Iron Angel

11

"No,” Rachel said to Trench. “The caravan trail is too dangerous by daylight. Spine are everywhere, hunting any refugees who attempt that route. And they’re not the only ones. Rumors of Heathen attacks reached us while we were in Sandport. We must wait till dark and then head southeast.” She drew a line in the sand. “Then we can cut east through Cinderbark Wood.” She hesitated. It was a dangerous route, but likely to be their best chance. “From there we should be able to reach the Coyle without much fear of detection.”

Deepgate’s expanding canopy of smoke throbbed overhead, a dark bruise streaked with toxic colours-orange, lime green, yellow, and red. Rachel and Trench had hidden in a sandy basin in the lee of an iron groyne, two hundred yards southwest of the Spine patrol routes and the abyss perimeter. Exhausted from their trek through the stricken city, and with only an hour till dawn, it had been pointless to continue across the Deadsands. Instead, Rachel had used the last of the darkness to sneak back into the perimeter camp, where she had searched for supplies for the journey ahead. Her foray yielded a satchel of labourers’ rags, a field medical kit, a cord of pigskin, four flasks of water, and a serrated kitchen knife, which she secreted in her armour beside the dagger she had taken from the Spine master in the temple.

Now dawn was here, and Rachel desperately needed to sleep. She sat in the shade of the groyne, tending to her companion’s wounded wings and hands. Red vapor was rising from the city like bloody steam. The low sun filtered through, turning the Deadsands the colour of burned skin.

“We must not delay,” Trench insisted. His scowl seemed to belong to an older face than that of the young angel he had possessed, yet his eyes burned as orange with annoyance as Dill’s ever had. “The Veil is growing denser. By nightfall the Icarates might have enough strength to regain their forms. Then everyone in Deepgate will die.”

Rachel pointed east, to where one of three churchships hovered over the Deadsands. “They’re looking for us. We wouldn’t manage to cover half a league without being spotted. We don’t have any choice but to remain here until dark.”

Trench’s eyes darkened, and he growled in frustration. Rachel studied those eyes for some sign of Dill, just a hint that her friend’s soul might still be connected to his living body. Yet the harder she looked, the further her hopes diminished. Her companion was a stranger to her.

And so they waited there in the shadow of the groyne, taking turns to sleep and watch for patrols, while the sun glimmered like a weak lantern in the gloom. The chained city groaned, cracked, and fumed behind them. Airships droned across the Deadsands in the distance, but the search soon moved away from the city.

Rachel slept in fits. Disturbing noises haunted her dreams: the distant explosions from the Poison Kitchens and the hideous twang and judder of overstressed chains became the sounds of war machines, things like huge insects and skeletal towers that shuddered and hissed jets of gas.

She woke sometime around noon to discover that the air quality had declined noticeably. A warm breeze sighed out of the abyss, carrying with it the stench of fuel. The heavens appeared angrier and more vivid than before. Fumes boiled in the blackness overhead, turning from clashing pinks and reds to fragile shades of yellow and silvery blue.

Trench had fallen asleep and rolled back onto his wings, reopening the wounds the Spine bindings had given him. Whatever regenerative powers Devon’s angelwine had bestowed upon the angel now seemed to have departed along with Dill’s soul.

Rachel pulled some lint from the field kit and cleaned the blood from her companion’s wings before wrapping a clean bandage around one of the deeper cuts. Trench woke, but did not resist her ministrations. When she had finished, he moved to the edge of the groyne and stared back towards the city.

Dark shapes flitted like windblown rags between the seething skies and the crimson mists now rising from the abyss.

“What are those vapors?” Rachel asked.

“It is the blood of the dead,” Trench replied. “There is much power in blood, enough to sustain a soul in this world. And so the Mesmerists use it to stain the ground before their warriors set foot upon it. It feeds their armies. Without it they would wither and die.” He swept a hand across the vista before them. “The Veil will spread until it covers all of this. When it reaches the sea the Mesmerists will make ships from blood and souls and metal.”

“Can we stop it?”

“Not while the portal beneath the city remains open.”

Rachel clenched her teeth. “Ulcis warned us. He built his palace over a gate to Hell.”

Trench looked surprised. “You knew him?”

“I knew his daughter.” Rachel wondered where Carnival was now. Last night’s ambush in the city had been thwarted by something. “We once stood together above the gates of Hell.”

“Gate is the wrong word to use. The Maze exists in a separate reality from this one. Since Ayen sealed Heaven, the Maze has been growing, exerting a new pressure on this world. Now the membrane between the two realms is wearing thin. It is weakest in places where a great number of souls have poured into Hell-in battlefields, or in plague cities like Cog in Pandemeria.”

“The Church of Ulcis.”

“Deepgate’s temple fed the god of chains, not the Maze. The portal under his palace was insignificant, no great threat to him or his Church.”

“But then he died.”

The archon nodded. “And his death has allowed a glut of souls into Hell.”

A bitter taste filled Rachel’s mouth. On Scar Night she had witnessed the death of the god of chains. In that dank cell at the bottom of the abyss, she had watched Ulcis’s daughter feed. By killing her own father, Carnival had unwittingly damned the city to Hell.

She tried to sleep again, but the foul mist creeping out of the abyss cloyed at her throat and filled her eyes with warm thick tears. Sleep, when it eventually came, brought nightmares.

A giant striding across the Deadsands towards her-a towering skeletal figure of bone and metal. Fireballs falling from the heavens struck the ground around it with the sound of pounding drums. Its grinning skull looming over her…

Trench was shaking her awake. The sky seemed much darker than before and the stench of decaying flesh filled her nostrils. She coughed and spat, tasting a vile film on her teeth. “How long have I slept?” she asked. “What time is it?” Her joints felt full of grit, her lungs heavy.

“Mid-afternoon,” the angel replied urgently. “The Veil is becoming dangerously thick. You were screaming in your sleep.”

“Just a dream,” she said.

“An unnatural dream. This air is not healthy.” He pointed east. “Something has happened to the skyships.”

Far across the Deadsands Rachel saw three isolated pockets of flame.

“They came down,” Trench said. “One after the other. I cannot explain it.”

Carnival? Rachel saw no sign of the scarred angel. But what else could have brought those airships down? The Heshette? It seemed unlikely. Deepgate’s aeronauts always kept their ships well above arrow range.

Then Rachel noticed the sands around her. Blue and green ash had drifted down and settled in soft bright clumps across a hundred yards of desert, like scabs of alien lichen. But this flora, when she disturbed it with the toe of her boot, stank of rotting metals.

A deep rumble rolled out from the chained city. Showers of white sparks rushed upwards from the burning city, sparkling against the vast dark columns of fuel smoke. “The Poison Kitchens,” she said. “Deepgate won’t last much longer.”

“Then let us hurry.”

Trench got to his feet and unfurled his wings against the turbulent sky. For a heartbeat he appeared in silhouette-an angel wreathed in red smoke and falling stars-and then the sky behind him bloomed with white light.

Deepgate exploded.

Rachel’s head struck the metal groyne as a violent concussion slammed her backwards. Flames swam across her vision. She heard an explosion as vast and terrible as the death cry of a god-then nothing but a shrill whine. A fireball of unimaginable size was mushrooming over the chasm. Silver-white flashes in the sky bleached the surrounding landscape as the blast swelled upwards, sucking a vast column of white smoke and embers upwards in its wake.

She grabbed Trench and dragged him down behind the groyne.

Torrents of sand howled past the edge of the iron barricade. A furious rumble shook the ground. The groyne shuddered and groaned, then pitched over at a shallow angle.

Silence.

Through a thick haze of dust Rachel saw Trench crouching beside her. Grit pattered against her leathers. The air was opaque, a fuming cloud of white and pink, yet Rachel glimpsed darker shapes in the sky above.

Debris?

It began to fall like hail. Shards of metal and blocks of stone thudded into the sand all around. Most of the pieces were small, no larger than a sword or a man’s head, yet they struck the ground with enough force to kill. Something hit the iron barrier with a teeth-numbing clang. Rachel shoved Trench up against the leaning groyne, then crawled in beside him. The low barrier gave limited protection, with barely a foot of overhang under which to shelter, but it was better than nothing. There she waited while shrapnel pounded the desert around their makeshift shelter, raising puffs of sand and colourful ash.

Smaller objects pinged against the barricade, yet she felt deeper, more violent concussions through the ground. From somewhere came the screech of rending, ripping metal, the crack and crumble of stone-the final death rattle of a city.

How many minutes passed Rachel could not say, but the hail of debris gradually lessened and finally stopped. A deep silence fell over them.

She wiped sand from her stinging eyes. “Shit. Are you all right?” What had the chemists stored there to cause such a powerful explosion? “Trench?”

“I’m fine.”

Abruptly, the air grew cold. A chill wind blew in from the desert, towards them, like a reflexive inhalation in response to the outward force of the blast.

And it began to rain.

Gently at first, then with increasing vigor, the rain came down. Fat black drops of water churned up the desert floor, rattled against their iron shelter. Rachel covered her nose and mouth. The water stank, like-?

When she heard Trench screaming, she knew it wasn’t water at all.