Iron Angel

by Alan Campbell

  The god had gone on to explain that they would train inside Iril’s sphere so as to allow Dill to continue to fashion his own blades and armour. “Remember, any sword you attempt to manifest in this castle would be forged from my spirit. Weapons made inside the sphere, however, draw upon the life-force of the shattered god. Iril’s sphere is a void. While we are inside it, our souls are not intertwined.”

  Dill had been wondering how his continued presence inside Hasp’s castle would affect the god. It was, after all, a parasitic relationship. Hasp provided the shelter and strength the young angel required for survival. The apple Dill had eaten was a manifest part of the god’s soul.

  Mina remained insensate. She stood in the Banquet Hall, clutching her jewelry box. Hasp ignored her, but he put up with her presence here for Dill’s sake.

  “I’m already sharing my fortress with an angel and his thirteen painted ghosts,” the god grumbled. “Another human soul makes little difference.”

  Dill trained. Hasp taught him how to will weapons into existence. And then he taught Dill how to alter them mid-strike to surprise an enemy. A sword could be transformed into a spear, a bow into a shield. Dill learned how to shoot an arrow and how to change that arrow so that it veered during flight, or looped and circled a target before contact.

  Combat in Hell had few rules.

  When he wasn’t training, Dill spent his time with Mina. He talked about his former life in the temple, and all about Rachel and how she’d saved him from Hell once before. He even offered the girl food from Hasp’s table when the god wasn’t looking. But nothing roused her from her catatonia.

  One day Hasp came into the Banquet Hall and frowned at them. “She ought to be a shade by now,” he remarked. “Human souls don’t last for long down here without their shells.”

  Dill rubbed at the splinter of wood she had placed under his skin, but said nothing.

  All this time Hasp kept his castle floating across the Maze. Sometimes Dill took the elevator up to the glass house at the top of the fortress from where he could gaze out across the landscape. The Maze was endless, scarred with canals and stippled with Middens. Very occasionally Dill spied an unusual black structure in the distance—like the bones of some alien temple or monolith. He asked Hasp what these were.

  “We don’t know,” the god conceded. “They’ve been here in Hell since long before we archons arrived. The Icarates use them for some purpose, places of pilgrimage perhaps. Occasionally the temples simply disappear. They may simply be the dreams of ghosts.”

  The skies darkened after dusk and grew brighter with the dawn, but each night lasted a different span of time. Some nights seemed to pass in mere moments, while others dragged on for much longer. No pattern regulated the ebb and flow of light in this place.

  “It is Hell’s heartbeat,” Hasp said. “A result of the conflicting expectations of a hundred billion souls. Time runs at many speeds in the Maze—it is constantly in dispute.” He grimaced and rubbed his temples, then gave a deep sigh. “Lots of things have changed here since Iril was shattered. We are in a constant state of war.”

  Hasp had been showing more evident signs of strain. His skin had become grey and slack, his shoulders stooped, and he moved with the weariness of an old man. Even his armour had dulled and rusted. Often the god stood in the glass house for hours, brooding, and staring back along the castle’s wake. A dark smudge covered the landscape there, like an encroaching sea of tar. When Dill pointed it out, Hasp shrugged and refused to comment. Instead he ordered Dill back down to the sphere for combat training.

  Dill retrieved the paintings from the lower hall and set them up in a room Hasp had allocated him. The thirteen spirits in Devon’s elixir gazed miserably out of their canvases at their new surroundings. Sometimes when Dill listened outside the door he heard them speaking to one another in hushed voices, but they always fell silent when he entered.

  He began to suspect they were plotting something.

  After the twentieth span of darkness the castle slowed. It seemed to Dill that the building had let loose a great sigh, and that it was giving up. Every mirror in Hasp’s fortress grew dull. The floors sagged. The fruit in the Banquet Hall began to moulder. Even the stones seemed to glisten under a patina of sweat.

  Hasp led him up a narrow spiral stair to the summit of the castle. The god paused many times to rest. The stairwell took them to a small balcony encircling a tower, very much like the one Dill had grown up in. Ivy engulfed one side. If he climbed it, Dill wondered, would he find a weather vane on top?

  “Yes, you would,” Hasp said.

  Dill blinked. Did Hasp just read his mind?

  “Our souls have shared space for so long now,” Hasp explained. “I’ve been dreaming your dreams. This tower, as you surmised, is similar to your former abode in Deepgate’s temple. You are unconsciously affecting this environment. As my will fades, your own steps in to take over.”

  “But I…”

  “I know,” Hasp said. “I know you don’t mean it. Nevertheless it is happening.” He leaned on the parapet and pointed far across Hell to the black sea which had been following them. It seemed much closer than before. “You know what that is,” Hasp said, “because I know what it is. And you understand what its approach means to us.”

  “You can’t go on any further,” Dill said.

  The god nodded. “I have exhausted all but the last shreds of my power. And we have still not covered a half of the journey to the First Citadel. You will have to continue on foot.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll stay, hold them off a bit if I can.”

  Dill was silent.

  “You will be harder to find on foot, but you must take strength for the journey ahead. This landscape is dread, hopelessness: it saps the will. You must not let it consume you before you reach the First Citadel.”

  “What about Mina?” Dill asked.

  “They’re after us, not her. I’ll try to hide her before the Legion of the Blind get here. She’s only human, and therefore of little interest to Menoa. There’s a chance she might escape their attention.”

  “What do I do?”

  “It’s mostly done,” Hasp said. “The sphere we fought in has been nourishing you from the beginning, giving up its strength to you. It taught you how to fight, not I. And that fragment of Iril is now inside you.”

  Dill remembered the apple. A part of you is also inside me.

  And Mina’s splinter? Like Hasp, she had given up a part of herself.

  “But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” Hasp went on, “another way we might tip the scales in your favor.” He scratched his stubble. “You arrived in this place with thirteen souls. Your mind made paintings of them to hang on your walls, and yet they have never really been connected to you down here. Some part of you kept them at bay. I propose we change that.”

  “How?”

  The god shrugged. “I have an idea. I’m afraid it’s rather grisly.”

  Harper flexed her glass tail, propelling herself up the slope of a toppled black stone monolith. Many such ancient structures dotted the Maze, and the Icarates considered them to be holy places. Harper had seen one of the rituals Menoa’s priests performed inside these relics, and she had no desire to witness another. Right now she just wanted a viewpoint.

  The Legion of the Blind flowed around the monolith, a tide of chitinous black scales, claws, and teeth. Those demons in the forward ranks squabbled over the supply of eyes, snatching the precious artefacts from one another so that they might be the ones to see what lay ahead. Countless more followed behind with nothing to guide them but the relentless forward pressure of the horde. They moved like a tsunami, covering the landscape of Hell for as far as the engineer could see. She stared ahead of the army to the maroon castle in the distance. It had finally stopped moving.

  An Icarate hunting horn sounded.

  Arrrrrooooo

  And the Blind surged forward, eager for the opportu
nity to attack.

  Dill was appalled at the hideous scheme Hasp suggested. To allow the young angel to absorb the souls inside the thirteen paintings, the Lord of the First Citadel had proposed they make a broth.

  “This is about survival,” Hasp insisted. He looked exhausted, a shadow of his former self. “Just as the Poisoner made an elixir on earth, so we can make another here in Hell. You need the strength of these souls to bolster your own.”

  “I’ll survive without them.” Dill looked away from the portraits. The painted expressions glared down at him in rage and fear, clearly aware of their present situation.

  Hasp shook his head. “I can’t guarantee that. My castle is grounded and you have drained the only fragment of the Shattered God in my possession.”

  “These are people, not meat to be eaten.”

  “No…no longer people. This is the Maze, Dill. They have become nothing but ghosts trapped in paintings. What sort of existence is that? Do you think the Mesmerists will offer them a better deal?” From somewhere Hasp had found a source of anger and his voice boomed in the low vaulted passageway. “They were part of your life, now make them part of your death. Take them with you to the First Citadel or leave them to Menoa’s imagination. The choice is yours.”

  Hasp spoke the truth. Dill’s fate was bound to that of these painted ghosts. It was evident that this fate did not appeal to them, but necessity gave him no choice.

  “Do it,” Dill said.

  For the procedure Hasp located a chest containing Mesmerist equipment: an iron tripod, an etched glass retort, and a reeking black candle composed of demon fat and a concoction of bitter herbs. Unlike the sphere, these seemed to possess little, if any, arcane power. The candle burned, the tripod supported the retort, which was soon bubbling with a thinned solution of the young angel’s own blood. One by one, Hasp saturated the paintings with the foul-smelling steam until the faces faded from the canvases.

  In silence he continued to boil steam from the solution. Once he had reduced the liquid to a thicker consistency, he decanted it into a small bottle. “Now drink.”

  Dill swallowed the souls. The liquid cloyed at his throat, making him cough, but he managed to force it down.

  “I don’t feel any different,” he said.

  Hasp took the empty bottle back. “Your own soul recognizes these others. But you must never consume another soul down here. Don’t drink the blood in the canals, for it will lead to madness.”

  “I must leave now?”

  The god extinguished the candle. He clasped Dill’s shoulders and tried to smile. But all energy and conviction had left his eyes. “Stay low,” he said. “The Mesmerists have a million spies who will see you if you fly. And take this…” From a pouch in his belt he took out something and pressed it into Dill’s hand. It was an old brown apple, its flesh as wrinkled as Hasp’s own.

  Dill left Hasp’s castle without ceremony. The god willed a small door to appear in the lower battlements, and a narrow set of steps to take the young angel down to the surface of Hell. The skies churned like poison overhead, lending a ruby hue to the obsidian walls. These partitions divided the Maze into a nest of devious veins, interspersed with rooms and corridors and houses and castles: the living incarnations of the souls who dwelt within them. There were archways and oddly shaped portals, and steps that sank down to bubbling sumps or drowned quadrangles, or rose up to nowhere. Standing beside Hasp at the top of the stairs, Dill noticed that the stonework of the Maze was rotten in places: mirror-black where it hadn’t yet crumbled, but porous and dull where the constant flow of those red waters had eroded it.

  Half a league away the canals opened into a wider space, a quadrangle where the alien remains of an Icarate temple loomed above the crimson slough and hexagonal pillars rose amidst mounds of polished white bones. The air was muggy and warped, buzzing with flies and larger winged shapes that circled through the haze. Everywhere could be heard the sound of fluids leaking from broken walls and windows, gurgling and trickling into deep stone throats.

  Hasp warned him to stay clear of the deeper channels. Living barges plied these thoroughfares: heavy wooden vessels with iron funnels and heaps of cages upon their narrow decks. These were called the Wailing Ships, for each vessel was a soul reshaped by Menoa’s will—their captains could never leave their vessels because the captains were the vessels. And yet on the upper decks Mesmerist soul traders moved freely: dark figures fused to metal stilts, watching while stout-armed slaves pushed tillers or fed coal into screaming furnaces.

  “Avoid those barges,” the god explained. “Soul traders will try to capture you and sell you on to the Icarates. Stay away from locks, too, indeed from anywhere where the canals change level. The machinery that operates the lock gates was once human. It is notoriously deceitful.”

  “Can I trust anything?”

  “Trust the walls which separated the canals. Trust steps and wells. They will not betray you because they have no memory. But do not trust doorways. Menoa deliberately constructed them from the bricks of broken minds. Many don’t realize that they are now doorways and will be angered by your passage through them.”

  From the steps of Hasp’s castle Dill could see hills composed of these canals and walls, rising in tiers like ziggurats. He decided to avoid them. There would be locks between each level and he saw no point in trying to reach higher ground. And yet the plains looked equally dangerous, a great wet labyrinth of narrow channels and rotting temples.

  “Where do I go?” he asked. “How do I reach the First Citadel?”

  Hasp lifted his hand and pointed to a place on the horizon where the red mists appeared thickest. “There,” he said. “To the place where every soul catcher in Hell brings his goods. The First Citadel is under siege, encircled by Menoa’s armies. That is where you must go.”

  At another blast from the hunting horn, the Legion of the Blind came to a halt two hundred yards back from the battlements of Hasp’s castle. The demons passed around their borrowed eyes among their ranks to survey the scene. Standing on the summit of a low ziggurat, Harper let her gaze travel up across the building’s pitted stone and rusted armour plating. It had settled in the center of a wide quadrangle, encompassing a morass ankle-deep in blood. Little power could be drawn from this shallow lake.

  Cracks zigzagged across the castle’s facades, and even the spires appeared to slump. The Lord of the First Citadel was evidently exhausted. A consultation with King Menoa by way of her sceptre had confirmed the engineer’s suspicions as to the castle’s occupant. This particular archon could only be the god Hasp, youngest of Ayen’s seven sons. No other entity within the Maze possessed enough power to move such a vast building so far across Hell at such speeds. Even the Blind had been unable to gain ground on the castle until it had finally slowed down.

  Now Hasp was stranded here, and the Mesmerist hordes faced a much weakened foe. Unease still roiled in Harper’s gut, however. The coming battle would not be easy. Hasp had proved himself to be a brilliant tactician, and his campaigns of terror had been a thorn in King Menoa’s side for thousands of years.

  The Blind, however ferocious, fought with nothing but a savage instinct to destroy. One could not marshal or direct them in any complex way. One merely set them loose.

  A flash in the sky grabbed the engineer’s attention. A great glass lizard, surely the largest of Menoa’s Iolite spies, shimmered and blurred against the seething clouds. Crimson light washed through veins in its transparent wings and skull, so that it appeared to merge partly with the sky, fading and reappearing at will. In its invisible phase only the tiny red heart in its breast betrayed its position to careful observers.

  The winged lizard swooped low over the Blind, and then thrashed its wings to slow itself. With a sound like the wind blowing through crystal chimes, it settled on the ground beside Harper.

  Call me Forgotten, it said. The king has sent me to direct this battle and supply him with visions of our victory.

  “He
sent a spy to do that?”

  Forgotten clicked its beak. A spy who has seen much conflict. I carried the news of the Broken Peak skirmish to Menoa, and of the destruction of the Third and Fourth Citadels. I have observed Hasp on many battlefields, the Lake of Temples, the Garden of Bones.

  “Then you’re a harbinger of ill luck.”

  Luck is meaningless. I have Menoa’s authority, engineer. He required a leader with combat experience. You have none. The great glass lizard then turned its long head towards the doomed castle, momentarily turning a deep shade of red as a surge of blood passed through its clear veins. Then it sent a vision to the waiting demons.

  Harper registered the unvoiced command in her mind. Forgotten had conjured an image of a battlefield—this very same battlefield—in which the Legion of the Blind rushed forward to tear Hasp’s castle into fragments. They would assault the god’s soul in one powerful strike, relying on brute savagery to bring its manifested defenses down.

  And the Blind obeyed without question. As one, they charged across the open quadrangle, their claws reaching out towards the tired stone and battered iron facades.

  The castle shimmered and changed.

  Hundreds of doorways appeared along the base of its walls, stone portals leading into the bowels of the building. Hasp had dismissed his defenses with one sweep of thought, leaving his own soul exposed to the advancing horde.

  Why? Harper suspected a trap. What horrors were waiting to greet the attackers in those dark passages?

  But Forgotten’s thoughts still shrilled loudly in every mind able to receive them. Hasp has relented. He hopes for a quick death. He sent another vision to the Blind, urging them to pour inside and rip out the heart of the building.