Iron Angel dc-2

by Alan Campbell

  “Tar,” Harper said. “It stinks but you’re safe enough. I doubt it’s more than an inch deep. You might lose your shoes, but it won’t do you much harm.”

  “It may be shallow,” Pilby said, “and it may be safe. But it is filthy. I have traversed this town from one side to the other in leaps and bounds to minimize the damage to my suit and shoes, and I have no intention of soiling them now. These brogues were handmade in Skirl, you know?” He gave a small shrug, then adjusted his lenses. “You’ll just have to carry me over.”

  Harper was about to reply, when she heard a clicking, whirring noise behind her and turned to see the glittering figure of Hasp approaching. Sunlight blurred through the extremities of the angel’s transparent armour and gave him a flame-red halo. His brow crinkled beneath his glass half-helm, folding the tattoos above his brow. “Refueling is finished,” he growled, his gaze flitting between Harper and the stranded man. “They sent me to find you.”

  “Who did? Carrick?”

  He nodded.

  “An hour ago Carrick forbade me or anyone else from going anywhere near you.”

  “Some of the ladies,” Hasp said, “thought my armour would look splendid in the sunlight. Your boss obliged them, and then took the opportunity to demonstrate his power over me. Sadly, I remain compelled to obey the orders of Menoa’s lackeys, so here I am. Who is this idiot on the wall?”

  “Isaac Pilby,” Harper said. “He collects butterflies.”

  The angel studied the man for a moment. “Let’s get back, then.”

  “Excuse me,” Pilby called after them in a high voice. “I say! Excuse me?”

  The angel and the engineer kept walking.

  “You can’t leave me here,” the lepidopterist protested.

  The Eleanor’s rear carriages came into view as Harper and Hasp neared the corner of the engine shed.

  “Wait!” Pilby yelled after them. “Listen! I have a magic stone.”

  “Oh, that’s funny,” Harper muttered. She faced Hasp. “How are you feeling now?” The angel’s eyes had remained the same dark, brooding grey since she’d last seen him. “Have you suffered any dizziness since…?” Since Carrick had forced him to murder.

  “I’m fine,” Hasp said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t.

  A shrill voice came from behind them. “I can pay. That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Mercenaries! You’re no better than Cohl’s Shades. Very well, you’ve made your point, now name your fee.”

  “The chief enjoys power,” Harper said to the glass-armoured god. “That’s why he orders you to do these things. But your resistance to his commands will kill you. If you obeyed without question, without thought, he’d lose interest and you might stand a better chance of reaching Coreollis alive.”

  Hasp grunted. “If I obeyed without question or thought, then I wouldn’t deserve to live.”

  Harper sucked in mist from her rubber bulb. “What would you do if you were free?” she said, offering the bulb to Hasp.

  Hasp glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “I’d try to kill Menoa.” He shrugged. “In this armour, I’d pose no threat to him, but it would be a worthy end.”

  The engineer was silent for a while. “I joined the Mesmerists for one reason,” she said at last. “My husband Tom was an officer in the King’s Reservists. After he died at Larnaig, I begged for an audience with Menoa. I wanted to convince him to give me Tom’s soul.” She remembered the months of pleading with Carrick at the Cog Island Liaison Centre. “I was rising quickly through the special engineering branch of the PRC, working on adapting Mesmerist technology to work in this world. It wasn’t easy-we had to engineer solutions for metaphysical devices the king could simply will into existence in Hell. Carrick refused to pass on my requests to meet Menoa, but after I had a breakthrough with the first Locators, the king actually asked to see me.”

  “He thought you had potential?”

  “The special engineering branch was crucial to the War Effort, and I was a crucial part of the branch. Once the king had heard my plea, he agreed to return Tom’s soul in exchange for a guaranteed term of service.”

  “And he reneged on that deal?”

  “He applies his philosophy of change to everything, including his promises. I soon learned that I couldn’t trust him.” She paused. What she was about to say, she had never told another person before. “So I went to Hell myself to find my husband.”

  Hasp nodded. “You’re not the first to try it.”

  “But of course Menoa expected me to try just that. I ended up working for him in Hell instead.” She sucked in another long breath of mist from her bulb. “And now I’m back here, and I’m dead, and I’d like someone to kill that bastard for me. Do you know anyone strong enough to accomplish such a feat?”

  “I used to, but he’s not the same god he was before. He’s much more fragile now.”

  Turning the corner, they stepped over the network of rusted steel tracks that led out from the engine shed. Harper glanced inside the building’s wide door but there were no locomotives inside, just a vast cavernous space pierced by dusty shafts of sunlight. Weeds reached through glassless metal windows in the outer wall and spread out in green veins across tired brickwork. Ahead of them, the Eleanor waited on the main line behind the coal stage, her carriages aglow. A haze of fine black dust drifted from her tender and spread across the yard and the moor beyond.

  The majority of the passengers had alighted and stood some distance from the train in groups of three or more, chatting or smoking clay pipes. Some carried porcelain cups of tea or flutes of white wine. Harper noticed Jan Carrick talking to a group of three ladies who were laughing and beating the air with their fans. Slightly closer, Ersimmin appeared to be engaged in a fierce debate with Jones. The pianist gesticulated wildly in Harper’s direction, although he hadn’t turned and thus could not be aware of her arrival on the scene. The older white-whiskered man shot a glance her way, and his face flushed.

  “I should probably have helped him,” she said to Hasp, “the man on the wall.”

  The archon grunted. “What kind of man asks a lady to carry him through a pool of sludge?”

  “A lady?”

  Hasp’s neck buzzed. “That was the demon talking,” he said.

  A call came from behind them: “I say!”

  They turned.

  Isaac Pilby had evidently resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rescue himself. Shoeless and covered in tar up to his shins, the lepidopterist strode across the yard towards them, brandishing his folded parasol like a rapier, while his real sword swung in its white leather sheath at his side. He had been successful at keeping neither brolly nor blade entirely free of Moine’s pollution, for the tips of both now sported six inches of black gloop.

  “You,” he said, jabbing the parasol at Harper, “abandoned me. And you,” now he jabbed the umbrella at the angel, “are an abomination in glass. Now both of you are completely responsible for and deserving of whatever amercement the Pandemerian Railroad Company sees fit to extract from you as a result of this incident. I have powerful friends!”

  “If someone ordered me to kill him,” Hasp muttered, “I don’t think I’d resist too much.”

  Either Pilby didn’t hear him, or he was choosing to ignore the angel. Chin thrust out, the little man strode on towards the train and her staring passengers, rocking his thin shoulders in an almost comical gait, as though desperate to squeeze every last shred of majesty from his sorely blemished appearance.

  Jones was the first to approach him. “My dear sir,” he said, eyeing the other man with what appeared to be a degree of suspicion, “what on earth are you doing out here? Carrick, fetch a brandy for this man at once.”

  Carrick looked up from his audience, a line of annoyance creasing his brow, then he saw Pilby and the frown deepened.

  “I do not require alcohol,” the shoeless lepidopterist said, “merely a change of raiment and transport away from this foul place.” He plan
ted the soiled tip of his parasol on the ground and raised his nose in an expression of haughty indifference. “I will compensate you handsomely for the inconvenience of returning this locomotive to CogCity. But know that I fully intend to write a severe-”

  “We’ll take you with us,” Harper broke in, more to stop his endless prattling than from any great fear of reprisal. The sun was already making her feel nauseous and weak. “But we’re not heading back to Cog until the day after tomorrow. This train is bound for Coreollis.”

  “Coreollis?” Pilby looked vaguely confused. “But they closed the Larnaig Ferry. There’s no way to reach the city by train now. And Coreollis is Rys’s stronghold.”

  “The PRC have just reopened the ferry.”

  “Well, that’s bold,” said Edith Bainbridge, moving through the crowd of onlookers. She was wearing a different peach-coloured frock from the one she’d worn earlier. If anything it was peachier. “You, sir, are interfering with a diplomatic mission,” she said to Pilby. “Besides, why should you have a free ticket when we are financing this whole event? The idea is ridiculous. We’ve little enough room as it is.”

  “Madame-” the lepidopterist began to object.

  But Carrick broke in. “Compensation, you say?”

  Harper exhaled quietly through her teeth. Carrick had a familiar distant, calculating look in his eyes. She half expected him to ask how much. But, given the present company, she doubted even Carrick would be so crass.

  “Well, yes,” Pilby remarked. “It’s only fair. Return me to the terminus at CogCity and we’ll discuss some payment for your services. I am a man of considerable means. Indeed, if I had known the Pandemerian Railroad Company had reopened the route, I would undoubtedly have bought a ticket myself.”

  Carrick grinned. “Harper, find this gentleman some shoes, will you?”

  But before the engineer could go and find Pilby some footwear, a cry came from one of the stewards. There had been a terrible accident. Edgar Lovich was dead. The passengers rushed back inside to discover the actor’s body lying sprawled in one of corridors. Lovich’s wife, Yve, let out a shriek of horror and dropped to stem the flow of blood from her husband’s body. But it was already too late. Edgar Lovich had died within the last hour. Someone had stabbed him in the chest.

  Yet nobody, it seemed, had seen anything.

  Harper gave instructions to the crew to mop up the spilled blood, and left the ladies to accompany the sobbing wife back to her bedroom. Then, ignoring Carrick’s quarantine, she told Hasp to follow her back to the slave pens. As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, she asked the god, “Did you kill Lovich?”

  “Yes,” he replied without hesitation.

  “Why?”

  Hasp shrugged. “I can’t think of a plausible reason or motive.”

  “Did someone order you to do it?”

  “No.”

  The engineer frowned. Not only was Hasp incapable of violence against any of Menoa’s ambassadors without a direct order, but if someone had ordered him to slay the actor, then couldn’t they also have ordered the god to lie so as not to implicate the real culprit?

  She tried again. “I order you to answer my next question truthfully. Did someone order you to kill Lovich?”

  Hasp winced. He reeled, staggering against the carriage wall. And then he dropped to his knees on the floor, clutching his skull and moaning.

  “Forget that order,” Harper said quickly. “Hasp? Don’t answer my question.”

  The tension left the angel’s face. “No more questions,” he breathed. “The parasite…”

  Harper understood. Menoa’s parasite was punishing him for failing to answer her question. But it was also preventing him from answering that same question. The angel had been given two mutually opposing orders-he could not obey one without disobeying the other.

  “If you were instructed not to reveal the identity of the murderer under any circumstances, then any question that threatened that order-”

  “Might kill me,” Hasp finished in a despondent tone.

  Harper was thinking hard. How could she get to the truth of this if Hasp could not speak?

  If a passenger could get away with one murder, what else would they use the doomed god for? Would the engineer be at risk herself? She phrased her next question carefully. “If I asked you to detail your exact movements since Carrick released you from the slave pen, would you wish to answer?”

  “No,” the angel said.

  Of course not. Even that information would implicate someone. “Let’s get you out of the passengers’ way, then,” she said.

  Back in the slave pen, Harper studied the remaining captives. After the cripple’s death, eight of Rys’s Northmen remained, together with Hasp’s young female companion from his palace in Hell. The men sat apart from one another in silence, their scaly bodies wrapped in blankets. Not one of them would meet the engineer’s eye. “Did any of you see what happened?” she asked.

  The girl spoke up. “Why? What happened?”

  “A passenger was killed.”

  “Someone was killed in here, too, but you don’t seem so bothered about that.”

  Harper shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about it?” The truth was Carrick had actually threatened to put her off the train for pursuing the matter. He cared nothing for these people. Ten slaves or nine, it made no difference to him. Harper doubted that it made much difference to Rys, either. The handover was nothing more than a gesture of goodwill-intended to show the citizens of Coreollis that their new king was benign and just.

  The presence of Menoa’s vast and terrible army at their doorstep would merely reinforce the point.

  A low sky and ceaseless drizzle shrouded The Pride of Eleanor Damask’s arrival at the southern end of the IalarPass. Smoke from her stack boiled up between wet granite cliffs on either side, rock faces which still bore the pickax scrapes of those slave labourers who had widened the natural ravine here in recent years. Overhead the clouds bunched together in clumps like dirty sheep’s wool. The train slowed, the solid thump of her pistons reverberating in the narrower space. Then she sounded her whistle. Echoes bounced among the hidden, cloud-wrapped mountain peaks, before a horn blast from the Sally outpost answered the call. The soldiers stationed ahead, just beyond the pass, would now be preparing to wake the ancient steamer which would carry them across LakeLarnaig to Coreollis.

  Another voice answered the whistle, this one a long low roar which rumbled across the heavens. Menoa’s arconite came into view, striding between the foothills at the base of Rael Canna Moor. Its skull and shoulders were lost above the clouds, giving it the appearance of a decapitated giant. Engines thundered behind its ribs, powered by some arcane system of blood and fuel the Mesmerists had developed in Hell. Its voice echoed like thunder over the hidden mountain peaks:

  “I am ready to serve.”

  It turned away and strode quickly into the mists ahead, shaking the ground under its feet.

  To watch this spectacle of divine engineering, the passengers had gathered upon the viewing platform of Observation Car One. Rain dripped from colourful umbrellas as the party waited: the men in one group, smoking cigars while they discussed in layman’s terms the mechanics, torque, and forces about to be employed; the ladies in an excited huddle, whispering about some duke and his mistress and what she had said to so-and-so three months ago.

  Harper stood back from the group in an attempt to avoid the occasional acerbic glances from both Isaac Pilby, who still blamed her for the loss of his brogues, and Edith Bainbridge, who held the engineer accountable for everything else that had gone wrong, including the weather. She breathed mist from her bulb whenever she felt her strength begin to wane.

  Jones had given the lepidopterist a pair of shoes from his own wardrobe, while Ersimmin, being of a closer size to the newcomer, had donated several of his own crimson suits. Both the pianist and the elderly reservist seemed to have taken a special interest in Pilby, for they rarely left
the small man’s side. The three of them together, in their dark red suits, reminded Harper of the fractured glimpse she’d seen of the pianist through the music car ceiling.

  Did the trio have more in common than the white sword sheaths they each wore? She didn’t dwell on the matter. Whatever common ground they shared would be cinched by the social circle in which they moved-a closed world to someone from Harper’s background.

  Yet Jan Carrick seemingly remained unable to see the gulf of this class divide. Pilby had come to some financial arrangement with Menoa’s chief liaison officer, who had evidently regarded this as the first rung of a ladder that would raise him to a position of equality with the very guests he fawned over. The passengers tolerated the chief, of course, but they would never welcome him into their fold. They smiled and chatted with him, but with a barely concealed contempt Carrick utterly failed to notice.

  At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the Eleanor’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.

  The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four hundred feet below. The new line was much shorter, and more dangerous.

  Harper couldn’t drag her gaze from the red flag, which struck her as some dim portent of doom. They had a saboteur and a murderer aboard. Wouldn’t the perilous descent to Lake Larnaig provide the perfect moment for foul play? Harper studied the passengers carefully, searching for any emotion or expression which might betray a hidden agenda.