She ground the toe of her left boot into its mouth to shut it up, leaving it gasping and bleeding, then wandered over to the outstretched hands in the nearest wall.
Two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, ten fingers, ten toes. One head.
Harper passed through sixty-two rooms and climbed one hundred and four stairwells to reach the king’s balcony. She counted every step, trying to burn her progress into her memory lest the citadel trick her on the way back out. It enjoyed visitors too much, she feared, and was inclined to keep them here for longer than was strictly necessary. The long journey tired her, and she found that her concentration waned somewhat in the upper chambers. By the time she located Menoa, she had lost two fingernails and developed a curious grating sensation in her left knee, as though the joint had been subtly altered.
These were small changes, however, easy to remedy after she had had some rest. Most importantly, her uniform remained precisely the way it should be.
The Mesmerist ruler stood beside the parapet of the sweeping red balcony, gazing out across Hell. The crimson sky smouldered behind him, casting liquid shadows across the smooth ridges and indentations of his black glass helmet. He stood about nine feet tall today, more or less the same height he’d been since Harper had been in his service, yet his glass armour warped gradually as light and shade passed over it. Even as Harper watched, Menoa’s breastplate flowed, changing from the face of a catlike beast to the grimacing visage of a hanged man. Spikes grew out of his shoulder plates, and then shrunk back inside again, as though following the rhythm of his breathing. His gauntlets rested on the parapet before him like huge dark claws.
Harper could see bloodmists rising through the air behind him, those great fuming funnels of vapor exuded by the king’s Processors. The balcony itself glistened in this living mist. Part flesh and part mechanical, the whole floor beneath them throbbed with mute pleasure-evidently this part of the Ninth Citadel was drawing power from the bloodmists. From somewhere below came sound of machinery and screams, all mingled with the low, rhythmic chanting of the Icarates.
The king’s glass mask did not turn to face his servant. He spoke in a low, distant voice. “You have located the angel?”
“The dogcatchers picked up his scent briefly,” she replied. “He manifested somewhere west of the Lower Blaise Canal Area, but then vanished beneath one of the Soul Middens.” Most of the souls from Deepgate were falling into the Middens, and she had instructed the Icarates and their packs to search that area first. “It’s only a matter of time until we find him.”
“The First Citadel knows he is here. His ancestors will be searching for him.”
“We’ve seen no trace of any other archons in the area,” Harper said. “Perhaps the ongoing siege has restricted their influence so far from their fortress?”
“No.” King Menoa turned abruptly.
For a heartbeat Harper thought she glimpsed the face behind his mask-soft golden eyes, high arching cheeks like those of a porcelain doll, and beautiful bloodred lips-but then the glass turned as black as an Icarate’s throat.
“He is much too valuable to our enemies,” Menoa said. “The First Citadel is determined to unravel the mechanism by which the angel escaped Hell. There was no portal open when he first died, nothing but a rotting body for him to return to, and yet he somehow returned to the same flesh.” The king traced a claw across the chin of his mask. “He is the last of them, and yet he is somehow different from them. They will risk everything to understand him.” The mask’s glassy eyes stared through her, revealing nothing of the real eyes inside. “Look for their warriors below the Middens. These archons have been growing castles in unlikely places.”
She bowed. “I will seed the area with Screamers to detect unnatural vibrations. The packs will assuredly flush him out.”
“The packs have failed me before.”
“And you altered them, my Lord.” She swallowed. “Severely. They will not dare to fail you again.”
Menoa must have noticed the quiver of repulsion in her voice, for he turned sharply to face her. “You are from Pandemeria, aren’t you?” he said.
The king’s question startled her. He had never acknowledged her past before. “I am,” she said. “I was, I mean-”
“And you wish to return to the living world?”
She hesitated. “If it pleases you to send me there, my Lord.”
The king was silent a moment. “Do you enjoy the form you occupy?”
Harper chose her words carefully. “It allows me to serve you.”
The king made a sign in the air with his gauntlet. At this unvoiced command, a witchsphere rumbled out onto the balcony from one of the citadel doors, its metal panels shining dully under the bloody skies. It rolled across the floor towards the king, stopped, and then began to turn itself inside out.
Harper looked away. She heard the click of panels opening, followed by a hiss and then the brutal sound of snapping bones. When she glanced up again, the sphere had become a tangle of hag’s skin and filthy hair, full of eager white eyes. “King Menoa,” it said with a sigh.
“Consider the strengths of adaptation,” Menoa said to his engineer. “Your current form serves me well enough, yet another might serve me better. Take your own country for example.” He turned to the witchsphere and commanded, “Show us Pandemeria as it was.”
At once the sphere began to change again. The witches untangled themselves from one another, their withered bodies flowing together to form a single membrane. This membrane began to expand across the living balcony. Flesh bubbled and became earth, a representation in miniature of the fields, hills, and mountains Harper had known so well. In other places the skin split apart to form arroyos, gullies, and wide valleys. Clear fluid seeped from pores into these many hollows, marking the Moine lakes and SillRiver. Tiny black trees sprouted like hairs. Lesions swelled and hardened to become boulders or buildings or runnels of glacial scree.
Harper identified the city of Cog, her home before the plague and the war and the great floods had transformed Pandemeria. She recognized the patchwork of streets and squares now forming before her eyes: Highcliffe and the Theater District. She saw the SillRiver, and where it split into two branches that curled around the city like a moat. And still the witchsphere grew around her, filling her vision. RevolutionPlaza solidified before her eyes, the great white cathedral shining in the twilight-exactly as it had done before the Mesmerist Veil. She located Canary Street, Minnow Street, and the Offal Quarter. And her own house-the house she’d bought with Tom.
How long ago now?
Ten years, or a thousand? Involuntarily she clutched her chest. How much of this was real? The witches were clearly drawing on Harper’s own memories to form this illusion. She was gazing into her own dream.
“Now show us Pandemeria as it is today,” the king said.
“No, please, my Lord.” Harper closed her eyes, but the scene before her did not change. She no longer had eyelids to shut out this changing vision. Menoa had made a simple alteration to her physical form. Now he was chuckling behind his mask. “You want to see this,” he insisted.
Cog Island’s skies began to darken with red mist: the Mesmerist Veil. It seemed to Harper that she was watching from a great height as the shades of Cog’s plague victims rose from their mass graves out in Knuckletown Quarry and drifted towards the city in vast numbers. In moments they had crossed the SillBridge and were pouring into the city. Strange shadows flitted under the eaves of buildings while from the east could be heard the braying of hounds.
“You remember this?” King Menoa asked. “You recall the improvements my Icarates made?”
Harper remembered. Now unable to separate dreams from actual events, she saw the Icarates rise from the very ground itself. An army of warriors in queer ceramic armour, they moved from house to house, smashing down doors and dragging Cog’s citizens out into the glistening streets. The Icarates slaughtered the weak and the elderly, and herded the rest out towa
rds their flensing machine beyond Knuckletown, where a great red funnel of vapor was now twisting slowly above the plague graves.
The graves had crumbled inwards, leaving dark open pits in the red earth, and now the Mesmerists’ Maze-forged hordes crawled out: men of flesh and iron and glass, witchspheres, Iolites, and dogcatchers. Claws raked the wet soil, turning it into a bloody morass. White teeth flashed in the semidarkness.
Out they came in waves, in impossible numbers, a seething tide which swept into the doomed city. Time blurred. Days and weeks passed in mere moments and the scene changed again. New constructions now towered over the city: the Plague Portal Collar, the Terminus, and the Great Wheel through which ten thousand slaves supplied power to the new HighcliffeFlensingTowers. The Mesmerist Veil covered Pandemeria as far as Harper could see. Recent rain showers had drenched the land and now the crimson fields and furrows around the island city glistened like open wounds. The vanguard had moved out of sight, far across the MerianBasin to the north, yet hordes of reserve warriors continued to pour out of CogCity. They moved like rivers across the landscape, drawing power from the red earth.
Storm clouds were gathering in the north. Lightning flickered across the horizon among sheets of rain and great columns of black smoke.
Rys!
These fires heralded the approach of the god of flowers and knives. Rys had brought his armies down from the far north to meet the Mesmerist threat, and now the flames from his great war machines lit the horizon. The two armies had clashed on the northern shores of Lake Larnaig, outside the gates of Rys’s own city, Coreollis. Here King Menoa’s demons had been halted at last.
The witchsphere would not dare to display that battle for fear of enraging King Menoa. The Mesmerist leader had been soundly beaten at Coreollis. Instead the view remained focused on Cog: that skewed mound of blood-drenched houses and spires crouched upon SillRiverIsland. Four bridges connected the heart of Cog to its outlying suburbs on either side of the two river channels: Knuckletown to the east, Port Sellen to the west. A steam locomotive had been left abandoned on OperaBridge, its empty wagons now half full of water.
For it was raining in torrents.
“Rys brought this rain to cleanse Pandemeria’s blooded earth,” Menoa growled, his deep voice resounding like echoes in a cave. “Yet he underestimated the Mesmerist power to adapt. His deluge merely changed blooded land into a blooded sea.”
Harper sensed time shift again in the scene before her. The Sill River swelled and quickly burst its banks. Both Knuckletown and Port Sellen disappeared under the rising waters. The river itself had become a raging brown torrent. Floating detritus and corpses snagged on the underside of OperaBridge. And still the floodwaters rose, drowning the low-lying streets and plazas, and the wide plains of the MerianBasin, until only the highest city districts remained unaffected. CogIsland, once merely an outcrop of high rock between two branches of a river, had now become an island in the middle of a shallow sea.
The Mesmerists made ships. Under the guidance of chanting Icarates, souls from the plague graves were allocated power from the Veil. These dead soon lost their own frail human forms. The Icarates changed them slowly, painfully, into great empty shells of bone, flesh, and metal. Each new vessel cried out in agony and despair until the Icarates stifled its voice within the living steel.
And the troop deployment continued. Legions marched into the newly forged ships. Belching smoke and fire, the Mesmerist vessels sailed out over the flooded city and the plains beyond, while on the brooding horizon Rys’s storm of war flashed and rumbled.
Menoa said, “I have shown you this for a reason.” At another of the king’s gestures, the witchsphere began to collapse and recover its normal form, sucking in the Veil, the land, and the waters like inhaled air.
“Here in the Maze, Form is merely a manifestation of Will,” the king went on. “And yet you people choose to loll in your own dreary memories, assuming the forms you are used to, rather than exploring the unknown. There has been a glut of power in the Maze recently, and yet Hell has grown stagnant despite this potential.” The glass mask continued to flux in the crimson light, the features changing, always changing. “Your kind has no vision,” Menoa said. “So I must impose my vision upon you, and by doing so, set you free.”
“Yes, my Lord.” Fear crept up Harper’s spine. She had seen the frightening things Menoa had constructed to take his war into the world of men.
“Your fingers, for example,” Menoa said. “Are they suitably designed to fine-tune the mechanics of our ideas?”
“I-” Before Harper could properly respond, her hands began to change. Her fingers stretched and thinned and turned to silver. She cried out as she felt her nerves die in painful bursts. Crystals formed on each of her fingertips: Mesmeric devices to measure and alter the soul harmonics of Menoa’s warrior machines. Her knuckles swelled into irregular metal lumps, then ticked and whirred as clockwork mechanisms began to move inside them. Her wrists hardened and began to turn black. “Please…” she gasped. “Stop this.”
But Menoa did not stop. He stooped over her, his clawlike fingers directing the changes in her physical form. A hundred faces seemed to move behind his black glass mask. “Understand that you will become anything I desire,” he said. “If it suits my plans to alter any soul in my domain, then I shall do so without hesitation.” He frowned at her and made another sweeping movement with his gauntlet. The devices on her fingers began to retract and change shape once more.
Harper heard the witchsphere hissing with pleasure, but she could no longer see it. Menoa was changing the composition of her eyes. Her vision became suddenly fragmented, like the view through the facets of a gemstone. She felt her back crimp and buckle, before she sensed something hard and flexible growing out of her spine. This protrusion split and then divided again and again.
What was he changing her into?
The world around her seemed to expand. Menoa’s mask loomed over her, black against the seething crimson clouds, as though peering down at her from a great height.
“You are nothing but an insect,” King Menoa announced.
The sound of buzzing filled Harper’s ears. She glanced down at herself to see a clutch of chitinous shards protruding from her newly developed thorax. Her limbs had gone, replaced by bushels of wire-like tendrils. Sparks of agony shot through her freshly altered nerves.
Menoa scooped up his servant in one gauntlet and carried her to the balustrade. “Fly to the Processor,” he said, “and tell the Prime to prepare the Forming Ovens for another archon. I will delay the first strike until this angel has been suitably reinforced. Do this quickly and I might consider returning your arms and legs.” He cast Harper out into the skies over Hell.
She was flying, buzzing, clicking-a whirlwind of new pains and perceptions, yet Harper no longer possessed lungs with which to scream. She was trapped in a thin shell, carried by wings as frail as paper. The Maze reeled around her; she witnessed it as a dozen subtly different views of the same terrible landscape. Behind her the towers of the Ninth Citadel rose up like a flayed figure, glistening and seething with transmuted souls. Canals looped around its base like red ribbons, through which Icarates plied their heavy black barges.
In awkward fits, her fragile wings carried her through a bloodmist above one of the Icarates’ flensing machines. Harper felt a sudden surge of energy as her newly forged body drank in countless fractured souls. Thus enriched, she banked around Menoa’s citadel and made for the Processor.
The great building at the heart of the Mesmerist War Effort towered over the surrounding canals, ziggurats, and creeping machines. It was an inverted pyramid, said to be built from more than a million souls transformed into black stone. Harper could well believe it, for to facilitate the arcane processes within its living walls the Icarates had not removed the voices from these souls.
The Processor howled and screamed. Even the steady chanting of countless Icarates and the sound of the forges and bellows
inside could not mask those unholy cries. Steam billowed from the open hatch to one of the Forming Ovens, while a stream of rock and ore rained down from the heavens and was collected in the Processor’s central depression. Evidently the Icarates were still gathering raw materials from the world of the living.
As Harper flew nearer she saw the Mesmerist warrior priests backing away from the open oven. They hobbled across the smooth surface with their backs hunched under the weight of the white enamel armour that both shielded and powered their ancient bodies. Blue sparks dripped from mushroom-shaped protrusions on their heavy shoulder guards and back plates, striking the ground around their white boots in explosive bursts.
Now Harper could see why the Icarates were retreating from the steaming hatch.
Something was climbing out.
Two skeletal hands rose out of the Forming Oven. Fashioned to resemble the hands of dead men, and yet larger than the mightiest of oak trees, the bony fingers gripped the lip of the building’s summit with enough force to make the entire Processor howl.
Harper was about to witness the birth of an arconite: an iron-and bone-forged automaton built around an angel’s soul.
Plumes of smoke hissed from the Processor’s innards as the skeletal giant continued to clamber out of the Forming Oven. Its skull and wings towered over the pit, the creature’s newly forged bones and tendons glistening with oil and plasma. Engines thumped heavily in its ribcage as they pumped arcane chemicals and blood through the network of pipes intertwined throughout the whole of its body. It was dragging hundreds of chains behind it, the links still glowing red from the ovens in which they had been forged.
Now free of the Forming Oven, the arconite stood on the Processor summit, unfurled its vast wings, and roared.
Even from up here, Harper could see that those wings were useless, naught but tattered grey flesh-an affectation the Icarates had created to help bind the archon’s soul into this mechanical body. Even months of torture could not entirely cleanse an angel of the memory of its living body. Of all Hell’s creatures, only an angel could not be altered by the sheer force of Menoa’s will. In death, they retained something more than ordinary mortals, something that resisted even the king’s formidable powers of persuasion.
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