Caulker was stupefied. Now he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the answer to that question. He eyed the big man warily.
“You die trying to betray a friend,” Anchor said.
Caulker said nothing. A feeling of unease crept over him. How could Anchor possibly know his intentions? The big man was trying to trick him again, the same way he had tricked Caulker into swallowing the tainted soulpearl. And there was the truth of it, Caulker realized. The soul had somehow been rotten—that’s why it gave such horrible visions of death. As they marched on through the fog, down towards Menoa’s horde, the cutthroat became angry.
“You betrayed me,” he said. “You fed me a poisoned soul.”
“No.”
“You cursed me! Every night you return to murder me in my dreams.”
Anchor shrugged. “It is the nature of Cospinol’s soulpearls. These ghosts are angry. They live inside us, and give us strength, but they will try to hurt us, too.”
“But you don’t suffer.”
Anchor stopped. Dark shapes were shuffling at the limits of the fog ahead, while vague shadows sagged in the grey gloom behind. Tents or banners? Caulker smelled the dense odors of beasts and charnel. He heard the rasp of steel, the creak and rumble of an axle turning, and a thousand other low grunts and snuffles.
The tethered man whispered, “I have the same dreams, Jack Caulker.”
“Liar!” He reached for the leather pouch at Anchor’s side, but the big man grabbed his wrist, stopping him.
“All of these souls are angry, rotten, and bitter,” Anchor said quietly. “The one you chose was more benevolent than most.”
“No.” Caulker hissed through his teeth. This damned giant was lying to him again. Had Anchor brought him here to betray him? Did he hope to gain King Menoa’s favor first?
Anchor untied the pouch from his belt. “If you don’t believe me, then choose another. It will only add to your suffering.”
Caulker eyed the bag of pearls. How many dozens had the giant consumed since the Deadsands without suffering any ill effects? The souls of warriors from a hundred distant lands, battle-archons and demigods. And yet Anchor had tricked Caulker into consuming the rotting essence of a madwoman.
The cutthroat snatched the bag and ran.
He ran towards the armies of the King of Hell, and as he ran he gorged himself, stuffing the glass beads into his mouth. The shadows in the fog ahead became clearer. He sprinted past a barricade of bones and wicked crystal-tipped spears. Hobbled shapes flinched and grunted in the gloom all around, but still Caulker ran. And then suddenly he was past the pickets and leaving Anchor’s fog. He could see the whole encampment spread out before him, the horde amassing on the crimson lakeshore. He glanced back, and noticed that the fog was flowing quickly back up the incline towards Coreollis. Anchor had decided not to pursue him.
Caulker grinned and ate more pearls. These were not rotten, for he was already growing stronger. With each new soul he consumed, he felt his fatigue lift. All of the hard years he had spent on Missionary cogs and in the streets of Sandport simply peeled away. He could have run forever.
He could make out individual groups now among the throng: chained human slaves urged forward at spear point; tall figures on stilts and warriors in white armour following behind; red flayed things which crawled like beasts? Machines with human skin and faces crowded among the gears and chains?
Caulker slowed his step.
Where was the King of Hell? But, of course, these were minions, foot soldiers, slaves. No doubt the leader would be directing the battle from the rear. All Caulker had to do was find a way to get to speak to him.
He must offer a gift.
Alone at the encampment border, the cutthroat held up his stolen pouch. “A gift!” he cried. “Souls for your King Menoa. Let me speak to him.”
The demons advanced. They marched, crawled, or slithered up the incline. Before them they drove a group of twenty or so chained humans. It had become a true killing field. Slaves cried out as Menoa’s warriors cut them down to soak the earth before them. Wheeled machines belched smoke from hot pipes and crushed their bones. Savage howling things set about the flesh with claw and fang. The twenty slaves became ten, and then five.
Caulker swallowed another soulpearl for strength, and then another.
Grinning faces leered up towards him. Huge men in bronze armour clicked metal fingers together. Steel grated steel. Teeth chattered and axes fell. Five slaves became four, and then three. Their bones crunched and their blood flew, soaking the advancing horde. Witchspheres rolled among the throng, whispering, gouging shallow trenches in the fresh red earth.
“A gift for your master,” Caulker cried. “I seek an audience with him. I have important news.”
Nobody would answer him.
Somewhere distant he heard a hag scream and cackle. Caulker reached for another soulpearl, but the bag was empty. How many had he eaten? Twenty? Fifty? He could feel their power soaring inside him. It gave him confidence.
The king’s army marched closer, glaring at the cutthroat the way a predator inspects food. The last slave fell before them, his scream echoing across the sunlit slope. Swords and spikes were raised. Mouths drooled and salivated.
“I demand an audience with your king,” he said. “I demand—”
But the army had reached him now, and they had no more slaves left with which to bloody the ground.
From the fringes of Cospinol’s fog, Harper watched the reinforcements join the main bulk of Menoa’s army. And now she could see the human slaves among them. They had been harvesting the lands of Pandemeria en route to bloody the ground before Coreollis.
Part of Harper’s heart urged her to abandon these humans and join the demon hordes. Her bulb of mist had almost dried up and her strength would soon fade. She was not one of the living and she could not survive for long among them. Hell waited for her inevitably at the end of this day.
“There must be a hundred thousand souls in that army,” Jones muttered, “without even counting the slaves.”
“More,” she said. “Menoa uses souls as ammunition. Each acid bolt and ball of flame is someone’s life. These weapons feel as much pain as the victims they burn.” She turned to face him. “Why did Edith Bainbridge betray the Mesmerists? What did Rys offer her that Menoa couldn’t?”
He smiled. “The god of flowers and knives is very handsome.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He gave a shrug. “She’s vain and foolish, rich and arrogant and selfish. But she’s still a woman.”
“How would Rys feel, I wonder, to know that his looks helped to turn the war?”
“It would appeal to him greatly,” Jones mused. “But if Menoa unleashes the remainder of his arconites, this turn of events would seem to make little difference. We have only one giant.”
The reservist was right. Dill might slay every demon on the field down there, but he would be hard-pressed to stand against even one of Menoa’s twelve remaining arconites. She said, “Can we hope for more aid from the thaumaturge?”
The old man shook his head. “Mina Greene has been reunited with her pet. But the hound is nothing more than a Penny Devil. Basilis is crippled and debased, but I fear he has already overstretched his powers.”
“Then we’re doomed to fail.”
“I think so, yes,” he replied. “But not today.”
Horns blared suddenly down by the lakeshore. Menoa’s armies began to stir. Now they herded hundreds of their human slaves onto the battlefield, slaughtering the stragglers even as they urged the remainder forward. The king’s war machines, more resilient to untainted earth, rolled out to flank the main force.
An answering trumpet came from Rys’s Northmen. His army bellowed and clashed swords against their shields. Then they marched on, a tide of silver flowing down the incline to meet the threat. Banners of yellow and white streamed over their heads. The sound of their boots resounded like the beat of a metal heart.
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And Dill moved. He opened his wings to blanket the whole of the northern sky, disturbing low clouds. In one hand he gripped The Pride of Eleanor Damask like a club, the old locomotive shedding coal and oil upon the grass. He stooped to pick up the Sally Broom with his other hand. The empty steamship gave a mighty groan. Her hull buckled under his grip and her single remaining funnel collapsed.
Hasp stood alone on the city battlements, watching grimly. He had demanded that Rys allow him to fight, but his very skill as a warrior stood against him. Even the weakest of Menoa’s advancing hordes could have ordered the Lord of the First Citadel to turn against his fellows. And Rys would not risk that.
John Anchor’s laughter could be heard above the sound of the marching troops. He clapped his big hands together and dragged his master’s skyship down the hill where his fog lapped the heels of Rys’s Northmen.
Armed with bows and axes, Ramnir and his Heshette warriors urged their tough little horses down the western flank.
And the battle began.
Dill hurled the Sally Broom.
That great iron steamship plowed a furrow through Menoa’s warriors. It sliced through the wet earth, throwing up a vast spray of red soil and corpses and machines. And then the hull struck a mound in the landscape and rolled, tumbling funnel over keel. Whole decks peeled away and spun out across the enemy forces. Metal debris rained down. Its superstructure now torn apart, the bulk of the hull jumped and crashed down again, burst into flames, and settled close to the lakeshore in a cloud of grit and smoke.
The king’s dogcatchers set upon Rys’s Northmen. They moved like wild beasts, seeking to tear at exposed flesh, but Rys’s warriors formed phalanxes. Spears shot out of the metal huddles, again and again, slaying demons on all sides. Once the attacks had been quelled, they lifted their shields and charged as one wall into a mass of Menoa’s gladiators. Bronze-clad warriors fell under them, but the wall of Northmen pushed on, leaving the wounded to the swordsmen following behind the vanguard.
A pall of bloodmist had risen over the killing field. And now Harper watched as the king’s war machines sent screaming missiles hurtling into the thick of the battle. Bright explosions flashed among the ranks of Coreollis troops, shredding whole units of them. A witchsphere burst into a cloud of pus. Hellish cries and moans pierced the air.
Silister Trench fought alone against seven Non Morai, his shiftblade changing constantly as it blurred between forms. The winged demons spun and howled around him. The Champion of the First Citadel made shields to protect himself from their claws, then altered the weapon to hack or cut or jab at their leathery wings. Corpses fell around him and he moved on to fresh pasture for his demonic weapon.
Dill’s great skeletal body towered over the battlefield. He still wielded The Pride of Eleanor Damask. None of Menoa’s forces were a match for his size and strength; he slaughtered them like insects. He raised the iron locomotive and then brought it down, pounding the ground, crushing Icarates and dogcatchers and war machines and everything to mulch. The pistons in his joints hissed and leaked thin vapors. His engines growled like a forest of wolves. The very ground shook under him.
The Heshette were in trouble. Their mounts, unaccustomed to facing such creatures, reared and panicked. The horsemen struggled to control them while firing arrows into a pack of fang-toothed giants. These creatures had been pushing the war machines, the spinning, shrilling wheels of knives and nests of flesh and chains. Two-thirds of Ramnir’s men had already fallen, while the others were hard-pressed to retreat. Menoa’s armoured giants seemed impervious to arrows. They tore the horses to shreds and feasted on the meat.
But John Anchor moved to help his friend.
To see him in battle was to see nothing. Wherever his veil of fog moved through the army, it left corpses in its wake. And as it reached the last Heshette survivors, Harper turned away.
“It’s a slaughter.”
A young woman was standing beside Harper, gaunt and dressed in battered leathers. “Rachel Hael,” she announced herself.
“Alice Harper.”
“It’s not often I meet another as pale as me,” Rachel said.
The engineer drained the last mist from her bulb. “I’m dead,” she said. “And by all accounts I should be down there with the rest of Menoa’s freaks.”
Rachel shrugged. “We’re just as freakish on this side of the battlefield, too, only prettier.” She smiled. “And we’re winning.”
Harper squeezed her empty bulb. “Out of blood,” she said. “When the battle’s over, I’ll have to wander through the butchered corpses to feed my soul.” She expected a look of shock or horror from the other woman, but what she got was an even broader smile.
“Sounds pleasant,” Rachel said. “I think I’ll join you. A friend of mine is down there now, someone I haven’t spoken to in a long time. He’s grown since I last saw him.”
“Dill?”
She nodded.
“It won’t be long before it’s over now.”
Rys’s Northmen had driven the remnants of Menoa’s army back into the waters of Lake Larnaig. Trench, finding room around him, had lowered his shiftblade. He was breathing hard, his sackcloth shirt drenched in gore. Down on the western fringes, Anchor’s cloud of fog moved away from another field of corpses. And Dill now stood alone in the center of the battlefield, gazing down at the destruction. Fresh blood plastered his shins; his monstrous club was dented and missing most of its wheels.
Rachel and Harper set off together down the slope.
Severed limbs and shards of metal littered the ground for half a league in every direction. Red steam rose from wet mounds of unidentifiable remains. The landscape had been battered and scarred, pocked with great holes and trenches where Dill’s club had fallen. In places they were forced to wade through the crimson mire.
But Harper felt her strength return. “They bloodied the Larnaig Field,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Menoa saturated the ground all the way to the gates of Coreollis,” she explained. “After the arconite—Dill—had turned, he couldn’t hope to win this battle. He sacrificed his entire army in vain.” She shrugged. “It seems so senseless.”
“Simple rage?” Rachel asked.
She shook her head. “That isn’t like him. He plans everything in perfect detail. All his plans have plans within them. It’s his nature to adapt to changing circumstances. He thrives upon it.”
Rachel dragged her heel out of a sucking pit. She shook blood from her boots. “Perhaps he just couldn’t adapt to face this threat. He had every living god against him here, the most powerful warriors I’ve ever seen together in one place.”
Harper stopped suddenly. She swung her gaze around the battlefield, and the thousands upon thousands of dead, both human and demons, all piled together. Crows had already come out from the city to feed. They squawked and tore at strips of flesh, then fluttered away with their prizes. Crimson vapors rose from the newly slaughtered, so heady and sweet and rich that it made Harper shudder.
“All together in one place,” she whispered. “Rys, Cospinol, Mirith, and Hafe, the living gods. Hasp and his champion, both of the First Citadel. Human mercenaries and the Army of Flowers and Knives. A thaumaturge from Deepgate and her Penny Devil.
Everyone who could have stopped Menoa made it to this battlefield.” Now she gazed up at Dill. “And the only arconite who could have turned…Gods help us.”
“What do you mean?”
“The thaumaturge put a splinter of her soul in Dill. That’s how she was able to reach him. But Menoa knew about the splinter.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Menoa made twelve arconites. His Icarates have been feeding them all of these years, persuading them, torturing them into submission. But not Dill.” She threw her arms out. “Don’t you see? Dill was different. He was the only one who could betray Menoa. The King of Hell expected him to defect.”
“But why?”
�
�Because of all this,” Harper cried. “This killing field! This graveyard! Enough blood has been shed here to open another portal.”
And even as she uttered the words, Harper felt a tremor run through the battlefield. The ground began to sink under her. Heaps of corpses tumbled inwards, consumed by the now pliant earth.
Dill stumbled and then staggered back from the collapsing field as flesh and bone and armour slid towards a widening depression. A new lake was forming between Larnaig and the walls of Coreollis, a pool of foul red water. Crows rose, shrieking, and flapped back towards the city. Harper recognized the stench of the Maze.
Hemispheres of bone appeared in the bubbling waters, rising as large as islands. They rose slowly to reveal scarred brows and deep depressions where Harper knew their eyes would be, and then jaws and teeth. Twelve sets of grinning teeth.
Campbell, Alan - Iron Angel Page 42
