“You wish me to release him?” Devon asked. Then he whispered to Sypes, “What do you think? Should I release you?”
Another rumble sounded within the Tooth, louder this time.
Sypes frowned down at the army, apparently confused.
“Wake up, old man.” Devon shook him. “Better for us all if you appear lucid.”
The Presbyter’s face tightened. He gazed over the upturned faces of the men beneath him, and blinked. And then he twisted, grabbed Devon’s shirt with both hands and pulled hard.
Devon shot out his free arm to grab the lintel above his head, but his stump could grip nothing, and he fell forward, still holding on to Sypes with his good hand. The world swirled under him.
But instead of dropping into the mass of soldiers way below, he thumped against the hull just under the hatch, and swung back out. The Presbyter’s cassock had snagged on something. They were both now hanging underneath the hatch. Devon wrapped his damaged arm around the priest’s neck, and struggled to get a better grip with the other. Sypes gasped and choked.
Bataba and the two bowmen were pulling on the priest’s cassock, trying to heave both men back inside the Tooth. Devon twisted, collided against the hull again, and rebounded. Flashes of steel and fire and sky wheeled all around him. The cassock tightened around Sypes’s neck till the old man’s eyes bulged. His face was turning red but his fists still gripped Devon’s shirt.
And then all at once they were being hoisted up, as the Heshette dragged them back inside the Tooth. Sypes lay wheezing on the floor. As Devon rose unsteadily, three crossbow bolts thudded into his chest and knocked him back down with the force of a hammer blow. A fourth caught him in the neck even as he fell. He felt his jawbone shatter. The steel tip jarred into his palate and blood flooded his mouth.
Devon rolled aside as a further shower of bolts and arrows shattered against the wall behind him.
The bowmen in the corridor returned fire.
“Gahh,” Devon croaked, lying on his back on top of the Presbyter. He could feel the wooden shaft lodged in his neck, its end pressing against his chest where the other bolts protruded. Air burbled in his lungs. Grimacing, he ripped the bolt from his throat and threw it away. Agony blossomed in his jaw. “Gahh…” One by one he yanked out the others.
“Da…ness take you.” Devon spat blood and hauled himself upright. “Damn you, Sypes. Tha…was sore.”
Presbyter Sypes lay motionless at his feet. None of the missiles had struck him.
“You had better be dead,” Devon growled. “Tha…was unfeasibly—”
The corridor shook as, deep within the Tooth, engines grumbled to life. A roar went up from the bowmen in the corridor, answered by a savage bellow from the troops outside. Bugles and trumpets shrilled renewed orders. War drums began to pound.
“We’re moving!” Bataba shouted.
Devon could feel it: the Tooth had begun to crawl forward once more. Its tracks were already crushing a wide path through Deepgate’s army. A savage grin split his bloodied face. He felt the elixir answer his wounded body’s demands, felt it curl around his lungs and heart—repairing, strengthening—and for a moment he even thought he heard the keening of thirteen souls. He grabbed Sypes by the loose skin of his neck and yanked him to his feet. “Do you hear it, old man? Do you feel it in those brittle bones of yours? The end now. Everything you’ve done has led to this.”
Sypes’s head lolled drunkenly.
“These deaths are your doing, Sypes.”
“Please,” Sypes gasped, “Alexander…”
Devon smashed the priest’s head against the hull, once, twice, thrice, until fragments of bone and brain covered the bulkhead. Then he pitched him out of the hatch.
“That damn repair had better hold,” he roared.
Bataba stared at him in shock.
“What?” Devon snapped. “We’re moving, aren’t we?”
It’s alive, is it? Good, now we can kill it again.” The god of chains was still fuming. Occasionally he pinched his nostrils and examined the blood on his fingers with a mixture of horror and disbelief.
Rachel couldn’t tear her eyes away from Dill as he tried to rise, but flopped back to the floor, where he sat trembling and rubbing his arms. His face was chalk-white on one side, black on the other where the blood had pooled. And started to decompose. The stench from him turned her stomach.
Dill reached to pick up his sword and frowned at it, opening and closing his mouth as though struggling to remember the name of the object. A black, swollen tongue slid between his lips. “Word,” he said. “Min.”
“Dill?”
No response.
“Dill!”
When he looked at her, Rachel saw that his eyes were colourless, not the sharp white of fear but a misty gelid hue. “Dill, what do you remember?”
Dill wrapped his arms around himself and his gaze dropped to the empty syringe protruding from his chest. He plucked it out and let it clatter to the floor. Then he stretched out his wings…and winced.
Carnival and Ulcis were watching him intently: she with a look of lost hope; he with mounting ire. Swords unsheathed, two of the god’s lieutenants blocked the exit from the cell.
Dill was healing fast. As Rachel watched, the bruises on his face paled and his missing feathers grew back with astonishing speed. His eyes seemed clearer than just moments before. He placed a finger inside his mouth and pulled back his lower lip to reveal several missing teeth. The finger came away bloody. “Cold,” he whispered.
Ulcis sniffed contemptuously, and turned to leave. “Lock the cell door,” he said. “Let the freak devour her—”
With a clatter of iron, Carnival suddenly cast a loop of chain around his neck and yanked. The links snapped rigid and jerked the god off his feet. He crashed to his back on the flag-stones.
She was at his neck in an instant, twisting the chain tighter. Ulcis gasped, and both archons at the door moved to attack her. But the god held his hand up, and they paused, uncertain.
“I want you to remember this pain,” Carnival hissed.
The god’s face contorted with rage. He tried to say something, but Carnival drew the chain even tighter, and all that escaped his throat was a snarl.
“Send them away.” She loosened her grip and let Ulcis suck in a breath. His face bright purple, he tried to reach round for her, his mighty wings thumping for leverage against the floor.
“What do you—?” he began.
“Shut up!” Carnival twisted her fist again. She leaned closer, her teeth an inch from his neck. “Get rid of those bastards or your head comes off. Then we’ll see if you can grow a new one.”
Ulcis slumped, holding up his hands. “Wait,” he gasped. “Rebecca—”
The links bit deeper into his flesh. “My name is Carnival!”
Blood bubbled from the corners of Ulcis’s mouth as veins ridged his neck and his eyes swelled.
The archons edged closer. Rachel slashed the air in front of them with her sword.
“Last chance,” Carnival warned. “Do you want to see another eon? Another day?”
Dill had finally found his feet. The bruises on his face had almost disappeared, and his eyes had changed colour. He regarded Carnival for a moment with a pale gold gaze, then turned to Rachel, a slight frown creasing his brow.
“Domestic,” she explained.
Ulcis waved a panicked hand at the archons. They backed off.
“Into the cell opposite,” Carnival growled.
The chain stretched just far enough to allow Rachel to pick up Mr. Nettle’s keys and lock the door.
“Now go,” Ulcis wheezed. “Leave me.”
Carnival grinned. “I won’t abandon you like this, Father.” She grabbed his wrist and forced it, struggling, to her mouth. “Tonight is Scar Night—or had you forgotten?”
The angel bit deeply.
The Poisoner shouldered several bowmen aside, then headed upstairs, past runners, warriors, and wounded, through the ca
cophony of booming drums and clashing metal, rumbling engines and screams.
When he reached the bridge, he was in no better mood. He glowered at the Heshette councillors assembled, batted their questions aside with his stump, then slumped heavily into his control seat to peer out of the cracked and blackened windows.
Dawn turned the scene outside into an inferno. A handful of churchships hung in the smoke, like angry red welts in a poisonous sky. Deepgate troops broke in waves against the now static cutters, falling over each other to scramble away from the advancing Tooth. Knots of Spine among them kept loosing off bolts in a concentrated assault on the bridge windows. Scores of men disappeared beneath the great machine. Some managed to jump up to the cutting arms and hang there. Many others tried and failed.
“Mow them down, you said,” Devon snarled.
Bataba did not answer. The shaman had withdrawn to the far edge of the bridge, his face pinched and ashen.
Devon slammed a lever forwards and the sharpened cogs began to turn. Most of the men on the cutting arms dropped quickly into the scoop below or were crushed beneath the Tooth’s revolving tracks. A few held on longer, but as the cogs quickened they too were thrown back against the hull or down into the panicked mass of soldiers desperate to escape. The Tooth drove mercilessly over them all.
He banked the great machine to the left to intercept an abandoned siege-tower. The whirring cutters connected and ripped the structure into a cloud of splinters. Men leapt clear or died; a bloody mist fell over the jostling infantry. Devon resumed his southerly course, steering the machine up the ridge surrounding the abyss. Iron groynes broke under the Tooth’s tracks with hollow booms, and all at once Deepgate appeared before them.
The city looked as Devon had seen it on countless mornings before: the dusty shambles of wood and tin of the League; the curved shadow thrown by the eastern scarp; the pool of smog over the Scythe, pierced by chimneystacks, cranes and mooring spines; clumped tenements furrowed by endless winding lanes. And above it all, wreathed in mist, rose the temple. Gaslights still glimmered weakly among the chains. Had anyone bothered to evacuate the city? Devon doubted it. Deepgate had always been a place to die.
The cutters were a churning blur beneath him. Cogs hummed and ticked and sent nervous vibrations through the bridge. Devon eased the Tooth to a halt, just yards from the edge, his eyes fixed on the city before him. He clicked a short lever back.
Bataba edged closer.
“This is what you want?” Devon asked.
“For Ayen,” the shaman whispered.
The cutting arms extended. Devon eased back another handle. Spinning blades lowered and ripped through a clutch of peripheral timber shanties. The houses exploded into shards of wood and tin. A soft ripping sound, and then the cutters bit into a foundation chain with a metallic shriek. Sparks geysered, cascading over the rooftops of the League two hundred yards away.
The foundation chain parted with a colossal crack. It collapsed and sagged among skewed streets and walkways, and then the League of Rope gave way like so much dry wood. Lesser chains snapped under the additional strain, cables broke and whipped free, and the great chain itself ripped a path through the city. Flames bloomed along both sides of the rent as gas lines tore open. Half a thousand buildings toppled, then slipped into the abyss. At the heart of Deepgate, the temple shook and tilted.
“Man or god.” Devon manoeuvred the Tooth around the rim towards the next foundation chain. “Whatever Ulcis may be, this ought to get his attention.”
They left Dill’s cell and for some time followed a sequence of gloomy passages before emerging at the mountain of bones below the abyss. The hunger had left Carnival’s eyes; in its place shone something Rachel had never witnessed in the angel before. Not peace, but perhaps…something akin to calm . Carnival was drenched in blood, but she bore no fresh wounds. Her father’s death had not, it seemed, grieved her.
Of the scrounger there was no sign. Rachel hoped the big man was still alive, that somehow he had escaped the Palace of Chains.
Dill stood to one side, quietly regarding the city of Deep. The forges were now silent. Ulcis’s army had stopped making weapons and now seemed utterly confused, wandering listlessly through Deep’s sculpted hollows and passages. Thousands of tapers winked in the gloom, threw long shadows over the slopes of bones.
Dill turned as Rachel approached, but his expression didn’t change.
She held up her lantern. “Are you strong enough to fly?” Physically, he seemed fine, but there was a faraway look in his eyes. One hand rested lightly on the sword at his hip.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Do you remember anything ?”
“Something.” He studied the chain linking Rachel and Carnival. It lay in a blood-soaked coil between them. “Why are you two chained together?”
“Tradition.” Rachel shrugged. “Do you remember my name?”
No answer.
“Rachel,” she said. “And this is Carnival.” But if he recognized them, it didn’t show.
Carnival was staring straight up, her head tilted to one side.
A whine, a rush of air, and, thirty yards away, something huge fell from the darkness above and hit the mountain of bones with a colossalcrump . Bones flew everywhere.
Rachel jumped, grabbing Dill’s sleeve, and scanned the darkness overhead. Her sword was now in her hand, although she didn’t remember drawing it. Strips of tin roofing floated down like enormous leaves. “Was that a house?” she gasped.
Carnival nodded. “More are on their way down.” She wiped blood from her mouth. “A lot more.”
32
DEEPGATE FALLS
DILL LIFTED RACHEL upwards from the mountain of bones while all around them a city fell from the sky.
Stones and beams and mortar rained down. Entire houses dropped past, shedding slates from their roofs, before punching massive craters in the brittle slopes below. Spans of chain and cable tumbled like deadly gossamer. Arched bridges and chain bridges and fluttering walkways smashed to fragments amidst jagged sections of cobbled street.
Most of this debris was ablaze. Tangles of timber and rope trailed smoke and embers. Showers of sparks and burning coals fizzed and whined, burst and scattered off the abyss walls.
They struggled skywards through the onslaught. Rachel clung tightly to Dill’s shoulders, while Carnival shadowed them, as far as the chain between them would allow.
Dill watched it all with awe. Memories kept flashing in his head when familiar objects fell past, disconnected images that he couldn’t weave together into anything that made sense. He recalled stone corridors, worn steps, dusty stained glass; twilight lengthening over a vast desert of rose-coloured sand.
Had he seen this city before, from another viewpoint? Spread out in a great bowl below him, pale avenues and walled gardens, clumps of rooftops and chimneys? He was standing somewhere high, crisp morning air on his face. In his bones he recalled the sonorous clang of a bell. The Church of Ulcis?
The chain at Rachel’s ankle snapped taut when Carnival jerked aside as an old cistern dropped past them, emptiness booming inside it. It brushed her wing dangerously close. She hissed, “The whole city is coming down.”
“Careful,” Rachel said. “I don’t need a feather trinket hanging from my ankle.”
Carnival grunted.
The falling debris grew thicker. A stone tower roared by, lights blazing in its windows as if the occupants were still busy within. Gas lamps and girders shot past like spears. A rusted bridge, dragging chains, tumbled into the depths, spinning end over end like a huge discarded toy. Pillars, arches, and chunks of wall, some with windows or chimneystacks intact. A horse, still harnessed to a merchant’s cart, whinnied and kicked the air as it plummeted.
Against this onslaught, they beat harder up towards the light, through clouds of dust and rainbow-laced curtains of water. Grit peppered Dill’s head and shoulders, brought tears to his eyes. While Rachel buried her face in his sho
ulder, he kept his gaze fixed above, alert for anything that might strike them.
The smaller objects were almost impossible to avoid. Shards of glass, falling in glittering showers, tore their clothes and their skin. Broken tiles and fragments of wood pummelled them. Dill spun and twisted, dropped back and weaved through this deluge, endlessly trying to avoid the worst of it. Carnival followed their progress, the chain dancing between herself and the assassin.
Deepgate? Dill’s memories surfaced with the name. The foundation chains; the League; the Warrens. He saw himself on a high balcony ringing a turret, remembered his cell beneath the belfry. A chipped tile floor. Sunlight glimmering through a glass angel .
His home? He was going home.
“This dust.” Rachel coughed into his shoulder. “I can’t see anything through it until it’s almost upon us. Is there anything left of the city above?”
Dill squinted through the dust clouds. Chains hung like torn webs from at least a quarter of the city, leaving a gap through which he could discern blue sky. Flames flickered around the damaged edges and, even as he watched, another mass of buildings sagged toward them and broke free.
He shouted back to Carnival, “Head there, over there! Less dangerous. The districts there have already come down.” Then he whispered into Rachel’s ear, “Some of the foundation chains have gone. From the edge to the hub, everything around them has been lost.”
“The temple?”
“I can see it.” Right there in the centre, a burning halo surrounded the Church of Ulcis.
“We would have heard it drop,” Carnival growled. “That many wailing priests.”
Gradually the city grew nearer. Fresh showers of water occasionally drenched them, momentarily clearing the dust and smoke until it felt like they were flying through thunderheads. The air seemed to crackle and course with violent energy. Hairs rose on Dill’s arms and on the back of his neck.
A roar and, a hundred yards away, an entire street ripped past, its houses ablaze, disintegrating into plumes of rubble. An old stonewood tree tumbled after it, its gnarled branches reaching out amid flailing chains. Carnival watched its descent. In the fleeting firelight, Dill saw a look of grim detachment on her face.