“Almost isn’t good enough,” he said. “Do you think the PRC pays you to almost do your job? You’d better find the fucking thing now, or you’re finished.”
“Two seconds,” she said.
Carrick’s temper reddened his face. “Not two seconds,” he snarled. “Now!”
“If you say so.”
The Screamer screamed. The interior of the observation car blazed with crimson luminance as furious bolts of Maze-light crackled and flashed between its glass-paneled walls. There was a sense of building atmospheric pressure, a violent snap, and then the air thickened with an earthy, rotten stench. The sphere in Harper’s hand glowed white. She dropped it, wincing-its metal frame was burning hot. Carrick stumbled backwards, shielding his eyes, and knocked over a tea table. Hasp hefted his shiftblade. Harper backed away, gagging at the dense odor, while loops of Maze-light whirled and pulsed and contracted into a bloody knot, and then vanished with a pop.
Something remained in its place.
Shorter than Hasp, but twice his bulk, the demon hunched over a stone hammer which looked heavy enough to level a mountain. It looked like a blisterman, but bigger. Grey sacs of skin covered every inch of its naked body; they were inflating and contracting like lungs. It was wheezing-but Harper could not discern a mouth or nose in its face, just pinprick eyes which stared out from the tumescent flesh. The enormous muscles on its shoulders and arms glistened and steamed with red fluids born of forced manifestation.
It turned to Hasp and said, “I am in pain. Why have you done this to me, angel?”
“Not me, soldier,” the archon replied. “I’ve no quarrel with you.” His eyes were fading to a somber grey. “You have been the victim of a clockwork incantation. Technology, these people call it.”
The demon cocked its head for a moment, as though trying to digest this unfamiliar word. The blisters on its skull puffed in and out, hissing faintly. Finally it said, “I am named Flower. I am trapped in this place. I heard noises. This is not the Forest of War.”
“You are aboard a steam locomotive bound for Coreollis,” Hasp said, “in the country of Pandemeria.”
“Those names are unfamiliar to me. What is a steam locomotive?”
“A vehicle propelled by burning the souls of old earth spirits.”
The demon nodded.
“Be wary, soldier.” Hasp indicated Harper and Carrick with a nod of his head. “These people will order me to kill you, and I am compelled to obey them. If you are slain in this world, your soul will go to Hell.”
Flower turned its pinprick eyes on Harper. “I do not wish this to happen. Send me home.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not until we discover who summoned you. Tell us his name.”
“I do not know it.”
Carrick had retreated to the end of the carriage. The chief’s face was slack and bloodless, but he found his voice at last. “Get rid of it, Harper.”
“Hold on,” she said. “We need to know who brought it here.”
His expression soured. “What are you gabbling on about? You brought it here.”
“No,” she snapped. Why could the chief liaison officer not understand the most fundamental concepts of soul traffic? “I pulled it out of hiding, forced it to manifest. I didn’t summon it. It was already on board the train, remember?”
“Well, send it back to Hell before the passengers get a whiff of it.”
“It isn’t from Hell! We don’t know-”
“I don’t care!” Chief Carrick yelled. “I want it out of here now. It’s dangerous.” He turned to Hasp. “Kill it.”
The angel flinched and his glass armour flashed with pools of reflected aether light. His eyes suddenly darkened. The sound of clockwork came from his neck. He gave a grunt of pain, raised his shiftblade, and stepped forward.
“Wait,” Harper said. “I order you to leave it alone.”
Hasp staggered, then hesitated, his sword wavering.
“Kill it,” Carrick snarled at him. “Kill it now. That’s an order.”
Blood surged in a red web through the angel’s breastplate. The parasitic mechanism in his head chattered furiously, and then shrieked. Hasp hissed and took another step forward, eyes churning from black to red to black again. Teeth clenched, he lifted his weapon again.
“No,” Harper cried.
Carrick spat the order through his teeth, “Kill it!”
“I do not wish this,” the demon said.
The angel took a ferocious swing at the blistered creature, but Flower leapt back easily, now whirling its great stone hammer above its head.
“Stop it,” Harper yelled at Hasp. “That’s an order.”
Carrick grabbed her and clamped his hand over her mouth. “Kill it!” he yelled.
Hasp roared in pain. He brought his shiftblade back up, changing it from a sword to a heavy bone club, and then swept it down, aiming for the demon’s skull. The demon parried the blow with the shaft of its hammer. Petrified bone struck stone with a sound like a detonation. The concussion blasted half of the carriage windowpanes into shards. Bright fragments of glass exploded outwards into the night. Wind rushed in.
The demon had twisted its hammer and driven the angel’s club down, pinning it against the floor. “I do not wish this,” it said.
“Gods!” Hasp hissed. “I…don’t…” He slammed the heel of his free hand into the creature’s face, sending it hurtling backwards. Flower crashed into a cluster of chairs and a tea table, smashing them to fragments. A vase of roses fell and shattered.
“Watch the furniture!” Carrick roared. He had a manic grin on his face; his eyes shone with violent lust. “Don’t smash anything else, angel, or I’ll make you pay for it. I’ll make you suffer so badly you’ll think this is a pleasant dream.”
Harper struggled to break free of his grip, but he was too strong.
Hasp reeled, screwed up his eyes, then snapped them open again and gasped. The blood quickened and seemed to glow like molten iron inside his glass armour. Rose petals skirling around him, the angel advanced again.
Flower had already risen. The blisters on its face had burst and now wept clear fluids over its chin, but the demon didn’t appear to have been injured. It hunched low, twirling its hammer again, its tiny eyes locked on the approaching opponent.
Harper tried to grab Hasp as he passed, but her fingers found no purchase on his smooth arm-bracer. The armour felt red-hot where she touched him. She twisted away from Carrick. “Hasp, I order-”
Carrick silenced her with a punch to her stomach and then wrestled her against him. Harper felt the wind go out of her. She tried to reach the bulb in her belt, but couldn’t move her arms against the chief’s grip.
The angel advanced.
Hasp swiped at Flower, and again the demon danced away-surprisingly quickly for such a bulky creature. The hammer shot out, but Hasp diverted the blow by changing his club into a shield. A second violent concussion shook the observation car. Facets shattered and rained down around them. Fresh torrents of wind screamed through the carriage. “I do not wish this,” Flower said.
“Don’t break the glass,” Carrick yelled at Hasp. “I order you not to smash any more fucking windows!”
The angel groaned and staggered back, clawing at the metal-and-bone mechanism at the back of his skull. Streams of smoke unfurled through his fingers. The parasite howled like a wild beast. Hasp closed his eyes. “You…” he gasped. “I…don’t…”
“Finish it,” Carrick snarled.
Hasp was still reeling as Flower stepped forward and swung its hammer hard at the angel’s chest. But the god raised his shield in time. The blow connected with a terrible thud. Hasp stumbled back a step, yet remained on his feet.
Carrick threw Harper aside and snarled at Hasp, “Kill it now, without that damned weapon. Use your bare hands.”
Abruptly the angel dropped his shield. He lunged at the demon, grabbed its head between both hands, and pulled it close to his chest. Flower tried to sw
ing its hammer, but it had no room to move. Hasp hunched over the blistered thing and squeezed.
The demon gasped. “I do not…wish this.”
“Yes,” Carrick hissed. “That’s it. Break that skull.”
“I do…not…”
“Harder!”
“No, Jan, please. For god’s sake don’t make him do this. Order him to stop.”
“I do not wish…”
“Harder!”
“Hasp!”
“I…”
After it was done, Carrick ordered the angel to find a mop and bucket and clear up the mess. Hasp obeyed the chief liaison officer without a word, but his eyes stayed black for a long time afterwards.
Mina Greene was bored. She had pressed her nose against the exterior glass wall for three minutes, looking for ghosts in the bloody desolation beyond, but she soon grew tired of that. She had gathered up the god’s sketched castles, then set to work improving them, adding people in the windows and flowers and flags on the balustrades, until the last pencil lead had snapped. Finally she had crumpled all of the sketches into pellets and flung them at the other captives. They were all broad-shouldered Northmen with wheat-coloured hair and hard blue eyes. Once strong and proud Coreollis soldiers, they now slouched like broken men. They grumbled weakly as Mina threw her paper missiles. One of the older men even had the temerity to demand that she sit still and stop annoying him and behave like the goddamn human being she was supposed to be.
Now Mina ignored him. It wasn’t difficult: he was hideously scarred-all hunched over under his blanket with only his scorched hands visible. They looked like they’d been roasted in a steamship furnace before being plated with glass. She ignored all of the others, but she singled this one out for special indifference.
He had the cheek to feign relief.
The train’s steel wheels clattered on the tracks below: Coreollis, Coreollis, Coreollis. She wondered how Rys would respond to the return of these glass-skin warriors, now that they had been so thoroughly disfigured by Menoa. Would the god make a show of executing them? Would he inflict a second death upon these soldiers to punish them for dying on the battlefield the first time around?
The pumps in the corners of the slave pen puffed suddenly, blowing fine red mist into the air. The soldiers breathed it in deeply, but Mina just wrinkled her nose.
The Mesmerists’ one weakness. They could not survive for long without drawing power from bloodied air or earth or water. And this was why Rys would not dare to kill his own brother Hasp. The blood of a simple soldier might sustain an Icarate or dogcatcher for a while. But the blood of a god was a far more dangerous thing to shed.
Invigorated by the hellish air, the soldiers stretched and shifted like men aroused from a long sleep.
“The train’s slowing,” one of them said. “We’re pulling in somewhere.”
Another man opened his eyes. “The Larnaig ferry? Can you see Coreollis?”
“No.” The first soldier was peering through the carriage wall into the darkness beyond. “We’re still in Pandemeria. This is the Cog Portal.”
The second man grunted. “Then they’re sending us back to Hell. Lord Rys must have changed his mind about the handover.”
“Not a chance. This is just a temporary stop. The Red King is coming to meet his ambassadors.”
“Traitorous fucks.”
The soldiers had gathered along one wall to watch the train pull in. Mina could hear the locomotive slowing now, the thump of its engine, the hiss of steam, and the clack of rails under steel wheels.
Mina thought of her own painted wagon, so far way in Cinderbark Wood, and her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She turned and hid her face against the wall, ashamed to let the others see her like this, and found herself staring at her own grubby reflection. A sob found its way out of her throat.
“Quiet, girl.”
The old burned man had spoken to her. “I don’t want to listen to your bleating all night,” he went on. With his bent black limbs and crooked spine, he looked more like a ghoulish puppet than a man. She might have felt pity for him, if his grin hadn’t been so sardonic and cruel.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that!” she snapped. “I’m Mina Greene. I’m older than you.”
“I’m Mina Greene,” he mimicked in a singsong voice. “I’m Mina Greene, I’m Mina Greene.” His eyes narrowed on her. “Who is Mina Greene? Shall we take off your blanket and see?”
She exhaled sharply, composing herself.
He began to crawl towards her. “We’ll all be dead again in a couple of days anyway,” he said. “Why not enjoy ourselves now?”
“You’d better stay back,” she said. “I’m dangerous. I know spells.”
“Oh, yes?”
Mina looked to the other slaves for assistance, but none of them would even meet her eye. “Get away from me,” she cried. “I’ll scream.”
The old cripple sniggered. “I’ll enjoy that. I haven’t heard a woman scream in months.” He reached for her foot.
She kicked out. The glass scales on her heel clicked against those on his hand.
“Careful,” he hissed.
“I’ll kick you harder next time.”
He grinned. “Bad news for one of us.” Again he approached.
Mina sighed. “I did try to warn you.” She made a quick gesture with her hand, as if drawing a knot in the air. Then she bit her lip, drawing blood.
The cripple suddenly froze and stared at her uneasily. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He began to wheeze. “What…did you just do?”
“I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who got all hot.” It made her smile every time she used that line. “And look at where it’s got you now.”
The man let out a gasp. “I…”
“Can’t…” Mina said, mimicking him, “…breathe?”
Steam curled from the cripple’s glass scales, yet he remained rooted to the spot. The other men looked on in shocked silence as the scales glowed red. The smell of burning skin wafted through the slave pen.
“I told you I know spells,” Mina said. “This isn’t even a hard one.” She made another hand gesture, and the crippled man collapsed on the floor before her. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from him.
An hour later he had cooled enough to allow Mina to touch his scales. She pulled one of the glass plates off his shoulder and hid it inside the folds of her blanket. It would make a good addition to her collection.
22
IRON ANGEL
The Pride of Eleanor Damask arrived at Cog Portal station shortly after nightfall. Steam billowed along the platform and around the tall cloaked figure standing alone on the platform. An aether light popped and flickered overhead, illuminating the message someone had scrawled across the wall of a metal storage shed:
Platform Two for Hell
There was no platform two, for beyond the solitary tongue of concrete beside the line the land sloped away in a steep embankment. At the base of this lay the Pandemerian door to Hell.
Harper had seen this place twice before, once on her journey to the Maze, and once on her return. After Cog’s great plague, the ground underneath the burial pit had sunk to form a vast basin. Over the subsequent years the steadily thickening Mesmerist Veil had turned this depression into a broad red lake.
Now as she filed off the train with Carrick and the Pandemerian passengers, Harper glanced down towards the pit again. Sections of one of the original steel tracks could be seen running along the base of the embankment, although the old station itself had been buried somewhere under their feet. Extra rails swept out to an engine shed, where Menoa’s old troop supply train had lain since the rains drowned these lowlands. Shades of grey and black defined the landscape down there; the low dykes and woodlands were as scrapes and smudges of charcoal on slate. Even in this weak light the engineer spied PortalLake. Dark masses of misshapen figures were waiting around it, peering into the greasy waters.
King Men
oa stood on the platform. He had wrapped himself in a long dark robe and altered his mask to resemble the visage of an elderly man with a strong, proud jaw and kind eyes-exactly the sort of benevolent ruler he wished his human ambassadors to see. The hem of his robe blew raggedly behind him, although there was no wind.
By his side was a child-a thin, sad-eyed girl of about nine or ten wearing a grey dress. Lines of script had been tattooed in crimson ink into her arms and face. Her small hand clutched one of the king’s glass claws.
“Chief Liaison Officer,” Menoa said to Carrick. “How good to see you again.”
“The pleasure is mine, Your Highness.”
The king turned to Harper. “And my engineer,” he said. “Are you enjoying your new position with the railroad company?”
“It allows me to serve you, Your Highness.”
“Of course. I trust Chief Carrick has looked after you well?”
This civility was all for show, Harper knew. The king was presenting a human facade. Nevertheless she nodded.
The passengers had by now noticed the legions waiting around the Portal Lake, and the smiles they had prepared for the Lord of Hell were failing under a growing atmosphere of uncertainty. They shifted uncomfortably, their gazes returning again and again to the darkness below the embankment where the king’s demons waited. The thick wet air was already beginning to stain their fine clothes.
Menoa reassured them. “Reinforcements for the front lines,” he said. “A display of our power. When Rys kneels before you, he will know that the whole Mesmerist army stands at your back.”
As Harper’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw that this great dark horde stretched far across the fields beyond the portal. And she could hear them-the legions of beasts snuffling under the stars, the rumble of war machines moving in the distance. Reinforcements? This looked more like an invasion force.
“Friends,” said the king. “Mr. Lovich…Mr. Ersimmin…dear Edith. Between you, you own most of Cog City-the factories, the railroad, even the lives of the citizens themselves. Without your help, the process of change in Pandemeria would have been long and bloody.” He spilled a fist of soulpearls onto the platform and waited while the passengers scrambled after them. These would contain the lowest caste of demons and perhaps the odd human, worthless to anyone who used such trinkets for power, but they were scooped up by the guests like diamonds.
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