Iron Angel

2

The spine warship thundered over furrows of brown smoke clouds, her envelope flashing like a polished steel shield under the blue sky. In her wake came a flock of carrion birds: crows, eye-picks, and blackgulls, all shrieking and feeding on the corpses suspended from the ship’s aft deck and ballast arms.

She turned to starboard. Sunlight slanted across her gondola, granting the scrawls and abrasions in the metal hull a moment of crisp definition. Portholes gleamed dully like old men’s eyes. Sandstorms had stripped her deck timbers of any varnish, had scoured the arcuballista, net, and grapple guns down to their metal bones.

With her rudders hard to port and twin propellers blurring, the vessel turned until her bow faced east. Then she waited, her cooling engines ticking, while the crew moved inside to prepare their air scrubbers for descent into the turmoil below. Fumes tumbled under her gondola, curling around the feet of the hanging corpses and reaching across the empty decks, cables, and rails-lingering, it seemed, at the locked portholes and hatches.

The ship’s engines growled with a sudden surge of power. Elevators slammed back into dive position. Birds scattered, screaming, from the gruesome ballast. Reclamation Ship Twelve shuddered, purged air from her buoyancy ribs, and then sank into the boiling clouds.

Darkness engulfed the warship. Buffeted by turbulence, she rolled and pitched in upwards-rushing eddies of smoke. Cables shivered and moaned under the stress; her envelope shook and creaked. Ten heartbeats passed, then twenty, and then a thin, grainy light suffused the air. Three whistles shrilled within the gondola. The sound of thumping pistons rumbled through her superstructure, as engines pumped hot exhaust back into the ship’s exterior ribs. Her envelope swelled, slowing her descent.

She emerged in the amber twilight beneath a brooding ceiling of cloud, a hundred yards above the Deadsands, dragging corpses along like strung puppets.

Deepgate lay to the west, now half a league behind the airship. Torn and burning in a thousand places, the city hung in her surviving chains like a great blackened funnel over the abyss. Swathes of the League of Rope quarter had been reduced to a smouldering crust, or had crumbled entirely into the pit below, exposing further webs of chain. Ash swirled between the metal links. Fires raged out of control in the Workers’ Warrens, in Ivygarths and Chapelfunnel, and on the fringes of the Scythe where vast rents could be seen among the shipyards. Gases poured from ruptured aether vats and from the coal gas depositories around Mesa’s chain, forming ochre and white layers between docking spines and buckled gantries. Trunks of black, red, and silver smoke uncoiled from the Poison Kitchens, feeding the expanding clouds above, while the city below lay veiled in crimson vapors. The sun glimmered faintly, a copper-coloured smudge.

A camp had been built on the eastern curve of the abyss, where Deepgate’s foundation chains met the desert bedrock and the surface pipes from Jakka curled over the lip of the pit. It was to this ad hoc shamble of pulpboard shacks and bunkers that Reclamation Ship Twelve began to drift. Still with her stern facing the city, she relaxed the power to her twin propellers and allowed the howling gales to suck her into the low-pressure areas around the updraft. Orange sand fumed around her, battering and scouring her hull. The hanging corpses swung madly under her ballast arms.

There were no longer any docking spines available for use, but men appeared from bunkers and rushed over to guide the ship’s grapples into anchor hoops fixed into the desert floor. In time she came to rest and was secured. Her port hatch opened. Nine Spine assassins in leather armour and sand masks disembarked: eight Cutters carrying light steel crossbows, and an Adept with a sword slung across his back. Their mirrored goggles reflected the burning city. Through the boiling dust, two of the Cutters carried the body of an angel towards the edge of the abyss, to where a wooden walkway dipped away into the district called the League of Rope. The Adept meanwhile dragged a manacled woman from the airship and threw her to the ground.

Rachel Hael spat sand from her mouth and glared up at the masked figure. He had an unusually rough manner for an assassin of his high rank. The process of tempering normally removed all aggression from an assassin, along with the bulk of his mind. These temple warriors killed more efficiently without emotional burdens or base human desires.

The Adept removed his sand mask, then pointed to a standpipe set alongside the walkway. “Drink there,” he shouted above the howling wind. “Water is scarce in the city, and you will have no more until we reach the sanctuary of the temple.” He tapped the mask against his hip, dislodging sand, then pulled it back over his head so that its copper grille again covered his mouth.

Rachel Hael staggered over to the water tap, her tattered gabardine flapping against her shins. She could barely stand in this ferocious wind, but she managed to crouch by Dill’s insensate form and inspect him. “He’s barely breathing,” she said. “He could die before we reach the temple.”

“His lungs reacted unexpectedly to the gas,” the Adept replied, his voice now muffled by the sand mask. “Nevertheless, his death will be bloodless. We will cast his body down to our Lord Ulcis.”

“This is madness.” She pointed down into the smouldering bowl of the chained city. “Ulcis is dead. There’s nothing left down there.”

The Adept’s mirrored lenses surveyed the scene. “Reconstruction is under way,” he said. “Deepgate is as eternal as the abyss; it cannot be destroyed.” His pale fingers touched the tiny metal talisman fixed to his collar: the Knot of Ulcis, awarded only to the highest-ranking Church assassins.

Rachel had, until recently, owned a similar talisman. Her captors had demanded its return, but she’d already sold it to buy food in Sandport. “Reconstruction?” she cried in disbelief. “Half the city is on fire. The Warrens, the Temple Districts-most of it has already fallen into the abyss, and the rest looks like it’s going to go at any moment. The city is not eternal…it’s royally fucked. The League is little more than charcoal, and the temple…” She wiped dust from her eyes. “Where the hell is it?”

“The loss of some support chains caused the Church of Ulcis to invert,” the Adept replied, his tone flat and emotionless. “The bulk of the building remains intact, only suspended beneath the city.”

Rachel snorted. “And you’re going to pull it back upright, are you? With what? Horses and camels? How will you forge new chains to keep it in place? Didn’t you see what happened to the only machine capable of doing that? It’s now lying at the bottom of that fucking pit!”

“The logistics do present some problems.”

“You don’t say!”

At least one-third of the foundation chains had snapped, or had pulled their anchors out of the abyss bedrock. Collapsing chains had shredded miles of ordinary homes. Gashes ran from the outskirts all the way down to the hub, where, through the billowing fumes, Rachel glimpsed a mound of huge metal rings and spikes. The base of the temple? She recognized it now. The great building had indeed flipped over entirely, and had punched a ragged hole through sections of Bridgeview, Ivygarths, and Lilley quarters. Most of the other foundation chains had twisted over one another, buckling entire neighborhoods for miles. Whole districts of townhouses had been compressed to rubble. Cross-chains punctured roofs, windows, and walls. Bridges and walkways dangled like banners over open abyss, while entire sections of the city hung from the sapperbane links like monstrous chain-wrapped pendulums. The only city quarters that didn’t appear to be burning were missing altogether.

Rachel felt inclined to agree with her captor: the logistics involved in reconstruction would present some problems. Evacuating survivors would have been difficult enough, yet she saw no evidence that such an operation had been attempted. The newly constructed camp seemed scarcely large enough to hold a fraction of the population and, apart from the Spine who’d helped moor the airship, it appeared to be deserted.

Far below, a bright silver flash lit the area around the Poison Kitchens. The spreading fires had just claimed one of Deepgate’s airship-fueling vats, exploding a hundred tons of aether in an instant. A cloud of flames and debris mushroomed skywards into the smoke above the city. Tiny metal shards spun out over rooftops like a shower of stars.

A moment later Rachel heard the crack of that distant concussion, and the ground beneath her trembled. The walkway shook; its support poles rattled against the edge of the precipice and tugged at the massive chain anchor buried in the rock below. Puffs of dust rose all over the hanging city as parts of Deepgate simply disappeared into the abyss. The gale seemed at once to strengthen and to wail in approval. Down beside the Scythe, flames leapt higher up one side of the Department of Military Science. Rachel took an involuntary step back.

“The incendiaries in the Poison Kitchens,” she shouted, “you can’t have had time to remove them all?”

“Fires and noxious fumes within the Department of Military Science have precluded retrieval,” the Adept said. “The Poison Kitchens are inaccessible at present.”

“You haven’t moved any of the stuff out of there?” She was thinking about those vast caches of poisons, chemicals, and explosives that Deepgate’s chemists stored inside that building. They had barely had time to evacuate a quarter of it before Devon’s monstrous cutting machine had reached the city perimeter. “What about the workers?” she asked. “There must have been six thousand people in that building when the Tooth attacked.”

“All dead.”

“Shit,” she said. “You’d better hope they had the foresight to start dumping all that crap into the abyss as soon as the fires reached them.”

“Such actions are forbidden by Codex law.”

The mirrored lenses revealed nothing of the Adept’s expression, but Rachel knew his face would be devoid of emotion. Spine tempering had rendered him so thoroughly conditioned to serve the temple and the god of chains that he remained unable to reconcile himself to the loss of either. He would stay here in Deepgate until the very last chain-link snapped apart.

“Now drink,” he said.

While Rachel slaked her thirst, she considered their position. The Spine had declared martial law. Desertion was now decreed a crime against god, and therefore subject to punishment under Codex law. Even if she could prove to them that their god was dead in his abyss, it wouldn’t make much difference. The same tempering process that had peeled away their desires had also ensured that their faith remained unassailable and inviolate. Rachel could not bargain with them. She had to hope for escape or intervention. And soon-

Flames had taken firm hold of the Poison Kitchens by now, and the metal structure looked more like a great steaming cauldron than ever before. White fumes hissed from the funnels at its apex, while thicker yellow-black smoke poured from a hundred windows and engulfed the surrounding warehouses, engineering yards, and ship berths.

The Adept motioned to two of his men, who then lifted the angel between them.

But then a gruff cry came at them from behind. Rachel turned to see six temple guards marching through the dust storm towards them. The men all carried pikes and wore heavy black-enameled plate armour. Scratches in the steel suits indicated their prolonged exposure to sandstorms. The guards’ faces were hidden by scarves tied around their heads in the fashion of desert tribesmen, but Rachel recognized Clay’s tattered cloak before the captain reached the party.

“Hold it there,” the big man called out to the Spine Adept. “We’ll take charge of these prisoners.” He stood panting for a moment, eyeing the manacles around Rachel’s wrists and Dill’s unconscious form. “My pickets,” he waved a hand, “saw the ship come in.” He exhaled and then sucked another breath in through his scarf. “Hell’s balls, I didn’t expect them to bring you back so soon. The city’s not safe-you’d best come with us.”

“We’d be glad to,” Rachel concurred.

The Spine assassins now stood in a crescent around them, their slim black figures stark before the umber desert. Deepgate’s fires burned in their mirrored lenses. The Adept said, “These are our prisoners, Captain. The temple guard no longer has authority.”

Ernest Clay gathered himself up before the other man, and yanked down his scarf, revealing his face. He looked angry. “I’ve every right to interrogate them,” he said. “They were out in the Deadsands for-what? — six, seven days? And another week in Sandport before you caught them. That girl’s still got contacts up and down the Coyle. Chances are she’ll have heard a lot more about our enemy’s plans than you have.”

The assassin spoke from behind his mask. “Captain,” he said flatly, “your persistent interference in Spine affairs is becoming…inconvenient. I do not believe you intend to interrogate either of these prisoners. None of those you have gathered for questioning have, as far as we know, yielded useful reconnaissance. Nor have our captives ever been returned to us. Evidently you are trying to divert such people into your own camp for other reasons.” He paused, tilted his lenses to one side. “Do you disapprove of our methods of punishment?”

Clay grunted. “I don’t care what you do with your captives. Just stick to your job, and I’ll stick to mine. But it seems to me your torture cells are already full to bursting. We’re doing you a favor by easing the burden a bit.”

“That may-”

“Besides,” Clay broke in. “None of your new Cutters will speak to me. How am I to know what’s happening out there if I can’t question a few deserters?”

“Yet you invariably choose to interrogate the women and children.”

“Makes sense.” The captain scowled. “We’ve bugger-all food left, in case you hadn’t noticed. Since you won’t let us question everyone, we’ll take the ones who eat the least.”

The Adept seemed to consider this.

“There might be a thousand Shetties a league from here, right now,” Clay went on, “and we wouldn’t know about it. We haven’t been able to reconnoiter effectively since the sandstorms started. All this smoke around the city will bring metal scavengers and raiders all the way down from the Northern Steppes. We’ve already learned that they’ve been sniffing round the caravan trails for water and women.” He tipped his head at Dill. “And he looks like he needs medical treatment. Don’t you need them healthy before you start cutting into their brains? We have a doctor in our barracks.”

“Nevertheless,” the Adept replied. “I cannot sanction the release of these two. The archon is temple property. This woman was a Spine Adept, and as such remains our responsibility.”

“Let me have them for a couple of days,” Clay said. “I’ll bring them back to you myself.”

“You have already reneged on similar promises, and then lied to conceal your deceit.” Another explosion in the chained city bloomed in the assassin’s silvered lenses. Sand howled around him. “Prisoners who you claimed had died under interrogation have since been discovered alive, hidden in one of the Codex bunkers. Such deception will no longer be tolerated.”

Clay winced.

“We are prepared to make allowances, Captain,” the Adept said. “But do not take us for fools, and do not test our leniency.”

The captain paused. “I’d still like to question the girl, if I may,” he said. “If you’ve no objections, I’ll accompany you to the temple.”

“As you wish.”

The group tramped down the steep walkway into the ruins of the district known as the League of Rope. Once they were below the lip of the abyss, the wind dropped noticeably. In the amber gloom down here, the air simmered with the heat of the recent fires. Ash smothered the walkway planks and crumbled away from the support ropes whenever Rachel gripped them. Agitated by the party’s progress, the stinking dust soon engulfed them like a veil. The charred remains of shacks and platforms hung from the web of ropes on all sides, their vague dark shapes like insects cocooned within spider’s silk.

Captain Clay matched pace with Rachel. “We sprayed the whole neighborhood with water from the Dawn Pipes to keep the fires here under control,” he said to her in a low voice. “We were trying to preserve at least one route out of the city.” He pointed across the city. “The Spine tried the same thing on the other side, but they didn’t have enough water. So they sprayed those districts with effluence from the sewage pipes. Kept the fires from taking hold, I’m told, though I wouldn’t want to go for a stroll there right now.” He grunted. “Trust the Spine to ruin a perfectly good slum. I wonder what would have happened if the flames had reached the temple. Would they have doused it with water, or with-”

“Thanks,” Rachel said, “for trying to get us away.”

Clay shot a glance at the Adept two paces ahead of him, then whispered quickly, “The bastards have been tempering everyone who flees the city. It’s martial law here.” He shook his head. “We do what we can, try to get the women and the kids out, but it’s becoming difficult now. They don’t trust us, and I sure as hell-goddamn it!” He tripped and lurched forward as a plank broke under his armoured boot.

Rachel caught him just in time.

Clay hissed. “The whole city’s falling apart. The temple…gods below, you should see it up close! It’s hanging upside down like a goddamn stalactite. Every time I look at it, another spire or tower has fallen off. I don’t know how it’s survived for so long.”

“The stone and mortar came from Blackthrone,” Rachel replied, “which makes them unnaturally strong. Devon once said that the mountain doesn’t belong in this world. He believed it fell from the sky.” She shrugged. “But then, he was mad.”

“Rock and ore from Heaven?” The temple guard whistled. “It’s strong, aye, but not that strong. The rest of the building is going to fall sooner or later. You don’t want to be stuck in there while you’re waiting-I mean…” He looked peevish. “I’m sorry, lass. We’d have got you away from them if we could. Our barracks aren’t much…pretty crowded, and I wasn’t lying about the food situation, but there’s enough fresh water and we’ve a couple of priests on loan from the Spine. Nobody’s comfortable, but at least the floor’s not likely to suddenly fall away under our feet.”

His mention of priests struck her as odd: Why would they need holy men in the temple guard barracks? “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I should have foreseen this.”

“The Carousel brought us news of your capture, but it was sketchy. I heard they caught you in Sandport? They used a ferret?”

She nodded. “They fired it from high altitude so we wouldn’t hear the warship’s engines. We were staying at Olirind Meer’s tavern down by the harbor. I thought we’d be safe there for a while.” She shrugged. “But I was wrong.”

Clay nodded. “Sandporters,” he said. “You can’t trust those bastards. What happened to Carnival?”

“She abandoned us.”

“Sounds like her. Did you see any Spine recruiters in Sandport?”

“They were everywhere.”

“They’re keeping it subtle just now,” Clay said, “disguising their recruitment drive as a form of law enforcement. You commit a crime, they drag you to the temple, break your mind, and then enlist you as a Cutter. That’s how it works here anyway. But they’re becoming increasingly stringent, tempering folks for all manner of alleged sins. Soon there won’t be anyone left in Deepgate but Spine.”

“I thought the refugee camp looked quiet.”

“Refugee camp?” Clay gave her a grim look. “Hell, lass, that isn’t a refugee camp. My people are squeezed into two barracks on the northern edge. The rest of the bunkers are full of books. The Spine have been moving Presbyter Sypes’s library out of the city.”

Rachel’s fists balled. “They’re saving the Codex?” she hissed. “Why am I not surprised? They force the people back to the temple, and then save a pile of old-”

The sound of cracking, splintering wood interrupted her. To their left, a sunken mass of fire-blackened shacks collapsed in on itself, before crumbling into the abyss below. The walkway they were on lurched suddenly as a ball of dust rolled up out of the newly made gap beside it.

Rachel coughed, and squinted back through the dust. The two Cutters had dropped Dill’s limp body like a sack and now stood over him, gripping the street ropes for support. Fortunately no one had fallen. “We’ll be lucky to get to the temple at all,” she said, “assuming it’s still there when we arrive.”

The walkway dipped and rose as they followed a zigzag course through smashed acres of burnt pulpboard and tin sheets, through nests of ash-black chains. The sound of pinging metal and cracking wood accompanied their footsteps, while deeper booms and clangs resounded from the industrial heart of the city to the northwest. The air grew steadily thicker and fouler as they marched onwards. Gusts of wind rattled the shacks around them, carrying the smell of airship fuel. Crimson and black clouds continued to unfurl across the heavens, now dappled in places with lozenges of yellow.

Beyond the League of Rope the party reached the more substantial districts of the Workers’ Warrens. Most of the tenements here had already been gutted by fire; for the most part they were roofless and windowless: naught but black shells, empty but for pockets of rubble. Smoke drifted in greasy brown layers between them. Minnow Street and Pullow’s Row had fallen away completely, leaving gulfs of dark abyss with tangled masses of chains and iron girders lining their banks.

The stink of soot pervaded everything. Rachel tasted it with every breath. It stung their eyes and gathered in the creases on Captain Clay’s brow. Trickles of sweat left black lines down his stubbled jaw.

On Candlemaker Row the path narrowed and wove between great tumbles of stone that had once been glue stores and workhouses. Rivulets of milky gel had oozed from doorways and set in hard pools that tugged at the soles of their boots.

Rachel glanced back at the Cutters carrying Dill. There was something almost mechanical about the way these lower-rank assassins moved, lacking the grace of their Adept master. They even looked like automatons in their identical bug-eyed masks, their heads turning constantly as they studied the rubble on either side of the path.

Studied the rubble?

The Spine Adept stopped suddenly and raised a hand, signaling his men to halt. Clay shifted position, taking a firmer grip of his pike, and glanced at the shadows nearby.

A peal of manic laughter came from somewhere nearby.

Clay stared hard in the direction of the sound for a long moment, then relaxed his hold on the pike.

“What was that?” Rachel said.

“The Spine don’t like us talking about them,” he muttered.

“Them?”

The captain shrugged. “Manifestations,” he said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of them since all the troubles began. They’re drawn to the dead like flies, and we have streets full of corpses in this city. You’ll be safer when we get to the temple.” He gestured towards the source of the laughter. “Safe enough from them, at any rate.”

“Now I see why you need priests in your barracks.”

“Our guard dogs,” Clay explained. “We’ve been allocated two of them-nice fellows, but they’ve been struggling to keep these damned shades out. This perpetual gloom is bad enough, but it gets worse at night. Even the Spine don’t dare leave the temple after dark without a priest to accompany them.”

“Have you noticed anything else unusual?”

“Like what?”

“Someone brought a demon into Sandport-a shape-shifter. She claimed it had been found here.”

The captain shook his head. “I haven’t seen nothing like that,” he said. “But then I don’t go strolling about the city if I can otherwise avoid it. What did it look like?”

“Like a chair,” she said, walking on ahead of the captain’s bemused expression.

They smelled the Poison Kitchens before they saw the huge funnels and iron spines looming over the tenement rooftops. The bulk of Deepgate’s fuel, coal, and chemicals had been stored in the industrial areas around here. Now vast pillars of black smoke rose from the factories, warehouses, and depots. Fires had ravaged this part of the district and still continued to burn in the north, bathing layer after layer of ragged brickwork in flickering orange light. Girders jutted like fossilized bones from broken walls and mounds of slag. Flakes of ash danced in hot breezes or fell upon chains and cobbles, accumulating in pale crusts that looked like snow but stank of fuel. Rachel’s boots creaked in it and left faint red imprints behind. And from all around came the groans of heated metal.

The thoroughfares and humped bridges were stouter here than in most places, to allow for trade traffic to and from the shipyards, but all were deserted. Beyond their own party, Rachel had so far not seen another living person in Deepgate. Yet now she saw shadows moving everywhere.

“Best not to look directly at them,” Clay grumbled. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for chairs.”

Their Spine captors clearly had an intimate knowledge of the precise extent of Deepgate’s destruction, for they frequently chose long and winding routes to circumvent obstacles and moaning crevasses. As the gloom deepened, shadows gathered in the shells of derelict buildings and peered out through the windows. The Adept lit a tarred torch and swung it around him, throwing harsh light over the nearby facades. The shades retreated, whispering and sniggering like children.

“Look there.” Clay pointed to a spot up ahead.

Rachel glimpsed a group of Spine moving through the ruins, their own torches winking in the deepening twilight. They were dragging heavy sacks behind them.

“Corpse duty,” the captain explained. “They’re searching for bodies.”

“What do they do with the ones they find?”

“They add them to the pile at Sinner’s Well,” he replied. “You want to steer well clear of that place.”

She could not even tell when they finally arrived in Bridgeview, because there was nothing recognizable left of that ancient district. The street ended abruptly in a great hill of rubble over which they had to clamber. On reaching the summit, she saw that none of the old townhouses had survived. There was no Gatebridge spanning a moat of air, no esplanades or cobbled rounds, no winding alleys draped with silkwood walkways. A great snarl of twisted foundation chains had destroyed it all. Before them lay a wide expanse of open abyss, tapering off to a point several hundred yards to the east. In the center of this gulf loomed the base of the temple itself, an island of iron spikes, rings, and gantries. To Rachel’s left, a flimsy walkway had been lashed to one of the few surviving sapperbane chains still attached to the temple.

But the sight below took her breath away.

She had known the building so intimately that this sudden change of perspective made her feel giddy. The temple’s sheer black walls dropped far into the darkness below her, branching out into a mass of broken spires and pinnacles now looking like stalactites of stonework. Much of the structure had already crumbled into the pit, and yet the great bulk of it remained intact, held together by three-thousand-year-old Blackthrone rock mortar. The sight of it made Rachel stumble and clutch at the captain for support. It seemed so vast and improbable that part of her mind insisted that she was upside down, while the temple itself remained upright. Stained glass windows burned in the walls, thousands of them, like jewels in the abyss.

“We must take the prisoners to the lowest levels,” the Adept told his Cutters. His lenses moved between Rachel and Clay, then out across the abyssal gap towards the temple. The copper grille of his sand mask gleamed in the torchlight. “And confine them in solitary cells.”

“Our holding facilities are overstretched,” one of the Cutters replied.

“Make space for them in the Rookery Spire.”

The other assassin nodded. “What of those thus displaced?”

“Redemption.”

Rachel’s heart felt like a hollow in her chest as she stared down at the vast black building with mounting despair. Our holding facilities are overstretched. Suddenly she realized why the city districts had been so empty. She understood now why all of the lights were burning in the temple, and a creeping horror stole over her. How many tens of thousands of people were interred there? She had lived with tempered Spine long enough to know how their broken minds worked. There were only two ways to cleanse a blasphemer of his sins: through either tempering or redemption by knife, rope, and saw. Inside the temple before her, the torture chambers would be running with blood.