A voice rang out across the heavens: “… continue to reject our attempts at diplomacy. Should we crush your bones right now, or will you stand amongst us and hear King Menoa's terms?”
Rachel knew what was coming, but it still made her jump. Dill buried his massive cleaver in the other automaton's neck, driving the huge warrior to its knees. Its shins burst through the rubble mere yards from their fleeing party. One of Oran's men cried out and fell, buried under a collapsing wall. The others covered their heads with their hands against the spewing dust.
Now prostrate, but looming directly overhead, Menoa's fallen creature had noticed the humans underneath it. Its vast dark eye sockets seemed to stare into Rachel's own soul.
Oran was yelling up at it, “… Menoa to form an alliance. We have—”
Dill slammed his knee into the arconite's face and sent it pitching backwards. He turned suddenly and his cleaver flashed across the sky over their heads, disappearing towards the east. The ensuing gale whipped up dust from the street. The blow struck its target several blocks away with a mighty clang.
“… speak to him,” Oran finished shouting. He growled with frustration, and then ordered his men to head deeper into the stricken town.
Rachel found a chance to whisper to her other self. “I hope your moment is still to come, sis,” she said. “The brakes are off this universe now. We're well and truly careening down the road of the damned.”
“I know.”
“Can you focus?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that makes one of us. I won't be quick, but I'll back any move you—”
One of her captors shoved her forward. A dozen of his fellows followed behind, as battered-looking and ashen as earthquake survivors. They coughed and spat and constantly dragged leather gauntlets across their eyes. Whirlwinds of embers scorched the heavens behind them. The group moved on, turning south again at another intersection, while overhead the battle amongst the giants raged.
She could not now tell where they were, since nothing recognizable remained of Burntwater. She wondered if her former self had escaped with Mina by now. They would cross the lake under the cover of fog, but Rachel herself would not now be waiting in her own boat to meet them and guide them to Sabor's castle. She would not now punch her former self in the face.
Rachel lifted a hand to touch the bruise under her eye. The flesh there still felt tender and sore. How could she have sustained the blow when she had not been there to deliver it?
But of course that had all happened in a different universe than this one. This world was the one where everything went wrong, where the future would become so unbearable that Rachel herself would come back from another time to try to fix her own mistake. She turned to face her older self and said, “What are the consequences of all this? Does it really matter if you tell me now?”
The other woman hesitated, and then said, “Dill loves you. He'd do anything for you. Even if it meant his own death. Even if it meant the end of this world.”
“I don't understand.”
“Don't let the Mesmerists take you alive.”
Rachel nodded. Now at last she understood.
An order to halt came from ahead, and the party drew up before a steep bank of rubble. Oran was standing amidst rising vapours on the summit of this obstruction, his hands cupped around his mouth as he shouted up against the great clamour of steel from the skies. Fuming clouds of smoke obscured all else.
But then Rachel spied something huge and metallic stir in the murky air behind the militia leader. The sounds of battle ceased. A shadow fell over her.
Her older self cried out and shoved Rachel hard to one side. But she wasn't fast enough. Five monstrous bone fingers descended and closed around the two women, the tips gouging deep furrows in the earth. The ground rocked, and Rachel fell against her other self.
She felt herself being lifted up rapidly into a cloud of choking dust. Below, Oran continued to shout, but she could not decipher his words. “Dill!” she cried. “Dill, is that you?”
But then a thundering voice came from very nearby: “I am told the name Rachel Hael holds meaning for you.” A pause, and then the arconite spoke more gently. “Is this she in my hand, Dill? We will not harm her. The king has always desired peace between us.”
Rachel's heart thundered in her chest. She struggled to breathe. “I hope you haven't missed your moment, sis,” she said, rubbing tears from her aching eyes. “The future isn't certain yet.”
She felt a hand squeeze her own. “No, it isn't.”
Through a break in the dust she saw Dill's skeletal face. Or was it him? She couldn't tell anymore. The arconites were all around her now. She could hear the massive crash of their feet, the rumble of their engines. She smelled the Maze in every quivering breath she took.
“Kneel,” Menoa's warrior commanded.
And then she saw him. He lacked expression—for that bone visage could muster none—but she knew it was Dill when he sank to the ground amidst the smouldering remains of Burntwater.
“Put down your weapon,” the arconite demanded.
Dill set his stolen cleaver down upon a row of rooftops. The partially destroyed buildings collapsed beneath it.
“The king is pleased,” the arconite said, “but he remains cautious. As a gesture of goodwill and submission, he requires that you permit us to return Lord Hasp to the Maze. We need his assistance to deal with a small matter there. Do this for the king and you have his word that Rachel Hael will not be harmed.”
Rachel threw herself against the automaton's fingers, and cried, “No!”
“If you agree,” Menoa's warrior went on, “you need only lower your head.”
Rachel cried out again, but she couldn't stop what happened next. Dill lowered his head. Menoa's arconite raised its blade and brought it crashing down upon the top of his skull.
Dill's jaw slammed into the ground with the force of a rockslide. The resulting dust cloud billowed out over the whole settlement.
Rachel watched in horror as the dust settled. The stream of doubts Menoa's warriors had been planting in Dill's soul throughout the battle had successfully weakened him, for she could see that he was injured. A deep fissure now ran from the top of Dill's cranium down to his jaw. He managed to raise his head again. Blood flowed freely between Dill's teeth and down across his chin.
“Hasp?” Rachel cried.
“This is the moment, sis.”
Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see her older self slipping her knife out from her belt. She looked tired, much older now than the two decades that separated them.
“What happens if you don't do it?” Rachel said.
“A lot of people suffer.”
Rachel took a long slow breath. “I wonder if we missed another opportunity—if I had only done something differently.”
“This was always the only way for us to be sure. It's too dangerous for either of us to exist here.” She turned the blade over slowly in her hands. “I'll make it quick. Neither of us will suffer.”
“But the Rachel on the lake manages to escape, doesn't she?”
“Dill won't stop the arconites' advance now. He doesn't know that that Rachel escaped, because you are here. As long as Menoa has one of us hostage, he'll obey the Lord of the Maze. This timeline is a dead end for us.”
“But we must survive elsewhere?” Rachel insisted. “The universe where I met myself out on the lake… that still exists, doesn't it? That other version of me is still in Sabor's castle.”
The other Rachel nodded. “She's you,” she agreed. “And she does survive, and grow older. And one day she realizes that no world deserves to suffer, not even a doomed one.” She smiled sadly. “Doesn't make it any easier, does it?”
Rachel rubbed tears from her eyes. “No,” she said, “it doesn't.”
“Good-bye, sis.”
“ Good-bye.”
11
CARNIVAL AND MENOA
Rachel felt
finally relieved. The room into which her former self had stepped was now empty. The Greengage Suite had undergone another temporal shift, and now looked out upon a different Time altogether. She peered through the porthole to see a moonlit room.
A younger version of Garstone appeared, wearing a crushed brown suit. He tilted his head to his brother Iron Head, and then to Sabor. “You asked for me, sir?”
“You're late, Garstone,” the god of clocks replied. “I needed you to accompany Miss Hael ten hours into the past, but you've missed your opportunity. She's already gone.”
The small man took out a map from his inside jacket pocket and unfolded it. “Ten hours, sir? Hmm…” He frowned. “That does present us with a little problem, doesn't it?”
He scratched his head and then sighed. “There is a route, but I'm afraid I shall be fourteen years older by the time I rendezvous with her.”
Sabor raised his nose. “Fourteen years is nothing. You'll still be fit enough when you emerge. Ah, thank you…” He snatched an envelope from the hand of a second, much older, Garstone, who just happened to be passing at that very moment, and gave it to the younger assistant. “Here are your instructions, along with some drawings of the decoys we'll build to ensure our friendly arconite eludes his pursuers. You have fourteen years to read them and less than ten hours to execute them.”
“Those decoys were a waste of time,” Rachel said, “and we're wasting even more time here. Dill needs our help right now.”
Garstone accepted the documents from his master. “Thank you, sir. Now if you'll excuse me, I'd better be going. The first suite fails in”—he glanced at his timepiece—“fifty-three seconds.” He hurried away and disappeared into one of the many doors.
Clocks chimed all around them as if in celebration of his departure.
“Now let's go.” Rachel turned away without waiting to see if the others followed. Too many minutes had passed since they'd crowded around Sabor's obscura table and witnessed Dill crawling from the lake—an image that had already been seventeen minutes old. Anything could have happened to her friend since then.
The group assembled beside a glassy basalt outcrop at the edge of the plateau surrounding the Obscura Redunda. A freezing wind shrieked past their ears, while the walls of the castle flickered and throbbed behind them. From up here Rachel could see for leagues in each direction along the Flower Lake's northern shore: peninsulas and crescents of silver beach; the smudge of smoke over Kevin's Jetty; the green wooded hills rising up in banked mounds from the water's edge to the dour Temple Mountains; and, half a league further down the slope below, the arconite Dill.
He was using his one good arm to drag his huge body up through the forested slopes. A clutter of pipes and bones and wire-snagged machine parts scraped along the ground behind his broken pelvis. In his wake he left a trench full of oil and broken trees.
Rachel ran towards the path that would take them back down the mountainside, but Sabor called after her, “You can't help him.”
“I have to help him,” Rachel replied.
“He's too big,” the god of clocks said. “You can't carry him up here, and you can't repair him. He has to make it on his own.”
“He might have to drag himself,” Rachel said, “but that doesn't mean he has to make the journey alone.” She wheeled away and sprinted down the track.
She had barely covered two hundred yards before Iron Head caught up with her. She heard his leather armour creaking, and the thud of his boots behind her, and looked back to find him grinning.
“You gave Sabor a lesson in compassion,” he said.
“I've never met a god who didn't need one,” she replied. “Except for Hasp, and he tried to kill me.”
A yelp came from somewhere behind. Rachel glanced back up to see Mina struggling down the steep trail a short distance away, her glass-sheathed feet slipping in the loose dirt, while her little dog sauntered along beside her. There was no sign of Sabor—apparently he had decided not to come.
They remained on the path for an hour before Rachel heard the arconite's enormous body smashing through the forest. She turned in the direction of the sounds and led her two companions through densely packed trees. All was silent except for the regular crunch of the canopy breaking up ahead, and the rhythmic thud of bone striking earth.
He stopped moving when he saw them. His massive arm collapsed to the ground with one final crash, and his jawless skull simply settled upon the hillside and lay there, staring.
Rachel burst into tears. She scrambled over to his skull and pressed her body against it. The dead bone felt coarse and hard under her hands, utterly cold. The arconite's great skeleton stretched far down the slope below in a mess of twisted metal, pipes, and ribs.
Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to find Mina standing beside her.
“He can't speak,” she said. “Let's find his soul.”
The narrow passageway leading into Dill's soul chamber had been left exposed by his missing jaw, and they had little trouble finding it and crawling inside. The chamber within remained gloomy, only partially illuminated by dim shafts of daylight falling through holes in the arconite's cranium. In the very center, the glass sphere containing the angel's spirit rested amidst piles of broken machine parts and blue crystal shards.
A hooded figure was slumped on the floor with his back against the sphere, an empty whisky bottle in his hand. He looked up and groaned.
“Hasp!” Mina shouted, rushing towards him.
The Lord of the First Citadel clutched his head in his hands and groaned again. “Stay away from me, thaumaturge,” he said. “I don't know where I am or what I might do. It seems I've been in a battle, but I have no recollection of it.”
“You're hungover,” she said.
“That, too.” Hasp tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
Rachel stepped over debris and placed her palms against the glass sphere. The ghosts inside drifted through each other like dreams, passing in and out of Dill's own spectre. Their voices assaulted her mind:
Too late … too late …It is dying… He should not have fought, and now … Killing us… Too late, the blow from above … withering … Such pain, and dust, and darkness… Leave us alone …
“Dill?”
His voice sounded faint. I was coming to meet you at Sabor's castle.
“It's not far now.”
He was silent a moment. This hill nearly finished me.
“Are you in pain?”
Some.
She pressed her face against the cold glass. “But you got away from them. You made it here.”
I lost the cleaver.
“That doesn't matter.” A tear ran down over the smooth surface of the sphere and broke against her hand. She didn't know what to tell him. They couldn't heal him, and they couldn't take him inside Sabor's castle. If he managed to crawl to the top of the mountain, he would have to remain there while the rest of them went inside.
Mina pressed her hand to the glass an inch in front of Rachel's face. “Do you realize how much of a mess you're in, Dill?” she said. “They've completely destroyed you.”
Mina?
“Mina!” Rachel glowered at her. “Do you have to be so fucking insensitive all the time?”
“Well, just look at him,” the thaumaturge said, “or what's left of him. He's got no legs, one arm, and the rest of him looks like crawling scrap. He's not even going to make it to the Obscura.”
“He'll make it,” Rachel said.
“And then what?” the thaumaturge retorted. “He'll lie outside and rust. There's nothing left of him, Rachel, nothing here we can salvage.”
A crack sounded above them, and a table-sized chunk of Dill's cranium fell down and smashed into a mound of shattered crystal at one side of the chamber. Hasp twitched and clutched his head.
Rachel grabbed Mina by her shoulders and wrenched her away from the sphere. “What are you doing?”
Mina's dark eyes narrowed. She leaned her face
forward and whispered in Rachel's ear. “I'm telling it like it is, Rachel. He can't survive like this, and I think he should know that.” She straightened again, smiling coldly. “Use your head, Spine.”
And suddenly Rachel understood. Menoa's warriors had weakened Dill by planting doubts in his mind. This huge bone-and-metal body was only as strong as Dill believed it to be, so the other arconites had made it vulnerable simply by convincing Dill that he was vulnerable. Now Mina was trying to finish the job for them. If they weakened him enough, they might be able to break the sphere and release his soul.
Rachel glared at the other woman. “What happens to his soul if we can free it?”
“Most spirits can survive for a short while on this earth,” she whispered, “and Dill is a lot more powerful than your average phantasm. When he was in Hell, he consumed a fragment of Iril, a piece of Hasp's soul, and…” She smiled. “… a little bit of me.”
“How long could he exist outside this body?”
Mina shrugged. “He's a rather uncommon person,” she said, “even for an angel. Why don't we get him out of here and see what happens?”
“Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Mina replied. “But do it anyway.”
Iron Head swung his hammer at the glass sphere. It connected with a loud crack. He examined the tiny white scratch he'd made on the smooth surface, shook his head, and then hefted the weapon once again. On the second blow the glass shattered.
Thus liberated, the ghosts from the sphere tore around the walls of the chamber in a vortex of vapourous hands and eyes and teeth. Rachel staggered as they howled past her face, grabbing at her, buffeting her, and she heard their cries in her mind.
Not in Hell…freezing… there's life, warmth … look at the glow … so cold… treasures…
Mina remained at the back of the chamber, her eyes closed. She was stroking her little dog and muttering something under her breath. Then she opened her eyes and allowed Basilis to jump down from her embrace.
The dog padded forward, growling.
“Stay out of my friends,” Mina warned the spectres. “Possess any one of us here, and my master will drag you back out again and send you somewhere you really don't want to go. Do you know what a Penny Devil can do to a soul?” She smiled grimly. “If you thought Hell was bad, just wait until you see Basilis's house.”
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