Iron Angel dc-2

by Alan Campbell

  Although Dill could not share the good humor, he had begun to appreciate his surroundings more. The Maze was as beautiful as it was complex. This crimson playground which had at first driven him to such despair had become, by degrees, less threatening. There were so many marvels to behold: the chuckle of fluids behind the cage wheels; the bright chunks that clung to the spokes like rubies; the madwoman’s scrawl of white hair. He relished these sights. Once he spied silver-robed figures floating high in the sky and he felt his dead heart soar with wonder.

  “Don’t look at them,” the thief warned. “Dangerous, dangerous creatures.”

  How much time had passed, Dill did not know. The soul collectors found new prisoners for their caravan and threw them into the cages behind. There was a naked man without teeth or eyes and a bruised shapeless thing that could not stand unaided, a thin pale woman who never made a sound but just gaped at her darkly stained hands, and an old, old angel with a tin hat and only one wing. Most of the other captives laughed at this last find, but Dill only smiled.

  He thanked the Icarates daily.

  A year passed, or maybe a hundred years. Dill’s skin crawled with the memory of burns, yet these sensations were important to him. In those moments when he forgot the pain of the Icarates’ tridents a desperate panic came over him. The agony anchored him; without it, he feared he might forget who he was and start to fade like the hag. The soul collectors’ tridents gave him vigor; the burns he received kept him focused.

  He couldn’t stop smiling. His friend, the thief, was always there to encourage him. “Fadder Carpal knows his business well,” he said. “He takes good care of us, of his family. He won’t let us become like them.” He inclined his head towards the faces in the walls.

  The phantasms gazed out at Dill from the stonework. Their lips were moving, but he could not hear their words, only the sound of Fadder Carpal’s whip.

  One evening soon afterwards, the caravan reached its destination. Dill had been dreaming, and didn’t notice the grey towers at first. Instead he first became aware of crowds of strange creatures around his cage. A few of them resembled humans, but most had been changed. There were the usual Icarates and dogcatchers, and even a tall cloaked figure with a blisterman on a leash. Other figures moved with metal limbs or wheels and leaked foul-smelling smoke from their lips. Two women with crystal skulls paused to peer into Dill’s cage. A constant hubbub of chatter and mechanical clunks filled the canal through which they were passing. This avenue was different from those they had passed along before. Its walls were taller, full of windows and doorways that crept slowly past one another.

  “We are here,” the dwarf said. “Here for show and then sale to the king’s captains. Look! Over there you can see the First Citadel.”

  They had arrived in a great city. Monolithic black buildings lined the canals here, their flat roofs bristling with needlelike protrusions and slowly turning wheels. Smoke and fresh red mist wheezed from valves set in walls, but the waters in this shallow avenue were tinged with green and smelled of fuel.

  Over all this towered a group of six stone towers, each supporting a flat platform at its summit. On each such platform grew a tree. Arched bridges between linked the platforms together, although three of these had collapsed. Blue windows shone in the tower walls below the platform-as though reflecting a different sky.

  “The trees repel shades,” the thief explained. “And it’s said that the roots grow all the way down through the towers themselves.” He gazed up at the fortress hungrily. “There’s no way in from the ground. I would trade my hands for wings to sneak in there.”

  Dill nodded his head woozily. Sleep beckoned him, but he resisted.

  On through the streets the soul collectors’ procession sloshed. The dwellings lining the canal became sparser, replaced by arrays of chattering mechanical towers. Eventually these gave way to low ziggurats that exhaled white fumes and groaned as if packed with people.

  Now the procession rolled into a wide circular arena hemmed by tiered stone steps and wound around itself in an expanding spiral. Dill at last staggered to his feet and pressed his face against the bars to get a better look. The soul collectors were unharnessing their kine. Between the wagons, the great beasts bellowed and bulled and reeked of dung. For the first time, Dill saw the entire procession at close quarters. Wagons were being unloaded, structures erected all around: huge spiked wheels and gaudy towers, and metal huts, each with a single puffing chimney and its walls etched with hieroglyphs. Hammers pounded, ropes skreaked in pulleys. Thin metal boxes, as long as a man, were carried from one flat cart and stacked upon the sodden ground. Gladiators clashed their swords against their shields and whooped. Everywhere, men were shouting and thumping their cages.

  “Now the Mesmerist captains will see what we can do!” the dwarf cried. “They will witness a dance of steel the like of which has not been seen since Hasp met Ayen’s bodyguards in the War Against Heaven. We’ll cut through dead men and demons and beasts from nameless worlds and give them wounds that will amaze them even as they sink into the mire.” He grabbed Dill and shook him. “Here is our chance to bathe Fadder Carpal in glory.”

  Dill’s heart surged with joy.

  The Icarates took three days to assemble their market. They beat Dill until he felt alive again. On the evening of the third night a heavy silence settled over the arena and the ad hoc collection of structures which had sprung up within its boundaries. The sky brooded, dark as a velvet shroud. Green and yellow lights bobbed on ropes between the cluttered towers, wheels, and huts, bathing all in harsh and sickly radiance. Soul collectors glided between the gladiator cages, their queer armour sparking brightly, their eye-lenses gleaming.

  Dill was curled up on the floor of the cage, imagining the battles to come. He would shine for Fadder Carpal and fetch him a good price at the warrior’s market.

  A strange crystal voice sounded nearby, like the chiming of tiny glass bells: “A thorough job as always, Fadder, although the process took much longer than the king expected.”

  Silence.

  “I understand, Fadder, but we cannot delay any longer. Menoa has already constructed the thirteenth arconite. His surgeons have now finished with Hasp and his woman. There are plans in motion. He needs the angel’s soul now.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “Of course we know about the splinter. The king is satisfied. It is time to bring Dill to the Processor.”

  PART THREE

  PANDEMERIA

  19

  ALICE ELLIS HARPER

  The train to Coreollis rumbled along a narrow slag embankment above Upper Cog City, dragging mountains of smoke behind it. The lower districts remained flooded, but here the waters had receded some fifteen yards below the raised steel tracks, leaving streets clogged with silt and rusting warships. From the embankment’s slopes to the horizon, ten thousand vessels had been left to rot among the waterlogged shops and houses. Mangled heaps of gunboats and destroyers filled the plazas of Highcliffe and the Theater District, while the cries of these adapted souls rose higher still. Battleships loomed like great red headlands above rows of townhouse roofs, their hulls scarred by cannon-fire or scraped and dented by rubble from collapsed buildings, their groans of pain long and low. A Mesmerist-adapted war barge had come to rest against the roof of the cathedral in RevolutionPlaza, her bow pointing skywards, her stern deep in cafe tables and mud. The late-evening sun gave a molten edge to those funnels, decks, and gun batteries that rose above the chimneystacks, and bathed the brickwork between ships in soft amber light.

  South of the terminus the embankment sank with the surrounding streets towards SillRiver, and here the waters rose to within a foot of the newly laid railway sleepers. Flooded lanes looped around the Offal Quarter factories like a giant fingerprint or like the canals of Hell, all choked with flotsam, furniture, and corpses. Nacreous swirls of oil and yellow, aquamarine, and ochre froths revolved between hull, keel, and lamppost. Cannon boats drifte
d in the deep square pools of old workhouse yards or lay beached on tenement roofs, their lines fouled in weather vanes. The bloodied waters in Emerald Street, Minster Street, and Canary Row were clogged with steam yachts and with painted dolls from the Low Cog Puppet Workshop. A breeze came up from the city: bitter, engine-scented air full of hot dust and strange metallic cries.

  To Harper it seemed that the ships were singing laments she understood. These iron voices were no longer human, and yet they evinced human suffering clearly. The Mesmerist Veil had thinned over this old battleground, though blood could still be seen on the townhouse walls and in stagnant pools across the city. The train, however, had been adapted, not metaphysically, but mechanically. Pumps wheezed out clouds of crimson vapors behind the engineer.

  King Menoa had granted her a human shape for this trip to the front. She had become a pale woman in a stiff, ash-coloured uniform. Now she stood on the hunting platform at the very rear of the train, idly fingering the tool belt at her hip. She had taken her cap off and her hair tumbled like red smoke. Up ahead, a whistle sounded. The train shuddered, then smacked across a bridge where the ruby-bright waters had eaten through the bank below. Shaken from her reverie, Harper turned away, dimly aware that she had been reading the names Menoa’s reservists had painted on the ships’ hulls, searching for one in particular.

  The sun sank lower in the west until it slipped behind the vast silhouettes of the Mesmerist war-behemoths and god-smashers on the outskirts of the city. The train thundered on, building speed, cleaving through the river districts towards NewSillBridge and Knuckletown. Before the war, her engine had been nickle-plated and inlaid with silver filigree. But four years ago she was stripped of her decoration, rebored for power, and from that day forth the exhaust from her stack had stained her skin a deeper, more honest black than the hulls of her saltwater cousins.

  Harper had loved the train the moment she’d first set eyes on her in the yards at Cog Island Terminus. The Pride of Eleanor Damask had been proud and unforgiving: eighteen coupled driving wheels powered by eight high-pressure cylinders. For four years now she had dragged shale, steel, and machinery for the railway reconstruction project. She had pushed the newly raised tracks closer to Coreollis and the front lines while Harper rotted in Hell. The Eleanor had once been a worker, a symbol of mankind’s determination to overcome impossible odds. For Harper, the train had once represented the human struggle-but to look at the old engine now inspired nothing but pathos.

  Tonight the Eleanor was transformed. Her new glass carriages were all aglow and sparkling in a celebration of light and gold: observation cars crowned with faceted domes, a dining carriage of crystal geminate panes and spars of beech, two frost-walled sleeping wagons, and a music car in which chandeliers trembled over artfully etched mirrors. Only the demon carriage at the front of the train remained dark. Even the hunting platform had been constructed from crushed-composite glass and festooned with aether bulbs. All human work, and paid for with looted gold, for the King of the Maze had found allies in Pandemeria.

  From this height Harper could see through the glass roofs immediately ahead of her. Mesmerist resonance muskets and shiftblades packed the racks in the train’s armoury. In the music car beyond, she spied fractured glimpses of revelry: gentlemen and ladies dancing, laughing, and chatting. Through the confusion of glass, three men in the same plum red suit appeared to be playing a white piano at different angles, although she could not hear the music above the pounding wheels and rushing air.

  These were Cog’s elite, those men and women who had backed the Mesmerist campaign against Rys and his brothers. Tonight they were having a party at Menoa’s expense, and tomorrow morning the god of flowers and knives would kneel at their feet.

  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 CogCity, 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 ReadjustmentCenter.”

  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 ReadjustmentCenter: 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.