Iron Angel

20

The constant clickety-clack of steel wheels on the rails below had begun to sound like a chorus of insistent voices, endlessly repeating the train’s destination: Coreollis, Coreollis, Coreollis. Mina Greene shuddered, pulled her thin blanket more tightly around her glass-plated shoulders, and looked down at the floor of the slave pen. It was as hard and transparent as the brittle scales the Mesmerists had given her in place of her old skin. Wheels and axles whirred in the gloom beneath the train. Sleepers, slag, and gravel blurred past.

The other slaves refused to move for fear of shattering their own transparent skins, and so she sat alone in the center of the low-ceilinged space. They seemed to be afraid of talking, too. As if words could shatter glass! More likely, they were wary of her proximity to the Lord of the First Citadel, which made Mina smile. They had a right to be nervous, she decided. He was a fearsome type.

“Hasp,” she said.

The god looked up, and a wheezing, clicking sound issued from the metal-and-bone mechanism clamped to the back of his skull. He frowned, then lowered his gaze and went back to whatever he was sketching. To keep the wounded god happy, the Pandemerian Railroad Company had given him paper and pencils.

Despite his current appearance, she still preferred to think of him as an angel. Menoa’s Icarates had removed his wings completely, cutting out the bones, muscles, and tendons from his shoulders, so that now he almost looked like a man: an old buccaneer slumped on the floor, all drooping jowls, patchy stubble, and a paunch. But the image of Hasp as a man was difficult to sustain, for his eyes constantly shifted colour. Sometimes to the colour of verdigris or gold; sometimes to the colour of the blood that flowed through his own ghastly armour.

Mina watched the god’s blood pulse through glass veins in his breastplate and shoulder-guards, out through the flexible, transparent pipes into his arm-and leg-bracers. She marveled at the blood looping around his neck where it branched into thin channels within his cheek-guards and half-helm, and she wondered how the Mesmerists could have engineered something so hideous and yet so beautiful: those cold-forged, metameric plates, spikes, and tubes were as magnificent as any sculpture to be found in a Dalamooran vizier’s palace.

The angel’s armour was much grander than the other slaves’ glass scales, and yet it was just as brittle. One hard tap with a sword would shatter it as easily as a wine flute. And it would be shattered soon, she suspected. The proposed handover, the peace treaty-all just more of Menoa’s lies. Their blood would stain the ground around Coreollis before the sun set tomorrow.

“Lighten up,” she said.

Hasp didn’t even look at her. His brow crinkled and he spoke slowly: “I preferred you in Hell. You talked less.”

Mina giggled and shifted closer to him. The curved panels on her legs and ankles clacked against the floor, but she didn’t care. “Kill me, then,” she said. She snatched up two of his pencils and rattled them against his glass-sheathed shin.

Hasp moved his leg away. “What’s wrong with you?” he growled. “If you want to die so badly then stand up and hurl yourself against the floor. I guarantee the fall will break your fragile skin.”

“But I want you to do it,” she cooed.

“Only because you know I can’t.” Tiny gears skittered somewhere inside the god’s neck, or perhaps in his brain. A smell of burning wires and scorched blood came from the implanted Mesmerist device at the back of his skull. He twitched, and his cracked lips contorted into a grimace beneath his transparent helm. “But keep annoying me and I might even try. This is a dangerous game you’re playing, lass.”

Mina examined one of the pencils, turning it over in her grubby hands. “It’s not a game.”

Hasp’s jaw tightened. His irises pulsed through a spectrum of colours and his hands clenched to fists. “Bastard Menoa,” he hissed. “I think he put a spiteful demon in my skull.”

“I like it when your eyes do that,” she said.

“Same thing happens to all angels on earth.”

“Do it again.”

“I’m not your pet, Mina.”

She sighed and dropped the pencil. “You’re so boring.”

“Then leave me alone.”

“Only if you help me break this.” She placed her hands against her chest.

A growling sound came from Hasp’s skull. His eyes shifted colour-grey to black to blue to red. “I can feel its teeth now,” he said. “You’re making the damn thing bite.”

Pumps sounded overhead, blowing more mist through valves into the slave pen.

Mina stifled a laugh.

“Enough,” he growled. He clamped his teeth together and went back to his sketch. “You are tormenting me simply because you can. What have I done to you? I sheltered you from the Icarates. I tried to defend you.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Then what more do you want from me?”

“I want you to kill me.”

The god hissed again. “So you can go back to Hell? You’ll end up back there soon enough without my help. What do you think will happen to you in Coreollis? Do you think Rys wants to be reminded of his failure?” He grunted. “My brother will sign Menoa’s treaty and then butcher us all.”

“Not you.”

“Especially me,” Hasp said. “I’m no use to him like this.” He turned his glassy hands palm up. “Rys will feed me to his garden and grow roses from my blood. And he’ll do it just to spite Menoa. This war was over as soon as my brother learned about the arconites. His memories of Skirl still haunt him.”

“I disagree. You’re more important to Rys than you think you are.”

He scowled. “You don’t know him.”

“What are you drawing?” She craned her neck to see, but Hasp turned away from her to hide his work. She pouted and smacked him gently. “Go on…” she said. “Just break my arm, a finger even. You wouldn’t even need to use your shiftblade.”

“Right now, I’d break your neck if I could,” he said.

But Mina knew it was a lie. The parasite in Hasp’s skull protected only Menoa’s servants. It did not care which of the king’s enemies the god killed. Hasp could have slain her easily, and yet he chose not to. And that was exactly why Mina persisted. The defeated god had been so horribly debased that she needed to keep reminding him who he really was. She couldn’t let him simply give up, for it would be too easy for him to end his own life.

Hasp was gazing at the shiftblade on the floor beside him, a weapon which could change its shape into any other. King Menoa himself had given it to him as a display of his absolute power over the Lord of the First Citadel. Shreds of muscle still clung to the steel blade. Someone in the king’s army had used it recently.

A sudden tremor ran through the god. His neck jerked violently before he was able to still himself, and the pencil in his hand snapped in two. He let out a long sigh and tossed the broken fragments away. “Two hundred thousand,” he muttered. “And I manage to slay less than thirty.”

“You gave up.”

He grunted.

Mina slouched back from him. The other slaves remained motionless, breathing gently. She recognized none of them, and none would meet her eye. Crystal chandeliers trembled in the lounge above them, illuminating the thin glass scales covering their faces and necks. Perhaps she ought to have spoken with them before this, but what was the point now? They had accepted whatever fate would befall them. Now they simply sat there and counted their own breaths. So she thought about her father instead, bumbling about their house in Lye Street, chattering about the badlands north of Deepgate and all the gold he hadn’t found and all the lead that he had. He had been a big man, like Hasp. And in all his life, she had never seen him give up.

She let her gaze roam over the fine furnishings on the opposite side of the ceiling: the soft gold curlicues of a table, an opaque blue vase, the leaves etched into a mirror. Beautiful, she supposed, and yet cold. She could not enjoy such objects. Mina imagined she could hear soft music over the insistent thump of the train, and she strained to see through the carriage roof to the stars beyond. Hasp had supposedly once been one of those stars; Ulcis and Rys, too. But the heavens were invisible from down here, obscured by a hundred aether lights. Wasn’t it funny how the most transient things could outshine the timeless?

She slid her body even closer to the angel, and then rattled one of his pencils repeatedly against his shoulder-guard, trying to time each of her taps to the pulse of his blood inside the glass veins. Hasp blew through his teeth, then hunched further over his sketch, evidently trying his best to ignore her. But had his heartbeat quickened? Mina fancied that it had. “Please,” she whined, “I’ll make it worth your while…” Now there was something to think about. Could Hasp still-?

“Get away from him!” The new voice had come from behind. Mina twisted round to see a female engineer unlocking the door to the slave pen. Beyond the woman, a gloomy corridor ran the length of the carriage; through its outer wall Mina glimpsed dark brickwork and steel blurring past.

“He’s not some animal to be prodded,” Harper said. She briefly inhaled mist from a rubber bulb. “And he’s dangerous. Carrick should never have put him in here with the rest of you.”

“He’s not dangerous.” Mina laid a hand upon the angel’s arm; his armour felt surprisingly hot. “Are you?”

“Leave.” Hasp jerked his arm away from her. “I have warned you…”

Harper ducked inside the slave pen. “They want you upstairs,” she said to Hasp. “Bring your shiftblade. Let’s go.”

The blood pulsing within the angel’s glass armour seemed to quicken even more. He trembled, his eyes blackened, and he snatched up his weapon. “Odd,” he growled, frowning at the blade with an expression of distaste and confusion, as though he’d just picked up a river snake and was trying to work out why. “Odd that I should recognize your voice.” He stared up at her. “Menoa has changed your form since the last time we met.”

The engineer nodded. “Alice Harper.”

“You were a serpent.”

Harper studied him a moment, then said, “I order you to drop the weapon.”

At once, Hasp released the shiftblade. The sword cracked against the glassy floor. Most of the slaves flinched away from the sound-all except Mina, who was watching intently.

Hasp winced. “I see nothing has changed.”

“The parasite in your skull,” Harper said slowly, “will obey any of King Menoa’s servants. Even the weakest of them could order you to slay yourself-” she inclined her head “-or your woman there, and you would be forced to comply without hesitation.”

Hasp glanced at Mina, but said nothing.

“If you try to resist it,” Harper said, “it will eventually kill you.”

The god’s massive shoulders bunched under two dozen plates of overlapping glass; tubes flexed; cords in his neck pushed against his transparent collar. “Before or after I reach Coreollis?” he said.

The engineer looked away. “It’s agitated because it has been removed from Hell. That’s why it’s causing you so much pain. I can stop that from happening.”

“My thanks.”

“Then you’ll come upstairs with me?”

Hasp snorted a laugh. “As long as you don’t order me to.”

The engineer crouched down beside him. She rummaged in her tool belt, and after a brief moment brought out a slender silver device about the size of a pencil, which she twisted at various places along its length. The tool crackled and then made a high-pitched whining sound. “Lean forward,” she said.

Hasp obeyed, and Harper inserted the device into a tiny slot at the back of his skull. “Tell me if this hurts,” she said, “or if you begin to feel dizzy.” She inhaled from her bulb again and then, gently, blew into the device. After a moment she paused and said, “You may experience a brief moment of confusion, some bright flashes of colour at the edges of your vision, unusual sounds or smells. If you think you’re going to pass out, tell me at once.”

The god gasped, and then bared his teeth, “Get that…thing out of my mind!”

Harper withdrew the device, and stood up. “It’s done,” she said. “The demon is calmer now. But you’re going to have to stop resisting it.”

“Stop resisting it?” Hasp pressed his fist against his breastplate, at the place where the blood spread from his heart in a crimson web across his chest, and took several deep breaths. “If I don’t resist it I’m dead anyway. When Rys learns that his own brother has become a tool, a weapon to be used by any of his enemies…” He shook his head. “Tell me, Alice Harper, what would you do?”

The engineer looked down at him with an expression that might have been pity. She shrugged. “I’d make friends with a Mesmerist.”

Hasp’s grunt was almost a laugh. He reclaimed his shiftblade and stood up. “You want me to kill something, I presume.”

From inside the slave pen, Mina Greene tried to follow the angel’s progress along the corridor and up the stairs to the lounge, but she soon lost sight of him among the confusion of glints and glimmers within the train. She glanced down at Hasp’s sketches, now strewn across the floor amidst the fragments of his broken pencil. She gathered up the sheets of paper, then flopped down and leafed through them.

Each sketch was different, but of a similar subject: stone keeps and towers of every shape and size, round or square, tall or stubby; each with battlements and high turrets, narrow windows and thick iron portcullises, deep moats and stout drawbridges. Mina tossed the drawings away. Ultimately they were all boring. Hasp sketched nothing but castles.