Iron Angel

suspended by ropes looped around their necks. Some were struggling and clawing at their nooses, their blue-black faces contorted in hideous anguish; others simply hung limp and moaned or wept. All wore corroded armour of unusual design; it was as though each suit had been forged in some different foreign land. Overhead, a knight in red rusted half-plate swung back and forth from a stout travis, gibbering and tugging at his noose, while above and to the left of him, a thin dark-skinned angel in a tattered coat of mail gazed up into the heavens from the end of its own rope. This pitiful creature had only one wing. Countless others depended from the yards around them, ranks of warriors and archons sheathed in rotting metal: in spoiled cuirasses, bucklers, and mouldering brigandines, queer winged armets or dull half-helms. Steel ground against steel, and ropes creaked on timbers beneath the mournful sobbing.

John Anchor flexed his shoulders and let out a long sigh. He grumbled, “Cospinol’s ship is very heavy.” And then he laughed suddenly. “One day I find a nice girl to give me a massage.”

Caulker dragged his gaze from the upended rigging and stared at the big man. “Who are they?”

The giant shrugged. “Soldiers, angels, demons.” He stomped a foot down on the rope, pinning it to the ground. “Noisy crowd, eh? Always complaining and moaning. Unhappy because they are dead but cannot go to Hell.” He grinned and tipped his head at the Spine corpses he had pulled from the rubble. “Now these white folks will come aboard. More nastiness for all. More complaining.”

“They’re dead?” Caulker asked with a hesitant nod to the legions above, still unable to comprehend this hellish vision. “But they’re moaning…screaming.”

“Dead,” the other man said, “but not…uh, not at peace. Souls still in this world, in Cospinol and inside me.” He slammed his huge belly. “Very noisy.”

A terrible thought struck the cutthroat. “You killed them?” he asked. “All of them?”

Anchor looked uncomfortable. “It is heavy,” he muttered, as if that somehow answered the cutthroat’s question. Then he withdrew the reed from his pocket and blew another soundless note from it.

John Anchor’s impossible skyship-if that was indeed what it was, for there had to be ten thousand interconnected beams in that scaffold overhead-had held the crowd enthralled, pinned by their own fears, but now the tiny red sprites that poured out of the fog above proved too much for them. The fisher folk fled screaming. Caulker had a mind to run after them, but he fought this desire. He had not shied from these creatures before, and would not do so now. Let the river-sifters of Sandport cower behind their mud walls, but Jack Caulker had been a great salt sailor once, not a man to flee from skyships or crustaceans, and his instincts told him now that Anchor posed no threat. The Adamantine Man hunted an angel. And he still carried a fortune in pearls.

Clicking and chittering, the crabs came out of the fog and scuttled down the greasy rigging. Millions of them converged on the giant’s rope and then poured down it. When they reached the ground, they swept over the mounds of coiled hemp like a wave of blood towards the dead assassins.

“Six more souls for Cospinol,” Anchor grumbled. “Six more pearls for his hoard.”

The cutthroat stood stock-still, as the chitinous tide surged over his boots. “Cospinol?” he ventured.

“My master.” Anchor tipped his head back. “God of brine and fog, pearlmaker and pirate in Heaven. Ayen’s shipwright and captain of the Rotsward. So many names, eh?” Then he grinned and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Crusty old bastard thinks them up himself and pays me to preach the word, but don’t say this to anyone.”

The crabs now covered the dead assassins in a seething, bubbling mound. Red claws and legs murmured like hookfleas in a carcass. Caulker swallowed and turned away. “Then this…thing is his ship?”

“The Rotsward?” Anchor said. “Yes, it is his skyship. Used to be called the Cleaver, and before that the Fist, and once even the Sally Broom, after a woman.” The giant shook his head. “Good pretty name, the Sally. I liked that name, but Cospinol is fickle. Never happy, always complaining. You think my real name is John Anchor? Ha! The name amuses Cospinol. This god lacks the wit to be subtle.”

Now a corpse-sized lump detached itself from the mass of crabs and slid over the uneven coils of hemp towards Anchor. When it neared the giant’s feet, it rose, as if the dead body amid those crustaceans had been resurrected and was standing up of its own accord. Horrified, Caulker watched as the crab-enshrouded figure climbed up the harness on the giant’s back and began to pull itself up the rope.

Anchor beamed at the cutthroat. “You like crab?”

“I used to,” Caulker replied flatly.

“I like crab.” The big man clapped his hands together. “Pandemerian crab salad with cuttlefish and sea jellies. Good for the heart, you know? Best food for sailors. You are a seaman, yes?”

“I was.”

By now the first red figure had disappeared into the mist overhead and a second clump of crabs had parted from the teeming pile, and was inching closer to the giant.

“Ha!” Anchor exclaimed. “I recognized you for a sailor. You have a stout heart. You know this land well?”

Caulker felt increasingly ill, but he managed a nod.

“Then you will help me find my quarry. My master’s witchsphere lies to him, so he does not trust it to guide him now. We pay well for an honest guide. Many pearls…or salt. Salt we have in abundance.”

“Witchsphere?”

“Yes. You have them here? Evil things, always lying. This one has nine Mesmerist hags inside, so it never agrees with itself.” With a hideous rustling sound, the second red corpse stood and began to climb up the rope to the gallows waiting for it overhead. “You will be my guide?” Anchor persisted.

A witchsphere? Caulker had no idea what Anchor was talking about. Yet evidently the big man needed help. No doubt he had also noticed the lack of any other would-be assistants in the lane outside the broth shop he’d just destroyed. Despite himself, Caulker moistened his lips and said, “First let me see these pearls.”

Anchor retrieved the pouch from his pocket, and then rummaged inside it. He pulled out a tiny bead, sniffed it, then shook his head and dropped the thing back into the bag. Then he lifted out another, sniffed again, and nodded. “This is a good one,” he said, extending his arm to the cutthroat. “In Oxos this would buy the death of a snake woman. In Pandemeria it might buy a bloodship. Take it, but be careful, is fragile.”

Caulker accepted the jewel. It was not actually a pearl as he had hoped, but rather a similar-sized bead made from glass. He held it up between two fingers and studied it. Intricate lines and whorls had been etched into the surface, and there seemed to be something glimmering inside: a weak, uneasy light.

“Is the soul of a powerful angel,” Anchor said. “The archon once named Malleus Trench, brother of Silister, who is Hasp’s champion in Hell. Very dangerous warrior-but the soul is good for you, I think. You can eat it, yes? Make you big and strong like me.”

The cutthroat had seen enough of the world to recognize a scam when he saw one. This bauble was nothing more than glass, the light inside a trick of the engraving. He frowned. “Really, my friend,” he said with a sigh, “you’ll have to do better than this.” With a snap of his fingers, he flicked the worthless trinket away.

The glass bead flew into the rubble of the Widow’s Hook, and shattered.

A sudden roar compressed the air like a detonation. Caulker was thrown to the ground, his thoughts tumbling around him. He glimpsed shingles flying from the surrounding roofs, dust sloughing skywards, shadows and bloodred crabs rippling at the edges of his vision. An explosion? Had Cospinol’s skyship launched an attack? Overhead, the hanging warriors shook and gibbered and shrieked in their gins. Had John Anchor caused that unholy ruckus himself in some way?

But no, amidst the dust clouds, Caulker now saw a winged apparition, the spectre of an enormous battle- archon. Daylight bled through its heavy iron plate armour and winged helmet. It howled, lifted a black blade as tall as a man, and brought it down upon the tethered giant.

Anchor stepped aside, avoiding the strike. His fists blurred as he launched a flurry of punches at the spectre’s head and neck, but his opponent merely laughed. Anchor’s hands had passed clean through the archon as though through smoke.

The archon’s great sword burst apart like a cloud of black flies, but then re-formed and clove through the dust once more. Anchor was hard-pressed to avoid it. Yet avoid it he did, as purposefully as if it was a real blade. Could a ghost sword cause the giant harm?