“What’s wrong with her?”
The god grunted. “Shock,” he said. “Watching the shell of your soul being consumed by demons can have that effect. It’s a wonder she hasn’t already become a shade. Look behind you!”
There was almost nothing left of Mina’s room; it had been swallowed up, the fragments carried back inside the Worm’s endless gullet. The rim of the tunnel had finally reached Dill’s window. But then it came to a sudden halt, and those demons closest to the window held up their fists so that the eyes they clutched could peer into the angel’s room.
Dill dragged Mina to her feet.
“What do I do now?” he cried.
The god stepped aside. “Get in here.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said. Get in here! The Mesmerists have seen us now.”
Dill took a final desperate look at his surroundings. The walls and furnishings were losing their colour, turning as white as his own eyes. The room was afraid. Only the portraits on the walls kept their colour—those thirteen souls who had shared his blood on earth and now shared his space in Hell. Why should he leave them to be consumed? Frantically he yanked down the canvases from the walls. With frames stuffed clumsily under each arm, he urged Mina towards the doorway to Hasp’s castle.
“Not the girl,” Hasp said.
“She can’t stay here!”
The god spoke through his teeth. “You had no business bringing her inside your soul, and you are not going to bring her into mine. Leave her!”
Dill didn’t move. Something strange was happening within the tunnel now. The demons parted, jostling and snapping at each other as they cleared a path through their ranks. The tunnel itself writhed and flexed, its muscles contracting. And soon a wide avenue had appeared among the hordes; it stretched upwards to follow the tunnel’s inside curve. In the far distance Dill saw some sort of procession marching down this newly forged road: a group of pale, armoured figures and great brown beasts like oxen.
“Mesmerists?” Dill whispered urgently.
“Icarates,” Hasp growled. “The Mesmerists manufactured them to enforce their laws. But they have been forced to bend the structure of Hell to facilitate their progress down here. See how their armour sparks? Their power is temporarily depleted.” His mouth set in a grim line, he beckoned Dill towards his own warren of chambers. “Come with me now if you want to survive this. Quickly! Before I change my mind.”
“I’m not leaving Mina.”
Hasp gnashed his teeth in anger. And then he reached in, grabbed Dill and Mina, and pulled them both through the doorway into his castle.
The sudden sense of disassociation Dill felt when he set foot inside the god’s soul nearly drove him to his knees. He dropped the paintings and heard them strike the floor. He saw Hasp’s face looming over him, grey and sweating, his eyes a hard blue under his creased brow. And yet he felt power all around him, ancient and immensely powerful. It was staggering. Memories of ten thousand battles assailed him. His skin crawled with countless pains. He heard the clash of steel and the screams of armies, smelled blood and death. He sensed the pounding heart of a god in his own chest, and struggled desperately to cling to his own identity. Mina slumped against the wall, slack-faced and staring at nothing.
“My home,” Hasp said through his teeth.
“Your soul,” Dill replied.
Hasp grunted. “Try not to break it.”
The procession in the tunnel was nearer now. Huge beasts like the gods of oxen snorted and steamed in the demon-crowded corridor, each harnessed to a wheeled cage. These prisons were full of people who gibbered and shrieked and rattled their bars. Eyeless things with wet red skin and clickety teeth kept pace on either side, while banners of black and gold snapped in the gale above their heads. The white-armoured warriors hobbled like cripples, yet they wielded heavy hammers and tridents. They were yards away from Dill’s room.
Hasp kicked Dill’s dropped paintings aside, and then hurried the young couple down the long low chamber, past racks of swords and shields, bows and quivers of arrows. From behind came the sound of splintering glass. The Icarates were smashing their way into Dill’s soul. Pain clouded the young angel’s vision, throwing up a barrage of colourful dazzling lights. He stumbled, but Hasp grabbed the collar of his steel shirt in one huge fist and dragged him onwards.
“Those rooms back there are just a manifestation of your soul,” said the god, “like the body you think you now inhabit. That manifestation is now being destroyed, but the core of your soul remains here, under my protection. Remember your training. Ignore the pain, or you’ll end up as catatonic as this human.” He held up Mina like a rag doll in his other fist. “You can avoid the girl’s fate if you have the will to do so.”
“I can’t see clearly,” Dill gasped.
“Yes, you can.”
And Dill suddenly found that he could see. His eyes no longer stung, yet now the pain moved to his bones and almost crippled him. He heard the sound of crashing debris coming from behind, and then he felt it in his bruised and battered limbs. A second doorway loomed before him, this leading to an enormous banquet hall lit by golden chandeliers. The drone of a hunting horn vibrated the air.
Dill glanced back. The Icarates had now destroyed most of his apartment. They were driving their procession through its remnants. As soon as Dill saw them, he sensed the beasts’ hooves pressing down, the weight of their huge lumbering bodies on the floorboards. His vision blurred again. He felt like he was standing on the edge of an abyss—the darkness pulling him closer.
“Fight it!” Hasp shook the young angel. “Don’t lose your wits now.”
Hasp dragged the pair into the banquet hall. Long tables had been arranged along three of the walls, each covered in platters of food. The god shoved Mina roughly to one side, and then snatched an apple from the nearest table. “Eat this,” he said to Dill. “It will give you the strength.”
“What about Mina?”
“Just do as I say,” the god growled. “And don’t even think about eating anything else.” He turned and charged back the way they had come.
As the Lord of the First Citadel ran, the chamber changed around him, reflecting his rage. The walls darkened, turning from rough grey stone to hard black glass. Over his head the ceiling began to crack. Ahead of him, the doorway expanded until the hole filled the entire wall.
Dill could sense that the Icarates had destroyed most of his soul. Through the throbbing of his blood he felt his room’s agony: the split skirting, the broken furniture, and the shattered bed with its torn drapes trampled under the hooves of stinking beasts. Dizzying, disparate sensations crowded his exhausted nerves. Fighting unconsciousness, he took a bite of the apple. Abruptly, the pain diminished; his heartbeat steadied, then pounded with renewed vigor.
He took the apple over to Mina.
At the far end of the corridor Hasp roared. He had reached the open doorway, a portal now as large as a portcullis. The Icarates had finished consuming Dill’s room and now stood at the entrance to Hasp’s own castle.
Here, they hesitated.
Either the Lord of the First Citadel had grown in size, or the passageway had constricted around him. In his old, battered armour, he towered before the intruders. From somewhere he had acquired a massive stone sword, which he held effortlessly before him. The Icarates clicked and buzzed in apparent agitation, sparks fizzing from their awkward white suits.
Hasp flexed his shoulders. “Should I break your souls?” he boomed. “Or armour mine?”
A heavy iron grate crashed down across the door to his castle, separating him from the would-be invaders. Metal panels appeared from out of nowhere, then slammed and bolted themselves against the interior walls. Girders slid in from the walls on either side, meeting each other with a series of loud bangs. “Would that stop your hammers?” he asked with a shrug. The metal defenses wavered for a moment, and then dissolved like smoke.
“Or should I forge an army
of my own?” the god went on.
The floor around him bubbled. The bubbles swelled and changed, forming black glass creatures like crude sculptures of men and beasts: clubfooted golems and sleek, powerful cats. Their claws raked the floor of the passageway.
“Or should I simply move?” Hasp said.
Dill could not persuade Mina to eat. She stared through him, oblivious to her surroundings. He took another bite of the apple, and then offered it to her again, but she remained as slack and witless as a puppet.
The floor gave a sudden jolt.
The passageway in which Hasp stood suddenly contracted, bringing the god and his glass-forged figures careening back towards the young angel until he was immediately outside the entrance to the banquet hall. What had been a long corridor a moment ago had compressed into a short hallway.
But beyond Hasp’s front door now lay a chasm. The Icarates and their tunnel had remained in one place while the castle retracted from them. Now their procession was trapped on the other side of a wide gap. They were gazing out through a ragged hole in the wall of a vast and strange building.
Dill saw that his own little apartment had been one among countless others. Oddly shaped windows and doors clustered around the rent where the Icarates stood. More and more apartments came into view—a thousand dwellings stacked one upon the other—even as Hasp’s castle retreated. The facade looked like a cliff of stone, steel, glass, and metal, all entangled as if an epic struggle between different builders had taken place. And in a sense that was exactly what had happened, for each apartment was a manifestation of someone’s soul. The carved marble, brick, and dark-stained timber was living.
This, then, was Hell.
But now the whole facade was broken and bleeding. Streams of blood poured from the fractured walls, spattered off timbers and girders, and formed a fine red mist. Debris cascaded past the portcullis. A sweet, copper-rich scent filled the air. Then Hasp’s castle picked up speed. Now the god’s stronghold was burrowing through Hell, leaving its own ragged tunnel behind. By now the Icarates were left far behind.
Hasp wore a grim expression. Sweat lined his brow and his hard blue eyes were tense with concentration. “This flight will cost me dearly,” he muttered. “And it will destroy many of the other souls around us. I doubt I can keep this up for long. Did you consume the apple?”
Dill nodded.
“Good. Technically, I suppose that was cannibalism.” He shrugged. “Better that, than have you fade away completely. Now—” he turned away “—our cover is gone. We must surface and draw what power we can from the bloodmists. Otherwise we’ll be grounded.”
The living ghetto of souls existed on all sides of Hasp’s stronghold. From the bloody passage the castle had already ripped through it, it looked impossibly vast. Hasp clenched his fists and the whole castle rumbled and began to rise, now cleaving a path upwards.
“Leave the girl.” The god beckoned towards the corner of the banquet hall. “She’s safe enough here. I want to show you something. Follow me into the cage.”
“What cage?” Dill asked.
A folding metal gate appeared in the corner of the room, and then opened with a clatter and a clunk.
“That cage,” Hasp said.
It was an elevator much like the one Dill had used every day to descend through the heart of Deepgate’s temple—a metal cage suspended by chains and pulleys. The god closed the folding gate behind them. “While you remain in my castle, you’re under my protection,” he said. “Your soul will recover from the damage it sustained. Just don’t start growing any walls in here.”
With a rattle of chains the cage began to rise. It jolted, and suddenly picked up speed. Before Dill had time to breathe, another jolt quickened their ascent again. And another. Soon they were racing upwards through a glass-walled shaft through which Dill spied luxurious suites full of plush furniture and golden, sparkling chandeliers. Rooms passed in a blur, scores of them, and still the metal elevator rose higher and higher.
They arrived eventually in a glass conservatory which glowed like a multifaceted lantern. Lush green plants writhed around them on all sides, curling their slender leaves around one another in the golden glow from a swarm of fireflies. Vines crept up the windows, sprouted yellow flowers, and then withered and fell. As Dill watched, the process repeated itself again and again: plants grew, died, and then struggled up from the earth anew.
Overhead, buildings smashed against the conservatory panes. Hasp’s castle was still rising up through Hell, demolishing everything in its path. Dill could only wonder why the glass ceiling did not shatter and rain down upon them. Evidently the god’s soul was tougher than it appeared.
And then suddenly the heavens appeared above them. Chunks of building fell away from the windowpanes to reveal an angry red sky. Darker whorls of crimson and black drifted slowly across this vista like scum floating in a cauldron. The conservatory continued to rise until they were looking out across the landscape from a great height.
A maze of canals etched the ground for as far as Dill could see, their mirror-black walls bounding loops and narrow twisted runnels of dark red liquid. Above these channels towered high, sharply tapering hills crowded with houses as queer and disparate in their architecture as those underground.
The shells of living souls?
But the skyline was dominated by a monstrous black Worm—the exterior of the tunnel they had seen below, Dill realized. One end of it plunged into the ground a few hundred yards away from the walls of Hasp’s castle, yet it stretched to the far horizon.
Hasp said, “Menoa must have expended a great deal of power to send that Worm. We can only hope it takes time for him to recover.” He shook his head wearily. “I had hoped to move my castle and your chambers slowly beneath the earth, where we might remain undetected. But now, we must run. I’ll push this building as fast and as far as I can, but I fear it won’t be enough to reach the First Citadel. When that happens, you’ll need to get out and walk.”
The castle halted its ascent, shuddered again, and then began to move away across the surface of Hell.
Harper watched the archon’s castle burst from the bleeding ground and hover no more than twenty feet above the surrounding Middens. The canals had already begun to drain into the hole it had made. Meanwhile her Icarates remained underground, still caught inside the great black Worm.
My Icarates?
When had she started to think of these warriors as her own? The thought repulsed her—Menoa’s Icarates had been the cause of her husband’s suffering, after all. But the threat of King Menoa’s rage at the loss of the angel spurred her into action. Through her sceptre, she planted a vision in the Worm’s collective mind, urging it to rise to the surface once more. The sheer force of King Menoa’s will had kept the Worm together, but it would not last much longer in this form. And loosing those demons that comprised its exoskeleton and teeth would provide her with an army.
Harper intended to pursue her quarry.
Judging by the size and grandeur of the castle, its occupant was a powerful angel, perhaps even Lord Hasp himself. Had the Lord of the First Citadel come to claim the young angel? It was possible, Harper conceded. It made no difference. No amount of will could carry that vast fortress far enough across the leagues of Hell. Free of the ground, the castle’s battlements and spires now towered over the Soul Middens, the maroon rock plated with thick iron on the lower walls, and occasionally festooned with glass. The pinnacles were capped by pointed roofs of deep blue slate. Flowering ivy veined its facades. Only the underside of the building was tattered where it had broken away from the souls below.
Blood fell like rain from those foundations and fell soundlessly into the huge pit below. The archon’s soul had already begun to die.
The stronghold hovered for a further moment, then moved away. Its heavy iron plates snagged against one slope of a Midden, and then it smashed through the dwellings and freed itself.
By now the Worm had extracted
itself from the rendered foundations and laid its maw on level ground to expel the Icarates and their retinue of beasts and soul-cages.
Harper used her sceptre to plant another vision within the Worm’s many minds, one which would travel back to the Ninth Citadel itself. King Menoa would understand her plan, and hopefully sanction it. She envisioned the Worm breaking apart.
Evidence of the king’s approval came back at once, for the Worm burst apart into its component demons. A wave traveled from the horizon all the way to the Worm’s maw as countless numbers of the black scaly creatures untangled themselves from their neighbors and leapt clear. This was Menoa’s Legion of the Blind, the oldest and most primitive of his warrior clans. Long claws thrashing at the air and teeth clashing, the Blind dropped to the ground. Of a similar size, though varying in shape, each possessed between four and six skeletal limbs. A hard turtlelike shell protected their backs, and served to link them together, when necessary, to form a Phalanx or a Worm. They had no eyes of their own, but many clutched the Eyes of the Old Worm—the parasite monster Menoa had butchered three thousand years ago.
Legend told how he had discovered the creature in a deep burrow, feasting on unclaimed souls. He had persuaded the creature to ally with him by the simple offer of food. And then he had betrayed it. Now its eyes gave sight to the Legion of the Blind, while the Blind assumed the beast’s former shape to torment it.
King Menoa’s punishments often had no end.
The blind demons parted like a dark tide around Harper. Tens of thousands of them clambered over the Middens and across the walls between canals, or sloshed through the red mire. Some of them had not managed to extricate themselves from their neighbors and now walked in clusters of two or more, their shells still fused together.
But it was a considerable force. And fast, for the Blind moved surprisingly quickly. The perfect legion for hunting with.
The strain of his efforts pinched Hasp’s expression, and yet the Lord of the First Citadel demanded that Dill accompany him to the training sphere. “While you’re a resident in my soul,” he said, with a sweep of his hand to indicate the great flying stronghold around him, “you will abide by my rules. And that means learning to use battle-archon weapons. The short sword you know. But you must master the pike, rapier, bow, shield, spear, axe, and mace. Once you’ve learned those, I will teach you to use more exotic weapons.”