Iron Angel

throat. Time seemed to move to a more solemn beat here, to belong to a different world entirely. Their footfalls were soundless as, unconsciously, they had both become light-stepped and adept at avoiding the skeletons underfoot.

It was Trench who found the spring first. The angel pointed through the wood towards a muddy hollow with a clear pool rimmed with red and lavender grasses. Silver fish, no larger than Rachel’s thumb, hovered in the water. The tracks of small three-toed beasts pocked the mire. But there was another larger and more familiar imprint, and the assassin stared down in wonder.

The queer trail they had followed previously resumed here.

Rachel instantly crouched down to inspect the wet earth. The imprints were clearer here: a shallow trench about the width of a person surrounded by other marks like scuffs. The tracks led off into the trees, becoming more insubstantial in the dry sand extending further away from the pool. She saw no foot- or hoofprints. Whoever or whatever had come here to drink had wriggled along.

Quickly she filled their water flasks, then, after a moment’s hesitation-the fish in the pool were alive, unchanged, therefore the water it contained should be fine-took a sip.

“We’re halfway through,” she whispered to Trench, offering him a flask. “But there’s still worse to come.” She eyed those strange tracks in the mud again…wondering.

Trench drank and handed the flask back to her. While she refilled it, he found a safe place to sit. “I think I recall this woodland from my previous life,” he said quietly. “Long before Deepgate’s poisoners changed it, my brother and I used to hunt here.”

“What did you hunt?”

“Heshette.”

Rachel stared at him coldly.

“You don’t approve?”

“I’ve done worse,” she said.

He grinned. “Crueller things happen on earth than in Hell. Perhaps the Mesmerists are afraid of mortals. They can only reshape souls into things they understand-machines, simple demons. They cannot forge people.”

“They understand destruction.”

“Even a child knows how to destroy.” He sniffed suddenly. “We should go. The air here is turning foul.”

Rachel noticed a cloud of pink gas drifting through the trees towards them. After a moment’s thought, she decided to continue along the existing trail. It led in roughly the right direction, after all, and by stepping on already disturbed ground they would hopefully avoid any traps.

Barely two hundred paces further on, they came across a sight so unusual that for a heartbeat Rachel wondered whether she had succumbed to toxic hallucinations.

A brightly painted wagon stood among the trees. It had yellow and green slatted sides, with red shutters and a red door, wheels with gaily decorated spokes. A tin funnel protruded from the roof. The long pole at the front had clearly been designed for horses or oxen, yet no such animals were anywhere in sight. Rachel recognized it from her time in Sandport before she even read the legend painted across one side:

Greene’s Magical Circus.

Beside the wagon a shack had been erected. If anything, it resembled a hand-puppet booth, but of much larger proportions, its planks all decorated with stars, rainbows, and grinning faces. A hatch in the front of it had been lowered to provide an opening, through which Rachel could see a stage with a painted backdrop.

Above the stage dangled two man-sized puppets, each suspended by a number of ropes dangling from the top of the booth. They looked frail and cadaverous, yet with wild glassy eyes and the drooling lips of madmen. Each had been dressed in garish motley: a black-and-white striped suit with a red bow tie for the figure on the left, a puffy blue quilted jacket and green rubber boots for the one on the right.

The trail, Rachel noticed, disappeared around the other side of the puppet booth. She was just about to follow it, when one of the marionettes spoke.

“Is that you, Mr. Partridge?”

The hideous thing was not a puppet at all. It was a living man.

“Mr. Partridge? We have waited an age for you to return.”

The second puppet said, “It’s not him, Mr. Hightower. I can see them from over here. It’s not him, I tell you.” Slack-eyed and slack-jawed, he peered at the two travelers from the end of his rope. “One of them appears to be an angel, although the wings beneath his shirt are naught but bloody stumps; the other one’s a Spine assassin.”

“Why do you insist on taunting me, Mr. Bloom?” the first man responded. “You’re becoming as bad as Partridge-and I find your choice of words vulgar.”

“I am not fibbing, Mr. Hightower. Look, here they come now.”

Rachel and Trench walked around the front of the booth, until both of the living mannequins could properly see them. Both men hung limply, their arms supported by ropes at varying heights. Something about their bodies seemed odd to Rachel: they were altogether too pliant, and only their eyes and lips moved.

“My apologies, Mr. Bloom,” said Mr. Hightower. “I see you have spoken the truth for once. She over there is indeed one of the Spine.” One of his eyelids twitched. A trickle of saliva fell from his chin and soaked into his blue quilted jacket. “Tell me, Spine, have you seen our Mr. Partridge? He’s gone off and left us again.”

Rachel considered the trail. “I suspect he’s hiding behind the booth,” she said. “Is he…in a similar condition to you?”

“Greene never strung him up,” said Mr. Hightower. “So the lucky sod goes off wandering all the time.” His face creased in odd places. “Unfortunately he enjoys these bright poisons too much. He has become an addict, and has no consideration for his friends. He abandons us frequently. When he does show up, it’s only to mock us.”

“Do you mean Mina Greene?”

“That’s her, the puppeteer. She went for a walk last week and never came back. I hope she stepped in something nasty. Now there are only the three of us, and Mr. Partridge is hardly ever here, either. It’s tremendously dull for us. Would you mind terribly cutting us down?”

“Don’t ask them to cut us down,” said Mr. Bloom, managing somehow to huff. “Now they know we can’t get down by ourselves, it puts us at their mercy. You should have tricked them, Mr. Hightower, by making them believe that cutting us down would be to their great benefit.”

“But it isn’t.”

“I know, Mr. Hightower. But they did not realize that.”

“Oh, I see.” Mr. Hightower’s gaze returned to Rachel. “Would you mind cutting us down?

We’d be awfully grateful, and it would be to your enormous benefit to assist us.”

Mr. Bloom sighed.

Mr. Partridge, Mr. Hightower, and Mr. Bloom? Rachel thought the names sounded familiar. She wracked her memory. Where had she heard them before? Suddenly her breath caught.

The Soft Men?

Were these the three scientists who had discovered angelwine, long before the master poisoner Devon had attempted to re-create their elixir? How did they get here? Hadn’t the Spine removed their bones and…?

“They buried you,” Rachel said. “The Spine buried you under the Deadsands more than three hundred years ago.”

“And Miss Greene dug us up,” said Mr. Hightower. “Six days ago, it was. She claimed to be an entrepreneur. She cut our hair. And then she abandoned us, leaving that ragged little pup to guard her wagon.”

Rachel recalled the show-woman’s pet dog from Sandport. It wasn’t exactly much of a guard dog.

“Don’t keep giving them information,” snapped Mr. Bloom. “Information is power. How many times have I told you that? Now they know who we are, and what we are, they’ll be less likely to help us.”

“I thought you said knowledge was power.”

“It’s the same thing, Mr. Hightower.”

“Well, I don’t see that it makes a difference,” said the other man. “You’re just being crotchety as usual.”

Mr. Bloom harrumphed. “You weren’t the one buried upside down.”