Something creaked above him. A chain moving in a stray draught, probably.
Dill avoided looking up; the things up there were worse than anything in the shadows to either side. Instead he fixed his eyes on the stable doors, anxious for them to open, yet hoping they’d stay firmly shut. Borelock tended the stables.
Another creak above, and Dill looked up.
On tall columns hung the remains of the Ninety-Nine, displayed like ghoulish puppets in chains which held their skeletal arms in place and their tattered wings outstretched. Some wore scraps of armour or peered over dented shields, but all of them brandished weapons: swords, spears, halberds, or pikes, all pitted, scarred, and rusted.
Dill shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His uniform felt stiff and uncomfortable; the sword hilt dug into his ribs. He clasped and unclasped his hands, studied the floor, loosened some buttons, and tugged at his collar, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from returning to the heights.
Gaine had told him stories of this gloomy place: winter storms when the whole temple swayed and the relics rattled their chains in howling draughts. Dill peered along their ranks, half expecting to find his dead father among them, but there were only the bones of the Ninety-Nine, staring out at nothing, collecting dust.
With a clank the stable doors on one side of the corridor swung open. Torchlight fanned out over the floor, bringing with it the odour of straw and animals. Borelock led two huge mares out into the corridor. Behind them, the soulcage rumbled into view on its wooden wheels.
A heavy structure of iron and tarred wood, the soulcage had been specially blessed by the priests to ensure that souls given over to the temple’s care were protected until the time they were released into the abyss. It was empty now, but when full was big enough and sturdy enough to keep fifty souls safe. In the dead, unblessed blood was dangerous. Hell opened its doors to receive unblessed blood, and when Iril’s doors were open there was no telling what might get loose.
With awkward precision, Borelock walked the horses across the polished marble floor. A sour line of a mouth jutted from his cowl; his chin protruded like a spike of bone. The rest of the priest’s body hobbled and shifted beneath his cassock as if there were more than one set of arms and legs under there. Once he reached Dill he stopped, clutching the reins with yellow-stained fingers.
Dill wondered if the priest’s eyes were yellow too. He swallowed, and said, “Fine animals.”
The nearest horse bared its teeth and snorted. Its coat gleamed black as a temple guard’s armour.
“Five years,” Borelock grumbled, “I’ve been driving this cage in your stead. Five years until the Presbyter saw fit to pluck you from your tower and put you to honest work. Don’t you think I’ve had better things to do with my time than face the scorns of those miserable bastards outside?”
“I’m grateful,” Dill replied weakly.
“Don’t mess it up,” Borelock said. “Mark Hael and his sister are in there.” He jabbed a thumb at the Sanctum doors behind them. “The late general’s son and daughter.”
Dill clambered into his seat at the front of the cage, and leather creaked. The seat was even higher than it had looked from the ground and Borelock had to throw the reins up to him. The horses bobbed their heads and whisked their tails, eager to be off.
“Wings,” Borelock said.
Dill spread his wings.
As the horses lurched into motion, Dill almost toppled back onto the cage bars. He pulled hard on the reins, but the animals ignored him. The soulcage lumbered forward, picking up speed.
“I’ll be watching you,” Borelock called after him.
They clopped along, uncomfortably fast, under the scrutiny of the decaying angels. Rust had eaten the name plaques beneath the skeletons’ feet, but Dill still recognized a few from his one previous visit down here.
He’d been eleven years old when his father had brought him to this dismal corridor, ordered the temple doors to be opened to let some light in, and left him with a slab of parchment on which to sketch the relics. In daylight, the skeletons had seemed less threatening, so Dill had relished his task at first, writing each name in his best hand beneath his sketches, determined to draw them all. That morning passed quickly, and occasionally Gaine returned, bringing him cups of sweet tea, to admire his handiwork. When they paused for lunch at a rough table outside the kitchen, Dill proudly displayed his drawings to everyone and anyone who passed by. Everyone had seemed impressed.
By mid-afternoon he’d drawn eight and was bored. They all looked the same. So he squeezed the remaining ninety-one of them into a giant battle played out on a single sheet of parchment—with a dozen stick-like Heshette enemies fleeing into the bottom corner. At Dill’s insistence, Gaine counted the pencilled archons and admitted that there were, indeed, ninety-nine in total. There hadn’t been space to fill their names in, but his father had liked his composition all the same. It was one of the last times they had spent together. Gaine had died only weeks later at the hands of a Heshette bowman. Presbyter Sypes had brought Dill extra candles that night, helped him set them up around his tower room.
The soulcage now passed beneath the archon with the lopsided wing, repaired at some point with brass staples, and there over on the left was the one who leaned out too far, ever threatening to drop its spear. Dill had originally sketched that one from the side.
Looking up at them now, Dill tried to fit the names he remembered to the skeletons’ bones. This one standing fierce and proud over his great sword, Simon perhaps—or Barraby? This one, more melancholy, resting on his spear, could he be Dolmen? And here, the toothy grin of a shield-carrier made him think of Praxis, the last archon before Callis to die. He imagined these angels as they must have looked in life: Ulcis’s elite sweeping into battle with their wings like shards of sunshine and their weapons glittering like ice crystals. Three thousand years had passed since the angels had risen from the abyss, and now their bones watched over the dead, and over the Soul Wardens who brought them into the temple.
He was twisting round, trying to identify the design on a shield that might have belonged to either Mesa or Perpaul, when the soulcage jerked to a halt with an irreverent thud. Dill spun round. One of the vehicle’s front wheels had collided with the column to his left.
The next few moments stretched into a long, sluggish dream. Both mares lowered their heads, chopped their hoofs against the floor, and bulled forward. Dill yelled. The soulcage groaned.
The column shifted…and teetered.
High above, the archon’s spine flexed and its legs seemed to move, as though the skeleton was keeping its balance. Slowly, the column rocked in the opposite direction. Chains creaked…Dill held his breath…the column tilted back.
And settled.
Dill breathed again.
There was a snap and the angel collapsed in a shower of bones. A helmet plummeted and hit the floor with a bang; a spear clattered on the marble and skittered off into the shadows. Bones rained down, hands and limbs and ribs smashed to fragments around him. The horses whinnied and stamped their hoofs in protest. The angel’s skull struck the seat beside Dill and ricocheted away. It flew up almost as high as the top of the column before descending again to hit the stone floor with a sickening crack. Its jaw snapped off, teeth exploded everywhere. The skull bounced again, and again, shattering more teeth each time, until at last it rolled along the passage and came to rest a dozen yards away, facing him.
Bone dust drifted down.
Borelock screamed. He flew along the corridor like a wraith, his thin arms flailing about his head. Dill sank lower into the driver’s seat and shuddered.
“Three thousand years,” Borelock was howling. “Three thousand years—preserved, protected, safe from decay and intruders. But not from you! Not from the wretched, clumsy, gangling paws of fools and children. Three—” He choked on the word.
Dill’s eyes flashed pink. A deeper, hotter pink than he had ever experienced before. He felt the b
lood leave his face, as though his eyes drew it into themselves like a searing beacon to proclaim his shame.
“A disaster,” Borelock wailed. He whirled round, finding yet more blasphemous evidence of destruction everywhere he looked. “Dust! One of the Ninety-Nine in ruin.” He rushed over to peer at the plaque affixed to the column, then threw up his arms. “Samuel. The Dawn Star, bane of Heshette, reduced to this. Destroyed!”
The Dawn Star’s jawless, toothless skull gazed back up at them from a carpet of broken bones.
“What will Presbyter Sypes say? Eh? What will he do? A whipping for you, no doubt. Yes, a whipping for you. Sorry and raw red you’ll be. But me? What of me?” He faced Dill, his chin jutting knife-like from under the cowl. “Go now. The Sending won’t wait. Punishment will come later, but now, go, go, and cage the dead. I must attend to this disaster myself. Go!”
Dill flicked the reins with shaking hands. As the two mares nickered and moved off, bones crunched and popped beneath the soulcage wheels. Dill left Borelock on his knees, sobbing and muttering as he picked up fragments of the fallen archon.
The journey along the rest of the corridor lasted a thousand quick, sharp breaths. At the far end, the horses stopped before the huge banded doors which opened on to the Gatebridge, and Dill found himself looking up at the last skeleton of all. There stood the bones of Callis, the greatest of the first angels. Ulcis’s Herald seemed to have deteriorated more than the archons he’d once commanded: countless staples held his old yellow joints in place. One bony fist clutched a mouldering book, the other a key enveloped by a hissing blue flame. The flame was supposed to burn eternally, but Dill had heard whispers that the priests often forgot to change the gas tank that fuelled it, leaving the light extinguished for days at a time. He bowed his head in reverence all the same.
Two guardsmen in black-enamelled armour pushed the temple doors inwards and bright sunshine leapt in.
Dill blinked. Six corpses lay wrapped in shrouds on the temple steps. Mourners crowded behind them, spanning the Gatebridge from side to side, and beyond them dozens of onlookers had climbed up to perch on or cling to the girders for a better view. A cheer from the younger elements of the crowd was followed by stern hushing from wives and mothers. Pillars of smoke rose from the Bridgeview townhouses. Somewhere distant, a blacksmith’s hammer pounded out dull iron notes.
Dill edged the soulcage forward, out onto the wide esplanade above the temple steps. Then he slid down from his seat and, fumbling with the key, finally managed to unlock the soulcage.
While the guards hefted corpses into the cage, Dill studied the mourners. Hoods hid their faces, but every head was turned his way. They were watching him. Someone pointed and whispered, provoking nervous laughs, and Dill suddenly remembered his eyes: they would be seashell pink in the sunlight. To his dismay, the colour only deepened.
When they had finished loading the corpses, one of the temple guards guided the horses round in a tight circle. Dill climbed back into his seat and flicked the reins. The beasts did not move.
The guard coughed, nodded at the soulcage.
Dill’s eyes reddened further. Once more, he slipped to the ground, and locked the soulcage. At the familiar sound, the horses began to move, so Dill had to scramble after them. A mourner stepped forward and threw up a shower of petals that drifted over both the angel and the dead.
The temple doors were heaved shut behind him and he was confined once more in gloomy silence. A single guard remained inside to escort the soulcage back along the corridor, but even with this limited company the vaulted space felt emptier than before.
Dill urged the horses forward. They were no keener to obey the reins than they had been a moment earlier, moving off only after a while, when they were ready. The axle creaked and the horses nickered. Ten paces behind them, the guard marched along in his armour, his footsteps resounding like a slow, metallic heartbeat. Any guard with a relative among the corpses could claim the right to escort the soulcage, and Dill wondered if this was true today. Did this man have a loved one among the dead? He glanced back, but detected no sign of grief in the man’s face, just weariness, and possibly boredom.
Borelock had meanwhile gathered the shattered bones into a pile beside their empty column and stood hunched over them, his rage still seething about him like an invisible cloud.
At last the small procession reached the Sanctum doors, where Dill checked his appearance. Flecks of dust and bone covered his jacket. He brushed them away as best he could, then finger-smoothed his tufted hair. Rushes of pink still shifted through his irises: he screwed his eyes closed and tried to shed the colour, but it proved hopeless. Something jabbed him in the back: a small bone, perhaps part of a finger, snagged in his feathers.
A key clunked in a lock. Dill stuffed the bone in his pocket, sat up straight, and pulled his wings tighter against his back.
Wrought ironwork as sharp as thorns hedged the Sanctum walls. Spikes of tallow hung from brackets set deep inside, where candles burned and threw clawlike shadows around a wide aperture in the floor. Blessings had been carved in spirals fashioned around the hole, to keep the dead from rising from the abyss below until Ulcis should release them. A chain ran up from a winch fixed to one side, through a system of pulleys set high above, and back down to where it coiled in loops on the floor. This was the very heart of the temple, the heart of Deepgate itself.
Dill shook the reins again and, thankfully, the horses moved into the Sanctum without hesitation, the sound of their hoofs like whiplashes in the silence. The scent of flowers overwhelmed him, so thick he could almost taste it, and he forced himself to take shallow breaths.
Presbyter Sypes leaned on a hardwood lectern. Next to him, three others sat on high-backed chairs facing the aperture of the pit. There was Adjunct Crumb, sitting closest to the Presbyter, Rachel Hael beside him, and a young man who must be her brother.
Deepgate’s new aeronaut commander?
The fourth chair was empty.
They expected someone else. But who would ignore a summons from the temple?
In front of the group lay a body wrapped in silk printed with a hundred blessings. Dill’s gaze lingered on the shroud for a moment before he remembered his duty and climbed up beside the soulcage to help the guard hook it up.
Iron rattled and scraped as the guard dragged the loose chain over the floor. He passed the hook up to Dill, who attached it to the top of the cage, then clambered down to unhitch the horses. The mares trotted back into the corridor on their own, and he hurried to close the doors behind them.
Click.
The temple guard had by now unlocked the winch. He cranked the handle, drawing in the slack. The Presbyter, Adjunct, and guests looked on silently as, slowly, the chain grew taut and, inch by inch, the soulcage began to rise, wheels and all.
“Frailer specimen than Gaine.” Mark’s whisper was strikingly loud in the still of the Sanctum. The commander had leant closer to his sister, looking at Dill out of the corner of his eye. Rachel Hael did not reply, just sat there, staring ahead. The brother slumped back in his chair, nonplussed.
Mark Hael was just as lean as his sister, but there the similarity ended. Deepgate’s aeronaut commander lounged in his chair, arms dangling, an expression of boredom on his deeply tanned face. Rachel looked corpse-pale by comparison. She sat primly upright, dressed in the same grubby leathers she had worn earlier.
Presbyter Sypes was propped against the lectern as though it was all that kept him standing, his sunken eyes fixed on the aperture below. Adjunct Crumb sparkled beside him like a heap of treasure, hands folded neatly in his lap, his whole head scrubbed and pink as a perfume pot. He caught Dill’s eye and gave him an oily wink.
The soulcage swung out over the open abyss and the guard paused to rest, flushed and panting.
Everyone waited.
For a long time, Presbyter Sypes stared down into the void below the soulcage while Rachel, her brother, and Adjunct Crumb all appeared to be deep
in their own thoughts. A breeze stirred the air. Candles flickered. Shadows swayed like wind-blown branches over the floor. Minutes passed. Sypes’s eyelids drooped.
Adjunct Crumb suddenly cleared his throat. The Presbyter’s eyes flicked open. He sniffed the air, frowned, then muttered something Dill didn’t catch.
The Adjunct grimaced.
Presbyter Sypes seemed to remember where he was, and nodded to the guard, who began to lower the cage through the aperture into the waiting abyss. Once it was out of sight, the guard locked the winch, and Dill heard a murmur like cogs whirring in a clock.
“Death,” the Presbyter announced, “is always close. Death is the pause between each breath, the space between each heartbeat.” He lowered his head. “When Ayen sealed the doors to Heaven, she damned us all to Hell. Ghosts of good men abandoned, for ever destined to walk Iril’s corridors among the wicked…”
Dill wiped bone-dust from his sword hilt. A fine weapon; solid and heavy—a sword worthy of a temple archon. And he would grow accustomed, he supposed, to its weight.
“…endless corridors, waist-deep in blood where purulent demons and wraiths, lunatics, murderers, foulest bastards, blasphemers, and whores are damned to wander lost for all eternity…”
Flecks of gold leaf had come away from the curved hand guard. Dill ran a finger over its polished surface. Gold-leafed lead or not, old swords were definitely superior to new swords.
“…but Ayen’s spite strengthened the Maze. Nourished with souls over which it had no claim, Iril grew sentient, cunning…”
Ancient weapons had a presence, a personality, and steel could be sharpened.
“…even now trying to find ways into this world. Had her eldest son, Ulcis, not sought to depose her…”
Dill would ask the priests to sharpen the blade for him. Now that he was actively in temple service, they would have to listen to him.
“…a hundred years of war in Heaven. Only to be cast out, his shattered legion of angels fallen…and imprisoned in the abyss beneath our temple…”