One heart. Rachel pitched the body towards Mina, who was crouching ready on the ground three yards behind her.
Dill moved into the fray, his translucent armour and sword pulsing faintly in the shade of the trees.
Two more Sombrecur had cleared the wicker at the water's edge, but now halted abruptly before the phantom angel and raised their spears. They began to circle Dill cautiously, in opposite directions.
Dill lunged with his sword.
The warrior reacted, meeting the blow with his spear, but the tip of the ghostly blade passed clean through his weapon's shaft and pierced his stomach. For a heartbeat he stared down at his own guts—three inches of Dill's sword had apparently disappeared inside his flesh, and yet there was no blood. Then he stepped back from the blade. There was no puncture wound, no damage at all.
The Sombrecur grinned, and advanced again.
Dill swiped his sword again, but the phantom steel passed harmlessly through his opponent without leaving a trace. He was unable to inflict damage. The Sombrecur simply walked through him.
An arrow whizzed past Rachel's ear. She spun round in time to see Hasp grab the bowman by the neck and groin and hoist him over the god's glass helm. Roaring, he slammed the struggling man down against a boulder, then turned to meet another attack with an out-thrust baton, knocking this second Sombrecur completely off his feet. Bodies soon lay strewn all around the glass-skinned god.
And five more there. Rachel started towards the fallen, but was cut off by two Sombrecur charging madly at her on either flank. One bowman, one spearman. She threw her sword into the bowman's face just as he released his fingers from the bowstring. The shot went wide. The spearman then lunged at her, but not fast enough. She kicked the shaft out of his hands, snatched it from the air, and whirled it around, drawing the metal tip across his naked chest, till beads scattered from his broken necklace. Across his upper torso a red line welled and began to ooze blood. He dropped to his knees.
Rachel jerked her sword out of the bowman's head and finished him off. Three hearts left. She dragged the two corpses back to Mina.
The Sombrecur were now pouring out of the wicker in greater numbers. Others closed in from east and west, pressing Hulfer's men closer together. This may have been what the Riot Coasters had intended all along, for the enemy, thus confined amongst their own, could not deploy their bows effectively. The dark giants performed a strange and brutal dance amongst the lighter-skinned warriors, wheeling to divert strikes as though they knew exactly where and when to expect them.
The survivors remember!
Finding herself momentarily unassailed, Rachel heaved two more corpses closer to the thaumaturge and split them open. “That's five,” she said.
Mina was on her knees, her eyes closed, whispering rapidly to herself. Rachel thought she heard the word forest. Basilis sniffed around the dead, thoroughly unconcerned by the mayhem all around.
Hasp roared suddenly. He had disposed of his batons in favour of a larger weapon. In one glass gauntlet the god wielded one of the Sombrecur's own warriors, whirling the limp body around him as any normal brawler might use a club. Opponents flew under his blows, knocked senseless and reeling back into their own ranks.
The Riot Coasters had meanwhile arranged themselves into a spearhead phalanx and were driving back through the Sombrecur rear guard, opening a route back into the forest. Arrows lanced in from the east, striking one of the unarmed giants in the neck as he fought against two opponents. He made a gurgling sound and clutched the shaft. Before Rachel could yell a warning, a Sombrecur spearman had plunged his weapon into the wounded man's side.
She spotted Dill amidst a group of four enemy warriors, and she then watched him vanish from sight.
Unable to injure his opponents conventionally, the young angel was using a stranger and more ghoulish tactic against them. Rachel stared as Dill's body flowed into one of the Sombrecur. That warrior jerked, and cried out. And then, now limned in blue radiance, he spun round and thrust his spear into the chest of one of his own companions. Dill had just taken possession of the man's body.
The two remaining Sombrecur backed away from the possessed fighter. Dill charged wildly at the nearest of them, raising his spear for another attack. But his opponent reacted with a sudden downward thrust, piercing Dill's stolen body low in its left side.
The angel abandoned his wounded host. In a vapourous rush, his spirit moved into the flesh of the warrior who had just stabbed him. Thus possessing his own attacker, he now drove the spear deeper into his former body, and then turned to face the final opponent.
Basilis barked.
Rachel turned round.
Mina's eyes were open again, but now with a faraway stare. She looked pale and exhausted, her chest rising and falling rapidly under her thin robe. Fresh blood steamed on her hands. “It's done,” she said.
“What is?”
“I've summoned a forest.”
Rachel frowned. “We're already in a forest, Mina.”
The thaumaturge got to her feet and gazed around her as though for the first time. The air was alive with the clack and snap of spears, men grunting and growling, the cries of the dying. “Gods, look at Dill,” she said.
The angel's ghost darted between the enemy like a firefly, possessing one warrior after another, and then turning their weapons against their own comrades. Scores of Sombrecur had already fallen in his wake. Whenever one host body died, Dill simply shifted his soul into a fresh one. Unable to slay this phantasm, the Sombrecur were simply butchering each other.
“Too much bloodshed,” Mina said, and then she shouted over to him, “Dill! Don't—”
Another noise cut her off.
It seemed to Rachel to issue from the earth itself—a low creaking sound like the hull of a ship protesting in a heavy squall. The Sombrecur had noticed it, too, for they were eyeing the ground with frantic suspicion. A roar went up from the Riot Coast warriors, who had used this distraction to push through the Sombrecur ranks and reach more open ground. Only two of their number had fallen so far.
Rachel felt the earth shuddering under her feet. A powerful smell assaulted her nostrils, an odour of terrible decay. From out of the forest floor snaked thick white tendrils.
Roots?
All around, these extrusions broke free of the soil, wrapping around each other, around the boles of trees and the legs, spears, and torsos of the panicked Sombrecur. The tendrils quivered, growing rapidly, enmeshing the natural forest in a vast pale web. They engulfed the Sombrecur completely, binding them where they stood, but miraculously they left the Riot Coast fighters untouched.
Within moments every bole and branch had been ensnared by these white roots, their thin blanched fibres crisscrossing the canopy overhead or hanging like ropes. The Sombrecur cried out from their cocoons, but then the tendrils contracted with a series of spasmodic creaks till finally the scene became silent. To Rachel it seemed like one forest had been consumed by a second, parasitic one. She clutched her nose against the stench, for Mina's forest smelled of a plague pit.
“Now we have to run,” Mina cried. “Get out of here while the new trees are still pliable. Once they've hardened, we'll be stuck here.”
“Trees?” Rachel said. “What sort of forest is this?”
“The forest of bone,” Mina replied. “It's an aspect of Basilis. I had the idea when we first reached Herica and I saw its remains along the lakeshore. These forests take thousands of years to decay.”
“You knew we would be coming back here?”
Mina grabbed Rachel's hand and hurried her along through the strange white forest. Hasp and Dill, joined by the Riot Coast men, quickly followed behind. Mina glanced back at the god and then whispered to the assassin. “I'm afraid I asked Sabor to lie. Hasp needed to believe that he was going to die here, that this was to be his glorious end.”
“Why?”
“So that he'd rediscover his passion for life. Confronting the Sombrecur gave him the oppor
tunity to fight as a free man… or god, I suppose.”
Rachel stopped suddenly, dragging Mina to a halt. “You dragged us into this deliberately?” she growled. Then she lowered her voice. “You forced me to kill so that he could relive his past glories.”
“It already happened in our world's past,” Mina said. “In Riot Coast legend we were always present here. Even the last stanza of John Anchor's song mentions a ghost, a god, a witch, and a maiden.” She shrugged. “I don't know why they'd think you were a witch, but that's not the point… If we hadn't lived through these events, we'd have corrupted this timeline even more than it already has been. Don't you see? The further back in time we go, the more dangerous our actions become.”
“What else have you tampered with, Mina?” Rachel demanded, grabbing the sleeve of Mina's robe. “Exactly how far back does your meddling go?”
Mina pulled away from the assassin. “We need to get out of here!” she urged.
“Who roused the Sombrecur against Sabor in the first place?” Rachel persisted. “Mina, who sent them to their deaths? Was it Menoa?”
The thaumaturge hurried away through the tangled white roots.
“Was it Menoa?” Rachel repeated.
But Mina wouldn't answer her.
Carnival didn't require a mirror to gauge the extent of her restoration. She could feel the tight pressure of her wings against her back and shoulders, the powerful muscles flexing as she beat them. Her long hair, now dry and ragged, blew about her shoulders. Her heart thundered with anticipation. She turned her naked arms over and examined the tracery of scars there. Her skin tingled with the memory of old wounds. She felt renewed, angry.
Dangerous.
It was as if that single taste of the bastard god's blood had acted like a key to unlock her mind from its cage.
Here in Hell, all form was a matter of will. Carnival had won the freedom to exist as her own will dictated. Even her old leathers and lightweight boots had returned. The armour clung to her lithe figure in all its battered and rotten glory, and she welcomed the smell of decay.
Yet there was more.
Had she been quite this tall, quite this strong? The muscles on her arms and legs seemed much larger and better defined. Her leathers felt tight around her thighs and upper arms. Was this merely subconscious vanity, or a reaction to her present instinct to smash her way out of here?
Four white walls enclosed her. She had no other way out but brute force.
She slammed the heel of her boot against the outer wall, aware that even the stone itself was an amalgam of living sentient souls. The barrier would be as strong as it believed itself to be, and she suspected that Menoa would have convinced it thoroughly. Her kick made no difference to the smooth surface.
Carnival took a step back and examined the wall, realizing she could not defeat this barrier in her current physical form. So she concentrated hard, willing greater strength and endurance from somewhere. She felt her wings grow, her muscles expand unnaturally, her very bones become heavier and denser. Her armour creaked and split around her new, bulkier frame. Her skin darkened to become a dull ironlike patina.
All a matter of will.
The scarred angel threw another savage kick at the wall. It shuddered. A crack appeared in the stonework from floor to ceiling. She lashed out again with her foot, and chips of white stone crumbled before her eyes.
The wall moaned.
She punched a heavy fist right through it. Masonry fell away in great chunks, revealing a turbulent red sky and the vast expanse of the Maze beyond.
The prison cell was near the summit of the Ninth Citadel. From this new rent in its outer wall, Carnival gazed down. Canals had flooded the thoroughfares within King Menoa's strange living metropolis: crimson slough skirted canted angles of black stone, glutted entire quadrangles, stained the brickwork. And yet the scene looked busier than ever. Hundreds of creatures in bulky armour darted here and there, sloshing through the thick mire, pushing, carrying, or rolling strange machines before them. Those canals… there was something odd about them.
Red figures stood in the waters.
The River of the Failed had encircled Menoa's fortress like a moat, and then flowed out to encompass all the streets around it. Even now tributary rivulets of it were leaching into the surrounding territory, flooding acres of dry passages. It was defending its master's home.
But from what?
And then Carnival noticed the approaching army—already so near the citadel that it defied her powers of observation. At first she had simply swept her gaze over it without even identifying it as such. If she hadn't now spied movement, she would just have glanced over it a second time. Whole cities, after all, were not supposed to crawl across the landscape.
A vanguard of mysterious machines moved at the forefront of this bizarre, creaking, and jostling army. These vessels looked vaguely like airships, though their tapering hulls appeared to have been forged from metal. They slid across the surface of Hell, smashing through the myriad walls, gouging out paths for the creeping rear guard to follow. Carnival spied two figures standing atop the leading vessel, a red-haired woman and a huge, dark giant, still wearing his wooden harness.
While the remaining survivors of Hulfer's Hundred marched back inside the Obscura Redunda, Mina instructed Hasp and Rachel to wait with her outside until they could be sure their future selves had duly departed.
Rachel had half a mind to burst in there and tell her other self the truth. But she knew that Mina had been right in a sense. To avoid corrupting this timeline any further, they must ensure that historical events happened exactly the way they ought to.
If the Sombrecur had been allowed to take Sabor's castle, then Rachel would have found herself in a new branch of the multiverse, facing a very uncertain future.
Yet Mina's meddling had likely caused the deaths of five thousand men, and for no apparent reason other than to inspire Hasp to struggle against his hellish parasite. Of course none of this troubled the thaumaturge, who seemed to be as morally flexible as a starving vulture in a nest of its sister's chicks.
After the sun had swept its long red rays below the horizon, they entered the castle and found Sabor waiting in the Obscura Hall. Rachel was vaguely relieved to find that this was the original Sabor, although she couldn't be entirely sure why. All versions of him were the same god, after all, and she couldn't bear a grudge against one without bearing a grudge against all of them. The god of clocks accepted another map from one of the many Garstones in evidence here. The galleries above were also bustling with Sabor's assistants, and timelock doors clicked open and closed constantly overhead. The pattering of footsteps produced sounds more numerous than all the ticks and chimes from the castle's clocks.
“My other self has now departed for earlier times,” Sabor announced, with just the merest flicker of a glance towards Mina. “Our Riot Coast friends are taking their supper in the dining room.”
Rachel glared at Mina, who clumsily pretended not to notice. Had the thaumaturge already told Sabor to rouse the Sombrecur? Was that unnecessary battle doomed to have always happened?
Nevertheless her machinations appeared to have had the desired effect, for Hasp was clearly in vigorous good spirits. Still plastered in dry mud, he beamed and said, “Well, 442 was a good year, but we've that many more of them left to traverse. Let's move on before the bastard king causes any more mischief.”
Mischief? Rachel felt sick, but she had to agree that they should move on soon, if only to prevent Mina from causing any more problems.
Sabor consulted his map to locate a suite that would take them back a full six years before the battle in which they had just fought. He looked up and around at his numerous assistants, many of whom were now leaving through the castle doors, presumably to create space while they waited for a future timelock. The god of clocks nodded with satisfaction.
“Making your own army here, Sabor?” Hasp asked.
“Hardly,” Sabor replied. “This ha
s ceased to become a multiplication procedure. Now, rather, it is a rescue operation, as Menoa's bastard universe continues to grow around us. The Lord of the Maze is creating thousands of branches from his own timeline, and many more of the Obscura's suites now lead into these warped realms.” He grunted. “Garstone has orders to locate as many of his selves as possible and bring them into this timeline. They have orders to converge at year zero by any route available. Ergo, the closer we get to our destination, the more of Garstone's selves you will see.”
“Your castle is going to get very crowded.”
“Indeed.”
But as the numbers of Sabor's assistants increased, it soon became evident that another force was working to ensure that they didn't. In the next suite they found three more corpses. Again the victims were all versions of that diminutive rumple-suited man. All had been slain with a wide blade, the wounds suggesting that they had been cut down while trying to flee. Whatever had killed them had simply piled the victims in the center of the room.
As soon as they made this grim discovery, Rachel rushed to the timelock door and peered through. Crowds of Garstones passed outside the porthole window, seemingly oblivious of anything untoward.
Mina crouched by one of the bodies, and slipped its time piece from its breast pocket. “It's the correct time,” she said. “He was killed here not long ago, and his body hasn't been moved.” The other corpses' pocket watches told the same story. Whatever had slain these men had done so in this universe, with a thousand alternate versions of his three victims outside this very door.
And yet a hurried conference with Garstones passing outside soon revealed that none had seen anything. The killer had gone unnoticed.
Sabor's brow creased in a deep frown. “Either the killer was invisible,” he announced to the assistants now gathered on every balcony above the Obscura Hall, “or one of you has betrayed us… and thereby betrayed yourself.”
A moment's stunned silence was followed by shocked protests and denials from every level of the castle. They couldn't conceive of such a thing. The murderer could only have been a shade, a phantasm, a shape-shifter.