God of Clocks

3

Rachel spent the night in Dill's mouth. She had curled up under a blanket with her back pressed against his molars, but she couldn't get comfortable. Air seeped in through gaps in his front teeth and turned the space into a cold, dank cave. Mina had suggested building a fire, but Rachel had snuffed that idea. It just hadn't seemed right. From far below she heard the constant judder of machinery and the crash of broken trees each time Dill took another step through the forest.

Living forest. Dill's vision of petrified trees could only have been a flash of memory or a dream. Since leaving Deepgate, the young angel had been thrust from one horrific reality to another, from the fathomless pit beneath the chained city to the corridors of Hell itself. It was a wonder he had maintained any of his sanity at all.

They had tied up Cospinol's stores as best they could. The stacked barrels and crates had been inclined to topple over each time Dill turned his monstrous head-prompting Mina and Hasp to leap aside in order to avoid damaging their fragile skins. Now both the thaumaturge and the debased god were slumped against the piled goods. Hasp looked twice as exhausted as Mina, the parasite in his skull having tormented him throughout the night. Only Mina's hideous little dog, Basilis, had managed to sleep easily.

Cospinol had provided them with rude furnishings: rugs, blankets, lanterns, and even an old table and chairs. The chairs and lamps had fallen over, and now stood in a heap against one side of the jaw, but the table remained where they had set it-a huge rotten old slab of wood that smelled faintly of brine.

The sky lightened. They had no view but one of fog. Occasionally Mina closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the mist, announcing the position of those arconites she could sense. Six of Menoa's twelve golems remained within the fog, following them to the south. The others were lost, somewhere beyond the reach of her sorcerous vision.

This troubled Rachel. Had those giants now gone after Anchor and Cospinol? If they had managed to stop the tethered man before he reached the portal, then all hope rested on Mina's crazy plan to attack Heaven.

She stretched her neck, then rose and peered out of Dill's mouth. Nothing but a flat greyness in the sky ahead, a bleary carpet of forest below. “How much further does this woodland stretch?” she asked.

“A hundred and twenty leagues,” Hasp replied. “It once covered most of Pandemeria, but the Pandemerian Railroad Company cut vast swaths of it down during the railway reconstruction project. All that's left are the old forests beyond Coreollis. The Northmen were once woodsmen, you should remember.”

“We must have covered at least eighty leagues during the night,” Rachel said, “if Dill managed to keep a straight course, that is. Aren't we supposed to have reached the Rye Valley by now?”

They had decided to head for the Flower Lakes, a system of deepwater reservoirs Rys had formed by damming two of the rivers in the north. The lands around there were reputed to be the garden of Coreollis, and there they hoped to lose their pursuers. Dill's trail through the Great Pandemerian Forest was too easy to follow but, if his giant footprints could be hidden under deep water, they might yet slip away from Menoa's arconites in the dense fog.

Hasp shrugged. “I have no idea where we are, nor where to find the Flower Lakes from here.” He winced and pressed a hand against his head. “No doubt Mina or Basilis has an inkling. Everything in this grey gloom seems evident to her.”

Mina looked up. “The land keeps rising northwards and forms a low ridge. I can see a forest trail half a league to the northeast. It seems to have been used recently by a large number of people-refugees, I think, from an abandoned loggers' town lying to the southeast. The road runs on through a second, much smaller camp next to a sawmill, but that looks deserted, too. Just a group of workers' houses, storage sheds, and a shuttered inn. There's a huge yellow machine-an abandoned steam tractor-but it doesn't look like anyone's been working there recently.”

“So, where are we?”

She shook her head. “I've no idea.”

Hasp grunted. “Would that Cospinol had possessed a map.”

Sabor's realm lay to the north of Pandemeria and the Flower Lakes. It was a wild, ice-blown land-a place named Herica since before man's memory. Cospinol had described it as a country of white bears and five-limbed beasts larger than aurochs. Sabor's fortress-the oddly titled Obscura Redunda-stood atop the summit of an outcrop of black volcanic glass in the shadow of the Temple Mountains. But not even Cospinol had known exactly where to find it. He'd never been to visit his brother.

None of this helped Mina, who could sense, in the minutest detail, the leagues of forest within the surrounding fog and yet couldn't explain how their immediate environs corresponded to the wider world. Without sun or stars to guide them, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning. And they were lost.

Rachel gazed down through the gaps in Dill's teeth. From this height she could see an unbroken canopy of misty trees. Acres of dismal grey forest swept by them with each of the arconite's steps. “We could stop and ask for directions,” she suggested.

Hasp laughed.

It was the first time Rachel had heard the god laugh. She turned to look at him and noticed that the strain had left his eyes.

“I'm serious,” she said. “In this gloom we can't even be sure if we're heading in the right direction. Mina, how close is that camp?”

Even the thaumaturge was smiling. “A few minutes away. I can't see anyone about, although there may be people in one of the houses.” She looked at Hasp.

“Why not?” he said.

Rachel gazed up at the arconite's palate. “Dill? Did you hear us?”

The bony chamber tilted sharply forward and then back, causing the chairs and lamps to slide across the floor and crash against Dill's barrier of giant teeth. Hasp and Mina clung on for their lives.

Hasp let out a snarl and righted himself, his face contorting with anger. “Would you remind him to stop doing that?” he growled at Rachel. “Nine Hells, it's bad enough being trapped in this damn cave, without him almost killing us every time he nods his head.” He grabbed both sides of his head roughly, then twisted away in pain and stormed off to the back of the chamber.

Rachel placed a hand against the side of Dill's inner jaw. She didn't even know if he could sense her touch or not. “Head for the settlement, Dill. Let's find someone who knows where we are.”

The village hugged one edge of a broad clearing in the forest. Several hectares of the nearby woodland had been cut to provide grazing land for animals, but it looked like most of the wood had been brought in from other places via the many smaller cart tracks that radiated out from the central sawmill. Wedge-shaped piles of fresh logs waited in the fog behind a row of shacks with tin chimneys. The shuttered inn stood at one end, but Rachel did not see any signs of life. The sawmill itself was a long low shed with an overgrown sod-and-grass roof. A belt ran through the shed wall to a bright red steam tractor positioned outside, but the machine was not currently operating.

The former assassin glanced at Mina. Hadn't she said that tractor was yellow? It seemed like an odd mistake to make, but hardly an important one. Perhaps Rachel had simply been mistaken.

“It's safe enough,” the thaumaturge said. “But don't take too long.”

Rachel slipped out between Dill's teeth and onto his hand, and he lowered her to the ground. His four-hundred-foot-high body crouched over her, his useless wings blurring into the sky above him. As soon as he became motionless, all vestige of life seemed to desert him. He was a mountain, or an ancient and hideous piece of sculpture, as much a part of the landscape as was the settlement. The smell of chemicals and grease appeared to ooze from the scratches and whorls in his impossible bones. He had kept his skull raised level while he stooped, and the dark caves of his eye sockets now stared ahead at nothing.

She hopped down from his palm onto a deeply pocked and rutted track showing signs that a large number of people had been this way recently. Beyond the road, the row of shacks waited in the mist, their glassless windows dark. A wall of conifers stood behind them, the boles stripped of lower branches and tinged broccoli green.

Rachel approached the dwellings cautiously.

She searched three of them in turn and found nothing. They were simple one-roomed huts with bunks for six workers in each. The bedding and mattresses were missing. In the fourth shack she found a freshly cut pile of firewood beside the potbelly stove, and four human skulls lying on the floor. She placed her hand on the iron cooking plate. It still felt warm.

The inn was a larger, two-story building, constructed from heavy interconnected logs and painted grey. A wooden sign hung above the door, bearing the words The Rusty Saw alongside a skillful carving of a bowed and serrated logging blade.

Rachel walked around the building's perimeter, trying both of the locked doors and many of the small shuttered windows. After she returned to the front she banged on the main entrance door. Nothing. She kicked the door in.

A broad saloon took up most of this floor. Shelves packed with whisky bottles occupied the wall behind the bar, framing an old mirror etched with the words Pandemerian Railroad Company.

Rachel walked amongst empty chairs and tables, the floorboards creaking under her boots. “Hello?” she called out. The room smelled of sawn wood, that bitter-fresh yet aged aroma of seasons past. She peered up the staircase rising at the rear of the room.

“Hello? Anybody up there?”

No answer.

The hairs on her neck tingled suddenly. She sensed a glimmer of movement at the edge of her vision, like a passing shadow, and wheeled round.

Nothing.

Her own reflection stared back from behind the scratches of the old mirror. The leather jerkin Cospinol's slaves had given her looked too bulky for her slender frame. Her hair appeared darker in this gloom, almost honey-coloured. She noted the hilt of her newly acquired Pandemerian sword protruding from its roughly woven scabbard. Unconsciously her hand had slipped down to grip the weapon.

A crack divided the mirror from top to bottom. It bisected her pale face, giving her mouth a crooked appearance. Had that fracture always been there? For some reason it unnerved her.

One of the two doors from the saloon brought her into a passage that offered a way out back leading to the well and the privy, but also to a small kitchen through a further door on the left. This room had a water tank and a pantry still stocked with tinned food, jars of preserves, and boxes of fresh vegetables. She returned to the saloon and opened the second door. This must have been the owner's office: a wardrobe, an overstuffed chair before a desk, papers crammed into cardboard file boxes, and a narrow camp bed set against the rear wall. A pendulum rocked back and forth beneath a clock on the wall. Just as she turned away, the clock gave two brassy chimes.

Rachel heard a footfall behind her and spun round to face the saloon once more.

Nobody there.

From her position here by the office door, it looked as if she possessed two distinctly separate reflections in the old mirror behind the bar. They stared back at her from either side of the fracture. The glass must have warped, for each image appeared to have a subtly different expression. The one on the left looked…

Crueller?

Rachel shook her gaze away. I must be going mad. First Rys, and now this. Had she really seen Rys's double appear in his own bastion moments before it fell? A growing number of recent strange events troubled her, lurking in the back of her mind.

She sighed. This creepy place had let her nerves take control of her imagination once more.

Nevertheless, the footfall had sounded real enough, and such a noise could easily have carried from the building's upper floor. To dismiss it too easily would be rash.

Slowly, Rachel walked up the stairs.

Four doors led from the upper landing: three open, one closed. Gripping the hilt of her sword, Rachel edged past the first open doorway. Musty furniture filled a small bedroom: a bed, chest of drawers, rug, small stove, and grey lace curtains backed by fog.

The second room was similarly furnished.

Then she came to the closed door. “I'm not going to hurt you,” she announced. “I just need some directions.” She waited and then tried the doorknob.

A slender young woman in a floral dress burst out of the doorway immediately to Rachel's left and flung herself at the assassin, screaming like a witch loosed from the pyre. She hefted an axe in her raised fist. Her staring eyes and hollow, painted cheeks formed a mask of utter terror. She swung wildly, so completely wide of Rachel's shoulder that the assassin barely had to move an inch to let her attacker simply bull past. And then the woman was sobbing, visibly shaking, and turning on the landing to deliver a second blow.

Rachel could see instantly that this opponent was no warrior. “Wait!” she yelled, and held out her hand mere inches in front of the other woman's face. “What do you think you're doing?” she demanded. “You almost hurt me.”

The slim woman halted, uncertain, her axe still quivering. Her lips seemed as thin as a red wire in that powdered white face. Sweat stained her dress under the armpits and across her chest. Strands of orange hair were spilling out of the loop of ribbon she'd used to restrain them, yet underneath the hideous makeup she might have been attractive. She looked at Rachel with a mixture of fear and desperation-and perhaps just a shade of hope.

“Put that down,” Rachel said.

The other woman immediately lowered the axe. “Abner made me do it,” she said. “It was his idea. He said since I was younger than him I'd be the best one to frighten you off. I never meant to hit you. Abner said I should…” She stopped herself and gave a small wince. “But I couldn't do that anyway. We were just trying to scare you away.” Her throat bobbed. She glanced down at the axe on the floor. “Please don't kill us. There are four hundred copper marks hidden in the well. You can have them all.”

“Where is Abner? Is he your husband?”

The woman's gaze darted momentarily past Rachel to the room she'd just come storming out of, before returning to the assassin. “My husband? Yes. He ran out back when the fog and the golem came. He'll be hiding in the woods somewhere. He didn't mean you no harm.”

Rachel had turned so that her back was now against the landing wall. She was not surprised to spy movement to one side, a figure beyond the open doorway through which her unlikely attacker had just come.

A stout man wearing scruffy green breeches and a white shirt stood in the doorway. Abner was twice the size of his wife. His cynical little eyes fixed on Rachel as he aimed a musket at her face.

He said, “She's not getting my money.”

Then he pulled the trigger.

John Anchor had carried the weight of the sea on his back before and therefore he understood pressure, but in this strange realm the fluid was becoming thinner and more transparent as he descended. He felt like he was adrift in a red sky. Hundreds of motes of light had been drawn to him, and the whole constellation sparkled and danced all around like pieces of living aether; these were souls trapped in the portal.

Anchor reached out again and again, grabbing fistfuls of cord as he pulled himself even deeper, Cospinol's great ship ploughing through the waters above him.

All the while he kept his eyes on the depths, watching out for the entity that Alice Harper had detected on her Mesmerist device.

Soon he began to perceive objects in the waters around him: physical things like Anchor himself that must surely have fallen down from earth, and other, weirder detritus that looked like it belonged below in the Maze. An oak tree floated several yards to his left, complete with roots, its twigs still bearing acorns. Three steel helmets hung suspended in the waters as though they had come together to confer. In the far gloom Anchor spotted an iron vessel, a small Pandemerian steamer of some kind. He could just make out its funnel and bridge.

And everywhere there were corpses of both men and beasts: hundreds of the Northmen who had fallen at Larnaig; a score of dead horses like huge pale foetuses suspended in amnion; jackals and hunting dogs and countless scraps of other unidentifiable remains.

The Mesmerist refuse was even stranger: different-sized spheres composed of human bones, two figures on long black stilts-quite dead-clusters of vicious metal shapes, and dozens of vaguely humanoid warriors and flayed red men. But there was also debris that Anchor suspected had never seen the sun: broken chunks of carved black stone and arches, and entire sections of churches or temples. The lights seemed attracted to these things and looped around them in constantly slow orbits.

Opening the portal, Anchor realized, had caused a cataclysm not just on earth but also in Hell. Now the detritus from opposing universes mingled here in the limbo between them.

And then he saw something moving through the debris to his right-a long sleek shadow with a pointed head and a crescent tail. It disappeared behind a section of temple wall.

A shark?

Anchor paused his descent. Surely it was impossible for any normal living creature to survive down here. The tethered man and his master, however, had consumed enough souls over the aeons to bend the very substance of nature to their wills. Everyone else aboard the skyship, with the sole exception of Carnival, had been dead for centuries. Dead slaves, dead sailors, dead warriors hanging in the Rotsward's gins. Even Alice Harper did not require air to survive, simply a supply of blood.

Was this the creature Harper had detected earlier?

The skyship rope thrummed against his back. What's wrong, John? Why have you stopped? Some sort of trouble?

Anchor wrapped his legs around the spine of the portal, and then used both fists to jerk down on the rope three times in order to relay his uncertainty back to Cospinol.

Harper isn't reading anything unusual on her locator. Some ghostsnearby, but nothing that wasn't once human. The soul traffic she detected earlier is still quite far below you. I'm afraid it's much further away and larger than we previously thought. The sheer scale of it has confused her device. But the closer we get the more information she can decipher. It's certainly not an arconite, John.

The tethered man peered into the murky red waters. Human souls swarmed amongst the suspended debris like jack-o'-lanterns at play, illuminating facets of the queer drowned architecture. He looked again for the creature but saw nothing more.

No doubt it was simply a Mesmerist construct that had somehow failed to die at Larnaig. Still, he did not recall seeing such an animal on the battlefield.

He began his descent again.

Further down it grew brighter. The waters thinned and cleared, and soon Anchor could discern just how vast the debris field was. It stretched as far as he could see in every direction, men and beasts and machines and pieces of black masonry all floating in fluid as thin as air. Strange gold and crimson clouds stained the far horizon, as if backlit by a hidden sun, and from these issued an amber radiance that slanted through the fluid like evening sunshine.

The pressure had fallen to such an extent that Anchor was tempted to open his mouth and inhale. He resisted that urge. This was not air.

The rope trembled again. John, our metaphysical engineer is obtaining clearer readings from the portal below you. There is a vast number of souls down there. Cospinol paused. I can't explain it, John, but this looks like another army rising from the Maze.

An army of what? King Menoa had slaughtered his entire Mesmerist force to open this portal. He had nothing left but the arconites that walked the earth. And yet here appeared to be a second force as vast as the first. Hidden reserves, perhaps? Or had the Lord of the Maze managed to bend the souls of Rys's slain Northmen so soon after Larnaig?

Either seemed unlikely.

Then what was this new force?

The tethered man grinned. King Menoa had exceeded all of his expectations, a worthy foe indeed. Anchor slammed his hands together and chuckled deep in his throat. In all his long life he had not heard of another being fighting an army within a portal. Men would sing about this battle for centuries to come.

John, they're rising fast. Drag the Rotsward down towards you. My gallowsmen have centuries of saved anger to spend.

Anchor felt a twinge of disappointment, but he was neither proud nor selfish enough to deny his master's gallowsmen their share of sport. He gripped the portal spine between his knees and then tugged on the skyship rope. Again and again he pulled on that briny hemp, allowing a great loop of it to sag into the portal below him.

After a while the rope continued to fall past him without his aid; he had given Cospinol's skyship enough momentum to descend on her own. He looked up to see a vast dark moon burgeoning in the heavens above, the edges made ragged by countless crosshatching gallows.

And when he looked down again, he saw the opposition Menoa had brought to meet him. Not warriors. Not Mesmerists, either.

Something far worse.

Cospinol's cries of dismay traveled down through the skyship rope and into Anchor's mind. How could he have gathered such a force so soon? Are these creatures the Larnaig fallen returned to haunt us? There are too many!

From the depths of the portal surged a vast and ragged army of cripples. Most appeared human, or partially so, but their faces reminded Anchor of the scribbles of a delinquent child. Their twisted limbs flapped and groped at the portal waters, arms and legs that appeared to have been broken and allowed to set crooked. Rags trailed behind their torsos like bloody bandages. Many had been stretched, twisted, or punctured, as if forged by instruments of torture. Others were part beast-dog- or apelike-their toothy grins and impassive eyes mere parodies of humanity. Yet more were simply children.

Harper recognizes these creatures, Cospinol said in a weary and doom-laden tone. She says they're known as the Failed, John. The Mesmerists broke them so badly that their minds became useless. He paused. Those Icarate priests abandoned them, leaving their souls to cascade down through Hell and form a river. Menoa should not have been able to recruit these creatures from their grave. They do not suffer men or gods. They can no longer be persuaded.

Dread filled Anchor's heart. He gave up counting their numbers. There was no honour to be found here. These pitiful creatures swam in currents of madness.

He waited, a great solitary figure limned in the long amber light, clutching the portal spine as tightly as if it had been a life rope. What could Menoa hope to achieve by sending this force here to die so senselessly?

The Failed propelled themselves upwards through the debris field in ways that suggested unfamiliarity with their own flesh, their arms and legs writhing like the tentacles of strange cephalopods. Some wore useless armour made from broken mirrors or feathers stitched with colourful thread, while a few gripped weapons drunkenly by the blade or hilt or guard, as if someone had thrust unidentifiable objects into their uncertain hands. They breathed in the portal water and clutched wildly at the tiny motes of light around them, and many dropped their swords and knives in doing so.

Did they understand battle?

By now the Rotsward was looming directly overhead, and its gallows spanned the watery sky, its timbers aglow like gold bars in the slanting amber light. Anchor gazed numbly up at the vessel. This was the first time he had seen Cospinol's skyship without its cloak of fog. He had imagined something grander. An agglomeration of corpses and pieces of debris had snagged on the underside of her hull, and her gallowsmen had begun to struggle and kick against this refuse. Other slaves moved quickly amongst the gallowsmen, cutting them from their nooses with knives so that they might fight.

The skyship rope hung loosely below Anchor, and scores of the Failed had reached that rope and were clinging to it, some gnawing on it or hacking at it with blades. They had distinguished it as something alien amongst the floating debris and so set upon it with a common purpose.

With the lowest of the Rotsward's gallows still three hundred yards above Anchor, the first of the Failed swam closer. Their outstretched fingers groped for him.

The Riot Coast barbarian finally pushed himself away from the portal spine. He grabbed the first hand that drew near and pulled his opponent towards him, then broke the thing's neck and shoved its corpse away without giving any more heed to it. But the victim with the broken neck flailed his arms, turning in the clear water, and came back at Anchor again. He had bitten his tongue, and a ribbon of blood now trailed from his backwards-lolling head.

Anchor was now right in the midst of six or seven foes. Grim-faced, he set about the fight methodically. He snapped their bones and smashed their skulls with his fist, then kicked their broken bodies away with the thoughtless efficacy of a fisherman gutting his catch. The broken-necked man lunged for him again, his head lolling. Anchor grabbed the thing's jawbone and twisted the head all the way around, tearing it off.

Still it lacked the sense to die.

The headless creature swam back towards the big Riot Coaster. But Anchor was brawling with a dozen foes by now and he lost sight of the thing amidst flailing limbs. Those whom he thought he had already killed returned to fight again, while yet more swam up from the depths to join them. He broke them all and threw them back but they would not die. Three half-naked wretches set upon the decapitated head with savage blows, yet without a glimmer of thought or emotion in their bovine eyes. From the depths thousands more swam closer.

Anchor had underestimated Menoa. These foes lacked the wits to fight with any skill, yet that hardly mattered if Anchor could not destroy them. The waters all around him were already thick with fragments of them, and still more arrived with every passing moment. He could barely see through the gore. This battle was hopeless. Eventually the Failed would overwhelm him, suffocate him, drown him.

Despair filled his heart. With a powerful kick, Anchor propelled himself backwards away from the portal spine. Scores of clammy fingers fumbled over his skin, grabbed his harness, pulling him back. He closed his eyes and thrashed his arms, dragging himself backwards through the strangely airy water. He almost cried out. The desire to open his mouth and breathe became intolerable.

Cospinol's voice shuddered through the skyship rope. Control yourself!

And do what? Fight? Ripping this army to pieces was achieving nothing. Couldn't Cospinol see that?

The sea god must have realized his servant's plight, for he said, Get up here, John. Swim to the Rotsward. We need to think about this carefully.

Anchor bulled free from the mass of figures, propelling his huge body upwards. He swam through a detritus of broken mirror shards, fingers, and feathers. In the spinning silvered glass he glimpsed reflected a hundred calm eyes.

One of the Failed tried to pull down on the Rotsward's rope, but Anchor barely noticed this. He kicked a Mesmerist bone sphere out of his way and surged up through the debris field, leaving countless outstretched hands grasping for his heels.

The skyship was still sinking towards him and he didn't have to swim far before he reached the lowest gallows. Not all of his master's dead warriors had been cut loose, yet all stopped their silent howling to watch the tethered man rise amongst their ranks. Anchor's rope grated across the timbers behind him, dislodging some of the debris the vessel had accumulated. He moved faster, pulling upon the spars to quicken his ascent, weaving through that great crosshatched scaffold like a bobbin through a loom.

By now the Failed had reached Cospinol's gallowsmen and a fight was under way. Most of the gallowsmen fled, but some remained trapped in nooses and fought; these men were soon relieved of their souls.

Anchor reached the Rotsward's hull and kicked up from a horizontal joist and swooped over the drowned balustrade. The Failed were still busy with the gallowsmen and had not followed. Dragging his great rope over the midships deck, Anchor headed for a hatch in the weather deck at the stern of the vessel. He yanked it open and peered down into the dark bowels of the vessel. Which way to Cospinol's cabin? He tried to remember.

He had not been here for over three thousand years.

When he finally opened the correct door, he found Cospinol and Alice Harper waiting for him. The metaphysical engineer was drifting about a foot from the floor; her red hair floated behind her like an underwater fire. She smiled with full blue lips, then pointed up at the ceiling. The god of brine and fog floated up there, gently flexing his great grey wings to keep himself level.

Anchor and Harper swam up to join him.

The uppermost foot or so of the cabin held an air pocket. Anchor broke the surface of the water to see Cospinol's bedraggled face looking back at him. The tethered man's head knocked against a roof joist. There was a splash and then Harper emerged, too, her hair now lank and dripping.

God and slave regarded each other.

“You can breathe if you wish,” Cospinol said. “The air is rank and probably poisonous by now, but I don't suppose that matters much to any of us.” He gave Harper a nod. “More important, it carries sound.”

Anchor coughed and spat out water, then looked around him. “You have really let this place go, eh?” He took a deep breath, and then wished he hadn't. The old sea god was right about the air.

“The Rotsward still exists because we will it to. If it's old and rotten, then what does that say about us?”

Anchor snorted a laugh.

Cospinol smiled. “It's good to see you again after all these years, John, though I wish the circumstances were different. This battle is clearly not one you relish.”

“These cripples lack the brains to know when they're dead,” he grumbled. “This is no battle, Cospinol. It is butchery.”

“And with little purpose,” Cospinol agreed. “I'm not convinced that this enemy can be destroyed, not here at least. If all of them were present, then perhaps, but these few thousand…” He gazed down into the waters under his neck.

Anchor frowned. “What do you mean if all of them were present?” he said. “There are already thousands down there. That is the problem, yes? Too many foes?”

Harper shook her head. “You can't kill them,” she said, “because they are not individuals. They share a common will, perhaps even a common soul.”

Anchor didn't understand.

“It's like a colony of ants,” she explained. “The group purpose is greater than any of its parts. But in this case, the colony is sentient. The Failed are not an army-they are a single entity, a god if you like. These crippled warriors may not even be aware that they are part of an idea that is larger and more complex than their individual selves. Destroying a handful of ants doesn't much harm the operation of the colony, and it has no effect on the idea of a colony. While any of the Failed remain, the idea that gives them power is unassailable.”

The big man grunted. “So we must kill them all?” he said heavily.

“That's the problem,” Cospinol said. “They aren't all here. Menoa's Icarates tortured these people until their minds broke. Without minds they could no longer maintain their individual shapes in Hell. Their physical bodies dissipated and dripped down through the Maze, forming a vast subterranean river. But now the River of the Failed has become sentient. It is rising again-a new god with a single mind that is able to give shape to its legion components once more. To destroy the Failed, we must destroy the whole river. But how does one destroy a river?”

Anchor felt somewhat relieved. He had shed enough blood for one day. “So what do we do?”

“Reason with it,” Harper said.

Anchor grunted. “Before or after it finishes slaughtering Cospinol's gallowsmen? It hardly seems capable of listening.”

“This is only a tiny part of it,” she retorted. “A handful of ants separated from the colony. If we reach its source, its mind, we might be able to talk some sense into it. After all, Menoa convinced it to fight for him.”

The god of brine and fog suddenly looked old and weary. “That's what frightens me. What Menoa has done here would seem to be impossible. The Lord of the Maze shouldn't be able to influence the Failed. His own Icarates ruined those people to begin with. The priests damaged them until they simply could not be damaged anymore, and now their Mesmerist techniques are useless. If Menoa has made a bargain with this new god, then he must have tricked it in some way.”

“You think it is still afraid of him?” Anchor said.

“Perhaps,” Cospinol replied. “If it doesn't know Menoa is no longer a threat, then we have a chance. But I'm worried it's more complicated than that.” He shook his head.

A sudden burst of white light flashed under the surface of the waters. Harper lifted out a small silver and crystal device, smeared away water from its face, and then studied the readout. “They're on the decks now,” she said.

“Well?” Anchor turned to Cospinol and raised his eyebrows. “One way or another, this portal is soon going to look like meat broth.”

The god of brine and fog pinched his nose and then sniffed. “I will not continue to harm such a pitiful creation for no good reason,” he declared. “If King Menoa spoke with the source and survived, then so can we.” He looked hard at Anchor. “Break the spine of the portal. We're more than halfway down now. When it collapses the blast should scatter the Failed and throw us all into Hell.”

“You don't know that!” Harper protested. “We might end up back on earth, or…” She wrung her lifeless hands. “… somewhere, anywhere in Hell. A million leagues from Menoa's citadel! Nobody has ever broken a portal before.”

Cospinol looked to Anchor.

The big slave grinned. “I've no wish to kill any more of these cripples,” he said. “If there's still a chance to reach Hell without further bloodshed, then I do not mind a bit of a walk at the other end.”

Cospinol nodded.

This time the tethered man did not attack his foes. He met dozens of them in the Rotsward's passageways and shoved them all aside. And when he finally burst out onto the Rotsward's deck, twenty of the enemy erupted out into the waters ahead of him.

Anchor swam.

The portal spine had already been weakened by the passage of the arconites, so it would have torn apart before long. Now Anchor simply helped that unnatural process along. With hundreds of the Failed clawing at his back and harness, John Anchor grabbed the burning membrane in both his fists and pulled.

White light erupted from the sundered material. Anchor felt the water around him contract, a sudden momentous pressure on his flesh and bones. The force of it would have crushed a normal man.

But John Anchor had not been a normal man for thirty centuries and, when that sudden implosion reversed and then burst outwards again, he merely clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, suffering the blast because he had no choice in the matter. He had long ago decided not to succumb to something as foolish as death.

In that first instant, a thousand tons of debris and bodies battered against him and threw him backwards. He felt the skyship rope slacken behind him, and then snap taut again, slamming him hard against his harness.

He was falling.…

And when at last he opened his eyes, he saw the crimson skies of Hell churning around him. Far below, the Maze stretched to the horizon-an endless labyrinth of gemstone-red canals and rotting black walls. Temples and ziggurats squatted on outcrops of dark stone or in glutinous pools. The scene was hazy with flies and hot gusts of vapour and yet the atmosphere up here remained as cold as frozen blood. He cast his gaze around, hoping to spy the Ninth Citadel or the Processor from where the Icarate Prime controlled their murderous giants.

But those structures eluded him. Menoa's fortress was nowhere in sight. There was nothing below him but a million leagues of Hell.

Dill heard the musket shot, a sudden crack. It rang out over the logging camp and reverberated in the drab grey mists. The body he occupied did not belong to him, and therefore he knew that the pain he felt in his heart could not be a physical reaction to his distress. But it still hurt.

He reached down towards the inn on the ground below him, but then stopped. His hand would not fit through the door without ripping the building to shreds.

“Dill, wait!” Mina's shrill cry emerged through his teeth. “Let us down.”

Dill stared down at the shingled roof. To hell with it. He leaned forward and dug both his huge hands into the earth on either side of the inn, and lifted the whole building clear of the ground. The chimneystack leaned away from the side of the logbuilt wall and then fell and shattered against his thumb, but the walls and roof remained intact.

Screams came from within.

Dill held the tiny inn upon his two upturned palms. It rested upon a fat clod of earth and grass that he had scooped up along with it. He raised it close to his face and peered through one of the windows.

An empty room.

He turned the building slowly around in his hands.

“Dill!” Mina cried. “Open your goddamn mouth, and let us out of here.”

He opened his mouth and then brought the building and that great lump of compacted earth nearer to his jaw. Mina and Hasp clambered across the barrier of his teeth, while mud and rock slipped through his bony fingers and spattered across the ground a hundred feet below. Hasp ran inside the building and Mina followed. Dill tilted the inn so that he could peer through the open doorway.

The Lord of the First Citadel went sprinting up the stairs from the main saloon. A sudden lurch made him growl and clutch the banister to steady himself. Mina stumbled across the sloping floor, and called out, “Dill, for the gods' sake try to keep this building level! I break too easily.” Hasp had, by now, reached the top of the steps and disappeared from view.

Dill rotated the building carefully in his hands. Most of its windows were shuttered. He could not find an opening that looked in upon the upstairs landing, and with both hands full he could not flick open any of the shutters without dropping the entire inn. Its little sign flapped against the wall above the door.

He almost roared in frustration. For all his great size, he was useless.

He lifted the building again, more gently this time, and looked back in through the open doorway. Mina had halted halfway up the stairs, but Hasp and Rachel were nowhere in sight. Most of the tables and chairs had slid away, gathering like flotsam against the far wall. Dozens of bottles still rolled this way and that, spilling whisky across the floor. The smell of alcohol wafted out. The whole building creaked ominously.

Dill could not restrain himself. “Where is she?” he roared. His voice resounded across the heavens, metallic and hideously loud even to his own ears. The thaumaturge's dog began to bark frantically, still inside Dill's mouth.

Mina pressed her ears. “Try not to speak, Dill. Your voice tends to carry. Hasp is looking for her now. Hold on, I can hear…”

And then the Lord of the First Citadel came striding back down the stairs, holding Rachel's limp body in his arms. The former assassin was bleeding profusely from a wound in the side of her head.

Alice Harper sat on the edge of her bunk while the skyship plummeted towards the surface of Hell. The whole cabin creaked and whistled around her. She kept her gaze averted from the single tiny porthole, focusing instead on the array of instruments and their tiny accoutrements laid out on her narrow mattress. To keep herself occupied she made an inventory.

One Screamer. One Locator. Spare Mesmeric and parasitic foaming crystals. A knot of seeker wires in three states of agitation. Soul oil. Three phials of murderers' blood to feed the Locator and the Screamer. A silver screwtwist with a level-three shape-shifting head. Pincers and other tiny torture implements for keeping the instruments obedient. A Bael-Lossingham adaptive whistle from Highcliffe. Spirit lenses.

Her soulpearl.

Bathed in the bloody light from the window, this small glass bead seemed to emit a fierce radiance of its own-as if it could actually sense, and was reacting to, this new environment. That was impossible, of course. Only the Screamer, Locator, and screwtwist were sentient. The pearl itself was empty.

Harper clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes, listening to the winds of Hell bawling outside the skyship. A million leagues of rotten, cackling labyrinth might lie between this vessel and King Menoa's great living fortress, but she could not feel safe. The Lord of the Maze would have countless spies looking for them.

For her?

She dared not dwell on such thoughts. Menoa had previously taken a personal interest in her suffering, repeatedly breaking his promises to return her husband's soul to her.

The Locator made a tinny trumpeting sound.

Harper opened her eyes, picked up the device, and watched the silver needle dance between the glyphs etched into its metal display panel. She had instructed it to search for one particular emotive frequency-and now it was announcing its success.

“Too soon,” she said. “I don't believe you.”

The Locator crackled. To Harper it sounded like a tiny metallic laugh. Was the machine teasing her? She had never known it to lie before.

The needle wagged back and forth like an admonishing forefinger, then settled on a glyph shaped like a teardrop falling from a crescent moon. The Locator whined and then trumpeted again.

“Tom can't be here,” she said. “The odds are…”

What were the chances? Harper had spent more than one lifetime in Hell searching for her husband, yet all her efforts had been in vain. To pick up his emotae now, at the very moment she had arrived back in the Maze, was too much of a coincidence for her to blindly accept. She sensed someone else's hand in this.

Menoa?

She shook the Locator roughly. “When did he get to you?” she cried. “Did Menoa order you to do this? Don't lie to me!”

The little device wailed.

Abruptly Harper stopped shaking it. With trembling hands she pressed the Locator against her cheek, feeling its warmth against her cold dead skin. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to hurt you.” She stroked the device, then sniffed. She stared down at the glyph again. Could Tom really be somewhere nearby?

She went over to the porthole and looked out.

Cospinol's fog had vanished. Down here there was no natural sun to injure the god or his vessel, and the skies outside burned like smouldering coals. The Maze below stretched to the limits of her vision, glistening black and red.

Harper clutched the Locator in one hand and with her other hand dragged her cold fingers across the porthole. She left neither fingerprints nor smudges on the glass. Her keen eyes, long accustomed to searching for Iolites and other transparent spies in the skies of Hell, detected something odd-vague movements, like very faint shadows flitting across the heavens.

She took the trio of spirit lenses from her bunk, shuffled through them, and lifted the darkest one up to her eyes. Seen through the tinted glass, the crimson sky became green. The vague shapes she had seen earlier suddenly clarified and became immediately recognizable.

“Shit,” she said.