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.
3
They entered the temple via a near-vertical Spine conduit in what had once been the building’s foundations. Flanked above and below by the Church assassins, Rachel and Clay clambered down a series of rungs bolted to the metal walls. She watched the captain’s agitation grow as the circle of crimson sky gradually diminished above them. The big man seemed to become increasingly gruff and surly, cursing and muttering under his breath whenever his armoured boots or elbows clanged against the inside of the narrow passageway. He made as much noise as a blacksmith at his anvil.
For the first time during their trek, he seemed genuinely afraid.
With the help of a rope, the Spine manhandled Dill down after them. To Rachel’s great relief, she heard her friend moaning faintly at his mistreatment. He had regained consciousness at last.
The ladder terminated at a spherical antechamber from which a score of other tunnels radiated at all angles. An ancient aether light set into the floor gave a green cast to the sapperbane plates and rivets in the curved walls around them. When the Cutters finally lowered the young angel to the floor, Rachel rushed over to his side.
“Dill?”
His head lolled drunkenly but he didn’t open his eyes or reply.
“He’s breathing more easily,” she said to Clay.
“Good,” Clay said. “I don’t think your captors planned on sending for a doctor.” His gaze moved from the Spine Adept down to Dill’s tattered chain-mail vest. “It’s all shit, you know-the armour, the gold swords they gave the temple archons. It was all for show.”
“I know.”
“They shouldn’t have lied to him.”
“Be silent,” said the Adept.
Rachel eyed the man’s mask, then turned back to Clay. “Dill was never cut out to be a warrior,” she said. Her manacles clunked suddenly against the floor. The sapperbane panel had tugged at the iron cuffs with what felt like a strong magnetic attraction, but then immediately released its hold. “That’s strange,” she said.
“It’s the sapperbane,” Clay whispered. “It does all sorts of weird things. I never liked coming down here, not even when the temple was the right way up.” He paused, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “These tunnels bend sound in odd ways. They say you can hear a conversation spoken in any room in the temple if you stand in exactly the right place. Some folks even swear that you can hear conversations from the past.”
Dill gasped and threw back his head.
Rachel grabbed his shoulders.
He opened his eyes. “Rachel? I smell poison.”
“You inhaled a soporific gas,” she said. “But it’s gone now; you’re going to be fine.”
“No,” he said. “They mean to poison us all and bring their paradise to earth. There is no more room for them in Hell. They are coming here.”
“Who is coming? Who are you talking about?”
“The Mesmerists.”
Clay shot an inquiring look at Rachel.
“Dill died,” Rachel explained. “After we reached the bottom of the abyss, he was killed in battle. I used Devon’s angelwine to resurrect him, but by then he’d already spent several days in the Maze. Since then he hasn’t been able to explain what happened to him there. His memories are muddled, fragmented; they come to him in nightmares.”
