Iron Angel

commanded, “Show us Pandemeria as it was.”

At once the sphere began to change again. The witches untangled themselves from one another, their withered bodies flowing together to form a single membrane. This membrane began to expand across the living balcony. Flesh bubbled and became earth, a representation in miniature of the fields, hills, and mountains Harper had known so well. In other places the skin split apart to form arroyos, gullies, and wide valleys. Clear fluid seeped from pores into these many hollows, marking the Moine lakes and SillRiver. Tiny black trees sprouted like hairs. Lesions swelled and hardened to become boulders or buildings or runnels of glacial scree.

Harper identified the city of Cog, her home before the plague and the war and the great floods had transformed Pandemeria. She recognized the patchwork of streets and squares now forming before her eyes: Highcliffe and the Theater District. She saw the SillRiver, and where it split into two branches that curled around the city like a moat. And still the witchsphere grew around her, filling her vision. RevolutionPlaza solidified before her eyes, the great white cathedral shining in the twilight-exactly as it had done before the Mesmerist Veil. She located Canary Street, Minnow Street, and the Offal Quarter. And her own house-the house she’d bought with Tom.

How long ago now?

Ten years, or a thousand? Involuntarily she clutched her chest. How much of this was real? The witches were clearly drawing on Harper’s own memories to form this illusion. She was gazing into her own dream.

“Now show us Pandemeria as it is today,” the king said.

“No, please, my Lord.” Harper closed her eyes, but the scene before her did not change. She no longer had eyelids to shut out this changing vision. Menoa had made a simple alteration to her physical form. Now he was chuckling behind his mask. “You want to see this,” he insisted.

Cog Island’s skies began to darken with red mist: the Mesmerist Veil. It seemed to Harper that she was watching from a great height as the shades of Cog’s plague victims rose from their mass graves out in Knuckletown Quarry and drifted towards the city in vast numbers. In moments they had crossed the SillBridge and were pouring into the city. Strange shadows flitted under the eaves of buildings while from the east could be heard the braying of hounds.

“You remember this?” King Menoa asked. “You recall the improvements my Icarates made?”

Harper remembered. Now unable to separate dreams from actual events, she saw the Icarates rise from the very ground itself. An army of warriors in queer ceramic armour, they moved from house to house, smashing down doors and dragging Cog’s citizens out into the glistening streets. The Icarates slaughtered the weak and the elderly, and herded the rest out towards their flensing machine beyond Knuckletown, where a great red funnel of vapor was now twisting slowly above the plague graves.

The graves had crumbled inwards, leaving dark open pits in the red earth, and now the Mesmerists’ Maze- forged hordes crawled out: men of flesh and iron and glass, witchspheres, Iolites, and dogcatchers. Claws raked the wet soil, turning it into a bloody morass. White teeth flashed in the semidarkness.

Out they came in waves, in impossible numbers, a seething tide which swept into the doomed city. Time blurred. Days and weeks passed in mere moments and the scene changed again. New constructions now towered over the city: the Plague Portal Collar, the Terminus, and the Great Wheel through which ten thousand slaves supplied power to the new HighcliffeFlensingTowers. The Mesmerist Veil covered Pandemeria as far as Harper could see. Recent rain showers had drenched the land and now the crimson fields and furrows around the island city glistened like open wounds. The vanguard had moved out of sight, far across the MerianBasin to the north, yet hordes of reserve warriors continued to pour out of CogCity. They moved like rivers across the landscape, drawing power from the red earth.

Storm clouds were gathering in the north. Lightning flickered across the horizon among sheets of rain and great columns of black smoke.

Rys!

These fires heralded the approach of the god of flowers and knives. Rys had brought his armies down from the far north to meet the Mesmerist threat, and now the flames from his great war machines lit the horizon. The two armies had clashed on the northern shores of Lake Larnaig, outside the gates of Rys’s own city, Coreollis. Here King Menoa’s demons had been halted at last.

The witchsphere would not dare to display that battle for fear of enraging King Menoa. The Mesmerist leader had been soundly beaten at Coreollis. Instead the view remained focused on Cog: that skewed mound of blood- drenched houses and spires crouched upon SillRiverIsland. Four bridges connected the heart of Cog to its outlying suburbs on either side of the two river channels: Knuckletown to the east, Port Sellen to the west. A steam locomotive had been left abandoned on OperaBridge, its empty wagons now half full of water.

For it was raining in torrents.

“Rys brought this rain to cleanse Pandemeria’s blooded earth,” Menoa growled, his deep voice resounding like echoes in a cave. “Yet he underestimated the Mesmerist power to adapt. His deluge merely changed blooded land into a blooded sea.”

Harper sensed time shift again in the scene before her. The Sill River swelled and quickly burst its banks. Both Knuckletown and Port Sellen disappeared under the rising waters. The river itself had become a raging brown torrent. Floating detritus and corpses snagged on the underside of OperaBridge. And still the floodwaters rose, drowning the low-lying streets and plazas, and the wide plains of the MerianBasin, until only the highest city districts remained unaffected. CogIsland, once merely an outcrop of high rock between two branches of a river, had now become an island in the middle of a shallow sea.

The Mesmerists made ships. Under the guidance of chanting Icarates, souls from the plague graves were allocated power from the Veil. These dead soon lost their own frail human forms. The Icarates changed them slowly, painfully, into great empty shells of bone, flesh, and metal. Each new vessel cried out in agony and despair until the Icarates stifled its voice within the living steel.

And the troop deployment continued. Legions marched into the newly forged ships. Belching smoke and fire, the Mesmerist vessels sailed out over the flooded city and the plains beyond, while on the brooding horizon Rys’s storm of war flashed and rumbled.

Menoa said, “I have shown you this for a reason.” At another of the king’s gestures, the witchsphere began to collapse and recover its normal form, sucking in the Veil, the land, and the waters like inhaled air.

“Here in the Maze, Form is merely a manifestation of Will,” the king went on. “And yet you people choose to loll in your own dreary memories, assuming the forms you are used to, rather than exploring the unknown. There has been a glut of power in the Maze recently, and yet Hell has grown stagnant despite this potential.” The glass mask continued to flux in the crimson light, the features changing, always changing. “Your kind has no vision,” Menoa said. “So I must impose my vision upon you, and by doing so, set you free.”

“Yes, my Lord.” Fear crept up Harper’s spine. She had seen the frightening things Menoa had constructed to take his war into the world of men.

“Your fingers, for example,” Menoa said. “Are they suitably designed to fine-tune the mechanics of our ideas?”

“I-” Before Harper could properly respond, her hands began to change. Her fingers stretched and thinned and turned to silver. She cried out as she felt her nerves die in painful bursts. Crystals formed on each of her fingertips: Mesmeric devices to measure and alter the soul harmonics of Menoa’s warrior machines. Her knuckles swelled into irregular metal lumps, then ticked and whirred as clockwork mechanisms began to move inside them. Her wrists hardened and began to turn black. “Please…” she gasped. “Stop this.”

But Menoa did not stop. He stooped over her, his clawlike fingers directing the changes in her physical form. A hundred faces seemed to move behind his black glass mask. “Understand that you will become anything I desire,” he said. “If it suits my plans to alter any soul in my domain, then I shall do so without hesitation.” He frowned at her and made another sweeping movement with his gauntlet. The devices on her fingers began to retract and change shape once more.

Harper heard the witchsphere hissing with pleasure, but she could no longer see it. Menoa was changing the composition of her eyes. Her vision became suddenly fragmented, like the view through the facets of a gemstone. She felt her back crimp and buckle, before she sensed something hard and flexible growing out of her spine. This protrusion split and then divided again and again.

What was he changing her into?

The world around her seemed to expand. Menoa’s mask loomed over her, black against the seething crimson