Iron Angel (5 page)

“Nevertheless,” the Adept replied. “I cannot sanction the release of these two. The archon is temple property. This woman was a Spine Adept, and as such remains our responsibility.”

“Let me have them for a couple of days,” Clay said. “I’ll bring them back to you myself.”

“You have already reneged on similar promises, and then lied to conceal your deceit.” Another explosion in the chained city bloomed in the assassin’s silvered lenses. Sand howled around him. “Prisoners who you claimed had died under interrogation have since been discovered alive, hidden in one of the Codex bunkers. Such deception will no longer be tolerated.”

Clay winced.

“We are prepared to make allowances, Captain,” the Adept said. “But do not take us for fools, and do not test our leniency.”

The captain paused. “I’d still like to question the girl, if I may,” he said. “If you’ve no objections, I’ll accompany you to the temple.”

“As you wish.”

The group tramped down the steep walkway into the ruins of the district known as the League of Rope. Once they were below the lip of the abyss, the wind dropped noticeably. In the amber gloom down here, the air simmered with the heat of the recent fires. Ash smothered the walkway planks and crumbled away from the support ropes whenever Rachel gripped them. Agitated by the party’s progress, the stinking dust soon engulfed them like a veil. The charred remains of shacks and platforms hung from the web of ropes on all sides, their vague dark shapes like insects cocooned within spider’s silk.

Captain Clay matched pace with Rachel. “We sprayed the whole neighborhood with water from the Dawn Pipes to keep the fires here under control,” he said to her in a low voice. “We were trying to preserve at least one route out of the city.” He pointed across the city. “The Spine tried the same thing on the other side, but they didn’t have enough water. So they sprayed those districts with effluence from the sewage pipes. Kept the fires from taking hold, I’m told, though I wouldn’t want to go for a stroll there right now.” He grunted. “Trust the Spine to ruin a perfectly good slum. I wonder what would have happened if the flames had reached the temple. Would they have doused it with water, or with—”

“Thanks,” Rachel said, “for trying to get us away.”

Clay shot a glance at the Adept two paces ahead of him, then whispered quickly, “The bastards have been tempering everyone who flees the city. It’s martial law here.” He shook his head. “We do what we can, try to get the women and the kids out, but it’s becoming difficult now. They don’t trust us, and I sure as hell—goddamn it!” He tripped and lurched forward as a plank broke under his armoured boot.

Rachel caught him just in time.

Clay hissed. “The whole city’s falling apart. The temple…gods below, you should see it up close! It’s hanging upside down like a goddamn stalactite. Every time I look at it, another spire or tower has fallen off. I don’t know how it’s survived for so long.”

“The stone and mortar came from Blackthrone,” Rachel replied, “which makes them unnaturally strong. Devon once said that the mountain doesn’t belong in this world. He believed it fell from the sky.” She shrugged. “But then, he was mad.”

“Rock and ore from Heaven?” The temple guard whistled. “It’s strong, aye, but not that strong. The rest of the building is going to fall sooner or later. You don’t want to be stuck in there while you’re waiting—I mean…” He looked peevish. “I’m sorry, lass. We’d have got you away from them if we could. Our barracks aren’t much…pretty crowded, and I wasn’t lying about the food situation, but there’s enough fresh water and we’ve a couple of priests on loan from the Spine. Nobody’s comfortable, but at least the floor’s not likely to suddenly fall away under our feet.”

His mention of priests struck her as odd: Why would they need holy men in the temple guard barracks? “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I should have foreseen this.”

“The
Carousel
brought us news of your capture, but it was sketchy. I heard they caught you in Sandport? They used a ferret?”

She nodded. “They fired it from high altitude so we wouldn’t hear the warship’s engines. We were staying at Olirind Meer’s tavern down by the harbor. I thought we’d be safe there for a while.” She shrugged. “But I was wrong.”

Clay nodded. “Sandporters,” he said. “You can’t trust those bastards. What happened to Carnival?”

“She abandoned us.”

“Sounds like her. Did you see any Spine recruiters in Sandport?”

“They were everywhere.”

“They’re keeping it subtle just now,” Clay said, “disguising their recruitment drive as a form of law enforcement. You commit a crime, they drag you to the temple, break your mind, and then enlist you as a Cutter. That’s how it works here anyway. But they’re becoming increasingly stringent, tempering folks for all manner of alleged sins. Soon there won’t be anyone left in Deepgate but Spine.”

“I thought the refugee camp looked quiet.”

“Refugee camp?” Clay gave her a grim look. “Hell, lass, that isn’t a
refugee
camp. My people are squeezed into two barracks on the northern edge. The rest of the bunkers are full of books. The Spine have been moving Presbyter Sypes’s library out of the city.”

Rachel’s fists balled. “They’re saving the Codex?” she hissed. “Why am I not surprised? They force the people back to the temple, and then save a pile of old—”

The sound of cracking, splintering wood interrupted her. To their left, a sunken mass of fire-blackened shacks collapsed in on itself, before crumbling into the abyss below. The walkway they were on lurched suddenly as a ball of dust rolled up out of the newly made gap beside it.

Rachel coughed, and squinted back through the dust. The two Cutters had dropped Dill’s limp body like a sack and now stood over him, gripping the street ropes for support. Fortunately no one had fallen. “We’ll be lucky to get to the temple at all,” she said, “assuming it’s still there when we arrive.”

The walkway dipped and rose as they followed a zigzag course through smashed acres of burnt pulpboard and tin sheets, through nests of ash-black chains. The sound of pinging metal and cracking wood accompanied their footsteps, while deeper booms and clangs resounded from the industrial heart of the city to the northwest. The air grew steadily thicker and fouler as they marched onwards. Gusts of wind rattled the shacks around them, carrying the smell of airship fuel. Crimson and black clouds continued to unfurl across the heavens, now dappled in places with lozenges of yellow.

Beyond the League of Rope the party reached the more substantial districts of the Workers’ Warrens. Most of the tenements here had already been gutted by fire; for the most part they were roofless and windowless: naught but black shells, empty but for pockets of rubble. Smoke drifted in greasy brown layers between them. Minnow Street and Pullow’s Row had fallen away completely, leaving gulfs of dark abyss with tangled masses of chains and iron girders lining their banks.

The stink of soot pervaded everything. Rachel tasted it with every breath. It stung their eyes and gathered in the creases on Captain Clay’s brow. Trickles of sweat left black lines down his stubbled jaw.

On Candlemaker Row the path narrowed and wove between great tumbles of stone that had once been glue stores and workhouses. Rivulets of milky gel had oozed from doorways and set in hard pools that tugged at the soles of their boots.

Rachel glanced back at the Cutters carrying Dill. There was something almost mechanical about the way these lower-rank assassins moved, lacking the grace of their Adept master. They even looked like automatons in their identical bug-eyed masks, their heads turning constantly as they studied the rubble on either side of the path.

Studied the rubble?

The Spine Adept stopped suddenly and raised a hand, signaling his men to halt. Clay shifted position, taking a firmer grip of his pike, and glanced at the shadows nearby.

A peal of manic laughter came from somewhere nearby.

Clay stared hard in the direction of the sound for a long moment, then relaxed his hold on the pike.

“What was that?” Rachel said.

“The Spine don’t like us talking about them,” he muttered.

“Them?”

The captain shrugged. “Manifestations,” he said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of them since all the troubles began. They’re drawn to the dead like flies, and we have streets full of corpses in this city. You’ll be safer when we get to the temple.” He gestured towards the source of the laughter. “Safe enough from them, at any rate.”

“Now I see why you need priests in your barracks.”

“Our guard dogs,” Clay explained. “We’ve been allocated two of them—nice fellows, but they’ve been struggling to keep these damned shades out. This perpetual gloom is bad enough, but it gets worse at night. Even the Spine don’t dare leave the temple after dark without a priest to accompany them.”

“Have you noticed anything else unusual?”

“Like what?”

“Someone brought a demon into Sandport—a shape-shifter. She claimed it had been found here.”

The captain shook his head. “I haven’t seen nothing like that,” he said. “But then I don’t go strolling about the city if I can otherwise avoid it. What did it look like?”

“Like a chair,” she said, walking on ahead of the captain’s bemused expression.

They smelled the Poison Kitchens before they saw the huge funnels and iron spines looming over the tenement rooftops. The bulk of Deepgate’s fuel, coal, and chemicals had been stored in the industrial areas around here. Now vast pillars of black smoke rose from the factories, warehouses, and depots. Fires had ravaged this part of the district and still continued to burn in the north, bathing layer after layer of ragged brickwork in flickering orange light. Girders jutted like fossilized bones from broken walls and mounds of slag. Flakes of ash danced in hot breezes or fell upon chains and cobbles, accumulating in pale crusts that looked like snow but stank of fuel. Rachel’s boots creaked in it and left faint red imprints behind. And from all around came the groans of heated metal.

The thoroughfares and humped bridges were stouter here than in most places, to allow for trade traffic to and from the shipyards, but all were deserted. Beyond their own party, Rachel had so far not seen another living person in Deepgate. Yet now she saw shadows moving everywhere.

“Best not to look directly at them,” Clay grumbled. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for chairs.”

Their Spine captors clearly had an intimate knowledge of the precise extent of Deepgate’s destruction, for they frequently chose long and winding routes to circumvent obstacles and moaning crevasses. As the gloom deepened, shadows gathered in the shells of derelict buildings and peered out through the windows. The Adept lit a tarred torch and swung it around him, throwing harsh light over the nearby facades. The shades retreated, whispering and sniggering like children.

“Look there.” Clay pointed to a spot up ahead.

Rachel glimpsed a group of Spine moving through the ruins, their own torches winking in the deepening twilight. They were dragging heavy sacks behind them.

“Corpse duty,” the captain explained. “They’re searching for bodies.”

“What do they do with the ones they find?”

“They add them to the pile at Sinner’s Well,” he replied. “You want to steer well clear of that place.”

She could not even tell when they finally arrived in Bridgeview, because there was nothing recognizable left of that ancient district. The street ended abruptly in a great hill of rubble over which they had to clamber. On reaching the summit, she saw that none of the old townhouses had survived. There was no Gatebridge spanning a moat of air, no esplanades or cobbled rounds, no winding alleys draped with silkwood walkways. A great snarl of twisted foundation chains had destroyed it all. Before them lay a wide expanse of open abyss, tapering off to a point several hundred yards to the east. In the center of this gulf loomed the base of the temple itself, an island of iron spikes, rings, and gantries. To Rachel’s left, a flimsy walkway had been lashed to one of the few surviving sapperbane chains still attached to the temple.

But the sight below took her breath away.

She had known the building so intimately that this sudden change of perspective made her feel giddy. The temple’s sheer black walls dropped far into the darkness below her, branching out into a mass of broken spires and pinnacles now looking like stalactites of stonework. Much of the structure had already crumbled into the pit, and yet the great bulk of it remained intact, held together by three-thousand-year-old Blackthrone rock mortar. The sight of it made Rachel stumble and clutch at the captain for support. It seemed so vast and improbable that part of her mind insisted that she was upside down, while the temple itself remained upright. Stained glass windows burned in the walls, thousands of them, like jewels in the abyss.

“We must take the prisoners to the lowest levels,” the Adept told his Cutters. His lenses moved between Rachel and Clay, then out across the abyssal gap towards the temple. The copper grille of his sand mask gleamed in the torchlight. “And confine them in solitary cells.”

“Our holding facilities are overstretched,” one of the Cutters replied.

“Make space for them in the Rookery Spire.”

The other assassin nodded. “What of those thus displaced?”

“Redemption.”

Rachel’s heart felt like a hollow in her chest as she stared down at the vast black building with mounting despair.
Our holding facilities are overstretched
. Suddenly she realized why the city districts had been so empty. She understood now why all of the lights were burning in the temple, and a creeping horror stole over her. How many tens of thousands of people were interred there? She had lived with tempered Spine long enough to know how their broken minds worked. There were only two ways to cleanse a blasphemer of his sins: through either tempering or redemption by knife, rope, and saw. Inside the temple before her, the torture chambers would be running with blood.

3

THE TEMPLE

T
HEY ENTERED THE temple via a near-vertical Spine conduit in what had once been the building’s foundations. Flanked above and below by the Church assassins, Rachel and Clay clambered down a series of rungs bolted to the metal walls. She watched the captain’s agitation grow as the circle of crimson sky gradually diminished above them. The big man seemed to become increasingly gruff and surly, cursing and muttering under his breath whenever his armoured boots or elbows clanged against the inside of the narrow passageway. He made as much noise as a blacksmith at his anvil.

For the first time during their trek, he seemed genuinely afraid.

With the help of a rope, the Spine manhandled Dill down after them. To Rachel’s great relief, she heard her friend moaning faintly at his mistreatment. He had regained consciousness at last.

The ladder terminated at a spherical antechamber from which a score of other tunnels radiated at all angles. An ancient aether light set into the floor gave a green cast to the sapperbane plates and rivets in the curved walls around them. When the Cutters finally lowered the young angel to the floor, Rachel rushed over to his side.

“Dill?”

His head lolled drunkenly but he didn’t open his eyes or reply.

“He’s breathing more easily,” she said to Clay.

“Good,” Clay said. “I don’t think your captors planned on sending for a doctor.” His gaze moved from the Spine Adept down to Dill’s tattered chain-mail vest. “It’s all shit, you know—the armour, the gold swords they gave the temple archons. It was all for show.”

“I know.”

“They shouldn’t have lied to him.”

“Be silent,” said the Adept.

Rachel eyed the man’s mask, then turned back to Clay. “Dill was never cut out to be a warrior,” she said. Her manacles clunked suddenly against the floor. The sapperbane panel had tugged at the iron cuffs with what felt like a strong magnetic attraction, but then immediately released its hold. “That’s strange,” she said.

“It’s the sapperbane,” Clay whispered. “It does all sorts of weird things. I never liked coming down here, not even when the temple was the right way up.” He paused, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “These tunnels bend sound in odd ways. They say you can hear a conversation spoken in any room in the temple if you stand in exactly the right place. Some folks even swear that you can hear conversations from the past.”

Dill gasped and threw back his head.

Rachel grabbed his shoulders.

He opened his eyes. “Rachel? I smell poison.”

“You inhaled a soporific gas,” she said. “But it’s gone now; you’re going to be fine.”

“No,” he said. “They mean to poison us all and bring their paradise to earth. There is no more room for them in Hell. They are coming here.”

“Who is coming? Who are you talking about?”

“The Mesmerists.”

Clay shot an inquiring look at Rachel.

“Dill died,” Rachel explained. “After we reached the bottom of the abyss, he was killed in battle. I used Devon’s angelwine to resurrect him, but by then he’d already spent several days in the Maze. Since then he hasn’t been able to explain what happened to him there. His memories are muddled, fragmented; they come to him in nightmares.”

“Was what he said just then true?”

“I don’t know.”

The Spine Adept removed his sand mask; his lifeless eyes now turned towards the captain of the temple guard. “This conversation is illegal. I advise you to keep silent.”

“Didn’t you hear what the lad said?”

“The Maze is a place for sinners. Salvation lies only with our Lord Ulcis.”

Clay ignored him. “Who are these Mesmerists?” he asked Dill.

“They whisper to the dead,” the young angel replied, “and change them. They are making demons for the war to come. A red veil heralds their coming.”

“What war?”

“The war between Hell and Earth.”

The captain rubbed a big hand across his stubble. “Fucking gods,” he growled. “Ulcis offered slavery, and now Iril wants to wipe us out completely. You can’t trust any of them.”

“Ulcis offers salvation,” the Adept said.

Clay punched him, or tried to.

The temple assassin neatly sidestepped the blow. Behind him, his men loaded their crossbows with bone-breakers, the heavy bolts they reserved for use in holy places. The round stone tips could crush a man’s skull without drawing blood.

“Clay!” Rachel warned.

But the captain’s face had darkened with fury. He lashed out at his opponent a second time. He was quicker than Rachel expected him to be, much quicker than an old man in heavy plate had any right to be. But he wasn’t nearly fast enough.

The Adept grabbed the other man’s fist and turned it effortlessly against the force of Clay’s own attack. Rachel heard bones snap in the captain’s wrist. Clay roared in pain, and then threw himself forward, trying to use his own weight to slam the smaller man against the wall.

But the assassin flowed around his opponent’s charge, almost lazily it seemed. He motioned to his men to lower their weapons, then drove a savage kick into the back of Clay’s knee, one of the few weak spots in his armour. A second bone snapped. The captain crashed to the floor, his broad face creased in agony.

“That’s enough,” Rachel cried.

“Not quite,” the Adept said.

“But he can’t even get up to fight back.”

The assassin shrugged. He broke Clay’s other knee with a second kick, then paused for a moment, studying the metal suit. Clay remained facedown on the sapperbane floor panels, unable to turn over. He sucked in gulps of air through his teeth. “Fuck…you,” he gasped. “And fuck…your…”

“His armour is standard temple issue,” the Adept said to his men. “How would you seek to improve this design against ranged attacks?”

“Find and eliminate weaknesses,” one of the Cutters replied. He removed his sand mask, revealing a youthful face with a high forehead and a weak chin. Bruises and needle marks under his eyes indicated recent tempering. “I would test the joints for strength.”

“Then do so.”

The Cutter raised his crossbow and shot a bolt into the captain’s neck guard. The stone missile ricocheted off the metal with a hideous peal. Clay gnashed his teeth and groaned. The young assassin reloaded.

“Stop it!” Rachel yelled. “You’re just tormenting him.”

“Restrain those two. Bind the angel’s wings.”

The remaining Spine surged forward, dragged Rachel and Dill to their feet, and forced them up against the wall. One of them produced a set of chain-and-burr cuffs, a torture implement like a short leash, and tightened them around the angel’s wings, drawing them closely together behind Dill’s shoulder blades. Meanwhile the young Cutter standing over Clay aimed down a second time. This time the bone-breaker struck the captain in the crook of his elbow. The big man howled and tried to push himself upright, but he could no longer move his broken legs. Four more bolts followed before the young Cutter finally stopped shooting. “I don’t see any weaknesses beyond the obvious gaps in the knee joints,” he observed.

“Give your crossbow and quiver to me.”

The younger man complied.

The Adept rewound the windlass, set the latch, and then selected a fresh bolt from the borrowed quiver. This missile had a yellow glass bulb full of oily liquid attached to its tip. “Your mistake was to test only the efficacy of what you perceived,” he said to the Cutter, “while failing to consider what was absent from the design altogether. These older suits lack fireproofing.”

“No!” Rachel tried to break free from her restrainers. She struggled, every muscle in her body fighting against their grip, but it made no difference. She wasn’t strong enough. The Adept aimed the crossbow down at the helpless man and squeezed the trigger.

The incendiary struck Clay’s back and exploded, engulfing his whole body in crackling, spitting green flame. He screamed in agony as the burning chemicals trickled down through the tiny gaps between the plates of his armour. Rachel could feel the searing heat from the other side of the chamber.

“A productive lesson,” the Adept said, handing the bow back to the young assassin. “Obstacles cannot necessarily be overcome by brute force. You must make yourself familiar with the entire breadth of your arsenal.”

He smiled, just for an instant, but long enough for Rachel to notice. Her eyes widened in surprise. This Adept had taken pleasure in murder. His stoicism was just a carefully maintained facade. Like Rachel herself, he hadn’t been tempered.

They left the antechamber and Clay’s charred corpse, and proceeded through a warren of interconnected metal tunnels. Aether lights set into the floors bathed each junction in soft green luminance, while leaving the passageways between shrouded in darkness. Eerie metallic tones with no determinable cause or origin haunted the spaces around them.

Their route gradually led them down into the temple. The sapperbane conduits gave way to passages constructed from cut black stone and then finally to a lofty chamber with a sunken, bowl-shaped floor. Rachel did not recognize the place until she tilted her head, thus viewing the room the other way up. This had once been a hallway right below the Spine sleeping quarters. Smoke rose from cressets arranged along one side of the depression and hung in a thin blue layer over the heads of the nine assassins and their captives. The room also smelled vaguely of sweat. Shards of glass littered the floor, although there were no windows here. In the center, a rickety scaffold had been constructed out of timbers and hemp: a series of ladders and platforms that rose twenty yards to connect two small doors positioned on either side of the flat polished ceiling that had once been the floor.

“Climb,” the Adept said flatly. His face still revealed no emotion, but Rachel now knew him to be a fraud. If he hadn’t been tempered, why go to the trouble of pretending that he had been? His Spine masters would know the truth. Only the low-ranking Cutters would not be aware of his deception.

“Why aren’t you tempered?” she asked him.

“All Adepts are tempered.”

She snorted. “I’m living proof that they’re not, and so are you. You enjoyed what you did to Clay, didn’t you? Torturing him gave you pleasure. My problem was always the opposite. I didn’t particularly enjoy the messier aspects of my work.”

He stared at her, but his eyes betrayed nothing. “Your Spine status was revoked,” he said. “Indeed, you were never truly an Adept. You always lacked the ability to focus.”

This was the one Spine technique Rachel had been unable to master during her former training. The brutal process of tempering through torture and the administration of neural toxins vandalized an Adept’s mind, destroying his or her ego, yet it also granted the tempered assassin mastery of his or her own physiology. Focusing enabled Spine to temporarily heighten their senses, and to push their bodies far beyond the limits of normal endurance. Such combatants were far quicker and stronger than normal humans.

Rachel had struggled for years to learn the technique, but still her untempered mind had resisted. Every attempt at focusing had ended in failure.

Except once.

In the deep abyss under the city, the Spine technique had saved Dill’s life. In that one desperate moment when she had most needed to become more than human, she had somehow succeeded.

“Climb,” the Adept repeated.

He led Dill and Rachel up the scaffold, and through one of the upturned doorways. The Cutters followed in a pack, their fingers never far from their weapons’ triggers. One corridor led to another and yet another. In the loftier passageways catwalks had been erected above the floor to provide access to chambers on either side. Rachel glanced through doorways into tiny sleeping cells and vast training rooms full of sparring combatants. The sound of clashing blades and staffs echoed through the whole torchlit maze.

At last they reached the Rookery Spire. There the Spine herded their two prisoners down a steep, spiralling slope within the upturned tower: following the underside of the main stairwell. It was a disorienting experience in cramped semidarkness, a slip-sliding descent beneath steps cut into the roof. Rachel was forced to remove her wood-soled sandals and walk barefooted. She smelled sweat from her captors’ leathers, an honest human odor at odds with their ghoulish faces and dead-eyed gazes.

Halfway down, they bundled Dill into one dark chamber, and then forced Rachel to descend another level before piling her into a second room and locking the door behind her. She fell all of eight feet in almost complete darkness, rolled over, and came to rest amid a pile of hard-edged debris.

When her eyes finally grew accustomed to the gloom, she was able to survey her surroundings. The cell had previously been a rough-walled chamber with a highly arched stone ceiling—the bedroom of a high-ranking priest, she supposed—before it had turned upside down.

The floor, once the ceiling, was a conical basin full of shattered furniture and dusty tapestries, dry rushes and broken porcelain, and the remains of fine furnishings that had come crashing down on top of an ancient iron chandelier. Her captors hadn’t bothered to remove any debris, and little wonder with the temple so crammed with prisoners. “Our holding facilities are stretched,” Rachel recalled.

She got up off the floor and walked over to the window. A crimson mist wreathed the abyss beyond the glass and, looking up, Rachel could just discern the dark, cluttered bulk of Deepgate looming overhead, all wrapped in chains and illuminated in places by flickering firelight. Was this the red veil Dill had spoken of, or simply clouds of poison from the burning city? She was about to turn away, when a movement outside grabbed her attention.

Vaporous figures were rising through the mist, the ghosts of countless men and women. With arms outstretched they drifted upwards, their gazes fixed longingly on the city above. The nearest of them passed by only yards from the window and she noticed that for the most part the men were dressed in the old-style suits and pudding-bowl hats once fashionable among Deepgate’s wealthier pioneers, while the women wore layered frocks and carried parasols as protection against a sun that no longer shone upon them. They were almost translucent, as though formed of the red mist itself, but in their faces Rachel glimpsed terrible white eyes and lunatic grins.