Iron Angel

clouds, as though peering down at her from a great height.

“You are nothing but an insect,” King Menoa announced.

The sound of buzzing filled Harper’s ears. She glanced down at herself to see a clutch of chitinous shards protruding from her newly developed thorax. Her limbs had gone, replaced by bushels of wire-like tendrils. Sparks of agony shot through her freshly altered nerves.

Menoa scooped up his servant in one gauntlet and carried her to the balustrade. “Fly to the Processor,” he said, “and tell the Prime to prepare the Forming Ovens for another archon. I will delay the first strike until this angel has been suitably reinforced. Do this quickly and I might consider returning your arms and legs.” He cast Harper out into the skies over Hell.

She was flying, buzzing, clicking-a whirlwind of new pains and perceptions, yet Harper no longer possessed lungs with which to scream. She was trapped in a thin shell, carried by wings as frail as paper. The Maze reeled around her; she witnessed it as a dozen subtly different views of the same terrible landscape. Behind her the towers of the Ninth Citadel rose up like a flayed figure, glistening and seething with transmuted souls. Canals looped around its base like red ribbons, through which Icarates plied their heavy black barges.

In awkward fits, her fragile wings carried her through a bloodmist above one of the Icarates’ flensing machines. Harper felt a sudden surge of energy as her newly forged body drank in countless fractured souls. Thus enriched, she banked around Menoa’s citadel and made for the Processor.

The great building at the heart of the Mesmerist War Effort towered over the surrounding canals, ziggurats, and creeping machines. It was an inverted pyramid, said to be built from more than a million souls transformed into black stone. Harper could well believe it, for to facilitate the arcane processes within its living walls the Icarates had not removed the voices from these souls.

The Processor howled and screamed. Even the steady chanting of countless Icarates and the sound of the forges and bellows inside could not mask those unholy cries. Steam billowed from the open hatch to one of the Forming Ovens, while a stream of rock and ore rained down from the heavens and was collected in the Processor’s central depression. Evidently the Icarates were still gathering raw materials from the world of the living.

As Harper flew nearer she saw the Mesmerist warrior priests backing away from the open oven. They hobbled across the smooth surface with their backs hunched under the weight of the white enamel armour that both shielded and powered their ancient bodies. Blue sparks dripped from mushroom-shaped protrusions on their heavy shoulder guards and back plates, striking the ground around their white boots in explosive bursts.

Now Harper could see why the Icarates were retreating from the steaming hatch.

Something was climbing out.

Two skeletal hands rose out of the Forming Oven. Fashioned to resemble the hands of dead men, and yet larger than the mightiest of oak trees, the bony fingers gripped the lip of the building’s summit with enough force to make the entire Processor howl.

Harper was about to witness the birth of an arconite: an iron-and bone-forged automaton built around an angel’s soul.

Plumes of smoke hissed from the Processor’s innards as the skeletal giant continued to clamber out of the Forming Oven. Its skull and wings towered over the pit, the creature’s newly forged bones and tendons glistening with oil and plasma. Engines thumped heavily in its ribcage as they pumped arcane chemicals and blood through the network of pipes intertwined throughout the whole of its body. It was dragging hundreds of chains behind it, the links still glowing red from the ovens in which they had been forged.

Now free of the Forming Oven, the arconite stood on the Processor summit, unfurled its vast wings, and roared.

Even from up here, Harper could see that those wings were useless, naught but tattered grey flesh-an affectation the Icarates had created to help bind the archon’s soul into this mechanical body. Even months of torture could not entirely cleanse an angel of the memory of its living body. Of all Hell’s creatures, only an angel could not be altered by the sheer force of Menoa’s will. In death, they retained something more than ordinary mortals, something that resisted even the king’s formidable powers of persuasion.

And so the Mesmerist leader had resorted to this barbarism, this fusion of the physical and the metaphysical that bound an archon’s soul to metal and bone.

The Icarates took up the automaton’s chains and guided it to the edge of the Processor and down a ramp to join its eleven brothers in the vast holding area. This pen formed an open quadrangle amid the Mesmerist city, among those great black ziggurats and towers, rising like shards of obsidian, which stretched for as far as the eye could see. Red mists rose from a thousand flensing machines, while Menoa’s queer mix of slaves, warriors, and priests plied the deep canals in barges or crawled, limped, and rolled along thoroughfares. A pack of liver-skinned dogcatchers left a Ziggurat of Worship and splashed through one of the shallower canals, howling and clicking their teeth as their masters drove them onwards. Many such packs had been dispatched lately as King Menoa increased his hunt, not just for archons, but for pieces of the shattered god.

Harper flew to the top of the Processor and down through one of the smaller Icarates’ doorways. She passed through corridors of blue wires and sulphurous pools from which hands reached up to clutch at her. Yet in this current shape she was quick enough to elude their grasp.

In time she came to the Bastion of Voices.

It was a high chamber constructed of translucent lozenges, each one forged from a soul of rare insight. In the center of the room the king’s twelve Prime Icarates sat motionless in a circle of thrones arranged upon a dais, listening solemnly to the whispers from the glass. Tubes ran from valves in their bone-coloured armour and disappeared into the black glass floor, where further ancient seals had been engraved. Unlike most Icarates, these lords did not wear helmets. Their ancient faces had the pallor and texture of dead fish-flesh, while their eyes and mouths had been sewn up with copper wire.

Harper could not understand the whispers all around her, yet the voices became still more subdued as she approached. Her presence here had clearly not gone unnoticed.

The engineer tried to find her own voice, but her current shape was still new to her. She made a startled clicking sound, and then settled on the floor before the dais.

The arconites now equal the Prime, the voices of the chamber announced. We have achieved everything Menoa has commanded. Twelve giants will walk upon unblooded ground, each of them as powerful as a mortal army. Our thoughts are their thoughts. Relay the king’s message and retreat, insect. War is at hand.

Harper tried to speak again, but no sound came out except a fibrillating scratch. Her bristled limbs twitched in frustration. Her carapace made a noise like dry paper rustling. Why had Menoa not issued her with a throat to declare his demands?

He neglected to provide you with a throat, the chamber said, to prevent you from lying. Your mind is glass to us. It is enough to merely recall Menoa’s conversation with you.

So Harper remembered her audience on the king’s balcony, and through her thoughts the Bastion of Voices came to understand what Menoa expected it to do.

At last the chamber said, Tell the king we will construct a body for another iron angel, but warn him that there is much to do. Ore must be gathered from Pandemeria in abundance; a thousand souls will need to be re-formed; it will be necessary to harvest blood and bone from the flensing machines.

Leaving the silent Icarates upon their thrones, Harper took to the air again and retraced her path through the Processor. Outside, the newly forged arconite, still glistening and steaming from the Forming Ovens, was being chained to the floor of the holding area among the rest of its kin. These twelve giants squatted on the ground, their bony arms wrapped around their knees, in complete subservience to their Icarate masters. Flocks of airborne shades had already come to feed upon their great tattered wings, attracted by the living blood within them.

As Harper’s own translucent wings buzzed like those of a dragonfly, she wondered how she had allowed herself to become a part of all this madness. After all, she had come to Hell for another reason entirely.

The king was waiting for her on his balcony. He stared at her, and for a moment Harper felt his presence scour the inside of her mind. Then the feeling was suddenly gone, leaving her empty and shaken. He said, “You wish me to restore your original shape?”

She didn’t have to answer him. He already knew.

Menoa scraped one of his glass claws across the top of the balustrade, and Harper felt her nerves flare as her