Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  “Have your master send this witchsphere down to us,” one of the Heshette remarked. “We’ll roast it over an open fire until it decides to cooperate.”

  Anchor shook his head. “It is only a few hags,” he said. “I think the gods have made them suffer enough.”

  This false display of pity only increased Anchor’s standing among his fawning crowd of followers, while the Heshette who had advocated torturing their enemy’s agent was shunned by his companions. Caulker felt his bile rise all the more. What did these savages know about the world?

  And who were the Mesmerists?

  The cutthroat had been able to gather a little about them. From what Anchor had said, the Mesmerists appeared to be the ruling force in Hell, an elite group which now sought to expand the borders of their realm. Yet wasn’t Lord Iril himself supposed to have complete authority in the Maze? Some even said that Lord Iril was the Maze—an even stranger concept. Could a god actually be Hell? Deepgate’s priests had often spoken of an endless labyrinth of red corridors, like the network of roots beneath a tree through which the damned wandered. But what did those bastards know?

  Caulker had begun to think of the Mesmerists as kings. It thrilled him to think that Anchor and his master were afraid of them. What sort of power would they wield? As he watched the heathens pack up their horses, he imagined the ground opening up beneath them. He imagined red warriors rising from the earth, and the tethered giant cowering on his knees before them.

  Like every other Sandport crook, Caulker had always known he’d end up in Hell. Deepgate’s chains had never been for him, and he didn’t subscribe to the heathen religions. The certainty of his damnation had even steered some of his decisions in the past. He had murdered, stolen, and raped, and rejoiced in his sins.

  And if he was bound for the Red Maze, then wasn’t it better to be on good terms with its rulers? Once he was in Hell, the Mesmerists might reward him with far more than he could ever hope to steal in this world. He had valuable information to offer. If he could only beg an audience with them without first opening his own throat…

  He peered up into the skies above him, where Anchor’s rope disappeared into seemingly endless fog. Whatever this witchsphere was, it was clearly aware of him.

  13

  CINDERBARK WOOD

  A WIND FROM the south had picked up; it blew sand around their shoulders and into their faces, obscuring the trail they had followed from the last stone forest. Rachel blinked and rubbed her eyes, and for a moment the view ahead blurred.

  Drenched in phosphorescent toxins, Cinderbark Wood lit the eastern skyline like a festival celebration, its tangled branches and boles throbbing with a furious mix of colour. To each hue Rachel tried to apply the name the chemists had invented for their creation: Hot-Mylase and S661, Sugarglaze and Arkspot, Lemonbrine-4, Red-Seven, Deadeye and Lossus Green, Asphyis-manganate and Crawling Peach. There were poisons to blind and to rot bones, toxins which hardened split flesh, rare psychotropics extracted from lizard’s skin and frogs, hog’s livers and anemones. Thorns glistened with black and red fluid, denoting venoms or accidents stumbled upon in a lab.

  Originally a proving ground for the Department of Military Science, the trees had been used by Deepgate’s chemists as a canvas for their own imaginations. They had applied the caustic tars liberally, leaving no twig or patch of bark untouched, till ultimately this had become their greatest work of art. One careless touch might kill a man, or perhaps much worse.

  For not all of the poisons were fatal.

  The chemists had, of course, left the woodland’s spring unspoiled. It was the only clean water for leagues around, as many desperate nomads had discovered to their peril.

  Rachel hesitated at the edge of the wood. Faced with its dazzling colours she reconsidered her plan. They could probably reach the northern edge of the forest well before dawn, head north to the caravan trail, and find one of the Acolyte springs by tomorrow evening. But this would bring them closer to the Spine patrols, or possible attack from desert raiders. If they continued east they would reach a source of clean water in perhaps two hours, and then be clear of Cinderbark Wood before sunrise.

  All they had to do was stay alert.

  She turned to Trench. “Don’t touch anything, do you understand? Absolutely nothing. Most of the poisons in there are designed be absorbed through the skin. And stay close to me, for there are other dangers.”

  She was thinking about the caches buried beneath the sands, the jars of rotting chemicals deemed too virulent to keep in Deepgate’s own fuming Poison Kitchens. Vapors regularly leaked from these hidden hoards and made colourful mists among the trees. It was a beautiful sight.

  And so they walked into the vibrant hush of Cinderbark Wood. Overhead the branches clashed in a riot of pinks, greens, blues, yellows, a dizzying spectacle that resisted starlight and imbued the sands below with different, gentler hues. Something crunched beneath Rachel’s foot, and she looked down to discover the tiny skeleton of a bird under her heel, its fragile bones polished by erosion. Scattered hither and thither were the remains of hundreds of others, too: the chalky beaks and claws; the wings reduced to delicate spokes. Some of the larger specimens she identified as sand-hawks, owls, and vultures, but she couldn’t put a name to the smaller remains. The sight of those unidentified birds, those tough little harridans of the Deadsands, filled her with a profound sadness. How many had been attracted to this false oasis from the sand and scrub only to meet their death?

  Silister Trench seemed unaffected by this miniature graveyard. Instead, he appeared to be afflicted with a kind of awe. Like a scholar in a rare museum, he moved between the gaudy boles with his hands clasped at his chest—a posture less instilled by fear, Rachel suspected, than reverence.

  The petrified woodland seemed largely impervious to the gales blowing beyond its perimeter. Only the tips of the highest branches shifted, glassy thorns tinkling overhead, and these tiny notes only heightened the deep sense of stillness. Rachel kept a hand on Trench’s shoulder as she led him onwards, alert for sudden mists or exposed roots. She looked for poisons she recognized, trying to fit hue and texture to the incongruent names the chemists had devised. One bowed trunk had been daubed in Whooping-Silver and spattered with purple Sirsic Acid ember. She saw Blood-Lime and EM9 on the bark of another tree, fused with streaks of Raven Stain, Rosemary’s Throat, Blushlilly, Dogweed, and Generic 120. Nothing but the sand itself, and the tiny skeletons, had been left un-painted.

  There was no path to follow, no stars visible to keep them on course. She relied on gut instinct and those few memories she retained from her one previous visit here.

  She’d been seventeen when the Spine had brought her back from Hollowhill for punishment. Her hands were still bloody from the fight with the Deepgate reservists, and those hands had been manacled, chained to a line of Heshette pilgrims bound for the Avulsior’s justice. None of the other prisoners would speak to her, despite what she’d done for them. Rachel didn’t blame them. As a Spine Cutter, the most she could expect was a whipping, or to endure one of Devon’s toxic dreams. The other captives, all Heshette heathens, were bound for Sinners’ Well.

  Seven leagues west of Sandport, the head Spine Adept had announced they would take the path through Cinderbark Wood. His pale face had given nothing away when he’d told her why. They’d take the southern route, he said, away from the busy caravan trails, to spare Rachel her humiliation.

  Four Heshette had died among the poisoned trees. The first man had rested a hand against bark when the party stopped to rest. His screams and bleeding eyes had prompted a second, younger warrior to attempt to flee. This boy—he had been only a boy, she remembered—had tripped over a root in his panic. His feet had been bare, his death violent and stinking. A third, a greybeard at the end of the line, had breathed a lungful of pink air before the Spine Adepts had hastened the party away from the mist. The fourth had been a young woman, one of the maidens Rachel had saved from the reservists’ ten
ts. Weeping, the girl had wrapped her arms around a colourful trunk and refused to let go. The Adepts had carefully unchained her and left her where she was.

  When the party finally reached Deepgate, Rachel never received her whipping.

  Now the assassin looked at the physical form of the young angel before her, at the bloody stains on the back of his shirt and the ruined fingers he kept close to his chest, and her breathing became suddenly heavy. Where was Dill’s soul now, she thought sadly. She inadvertently tightened her hand on his shoulder.

  Trench glanced back at her and quickly away again.

  The night stretched on. Thorns chimed like memories. Further in, the woodland grew even denser. Low loops and snarls of branch had to be negotiated with care. Poisons glowed softly all around. Occasionally they were forced to alter course to skirt wandering mists or solitary spires of clear hot vapor, or thickets where the trees blazed like colourful fire. Chemical smells constantly assailed them, queer sulphuric odors that stuck to the back of Rachel’s throat. Time seemed to move to a more solemn beat here, to belong to a different world entirely. Their footfalls were soundless as, unconsciously, they had both become light-stepped and adept at avoiding the skeletons underfoot.

  It was Trench who found the spring first. The angel pointed through the wood towards a muddy hollow with a clear pool rimmed with red and lavender grasses. Silver fish, no larger than Rachel’s thumb, hovered in the water. The tracks of small three-toed beasts pocked the mire. But there was another larger and more familiar imprint, and the assassin stared down in wonder.

  The queer trail they had followed previously resumed here.

  Rachel instantly crouched down to inspect the wet earth. The imprints were clearer here: a shallow trench about the width of a person surrounded by other marks like scuffs. The tracks led off into the trees, becoming more insubstantial in the dry sand extending further away from the pool. She saw no foot- or hoofprints. Whoever or whatever had come here to drink had wriggled along.

  Quickly she filled their water flasks, then, after a moment’s hesitation—the fish in the pool were alive, unchanged, therefore the water it contained should be fine—took a sip.

  “We’re halfway through,” she whispered to Trench, offering him a flask. “But there’s still worse to come.” She eyed those strange tracks in the mud again…wondering.

  Trench drank and handed the flask back to her. While she refilled it, he found a safe place to sit. “I think I recall this woodland from my previous life,” he said quietly. “Long before Deepgate’s poisoners changed it, my brother and I used to hunt here.”

  “What did you hunt?”

  “Heshette.”

  Rachel stared at him coldly.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “I’ve done worse,” she said.

  He grinned. “Crueller things happen on earth than in Hell. Perhaps the Mesmerists are afraid of mortals. They can only reshape souls into things they understand—machines, simple demons. They cannot forge people.”

  “They understand destruction.”

  “Even a child knows how to destroy.” He sniffed suddenly. “We should go. The air here is turning foul.”

  Rachel noticed a cloud of pink gas drifting through the trees towards them. After a moment’s thought, she decided to continue along the existing trail. It led in roughly the right direction, after all, and by stepping on already disturbed ground they would hopefully avoid any traps.

  Barely two hundred paces further on, they came across a sight so unusual that for a heartbeat Rachel wondered whether she had succumbed to toxic hallucinations.

  A brightly painted wagon stood among the trees. It had yellow and green slatted sides, with red shutters and a red door, wheels with gaily decorated spokes. A tin funnel protruded from the roof. The long pole at the front had clearly been designed for horses or oxen, yet no such animals were anywhere in sight. Rachel recognized it from her time in Sandport before she even read the legend painted across one side:

  Greene’s Magical Circus.

  Beside the wagon a shack had been erected. If anything, it resembled a hand-puppet booth, but of much larger proportions, its planks all decorated with stars, rainbows, and grinning faces. A hatch in the front of it had been lowered to provide an opening, through which Rachel could see a stage with a painted backdrop.

  Above the stage dangled two man-sized puppets, each suspended by a number of ropes dangling from the top of the booth. They looked frail and cadaverous, yet with wild glassy eyes and the drooling lips of madmen. Each had been dressed in garish motley: a black-and-white striped suit with a red bow tie for the figure on the left, a puffy blue quilted jacket and green rubber boots for the one on the right.

  The trail, Rachel noticed, disappeared around the other side of the puppet booth. She was just about to follow it, when one of the marionettes spoke.

  “Is that you, Mr. Partridge?”

  The hideous thing was not a puppet at all. It was a living man.

  “Mr. Partridge? We have waited an age for you to return.”

  The second puppet said, “It’s not him, Mr. Hightower. I can see them from over here. It’s not him, I tell you.” Slack-eyed and slack-jawed, he peered at the two travelers from the end of his rope. “One of them appears to be an angel, although the wings beneath his shirt are naught but bloody stumps; the other one’s a Spine assassin.”

  “Why do you insist on taunting me, Mr. Bloom?” the first man responded. “You’re becoming as bad as Partridge—and I find your choice of words vulgar.”

  “I am not fibbing, Mr. Hightower. Look, here they come now.”

  Rachel and Trench walked around the front of the booth, until both of the living mannequins could properly see them. Both men hung limply, their arms supported by ropes at varying heights. Something about their bodies seemed odd to Rachel: they were altogether too pliant, and only their eyes and lips moved.

  “My apologies, Mr. Bloom,” said Mr. Hightower. “I see you have spoken the truth for once. She over there is indeed one of the Spine.” One of his eyelids twitched. A trickle of saliva fell from his chin and soaked into his blue quilted jacket. “Tell me, Spine, have you seen our Mr. Partridge? He’s gone off and left us again.”

  Rachel considered the trail. “I suspect he’s hiding behind the booth,” she said. “Is he…in a similar condition to you?”

  “Greene never strung him up,” said Mr. Hightower. “So the lucky sod goes off wandering all the time.” His face creased in odd places. “Unfortunately he enjoys these bright poisons too much. He has become an addict, and has no consideration for his friends. He abandons us frequently. When he does show up, it’s only to mock us.”

  “Do you mean Mina Greene?”

  “That’s her, the puppeteer. She went for a walk last week and never came back. I hope she stepped in something nasty. Now there are only the three of us, and Mr. Partridge is hardly ever here, either. It’s tremendously dull for us. Would you mind terribly cutting us down?”

  “Don’t ask them to cut us down,” said Mr. Bloom, managing somehow to huff. “Now they know we can’t get down by ourselves, it puts us at their mercy. You should have tricked them, Mr. Hightower, by making them believe that cutting us down would be to their great benefit.”

  “But it isn’t.”

  “I know, Mr. Hightower. But they did not realize that.”

  “Oh, I see.” Mr. Hightower’s gaze returned to Rachel. “Would you mind cutting us down? We’d be awfully grateful, and it would be to your enormous benefit to assist us.”

  Mr. Bloom sighed.

  Mr. Partridge, Mr. Hightower, and Mr. Bloom? Rachel thought the names sounded familiar. She wracked her memory. Where had she heard them before? Suddenly her breath caught.

  The Soft Men?

  Were these the three scientists who had discovered angelwine, long before the master poisoner Devon had attempted to re-create their elixir? How did they get here? Hadn’t the Spine removed their bones and…?
>
  “They buried you,” Rachel said. “The Spine buried you under the Deadsands more than three hundred years ago.”

  “And Miss Greene dug us up,” said Mr. Hightower. “Six days ago, it was. She claimed to be an entrepreneur. She cut our hair. And then she abandoned us, leaving that ragged little pup to guard her wagon.”

  Rachel recalled the show-woman’s pet dog from Sandport. It wasn’t exactly much of a guard dog.

  “Don’t keep giving them information,” snapped Mr. Bloom. “Information is power. How many times have I told you that? Now they know who we are, and what we are, they’ll be less likely to help us.”

  “I thought you said knowledge was power.”

  “It’s the same thing, Mr. Hightower.”

  “Well, I don’t see that it makes a difference,” said the other man. “You’re just being crotchety as usual.”

  Mr. Bloom harrumphed. “You weren’t the one buried upside down.”

  And on it went.

  Rachel listened to their ranting for a while longer, and then interrupted. “Where is Mina Greene now?”

  “In Hell, I suppose,” said Mr. Hightower.

  Rachel and Trench exchanged a glance.

  “Mr. Hightower!” exclaimed Bloom.

  “I don’t care to listen to you anymore, Mr. Bloom.” The scientist’s damp eyes turned back to Rachel. “There’s power in this forest, places where Hell bubbles up close to the surface. It’s because of all the heathens who have died here—the sands have drunk a lot of blood, you see.” A strand of drool extended from his lip. “Miss Greene is a collector of horrors, and she became quite animated when we explained all of this to her.”

  “When you explained it,” said Bloom. “You couldn’t keep your mouth shut then, and you can’t keep it shut now.”