaps we should return to the city,” he said to Anchor. “The soldiers will not thank you for bringing this fog.”

  “I help them in the fight,” Anchor replied, still staring up at the arconite. “They put up with Cospinol’s fog. Fair trade, eh?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Trench hissed.

  Rachel turned to see the group of passengers who had disembarked from the steamship outside the city walls. Now Silister Trench, the archon who had accompanied her all the way from Deepgate, rushed over to greet one of them.

  The old man clad in queer glass armour looked up as Trench approached, and grinned. “You made it, then? And without wings, I see.”

  “You appear to have lost more than a few feathers yourself.”

  They clasped arms.

  “Rachel, this is Hasp,” Trench said, “the Lord of the First Citadel and commander of the Maze Archons. Ulcis’s brother. Hasp, this is Rachel Hael, a friend of the angel who gave up this body.”

  Rachel swallowed. How many more brothers of Ulcis was she likely to meet?

  Hasp said to her, “You knew Dill?”

  She nodded. “Trench told me you would search for him in Hell. I…” She hesitated. “Did you find him?”

  Hasp studied her for a moment. “He exists still.”

  Relief flooded her heart. If Dill’s soul had not been destroyed then there remained a chance to return it to his body. Trench had promised her as much. But then she had a sudden thought. What did it mean that the Lord of the First Citadel was here on earth? Who, then, was looking after the young angel in the Maze?

  “Menoa got to him,” Hasp said bluntly. “I tried to protect him but I failed.”

  “What do you mean? What’s happened to him? Where is he?”

  And Hasp explained.

  “We go to look at the enemy now.”

  “What?”

  John Anchor beamed. “Cospinol’s fog makes it difficult to see. Come…” He beckoned to Caulker. “We will go and see what type of demons we are facing.” He started walking down the slope towards the hidden horde.

  “Sho
uldn’t you wait for the soldiers?” Caulker called after him.

  Anchor glanced back over his shoulder. “What for?” Then he laughed and set off again, dragging his massive rope behind him.

  Caulker hesitated. He’d seen Anchor fight, and knew that the big man was probably more than a match for whatever pickets the demons had placed around their encampment. And he realized that this might be the one chance he’d have to betray the tethered giant to his enemies. But the thought of walking into that terrible unknown made him pause.

  Anchor had almost disappeared into the fog ahead. It was now or never. He bolted after the big man.

  “Jack Caulker,” Anchor said as the cutthroat drew alongside him. There was a hint of sadness in his tone. “You once asked Cospinol to tell you how you die. He did not know the answer then, but he knows it now.”