Iron Angel

  Tentatively, Dill tried to move his feet. At first they would not budge, but then, after some effort, two of the brittle shoots snapped. Dill winced as blood leaked from the sheared roots, spilling out of both his heel and the floor. He paused, gasping for breath, before shifting his foot again. Three more of the weird shoots cracked, spattering the floor further with spots of blood. Now he had freed his left foot entirely. He stared in horror and fascination at the woody growths that sprouted like talons from his toes and heel.

  He reached out and touched the place where the broken roots protruded from the floorboards. As his fingers brushed the stems, a shiver of pain coursed through him. The wood remained as tactile as his own tender flesh. He could feel the dull throb of blood leaching out from the floor, the touch of his own fingers against the wounded roots. The sensation filled him with revulsion.

  With a sharp jerk of his leg, he freed his other foot.

  The pain came from everywhere: from Dill’s bones and teeth and from the drapes hanging from the four-poster bed, stretched like taut veils of hot skin. He felt the tightness of the oval mirrors in their frames and wanted to shut them like eyes. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move any part of this environment, yet he could feel every inch of it. The room was alive around him. It was him. He sensed an ache take root behind the lowest drawer of the poppywood sideboard, and then spread through each dovetailed joint in turn. The chamber’s tall shutters cramped like the angel’s own muscles. He felt the flowers tremble in their vase and then he sensed the vase itself, the brittle curve of porcelain, more delicate than any of his other bones.

  The floorboards continued to bleed under him where he had torn his feet free. Warm iron-scented blood soaked into the rug. He glanced up to see the wood panels in the walls expand outwards and then contract, as though they were breathing. The spars between them itched and grated against each other, hurting him.

  And then he became aware of other chambers beyond this apartment he had grown around himself. Other rooms all around him, pressing against Dill’s own.

  The Maze, he realized, was not just a place where dead souls went, for the damned created Hell around themselves. Every last brick and nail was sensate, a part of someone’s living soul.

  The Maze of Blood had been aptly named.

  A sudden pounding headache struck Dill, as though a hammer was striking his skull repeatedly. He gasped and squeezed his temples before he realized the pain was coming from somewhere else. He could hear the sound of knocking. Someone was thumping on the door to his apartment.

  He had a guest.

  17

  TRANSFORMATION

  KING MENOA HAD turned Harper into a machine, a combination of interconnected tools for hunting, trapping, and torturing errant souls. He had provided her with a cowl so that she might hide the potential of her vast and hideous crystal skeleton from the particular soul she was supposed to pursue—yet there was no way to hide the knowledge of what she’d become from herself.

  All resemblance to a human had been stripped away. Now she towered over her own king, at least five or six times Menoa’s height. Her increased stature would allow her to gaze far across the landscape of Hell, and yet she could not lift her eyes from the sight of her own body. Conjoined transparent sections now curled down all the way from her waist, like the tail of a serpent sculpted from glass. Crystal gears moved inside her pelvis and midriff, sending vibrations up through her ribs and chest. To replace her arms Menoa had given her three long, thin glass limbs, each of which culminated in a different object: a spear, a sceptre, and a mirrored shield. Intricate Mesmerist machinery turned inside the sceptre, emitting occasional pulses of white light.

  “I have improved you,” the king explained. “The sceptre acts as both an Oracle and a Locator, while the remaining limbs are designed for combat. Your spear can induce pain on many levels, and will inflict visions upon any creature you confront. Of course the shield offers physical protection, and yet much more…it is a rather special device.”

  Harper lifted the shield and gazed down at her own reflection in the mirrored glass. “My face…” she cried in a voice which sounded like crystal bells chiming.

  “Beautiful, is it not? You wished to keep your original form, and I have obliged. Now you exist as a combination of old and new.”

  Harper’s new skull was a bulb of clear glass, moulded to resemble her face. The transparent eyes, cheeks, nose, and mouth were fixed in an immovable expression of rage—a frightening grimace, yet not nearly as terrifying as the object trapped within the glass.

  It was a manikin, the tiny shivering figure of a woman in a Mesmerist uniform. She was curled up very tight with her arms wrapped around her legs and her head buried between her knees. Harper lifted her shield for a closer view. She could not see the little woman’s face, but she recognized her nevertheless.

  “She represents the core of your soul,” Menoa said. “And yet I have given her the human weaknesses you still yearn for in Hell. Hunger and thirst will slowly kill her while she remains trapped.” He turned suddenly and walked away from Harper. “Go find the angel and bring him to the Processor,” he called back. “For your own sake I suggest you do it quickly.”

  Dill opened the door. Already standing there with his hands on his hips, and clad in his old metal armour, was the battle-archon from Dill’s dream. The big angel frowned merrily down at him, his huge grey wings folded behind his back. A series of connected stone chambers stretched far into the gloom behind him. Each room appeared to be full of weapons, shields, and training blocks, like an enfilading sequence of soldiers’ barracks.

  “Stay right where you are,” the archon demanded. “We’ll talk here at the door if you don’t mind. You just stay on your side, and I’ll stay on mine. For either of us to cross this threshold would be improper at least, and probably obscene. The castle behind me is the incarnation of my soul, just as the rooms on your side of the door are the incarnation of yours.”

  “Who are you?” Dill asked.

  “I’m Hasp,” said the angel, grinning.

  “Hasp?” Dill gave him a blank look.

  The archon’s frown deepened. “You don’t know who I am?”

  Dill shook his head.

  “Hasp, youngest of Ayen’s seven sons, Lord of the First Citadel. Is your mind addled?”

  The young angel said nothing.

  The god looked incredulous. “Light and Life, lad! What have Ulcis’s priests been teaching their temple archons? I’m his bloody brother—your own god’s brother.”

  “I didn’t know he had one.”

  Hasp shook his head. “I should have expected this. Your ancestors were not any wiser than you. It’s the same every time we find another Deepgate angel down here.” He sighed. “My brother liked to keep his little secrets, see? Stifling knowledge to keep the humans in their yokes. Anyway, it hardly matters. Ulcis was my brother, and Callis was one of his sons. So you must be my great-great-nephew or something like that. Welcome back to Hell.”

  “My body was stolen,” Dill said. “By a shade, an archon. He said he was from the First Citadel.”

  Hasp looked uncomfortable. “Sorry about that, but we saw a chance to get a message out when the portal opened. A lot of shades were pouring out of Hell, and we felt desperate enough to attempt to send out one of our own. You’ll get your body back sometime. As soon as Trench delivers his message, your body will be free of him again.”

  “But I’ll be down here!”

  “It didn’t stop you before,” Hasp said. “The last time you arrived in Hell, you vanished again before any one of us could reach you.” The god chuckled. “That made us sit up, I can tell you. We were hoping you could explain that little trick to us.”

  Dill recalled his last time in the Maze. He had been trapped in a cramped cell, without room to extend his wings. He remembered the agony whenever he tried to move, and terrible dreams that had haunted his sleep. Each time he’d woken, it was to discover that the cell had chan
ged in some subtle way. Finally he’d opened his eyes to see Rachel…who had brought him back to life with Devon’s angelwine.

  Still, the young angel didn’t feel comfortable divulging too much to this strange god. He glanced behind the armoured archon at the vast network of chambers, the tapestries and racks of ancient weapons. This was a part of Hell new to him. “It’s so different from before,” he said.

  Hasp nodded. “The Maze changes all the time. Your immediate environment is only a manifestation of your eternal consciousness—your soul, if you like. Handy if you learn how to manipulate it, so long as you keep your chin up.” He laughed. “Just don’t get any suicidal thoughts, or the walls of your prison are likely to grow knives.”

  Now the god was peering into Dill’s own chamber. “Those portraits on your walls…” he said quietly. “They…they actually seem to be looking at me.”

  Dill turned. “They do that.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. This is your soul.”

  Dill shrugged. “I’ve never seen those faces before.”

  Hasp stared for a minute longer, his expression growing darker. “Ask them.”

  The young angel felt suddenly reluctant to comply. Something about the portraits frightened him. “They’re just paintings,” he muttered.

  But Hasp clearly wasn’t convinced. He moved closer, until his armoured bulk filled the doorway. Dill sensed the god’s presence as a pressure building against his soul.

  “Speak if you have the wits to do so,” Hasp demanded of the paintings. “Who are you?”

  Thirteen voices whispered together. “A Cutter by…Lisa, a maid…I don’t…hop-keeper…My name…potboy…where is this…? Why? Daniel Crook…Who are you…? The pain…” And on it went: a torrent of hissed statements and queries.

  “Enough!”

  The paintings fell silent.

  Hasp stepped back from the doorway. “Those portraits are other souls bound to your own,” he said to Dill. “You’re sharing this part of Hell with thirteen other people.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  The angelwine! Devon’s elixir had contained thirteen souls, power enough to resurrect Dill. But now that the angel had died again, these same thirteen had accompanied him back to the Maze. Dill looked up in horror at the painted faces. Each one of them gazed down at him with a different expression ranging from curiosity to evident anger.

  Hasp frowned. “I need to get you out of here,” he said. “If the Mesmerists get one whiff of this—and believe me, they will—they’ll roll through here like a mountain of bones to capture you.”

  “Out of here? Where?”

  The god’s face remained grim. “We need to reach the First Citadel. If we’re to have any chance of success, I’m going to have to start training you.”

  Harper moved through the Blaise Canal Area, a maze of channels divided by walls of mirror-black rock. The faces of reconstructed souls glared from the smooth surfaces to the left and right as they watched the engineer pass. The fluids here were too shallow for Mesmerist barges, yet Harper’s newly forged glass tail propelled her along rapidly. This was, of course, why Menoa had gifted her with it. Her sceptre flickered and hummed, indicating the presence of Icarates nearby. Soon enough she heard them.

  The Icarate pack had gathered in a basin between the Soul Middens: those low hills where a thousand transformed souls piled one upon the other like heaped houses. Some of the dwellings, Harper noted, had fused with one another to form teetering castles and unlikely towers. These delicate structures would not survive for long, however, as Icarates continued to smash through the sensate brick and mortar to get to the souls within.

  Overhead, the heavens smouldered like a dying hearth. In places flashes of darkness pulsed behind the rising crimson mists where bodies or pieces of detritus passed through the Deepgate Portal and fell from the skies. Crackling sounds accompanied this hail of debris. Blooms of white light flashed less frequently, but fell like shooting stars where the souls of the living entered the Maze.

  So many bones.

  Icarates moved through the canals and between the Soul Middens, collecting human remains and piling them into the hoppers of flensing machines. These vast slow-moving constructs resembled huge wagons with metal wheels and bone axles. When full they would be dragged back to Menoa’s Processor so that their contents could be used in the construction of arconites.

  Her glass body clicking, Harper slithered over to the group of Icarates. There were six of them, powerfully built but hobbled like old men beneath the weight of their ceramic armour. Knee-deep in the red mire, they wielded huge hammers in an effort to break through one of the walls at the base of a Midden. Holes had already been smashed into nearby dwellings, the occupants dragged out and locked inside cages in the center of the basin. Dogcatchers moved lithely across the mounds above them, sniffing at windows and doors. One of the Mesmerists’ most enduring creations, the dogcatchers had the look of skinless men with long white teeth, constantly tasting the air as they toiled for their Icarate masters.

  One of the Icarates lowered his hammer and turned his pale helmet towards the approaching engineer.

  “Menoa sent me,” Harper said.

  He replied with a buzzing sound. Blue sparks cascaded from the protrusions on his back and shoulders. His crooked body even dipped in what might have been an attempt at a bow.

  “We should move to high ground,” Harper went on. “The king has equipped me with the tools to locate metaphysical disturbances. Archons from the First Citadel are likely to be hiding nearby. The pack must be ready to move quickly.”

  Again the Icarate bowed. This time his thoughts murmured in Harper’s glass skull. The First Citadel has no power here. We do not sense their archons’ presence.

  “They may have buried themselves deep in the Soul Middens.” Harper indicated them with a gesture of her glass spear. Death lights swarmed within the weapon’s shaft. “You must dig deeper.”

  A sudden scream grabbed Harper’s attention. The remaining five Icarates had finally broken through the outer wall of the nearest Midden and were now pushing through the cavity they had made. Those in the lead carried tridents crackling with black wisps of energy and stepped forward as a man cried out from within.

  The Icarates dragged their captive out of the gap and threw him to his knees in the basin. He was young, dressed in rough hemp labourer’s clothes—the most memorable of his earthly raiment, Harper knew, for his whole presence here was naught but a manifestation of his own soul’s memories. Now devoid of the shelter he had grown around himself, his body rapidly began to fade, turning ghostlike.

  A recollection chimed inside Harper’s glass thorax, and for a moment it was not the shade of a Deepgate labourer kneeling on ground before her, but her own husband Tom.

  One of the Icarates drove his trident into the man’s back, and his ghostly form became solid again. All likeness to Harper’s husband disappeared. A trick of the light? Or had the engineer’s own thoughts intruded upon this man’s soul? Out here he was as vulnerable to external influences as he was to complete dissolution. The Mesmerist priests must force power into the soul to prevent his physical form from becoming a shade. They herded the man off to the waiting cages.

  This is what awaits the angel, Harper thought. At least until Menoa bestows his new body.

  “Things were fine before the War Against Heaven,” Hasp called over to Dill. The god was searching through one of the many trunks set along the edges of his chamber. “Balance was sustained. Iril got the wicked souls, Ayen got the good ones. But since the goddess of light and life shut the doors to Heaven, it’s been overcrowded down here. Too many souls for even the Mesmerists to gather.”

  Dill watched him from the doorway. “But Ulcis took Deepgate’s dead for himself.”

  “We all did,” Hasp admitted. “Each of Ayen’s sons harvested souls. We needed to keep as many as poss
ible out of Hell and away from the Mesmerists. Aha!” He pulled something out of the chest, an orb of brass clockwork with glowing crystals inside. “And we needed the power for ourselves,” he went on, examining the strange globe. “The War Against Heaven left us weak.”

  How many people had been brought to Deepgate’s temple and cast into the abyss, shrouded with promises of redemption and Heaven? In reality they’d been nothing but fodder for Ulcis. The young angel felt his eyes darken. “How did you end up here?”

  Hasp was silent for a long moment. Finally he rose, still holding the globe in his hand, and approached the doorway. “My brother Rys decided that one of us should go fight the Mesmerists in Hell.” He sighed. “And I was chosen for that honour. Put your anger aside, Dill. If you want to survive down here, you need the help of the First Citadel. And you need me to prepare you for the journey out there.” He looked back over Dill’s shoulder into the apartment the young angel had grown from his own body. His gaze lingered on the thirteen portraits on the wall, then moved quickly away. “Ideally, you’d have time to familiarize yourself with your new environment.” He waved his hand at the rooms behind Dill’s doorway. “It is important for you to know every inch of your soul.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can detach you from it.” He rolled his shoulders, causing the armoured plates there to rasp together; then he lifted his globe. Crystals gleamed behind the brass filigree. “We don’t have time to acclimatize you, and less time to train you, so we’ll cheat.”

  Dill stared at the orb in Hasp’s hand. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a tool for creating voids, neutral spaces between the crush of souls in Hell. It will allow us to meet without damage to either of our souls, but it exerts pressure on all those around us. Open your window shutters. We need to know who’s nearby.”