Iron Angel

Anchor himself had become subdued. For a while he kept one ear to the skies above as though eavesdropping upon a secret conversation, but then announced, “We go soon, I think. Bad news.”

  “I’ll be glad to get out of this wood,” Caulker muttered. He had already dismounted and was pacing back and forth between the boles of two poisoned trees. “Although the path out of here is likely to be just as treacherous. The skyship must have brought down half a hundred branches from the canopy.”

  Yet despite his misgivings, Caulker was beginning to feel more comfortable. Anchor had dispatched the scarred angel with consummate ease. Any Spine they encountered on the road to Deepgate would not pose a threat to him. It seemed to Caulker that they had survived the worst of it.

  The tethered man took a soulpearl from his pouch and swallowed it. Then he rolled his huge shoulders and gave a great sigh. “War always benefits Hell,” he said. “Death and bloodshed make it stronger. Menoa knows this. It is why he wants war. The gods know this, too, but they cannot be slaves to Menoa.” He shook his head. “I do not think there will ever be peace between them.”

  “You think Hell is bound to win?” Caulker asked.

  “It is likely,” Anchor admitted.

  Caulker had suspected as much. All souls flowed to the Maze eventually. And with Iril shattered and powerless, no one could stop Menoa from claiming those souls. The King’s Mesmerists would inevitably rise to consume this earth, and all who stood against them would die.

  It made no sense to Caulker to be on the losing side.

  John Anchor remained distracted. Absently, he consumed another soulpearl. This time, when he swallowed the glass bead, he grimaced and looked like he was about to spit. An incautious choice of soul, perhaps?

  The cutthroat eyed the bag of soulpearls. A single strike with the flat of a sword—or even a stick—would shatter most of them, releasing the furious spirits inside. Despite Anchor’s great strength and speed, the wrath of one spectral archon had drawn the big man’s blood. What damage could a horde of such ghosts accomplish? And what if they were released during the heat of battle? King Menoa would surely reward such cunning.

  “How do you plan to deal with the Mesmerists?” Caulker asked. “Deepgate must be crawling with them by now.”

  “No doubt,” Anchor replied. “But we do not meet Menoa’s forces there.”

  “No? But I thought—”

  “We go east.”

  “East?” Caulker gaped at him. “But Deepgate lies to the west.”

  “Cospinol changed plan,” Anchor said. “We leave Deepgate to the Mesmerists and go back across the sea to Pandemeria. All are welcome. Even you, Jack Caulker. There is no more debt between us.”

  The ember of Caulker’s own plan faded. If he was to gain favor with the Mesmerists, he needed something with which to bargain. The cutthroat needed to show King Menoa where his loyalties lay. “You mean to abandon Deepgate to the enemy?” he asked.

  “Yes. We go to sea.”

  A sea journey?

  With the Heshette as companions? Muttering curses to himself, Jack Caulker slouched further into his fog-damp jacket. What other choice remained? He could hardly remain here. His vision of plummeting from the Rockwall battlements returned to him, and now it seemed apt—for he felt like a man who had stepped off a precipice, leaving his destiny in the hands of the gods.

  Anchor was consulting Ramnir now. Caulker could not hear their hushed conversation, but the big man’s hand gestures were urgent. Finally the pair clasped arms.

  And so Caulker found himself once more sharing the saddle with a Heshette horseman as the group picked their way east now through Cinderbark Wood. They reached the edge of the petrified woodland without incident and stopped to camp a short distance out from the colourful boles while they waited for the rest of the original party to bring the livestock down the eastern edge of the wood to join them. The tribesmen built a dismal fire from their supplies of dried dung, boiling strips of tough meat in a small iron pot, which they insisted on sharing with both Anchor and Caulker.

  Caulker chewed the meat without tasting it. He was exhausted. Sleep tugged at him, but his fears of reliving that nightmare fall from Rockwall’s battlements forced him to resist.

  The tethered giant accepted the meal graciously enough, but he insisted on allowing Cospinol to improve their fare. Again the same basket was lowered from the skyship, now loaded with flagons of water, wine, and salted fish. Anchor and Ramnir continued to converse in hushed tones while they ate. Ramnir seemed disturbed, often shaking his head or gazing thoughtfully into the fire.

  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 beg
gar 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

  ONLY 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, tw
o 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?”