ribs scattered over hundreds of yards.
At the edge of the precipice Rachel looked down and saw nothing but a pool of white smog. “The city is gone,” she said.
“No.”
Then Rachel spotted chains. Amidst the rising steam, she saw the sweeping curve of one, two, and then four foundation chains. Between them hung a ragged web of smaller cross-chains, each supporting a score of houses and hanging bridges. A dark mass hunched in the center of the pit, like an island floating in a sea of mist. “The temple,” she said. “That fucking thing just won’t let go.”
Still hanging upside down, the great building had nevertheless survived the explosion. Tens of thousands of people would be trapped inside. Now there was no way for them to escape.
Trench turned away, his wings hanging from his shoulders like a steaming cape. “We must leave,” he said stiffly. “Nothing has changed. The Mesmerists will return soon.” He took a step, then stumbled and hissed through his teeth in pain.
Rachel smelled burning. “Wait,” she said. “Let me see your wings.”
“There is no time,” he gasped. “My message…” He crumpled forward, landing on his knees in the sand.
Rachel examined him. “The poisons are still burning you,” she said. “You can’t go on like this.”
“Then remove my wings,” he said.
She just stared at him.
“You have a knife.”
“A
“I cannot delay,” he snapped. Then he sucked in a deep breath and steadied his temper. “Forgive my outburst. These ruined wings are useless to me now, and amputation would seem to be the quickest and most practical solution.” He paused. “Please use the knife.”
“Here?”
“Here.”
Rachel took two tourniquets from the field kit and wrapped one around the base of each of Trench’s wings. She cleaned his flesh with alcohol, then forced him to drink most of the remainder of the bottle. She found a strap of leather for him to bite down on. Kneeling on the sand before her, he grunted and hissed through the corners of his mouth while she worked, but he did not move or cry out.
When it was done she doused the wounds with the last of the whisky and bound his stumps tightly in fresh bandages. She took the labourer’s sackcloth shirt from her satchel and eased it over his wounded shoulders.
Once more Rachel found herself heading into the Deadsands with an angel by her side. But this time, although her companion was here in the flesh, everything else had changed. The young angel’s body had been possessed by one of his own ancestors, while her real friend’s soul now resided in Iril: one more ghost among the endless dead. If he were ever to return, it would only be to discover that he would never fly again.
No Spine were about, but Rachel decided to keep to her original plan. The temple assassins would still control Deepgate’s main caravan routes, and she did not know how many more airships were at large. They would head southeast towards Cinderbark Wood, traveling by night whenever possible, and hopefully reach Sandport in six or seven days.
Trench walked stiffly. The low sun cast a long shadow across the sands before him, but it was no longer the shadow of an angel. Now wingless and dressed in rags, he could easily have been mistaken for a common labourer. He wore a grim expression on his slender face, and his eyes belonged to a much older person than the young angel he had usurped.
But when he glanced at Rachel, she noticed a glimmer of the desire she had seen earlier.
He looked away suddenly. “I have been dead too long,” he said. “In Hell, pain and lust are nothing but memories. One can learn to control them, to forget about them. But the living are victims of their own blood.”
“Obviously you haven’t spent much time with the Spine,” she replied.
He grunted. “They, too, have changed since I was last alive.” He glanced at his wounded hands, at the bound stumps of his fingers. “Tell me about my descendant,” he said. “What was Dill like?”
“He annoyed me when I first met him,” she admitted. “Deepgate’s priests brought him up to believe the world worked in a certain way. They sheltered him from everything, even banned him from flying. It was only a matter of time before he rebelled.”
“And you helped him with that?” Trench asked.
She shrugged. “I only did it to annoy the priests-to get back at them. In the end I realized he was the only thing they hadn’t corrupted. I think they hid their own cruelty from him because he represented an ideal they could no longer recognize in themselves.”
“Was he a warrior?”
She remembered the way Dill had fumbled with his sword when she had tried to teach him to fight-he had been the most inept pupil she had ever seen. But then she recalled how he had stepped between her and Ulcis’s army on the mountain of bones. He had even tried to protect Carnival. “Yes,” she said firmly. “He was.”
“Then the First Citadel will protect him for as long as it can. Hasp will not be disappointed. He welcomes the brave and punishes the unworthy.”
“Hasp?”
“Hasp was Ulcis’s brother, and leader of the First Citadel. He has already taken a special interest in Dill.”
The archon looked at her strangely. “Dill returned from Hell.”
Some time later they reached the edge of a petrified woodland at the summit of a high bank of dunes. Hard black branches rose up against the darkening sky before them. These trees had been dead for almost three thousand years, drained of life by the same force that had turned the landscape to desert when Ulcis had fallen to these lands from Heaven. The boles were as black and glassy as obsidian, in stark contrast to the soft white sands between. Rachel scooped up a handful of the powdery stuff and let it trickle away between her fingers; the grains glittered like crushed test tubes.
Fumes still leached from the abyss and drifted across the heavens to the northwest. It may have simply been the sunset, but it seemed to Rachel that the vapors had taken on a reddish hue. Was the Mesmerist Veil already beginning to re-form?
They followed a meandering path through the stone trees. Twilight deepened, turning the sand underfoot from white to pink to maroon. Rachel heard the scratch of hookfleas and kisser-crabs under the sand, and watched for depressions in the ground. Yet her eyes kept returning to the canopy overhead. The branches came alive with twinkling lights as the skies darkened and the crystal thorns reflected the last rays of sunset. Soon the whole woodland seemed to shimmer under its own weight of stars.
Trench stopped to rest against the bole of a tree. His face looked pinched and ashen. “I keep forgetting that this is not my body,” he gasped. “It has certain limits.”
“And your soul in Hell doesn’t?”
He shook his head. “A soul is ethereal. In Iril’s realm you are simply what you believe yourself to be. Your own mind decides the shape and limits of its form…within reason. Before the Mesmerists, most spirits simply resembled their original bodies. In Hell I appeared to be much the same as I had looked in life: an archon not unlike your friend, Dill, albeit somewhat taller and broader.”
“How did you die, Trench?”
He grunted. “Carnival murdered me.”
Rachel closed her mouth.
“The Church sent me after her,” the angel went on. “I was the second born to my father, and thus expendable. I trained every day for twenty years, yet she still defeated me.” He looked away. “But she had already feasted, and so she abandoned my soul to Hell.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I got one good cut in. Not many can claim to have given Carnival a scar.” He stared into the trees for a long moment. “I know she’s still alive in this world somewhere. After I deliver my message, I intend to look for
