Iron Angel

23

Dawn came: thin and grey and flecked with puffs of lead and pewter. The skies lightened, and The Pride of Eleanor Damask began to climb out of the Pandemerian Lowlands towards the Moine Massif. Wheels thumping, stack blowing, whistle screaming, she followed a long snaking route up through the black volcanic hills that bounded the edge of the plateau. King Menoa’s reinforcements meanwhile followed the Red Road two leagues to the southwest. A vast plume of smoke from the king’s war machines bent its way across the sky, while the troops marched in a long line behind. From this distance they looked like a river of ink flowing uphill from the portal basin. Only the arconite itself could be seen with any clarity. The giant had moved far ahead of its smaller brethren and now stood among the hills below the Moine Massif.

Even these highlands had not been immune to Rys’s torrential rain. The valleys and gullies below remained flooded, so that it seemed like they were now weaving through a chain of lagoons. Crescents of basalt rose from steaming pools, linked by causeways of metallic slag and cruel iron bridges. Fuels and oils left by the railway reconstruction effort made rainbow patterns on the waters, colourful skins that unraveled where the currents mingled. New maps named this place Callar Wash, but on old maps the land had been called Callowflower. The train followed the rims of hot calderas or plunged, shuddering, through dark defiles, or was carried between islands by spans of silt-and weed-clogged girders.

She clattered across bridges: CutlassBridge and BrokenTempleBridge where a thousand empty lanterns depended from hooks, out over the drowned farmland beneath Spinney Crag. Smudged by a shifting dawn haze, the summit of the crag itself still sulked above the waterline, diminished now from an imposing mountain to a meager sketch of dolerite and black pines. Other trees could be seen in the oily waters below, now dead and rimed with furs of crystal.

Harper had moved out of Carrick’s room into a spare bunk in the stewards’ quarters. Uncomfortable in the unfamiliar surroundings, she had woken early and been unable to get back to sleep. Now she stood on the terrace of Observation Carriage Two and gazed down into the pools between the islands. Sometimes she thought she saw fish below: impossible black shapes, huge and motionless. There seemed to be faint green glimmers where the eyes ought to be, an ice-cream sheen underneath where the belly would be, but the objects never moved.

“Pike.”

Harper turned.

“The fish,” Carrick said. “They’re pike.”

“Pike don’t grow to that size.”

“They do now.” The chief joined her by the glass balustrade and peered down. Yellow sunlight slanted through the carriage under his feet. “There. You see?” He pointed at a long shadow hanging beneath the water. “They’ve changed.”

“You’ve changed,” she muttered.

He ignored this, continuing, “Nothing should be able to live in that queer water, but some things do. Fish from the old rivers and canals; animals from the woods. The trees still grow, but not in the same way they did before. People, too, maybe. The combination of Rys’s rain and the Mesmerist Veil did strange things to the land here.”

“People?”

“The engineers who raised and rerouted the track swear it. They say the farmers are still down there, alive…but altered.” He was silent a moment, then he shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like that. A lot of workers drowned during the reconstruction. I suppose the survivors are superstitious.”

She nodded.

The Eleanor rattled across another bridge. Far below, a clump of farm buildings huddled around an earthen courtyard, the scene apple-tinted and woozy under twenty fathoms of water. Dark windows looked out over submerged fields and dykes and scraps of queasy woodland. Harper spied an old steam tractor, and the carcass of some large animal now soft with white eels, and shivered at the thought of anyone still living down there.

What did they farm?

“I brought you a refill.” Carrick held out a flask of blood. “I noticed you were getting low.”

She just stared at it.

“I’m sorry.” Carrick’s smile looked ugly and desperate. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? An apology. Well, there it is.”

“It’s not enough, Jan.”

The lines around Carrick’s eyes pinched. “I’m asking for a second chance. You could do a lot worse than me. I was serious about the house in Highcliffe-a place of your own.”

“As your own personal whore?” She snorted. “I’ll think about that offer if Menoa ever turns me away from Hell.”

Carrick spat into the water below.

Harper glanced back at Observation Carriage One. The Eleanor had had enough spare glass aboard for the midnight shift to repair most of the shattered windows, but many of the rest of the panes remained empty. Someone had suggested they cover these up with paper or squares of linen, but Carrick had insisted those patches would spoil the look of his train. Harper sighed. Either way, the passengers would not be happy. They were bound to complain. “Somebody summoned it,” she said. “If you’d only let me interview the passengers, Jan.”

“I’m not getting into this again,” he replied. “I’ve told you what I think.”

“The slaves, at least…” Harper suggested.

“Out of bounds. We had one death already of suspected plague. You’re not even to mingle with them.” She opened her mouth to argue (what proof did he have that the man had died of plague? He was old and crippled), but Carrick went on, “And I don’t want you going near that glass bastard until we arrive at Coreollis. I’m not having you tinkering with his goddamn head again. He’s obstinate enough as it is.”

“What I did to the parasite has nothing to do with his behavior. Hasp has been fighting the implant every step of the way. You’re the one being stubborn here.”

“You admit he’s dangerous?”

“Of course he’s dangerous. I didn’t want him released in the first place.”

The lines around Carrick’s mouth tightened. “You’d better go sweep the train again before the guests get up,” he said. “I don’t want any more surprises on this journey.”

Harper turned away from him. “I was leaving anyway. The air stinks here; I don’t want to breathe it too long.” She walked back towards the stairs which led down into the carriage below.

Carrick called after her: “I’m not a bad man, Alice. You hear me? I’m not a bad man.”

The engineer quickened her pace. It scared her to think that he might be right.

“And I know why you’re here.”

She hesitated at the top step.

“I’ve seen the soulpearl you wear under your uniform,” he went on. “Do you think I don’t know why you hide it? Why you always clutch it when you’re upset? Why you take it off at night before you come to bed?”

She turned slowly. “A lot of people collect souls.”

Carrick chuckled. “What soul? That pearl is empty. The holding patterns are there, but there’s no glow, no ghost inside.” He studied her for a long moment before his eyes narrowed. “Everyone knows what happened to your husband-the real story, not that bullshit the PRC put out.”

Harper made a dismissive gesture. “I bought the jewel at the Garrison Market. It’s fake.” She shrugged. “But I liked it; I thought it looked pretty.”

“I’ve seen fakes before,” Carrick said, “and that isn’t one of them. You are wearing one hell of an expensive jewel, Alice. How many times did you have to open your legs before you could afford it?” He bared his teeth and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Or did you just fuck Menoa? He certainly fucked you.”

“Don’t…” She glanced over her shoulder as if expecting to find the king there. He had remained at Cog Portal, yet his presence seemed to haunt the train.

Carrick’s tone became contemptuous. “You think I’m any worse than your husband?” he shouted. “I survived the war, Alice. Tom didn’t, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You should thank Menoa for keeping that coward in Hell.”

Harper stormed down the stairwell, her heart pounding like the train’s own wheels. When she reached the observation lounge she glanced up. Carrick was leering down at her through the transparent ceiling. She wanted to hide, but she couldn’t think of anywhere to go. Her world was made of glass.

The train thundered on through the conical black hills, climbing steadily, crossing bridges and causeways between islands until the ground rose at last to meet the edge of the Moine Massif. From her viewpoint at the rear of the train Harper watched the landscape unfold. White froth still clung to the rocks and grasses in places, a sour indicant of the extent of the waters’ retreat, but the landscape beyond remained untainted and naturally bleak. To the north, clear streams still chuckled and bounced down the slopes of Moine Moor. A dun heather moorland swept southwards towards Helmbog and the distant peaks of the FossilMountains, where the low sun could be seen gleaming like a copper penny in the pale sky. Ancient maps named that land Benecoir or Bencora. But most people knew it simply as Brownslough; Hafe’s realm.

The king’s army stayed on the Red Road, which had been regularly bloodied so as to maintain a direct road to the front lines. They could not dare leave that trail. Only the arconite wandered further afield. It had climbed onto the massif and now paced the border of Brownslough.

During the war, the Pandemerian Railroad Company had posted pickets along the borders of Hafe’s realm. King Menoa had been warring with Hafe’s brother Rys, after all. Harper rolled her empty soulpearl between her fingers as she recalled those early days: the incessant rain, the distant flashes across the horizon, the raging seas around the Highcliffe wharfs and pontoons. The wind had seemed to carry the booms of resonance cannon from halfway around the world. She closed her eyes, pressed the pearl against her chest.

The god of dirt and poison had not retaliated. He’d killed those diplomats the PRC had sent out to parley after the war, and yet he’d kept his own armies close. It seemed Hafe was quite content to let his brother Rys do the fighting.

Gods were always difficult to predict. What devilry would they be up to now? Hafe sat in Brownslough and grew fatter. Cospinol’s great skyship would be patrolling the seas beyond the RiotCoast, hunting any ships who ventured too close to his domain, while Sabor watched the sand grains trickle through his castle in the CharrelMountains. Mirith never strayed far from his elder brother, Rys, of course, following that handsome god like a loyal puppy. And Hasp brooded in the Eleanor’s slave pens even now.

Only Ulcis had been slain, murdered by an unknown assassin in Deepgate.

Harper clutched her soulpearl again.

If one god could die, why not two?

By midday the moor had become a blanket of cerise heather and white flowers rising towards the mountains all around. Pools of still water mirrored the vast blue sky, turning partially submerged boulders into islands hovering in their own pockets of air. The train pulled its banner of smoke in a long curve around Ialar Moor and through the IalarPass to where the coke-oven funnels of the town of Moine rose above the moorland beyond. Here the Eleanor stopped to refuel at the depot coal stage, and two strange things happened.

Edgar Lovich was butchered in his sleep. And the Eleanor picked up an unlikely passenger.

As much to stretch her legs as to avoid the clouds of coal dust which would inevitably descend around the train, Harper took a stroll out across the locomotive yard. She was careful not to stray too far from the train, and to take a full bulb of mist with her, for the sun would quickly sap her strength. Being dead had distinct disadvantages in the world of the living.

She envied the arconite Menoa had constructed from the angel Dill. Powered by a fragment of the Shattered God, it had been able to leave the Red Road, following the train across the plateau while the troops forced to march only on bloodied ground lagged far behind. The smoke from Menoa’s war machines still stained the southeastern sky, but the distance between the Eleanor and the king’s army had stretched. Now the arconite towered over the town of Moine, its vast wings covering most of the southern sky. The foul waters from the PortalLake had dried to a brown crust on its bones, but it did not need this blood or any mist or crimson earth to survive here.

Menoa had used a fragment of the Shattered God to create the arconite, and then butchered countless souls to temporarily widen the portal so that it could leave the Maze. He had unleashed a warrior capable of destroying entire cities and armies. Free from the confines of the Veil, this single great automaton was worth more to the king than his entire horde. The rumble of coal came from behind as the Eleanor’s crew refilled her tender from the stage. Moine had been a mining settlement before the war, but Rys’s rain had lifted the water table, swelling the town’s tar pits past bursting. Now the noxious overflow had rendered the place uninhabitable. The PRC had cleaned up the yard itself, but the streets and lower walls of the workers’ houses and coke factories had been abandoned to the viscid black liquid. Away from the train, an eerie silence blanketed the spoiled town, broken only by the sigh of a hot breeze and the occasional slap of a tin shutter against a brick wall. Moine, more so even than CogIsland, was a city for ghosts. Harper was startled when she heard a very human cry for help.

The shout had seemed to originate behind one of the old engine sheds which ran parallel to the main track. She stepped over the auxiliary rails and walked around the building to investigate.

Parts of the yard’s outer wall had collapsed, leaving only a chain of slender brick islands connected by rubble. This broken wall formed a promontory of sorts, jutting out across Moine’s lake of tar to stop some five yards short of the cleaned concrete surface of the yard. A thin-faced man in a white suit was sitting there, waving a white parasol. Evidently he had reached the wall by climbing through the shell of one of the coke factories bordering the yard, and then walked along its uneven summit only to reach a place where he could not proceed any further without soiling his fine clothes on the thick black gloop all around. He wore a sheathed clockwork sword at his hip, and circular blue lenses over his eyes which now turned to face Harper.

“I require assistance,” he said. “Would you be kind enough to help me?” He inclined his head at the tar separating him from the engineer. “It’s rather undignified, but I suppose I’ll have to be carried.”

Harper folded her arms. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

He gave a wan smile and a smooth bow. “Isaac Pilby, renowned lepidopterist, published poet, and lately an unwitting tourist. My guide, having reneged upon our deal in the field and demanded an additional-exorbitant-fee in order to have his entire village employed as porters, stole my luggage and my butterflies, before abandoning me over there.” He flapped a hand in the general direction of Ialar Moor. “I walked all morning before I saw the smokestacks of this wretched place. With so much industry, one would have expected to find civilization.” He shook his parasol. “Instead of cafes, I find a town knee-deep in some ghastly pollutant.”

“Tar,” Harper said. “It stinks but you’re safe enough. I doubt it’s more than an inch deep. You might lose your shoes, but it won’t do you much harm.”

“It may be shallow,” Pilby said, “and it may be safe. But it is filthy. I have traversed this town from one side to the other in leaps and bounds to minimize the damage to my suit and shoes, and I have no intention of soiling them now. These brogues were handmade in Skirl, you know?” He gave a small shrug, then adjusted his lenses. “You’ll just have to carry me over.”

Harper was about to reply, when she heard a clicking, whirring noise behind her and turned to see the glittering figure of Hasp approaching. Sunlight blurred through the extremities of the angel’s transparent armour and gave him a flame-red halo. His brow crinkled beneath his glass half-helm, folding the tattoos above his brow. “Refueling is finished,” he growled, his gaze flitting between Harper and the stranded man. “They sent me to find you.”

“Who did? Carrick?”

He nodded.

“An hour ago Carrick forbade me or anyone else from going anywhere near you.”

“Some of the ladies,” Hasp said, “thought my armour would look splendid in the sunlight. Your boss obliged them, and then took the opportunity to demonstrate his power over me. Sadly, I remain compelled to obey the orders of Menoa’s lackeys, so here I am. Who is this idiot on the wall?”

“Isaac Pilby,” Harper said. “He collects butterflies.”

The angel studied the man for a moment. “Let’s get back, then.”

“Excuse me,” Pilby called after them in a high voice. “I say! Excuse me?”

The angel and the engineer kept walking.

“You can’t leave me here,” the lepidopterist protested.

The Eleanor’s rear carriages came into view as Harper and Hasp neared the corner of the engine shed.

“Wait!” Pilby yelled after them. “Listen! I have a magic stone.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Harper muttered. She faced Hasp. “How are you feeling now?” The angel’s eyes had remained the same dark, brooding grey since she’d last seen him. “Have you suffered any dizziness since…?” Since Carrick had forced him to murder.

“I’m fine,” Hasp said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t.

A shrill voice came from behind them. “I can pay. That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Mercenaries! You’re no better than Cohl’s Shades. Very well, you’ve made your point, now name your fee.”

“The chief enjoys power,” Harper said to the glass-armoured god. “That’s why he orders you to do these things. But your resistance to his commands will kill you. If you obeyed without question, without thought, he’d lose interest and you might stand a better chance of reaching Coreollis alive.”

Hasp grunted. “If I obeyed without question or thought, then I wouldn’t deserve to live.”

Harper sucked in mist from her rubber bulb. “What would you do if you were free?” she said, offering the bulb to Hasp.

Hasp glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “I’d try to kill Menoa.” He shrugged. “In this armour, I’d pose no threat to him, but it would be a worthy end.”

The engineer was silent for a while. “I joined the Mesmerists for one reason,” she said at last. “My husband Tom was an officer in the King’s Reservists. After he died at Larnaig, I begged for an audience with Menoa. I wanted to convince him to give me Tom’s soul.” She remembered the months of pleading with Carrick at the Cog Island Liaison Centre. “I was rising quickly through the special engineering branch of the PRC, working on adapting Mesmerist technology to work in this world. It wasn’t easy-we had to engineer solutions for metaphysical devices the king could simply will into existence in Hell. Carrick refused to pass on my requests to meet Menoa, but after I had a breakthrough with the first Locators, the king actually asked to see me.”

“He thought you had potential?”

“The special engineering branch was crucial to the War Effort, and I was a crucial part of the branch. Once the king had heard my plea, he agreed to return Tom’s soul in exchange for a guaranteed term of service.”

“And he reneged on that deal?”

“He applies his philosophy of change to everything, including his promises. I soon learned that I couldn’t trust him.” She paused. What she was about to say, she had never told another person before. “So I went to Hell myself to find my husband.”

Hasp nodded. “You’re not the first to try it.”

“But of course Menoa expected me to try just that. I ended up working for him in Hell instead.” She sucked in another long breath of mist from her bulb. “And now I’m back here, and I’m dead, and I’d like someone to kill that bastard for me. Do you know anyone strong enough to accomplish such a feat?”

“I used to, but he’s not the same god he was before. He’s much more fragile now.”

Turning the corner, they stepped over the network of rusted steel tracks that led out from the engine shed. Harper glanced inside the building’s wide door but there were no locomotives inside, just a vast cavernous space pierced by dusty shafts of sunlight. Weeds reached through glassless metal windows in the outer wall and spread out in green veins across tired brickwork. Ahead of them, the Eleanor waited on the main line behind the coal stage, her carriages aglow. A haze of fine black dust drifted from her tender and spread across the yard and the moor beyond.

The majority of the passengers had alighted and stood some distance from the train in groups of three or more, chatting or smoking clay pipes. Some carried porcelain cups of tea or flutes of white wine. Harper noticed Jan Carrick talking to a group of three ladies who were laughing and beating the air with their fans. Slightly closer, Ersimmin appeared to be engaged in a fierce debate with Jones. The pianist gesticulated wildly in Harper’s direction, although he hadn’t turned and thus could not be aware of her arrival on the scene. The older white-whiskered man shot a glance her way, and his face flushed.

“I should probably have helped him,” she said to Hasp, “the man on the wall.”

The archon grunted. “What kind of man asks a lady to carry him through a pool of sludge?”

“A lady?”

Hasp’s neck buzzed. “That was the demon talking,” he said.

A call came from behind them: “I say!”

They turned.

Isaac Pilby had evidently resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rescue himself. Shoeless and covered in tar up to his shins, the lepidopterist strode across the yard towards them, brandishing his folded parasol like a rapier, while his real sword swung in its white leather sheath at his side. He had been successful at keeping neither brolly nor blade entirely free of Moine’s pollution, for the tips of both now sported six inches of black gloop.

“You,” he said, jabbing the parasol at Harper, “abandoned me. And you,” now he jabbed the umbrella at the angel, “are an abomination in glass. Now both of you are completely responsible for and deserving of whatever amercement the Pandemerian Railroad Company sees fit to extract from you as a result of this incident. I have powerful friends!”

“If someone ordered me to kill him,” Hasp muttered, “I don’t think I’d resist too much.”

Either Pilby didn’t hear him, or he was choosing to ignore the angel. Chin thrust out, the little man strode on towards the train and her staring passengers, rocking his thin shoulders in an almost comical gait, as though desperate to squeeze every last shred of majesty from his sorely blemished appearance.

Jones was the first to approach him. “My dear sir,” he said, eyeing the other man with what appeared to be a degree of suspicion, “what on earth are you doing out here? Carrick, fetch a brandy for this man at once.”

Carrick looked up from his audience, a line of annoyance creasing his brow, then he saw Pilby and the frown deepened.

“I do not require alcohol,” the shoeless lepidopterist said, “merely a change of raiment and transport away from this foul place.” He planted the soiled tip of his parasol on the ground and raised his nose in an expression of haughty indifference. “I will compensate you handsomely for the inconvenience of returning this locomotive to CogCity. But know that I fully intend to write a severe-”

“We’ll take you with us,” Harper broke in, more to stop his endless prattling than from any great fear of reprisal. The sun was already making her feel nauseous and weak. “But we’re not heading back to Cog until the day after tomorrow. This train is bound for Coreollis.”

“Coreollis?” Pilby looked vaguely confused. “But they closed the Larnaig Ferry. There’s no way to reach the city by train now. And Coreollis is Rys’s stronghold.”

“The PRC have just reopened the ferry.”

“Well, that’s bold,” said Edith Bainbridge, moving through the crowd of onlookers. She was wearing a different peach-coloured frock from the one she’d worn earlier. If anything it was peachier. “You, sir, are interfering with a diplomatic mission,” she said to Pilby. “Besides, why should you have a free ticket when we are financing this whole event? The idea is ridiculous. We’ve little enough room as it is.”

“Madame-” the lepidopterist began to object.

But Carrick broke in. “Compensation, you say?”

Harper exhaled quietly through her teeth. Carrick had a familiar distant, calculating look in his eyes. She half expected him to ask how much. But, given the present company, she doubted even Carrick would be so crass.

“Well, yes,” Pilby remarked. “It’s only fair. Return me to the terminus at CogCity and we’ll discuss some payment for your services. I am a man of considerable means. Indeed, if I had known the Pandemerian Railroad Company had reopened the route, I would undoubtedly have bought a ticket myself.”

Carrick grinned. “Harper, find this gentleman some shoes, will you?”

But before the engineer could go and find Pilby some footwear, a cry came from one of the stewards. There had been a terrible accident. Edgar Lovich was dead. The passengers rushed back inside to discover the actor’s body lying sprawled in one of corridors. Lovich’s wife, Yve, let out a shriek of horror and dropped to stem the flow of blood from her husband’s body. But it was already too late. Edgar Lovich had died within the last hour. Someone had stabbed him in the chest.

Yet nobody, it seemed, had seen anything.

Harper gave instructions to the crew to mop up the spilled blood, and left the ladies to accompany the sobbing wife back to her bedroom. Then, ignoring Carrick’s quarantine, she told Hasp to follow her back to the slave pens. As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, she asked the god, “Did you kill Lovich?”

“Yes,” he replied without hesitation.

“Why?”

Hasp shrugged. “I can’t think of a plausible reason or motive.”

“Did someone order you to do it?”

“No.”

The engineer frowned. Not only was Hasp incapable of violence against any of Menoa’s ambassadors without a direct order, but if someone had ordered him to slay the actor, then couldn’t they also have ordered the god to lie so as not to implicate the real culprit?

She tried again. “I order you to answer my next question truthfully. Did someone order you to kill Lovich?”

Hasp winced. He reeled, staggering against the carriage wall. And then he dropped to his knees on the floor, clutching his skull and moaning.

“Forget that order,” Harper said quickly. “Hasp? Don’t answer my question.”

The tension left the angel’s face. “No more questions,” he breathed. “The parasite…”

Harper understood. Menoa’s parasite was punishing him for failing to answer her question. But it was also preventing him from answering that same question. The angel had been given two mutually opposing orders-he could not obey one without disobeying the other.

“If you were instructed not to reveal the identity of the murderer under any circumstances, then any question that threatened that order-”

“Might kill me,” Hasp finished in a despondent tone.

Harper was thinking hard. How could she get to the truth of this if Hasp could not speak?

If a passenger could get away with one murder, what else would they use the doomed god for? Would the engineer be at risk herself? She phrased her next question carefully. “If I asked you to detail your exact movements since Carrick released you from the slave pen, would you wish to answer?”

“No,” the angel said.

Of course not. Even that information would implicate someone. “Let’s get you out of the passengers’ way, then,” she said.

Back in the slave pen, Harper studied the remaining captives. After the cripple’s death, eight of Rys’s Northmen remained, together with Hasp’s young female companion from his palace in Hell. The men sat apart from one another in silence, their scaly bodies wrapped in blankets. Not one of them would meet the engineer’s eye. “Did any of you see what happened?” she asked.

The girl spoke up. “Why? What happened?”

“A passenger was killed.”

“Someone was killed in here, too, but you don’t seem so bothered about that.”

Harper shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about it?” The truth was Carrick had actually threatened to put her off the train for pursuing the matter. He cared nothing for these people. Ten slaves or nine, it made no difference to him. Harper doubted that it made much difference to Rys, either. The handover was nothing more than a gesture of goodwill-intended to show the citizens of Coreollis that their new king was benign and just.

The presence of Menoa’s vast and terrible army at their doorstep would merely reinforce the point.

A low sky and ceaseless drizzle shrouded The Pride of Eleanor Damask’s arrival at the southern end of the IalarPass. Smoke from her stack boiled up between wet granite cliffs on either side, rock faces which still bore the pickax scrapes of those slave labourers who had widened the natural ravine here in recent years. Overhead the clouds bunched together in clumps like dirty sheep’s wool. The train slowed, the solid thump of her pistons reverberating in the narrower space. Then she sounded her whistle. Echoes bounced among the hidden, cloud-wrapped mountain peaks, before a horn blast from the Sally outpost answered the call. The soldiers stationed ahead, just beyond the pass, would now be preparing to wake the ancient steamer which would carry them across LakeLarnaig to Coreollis.

Another voice answered the whistle, this one a long low roar which rumbled across the heavens. Menoa’s arconite came into view, striding between the foothills at the base of Rael Canna Moor. Its skull and shoulders were lost above the clouds, giving it the appearance of a decapitated giant. Engines thundered behind its ribs, powered by some arcane system of blood and fuel the Mesmerists had developed in Hell. Its voice echoed like thunder over the hidden mountain peaks:

“I am ready to serve.”

It turned away and strode quickly into the mists ahead, shaking the ground under its feet.

To watch this spectacle of divine engineering, the passengers had gathered upon the viewing platform of Observation Car One. Rain dripped from colourful umbrellas as the party waited: the men in one group, smoking cigars while they discussed in layman’s terms the mechanics, torque, and forces about to be employed; the ladies in an excited huddle, whispering about some duke and his mistress and what she had said to so-and-so three months ago.

Harper stood back from the group in an attempt to avoid the occasional acerbic glances from both Isaac Pilby, who still blamed her for the loss of his brogues, and Edith Bainbridge, who held the engineer accountable for everything else that had gone wrong, including the weather. She breathed mist from her bulb whenever she felt her strength begin to wane.

Jones had given the lepidopterist a pair of shoes from his own wardrobe, while Ersimmin, being of a closer size to the newcomer, had donated several of his own crimson suits. Both the pianist and the elderly reservist seemed to have taken a special interest in Pilby, for they rarely left the small man’s side. The three of them together, in their dark red suits, reminded Harper of the fractured glimpse she’d seen of the pianist through the music car ceiling.

Did the trio have more in common than the white sword sheaths they each wore? She didn’t dwell on the matter. Whatever common ground they shared would be cinched by the social circle in which they moved-a closed world to someone from Harper’s background.

Yet Jan Carrick seemingly remained unable to see the gulf of this class divide. Pilby had come to some financial arrangement with Menoa’s chief liaison officer, who had evidently regarded this as the first rung of a ladder that would raise him to a position of equality with the very guests he fawned over. The passengers tolerated the chief, of course, but they would never welcome him into their fold. They smiled and chatted with him, but with a barely concealed contempt Carrick utterly failed to notice.

At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the Eleanor’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.

The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four hundred feet below. The new line was much shorter, and more dangerous.

Harper couldn’t drag her gaze from the red flag, which struck her as some dim portent of doom. They had a saboteur and a murderer aboard. Wouldn’t the perilous descent to Lake Larnaig provide the perfect moment for foul play? Harper studied the passengers carefully, searching for any emotion or expression which might betray a hidden agenda.

She saw nothing suspicious.

While the murderer was most likely to be one of Menoa’s own ambassadors, the saboteur need not be a passenger at all. She glanced back along the train. Stewards were busy inside each of the carriages, wrapping up loose and breakable items and stowing them away in preparation for the descent. The vague shapes moving inside the frost-walled accommodation cars would be more staff, performing this same task with the passengers’ belongings.

Finally the train huffed free of the ravine and out into the base of a quarry abutting the northern edge of the Moine Massif. Here the railway line which had brought them all the way from Cog Terminus finally came to an end, halted by a precipitous drop of four hundred feet down to LakeLarnaig itself. Crescent cliffs of ochre rock formed a basin between the slopes of Ialar Moor on one side and an ancient Arnic burial site in the shadow of Rael Canna Moor on the other. The unremarkable keep Harper had glimpsed earlier squatted to the left of the tracks among slopes of weatherworn scree, mud, and great wet mounds of anthracite. Opposite this, the flooded imprints of boots marked paths between hummocks of crushed limestone and shale, and sumps where old steam-diggers had been left to corrode in pools of orange rainwater.

The last excavations undertaken here had undermined the burial site itself, exposing the tunnels and chambers the ancients had burrowed in the clay subsoil. Someone had even packed these openings with lime to discourage Non Morai from gathering where the dead had once lain. Harper wondered vaguely what the workers had done with the bodies they’d unearthed. The remains of four cairns squatted above the cliffs, the tumbled mounds of stone patched with white lichen.

Ahead, the smoke cleared to reveal the end of the railway line. The Larnaig Ferry had already built up a head of steam; her funnels were pumping cords of white and grey smoke into the clouds. A pre-revolution eight-decked paddle steamer, the Sally Broom was a hulk of sepulchral metals. Ornate steel passenger decks clung to her superstructure like drapes of cobwebs, all lit by yellow oil lanterns which shuddered to the thump-thump-thump of her engines. Ten or so of her crewmen were busy at winches, lowering a wide gangway in the vessel’s stern which led into her hold. Chains rattled, and then the gangway boomed down, slamming neatly into an indentation in the quarry floor. The steel tracks now led all the way into the ferry’s hold-a cavernous space large enough to swallow The Pride of Eleanor Damask and all of her carriages.

Harper’s gaze traveled out beyond the lip of the quarry to where the bulk of the old steamship appeared to float, impossibly, in open air four hundred feet above Lake Larnaig, and it took her several moments before she was able to reconcile her preconceptions of the landscape with the sight of the four enormous skeletal fingers gripping the hull.

The arconite held the steamship in one bony hand, her stern pressed against the uppermost edge of the cliff.

With its feet lost somewhere in the swollen lake four hundred feet below and its skull hovering like a moon in the gauzy sky, the bone-and-metal colossus remained completely motionless, hunched low over the lip of the Moine Massif as though it had rusted solid while inspecting the connections between the railway line crossing the quarry floor and the steamship it held in its skeletal grip. Grease glistened on the cogs and pistons visible between its knuckles and on the many shafts and hydraulic rams in its forearms and spine. Countless souls swam in its chemically altered blood. It had two engines: one, the size of a locomotive shed, occupied its skull and controlled the movement between vertebrae and hence the flex of the spine; the second, much larger engine was housed within the ribcage and gave power to the automaton’s reinforced limbs. It had wings in proportion to its torso, yet they were tattered and useless, as thin as the clouds that now enveloped them.

There was a collected intake of breath from the passengers, and then Jones said, “Good grief.” The old reservist had taken an abrupt step back. “Up close it’s so…” he shook his open brolly at the sky, “…big.”

“The automaton is modeled on the form of the controlling soul,” Harper explained. “It’s less stressful for a spirit to accept a form it considers natural. Its size was merely dictated by what was possible. The larger the arconite, the more damage it can cause.”

“You mean this machine was once an angel?” Jones asked.

She nodded. “Dill was one of the guardians of Ulcis’s temple in Deepgate. We caught him in Hell.”

“Dill?” Jones laughed uneasily. “It suits him, I suppose.”

A horn sounded inside the easternmost keep, drowning out the passengers’ chatter. The signalman on the roof of the building lowered his red flag below the level of the parapet and The Pride of Eleanor Damask shuddered to a halt. Steam hissed from brake-piston pressure valves beneath her carriages.

“…until recently,” Carrick was answering a question from one of the group. “And yet the king thought this way would be smoother. He feared the constant movement would shake the ship too much and damage our captives. It’s only a short distance across the lake to Coreollis.”

“It’s hideous for a reason,” Edith whispered to one of her companions. “To strike terror into Rys’s Northmen.” She waited until the other lady nodded, before adding, “The king told me he might make more if this one is successful.”

Harper said nothing. King Menoa had already constructed twelve other arconites. All he required now was enough blood to release them from Hell.

Carrick grinned. “Even the gods cannot match our strength,” he said. “With warriors like this, Pandemeria will become the dominant world force. Menoa has given us a future.”

A laugh from down in the quarry distracted Harper. The train driver had hopped down from the engine and was now chatting amicably with two Company officiators in slate-grey uniforms who had strolled out from the keep to meet him. One of these men had apparently made a joke. After the officiators’ release forms had been completed to their satisfaction, the driver tipped his cap to each of the two others in turn and then climbed back aboard the train. At a wave from one of the uniformed men, the signalman on the keep raised his red flag again. The Pride of Eleanor Damask jolted, and then huffed forward, closer to the edge of the cliff where the Larnaig steamer waited in its cradle of bones.

Harper gazed up at the arconite as the train inched along. Rain slicked the broad expanse of cranium and dripped from ridges in the guano-spattered skull. The eye sockets were deep caves full of wheeling gulls and dark machinery. Hydraulic tubing veined naked bones everywhere, while metal vats, valves, ramrods, and camshafts, all slick with black grease, crowded within the chest cavity.

A rumble shook the carriages. The glass train began to inch across the iron gangway into the hold of the Sally Broom.

“Condensers,” the driver shouted from the engine cab.

A locomotion engineer threw a switch on the control panel beside the driver, turning on the Eleanor’s condenser pumps. A furious clattering came from the train’s engine; the clouds of steam above her stack dwindled to a wisp.

“We’re rerouting the exhaust,” Carrick explained to the passengers, “and condensing the steam back into water.”

“It’s very noisy,” Edith complained.

“True,” the chief admitted, “but preferable to venting so much hot vapor into an enclosed space. The mine trains in Moine and Cog use the same system.”

The arconite did not move as the locomotive, the tender, and then the leading carriages were swallowed by the steamship’s cavernous hold. Three of the ship’s crew appeared on the gangway, bending low to check the steel links where the sections of the Cog railway joined those of the Sally Broom’s deck. A dank, rusty darkness engulfed the passengers as the Eleanor rumbled further inside the vessel. The sound of the condensers became louder, rattling between bulkheads.

“Oh, this is awful.” Edith’s exclamation had a hollow ring to it. “How are we supposed to see anything at all? There aren’t any windows!”

Carrick had to raise his voice above the booming engines and the clacking of the condenser pumps. “We’ll alight as soon as the train is fully aboard. The ship has a splendid observation deck, for which the cooks have prepared a buffet lunch.”

“It doesn’t look very splendid from here,” Edith retorted, sweeping an angry gaze across the orange puddles on the floor. “I don’t want to spoil my dress.”

“I’ll stay here with you.” Isaac Pilby thrust out his chest and gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword. “We can avail ourselves of the Eleanor’s dining car.”

“You shouldn’t even be here!” Edith cried. “And if you’re staying, I’m going.” She spun on her heel and stomped away across the glass carriage roof towards the stairwell.

“I rather think you put your foot in it, old boy,” Jones muttered to Pilby.

The lepidopterist gave the old man a withering smile, yet Harper thought she saw an odd hint of satisfaction in this expression. Had the little man wanted to stay here alone?

When the hunting platform at the very rear of the train was finally aboard, the driver eased the locomotive to a stop. The Eleanor’s kitchen staff disembarked first. Guided by another two of the Sally’s crew, they carried oil lanterns and wicker hampers out across the hold towards a stairwell that would take them to the upper decks. Stewards mustered all of the passengers except Pilby-who had elected to stay-and then wasted no time herding everybody off in the wake of the picnic baskets. Harper refilled her bulb, then hopped down from the carriage as more men ran back to raise the ship’s gangway and to chain the train’s wheels and axles to steel hoops in the deck.

The low drone of engines followed the guests up a carpeted stairwell, past boiler and crew decks. They emerged into a bright, if somewhat musty, saloon. The Eleanor’s stewards were already unpacking the buffet onto long tables set beneath the lines of portholes on either side of the spacious room. Orange flames puttered in the gasoliers overhead, casting a rich light over the tarred bulkheads and threadbare carpet. Hatches to port and starboard opened onto narrow grey metal passenger decks and the mist-heavy skies beyond, while a set of double doors in the bow had been flung open, giving access to a wide, wooden hurricane deck. The scent of freshly baked bread from the lunch tables mingled with the odor of burning coal.

Harper wandered outside and peered over the hurricane-deck balustrade. Clouds of smoke from the Sally’s funnels blew across the edge of the Moine Massif, enveloping the arconite’s forearm up to its elbow. The engineer spied intricate patterns of loops and whorls etched into the massive bones-similar to those found on Ayen’s old construction machines. Seen to the starboard side of the steamship, a mass of heavy machinery filled the skeleton’s ribs. At its heart, a dull red light glowed.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Carrick called from the saloon, “if you will follow me outside, we’ll have a better view of the spectacle.”

The passengers assembled on the deck behind her, but Harper didn’t turn away from the view. From this vantage point she could look far out across Lake Larnaig. Shafts of sunlight pierced the clouds in the west and dappled the silver waters far below. She leaned out and looked straight down the side of the steamer’s hull. Four hundred feet below, the waters had risen above the old mine depot at the base of the plateau. A stone quay with its cranes and mooring stanchions was dimly visible under the surface of the lake and clustered around the huge feet of the arconite lay a great red-brown heap of sunken ships and steam locomotives.

“Carrick,” she muttered, “what are those?”

The chief responded with an angry hiss, “Don’t make a fuss about them.”

“I’m not making a fuss. I’d like to know why there’s a pile of wrecked ships and trains clustered around the arconite’s feet.” She counted the hulls of five vessels and as many locomotives lying half buried in the silt at the bottom of the lake. In each case, a section of the sunken trains had remained partially inside the hold of one of the ships, having apparently spilled out of it. “And I’d like to know why two-no, three-of the ships down there have the name Sally Broom painted on their hulls. I was under the impression that this was the only vessel to bear that name.”

“I’m rather curious about that, too,” Jones murmured. The old reservist had joined them and now stood beside Harper with his hand resting lightly on the grip of his rapier. He was peering intently down at the submerged hulks. “Those steamers look badly damaged. One might assume that they’d been dropped from a great height.”

“No,” Carrick began, “I can assure-”

“What’s that, old boy?” Ersimmin now wandered over to stand beside Jones. He looked down. “Oh, my!” he exclaimed. “That’s rather unnerving, isn’t it? You know, I did hear a rumor that another arconite had been constructed before this one.”

“The Skirl demon,” Jones confirmed. “I don’t think it was an arconite, though. Nobody in the Liaison Centre will talk about it.”

Carrick shifted uncomfortably. “There’s no truth to those rumors.”

“What have you boys spotted now?” Edith Bainbridge’s frock rustled across the hurricane deck. She peered down and frowned. “What are those?”

The chief tried to guide her away, but she resisted, an expression of distrust now forming on her thin face.

“Sunken ships,” Ersimmin said, “and locomotives.”

“Ships?” Edith was still frowning down at the wreckage. “Why would so many ships sink there? Is there a reef?”

Ersimmin chuckled. “No doubt that’s it, Edith.”

“The stewards are now ready to serve,” Carrick announced.

But Edith Bainbridge, whose mind had finally grasped the implications of the scene below her, suddenly shrieked, “Good grief! Stop the descent, stop the descent!” She reeled, turning the full extent of her wrath on Carrick. “What in the name of Cog’s dungeons do you mean to do to us? Kill us all? Open the doors, I’m getting off this ship right now!”

The other guests rushed over.

“Miss Bainbridge,” Carrick said. “There were some initial…teething problems with an earlier automation. But I can assure you that these have now been fixed. There’s really no danger at all.”

“So there was an arconite at Skirl,” Jones muttered to Ersimmin.

“And it would seem to have passed this way,” the pianist replied.

Edith stabbed a gloved finger at him. “Those are not teething problems…” Her shrill voice rose above the sound of the steamer’s engines. “That is a graveyard, and I am getting off before this vessel ends up down there, too.”

At that moment a horn blared in the quarry behind them and, after a heartbeat, was answered by a blast from the Sally’s own foghorn. Harper felt a shudder run through the hurricane deck and looked up to see a forest of piston shafts and wheels turning inside the arconite’s ribcage. Gulls scattered, screaming, around the huge machine. The red light at the heart of the engines darkened, and started to pulse.

And the bone and metal automaton raised its vast grinning skull above the quarry and straightened its spine. Its thin wings unfolded, extended, and cut through the clouds, shedding sheets of water. The steamship trembled again, then lurched. Harper sensed her Locator murmuring against her hip. She slipped the device from its holster, wound it quickly, and studied the wavering needle for a moment before relaxing. She had registered nothing more than a surge of power from the fragment of Iril inside the arconite’s heart.

The sound of metal scraping on rock came from the rear of the Sally Broom, followed by the shouts of men:

“Lines clear!”

“Raise the gangway.”

Chains rattled; the steamship trembled. The huge engine inside the arconite’s ribcage was churning furiously now, pumping chemically altered blood through its metal veins. Its heart-light throbbed, brighter and faster. Dark walls of gears chattered. Piston shafts moved in its arms; camshafts turned, quickening. A mighty hiss came from the skull, and Harper felt the air stir. She clutched the rail of the hurricane deck.

In one monstrous hand, the arconite lifted the steamship-locomotive, passengers, and all-away from the edge of the Moine Massif plateau and out into the open air.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Carrick shouted over the clamour of working metal, “let us return inside where we can enjoy the descent in comfort.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Jones exclaimed. “This is too good a sight to watch through any porthole windows.”

The ship lurched violently and then halted. Her funnels gave a massive groan as they strained against the body of the ship. Harper stumbled, but the old reservist grabbed her.

“Our gigantic friend needs to learn gentleness,” Jones remarked. “Another movement like that could break this vessel in two.”

She caught her breath. “I hope that didn’t shatter some of the more fragile glass inside.”

“I’m sure the staff have wrapped up everything breakable.”

“Not the slaves.”

“Oh.” Jones’s face fell. “I see what you mean.”

Ersimmin had caught hold of Edith Bainbridge, who was now beating the pianist with her fan. “Get off me, you lout. It’s going to drop us! I must find a life preserver.”

For a few moments the ship remained motionless in the arconite’s grip. Harper leaned out over the balustrade and peered back along the hull. Beyond the vessel’s stern, the wet brown cliffs of the Moine Massif sank a sheer four hundred feet down to the calm waters. A blizzard of gulls skirled around the ship. The arconite’s skull turned slowly, then moved closer until its yellow grin filled the sky above them. Harper’s Locator gave out a sudden shrill tone.

“What is it?” Jones asked.

She stared hard at the device with a growing sense of dread. Its fluctuating needle darted back and forth, between both ends of the scale. Crystals pulsed fiercely inside.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “The Locator doesn’t know. It’s panicking again.”

The reservist kept one hand on the hilt of his sword. “Another uninvited guest?”

She shook her head. “It might just be the proximity of the-”

But just at that moment another massive jolt unbalanced the passengers. Still gripped in the automaton’s skeletal hand, the ship began a sudden rapid descent.

“Cruel heavens!” Jones cried. The old man’s white hair lashed about his face as the ship dropped closer to Larnaig’s waters. “Do we need to descend quite so briskly?”

“I expect that need has little to do with it,” Ersimmin replied. The pianist had extricated himself from Edith. Now like his reservist colleague, he appeared to be quite relaxed-an observation which could not be extended to encompass the other guests. “From the expression on our host’s face,” Ersimmin went on, inclining his head towards Chief Carrick, “it seems that we are currently experiencing yet another of his teething problems.”

Carrick was clutching the deck rail with both fists, his face a curdled, off-white colour. Most of the passengers had found something to hang on to now. The gentlemen had grabbed the saloon bulkheads or deck balustrades; the ladies clung to the gentlemen.

The steamship shuddered again, and then tilted sharply towards the bow. Several passengers stumbled. Plates toppled and smashed within the saloon.

Ersimmin’s voice radiated calmness. “I’m beginning to understand why the Mesmerists hired our railroad company to support the War Effort,” he said to Jones. “They make terrifying soldiers, but they haven’t quite got the hang of transportation matters.”

The jolt had sent two Northmen crashing into each other, shattering their glass-scaled skins. Mina’s feet slipped out from under her on the slick floor, and she struggled to push herself back up onto her hands and knees. Her hands were now wet and red. Oil lanterns stuttered in the deep gloom of the ship’s hold, throwing lances of light through the transparent carriages.

“Wasn’t this what you wanted?” Hasp cried. “A quick return to Hell.”

“I asked you to kill me,” she replied. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“An unusually biased form of suicide. Still, there’s a glut of fresh souls here. Time for some thaumaturgy, if I’m not mistaken?”

“How did you know?”

“I’ve known from the start.”

She wrinkled her nose.

The slave pen lurched again and another of Rys’s former soldiers crashed against the wall. His glass scales cracked at the wrists, elbows, and head; his life poured out of him.

Mina muttered a prayer: an appeal to her guardian, Basilis, the Hound Master of Ayen. She made sigils in the bloody floor:

One red soul for the Forest of Eyes,

A second for the Forest of Teeth,

The third to rot in the Forest of War,

If you’ll aid your servant now.

Hasp grunted. “It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed blood thaumaturgy and longer since I’ve seen that bastard Basilis. This’ll be fun.”

The stink from the Forest of War greeted Mina’s nostrils as something moved within the red pool on the floor, then reached out roots and branches, growing until it filled the space before her. This was Basilis’s heart tree, a manifestation of Ayen’s Hound Master himself.

Those Northmen who were still alive to witness this apparition now scuttled away to the far corner of the chamber, their eyes wide with fear and horror.

A deep voice rolled out from the tree: “These are weak souls, thaumaturge.” Basilis’s arboreal manifestation dripped and shuddered. “As thin as memories.”

“They’re still souls,” she retorted. “And I didn’t have to kill them myself. I need your help, Basilis. We need to do something about Dill.”

The Hound Master laughed. “You always underestimate yourself, Mina,” he said. “You summoned a guardian from the Forest of War without my help. You killed one of your fellow captives without my help. And didn’t you place a piece of your soul inside the arconite without my help? All you have to do now is reach out to it.”

“I can’t!” she protested. “The Mesmerists changed me. My soul is all muddled up and…sore.” She almost stomped her foot down, but thought better of it. “Besides, I’d feel more comfortable if you were there with me.”

Another laugh issued from the tree.

Hasp said, “This is a new form for you, Basilis. Didn’t you used to be a dog?”

“Hasp…” The tree sighed. “Why are you not in Hell?”

The god grunted. “The Mesmerists caught us both. They assumed she was my woman.”

“Your woman?” Basilis growled.

“Relax,” Hasp said. “She’s not my type.”

Mina felt suddenly cross. It wasn’t that she liked the god-not in that way. But for him to have a type that didn’t include her seemed desperately unfair. The floor lurched again and she slid a yard to the left. She reached out to grab the heart tree’s roots, but Basilis withdrew them. A low snarl came from the demonic tree.

Oh, no.

“Hasp and I both happened to be looking for Dill,” she said quickly. “That’s all. I’m sorry I left you alone in Cinderbark Wood, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sneak into Hell undetected. Deepgate’s Portal was already teeming with Mesmerist shades. You know I’ll come back for you just as soon as I can.”

The steamship plummeted. In the iron gloom of her belly, The Pride of Eleanor Damask heaved and groaned against the chains binding her wheels and axles to the hold’s deck. Steel links stretched and warped. The glass carriages ground against one another, straining to be free of their shackles.

Basilis’s voice sounded like thunder. “I am no longer in that poisonous forest,” he rumbled. “And I am no longer alone. A Spine woman and her companion found my physical form in Cinderbark Wood. They brought me to Cospinol, who has delivered us by skyship to Coreollis. While you were in Hell, Mina, I have traveled across the world. Now I am in Rys’s own palace, not two leagues away from you. From here we can watch the arconite’s approach across LakeLarnaig.”

“Woman?” Mina said. “What woman?”

The demon chuckled. “She is no thaumaturge, Mina.”

Another jolt sent blood sloshing against the slave pen wall. Mina slipped, but one of Basilis’s roots writhed across the floor and curled softly around her wrist, dragging her back towards the tree. Even Hasp was gripping the demon’s roots. But the Northmen were still fearful of the apparition and would not approach it. They fell and hit the wall hard, cracking their scales. While these unfortunate soldiers tried in vain to stop their lives pouring out, Mina clung to her demonic master.

“Now reach out for the splinter,” Basilis said. “Show these poor frightened gods what a Penny Devil and his guardian can do.”

“I need your help to see it clearly.”

“Very well.”

Mina envisioned herself in the Forest of Eyes-the first of her master’s three aspects to survive his expulsion from Heaven. A scrawl of black trees surrounded her, as dense and tangled as a thicket of thorns. The twisted boles and branches glistened as countless eyes within the bark turned towards the thaumaturge.

Mina strolled up to the nearest tree and peered into one of its eyes. She frowned and then looked into another, and another, while millions more stared down at her.

“Help me, Basilis,” she cried.

But the eyes just mutely blinked.

Harper’s knees struck the deck as the steamship hit the surface of LakeLarnaig with a boom. The hull pitched violently and a shower of icy water drenched the hurricane deck, soaking her and everyone else. Edith Bainbridge screamed and stumbled backwards, but Jones and Ersimmin, who had both somehow remained upright, caught her between them. The other passengers had fallen into an un-seemly jumble of silk frills, fans, and hankies.

Carrick remained to one side of the group, still cowering, with both of his arms wrapped around a wooden life preserver. The deck righted itself, groaning, then rolled over in the opposite direction. Water rushed up the hull below, and subsided in a sucking wave of froth as the steamship rocked to a gentle halt.

“I will sue, I will sue, I will sue.” Edith’s hair hung in a limp black net across her face, framing dark tears of eyeliner beneath her shock-wide eyes.

“Calm yourself,” Jones said. “It’s not over yet. Listen!”

Harper tilted her head. An odd humming, crackling noise was beginning to build; it seemed to thrum along the ship’s iron banisters and reverberate through the bulkheads. She checked her Locator.

“A door opening?” Jones ventured.

Harper studied the device, trying to make sense of what she was reading. The silver needle shifted and bounced between ideographs, resisting her attempts to isolate a source of this burgeoning spiritual energy. “It is the same thing as before,” she said. “This energy isn’t coming from Hell or Earth. There are portals opening and closing everywhere, but they don’t lead to the Maze.”

“Is that possible?”

She clenched her teeth. “It’s as if something is searching the ship.” Her gaze traveled the length of the deck where green and black flames flickered and diminished, lingering around the iron nails in the planks. The cold fire leapt from the deck and licked the metal balustrades and fixtures, burning nothing but exuding an ancient and earthy odor.

“It smells like a forest,” Harper said.

The passengers were backing away from these weird fires, covering their noses against the stench, as the Sally Broom rocked back and forwards on the surface of the lake. Harper watched as the flames poured between the rails of the balustrades and cascaded down the hull to where the submerged hand of the great bone automaton was slowly releasing its grip of the floating vessel.

Harper raced to the side of the ship. “It’s going for the arconite.”

Jones’s whiskers twitched. “Sabotage?”

“What else?”

“Please lower that device,” said a voice from behind.

The engineer turned to see Isaac Pilby standing inside the door to the saloon. He had unsheathed his sword and now held it out: a white weapon with a polyhedral crystal pommel set in a nest of silver. With a twitch of the blade he indicated that he meant the engineer to stop what she was doing. Harper complied.

“We’ll wait here a few moments,” Pilby continued.

Harper noticed that the tip of the little man’s blade was covered in fresh blood. “What have you done?”

Pilby gave her an apologetic smile. “There were too many staff aboard this vessel for my comfort. Doubtless many of them were agents of King Menoa.”

“Who the hell are you?” Harper asked.

“Look at the colour of my blade,” he said. “This weapon, unlike so many of the others present here, is not an affectation. I make no concessions to fashion. And my name is not Pilby.”

The sound of crackling came from the waters below as the arconite lifted its arm above the level of the deck. The bones of its hand and wrist were now wreathed in green and black flames.

The lepidopterist glanced up at the automaton, then back at Harper. “I am the First of Cohl’s Shades,” he said. “I am the White Sword.”

“Damn mercenary!” Jones exclaimed. “How much is Rys paying you to sabotage this mission?”

The White Sword shrugged. “Stay on your knees.”

“There are a hundred of these arrogant bastards out there,” Jones explained to Harper. “Cohl’s mercenaries fight with weapons coloured in shades between black and white. The Black Sword and his counterpart, the White Sword, are the most skilled warriors in each one of the two disciplines of Kiril and Yen, while those in between kill one another for better weapons and thus better ranks.”

“I see you’ve watched Adelere’s play,” the White Sword remarked.

“I watched Edgar Lovich play you onstage!”

“Badly, I fear.”

“And you killed him because of that?”

“Alas, someone beat me to it.”

“What do you want?” Jones said.

“Just let the thaumaturgy work without interference.”

The flames had now risen to the arconite’s shoulder, and the great bone giant stood wreathed in green and black fire. In this unnatural light, Pilby’s face seemed much harder than it had previously looked. His laconic smile evinced an utter lack of fear, a confidence in his own abilities that exceeded arrogance. “Many entities, mortal and immortal, sought to prevent the release of this arconite into the world,” he said. “That has failed, so now they must try to control it.”

“And which of them do you serve?” Jones said. “Rys, I suppose?”

Pilby gave a nod.

Ersimmin the pianist had been watching all of this from a few yards further back along the passenger deck. “Preposterous,” he called, walking over. “Your weapon isn’t even white. Ivory, I’d guess. Compare the shade to my own.” He drew his sword.

Pilby’s eyes flicked to the other man’s blade, then back to meet the pianist’s gaze. “Yours is a fake,” he said.

“No,” Ersimmin said, “it isn’t.” He lunged at the smaller man.

Steel clashed.

Pilby foiled one attack, then a second, but the third thrust took him in the neck.

The self-proclaimed First of Cohl’s Shades gurgled once, then crumpled to the deck, his lifeblood pouring out between the fingers now clamped over his throat.

Ersimmin picked up the fallen sword and compared it to his own, examining both weapons closely. Finally he nodded to himself. “His blade is darker. Old Pilby was labouring under a misapprehension.” He slipped a handkerchief from his suit pocket and wiped his own sword clean of the other man’s blood. “This business can get confusing, what with so many weapons of a similar luster in circulation. One can never really be sure one has achieved true mastery.”

“Then you’re the White Sword?” Harper said.

The pianist gave a curt bow. “I’m more confident of that title now, although I can’t be certain until I have faced the remainder of Cohl’s Shades. I’ve heard of one Kirillin warrior who has collected twenty-two blades already.” He shrugged, and appeared to stifle a smirk. “Almost as many as myself.”

Jones helped Harper up. “How many of you bloody mercenaries are on board?” he asked. “I suppose Lovich was another one?”

“Hardly.” Ersimmin snorted. “He was just a terrible actor with a painted blade-an embarrassment to all of Cohl’s Shades. There was no need for me to challenge him to a fight.”

Harper inhaled deeply from her bulb. So this was the man who had ordered Hasp to kill Lovich? She was about to demand answers from him when her Locator shrilled.

Ersimmin eyed the device in her hands. “King Menoa foresaw difficulties, so he hired me to protect this mission and to allow you to do your job, Miss Harper. Can you stop this sabotage?”

“I don’t know,” Harper admitted. And, truthfully, she didn’t know if she wanted to stop the sabotage. The loss of an arconite would be a tremendous blow to Menoa. In a small way it would be revenge for what had happened to Tom. But if she failed Menoa now, she might never get close to him again. And she could not predict what the automaton would do if it were freed from the king’s influence.

A whisper of steel. Jones had drawn his own rapier from its sheath and now swept it in an arc from his hip towards the pianist’s neck. Ersimmin parried, before lashing out a fist at the side of the older man’s head. Jones ducked, striking the other man hard in the chest with his elbow. The pianist recoiled. Jones pushed his blade deep into the other man’s heart.

Ersimmin’s body slumped to the deck atop Pilby’s corpse.

“Arrogant bastard,” Jones muttered. He put one foot on Ersimmin’s pelvis and heaved the bloody sword free of the other man’s chest.

For a moment Harper stared at him in shocked silence. “Don’t tell me you’re…”

“The White Sword?” Jones picked up the pianist’s handkerchief and wiped his own blade clean. The metal shone a dull stony colour. “No. I suppose I’m actually somewhere in the mid-greys.” He grabbed both Ersimmin’s and Pilby’s discarded weapons and tossed them over the side of the ship into the lake below.

“Aren’t you supposed to hold on to those?” Harper asked. “In order to ascend the ranks?”

The old man grunted. “I’m just in it for the money. The moment you possess a pure white or black sword, then every one of Cohl’s Shades comes after you. Besides…” He hefted his own grey blade. “This one is just as sharp as the others.”

Edith Bainbridge stepped forward, raising her chin. “Mid-grey!” she shrilled. “This puts an entirely new perspective on our arrangement, Mr. Jones.” Her eyes became small and hard. “I was under the impression I had hired a grand master of Kiril, and yet you appear to be little better than a common cutthroat. Mid-grey indeed! You have misled me, sir.”

Jones shrugged. He glanced up at the automaton and then turned to face Harper. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “But I can’t let you stop this process. It seems that Pilby and I unwittingly shared the same contract. Had Ersimmin not slain him, there would have been no need to reveal my identity.”

“You’re Rys’s agent?”

He directed a nod to Edith Bainbridge.

“He works for me,” the small woman said. “And I work for the god of flowers and knives.” She smiled. “You Mesmerists think the human race exists to be used, moulded to any purpose that suits your warped ideology. Unlike you, dear, I chose not to abandon my own race.”

“We won’t hurt you,” Jones said. “Provided you do not interfere with our plans.”

“You brought a thaumaturge aboard? Who is he?”

Jones looked peevish. “Honestly, we don’t know. If Rys is behind this sorcery, he didn’t mention it to us.” He shrugged. “But then he said nothing about Pilby, either. It matters not. The thaumaturge’s actions suit our purpose, and so we will not interfere.”

The Sally Broom had by now steamed some sixty yards out from the base of the cliffs and was heading in a wide curve away from the automaton. A ribbon of froth bobbed up and down in her wake, carried by the swell of the grey lake waters. High above them the arconite appeared to be in a state of great agitation. The castle-sized skull stared down at the engine in its own chest, where the colourful fires now blazed. Flames of green and black danced deep within the machinery, illuminating gears, pistons, and blood vats. With a mighty creak and thump of metal, the arconite raised one huge hand and beat it against its ribcage. Gulls burst from nests within the titan’s shoulders and neck, their alarm cries shrill and distant.

“You don’t understand,” Harper said to Jones and Edith. “If the arconite is released from Hell’s influence, it will become independent, unpredictable. We’ll be put in grave danger.”

“Carrick,” Jones said, “would you be so kind as to inform the Sally’s captain of our predicament? I’d suggest to him he might want to increase our speed and move us directly away from the automaton.”

All this time, Chief Carrick had been sitting on the hurricane deck, slack-jawed, staring witlessly at the corpses of Ersimmin and Pilby. Now his glassy eyes darted up to meet Jones’s. “Yes, sir.” He scrambled to his feet and departed.

A great iron clamour fell from the clouds, like the clash of a hundred bells. The fires had contracted into a knot around the arconite’s chest, and drawn from it a cry of anguish. The five-hundred-foot-tall mechanical archon shuddered, then threw its arms and wings wide. A cold blast of wind rippled the surface of LakeLarnaig, lifting rags of spume, which blew across the steamship’s deck. The Sally rocked on her belly, riding each swell, chugging steadily away from the bone giant and the base of the Moine Massif…but not fast enough, for as Harper ran inside to fetch Hasp, she glanced up to see the giant’s skull turn slowly to fix its gaze upon the ship.

“Is it free?” Jones asked.

“Yes,” Harper replied. “Iril help us!”

“Good. Then Menoa has been deprived of a weapon.”

The arconite raised its fists to the heavens and roared. And then it began to march towards the tiny fleeing vessel.

Down the stairwell the engineer raced. The smack of her boots on the metal floor seemed distant, as though a queer silence had filled the air spaces between bulkheads, a stillness that muffled the drum of the Sally’s own engines, the heave and slap of waves against her hull. It felt like an omen, a taste of death. Hasp could not slay the monster outside. The automaton need only lift the ship and cast her far across LakeLarnaig, or push her decks down into the freezing waters. It would be the simplest thing. Harper plunged deeper into the vessel, though inside or outside, it made no difference; she would drown either way.

In the Eleanor’s slave pen she discovered a gruesome scene. Blood covered the floor of the cramped space. The corpses of most of the slaves lay heaped in the corner. Only two had survived: Hasp, and the young woman, whom the god held in his arms. She was unconscious but breathing.

“Our thaumaturge?” the engineer asked.

“Mina Greene, of Deepgate.” Hasp replied. “I fear she has exerted herself too much.”

“Come with me quickly.”

“More killing?”

Harper just stared at his glass skin and shuddered. Back on the uppermost deck of the Sally Broom, she watched the arconite stride through the lake towards them. Huge waves, formed by the movement of its legs, rolled across the surface of the waters and pounded the side of the vessel. Gulls swarmed around it like confetti.

It halted, filling the entire scope of Harper’s vision, and crouched beside the ship.

But rather than crushing the Sally’s hull, the bones of one vast hand curled, almost tenderly, around her bow, halting her forward movement.

And then it brought its skull close to peer at its captives.

Deep inside the dead eye sockets, the engineer saw black crystals glittering. She heard the continuous clatter of engines from its cranium and ribs, the slow thump of weird chemical blood. She smelled rust and grease, and something else…the odor of bones and tombs. For a long, long moment the automaton seemed content to watch them.

Dill?

Was there anything left of the young angel in there? Did he realize who or where he was? Could the Lord of the First Citadel now reason with him? She had to hope so.

But Chief Carrick had other ideas. “Kill it,” he ordered.

And the words rewoke the parasite lodged in Hasp’s mind.

The order had been given, and the glass-sheathed god remained compelled to obey it. He broke away from the group, vaulted over the balustrade towards the front of the ship. He tore a coil of rope free from one of the Sally’s lifeboats, and ran towards the bow, his shiftblade gripped in one huge fist.

Harper cried out for the angel to stop, but Hasp ignored her.

Jones called out his own command, but the angel still refused to halt. “It seems the parasite no longer considers us to be loyal servants of the king,” the old reservist said. “I daresay Menoa did not approve of what he saw through the arconite’s eyes. We have been cut loose.”

Harper faced Carrick. “Hasp can’t kill that!” she said. “But he knew the young angel in Hell. He helped him, protected him. Just let him try to talk to Dill.”

The chief liaison officer glared at her with utter hatred in his eyes. “You’ve chosen your side, Alice. You’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of your…miserable existence.” He shot a glance at Jones’s sword. “The glass bastard’s too far away to hear any more orders now.”

The automaton’s grinning skull filled the dismal sky. Tiny white gulls wheeled in slow circles around it or settled, finding rude perches among so many acres of bone, dropping specks of shit. Still the machine made no move. Its eye sockets were caverns. In its stillness, it had once more become an inanimate thing: of ridges, cracks, and hollows-dead spaces to be eroded by the wind, places where the rain might gather and pool. But Harper knew there would be anguish, even despair, boiling at the creature’s core. The thaumaturge’s strange fires had wrapped around its soul, like a fist squeezing the poison from its beating heart, and then they had retreated, freeing the creature from Menoa’s grip. Now Dill’s soul would be exposed to the agony of metal and bone and chemical blood, and to the knowledge of what he had become.

Hasp had by now reached the place where the automaton’s hand gripped the ship. He leapt from the deck to the back of the creature’s knuckle, then set off again, scrambling along the vines of steel hydraulic tubing which wrapped the forearm. The automaton, if it sensed his presence, paid him no more attention than it would have given to a fly. Clearly Hasp was too insignificant to be worth the effort of swatting. At the elbow joint, the god slipped between two pistons and began to climb the upper arm, into the shade of the clavicle.

The arconite chose this moment to unleash its fury. Its right hand remained pressed against the bow, while the left, a clawed fist, suddenly loomed overhead and smashed through the superstructure near the stern of the vessel. Metal buckled and tore. The concussion knocked Harper from her feet; her head struck the deck hard. When she looked up she saw a sky full of teeth, and then the clouds seemed to fall towards her.

The automaton had hefted the steamship airborne in its right fist. The deck lurched, sloped away at a dizzy angle. From inside the saloon came the sound of smashing crockery or glass, the thud of heavy objects breaking against interior bulkheads, the smell of burning lamp oil. A metal groan trembled through the wooden planks beneath her; cables stuttered and pinged. There was a series of snaps and one of the Sally’s two funnels toppled forward, plowing through the ship’s bridge with a jaw-breaking boom. Harper glimpsed heaving grey waters far below the bow of the vessel, flecks of white foam. She clung on desperately. Pistons rumbling, the Sally plunged suddenly backwards through the air.

The automaton drew back its arm to throw the ship.

From somewhere Harper thought she heard the sound of battle.

The parasite chattered inside Hasp’s skull, insisting on destruction even as the angel raged against the command he had been given. This giant was Dill, the very archon he had fought so hard to save in Hell. And now he had been ordered to slay him. A red mist blurred the god’s vision, a veil his fury sought to cut through with his sword. He had tied his rope to a pipe near the automaton’s scapula, the other end around his own midriff. Now he reached the creature’s shoulder.

Before him loomed the arconite’s spine and skull. Hasp could see wires among the vertebrae. He ran across the plates of bone, his blade ready.

The skull turned.

For a heartbeat, something glimmered deep in the arconite’s eye sockets-in the crystals which had replaced Dill’s eyes. His huge jaws opened and closed with a crash.

“I have been ordered to slay you,” Hasp shouted. “And I cannot resist this order.” His mind swam under the strain of speaking. “Kill me and save yourself.”

A voice rolled out from the thing, as deep as an earthquake. “Hasp…”

“Slay me, Dill.” Hasp had reached the arconite’s neck. He raised his shiftblade and plunged it into a nest of wires and crystals and cogs between two vertebrae, trying to hack it all to shreds. But he could not dent nor even scratch the machinery.

The arconite howled.

Its massive fist came up and closed around the glass-skinned archon, and Hasp did not flee. He could not stop himself from harming Dill, but he had been given no orders to protect himself.

A cage of bones now surrounded him, and Hasp felt himself being suddenly carried out far across the waters of LakeLarnaig. The parasite in his skull demanded destruction. Before the god could stop himself, he turned his shiftblade into an axe, and began to hack at the skeletal fingers before him.

The fist opened.

And once more Hasp found himself staring up at that huge face. Dill’s dead eyes lacked expression. His grin could not express whatever emotions he felt. Yet Hasp sensed turmoil within that skull. Dill could easily have crushed the archon in his hand, and yet he hadn’t.

Hasp raised his axe again.

A voice cried out somewhere below. The words eluded Hasp. He clove his axe into the arconite’s wrist. No wound or gouge appeared under his blade, and yet the arconite cried out in agony. Hasp lifted his axe again.

“Stop…order…Hasp!”

This time Hasp recognized the voice. Chief Carrick was calling out from below. Had he just ordered Hasp to stop the attack? The glass-armoured god looked down.

Far down below on the deck of the steamship, Jones had a blade against Carrick’s throat. “Stop the attack,” Carrick shouted. “That’s an order.”

Harper was standing next to the pair, a look of vast relief on her face. Jones just looked up and grinned.

“When we saw how the arconite reacted to you,” Harper explained to Hasp, “Jones persuaded Carrick to intervene.”

“I-” Carrick began.

Jones moved his sword closer to the chief liaison officer’s throat. “Remember what we said about silence?” he reminded the other man.

Hasp had returned to the Sally’s deck without further incident. The arconite had then lowered the steamship back into the water and now towered over them, peering down. Hundreds of birds had settled on its great tattered wings. The other passengers had retired to the saloon for a stiff drink.

“His name is Dill,” Hasp said.

Harper could only nod. Of all of them, she had played the greatest part in his downfall.

Dill had woken from a terrible dream, and yet he found the reality of his present situation identical to the memories of that nightmare. His body felt strangely numb, disconnected, with no sensation of cold or warmth-only pain. The skeletal arms and legs he saw before him could not be his, and yet-disturbingly-they moved in correspondence to his own conscious movements. He heard engines pounding somewhere nearby, but he could not at first locate them. The sound of gusting wind reached his ears, yet he felt nothing.

He was standing up to his shins in a pool, peering down at a tiny ship. From its deck tiny people stared back up at him. In his nightmare he had walked across a miniature landscape of small trees, grasses, desolate moors, or stone-hemmed fields left to grow wild. He had come to a steep bank and stepped down into a shallow pool. Voices had compelled him to lift this tiny vessel into the waters. And now that the voices had stopped, he found himself gazing down at the same vessel, and at an archon in glass armour whom he recognized.

“Hasp?”

His voice sounded like a collapsing mountain. It seemed to echo back from the ends of time. Dill was suddenly afraid. He lifted his hands and gazed down at hard dry bones. When he flexed his fingers, the bones moved.

“Hasp!”

The tiny archon was shouting, “-me up…your hand.”

Dill reached out towards the ship, and let the archon leap into his outstretched hand. The Lord of the First Citadel looked no larger than a glass bead. Dill lifted his hand close to his face.

“Don’t think about anything except my voice,” Hasp said. “Just listen to what I have to say.”

Dill nodded.

“You’ve been dreaming,” Hasp said. “But your soul is now free. You’re no longer in Hell. You don’t have to fear the Icarates anymore.”

“Hell?” Dill began. Memories of his time in the Processor assaulted him like a violent squall: the Icarates chanting, the screaming walls and sobbing machines, the knives, and the blood. He stared in horror at his skeletal hand.

“A physical form is transient,” Hasp said. “Only your soul is eternal. That’s all that matters now.”

“Where am I? Where is Deepgate?”

“You’re on the other side of the world, lad, and I don’t even know if Deepgate still exists.” The Lord of the First Citadel gave a long sigh, and then pointed southwest. “Do you see that stain on the horizon? That is Menoa’s army. They have taken the Red Road out of Pandemeria.”

Dill spied a series of dark shapes-rough squares and oblongs-a short distance beyond the perimeter of the pool, following a crimson track. Smoke trailed from the rearmost of these.

Machines?

“Now look to the northern shore.”

The earth here was stained red in a thick line extending out to the east and west beyond the shore of the pool. Masses of tiny black creatures crawled over this crimson landscape, and at first Dill took them to be insects. But then he realized the truth of it. An encampment had been erected there. It housed a second army-much smaller than the one approaching from the southeast, but a considerable force nevertheless. Beyond these legions the ground sloped gently up towards a pale city of slender minarets hedged by thick walls, all rising before a curious bank of mist which enveloped a large part of the northern skies. Earthen and timber barricades had been constructed on the open ground before the twin GateTowers, and flanking these were iron-banded ballistae.

“Coreollis,” Hasp explained. “The fortress of the god of flowers and knives. King Menoa expects my brother Rys to bend the knee before Hell’s ambassadors today-to sign away his soul to the Ninth Citadel. He must comply or face complete annihilation.”

“From that army?” The dark horde beyond the shore seemed so tiny and insignificant to Dill, but he began to understand the threat from Hasp’s perspective.

“No,” Hasp said. “From you.” He looked towards Coreollis. “That fog must mean that Cospinol has arrived to fight beside my brother. Rys’s Northmen will use it to conceal their pitiful numbers.”

“Then they’ll fight?”

“Now that Menoa has lost you, he knows Rys will not sign the treaty. He has no choice now but to throw his whole horde against Coreollis and try to break her.” The god looked back up at Dill. “The forces of Hell and Earth will clash here today. If the Mesmerists win, King Menoa’s form of living death will replace all life here. This country will become the stuff of chaos.”

Dill watched tiny figures assembling along the shore. They were boarding low sleek boats and pushing them into the lake. Wherever these dark hulls met the water, they bled, leaving crimson trails behind them.

“They have realized that something is wrong,” Hasp said. “Or King Menoa has already issued orders. They will attack us soon.”

Dill lowered Hasp to the deck of the ship. Then he reached a hand under the hull and lifted, hoisting the whole vessel clear of the waters.

With the Sally Broom safely in his grip, he set off to meet Menoa’s bleeding ships.