Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel

by Campbell, Alan

  She spotted Carrick. The chief liaison officer was untangling himself from the revelers, nodding greetings and heading this way, and so Harper shook out her hair and gathered it up to tie back. By the time he opened the armoury door below the hunting deck, she had replaced her cap.

  “Glorious, they tell me,” Carrick said happily, climbing the narrow steps to join her on the platform. “The lights, mirrors, glass. Menoa has surpassed himself.” He was a solid man, hard-faced, but not ugly. One hand tugged, as always, at the neat viridian collar of his new uniform, where Harper glimpsed a length of the pewter chain he wore with such pride. It had been given to him by the same Pandemerian Railroad Company financiers he had just been entertaining below. “It’s fitting, I suppose,” he said, “if a trifle ostentatious. Must have cost a fortune. They’re burning enough aether back there to light up Heaven.”

  He reached her and put an arm around her waist and pulled her close. His hand slipped inside her jacket and found her breast. His skin was hot, hers cold and dead. She breathed in a lungful of Mesmerist mist. Harper had learned not to flinch, but she couldn’t hide the way her jaw tensed, and she couldn’t smile for him.

  “How can you be so cold?” Carrick said. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To be among the living again…” He squeezed her hard enough to make her gasp, before releasing his grip. “Now why don’t you just loosen up and enjoy the party?”

  Harper said nothing. She gazed across Cog City, and when she narrowed her eyes the sea of roofs and funnels became a different sea: of towering grey and black waves, vigorous and storm-lashed and angry. But then the vision faded and she was looking once more at the drowned ruins and rusting graveyard. Half a mile away, a pale blue rag, snared on a cable, snapped and fluttered. It might once have been part of a naval uniform.

  “I already bought salvage rights,” Carrick said, inclining his head towards the piles of rotting steel and iron scattered throughout the city. “When Menoa issues claim edicts, I’ll have money, Alice, lots of it. I could buy you a house of your own in the city, a private place—”

  “Out of sight of your friends.”

  He didn’t look at her. “I’m offering you a comfortable life. You could get back your old job at Special Engineering. Keene would have to rehire you. You wouldn’t need to return to the Readjustment Center.”

  Harper gave his offer serious consideration. In the month since her departure from Hell, her life had felt like a leaf tossed about in a storm. She had not been spared the Readjustment Center: the examinations, the mountains of paperwork, and the endless interviews with social integration officers.

  Just another few days, Miss Harper. There are some more questions we need to ask you. If you’d be kind enough to look at this list and tell me the names you recognize…

  Cog’s Readjustment Center had been built to accommodate a hundred and fifty citizens, but Harper’s room had been the only one occupied. The curtains, towels, and bed linen had all been brand-new.

  Those souls before her had left the Maze via a different route.

  Carrick was still gazing at the derelict ships. “That’s a gold mine,” he said. “It would be a shame to let it all go to waste.”

  The ships had been forged in response to Rys’s rain: paddle steamers created for the Supply Effort; cruisers and pickets, cannon boats and destroyers—all built from the souls of Cog’s dead. Some wit had since named this place the Sea of Invention. Harper remembered when there had been nothing here but shops and taverns and homes.

  Cog Island had changed so much in her life and deathtime: from urban sprawl to boiling sea to this weeping landscape of scrap. Rys had conjured the endless rain, his promise to wash away the Mesmerist Veil and restore human rule to Pandemeria. But his plan had failed. The waters were now draining, the pools and canals—poisoned and starkly beautiful in the failing light—sinking back into the earth, or perhaps back into whichever pocket of that god’s imagination they had come from. But wherever they went, they left in their wake a thick red scum.

  And for all their glory The Pride of Eleanor Damask’s pretty carriages would one day dull and shatter. The human passengers didn’t care. They would be gone by then, dancing at some other venue. Tonight they were burning enough aether to light up Heaven.

  “Tomorrow will mark a turning point in history,” Carrick said. “No god has ever knelt at the feet of humans before. It’s a new beginning for us all. After Rys signs the treaty, you’ll see great changes around here. King Menoa has promised to reward his most loyal servants. He’s going to release two thousand souls in the first year. You won’t be alone much longer, Alice.”

  Metal winds moaned in the distance.

  “I’m not alone,” she said. “Can’t you hear the ships singing?”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about the unaltered: the families of those people who stood by Menoa throughout this war.”

  Harper moved a hand to her chest, feeling for the empty soulpearl she wore on a cord inside her blouse. For a breathless moment she couldn’t find it, and then her hand closed on the familiar jewel and she breathed. The pearl was there, close to her heart, cold against her cold skin.

  Carrick was gazing back along the ever-lengthening curve of steel track behind the train, to where the Mesmerist Eye towered over the concrete terminus building. The twin wheels, set back to back on opposing axles, revolved gradually in opposite directions. Even from this distance, the hourly shift-change klaxons could be heard blaring out across the drowned city. Crowds of administrators would be disembarking the lowest of the twelve Workwheel office gondolas, their own weight having helped to drag the mighty steel spokes through another 180 degrees. Now they would receive their food parcels and begin the long climb up the central scaffold to the uppermost gondola of the Sleepwheel. Other workers, their satchels full of paperwork and candles, were already leaving the bottom of the Sleepwheel to join them on the scaffold for their own ascent to the top of the Workwheel. In this manner the Pandemerian Railroad Company powered the machines in their Highcliffe laboratories, while maximizing return from the food issued to their staff.

  “Another one jumped last week,” Carrick said. “I’ll never understand these people. They’re given a good job, decent food, and soft bunks. They get plenty of exercise, and the best damn view on Cog Island. And what do they do? Spit it all back in the company’s face and take the big leap.”

  “Their lives are a constant uphill struggle,” Harper said. “Don’t you ever feel like that?”

  Carrick pulled away from her suddenly. “Only with you,” he said, turning to face the bright curve of glass carriages stretching ahead of them. The train was now thumping across the New Sill Bridge above what had once been Knuckletown Port District. Down below, the former bridge could still be seen below the murky waters, the stanchions and girders now furred with red weeds. “I need you back inside now,” he said. “We’ve had complaints of something dead aboard the train. God-awful gibbering noises coming from the heating ducts in car C, down near the slave holds. Likely it’s just a ghost one of the passengers brought aboard, so be gentle with it. If you send it screaming back to the Maze, I won’t be the one who has to tell them.”

  Harper nodded and turned to go.

  “Alice,” Carrick said. His teeth looked strangely bright in the uneasy light. “You will be gentle with it, won’t you?”

  To reach car C, Harper had no choice but to walk through the crowd gathered in the music carriage. The party was in full swing and most of the guests appeared to be drunk or well on the way. The pianist saw her and broke abruptly from the waltz he was playing into a crescendo of notes that reached towards a climax as she approached, halting abruptly the moment she reached him.

  “A toast,” he said loudly, for the benefit of the room. “To the first woman to return from Hell still wearing lipstick. I give you Cog City’s most beautiful corpse.”

  The crowd closed in on Harper and she found herself pinned by the
attention of a roomful of well-dressed gentlemen and ladies: the frocks all puffs of almond-, orange-, and rose-coloured silk, the suits in rich dark hues of plum and whalehide. The men wore snub-nosed pistols or Mesmeric rapiers at their belts, the blades sheathed in white leather, as had been the fashion since Adelere’s adaptation of Cohl’s Shades had become the most talked-about play in Highcliffe. Glasses were raised, as was a voice from the back of the room: “Did you say most beautiful, Ersimmin? Which among the dead do you rate second to her?”

  The pianist played a dramatic flurry of notes. “Perhaps I should have said most human,” he said. “Our resurrected dead have lacked that quality until now. But you shouldn’t dismiss all of them out of hand, Mr. Lovich. Menoa’s hordes aren’t all fangs and blisters. In fact, there’s a pretty little sloop lying on its side in Covenant Square

  . I’ve had my eye on it for a while.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t play that tune every time I speak,” the other man said.

  Ersimmin said, “It’s from a famous play, you know.”

  The other man sighed. Harper thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t immediately place him.

  A young woman in a puffy peach dress and black elbow-length gloves sauntered up to Harper. A fat necklace of soulpearls looped her powdered neck. “I think it’s disgusting,” she said. “Do we really need to plunder Hell for workers? Aren’t there living people who can do her job just as well? No offense, dear; I’m sure the Maze was lovely.”

  This elicited a chorus of stifled shrieks and giggles from the younger ladies present, a collected frown from the older women, and a unanimous expression of bemused innocence from the gentlemen, each effected with various degrees of skill.

  Harper realized she was staring at the woman’s soulpearls, and lowered her eyes. The speaker had half a hundred of them, there, on display like ordinary jewelry for anyone to see.

  A collector, then.

  King Menoa had already rewarded this one well.

  “Excuse me.” Harper moved to push on through the crowd.

  An elderly, white-whiskered man in a crimson suit extended an arm, blocking her way. He wore an extraordinarily fine Mesmeric sword at his hip, the pommel an exquisite knot of silace and crystal, the sheath an alabaster spike to match his mustache. “Please…Miss Harper, isn’t it? Won’t you stay and join us for a drink? My name is Duncan Jones.” He gave a curt bow. “I served with your husband in the King’s Reservists. Damn fine young man. We fought together at Larnaig.” He paused a moment, his cheeks flushing. “I’m sorry about what happened. This must be a difficult journey for you.”

  “How can it be difficult?” said the woman in the peach dress. “Demons don’t have feelings, Mr. Jones.”

  “She’s not a demon, Edith.”

  “Why? Because she still has breasts?”

  Another flurry of giggles swept through the younger ladies. Jones’s face reddened further; his whiskers twitched. Several of the other gentlemen had the decency to look embarrassed, but not, Harper noted, Ersimmin. The pianist was grinning.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Edith went on, “if she’s come from Hell then she’s earned that title.” She eyed the heavy flask and rubber bulb attached to Harper’s belt. “Don’t let her appearance deceive you. This woman breathes human blood, just like the rest of those foul creatures.”

  Harper was already beginning to feel woozy. The mist pumps had not been switched on in here, and the air in this carriage was too thin for her dead lungs. But the young lady’s words had stung her, and she resisted inhaling a breath of mist from her bulb.

  “Please let me pass,” she said.

  “Feeling faint, dear?”

  “Leave her be, Edith,” Jones said. “She doesn’t look well.”

  The young lady raised her chin and gave the old reservist a supercilious glance, but she stepped aside to let the engineer pass.

  Harper didn’t meet her eyes for more than an instant. She’d possessed a temper once, but it had dried up long ago. She left the music car as Ersimmin began to play a new tune, each note perfectly timed to match her rapidly retreating footsteps.

  Car C boasted a lounge of gilt-edged pastel furniture, plush recliners and low tables, and scattered reading lamps fashioned like jelly-fish. It was currently deserted. Reflections of the room bounced back from the etched glass walls and gave the impression of a multitude of identical lounges placed side by side, but behind those phantom copies Harper spied the dark shapes of buildings and abandoned demon ships in Knuckletown slipping past. She didn’t have much time. The train would soon be pulling in to its first stop.

  The human passengers were about to meet their hellish leader in the flesh.

  Harper felt dizzy. She slipped the rubber bulb from her tool belt, raised it to her lips, and inhaled deeply. The dense mist cloyed at her throat, but it cleared her head and brought some colour back to her skin. She replenished the bulb with a trickle of liquid from her flask, and then considered the job ahead.

  The lounge had a glass floor. Harper did her best to ignore the upturned faces in the slave pens below, but their stares burned into the back of her neck. She didn’t know which was worse, the gaunt, pleading looks from the slaves or the baleful glare from the god imprisoned with them.

  She unscrewed a copper grille set low on the interior frosted-glass wall and slipped her Mesmeric Locator from its pouch on her belt. In nature it resembled the sceptre she had once carried across Hell, but this device had been manufactured in the laboratories in Highcliffe—a physical tool with a metaphysical core.

  Warm perfumed air blew up through the exposed vent. After she had wound the crystal device, Harper set it resonating. A range of ninety to one hundred and twenty Bael cycles would pick up all unauthorized soul traffic, with angel or demon emotae at the higher end of the spectrum. Most likely, one of the passengers had broken a soulpearl, and they now had a human ghost aboard.

  While Harper waited for the Locator to react, she checked the mist-pump feeder tubes and pressure gauges inside the vent. Everything seemed to be in order for the king’s arrival. It gave her a certain amount of pleasure to think of the living passengers breathing the same foul air as their master while he remained aboard.

  The tiny needle wavered from one ideograph to another before it settled in the center of the plate.

  Then it went off the scale.

  Harper stared at the Locator in astonishment, not quite comprehending. She shook the Locator, then stopped herself. It was operating correctly. She’d calibrated it against stored ghosts at the Pandemerian Railroad Company terminus on Cog Island. The reading was not at fault. Quickly, her hands trembling, she reset the device and broadened the spectrum. Ninety to one hundred and sixty Baels—the range required to detect gods. Once more she set the Locator resonating, watched the needle waver, settle, and then leap.

  The needle went off the scale.

  Impossible.

  Either the device was malfunctioning, or the intruder was something she had never seen before—which meant that it could not have come from Earth or Hell.

  She did not, however, get the chance to speculate. From the direction of the music car came a loud bang, followed by the sound of women screaming.

  A restaurant and two accommodation wagons separated the lounge from the music carriage. Harper stormed through the restaurant, shouldered curious and apprehensive stewards aside, bumped against tables and chairs, and slammed through the door to the first accommodation car only to find her way blocked by a fat little boy trailing along a dog in a bag. She would have jumped over the lad had he been a few inches shorter. As it was, she was forced to slow and sidle by him, her back brushing the wall of the glass corridor. She stepped over the dog: a tiny thing, zipped tightly into a richly woven travel bag so that only its head was visible.

  “Do you work here?” the boy said.

  “Don’t have time, son, sorry.” She took off down the corridor at a run.

  “I heard screa
ms,” he said. “Is it a ghost? Aunt Edith said I can hunt them at Coreollis. Got my own gun and everything.”

  “Not a ghost,” Harper called back. She was halfway along the corridor. “Something else.”

  “A demon, then?” He ran after her, pulling his imprisoned dog after him. Apparently the bag had wheels underneath. “Aunt Edith said I can hunt them when I grow up. Should I get my gun? Can I let Wolf-thunder out of his bag? I want to train him to hunt demons but they won’t let him wander about in case he poos.”

  She had reached the end of the corridor. “I don’t know what it is. Stay here, it might be dangerous.” Without pausing, she slammed into the far door and plunged on through. The rapid squeaking of wheels came from somewhere behind. Wolf-thunder yipped.

  The music car was in chaos. Three of the ladies had swooned and lay on recliners where they were being attended to by several of the gentlemen. The piano had been smashed into what looked like a pile of heavily lacquered kindling, wrapped in a confusion of wire. Ivory keys and small hammers were strewn everywhere. The white-whiskered reservist, Jones, was busy brushing most of it into the corner with his foot, while Ersimmin the pianist watched him—a look of amused befuddlement on his face. A strange odor lingered: the earthy scent of a forest or a swamp mingled with something else—something bestial. Harper inhaled it deeply, trying to identify it.