Scar Night; Book One of the Deepgate Codex Trilogy

by Alan Campbell

  “We have to move faster,” she said. “Ulcis’s archons are free.”

  “How many?” Rachel whispered.

  “Fifty or more,” Dill said, after gazing into the depths. “They’re gaining fast.” He beat his wings with all of his strength. Carnival groaned in protest and lashed after them in pursuit.

  Rachel drew the bamboo tube from her belt and popped open its lid. A musty odour emerged from inside; accompanied by a strange scratching sound. She closed it again quickly. “Tell me when they get near,” she shouted. “I can’t see well enough.”

  Now there were people visible among the debris: ragged men, women, and children, tumbling head over foot, garments rippling. Screams and cries filled the abyss. One woman clutched an infant in her arms; its wail tapered away to nothing.

  Beneath them the archons had drawn their swords. They circled as they rose, sweeping like great grey hawks through the falling debris.

  “How close now?” Rachel asked.

  “Close enough,” Dill replied.

  “Take this, then.” She handed the tube to Dill. “Open it and throw it in the face of the first one that gets near us.” Then, gripping Dill’s waist between her legs, she leaned outwards and pulled her sword free.

  Dill examined the tube. “What’s in here?”

  “Hookfleas.”

  A battle cry went up from the archons, as the closest moved to attack.

  “Above!” Carnival shouted suddenly.

  Dill glanced up just in time. He dived aside to avoid an iron spike as large as a temple spire.

  “The Scythe!” Rachel cried. “The shipyards are coming down.”

  Massive iron skeletons thundered past. Mooring spines, gantries and cranes, huge winches and pulleys and rusted hooks, nets of blackened cable and chain. An iron funnel, belching smoke, thumped against the roof of a warehouse with a mighty boom that shook the abyss from side to side.

  “We can’t—” Rachel broke off and cried out in pain as the chain confining her ankle tightened and her leg was jerked down savagely. Carnival had been forced to dive out of the path of a spitting furnace. They lost considerable height and suddenly were among their pursuers.

  An archon with a cadaverous grin reached out and grabbed Dill by the ankle; sank its nails deep into his flesh. Rachel’s sword drove down, aimed for the attacker’s elbow. But the winged creature avoided her blow easily. It slipped away, leering, brought a scimitar up to strike.

  Dill emptied the bamboo tube directly in its face.

  Hookfleas burst from the tube with a chittering sound. The archon howled, dropped its sword, and began clawing at its face. The fleas had already burrowed into its flesh, were bubbling under its grey skin. Blood-smeared bone gleamed through rips opening in its cheeks and forehead.

  “They’ll burrow on into the brain and nest there,” Rachel shouted. “It won’t die for a while, if it can still remember how to fly.”

  A second archon threw itself at Carnival’s back, sword aiming for a point between her shoulder blades. The scarred angel spun, lifted a strand of the chain to parry. Steel struck iron. Sparks flew.

  Rachel cried a warning.

  Carnival recoiled as a brick wall plummeted between herself and her opponent. When windows rushed by, she lashed out half a dozen lightning blows through them, smashing glass each time. Then the wall was gone, leaving the archon hovering dazed and toothless. Carnival kicked the creature in the face and it tumbled away, snarling.

  But the others were still closing, more than forty of them now. Huge wings pounding, they weaved through the onslaught of falling debris. The closest dived at Rachel and Dill, who drew his own sword. Did he even know how to use it? It felt so awkward in his hand. He threw the empty tube at the archon, but missed. The creature grinned triumphantly, then disappeared as a cargo hook slammed into it from above. Feathers skirled down after it.

  “This is too much,” Rachel shouted to Carnival. “Stay close to us. The chain…If something hits it…”

  Dill swerved again as the corner of a blazing building whoomphed by. Smoke engulfed them, and suddenly they were spinning, tumbling blind through turbulent, choking air.

  “That was a warehouse!” Rachel yelled. Which meant the heavy industrial buildings that had once bordered the Scythe were falling now: factories and warehouses, foundries and mills, burning, booming, breaking apart. Monstrous chains thundered into the depths, slicing through clouds of seething smoke and dust. A knotted cluster of workers’ shanties struck a crane and burst into planks and coils of rope.

  A scarred archon in rusted half-plate armour engaged Carnival briefly, its spear flickering like a snake’s tongue. Carnival was grinning back through her own scars. She fought with an arm span of chain, first snapping it taut to deflect the blows, then whipping it into her opponent’s face. Three blows to counter every thrust her attacker made, soon reducing his face to shreds. She grabbed at the spear and kicked the archon in the shoulder, spinning it round. Carnival flipped the spear point over, drove it deep between the archon’s wings.

  An arrow hissed past Dill’s ear. “Archers!” he warned, pointing wildly in the direction the arrow had appeared from.

  Carnival flung herself away in that direction.

  “Wait,” Rachel cried—but Carnival was too lost in the frenzy of battle to remember the chain. Before Dill could react, Rachel was pulled free from his grip. Suddenly he was weightless. Alone.

  Carnival shrieked as Rachel’s weight yanked her from her course, and dragged her a dozen fathoms down before she adapted to the strain and clawed back some height.

  Ulcis’s lieutenants attacked as one.

  Those level with Dill, a dozen or more, dived at Carnival herself. A score more beat up from below to where Rachel swayed like a pendulum. Swords, spears, cutlasses, and sabres closed in like fangs.

  “Spine,” Carnival yelled, “make yourself useful.” She grabbed the chain at her ankle, then shifted her weight back, her wings thrashing at the air. Then she began to circle slowly, swinging Rachel beneath her.

  Rachel looped her free leg around the chain, thrust out her sword.

  Carnival increased her speed, circling over the assassin, then she dropped lower and leaned back into her wings. The muscles on her neck corded as she strained against the weight of the chain.

  “Faster!” Rachel cried from below.

  Wings lashing, quickening her rotations, Carnival pulled even harder on the chain. Rachel gained speed, drew level, and began to spin around her like a living mace.

  From fathoms above, Dill watched them breathlessly.

  The assassin’s sword carved a bright circle through the surrounding darkness, once, twice, thrice around Carnival before it found the first of Ulcis’s archons. As Rachel’s blade ripped through it, the grey-skinned creature did not have time to scream. A cloud of blood and feathers followed the divided halves of its corpse into the abyss.

  Teeth set grimly, Carnival was now using Rachel’s momentum to increase their speed. Round and round the assassin spun, faster and faster, until the links taut between them sang and her sword seemed like a ring of steel.

  Rachel clove another angel from shoulder to stomach, severed the wing of a third. Above, below, around, she whirled, her blade trailing arcs of blood. And all the while she wasparrying, deflecting blows with astonishing speed. Steel clashed and sparked and flickered around her.

  But it wasn’t enough. Her opponents were faster. They swooped around the assassin, searching for a way past the whirring chain and blade. A hulking dust-coloured angel threw its spear, managed to catch Rachel’s shoulder. As she cried out, Carnival bit hard against the spin, and swung Rachel over her head and back down with brutal force. The assassin smashed into the same archon, impaling it on her sword, and then she was torn free again.

  Dill watched, rapt. At the end of the chain, Rachel was spinning so fast he couldn’t see her clearly. How could she still remain conscious? Blood flew in circles from her blade. Sparks and emb
ers spiralled in a raging vortex behind her. Ulcis’s angels were everywhere, thirty or forty of them, swerving, veering, circling. Parrying her blows, wounding her, they were going to tear her to pieces.

  And, all around, the city fell. Great smouldering beams and crosses of iron. Chains, buttresses, turrets, and scaffolding. Catwalks and stairwells, gutters and gables. Houses that spewed smoke, roared, and split apart among fizzing torrents of glass, cobbles, and tiles.

  The darkness deepened. And Dill glanced up.

  A pendulum house the size of a warship filled the sky, three storeys of chain-wrapped stone and buckled iron plate. It would hit them full on.

  He screamed, “Carnival!”

  She saw it, too.

  Carnival heaved Rachel around one more time, and then folded her wings flat against her back. The assassin’s momentum threw her beyond the circling archons, jerked Carnival after her. She only just made it as, inches behind, the pendulum house smashed into Ulcis’s archons—and they were gone.

  The city of Deepgate listed above him, torn open from edge to axis. Buildings swung below the temple from a score of foundation chains, still wrapped in tangles of lesser chains and cables. Fires raged across half the sky and motes of soot and embers fell like burning snow, but the sun was still visible through the dust-shrouded rent.

  Ulcis’s angels were nowhere to be seen—one way or another, they had returned to the depths.

  Carnival was waiting for him, with Rachel in her arms. The assassin’s body was covered in wounds, glistening red through countless gashes defacing her dusty leathers. Her head rested on the scarred angel’s shoulder and her sword arm hung slack, the blade still dripping blood. She showed no sign of movement.

  But as Dill’s approaching wings blew dust around her face, she looked up wearily and smiled.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Dizzy,” she whispered.

  He returned her smile. Then he glanced at Carnival. Dust enveloped her face and arms, covering her scars. She looked exhausted, but her eyes seemed a shade lighter than he remembered, and he was struck by the strange thought that she was pretty. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Save it,” the other angel said.

  They flew on up—through the broken city and into sunlight.

  As if a floodgate in Dill’s mind had been opened, the memories of his previous life rushed back. He remembered clinging to a weathervane, turning with the wind under a darkening sky. He remembered circling his cell, carefully planting candles. Had he been so afraid of the dark?

  He couldn’t now think why.

  He recalled priests in black robes shuffling through dim spaces; a vaulted corridor where the bones of his predecessors looked down from tall pillars; and Presbyter Sypes, muttering and grumbling, but unfailingly kind; also Borelock’s whip; Adjunct Crumb’s perfume.

  Where were they all now?

  Everything he knew was being destroyed. Deepgate was in ruins. One quarter of the city had fallen. Chains, cables, and ropes hung from the edges where structures had been ripped away. Whole streets dangled over the yawning abyss. Just then, there was a mighty rumble and part of Lilley crumbled and fell. Fire engulfed the districts surrounding it, blackened chains interknitting with smoke. The temple itself tilted ominously, like a thin, cloaked figure bending to peer into a hole at its feet.

  On the eastern perimeter of the abyss stood a vast machine the likes of which Dill had never seen. It was ablaze, funnels disgorging angry smoke from the summit of its yellow- and black-streaked hull. At its base long jointed arms held whirring cogs against one foundation chain, spraying sparks across the city. Deepgate’s armies were pouring around this behemoth, inching siege-towers and ladders closer. Warships harried it from above with waterfalls of burning pitch and showers of bolts.

  “Devon,” Rachel said.

  Carnival studied the devastation. “The bastard cut down my tree.”

  Clouds of smoke rose over Deepgate and lifted the three of them up among the fleet of churchships. Missionaries stood on the decks, gaping down, but their airships made no move to engage the Tooth. They seemed to buzz through the smoke without purpose.

  Rachel’s gaze moved between the churchships and the streets below. “Those cowards could at least help them evacuate. They’re doingnothing .”

  Refugees were leaving Deepgate in droves. Crowds packed the streets in creeping, shuffling lines. Many carried their possessions with them, or drove donkeys laden with furniture, crates, and barrels. Thousands had already descended upon the army encampment, where a frantic lieutenant was shouting orders, ushering the refugees through the lines to where the camp encroached upon the desert. But thousands more were moving in the opposite direction, converging on the temple at the centre of the stricken city. Streams of people tried to filter past each other, till streets were either congested or completely blocked and fights were breaking out everywhere.

  Four heavyset workers, en route to the temple, were cutting their way through a family trying to escape the other way. The wife was screaming over the fallen body of her husband. More casualties choked the lane behind, where a horse bucked and kicked among the jostling crowd.

  “Someone should tell them what’s down there in the pit,” Rachel said. “They wouldn’t then be so keen to get to the temple.”

  Carnival grunted. “They’d only hate you for it.”

  They flew over the clogged lanes of the Warrens and high above the League of Rope, where fires raged far beyond the edges of the rent. When they reached the mountain-sized machine itself, they paused.

  Battle raged below. Sappers were attacking the tracks of the machine with rams and lances, dragging beams from broken siege-towers nearer. Meanwhile, soldiers advanced, shields upheld, striving to reach ladders planted against the hull. Dozens of men fell under arrow fire. Grapples flew up, but most failed to find purchase on the smooth surface and clattered away.

  Dill and his two companions descended. From the roof of the machine, a stairwell brought them down to a hatch.

  Inside, resistance was heavy, yet the scarred angel and the assassin dispatched the men they encountered with appalling efficiency. Both the chain that united them and the sword glistened freshly with blood by the time they reached the bridge.

  Devon was hunched over a skeletal contraption, shifting levers, his attention fully on events outside. A bearded man with a heavily tattooed face stood to one side. When he saw them, his single eye widened in surprise and he murmured a warning to the Poisoner.

  “Please come in,” Devon said, without turning. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” He pushed and pulled a few more levers before he turned to face them.

  Outside, the grinding of metal ceased, the cutters lifting into view before the bridge windows.

  “This is Bataba.” Devon indicated the bearded man. “Heshette shaman and leader of those you slaughtered on the way in.” He eyed the fresh blood on Rachel’s sword. “I tried to warn him when we saw you approach. Providing you with an escort would have been less messy.” He gave a little shrug. “Now he is angry, of course, and no doubt blames me.”

  He made a dismissive gesture. “On the day Deepgate falls, an angel, a leech, and an assassin rise from the pit.” He looked from one to the other, before his gaze finally settled on the chain between Carnival and Rachel. “Scar Night must have been interesting.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Rachel lowered the point of her sword to the floor. With her other hand she slipped the hood off the poisonsong bolt at her hip.

  Devon snorted. “It’s what they want. Look.” He punched his stump at the window. “The faithful are converging on the temple. The faster I cut, the more eager they become.”

  “Half the city is trying to escape.”

  “And if they do escape, I won’t pursue them. I’m not unreasonable.”

  “Ulcis is dead,” Rachel said. “His archons are dead. There’s nothing left down there.”

  Devon raised an eyebrow. “Yo
u found some evidence of that?” He seemed unconvinced. “A tomb?”

  “I drank him,” Carnival said.

  Devon frowned, cupped his chin in his hand. His eyes flicked from Carnival to the floor and back. Then he looked up, amused. “You drank him?” There was now an edge of uncertainty in his voice. “You drank a god?”

  “I could manage another,” she said.

  Dill sensed blood in the air, the pressure of violence, like water building behind a dam ready to burst. And in response he felt something building inside himself, a force pushing back. Hadn’t there been enough blood spilled? Too many lives already lost? He’d had enough. “No,” he said firmly. “No more killing.” He faced Carnival. “Let him go. Let them all leave.”

  “I think it’s beyond that now,” Devon said, not unkindly.

  “Enough!” Bataba snarled. He grabbed Devon’s shoulder, swung him round. “The city—finish it.”

  Rachel said, “There’s nothing underneath Deepgate but bones, shaman.”

  “Bones!” Devon laughed. “What am I supposed to do with bones?” But his gaze then fixed on the freshly healed wounds on Dill’s chest. “The angelwine,” he said, “you found it?”

  “Dill died,” Rachel explained. “It revived him.”

  “Died?”

  “I’m afraid I left your hand behind.”

  Dill was stunned.He had died? His memories were now crystallizing. He remembered the fight on the mountain of bones, the pain in his chest before he blacked out. And then he remembered waking in the dark cell. Was there anything between?

  Something…

  A void, darkness. But he had a sense that this darkness cloaked other memories, lurking there just out of reach. “How long was I dead?” he asked.

  “Days,” Rachel said. “Maybe a week. I don’t know.”

  “What do you remember?” Devon asked.

  “Darkness.”

  “That’s it?”

  Dill tried to shake the fog from his head. There was something else. A dream of shadows moving. Had there been a glimmer of light? Voices?