Iron Angel (9 page)

6

THE ROTSWARD

D
RAWN FROM THEIR houses by the sound of disaster, a crowd of fisher folk had gathered in the lane beside the wreckage of the Widow’s Hook. A few eager men were already picking through the damp piles of timbers, mud bricks, and shingles, perhaps searching for valuables or survivors. Another small group stood muttering around the pile of Spine corpses which Anchor had dragged clear of the broth shop. But most of them, like Jack Caulker himself, waited in a breathless circle around John Anchor and stared up into the fog above.

The tethered man was pulling more and more of his huge rope out of the sky. Down and down it came, yards and then miles of it, until the lane was buried under coils of hemp and Caulker began to wonder if the stranger had been tethered to the goddess Ayen herself.

Anchor worked patiently, humming a tune, as if he’d done this a thousand times before. And still there seemed no end to that monstrous line. The giant drew down length after length of rope, flinging great coils of it onto the ground around him. Some of the hemp now appeared to be sodden and rotten, rimed with salt, and brought with it the heavy odor of brine. The crowd edged backwards, uneasy. Caulker waited.

And waited……until the sky above Sandport began to grow dark. Something vast was descending over the town.

Now even those folks who had been eagerly sifting through the rubble stopped and peered up into the growing gloom. The stench of salt became acrid, like the odor from shrunken rock pools and rotting kelp. Caulker heard a warning bell clang wildly somewhere down near the docks, followed by another, and then yet another. Apparently Sandport’s lookouts had spied something in the skies above their heads.

The cutthroat still could not spot any details in the unnatural darkness—a pall which now stretched far beyond both ends of the fog-veiled lane, like a thundercloud—but he sensed the air around him stir. Some of the fisher folk let out cries of alarm; and suddenly those standing on the collapsed broth shop began to clamber hurriedly down from among the debris.

Caulker thought he heard noises far above, a sound which at first reminded him of squawking gulls. But then, as the giant continued to drag down his mighty rope, the cacophony grew louder and more distinct. Caulker realized he was hearing the wails and sobs of people: lots of them, some close by, other more distant; a chorus of suffering and despair that drifted down from the grey air and filled the streets of Sandport.

A broad grin spread across John Anchor’s face. He began to pull with renewed vigor at his tether. His humming grew louder, as if he sought to drown out the cries of woe overhead. The sky darkened further, the stench of brine brought tears to the eyes. Caulker thought he caught a glimpse of something in the grey gloom overhead—something swaying. But before he could identify the object, it vanished again, swallowed by shifting mists. The fisher folk were yelling in dismay now, backing away from the giant and his rope, their gazes still pinned on the lowering heavens.

Then Caulker finally saw what the stranger was dragging down from the skies, and his blood froze in his veins.

Out of the fog descended a great rope-tangled skeleton of wood. Like the rigging of an upended fleet of ships, the clutter of masts and yards formed a rude thicket of indeterminable width, breadth, and height. Rotting, salt-furred timbers sweated moisture. Seaweed hung from dripping lines. As Anchor continued to drag the thing down, more and more of the poles and spars appeared amid the fog, until they totally filled the skies over Sandport. Yet Caulker realized that this scaffold formed only the lowest fraction of a far bigger vessel. The shadow of something solid and phenomenally huge still loomed in the mists above.

It had to be an airship.

Finally one of the longest masts punctured the rooftop of a nearby building, and the whole construction jerked to a halt.

Caulker’s eyes widened. Among the rigging hung men and women and angels: a disparate army of warriors, suspended by ropes looped around their necks. Some were struggling and clawing at their nooses, their blue-black faces contorted in hideous anguish; others simply hung limp and moaned or wept. All wore corroded armour of unusual design; it was as though each suit had been forged in some different foreign land. Overhead, a knight in red rusted half-plate swung back and forth from a stout travis, gibbering and tugging at his noose, while above and to the left of him, a thin dark-skinned angel in a tattered coat of mail gazed up into the heavens from the end of its own rope. This pitiful creature had only one wing. Countless others depended from the yards around them, ranks of warriors and archons sheathed in rotting metal: in spoiled cuirasses, bucklers, and mouldering brigandines, queer winged armets or dull half-helms. Steel ground against steel, and ropes creaked on timbers beneath the mournful sobbing.

John Anchor flexed his shoulders and let out a long sigh. He grumbled, “Cospinol’s ship is very heavy.” And then he laughed suddenly. “One day I find a nice girl to give me a massage.”

Caulker dragged his gaze from the upended rigging and stared at the big man. “Who are they?”

The giant shrugged. “Soldiers, angels, demons.” He stomped a foot down on the rope, pinning it to the ground. “Noisy crowd, eh? Always complaining and moaning. Unhappy because they are dead but cannot go to Hell.” He grinned and tipped his head at the Spine corpses he had pulled from the rubble. “Now these white folks will come aboard. More nastiness for all. More complaining.”

“They’re dead?” Caulker asked with a hesitant nod to the legions above, still unable to comprehend this hellish vision. “But they’re moaning…
screaming
.”

“Dead,” the other man said, “but not…uh, not at peace. Souls still in this world, in Cospinol and inside me.” He slammed his huge belly. “Very noisy.”

A terrible thought struck the cutthroat. “You killed them?” he asked. “All of them?”

Anchor looked uncomfortable. “It is heavy,” he muttered, as if that somehow answered the cutthroat’s question. Then he withdrew the reed from his pocket and blew another soundless note from it.

John Anchor’s impossible skyship—if that was indeed what it was, for there had to be ten thousand interconnected beams in that scaffold overhead—had held the crowd enthralled, pinned by their own fears, but now the tiny red sprites that poured out of the fog above proved too much for them. The fisher folk fled screaming. Caulker had a mind to run after them, but he fought this desire. He had not shied from these creatures before, and would not do so now. Let the river-sifters of Sandport cower behind their mud walls, but Jack Caulker had been a great salt sailor once, not a man to flee from skyships or crustaceans, and his instincts told him now that Anchor posed no threat. The Adamantine Man hunted an angel. And he still carried a fortune in pearls.

Clicking and chittering, the crabs came out of the fog and scuttled down the greasy rigging. Millions of them converged on the giant’s rope and then poured down it. When they reached the ground, they swept over the mounds of coiled hemp like a wave of blood towards the dead assassins.

“Six more souls for Cospinol,” Anchor grumbled. “Six more pearls for his hoard.”

The cutthroat stood stock-still, as the chitinous tide surged over his boots. “Cospinol?” he ventured.

“My master.” Anchor tipped his head back. “God of brine and fog, pearlmaker and pirate in Heaven. Ayen’s shipwright and captain of the
Rotsward
. So many names, eh?” Then he grinned and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Crusty old bastard thinks them up himself and pays me to preach the word, but don’t say this to anyone.”

The crabs now covered the dead assassins in a seething, bubbling mound. Red claws and legs murmured like hookfleas in a carcass. Caulker swallowed and turned away. “Then this…thing is his
ship
?”

“The
Rotsward
?” Anchor said. “Yes, it is his skyship. Used to be called the
Cleaver,
and before that the
Fist,
and once even the
Sally Broom,
after a woman.” The giant shook his head. “Good pretty name, the
Sally
. I liked that name, but Cospinol is fickle. Never happy, always complaining. You think my real name is John Anchor? Ha! The name amuses Cospinol. This god lacks the wit to be subtle.”

Now a corpse-sized lump detached itself from the mass of crabs and slid over the uneven coils of hemp towards Anchor. When it neared the giant’s feet, it rose, as if the dead body amid those crustaceans had been resurrected and was standing up of its own accord. Horrified, Caulker watched as the crab-enshrouded figure climbed up the harness on the giant’s back and began to pull itself up the rope.

Anchor beamed at the cutthroat. “You like crab?”

“I used to,” Caulker replied flatly.

“I like crab.” The big man clapped his hands together. “Pandemerian crab salad with cuttlefish and sea jellies. Good for the heart, you know? Best food for sailors. You are a seaman, yes?”

“I was.”

By now the first red figure had disappeared into the mist overhead and a second clump of crabs had parted from the teeming pile, and was inching closer to the giant.

“Ha!” Anchor exclaimed. “I recognized you for a sailor. You have a stout heart. You know this land well?”

Caulker felt increasingly ill, but he managed a nod.

“Then you will help me find my quarry. My master’s witchsphere lies to him, so he does not trust it to guide him now. We pay well for an honest guide. Many pearls…or salt. Salt we have in abundance.”

“Witchsphere?”

“Yes. You have them here? Evil things, always lying. This one has nine Mesmerist hags inside, so it never agrees with itself.” With a hideous rustling sound, the second red corpse stood and began to climb up the rope to the gallows waiting for it overhead. “You will be my guide?” Anchor persisted.

A witchsphere?
Caulker had no idea what Anchor was talking about. Yet evidently the big man needed help. No doubt he had also noticed the lack of any other would-be assistants in the lane outside the broth shop he’d just destroyed. Despite himself, Caulker moistened his lips and said, “First let me see these pearls.”

Anchor retrieved the pouch from his pocket, and then rummaged inside it. He pulled out a tiny bead, sniffed it, then shook his head and dropped the thing back into the bag. Then he lifted out another, sniffed again, and nodded. “This is a good one,” he said, extending his arm to the cutthroat. “In Oxos this would buy the death of a snake woman. In Pandemeria it might buy a bloodship. Take it, but be careful, is fragile.”

Caulker accepted the jewel. It was not actually a pearl as he had hoped, but rather a similar-sized bead made from glass. He held it up between two fingers and studied it. Intricate lines and whorls had been etched into the surface, and there seemed to be something glimmering inside: a weak, uneasy light.

“Is the soul of a powerful angel,” Anchor said. “The archon once named Malleus Trench, brother of Silister, who is Hasp’s champion in Hell. Very dangerous warrior—but the soul is good for you, I think. You can eat it, yes? Make you big and strong like me.”

The cutthroat had seen enough of the world to recognize a scam when he saw one. This bauble was nothing more than glass, the light inside a trick of the engraving. He frowned. “Really, my friend,” he said with a sigh, “you’ll have to do better than this.” With a snap of his fingers, he flicked the worthless trinket away.

The glass bead flew into the rubble of the Widow’s Hook, and shattered.

A sudden roar compressed the air like a detonation. Caulker was thrown to the ground, his thoughts tumbling around him. He glimpsed shingles flying from the surrounding roofs, dust sloughing skywards, shadows and bloodred crabs rippling at the edges of his vision. An explosion? Had Cospinol’s skyship launched an attack? Overhead, the hanging warriors shook and gibbered and shrieked in their gins. Had John Anchor caused that unholy ruckus himself in some way?

But no, amidst the dust clouds, Caulker now saw a winged apparition, the spectre of an enormous battle-archon. Daylight bled through its heavy iron plate armour and winged helmet. It howled, lifted a black blade as tall as a man, and brought it down upon the tethered giant.

Anchor stepped aside, avoiding the strike. His fists blurred as he launched a flurry of punches at the spectre’s head and neck, but his opponent merely laughed. Anchor’s hands had passed clean through the archon as though through smoke.

The archon’s great sword burst apart like a cloud of black flies, but then re-formed and clove through the dust once more. Anchor was hard-pressed to avoid it. Yet avoid it he did, as purposefully as if it was a real blade. Could a ghost sword cause the giant harm?

Caulker watched in horror and fascination as Anchor lashed out again. For a heartbeat the big man’s hand seemed to close upon the apparition’s wrist and
grip
it, but then his hold on the creature dissolved and the archon was free once more. It raised its massive sword again…

…and screamed as daylight pierced its armour like flames through parchment. The battle-archon faded. A final terrible shriek resounded among the mud-brick houses, and then nothing remained but dust.

The big man stood motionless for a long moment. Then he examined his fist and sucked at a bleeding knuckle. “The dead are tricky opponents,” he said to Caulker. “It is like fighting a memory, or a nightmare. Not easy. We are lucky it is not nighttime. Such shades can only survive for a brief time in daylight.”

He was smiling now. Something in that smile warned Caulker, for the twist of those black lips evinced none of Anchor’s previous mirth.

“My friend,” the giant said ruefully, “you have now sent the poor angel to join his ancestors in Hell.” He swept his gaze across the pile of mud and timbers. “A door to the Maze will soon open there. Hell is coming now, yes? So we must go.” He sighed and squeezed the nape of his neck, then shrugged. “Iril is Iril, we do not interfere. But now you have a problem, I think. You owe me an expensive soul. You are—what is the word—undoubted to me.”