“You don’t understand,” Harper said to Jones and Edith. “If the arconite is released from Hell’s influence, it will become independent, unpredictable. We’ll be put in grave danger.”
“Carrick,” Jones said, “would you be so kind as to inform the Sally’s captain of our predicament? I’d suggest to him he might want to increase our speed and move us directly away from the automaton.”
All this time, Chief Carrick had been sitting on the hurricane deck, slack-jawed, staring witlessly at the corpses of Ersimmin and Pilby. Now his glassy eyes darted up to meet Jones’s. “Yes, sir.” He scrambled to his feet and departed.
A great iron clamour fell from the clouds, like the clash of a hundred bells. The fires had contracted into a knot around the arconite’s chest, and drawn from it a cry of anguish. The five-hundred-foot-tall mechanical archon shuddered, then threw its arms and wings wide. A cold blast of wind rippled the surface of LakeLarnaig, lifting rags of spume, which blew across the steamship’s deck. The Sally rocked on her belly, riding each swell, chugging steadily away from the bone giant and the base of the Moine Massif…but not fast enough, for as Harper ran inside to fetch Hasp, she glanced up to see the giant’s skull turn slowly to fix its gaze upon the ship.
“Is it free?” Jones asked.
“Yes,” Harper replied. “Iril help us!”
“Good. Then Menoa has been deprived of a weapon.”
The arconite raised its fists to the heavens and roared. And then it began to march towards the tiny fleeing vessel.
Down the stairwell the engineer raced. The smack of her boots on the metal floor seemed distant, as though a queer silence had filled the air spaces between bulkheads, a stillness that muffled the drum of the Sally’s own engines, the heave and slap of waves against her hull. It felt like an omen, a taste of death. Hasp could not slay the monster outside. The automaton need only lift the ship and cast her far across LakeLarnaig, or push her decks down into the freezing waters. It would be the simplest thing. Harper plunged deeper into the vessel, though inside or outside, it made no difference; she would drown either way.
In the Eleanor’s slave pen she discovered a gruesome scene. Blood covered the floor of the cramped space. The corpses of most of the slaves lay heaped in the corner. Only two had survived: Hasp, and the young woman, whom the god held in his arms. She was unconscious but breathing.
“Our thaumaturge?” the engineer asked.
“Mina Greene, of Deepgate.” Hasp replied. “I fear she has exerted herself too much.”
“Come with me quickly.”
“More killing?”
Harper just stared at his glass skin and shuddered. Back on the uppermost deck of the Sally Broom, she watched the arconite stride through the lake towards them. Huge waves, formed by the movement of its legs, rolled across the surface of the waters and pounded the side of the vessel. Gulls swarmed around it like confetti.
It halted, filling the entire scope of Harper’s vision, and crouched beside the ship.
But rather than crushing the Sally’s hull, the bones of one vast hand curled, almost tenderly, around her bow, halting her forward movement.
And then it brought its skull close to peer at its captives.
Deep inside the dead eye sockets, the engineer saw black crystals glittering. She heard the continuous clatter of engines from its cranium and ribs, the slow thump of weird chemical blood. She smelled rust and grease, and something else…the odor of bones and tombs. For a long, long moment the automaton seemed content to watch them.
Dill?
Was there anything left of the young angel in there? Did he realize who or where he was? Could the Lord of the First Citadel now reason with him? She had to hope so.
But Chief Carrick had other ideas. “Kill it,” he ordered.
And the words rewoke the parasite lodged in Hasp’s mind.
The order had been given, and the glass-sheathed god remained compelled to obey it. He broke away from the group, vaulted over the balustrade towards the front of the ship. He tore a coil of rope free from one of the Sally’s lifeboats, and ran towards the bow, his shiftblade gripped in one huge fist.
Harper cried out for the angel to stop, but Hasp ignored her.
Jones called out his own command, but the angel still refused to halt. “It seems the parasite no longer considers us to be loyal servants of the king,” the old reservist said. “I daresay Menoa did not approve of what he saw through the arconite’s eyes. We have been cut loose.”
Harper faced Carrick. “Hasp can’t kill that!” she said. “But he knew the young angel in Hell. He helped him, protected him. Just let him try to talk to Dill.”
The chief liaison officer glared at her with utter hatred in his eyes. “You’ve chosen your side, Alice. You’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of your…miserable existence.” He shot a glance at Jones’s sword. “The glass bastard’s too far away to hear any more orders now.”
The automaton’s grinning skull filled the dismal sky. Tiny white gulls wheeled in slow circles around it or settled, finding rude perches among so many acres of bone, dropping specks of shit. Still the machine made no move. Its eye sockets were caverns. In its stillness, it had once more become an inanimate thing: of ridges, cracks, and hollows-dead spaces to be eroded by the wind, places where the rain might gather and pool. But Harper knew there would be anguish, even despair, boiling at the creature’s core. The thaumaturge’s strange fires had wrapped around its soul, like a fist squeezing the poison from its beating heart, and then they had retreated, freeing the creature from Menoa’s grip. Now Dill’s soul would be exposed to the agony of metal and bone and chemical blood, and to the knowledge of what he had become.
Hasp had by now reached the place where the automaton’s hand gripped the ship. He leapt from the deck to the back of the creature’s knuckle, then set off again, scrambling along the vines of steel hydraulic tubing which wrapped the forearm. The automaton, if it sensed his presence, paid him no more attention than it would have given to a fly. Clearly Hasp was too insignificant to be worth the effort of swatting. At the elbow joint, the god slipped between two pistons and began to climb the upper arm, into the shade of the clavicle.
The arconite chose this moment to unleash its fury. Its right hand remained pressed against the bow, while the left, a clawed fist, suddenly loomed overhead and smashed through the superstructure near the stern of the vessel. Metal buckled and tore. The concussion knocked Harper from her feet; her head struck the deck hard. When she looked up she saw a sky full of teeth, and then the clouds seemed to fall towards her.
The automaton had hefted the steamship airborne in its right fist. The deck lurched, sloped away at a dizzy angle. From inside the saloon came the sound of smashing crockery or glass, the thud of heavy objects breaking against interior bulkheads, the smell of burning lamp oil. A metal groan trembled through the wooden planks beneath her; cables stuttered and pinged. There was a series of snaps and one of the Sally’s two funnels toppled forward, plowing through the ship’s bridge with a jaw-breaking boom. Harper glimpsed heaving grey waters far below the bow of the vessel, flecks of white foam. She clung on desperately. Pistons rumbling, the Sally plunged suddenly backwards through the air.
The automaton drew back its arm to throw the ship.
From somewhere Harper thought she heard the sound of battle.
The parasite chattered inside Hasp’s skull, insisting on destruction even as the angel raged against the command he had been given. This giant was Dill, the very archon he had fought so hard to save in Hell. And now he had been ordered to slay him. A red mist blurred the god’s vision, a veil his fury sought to cut through with his sword. He had tied his rope to a pipe near the automaton’s scapula, the other end around his own midriff. Now he reached the creature’s shoulder.
Before him loomed the arconite’s spine and skull. Hasp could see wires among the vertebrae. He ran across the plates of bone, his blade ready.
The s
kull turned.
For a heartbeat, something glimmered deep in the arconite’s eye sockets-in the crystals which had replaced Dill’s eyes. His huge jaws opened and closed with a crash.
“I have been ordered to slay you,” Hasp shouted. “And I cannot resist this order.” His mind swam under the strain of speaking. “Kill me and save yourself.”
A voice rolled out from the thing, as deep as an earthquake. “Hasp…”
“Slay me, Dill.” Hasp had reached the arconite’s neck. He raised his shiftblade and plunged it into a nest of wires and crystals and cogs between two vertebrae, trying to hack it all to shreds. But he could not dent nor even scratch the machinery.
The arconite howled.
Its massive fist came up and closed around the glass-skinned archon, and Hasp did not flee. He could not stop himself from harming Dill, but he had been given no orders to protect himself.
A cage of bones now surrounded him, and Hasp felt himself being suddenly carried out far across the waters of LakeLarnaig. The parasite in his skull demanded destruction. Before the god could stop himself, he turned his shiftblade into an axe, and began to hack at the skeletal fingers before him.
The fist opened.
And once more Hasp found himself staring up at that huge face. Dill’s dead eyes lacked expression. His grin could not express whatever emotions he felt. Yet Hasp sensed turmoil within that skull. Dill could easily have crushed the archon in his hand, and yet he hadn’t.
Hasp raised his axe again.
A voice cried out somewhere below. The words eluded Hasp. He clove his axe into the arconite’s wrist. No wound or gouge appeared under his blade, and yet the arconite cried out in agony. Hasp lifted his axe again.
“Stop…order…Hasp!”
This time Hasp recognized the voice. Chief Carrick was calling out from below. Had he just ordered Hasp to stop the attack? The glass-armoured god looked down.
Far down below on the deck of the steamship, Jones had a blade against Carrick’s throat. “Stop the attack,” Carrick shouted. “That’s an order.”
Harper was standing next to the pair, a look of vast relief on her face. Jones just looked up and grinned.
“When we saw how the arconite reacted to you,” Harper explained to Hasp, “Jones persuaded Carrick to intervene.”
“I-” Carrick began.
Jones moved his sword closer to the chief liaison officer’s throat. “Remember what we said about silence?” he reminded the other man.
Hasp had returned to the Sally’s deck without further incident. The arconite had then lowered the steamship back into the water and now towered over them, peering down. Hundreds of birds had settled on its great tattered wings. The other passengers had retired to the saloon for a stiff drink.
“His name is Dill,” Hasp said.
Harper could only nod. Of all of them, she had played the greatest part in his downfall.
Dill had woken from a terrible dream, and yet he found the reality of his present situation identical to the memories of that nightmare. His body felt strangely numb, disconnected, with no sensation of cold or warmth-only pain. The skeletal arms and legs he saw before him could not be his, and yet-disturbingly-they moved in correspondence to his own conscious movements. He heard engines pounding somewhere nearby, but he could not at first locate them. The sound of gusting wind reached his ears, yet he felt nothing.
He was standing up to his shins in a pool, peering down at a tiny ship. From its deck tiny people stared back up at him. In his nightmare he had walked across a miniature landscape of small trees, grasses, desolate moors, or stone-hemmed fields left to grow wild. He had come to a steep bank and stepped down into a shallow pool. Voices had compelled him to lift this tiny vessel into the waters. And now that the voices had stopped, he found himself gazing down at the same vessel, and at an archon in glass armour whom he recognized.
“Hasp?”
His voice sounded like a collapsing mountain. It seemed to echo back from the ends of time. Dill was suddenly afraid. He lifted his hands and gazed down at hard dry bones. When he flexed his fingers, the bones moved.
“Hasp!”
The tiny archon was shouting, “-me up…your hand.”
Dill reached out towards the ship, and let the archon leap into his outstretched hand. The Lord of the First Citadel looked no larger than a glass bead. Dill lifted his hand close to his face.
“Don’t think about anything except my voice,” Hasp said. “Just listen to what I have to say.”
Dill nodded.
“You’ve been dreaming,” Hasp said. “But your soul is now free. You’re no longer in Hell. You don’t have to fear the Icarates anymore.”
“Hell?” Dill began. Memories of his time in the Processor assaulted him like a violent squall: the Icarates chanting, the screaming walls and sobbing machines, the knives, and the blood. He stared in horror at his skeletal hand.
“A physical form is transient,” Hasp said. “Only your soul is eternal. That’s all that matters now.”
“Where am I? Where is Deepgate?”
“You’re on the other side of the world, lad, and I don’t even know if Deepgate still exists.” The Lord of the First Citadel gave a long sigh, and then pointed southwest. “Do you see that stain on the horizon? That is Menoa’s army. They have taken the Red Road out of Pandemeria.”
Dill spied a series of dark shapes-rough squares and oblongs-a short distance beyond the perimeter of the pool, following a crimson track. Smoke trailed from the rearmost of these.
Machines?
“Now look to the northern shore.”
The earth here was stained red in a thick line extending out to the east and west beyond the shore of the pool. Masses of tiny black creatures crawled over this crimson landscape, and at first Dill took them to be insects. But then he realized the truth of it. An encampment had been erected there. It housed a second army-much smaller than the one approaching from the southeast, but a considerable force nevertheless. Beyond these legions the ground sloped gently up towards a pale city of slender minarets hedged by thick walls, all rising before a curious bank of mist which enveloped a large part of the northern skies. Earthen and timber barricades had been constructed on the open ground before the twin GateTowers, and flanking these were iron-banded ballistae.
“Coreollis,” Hasp explained. “The fortress of the god of flowers and knives. King Menoa expects my brother Rys to bend the knee before Hell’s ambassadors today-to sign away his soul to the Ninth Citadel. He must comply or face complete annihilation.”
“From that army?” The dark horde beyond the shore seemed so tiny and insignificant to Dill, but he began to understand the threat from Hasp’s perspective.
“No,” Hasp said. “From you.” He looked towards Coreollis. “That fog must mean that Cospinol has arrived to fight beside my brother. Rys’s Northmen will use it to conceal their pitiful numbers.”
“Then they’ll fight?”
“Now that Menoa has lost you, he knows Rys will not sign the treaty. He has no choice now but to throw his whole horde against Coreollis and try to break her.” The god looked back up at Dill. “The forces of Hell and Earth will clash here today. If the Mesmerists win, King Menoa’s form of living death will replace all life here. This country will become the stuff of chaos.”
Dill watched tiny figures assembling along the shore. They were boarding low sleek boats and pushing them into the lake. Wherever these dark hulls met the water, they bled, leaving crimson trails behind them.
“They have realized that something is wrong,” Hasp said. “Or King Menoa has already issued orders. They will attack us soon.”
Dill lowered Hasp to the deck of the ship. Then he reached a hand under the hull and lifted, hoisting the whole vessel clear of the waters.
With the Sally Broom safely in his grip, he set off to meet Menoa’s bleeding ships.
24
COREOLLIS
Rachel left John Anchor laughing and drin
king with one of Rys’s commanders and walked through the streets of Coreollis along with Trench and Ramnir. They had arrived two days ago-and just in time, for the Mesmerist reinforcements had been spotted approaching via the Red Road on the western shores of Lake Larnaig. But something else had unnerved the populace of Rys’s city-something vast and terrible-and it was this that she had set off to see.
Coreollis was now preparing for battle and Rys’s Northmen were everywhere. Trained veterans well used to repelling attacks from the Mesmerist hordes, they filled the streets of the city. As Rachel and her companions walked down a narrow lane, they passed a unit of mounted soldiers. Like the god they followed, these men wore silver plate forged here in Coreollis. They were tall and golden-haired and broad of shoulder-a race descended from the Skarraf Northerners who had claimed this handsome city a thousand years ago. And yet Rachel had noticed an edge of cruelty to their ways. They were quick to show disapproval, and quicker to inflict punishment on the hapless locals.
Coreollis lay in the shadow of the Mesmerists and yet it had never come under siege. Menoa’s hordes, it seemed, required blooded ground to sustain them as they crept from one battlefield to the next, and Rys’s soldiers had exploited this weakness to their advantage, keeping the threat away from supply lines open north of the city. They had effectively corralled the enemy to an area that had seen intense conflict over the last decade, refusing to let the Mesmerists encircle the city.
Now a sense of urgency filled the streets. Rachel, Trench, and Ramnir passed a quadrangle full of shouting warriors engaged in combat practice, almost colliding with a runner who had been distracted by this melee. Wide steps led them down to an esplanade before the city GateTowers, where soldiers formed ranks before marching out to positions outside the city walls. Commoners hurried about them, carrying supplies to the archers and pike-men on the battlements. As they reached the base of the steps, the trio passed two soldiers of the Flower Guard who were untying their horses’ reins from a post.
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