The god’s face remained grim. “We need to reach the First Citadel. If we’re to have any chance of success, I’m going to have to start training you.”
Harper moved through the Blaise Canal Area, a maze of channels divided by walls of mirror-black rock. The faces of reconstructed souls glared from the smooth surfaces to the left and right as they watched the engineer pass. The fluids here were too shallow for Mesmerist barges, yet Harper’s newly forged glass tail propelled her along rapidly. This was, of course, why Menoa had gifted her with it. Her sceptre flickered and hummed, indicating the presence of Icarates nearby. Soon enough she heard them.
The Icarate pack had gathered in a basin between the Soul Middens: those low hills where a thousand transformed souls piled one upon the other like heaped houses. Some of the dwellings, Harper noted, had fused with one another to form teetering castles and unlikely towers. These delicate structures would not survive for long, however, as Icarates continued to smash through the sensate brick and mortar to get to the souls within.
Overhead, the heavens smouldered like a dying hearth. In places flashes of darkness pulsed behind the rising crimson mists where bodies or pieces of detritus passed through the Deepgate Portal and fell from the skies. Crackling sounds accompanied this hail of debris. Blooms of white light flashed less frequently, but fell like shooting stars where the souls of the living entered the Maze.
Icarates moved through the canals and between the Soul Middens, collecting human remains and piling them into the hoppers of flensing machines. These vast slow-moving constructs resembled huge wagons with metal wheels and bone axles. When full they would be dragged back to Menoa’s Processor so that their contents could be used in the construction of arconites.
Her glass body clicking, Harper slithered over to the group of Icarates. There were six of them, powerfully built but hobbled like old men beneath the weight of their ceramic armour. Knee-deep in the red mire, they wielded huge hammers in an effort to break through one of the walls at the base of a Midden. Holes had already been smashed into nearby dwellings, the occupants dragged out and locked inside cages in the center of the basin. Dogcatchers moved lithely across the mounds above them, sniffing at windows and doors. One of the Mesmerists’ most enduring creations, the dogcatchers had the look of skinless men with long white teeth, constantly tasting the air as they toiled for their Icarate masters.
One of the Icarates lowered his hammer and turned his pale helmet towards the approaching engineer.
“Menoa sent me,” Harper said.
He replied with a buzzing sound. Blue sparks cascaded from the protrusions on his back and shoulders. His crooked body even dipped in what might have been an attempt at a bow.
“We should move to high ground,” Harper went on. “The king has equipped me with the tools to locate metaphysical disturbances. Archons from the First Citadel are likely to be hiding nearby. The pack must be ready to move quickly.”
Again the Icarate bowed. This time his thoughts murmured in Harper’s glass skull.
“They may have buried themselves deep in the Soul Middens.” Harper indicated them with a gesture of her glass spear. Death lights swarmed within the weapon’s shaft. “You must dig deeper.”
A sudden scream grabbed Harper’s attention. The remaining five Icarates had finally broken through the outer wall of the nearest Midden and were now pushing through the cavity they had made. Those in the lead carried tridents crackling with black wisps of energy and stepped forward as a man cried out from within.
The Icarates dragged their captive out of the gap and threw him to his knees in the basin. He was young, dressed in rough hemp labourer’s clothes-the most memorable of his earthly raiment, Harper knew, for his whole presence here was naught but a manifestation of his own soul’s memories. Now devoid of the shelter he had grown around himself, his body rapidly began to fade, turning ghostlike.
A recollection chimed inside Harper’s glass thorax, and for a moment it was not the shade of a Deepgate labourer kneeling on ground before her, but her own husband Tom.
One of the Icarates drove his trident into the man’s back, and his ghostly form became solid again. All likeness to Harper’s husband disappeared. A trick of the light? Or had the engineer’s own thoughts intruded upon this man’s soul? Out here he was as vulnerable to external influences as he was to complete dissolution. The Mesmerist priests must force power into the soul to prevent his physical form from becoming a shade. They herded the man off to the waiting cages.
“Things were fine before the War Against Heaven,” Hasp called over to Dill. The god was searching through one of the many trunks set along the edges of his chamber. “Balance was sustained. Iril got the wicked souls, Ayen got the good ones. But since the goddess of light and life shut the doors to Heaven, it’s been overcrowded down here. Too many souls for even the Mesmerists to gather.”
Dill watched him from the doorway. “But Ulcis took Deepgate’s dead for himself.”
“We all did,” Hasp admitted. “Each of Ayen’s sons harvested souls. We needed to keep as many as possible out of Hell and away from the Mesmerists. Aha!” He pulled something out of the chest, an orb of brass clockwork with glowing crystals inside. “And we needed the power for ourselves,” he went on, examining the strange globe. “The War Against Heaven left us weak.”
How many people had been brought to Deepgate’s temple and cast into the abyss, shrouded with promises of redemption and Heaven? In reality they’d been nothing but fodder for Ulcis. The young angel felt his eyes darken. “How did
Hasp was silent for a long moment. Finally he rose, still holding the globe in his hand, and approached the doorway. “My brother Rys decided that one of us should go fight the Mesmerists in Hell.” He sighed. “And I was chosen for that honour. Put your anger aside, Dill. If you want to survive down here, you need the help of the First Citadel. And you need me to prepare you for the journey out there.” He looked back over Dill’s shoulder into the apartment the young angel had grown from his own body. His gaze lingered on the thirteen portraits on the wall, then moved quickly away. “Ideally, you’d have time to familiarize yourself with your new environment.” He waved his hand at the rooms behind Dill’s doorway. “It is important for you to know every inch of your soul.”
“Why?”
“So we can detach you from it.” He rolled his shoulders, causing the armoured plates there to rasp together; then he lifted his globe. Crystals gleamed behind the brass filigree. “We don’t have time to acclimatize you, and less time to train you, so we’ll cheat.”
Dill stared at the orb in Hasp’s hand. “What is that thing?”
“It’s a tool for creating voids, neutral spaces between the crush of souls in Hell. It will allow us to meet without damage to either of our souls, but it exerts pressure on all those around us. Open your window shutters. We need to know who’s nearby.”
The young angel strode back across his apartment. He felt his bare feet pad across the floor as though he was walking on his own skin. And in a sense he was. He was standing on his own soul.
The shutters towered over him, six feet high and three wide. A weird sensation ran through his flesh as he unlatched one of them and pulled it back to reveal a window composed of many small panes.
Through the glass he saw another chamber, much grander and gaudier than his own, shrouded in gloom. Shadows cloaked dim marble walls and pillars that retreated into deeper darkness. In the half-light, Dill could just make out a cupola overhead painted with scenes in which angels hunted queer piglike beasts through a forest. But the shallow alcoves set in the walls boasted a still stranger display. The shelves within these alcoves were laden with the skulls of long-toothed creatures.
Dill strained to see.
In the center of the room, a young woman sat at a desk. Dark brown twists of hair tumbled over the shoulders of her rainbow-coloured dress as she leaned forward to scribble in a journal. For a moment Dill stared at her slender wrists, as smooth as honey, and then noticed the swell of her bosom against the fabric of her dress.
Suddenly she looked up at him and smiled.
The wallpaper, curtains, and rugs in Dill’s room turned a sudden bright shade of pink. He looked away quickly.
