“Like what?”
“I don't know! Ship isn't moving, is it? Gives you the chance to slip outside and do something unexpected. Take an axe to the hull—that'll soon get the bastards running.”
“You can't break the hull,” the boy replied. “No matter how rotten it gets, you can't break it, not even with an axe. I know that much.”
Monk frowned. He seemed ready to argue, but then the whole vessel gave a sudden lurch and began to creak and groan. “We're moving again,” he said. “They've eased the pressure on the hull. We're going deeper into Hell.”
In the chamber below them, Cospinol's slaves toiled at the brazier, shoveling coke and working the bellows and checking the contents of the condensing flask. Ghost lights whirled inside that glass tube and gave off a fierce illumination. Dull thuds continued to issue from the cooker as the scarred angel kicked at her tiny iron prison.
Hidden in the crawl space, the two conspirators waited.
After a while the hook-fingered boy heard the old man snoring. He had fallen asleep again. Lying there on his side in that confined wooden space, he looked like something that truly belonged in a coffin. His forehead was the colour of ancient bone, and tufts of wild hair sprouted from his cranium like scraps of dry moss. The boy thought about piling him down through the hole. It would be fun to see the slaves grab him and string him up again. Gallowsmen were supposed to stay outside the Rotsward.
But Monk was interesting in his odd way. The boy liked it when he talked about Pandemeria, the battles with the Mesmerists, and the first great automaton. And Monk knew how to get that pressure cooker open. The boy decided to wait until after he'd drunk some of the angel's essence.
He left the old man sleeping and crawled back through the sky-ship's maze of conduits. Once he reached the outer hull, he slipped out through one of the many gaps in it and onto the great scaffold that surrounded the vessel.
Now that the fog had gone, he could see the gallowsmen clearly. Most had moved to the outer reaches of the wooden matrix, ready to break down Hell's facades. The boy scuttled along one long spar and then leapt onto another one. He jumped again and his metal fingers gripped one of the empty nooses. He swung, let go, and landed next to a huge vertical timber that acted as a support column. Numerous ropes dangled around him, but these were for hoisting up debris and he couldn't risk using them, so he climbed down the timber itself. The Rotsward's hull diminished above him.
He wanted to see exactly where the ship was going.
In no time at all he neared the lower edge of the skyship's scaffold. The whole vessel sat atop what looked like a huge crushed labyrinth. A vast network of rooms with torn-open ceilings stretched away into the gloom on all sides, the scene illuminated in places by gallowsmen with flaming brands. The Rotsward's lowest spars had pierced the floors below, and many men were working down there, moving through the rooms or ripping up great chunks of stone, tiles, and wood, and loading it into baskets to be dragged up to the skyship's decks. They would squeeze the living energy from this detritus and manufacture soulpearls to feed the god of brine and fog.
Crunch.
The scaffold jerked and sank further into the maze. The boy heard men and women howling. He climbed down even closer and saw that most of the rooms were occupied, but the gallowsmen were not loading the people up. They were butchering them instead.
Crunch.
Another jolt, and the Rotsward descended again. Floorboards shattered. Walls toppled. Scores of dwellings crumbled down into the ones below. Cospinol's slaves were working flat out to save as much matter as possible, but they could only recover a fraction of it. The rest simply dropped away, falling upon the unwitting denizens below.
The armoured gallowsmen moved over this devastated landscape like a swarm of strange metal insects, entering houses through corridors wherever possible and climbing over debris where the damage was too great. They used their eclectic armaments against any souls they encountered. An old woman sitting at a loom turned when a metal-suited soldier leapt down beside her. She smiled and then died on his sword, before he put his boot to her chest and slid her corpse free.
Crunch.
Two warriors suddenly reacted to a new breach in the floor of a large stone dwelling. A young man in rich finery looked up in time to see their spears fall before his twitching body left red stains across his tiled floor. Four others were meanwhile dragging a screaming woman from her tiny brick cell.
These men were the dead from a thousand armies, the corpses of those warriors Anchor had slain since the day he first hitched the Rotsward's rope to his harness. No two were alike. They wore battered mail, plain plate, or enameled armour in bright yellows, greens, and blues—mercenaries and woodsmen in banded leather; archers with bone or yew bows; knights in steel, wearing colourful plumes; thieves, hooded gangers, and way-trappers. Some fought like brawlers with iron fist spikes; others used skinny blades in exotic flowing styles that the boy did not recognize. Blue-skinned and distended from years in their gins, these butchers moved in force through the steadily crumbling labyrinth.
Crunch.
Why were they killing these people in the Maze? Could these souls not be better used by Cospinol? The blood of those slain was now being wasted. Their essence mingled with the blood from the walls and floors, and leaked down into the depths of the Maze.
To where?
The slaves harvested scraps of living stone and wood, but they would not touch the corpses. The whole bloody scene felt like a giant sacrifice.
Crunch.
The scaffold dropped again. But this time something unusual happened.
The ground gave a sudden rumble, and great sections of it simply fell away. Several gaping chasms appeared amongst the network of interconnected rooms, corridors, and rows of brick partitions. The Rotsward appeared to have broken through into a vast cavern. The boy could see nothing down there except impenetrable darkness, but he heard the unmistakable sound of rushing water.
There was a pause.
And then John Anchor heaved on the rope again.
The Rotsward broke her way through the base of Hell. The network of gallows shuddered and groaned, and then suddenly dropped twenty fathoms. The lowest spars struck something solid, and the whole skyship came to an abrupt halt.
At that point, had the boy not shaped his own fingers to grip his environment, he might have lost his hold on the wood and fallen. Cospinol's gallowsmen were not so lucky, however. Dozens slipped from the greasy timbers and plummeted. To the boy's surprise, most of them landed in water.
It was an entire maze of waterways separated by low, greasy banks. Its layout reminded him of the old spiral patterns that the ancients had painted on rocks back in Brownslough: a single line looping back on itself again and again, to form a labyrinth. Like the lines of a finger, the channels did not intersect each other. They were all part of the same river.
Debris rained down, sending up thick gouts of liquid. Islands of rubble formed quickly. The waterways were shallow, not even reaching as high as a man. Brands fell from the scaffold and hit water, fizzling out, or else landed on banks and islands and threw wildly flickering shadows across the landscape. By the light of these torches, the boy saw that the watercourses were as thick and red as blood.
A sacrifice?
A great cheer went up from the gallowsmen. Those still left on the scaffold were now climbing down towards these subterranean shallows. Even the slaves abandoned their baskets of debris to join them. Those warriors who had already fallen splashed around and roared and laughed and drank their fill of the waters. Some of them climbed upon the islands to reclaim brands, their armour darkly stained and dripping. They hollered and clashed blades against their own armour, and then knelt on the shore to sup. Evidently Cospinol had promised them a feast.
The boy glanced up.
In the torchlight, the base of Hell looked as gnarled as the thickest forest. Around the rift created by the skyship, twisted iron girders extended like black
roots through the brickwork.
The Rotsward's main hull sat lower than this ceiling, but her upper scaffold still remained lodged in the Maze above. There was not enough room here to fully contain her great size. Bloody streams still trickled down through her joists and spars, and also from the edges of the well John Anchor had made by dragging the skyship down here.
The boy returned his gaze to the shallows, hoping to spot the tethered man. Torches moved over the waters and over the islands between the skyship's masts, but the spaces between them remained dark. Anchor was nowhere to be seen, so the boy looked for the great rope instead.
It had curled around one of the scaffold's lower joists, a few hundred yards away, and was tightening, drawing in slack as Anchor pulled on it. The boy peered in the direction of the rope and spied a faint aura of white light receding in the distance. The Rotsward would soon be moving horizontally again.
He had to tell Monk. This celebration might be the distraction they needed. While Cospinol's gallowsmen and his slaves feasted, they could sneak into the boiling room.
But just as he was about to turn and climb back up the scaffold, he spotted the red figures rising from the water below.
She was drowning and had been drowning for months or years or perhaps even centuries. Carnival could not remember how long she'd been trapped in this hell. Scalding water filled her eyes, her mouth, and her lungs. It flayed her skin. Her wings and legs had been broken once, but now they had healed, though the bones had reset themselves in awkward positions. That made kicking at the inside of her prison difficult.
But she kicked again anyway, as there was nothing else for her to do. The pain gave her strength. She savoured it and used it, compressing the agony up inside herself and then releasing it with another vicious blow to the walls of her container.
She felt, however, that she was growing weaker by degrees. The scalding water seemed to sap the very life from her. She wondered if she would die. On one level the idea of an end to her suffering was appealing, as it offered her some consolation, a hope of peace. At the same time it enraged her. Someone had put her in here.
And so she lashed out again.
This time she felt the wall of the container give.
7
UNDER HELL
The River of the Failed was quick and cunning and carnivorous. In its many disparate parts it tore the fallen gallowsmen to pieces. Columns of lamplight dropped from windows in the base of Hell and lit up the scene. Red figures rose from the bubbling waters and set upon their foes with no weapons except their newly forged hands and teeth. Their hardened liquid forms could be mutilated and scattered by blades and spears, yet the Failed themselves remained immune to death, for the river was their common flesh.
Anchor turned his back on the slaughter as the screams of Cospinol's warriors filled that vast emptiness underlying Hell.
They fought with increased desperation but ultimately they fought in vain. The river learned from its mistakes, and it adopted new tactics to trick its foes. Giants rose in places where the smaller constructs were destroyed, great brutes with clubs for fists that terrified the gallowsmen and caused them to flee. Long muscular shapes with fins and jaws lashed through the water. Red threads reached up and wound themselves around the gallowsmen's weapons, entangling them. Vortexes chewed at their shins, forcing them to retreat to higher ground. But the red river swelled around them and hardened itself into walls that funneled its victims into pens where they could be murdered more efficiently.
For a brief time it rained upwards. The tiny droplets were as cunning as their source and trickled up across the warriors' skin and into their mouths and eyes. So afflicted, a knight in blasted-steel plate rushed blindly through a frothing channel and scratched at his eyes and cried, “Teeth, teeth!”
Downstream from him a short, wiry way-ganger clung to his useless bow as he struggled against the red threads that tried to pull him under.
Three warriors clad in coloured enameled armour stood back to back atop one of the larger islands, driving spears into the crimson shapes that crawled up the rubble towards them. Before long this trio became the only effective resistance that Anchor could see. The river seemed to have momentarily neglected them, but then the waters receded suddenly and surged back over the warriors' island, knocking them into the surrounding channel.
As Anchor walked away, he felt a chill in his heart. He dragged a hand through the fast-flowing waters around his midriff. Surely no army could defeat such an amorphous foe. Here was the antithesis of Iril—brute power without any structure that could be dominated by physical force. How could one fight absolute chaos?
Anchor carried Harper, his large hands grasping her waist. She had stopped supping the fluid. “The river would have taken the gallowsmen anyway,” she declared. “Cospinol had no choice but to sacrifice them. By doing so, he has gained its favour.”
“For now,” Anchor said. “We are still at its mercy, I think. If it decides to eat us, I do not know how to stop it.”
“Then let's try not to do anything to upset it.”
“How do you upset a river?”
“The river is a god, and this god is a child. Anything might cause a tantrum.”
After some distance the Rotsward's rope tugged at Anchor's harness and he felt the familiar pull of the skyship against his back. He took a deep breath and bulled forward. The skyship felt so much lighter than before. He hardly noticed as, behind him, the great wooden vessel shifted and scraped across the drowned floor of this subterranean realm. The upper part of the scaffold remained buried in the base of the Maze, but its timbers would not be broken by mere bricks and iron.
“This is a very strange place,” Anchor said.
“You get used to it,” Harper replied. “Hell, I mean. I don't know if this place down here can still be called Hell. The Maze ends up there.” She slipped the luminous wand behind her ear, and nodded at the ceiling. “That was my home for a very long time.”
The big man grunted. “The way you speak… I think you miss it.”
“I do. Your soul imposes its own order on its surroundings. You become a world amongst many others, but still joined. If it wasn't for overcrowding and the Mesmerist threat, it would be paradise. Imagine the sex.”
He laughed.
“It's when others impose their will upon you that things become difficult.” She looked at him meaningfully. “Wouldn't you agree?”
“I chose to become a slave.”
“But you regret it now.”
He chose not to answer. “Do you think Heaven is like the Maze?”
“Not while Ayen remains dominant. She expelled her own sons just to maintain order. Her version of order. If there are still any souls left in Heaven, I doubt they're at all free.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “No, Heaven is for sheep, and Hell is for—”
“Goats?”
“Wolves, John,” she said. “Wolves.”
The fierce current made walking difficult, but Anchor held her firmly and caught her when she slipped. She kept Tom's soul close to her heart, and imagined she could feel the warmth of it through the glass. In this unnaturally engineered state, he would not be aware of anything around him. His spirit was trapped in a suspension of some esoteric fluid, an elixir like those rumoured to have been distilled in Pandemeria before the war. In such a form he would merely be dreaming.
Removing his soul from the liquid wouldn't be difficult. She could simply find a man—living or dead—to drink the elixir, and thereby become host to her husband's personality. Yet that person wouldn't physically be Tom, not as she remembered him.
Nevertheless, a return to any physical body was infinitely better than an eternity spent in a soulpearl. This way she wouldn't just possess her husband's soul. She would have Tom back.
If she could find a man to act as host for Tom's spirit, she and her husband could finally be together again. A couple, a home. In time they might even create a nice apartment in Hell, something far from the N
inth Citadel, something with a view.
But who would be the host?
The crimson river continued to rush past them, urging them on to their destination. Drips fell from above and bloodied their skin and clothes. They followed a path as twisted and tortuous as a deathbed scribble, but when they tried to leave the waters to cross one of the many adjoining banks, the currents sucked at them, urging them back into the center of the channel. Harper's light bobbed ahead, glistening on the waters, while in the darkness far behind, the grounded skyship scraped a terrible gouge through the ceiling of this thin realm.
Finding a hale physical form down here wasn't going to be easy, Harper realized. As far as she knew, in all of Hell there was only one such body available. And John Anchor wasn't about to give it up.
Before long the Failed reappeared again, rising from the waterway as though they had been submerged all this time. Thousands stood in the main channel and in all the surrounding ones. Harper shone her light around, revealing more of them everywhere. They had become more defined, Anchor noticed. He could now discern features in their faces—mouths and noses, yet none of them had yet developed eyes. Many now resembled the gallowsmen they had so recently butchered. Their wet red skins had the appearance of armour, and they carried blades, bows, and spears.
Anchor and Harper halted.
As the Failed spoke, a single voice issued from many mouths. “What is that object you drag?” they said. “There is food within.”
“The Rotsward is my master's ship,” Anchor replied. “There's no food aboard.”
One figure stepped closer. It was larger than its neighbours and appeared to be wearing red plate armour, yet the steel panels of its suit did not move in the way layers of metal should. This armour was merely an affectation. “There are many souls inside the Rotsward,” it said, and the group chorused its words. “Souls everywhere.” It tilted its head and seemed to be studying the pouch of soulpearls tied to the tethered man's belt. Then it reached out towards them.