Iron Angel (39 page)

The presence of Menoa’s vast and terrible army at their doorstep would merely reinforce the point.

A low sky and ceaseless drizzle shrouded
The Pride of Eleanor Damask
’s arrival at the southern end of the Ialar Pass. Smoke from her stack boiled up between wet granite cliffs on either side, rock faces which still bore the pickax scrapes of those slave labourers who had widened the natural ravine here in recent years. Overhead the clouds bunched together in clumps like dirty sheep’s wool. The train slowed, the solid thump of her pistons reverberating in the narrower space. Then she sounded her whistle. Echoes bounced among the hidden, cloud-wrapped mountain peaks, before a horn blast from the
Sally
outpost answered the call. The soldiers stationed ahead, just beyond the pass, would now be preparing to wake the ancient steamer which would carry them across Lake Larnaig to Coreollis.

Another voice answered the whistle, this one a long low roar which rumbled across the heavens. Menoa’s arconite came into view, striding between the foothills at the base of Rael Canna Moor. Its skull and shoulders were lost above the clouds, giving it the appearance of a decapitated giant. Engines thundered behind its ribs, powered by some arcane system of blood and fuel the Mesmerists had developed in Hell. Its voice echoed like thunder over the hidden mountain peaks:

“I am ready to serve.”

It turned away and strode quickly into the mists ahead, shaking the ground under its feet.

To watch this spectacle of divine engineering, the passengers had gathered upon the viewing platform of Observation Car One. Rain dripped from colourful umbrellas as the party waited: the men in one group, smoking cigars while they discussed in layman’s terms the mechanics, torque, and forces about to be employed; the ladies in an excited huddle, whispering about some duke and his mistress and what she had said to so-and-so three months ago.

Harper stood back from the group in an attempt to avoid the occasional acerbic glances from both Isaac Pilby, who still blamed her for the loss of his brogues, and Edith Bainbridge, who held the engineer accountable for everything else that had gone wrong, including the weather. She breathed mist from her bulb whenever she felt her strength begin to wane.

Jones had given the lepidopterist a pair of shoes from his own wardrobe, while Ersimmin, being of a closer size to the newcomer, had donated several of his own crimson suits. Both the pianist and the elderly reservist seemed to have taken a special interest in Pilby, for they rarely left the small man’s side. The three of them together, in their dark red suits, reminded Harper of the fractured glimpse she’d seen of the pianist through the music car ceiling.

Did the trio have more in common than the white sword sheaths they each wore? She didn’t dwell on the matter. Whatever common ground they shared would be cinched by the social circle in which they moved—a closed world to someone from Harper’s background.

Yet Jan Carrick seemingly remained unable to see the gulf of this class divide. Pilby had come to some financial arrangement with Menoa’s chief liaison officer, who had evidently regarded this as the first rung of a ladder that would raise him to a position of equality with the very guests he fawned over. The passengers tolerated the chief, of course, but they would never welcome him into their fold. They smiled and chatted with him, but with a barely concealed contempt Carrick utterly failed to notice.

At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the
Eleanor
’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.

The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four hundred feet below. The new line was much shorter, and more dangerous.

Harper couldn’t drag her gaze from the red flag, which struck her as some dim portent of doom. They had a saboteur and a murderer aboard. Wouldn’t the perilous descent to Lake Larnaig provide the perfect moment for foul play? Harper studied the passengers carefully, searching for any emotion or expression which might betray a hidden agenda.

She saw nothing suspicious.

While the murderer was most likely to be one of Menoa’s own ambassadors, the saboteur need not be a passenger at all. She glanced back along the train. Stewards were busy inside each of the carriages, wrapping up loose and breakable items and stowing them away in preparation for the descent. The vague shapes moving inside the frost-walled accommodation cars would be more staff, performing this same task with the passengers’ belongings.

Finally the train huffed free of the ravine and out into the base of a quarry abutting the northern edge of the Moine Massif. Here the railway line which had brought them all the way from Cog Terminus finally came to an end, halted by a precipitous drop of four hundred feet down to Lake Larnaig itself. Crescent cliffs of ochre rock formed a basin between the slopes of Ialar Moor on one side and an ancient Arnic burial site in the shadow of Rael Canna Moor on the other. The unremarkable keep Harper had glimpsed earlier squatted to the left of the tracks among slopes of weatherworn scree, mud, and great wet mounds of anthracite. Opposite this, the flooded imprints of boots marked paths between hummocks of crushed limestone and shale, and sumps where old steam-diggers had been left to corrode in pools of orange rainwater.

The last excavations undertaken here had undermined the burial site itself, exposing the tunnels and chambers the ancients had burrowed in the clay subsoil. Someone had even packed these openings with lime to discourage Non Morai from gathering where the dead had once lain. Harper wondered vaguely what the workers had done with the bodies they’d unearthed. The remains of four cairns squatted above the cliffs, the tumbled mounds of stone patched with white lichen.

Ahead, the smoke cleared to reveal the end of the railway line. The Larnaig Ferry had already built up a head of steam; her funnels were pumping cords of white and grey smoke into the clouds. A pre-revolution eight-decked paddle steamer, the
Sally Broom
was a hulk of sepulchral metals. Ornate steel passenger decks clung to her superstructure like drapes of cobwebs, all lit by yellow oil lanterns which shuddered to the
thump-thump-thump
of her engines. Ten or so of her crewmen were busy at winches, lowering a wide gangway in the vessel’s stern which led into her hold. Chains rattled, and then the gangway boomed down, slamming neatly into an indentation in the quarry floor. The steel tracks now led all the way into the ferry’s hold—a cavernous space large enough to swallow
The Pride of Eleanor Damask
and all of her carriages.

Harper’s gaze traveled out beyond the lip of the quarry to where the bulk of the old steamship appeared to float, impossibly, in open air four hundred feet above Lake Larnaig, and it took her several moments before she was able to reconcile her preconceptions of the landscape with the sight of the four enormous skeletal fingers gripping the hull.

The arconite held the steamship in one bony hand, her stern pressed against the uppermost edge of the cliff.

With its feet lost somewhere in the swollen lake four hundred feet below and its skull hovering like a moon in the gauzy sky, the bone-and-metal colossus remained completely motionless, hunched low over the lip of the Moine Massif as though it had rusted solid while inspecting the connections between the railway line crossing the quarry floor and the steamship it held in its skeletal grip. Grease glistened on the cogs and pistons visible between its knuckles and on the many shafts and hydraulic rams in its forearms and spine. Countless souls swam in its chemically altered blood. It had two engines: one, the size of a locomotive shed, occupied its skull and controlled the movement between vertebrae and hence the flex of the spine; the second, much larger engine was housed within the ribcage and gave power to the automaton’s reinforced limbs. It had wings in proportion to its torso, yet they were tattered and useless, as thin as the clouds that now enveloped them.

There was a collected intake of breath from the passengers, and then Jones said, “Good grief.” The old reservist had taken an abrupt step back. “Up close it’s so…” he shook his open brolly at the sky, “…big.”

“The automaton is modeled on the form of the controlling soul,” Harper explained. “It’s less stressful for a spirit to accept a form it considers natural. Its size was merely dictated by what was possible. The larger the arconite, the more damage it can cause.”

“You mean this machine was once an angel?” Jones asked.

She nodded. “Dill was one of the guardians of Ulcis’s temple in Deepgate. We caught him in Hell.”

“Dill?” Jones laughed uneasily. “It suits him, I suppose.”

A horn sounded inside the easternmost keep, drowning out the passengers’ chatter. The signalman on the roof of the building lowered his red flag below the level of the parapet and
The Pride of Eleanor Damask
shuddered to a halt. Steam hissed from brake-piston pressure valves beneath her carriages.

“…until recently,” Carrick was answering a question from one of the group. “And yet the king thought this way would be smoother. He feared the constant movement would shake the ship too much and damage our captives. It’s only a short distance across the lake to Coreollis.”

“It’s hideous for a reason,” Edith whispered to one of her companions. “To strike terror into Rys’s Northmen.” She waited until the other lady nodded, before adding, “The king told me he might make more if this one is successful.”

Harper said nothing. King Menoa had already constructed twelve other arconites. All he required now was enough blood to release them from Hell.

Carrick grinned. “Even the gods cannot match our strength,” he said. “With warriors like this, Pandemeria will become the dominant world force. Menoa has given us a future.”

A laugh from down in the quarry distracted Harper. The train driver had hopped down from the engine and was now chatting amicably with two Company officiators in slate-grey uniforms who had strolled out from the keep to meet him. One of these men had apparently made a joke. After the officiators’ release forms had been completed to their satisfaction, the driver tipped his cap to each of the two others in turn and then climbed back aboard the train. At a wave from one of the uniformed men, the signalman on the keep raised his red flag again.
The Pride of Eleanor Damask
jolted, and then huffed forward, closer to the edge of the cliff where the Larnaig steamer waited in its cradle of bones.

Harper gazed up at the arconite as the train inched along. Rain slicked the broad expanse of cranium and dripped from ridges in the guano-spattered skull. The eye sockets were deep caves full of wheeling gulls and dark machinery. Hydraulic tubing veined naked bones everywhere, while metal vats, valves, ramrods, and camshafts, all slick with black grease, crowded within the chest cavity.

A rumble shook the carriages. The glass train began to inch across the iron gangway into the hold of the
Sally Broom.

“Condensers,” the driver shouted from the engine cab.

A locomotion engineer threw a switch on the control panel beside the driver, turning on the
Eleanor
’s condenser pumps. A furious clattering came from the train’s engine; the clouds of steam above her stack dwindled to a wisp.

“We’re rerouting the exhaust,” Carrick explained to the passengers, “and condensing the steam back into water.”

“It’s very noisy,” Edith complained.

“True,” the chief admitted, “but preferable to venting so much hot vapor into an enclosed space. The mine trains in Moine and Cog use the same system.”

The arconite did not move as the locomotive, the tender, and then the leading carriages were swallowed by the steamship’s cavernous hold. Three of the ship’s crew appeared on the gangway, bending low to check the steel links where the sections of the Cog railway joined those of the
Sally Broom
’s deck. A dank, rusty darkness engulfed the passengers as the
Eleanor
rumbled further inside the vessel. The sound of the condensers became louder, rattling between bulkheads.

“Oh, this is awful.” Edith’s exclamation had a hollow ring to it. “How are we supposed to see anything at all? There aren’t any windows!”

Carrick had to raise his voice above the booming engines and the clacking of the condenser pumps. “We’ll alight as soon as the train is fully aboard. The ship has a splendid observation deck, for which the cooks have prepared a buffet lunch.”

“It doesn’t look very splendid from here,” Edith retorted, sweeping an angry gaze across the orange puddles on the floor. “I don’t want to spoil my dress.”

“I’ll stay here with you.” Isaac Pilby thrust out his chest and gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword. “We can avail ourselves of the
Eleanor
’s dining car.”

“You shouldn’t even be here!” Edith cried. “And if you’re staying, I’m going.” She spun on her heel and stomped away across the glass carriage roof towards the stairwell.

“I rather think you put your foot in it, old boy,” Jones muttered to Pilby.

The lepidopterist gave the old man a withering smile, yet Harper thought she saw an odd hint of satisfaction in this expression. Had the little man
wanted
to stay here alone?

When the hunting platform at the very rear of the train was finally aboard, the driver eased the locomotive to a stop. The
Eleanor
’s kitchen staff disembarked first. Guided by another two of the
Sally
’s crew, they carried oil lanterns and wicker hampers out across the hold towards a stairwell that would take them to the upper decks. Stewards mustered all of the passengers except Pilby—who had elected to stay—and then wasted no time herding everybody off in the wake of the picnic baskets. Harper refilled her bulb, then hopped down from the carriage as more men ran back to raise the ship’s gangway and to chain the train’s wheels and axles to steel hoops in the deck.