Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  The Heshette warrior clasped the giant’s shoulder, but said nothing.

  Anchor was actually drawing a map now. Using his finger, he sketched out the outline of a coast in the hard sand. “This is your land here,” he said. “This is the Sand Sea, yes? The yellow waters. All this, all around.” A few feet away from this he drew some small round shapes. “These islands we call the Tail of Smoke. Big mountains there, bad smell.”

  The Volcanic Isles. Caulker recognized them from charts he’d seen. Deepgate’s missionary ships had visited those islands.

  “Now look here.” Anchor had drawn another coastline, at least twice as far away again as the Volcanic Isles, but on the opposite side. “This is Pandemeria. High Meria, here…Brownslough, and the Riot Coast.” He made lines in the sand, dividing up the continent. The last squiggle appeared to be a peninsula at the very southern tip of the land mass.

  Caulker did some calculations. Pandemeria lay several hundred leagues beyond the furthest island to which missionary ships had sailed: on the far side of the Strakebreaker Sea, as it had come to be known after the loss of so many expeditions. The waters were said to be so wild and empty that most salt sailors feared to venture near them. Yet new lands meant trade, and profit. And if John Anchor had crossed them…

  How had he crossed them?

  Had his own god’s airship carried him? Caulker wondered if Cospinol would accept another passenger, but the thought of begging a lift on such a gruesome mode of transportation made the cutthroat flinch. Boundless profit or not, he’d have to think about that one.

  “You need ships,” Anchor said. “Strong ships. Very dangerous seas here and here.” He drew wiggles all across the Strakebreaker Sea, almost dividing it in two. “One time there was a great battle here, many ships sunk. Then Iril opened a big door under the water and something escaped.”

  “A monster?” Caulker asked. He had been so caught up in Anchor’s map, he had quite forgotten about the Heshette.

  “No,” Anchor looked thoughtful, then frowned. “More like a piece of Hell, like something the Mesmerists would make.”

  “The Mesmerists?” Anchor had mentioned them before. “These people who came to Pandemeria?”

  “They come to Pandemeria, but they are not people. Big problem with them in the east. You’ll see them soon, I think. They will come here too now.” He looked sternly at Ramnir; his brow creased, and he stabbed his finger in the center of the first land mass he had drawn to indicate the Deadsands. “Big door to Hell opens, the Mesmerists come out. Same in Pandemeria, same in Deepgate. Much blood.”

  The horseman met the giant’s gaze. “Why are you here, John Anchor? What is attached to the other end of that rope?”

  Anchor gave a deep sigh. “I go to Deepgate for two reasons,” he said. “One: I kill someone. Maybe she is an angel, maybe a demigod, no matter. This part is easy. The other task…” He flexed his shoulders. “This part is not so easy.”

  Over the next hour he explained about the god whose skyship he dragged behind him.

  “Cospinol will try to seal the breach under Deepgate. Many things to consider, many dangers. It is a problem for you if my master fails. You have no other gods here, no great armies to fight the Mesmerists. Much of this land will become Hell, I think.” He nodded his head and stabbed his finger into the sand again, pointing to the distant land he’d drawn across the Strakebreaker Sea. “If I don’t come back from Deepgate, it is safer for you to find ships and go here.”

  Poison and acid fell from the sky. The greasy, colourful rain spattered the Deadsands, hissing and smoking wherever it fell. It pummeled the clumps of blue and green ash, reducing them to smouldering mud, and it struck the top of the leaning groyne under which Rachel and Trench were trying to hide. But while there was just enough space under the narrow shelter for the assassin to keep all but a few drops from striking her knees, it was a different matter for Trench.

  Rachel tried to pull him as much under the iron overhang as she could, but it was useless. His wings were too large. There simply wasn’t space for them under the metal canopy.

  He continued to scream as the lethal rain burned his feathers and tendons.

  “Lie down!” Rachel yelled. “There isn’t room! We’ll cover your wings with sand.”

  The assassin tried to push Trench down while she scooped up sand and threw it over him, but he struggled against her. He was panicking, fighting her, oblivious to everything but his own pain. In blind terror, he shoved her out from under the groyne and tried to squeeze himself further into the gap where she had been. Even then he could not fit his wings in fully behind him. He wheeled around and tried to back up against the tilting barricade, but now his head and neck were exposed.

  He screamed again.

  Lying outside where Trench had shoved her, Rachel was fully exposed to the caustic downpour. Drops pattered against her armour, and the smell of singed leather filled her nostrils. She scrambled back under cover. A heartbeat later the piercing pains in her back and thighs told her where acid had eaten through to her flesh. She rolled on the ground, and shoveled sand over her thighs.

  By the time the rain stopped, the stench of seared flesh and feathers hung thickly in the air. Trench lay on the steaming ground, hissing quietly through his teeth. His wings—Dill’s wings, Rachel reminded herself—now looked like black mulch. All of his feathers had burned away, leaving tattered skin full of black-rimed holes and glistening white bone.

  A vast plume of white smoke had risen above the abyss and now covered the sky like gauze. The darker red and black clouds had been torn apart and blown far across the wasteland. All around Rachel the Deadsands hissed and shimmered in painfully harsh sunlight. Wisps of foul-smelling steam drifted from the tops of dunes, while shards of bright metal glinted where they had descended and lodged in the sands. All trace of the colourful ash had been dissolved in the acid shower.

  “I had forgotten what real pain was like,” Trench said through clenched teeth. “I’m sorry for putting you in danger, Rachel Hael. I behaved shamefully.”

  “Forget it,” Rachel said. She knew there was nothing in the field kit to ease his pain. The Spine did not consider such drugs necessary. She could do nothing but watch him suffer.

  Somehow he managed to stagger upright. Scraps of his chain-mail shirt slid from his back and shoulders, revealing swathes of blistered red flesh beneath. Pieces of skin fell from his ruined wings. “The world has changed since I was last here,” he wheezed. “What could have caused such an explosion?”

  “Fuel,” she suggested. “I don’t know…Everything our chemists ever invented they stored in the Poison Kitchens.”

  “The Veil has disappeared,” Trench observed.

  She could hardly bear to look at him. Even now smoke continued to rise from globs of poison sticking to his eviscerated wings. Sunlight shone through the bloody fans of bone and skin. His face had paled yet his eyes raged darkly.

  “Let us survey the damage,” he said.

  They walked back towards the edge of the abyss. The angel limped slowly, painfully, but Rachel slackened her pace to match his. She was afraid to offer him support, afraid even to touch his seared flesh.

  The journey took an age, but finally the pair drew near to the southern edge of the steaming chasm. To the east of them the tin bunkers of the reconstruction workers’ settlement gleamed brilliantly, yet it appeared to be deserted. Rachel could see no trace of life in the dusty streets, only the metal skeleton of an airship, its polished ribs scattered over hundreds of yards.

  At the edge of the precipice Rachel looked down and saw nothing but a pool of white smog. “The city is gone,” she said.

  “No.”

  Then Rachel spotted chains. Amidst the rising steam, she saw the sweeping curve of one, two, and then four foundation chains. Between them hung a ragged web of smaller cross-chains, each supporting a score of houses and hanging bridges. A dark mass hunched in the center of the pit, like an island floating in a sea of
mist. “The temple,” she said. “That fucking thing just won’t let go.”

  Still hanging upside down, the great building had nevertheless survived the explosion. Tens of thousands of people would be trapped inside. Now there was no way for them to escape.

  Trench turned away, his wings hanging from his shoulders like a steaming cape. “We must leave,” he said stiffly. “Nothing has changed. The Mesmerists will return soon.” He took a step, then stumbled and hissed through his teeth in pain.

  Rachel smelled burning. “Wait,” she said. “Let me see your wings.”

  “There is no time,” he gasped. “My message…” He crumpled forward, landing on his knees in the sand.

  Rachel examined him. “The poisons are still burning you,” she said. “You can’t go on like this.”

  “Then remove my wings,” he said.

  She just stared at him.

  “You have a knife.”

  “A kitchen knife,” she said. “We should go to the temple guard barracks, we could look for—”

  “I cannot delay,” he snapped. Then he sucked in a deep breath and steadied his temper. “Forgive my outburst. These ruined wings are useless to me now, and amputation would seem to be the quickest and most practical solution.” He paused. “Please use the knife.”

  “Here?”

  “Here.”

  Rachel took two tourniquets from the field kit and wrapped one around the base of each of Trench’s wings. She cleaned his flesh with alcohol, then forced him to drink most of the remainder of the bottle. She found a strap of leather for him to bite down on. Kneeling on the sand before her, he grunted and hissed through the corners of his mouth while she worked, but he did not move or cry out.

  When it was done she doused the wounds with the last of the whisky and bound his stumps tightly in fresh bandages. She took the labourer’s sackcloth shirt from her satchel and eased it over his wounded shoulders.

  Once more Rachel found herself heading into the Deadsands with an angel by her side. But this time, although her companion was here in the flesh, everything else had changed. The young angel’s body had been possessed by one of his own ancestors, while her real friend’s soul now resided in Iril: one more ghost among the endless dead. If he were ever to return, it would only be to discover that he would never fly again.

  No Spine were about, but Rachel decided to keep to her original plan. The temple assassins would still control Deepgate’s main caravan routes, and she did not know how many more airships were at large. They would head southeast towards Cinderbark Wood, traveling by night whenever possible, and hopefully reach Sandport in six or seven days.

  Trench walked stiffly. The low sun cast a long shadow across the sands before him, but it was no longer the shadow of an angel. Now wingless and dressed in rags, he could easily have been mistaken for a common labourer. He wore a grim expression on his slender face, and his eyes belonged to a much older person than the young angel he had usurped.

  But when he glanced at Rachel, she noticed a glimmer of the desire she had seen earlier.

  He looked away suddenly. “I have been dead too long,” he said. “In Hell, pain and lust are nothing but memories. One can learn to control them, to forget about them. But the living are victims of their own blood.”

  “Obviously you haven’t spent much time with the Spine,” she replied.

  He grunted. “They, too, have changed since I was last alive.” He glanced at his wounded hands, at the bound stumps of his fingers. “Tell me about my descendant,” he said. “What was Dill like?”

  “He annoyed me when I first met him,” she admitted. “Deepgate’s priests brought him up to believe the world worked in a certain way. They sheltered him from everything, even banned him from flying. It was only a matter of time before he rebelled.”

  “And you helped him with that?” Trench asked.

  She shrugged. “I only did it to annoy the priests—to get back at them. In the end I realized he was the only thing they hadn’t corrupted. I think they hid their own cruelty from him because he represented an ideal they could no longer recognize in themselves.”

  “Was he a warrior?”

  She remembered the way Dill had fumbled with his sword when she had tried to teach him to fight—he had been the most inept pupil she had ever seen. But then she recalled how he had stepped between her and Ulcis’s army on the mountain of bones. He had even tried to protect Carnival. “Yes,” she said firmly. “He was.”

  “Then the First Citadel will protect him for as long as it can. Hasp will not be disappointed. He welcomes the brave and punishes the unworthy.”

  “Hasp?”

  “Hasp was Ulcis’s brother, and leader of the First Citadel. He has already taken a special interest in Dill.”

  Ulcis’s brother? A sense of dread crept up Rachel’s spine. “Why is your leader so interested in Dill?”

  The archon looked at her strangely. “Dill returned from Hell.”

  Some time later they reached the edge of a petrified woodland at the summit of a high bank of dunes. Hard black branches rose up against the darkening sky before them. These trees had been dead for almost three thousand years, drained of life by the same force that had turned the landscape to desert when Ulcis had fallen to these lands from Heaven. The boles were as black and glassy as obsidian, in stark contrast to the soft white sands between. Rachel scooped up a handful of the powdery stuff and let it trickle away between her fingers; the grains glittered like crushed test tubes.

  Fumes still leached from the abyss and drifted across the heavens to the northwest. It may have simply been the sunset, but it seemed to Rachel that the vapors had taken on a reddish hue. Was the Mesmerist Veil already beginning to re-form?

  They followed a meandering path through the stone trees. Twilight deepened, turning the sand underfoot from white to pink to maroon. Rachel heard the scratch of hookfleas and kisser-crabs under the sand, and watched for depressions in the ground. Yet her eyes kept returning to the canopy overhead. The branches came alive with twinkling lights as the skies darkened and the crystal thorns reflected the last rays of sunset. Soon the whole woodland seemed to shimmer under its own weight of stars.

  Trench stopped to rest against the bole of a tree. His face looked pinched and ashen. “I keep forgetting that this is not my body,” he gasped. “It has certain limits.”

  “And your soul in Hell doesn’t?”

  He shook his head. “A soul is ethereal. In Iril’s realm you are simply what you believe yourself to be. Your own mind decides the shape and limits of its form…within reason. Before the Mesmerists, most spirits simply resembled their original bodies. In Hell I appeared to be much the same as I had looked in life: an archon not unlike your friend, Dill, albeit somewhat taller and broader.”

  “How did you die, Trench?”

  He grunted. “Carnival murdered me.”

  Rachel closed her mouth.

  “The Church sent me after her,” the angel went on. “I was the second born to my father, and thus expendable. I trained every day for twenty years, yet she still defeated me.” He looked away. “But she had already feasted, and so she abandoned my soul to Hell.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I got one good cut in. Not many can claim to have given Carnival a scar.” He stared into the trees for a long moment. “I know she’s still alive in this world somewhere. After I deliver my message, I intend to look for her.”

  “And if you find her?”

  He smiled and rose to his feet. “I’ll kill her.”

  Soon afterwards they came across a strange trail. Rachel’s Spine training had involved extensive travel throughout the Deadsands, but she still struggled to identify the cause of it. She had never seen so bizarre a set of impressions. The sand between the stone boles had been disturbed by a much larger creature than a kisser-crab or snake, something which had left a shallow, undulating ditch behind it. There were no footprints, yet the creature was evidently man-sized.
It appeared to have crawled across the ground in a wormlike fashion.

  The trail followed the route Rachel planned to take, which made sense as the only clean spring for leagues around lay in that direction. Looking back, it seemed to originate from a place near to where they themselves had entered the petrified woodland.

  Had something crawled up there to get a look at Deepgate, and then returned the way it had come?

  “Any ideas?” she asked.

  “It’s not any animal I know,” Trench replied.

  They followed the trail to the opposite side of the woodland. Beyond this point the land sloped away to the east, north, and south: a vast expanse of pale, rippling dunes and darker patches of scrub. Northwards towards Blackthrone and the caravan trail, a curious bank of cloud or mist smothered the landscape like a dim grey veil, almost as if another city was burning there.