Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  He screamed again.

  Lying outside where Trench had shoved her, Rachel was fully exposed to the caustic downpour. Drops pattered against her armour, and the smell of singed leather filled her nostrils. She scrambled back under cover. A heartbeat later the piercing pains in her back and thighs told her where acid had eaten through to her flesh. She rolled on the ground, and shoveled sand over her thighs.

  By the time the rain stopped, the stench of seared flesh and feathers hung thickly in the air. Trench lay on the steaming ground, hissing quietly through his teeth. His wings—Dill’s wings, Rachel reminded herself—now looked like black mulch. All of his feathers had burned away, leaving tattered skin full of black-rimed holes and glistening white bone.

  A vast plume of white smoke had risen above the abyss and now covered the sky like gauze. The darker red and black clouds had been torn apart and blown far across the wasteland. All around Rachel the Deadsands hissed and shimmered in painfully harsh sunlight. Wisps of foul-smelling steam drifted from the tops of dunes, while shards of bright metal glinted where they had descended and lodged in the sands. All trace of the colourful ash had been dissolved in the acid shower.

  “I had forgotten what real pain was like,” Trench said through clenched teeth. “I’m sorry for putting you in danger, Rachel Hael. I behaved shamefully.”

  “Forget it,” Rachel said. She knew there was nothing in the field kit to ease his pain. The Spine did not consider such drugs necessary. She could do nothing but watch him suffer.

  Somehow he managed to stagger upright. Scraps of his chain-mail shirt slid from his back and shoulders, revealing swathes of blistered red flesh beneath. Pieces of skin fell from his ruined wings. “The world has changed since I was last here,” he wheezed. “What could have caused such an explosion?”

  “Fuel,” she suggested. “I don’t know…Everything our chemists ever invented they stored in the Poison Kitchens.”

  “The Veil has disappeared,” Trench observed.

  She could hardly bear to look at him. Even now smoke continued to rise from globs of poison sticking to his eviscerated wings. Sunlight shone through the bloody fans of bone and skin. His face had paled yet his eyes raged darkly.

  “Let us survey the damage,” he said.

  They walked back towards the edge of the abyss. The angel limped slowly, painfully, but Rachel slackened her pace to match his. She was afraid to offer him support, afraid even to touch his seared flesh.

  The journey took an age, but finally the pair drew near to the southern edge of the steaming chasm. To the east of them the tin bunkers of the reconstruction workers’ settlement gleamed brilliantly, yet it appeared to be deserted. Rachel could see no trace of life in the dusty streets, only the metal skeleton of an airship, its polished ribs scattered over hundreds of yards.

  At the edge of the precipice Rachel looked down and saw nothing but a pool of white smog. “The city is gone,” she said.

  “No.”

  Then Rachel spotted chains. Amidst the rising steam, she saw the sweeping curve of one, two, and then four foundation chains. Between them hung a ragged web of smaller cross-chains, each supporting a score of houses and hanging bridges. A dark mass hunched in the center of the pit, like an island floating in a sea of mist. “The temple,” she said. “That fucking thing just won’t let go.”

  Still hanging upside down, the great building had nevertheless survived the explosion. Tens of thousands of people would be trapped inside. Now there was no way for them to escape.

  Trench turned away, his wings hanging from his shoulders like a steaming cape. “We must leave,” he said stiffly. “Nothing has changed. The Mesmerists will return soon.” He took a step, then stumbled and hissed through his teeth in pain.

  Rachel smelled burning. “Wait,” she said. “Let me see your wings.”

  “There is no time,” he gasped. “My message…” He crumpled forward, landing on his knees in the sand.

  Rachel examined him. “The poisons are still burning you,” she said. “You can’t go on like this.”

  “Then remove my wings,” he said.

  She just stared at him.

  “You have a knife.”

  “A kitchen knife,” she said. “We should go to the temple guard barracks, we could look for—”

  “I cannot delay,” he snapped. Then he sucked in a deep breath and steadied his temper. “Forgive my outburst. These ruined wings are useless to me now, and amputation would seem to be the quickest and most practical solution.” He paused. “Please use the knife.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  Rachel took two tourniquets from the field kit and wrapped one around the base of each of Trench’s wings. She cleaned his flesh with alcohol, then forced him to drink most of the remainder of the bottle. She found a strap of leather for him to bite down on. Kneeling on the sand before her, he grunted and hissed through the corners of his mouth while she worked, but he did not move or cry out.

  When it was done she doused the wounds with the last of the whisky and bound his stumps tightly in fresh bandages. She took the labourer’s sackcloth shirt from her satchel and eased it over his wounded shoulders.

  Once more Rachel found herself heading into the Deadsands with an angel by her side. But this time, although her companion was here in the flesh, everything else had changed. The young angel’s body had been possessed by one of his own ancestors, while her real friend’s soul now resided in Iril: one more ghost among the endless dead. If he were ever to return, it would only be to discover that he would never fly again.

  No Spine were about, but Rachel decided to keep to her original plan. The temple assassins would still control Deepgate’s main caravan routes, and she did not know how many more airships were at large. They would head southeast towards Cinderbark Wood, traveling by night whenever possible, and hopefully reach Sandport in six or seven days.

  Trench walked stiffly. The low sun cast a long shadow across the sands before him, but it was no longer the shadow of an angel. Now wingless and dressed in rags, he could easily have been mistaken for a common labourer. He wore a grim expression on his slender face, and his eyes belonged to a much older person than the young angel he had usurped. But when he glanced at Rachel, she noticed a glimmer of the desire she had seen earlier.

  He looked away suddenly. “I have been dead too long,” he said. “In Hell, pain and lust are nothing but memories. One can learn to control them, to forget about them. But the living are victims of their own blood.”

  “Obviously you haven’t spent much time with the Spine,” she replied.

  He grunted. “They, too, have changed since I was last alive.” He glanced at his wounded hands, at the bound stumps of his fingers. “Tell me about my descendant,” he said. “What was Dill like?”

  “He annoyed me when I first met him,” she admitted. “Deepgate’s priests brought him up to believe the world worked in a certain way. They sheltered him from everything, even banned him from flying. It was only a matter of time before he rebelled.”

  “And you helped him with that?” Trench asked.

  She shrugged. “I only did it to annoy the priests—to get back at them. In the end I realized he was the only thing they hadn’t corrupted. I think they hid their own cruelty from him because he represented an ideal they could no longer recognize in themselves.”

  “Was he a warrior?”

  She remembered the way Dill had fumbled with his sword when she had tried to teach him to fight—he had been the most inept pupil she had ever seen. But then she recalled how he had stepped between her and Ulcis’s army on the mountain of bones. He had even tried to protect Carnival. “Yes,” she said firmly. “He was.”

  “Then the First Citadel will protect him for as long as it can. Hasp will not be disappointed. He welcomes the brave and punishes the unworthy.”

  “Hasp?”

  “Hasp was Ulcis’s brother, and leader of the First Citadel. He has already taken a
special interest in Dill.”

  Ulcis’s brother? A sense of dread crept up Rachel’s spine. “Why is your leader so interested in Dill?”

  The archon looked at her strangely. “Dill returned from Hell.”

  Some time later they reached the edge of a petrified woodland at the summit of a high bank of dunes. Hard black branches rose up against the darkening sky before them. These trees had been dead for almost three thousand years, drained of life by the same force that had turned the landscape to desert when Ulcis had fallen to these lands from Heaven. The boles were as black and glassy as obsidian, in stark contrast to the soft white sands between. Rachel scooped up a handful of the powdery stuff and let it trickle away between her fingers; the grains glittered like crushed test tubes.

  Fumes still leached from the abyss and drifted across the heavens to the northwest. It may have simply been the sunset, but it seemed to Rachel that the vapors had taken on a reddish hue. Was the Mesmerist Veil already beginning to re-form?

  They followed a meandering path through the stone trees. Twilight deepened, turning the sand underfoot from white to pink to maroon. Rachel heard the scratch of hookfleas and kisser-crabs under the sand, and watched for depressions in the ground. Yet her eyes kept returning to the canopy overhead. The branches came alive with twinkling lights as the skies darkened and the crystal thorns reflected the last rays of sunset. Soon the whole woodland seemed to shimmer under its own weight of stars.

  Trench stopped to rest against the bole of a tree. His face looked pinched and ashen. “I keep forgetting that this is not my body,” he gasped. “It has certain limits.”

  “And your soul in Hell doesn’t?”

  He shook his head. “A soul is ethereal. In Iril’s realm you are simply what you believe yourself to be. Your own mind decides the shape and limits of its form…within reason. Before the Mesmerists, most spirits simply resembled their original bodies. In Hell I appeared to be much the same as I had looked in life: an archon not unlike your friend, Dill, albeit somewhat taller and broader.”

  “How did you die, Trench?”

  He grunted. “Carnival murdered me.”

  Rachel closed her mouth.

  “The Church sent me after her,” the angel went on. “I was the second born to my father, and thus expendable. I trained every day for twenty years, yet she still defeated me.” He looked away. “But she had already feasted, and so she abandoned my soul to Hell.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I got one good cut in. Not many can claim to have given Carnival a scar.” He stared into the trees for a long moment. “I know she’s still alive in this world somewhere. After I deliver my message, I intend to look for her.”

  “And if you find her?”

  He smiled and rose to his feet. “I’ll kill her.”

  Soon afterwards they came across a strange trail. Rachel’s Spine training had involved extensive travel throughout the Deadsands, but she still struggled to identify the cause of it. She had never seen so bizarre a set of impressions. The sand between the stone boles had been disturbed by a much larger creature than a kisser-crab or snake, something which had left a shallow, undulating ditch behind it. There were no footprints, yet the creature was evidently man-sized. It appeared to have crawled across the ground in a wormlike fashion.

  The trail followed the route Rachel planned to take, which made sense as the only clean spring for leagues around lay in that direction. Looking back, it seemed to originate from a place near to where they themselves had entered the petrified woodland.

  Had something crawled up there to get a look at Deepgate, and then returned the way it had come?

  “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “It’s not any animal I know,” Trench replied.

  They followed the trail to the opposite side of the woodland. Beyond this point the land sloped away to the east, north, and south: a vast expanse of pale, rippling dunes and darker patches of scrub. Northwards towards Blackthrone and the caravan trail, a curious bank of cloud or mist smothered the landscape like a dim grey veil, almost as if another city was burning there.

  Some trick of the weather?

  Rachel turned her attention to the east. Across the horizon jagged the silhouette of the Shale Mountains, over which lay the Yellow Sea. Millions of stars crusted the heavens above. The river Coyle, a faint silvery line, wove across the plain below the foothills, although Rachel could not spy any of the river towns in the gloom.

  Yet there were other lights.

  Some leagues southeast of where they stood, a great phosphorescent patch covered the Deadsands. From this distance it looked like a town—or perhaps a traveling festival, so garish were the colors. Shades of aquamarine, permanganate, yellow, and ochre throbbed, shifted, and bled together under the night sky. The trail Rachel and Trench had followed through the petrified trees led down the slope towards it.

  Trench pointed. “What is that?”

  “Cinderbark Wood,” Rachel replied.

  “Some form of sorcery?”

  “Hardly,” Rachel replied.

  “Then why does it shimmer?”

  “Deepgate’s chemists painted it with toxins,” she said. “They conceived of the idea during the Southern Clearances. The stone trees were originally supposed to act as a warning to the surviving tribes, an aggressive display of the chained city’s power. But it’s also a trap for the unwary. Every branch and thorn down there is saturated with poison. One scratch can kill.”

  “Might a cautious man walk through without harm?”

  “It’s not that simple,” Rachel said. “There are poisonous roots buried under the sand, and caches that leak toxic vapors. The dunes are constantly shifting within it, so trails soon disappear. Sometimes the trees are completely covered by drifts. You don’t know what you’re walking on. What might seem like a safe path is often perilous.” She wiped sweat from her brow. “The chemists used the trees as a canvas, colouring their poisons while creating ever more devious ways to bring death to their foes. It became a proving ground, with each man striving to outdo the work of his peers.”

  Trench unplugged his water bladder and took a sip. “We could skirt it.”

  “We need water,” Rachel said, stalking grimly on ahead. “The only clean spring for many leagues lies within Cinderbark Wood.” She glanced back to the north again, to the queer bank of mist hanging over the Deadsands, and frowned.

  It appeared to be moving south towards them.

  Caulker hated horses. They smelled as bad as the Heshette who rode them, and had less flesh on their bones than a bag of boiled knuckles. To make matters worse, he had been forced to share a horse with one of the savages. The cutthroat now perched on a skinny gelding behind his bearded companion, wincing with every hard-boned step the beast took, while the horseman in front of him swayed easily in rhythm. This particular bastard seemed to have an unnatural fondness for horses. He was forever patting and stroking the beast’s neck and mumbling to it in his heathen language. For all Caulker knew, the two were man and wife.

  Anchor strolled up ahead, chatting with Ramnir. The Heshette leader was mounted, yet such was the giant’s size that the pair of them were almost face-to-face. Often they glanced back at Caulker and spoke in whispers, and then Anchor’s laugh would boom out in the fog, rolling back along the long line of horsemen. Since this morning, their ranks had swelled, from six to almost thirty. The initial party had apparently been part of a larger group of raiders.

  “Your master has a good heart,” said the horseman seated in front of Caulker. “He boasts a cheerful spirit.”

  “He’s an idiot,” Caulker muttered. “And he’s not my master.”

  Yet Anchor’s fame was growing among the heathens. Ramnir had sent riders out beyond the fog to spread the word and beg news from other tribes. Each time the scouts returned, they brought with them more of the savages, curious to see the giant and his rope for themselves. Anchor welcomed them all with his big dumb grin.

/>   In this way scraps of news filtered in from the desert. A vast explosion had rocked Deepgate, spewing debris for leagues around. None of the tribesmen had ventured close enough to inspect the chained city, but the damage was rumored to be extensive. The red mist that had enveloped Deepgate of late had dissipated—an observation that had greatly pleased the tethered giant.

  The scarred angel’s two companions had been taken to the chained city by airship three weeks ago. And one of them—the Spine woman—had since been spotted fleeing across the southern Deadsands with a labourer from Deepgate’s workers’ settlement. They were last seen heading in the direction of Cinderbark Wood, so Anchor had decided to make a detour south to look for them. Carnival herself had not been seen, and yet the apparently fortuitous destruction of three skyships the night before suggested she might still be in the area.

  They made camp just before nightfall to allow Anchor to discuss this last information with his master in the skyship above. The entire exchange consisted of muttered questions from the giant and unheard replies from the god above while Anchor frowned in deep concentration, but when it was over the tethered man made an announcement:

  “It is no good,” he said. “Now Cospinol is convinced that his witchsphere is lying to him. Always it tries to steer us away from the scarred angel, and warns of Heshette treachery. Always lies. The witches have been poisoned by Cospinol’s brother, Rys.”

  Caulker snorted. “What makes you so sure it’s lying?”

  “It says we should trust you,” Anchor said.

  The Heshette laughed, but the cutthroat only seethed and wrapped his blanket more tightly around himself. Hadn’t Anchor himself lied to Caulker in order to lure him out into this wilderness? And what exactly had the giant been whispering to Ramnir about? Caulker noticed the way the other heathens looked at him, all shifty, as though they meant to do him harm. Well, Jack Caulker had no intention of allowing that to happen. He had taken to keeping a knife in his sleeve and one eye always on the pouch of pearls in John Anchor’s belt.