Iron Angel dc-2

by Alan Campbell

  “You helped to shape this world in preparation for my coming,” the king went on, “and I thank you for that. You assisted me throughout this long campaign and, again, I am grateful.

  “Tomorrow you will reap the rewards I have promised. After Rys abandons his foolish war against us, Pandemeria will become the center of our new world.” He urged the little girl forward. “Here is your treaty,” he said. “An unspoiled soul. Her name, of course, is Peace.”

  Jones and Lovich frowned. Clearly this was not what they had expected; Harper could see their minds working to unravel this unexpected twist.

  But then the child looked up at Menoa, and the king nodded.

  The girl began to change, shrinking rapidly until she was a fraction of her original size. Her hair whirled around her, and then her body itself began to spin. She became a blur of tattooed script. Her flesh turned the colour of parchment. One of the female passengers took a sharp intake of breath.

  Carrick stooped and picked up the scroll that had appeared in the child’s place.

  “Bring Rys’s signature back to me,” King Menoa said. “And I will return the treaty to the Ninth Citadel. May it last forever.”

  A great howl went up from the waiting armies, like the sudden onslaught of a storm. The platform shuddered as ten thousand boots, hooves, and claws beat against the earth around PortalLake. The passengers flinched. Mrs. Lovich buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as a cold gale tore across the platform.

  King Menoa turned to face his horde.

  Brands flared in the darkness below the embankment, tens of thousands of them, and Harper saw the king’s army clearly at last. There were ranks of Icarates and glittering Iolites and other, bulkier creatures with hammers for fists and great curling horns. The Blind composed a large part of this army, along with packs of dogcatchers and phantasms and Non Morai, and beasts like oxen or huge boars, and winged lesser demons and man-shaped gladiators in bronze plate. War machines covered the hills beyond the main force: great spiked spheres and smoking iron towers, lumbering armoured beasts carrying upon their backs cannon towers or crystal globes full of corpse mites and yellow flies. And in the middle of the plague pit stood an arconite.

  A collective gasp came from the human onlookers.

  Harper’s gaze roamed up from the creature’s skeletal feet, and up past its pelvis, and up to where the arcane engines thundered in its ribs, and up again to the skull still glistening red from the PortalLake. The creature was colossal; its tattered wings, outstretched, could have enveloped a mountain. In one bony fist it clutched an oak tree pulled from the ground nearby. In the other hand it held a locomotive shed. It had lifted the building up close to its eyeless skull, and was peering inside the way a child might inspect a new toy.

  King Menoa sounded like he was smiling, but his glass mask gave nothing away.

  “His name is Dill,” he said.

  23

  MENOA’S ARMY

  Dawn came: thin and grey and flecked with puffs of lead and pewter. The skies lightened, and The Pride of Eleanor Damask began to climb out of the Pandemerian Lowlands towards the Moine Massif. Wheels thumping, stack blowing, whistle screaming, she followed a long snaking route up through the black volcanic hills that bounded the edge of the plateau. King Menoa’s reinforcements meanwhile followed the Red Road two leagues to the southwest. A vast plume of smoke from the king’s war machines bent its way across the sky, while the troops marched in a long line behind. From this distance they looked like a river of ink flowing uphill from the portal basin. Only the arconite itself could be seen with any clarity. The giant had moved far ahead of its smaller brethren and now stood among the hills below the Moine Massif.

  Even these highlands had not been immune to Rys’s torrential rain. The valleys and gullies below remained flooded, so that it seemed like they were now weaving through a chain of lagoons. Crescents of basalt rose from steaming pools, linked by causeways of metallic slag and cruel iron bridges. Fuels and oils left by the railway reconstruction effort made rainbow patterns on the waters, colourful skins that unraveled where the currents mingled. New maps named this place Callar Wash, but on old maps the land had been called Callowflower. The train followed the rims of hot calderas or plunged, shuddering, through dark defiles, or was carried between islands by spans of silt-and weed-clogged girders.

  She clattered across bridges: CutlassBridge and BrokenTempleBridge where a thousand empty lanterns depended from hooks, out over the drowned farmland beneath Spinney Crag. Smudged by a shifting dawn haze, the summit of the crag itself still sulked above the waterline, diminished now from an imposing mountain to a meager sketch of dolerite and black pines. Other trees could be seen in the oily waters below, now dead and rimed with furs of crystal.

  Harper had moved out of Carrick’s room into a spare bunk in the stewards’ quarters. Uncomfortable in the unfamiliar surroundings, she had woken early and been unable to get back to sleep. Now she stood on the terrace of Observation Carriage Two and gazed down into the pools between the islands. Sometimes she thought she saw fish below: impossible black shapes, huge and motionless. There seemed to be faint green glimmers where the eyes ought to be, an ice-cream sheen underneath where the belly would be, but the objects never moved.

  “Pike.”

  Harper turned.

  “The fish,” Carrick said. “They’re pike.”

  “Pike don’t grow to that size.”

  “They do now.” The chief joined her by the glass balustrade and peered down. Yellow sunlight slanted through the carriage under his feet. “There. You see?” He pointed at a long shadow hanging beneath the water. “They’ve changed.”

  “You’ve changed,” she muttered.

  He ignored this, continuing, “Nothing should be able to live in that queer water, but some things do. Fish from the old rivers and canals; animals from the woods. The trees still grow, but not in the same way they did before. People, too, maybe. The combination of Rys’s rain and the Mesmerist Veil did strange things to the land here.”

  “People?”

  “The engineers who raised and rerouted the track swear it. They say the farmers are still down there, alive…but altered.” He was silent a moment, then he shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like that. A lot of workers drowned during the reconstruction. I suppose the survivors are superstitious.”

  She nodded.

  The Eleanor rattled across another bridge. Far below, a clump of farm buildings huddled around an earthen courtyard, the scene apple-tinted and woozy under twenty fathoms of water. Dark windows looked out over submerged fields and dykes and scraps of queasy woodland. Harper spied an old steam tractor, and the carcass of some large animal now soft with white eels, and shivered at the thought of anyone still living down there.

  What did they farm?

  “I brought you a refill.” Carrick held out a flask of blood. “I noticed you were getting low.”

  She just stared at it.

  “I’m sorry.” Carrick’s smile looked ugly and desperate. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? An apology. Well, there it is.”

  “It’s not enough, Jan.”

  The lines around Carrick’s eyes pinched. “I’m asking for a second chance. You could do a lot worse than me. I was serious about the house in Highcliffe-a place of your own.”

  “As your own personal whore?” She snorted. “I’ll think about that offer if Menoa ever turns me away from Hell.”

  Carrick spat into the water below.

  Harper glanced back at Observation Carriage One. The Eleanor had had enough spare glass aboard for the midnight shift to repair most of the shattered windows, but many of the rest of the panes remained empty. Someone had suggested they cover these up with paper or squares of linen, but Carrick had insisted those patches would spoil the look of his train. Harper sighed. Either way, the passengers would not be happy. They were bound to complain. “Somebody summoned it,” she said. “If you’d only let me interview the passengers,
Jan.”

  “I’m not getting into this again,” he replied. “I’ve told you what I think.”

  “The slaves, at least…” Harper suggested.

  “Out of bounds. We had one death already of suspected plague. You’re not even to mingle with them.” She opened her mouth to argue (what proof did he have that the man had died of plague? He was old and crippled), but Carrick went on, “And I don’t want you going near that glass bastard until we arrive at Coreollis. I’m not having you tinkering with his goddamn head again. He’s obstinate enough as it is.”

  “What I did to the parasite has nothing to do with his behavior. Hasp has been fighting the implant every step of the way. You’re the one being stubborn here.”

  “You admit he’s dangerous?”

  “Of course he’s dangerous. I didn’t want him released in the first place.”

  The lines around Carrick’s mouth tightened. “You’d better go sweep the train again before the guests get up,” he said. “I don’t want any more surprises on this journey.”

  Harper turned away from him. “I was leaving anyway. The air stinks here; I don’t want to breathe it too long.” She walked back towards the stairs which led down into the carriage below.

  Carrick called after her: “I’m not a bad man, Alice. You hear me? I’m not a bad man.”

  The engineer quickened her pace. It scared her to think that he might be right.

  “And I know why you’re here.”

  She hesitated at the top step.

  “I’ve seen the soulpearl you wear under your uniform,” he went on. “Do you think I don’t know why you hide it? Why you always clutch it when you’re upset? Why you take it off at night before you come to bed?”

  She turned slowly. “A lot of people collect souls.”

  Carrick chuckled. “What soul? That pearl is empty. The holding patterns are there, but there’s no glow, no ghost inside.” He studied her for a long moment before his eyes narrowed. “Everyone knows what happened to your husband-the real story, not that bullshit the PRC put out.”

  Harper made a dismissive gesture. “I bought the jewel at the Garrison Market. It’s fake.” She shrugged. “But I liked it; I thought it looked pretty.”

  “I’ve seen fakes before,” Carrick said, “and that isn’t one of them. You are wearing one hell of an expensive jewel, Alice. How many times did you have to open your legs before you could afford it?” He bared his teeth and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Or did you just fuck Menoa? He certainly fucked you.”

  “Don’t…” She glanced over her shoulder as if expecting to find the king there. He had remained at Cog Portal, yet his presence seemed to haunt the train.

  Carrick’s tone became contemptuous. “You think I’m any worse than your husband?” he shouted. “I survived the war, Alice. Tom didn’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You should thank Menoa for keeping that coward in Hell.”

  Harper stormed down the stairwell, her heart pounding like the train’s own wheels. When she reached the observation lounge she glanced up. Carrick was leering down at her through the transparent ceiling. She wanted to hide, but she couldn’t think of anywhere to go. Her world was made of glass.

  The train thundered on through the conical black hills, climbing steadily, crossing bridges and causeways between islands until the ground rose at last to meet the edge of the Moine Massif. From her viewpoint at the rear of the train Harper watched the landscape unfold. White froth still clung to the rocks and grasses in places, a sour indicant of the extent of the waters’ retreat, but the landscape beyond remained untainted and naturally bleak. To the north, clear streams still chuckled and bounced down the slopes of Moine Moor. A dun heather moorland swept southwards towards Helmbog and the distant peaks of the FossilMountains, where the low sun could be seen gleaming like a copper penny in the pale sky. Ancient maps named that land Benecoir or Bencora. But most people knew it simply as Brownslough; Hafe’s realm.

  The king’s army stayed on the Red Road, which had been regularly bloodied so as to maintain a direct road to the front lines. They could not dare leave that trail. Only the arconite wandered further afield. It had climbed onto the massif and now paced the border of Brownslough.

  During the war, the Pandemerian Railroad Company had posted pickets along the borders of Hafe’s realm. King Menoa had been warring with Hafe’s brother Rys, after all. Harper rolled her empty soulpearl between her fingers as she recalled those early days: the incessant rain, the distant flashes across the horizon, the raging seas around the Highcliffe wharfs and pontoons. The wind had seemed to carry the booms of resonance cannon from halfway around the world. She closed her eyes, pressed the pearl against her chest.

  The god of dirt and poison had not retaliated. He’d killed those diplomats the PRC had sent out to parley after the war, and yet he’d kept his own armies close. It seemed Hafe was quite content to let his brother Rys do the fighting.

  Gods were always difficult to predict. What devilry would they be up to now? Hafe sat in Brownslough and grew fatter. Cospinol’s great skyship would be patrolling the seas beyond the RiotCoast, hunting any ships who ventured too close to his domain, while Sabor watched the sand grains trickle through his castle in the CharrelMountains. Mirith never strayed far from his elder brother, Rys, of course, following that handsome god like a loyal puppy. And Hasp brooded in the Eleanor’s slave pens even now.

  Only Ulcis had been slain, murdered by an unknown assassin in Deepgate.

  Harper clutched her soulpearl again.

  If one god could die, why not two?

  By midday the moor had become a blanket of cerise heather and white flowers rising towards the mountains all around. Pools of still water mirrored the vast blue sky, turning partially submerged boulders into islands hovering in their own pockets of air. The train pulled its banner of smoke in a long curve around Ialar Moor and through the IalarPass to where the coke-oven funnels of the town of Moine rose above the moorland beyond. Here the Eleanor stopped to refuel at the depot coal stage, and two strange things happened.

  Edgar Lovich was butchered in his sleep. And the Eleanor picked up an unlikely passenger.

  As much to stretch her legs as to avoid the clouds of coal dust which would inevitably descend around the train, Harper took a stroll out across the locomotive yard. She was careful not to stray too far from the train, and to take a full bulb of mist with her, for the sun would quickly sap her strength. Being dead had distinct disadvantages in the world of the living.

  She envied the arconite Menoa had constructed from the angel Dill. Powered by a fragment of the Shattered God, it had been able to leave the Red Road, following the train across the plateau while the troops forced to march only on bloodied ground lagged far behind. The smoke from Menoa’s war machines still stained the southeastern sky, but the distance between the Eleanor and the king’s army had stretched. Now the arconite towered over the town of Moine, its vast wings covering most of the southern sky. The foul waters from the PortalLake had dried to a brown crust on its bones, but it did not need this blood or any mist or crimson earth to survive here.

  Menoa had used a fragment of the Shattered God to create the arconite, and then butchered countless souls to temporarily widen the portal so that it could leave the Maze. He had unleashed a warrior capable of destroying entire cities and armies. Free from the confines of the Veil, this single great automaton was worth more to the king than his entire horde. The rumble of coal came from behind as the Eleanor’s crew refilled her tender from the stage. Moine had been a mining settlement before the war, but Rys’s rain had lifted the water table, swelling the town’s tar pits past bursting. Now the noxious overflow had rendered the place uninhabitable. The PRC had cleaned up the yard itself, but the streets and lower walls of the workers’ houses and coke factories had been abandoned to the viscid black liquid. Away from the train, an eerie silence blanketed the spoiled town, broken only by the sigh of a hot breeze and the occasional slap of a
tin shutter against a brick wall. Moine, more so even than CogIsland, was a city for ghosts. Harper was startled when she heard a very human cry for help.

  The shout had seemed to originate behind one of the old engine sheds which ran parallel to the main track. She stepped over the auxiliary rails and walked around the building to investigate.

  Parts of the yard’s outer wall had collapsed, leaving only a chain of slender brick islands connected by rubble. This broken wall formed a promontory of sorts, jutting out across Moine’s lake of tar to stop some five yards short of the cleaned concrete surface of the yard. A thin-faced man in a white suit was sitting there, waving a white parasol. Evidently he had reached the wall by climbing through the shell of one of the coke factories bordering the yard, and then walked along its uneven summit only to reach a place where he could not proceed any further without soiling his fine clothes on the thick black gloop all around. He wore a sheathed clockwork sword at his hip, and circular blue lenses over his eyes which now turned to face Harper.

  “I require assistance,” he said. “Would you be kind enough to help me?” He inclined his head at the tar separating him from the engineer. “It’s rather undignified, but I suppose I’ll have to be carried.”

  Harper folded her arms. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

  He gave a wan smile and a smooth bow. “Isaac Pilby, renowned lepidopterist, published poet, and lately an unwitting tourist. My guide, having reneged upon our deal in the field and demanded an additional-exorbitant-fee in order to have his entire village employed as porters, stole my luggage and my butterflies, before abandoning me over there.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of Ialar Moor. “I walked all morning before I saw the smokestacks of this wretched place. With so much industry, one would have expected to find civilization.” He shook his parasol. “Instead of cafes, I find a town knee-deep in some ghastly pollutant.”