The rope at Anchor's back trembled, and he heard Cospinol's voice. Ask Harper how deep that funnel is likely to go. Could it lead us down to the River of the Failed?
The tethered man passed the question on to the engineer.
Harper avoided his eye, perhaps trying to hide something in her expression. “The River of the Failed flows underneath Hell,” she admitted, “and any pit is going to take us nearer.”
So be it, Cospinol said. John, take the Rotsward underground. We're going to parley with a river.
Anchor looked down into the gulping funnel. “It's going to be a tight fit,” he said. “Much destruction in our wake.” He slapped his big hands together and beamed.
Cospinol sighed in his servant's mind.
Harper slammed her Mesmerist device into her tool belt, then gestured angrily towards the surface of the Maze. “Hell is alive, John,” she said. “You'll destroy thousands of souls if you try to drag Cospinol's ship through its very fabric. Assuming such a feat is even possible.”
Anchor frowned. “Possible?” he muttered. “Strength is merely will. Anything is possible.” He gave a grunt of decision. “And if Hell is alive, then it can get itself out of my way.”
He leapt from the side of the Midden, dragging the great skyship down towards the funnel, and the living, thinking interior of Hell.
5
THE PRINCESS
Oran ordered his militiamen out of the Rusty Saw tavern, but most were already drunk, and some were off whoring and could not be found.
Oran regained order through threats and violence. He raged at them. He fought with two and broke one man's nose. His shouts of anger finally silenced the ruckus in the saloon.
“It is Lord Rys himself who commands you to stand and fight here tonight,” he yelled. “I have his authority in this and all matters.”
Rachel sensed resistance amongst the militiamen. Veiled glances and muttered curses passed amongst them. They had heard this speech, but clearly they did not fully accept his authority.
But they had even less liking for Rachel—and no respect. Their dark gazes evinced contempt for the assassin. After all, she had brought Menoa's Twelve upon them.
In a quiet voice Oran said to her, “They know this battle cannot be won. All of them expect to die tonight, so they would rather spend their new-won credit on whisky and whores.”
They're afraid. But Rachel chose not to voice her thoughts.
The men now assembled on that cold overcrowded strip of earth outside the log building. All were armed. A few had taken up coils of ropes and the iron hooks used to scale mundane defenses, palisades and the like, but these implements did not rest comfortably in their hands. Many still drank from bottles or simply stood in the glow of the upstairs windows, gazing mutely at their own shadows.
Mina came out of the inn a moment later, clutching her dog to her chest and stroking its ears. The troubled expression on her face was enough to tell Rachel the result of her latest consultation with Basilis.
“No great plan, Mina?”
Mina shook her head. “Basilis has no power to influence this thing. Its soul is hidden from us.” She hesitated, then set her dog down on the ground. “Menoa tricked us at Larnaig. We managed to free Dill because the Lord of the Maze wished us to do so—and now we face the consequences of our actions.” She sighed. “He used us like puppets, Rachel. Basilis is furious about it, and yet he's reluctant to commit himself to a fixed plan of action until he understands the king's motives. My master does not want to be fooled again.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we don't have a choice. If Menoa is steering our actions, then we risk helping him in whatever we do. But if we do nothing at all, we die.”
Dill carried them onwards, the tiny island of humanity cradled in his dead hands. The smell of Maze-forged bones and metal filled the night. His gait spanned swaths of dark forest, heels pounding the earth, a deep rhythm that seemed to stir an unspoken presage in the hearts of the waiting militiamen.
Doom, doom … Doom, doom.
Now Rachel could hear the noise of the pursuing arconite clearly. She turned to Mina. “We'll make a stand now. I'll tell Dill to set us down.”
“Wait.” Mina bit her lip. “Rachel, I think there's a way we can beat this thing. I just need to get inside its head.”
“In what way?”
“Physically!”
Rachel understood. If the construction of Menoa's arconite mirrored Dill's, then they would find within it a chamber containing the trapped soul of an angel. “Shit, Mina, we'll have to get inside its jaw.”
But by then they had run out of time, for Menoa's arconite was already upon them.
The automaton came crashing out of the fog. In its Maze-forged armour it was far bulkier than Dill. Dull green soul lights lingered around the edges of its bracers, cuisses, and greaves, like the remnants of some queer electric storm. It moved stiffly and unnaturally, issuing gouts of steam from its shoulder joints. Its ironclad limbs were darkly spattered with human and Mesmerist gore from the killing field at Larnaig. Half of its skull had been burned black by some unknown inferno. In one massive gauntlet it held a steel cleaver the extent of a city wall.
Oran's men fell back cursing and gasping as the stink of the creature fell upon them: an odour of the dead, of those tens of thousands slain at Larnaig and Coreollis. The arconite brought with it the stench of war.
“Dill,” Rachel cried, “set us down.”
Dill turned and stooped and set the inn down roughly upon the forest track. The Rusty Saw's timbers creaked in protest. One corner of the building tilted and sank into its now-crumbling island, forcing great clumps of earth aside. Oran's militiamen leapt down, carrying ropes and axes, and spread out into the trees on either side.
Dill stood and faced the other arconite.
The automaton paused. It stood back in the fog. Its metal armour, though dark with blood, grease, and soil, was limned by a queer green radiance—like a star-festooned fortress emerged from the moonlit clouds. Its useless wings reared up behind it like great tattered sails. Engines ticked within its cuirass and scorched skull. Smoke gusted from its joints and uncurled around the naked vertebrae of its neck. With a massive shriek and groan of metal, it took a step forward and swiped sideways with its cleaver.
Dill moved to intercept.
The earth around them shuddered.
Dill met the other automaton's blow with his open palm. The concussion bleached all sound from Rachel's ears except for a shrill painful monotone. She saw men on their knees on the ground with their hands pressed against the sides of their heads. For several heartbeats she heard nothing but the sharp whine inside her own skull…
… Until she became aware of movement again, of the frenzied crunch of shattered trees and bushes, the screech of grinding metal. Somewhere in the dark skies overhead the two arconites fought. The moon vanished and then reappeared, as Menoa's great warrior grabbed Dill's neck and shoved him back. Dill retreated, his heels ramming craters into the earthen road on either side of the displaced inn. Voices cried out in the fog all around—women, howling children, all fleeing the Rusty Saw, scrambling away through mud and mist. Shadowy figures loped through the surrounding forest as Oran's men closed on the intruding arconite.
Mina tugged Rachel's arm, whispering urgently, “Tell him to bring it down.”
Rachel looked up. She could make out little but vague shapes looming in the mist, the flicker of green light around armour and bone, the flash of the enemy's monstrous cleaver. Another massive concussion shook the ground. Someone screamed in terror.
“Dill!” Rachel cried over the voice, “knock the bastard's feet from underneath it. Topple it.”
One huge ironclad heel thumped into the ground ten paces from Rachel. Mina stumbled and fell. Rachel grabbed her grey cassock roughly and pulled her aside as branches rained down upon them both. The assassin slipped in the mud, her wrist striking a rock buried in the clay. She dra
gged Mina into the darkness beneath the trees as great shadows moved across the heavens. Behind her rose a wall of blood-soaked metal. Sounds of weapons rang out from somewhere nearby, followed by another momentous clash as the arconites exchanged blows. Green lights rippled and flashed through the canopy overhead, like chemical fires.
Mina's sorcerous mist rolled and broke across the area around the track and the inn, glowing in the moonlight as though imbued with some spectral energy of its own. Rachel caught glimpses of the scene: Dill's bone limbs moving amidst columns of rank red metal, the roots of upended trees reaching from banks of wet earth, crushed bodies lying half buried in the mire or trapped under dark masses of smashed boughs. Through a break in the fog Rachel spied a score of Oran's woodsmen advancing upon the intruding automaton with ropes, trying in vain to bind its shins to trees. The great bone-and-metal limbs shifted again. She heard death cries, and then yells of rage and grief.
“What's happening back there?” Mina cried.
Rachel shoved her on, into the dark forest. “I don't know. But we need—”
A sudden clash of metal stole her words. She looked back, her ears ringing. The two giants now stood locked together, struggling in the mist. Dill's heel slid backwards and exploded through a dirt bank. Clods of earth spattered the inn and the forest canopy beyond. He turned, twisted, and thumped his foot back down. Oran's voice sounded distantly, barking orders at his men. A woman wailed somewhere to the south. The green lights in the sky moved suddenly, violently, and then seemed to topple.
Menoa's arconite fell.
Vast wings flashed across the heavens. A blast of dank air tore through the forest. The automaton struck the ground with such force that it threw Rachel off her feet. She landed in soft earth, mud and humus filling her mouth and nostrils. The bandage had unraveled from her head and now hung in loose loops around her neck. She spat out dirt.
Mina was now crouching against an earth embankment, panting heavily. Back in the clearing around the inn, Oran's woodsmen let out a roar of triumph. Rachel could see little through the trees but vague green lights pulsing in the mist. She extended a hand and helped the thaumaturge to her feet. “Hurry,” she said. “We might only have a few moments. I don't know how long Dill can keep that big bastard down.”
A strange scene greeted them as they left the forest gloom. Menoa's arconite had fallen headlong along the track, just beyond the Rusty Saw, with one arm trapped underneath its cuirass, and its vast mothy wings bent over at a shallow angle. Its huge metal cleaver rested against a nearby tree like a toppled monolith. Dill knelt on the giant's back, crushing one of its wings under his shin, while gripping its neck in his fist as he pinned it to the ground. He had forced its blackened skull down into the mud, and it lay there motionless, stinking of death and wreathed in gouts of its own engine smoke.
Enraged and emboldened with whisky, a group of Oran's men had climbed upon the arconite's back to probe for weaknesses in its armour with their axes. As Rachel hurried under the fallen giant's wing and around its shoulder, she noticed the whorls and scrawls etched in those metal plates: esoteric looping designs that again reminded her so much of the hull of the Tooth that had cut through Deepgate's chains. And yet this construct was very much from Hell.
Mina noticed Rachel's puzzlement. “Heaven and Hell have more in common than most would suspect,” she advised. “Remember that Ayen and Iril were once lovers. They came from the same unknown place.”
“What about King Menoa?”
Mina shrugged. “That's a more difficult question to answer. Menoa has been in Hell since the very beginning. Whether he was once human or not, I don't know, but he got close enough to Iril to betray him. I suspect there's a family connection somewhere.”
They hesitated at the front of the stricken arconite's skull. Ranks of yellow-black teeth confronted them like an impenetrable wall. The colossus stared out at nothing, seemingly dead but for the hiss of steam and the tick of machinery inside its armoured torso. One of its great ragged wings twitched, but Dill held the creature fast, his own towering body looming like a great bone citadel in the fog. Fifty yards away, the enemy's cleaver slipped sideways from the tree trunk that had temporarily halted its fall, crashing to the ground.
Rachel clutched her nose. “This monster stinks worse than Deepgate's Poison Kitchens,” she said. “Devon himself couldn't have concocted a fouler stench.”
Mina shrugged. “It's just rotting blood.”
“Lovely. So what now?” Rachel asked. “You still want to get inside it?”
“Into the skull,” Mina confirmed. She examined the giant's visage for a moment, noting how the metal plates had been welded into the base and sides of the jaw. Its teeth were too closely set to permit them easy access inside its maw. “Dill, can you smash a way in?”
In answer Dill raised his free hand. The bony fist hovered in the sky for a moment, and then dropped like a boulder. He struck Menoa's warrior hard on its chin. The impact drove the creature's jawbone a foot deeper into the soft earth. A sound like a crack of thunder echoed far across the forest.
Mina shirked away from the blow.
Rachel winced and clutched her forehead as the noise of that concussion faded. The musket wound on the side of her head throbbed with renewed vigour. “Darkness take me!” she cried. “You could have warned us, Dill.”
And yet Dill's attack had failed to damage the fallen warrior. Both his fist and the arconite's teeth remained unmarked.
Rachel stared at that huge blackened skull and said, “Force its mouth open.”
Dill obeyed. This time he gripped his opponent's chin and wrenched its jaw open. A gap of several feet appeared between the columns of teeth.
Rachel and Mina approached, then stopped to exchange a glance. The assassin shrugged, and then climbed inside first.
The darkness was almost complete. Rachel stood at the inner curve of the arconite's maw, trying to see something, anything, in that miserable gloom. Almost no illumination penetrated through the gap behind her, but for a faint sliver of moonlight. The air smelled subterranean, yet as rotten as the bloodiest Mesmerist earth. She heard Mina climb through to join her and then felt the thaumaturge's cool glass-scaled hand in her own.
“There should be a crawl space at the back of the mouth,” Mina said. “Somewhere on the left. It ought to lead into the soul room in the skull.”
Hand in hand they edged forward. The bony floor gave a sudden lurch, and then settled once more. The air smelled of oil and scorched meat. Their footsteps echoed back from the unseen walls. Rachel realized she was gripping Mina's hand more tightly, perhaps dangerously so, given its fragility. She relaxed her grip.
After some searching they found the narrow passageway. A dank, metallic odour came from within. Rachel knelt and ran her hands over the bone lip around the opening. It was large enough for her to crawl inside. But just as she stooped to enter it, the arconite spoke.
“These are the words of Menoa's Prime,” it said in a thunderous yet clear and inflectionless voice. “The Lord of the Maze commands you, Hasp, to kill the two women within his arconite.”
Rachel stopped. “Shit,” she said.
Mina pushed her onwards. “Hurry.”
“How drunk was Hasp?”
“Not drunk enough.”
Even within the confines of this strange bone warren, Rachel heard Hasp howl. His cries rang out into the night as the parasite in his skull usurped his will. Unable to resist that command, the Lord of the First Citadel would now be coming for them.
Rachel scrambled on through darkness, feeling the way with her hands. After a moment she spied a faint light issuing from around a corner ahead. The arconite's soul room? She hurried on, with Mina close behind.
The layout of the chamber was identical to the one they'd found inside Dill. A glass sphere sat amidst arcane machinery under a multifaceted crystal ceiling. Illumination came from within the sphere, where there floated the soul of an angel.
Rachel
swallowed her revulsion. Unlike Dill, this thing appeared to be ancient, its flesh corrupted to the point of utter desiccation, its wings mere broken shards of bone. Some scraps of armour still clung to its fibrous muscles, but did little to cover its nakedness. It did not seem to be aware of them, but rather floated in the center of its globe and stared inwards as if dreaming.
Another terrible cry came from outside the chamber, much closer now.
“Whatever you think you can do to damage this thing,” Rachel said, “do it now. Hasp will be here in seconds.”
Mina placed her hands against the sphere, then recoiled abruptly. “Gods,” she whispered. “Oh, god, oh, god.”
“What is it?”
The thaumaturge simply shook her head. “Guard the entrance to the chamber,” she said. “Try to hold Hasp back. Kill him if you have to.”
If I can. As drunk and vulnerable as the god now was, Rachel doubted she'd be able to delay him by more than a few moments. Just buying them that short amount of time could cost her her own life.
She returned to the passageway as Mina began whispering in a low singsong voice. The thaumaturge's soothing tones filled the chamber. Another terrible howl came from outside the skull. Hasp was getting close.
Rachel drew the simple blade she had taken from a dead soldier in Coreollis. She crouched at the entrance to the chamber, listening carefully, and waited.
And waited.
After another long moment she heard a low wail issue from the night outside. It sounded more melancholy than the previous cries, but still Hasp did not appear. Rachel crawled through the passageway back into the cavern of the arconite's maw. She could just make out the gap between its jaws as a smudge of grey in the black-ness. She waited again for ten rapid heartbeats, then strode over and peered outside.
The Lord of the First Citadel met her gaze with red and miserable eyes. Rachel's instincts readied her for battle, before she fully comprehended the scene, and her heart steadied. Hasp was trapped, unable to attack her. Dill had caught the god in the bone cage of his down turned fingers.
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