Iron Angel

“You think Hell is bound to win?” Caulker asked.

“It is likely,” Anchor admitted.

Caulker had suspected as much. All souls flowed to the Maze eventually. And with Iril shattered and powerless, no one could stop Menoa from claiming those souls. The King’s Mesmerists would inevitably rise to consume this earth, and all who stood against them would die.

It made no sense to Caulker to be on the losing side.

John Anchor remained distracted. Absently, he consumed another soulpearl. This time, when he swallowed the glass bead, he grimaced and looked like he was about to spit. An incautious choice of soul, perhaps?

The cutthroat eyed the bag of soulpearls. A single strike with the flat of a sword-or even a stick-would shatter most of them, releasing the furious spirits inside. Despite Anchor’s great strength and speed, the wrath of one spectral archon had drawn the big man’s blood. What damage could a horde of such ghosts accomplish? And what if they were released during the heat of battle? King Menoa would surely reward such cunning.

“How do you plan to deal with the Mesmerists?” Caulker asked. “Deepgate must be crawling with them by now.”

“No doubt,” Anchor replied. “But we do not meet Menoa’s forces there.”

“No? But I thought-”

“We go east.”

“East?” Caulker gaped at him. “But Deepgate lies to the west.”

“Cospinol changed plan,” Anchor said. “We leave Deepgate to the Mesmerists and go back across the sea to Pandemeria. All are welcome. Even you, Jack Caulker. There is no more debt between us.”

The ember of Caulker’s own plan faded. If he was to gain favor with the Mesmerists, he needed something with which to bargain. The cutthroat needed to show King Menoa where his loyalties lay. “You mean to abandon Deepgate to the enemy?” he asked.

“Yes. We go to sea.”

A sea journey?

With the Heshette as companions? Muttering curses to himself, Jack Caulker slouched further into his fog-damp jacket. What other choice remained? He could hardly remain here. His vision of plummeting from the Rockwall battlements returned to him, and now it seemed apt-for he felt like a man who had stepped off a precipice, leaving his destiny in the hands of the gods.

Anchor was consulting Ramnir now. Caulker could not hear their hushed conversation, but the big man’s hand gestures were urgent. Finally the pair clasped arms.

And so Caulker found himself once more sharing the saddle with a Heshette horseman as the group picked their way east now through Cinderbark Wood. They reached the edge of the petrified woodland without incident and stopped to camp a short distance out from the colourful boles while they waited for the rest of the original party to bring the livestock down the eastern edge of the wood to join them. The tribesmen built a dismal fire from their supplies of dried dung, boiling strips of tough meat in a small iron pot, which they insisted on sharing with both Anchor and Caulker.

Caulker chewed the meat without tasting it. He was exhausted. Sleep tugged at him, but his fears of reliving that nightmare fall from Rockwall’s battlements forced him to resist.

The tethered giant accepted the meal graciously enough, but he insisted on allowing Cospinol to improve their fare. Again the same basket was lowered from the skyship, now loaded with flagons of water, wine, and salted fish. Anchor and Ramnir continued to converse in hushed tones while they ate. Ramnir seemed disturbed, often shaking his head or gazing thoughtfully into the fire.

Finally Caulker could no longer remain awake. He curled up on a foul-smelling Heshette blanket and closed his eyes. And in his dreams he fell a thousand times. Again and again he found himself peering down into that deep, fog-shrouded valley. He smelled the fresh mountain pines and he watched the eagles soaring through the mists below the high battlements. The cutthroat had no wings to save him. Each time Anchor pushed him, he fell screaming to his death.

He woke to the sound of his own cries. Sweat plastered his hair and face, his muscles ached, and for a heartbeat he feared that his plummet from the fortress battlements had been real, that his body now lay broken in the gloom beneath that faraway fortress. But then he became aware of the early-morning sun shining through the fog like beaten gold. Horses were snorting and goat-bells tinkling nearby. He could smell livestock and dung fires.

The whole camp was already full of life. Heshette riders were cinching saddles and tackle, and strapping packs and weapons to their mounts. Women were milking goats, and chattering in their heathen language. Those greybeards and family descendants who had driven their livestock around the northern edge of Cinderbark Wood had finally caught up with the rest of the party.

Ramnir gathered the Heshette together and addressed them: “Most of you have already seen the red mists rising from Deepgate,” he cried. “This pestilence is the breath of Hell, and it has been brought upon us by the chained city’s own priests.” He raised his hands to quell the murmuring crowd. “Iril was shattered in the War Against Heaven, and now Hell has a new king. This bloody Veil heralds the approach of his armies. It is already spreading beyond the abyss, poisoning the lands all around Deepgate.”

One of the older greybeards yelled out, “We’ll pray for rain!”

“Rain will not wash this away,” Ramnir said to the man. “Nor will Ayen lower Heaven’s barricades to help us. We cannot stop this thing. The Deadsands will be consumed.”

“The Heshette do not flee.” The old man spat.

“Hear me out, old man,” Ramnir said. “The abyss below Deepgate is one of two doors into Hell. The other lies across the sea in the lands that border John Anchor’s country, and is already the focus of a great war.” He paused to look at each of the surrounding group in turn. “Who will stand and fight against Hell here? The chained city is in ruins, its people tempered and reduced to slavery. There are no armies to hold back the Maze king’s forces, and those tatters that remain will resist, at every step, our approach to the abyss.”

“We don’t need an army,” the old man said. “We need faith.”

But Ramnir shook his head. “Our friend Anchor has offered us passage across the Yellow Sea to join his own people in the battle against Hell. We have the chance to start again, to fight with those who would welcome our efforts against a common foe. If we remain here, we die.”

The sight of these withered men on their ill-fed beasts considering war almost tore a laugh from Caulker’s gut, but he managed to clench the outburst in his throat as Ramnir’s thin dark eyes turned to him. The Heshette had no choice but to flee. Deepgate’s armies had decimated the tribes in decades of war. King Menoa would crush the survivors like lice.

After some discussion the Heshette came to realize this, just as Caulker knew they would. They would be ferried to Pandemeria, taken in there as refugees, and then pitied and scorned by the locals. Caulker had seen it happen many times before. The beggar cups of nomads clacked around half the street corners in Sandport and Clune. Tribal children raked through refuse heaps like dogs. Anchor must have known this, too. Surely the tethered giant didn’t expect these weak old men to fight?

It was all in the blood, of course. Jack Caulker’s ancestors had been great river men, smugglers, and infamous profiteers, thus he came from good stock. But these heathens were different. They hadn’t crawled very far from the caves their ancestors had burrowed into Hollowhill. To think of them as human required a generous imagination.

But Caulker had little time to consider the matter further, since the group had come to a decision. The Heshette would accompany Anchor to the continent of Pandemeria, abandoning forever the poisoned desert which had been their home.

“Do you expect to carry all of them on your back?” Caulker asked Anchor harshly. “What about the elderly and crippled? And the beasts? Will your master allow his skyship to become a menagerie?”

“All are welcome,” Anchor replied.

The cutthroat cursed, and then continued to curse throughout the sixteen-day march southeast towards the Pocked Delta. The Heshette led Anchor along an old nomad route long disused since the wells had been poisoned by Deepgate’s armies. Now, at last, with a ready supply of food and water from Cospinol’s skyship, the trail became passable once more. They traveled in haste, for riders brought grim news from beyond their shroud of fog. The