Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  Clay grunted. “I don’t care what you do with your captives. Just stick to your job, and I’ll stick to mine. But it seems to me your torture cells are already full to bursting. We’re doing you a favor by easing the burden a bit.”

  “That may—”

  “Besides,” Clay broke in. “None of your new Cutters will speak to me. How am I to know what’s happening out there if I can’t question a few deserters?”

  “Yet you invariably choose to interrogate the women and children.”

  “Makes sense.” The captain scowled. “We’ve bugger-all food left, in case you hadn’t noticed. Since you won’t let us question everyone, we’ll take the ones who eat the least.”

  The Adept seemed to consider this.

  “There might be a thousand Shetties a league from here, right now,” Clay went on, “and we wouldn’t know about it. We haven’t been able to reconnoiter effectively since the sandstorms started. All this smoke around the city will bring metal scavengers and raiders all the way down from the Northern Steppes. We’ve already learned that they’ve been sniffing round the caravan trails for water and women.” He tipped his head at Dill. “And he looks like he needs medical treatment. Don’t you need them healthy before you start cutting into their brains? We have a doctor in our barracks.”

  “Nevertheless,” the Adept replied. “I cannot sanction the release of these two. The archon is temple property. This woman was a Spine Adept, and as such remains our responsibility.”

  “Let me have them for a couple of days,” Clay said. “I’ll bring them back to you myself.”

  “You have already reneged on similar promises, and then lied to conceal your deceit.” Another explosion in the chained city bloomed in the assassin’s silvered lenses. Sand howled around him. “Prisoners who you claimed had died under interrogation have since been discovered alive, hidden in one of the Codex bunkers. Such deception will no longer be tolerated.”

  Clay winced.

  “We are prepared to make allowances, Captain,” the Adept said. “But do not take us for fools, and do not test our leniency.”

  The captain paused. “I’d still like to question the girl, if I may,” he said. “If you’ve no objections, I’ll accompany you to the temple.”

  “As you wish.”

  The group tramped down the steep walkway into the ruins of the district known as the League of Rope. Once they were below the lip of the abyss, the wind dropped noticeably. In the amber gloom down here, the air simmered with the heat of the recent fires. Ash smothered the walkway planks and crumbled away from the support ropes whenever Rachel gripped them. Agitated by the party’s progress, the stinking dust soon engulfed them like a veil. The charred remains of shacks and platforms hung from the web of ropes on all sides, their vague dark shapes like insects cocooned within spider’s silk.

  Captain Clay matched pace with Rachel. “We sprayed the whole neighborhood with water from the Dawn Pipes to keep the fires here under control,” he said to her in a low voice. “We were trying to preserve at least one route out of the city.” He pointed across the city. “The Spine tried the same thing on the other side, but they didn’t have enough water. So they sprayed those districts with effluence from the sewage pipes. Kept the fires from taking hold, I’m told, though I wouldn’t want to go for a stroll there right now.” He grunted. “Trust the Spine to ruin a perfectly good slum. I wonder what would have happened if the flames had reached the temple. Would they have doused it with water, or with—”

  “Thanks,” Rachel said, “for trying to get us away.”

  Clay shot a glance at the Adept two paces ahead of him, then whispered quickly, “The bastards have been tempering everyone who flees the city. It’s martial law here.” He shook his head. “We do what we can, try to get the women and the kids out, but it’s becoming difficult now. They don’t trust us, and I sure as hell—goddamn it!” He tripped and lurched forward as a plank broke under his armoured boot.

  Rachel caught him just in time.

  Clay hissed. “The whole city’s falling apart. The temple…gods below, you should see it up close! It’s hanging upside down like a goddamn stalactite. Every time I look at it, another spire or tower has fallen off. I don’t know how it’s survived for so long.”

  “The stone and mortar came from Blackthrone,” Rachel replied, “which makes them unnaturally strong. Devon once said that the mountain doesn’t belong in this world. He believed it fell from the sky.” She shrugged. “But then, he was mad.”

  “Rock and ore from Heaven?” The temple guard whistled. “It’s strong, aye, but not that strong. The rest of the building is going to fall sooner or later. You don’t want to be stuck in there while you’re waiting—I mean…” He looked peevish. “I’m sorry, lass. We’d have got you away from them if we could. Our barracks aren’t much…pretty crowded, and I wasn’t lying about the food situation, but there’s enough fresh water and we’ve a couple of priests on loan from the Spine. Nobody’s comfortable, but at least the floor’s not likely to suddenly fall away under our feet.”

  His mention of priests struck her as odd: Why would they need holy men in the temple guard barracks? “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I should have foreseen this.”

  “The Carousel brought us news of your capture, but it was sketchy. I heard they caught you in Sandport? They used a ferret?”

  She nodded. “They fired it from high altitude so we wouldn’t hear the warship’s engines. We were staying at Olirind Meer’s tavern down by the harbor. I thought we’d be safe there for a while.” She shrugged. “But I was wrong.”

  Clay nodded. “Sandporters,” he said. “You can’t trust those bastards. What happened to Carnival?”

  “She abandoned us.”

  “Sounds like her. Did you see any Spine recruiters in Sandport?”

  “They were everywhere.”

  “They’re keeping it subtle just now,” Clay said, “disguising their recruitment drive as a form of law enforcement. You commit a crime, they drag you to the temple, break your mind, and then enlist you as a Cutter. That’s how it works here anyway. But they’re becoming increasingly stringent, tempering folks for all manner of alleged sins. Soon there won’t be anyone left in Deepgate but Spine.”

  “I thought the refugee camp looked quiet.”

  “Refugee camp?” Clay gave her a grim look. “Hell, lass, that isn’t a refugee camp. My people are squeezed into two barracks on the northern edge. The rest of the bunkers are full of books. The Spine have been moving Presbyter Sypes’s library out of the city.”

  Rachel’s fists balled. “They’re saving the Codex?” she hissed. “Why am I not surprised? They force the people back to the temple, and then save a pile of old—”

  The sound of cracking, splintering wood interrupted her. To their left, a sunken mass of fire-blackened shacks collapsed in on itself, before crumbling into the abyss below. The walkway they were on lurched suddenly as a ball of dust rolled up out of the newly made gap beside it.

  Rachel coughed, and squinted back through the dust. The two Cutters had dropped Dill’s limp body like a sack and now stood over him, gripping the street ropes for support. Fortunately no one had fallen. “We’ll be lucky to get to the temple at all,” she said, “assuming it’s still there when we arrive.”

  The walkway dipped and rose as they followed a zigzag course through smashed acres of burnt pulpboard and tin sheets, through nests of ash-black chains. The sound of pinging metal and cracking wood accompanied their footsteps, while deeper booms and clangs resounded from the industrial heart of the city to the northwest. The air grew steadily thicker and fouler as they marched onwards. Gusts of wind rattled the shacks around them, carrying the smell of airship fuel. Crimson and black clouds continued to unfurl across the heavens, now dappled in places with lozenges of yellow.

  Beyond the League of Rope the party reached the more substantial districts of the Workers’ Warrens. Most of the tenements here had already been gutted
by fire; for the most part they were roofless and windowless: naught but black shells, empty but for pockets of rubble. Smoke drifted in greasy brown layers between them. Minnow Street and Pullow’s Row had fallen away completely, leaving gulfs of dark abyss with tangled masses of chains and iron girders lining their banks.

  The stink of soot pervaded everything. Rachel tasted it with every breath. It stung their eyes and gathered in the creases on Captain Clay’s brow. Trickles of sweat left black lines down his stubbled jaw.

  On Candlemaker Row the path narrowed and wove between great tumbles of stone that had once been glue stores and workhouses. Rivulets of milky gel had oozed from doorways and set in hard pools that tugged at the soles of their boots.

  Rachel glanced back at the Cutters carrying Dill. There was something almost mechanical about the way these lower-rank assassins moved, lacking the grace of their Adept master. They even looked like automatons in their identical bug-eyed masks, their heads turning constantly as they studied the rubble on either side of the path.

  Studied the rubble?

  The Spine Adept stopped suddenly and raised a hand, signaling his men to halt. Clay shifted position, taking a firmer grip of his pike, and glanced at the shadows nearby.

  A peal of manic laughter came from somewhere nearby.

  Clay stared hard in the direction of the sound for a long moment, then relaxed his hold on the pike.

  “What was that?” Rachel said.

  “The Spine don’t like us talking about them,” he muttered.

  “Them?”

  The captain shrugged. “Manifestations,” he said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of them since all the troubles began. They’re drawn to the dead like flies, and we have streets full of corpses in this city. You’ll be safer when we get to the temple.” He gestured towards the source of the laughter. “Safe enough from them, at any rate.”

  “Now I see why you need priests in your barracks.”

  “Our guard dogs,” Clay explained. “We’ve been allocated two of them—nice fellows, but they’ve been struggling to keep these damned shades out. This perpetual gloom is bad enough, but it gets worse at night. Even the Spine don’t dare leave the temple after dark without a priest to accompany them.”

  “Have you noticed anything else unusual?”

  “Like what?”

  “Someone brought a demon into Sandport—a shape-shifter. She claimed it had been found here.”

  The captain shook his head. “I haven’t seen nothing like that,” he said. “But then I don’t go strolling about the city if I can otherwise avoid it. What did it look like?”

  “Like a chair,” she said, walking on ahead of the captain’s bemused expression.

  They smelled the Poison Kitchens before they saw the huge funnels and iron spines looming over the tenement rooftops. The bulk of Deepgate’s fuel, coal, and chemicals had been stored in the industrial areas around here. Now vast pillars of black smoke rose from the factories, warehouses, and depots. Fires had ravaged this part of the district and still continued to burn in the north, bathing layer after layer of ragged brickwork in flickering orange light. Girders jutted like fossilized bones from broken walls and mounds of slag. Flakes of ash danced in hot breezes or fell upon chains and cobbles, accumulating in pale crusts that looked like snow but stank of fuel. Rachel’s boots creaked in it and left faint red imprints behind. And from all around came the groans of heated metal.

  The thoroughfares and humped bridges were stouter here than in most places, to allow for trade traffic to and from the shipyards, but all were deserted. Beyond their own party, Rachel had so far not seen another living person in Deepgate. Yet now she saw shadows moving everywhere.

  “Best not to look directly at them,” Clay grumbled. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for chairs.”

  Their Spine captors clearly had an intimate knowledge of the precise extent of Deepgate’s destruction, for they frequently chose long and winding routes to circumvent obstacles and moaning crevasses. As the gloom deepened, shadows gathered in the shells of derelict buildings and peered out through the windows. The Adept lit a tarred torch and swung it around him, throwing harsh light over the nearby facades. The shades retreated, whispering and sniggering like children.

  “Look there.” Clay pointed to a spot up ahead.

  Rachel glimpsed a group of Spine moving through the ruins, their own torches winking in the deepening twilight. They were dragging heavy sacks behind them.

  “Corpse duty,” the captain explained. “They’re searching for bodies.”

  “What do they do with the ones they find?”

  “They add them to the pile at Sinner’s Well,” he replied. “You want to steer well clear of that place.”

  She could not even tell when they finally arrived in Bridgeview, because there was nothing recognizable left of that ancient district. The street ended abruptly in a great hill of rubble over which they had to clamber. On reaching the summit, she saw that none of the old townhouses had survived. There was no Gatebridge spanning a moat of air, no esplanades or cobbled rounds, no winding alleys draped with silkwood walkways. A great snarl of twisted foundation chains had destroyed it all. Before them lay a wide expanse of open abyss, tapering off to a point several hundred yards to the east. In the center of this gulf loomed the base of the temple itself, an island of iron spikes, rings, and gantries. To Rachel’s left, a flimsy walkway had been lashed to one of the few surviving sapperbane chains still attached to the temple.

  But the sight below took her breath away.

  She had known the building so intimately that this sudden change of perspective made her feel giddy. The temple’s sheer black walls dropped far into the darkness below her, branching out into a mass of broken spires and pinnacles now looking like stalactites of stonework. Much of the structure had already crumbled into the pit, and yet the great bulk of it remained intact, held together by three-thousand-year-old Blackthrone rock mortar. The sight of it made Rachel stumble and clutch at the captain for support. It seemed so vast and improbable that part of her mind insisted that she was upside down, while the temple itself remained upright. Stained glass windows burned in the walls, thousands of them, like jewels in the abyss.

  “We must take the prisoners to the lowest levels,” the Adept told his Cutters. His lenses moved between Rachel and Clay, then out across the abyssal gap towards the temple. The copper grille of his sand mask gleamed in the torchlight. “And confine them in solitary cells.”

  “Our holding facilities are overstretched,” one of the Cutters replied.

  “Make space for them in the Rookery Spire.”

  The other assassin nodded. “What of those thus displaced?”

  “Redemption.”

  Rachel’s heart felt like a hollow in her chest as she stared down at the vast black building with mounting despair. Our holding facilities are overstretched. Suddenly she realized why the city districts had been so empty. She understood now why all of the lights were burning in the temple, and a creeping horror stole over her. How many tens of thousands of people were interred there? She had lived with tempered Spine long enough to know how their broken minds worked. There were only two ways to cleanse a blasphemer of his sins: through either tempering or redemption by knife, rope, and saw. Inside the temple before her, the torture chambers would be running with blood.

  3

  THE TEMPLE

  THEY ENTERED THE temple via a near-vertical Spine conduit in what had once been the building’s foundations. Flanked above and below by the Church assassins, Rachel and Clay clambered down a series of rungs bolted to the metal walls. She watched the captain’s agitation grow as the circle of crimson sky gradually diminished above them. The big man seemed to become increasingly gruff and surly, cursing and muttering under his breath whenever his armoured boots or elbows clanged against the inside of the narrow passageway. He made as much noise as a blacksmith at his anvil.

  For the first time during their trek, he seemed genuin
ely afraid.

  With the help of a rope, the Spine manhandled Dill down after them. To Rachel’s great relief, she heard her friend moaning faintly at his mistreatment. He had regained consciousness at last.

  The ladder terminated at a spherical antechamber from which a score of other tunnels radiated at all angles. An ancient aether light set into the floor gave a green cast to the sapperbane plates and rivets in the curved walls around them. When the Cutters finally lowered the young angel to the floor, Rachel rushed over to his side.

  “Dill?”

  His head lolled drunkenly but he didn’t open his eyes or reply.

  “He’s breathing more easily,” she said to Clay.

  “Good,” Clay said. “I don’t think your captors planned on sending for a doctor.” His gaze moved from the Spine Adept down to Dill’s tattered chain-mail vest. “It’s all shit, you know—the armour, the gold swords they gave the temple archons. It was all for show.”

  “I know.”

  “They shouldn’t have lied to him.”

  “Be silent,” said the Adept.

  Rachel eyed the man’s mask, then turned back to Clay. “Dill was never cut out to be a warrior,” she said. Her manacles clunked suddenly against the floor. The sapperbane panel had tugged at the iron cuffs with what felt like a strong magnetic attraction, but then immediately released its hold. “That’s strange,” she said.

  “It’s the sapperbane,” Clay whispered. “It does all sorts of weird things. I never liked coming down here, not even when the temple was the right way up.” He paused, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “These tunnels bend sound in odd ways. They say you can hear a conversation spoken in any room in the temple if you stand in exactly the right place. Some folks even swear that you can hear conversations from the past.”

  Dill gasped and threw back his head.

  Rachel grabbed his shoulders.

  He opened his eyes. “Rachel? I smell poison.”

  “You inhaled a soporific gas,” she said. “But it’s gone now; you’re going to be fine.”