God of Clocks

7

The River of the Failed was quick and cunning and carnivorous. In its many disparate parts it tore the fallen gallowsmen to pieces. Columns of lamplight dropped from windows in the base of Hell and lit up the scene. Red figures rose from the bubbling waters and set upon their foes with no weapons except their newly forged hands and teeth. Their hardened liquid forms could be mutilated and scattered by blades and spears, yet the Failed themselves remained immune to death, for the river was their common flesh.

Anchor turned his back on the slaughter as the screams of Cospinol's warriors filled that vast emptiness underlying Hell.

They fought with increased desperation but ultimately they fought in vain. The river learned from its mistakes, and it adopted new tactics to trick its foes. Giants rose in places where the smaller constructs were destroyed, great brutes with clubs for fists that terrified the gallowsmen and caused them to flee. Long muscular shapes with fins and jaws lashed through the water. Red threads reached up and wound themselves around the gallowsmen's weapons, entangling them. Vortexes chewed at their shins, forcing them to retreat to higher ground. But the red river swelled around them and hardened itself into walls that funneled its victims into pens where they could be murdered more efficiently.

For a brief time it rained upwards. The tiny droplets were as cunning as their source and trickled up across the warriors' skin and into their mouths and eyes. So afflicted, a knight in blasted-steel plate rushed blindly through a frothing channel and scratched at his eyes and cried, “Teeth, teeth!”

Downstream from him a short, wiry way-ganger clung to his useless bow as he struggled against the red threads that tried to pull him under.

Three warriors clad in coloured enameled armour stood back to back atop one of the larger islands, driving spears into the crimson shapes that crawled up the rubble towards them. Before long this trio became the only effective resistance that Anchor could see. The river seemed to have momentarily neglected them, but then the waters receded suddenly and surged back over the warriors' island, knocking them into the surrounding channel.

As Anchor walked away, he felt a chill in his heart. He dragged a hand through the fast-flowing waters around his midriff. Surely no army could defeat such an amorphous foe. Here was the antithesis of Iril-brute power without any structure that could be dominated by physical force. How could one fight absolute chaos?

Anchor carried Harper, his large hands grasping her waist. She had stopped supping the fluid. “The river would have taken the gallowsmen anyway,” she declared. “Cospinol had no choice but to sacrifice them. By doing so, he has gained its favour.”

“For now,” Anchor said. “We are still at its mercy, I think. If it decides to eat us, I do not know how to stop it.”

“Then let's try not to do anything to upset it.”

“How do you upset a river?”

“The river is a god, and this god is a child. Anything might cause a tantrum.”

After some distance the Rotsward's rope tugged at Anchor's harness and he felt the familiar pull of the skyship against his back. He took a deep breath and bulled forward. The skyship felt so much lighter than before. He hardly noticed as, behind him, the great wooden vessel shifted and scraped across the drowned floor of this subterranean realm. The upper part of the scaffold remained buried in the base of the Maze, but its timbers would not be broken by mere bricks and iron.

“This is a very strange place,” Anchor said.

“You get used to it,” Harper replied. “Hell, I mean. I don't know if this place down here can still be called Hell. The Maze ends up there.” She slipped the luminous wand behind her ear, and nodded at the ceiling. “That was my home for a very long time.”

The big man grunted. “The way you speak… I think you miss it.”

“I do. Your soul imposes its own order on its surroundings. You become a world amongst many others, but still joined. If it wasn't for overcrowding and the Mesmerist threat, it would be paradise. Imagine the sex.”

He laughed.

“It's when others impose their will upon you that things become difficult.” She looked at him meaningfully. “Wouldn't you agree?”

“I chose to become a slave.”

“But you regret it now.”

He chose not to answer. “Do you think Heaven is like the Maze?”

“Not while Ayen remains dominant. She expelled her own sons just to maintain order. Her version of order. If there are still any souls left in Heaven, I doubt they're at all free.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “No, Heaven is for sheep, and Hell is for-”

“Goats?”

“Wolves, John,” she said. “Wolves.”

The fierce current made walking difficult, but Anchor held her firmly and caught her when she slipped. She kept Tom's soul close to her heart, and imagined she could feel the warmth of it through the glass. In this unnaturally engineered state, he would not be aware of anything around him. His spirit was trapped in a suspension of some esoteric fluid, an elixir like those rumoured to have been distilled in Pandemeria before the war. In such a form he would merely be dreaming.

Removing his soul from the liquid wouldn't be difficult. She could simply find a man-living or dead-to drink the elixir, and thereby become host to her husband's personality. Yet that person wouldn't physically be Tom, not as she remembered him.

Nevertheless, a return to any physical body was infinitely better than an eternity spent in a soulpearl. This way she wouldn't just possess her husband's soul. She would have Tom back.

If she could find a man to act as host for Tom's spirit, she and her husband could finally be together again. A couple, a home. In time they might even create a nice apartment in Hell, something far from the Ninth Citadel, something with a view.

But who would be the host?

The crimson river continued to rush past them, urging them on to their destination. Drips fell from above and bloodied their skin and clothes. They followed a path as twisted and tortuous as a deathbed scribble, but when they tried to leave the waters to cross one of the many adjoining banks, the currents sucked at them, urging them back into the center of the channel. Harper's light bobbed ahead, glistening on the waters, while in the darkness far behind, the grounded skyship scraped a terrible gouge through the ceiling of this thin realm.

Finding a hale physical form down here wasn't going to be easy, Harper realized. As far as she knew, in all of Hell there was only one such body available. And John Anchor wasn't about to give it up.

Before long the Failed reappeared again, rising from the waterway as though they had been submerged all this time. Thousands stood in the main channel and in all the surrounding ones. Harper shone her light around, revealing more of them everywhere. They had become more defined, Anchor noticed. He could now discern features in their faces-mouths and noses, yet none of them had yet developed eyes. Many now resembled the gallowsmen they had so recently butchered. Their wet red skins had the appearance of armour, and they carried blades, bows, and spears.

Anchor and Harper halted.

As the Failed spoke, a single voice issued from many mouths. “What is that object you drag?” they said. “There is food within.”

“The Rotsward is my master's ship,” Anchor replied. “There's no food aboard.”

One figure stepped closer. It was larger than its neighbours and appeared to be wearing red plate armour, yet the steel panels of its suit did not move in the way layers of metal should. This armour was merely an affectation. “There are many souls inside the Rotsward,” it said, and the group chorused its words. “Souls everywhere.” It tilted its head and seemed to be studying the pouch of soulpearls tied to the tethered man's belt. Then it reached out towards them.

Anchor stepped back. He felt Harper's grip tighten on his arm. She hissed something urgent in his ear, but he couldn't make out what she had said.

The figure crouched there in the waterway, dripping and sniffing the air. Then an angry voice cried out from all directions at once. “You have food.”

This time Anchor heard Harper whispering clearly. “Give it everything it asks for. You can't fight this thing.”

Anchor hesitated. Without those soulpearls he would soon lose his strength.

“Do it,” Harper urged.

An urgent shudder ran through the skyship rope. She's right. Cospinol sounded wary. We need to build up trust. We can't anger it now. Give up the pearls, John. I have many more.

Anchor snorted. “Then you should get used to walking, Cospinol. If it takes these, it will only want more. How much power are you prepared to give up?” The river heard him, but Anchor no longer gave a damn. “It's broken one deal already. There's no honour in it, just hunger.”

Right now its hunger is the only part of it we can communicate with.

The figure tilted its head again. A thousand voices whispered, “Where is the person who speaks through the rope?”

“He's in the ship,” Anchor retorted.

John! What's the matter with you? If I didn't know you better I'd say you were afraid of this thing.

The tethered man clenched his jaw. “Afraid?” he said. “The river should fear me!” He untied the leather pouch and emptied the glassy beads into his cupped palm. The soulpearls emitted their own weak light, the ghosts inside sparkling in the darkness. Anchor tipped the lot into his mouth and swallowed.

Then he grinned. “Now I've eaten them all,” he said to the dripping figures. “No more souls. You've had enough today already.”

The Failed threw back their heads and howled. The air filled with their furious cries. The waters rose and quickened to a torrent, buffeting against Anchor and Harper. Red foam rushed past. The current threatened to rip the engineer from the tethered man's side, but he held on grimly.

“Enough!” he shouted.

The voices dwindled to a chorus of wails.

“I said, enough!”

The Failed fell silent. The river torrent slowed to a more gentle flow. Every one of their heads was now turned towards Anchor. In the surrounding darkness they shifted uncomfortably.

Anchor rested his hands on his hips and studied them. “Now take us to the Ninth Citadel like you promised,” he yelled. “You get nothing more from me until after we arrive. You understand?”

Abruptly, the figures dissolved back into the waters, disappearing as quickly as they had appeared. After a moment there was no trace of them, no sound but the incessant drip of blood from the Maze above.

Harper squeezed his arm. “John, that was…” She paused. “I don't know if that was stupid or brilliant. How did you know to do that?”

“Stupid, maybe,” Anchor said. “You said this god was a child, and it behaved like a child. But I had children once; I know what they are like. It is bad to spoil them, yes?” He grunted. “Bad to give them all the things they want.”

“You have children?”

He shook her off him. “Had,” he said. “I do not want to talk about it.” He rolled his shoulders, took up the strain of the rope, and then marched forward. From far behind came the rumble and crash of Hell being further destroyed in his wake.

How many times had Rachel woken in agony? For a Spine assassin, she thought, it had been once too many. She raised herself onto her elbows and groaned. Her muscles felt like beaten strips of leather. It was dark and foggy, and she didn't know where the hell she was. The whole room seemed to be swaying.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

Rachel recognized Mina's voice, and then she recognized her surroundings. Caskets of coins, an old table and chairs, a rug. The room was indeed moving, after all. She was inside Dill's mouth again. A wall of teeth separated her from the grim daylight outside, and the crump of his great footsteps sounded far below. Mina sat with her back against the leftmost incisor, her glass-scaled face floating, hazy and red, above the shoulders of her robe. She was stroking her devil pup, Basilis.

Rachel winced. Her jaw felt bruised and tender. She lifted a hand and touched it gingerly and located some swelling. “The good news, please.”

“You're alive.”

“That's the best you could come up with?”

“Sorry,” Mina said. “I tried to think of something better to offset the bad news, but there really wasn't anything else.”

“Don't tell me the bad news,” Rachel said.

“Okay.”

Rachel sighed. “What is it?”

“Hasp tried to beat you to death. Then when Oran's woodsmen realized what you'd done to their friends, they tried to kill you, too. And that just pissed off Hasp even more. We're only alive because I dragged you out while they were hurling abuse at each other. Now this miserable cave is the only safe place left. Oran is threatening to burn the inn if we don't come down to face their justice. He won't do it, though, because it's the only shelter they have. But he'll probably find some other leverage soon enough. The whole situation could get quite messy.”

“How did I get up here?”

“I asked Dill to intervene. He lifted the building rather quickly, and we made our grand escape. Your head made really weird knocking sounds as I dragged you down the inn's front steps.”

“Thanks.”

Mina looked down at her hands. “I'm afraid I had to kill one of them… Well, Basilis…”

“You?” The assassin shook her head, and then regretted it immediately, as she groaned again. “I don't want to know. Needless to say, you're now an outlaw, too?”

“The bastards fired arrows at me.”

Rachel got to her feet and moved over to peer through the arconite's teeth. Down below she glimpsed the tops of evergreen trees sliding past in the mist. The inn still rested on the cleaver Dill had taken from the fallen arconite, but its log walls looked even more lopsided and battered than before. Part of one eave had fallen away, and the timbers comprising it now rested on the automaton's huge bone wrist. The earthen island on which the building sat had all but disintegrated. A ribbon of smoke rose from a hole in its shingled roof. Nobody was outside.

She faced the thaumaturge. “You said Oran would probably find some new leverage soon? I assume that's why we haven't just told Dill to abandon those bastards in the forest. We don't need Abner's inn that much.”

Mina nodded. “Hasp is still down there.”

Now Rachel understood. The woodsmen might use the Lord of the First Citadel as a hostage, as soon as Oran figured out that Rachel didn't actually want Hasp dead.

Or did she? The bruise on her jaw throbbed evilly. “That glass bastard deserves to be used as a hostage. Why did he react like that? I was only trying to protect him.”

“He's not himself.” Mina let her dog jump down from her lap. “Hasp can't come to terms with what Menoa did to him. The parasite in his head will force him to betray his friends, and for an archon of the First Citadel there can be no greater crime. When the king's arconite attacked Dill, it became brutally evident to Hasp that he couldn't resist its influence. He thereby lost his honour, and turning on you was just a reaction to that loss. I think he deliberately angered Oran's men because he truly wanted to die. You denied him that escape by intervening. In his eyes, you diminished him.”

Rachel sighed. “Spine have never been very good at reading people,” she admitted. “I really should just stick to murdering peo-ple in dark alleys.”

“There aren't any dark alleys here.”

The assassin grunted. “I think I need to speak to Dill.” She left the rest of her thoughts unvoiced. She needed to speak to someone human and, absurdly, Dill's voice was the most human one she knew.

A dark blue radiance filled the inside of the skull chamber. The tiny motes trapped within the crystals set into the ceiling appeared to be unusually active. Agitated, Rachel reckoned. She eased her body between the banks of shining machinery, leaning for support against a metal panel as the chamber lolled like a ship at sea.

Dill's ghost still shared the glass sphere in the center of the room with thirteen others. The phantasms floated through each other and shoved and brawled silently. White light pulsed faintly inside that huge bauble, occasionally erupting into glimmering fits that seemed to correspond to moments of conflict between its gauzy prisoners.

She laid her hand against the sphere.

… back … she's back … Murder on her … Don't let her see your thoughts… The agony … I was once within a room and then… Stop screaming! Who are you …?… in that place …men in the river… Shush … Quiet, quiet, quiet… Who …?

“Dill?”

The voices faded, then she heard her young friend. Sorry, Rachel.

“Sorry? For what?”

They almost killed you.

She pretended to laugh, but failed even to convince herself. She shook her head, thinking their situation was already dire enough without Dill's angst. “You got us out of there, Dill. Now Oran and his would-be avengers are in the palm of your hand. I'm actually pleased you've resisted the urge to crush them.”

Not entirely. Mina yelled at me to stop once I started to squeeze. I think I cracked one of the walls. He paused. They were so fragile. Everything seems so fragile now.

“But you're not.”

Tell that to the other eleven arconites. The big ones.

This time she gave a genuine laugh. “That's one fewer than there were two days ago. Who taught you how to fight like that?”

Hasp.

Hasp? Ayen's youngest son remained an enigma to Rachel. The goddess's other sons had adopted grandiose titles for themselves: the god of chains, the god of clocks… But not Hasp. They knew him only as the Lord of the First Citadel-ruler of a mere stronghold, a human position-and now he seemed to have wholly embraced this comparatively diminutive status. He was currently as drunk and suicidal as any mortal man.

That meant he'd given up.

Mina had once informed Rachel how Hasp had gone willingly to Hell. While his brothers raised armies and harvested power from the world of men, Hasp accepted the role of looking after the dead. The First Citadel belonged to mortal archons, the bastard descendants of gods and men.

Rachel. Dill's voice interrupted her thoughts. I've been seeing more strange things… Visions, or waking dreams. I don't know exactly what they are, but they're becoming more frequent.

She recalled his nightmare of the stone forest, soon after they'd left Coreollis. “What sort of things?” she asked.

A crack appeared in the world, stretching all the way from one horizon to the other. It was full of… emptiness. Not darkness, but emptiness, as if something fundamental was missing from the world.

Rachel frowned. Mina had experienced a similar vision, she recalled. And Rachel herself had witnessed a number of strange happenings since leaving Coreollis: those two identical versions of Rys inside his bastion, moments before it fell; the inexplicable change of the steam tractor's and Rosella's hair colour; Oran's strangely repetitive conversation. As isolated incidents, she had dismissed them as nerves, dizziness, or confusion. But now that she thought about it, couldn't these glitches, when put together, be the result of some greater force at work?

“Thaumaturgy?”

The whole chamber swung violently to the left, then to the right, and then left once again.

Rachel heard an abrupt yell of protest coming from the crawl space behind her. “Stop shaking your head, Dill,” she said absently. “Mina's skin is made of glass.”

I don't think this is thaumaturgy, Dill went on. It feels… bigger than that. It's like we're walking through a ghost world, as if the whole of creation is somehow wrong. I can't explain it. The closer we get to Sabor's castle, the more powerful the feeling becomes.

Could the god of clocks be responsible?

Mina cried out again, from somewhere nearby.

Rachel turned to find the thaumaturge poking her head into the room. The blood inside her glass-scaled cheeks looked hot and angry. “Dill,” she yelled, “are you aware that you've just killed two men and sent another fleeing for his life?”

Abruptly the chamber stopped moving.

What men? Rachel heard the angel's reply through the glass, but Mina remained oblivious to it, because Dill had not spoken aloud. The assassin repeated her trapped friend's question for her.

Mina said, “He just trod on a watchtower.”

“A manned watchtower? Where?”

The thaumaturge nodded. “An outpost belonging to the settlement I told you about, the town on the shore of the Flower Lakes. They didn't even have time to light their warning beacon. There are two really flat corpses lying back there, while the lone survivor is now riding for the main settlement.”

Rachel let out a long breath. “How soon until he reaches their palisade?”

“His horse's legs aren't as long as Dill's,” Mina replied. “If our giant friend just moved now, he could catch up and crush him.”

The chamber lurched to one side again, quite suddenly. Mina grabbed the side of the passageway to stop herself from falling.

I see the horse, Dill said. The rider… he's only a child.

Rachel glared at Mina. “You didn't mention that.”

The other woman shrugged. “You didn't ask. Does it make any difference? When that lad tells his people what bonehead has done, it might just cast a shadow over our attempts to parley with them.”

Rachel raised her hand. “Dill is not killing anyone else today. And certainly not a child.”

“I could-”

“No, Mina!” the assassin cut her off. “You're not going to do anything. Let the boy go. We'll face the consequences of this mishap if we have to.” She hissed through her teeth. “Either we avoid the place entirely and leave its populace prey to Menoa's arconites, or we try to ally with these people. We've nothing to lose by speaking to them. They pose no threat to Dill.”

The bloody scales on Mina's face transformed into a smile. “Fine,” she said. “Then you can handle the negotiations. I'm sure the town militia will listen to you, since you're so good with people.”

The hook-fingered boy scrambled back up the Rotsward's scaffold. The sudden emptiness of those timbers chilled him more than he had expected, for he'd never seen the skyship without her complement of gallowsmen. When he reached the hole in the hull he ducked inside, swinging Monk's sightglass on its tripod, and looked around. The old astronomer was probably still asleep above the boiling room. He'd obviously missed the whole battle.

The boy set off through the narrow skyship passageways, heading back towards the boiling room. All around him, the interior of the vessel shuddered, clicked, and groaned. These noises seemed much louder since Anchor had started dragging her sideways again, and he could feel the wooden boards bending under stress. The Rotsward sounded like she was falling apart.

But she wasn't. The old vessel was as indestructible as she'd ever been.

One more bend before he reached the crawl space above the boiling room, the boy suddenly became wary. Something was wrong. Something-he couldn't put his finger on it exactly-sounded different.

He stopped, lying on his belly in that dark and narrow conduit, and listened hard.

The bellows had stopped working.

He shuffled forward again, more quickly now, suddenly angry. What if Monk had decided not to wait for him? What if the old man had spotted an opportunity while the gallowsmen were being slaughtered? Where were Cospinol's slaves?

“You'd better not have taken a sip of her without me,” he muttered. “Better not, better not.” They were supposed to have shared the scarred angel's essence.

Dragging himself around that final bend in the passageway, his worst fears became realized. There ahead was the hole in the floor above the boiling room, the roof of the crawl space flickering overhead with the brazier light.

Monk was nowhere to be seen.

“Rotten, rotten…” The boy rattled his metal fingers against the wood and then clawed his way up the crawl space towards the hole.

And then he peered down, and stopped dead.

She crouched there, glaring up at him, her eyes as black as the scorched bulkhead behind her. The iron cooking pot had been wrenched from its vice above the brazier and now lay in one corner, heavily dented. The angel's body was misshapen, too, crooked as a scare-for-crows, her arms and legs and wings all bent at odd angles. The leathers she wore had rotted and burst open in places, revealing patches of scarred white flesh beneath. Blood covered her mouth, jaw and neck. Thin lines of red extended upwards from this gruesome stain and wrapped around her eyes and crosshatched forehead.

Scars.

Pieces of Monk's corpse lay scattered around her feet amidst shards of glass. She had broken the condenser flask. Carnival coughed, regurgitating water.

And then she threw her head back and screamed-a cry of such desperate fury that it froze the boy's wits. No creature should have been capable of uttering a sound like that. He tried to move, but his muscles would not respond. He simply stared down at her.

Her cry subsided. Her eyes met his again. She tried to step forward, but her leg buckled and twisted horribly underneath her. One tattered wing flapped. One arm hung limply at her side; the other remained at her chest, as gnarled as an old root. She moved again, dragging her body closer to the hole in an awkward shuffle. Then she gave a snarl that tapered into a wail of frustration.

“Break my bones,” she said.

The boy continued to stare.

“Break my bones.”

He said nothing.

Her chest rose and fell in rapid motions. “Get down here and help me or I will rip open your throat.” Her white teeth flashed suddenly in the red mess of her face. “Help me!” she cried, the pitch of her voice seesawing. “Help me!”

Before he even knew what he was doing, the boy obeyed. He gripped the edge of the hole and then swung his body through it, heels over head. In one quick somersault he dropped to the floor in front of her. His left foot slid sideways an inch across the slick boards before he recovered his balance.

The room smelled of fire and meat. The brazier still burned bright red in that confined wooden space, turning the scarred angel's body into a demonic silhouette. Her crippled wings shuddered.

“The hammer,” she said.

He spotted the tool lying amongst pieces of offal. An old man's hand still clutched its handle. The boy stooped and picked it up. He peeled away Monk's hand and let it drop.

“My arms,” she said.

The boy hesitated. “I don't-”

“My arms!” she screamed, dragging herself a step nearer. Her terrible shadow loomed over him. Scars slid under the scraps of leather that still clung to her. “Break them at the elbow and the wrist, the shoulders…”

The whole process happened in fits, so he could hardly recall it afterwards. He remembered the weight of the hammer, the momentum as he swung… Pauses between the sounds of snapping bones in which he wiped sweat from his brow… Carnival's voice, growing steadier as time passed. The hands. The knees. This foot. My wings. My spine. She did not scream again. She stumbled occasionally. Once she collapsed. Scars flared like lines of fire around her eyes. He remembered her eyes, at least.

The boy couldn't say how long they spent together in that room, but when it was finally over the scarred angel rested on the bloody floor, her back pressed against one of the bulkheads. Her leathers hung in tatters about her wiry body, her muscular thighs and small hard breasts. Carnival was barefoot, and for some reason, the boy thought that strange.

“Your name,” she said. “What is it?”

He shrugged. “Don't know.” Then he thought about it. “Maybe John. After my father.”

“Okay then, Maybe John.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Leave here while you still can.”

“I don't see Cospinol's slaves coming back anytime soon.”

“Get out.” She said this through her gritted teeth. The anger was building inside her again. “You stupid, ignorant… get the hell out of here!”

The boy fled. He rushed to the door and pulled it open and ran through, leaving it to slam against its frame. Now he was in one of the ship's main companionways, but he didn't recognize it. He was used to the Rotsward's darker spaces, the cramped tunnels behind the bulkheads and between the decks. But nobody was about to see him. Where were all the slaves?

He skidded around a corner and ran straight into Cospinol.

The god of brine and fog occupied the whole of the passage. His sagging grey wings stretched from wall to wall. His lank hair fell over the shoulders of his crab-shell armour, that cracked and useless suit that still stank of distant oceans. In one fist he held an axe.

“You!” the god said.

The boy turned to run away, but Cospinol grabbed him. Instinctively the boy's skin began to morph. It became pliant and slippery. He felt claws extend from his feet to give him greater purchase on the floorboards.

“Oh, no, you don't.” Cospinol struck him across the back of the head. “You'll keep that mangy shape, you little demon.” He wrenched the boy around to face him. “What have you done?”

The boy realized that Cospinol's hands were trembling.

“What have you done?” the god repeated. “Slippery little Mesmerist shit. I heard her screaming.”

“Nothing,” the boy wailed. “I didn't do anything.”

“Is she in there?”

“Let me go.”

“Did you let her out?” Cospinol shook him roughly. “Where is she?”

A female voice answered, “Here.”

Carnival hovered at the end of the companionway. Her wings were smaller than Cospinol's and very black. But she stood taller than before. Her limbs had reset and now looked almost normal. Her attitude evinced litheness and power. Only her tattered armour and pallid flesh spoke of her months-long ordeal in the boiling room. Countless wounds burned fiercely red against her pale skin. The blood around her lips had darkened and dried, and now cracked when she spoke.

“Cospinol,” she said in a low and even voice.

Cospinol released the boy. “I am Ayen's eldest son,” he said in a tone that managed to sound both defensive and indignant. “Heaven's shipwright. I am the god of brine and fog…”

She walked towards him. Her eyes were dark and devoid of any recognizable emotion, as unknowable as those of a wild beast.

She stopped just beyond the reach of his axe, and stared mutely at him for a long moment.

And then she killed him.

The attack came so fast that the boy did not see it. Carnival's wings flickered like a passing shadow. Cospinol had no time to raise his weapon. By the time the god's instincts compelled him to flinch, the scarred angel had ripped off his jaw. He gaped at her in-credulously as she dropped the bloody chunk of bone. Then she rushed forward again. It seemed to the boy that she embraced the god, held him close as a lover would. It took him a moment to register that the snap he heard was Cospinol's spine. Carnival buried her teeth in her victim's neck. He spasmed once, but the life had already left his eyes.

She was a long time drinking.

When she was done, she let the old god's body crumple to the floor. She then turned to face the boy, staring at him without recognition, her eyes seeming unfocused. Blood sluiced down her neck and arms. The clawed fingers twitched at her sides.

“You killed a god,” he said.

“A long time ago.”

“What? No, I mean Cospinol. Him! You killed him.”

She glanced at the corpse, then back at him. Awareness tightened the corners of her eyes, and her expression became suddenly suspicious. “I know you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don't you recognize me?”

She continued to stare at him as her bloodied chest rose and fell rapidly, her breaths coming in quick rasps. For a moment she looked uncertain. Her hands twitched again. A drop of blood fell from her fingernail and hit the floor. Finally she said, “Maybe John.”

“That's right.”

“After your father.”

“Please let me go.”

The scarred angel lifted her eyes and gazed into the far distance. She licked the palm of her hand and then licked her knuckles. Then she turned around and walked away, leaving the boy alone with the corpse of the Rotsward's master: the god whose will had bound the rotten skyship together…

“Oh, no,” said Maybe John, suddenly realizing.

The first beam broke before he had even scrambled to his feet. A mighty crash sounded somewhere overhead, and the companionway ceiling collapsed as heavy timbers plunged through the thin wainscoting. Clouds of dust rolled into the narrow passage. Coughing, the boy shuffled away-on his knees and elbows-from this scene of collapse. A section of floor gave way behind him and he was pitched backwards down a steep wooden ramp.

He struck solid boards again inside one of the Rotsward's many crawl spaces. Overhead, the ceiling joists snapped and a mass of rotten wood and dust crumpled into the companionway he'd just vacated, filling it entirely. Now trapped in the gloom of the narrow conduit below, Maybe John glanced around. Debris blocked both directions. There was no way out.

He changed his human form for another, more suitable, shape, though shape-shifting had never come naturally to Maybe John. He had resisted the Mesmerist implants all along, and the priests in turn had almost given up on him. They'd threatened to put him to work in the Ninth Citadel simply as a door, before he'd finally stopped fighting them. He hadn't liked the idea of people walking through him. He'd told himself that it would be better, after all, to become a shiftblade.

He clasped his hands and stretched out his arms, allowing his skin, muscles, and bones to flow together into a long ribbon. His metal fingers twisted around each other and became a slender cone. He forced the rest of his body to tighten and elongate behind that cone, becoming serpentlike. As an afterthought he grew metal scales along his back for protection.

Finally transformed, Maybe John slithered through gaps in the rubble and thus cleared the crawl space blockage. Around a bend he found another conduit, similarly congested, but this likewise proved to be no problem now. All the while, the skyship continued to break apart around him. Great booming noises issued from somewhere outside the hull. The Rotsward's gallows? Insects scurried everywhere, shaken out of the rotten wood. The boy spotted a tiny hole that seemed to lead in the right direction, and squeezed himself through. He slipped down between decks and reached what was left of the outer hull. Here dozens of the heavy gallows crossbeams had punctured and crushed the skyship's skin as if it were paper.

The boy coiled around one such timber and slipped outside through the narrow gap surrounding it.

Nothing recognizable remained of the vessel he had known. The shafts of light that fell from the lowest windows of the Maze revealed dark tangles of broken wood and knotted rope scattered over the River of the Failed. Curious souls peered down through the squares of glass above, as though from portals of a far grander vessel than the Rotsward had been. Cospinol's ship had ceased to exist in any true sense. Stripped of his protection, she had simply disintegrated.

The boy resumed his human shape. A few yards to his left, a huge pile of debris shifted suddenly, and then collapsed. The great rope that had pulled the Rotsward slithered across one of the raised banks between waterways, and then it stopped.

Far across the flooded landscape John Anchor stood beside a woman with red hair. He still wore his harness, but now his rope connected him to nothing but debris. Then the boy saw movement close by. A small winged figure was pushing through the waters in the direction of the tethered man.

Anchor didn't notice the skyship's demise-probably because destruction had always followed in his wake. He had learned to tune out the sound of devastation. And he didn't immediately become aware of the slackening pressure against his harness because the weight of the Rotsward was not something he had ever paid much attention to.

It was Harper who noticed it first.

He was grimly trudging through a warm current when she suddenly grabbed his arm and whispered urgently, “John.”

“What?” He turned, and then frowned. The rope lay slackly across the mire behind him. He stared at it for a long moment before lifting his gaze to the scene beyond.

The Rotsward was in pieces. Debris covered the flooded ground for half a league behind him. Wafers of hull sat half submerged in the red channels. Thin lines of rigging rope stretched from one patch of detritus to the next, linking odd arrays of items: clothing, furniture, window frames, painted crockery, a horsehair mattress, several unidentifiable iron drums, and a silver tea tray.

The air remained still and silent. Nothing moved out there.

“He's dead,” Anchor said. “My master is dead.” A surge of panic came over him, although he could not say why. He stared at the rope and then he looked at the wreckage again. Had anything survived? He scanned the horizon, searching for larger parts of the Rotsward's hull. There was nothing to be seen but broken wood.

“Cospinol is dead,” he said again. He felt numb from head to foot. For the first time in years he noticed the weight of the harness on his back. He also noticed that his mouth was dry. “I'm free,” he said. But the words had a cold ring to them. They sounded odd to his ears.

Harper straightened up. She was gazing across the wreckage, as if looking for something. Her fingers tightened on his arm.

Anchor saw her, too. He wasn't surprised. From the moment he'd seen the broken skyship he'd known. She was now wading towards them through the bloody waters.

“She's an angel,” Harper said.

“Her name is Carnival.”