Iron Angel

17

King Menoa had turned Harper into a machine, a combination of interconnected tools for hunting, trapping, and torturing errant souls. He had provided her with a cowl so that she might hide the potential of her vast and hideous crystal skeleton from the particular soul she was supposed to pursue-yet there was no way to hide the knowledge of what she’d become from herself.

All resemblance to a human had been stripped away. Now she towered over her own king, at least five or six times Menoa’s height. Her increased stature would allow her to gaze far across the landscape of Hell, and yet she could not lift her eyes from the sight of her own body. Conjoined transparent sections now curled down all the way from her waist, like the tail of a serpent sculpted from glass. Crystal gears moved inside her pelvis and midriff, sending vibrations up through her ribs and chest. To replace her arms Menoa had given her three long, thin glass limbs, each of which culminated in a different object: a spear, a sceptre, and a mirrored shield. Intricate Mesmerist machinery turned inside the sceptre, emitting occasional pulses of white light.

“I have improved you,” the king explained. “The sceptre acts as both an Oracle and a Locator, while the remaining limbs are designed for combat. Your spear can induce pain on many levels, and will inflict visions upon any creature you confront. Of course the shield offers physical protection, and yet much more…it is a rather special device.”

Harper lifted the shield and gazed down at her own reflection in the mirrored glass. “My face…” she cried in a voice which sounded like crystal bells chiming.

“Beautiful, is it not? You wished to keep your original form, and I have obliged. Now you exist as a combination of old and new.”

Harper’s new skull was a bulb of clear glass, moulded to resemble her face. The transparent eyes, cheeks, nose, and mouth were fixed in an immovable expression of rage-a frightening grimace, yet not nearly as terrifying as the object trapped within the glass.

It was a manikin, the tiny shivering figure of a woman in a Mesmerist uniform. She was curled up very tight with her arms wrapped around her legs and her head buried between her knees. Harper lifted her shield for a closer view. She could not see the little woman’s face, but she recognized her nevertheless.

“She represents the core of your soul,” Menoa said. “And yet I have given her the human weaknesses you still yearn for in Hell. Hunger and thirst will slowly kill her while she remains trapped.” He turned suddenly and walked away from Harper. “Go find the angel and bring him to the Processor,” he called back. “For your own sake I suggest you do it quickly.”

Dill opened the door. Already standing there with his hands on his hips, and clad in his old metal armour, was the battle-archon from Dill’s dream. The big angel frowned merrily down at him, his huge grey wings folded behind his back. A series of connected stone chambers stretched far into the gloom behind him. Each room appeared to be full of weapons, shields, and training blocks, like an enfilading sequence of soldiers’ barracks.

“Stay right where you are,” the archon demanded. “We’ll talk here at the door if you don’t mind. You just stay on your side, and I’ll stay on mine. For either of us to cross this threshold would be improper at least, and probably obscene. The castle behind me is the incarnation of my soul, just as the rooms on your side of the door are the incarnation of yours.”

“Who are you?” Dill asked.

“I’m Hasp,” said the angel, grinning.

“Hasp?” Dill gave him a blank look.

The archon’s frown deepened. “You don’t know who I am?”

Dill shook his head.

“Hasp, youngest of Ayen’s seven sons, Lord of the First Citadel. Is your mind addled?”

The young angel said nothing.

The god looked incredulous. “Light and Life, lad! What have Ulcis’s priests been teaching their temple archons? I’m his bloody brother-your own god’s brother.”

“I didn’t know he had one.”

Hasp shook his head. “I should have expected this. Your ancestors were not any wiser than you. It’s the same every time we find another Deepgate angel down here.” He sighed. “My brother liked to keep his little secrets, see? Stifling knowledge to keep the humans in their yokes. Anyway, it hardly matters. Ulcis was my brother, and Callis was one of his sons. So you must be my great-great-nephew or something like that. Welcome back to Hell.”

“My body was stolen,” Dill said. “By a shade, an archon. He said he was from the First Citadel.”

Hasp looked uncomfortable. “Sorry about that, but we saw a chance to get a message out when the portal opened. A lot of shades were pouring out of Hell, and we felt desperate enough to attempt to send out one of our own. You’ll get your body back sometime. As soon as Trench delivers his message, your body will be free of him again.”

“But I’ll be down here!”

“It didn’t stop you before,” Hasp said. “The last time you arrived in Hell, you vanished again before any one of us could reach you.” The god chuckled. “That made us sit up, I can tell you. We were hoping you could explain that little trick to us.”

Dill recalled his last time in the Maze. He had been trapped in a cramped cell, without room to extend his wings. He remembered the agony whenever he tried to move, and terrible dreams that had haunted his sleep. Each time he’d woken, it was to discover that the cell had changed in some subtle way. Finally he’d opened his eyes to see Rachel…who had brought him back to life with Devon’s angelwine.

Still, the young angel didn’t feel comfortable divulging too much to this strange god. He glanced behind the armoured archon at the vast network of chambers, the tapestries and racks of ancient weapons. This was a part of Hell new to him. “It’s so different from before,” he said.

Hasp nodded. “The Maze changes all the time. Your immediate environment is only a manifestation of your eternal consciousness-your soul, if you like. Handy if you learn how to manipulate it, so long as you keep your chin up.” He laughed. “Just don’t get any suicidal thoughts, or the walls of your prison are likely to grow knives.”

Now the god was peering into Dill’s own chamber. “Those portraits on your walls…” he said quietly. “They…they actually seem to be looking at me.”

Dill turned. “They do that.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. This is your soul.”

Dill shrugged. “I’ve never seen those faces before.”

Hasp stared for a minute longer, his expression growing darker. “Ask them.”

The young angel felt suddenly reluctant to comply. Something about the portraits frightened him. “They’re just paintings,” he muttered.

But Hasp clearly wasn’t convinced. He moved closer, until his armoured bulk filled the doorway. Dill sensed the god’s presence as a pressure building against his soul.

“Speak if you have the wits to do so,” Hasp demanded of the paintings. “Who are you?”

Thirteen voices whispered together. “A Cutter by…Lisa, a maid…I don’t…hop-keeper…My name…potboy…where is this…? Why? Daniel Crook…Who are you…? The pain…” And on it went: a torrent of hissed statements and queries.

“Enough!”

The paintings fell silent.

Hasp stepped back from the doorway. “Those portraits are other souls bound to your own,” he said to Dill. “You’re sharing this part of Hell with thirteen other people.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

The angelwine! Devon’s elixir had contained thirteen souls, power enough to resurrect Dill. But now that the angel had died again, these same thirteen had accompanied him back to the Maze. Dill looked up in horror at the painted faces. Each one of them gazed down at him with a different expression ranging from curiosity to evident anger.

Hasp frowned. “I need to get you out of here,” he said. “If the Mesmerists get one whiff of this-and believe me, they will-they’ll roll through here like a mountain of bones to capture you.”

“Out of here? Where?”

The god’s face remained grim. “We need to reach the First Citadel. If we’re to have any chance of success, I’m going to have to start training you.”

Harper moved through the Blaise Canal Area, a maze of channels divided by walls of mirror-black rock. The faces of reconstructed souls glared from the smooth surfaces to the left and right as they watched the engineer pass. The fluids here were too shallow for Mesmerist barges, yet Harper’s newly forged glass tail propelled her along rapidly. This was, of course, why Menoa had gifted her with it. Her sceptre flickered and hummed, indicating the presence of Icarates nearby. Soon enough she heard them.

The Icarate pack had gathered in a basin between the Soul Middens: those low hills where a thousand transformed souls piled one upon the other like heaped houses. Some of the dwellings, Harper noted, had fused with one another to form teetering castles and unlikely towers. These delicate structures would not survive for long, however, as Icarates continued to smash through the sensate brick and mortar to get to the souls within.

Overhead, the heavens smouldered like a dying hearth. In places flashes of darkness pulsed behind the rising crimson mists where bodies or pieces of detritus passed through the Deepgate Portal and fell from the skies. Crackling sounds accompanied this hail of debris. Blooms of white light flashed less frequently, but fell like shooting stars where the souls of the living entered the Maze.

So many bones.

Icarates moved through the canals and between the Soul Middens, collecting human remains and piling them into the hoppers of flensing machines. These vast slow-moving constructs resembled huge wagons with metal wheels and bone axles. When full they would be dragged back to Menoa’s Processor so that their contents could be used in the construction of arconites.

Her glass body clicking, Harper slithered over to the group of Icarates. There were six of them, powerfully built but hobbled like old men beneath the weight of their ceramic armour. Knee-deep in the red mire, they wielded huge hammers in an effort to break through one of the walls at the base of a Midden. Holes had already been smashed into nearby dwellings, the occupants dragged out and locked inside cages in the center of the basin. Dogcatchers moved lithely across the mounds above them, sniffing at windows and doors. One of the Mesmerists’ most enduring creations, the dogcatchers had the look of skinless men with long white teeth, constantly tasting the air as they toiled for their Icarate masters.

One of the Icarates lowered his hammer and turned his pale helmet towards the approaching engineer.

“Menoa sent me,” Harper said.

He replied with a buzzing sound. Blue sparks cascaded from the protrusions on his back and shoulders. His crooked body even dipped in what might have been an attempt at a bow.

“We should move to high ground,” Harper went on. “The king has equipped me with the tools to locate metaphysical disturbances. Archons from the First Citadel are likely to be hiding nearby. The pack must be ready to move quickly.”

Again the Icarate bowed. This time his thoughts murmured in Harper’s glass skull. The First Citadel has no power here. We do not sense their archons’ presence.

“They may have buried themselves deep in the Soul Middens.” Harper indicated them with a gesture of her glass spear. Death lights swarmed within the weapon’s shaft. “You must dig deeper.”

A sudden scream grabbed Harper’s attention. The remaining five Icarates had finally broken through the outer wall of the nearest Midden and were now pushing through the cavity they had made. Those in the lead carried tridents crackling with black wisps of energy and stepped forward as a man cried out from within.

The Icarates dragged their captive out of the gap and threw him to his knees in the basin. He was young, dressed in rough hemp labourer’s clothes-the most memorable of his earthly raiment, Harper knew, for his whole presence here was naught but a manifestation of his own soul’s memories. Now devoid of the shelter he had grown around himself, his body rapidly began to fade, turning ghostlike.

A recollection chimed inside Harper’s glass thorax, and for a moment it was not the shade of a Deepgate labourer kneeling on ground before her, but her own husband Tom.

One of the Icarates drove his trident into the man’s back, and his ghostly form became solid again. All likeness to Harper’s husband disappeared. A trick of the light? Or had the engineer’s own thoughts intruded upon this man’s soul? Out here he was as vulnerable to external influences as he was to complete dissolution. The Mesmerist priests must force power into the soul to prevent his physical form from becoming a shade. They herded the man off to the waiting cages.

This is what awaits the angel, Harper thought. At least until Menoa bestows his new body.

“Things were fine before the War Against Heaven,” Hasp called over to Dill. The god was searching through one of the many trunks set along the edges of his chamber. “Balance was sustained. Iril got the wicked souls, Ayen got the good ones. But since the goddess of light and life shut the doors to Heaven, it’s been overcrowded down here. Too many souls for even the Mesmerists to gather.”

Dill watched him from the doorway. “But Ulcis took Deepgate’s dead for himself.”

“We all did,” Hasp admitted. “Each of Ayen’s sons harvested souls. We needed to keep as many as possible out of Hell and away from the Mesmerists. Aha!” He pulled something out of the chest, an orb of brass clockwork with glowing crystals inside. “And we needed the power for ourselves,” he went on, examining the strange globe. “The War Against Heaven left us weak.”

How many people had been brought to Deepgate’s temple and cast into the abyss, shrouded with promises of redemption and Heaven? In reality they’d been nothing but fodder for Ulcis. The young angel felt his eyes darken. “How did you end up here?”

Hasp was silent for a long moment. Finally he rose, still holding the globe in his hand, and approached the doorway. “My brother Rys decided that one of us should go fight the Mesmerists in Hell.” He sighed. “And I was chosen for that honour. Put your anger aside, Dill. If you want to survive down here, you need the help of the First Citadel. And you need me to prepare you for the journey out there.” He looked back over Dill’s shoulder into the apartment the young angel had grown from his own body. His gaze lingered on the thirteen portraits on the wall, then moved quickly away. “Ideally, you’d have time to familiarize yourself with your new environment.” He waved his hand at the rooms behind Dill’s doorway. “It is important for you to know every inch of your soul.”

“Why?”

“So we can detach you from it.” He rolled his shoulders, causing the armoured plates there to rasp together; then he lifted his globe. Crystals gleamed behind the brass filigree. “We don’t have time to acclimatize you, and less time to train you, so we’ll cheat.”

Dill stared at the orb in Hasp’s hand. “What is that thing?”

“It’s a tool for creating voids, neutral spaces between the crush of souls in Hell. It will allow us to meet without damage to either of our souls, but it exerts pressure on all those around us. Open your window shutters. We need to know who’s nearby.”

The young angel strode back across his apartment. He felt his bare feet pad across the floor as though he was walking on his own skin. And in a sense he was. He was standing on his own soul.

The shutters towered over him, six feet high and three wide. A weird sensation ran through his flesh as he unlatched one of them and pulled it back to reveal a window composed of many small panes.

Through the glass he saw another chamber, much grander and gaudier than his own, shrouded in gloom. Shadows cloaked dim marble walls and pillars that retreated into deeper darkness. In the half-light, Dill could just make out a cupola overhead painted with scenes in which angels hunted queer piglike beasts through a forest. But the shallow alcoves set in the walls boasted a still stranger display. The shelves within these alcoves were laden with the skulls of long-toothed creatures.

Dill strained to see.

Wolves or hounds?

In the center of the room, a young woman sat at a desk. Dark brown twists of hair tumbled over the shoulders of her rainbow-coloured dress as she leaned forward to scribble in a journal. For a moment Dill stared at her slender wrists, as smooth as honey, and then noticed the swell of her bosom against the fabric of her dress.

Suddenly she looked up at him and smiled.

The wallpaper, curtains, and rugs in Dill’s room turned a sudden bright shade of pink. He looked away quickly.

“Who is it?” the god called from the doorway. “Who do you see?”

“A girl,” Dill said. He glanced back through the window, but his neighbor had resumed writing in her book. “I can’t see her very clearly.”

“What size of room?”

“What? It’s…” He thought for a moment. “It looks expensive.”

Hasp grunted. “Then she has an overly inflated ego. Most of these poor bastards are lucky if they can grow hovels around themselves. But does she appear human to you?”

He nodded.

“Then she’s no threat. She probably got near us when we fought the crowds in the portal, or I might have been using her as a club. I can’t honestly remember. Close the shutters. She won’t cause us trouble.”

Dill returned to the doorway, but he didn’t close the shutters. The other room had no lanterns, no source of light. He couldn’t bring himself to shut the girl in the dark. “She can’t see the doorway from her desk,” he said. “It’s so dark in there.”

The armoured god shook his head. “This is Hell, Dill. Do someone a favor and they’ll just turn against you.” He flipped the orb, and snatched it out of the air. It glowed with renewed brilliance. Hasp set it down at the base of the doorway where the two chambers met.

Light burst from the device, and it began to swell, quickly increasing in size. The air around it shimmered and blurred like frosted glass. A bubble was forming. Dill backed away as the sphere grew larger than the doorway, pushing the walls outwards on each side. Now voices were issuing from the expanding ball of light, strange whispers in a language the young angel did not recognize.

“Step inside,” Hasp said.

Dill hesitated. The space before him writhed with threads of light and hissing voices.

“Do it!” Hasp demanded.

The young angel stepped into the sphere. A feeling of terrible disorientation overcame him, and for a heartbeat he lost all sense of connection to the world around him. He was floating in a sea of light.

And then his feet struck solid ground with a resounding boom. The swarm of lights faded, revealing a spherical glass chamber as large as a planetarium. Opaque walls curved up over the young angel’s head, full of scintillations. Standing before him was the god, Hasp.

Hasp’s armour had changed. Instead of his old battered steel, he wore a suit of silvered metal. His grey wings and hair had turned as white as starlight, but his eyes held the same wry humor. “We’re standing inside a fragment of Iril,” he said, “the god of death and darkness himself.”

“Iril?”

“Our father was shattered during the War Against Heaven. The Mesmerists constructed this tool from one of the pieces of him they managed to recover.” He grinned. “Then we stole it from them.”

Dill gazed up at the swarms of stars. “It’s…beautiful.”

“Here we can meet without setting foot in each other’s souls.” Hasp clasped Dill’s shoulder. “You must learn how to adapt and control your environment, and how to arm and armour yourself properly. Just look at your current armour…”

Dill’s tattered mail shirt hung like curtains of rust from his shoulders. It was an identical manifestation of the armoured garment he had worn since leaving Deepgate, the one he had died in.

“You’re only dressed in that sack of rust because you remember wearing it when you died. So change it. Visualize yourself in something stronger and finer.”

The young angel envisioned himself wearing a suit of silvered plate, like Hasp’s own armour. Nothing happened; he was still standing there in his old rusty mail.

Hasp grunted. “So far so bad. Try on that suit behind you.”

Dill turned. A few feet behind him stood a wooden mannequin dressed in shining new armour. “You made this?”

“There’s enough power left in this sphere to create armour and weapons for ten thousand archons. But it’s only one of two pieces of the shattered god we possess, and we daren’t drain it too much.” Hasp helped Dill into the suit, strapping the light plates together. “The other fragment is all that keeps the Mesmerists from storming the First Citadel.”

The suit felt as light as silk, and yet the hardened plates were as tough as steel. Dill flexed his wings, then lifted his arms; the metal gleamed under the swirling lights.

“Now a sword,” Hasp said.

Dill turned again, expecting to see a weapon beside the now-empty mannequin, but he was disappointed.

“Create it yourself,” Hasp said. “Simply will it to appear in your hand.”

Dill concentrated. He felt the grip swell inside his closed fist and watched the air solidify into a long heavy blade. A gold guard extended over his hand. And suddenly he was holding his old sword again, the very weapon he had inherited from his forebears.

“Hmm…” The god frowned. “This blade is too fragile and unwieldy. Try again.”

And so Dill focused his thoughts on the weapon again. The steel flowed like liquid silver, the blade shortened, and the guard retracted to form a simple crosspiece.

“Much better,” Hasp said. “Now defend yourself. Show me what you can do.” A blade suddenly appeared in the god’s hand and he lunged at Dill.

Dill had never been combat-trained, and his inexperience was soon evident. Hasp disarmed him in a heartbeat. Dill’s newly manifested sword clattered across the glass floor.

“This is not good, lad,” the god said darkly. “Ulcis’s priests have been woefully lax in their duties. They ought to have shown you how to take care of yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Pick up your sword. We have a lot of work to do.”

Training lasted until long after Dill was exhausted. And then it began again. Hasp showed him how to shrug off his weariness by force of will alone. Fatigue meant nothing in Hell, where the body was simply a manifestation of the soul.

“Souls,” Hasp explained, “do not tire.”

Days seemed to pass within that sphere, but the shimmering lights kept the same level of brilliance. Dill thought about nothing except the next attack and how to foil it. And Hasp attacked him relentlessly. The battle-archon did not waver or spare his opponent once. When Dill made a mistake, he suffered for it.

“Souls,” Hasp said, “do not feel pain.”

Dill winced up at him from the floor of the sphere, and clutched two bleeding fingers in his other fist. This soul was in a lot of pain.

“Bah!” Hasp gestured with his sword. “It’s all in your mind, lad, and yet your mind isn’t strong enough to let go of it. If I plunged this weapon through your heart right now, you’d die.” He frowned. “If we can’t detach you from this fiction with which you’ve surrounded yourself, then we can’t take you back to the First Citadel. Do you want to be trapped here? No? Then stop whining about spilled blood that does not exist and get up!”

Dill rose, but the blood on his hands still felt warm and slick.

Time passed in endless dazzling coruscations: weeks or years, he could not say. Dill parried and lunged, made feints, ducked and wove around the god’s blade, until Hasp was suddenly grinning.

“Drop the sword,” Hasp said.

The young angel tried to comply, but he couldn’t. The weapon’s hilt had fused with his hand. Welds had appeared where his fingers touched the metal. In panic, he flailed his arm to separate himself from the sword. It would not budge.

“Good,” Hasp said. “Now it’s time to rest.”

“Do souls need rest?”

“Ha! Perhaps I should have said ponder. You need to remember who you were before you stepped inside this sphere. And then we’ll begin again.”

Blood now soaked the ground between the Soul Middens; it flowed from broken masonry and woodwork and gathered in pools. The Icarates had smashed through a full third of the nearest Midden, ripping out the consciousnesses and loading them into cages which now crackled with Mesmeric energy.

Bones and debris continued to fall from the sky, scattering across a wide area. And this was the problem. There was no way to tell exactly where the temple angel had fallen. He might already be buried somewhere deep inside one of the great, growing buildings. So far Harper’s sceptre had not been able to locate him, or any battle-archon.

The souls in this particular Midden had sensed the Icarates’ attack on their outer reaches. Now this mountainous building, this composite of individual manifested souls, had begun to change. The stubs of rude battlements and defensive towers were forming in places. Doors were growing reinforced iron bands across their planks, or simply shrinking and becoming stouter.

It was an unconscious reaction to the perceived threat. None of these souls had been in Hell long enough to learn how to adapt their surroundings with any skill. These battlements and towers would not be effective-they were merely affectations, a reflex display. And yet some of the souls were now working together in an altogether stranger way.

Three hundred yards away, one of the older Soul Middens had begun to creep away. This hill-sized mass of houses, balconies, and towers was moving, sluglike, across the bloody ground. Somehow, the thousands of souls within the Midden had contrived a way to flee.

Harper watched with fascination. Those dwellings at ground level had sheared away from the souls trapped below. Mortar crumbled and wood split as the Midden inched further away, leaving behind a nest of rooms without ceilings…and a trail of blood. The souls at the base of the Midden were sacrificing themselves for the good of those above. They were screaming.

And yet this painful separation and flight was doomed to fail. The cluttered mound of buildings could not move fast enough. The Icarates paid it no heed, aware that whenever they decided to take their hammers to the shifting edifice, it would be nearby for the taking.

While those souls trapped inside the Icarate cages moaned, the dogcatchers had returned to the basin to feed and to wallow. Like most creatures in Hell they drew energy from the red mire, the endless pools, canals, and gurgling channels within the Maze. Here they feasted on fresher fare than normal.

Harper’s sceptre hummed suddenly, and the lights within the glass orb pulsed. Icarates paused in their destruction to turn and stare.

Something…?

The engineer swept her sceptre across the scene before her. A ghostlike figure appeared within the glass: a powerful battle-archon. The image was vague, but the angel appeared to be clad in armour. He was striding through a long stone vault. He slotted a sword into a weapon rack, and then stooped to place a small glowing object inside a chest. The sceptre purred, and then the scene faded once more.

“An archon,” Harper said, pointing one of her glass limbs towards the ripped-open rooms left by the creeping Soul Midden. “He’s deep underground.”

“The ability to change,” Hasp said to Dill, “is everything in Hell. King Menoa has exploited the uncanny nature of this realm to forge demons. A soul can be persuaded to assume any shape and to serve any master, and the Mesmerists are very good at persuasion.”

They were facing each other through the open doorway between their chambers. Hasp had deemed Dill’s progress with the sword to be satisfactory, although the young angel suspected that the god was secretly pleased.

“These chambers are a part of you,” Hasp said. “So you ought to be able to change them. When the Mesmerists remove the core of a soul from rooms like these, they must bolster that soul with external energy or else it withers and becomes a shade. The rooms are left without the will to do anything but bleed.” He paused to gesture again at the paintings on Dill’s walls, the thirteen souls from Devon’s elixir who had taken refuge within the young angel. “Your chambers here are different. Most of the energy in this place comes from these interlopers. It ought to simplify the process of extracting you.”

“Extracting me?”

“Time is running out, lad. It would be better if you’re strong enough to move your environment with you, but if the Mesmerists find you before then, you’ll have to run for it.”

Dill’s nerves were threaded through the very floorboards and walls. The room’s stone and timber was his bones. The thought of leaving this place terrified him. “Show me how to change the rooms,” he said.

Hasp grunted. “You just need to concentrate. You want something? Then think it into existence.”

So Dill concentrated. He imagined a stack of parchment and some charcoals, much like the ones his father Gaine had given him as a child.

A vague white shape appeared on the floor. It looked rather like one of the temple candles. The moment this thought occurred to him, the shape solidified. It was indeed a candle, exactly like the one he had just imagined. He picked it up, unnerved as ever by the odd sensation of his own fingers pressing into this manifestation of self.

Hasp called over from the door, “I advise you not to try burning that. Don’t even imagine that candlewick on fire.”

Dill couldn’t help it. Hasp’s own words planted the image of a burning wick in the young angel’s mind, and suddenly the candle flared into life. He dropped it at once, but the pain did not diminish. He was burning.

“Get out of the rain!” the god yelled.

And Dill’s pain stopped as a sudden downpour of water engulfed him. Droplets of water cascaded from the ceiling, spattering against every solid surface. The candle flame had gone out. Dill felt the rain strike the floorboards and the furniture; he sensed it trickling down the walls and windows like sweat down his own neck.

The god laughed. “Forgive me for putting that suggestion in your head, but it’s better than the sensation of burning alive, is it not? I’ll leave you to figure out how to stop the rain by yourself. If you don’t you’ll drown.” Still chuckling, he wandered back into his own castle.

Dill stood in the downpour, feeling miserable. The water had already risen past his toes. He imagined himself turning off a tap, but it didn’t work. He pictured the Deadsands on a hot summer day.

But the rain still continued.

And then someone tapped him on the back of the head. Startled, Dill whirled round. There was nobody there. Water splashed off his fine furnishings. Already the ceiling plaster had begun to bow, a sensation Dill experienced as a soft ache in his skull. But the room was empty.

Another tap to the back of his head.

Again Dill wheeled. At first he saw nobody, but then he noticed the young woman standing outside his window. The glass panes had partially misted, but he recognized the rainbow dress. His neighbor! Dripping wet, he walked over and unlatched the window.

She smiled, showing dimples. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said brightly. “But this wall is leaking. I’m getting flooded in here.”

“Oh.”

Her large dark eyes shone. “I wouldn’t mind so much, but this water is…” She hesitated. “Well, the water is an incarnation of your soul. I’m afraid it’s giving me some odd thoughts.”

“Odd thoughts?”

She laughed. “Your thoughts. They’re very nice, but they’re spoiling my rugs.” She leaned closer, until her body brushed the window frame. “Dill, would you like me to put a suggestion in your head? One which might stop this silly downpour?”

Dill smelled perfume.

The rain ceased abruptly.

“That’s better,” the young woman said. “I’m Mina Greene.”

“I’m…” But she already knew his name. How much else did she know about him?

“Of course I know who you are,” she admitted. “You’re the whole reason I’m here. I have something for you-wait there.” She hurried back into her gloomy chamber, splashing through puddles. “I had to wait until that bothersome old god had gone. I doubt he’d approve of this.”

“Approve of what?”

“Just wait!” She rummaged among shelves of skulls in one of the alcoves. After a moment she withdrew a sword and brought it over to the window.

Dill frowned. “You’re here to give me a sword? Who are you? How do you know me?”

“I’m Mina Greene,” she repeated. “And I know as much about you as anyone from Deepgate. More, probably. It’s my job to know a lot of things.” She weighed the sword in her hand. “But no, I can’t give you this. It’s from the Forest of War. Basilis would be furious if I just handed it over.” Instead, she placed the edge of the sword against her own chamber’s window ledge. Then she grimaced and slid the blade sideways, cutting loose a sliver of wood. Blood welled from the gouge she’d made.

Mina gasped. She hopped in place, her hands clamped together against her breast until the pain subsided. “Blood magic doesn’t work in Hell,” she said in a strained voice. “So we’ll have to do this a different way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Mesmerists want you,” she said. “Why else do you think Hasp risked his soul in that portal to find you and bring you here?” Her brows rose, and she smiled again. “And if what I’ve been told about King Menoa is true, he’ll find a way to get you. Old Hasp isn’t as strong as he used to be. I wouldn’t put all your faith in his ability to protect you.” Now she held up the splinter of wood she’d cut from her window ledge. “So I’m going to give you this.”

“A bit of wood?”

“A bit of me!” She managed to look cross and absurdly beautiful at the same time. “How else will I be able to find you if I need to? This is what I came here to give you.” She huffed. “Do you think we should just sit back while Menoa brings his version of Hell out into the world? We’re not all as weak and foolish as the gods think we are. Cohl’s Shades have come to Pandemeria, and John Anchor’s stomping about somewhere. And there are others, too.” She smiled. “Like me. Now hold out your hand.”

Dill reached for the splinter.

“No, not like that,” she said. “Like this.” She grabbed his hand and slid the thin needle of wood into his wrist.

When the pain and shock of what Mina Greene had done to him finally subsided, Dill found himself lying curled up and shivering on the floor. Someone had closed and locked the shutters, and three vases of fresh flowers had appeared on the sideboard, but otherwise his room looked unchanged.

At least it was now dry.

His wrist throbbed, and he could see a faint red mark where the young woman had inserted the splinter. He rose groggily, and threw back the shutters.

But the view beyond the window had changed. A second set of closed shutters now prevented him from looking into Mina’s room-these ones on the inside of her windows.

It seemed she no longer wanted to speak.

Dill sat on his bed, brooding. He thought he could still smell a whiff of perfume. He closed his eyes and pictured her: her soft dark eyes, her honey-coloured skin, and the deep curves of her dress. A creak startled him. The base of the bed, he noticed, had raised itself a little higher from the floor.

Should he knock on her window?

And embarrass himself? She clearly wanted privacy. Perhaps she was feeling awkward. The bond they now shared was unusually…intimate. He decided to wait until she was ready to talk.

Living inside an incarnation of one’s soul had a certain appeal, Dill continued to discover. As long as he didn’t damage himself-by dropping a vase, for example, or accidentally slamming the dresser door too hard. He quickly learned to change his environment by simply willing those changes to happen.

In time he learned how to control the pain, and he began to experiment by conjuring flames. If he wanted a fire in the hearth, he simply thought about it, and it sprung into being. Only afterwards did he realize that there had never been a hearth in the room. That had appeared, too. At first the leaping flames sent jolts of pain through the chimneystack, but by degrees he managed to overcome the discomfort. He fireproofed himself, and the pain dwindled. It was an odd feeling, sitting on a rug while part of your soul burned before your eyes.

But was it really burning?

Other things happened without his conscious thought. The window drapes often changed colour to match his mood. When he was frustrated, he noticed they had turned orange. This observation filled him with awe, which then changed the curtains to gold. They stayed gold for a long time. The windowpanes became larger, while the shutters on this side of the glass diminished, creeping back into the surrounding walls. Eventually they disappeared altogether.

Mina Greene kept herself sealed in the darkness of her own room.

Time passed.

Hasp never closed his door, although he had made Dill swear not to step through it under any circumstances. From the god’s castle came the constant thud of arrows striking wood. He had taken to practicing with a bow.

Dill studied the paintings: those thirteen people who now shared his soul. They watched him soundlessly. Sometimes their expressions changed, but only when Dill wasn’t looking. He thought he recognized a few of them: two of the younger lads from the temple kitchens, and a girl in a scullery apron. Of them all, only the assassin unnerved him. The man bore tattooed marks on his neck-the sign of a failed tempering procedure-and his painted eyes smouldered with madness.

Could Dill conjure his own painting?

He created a blank canvas surrounded by a heavy gold frame. But the painting itself eluded him. Should it be a scene from the Codex? The Battle of the Tooth? Perhaps he should just paint himself painting himself?

Too self-indulgent. He dismissed the idea.

He tried to clear his mind and think of nothing at all. The lights in the room went out.

Dill hissed in exasperation. I’m thinking too small. Everything in his environment was malleable. He could create anything he desired.

So what did he actually want?

When the lights came on again, he found himself looking up at a painting of Mina Greene.

Harper’s towering new form afforded her a good view of the open foundations below. She watched the scene through glass eyes. The great castle that was the upper section of this Soul Midden had crawled away, leaving a large open wound in the Maze itself. Blood from broken dwellings had leached into the chambers below, partially flooding them. The men and women in that pit, now fully exposed to the skies above, gazed up in horror.

“Clear them out,” Harper said. “And ask King Menoa to send us a Worm.”

Most of the Icarates hobbled down into the labyrinth of walled spaces, their pale armour crackling with blue fire. Instead of hammers they carried tridents, for there would be no further need to smash down walls. What followed now would be a simple matter of collection.

Only the Icarate high priest remained: a stooped figure clad in ill-fitting white plates. The protrusions on his back were larger than those of his warrior comrades, like the pale fungi found on the boles of dead trees. Verdigris crusted his copper mouth grille, but he did not require it, or even a mouth, to speak.

It is done. Menoa will send a Worm.

The Worm came as soon as Menoa’s armoured warriors had cleared the souls from the bleeding pit. It appeared as a black thread, snaking higher and higher up above the far horizon, and then rushed nearer until it was weaving through the hot red mists towards them. Massive and uncertain, this conduit of souls looped above Harper’s head and then plunged down into the pit before her.

It was not one demon, but many linked together for one purpose. Their black scales rippled, serpentlike, across the Worm’s skin, but all the claws and teeth were within. Waves of peristalsis flowed back along its length as it fed on the remains of the Middens and burrowed itself deeper into the ground.

Harper studied her sceptre, searching for a psychic disturbance in the ground below. If the archon felt the presence of the Worm, then he might panic and try to flee. And then she would know exactly where he was.

But as she watched the Worm feed, a sensation of dizziness came over her, as though something inside her own body had shifted momentarily, throwing her off balance. She heard a weak tapping sound.

Harper raised her mirrored shield and gazed at her reflection.

The manikin peered back from inside Harper’s own glass skull. This tiny manifestation of her former self already looked much frailer than it had been. It swayed unsteadily on its feet. Shadows had appeared under its eyes. It cupped one hand into the shape of a bowl, made a spooning gesture with the other.

The manikin was starving.

Mina Greene’s shutters remained firmly closed. To Dill’s horror, the wood had begun to deteriorate. Damp had softened and warped the lowest edges, and the shutters now appeared to sit crookedly in their frame. He spied patches of white mould and rust on the hinges.

“Something’s wrong,” Dill told Hasp.

“Something’s wrong with most of the people down here,” Hasp replied. “She’s bound to be miserable. She’s in Hell. And souls get worn thin over time. It takes great force of will to maintain your surroundings. Ignore her; she’ll be gone soon.”

“Gone where?”

“Nowhere. She’ll just slip between the gaps and become a shade. Her room will eventually bleed to death and drain into the Mesmerist canals. Happens all the time. Some people just aren’t strong enough to survive here.”

“Then she needs help.”

“What she needs,” the god said, “is oblivion. The Veil. That’s the best thing for her now, and that’s where she’s headed. Trust me-I’ve seen it a billion times before. Don’t get involved.”

Dill rubbed his wrist where Mina had inserted a tiny splinter of her soul. He imagined her sitting alone in the darkness surrounded by those dusty shelves of skulls. He pictured her chamber rotting around her as she lost the will to maintain it. Perhaps he should just check that she was all right?

He knocked on her window.

It was a queer sensation. As his knuckles struck the glass, a vision flashed in his mind.

— A crowd of Sandporters cheered and clapped in a wide town square-

He knocked again.

— A brightly painted wagon stood in a sandy glade, surrounded by colourful trees-

“I told you to leave her be,” Hasp said.

“There’s no response,” Dill replied. “I’m going to open the window.”

“Not a good idea, lad. How would you feel if a stranger broke into your soul?”

But Dill was already searching for something to break the window with. And then he realized that he didn’t have to search at all-this little part of Hell was entirely malleable. He glanced down to find that a crowbar had already appeared in his fist.

Hasp growled. “Don’t do it. That kind of contact sends tremors through the whole damn Maze. You’re not just risking her soul.”

Dill hooked the crowbar under the window sash and pushed down on it.

— A mangy little pup sniffed around the deck of a ship-

The sash sprang open. He hoisted it up. Now only the closed shutters stood between him and Mina’s room. Behind him, Hasp threw up his arms in frustration and stormed back inside his castle.

Dill pounded his fist repeatedly against the shutters.

— Something padded through darkness, a powerful hunched shape. Blood dribbled from a sword into a clay bowl. A wild beast howled-

The rotten wood had split where Dill had struck it. One of the shutters was already coming away from its hinges. Dill pressed both hands against the wood and shoved hard. The shutters flew open.

— An odor of loam and bark, and of freshly butchered meat-

Dill stared. The room beyond the open window bore no resemblance to Mina Greene’s opulent chambers. It was much smaller-a dull brick-walled space with an earthen floor. To the left, a single doorway led to another similarly gloomy cell. There were no pillars, no grand cupola, and no furnishings except for a long wooden box sitting in the middle of the floor. It looked big enough to contain a corpse.

“Mina!”

Dill climbed up onto the window ledge and was about to step through, when he heard a scraping sound. Mina backed through the doorway, dragging a second-much smaller-wooden trunk behind her. When she reached the long box, she paused to catch her breath.

“That’s far enough, Dill,” she said without looking up.

“What are you doing?”

“Packing.” Mina opened the small chest. Then she tilted the long box up, standing it on one end. It was almost as tall as she was. With some effort, she lifted it up, and then lowered it down again so that its narrow base rested inside the open chest on the floor.

Dill watched in astonishment as the tall container slid down until it had disappeared completely inside the smaller one. Mina went back through to the other room. In a moment she returned with yet another chest, smaller again than the one remaining on the floor. She repeated the whole process. By placing the narrow end of one container inside the wider mouth of the next, she eventually managed to reduce her luggage to the size of a jewelry box.

“Where are you going?” Dill asked.

“I thought I’d have a wander around,” she replied cheerfully. She made comical bug eyes at him. “See some demons. Catch some ghosts.”

“That’s not normal,” Dill said.

Her dark eyes gleamed. “It is for me.”

“But what happened to your room? Where is everything?”

She wandered over to him, holding up the little jewelry box. “All the important stuff is in here,” she said. “Iril’s canals can drink the rest after I’ve gone.”

“But…” A hollow ache had taken root in Dill’s stomach. He didn’t want her to leave. Absurdly, a loose thread hanging from a seam on the side of her dress caught his eye. Why did he find this tiny imperfection so suddenly endearing? She was so close he could smell her perfume: the warm scent of desert spice on her skin. Without thinking, he shifted his position on the window ledge.

“Dill!” she warned.

Dill reached up to grip the sash above, but the window flinched away from him. Suddenly he was gripping nothing, and overbalanced. He fell forward into the girl’s room.

A moment of extreme disorientation overcame him, as though he had stepped outside of himself, and was looking back at his own face. It was the oddest sensation, both familiar and utterly strange to him. He saw the wings of an archon, his wings, with a plush room behind, but he was also staring at a dark brick-walled space and a screaming girl in a rainbow-coloured dress.

He saw, or felt, Mina shudder; Dill couldn’t be sure. His senses were reeling now, confusing him. He heard the savage howling of a wild animal. He reached out to Mina, or thought he did, but suddenly he was reaching out to himself, a young angel standing in a dismal cell. A girl stood by the window, her arms outstretched.

His fingers brushed another hand. The touch sent a powerful shock through him. Nausea cloyed at his throat. He heard shrieking, followed by the deep growl of a hound. Perfume mingled with the thick stench of animals. It was too much to bear. He staggered back from the angel, from the girl in the bright dress. His hands gripped something. A window frame?

He fell backwards.

“Fool!” Hasp’s voice roared somewhere behind him. “Close that window now! You’d better hope the Mesmerists didn’t feel that commotion.”

Dill’s thoughts still spun. “What? I don’t understand…”

“You stepped inside her soul,” Hasp growled. “Did you think her reaction to an intrusion like that would be subtle? You just violated that girl in the worst possible way.”

“I’m sorry,” Dill stammered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t-”

But he was cut off by a sound like an earthquake. His whole apartment-his whole soul-groaned and shook.

“Light and Life,” Hasp said. “Get back from that window!”

Dill rose unsteadily. Through the open window he could still see Mina. She was wailing uncontrollably, clutching the jewelry box to her chest. Dust shuddered free of the walls and clouded the air around her.

“Get back! Don’t make me come in there.”

But how could Dill leave her in such distress? Whatever was happening was his fault. By setting foot in her room, he had triggered this.

He shouted back to Hasp, “What’s happening?”

“Menoa’s hordes are coming.” The god smiled coldly. “And it sounds like they brought a Worm.”

The rear wall in Mina’s room suddenly cracked and then burst inwards. Chunks of brick and mortar showered the earthen floor. Something smashed through, and then pulled away again, leaving a ragged gap.

Claws?

Mina screamed again.

Bricks exploded to dust behind her. In one heartbeat the entire rear wall of the room disappeared. In its place Dill saw what appeared to be a wide tunnel, sloping upwards at a shallow angle. The interior of this space was moving, seething like a swarm of insects.

Demons? They were crowded together in the darkness, a crush of anthracite-like bones and curved claws and teeth all woven together by strands of red muscle. This moving mass receded as far as the eye could see. The leading rim of the tunnel had pressed firmly up against the edge of Mina’s room, while the nearest limbs reached in and tore away more sections of wall, passing the debris back to ranks of snapping teeth. A gale blew out from the tunnel, as heavy and dank as stale rainwater. The edges of the room had already begun to bleed.

Dill gasped. Further back, among the tunnel’s connective tissues, the crowd of demons were passing objects forward through their ranks towards those in front. These looked like pale gelatinous spheres, and the demons handled them with particular care. The objects, he realized, were eyes: thousands of them all staring back at the young angel.

Still screaming, Mina dropped to her knees and pressed her palms over her ears.

“Take my hand,” Dill cried. He reached back through the window. “Come with me, quickly!”

She didn’t look up at him.

“Get away from there, lad!” Hasp roared from the doorway.

The tunnel consumed more and more of Mina’s room, chewing through the walls as though they were paper. Cracks shot through the earthen floor. Fragments crumbled away only to be plucked up and skirled by the howling wind.

Dill scrambled back into Mina’s room, where her agony hit him like the blast from a furnace. He staggered but managed to grab her and drag her back towards the window.

Hasp pounded on the doorframe. “Leave her!”

Somehow Dill bundled them both over the window ledge. With the tunnel of claws and teeth mere yards behind them, the pair collapsed in a crumpled heap on Dill’s floor.

Or was it a floor? For a confusing moment, Dill glimpsed forest all around him-dark, ancient oaks crowding his vision. The rich perfume of soil and mulch filled his lungs. He heard Mina give a gasp…

…Then silence.

Dill’s vision faded abruptly; he was sprawled on the floor of his room again. Groggily, he shook his head and looked around.

Mina still clutched her jewelry box, but her eyes now stared vacantly into a faraway place.

“What’s wrong with her?”

The god grunted. “Shock,” he said. “Watching the shell of your soul being consumed by demons can have that effect. It’s a wonder she hasn’t already become a shade. Look behind you!”

There was almost nothing left of Mina’s room; it had been swallowed up, the fragments carried back inside the Worm’s endless gullet. The rim of the tunnel had finally reached Dill’s window. But then it came to a sudden halt, and those demons closest to the window held up their fists so that the eyes they clutched could peer into the angel’s room.

Dill dragged Mina to her feet.

“What do I do now?” he cried.

The god stepped aside. “Get in here.”

“But you said-”

“I know what I said. Get in here! The Mesmerists have seen us now.”

Dill took a final desperate look at his surroundings. The walls and furnishings were losing their colour, turning as white as his own eyes. The room was afraid. Only the portraits on the walls kept their colour-those thirteen souls who had shared his blood on earth and now shared his space in Hell. Why should he leave them to be consumed? Frantically he yanked down the canvases from the walls. With frames stuffed clumsily under each arm, he urged Mina towards the doorway to Hasp’s castle.

“Not the girl,” Hasp said.

“She can’t stay here!”

The god spoke through his teeth. “You had no business bringing her inside your soul, and you are not going to bring her into mine. Leave her!”

Dill didn’t move. Something strange was happening within the tunnel now. The demons parted, jostling and snapping at each other as they cleared a path through their ranks. The tunnel itself writhed and flexed, its muscles contracting. And soon a wide avenue had appeared among the hordes; it stretched upwards to follow the tunnel’s inside curve. In the far distance Dill saw some sort of procession marching down this newly forged road: a group of pale, armoured figures and great brown beasts like oxen.

“Mesmerists?” Dill whispered urgently.

“Icarates,” Hasp growled. “The Mesmerists manufactured them to enforce their laws. But they have been forced to bend the structure of Hell to facilitate their progress down here. See how their armour sparks? Their power is temporarily depleted.” His mouth set in a grim line, he beckoned Dill towards his own warren of chambers. “Come with me now if you want to survive this. Quickly! Before I change my mind.”

“I’m not leaving Mina.”

Hasp gnashed his teeth in anger. And then he reached in, grabbed Dill and Mina, and pulled them both through the doorway into his castle.

The sudden sense of disassociation Dill felt when he set foot inside the god’s soul nearly drove him to his knees. He dropped the paintings and heard them strike the floor. He saw Hasp’s face looming over him, grey and sweating, his eyes a hard blue under his creased brow. And yet he felt power all around him, ancient and immensely powerful. It was staggering. Memories of ten thousand battles assailed him. His skin crawled with countless pains. He heard the clash of steel and the screams of armies, smelled blood and death. He sensed the pounding heart of a god in his own chest, and struggled desperately to cling to his own identity. Mina slumped against the wall, slack-faced and staring at nothing.

“My home,” Hasp said through his teeth.

“Your soul,” Dill replied.

Hasp grunted. “Try not to break it.”

The procession in the tunnel was nearer now. Huge beasts like the gods of oxen snorted and steamed in the demon-crowded corridor, each harnessed to a wheeled cage. These prisons were full of people who gibbered and shrieked and rattled their bars. Eyeless things with wet red skin and clickety teeth kept pace on either side, while banners of black and gold snapped in the gale above their heads. The white-armoured warriors hobbled like cripples, yet they wielded heavy hammers and tridents. They were yards away from Dill’s room.

Hasp kicked Dill’s dropped paintings aside, and then hurried the young couple down the long low chamber, past racks of swords and shields, bows and quivers of arrows. From behind came the sound of splintering glass. The Icarates were smashing their way into Dill’s soul. Pain clouded the young angel’s vision, throwing up a barrage of colourful dazzling lights. He stumbled, but Hasp grabbed the collar of his steel shirt in one huge fist and dragged him onwards.

“Those rooms back there are just a manifestation of your soul,” said the god, “like the body you think you now inhabit. That manifestation is now being destroyed, but the core of your soul remains here, under my protection. Remember your training. Ignore the pain, or you’ll end up as catatonic as this human.” He held up Mina like a rag doll in his other fist. “You can avoid the girl’s fate if you have the will to do so.”

“I can’t see clearly,” Dill gasped.

“Yes, you can.”

And Dill suddenly found that he could see. His eyes no longer stung, yet now the pain moved to his bones and almost crippled him. He heard the sound of crashing debris coming from behind, and then he felt it in his bruised and battered limbs. A second doorway loomed before him, this leading to an enormous banquet hall lit by golden chandeliers. The drone of a hunting horn vibrated the air.

Dill glanced back. The Icarates had now destroyed most of his apartment. They were driving their procession through its remnants. As soon as Dill saw them, he sensed the beasts’ hooves pressing down, the weight of their huge lumbering bodies on the floorboards. His vision blurred again. He felt like he was standing on the edge of an abyss-the darkness pulling him closer.

“Fight it!” Hasp shook the young angel. “Don’t lose your wits now.”

Hasp dragged the pair into the banquet hall. Long tables had been arranged along three of the walls, each covered in platters of food. The god shoved Mina roughly to one side, and then snatched an apple from the nearest table. “Eat this,” he said to Dill. “It will give you the strength.”

“What about Mina?”

“Just do as I say,” the god growled. “And don’t even think about eating anything else.” He turned and charged back the way they had come.

As the Lord of the First Citadel ran, the chamber changed around him, reflecting his rage. The walls darkened, turning from rough grey stone to hard black glass. Over his head the ceiling began to crack. Ahead of him, the doorway expanded until the hole filled the entire wall.

Dill could sense that the Icarates had destroyed most of his soul. Through the throbbing of his blood he felt his room’s agony: the split skirting, the broken furniture, and the shattered bed with its torn drapes trampled under the hooves of stinking beasts. Dizzying, disparate sensations crowded his exhausted nerves. Fighting unconsciousness, he took a bite of the apple. Abruptly, the pain diminished; his heartbeat steadied, then pounded with renewed vigor.

He took the apple over to Mina.

At the far end of the corridor Hasp roared. He had reached the open doorway, a portal now as large as a portcullis. The Icarates had finished consuming Dill’s room and now stood at the entrance to Hasp’s own castle.

Here, they hesitated.

Either the Lord of the First Citadel had grown in size, or the passageway had constricted around him. In his old, battered armour, he towered before the intruders. From somewhere he had acquired a massive stone sword, which he held effortlessly before him. The Icarates clicked and buzzed in apparent agitation, sparks fizzing from their awkward white suits.

Hasp flexed his shoulders. “Should I break your souls?” he boomed. “Or armour mine?”

A heavy iron grate crashed down across the door to his castle, separating him from the would-be invaders. Metal panels appeared from out of nowhere, then slammed and bolted themselves against the interior walls. Girders slid in from the walls on either side, meeting each other with a series of loud bangs. “Would that stop your hammers?” he asked with a shrug. The metal defenses wavered for a moment, and then dissolved like smoke.

“Or should I forge an army of my own?” the god went on.

The floor around him bubbled. The bubbles swelled and changed, forming black glass creatures like crude sculptures of men and beasts: clubfooted golems and sleek, powerful cats. Their claws raked the floor of the passageway.

“Or should I simply move?” Hasp said.

Dill could not persuade Mina to eat. She stared through him, oblivious to her surroundings. He took another bite of the apple, and then offered it to her again, but she remained as slack and witless as a puppet.

The floor gave a sudden jolt.

The passageway in which Hasp stood suddenly contracted, bringing the god and his glass-forged figures careening back towards the young angel until he was immediately outside the entrance to the banquet hall. What had been a long corridor a moment ago had compressed into a short hallway.

But beyond Hasp’s front door now lay a chasm. The Icarates and their tunnel had remained in one place while the castle retracted from them. Now their procession was trapped on the other side of a wide gap. They were gazing out through a ragged hole in the wall of a vast and strange building.

Dill saw that his own little apartment had been one among countless others. Oddly shaped windows and doors clustered around the rent where the Icarates stood. More and more apartments came into view-a thousand dwellings stacked one upon the other-even as Hasp’s castle retreated. The facade looked like a cliff of stone, steel, glass, and metal, all entangled as if an epic struggle between different builders had taken place. And in a sense that was exactly what had happened, for each apartment was a manifestation of someone’s soul. The carved marble, brick, and dark-stained timber was living.

This, then, was Hell.

But now the whole facade was broken and bleeding. Streams of blood poured from the fractured walls, spattered off timbers and girders, and formed a fine red mist. Debris cascaded past the portcullis. A sweet, copper-rich scent filled the air. Then Hasp’s castle picked up speed. Now the god’s stronghold was burrowing through Hell, leaving its own ragged tunnel behind. By now the Icarates were left far behind.

Hasp wore a grim expression. Sweat lined his brow and his hard blue eyes were tense with concentration. “This flight will cost me dearly,” he muttered. “And it will destroy many of the other souls around us. I doubt I can keep this up for long. Did you consume the apple?”

Dill nodded.

“Good. Technically, I suppose that was cannibalism.” He shrugged. “Better that, than have you fade away completely. Now-” he turned away “-our cover is gone. We must surface and draw what power we can from the bloodmists. Otherwise we’ll be grounded.”

The living ghetto of souls existed on all sides of Hasp’s stronghold. From the bloody passage the castle had already ripped through it, it looked impossibly vast. Hasp clenched his fists and the whole castle rumbled and began to rise, now cleaving a path upwards.

“Leave the girl.” The god beckoned towards the corner of the banquet hall. “She’s safe enough here. I want to show you something. Follow me into the cage.”

“What cage?” Dill asked.

A folding metal gate appeared in the corner of the room, and then opened with a clatter and a clunk.

“That cage,” Hasp said.

It was an elevator much like the one Dill had used every day to descend through the heart of Deepgate’s temple-a metal cage suspended by chains and pulleys. The god closed the folding gate behind them. “While you remain in my castle, you’re under my protection,” he said. “Your soul will recover from the damage it sustained. Just don’t start growing any walls in here.”

With a rattle of chains the cage began to rise. It jolted, and suddenly picked up speed. Before Dill had time to breathe, another jolt quickened their ascent again. And another. Soon they were racing upwards through a glass-walled shaft through which Dill spied luxurious suites full of plush furniture and golden, sparkling chandeliers. Rooms passed in a blur, scores of them, and still the metal elevator rose higher and higher.

They arrived eventually in a glass conservatory which glowed like a multifaceted lantern. Lush green plants writhed around them on all sides, curling their slender leaves around one another in the golden glow from a swarm of fireflies. Vines crept up the windows, sprouted yellow flowers, and then withered and fell. As Dill watched, the process repeated itself again and again: plants grew, died, and then struggled up from the earth anew.

Overhead, buildings smashed against the conservatory panes. Hasp’s castle was still rising up through Hell, demolishing everything in its path. Dill could only wonder why the glass ceiling did not shatter and rain down upon them. Evidently the god’s soul was tougher than it appeared.

And then suddenly the heavens appeared above them. Chunks of building fell away from the windowpanes to reveal an angry red sky. Darker whorls of crimson and black drifted slowly across this vista like scum floating in a cauldron. The conservatory continued to rise until they were looking out across the landscape from a great height.

A maze of canals etched the ground for as far as Dill could see, their mirror-black walls bounding loops and narrow twisted runnels of dark red liquid. Above these channels towered high, sharply tapering hills crowded with houses as queer and disparate in their architecture as those underground.

The shells of living souls?

But the skyline was dominated by a monstrous black Worm-the exterior of the tunnel they had seen below, Dill realized. One end of it plunged into the ground a few hundred yards away from the walls of Hasp’s castle, yet it stretched to the far horizon.

Hasp said, “Menoa must have expended a great deal of power to send that Worm. We can only hope it takes time for him to recover.” He shook his head wearily. “I had hoped to move my castle and your chambers slowly beneath the earth, where we might remain undetected. But now, we must run. I’ll push this building as fast and as far as I can, but I fear it won’t be enough to reach the First Citadel. When that happens, you’ll need to get out and walk.”

The castle halted its ascent, shuddered again, and then began to move away across the surface of Hell.

Harper watched the archon’s castle burst from the bleeding ground and hover no more than twenty feet above the surrounding Middens. The canals had already begun to drain into the hole it had made. Meanwhile her Icarates remained underground, still caught inside the great black Worm.

My Icarates?

When had she started to think of these warriors as her own? The thought repulsed her-Menoa’s Icarates had been the cause of her husband’s suffering, after all. But the threat of King Menoa’s rage at the loss of the angel spurred her into action. Through her sceptre, she planted a vision in the Worm’s collective mind, urging it to rise to the surface once more. The sheer force of King Menoa’s will had kept the Worm together, but it would not last much longer in this form. And loosing those demons that comprised its exoskeleton and teeth would provide her with an army.

Harper intended to pursue her quarry.

Judging by the size and grandeur of the castle, its occupant was a powerful angel, perhaps even Lord Hasp himself. Had the Lord of the First Citadel come to claim the young angel? It was possible, Harper conceded. It made no difference. No amount of will could carry that vast fortress far enough across the leagues of Hell. Free of the ground, the castle’s battlements and spires now towered over the Soul Middens, the maroon rock plated with thick iron on the lower walls, and occasionally festooned with glass. The pinnacles were capped by pointed roofs of deep blue slate. Flowering ivy veined its facades. Only the underside of the building was tattered where it had broken away from the souls below.

Blood fell like rain from those foundations and fell soundlessly into the huge pit below. The archon’s soul had already begun to die.

The stronghold hovered for a further moment, then moved away. Its heavy iron plates snagged against one slope of a Midden, and then it smashed through the dwellings and freed itself.

By now the Worm had extracted itself from the rendered foundations and laid its maw on level ground to expel the Icarates and their retinue of beasts and soul-cages.

Harper used her sceptre to plant another vision within the Worm’s many minds, one which would travel back to the Ninth Citadel itself. King Menoa would understand her plan, and hopefully sanction it. She envisioned the Worm breaking apart.

Evidence of the king’s approval came back at once, for the Worm burst apart into its component demons. A wave traveled from the horizon all the way to the Worm’s maw as countless numbers of the black scaly creatures untangled themselves from their neighbors and leapt clear. This was Menoa’s Legion of the Blind, the oldest and most primitive of his warrior clans. Long claws thrashing at the air and teeth clashing, the Blind dropped to the ground. Of a similar size, though varying in shape, each possessed between four and six skeletal limbs. A hard turtlelike shell protected their backs, and served to link them together, when necessary, to form a Phalanx or a Worm. They had no eyes of their own, but many clutched the Eyes of the Old Worm-the parasite monster Menoa had butchered three thousand years ago.

Legend told how he had discovered the creature in a deep burrow, feasting on unclaimed souls. He had persuaded the creature to ally with him by the simple offer of food. And then he had betrayed it. Now its eyes gave sight to the Legion of the Blind, while the Blind assumed the beast’s former shape to torment it.

King Menoa’s punishments often had no end.

The blind demons parted like a dark tide around Harper. Tens of thousands of them clambered over the Middens and across the walls between canals, or sloshed through the red mire. Some of them had not managed to extricate themselves from their neighbors and now walked in clusters of two or more, their shells still fused together.

But it was a considerable force. And fast, for the Blind moved surprisingly quickly. The perfect legion for hunting with.

The strain of his efforts pinched Hasp’s expression, and yet the Lord of the First Citadel demanded that Dill accompany him to the training sphere. “While you’re a resident in my soul,” he said, with a sweep of his hand to indicate the great flying stronghold around him, “you will abide by my rules. And that means learning to use battle-archon weapons. The short sword you know. But you must master the pike, rapier, bow, shield, spear, axe, and mace. Once you’ve learned those, I will teach you to use more exotic weapons.”

The god had gone on to explain that they would train inside Iril’s sphere so as to allow Dill to continue to fashion his own blades and armour. “Remember, any sword you attempt to manifest in this castle would be forged from my spirit. Weapons made inside the sphere, however, draw upon the life-force of the shattered god. Iril’s sphere is a void. While we are inside it, our souls are not intertwined.”

Dill had been wondering how his continued presence inside Hasp’s castle would affect the god. It was, after all, a parasitic relationship. Hasp provided the shelter and strength the young angel required for survival. The apple Dill had eaten was a manifest part of the god’s soul.

Mina remained insensate. She stood in the Banquet Hall, clutching her jewelry box. Hasp ignored her, but he put up with her presence here for Dill’s sake.

“I’m already sharing my fortress with an angel and his thirteen painted ghosts,” the god grumbled. “Another human soul makes little difference.”

Dill trained. Hasp taught him how to will weapons into existence. And then he taught Dill how to alter them mid-strike to surprise an enemy. A sword could be transformed into a spear, a bow into a shield. Dill learned how to shoot an arrow and how to change that arrow so that it veered during flight, or looped and circled a target before contact.

Combat in Hell had few rules.

When he wasn’t training, Dill spent his time with Mina. He talked about his former life in the temple, and all about Rachel and how she’d saved him from Hell once before. He even offered the girl food from Hasp’s table when the god wasn’t looking. But nothing roused her from her catatonia.

One day Hasp came into the Banquet Hall and frowned at them. “She ought to be a shade by now,” he remarked. “Human souls don’t last for long down here without their shells.”

Dill rubbed at the splinter of wood she had placed under his skin, but said nothing.

All this time Hasp kept his castle floating across the Maze. Sometimes Dill took the elevator up to the glass house at the top of the fortress from where he could gaze out across the landscape. The Maze was endless, scarred with canals and stippled with Middens. Very occasionally Dill spied an unusual black structure in the distance-like the bones of some alien temple or monolith. He asked Hasp what these were.

“We don’t know,” the god conceded. “They’ve been here in Hell since long before we archons arrived. The Icarates use them for some purpose, places of pilgrimage perhaps. Occasionally the temples simply disappear. They may simply be the dreams of ghosts.”

The skies darkened after dusk and grew brighter with the dawn, but each night lasted a different span of time. Some nights seemed to pass in mere moments, while others dragged on for much longer. No pattern regulated the ebb and flow of light in this place.

“It is Hell’s heartbeat,” Hasp said. “A result of the conflicting expectations of a hundred billion souls. Time runs at many speeds in the Maze-it is constantly in dispute.” He grimaced and rubbed his temples, then gave a deep sigh. “Lots of things have changed here since Iril was shattered. We are in a constant state of war.”

Hasp had been showing more evident signs of strain. His skin had become grey and slack, his shoulders stooped, and he moved with the weariness of an old man. Even his armour had dulled and rusted. Often the god stood in the glass house for hours, brooding, and staring back along the castle’s wake. A dark smudge covered the landscape there, like an encroaching sea of tar. When Dill pointed it out, Hasp shrugged and refused to comment. Instead he ordered Dill back down to the sphere for combat training.

Dill retrieved the paintings from the lower hall and set them up in a room Hasp had allocated him. The thirteen spirits in Devon’s elixir gazed miserably out of their canvases at their new surroundings. Sometimes when Dill listened outside the door he heard them speaking to one another in hushed voices, but they always fell silent when he entered.

He began to suspect they were plotting something.

After the twentieth span of darkness the castle slowed. It seemed to Dill that the building had let loose a great sigh, and that it was giving up. Every mirror in Hasp’s fortress grew dull. The floors sagged. The fruit in the Banquet Hall began to moulder. Even the stones seemed to glisten under a patina of sweat.

Hasp led him up a narrow spiral stair to the summit of the castle. The god paused many times to rest. The stairwell took them to a small balcony encircling a tower, very much like the one Dill had grown up in. Ivy engulfed one side. If he climbed it, Dill wondered, would he find a weather vane on top?

“Yes, you would,” Hasp said.

Dill blinked. Did Hasp just read his mind?

“Our souls have shared space for so long now,” Hasp explained. “I’ve been dreaming your dreams. This tower, as you surmised, is similar to your former abode in Deepgate’s temple. You are unconsciously affecting this environment. As my will fades, your own steps in to take over.”

“But I…”

“I know,” Hasp said. “I know you don’t mean it. Nevertheless it is happening.” He leaned on the parapet and pointed far across Hell to the black sea which had been following them. It seemed much closer than before. “You know what that is,” Hasp said, “because I know what it is. And you understand what its approach means to us.”

“You can’t go on any further,” Dill said.

The god nodded. “I have exhausted all but the last shreds of my power. And we have still not covered a half of the journey to the First Citadel. You will have to continue on foot.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay, hold them off a bit if I can.”

Dill was silent.

“You will be harder to find on foot, but you must take strength for the journey ahead. This landscape is dread, hopelessness: it saps the will. You must not let it consume you before you reach the First Citadel.”

“What about Mina?” Dill asked.

“They’re after us, not her. I’ll try to hide her before the Legion of the Blind get here. She’s only human, and therefore of little interest to Menoa. There’s a chance she might escape their attention.”

“What do I do?”

“It’s mostly done,” Hasp said. “The sphere we fought in has been nourishing you from the beginning, giving up its strength to you. It taught you how to fight, not I. And that fragment of Iril is now inside you.”

Dill remembered the apple. A part of you is also inside me.

And Mina’s splinter? Like Hasp, she had given up a part of herself.

“But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” Hasp went on, “another way we might tip the scales in your favor.” He scratched his stubble. “You arrived in this place with thirteen souls. Your mind made paintings of them to hang on your walls, and yet they have never really been connected to you down here. Some part of you kept them at bay. I propose we change that.”

“How?”

The god shrugged. “I have an idea. I’m afraid it’s rather grisly.”

Harper flexed her glass tail, propelling herself up the slope of a toppled black stone monolith. Many such ancient structures dotted the Maze, and the Icarates considered them to be holy places. Harper had seen one of the rituals Menoa’s priests performed inside these relics, and she had no desire to witness another. Right now she just wanted a viewpoint.

The Legion of the Blind flowed around the monolith, a tide of chitinous black scales, claws, and teeth. Those demons in the forward ranks squabbled over the supply of eyes, snatching the precious artefacts from one another so that they might be the ones to see what lay ahead. Countless more followed behind with nothing to guide them but the relentless forward pressure of the horde. They moved like a tsunami, covering the landscape of Hell for as far as the engineer could see. She stared ahead of the army to the maroon castle in the distance. It had finally stopped moving.

An Icarate hunting horn sounded.

Arrrrrooooo

And the Blind surged forward, eager for the opportunity to attack.

Dill was appalled at the hideous scheme Hasp suggested. To allow the young angel to absorb the souls inside the thirteen paintings, the Lord of the First Citadel had proposed they make a broth.

“This is about survival,” Hasp insisted. He looked exhausted, a shadow of his former self. “Just as the Poisoner made an elixir on earth, so we can make another here in Hell. You need the strength of these souls to bolster your own.”

“I’ll survive without them.” Dill looked away from the portraits. The painted expressions glared down at him in rage and fear, clearly aware of their present situation.

Hasp shook his head. “I can’t guarantee that. My castle is grounded and you have drained the only fragment of the Shattered God in my possession.”

“These are people, not meat to be eaten.”

“No…no longer people. This is the Maze, Dill. They have become nothing but ghosts trapped in paintings. What sort of existence is that? Do you think the Mesmerists will offer them a better deal?” From somewhere Hasp had found a source of anger and his voice boomed in the low vaulted passageway. “They were part of your life, now make them part of your death. Take them with you to the First Citadel or leave them to Menoa’s imagination. The choice is yours.”

Hasp spoke the truth. Dill’s fate was bound to that of these painted ghosts. It was evident that this fate did not appeal to them, but necessity gave him no choice.

“Do it,” Dill said.

For the procedure Hasp located a chest containing Mesmerist equipment: an iron tripod, an etched glass retort, and a reeking black candle composed of demon fat and a concoction of bitter herbs. Unlike the sphere, these seemed to possess little, if any, arcane power. The candle burned, the tripod supported the retort, which was soon bubbling with a thinned solution of the young angel’s own blood. One by one, Hasp saturated the paintings with the foul-smelling steam until the faces faded from the canvases.

In silence he continued to boil steam from the solution. Once he had reduced the liquid to a thicker consistency, he decanted it into a small bottle. “Now drink.”

Dill swallowed the souls. The liquid cloyed at his throat, making him cough, but he managed to force it down.

“I don’t feel any different,” he said.

Hasp took the empty bottle back. “Your own soul recognizes these others. But you must never consume another soul down here. Don’t drink the blood in the canals, for it will lead to madness.”

“I must leave now?”

The god extinguished the candle. He clasped Dill’s shoulders and tried to smile. But all energy and conviction had left his eyes. “Stay low,” he said. “The Mesmerists have a million spies who will see you if you fly. And take this…” From a pouch in his belt he took out something and pressed it into Dill’s hand. It was an old brown apple, its flesh as wrinkled as Hasp’s own.

Dill left Hasp’s castle without ceremony. The god willed a small door to appear in the lower battlements, and a narrow set of steps to take the young angel down to the surface of Hell. The skies churned like poison overhead, lending a ruby hue to the obsidian walls. These partitions divided the Maze into a nest of devious veins, interspersed with rooms and corridors and houses and castles: the living incarnations of the souls who dwelt within them. There were archways and oddly shaped portals, and steps that sank down to bubbling sumps or drowned quadrangles, or rose up to nowhere. Standing beside Hasp at the top of the stairs, Dill noticed that the stonework of the Maze was rotten in places: mirror-black where it hadn’t yet crumbled, but porous and dull where the constant flow of those red waters had eroded it.

Half a league away the canals opened into a wider space, a quadrangle where the alien remains of an Icarate temple loomed above the crimson slough and hexagonal pillars rose amidst mounds of polished white bones. The air was muggy and warped, buzzing with flies and larger winged shapes that circled through the haze. Everywhere could be heard the sound of fluids leaking from broken walls and windows, gurgling and trickling into deep stone throats.

Hasp warned him to stay clear of the deeper channels. Living barges plied these thoroughfares: heavy wooden vessels with iron funnels and heaps of cages upon their narrow decks. These were called the Wailing Ships, for each vessel was a soul reshaped by Menoa’s will-their captains could never leave their vessels because the captains were the vessels. And yet on the upper decks Mesmerist soul traders moved freely: dark figures fused to metal stilts, watching while stout-armed slaves pushed tillers or fed coal into screaming furnaces.

“Avoid those barges,” the god explained. “Soul traders will try to capture you and sell you on to the Icarates. Stay away from locks, too, indeed from anywhere where the canals change level. The machinery that operates the lock gates was once human. It is notoriously deceitful.”

“Can I trust anything?”

“Trust the walls which separated the canals. Trust steps and wells. They will not betray you because they have no memory. But do not trust doorways. Menoa deliberately constructed them from the bricks of broken minds. Many don’t realize that they are now doorways and will be angered by your passage through them.”

From the steps of Hasp’s castle Dill could see hills composed of these canals and walls, rising in tiers like ziggurats. He decided to avoid them. There would be locks between each level and he saw no point in trying to reach higher ground. And yet the plains looked equally dangerous, a great wet labyrinth of narrow channels and rotting temples.

“Where do I go?” he asked. “How do I reach the First Citadel?”

Hasp lifted his hand and pointed to a place on the horizon where the red mists appeared thickest. “There,” he said. “To the place where every soul catcher in Hell brings his goods. The First Citadel is under siege, encircled by Menoa’s armies. That is where you must go.”

At another blast from the hunting horn, the Legion of the Blind came to a halt two hundred yards back from the battlements of Hasp’s castle. The demons passed around their borrowed eyes among their ranks to survey the scene. Standing on the summit of a low ziggurat, Harper let her gaze travel up across the building’s pitted stone and rusted armour plating. It had settled in the center of a wide quadrangle, encompassing a morass ankle-deep in blood. Little power could be drawn from this shallow lake.

Cracks zigzagged across the castle’s facades, and even the spires appeared to slump. The Lord of the First Citadel was evidently exhausted. A consultation with King Menoa by way of her sceptre had confirmed the engineer’s suspicions as to the castle’s occupant. This particular archon could only be the god Hasp, youngest of Ayen’s seven sons. No other entity within the Maze possessed enough power to move such a vast building so far across Hell at such speeds. Even the Blind had been unable to gain ground on the castle until it had finally slowed down.

Now Hasp was stranded here, and the Mesmerist hordes faced a much weakened foe. Unease still roiled in Harper’s gut, however. The coming battle would not be easy. Hasp had proved himself to be a brilliant tactician, and his campaigns of terror had been a thorn in King Menoa’s side for thousands of years.

The Blind, however ferocious, fought with nothing but a savage instinct to destroy. One could not marshal or direct them in any complex way. One merely set them loose.

A flash in the sky grabbed the engineer’s attention. A great glass lizard, surely the largest of Menoa’s Iolite spies, shimmered and blurred against the seething clouds. Crimson light washed through veins in its transparent wings and skull, so that it appeared to merge partly with the sky, fading and reappearing at will. In its invisible phase only the tiny red heart in its breast betrayed its position to careful observers.

The winged lizard swooped low over the Blind, and then thrashed its wings to slow itself. With a sound like the wind blowing through crystal chimes, it settled on the ground beside Harper.

Call me Forgotten, it said. The king has sent me to direct this battle and supply him with visions of our victory.

“He sent a spy to do that?”

Forgotten clicked its beak. A spy who has seen much conflict. I carried the news of the BrokenPeak skirmish to Menoa, and of the destruction of the Third and Fourth Citadels. I have observed Hasp on many battlefields, the Lake of Temples, the Garden of Bones.

“Then you’re a harbinger of ill luck.”

Luck is meaningless. I have Menoa’s authority, engineer. He required a leader with combat experience. You have none. The great glass lizard then turned its long head towards the doomed castle, momentarily turning a deep shade of red as a surge of blood passed through its clear veins. Then it sent a vision to the waiting demons.

Harper registered the unvoiced command in her mind. Forgotten had conjured an image of a battlefield-this very same battlefield-in which the Legion of the Blind rushed forward to tear Hasp’s castle into fragments. They would assault the god’s soul in one powerful strike, relying on brute savagery to bring its manifested defenses down.

And the Blind obeyed without question. As one, they charged across the open quadrangle, their claws reaching out towards the tired stone and battered iron facades.

The castle shimmered and changed.

Hundreds of doorways appeared along the base of its walls, stone portals leading into the bowels of the building. Hasp had dismissed his defenses with one sweep of thought, leaving his own soul exposed to the advancing horde.

Why? Harper suspected a trap. What horrors were waiting to greet the attackers in those dark passages?

But Forgotten’s thoughts still shrilled loudly in every mind able to receive them. Hasp has relented. He hopes for a quick death. He sent another vision to the Blind, urging them to pour inside and rip out the heart of the building.

The demons streamed into the castle at a furious pace, hacking the living masonry apart as they went.

“Wait!” Harper shouted to Forgotten. This reckless assault was foolish. Hasp must have preserved something of his power. What traps did he have hidden within that battered old castle? What could possibly repel so many invaders?

A heartbeat later she received her answer. The Lord of the First Citadel possessed no secret legion, no manifested warriors to fight for his cause. All that remained of his power-of his very soul-stood naked before them now. Hasp had nothing left but his own tired castle.

And he used it.

The nest of passages he had conjured under his battlements now gave way under the great weight of the building. With a riotous crack and rumble of stone, the entire foundation of the castle crumpled. The whole fortress trembled and lurched and plunged thirty feet into the rubble of its lowest floors, crushing the Blind who had already ventured inside. Clouds of red dust erupted and rolled over the remaining demon hordes.

He has diminished himself.

Harper recognized an aura of astonishment in the lizard’s thoughts. What Hasp had just done was incomprehensible. He had destroyed a substantial part of his manifested soul. By doing so, he had crippled himself.

All this just to destroy a fraction of the demon horde? Hasp’s actions would only quicken his inevitable defeat. Perhaps Forgotten had been correct after all? The god had simply chosen to die.

The demons who had escaped this partial collapse now rushed forward with renewed vigor, as if they had suddenly tasted promised blood.

The castle changed again.

A second line of doorways appeared under the battlements, occupying what had formerly been the second storey of the building but had now sunk to ground level. He was trying the same trick twice.

Forgotten sent a warning vision to the horde. There was no need to sacrifice more of the Blind. They must ignore this trap and remain outside. The winged Iolite ordered his army to attack the facing wall directly, thus denying Hasp the oblivion he sought.

Harper stared at these new doorways. They were as numerous as the ones before, apparently identical, and yet there was something different about them-something odd about the shadows within.

Suddenly it dawned on her what the god had done, but by then it was too late.

This time Hasp had not simply conjured more passages into the heart of his fortress. He had willed away the bulk of the building’s remaining foundations. The facade had only appeared solid. In reality it had acted as a disguise to conceal what lay behind. Now the thin outer walls collapsed, revealing nothing but a vast cavern underneath the front of the castle. It looked as though a huge bite had been taken out of the lowest part of the building.

With fully half of its foundations gone the castle tilted, precariously, towards the attackers. It balanced there for two heartbeats, its vast shadow looming over the Legion of the Blind. And then the whole building fell forward like a toppled tree. It slammed into the army, crushing innumerable demons to dust.

Perhaps ten or twenty thousand of the Blind now lay beneath that rubble, while Hasp’s castle had received little damage beyond what the god had already done to it himself.

Forgotten’s glass wings clashed. Its breast blushed red. This god is killing himself, it said.

He would rather die by his own hand than let the Blind cut his soul out from within.

The dramatic changes Hasp had been making to his manifested soul required a lot of will, but by diminishing himself each time, he had conserved his energy for each attack. Each transformation reduced the size of Hasp’s fortress, and thereby reduced the amount of power he required to hold the remains of the structure together. But this tactic was self-defeating. Like the serpent who ate its own tail, Hasp was consuming himself.

To confuse his opponents? Or to delay them, to keep them here while the younger angel escapes?

Forgotten now rose into the air with a mighty swoop of its wings, its beak snapping at the scattering demons to maintain order. The Blind had lost some of their eyes in the collapse of the fortress, and now the survivors were fighting over those that remained. The toppled building in their midst had been temporarily forgotten.

The glass lizard reacted with fury, assaulting the horde with images of torture and punishment so savage that Harper recoiled and subconsciously raised her shield to ward them off. The terrible vision worked as intended, quelling the rebellion among the Blind.

Hasp would die now, Harper was sure. His castle lay on its side in ruins. Its spires had sheared off and crumbled to the ground; the very backbone of the building had snapped. The trapped god could not hope to instigate another successful collapse from these remains. To do so now would not postpone his inevitable death, for millions of the demons still waited behind the vanguard.

And yet the castle changed again.

More doorways appeared along its buckled walls, scores of them.

Was this simply arrogance or pride? Or was this a final desperate attempt to diminish the last of his soul and thus end his life?

Destroy it! Forgotten raged. It showed Menoa’s army a vision of a single bloody heart, surrounded by a circle of teeth.

The Legion of the Blind responded with savage lust.

But this time they met resistance.

Harper hissed, “Oh, god.” From out of the castle doorways poured those demons who had been trapped by the building’s collapse. Somehow, Hasp had protected them within his castle walls. By enveloping these fallen creatures within his own soul, he had temporarily consumed them. Their simple minds had become a part of his mind, and therefore subject to his will. The god needed no power to create a legion of his own. He had simply stolen part of King Menoa’s army.

And now these briefly buried demons, compelled by the mind of a cunning god, set upon their simple-minded comrades. It was twenty thousand against a million-a battle Hasp could not win.

And yet he almost did. Those of the Blind under the god’s influence sought out the eyes of their former comrades. They attacked in organized packs while their opponents brawled for dominance among their own peers. Within moments Hasp’s demons had taken one eye, and then a second and a third. With each new acquisition their foes grew weaker and more disorganized. Soon they began to panic.

Forgotten flew overhead, flinging down desperate visions of furnaces and boiling lakes of poison at the Blind who fled, or turned in confusion to fight against their own side. But Hasp’s demons were immune to such onslaughts. The god’s sheer force of will kept them firmly bound to his desires. After all, they were now a part of his soul.

Twenty thousand against a million. They cut a path through Menoa’s army like a river of liquid obsidian across a field of cool rock. By now they had stolen almost all of the Blind’s eyes, and the bulk of the opposing army was in chaos.

Menoa was losing the fight.

Harper flexed her glass tail and slithered down into the quadrangle, using her shield to push her way through the panicked throng. Menoa had given her a spear, but she lacked the skill to use it. In Pandemeria she had served the Mesmerists as a metaphysical engineer. She had never been a warrior.

But she understood the Mesmerists’ arcane technology better than anyone except Menoa himself. To control his stolen legion, Hasp needed to maintain a psychic link with them. This required a great deal of concentration. If the link could be broken…

Her sceptre could be turned towards this purpose. The Mesmerists had developed Screamers, powerful psychic weapons designed to disrupt a soul’s grip of its manifested reality. Icarates sometimes used them to shatter Middens and reach powerful souls hiding inside. Such force would not be nearly enough to destroy an archon’s grip of his reality-she could not damage Hasp’s castle even in its current state-but she might be able to disrupt the link to his hijacked demons.

As Harper neared the fallen fortress, she raised her sceptre and let the device taste the souls around it. Crystal lights sparkled within the glass orb and she saw a vision of the god, deep in his castle.

— Alone, seated in a chair with his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, his face lined with exertion-a young woman standing nearby. His woman? No visible sign of the second angel. On his way to the First Citadel?

Harper activated the Screamer. At the high frequency to which she had coaxed it, it emitted a blast of psychic energy so powerful as to compress the air around it. There was a flash, and the engineer’s own thoughts blanked.

Silence.

It took Menoa’s army a heartbeat to recover from the shock, but much longer for Forgotten to force them back into battle. Hasp’s demons no longer reacted to anything. They simply stood motionless and died under the claws of their former comrades.

Harper surveyed the battlefield. Menoa’s army had been mostly destroyed, with fully eight-tenths of the Legion of the Blind wounded or killed. Their corpses filled the quadrangle and all the surrounding canals. The survivors, perhaps no more than two hundred thousand demons, waded through the flooded channels, groping in the waters for lost eyes.

Forgotten flashed a sudden warning at Harper, and she wheeled.

The Lord of the First Citadel stood in one of the doorways of his ruined castle. Sword in hand, and clad in old battered armour, he gazed at the scene of devastation with an expression of weary sadness. Behind him, the remains of his fortress began to fade. In some places the fallen battlements and spires were already as thin as gas. In a nearby corner of the quadrangle a pack of twenty or so Blind sniffed the air, and then started to creep towards him. Hasp ignored them.

He addressed Harper. “You set off the Screamer?”

Slowly, the engineer tilted her glass head.

“Then you saved me some honour,” Hasp remarked. “We archons generally like to fight our own battles. How many of the Blind remain for me to kill?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

The god grunted. “Enough to make a good song of this day.”

“You know they won’t kill you.” Hasp would suffer a far worse fate than death. “Where is the angel who fell from Deepgate?”

“I slew him. His soul gave me the strength to rattle this little army of Menoa’s.”

She knew he was lying, but said nothing. Her sceptre would soon locate her quarry.

The god extended his wings, now thin and ragged and clogged with grime. He took a step forward on trembling legs. He could hardly stand upright. Then he scratched the tip of his sword through the pile of rubble on which he stood, sketching a line in the dust.

His eyes narrowed on Harper again. “I see a starving woman trapped inside that Mesmerist thing,” he said. “She wears the uniform of a Pandemerian engineer, but she doesn’t look happy to be in there.” With some effort he raised his sword. “Come here and I’ll set her free.”

Harper didn’t move. All around her the Legion of the Blind clambered over piles of their dead comrades as they crept nearer to the diminishing castle and the solitary archon standing in its doorway.

“Two hundred thousand!” Hasp yelled. Wincing in pain, he hefted his blade high over his head, spun it, and brought it crashing down through the skull of the nearest demon.

Then he staggered back and leaned against the doorway, sucking in desperate gulps of air. “That’s one,” he cried.

Clutching their rescued eyes, Menoa’s horde crawled closer.