Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  Light burst from the device, and it began to swell, quickly increasing in size. The air around it shimmered and blurred like frosted glass. A bubble was forming. Dill backed away as the sphere grew larger than the doorway, pushing the walls outwards on each side. Now voices were issuing from the expanding ball of light, strange whispers in a language the young angel did not recognize.

  “Step inside,” Hasp said.

  Dill hesitated. The space before him writhed with threads of light and hissing voices.

  “Do it!” Hasp demanded.

  The young angel stepped into the sphere. A feeling of terrible disorientation overcame him, and for a heartbeat he lost all sense of connection to the world around him. He was floating in a sea of light.

  And then his feet struck solid ground with a resounding boom. The swarm of lights faded, revealing a spherical glass chamber as large as a planetarium. Opaque walls curved up over the young angel’s head, full of scintillations. Standing before him was the god, Hasp.

  Hasp’s armour had changed. Instead of his old battered steel, he wore a suit of silvered metal. His grey wings and hair had turned as white as starlight, but his eyes held the same wry humor. “We’re standing inside a fragment of Iril,” he said, “the god of death and darkness himself.”

  “Iril?”

  “Our father was shattered during the War Against Heaven. The Mesmerists constructed this tool from one of the pieces of him they managed to recover.” He grinned. “Then we stole it from them.”

  Dill gazed up at the swarms of stars. “It’s…beautiful.”

  “Here we can meet without setting foot in each other’s souls.” Hasp clasped Dill’s shoulder. “You must learn how to adapt and control your environment, and how to arm and armour yourself properly. Just look at your current armour…”

  Dill’s tattered mail shirt hung like curtains of rust from his shoulders. It was an identical manifestation of the armoured garment he had worn since leaving Deepgate, the one he had died in.

  “You’re only dressed in that sack of rust because you remember wearing it when you died. So change it. Visualize yourself in something stronger and finer.”

  The young angel envisioned himself wearing a suit of silvered plate, like Hasp’s own armour. Nothing happened; he was still standing there in his old rusty mail.

  Hasp grunted. “So far so bad. Try on that suit behind you.”

  Dill turned. A few feet behind him stood a wooden mannequin dressed in shining new armour. “You made this?”

  “There’s enough power left in this sphere to create armour and weapons for ten thousand archons. But it’s only one of two pieces of the shattered god we possess, and we daren’t drain it too much.” Hasp helped Dill into the suit, strapping the light plates together. “The other fragment is all that keeps the Mesmerists from storming the First Citadel.”

  The suit felt as light as silk, and yet the hardened plates were as tough as steel. Dill flexed his wings, then lifted his arms; the metal gleamed under the swirling lights.

  “Now a sword,” Hasp said.

  Dill turned again, expecting to see a weapon beside the now-empty mannequin, but he was disappointed.

  “Create it yourself,” Hasp said. “Simply will it to appear in your hand.”

  Dill concentrated. He felt the grip swell inside his closed fist and watched the air solidify into a long heavy blade. A gold guard extended over his hand. And suddenly he was holding his old sword again, the very weapon he had inherited from his forebears.

  “Hmm…” The god frowned. “This blade is too fragile and unwieldy. Try again.”

  And so Dill focused his thoughts on the weapon again. The steel flowed like liquid silver, the blade shortened, and the guard retracted to form a simple crosspiece.

  “Much better,” Hasp said. “Now defend yourself. Show me what you can do.” A blade suddenly appeared in the god’s hand and he lunged at Dill.

  Dill had never been combat-trained, and his inexperience was soon evident. Hasp disarmed him in a heartbeat. Dill’s newly manifested sword clattered across the glass floor.

  “This is not good, lad,” the god said darkly. “Ulcis’s priests have been woefully lax in their duties. They ought to have shown you how to take care of yourself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Pick up your sword. We have a lot of work to do.”

  Training lasted until long after Dill was exhausted. And then it began again. Hasp showed him how to shrug off his weariness by force of will alone. Fatigue meant nothing in Hell, where the body was simply a manifestation of the soul.

  “Souls,” Hasp explained, “do not tire.”

  Days seemed to pass within that sphere, but the shimmering lights kept the same level of brilliance. Dill thought about nothing except the next attack and how to foil it. And Hasp attacked him relentlessly. The battle-archon did not waver or spare his opponent once. When Dill made a mistake, he suffered for it.

  “Souls,” Hasp said, “do not feel pain.”

  Dill winced up at him from the floor of the sphere, and clutched two bleeding fingers in his other fist. This soul was in a lot of pain.

  “Bah!” Hasp gestured with his sword. “It’s all in your mind, lad, and yet your mind isn’t strong enough to let go of it. If I plunged this weapon through your heart right now, you’d die.” He frowned. “If we can’t detach you from this fiction with which you’ve surrounded yourself, then we can’t take you back to the First Citadel. Do you want to be trapped here? No? Then stop whining about spilled blood that does not exist and get up!”

  Dill rose, but the blood on his hands still felt warm and slick.

  Time passed in endless dazzling coruscations: weeks or years, he could not say. Dill parried and lunged, made feints, ducked and wove around the god’s blade, until Hasp was suddenly grinning.

  “Drop the sword,” Hasp said.

  The young angel tried to comply, but he couldn’t. The weapon’s hilt had fused with his hand. Welds had appeared where his fingers touched the metal. In panic, he flailed his arm to separate himself from the sword. It would not budge.

  “Good,” Hasp said. “Now it’s time to rest.”

  “Do souls need rest?”

  “Ha! Perhaps I should have said ponder. You need to remember who you were before you stepped inside this sphere. And then we’ll begin again.”

  Blood now soaked the ground between the Soul Middens; it flowed from broken masonry and woodwork and gathered in pools. The Icarates had smashed through a full third of the nearest Midden, ripping out the consciousnesses and loading them into cages which now crackled with Mesmeric energy.

  Bones and debris continued to fall from the sky, scattering across a wide area. And this was the problem. There was no way to tell exactly where the temple angel had fallen. He might already be buried somewhere deep inside one of the great, growing buildings. So far Harper’s sceptre had not been able to locate him, or any battle-archon.

  The souls in this particular Midden had sensed the Icarates’ attack on their outer reaches. Now this mountainous building, this composite of individual manifested souls, had begun to change. The stubs of rude battlements and defensive towers were forming in places. Doors were growing reinforced iron bands across their planks, or simply shrinking and becoming stouter.

  It was an unconscious reaction to the perceived threat. None of these souls had been in Hell long enough to learn how to adapt their surroundings with any skill. These battlements and towers would not be effective—they were merely affectations, a reflex display. And yet some of the souls were now working together in an altogether stranger way.

  Three hundred yards away, one of the older Soul Middens had begun to creep away. This hill-sized mass of houses, balconies, and towers was moving, sluglike, across the bloody ground. Somehow, the thousands of souls within the Midden had contrived a way to flee.

  Harper watched with fascination. Those dwellings at ground level had sheared away from the souls trapped below. M
ortar crumbled and wood split as the Midden inched further away, leaving behind a nest of rooms without ceilings…and a trail of blood. The souls at the base of the Midden were sacrificing themselves for the good of those above. They were screaming.

  And yet this painful separation and flight was doomed to fail. The cluttered mound of buildings could not move fast enough. The Icarates paid it no heed, aware that whenever they decided to take their hammers to the shifting edifice, it would be nearby for the taking.

  While those souls trapped inside the Icarate cages moaned, the dogcatchers had returned to the basin to feed and to wallow. Like most creatures in Hell they drew energy from the red mire, the endless pools, canals, and gurgling channels within the Maze. Here they feasted on fresher fare than normal.

  Harper’s sceptre hummed suddenly, and the lights within the glass orb pulsed. Icarates paused in their destruction to turn and stare.

  Something…?

  The engineer swept her sceptre across the scene before her. A ghostlike figure appeared within the glass: a powerful battle-archon. The image was vague, but the angel appeared to be clad in armour. He was striding through a long stone vault. He slotted a sword into a weapon rack, and then stooped to place a small glowing object inside a chest. The sceptre purred, and then the scene faded once more.

  “An archon,” Harper said, pointing one of her glass limbs towards the ripped-open rooms left by the creeping Soul Midden. “He’s deep underground.”

  “The ability to change,” Hasp said to Dill, “is everything in Hell. King Menoa has exploited the uncanny nature of this realm to forge demons. A soul can be persuaded to assume any shape and to serve any master, and the Mesmerists are very good at persuasion.”

  They were facing each other through the open doorway between their chambers. Hasp had deemed Dill’s progress with the sword to be satisfactory, although the young angel suspected that the god was secretly pleased.

  “These chambers are a part of you,” Hasp said. “So you ought to be able to change them. When the Mesmerists remove the core of a soul from rooms like these, they must bolster that soul with external energy or else it withers and becomes a shade. The rooms are left without the will to do anything but bleed.” He paused to gesture again at the paintings on Dill’s walls, the thirteen souls from Devon’s elixir who had taken refuge within the young angel. “Your chambers here are different. Most of the energy in this place comes from these interlopers. It ought to simplify the process of extracting you.”

  “Extracting me?”

  “Time is running out, lad. It would be better if you’re strong enough to move your environment with you, but if the Mesmerists find you before then, you’ll have to run for it.”

  Dill’s nerves were threaded through the very floorboards and walls. The room’s stone and timber was his bones. The thought of leaving this place terrified him. “Show me how to change the rooms,” he said.

  Hasp grunted. “You just need to concentrate. You want something? Then think it into existence.”

  So Dill concentrated. He imagined a stack of parchment and some charcoals, much like the ones his father Gaine had given him as a child.

  A vague white shape appeared on the floor. It looked rather like one of the temple candles. The moment this thought occurred to him, the shape solidified. It was indeed a candle, exactly like the one he had just imagined. He picked it up, unnerved as ever by the odd sensation of his own fingers pressing into this manifestation of self.

  Hasp called over from the door, “I advise you not to try burning that. Don’t even imagine that candlewick on fire.”

  Dill couldn’t help it. Hasp’s own words planted the image of a burning wick in the young angel’s mind, and suddenly the candle flared into life. He dropped it at once, but the pain did not diminish. He was burning.

  “Get out of the rain!” the god yelled.

  And Dill’s pain stopped as a sudden downpour of water engulfed him. Droplets of water cascaded from the ceiling, spattering against every solid surface. The candle flame had gone out. Dill felt the rain strike the floorboards and the furniture; he sensed it trickling down the walls and windows like sweat down his own neck.

  The god laughed. “Forgive me for putting that suggestion in your head, but it’s better than the sensation of burning alive, is it not? I’ll leave you to figure out how to stop the rain by yourself. If you don’t you’ll drown.” Still chuckling, he wandered back into his own castle.

  Dill stood in the downpour, feeling miserable. The water had already risen past his toes. He imagined himself turning off a tap, but it didn’t work. He pictured the Deadsands on a hot summer day.

  But the rain still continued.

  And then someone tapped him on the back of the head. Startled, Dill whirled round. There was nobody there. Water splashed off his fine furnishings. Already the ceiling plaster had begun to bow, a sensation Dill experienced as a soft ache in his skull. But the room was empty.

  Another tap to the back of his head.

  Again Dill wheeled. At first he saw nobody, but then he noticed the young woman standing outside his window. The glass panes had partially misted, but he recognized the rainbow dress. His neighbor! Dripping wet, he walked over and unlatched the window.

  She smiled, showing dimples. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said brightly. “But this wall is leaking. I’m getting flooded in here.”

  “Oh.”

  Her large dark eyes shone. “I wouldn’t mind so much, but this water is…” She hesitated. “Well, the water is an incarnation of your soul. I’m afraid it’s giving me some odd thoughts.”

  “Odd thoughts?”

  She laughed. “Your thoughts. They’re very nice, but they’re spoiling my rugs.” She leaned closer, until her body brushed the window frame. “Dill, would you like me to put a suggestion in your head? One which might stop this silly downpour?”

  Dill smelled perfume.

  The rain ceased abruptly.

  “That’s better,” the young woman said. “I’m Mina Greene.”

  “I’m…” But she already knew his name. How much else did she know about him?

  “Of course I know who you are,” she admitted. “You’re the whole reason I’m here. I have something for you—wait there.” She hurried back into her gloomy chamber, splashing through puddles. “I had to wait until that bothersome old god had gone. I doubt he’d approve of this.”

  “Approve of what?”

  “Just wait!” She rummaged among shelves of skulls in one of the alcoves. After a moment she withdrew a sword and brought it over to the window.

  Dill frowned. “You’re here to give me a sword? Who are you? How do you know me?”

  “I’m Mina Greene,” she repeated. “And I know as much about you as anyone from Deepgate. More, probably. It’s my job to know a lot of things.” She weighed the sword in her hand. “But no, I can’t give you this. It’s from the Forest of War. Basilis would be furious if I just handed it over.” Instead, she placed the edge of the sword against her own chamber’s window ledge. Then she grimaced and slid the blade sideways, cutting loose a sliver of wood. Blood welled from the gouge she’d made.

  Mina gasped. She hopped in place, her hands clamped together against her breast until the pain subsided. “Blood magic doesn’t work in Hell,” she said in a strained voice. “So we’ll have to do this a different way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Mesmerists want you,” she said. “Why else do you think Hasp risked his soul in that portal to find you and bring you here?” Her brows rose, and she smiled again. “And if what I’ve been told about King Menoa is true, he’ll find a way to get you. Old Hasp isn’t as strong as he used to be. I wouldn’t put all your faith in his ability to protect you.” Now she held up the splinter of wood she’d cut from her window ledge. “So I’m going to give you this.”

  “A bit of wood?”

  “A bit of me!” She managed to look cross and absurdly beautiful at the sa
me time. “How else will I be able to find you if I need to? This is what I came here to give you.” She huffed. “Do you think we should just sit back while Menoa brings his version of Hell out into the world? We’re not all as weak and foolish as the gods think we are. Cohl’s Shades have come to Pandemeria, and John Anchor’s stomping about somewhere. And there are others, too.” She smiled. “Like me. Now hold out your hand.”

  Dill reached for the splinter.

  “No, not like that,” she said. “Like this.” She grabbed his hand and slid the thin needle of wood into his wrist.

  When the pain and shock of what Mina Greene had done to him finally subsided, Dill found himself lying curled up and shivering on the floor. Someone had closed and locked the shutters, and three vases of fresh flowers had appeared on the sideboard, but otherwise his room looked unchanged.