Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  With barely another look in his direction, Rachel strode on ahead of him. “You can’t be seen with me,” she reminded him. “I’ll speak to you later.”

  Leaving Meer standing bemused at the junction, she hurried back to the tavern.

  Dill was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at his sword, when she entered the room. He hadn’t touched his bowl of chowder. “I feel better now,” he said. “I’m sorry I’ve been distant lately.”

  “We’re leaving,” she said.

  He accepted this without complaint. “Did you discover something while you were out?”

  “Only that Olirind Meer is a slimy, black-hearted wretch. I think he’s just betrayed us.” She opened the wardrobe and took out the satchel containing her leather armour and knives. “I met him out on the street,” she went on. “He was hurrying back from the direction of the Avulsior’s residence, and he did not look happy to see me.”

  “Maybe he happened to be in that part of town on his normal business. When he saw you, he just became worried that you’d be spotted.”

  “We’ve passed each other on these streets before, and he knows well enough to look the other way—nothing more than a passing glance between us. Otherwise he’d implicate himself if I was discovered.” She laid her leather vest and breeches on the bed, then opened the dresser drawer and began stuffing loose clothes into the empty satchel. “But this time he wasn’t concerned about being seen outside with me. He even offered to walk me back to the tavern. He was far more worried that I wasn’t here in our room, where he could—”

  She stopped speaking suddenly, listening, then rushed across to the door and turned the handle. The door remained firmly shut.

  “Shit,” she hissed. “Did someone come here while I was out? Dill, did you see anybody tamper with this, with the frame around this door?”

  “I…” He looked helpless. “I don’t know. I was sleeping.”

  “Get ready to fly. We’re leaving right now.”

  But just as Dill rose from the bed, the ceiling above his head collapsed in a shower of broken plaster. Something huge and metallic, like a spike, crashed down through the roof and embedded itself in the floorboards. Through the clouds of dust, Rachel spotted a trembling chain and a flexible tube leading back up through the hole above. Then she heard a low hiss and realized what was happening. “Poison gas,” she cried. “Don’t breathe.”

  Ferrets, Deepgate’s aeronauts had called them. Fired from warship grapple guns, the huge iron spears were capable of delivering toxic gases most effectively into sealed buildings. They’d used them on the Southern Clearances to pump lime gas into an underground network of Heshette tunnels, killing thousands without ever having to land one of their warships. Even now such a vessel would be hovering overhead, pumping invisible fumes into Dill and Rachel’s room. The gas leaked through holes in the shaft, while the barbs along its length could be detached and repositioned to determine more precisely how deeply it embedded itself into a building. The process to seal the door had been more subtle: a chemical solution painted on the inside of the frame designed to foam and swell upon contact with some silently administered catalyst vapor.

  Rachel cursed her own foolishness and she cursed that bastard Meer for his treachery. Why had she trusted him? Why had she trusted anyone in this godforsaken town?

  The Spine would have anticipated that she would hear their footsteps in the hall outside, and they had used her recent excursion to prepare this trap. And now they knew she must try to escape through the window. Hacking through the walls or floor would take too long.

  Holding her breath, Rachel threw open the windows, then leaped quickly aside. The expected flurry of bolts did not appear in the ceiling above her. Were there no Spine in the street below? No crossbows trained on the tavern? What did that mean? She had not yet breathed and yet she was already disturbingly confused and disoriented. A poison designed to permeate the cornea? She turned towards Dill, but the young angel had already collapsed and lay sprawled on the floor beside the hissing metal missile.

  She dragged him closer to the window, not knowing if he was already dead or not, desperately hoping that the lack of a secondary attack meant that the temple assassins had decided to take their quarry alive.

  He was heavier than she expected. She noticed how much his wings had grown, what a broad wake they left in the dust-covered floor. And then she was forced to drop him and lean out of the window to take a breath. A whiff of poison gas reached her nostrils, and she gagged; she didn’t recognize the toxin.

  Something new?

  From the effect that one tiny sniff had on her senses, it was more virulent than anything she’d experienced before. Sandport harbor swam before her eyes, a swarm of lights upon the dark river. She saw boat masts brawling, buildings melting into one another, the last blush of sunset. She heard the distant hum of an airship at high altitude.

  They flew high so I wouldn’t hear their engines, she thought. And then consciousness left her.

  2

  THE HAUNTED CITY

  THE SPINE WARSHIP thundered over furrows of brown smoke clouds, her envelope flashing like a polished steel shield under the blue sky. In her wake came a flock of carrion birds: crows, eye-picks, and blackgulls, all shrieking and feeding on the corpses suspended from the ship’s aft deck and ballast arms.

  She turned to starboard. Sunlight slanted across her gondola, granting the scrawls and abrasions in the metal hull a moment of crisp definition. Portholes gleamed dully like old men’s eyes. Sandstorms had stripped her deck timbers of any varnish, had scoured the arcuballista, net, and grapple guns down to their metal bones.

  With her rudders hard to port and twin propellers blurring, the vessel turned until her bow faced east. Then she waited, her cooling engines ticking, while the crew moved inside to prepare their air scrubbers for descent into the turmoil below. Fumes tumbled under her gondola, curling around the feet of the hanging corpses and reaching across the empty decks, cables, and rails—lingering, it seemed, at the locked portholes and hatches.

  The ship’s engines growled with a sudden surge of power. Elevators slammed back into dive position. Birds scattered, screaming, from the gruesome ballast. Reclamation Ship Twelve shuddered, purged air from her buoyancy ribs, and then sank into the boiling clouds.

  Darkness engulfed the warship. Buffeted by turbulence, she rolled and pitched in upwards-rushing eddies of smoke. Cables shivered and moaned under the stress; her envelope shook and creaked. Ten heartbeats passed, then twenty, and then a thin, grainy light suffused the air. Three whistles shrilled within the gondola. The sound of thumping pistons rumbled through her superstructure, as engines pumped hot exhaust back into the ship’s exterior ribs. Her envelope swelled, slowing her descent.

  She emerged in the amber twilight beneath a brooding ceiling of cloud, a hundred yards above the Deadsands, dragging corpses along like strung puppets.

  Deepgate lay to the west, now half a league behind the airship. Torn and burning in a thousand places, the city hung in her surviving chains like a great blackened funnel over the abyss. Swathes of the League of Rope quarter had been reduced to a smouldering crust, or had crumbled entirely into the pit below, exposing further webs of chain. Ash swirled between the metal links. Fires raged out of control in the Workers’ Warrens, in Ivygarths and Chapelfunnel, and on the fringes of the Scythe where vast rents could be seen among the shipyards. Gases poured from ruptured aether vats and from the coal gas depositories around Mesa’s chain, forming ochre and white layers between docking spines and buckled gantries. Trunks of black, red, and silver smoke uncoiled from the Poison Kitchens, feeding the expanding clouds above, while the city below lay veiled in crimson vapors. The sun glimmered faintly, a copper-coloured smudge.

  A camp had been built on the eastern curve of the abyss, where Deepgate’s foundation chains met the desert bedrock and the surface pipes from Jakka curled over the lip of the pit. It was to this ad hoc shamble of pulpboard shacks and b
unkers that Reclamation Ship Twelve began to drift. Still with her stern facing the city, she relaxed the power to her twin propellers and allowed the howling gales to suck her into the low-pressure areas around the updraft. Orange sand fumed around her, battering and scouring her hull. The hanging corpses swung madly under her ballast arms.

  There were no longer any docking spines available for use, but men appeared from bunkers and rushed over to guide the ship’s grapples into anchor hoops fixed into the desert floor. In time she came to rest and was secured. Her port hatch opened. Nine Spine assassins in leather armour and sand masks disembarked: eight Cutters carrying light steel crossbows, and an Adept with a sword slung across his back. Their mirrored goggles reflected the burning city. Through the boiling dust, two of the Cutters carried the body of an angel towards the edge of the abyss, to where a wooden walkway dipped away into the district called the League of Rope. The Adept meanwhile dragged a manacled woman from the airship and threw her to the ground.

  Rachel Hael spat sand from her mouth and glared up at the masked figure. He had an unusually rough manner for an assassin of his high rank. The process of tempering normally removed all aggression from an assassin, along with the bulk of his mind. These temple warriors killed more efficiently without emotional burdens or base human desires.

  The Adept removed his sand mask, then pointed to a standpipe set alongside the walkway. “Drink there,” he shouted above the howling wind. “Water is scarce in the city, and you will have no more until we reach the sanctuary of the temple.” He tapped the mask against his hip, dislodging sand, then pulled it back over his head so that its copper grille again covered his mouth.

  Rachel Hael staggered over to the water tap, her tattered gabardine flapping against her shins. She could barely stand in this ferocious wind, but she managed to crouch by Dill’s insensate form and inspect him. “He’s barely breathing,” she said. “He could die before we reach the temple.”

  “His lungs reacted unexpectedly to the gas,” the Adept replied, his voice now muffled by the sand mask. “Nevertheless, his death will be bloodless. We will cast his body down to our Lord Ulcis.”

  “This is madness.” She pointed down into the smouldering bowl of the chained city. “Ulcis is dead. There’s nothing left down there.”

  The Adept’s mirrored lenses surveyed the scene. “Reconstruction is under way,” he said. “Deepgate is as eternal as the abyss; it cannot be destroyed.” His pale fingers touched the tiny metal talisman fixed to his collar: the Knot of Ulcis, awarded only to the highest-ranking Church assassins.

  Rachel had, until recently, owned a similar talisman. Her captors had demanded its return, but she’d already sold it to buy food in Sandport. “Reconstruction?” she cried in disbelief. “Half the city is on fire. The Warrens, the Temple Districts—most of it has already fallen into the abyss, and the rest looks like it’s going to go at any moment. The city is not eternal…it’s royally fucked. The League is little more than charcoal, and the temple…” She wiped dust from her eyes. “Where the hell is it?”

  “The loss of some support chains caused the Church of Ulcis to invert,” the Adept replied, his tone flat and emotionless. “The bulk of the building remains intact, only suspended beneath the city.”

  Rachel snorted. “And you’re going to pull it back upright, are you? With what? Horses and camels? How will you forge new chains to keep it in place? Didn’t you see what happened to the only machine capable of doing that? It’s now lying at the bottom of that fucking pit!”

  “The logistics do present some problems.”

  “You don’t say!”

  At least one-third of the foundation chains had snapped, or had pulled their anchors out of the abyss bedrock. Collapsing chains had shredded miles of ordinary homes. Gashes ran from the outskirts all the way down to the hub, where, through the billowing fumes, Rachel glimpsed a mound of huge metal rings and spikes. The base of the temple? She recognized it now. The great building had indeed flipped over entirely, and had punched a ragged hole through sections of Bridgeview, Ivygarths, and Lilley quarters. Most of the other foundation chains had twisted over one another, buckling entire neighborhoods for miles. Whole districts of townhouses had been compressed to rubble. Cross-chains punctured roofs, windows, and walls. Bridges and walkways dangled like banners over open abyss, while entire sections of the city hung from the sapperbane links like monstrous chain-wrapped pendulums. The only city quarters that didn’t appear to be burning were missing altogether.

  Rachel felt inclined to agree with her captor: the logistics involved in reconstruction would present some problems. Evacuating survivors would have been difficult enough, yet she saw no evidence that such an operation had been attempted. The newly constructed camp seemed scarcely large enough to hold a fraction of the population and, apart from the Spine who’d helped moor the airship, it appeared to be deserted.

  Far below, a bright silver flash lit the area around the Poison Kitchens. The spreading fires had just claimed one of Deepgate’s airship-fueling vats, exploding a hundred tons of aether in an instant. A cloud of flames and debris mushroomed skywards into the smoke above the city. Tiny metal shards spun out over rooftops like a shower of stars.

  A moment later Rachel heard the crack of that distant concussion, and the ground beneath her trembled. The walkway shook; its support poles rattled against the edge of the precipice and tugged at the massive chain anchor buried in the rock below. Puffs of dust rose all over the hanging city as parts of Deepgate simply disappeared into the abyss. The gale seemed at once to strengthen and to wail in approval. Down beside the Scythe, flames leapt higher up one side of the Department of Military Science. Rachel took an involuntary step back.

  “The incendiaries in the Poison Kitchens,” she shouted, “you can’t have had time to remove them all?”

  “Fires and noxious fumes within the Department of Military Science have precluded retrieval,” the Adept said. “The Poison Kitchens are inaccessible at present.”

  “You haven’t moved any of the stuff out of there?” She was thinking about those vast caches of poisons, chemicals, and explosives that Deepgate’s chemists stored inside that building. They had barely had time to evacuate a quarter of it before Devon’s monstrous cutting machine had reached the city perimeter. “What about the workers?” she asked. “There must have been six thousand people in that building when the Tooth attacked.”

  “All dead.”

  “Shit,” she said. “You’d better hope they had the foresight to start dumping all that crap into the abyss as soon as the fires reached them.”

  “Such actions are forbidden by Codex law.”

  The mirrored lenses revealed nothing of the Adept’s expression, but Rachel knew his face would be devoid of emotion. Spine tempering had rendered him so thoroughly conditioned to serve the temple and the god of chains that he remained unable to reconcile himself to the loss of either. He would stay here in Deepgate until the very last chain-link snapped apart.

  “Now drink,” he said.

  While Rachel slaked her thirst, she considered their position. The Spine had declared martial law. Desertion was now decreed a crime against god, and therefore subject to punishment under Codex law. Even if she could prove to them that their god was dead in his abyss, it wouldn’t make much difference. The same tempering process that had peeled away their desires had also ensured that their faith remained unassailable and inviolate. Rachel could not bargain with them. She had to hope for escape or intervention. And soon—

  Flames had taken firm hold of the Poison Kitchens by now, and the metal structure looked more like a great steaming cauldron than ever before. White fumes hissed from the funnels at its apex, while thicker yellow-black smoke poured from a hundred windows and engulfed the surrounding warehouses, engineering yards, and ship berths.

  The Adept motioned to two of his men, who then lifted the angel between them.

  But then a gruff cry came at them from behind. Rachel t
urned to see six temple guards marching through the dust storm towards them. The men all carried pikes and wore heavy black-enameled plate armour. Scratches in the steel suits indicated their prolonged exposure to sandstorms. The guards’ faces were hidden by scarves tied around their heads in the fashion of desert tribesmen, but Rachel recognized Clay’s tattered cloak before the captain reached the party.

  “Hold it there,” the big man called out to the Spine Adept. “We’ll take charge of these prisoners.” He stood panting for a moment, eyeing the manacles around Rachel’s wrists and Dill’s unconscious form. “My pickets,” he waved a hand, “saw the ship come in.” He exhaled and then sucked another breath in through his scarf. “Hell’s balls, I didn’t expect them to bring you back so soon. The city’s not safe—you’d best come with us.”

  “We’d be glad to,” Rachel concurred.

  The Spine assassins now stood in a crescent around them, their slim black figures stark before the umber desert. Deepgate’s fires burned in their mirrored lenses. The Adept said, “These are our prisoners, Captain. The temple guard no longer has authority.”

  Ernest Clay gathered himself up before the other man, and yanked down his scarf, revealing his face. He looked angry. “I’ve every right to interrogate them,” he said. “They were out in the Deadsands for—what?—six, seven days? And another week in Sandport before you caught them. That girl’s still got contacts up and down the Coyle. Chances are she’ll have heard a lot more about our enemy’s plans than you have.”

  The assassin spoke from behind his mask. “Captain,” he said flatly, “your persistent interference in Spine affairs is becoming…inconvenient. I do not believe you intend to interrogate either of these prisoners. None of those you have gathered for questioning have, as far as we know, yielded useful reconnaissance. Nor have our captives ever been returned to us. Evidently you are trying to divert such people into your own camp for other reasons.” He paused, tilted his lenses to one side. “Do you disapprove of our methods of punishment?”