“Another one jumped last week,” Carrick said. “I’ll never understand these people. They’re given a good job, decent food, and soft bunks. They get plenty of exercise, and the best damn view on CogIsland. And what do they do? Spit it all back in the company’s face and take the big leap.”
“Their lives are a constant uphill struggle,” Harper said. “Don’t you ever feel like that?”
Carrick pulled away from her suddenly. “Only with you,” he said, turning to face the bright curve of glass carriages stretching ahead of them. The train was now thumping across the NewSillBridge above what had once been Knuckletown Port District. Down below, the former bridge could still be seen below the murky waters, the stanchions and girders now furred with red weeds. “I need you back inside now,” he said. “We’ve had complaints of something dead aboard the train. God-awful gibbering noises coming from the heating ducts in car C, down near the slave holds. Likely it’s just a ghost one of the passengers brought aboard, so be gentle with it. If you send it screaming back to the Maze, I won’t be the one who has to tell them.”
Harper nodded and turned to go.
“Alice,” Carrick said. His teeth looked strangely bright in the uneasy light. “You will be gentle with it, won’t you?”
To reach car C, Harper had no choice but to walk through the crowd gathered in the music carriage. The party was in full swing and most of the guests appeared to be drunk or well on the way. The pianist saw her and broke abruptly from the waltz he was playing into a crescendo of notes that reached towards a climax as she approached, halting abruptly the moment she reached him.
“A toast,” he said loudly, for the benefit of the room. “To the first woman to return from Hell still wearing lipstick. I give you CogCity’s most beautiful corpse.”
The crowd closed in on Harper and she found herself pinned by the attention of a roomful of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies: the frocks all puffs of almond-, orange-, and rose-coloured silk, the suits in rich dark hues of plum and whalehide. The men wore snub-nosed pistols or Mesmeric rapiers at their belts, the blades sheathed in white leather, as had been the fashion since Adelere’s adaptation of Cohl’s Shades had become the most talked-about play in Highcliffe. Glasses were raised, as was a voice from the back of the room: “Did you say most beautiful, Ersimmin? Which among the dead do you rate second to her?”
The pianist played a dramatic flurry of notes. “Perhaps I should have said most human,” he said. “Our resurrected dead have lacked that quality until now. But you shouldn’t dismiss all of them out of hand, Mr. Lovich. Menoa’s hordes aren’t all fangs and blisters. In fact, there’s a pretty little sloop lying on its side in Covenant Square. I’ve had my eye on it for a while.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t play that tune every time I speak,” the other man said.
Ersimmin said, “It’s from a famous play, you know.”
The other man sighed. Harper thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t immediately place him.
A young woman in a puffy peach dress and black elbow-length gloves sauntered up to Harper. A fat necklace of soulpearls looped her powdered neck. “I think it’s disgusting,” she said. “Do we really need to plunder Hell for workers? Aren’t there living people who can do her job just as well? No offense, dear; I’m sure the Maze was lovely.”
This elicited a chorus of stifled shrieks and giggles from the younger ladies present, a collected frown from the older women, and a unanimous expression of bemused innocence from the gentlemen, each effected with various degrees of skill.
Harper realized she was staring at the woman’s soulpearls, and lowered her eyes. The speaker had half a hundred of them, there, on display like ordinary jewelry for anyone to see.
A collector, then.
King Menoa had already rewarded this one well.
“Excuse me.” Harper moved to push on through the crowd.
An elderly, white-whiskered man in a crimson suit extended an arm, blocking her way. He wore an extraordinarily fine Mesmeric sword at his hip, the pommel an exquisite knot of silace and crystal, the sheath an alabaster spike to match his mustache. “Please…Miss Harper, isn’t it? Won’t you stay and join us for a drink? My name is Duncan Jones.” He gave a curt bow. “I served with your husband in the King’s Reservists. Damn fine young man. We fought together at Larnaig.” He paused a moment, his cheeks flushing. “I’m sorry about what happened. This must be a difficult journey for you.”
“How can it be difficult?” said the woman in the peach dress. “Demons don’t have feelings, Mr. Jones.”
“She’s not a demon, Edith.”
“Why? Because she still has breasts?”
Another flurry of giggles swept through the younger ladies. Jones’s face reddened further; his whiskers twitched. Several of the other gentlemen had the decency to look embarrassed, but not, Harper noted, Ersimmin. The pianist was grinning.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Edith went on, “if she’s come from Hell then she’s earned that title.” She eyed the heavy flask and rubber bulb attached to Harper’s belt. “Don’t let her appearance deceive you. This woman breathes human blood, just like the rest of those foul creatures.”
Harper was already beginning to feel woozy. The mist pumps had not been switched on in here, and the air in this carriage was too thin for her dead lungs. But the young lady’s words had stung her, and she resisted inhaling a breath of mist from her bulb.
“Please let me pass,” she said.
“Feeling faint, dear?”
“Leave her be, Edith,” Jones said. “She doesn’t look well.”
The young lady raised her chin and gave the old reservist a supercilious glance, but she stepped aside to let the engineer pass.
Harper didn’t meet her eyes for more than an instant. She’d possessed a temper once, but it had dried up long ago. She left the music car as Ersimmin began to play a new tune, each note perfectly timed to match her rapidly retreating footsteps.
Car C boasted a lounge of gilt-edged pastel furniture, plush recliners and low tables, and scattered reading lamps fashioned like jelly-fish. It was currently deserted. Reflections of the room bounced back from the etched glass walls and gave the impression of a multitude of identical lounges placed side by side, but behind those phantom copies Harper spied the dark shapes of buildings and abandoned demon ships in Knuckletown slipping past. She didn’t have much time. The train would soon be pulling in to its first stop.
The human passengers were about to meet their hellish leader in the flesh.
Harper felt dizzy. She slipped the rubber bulb from her tool belt, raised it to her lips, and inhaled deeply. The dense mist cloyed at her throat, but it cleared her head and brought some colour back to her skin. She replenished the bulb with a trickle of liquid from her flask, and then considered the job ahead.
The lounge had a glass floor. Harper did her best to ignore the upturned faces in the slave pens below, but their stares burned into the back of her neck. She didn’t know which was worse, the gaunt, pleading looks from the slaves or the baleful glare from the god imprisoned with them.
She unscrewed a copper grille set low on the interior frosted-glass wall and slipped her Mesmeric Locator from its pouch on her belt. In nature it resembled the sceptre she had once carried across Hell, but this device had been manufactured in the laboratories in Highcliffe-a physical tool with a metaphysical core.
Warm perfumed air blew up through the exposed vent. After she had wound the crystal device, Harper set it resonating. A range of ninety to one hundred and twenty Bael cycles would pick up all unauthorized soul traffic, with angel or demon emotae at the higher end of the spectrum. Most likely, one of the passengers had broken a soulpearl, and they now had a human ghost aboard.
While Harper waited for the Locator to react, she checked the mist-pump feeder tubes and pressure gauges inside the vent. Everything seemed to be in order for the king’s arrival. It gave her a certain amount of pleasure to think of the l
iving passengers breathing the same foul air as their master while he remained aboard.
The tiny needle wavered from one ideograph to another before it settled in the center of the plate.
Then it went off the scale.
Harper stared at the Locator in astonishment, not quite comprehending. She shook the Locator, then stopped herself. It was operating correctly. She’d calibrated it against stored ghosts at the Pandemerian Railroad Company terminus on CogIsland. The reading was not at fault. Quickly, her hands trembling, she reset the device and broadened the spectrum. Ninety to one hundred and sixty Baels-the range required to detect gods. Once more she set the Locator resonating, watched the needle waver, settle, and then leap.
The needle went off the scale.
Impossible.
Either the device was malfunctioning, or the intruder was something she had never seen before-which meant that it could not have come from Earth or Hell.
She did not, however, get the chance to speculate. From the direction of the music car came a loud bang, followed by the sound of women screaming.
A restaurant and two accommodation wagons separated the lounge from the music carriage. Harper stormed through the restaurant, shouldered curious and apprehensive stewards aside, bumped against tables and chairs, and slammed through the door to the first accommodation car only to find her way blocked by a fat little boy trailing along a dog in a bag. She would have jumped over the lad had he been a few inches shorter. As it was, she was forced to slow and sidle by him, her back brushing the wall of the glass corridor. She stepped over the dog: a tiny thing, zipped tightly into a richly woven travel bag so that only its head was visible.
“Do you work here?” the boy said.
“Don’t have time, son, sorry.” She took off down the corridor at a run.
“I heard screams,” he said. “Is it a ghost? Aunt Edith said I can hunt them at Coreollis. Got my own gun and everything.”
“Not a ghost,” Harper called back. She was halfway along the corridor. “Something else.”
“A demon, then?” He ran after her, pulling his imprisoned dog after him. Apparently the bag had wheels underneath. “Aunt Edith said I can hunt them when I grow up. Should I get my gun? Can I let Wolf-thunder out of his bag? I want to train him to hunt demons but they won’t let him wander about in case he poos.”
She had reached the end of the corridor. “I don’t know what it is. Stay here, it might be dangerous.” Without pausing, she slammed into the far door and plunged on through. The rapid squeaking of wheels came from somewhere behind. Wolf-thunder yipped.
The music car was in chaos. Three of the ladies had swooned and lay on recliners where they were being attended to by several of the gentlemen. The piano had been smashed into what looked like a pile of heavily lacquered kindling, wrapped in a confusion of wire. Ivory keys and small hammers were strewn everywhere. The white-whiskered reservist, Jones, was busy brushing most of it into the corner with his foot, while Ersimmin the pianist watched him-a look of amused befuddlement on his face. A strange odor lingered: the earthy scent of a forest or a swamp mingled with something else-something bestial. Harper inhaled it deeply, trying to identify it.
Carrick stood in the center of the room, reeling, seemingly unsure of where to turn or who to speak to. He still had a flute of wine in his hand.
Edith was shrieking. The colour seemed to have drained from her face to her thin chest, which heaved against the confines of her peach bodice. She had removed one of her gloves and clutched a bloody handkerchief in her naked fingers. A handsome man and his young wife, in matching raven-dark suit and frock, were attending to her. Harper now recognized the man as Edgar Lovich, an actor who’d made his fortune tramping the boards of Cog’s theaters before the war. Lovich was holding the young lady’s uninjured hand while his wife sought to inspect her wound. “Please, Edith,” she said. “I can’t help you unless you let me look at it.”
“It took my finger off,” Edith cried. “It took my finger off!”
“Let me see, then.”
“What happened?” Harper demanded.
Carrick wheeled to face her. “Where in hell have you been? While you’ve been off slacking, we’ve had a manifestation. Miss Bainbridge has been injured.”
“What kind?” Harper made a point of staring at the drink in Carrick’s hand.
“What?” The chief gaped at her.
“What kind?” she repeated. “A dogcatcher? An Icarate? Was it one of the Non Morai? If I’m going to get rid of it, it would help if I knew what it was.”
“What are you talking about?” Carrick said. “It manifested itself. Here. It smashed up the piano.”
The actor’s wife had succeeded in extracting the handkerchief from Edith’s hand. Now she was examining the young woman’s bloody fingers. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just a cut. The piano wire must have caught your knuckle just here.”
“The finger’s gone,” Edith moaned.
“No, dear. Look…” She counted the fingers. “One, two, three, four, and five. All digits present and correct, see?”
“It’s gone!” The young woman turned tear-filled eyes on Harper. “And it’s her fault. She’s supposed to prevent things like this from happening in here!”
Harper let out a long breath. “Would somebody please tell me exactly what happened?”
“Ersimmin was playing one of his new compositions,” Lovich said, “when this thing appeared from nowhere, destroyed the piano, and then vanished. Just like that!” He made a flamboyant gesture with his hands. “The whole incident was over in a heartbeat.”
“What did it look like?”
“Hideous, utterly hideous. It was quite dark and…” He frowned. “Chunky.”
“Seven hells, Edgar!” Jones exclaimed. “You make it sound like one of your wife’s muffins.” The former reservist approached Harper, his expression grave. “It was about five feet tall,” he said, “but bulky, powerful. Damn thing had muscles like the biggest navvy you’ve ever seen…and it was hairless, all covered in grey blisters.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall that it had a face as such…just blistered skin.”
Harper frowned. “A blisterman?”
“Bugger was armed, too,” Jones went on. “But not with a Mesmeric weapon. A plain stone hammer.” He lowered his voice. “It seems to have taken violent exception to Ersimmin’s playing.”
“It had taste, at least,” Lovich muttered.
Harper frowned. Such manifestations had become more common since the Cog Portal had opened. Demons could sometimes materialize in places where a lot of blood had been shed: the CogIsland plague pits, or in old temples to Iril. But this train was supposed to be clean. They hadn’t yet switched on the interior mist pumps.
And why had it targeted the passengers? These people were King Menoa’s human delegates. They were under his protection, and they would remain so until he betrayed them.
And then there was her Locator reading. For an instant she had detected something far more powerful than a simple blisterman. There were obviously gods at work here.
“If it’s still on board it will probably be hiding in the train’s blood tank,” she said. “I’ll go there now. I can set off a Screamer and force it out.”
“Splendid.” Ersimmin the pianist clapped his hands. “To the armoury, gentlemen. What do you say…ten spindles apiece, eh? The prize goes to the fellow who bags the thing?” He began to stride in the direction of the train’s arsenal.
Harper called after him. “I’m sorry, sir. You can’t fire weapons in here. The carriages are made of glass. One shot could shatter a wall.”
“Who cares about the carriages?” Edith howled. “Just shoot the damn thing.”
Jones stepped forward. “She’s right, Edith. You must think of our other guests. How would it look if we arrived at Cog Portal with a shattered train? The king would not look very kindly upon us. Even you can see that, Ersimmin.”
Edith buried her nose in the h
andkerchief.
Ersimmin looked disappointed, too. “Hellish waste,” he muttered. “I can get a thousand spindles for a blisterman soul on the collectors’ market. But no, you’re right. It would be foolish to risk damaging the train.”
Edith stamped her foot. “I demand that you turn this train around immediately. I require medical attention.”
“It’s barely a scratch, Edith,” Jones said. “Let Miss Harper do her work. She’ll locate the thing and send it back to the Maze before you know it.”
“Don’t hush me, old man,” the young lady retorted. “And don’t tell me to put my faith in this corpse. She did nothing to prevent the creature from appearing in the first place. Any living engineer would have caught it long before it had a chance to wreak havoc.”
“Edith…”
“No! I will not be patronized or belittled by you or anybody. I am not a child.” She spun to face Carrick, who still seemed to be in shock, and said, “Turn the train around this instant.”
Carrick raised his hands. “Miss Bainbridge, please, if you-”
“I will not be coddled by you, either, Chief Carrick. Do not forget your position here. My family could make life very difficult for you.” Suddenly she seemed to be on the verge of tears. “Why do you all have to be so cruel?”
Lovich’s wife gave her a gentle hug.
Ersimmin was frowning at his pocket watch. “Well, if we can’t shoot the damn thing, might I suggest a quick and practical alternative?”
“Sir?” the chief asked.
“Let Hasp out,” the other man said. “Let him dispatch it for us.”
“That’s not a good idea, sir,” Carrick said.
“Why not?” the pianist demanded. “He can’t harm us without a direct order. Menoa’s surgeons made quite sure of that. And I seem to recall that you gave us your personal assurance before we even stepped aboard the train.”
Carrick fidgeted. “Impossible,” he said at last. “If Hasp were killed before the handover, his brother Rys would refuse to sign the treaty. Any chance of peace between Coreollis and Pandemeria would vanish.”
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