The Birkita had cleared the funnels of the Tooth and was rising close below them. Streams of ballast sand poured from her gondola. She was turning as though out of control.
This is wrong.
Fogwill shot a questioning glance at the captain and navigator, but both men were too busy to speak to him. So he stumbled after Hael, still clutching his rumbling belly.
What was the worst that could happen?
Outside, the wind tore at Fogwill’s robes. The Adraki ’s engines thundered. Hael’s aeronauts were cranking tension into the grapple gun springs at each corner of the aft deck, fitting barbed iron shafts into the barrels, adjusting sights, and oiling spools of cable. Propellers hacked the air and massive rudders slammed sideways as theAdraki turned to intercept the Poisoner’s ship. Air rushed into the warship’s ribs and abruptly the deck lurched. Fogwill was caught by surprise. He staggered towards the port rail, arms flailing. One of his slippers fell off. The rail rushed closer, a white void beyond.
Hael caught him by the neck of his robe. “Get inside,” he growled, “before you kill yourself.”
Fogwill’s knees were shaking. “Let that ship go,” he cried. “Devon isn’t aboard. It’s a trap.”
Then his head swam and he retched.
Mark Hael grimaced and stepped away, releasing him. Fogwill slumped to the deck as the commander strode over to the rail. Two granite-faced aeronauts scowled at him from their positions at the grapple guns.
“Ready port grapples,” Hael called out. “Bow gun, target the aft deck. Put a line across it if you can. Aft, get ready if he misses—go for the envelope. On my mark.”
Fogwill saw theBirkita rise above the deck rail, a hundred yards away.
“Fire.”
With a loud crack, the bow grapple shot from the gun and arced across the space between the airships. Cable fizzed from its spool.
The grapple struck the Birkita ’s aft deck and lodged in the wood.
“Contact!”
“Winch!”
Two aeronauts pumped hard at the winch behind the gun, red-faced, muscles straining. The cable began to lose slack.
Mark Hael was nodding sternly. “Bow gun ready! Aim low in the envelope. Let’s steal a little of her breath. And…. fire!”
A second crack sent the bow grapple lancing through the air. It missed its mark and shattered a window in the Birkita ’s gondola.
“Contact. Low from target.”
“Winch.”
Aeronauts cranked the second winch. Both lines became taut.
Hael plucked a com-trumpet from the gondola’s rear wall. “Bring us parallel. Swing ballast arm portside, spill sand, and purge ribs on stress. We’re going to pitch. Prepare to tow.” He turned back to his men on the deck. “Lance those lines and bring her in.”
The starboard winchmen rushed to the port side and unstrapped long poles from the deck rail. The poles were ten yards long and hooked at one end. They snagged both lines and pushed. Cable groaned.
“Slack!” one shouted. The winchmen released pressure. When the poles were horizontal, they bolted the ends to fixtures in the deck.
“Winch!”
The cables strained taut again. TheBirkita bobbed as they drew her closer. Mark Hael glanced down at Fogwill sitting on the deck and explained, “To stop the lines cutting our envelope when she rises above us.” He grinned. “We’ve got her.”
The Birkita exploded.
Fogwill saw the aeronaut commander turn slowly against a sky of flame. Something knocked Fogwill sideways and everything went dark.
Someone was screaming quietly behind the ringing in Fogwill’s ears. “Down! Down! Down!”
Iron pressed into Fogwill’s cheek. A rail? Sand beyond. Pressure crushed his shoulder. The Deadsands reeled beneath him.
Distant voices.
“Holed!”
“I don’t care, I don’t care.”
“The cable!”
“Portside.”
“Where?”
“His leg—stop the bleeding.”
“I don’t know.”
“Bow.”
“Where?”
“Leave it!”
“No. It’s all gone. All of it.”
Fogwill gripped the rail. Sand and rocks and brass and white sky swung all around him. The deck moaned and shuddered.
“Cut—just bloody cut it!”
He looked at his hand. Blood spattered his powdered skin. How white his skin looked against the blood. This was wrong. He didn’t like this dream. Blood smeared his rings too. Their gold and gems were filthy. He would have to wash them when he got up. He turned his head, pain shooting through his neck. Planks of teak sloped at a steep angle, pinning him to the rail. More blood ran over the wood in little trickles towards him, towards the hem of his robe. He tried to move, but his hands stung. His muscles gave up; he was too heavy. The approaching blood was going to soak his robe, ruin it. A propeller screamed nearby. Wind whipped at him.
“Both of them. Now .”
Fogwill sought the voice. Mark Hael lay on his back, gripping the port hatch, eyes frantic. Blood there too. It soaked the aeronaut commander’s white uniform utterly. No way for an officer to be seen. Whatever would Fogwill’s mother have said? And what was wrong with Hael’s belly? A metal barb jutted from the wet cloth there. A grapple? That shouldn’t be there, Fogwill thought with a kind of detached curiosity. He ought to say something to the commander, tell him about the grapple. He tried to speak, but the howling wind stole his words.
He examined his rings again; the seastones and rubies glinted under the blood. He rubbed at the gold. It would clean: soap and water would do the trick. The captain would have some handy inside. But the hatch was far up the sloping deck. He would have to crawl over all the blood to reach it.
“I can’t stop it. The port propeller’s gone.”
Fogwill wished the aeronauts would stop yelling. Their shouts and the rip of the wind and the buzzing of the propellers were giving him an awful headache.
Pinned by the grapple, Mark Hael was trying to see inside the hatch. Iron barbs protruded absurdly from his belly. “Cut the stern,” he rasped. “Pull the fucking tubes out.”
There weren’t any tubes. Just a grapple. Surely the commander could see that? But he wasn’t looking at his belly. He was still twisted round, peering inside the airship.
Sand stung Fogwill’s eyes and he blinked. He looked back beyond the rail. Dunes were rising towards them fast. Too fast. They ought to slow down.
“Slow down,” Fogwill whispered. Nobody heard him. Mark Hael’s attention was elsewhere. They were really going to have to slow down. He had to tell the captain that. He pushed at the rail digging into him, but it was useless. He was too tired. His shoulder throbbed. His hands felt badly swollen. He blinked again, trying to clear sand from his eyes. Stinging tears flowed over his cheeks. His slippers. Where were his slippers? He searched around frantically. The desert rushed closer. Sand and rock surged toward him. He couldn’t see his slippers anywhere.
The dead crept from the darkness and surged up the mountain of bones. The lights that Dill had first taken to be souls were instead licks of flame curling around tapers clutched in bony fists. These were not ghosts; they were men and women. Some looked as thin as the skeletons beneath their feet; others were tumescent, their flesh shades of grey and blue. All wore rags. All looked hungry.
An army of them.
Dill dimmed his lantern.
“Too late,” Carnival hissed. “They’ve seen you.”
More were coming. They flooded out onto the bone mountain behind the others, and as Dill’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he realized from where.
The city of Deep had been hacked out of the abyss wall, where torrents of dark sculpture rose to staggering heights, façades of writhing figures and tormented faces. The lower third of the city swarmed with distant lights. Flames moved behind carved muscle and sinew; they crossed arched spinal bridges, crept down stairs lik
e spirals of black bone and out onto the slopes composed of human remains. Walls of skulls screamed silently from the rock-face. Tapers winked through eye sockets and tooth-framed doors as figures slipped behind. Fluted pillars supported great stone spheres cut into impossible orgies of flesh, wings, teeth, and bones, representations of countless angels feasting.
Deep shuddered to the pounding of metal.
Rachel was at Dill’s side. “There,” she pointed. “The sounds are coming from there.”
Flames glowed deep within the dark city. Silhouettes of figures working. Red-hot metal and flashes of steel.
“Forges,” she said. “They’re making weapons.”
A tide of torchlight poured out from the city and scaled the bone mountain. They moved lithely, disturbing little, shadowed eyes fixed on the three interlopers. Tongues darted between bloodless lips as if tasting the air. White, grey, and blue flesh slid beneath grease-stained rags. Knives and swords glinted.
In awful silence, the horde climbed closer.
“What are they?” Dill breathed.
“I think they’re dead,” Rachel said. “Or were.”
“We should leave.”
“Not yet.” She had a distant look about her. “Remember what we came for.”
Carnival picked up a skull, examined it, then tossed it away with a grunt of indifference. The skull bounced and tumbled down the slope, where it landed a few feet from the nearest of the advancing army. The line of men and women paused, then began to climb again, faces now twisting into snarls.
“Great,” Rachel said. “You’ve pissed them off.”
“So?”
“So, there’s an army of them, and three of us.”
Carnival shrugged. “As armies go,” she said, “it’s not so big.”
Ten yards below, one man raised a hand, and the closest of the horde, thirty or so ragged figures, halted behind him. They fixed their tapers among the bones at their feet with slow deliberation, never shifting their gaze from the intruders. All had produced bone-handled blades. Hundreds more climbed the slopes behind, fanned out to flank them in a wash of fire and steel.
Dill caught the scent of burning fat. From the corner of his eye he saw Rachel stiffen.
The man who’d raised his hand focused milky eyes on Dill and spat, “What you want here?” His voice was a wheezing rasp, as though his throat had been punctured. His teeth had been filed to points.
“Who are you?” Rachel asked.
He gave her a cursory glance, then returned his attention to the angel. “What you want here?” Behind him, the others were still spreading out, unhurried and silent, blanketing the slope as far as Dill could see.
Dill’s knees weakened. He knew his eyes would be as pale as those of the man who’d addressed him. Had any reply come to mind then, it would have been unable to escape his constricted throat.
“None of your damn business,” Carnival said.
Rachel flinched.
The man bared his needle-sharp teeth. His gums were swollen and bleeding, but the blood looked old, black. The knife in his hand came up, and for a heartbeat Dill thought he was going to throw it.
Dill would have taken flight then if his muscles weren’t quivering so, but he forced his leaden legs to move and he shifted position to stand between the needle-toothed man and Rachel. She stopped him with a hand and the faintest shake of her head, the muscles at the corners of her eyes tightening.
The knife wasn’t thrown.
Carnival wiped her hands on her leather trousers. “That’s not pitch they’re burning.”
Needle-tooth’s cloudy gaze slid towards her. He barked a command back to his followers in a language Dill didn’t understand. The army stirred behind him. A series of calls bounced back through the masses, and faded like echoes.
“Outcast,” Needle-tooth said to Carnival. “Scarred bitch. He knows you’re here. Wants you alive.”
Carnival smiled dangerously.
“Do I need to remind you,” Rachel murmured, “we are outnumbered?”
“You might be,” Carnival said.
Dill tried to ease himself in front of Rachel. Again she stopped him. A bone beneath his foot snapped and he swayed while catching his balance. Further down the slope, there was movement. Items were being passed forward. Nets?
Needle-tooth sneered at Carnival. “Freak.”
Carnival’s scars darkened. Her wings snapped out, lightning-quick. She snatched the fork from her belt—
—and charged into the army.
Dill didn’t see the net until it was almost upon her. Carnival, however, was quicker. She veered, with astonishing speed, and dived.
Needle-tooth was catapulted back, black blood geysering from his now truly punctured throat. He crashed into three followers with the force of a battering ram, and all four fell into the ranks behind. Two dozen men toppled. The net, meanwhile, landed on bones, sixty feet beyond Carnival.
She crouched, hissed.
Rachel was eyeing Needle-tooth’s body. “He isn’t getting up,” she whispered to Dill. “He’s just been killed—again.”
Carnival pounced. And there was a storm of blood.
Dill had never seen anyone, human or angel, move so fast. Carnival leapt, spun, wings extended flat above her, legs windmilling. Blood flew in arcs from three more throats before she landed. Crouching again, she paused for half a heartbeat, then, like a crossbow bolt, plunged into the nearest knot of opponents. Knives flashed. Carnival ducked inside one, two, three strikes…snaked through a flurry of limbs, her fork flickering…and suddenly there was open space around her.
A ring of fresh corpses crumpled onto the bones.
“Shit,” Rachel said, “she’s just warming up.”
Figures kept massing around Carnival, but she was already moving again. She flitted over the powdery slope as though she weighed nothing. She leapt again, punched her fork upwards between ribs and into the heart of a wild-eyed woman, then withdrew it at once so as to catch a savage down-cut from a man to her left, stopping his knife between the iron prongs. An elbow shattered his face; then the fork licked out and he recoiled, screaming.
The horde roared with bloodlust. Scores of frenzied men and women pressed closer, clawed towards her over the corpses of their fallen, snarling, hungry. Carnival wove among them, a dark whisper, and killed with a speed that continued to leave Dill stunned. Steel clashed with iron, again, again, again. Flesh ripped, blood sprayed, and howls filled the abyss.
And still they came, relentlessly, in savage waves. They threw themselves against Carnival’s fury, only to be cut down. Carnival did not falter or slow. She whirled and spun like a fever nightmare. Lines of blood trailed behind her fork. Her hair flew wildly about the scars on her face. Blades sparked and clashed. Her dance was measured, precise; a methodical slaughter that Dill found abhorrent to watch. She didn’t bother to fly; she didn’t have to. None were her match in speed or strength. Corpses fell on corpses, and soon the mountain of bones was strewn with the dead and the dying.
Now the horde began to hold back, uncertain, while Carnival stood on the summit of a pile of twitching corpses. Her wings unfurled suddenly like thunderheads, and her night-eyes thinned. She licked blood from one scarred arm and spat. “Dead!” she roared. “No souls!”
Dill had never seen an army flinch before.
Carnival beckoned them closer. They hesitated.
“We have to get out of here,” Dill said.“Now.”
“No,” Rachel said. “Look at this place. Dill! The bones, the forges, the path up to the surface. And look at them ! Fogwill risked everything to buy Carnival’s help, and now I know why. Don’t you see, these aren’t the ghosts in your Codex stories. These things have no souls. This is wrong, evil . It isn’t supposed to be like this. This is hell.”
“You can’t stand against her. Nothing can stand against that .”
“Not in a fair fight.”
A guttural call went up from somewhere below and suddenly the
air around Carnival was full of knives.
The scarred angel seemed to flex, sidestep, twist. Her fork still moved so fast Dill couldn’t see it. Sparks showered around her: a hundred rapid steel concussions. The onslaught drove her to her knees, but her fork was still blurring, sparking, batting away the knives.
Silence suddenly.
Carnival stood.
She was wounded. Two of the knives had found their mark. One lodged in her thigh, the other beneath her armpit. Blood welled, trickled down her side, spattering the bones under her feet.
She grinned.
The army charged in triumph. A visceral howl, and they surged forward as one.
Dill moved to help her.
“No.” Rachel gripped his shoulder. “Don’t go near her when she’s like this. She’ll kill anything that gets close.”
Once more Carnival sprang to meet the oncoming horde. A vicious swipe sent the nearest two warriors reeling, ripped open. She drove her fist into a third one’s face. His head snapped back and he collapsed at her feet.
More rushed in to flank her. Carnival dived beneath another net cast towards her. A withered, grey-skinned man snagged his foot in a rib cage. Carnival tore past him, slashed him open from groin to neck. She rolled, grabbed a skull, and shattered it against the forehead of another assailant.
A score of knives flashed through the air. Metal clashed as Carnival’s fork knocked them away. All but one, which lodged deep in the nape of her neck. She staggered back, roaring in pain.
And then they were all over her, pressing forward recklessly like wild beasts, punching and kicking and clawing at each other to get to her.
Still she cut them down. She whirled among them, stabbing, slashing. Bodies sank all around her, or fell away screaming, clutching severed veins. But yet more poured in, wave upon wave—a frenzied howling mob, scrambling over the dead and wounded.
Carnival was about to be engulfed by sheer weight of numbers, when she took to the air and kicked skywards. But a net snagged her wing. She shrieked in anger, twisted to tear it away, lost height. Another net engulfed her. A rope jerked back and the net closed tight. Trapped, she landed hard among the bones.