2
DEPARTURE
In the last moments of twilight a heavy gloom settled upon the forest. An owl hooted, and was answered by a distant cry from deep in the fog. Rachel waited beside John Anchor, and yet in this darkness she could discern little of the giant but the whites of his eyes. He remained as still and as darkly imposing as the oaks around him. They had moved a quarter league further north, to rendezvous with Dill. The bone-and-metal angel was somewhere nearby, but Rachel could not have said where exactly. He might have been standing just ten yards away.
She heard the Rotsward's elevator creaking before she saw it descend out of the murk, materializing amidst the forest canopy overhead. It was a simple basket suspended from ropes, hauled by slaves on the midships deck. The elevator's two occupants, Mina Greene and Hasp, looked like a strange pair of heavenly ambassadors in their grey cowled robes, their bloody glass-scaled hands clasped before them.
The basket landed with a soft thud. Hasp leapt out, seemingly unconcerned that a single crack in that Maze-forged armour would have spilled his lifeblood and returned his soul to Hell. Rachel realized she was staring. She looked away. Mina lifted out her demonic little dog, Basilis, and set him on the ground before cautiously climbing out after Hasp.
The pup sniffed at Anchor's feet and then bounded off into the shadows.
“Cospinol's slaves have transferred provisions and gold from the Rotsward,” Mina said. “Our friendly arconite made an impressive packhorse. They've stored tons of wheat and dried fish inside his ribs, and caskets of coins in his jaw.” She smiled. “Cospinol wasn't happy to see that gold go. His mood now suits this sorcerous weather.”
Rachel glanced at Hasp. The Lord of the First Citadel scowled, lifted his hand inside his cowl, and pressed it firmly against the side of his glass helm as though a sudden headache had gripped him. His red eyes flinched, and he bared his teeth.
“Hasp?” Rachel ventured.
He ignored her.
Hasp had become increasingly irritable and sullen since King Menoa had implanted a parasite inside his skull. A tiny demon of brass and flesh, it compelled the Lord of the First Citadel to obey Mesmerist orders. And poor Hasp, who had once stood alone against Hell's armies, had already been abused by the weakest of Menoa's servants.
His mouth tightened. He muttered soft curses to himself.
Such a cruel punishment. Menoa had stripped Hasp of everything that defined him, denying him even the glorious death in battle Hasp had coveted. She looked up, but she couldn't see or hear anything of the work going on overhead. “What about Menoa's Twelve?” she said to Mina. “Can you sense their presence?”
The thaumaturge inhaled a deep breath of the misty air, and then hesitated. “I can observe them while they remain in this fog,” she said. “Four are waiting at the western edge of the forest. Another two stand in the Larnaig Field south of Coreollis, guarding the portal. But the remaining six are moving north. They're following us.”
“Who are they after? Dill or Cospinol?”
“Both, I imagine.”
“How long can you maintain this fog?”
She shrugged. “That all depends on Basilis.” She picked up the hideous little pup, cuddled it in her arms, and kissed its ear. “Doesn't it, sweetie?”
The dog growled.
Anchor beamed. “I must be on my way to Hell now. The priests who control these golems won't kill themselves, eh? Good luck with Ayen, Mina Greene.”
Rachel looked between the two. “Hell is one thing,” she said, “but Heaven is an altogether different matter. Even Ayen's own sons didn't consider themselves powerful enough to intrude in their mother's realm. The goddess of light and life will butcher us all.”
A myriad of tiny glass scales around Mina's face crinkled. “But she'll kill the enemy, too.”
The young thaumaturge planned to use Dill to attack the gates of Heaven, reasoning that if the goddess of light and life perceived a threat from one arconite, she might destroy the rest of them, ridding the world of Menoa's unholy Twelve. Yet not even her son Cospinol knew exactly how to find the gates of Heaven, nor how to breach them in order to reach the goddess shuttered within. His kin had never been ones to share their knowledge, it seemed. The thaumaturge's plan was nothing more than a leap into the abyss. Yet it was still the best plan they had.
“We'll search Sabor's palace,” Mina explained to Rachel, “and then Mirith's. If anyone knew how to reach the goddess, it was them. They had to know something if they were planning to storm Heaven themselves.”
A hunting horn sounded somewhere to the west.
John Anchor stepped forward. “Hasp, Mina, I will not shake those glass hands of yours, but I must go now. Hell awaits.”
Mina rushed up and hugged him, while Rachel merely nodded. Hasp fixed his dark eyes on Anchor. “Give my regards to King Menoa,” he said.
The tethered man laughed, and strode southwards across the glade and then faded into the misty trees. The great rope trailed after him, cleaving a path through the forest canopy. The sound of snapping branches could be heard long after he vanished from sight. And then he started singing.
That's his idea of stealth? Rachel shook her head. The fog hid him and the skyship above, but it couldn't hide the noise of his passage. How can he hope to slip past his hunters and drag that vessel into Hell unnoticed? Rachel didn't really believe he expected to. King Menoa would know the precise moment when the portal was breached but, from what she had seen of Anchor, the big man from the Riot Coast relished confrontation.
And so Rachel found herself standing there in a forest in a strange land with a thaumaturge, a dog, and a debased god in glass armour. The hunting horns called again from somewhere closer. Hasp winced at the noise and clutched his head, but he said nothing.
They encountered Dill several hundred paces to the north. Or rather, they found his shins rearing amongst the oak and elm. The rest of him stood obscured in the misty grey heights. They stood beside his heel and looked up. From the heavens came the distant sound of machinery.
“Dill?” Rachel called.
A bony fist descended, snapping through branches, and formed a cradle on the ground. The three climbed into his upturned palm.
And then they were rising up through the chill damp air. Rachel clung on to Dill's knuckle as they surged through the forest canopy. The trees soon fell away below them, dissolving into the mist. Huge bones wrapped in metal tubing loomed on her left as they soared up past the arconite's pelvis and spine—their pitted yellow surfaces etched with the same complex whorls she had once seen on the hull of Deepgate's Tooth. A citadel of machinery shuddered behind the giant's ribs, composed of dark metal forged in Hell—perhaps from the broken chains of the city she had been born in. The mechanics of it were vast and unknowable. She smelled oil, and another ripe and coppery odour, like that of butchered meat or the killing fields of Larnaig, yet tainted in some chemical way she couldn't identify. Lime? It reminded her of the poisons in Cinderbark Wood. She sensed the pressure of tons of blood and hydraulic fluid within those piston housings and tubes and vats.
Dill's skull finally came into view—huge and naked and hideous, and devoid of anything that suggested a living mind inside. The cavernous eye sockets held naught but echoes and pools of dank water, providing shelter for birds or bats, whose shit spattered the lower ridges of bone. His jaw was partially open, and the yellow teeth stood motionless. Green moss clung to the underside of his jawbone. Rachel could see the barrels Cospinol's slaves had unloaded heaped in the darkness deep within that maw—enough coin to buy an army.
Dill's hand came to a halt beside his mouth and Rachel realized that he meant for them to step inside, beside the gold. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes but she could not say exactly why. They climbed from the hand and into the giant's mouth.
Mina set her dog down and headed into the gloom at the back of this dim bone-and-metal cave. Her glass-shod feet echoed on metal floor panels. Hasp stood looking up a
t the golem's palate above his head, his face in shadow. Rachel sniffed the damp air. It stank of the battlefield, of iron and blood.
“Dill?” she whispered.
For a moment she imagined that the floor had trembled, yet there was no answer but the echo of her own voice.
Mina looked up. “I warned him not to speak,” she said. “He has a voice like thunder, quite loud enough to betray our position to our enemies.”
Rachel stared at her. “I need to talk to him.” She hesitated. “I need to know that he understands where we're going.”
Mina beckoned her over and then took her hand. The thaumaturge led the Spine assassin over to the very back of the oral cave, where a dark crawl space led up out of the main chamber. “This leads to the topmost vertebrae of the spine,” she explained. “From there you can climb up into the skull.”
“His skull?”
“It's not a living creature,” Mina said quietly. “The arconite is simply a machine, a golem, a rude simulacrum of an angel. King Menoa chose this form to ease the stresses put upon the soul trapped within. This way Dill's subconscious can still function. He can move his limbs without having to consciously direct any unfamiliar mechanisms. It is a suit of armour for his soul, brash and hideous, yet functional.” She stared at the crawl space above her, perhaps unwilling to meet Rachel's eye. “Climb up inside the machine and you'll find your friend's soul. Speak to him there.” She looked at the floor. “He won't need his larynx to answer you.”
Rachel climbed. Crystals encrusted the walls, less like jewels than chunks of tarnished glass. The passage rose steeply, then opened into a dark atrium a little wider than her shoulders. She reached out in the darkness and felt a tangle of arm-thick pipes running vertically, more crystals, and hexagonal metal pins. She stood there in the dark for a long moment. It isn't you. It's just a prison … like Ulcis's abyss or Cospinol's ship.
Mina was right. This was armour: a suit created by the Lord of the Maze to allow his servants to walk freely amongst mortals—and to destroy them. When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she noticed a dim light shining overhead. The passageway now rose directly above her head. She gripped the pipes and pulled herself up.
A room had been created inside the arconite's head. There were no windows. The light she had previously seen came from another source entirely.
Rachel put her hand over her mouth and began to sob.
King Menoa allowed the Ninth Citadel to glut itself with power from the Maze, and then he gave the walls and steps within that living stronghold his permission to breed. Aeons had passed since these Mesmerist constructs had been human, but their souls remembered lust and exulted in the freedom granted to them. Flesh born of subconscious thought flowed and melded with uncountable partners in an orgiastic frenzy that pushed thousands of souls over the brink into madness. They produced sentient offspring to strengthen the citadel's own hive mind, but occasionally they also birthed mutants: fragments of dreams or memories that could not think in any useful way and merely mimicked the shapes of the faces around them. And these faces shouted and barked or simply licked their teeth and stared.
Whenever such deviants were discovered by functioning constructs they were murdered and absorbed back into the citadel. Hunters with fists grown into knives flowed through walls and ceilings in pursuit of imperfection. The whole process of unfettered copulation continued until Menoa's fortress had grown by almost thirty levels and the House of Faces set high upon the building's teetering summit had sprouted many new chambers, stairwells, and eyes.
When it was over, the citadel exhaled. Bloodmists hissed from vents in the foundations, and then drifted out over the great wet labyrinth of the Maze.
Menoa stood upon a freshly birthed balcony high on one side of the House of Faces and watched the mists recede. Ribs of new bone and crystal eyes glistened in the platform floor and made the surface uneven, yet he was prepared to allow that for the moment. He would wait and see how it matured before determining its value to him.
Far below him a witchsphere was rolling through the Maze on its way to the citadel. Barges lolled in deeper channels, their decks crammed with cages full of souls for the Processor. The great inverted pyramid continued to whisper and issue gouts of steam, but its forming ovens and arconite pens were empty now.
All of the king's children had now left Hell, yet the instrument of their passage still dominated the skyline. Menoa's portal writhed above the Maze like a vast ribbon of flies. From a fixed base of scorched and blasted stone the portal rose to impossible heights, becoming narrower and narrower until the last thread of it vanished somewhere inside that dark sun that lay at the very heart of the Maze. Both ends remained fixed in place, but the length between them undulated like a whip. It had lost most of its substance since the arconites had passed through, Menoa noted. He could almost see through it in places.
A fly settled on one of the claws of Menoa's black gauntlet. He glanced down and changed the tiny creature from living flesh to glass, then crushed it.
His reverie was broken by an unspoken query from the citadel. The witchsphere had reached the base of the fortress and it wished to speak to him.
Admit it. Allow it to pass through the citadel unmolested.
A short while later the witchsphere rolled onto his balcony. Menoa had no name for this construct, but he recognized it nevertheless. Its scraped and dented metal panels were evidence of the many years it had spent in the living world.
“We bring word from the Prime,” it said in the voices of numerous hags. “They have confirmed your expectations. The thaumaturge has conjured a mist to hide the traitorous arconite. It engulfs Cospinol's own fog and reaches far across the lands beyond.”
“And the portal, too?”
“Yes.”
Menoa sensed his glass mask contort as it mimicked his own expression of grim contemplation. “I did not expect this fog,” he admitted, “but certainly treachery. Cospinol cannot kill my warriors, so his agents must attempt to kill their controllers.” Menoa's Prime Icarates were ensconced within the Bastion of Voices deep inside the Processor, their minds watching the living world through the eyes of his arconites, their thoughts steering those vast iron limbs that had crushed Coreollis. He had already taken steps to protect them. The thaumaturge's fog was an unnecessary precaution, amateurish. Did they truly expect that he had not anticipated and planned for an attack on the Maze? “Perhaps his smokescreen has been engineered to allow an assassin to enter the portal?”
“They will send the arconite Dill?”
The king shook his head. “That young angel alone possesses enough strength to resist my own warriors. Cospinol needs him to remain on earth.” He turned back to the portal. The vast ribbon writhed and spun, but the twelve angels had all but drained it of power, and it was growing weaker with every passing moment. “Cospinol owns another assassin, the Riot Coast barbarian who drags his skyship. That is who he will send.”
The balcony had not yet grown itself a parapet, but the witchsphere rolled closer to the edge of the precipice. “Without Anchor, Cospinol will be grounded and helpless,” it declared.
“He cannot allow himself to be stranded,” the king agreed. “And so the god of brine and fog must accompany his slave. After all, he has an entire army of men hanging from the gallows of his ship. No doubt he plans to set them upon us as some form of distraction.”
“Shall I instruct the Icarates to stoke the furnaces within the flensing machines?”
“Yes,” Menoa said. “All of the furnaces.”
John Anchor took a deep breath. He relished the smell of this old woodland, the wet leaves, the cool rain-laden air. If he was ever required to walk across the bed of an ocean again, then this was the sort of air he'd prefer to fill his lungs with. It was a fine place in which to take a stroll. The soft brown mulch compressed under his feet and bounced back up in his wake. As he walked he scooped up a handful of soulpearls from the pouch at his hip and tipped them into his mouth.
Then he began to hum a tune.
The rope thrummed.
He laughed. “You worry too much, Cospinol. My voice is no louder than the sound of these snapping branches. And we can't silence the woodland, eh?”
His master's voice came through the rope. The arconites are bigger than you, John.
“But not stronger.”
Now is not the time to test that theory. Save your strength for Menoa's Icarates, I beg you.
“But I am quicker than the golems, Cospinol. Like a rat around their ankles, eh? I jump in the portal and pull you down after me while the giants stumble after us. Easy as swinging a boar.” You are tethered to me, John. Do not forget that.
Anchor grinned. In truth he hoped to confront at least one of these arconites. He felt strong today: A million souls howled in his blood, their voices like a war cry at the back of his mind… so long as he didn't listen too closely. If he concentrated too hard on it, he would recognize their moans and pleas, and that would take the edge off his good humour. He ducked under a low-hanging branch and then heard it catch on the Rotsward's rope behind him and snap loudly.
A hunting horn again bellowed in the west.
Anchor altered his direction subtly, moving more in that direction.
I'm warning you, John, Cospinol said. Mina Greene conjured this fog to disguise our own camouflage. Don't ruin it by trying to confront these things. I want to reach the portal without incident. Turn back to the southwest, away from that horn.
“You are reading my mind now?”
No, John, I just know what you're like.
The big man sighed and did as Cospinol instructed. Fog shrouded the view ahead, but he could see that the woodland here sloped down towards the south. In places he spied low walls amongst the oaks—the remains of some long-abandoned settlement now soft with moss and wrapped in snarls of black bramble. Fungi clumped in earthen hollows, like bones protruding from graves. He could not recall if he had visited this place before, and he wondered what tragedy had befallen the owners of these dwellings. As if in response, a lone soul cried out in the back of his mind. Anchor frowned and ignored it, not wanting to know. He began to hum again, half singing under his breath.