She slowly released the angel. “Who are these Mesmerists?”
Trench flexed his wings and winced. “They were once Lord Iril’s elite,” he said. “They rose to power after Ayen shattered Iril in the War Amongst the Gods. Menoa is their leader, a self-proclaimed king and one of Iril’s former strategists. Since Ayen debased the Lord of the Maze, Menoa has assumed his former master’s role for himself. Now he controls vast swathes of Hell.”
“And you opposed him?”
“The archons of the First Citadel rejected this upstart king. We have been scouring Hell for the shattered remains of our rightful ruler, while Menoa gathered armies and crushed dissent. Yet many believe Menoa is already in possession of a piece of our shattered god. He became too powerful too quickly. Now all who oppose him are changed.”
“One of their scouts is crawling towards us as we speak.” He pointed back to the lane from which he’d emerged. “This is what awaits you if you linger here much longer.”
At first Rachel saw nothing, but then, slowly, she began to notice odd shapes in the ash covering the cobbles-like two hands dragging themselves across the ground, trailing roots of fine white dust. They appeared to be moving towards Trench and Rachel.
She took a step back.
“It is a low-rank Icarate,” Trench said. “A common shape-shifter. Yet it lacks the strength to become the shape the Mesmerists have chosen for it.” He searched the ground quickly, then picked up a fragment of flint and hurled it at the two hands. One of the dust-shapes burst apart, then quickly re-formed. But now one of the hands looked darker and more angular, more like the stone shard Trench had thrown at it. “There are probably hundreds of them around here, hidden among the chains and stones all around us.”
“Can you fly?” Rachel said.
Trench flapped his wings, then growled in pain. “I can walk.”
“Then let’s walk quickly.”
They hurried east towards the League of Rope and the rim of the abyss as flashes of light pulsed across the horizon behind them.
10
Sandport’s lights dimmed behind them as Jack Caulker and his companion reached the summit of the rocky bluff. On a clear night Caulker might have looked down to see a sprawl of mud homes slumped in an uneven bowl extending around the bend in the river Coyle, skiffs bobbing in the moonlit waters. But tonight the fog surrounding John Anchor and his master’s skyship obscured the view.
The big man’s teeth shone whitely in his dark face. His wooden harness creaked as he dragged the monstrous rope behind him, yet he seemed utterly tireless. “It is good exercise,” he said jovially. “To climb, is good exercise, no?”
“I suppose so,” Caulker muttered. He was already fed up, and he still had a whole sodding desert ahead of him. They hadn’t even been able to stop for a drink, not after what had happened to the Cockle Scunny.
That broth shop had remained intact marginally longer than the Widow’s Hook, although Caulker suspected that the building might have been saved from destruction altogether had the proprietor not threatened to summon the town militia as soon as Anchor showed his face at the door. The tethered man had marched in the front door, used the privy, and then left by the back door.
Men were probably still picking through the rubble of that building, too.
Anchor was utterly unconcerned by the devastation he left in his wake. Indeed, he had remained cheerful during the whole incident, humming some half-wit sailor’s shanty while the corpses piled up behind him. Caulker could well imagine what tomorrow’s yells from the Sandport Criers would be.
At the top of the bluff, the murky air denied them any view of the Deadsands, but Caulker had seen the desert from this same point a hundred times before. To the west, the land rose and fell in waves of ash-coloured dunes, scoured in places down to the basalt bedrock or scabbed with thickets of brittle grass, scrub, and ancient rock forest. A trail led north, following the river to Clune and the logging depositaries there, while a second, wider route struck out directly west to the chained city of Deepgate. To keep traders well wide of the slipsand, cairns of glassy black rock had been built to mark this road, although the cutthroat could not see even the first of them in the fog.
His hand kept returning to his shoulder, reaching for a pack that was not there. It felt discomforting to set out across the wasteland without provisions, but Anchor had deemed it unnecessary for Caulker to carry anything. Whatever food and water they would need could be pulled down from Cospinol’s ship in the skies above them. This thought did not help to improve Caulker’s appetite.
Wreathed in fog, the two men thus set out upon the trail to Deepgate. Caulker winced to think of the sort of battle that lay ahead of his companion. Carnival had killed a god and stolen his power. And yet they’d sent a man to kill her-an odd, phenomenally strong man to be sure, but still a man. Despite the open desert, the cutthroat felt like he was trapped between two massive, inward-moving walls.
Behind them, the harbor bells rang out like a celebration of their departure.
11
'No,” Rachel said to Trench. “The caravan trail is too dangerous by daylight. Spine are everywhere, hunting any refugees who attempt that route. And they’re not the only ones. Rumors of Heathen attacks reached us while we were in Sandport. We must wait till dark and then head southeast.” She drew a line in the sand. “Then we can cut east through Cinderbark Wood.” She hesitated. It was a dangerous route, but likely to be their best chance. “From there we should be able to reach the Coyle without much fear of detection.”
Deepgate’s expanding canopy of smoke throbbed overhead, a dark bruise streaked with toxic colours-orange, lime green, yellow, and red. Rachel and Trench had hidden in a sandy basin in the lee of an iron groyne, two hundred yards southwest of the Spine patrol routes and the abyss perimeter. Exhausted from their trek through the stricken city, and with only an hour till dawn, it had been pointless to continue across the Deadsands. Instead, Rachel had used the last of the darkness to sneak back into the perimeter camp, where she had searched for supplies for the journey ahead. Her foray yielded a satchel of labourers’ rags, a field medical kit, a cord of pigskin, four flasks of water, and a serrated kitchen knife, which she secreted in her armour beside the dagger she had taken from the Spine master in the temple.
Now dawn was here, and Rachel desperately needed to sleep. She sat in the shade of the groyne, tending to her companion’s wounded wings and hands. Red vapor was rising from the city like bloody steam. The low sun filtered through, turning the Deadsands the colour of burned skin.
“We must not delay,” Trench insisted. His scowl seemed to belong to an older face than that of the young angel he had possessed, yet his eyes burned as orange with annoyance as Dill’s ever had. “The Veil is growing denser. By nightfall the Icarates might have enough strength to regain their forms. Then everyone in Deepgate will die.”
Rachel pointed east, to where one of three churchships hovered over the Deadsands. “They’re looking for us. We wouldn’t manage to cover half a league without being spotted. We don’t have any choice but to remain here until dark.”
Trench’s eyes darkened, and he growled in frustration. Rachel studied those eyes for some sign of Dill, just a hint that her friend’s soul might still be connected to his living body. Yet the harder she looked, the further her
