Iron Angel (20 page)

Finally Caulker could no longer remain awake. He curled up on a foul-smelling Heshette blanket and closed his eyes. And in his dreams he fell a thousand times. Again and again he found himself peering down into that deep, fog-shrouded valley. He smelled the fresh mountain pines and he watched the eagles soaring through the mists below the high battlements. The cutthroat had no wings to save him. Each time Anchor pushed him, he fell screaming to his death.

He woke to the sound of his own cries. Sweat plastered his hair and face, his muscles ached, and for a heartbeat he feared that his plummet from the fortress battlements had been real, that his body now lay broken in the gloom beneath that faraway fortress. But then he became aware of the early-morning sun shining through the fog like beaten gold. Horses were snorting and goat-bells tinkling nearby. He could smell livestock and dung fires.

The whole camp was already full of life. Heshette riders were cinching saddles and tackle, and strapping packs and weapons to their mounts. Women were milking goats, and chattering in their heathen language. Those greybeards and family descendants who had driven their livestock around the northern edge of Cinderbark Wood had finally caught up with the rest of the party.

Ramnir gathered the Heshette together and addressed them: “Most of you have already seen the red mists rising from Deepgate,” he cried. “This pestilence is the breath of Hell, and it has been brought upon us by the chained city’s own priests.” He raised his hands to quell the murmuring crowd. “Iril was shattered in the War Against Heaven, and now Hell has a new king. This bloody Veil heralds the approach of his armies. It is already spreading beyond the abyss, poisoning the lands all around Deepgate.”

One of the older greybeards yelled out, “We’ll pray for rain!”

“Rain will not wash this away,” Ramnir said to the man. “Nor will Ayen lower Heaven’s barricades to help us. We cannot stop this thing. The Deadsands will be consumed.”

“The Heshette do not flee.” The old man spat.

“Hear me out, old man,” Ramnir said. “The abyss below Deepgate is one of two doors into Hell. The other lies across the sea in the lands that border John Anchor’s country, and is already the focus of a great war.” He paused to look at each of the surrounding group in turn. “Who will stand and fight against Hell
here
? The chained city is in ruins, its people tempered and reduced to slavery. There are no armies to hold back the Maze king’s forces, and those tatters that remain will resist, at every step, our approach to the abyss.”

“We don’t need an army,” the old man said. “We need faith.”

But Ramnir shook his head. “Our friend Anchor has offered us passage across the Yellow Sea to join his own people in the battle against Hell. We have the chance to start again, to fight with those who would welcome our efforts against a common foe. If we remain here, we die.”

The sight of these withered men on their ill-fed beasts considering war almost tore a laugh from Caulker’s gut, but he managed to clench the outburst in his throat as Ramnir’s thin dark eyes turned to him. The Heshette had no choice but to flee. Deepgate’s armies had decimated the tribes in decades of war. King Menoa would crush the survivors like lice.

After some discussion the Heshette came to realize this, just as Caulker knew they would. They would be ferried to Pandemeria, taken in there as refugees, and then pitied and scorned by the locals. Caulker had seen it happen many times before. The beggar cups of nomads clacked around half the street corners in Sandport and Clune. Tribal children raked through refuse heaps like dogs. Anchor must have known this, too. Surely the tethered giant didn’t expect these weak old men to fight?

It was all in the blood, of course. Jack Caulker’s ancestors had been great river men, smugglers, and infamous profiteers, thus he came from good stock. But these heathens were different. They hadn’t crawled very far from the caves their ancestors had burrowed into Hollowhill. To think of them as human required a generous imagination.

But Caulker had little time to consider the matter further, since the group had come to a decision. The Heshette would accompany Anchor to the continent of Pandemeria, abandoning forever the poisoned desert which had been their home.

“Do you expect to carry all of them on your back?” Caulker asked Anchor harshly. “What about the elderly and crippled? And the beasts? Will your master allow his skyship to become a menagerie?”

“All are welcome,” Anchor replied.

The cutthroat cursed, and then continued to curse throughout the sixteen-day march southeast towards the Pocked Delta. The Heshette led Anchor along an old nomad route long disused since the wells had been poisoned by Deepgate’s armies. Now, at last, with a ready supply of food and water from Cospinol’s skyship, the trail became passable once more. They traveled in haste, for riders brought grim news from beyond their shroud of fog. The Mesmerist Veil was growing with each passing day, staining the western skies like a bloody gauze. Caulker’s bones grated in the saddle. Sand stung his eyes. And the flies! A buzzing cloud of insects kept pace with the party, as if they, too, were fleeing the crimson pall.

Ramnir sent riders far and wide to spread news of the exodus, and soon other tribes came along to join the group. By the time the party reached the sea their numbers had swelled to more than eight hundred: streams of refugees, including women and children, mingled with herds of thin goats and ranks of leather-faced horsemen. Warriors from a score of tribes gathered on Longlizard Point, a long low peninsula stubbled with tough ochre grasses. Beyond here, the Coyle emptied into the Yellow Sea beyond, carving dozens of channels through the Pocked Delta mud. It was low tide, and birds strutted across the grey expanse, plucking at tube worms.

Waves rushed and crashed against the rocks on the seaward side of the peninsula, lifting flecks of spume into the air.

Caulker dismounted on the lower slopes of the peninsula and wandered up the cracked rocks to join Anchor and Ramnir. The two men were staring out across the fog-heavy sea.

“—are you confident?” Ramnir was saying.

“Yes,” Anchor replied. “Easy.”

“Confident?” Caulker inquired. “About what?”

The Heshette leader spat and said nothing.

“Ramnir is interested to see how we will cross,” Anchor said. “It is a long way to Pandemeria from here.”

“And how exactly
do
we cross?” Caulker asked. “You can hoist all the goats and their keepers up to the skyship, but I fail to see how
you’ll
manage. You’ve no boat. Don’t tell me you intend to swim?”

“Swim?” The giant shook his head. “John Anchor does not know how to swim.”

“Then
how
…?”

Anchor beamed. “Confidence!” he exclaimed, striding back towards his followers.

For the rest of that day, the Heshette and their animals were hoisted up into the
Rotsward
. Humans and livestock traveled up by basket, but stout harnesses had to be fashioned for the horses. The Heshette women wrapped cloth around the animals’ eyes to prevent them panicking—a tactic which was only moderately successful. By dusk only Ramnir and Caulker remained on the ground with Anchor, although the leader’s horse had already been stowed aboard Cospinol’s ship.

Ramnir indicated that the cutthroat should be next in the basket, but Caulker wouldn’t hear of it.

“I’ve been with Anchor since the start,” he said, “and I’ll stay until the end. You have goats waiting.”

The Heshette leader reached for his knife, but Anchor stopped him. “Go and look after your people,” he said. He grinned and slapped his belly. “And we all need goats. Meat is more important than insults, yes?”

The other man smiled. “See you in Pandemeria, John Anchor.”

Once Ramnir had been taken up to the foggy skies, Caulker was left alone with the tethered giant.

“Why do you hate these people so much?” Anchor asked. “It is bad for you. Enemies creep up behind your back with a knife.” He made a stabbing motion. “Friends watch your back. Why make enemies and not friends?”

Caulker snorted. “I know what these people are like. Had you spent more time in Sandport you would have seen them for yourself. They wallow in filth and lethargy, poor as dirt. Their children run through the streets like rats.”

“Rats are clever. They know when to leave a sinking ship.”

“Animal cunning. You shouldn’t have offered to take them with you.” He watched the foaming waves break against the base of the peninsula, inhaling the scent of them. How did Anchor plan to cross? He could only think of one way. “That water’s deep,” he muttered, “and cold.”

“Here is your basket,” Anchor said.

The cutthroat climbed inside the wicker frame and clutched the rope. “Don’t trust them, Anchor,” he called out as he ascended into the fog.

Down below, the giant merely laughed. He rolled his massive shoulders, and then hopped down the rocks towards the shore. Then he leaned back and sucked in a long, long breath.

From up inside his basket, Caulker watched the Adamantine Man leap into the sea. He disappeared beneath the dark blue waters, with only the huge rope above water to reveal his progress.

Till the fog closed under him, Caulker saw that rope cut a path through the waves, moving slowly and steadily away from land.

PART TWO

THE MAZE

15

MENOA

O
NLY TOP-RANKING METAPHYSICAL engineers were permitted to ascend to the highest level of the Ninth Citadel. The House of Faces, as it had come to be known among the Icarates, had many separate rooms, but not one single window or doorway intervening between them.

Alice Harper stood before an entire wall of Mesmerist constructs. The creatures looked like thin grey men half buried in the stone and mortar, a scrum of naked bodies reaching from floor to ceiling, yet Harper knew that this scene was deceiving. There was no stone or mortar in the House of Faces, only the flesh of incarnate souls. Their arms reached out towards the engineer, beckoning her closer to their yawning mouths. This particular wall was composed of more than threescore of living creatures, but it was hard to be sure. Constructs often shared limbs with each other. Harper suspected the way through this wall would undoubtedly be painful.

“Let me pass,” she said. “I have business with King Menoa.”

The wall writhed. Many voices hissed, “Step forward.”

“Open a doorway, then. Let me walk through.”

“No. Step forward.”

Harper shivered. She really hated the process of moving from one room to the next within the House of Faces. Nevertheless, the wall seemed unlikely to cooperate, and she did not wish to make her regent wait. She stepped up to the wall, allowing the sharp fingers to drag her closer to its scores of waiting teeth.

The constructs ripped her to shreds. Harper tried not to scream—the agony would pass momentarily, she knew—but she could not help herself. The wall took delight in her cries, tearing at her flesh more vigorously as it stuffed pieces of the engineer into its countless mouths.

For a brief moment she was lost in a red haze. Her displaced soul drifted through a dark space. Was it the inside of the wall? She felt other consciousnesses jostling with her own, older and more savage minds trying to reshape her from their own desires or memories. Harper shunned these alien influences, fighting to remember who she was and why she was here.

Alice Ellis Harper. First-class metaphysical engineer. Two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, ten fingers, ten toes. One head. Red hair and grey eyes. I am here to give my report to King Menoa, Lord of the Ninth Citadel. I have one head. One head only.

And then she was through.

She found herself standing in a grey chamber on the opposite side of the wall. Her blurred vision came into focus, and she quickly examined her own body—checking herself thoroughly. Nothing seemed to have changed; even the grey cuffs of her Mesmerist uniform appeared to be identical to before. She clamped her hands against the sides of her head and breathed a sigh of relief.
Just one head this time.

The chamber before her was almost identical to the last one, a grey cube fifty paces to a side. Mesmerist constructs writhed in all four walls, their hungry gazes even now turning towards her. Only the ideogram in the floor was different, the geometric shapes and numerals referring to the second of the Mesmerist Laws of Foundation. These esoteric patterns encircled a solitary blue-lipped mouth, no larger than that of a human’s maw. It was licking its lips.

Harper approached it as it called out: “In the seventh faction of the first third. Elevation one ninety, moving from blue to red.”

“Where is Menoa, Speaker?”

“King Menoa, to you. Be silent, soul. I am attempting to configure the third parallel into the third bank, moving three hundred armoured suits and associated worms from Cog Island Portal to the Middle Green Nine Line out with the fringes of the Red Road. How much blood must be infused into the Pandemerian earth? How much has already been
absorbed
? King Menoa wishes to know these things.”

“Since when do Speakers think?”

“The war effort presses us all. I have assumed additional functions to further serve our Lord.”

“Then don’t neglect your primary function. Tell me where our ruler is, or I’ll let him know you delayed an important message.”

“What message? I will relay it through the walls and floors to him now.”

Harper snorted. “It won’t make any difference. Menoa won’t turn you into anything else. You’ll stay a floor forever.” She smacked the heel of her boot against the outer circle of the ideogram. “How does it feel to have people walking over you?”

The floor’s voice rose to a shrill cry. “I support the Ninth Citadel and those who dwell within it!”

“Then tell me where Menoa is!”

Its blue lips pinched together. “Our Great Lord, Creator of All in Hell, is now pacing across the thirtieth balcony on the canal side of His glorious citadel. He maintains His most recent, most beautiful form of black glass and jewels and—”

“The
thirtieth
balcony?” Harper gave a huge sigh, then put her hands on her hips and stared at the countless hands and teeth of those constructs embedded in the nearest wall. The thirtieth balcony was close to the very top of the citadel. “This is going to hurt like hell.”

“An inappropriate metaphor,” said the floor. “This
is
Hell, and so—”

She ground the toe of her left boot into its mouth to shut it up, leaving it gasping and bleeding, then wandered over to the outstretched hands in the nearest wall.

Two arms, two legs, two hands, two feet, ten fingers, ten toes. One head.

Harper passed through sixty-two rooms and climbed one hundred and four stairwells to reach the king’s balcony. She counted every step, trying to burn her progress into her memory lest the citadel trick her on the way back out. It enjoyed visitors too much, she feared, and was inclined to keep them here for longer than was strictly necessary. The long journey tired her, and she found that her concentration waned somewhat in the upper chambers. By the time she located Menoa, she had lost two fingernails and developed a curious grating sensation in her left knee, as though the joint had been subtly altered.

These were small changes, however, easy to remedy after she had had some rest. Most importantly, her uniform remained precisely the way it should be.

The Mesmerist ruler stood beside the parapet of the sweeping red balcony, gazing out across Hell. The crimson sky smouldered behind him, casting liquid shadows across the smooth ridges and indentations of his black glass helmet. He stood about nine feet tall today, more or less the same height he’d been since Harper had been in his service, yet his glass armour warped gradually as light and shade passed over it. Even as Harper watched, Menoa’s breastplate
flowed,
changing from the face of a catlike beast to the grimacing visage of a hanged man. Spikes grew out of his shoulder plates, and then shrunk back inside again, as though following the rhythm of his breathing. His gauntlets rested on the parapet before him like huge dark claws.

Harper could see bloodmists rising through the air behind him, those great fuming funnels of vapor exuded by the king’s Processors. The balcony itself glistened in this living mist. Part flesh and part mechanical, the whole floor beneath them throbbed with mute pleasure—evidently this part of the Ninth Citadel was drawing power from the bloodmists. From somewhere below came sound of machinery and screams, all mingled with the low, rhythmic chanting of the Icarates.

The king’s glass mask did not turn to face his servant. He spoke in a low, distant voice. “You have located the angel?”

“The dogcatchers picked up his scent briefly,” she replied. “He manifested somewhere west of the Lower Blaise Canal Area, but then vanished beneath one of the Soul Middens.” Most of the souls from Deepgate were falling into the Middens, and she had instructed the Icarates and their packs to search that area first. “It’s only a matter of time until we find him.”

“The First Citadel knows he is here. His ancestors will be searching for him.”

“We’ve seen no trace of any other archons in the area,” Harper said. “Perhaps the ongoing siege has restricted their influence so far from their fortress?”

“No.” King Menoa turned abruptly.

For a heartbeat Harper thought she glimpsed the face behind his mask—soft golden eyes, high arching cheeks like those of a porcelain doll, and beautiful bloodred lips—but then the glass turned as black as an Icarate’s throat.

“He is much too valuable to our enemies,” Menoa said. “The First Citadel is determined to unravel the mechanism by which the angel escaped Hell. There was no portal open when he first died, nothing but a rotting body for him to return to, and yet he somehow returned to the
same
flesh.” The king traced a claw across the chin of his mask. “He is the last of them, and yet he is somehow different from them. They will risk everything to understand him.” The mask’s glassy eyes stared through her, revealing nothing of the real eyes inside. “Look for their warriors below the Middens. These archons have been growing castles in unlikely places.”

She bowed. “I will seed the area with Screamers to detect unnatural vibrations. The packs will assuredly flush him out.”

“The packs have failed me before.”

“And you altered them, my Lord.” She swallowed. “Severely. They will not dare to fail you again.”

Menoa must have noticed the quiver of repulsion in her voice, for he turned sharply to face her. “You are from Pandemeria, aren’t you?” he said.

The king’s question startled her. He had never acknowledged her past before. “I am,” she said. “I was, I mean—”

“And you wish to return to the living world?”

She hesitated. “If it pleases you to send me there, my Lord.”

The king was silent a moment. “Do you enjoy the form you occupy?”

Harper chose her words carefully. “It allows me to serve you.”

The king made a sign in the air with his gauntlet. At this unvoiced command, a witchsphere rumbled out onto the balcony from one of the citadel doors, its metal panels shining dully under the bloody skies. It rolled across the floor towards the king, stopped, and then began to turn itself inside out.

Harper looked away. She heard the click of panels opening, followed by a hiss and then the brutal sound of snapping bones. When she glanced up again, the sphere had become a tangle of hag’s skin and filthy hair, full of eager white eyes. “King Menoa,” it said with a sigh.

“Consider the strengths of adaptation,” Menoa said to his engineer. “Your current form serves me well enough, yet another might serve me better. Take your own country for example.” He turned to the witchsphere and commanded, “Show us Pandemeria as it was.”

At once the sphere began to change again. The witches untangled themselves from one another, their withered bodies flowing together to form a single membrane. This membrane began to expand across the living balcony. Flesh bubbled and became earth, a representation in miniature of the fields, hills, and mountains Harper had known so well. In other places the skin split apart to form arroyos, gullies, and wide valleys. Clear fluid seeped from pores into these many hollows, marking the Moine lakes and Sill River. Tiny black trees sprouted like hairs. Lesions swelled and hardened to become boulders or buildings or runnels of glacial scree.

Harper identified the city of Cog, her home before the plague and the war and the great floods had transformed Pandemeria. She recognized the patchwork of streets and squares now forming before her eyes: Highcliffe and the Theater District. She saw the Sill River, and where it split into two branches that curled around the city like a moat. And still the witchsphere grew around her, filling her vision. Revolution Plaza solidified before her eyes, the great white cathedral shining in the twilight—exactly as it had done before the Mesmerist Veil. She located Canary Street, Minnow Street, and the Offal Quarter. And her own house—the house she’d bought with Tom.

How long ago now?

Ten years, or a thousand? Involuntarily she clutched her chest. How much of this was real? The witches were clearly drawing on Harper’s own memories to form this illusion. She was gazing into her own dream.

“Now show us Pandemeria as it is today,” the king said.

“No, please, my Lord.” Harper closed her eyes, but the scene before her did not change. She no longer had eyelids to shut out this changing vision. Menoa had made a simple alteration to her physical form. Now he was chuckling behind his mask. “You want to see this,” he insisted.

Cog Island’s skies began to darken with red mist:
the Mesmerist Veil.
It seemed to Harper that she was watching from a great height as the shades of Cog’s plague victims rose from their mass graves out in Knuckletown Quarry and drifted towards the city in vast numbers. In moments they had crossed the Sill Bridge and were pouring into the city. Strange shadows flitted under the eaves of buildings while from the east could be heard the braying of hounds.

“You remember this?” King Menoa asked. “You recall the improvements my Icarates made?”

Harper remembered. Now unable to separate dreams from actual events, she saw the Icarates rise from the very ground itself. An army of warriors in queer ceramic armour, they moved from house to house, smashing down doors and dragging Cog’s citizens out into the glistening streets. The Icarates slaughtered the weak and the elderly, and herded the rest out towards their flensing machine beyond Knuckletown, where a great red funnel of vapor was now twisting slowly above the plague graves.

The graves had crumbled inwards, leaving dark open pits in the red earth, and now the Mesmerists’ Maze-forged hordes crawled out: men of flesh and iron and glass, witchspheres, Iolites, and dogcatchers. Claws raked the wet soil, turning it into a bloody morass. White teeth flashed in the semidarkness.

Out they came in waves, in impossible numbers, a seething tide which swept into the doomed city. Time blurred. Days and weeks passed in mere moments and the scene changed again. New constructions now towered over the city: the Plague Portal Collar, the Terminus, and the Great Wheel through which ten thousand slaves supplied power to the new Highcliffe Flensing Towers. The Mesmerist Veil covered Pandemeria as far as Harper could see. Recent rain showers had drenched the land and now the crimson fields and furrows around the island city glistened like open wounds. The vanguard had moved out of sight, far across the Merian Basin to the north, yet hordes of reserve warriors continued to pour out of Cog City. They moved like rivers across the landscape, drawing power from the red earth.