Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  A gust of air brushed her cheek, as though something had moved quickly through the air nearby. Somewhere far below, a chain creaked.

  Carnival?

  Rachel’s gaze snapped to the source of the sound just as a violent tremor shook the bridge, followed by a mighty rumble of rock, like in a landslide. The granite deck pitched abruptly upwards, then slammed back down. Its chains groaned under enormous pressure. Rachel staggered, fighting to keep her balance. She heard the snap and whine of cables, then the hideous clamour of shrieking metal, and finally a series of vast booming concussions. The air clouded with white ash, as thick as fog.

  And then silence, but for a shrill ringing in Rachel’s ears.

  She heard a voice: “Remain where you are. There has been a disturbance.”

  A disturbance?

  Rachel coughed. Her eyes smarted. She could see nothing but churning clouds of sediment thrown up by the pitching bridge—which meant that for the moment her enemies couldn’t see her, either. The whole deck continued to rock in its cradle of chains. Trench was nowhere to be seen; for all she knew he might have fallen to his death. “No shit,” she shouted back, to give them her position. “Some sort of disturbance. I’m not going anywhere.”

  They would be aiming now.

  Her Spine training demanded that she flee while she still had a chance of escaping from her foes in this murk. But they’d expect her to run, and would shoot ahead of her position. Instead, she took two steps backwards and sat down. Flying bolts whined through the air ahead of her. She heard them slam against the deck several yards away.

  Now they would be reloading.

  Rachel scrambled to her feet and ran. Vague grey shapes loomed around her, chains and pendulum houses suspended in the ashen murk. A darker shadow rushed by on her left side. She ducked, and sensed a large object dashing past, the air howling behind it. A storm of grit lashed the side of her face. She kept going, her eyes narrowed against the stinging dust.

  A second barrage of bolts hit the deck behind her, though not nearly so many as before. But by then she was clear of the bridge: there were cobbles underfoot. She found a doorway, pressed herself flat against it, and waited, listening hard.

  Among all of the creaking and groaning metal, Rachel heard other, smaller noises: wet, ripping sounds, and the snap of breaking bones. At times she thought she heard a dull soft whoomph like the thump of wings. Something unseen was butchering the assassins. She didn’t hear a single scream, but then Spine never made a sound when they died.

  Had Carnival returned to help her?

  But when the clouds of sediment finally thinned, Rachel could see no trace of the scarred angel, merely a scene of utter devastation. An eerie silence hung over the bridge and its surroundings. She could see no sign of the temple assassins. Indeed, most of those pendulum houses in which the Spine had been hiding were gone, lost to the abyss, their broken support chains now empty, creaking back and forth in the dusty gloom. On the opposite side of the bridge the Taptack Acres, that vast, crippled district, had also vanished. Freed of their heavy burden, the mighty foundation chains that had once sagged under the strain of all those streets and houses now loomed overhead. It looked as if a storm had ripped through this broken quarter of the city, and then abruptly departed.

  “Carnival?” Rachel called.

  No answer.

  Could the sounds of slaughter have been Rachel’s imagination? Had the destruction been caused by nothing more than the parting of one weak but crucial support chain, a break that had sent a terrible shock wave through the entire district?

  “Carnival!”

  These silent chains offered no answers. Rachel glanced up at the pulsing, fire-lit sky and decided not to linger.

  Trench had not gone far. In this warren of blocked and buckled streets he had chosen to flee down one of many dead ends. Rachel caught up with him just as he was leaving the mouth of this alley to retrace his footsteps. He was in no better mood than before: sour and scowling, his eyes as dark as murder. When he saw her he lifted his chin and glared at her with unmasked contempt.

  “This wretched place will be the death of me,” he growled, jabbing a finger back in the direction from which he had come. “There are already Icarates in the city!”

  “Icarates?”

  “Mesmerist scouts,” he said. “Shape-shifters. The city is infested with them.” He dragged the back of his bleeding hand across his lips, then spat. “You must lead me out of here now. There’s little time left.”

  Rachel studied him carefully. “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” His eyes flashed with arrogance. “I am the champion of the First Citadel, commander of Hasp’s Archons.”

  Hasp’s Archons?

  A chill clutched Rachel’s heart as she realized her mistake. The consciousness that now held her friend had never been one of the thirteen souls in Devon’s elixir, which meant that this thing could have come from only one place. The assassin felt her mouth go dry. “You’re from Hell?”

  He smiled cruelly. “The First Citadel is home to all angels who have died in battle in this world. My life ended nine hundred years ago in the service of your Church, and now I have returned to serve it once more. War has been raging in Hell for centuries. Our fortress is under siege. Many of us have already been taken by Menoa’s forces to the Ninth Citadel, where our souls are altered, smashed apart only to be changed into impure forms. I must deliver a message to one of Ayen’s sons before we are lost.”

  “Where is Dill?” Rachel demanded.

  Trench shrugged. “He’s in Hell. We merely required his body, not his soul.”

  Rachel could only stare at Trench in numb shock. She had failed to protect the young angel on the mountain of bones, and then brought him back only for him to see his home and everyone he loved destroyed. She had failed him again in Sandport when the Spine captured him.

  And now…?

  She had failed him in the worst possible way. Iril had reached out and claimed him back. Everything she’d done had been for nothing. She’d lost him all over again.

  She grabbed Trench’s shoulders. “How do we get him back?”

  Disbelief clouded the impostor’s face. “Do you have any idea who you are assaulting?” His voice became ominously low. “I am a descendant of Callis, your own god’s Herald. You will bow before me.”

  “Ulcis was never my god,” Rachel said. “I didn’t bow before him and I won’t bow before you.” She took hold of one of the angel’s damaged wings and twisted hard. “Now tell me how to get Dill back from Hell.”

  Trench struggled against her clumsily, but his stolen body lacked the strength to resist. At last he stopped fighting. “We share the same enemy, Rachel Hael,” he said evenly. “Iril’s Mesmerists threaten your world as much as mine. But if they are defeated, the archons of the First Citadel will try to release Dill and return him to this body. However, if I fail to find help, and the citadel falls, your young friend is doomed to suffer more than you can imagine. The Mesmerists remake souls into whatever form suits their war plan. Your kind might face Dill on the battlefield one day—not as an angel, but as a monster or a bleeding sword or a warship: a sensate hulk of iron without even a mouth to scream his agony.”

  She slowly released the angel. “Who are these Mesmerists?”

  Trench flexed his wings and winced. “They were once Lord Iril’s elite,” he said. “They rose to power after Ayen shattered Iril in the War Amongst the Gods. Menoa is their leader, a self-proclaimed king and one of Iril’s former strategists. Since Ayen debased the Lord of the Maze, Menoa has assumed his former master’s role for himself. Now he controls vast swathes of Hell.”

  “And you opposed him?”

  “The archons of the First Citadel rejected this upstart king. We have been scouring Hell for the shattered remains of our rightful ruler, while Menoa gathered armies and crushed dissent. Yet many believe Menoa is already in possession of a piece of our shattered god. He became too powerful too quick
ly. Now all who oppose him are changed.”

  Changed? “They’re coming here?”

  “One of their scouts is crawling towards us as we speak.” He pointed back to the lane from which he’d emerged. “This is what awaits you if you linger here much longer.”

  At first Rachel saw nothing, but then, slowly, she began to notice odd shapes in the ash covering the cobbles—like two hands dragging themselves across the ground, trailing roots of fine white dust. They appeared to be moving towards Trench and Rachel.

  She took a step back.

  “It is a low-rank Icarate,” Trench said. “A common shape-shifter. Yet it lacks the strength to become the shape the Mesmerists have chosen for it.” He searched the ground quickly, then picked up a fragment of flint and hurled it at the two hands. One of the dust-shapes burst apart, then quickly re-formed. But now one of the hands looked darker and more angular, more like the stone shard Trench had thrown at it. “There are probably hundreds of them around here, hidden among the chains and stones all around us.”

  “Can you fly?” Rachel said.

  Trench flapped his wings, then growled in pain. “I can walk.”

  “Then let’s walk quickly.”

  They hurried east towards the League of Rope and the rim of the abyss as flashes of light pulsed across the horizon behind them.

  10

  GOOD-BYE TO SANDPORT

  SANDPORT’S LIGHTS DIMMED behind them as Jack Caulker and his companion reached the summit of the rocky bluff. On a clear night Caulker might have looked down to see a sprawl of mud homes slumped in an uneven bowl extending around the bend in the river Coyle, skiffs bobbing in the moonlit waters. But tonight the fog surrounding John Anchor and his master’s skyship obscured the view.

  The big man’s teeth shone whitely in his dark face. His wooden harness creaked as he dragged the monstrous rope behind him, yet he seemed utterly tireless. “It is good exercise,” he said jovially. “To climb, is good exercise, no?”

  “I suppose so,” Caulker muttered. He was already fed up, and he still had a whole sodding desert ahead of him. They hadn’t even been able to stop for a drink, not after what had happened to the Cockle Scunny.

  That broth shop had remained intact marginally longer than the Widow’s Hook, although Caulker suspected that the building might have been saved from destruction altogether had the proprietor not threatened to summon the town militia as soon as Anchor showed his face at the door. The tethered man had marched in the front door, used the privy, and then left by the back door.

  Men were probably still picking through the rubble of that building, too.

  Anchor was utterly unconcerned by the devastation he left in his wake. Indeed, he had remained cheerful during the whole incident, humming some half-wit sailor’s shanty while the corpses piled up behind him. Caulker could well imagine what tomorrow’s yells from the Sandport Criers would be.

  At the top of the bluff, the murky air denied them any view of the Deadsands, but Caulker had seen the desert from this same point a hundred times before. To the west, the land rose and fell in waves of ash-coloured dunes, scoured in places down to the basalt bedrock or scabbed with thickets of brittle grass, scrub, and ancient rock forest. A trail led north, following the river to Clune and the logging depositaries there, while a second, wider route struck out directly west to the chained city of Deepgate. To keep traders well wide of the slipsand, cairns of glassy black rock had been built to mark this road, although the cutthroat could not see even the first of them in the fog.

  His hand kept returning to his shoulder, reaching for a pack that was not there. It felt discomforting to set out across the wasteland without provisions, but Anchor had deemed it unnecessary for Caulker to carry anything. Whatever food and water they would need could be pulled down from Cospinol’s ship in the skies above them. This thought did not help to improve Caulker’s appetite.

  Wreathed in fog, the two men thus set out upon the trail to Deepgate. Caulker winced to think of the sort of battle that lay ahead of his companion. Carnival had killed a god and stolen his power. And yet they’d sent a man to kill her—an odd, phenomenally strong man to be sure, but still a man. Despite the open desert, the cutthroat felt like he was trapped between two massive, inward-moving walls.

  Behind them, the harbor bells rang out like a celebration of their departure.

  11

  SOUR RAIN

  NO,” RACHEL SAID to Trench. “The caravan trail is too dangerous by daylight. Spine are everywhere, hunting any refugees who attempt that route. And they’re not the only ones. Rumors of Heathen attacks reached us while we were in Sandport. We must wait till dark and then head southeast.” She drew a line in the sand. “Then we can cut east through Cinderbark Wood.” She hesitated. It was a dangerous route, but likely to be their best chance. “From there we should be able to reach the Coyle without much fear of detection.”

  Deepgate’s expanding canopy of smoke throbbed overhead, a dark bruise streaked with toxic colours—orange, lime green, yellow, and red. Rachel and Trench had hidden in a sandy basin in the lee of an iron groyne, two hundred yards southwest of the Spine patrol routes and the abyss perimeter. Exhausted from their trek through the stricken city, and with only an hour till dawn, it had been pointless to continue across the Deadsands. Instead, Rachel had used the last of the darkness to sneak back into the perimeter camp, where she had searched for supplies for the journey ahead. Her foray yielded a satchel of labourers’ rags, a field medical kit, a cord of pigskin, four flasks of water, and a serrated kitchen knife, which she secreted in her armour beside the dagger she had taken from the Spine master in the temple.

  Now dawn was here, and Rachel desperately needed to sleep. She sat in the shade of the groyne, tending to her companion’s wounded wings and hands. Red vapor was rising from the city like bloody steam. The low sun filtered through, turning the Deadsands the colour of burned skin.

  “We must not delay,” Trench insisted. His scowl seemed to belong to an older face than that of the young angel he had possessed, yet his eyes burned as orange with annoyance as Dill’s ever had. “The Veil is growing denser. By nightfall the Icarates might have enough strength to regain their forms. Then everyone in Deepgate will die.”

  Rachel pointed east, to where one of three churchships hovered over the Deadsands. “They’re looking for us. We wouldn’t manage to cover half a league without being spotted. We don’t have any choice but to remain here until dark.”

  Trench’s eyes darkened, and he growled in frustration. Rachel studied those eyes for some sign of Dill, just a hint that her friend’s soul might still be connected to his living body. Yet the harder she looked, the further her hopes diminished. Her companion was a stranger to her.

  And so they waited there in the shadow of the groyne, taking turns to sleep and watch for patrols, while the sun glimmered like a weak lantern in the gloom. The chained city groaned, cracked, and fumed behind them. Airships droned across the Deadsands in the distance, but the search soon moved away from the city.

  Rachel slept in fits. Disturbing noises haunted her dreams: the distant explosions from the Poison Kitchens and the hideous twang and judder of overstressed chains became the sounds of war machines, things like huge insects and skeletal towers that shuddered and hissed jets of gas.

  She woke sometime around noon to discover that the air quality had declined noticeably. A warm breeze sighed out of the abyss, carrying with it the stench of fuel. The heavens appeared angrier and more vivid than before. Fumes boiled in the blackness overhead, turning from clashing pinks and reds to fragile shades of yellow and silvery blue.

  Trench had fallen asleep and rolled back onto his wings, reopening the wounds the Spine bindings had given him. Whatever regenerative powers Devon’s angelwine had bestowed upon the angel now seemed to have departed along with Dill’s soul.

  Rachel pulled some lint from the field kit and cleaned the blood from her companion’s wings before wrapping a clean bandage
around one of the deeper cuts. Trench woke, but did not resist her ministrations. When she had finished, he moved to the edge of the groyne and stared back towards the city.

  Dark shapes flitted like windblown rags between the seething skies and the crimson mists now rising from the abyss.

  “What are those vapors?” Rachel asked.

  “It is the blood of the dead,” Trench replied. “There is much power in blood, enough to sustain a soul in this world. And so the Mesmerists use it to stain the ground before their warriors set foot upon it. It feeds their armies. Without it they would wither and die.” He swept a hand across the vista before them. “The Veil will spread until it covers all of this. When it reaches the sea the Mesmerists will make ships from blood and souls and metal.”

  “Can we stop it?”

  “Not while the portal beneath the city remains open.”

  Rachel clenched her teeth. “Ulcis warned us. He built his palace over a gate to Hell.”

  Trench looked surprised. “You knew him?”

  “I knew his daughter.” Rachel wondered where Carnival was now. Last night’s ambush in the city had been thwarted by something. “We once stood together above the gates of Hell.”

  “Gate is the wrong word to use. The Maze exists in a separate reality from this one. Since Ayen sealed Heaven, the Maze has been growing, exerting a new pressure on this world. Now the membrane between the two realms is wearing thin. It is weakest in places where a great number of souls have poured into Hell—in battlefields, or in plague cities like Cog in Pandemeria.”

  “The Church of Ulcis.”

  “Deepgate’s temple fed the god of chains, not the Maze. The portal under his palace was insignificant, no great threat to him or his Church.”