Caulker thought he heard noises far above, a sound which at first reminded him of squawking gulls. But then, as the giant continued to drag down his mighty rope, the cacophony grew louder and more distinct. Caulker realized he was hearing the wails and sobs of people: lots of them, some close by, other more distant; a chorus of suffering and despair that drifted down from the grey air and filled the streets of Sandport.
A broad grin spread across John Anchor’s face. He began to pull with renewed vigor at his tether. His humming grew louder, as if he sought to drown out the cries of woe overhead. The sky darkened further, the stench of brine brought tears to the eyes. Caulker thought he caught a glimpse of something in the grey gloom overhead-something swaying. But before he could identify the object, it vanished again, swallowed by shifting mists. The fisher folk were yelling in dismay now, backing away from the giant and his rope, their gazes still pinned on the lowering heavens.
Then Caulker finally saw what the stranger was dragging down from the skies, and his blood froze in his veins.
Out of the fog descended a great rope-tangled skeleton of wood. Like the rigging of an upended fleet of ships, the clutter of masts and yards formed a rude thicket of indeterminable width, breadth, and height. Rotting, salt-furred timbers sweated moisture. Seaweed hung from dripping lines. As Anchor continued to drag the thing down, more and more of the poles and spars appeared amid the fog, until they totally filled the skies over Sandport. Yet Caulker realized that this scaffold formed only the lowest fraction of a far bigger vessel. The shadow of something solid and phenomenally huge still loomed in the mists above.
It had to be an airship.
Finally one of the longest masts punctured the rooftop of a nearby building, and the whole construction jerked to a halt.
Caulker’s eyes widened. Among the rigging hung men and women and angels: a disparate army of warriors, suspended by ropes looped around their necks. Some were struggling and clawing at their nooses, their blue-black faces contorted in hideous anguish; others simply hung limp and moaned or wept. All wore corroded armour of unusual design; it was as though each suit had been forged in some different foreign land. Overhead, a knight in red rusted half-plate swung back and forth from a stout travis, gibbering and tugging at his noose, while above and to the left of him, a thin dark-skinned angel in a tattered coat of mail gazed up into the heavens from the end of its own rope. This pitiful creature had only one wing. Countless others depended from the yards around them, ranks of warriors and archons sheathed in rotting metal: in spoiled cuirasses, bucklers, and mouldering brigandines, queer winged armets or dull half-helms. Steel ground against steel, and ropes creaked on timbers beneath the mournful sobbing.
John Anchor flexed his shoulders and let out a long sigh. He grumbled, “Cospinol’s ship is very heavy.” And then he laughed suddenly. “One day I find a nice girl to give me a massage.”
Caulker dragged his gaze from the upended rigging and stared at the big man. “Who are they?”
The giant shrugged. “Soldiers, angels, demons.” He stomped a foot down on the rope, pinning it to the ground. “Noisy crowd, eh? Always complaining and moaning. Unhappy because they are dead but cannot go to Hell.” He grinned and tipped his head at the Spine corpses he had pulled from the rubble. “Now these white folks will come aboard. More nastiness for all. More complaining.”
“They’re dead?” Caulker asked with a hesitant nod to the legions above, still unable to comprehend this hellish vision. “But they’re moaning…screaming.”
“Dead,” the other man said, “but not…uh, not at peace. Souls still in this world, in Cospinol and inside me.” He slammed his huge belly. “Very noisy.”
A terrible thought struck the cutthroat. “You killed them?” he asked. “All of them?”
Anchor looked uncomfortable. “It is heavy,” he muttered, as if that somehow answered the cutthroat’s question. Then he withdrew the reed from his pocket and blew another soundless note from it.
John Anchor’s impossible skyship-if that was indeed what it was, for there had to be ten thousand interconnected beams in that scaffold overhead-had held the crowd enthralled, pinned by their own fears, but now the tiny red sprites that poured out of the fog above proved too much for them. The fisher folk fled screaming. Caulker had a mind to run after them, but he fought this desire. He had not shied from these creatures before, and would not do so now. Let the river-sifters of Sandport cower behind their mud walls, but Jack Caulker had been a great salt sailor once, not a man to flee from skyships or crustaceans, and his instincts told him now that Anchor posed no threat. The Adamantine Man hunted an angel. And he still carried a fortune in pearls.
Clicking and chittering, the crabs came out of the fog and scuttled down the greasy rigging. Millions of them converged on the giant’s rope and then poured down it. When they reached the ground, they swept over the mounds of coiled hemp like a wave of blood towards the dead assassins.
“Six more souls for Cospinol,” Anchor grumbled. “Six more pearls for his hoard.”
The cutthroat stood stock-still, as the chitinous tide surged over his boots. “Cospinol?” he ventured.
“My master.” Anchor tipped his head back. “God of brine and fog, pearlmaker and pirate in Heaven. Ayen’s shipwright and captain of the Rotsward. So many names, eh?” Then he grinned and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Crusty old bastard thinks them up himself and pays me to preach the word, but don’t say this to anyone.”
The crabs now covered the dead assassins in a seething, bubbling mound. Red claws and legs murmured like hookfleas in a carcass. Caulker swallowed and turned away. “Then this…thing is his ship?”
“The Rotsward?” Anchor said. “Yes, it is his skyship. Used to be called the Cleaver, and before that the Fist, and once even the Sally Broom, after a woman.” The giant shook his head. “Good pretty name, the Sally. I liked that name, but Cospinol is fickle. Never happy, always complaining. You think my real name is John Anchor? Ha! The name amuses Cospinol. This god lacks the wit to be subtle.”
Now a corpse-sized lump detached itself from the mass of crabs and slid over the uneven coils of hemp towards Anchor. When it neared the giant’s feet, it rose, as if the dead body amid those crustaceans had been resurrected and was standing up of its own accord. Horrified, Caulker watched as the crab-enshrouded figure climbed up the harness on the giant’s back and began to pull itself up the rope.
Anchor beamed at the cutthroat. “You like crab?”
“I used to,” Caulker replied flatly.
“I like crab.” The big man clapped his hands together. “Pandemerian crab salad with cuttlefish and sea jellies. Good for the heart, you know? Best food for sailors. You are a seaman, yes?”
“I was.”
By now the first red figure had disappeared into the mist overhead and a second clump of crabs had parted from the teeming pile, and was inching closer to the giant.
“Ha!” Anchor exclaimed. “I recognized you for a sailor. You have a stout heart. You know this land well?”
Caulker felt increasingly ill, but he managed a nod.
“Then you will help me find my quarry. My master’s witchsphere lies to him, so he does not trust it to guide him now. We pay well for an honest guide. Many pearls…or salt. Salt we have in abundance.”
“Witchsphere?”
“Yes. You have them here? Evil things, always lying. This one has nine Mesmerist hags inside, so it never agrees with itself.” With a hideous rustling sound, the second red corpse stood and began to climb up the rope to the gallows waiting for it overhead. “You will be my guide?” Anchor persisted.
A witchsphere? Caulker had no idea what Anchor was talking about. Yet evidently the big man needed help. No doubt he had also noticed the lack of any other would-be assistants in the lane outside the broth shop he’d just destroyed. Despite himself, Caulker moistened his lips and said, “First let me see these pearls.”
Anchor retrieved the pouch from his
pocket, and then rummaged inside it. He pulled out a tiny bead, sniffed it, then shook his head and dropped the thing back into the bag. Then he lifted out another, sniffed again, and nodded. “This is a good one,” he said, extending his arm to the cutthroat. “In Oxos this would buy the death of a snake woman. In Pandemeria it might buy a bloodship. Take it, but be careful, is fragile.”
Caulker accepted the jewel. It was not actually a pearl as he had hoped, but rather a similar-sized bead made from glass. He held it up between two fingers and studied it. Intricate lines and whorls had been etched into the surface, and there seemed to be something glimmering inside: a weak, uneasy light.
“Is the soul of a powerful angel,” Anchor said. “The archon once named Malleus Trench, brother of Silister, who is Hasp’s champion in Hell. Very dangerous warrior-but the soul is good for you, I think. You can eat it, yes? Make you big and strong like me.”
The cutthroat had seen enough of the world to recognize a scam when he saw one. This bauble was nothing more than glass, the light inside a trick of the engraving. He frowned. “Really, my friend,” he said with a sigh, “you’ll have to do better than this.” With a snap of his fingers, he flicked the worthless trinket away.
The glass bead flew into the rubble of the Widow’s Hook, and shattered.
A sudden roar compressed the air like a detonation. Caulker was thrown to the ground, his thoughts tumbling around him. He glimpsed shingles flying from the surrounding roofs, dust sloughing skywards, shadows and bloodred crabs rippling at the edges of his vision. An explosion? Had Cospinol’s skyship launched an attack? Overhead, the hanging warriors shook and gibbered and shrieked in their gins. Had John Anchor caused that unholy ruckus himself in some way?
But no, amidst the dust clouds, Caulker now saw a winged apparition, the spectre of an enormous battle-archon. Daylight bled through its heavy iron plate armour and winged helmet. It howled, lifted a black blade as tall as a man, and brought it down upon the tethered giant.
Anchor stepped aside, avoiding the strike. His fists blurred as he launched a flurry of punches at the spectre’s head and neck, but his opponent merely laughed. Anchor’s hands had passed clean through the archon as though through smoke.
The archon’s great sword burst apart like a cloud of black flies, but then re-formed and clove through the dust once more. Anchor was hard-pressed to avoid it. Yet avoid it he did, as purposefully as if it was a real blade. Could a ghost sword cause the giant harm?
Caulker watched in horror and fascination as Anchor lashed out again. For a heartbeat the big man’s hand seemed to close upon the apparition’s wrist and grip it, but then his hold on the creature dissolved and the archon was free once more. It raised its massive sword again…
…and screamed as daylight pierced its armour like flames through parchment. The battle-archon faded. A final terrible shriek resounded among the mud-brick houses, and then nothing remained but dust.
The big man stood motionless for a long moment. Then he examined his fist and sucked at a bleeding knuckle. “The dead are tricky opponents,” he said to Caulker. “It is like fighting a memory, or a nightmare. Not easy. We are lucky it is not nighttime. Such shades can only survive for a brief time in daylight.”
He was smiling now. Something in that smile warned Caulker, for the twist of those black lips evinced none of Anchor’s previous mirth.
“My friend,” the giant said ruefully, “you have now sent the poor angel to join his ancestors in Hell.” He swept his gaze across the pile of mud and timbers. “A door to the Maze will soon open there. Hell is coming now, yes? So we must go.” He sighed and squeezed the nape of his neck, then shrugged. “Iril is Iril, we do not interfere. But now you have a problem, I think. You owe me an expensive soul. You are-what is the word-undoubted to me.”
Caulker rose stiffly. “Indebted,” he said.
“Good. Yes, this is what I mean. But come; let’s talk more of this scarred angel and her companions. I will buy lunch: hearty food for sailors such as us. Crab salad, I think, with chowder and strong fishbeer.” He slapped his huge belly. “You can recommend a good quiet place? A nice broth shop where we can speak?”
The cutthroat thought of all those restaurants, taverns, and broth shops in the better part of town: the many establishments from which he’d been ejected for filching and cursing and fist-fighting over the years. And then he lifted his eyes from the giant, up the monstrous rope, past the seething red crabs and the climbing form of yet another dead assassin, to the creaking, gabbling wooden skyship which filled the heavens over Sandport.
“One or two places spring to mind,” he said.
7
THE WORST ASSASSIN
"Who are you?” she asked.
The angel’s head lolled drunkenly, and Rachel was answered only with a mocking red grin. Dill had bitten his tongue during his torture. Except…this person wasn’t Dill, she reminded herself. He leered at her through the young angel’s eyes, but there was nothing in that savage expression which belonged to the friend she formerly knew.
Rachel blamed herself. She had given him angelwine, filled him with a cocktail of other souls which had now bubbled to the surface. But if Dill was still in there, she would pull him back.
“I asked you a question.”
The angel sniggered and spat a gob of blood on the floor. “I think I’m intoxicated by your beauty,” he slurred. “Or is it from the pain? I’ve not felt my nerves burn like this for a thousand years.” His tongue lolled over his teeth. “It’s quite something.” He tried to rise from the pallet, then collapsed back again.
“It’s the dogweed they’ve given you,” Rachel said. “Try to concentrate. Look at me. Who are you?”
“Who am I?” He fumbled for her breast, but she pushed him away. “Who am I, you ask? Gods…who am I? The scourge of every filthy Mesmerist? My message! Where am I?”
“You’re in a Spine torture cell in the temple. You’ve been drugged.”
“Ohhhhh…” He shook his head. “That means nothing to me. Come here, woman.” His bloody hands reached for her.
She slapped him away again. This is useless. She needed him lucid and able to walk without stumbling if they were going to get out of here alive. Rachel got up and went over to where the corpse of the Spine master lay crumpled against the wall. Most of the poisons in the old man’s apron had been smashed during their fight, but she still searched through them thoroughly. There had to be something she could use to bring the angel round. The Spine employed an extensive array of drugs during the tempering process, and not all of them were designed to disorientate and confuse the victim.
When she found the tiny green vial, she almost kissed it.
“Take this,” she said, trying to place the bottle in his hand. “Just a sip.”
He waved his arms wildly in protest, and then gave her another wet grin.
She hissed. “Open your mouth.”
“Open yours, sweetling.”
Rachel squeezed the angel’s jaw hard, forgetting for the moment that the jaw did not belong to the person in the cell with her, and tipped a little of the clear liquid down his throat.
“Rrrrrrr.” He screwed up his face and spat.
“There,” Rachel said. “Now we might be able to have a proper conversation.”
She could see the drug working. The angel convulsed once, then gagged, then he sat up. He stared hard at her for a few moments, his black eyes full of loathing, then said, “You’ll pay for that.”
“I rather think you’ll thank me for it. Who are you?”
“None of your damn business. Where is this place?”
“Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”
He snorted, but then he noticed the five Spine corpses strewn around the chamber and stiffened. Now he glanced back at her, warily. “I am Silister Trench,” he said.
Trench? It was an unusual name. Rachel did not think she’d heard it in Deepgate before. “That’s a start,” she said. “There are
a hundred things I need to ask you, Trench, but this is not the place to do it. I’ll make this simple: If you value that body you’re currently occupying as much as I do, then you’ll come with me now. There are more assassins in this place than I can count, and they all want to stick needles and other pieces of metal into you.”
“And who are you?” he asked.
“I’m the worst of them.”
Leaving the temple was surprisingly easy. There were so many newly tempered acolytes that none of them had yet learned who anybody else was. In the Spine leathers she stole from a supply room, Rachel looked like any other Adept. She was allowed to pass unchallenged. A cassock she snatched from one of the old priests’ quarters served to cover the angel’s blood-caked wings and his disfigured hands. No one thought to question an Adept leading a hunchbacked old priest out into the city. Of late the Spine had taken to traveling with priests for holy protection at night.
Dusk was barely upon them, but the roiling smoke clouds overhead brought darkness early to Deepgate. Rachel hesitated at the temple exit. The sky fumed black and crimson, and she could see yellow and green chemical fires burning in the east, sending torrents of silver sparks up from the Scythe. The sound of explosions rumbled over the city. Red mist veiled the ruins of Bridgeview and Lilley, and shadows moved silently among the chains.
The consciousness inside Dill tried to move the young angel’s wings, and let out a gasp of agony. “My flesh is bruised and raw,” he complained. “My wings…Your ignorant assassins have damaged me.” The Spine chain-and-burr cuffs had bitten deeply into the muscles and tendons behind his shoulders.
“They’re not your wings,” Rachel muttered as she stared at the burning city. Deepgate teemed with ghosts from the abyss, countless thousands of them. Shades capered among the twisted metal and rubble like wisps of living darkness. She half heard sighs and shouts and cruel laughter: intangible voices hiding among the crack and rumble of stone, the creaking chains, and the roaring fires. Would that she had a real priest with her now. A holy man might keep Iril’s shades at bay, protect them against the madness of the abyss. These phantasms would cajole and torment them.
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