A handsome man in a dark suit spoke up: “He doesn’t look particularly dangerous to me. He’s wearing slave skin, for god’s sake. One prod with a sword would crack that wide open.”
“That’s true, Mr. Lovich. And yet the king was good enough to exhibit him at the Highcliffe Fair. Not one of the reservists who sparred with the archon survived the encounter. He showed remarkable skill with a shiftblade.”
“This is a foolish idea.” This came from an older, more heavily built man with white whiskers. “We’ll reach the portal in minutes. Let’s put this monster back in his cage and let Menoa decide what to do with the intruder.”
From somewhere Hasp found strength. He surged to his feet, his fist taut as iron on the hilt of his shiftblade, and bared his teeth at Carrick. “Try that again and I’ll rip your head off, reach inside your throat, pull your insides out and stuff them back into your empty skull.”
Carrick staggered backwards, fumbling for his pistol. “Get away!” he cried. “That’s an order, an order!”
Hasp halted, growling. He felt the demon’s teeth clench inside his skull. Pain like molten metal ran through his jaw. He tasted brass.
The whiskered man’s brow furrowed. “He appears to be resisting his implanted conscience, and I rather suspect that the puff of smoke that just issued from the mechanism in his head was not an intentionally engineered effect. Take him back to the slave pens, Chief Carrick, before you lose the ability to control him altogether. I have no desire to cross swords with an angry god”-he gave the slightest nod of his head-“when there are so many ladies present.”
Hasp studied the old man. This human had not glanced once at Carrick during his short speech. He was getting on in years, certainly, and portly, but he stood lightly on the balls of his feet, his hands resting just so at his hips. A good-quality rapier hung from a sash wrapped around his midriff, the blade sheathed in worn white leather. Hasp had no doubt that the old man well knew how to wield it.
“He cannot harm us,” Carrick stammered. “He cannot. The parasite knows we serve its master.”
Hasp noticed with a kind of derisive pleasure that the chief liaison officer’s shiftblade had turned the same colour as his suit. Its steel edges had already softened. Under Carrick’s ownership, the shape-shifting demon could not even assume the guise of a sword.
“Very well,” Jones said. “But let’s dispense with the showmanship and be about this business quickly. We are running out of time.”
Carrick faced the angel again. “We’ve had a manifestation,” he said. “We require you to kill it.”
“Kill it yourself.”
Carrick fingered the grip of his shiftblade, still apparently unaware of the weapon’s degradation. The sword’s guard was now wilting like butter in the sun. He said formally: “As the chief liaison officer between the Pandemerian Railroad Company and Hell, I order you to locate the intruder aboard this locomotive and destroy it.”
Hasp could not stop himself from flinching. How could words cause so much pain? Each syllable felt like a drop of acid inside his skull. Before he knew what he was doing, he found himself marching towards the front of the train, clutching his skull, dimly aware of Harper following behind him. She was whispering, “Don’t fight it, Hasp…go with it, please.”
But just as they reached the door to the accommodation section, it opened, and a small boy towing a travel bag along the floor behind him came through. A small dog poked his head out of one end of this bag-the pup had been zipped up inside.
“Out of the way, son,” Harper said.
The child stopped, and gaped up at the battle-archon. Behind him, his trapped pup growled. The rear end of the leather and cloth satchel oscillated wildly. “I wanted to see the angel,” the boy said. “Aunt Edith promised I could watch it kill something.”
Hasp halted, still reeling, and looked down at the boy and his pet. “You want to see me kill?” he muttered. “Then order me to do so. You’re all Menoa’s fucking people on this train.”
The boy brightened. “Do it!” he said. “Kill something now.”
“As you wish.” Hasp kicked the dog with all of the strength he could muster.
Had the animal been made of tougher stuff than flesh and bone, or had its bag been composed of something more substantial than woven thread, it might have made an impact hard enough to shatter the glass wall at the end of the corridor sixty feet away. Instead, the creature and the torn remains of its embroidered travel bag spattered against the opposite end of the passage in a series of wet smacks, more like a shower of red rain than anything resembling the corpse of a dog.
The boy screamed.
Hasp cricked his neck, then shoved the child aside and stomped away, his transparent armour swimming with rainbows.
Harper paused, hardly able to believe what she’d just witnessed. In under a heartbeat, the entire accommodation section corridor had been transformed from neat opulence into a scene from a slaughterhouse. Gore covered everything: the lights, the walls, the floor. Somewhere behind her a child was screaming, men were yelling, women shrieking. Hasp did not halt; he stormed ahead like some demonic vision, an anatomical nightmare of surgery and sculpted glass.
The engineer closed the door behind her, mindlessly hoping it might hide the gory scene from the passengers in the previous carriage. But it was useless: the corridor door was as transparent as the walls and ceilings. She ran after the angel, grabbed his arm, and tried to stop him. “Hold on.”
Hasp shrugged her off.
“Why did you do that?” Harper insisted. “What possible reason could you have had for killing that animal?” She felt suddenly woozy, and sucked in a breath from her rubber bulb.
“I couldn’t resist,” Hasp snapped. He threw open the blood-spattered door at the opposite end of the passageway, and ducked into the second accommodation car.
Harper followed. “You pressed that boy into giving you an order.”
“Did I?”
“You must have known what would happen. You must have-”
“No!” He wheeled on her, his eyes black with rage. “I didn’t. I was ordered to kill something, and it was either the pup or one of you. Don’t you see what Menoa’s arrogance has accomplished? He’s turned me into a sword, a weapon for any of his own people to use at will. Is there really no one you would like to see killed? Ask that question to the next man and the next, and you’ll soon find out how dangerous this situation is.” He touched his breastplate. “This armour makes me vulnerable. Order me to punch my own chest, and I will happily oblige. But command me to slay another man and he’d better be damn quick to get out of the way. And that makes me a desirable commodity. Do you think those power-hungry bastards back there aren’t thinking about that right now?”
Harper understood. Hasp’s presence on this world posed a threat to every man, woman, and child. All it would take was a word in his ear.
“And what about you, Alice Harper?” The battle-archon grinned savagely. “Who hurt you?”
Instinctively, Harper grabbed for the soulpearl hidden inside her blouse, then quickly dropped her hand. She could feel the empty jewel against her rapidly beating heart. Had Hasp noticed?
He simply turned and marched ahead, whirring, clacking, and leaking smoke from the mechanism behind his head like some ghastly automaton. His shiftblade scraped the carriage floor. “This parasite Menoa put in my skull is such a fickle thing,” he snarled. “So fickle.”
He threw open the door at the end of the corridor, ducked through, and stormed down the next carriage. No one had told him where to hunt for the demon. But Hasp had evidently decided to start the hunt as far away from the passengers as he could get.
The night outside smelled of rotting engines and old blood. Stars jostled with torrents of embers from the locomotive’s stack. Aether lights illuminated the embankment ahead of the train, exposing swathes of the black mud and wrecked shacks which had once been Knuckletown. To the south Harper could make out the shadow of Sill Wood, a low dark
mass against the dark purple sky. She stood with Hasp on a narrow scaffold at the rear of the coal tender, buffeted by wind and noise: the rasping shovels of engineers feeding coal into the firebox, the Eleanor’s wheels drumming the tracks, the shuddering glass of the wagons curving away behind the engine like a string of jewel boxes.
Harper aimed her Locator back along the length of the train, and wound its frequency range to its broadest setting. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. More worryingly, her Locator didn’t know. The soul trapped within the device now appeared to be agitated-its needle oscillated wildly between ideographs, until Harper whispered to it to calm it down. Then the needle became still. “Nothing,” she shouted to Hasp over the thumping engine. “We’ll have to get closer to the source, or get lucky. I doubt I’ll measure a reading until we’re right on top of it.”
Hasp was watching the dark scenery rush past. “Promise me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Don’t ever let that girl in the slave pen become a Mesmerist.”
“I think that’s unlikely to happen. Let’s walk slowly. Be ready.”
“Is that an order?” he asked, dryly.
“If you like,” she said.
They worked their way back from the coal tender through the staff accommodation cars. The coal-shovelers, pressure engineer, and driver who made up the midnight shift were still asleep in their cots on either side of the central passageway, snoring like bulls. Harper swept her Locator over the men, but registered nothing unusual. Two stewards and a cook were playing at cards at a low table in the second bunk-wagon. Harper nodded a greeting to them, but didn’t linger.
Beyond this, they came to Carrick’s private quarters where a frost-glass wall divided the chief liaison officer’s suite from a sixty-foot-long corridor. Harper slipped inside the room she shared with her new boss.
Hasp followed close behind.
Dark opulence defined the suite. Gold thread fringed heavy wine-coloured drapes along the exterior wall. A tall Ellonese wardrobe stood at the far end of the room beside a mirrored dresser with claw-shaped ivory handles. Shelves on the interior wall displayed Carrick’s collection of melodiums, those sumptuous golden music boxes he had brought with him from his Highcliffe home. She knew every one of the tunes intimately.
Harper scanned the walls and finally the bed: a wide high-sided cot smothered in red silk and gold pillows. Her position in Hell had been determined by success or failure at given tasks. Now her rise through the ranks of the Pandemerian Railroad Company might be measured by the quality of bed linen on which she rested each night.
I could buy you a house of your own in the city, a private place.
Why had Carrick pursued her with such enthusiasm since her return from Hell? He’d never shown much interest in her while she’d been alive.
She sucked in a temporary breath of life from her bulb, thinking of the bed she’d once shared with Tom.
Hasp leaned on his shiftblade and glared around at the room with distaste. Harper noticed the frayed pile where the ragged tip of the angel’s sword pressed into Carrick’s ermine rug, and couldn’t suppress a smile. The chief would probably have a fit when he saw it.
“I’m reading something,” she said finally. “But it’s faint, a residual echo.”
The angel sniffed, and his forehead creased. “This room smells rotten. Your demon has been here.” He picked up one of Carrick’s melodiums and examined it.
Harper couldn’t smell anything unusual. “I don’t think it’s a demon,” she said. “My Locator didn’t recognize it.”
Hasp grunted. “It’s a demon all right. Just not something your device has encountered before. Do you think you’ve witnessed everything there is to see in this world? There are old and powerful things lurking in places that the Mesmerists never imagined. But those things stay away for a good reason-you know why?”
She shook her head.
“Because there’s nothing for them here. They don’t seek power, and they don’t need to creep into this world like stray dogs to lap at spilled blood.”
“Then why is it here?”
“How should I know?” He gave her a humorless smile. “Your Mesmerist toys aren’t going to bother this thing much. You won’t be able to damage it with a Screamer, I warn you. This intruder is a warrior.”
“Like you,” she said.
The smile left Hasp’s face. His eyes darkened and the mechanism behind his skull made a low crackling sound. He released the melodium, which clattered to the floor and began a chiming tune. Hasp glanced down at it for a moment, and then crushed it beneath his glass-sheathed heel.
“Careful,” Harper said. “Your armour is more fragile than you think.”
Hasp kicked the broken pieces away.
The engineer gazed blankly at the scattered fragments of the music box, thinking. Beyond the Veil all known demons and shades haunted only those dark places of the world: the black city of Moine, Spire Nine back on Cog Island, the old whaling station down at Nigel’s Folly before Rys’s rain had flooded Pandemeria-places where battles had been fought and men had died. They came like flies in the wake of murder. The Mesmerists had long known that portals into the Maze could be opened only with the blood of the dead. But what could have caused such a powerful entity to manifest here? If it had no interest in blood…
“It was summoned?” she said.
Hasp’s smile was almost warm. “Clever girl. Now you’re beginning to understand. You have a saboteur aboard. Someone or something doesn’t want us all to reach Coreollis alive.”
“But who would gain by disrupting the peace treaty?”
“Only those with no future to lose.”
A vision of Tom came to her then: as one of many sailors boarding the tender that would take them out to the Karlsbad, the last god-smasher-class warship to sail for Larnaig. Menoa had constructed the huge vessel from a single archon’s soul. The Mesmerist Veil smothered the drowned city that was once their home. Crowds of onlookers had jostled on the temporary wharfs and pontoons built around the ever-shrinking islands of Highcliffe. Red waters sloshed against the piles under her feet. She remembered seeing the spire of Cog Cathedral, the only part of that great building which had remained above the rising waters. Somebody had contrived a way to make the bells ring, and they were clamouring now. Tom laughed, waving from the deck. He called out above the noise:
If I end up dead, you better ask Menoa to return my ghost. I’m not spending eternity in Hell with all these bastards. You should hear their awful jokes.
She called back to Tom as the tender cast off:
You think I’m going to spend my life saving up for a soulpearl? She had laughed with him. Don’t you dare get yourself killed. We can’t afford it.
That had been the last time she’d seen her husband. For all King Menoa’s promises, the soulpearl next to Harper’s heart remained empty.
The melodium lay in pieces scattered across the rug. Harper suddenly realized that Carrick would be furious at the loss of such a precious toy. She felt like destroying the rest of them then, snatching them off the shelves and hurling them against the wall. But she needed Carrick’s help. She needed to stay firm.
They had a saboteur aboard the train?
“Can you kill this demon?” she said to Hasp.
“Perhaps. But I’d rather not be ordered to do so.”
“Fine.” She closed her eyes a moment, breathed deeply, and focused on what she had to do. “Just…please don’t kill any more dogs.”
“Are there any more dogs aboard?”
“No.”
“Then there shouldn’t be a problem.” The angel’s gaze lingered on Harper’s uniform, at the place where her hidden jewel rested against the hollow of her neck.
Harper shrugged off his stare and raised her Locator again. “Let’s keep moving.”
Observation Car One was a misnomer, at least at night, for the transparent carriage shimmered like the inside of a Mesme
r crystal, the myriad light blotting any view of the dark landscape rushing by outside. Aether lamps made twinkling constellations on the many glass facets, while a spiral staircase of clear composite triangles led up to a viewing dome and an open terrace where passengers might stroll and take the air, weather permitting. Red plush chairs surrounded tea tables on which vases of pink and white roses had been artfully arranged. But even the heady odor of flowers could not wholly disguise the smell of the Pandemerian Railroad Company’s chemical antiseptic.
A twitch of movement on her Locator brought Harper to a halt. She adjusted the device before sending two full-spectrum pulses out in opposite directions. Then she changed her position and repeated the process. The needle fluctuated unevenly between both ends of the scale. “The device is still confused,” she whispered. “But I’m reading something…a local disturbance. It might be hiding in here.”
Hasp slouched over his shiftblade and looked bored. “It smells like it’s here.”
Harper altered her position, and went through the procedure one more time. Finally she halted to one side of the stairwell, and slipped a Screamer from her tool belt. The delicate skeletal globe murmured in her hand, its Mesmer crystals sensing the proximity of uncontained spiritual energy. She twisted one hemisphere of the Screamer against the other, engaging the clockwork timer.
“Eight seconds,” she said.
Hasp shrugged.
“Six seconds.” Quickly, she checked her Locator. “No change. If it’s here, then it should manifest when I trigger the Screamer.”
The door opened and Carrick strolled in. “Harper? For god’s sake, I’ve been searching the whole damn train for you. We’re pulling into the portal station now. The guests are furious. This”-he batted a fist in the direction of Hasp-“glass-wrapped bastard killed a passenger’s nephew’s pet. They’ll be discussing lawsuits as soon as they can figure out who to sue. And the mess…” He stopped when he realized her full attention was on the Screamer in her hand. “What the hell are you doing? What’s that thing? Haven’t you caught this demon yet?”
“Almost,” Harper said.
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