Iron Angel

Dill retrieved the paintings from the lower hall and set them up in a room Hasp had allocated him. The thirteen spirits in Devon’s elixir gazed miserably out of their canvases at their new surroundings. Sometimes when Dill listened outside the door he heard them speaking to one another in hushed voices, but they always fell silent when he entered.

He began to suspect they were plotting something.

After the twentieth span of darkness the castle slowed. It seemed to Dill that the building had let loose a great sigh, and that it was giving up. Every mirror in Hasp’s fortress grew dull. The floors sagged. The fruit in the Banquet Hall began to moulder. Even the stones seemed to glisten under a patina of sweat.

Hasp led him up a narrow spiral stair to the summit of the castle. The god paused many times to rest. The stairwell took them to a small balcony encircling a tower, very much like the one Dill had grown up in. Ivy engulfed one side. If he climbed it, Dill wondered, would he find a weather vane on top?

“Yes, you would,” Hasp said.

Dill blinked. Did Hasp just read his mind?

“Our souls have shared space for so long now,” Hasp explained. “I’ve been dreaming your dreams. This tower, as you surmised, is similar to your former abode in Deepgate’s temple. You are unconsciously affecting this environment. As my will fades, your own steps in to take over.”

“But I…”

“I know,” Hasp said. “I know you don’t mean it. Nevertheless it is happening.” He leaned on the parapet and pointed far across Hell to the black sea which had been following them. It seemed much closer than before. “You know what that is,” Hasp said, “because I know what it is. And you understand what its approach means to us.”

“You can’t go on any further,” Dill said.

The god nodded. “I have exhausted all but the last shreds of my power. And we have still not covered a half of the journey to the First Citadel. You will have to continue on foot.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll stay, hold them off a bit if I can.”

Dill was silent.

“You will be harder to find on foot, but you must take strength for the journey ahead. This landscape is dread, hopelessness: it saps the will. You must not let it consume you before you reach the First Citadel.”

“What about Mina?” Dill asked.

“They’re after us, not her. I’ll try to hide her before the Legion of the Blind get here. She’s only human, and therefore of little interest to Menoa. There’s a chance she might escape their attention.”

“What do I do?”

“It’s mostly done,” Hasp said. “The sphere we fought in has been nourishing you from the beginning, giving up its strength to you. It taught you how to fight, not I. And that fragment of Iril is now inside you.”

Dill remembered the apple. A part of you is also inside me.

And Mina’s splinter? Like Hasp, she had given up a part of herself.

“But there’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” Hasp went on, “another way we might tip the scales in your favor.” He scratched his stubble. “You arrived in this place with thirteen souls. Your mind made paintings of them to hang on your walls, and yet they have never really been connected to you down here. Some part of you kept them at bay. I propose we change that.”

“How?”

The god shrugged. “I have an idea. I’m afraid it’s rather grisly.”

Harper flexed her glass tail, propelling herself up the slope of a toppled black stone monolith. Many such ancient structures dotted the Maze, and the Icarates considered them to be holy places. Harper had seen one of the rituals Menoa’s priests performed inside these relics, and she had no desire to witness another. Right now she just wanted a viewpoint.

The Legion of the Blind flowed around the monolith, a tide of chitinous black scales, claws, and teeth. Those demons in the forward ranks squabbled over the supply of eyes, snatching the precious artefacts from one another so that they might be the ones to see what lay ahead. Countless more followed behind with nothing to guide them but the relentless forward pressure of the horde. They moved like a tsunami, covering the landscape of Hell for as far as the engineer could see. She stared ahead of the army to the maroon castle in the distance. It had finally stopped moving.

An Icarate hunting horn sounded.

Arrrrrooooo

And the Blind surged forward, eager for the opportunity to attack.

Dill was appalled at the hideous scheme Hasp suggested. To allow the young angel to absorb the souls inside the thirteen paintings, the Lord of the First Citadel had proposed they make a broth.

“This is about survival,” Hasp insisted. He looked exhausted, a shadow of his former self. “Just as the Poisoner made an elixir on earth, so we can make another here in Hell. You need the strength of these souls to bolster your own.”

“I’ll survive without them.” Dill looked away from the portraits. The painted expressions glared down at him in rage and fear, clearly aware of their present situation.

Hasp shook his head. “I can’t guarantee that. My castle is grounded and you have drained the only fragment of the Shattered God in my possession.”

“These are people, not meat to be eaten.”

“No…no longer people. This is the Maze, Dill. They have become nothing but ghosts trapped in paintings. What sort of existence is that? Do you think the Mesmerists will offer them a better deal?” From somewhere Hasp had found a source of anger and his voice boomed in the low vaulted passageway. “They were part of your life, now make them part of your death. Take them with you to the First Citadel or leave them to Menoa’s imagination. The choice is yours.”

Hasp spoke the truth. Dill’s fate was bound to that of these painted ghosts. It was evident that this fate did not appeal to them, but necessity gave him no choice.

“Do it,” Dill said.

For the procedure Hasp located a chest containing Mesmerist equipment: an iron tripod, an etched glass retort, and a reeking black candle composed of demon fat and a concoction of bitter herbs. Unlike the sphere, these seemed to possess little, if any, arcane power. The candle burned, the tripod supported the retort, which was soon bubbling with a thinned solution of the young angel’s own blood. One by one, Hasp saturated the paintings with the foul-smelling steam until the faces faded from the canvases.

In silence he continued to boil steam from the solution. Once he had reduced the liquid to a thicker consistency, he decanted it into a small bottle. “Now drink.”

Dill swallowed the souls. The liquid cloyed at his throat, making him cough, but he managed to force it down.

“I don’t feel any different,” he said.

Hasp took the empty bottle back. “Your own soul recognizes these others. But you must never consume another soul down here. Don’t drink the blood in the canals, for it will lead to madness.”

“I must leave now?”

The god extinguished the candle. He clasped Dill’s shoulders and tried to smile. But all energy and conviction had left his eyes. “Stay low,” he said. “The Mesmerists have a million spies who will see you if you fly. And take this…” From a pouch in his belt he took out something and pressed it into Dill’s hand. It was an old brown apple, its flesh as wrinkled as Hasp’s own.

Dill left Hasp’s castle without ceremony. The god willed a small door to appear in the lower battlements, and a narrow set of steps to take the young angel down to the surface of Hell. The skies churned like poison overhead, lending a ruby hue to the obsidian walls. These partitions divided the Maze into a nest of devious veins, interspersed with rooms and corridors and houses and castles: the living incarnations of the souls who dwelt within them. There were archways and oddly shaped portals, and steps that sank down to bubbling sumps or drowned