Iron Angel

harbored inside. Or had the Shattered God himself found a way to communicate with the angel? Maybe it was simply that rumors had been spreading through the walls of the Maze?

Even those doorways he’d met since the Icarates’ temple had been strangely quiet and obedient.

One such doorway now led to the canal beyond the roofless room where Dill was hiding. He forced himself to stop and take a breath before peering out.

More soul collectors were coming.

A caravan was moving through one of the canals. Great steaming oxenlike beasts dragged a train of huge wagons and cages along the shallow waterway. In deeper waters the Mesmerists used barges, but these canals were plowed by caravans. Strange machines and lurching wooden towers rumbled along behind. Wheels creaked and hooves churned the red slurry into froth. Banners and flags of many colours bobbed among the throng. From somewhere behind came a riotous tumult: the sound of lashing whips, the clicking of stilts, and the howls of men. Over it all sounded the deep, sonorous groan of horns.

There was nowhere for Dill to escape to, so he slunk back into his hiding place, crouched down low, and waited for the caravan to pass him by. Silently, he willed a short-sword to appear in his left hand, and a punching- shield in his right.

The first cages were full of partially altered souls: hot-eyed louts who screamed and rattled their metal limbs across the bars; cackling hags with oddly shaped skulls; huge warriors clad in plate and helms of exotic design, sitting quietly, sharpening the blades on their fingers. These were escapees of some kind, Dill surmised, for their transformations had not yet been completed. A column of box-wagons followed behind, sending thick waves through Dill’s doorway. Queer hieroglyphs drenched their slatted sides; the running boards below were chipped and scraped. Next came one of the Mesmerists’ living machines: a spherical metal device crammed with chains, wheels, and needles. After this, a cage full of dogcatchers.

Dill slid lower into the bloody pool to mask his own scent. Dogcatchers had keen noses.

The demons resembled cadaverous men, and indeed they had once been men, but now their skin glistened as red as the canal beneath their coop. They turned their eyeless heads this way and that, sniffing the air, gnashing their long white teeth. They could not speak, Dill knew, but they could howl, and the one who shifted his blind gaze towards the young angel howled now.

With many creaks and bellows, the procession grumbled to a halt.

Dill readied himself for battle.

They came for him. Anemic and gibbous, these Icarate soul collectors wore stained ceramic armour spattered with black corruption. Pale discs mushroomed from their hunched backs, crackling and dripping blue sparks. Dill presumed these creatures to be a lower caste than the Icarates he had seen before, for there were subtle differences in their appearance. Fractured reflections glinted in their cracked eye-lenses when they turned their heads, and when they grinned, the copper wires in their mouths showed verdigris. They were larger, bulkier, than the Mesmerist priests he had seen before, but they wore similar ill-fitting armour and carried the same hammers and tridents.

And Dill was getting used to dealing with those.

He stepped out into the canal, and ducked as a whip lashed out at his head. The tip of the whip struck a prisoner who had been gripping the bars of his cage, severing the tip of the man’s finger. The prisoner howled and flinched away.

Dill stared at the owner of the whip-an obese Icarate in badly rotted armour. He was hunched over like a cripple, seemingly barely able to stand at all. Rust covered half of the priest’s face, obscuring one of his eye-lenses, while a green crust had obliterated the wires in his mouth. The ceramic obtrusions on his back looked like stained teeth. The angel’s heartbeat quickened. That attack had been fast.

The prisoners started to chant in their cages. “Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal.” One man whooped and cried out: “That was the testing stroke, boy. The next one will take your fucking head off.”

The Icarate swept his whip back again.

Dill willed himself a suit of spider-silk armour-a hauberk, chausses, and a camail to protect his neck. He considered expanding his punching-shield to cover his entire forearm, but decided not to encumber himself any further. He needed to be fast.

The lash struck out again.

Dill simultaneously raised his buckler to block and his sword to sever through the whip. But the thin leather cord twisted in midair and changed direction. It folded around the edge of the tiny shield and struck Dill’s knuckle. The tip of the lash bit into the angel’s flesh and stuck there.

A flash of pain surged up Dill’s arm. He cried out, shaking his fist and shield madly, but the lash would not release him. He swiped at the leather cord with his sword-again and again-but the whip danced around his blows like a living thing.

The caged prisoners were chanting faster now: “Fadder Carpal…Fadder Carpal…”

The tip of the whip began to burrow into Dill’s knuckle. He felt it crawling through his flesh like an insect-a sensation that made him freeze and stare at his hand in shock. A lump had appeared on the back of his finger; it was moving rapidly under his skin towards his wrist. Dill beat at it with the pommel of his sword, but it continued to push into him.

Half in panic, and half in desperate rage, Dill charged at the Icarate. The Mesmerist priest made a motion with his hand-the whip sang between them, formed loops in the air, and then coiled around the angel’s neck.

Darkness crowded Dill’s vision as his camail compressed around his throat. The Icarate’s rusted face and broken lenses loomed before him-a dreamlike mess of rotting metal. Dill fell forward, lashed out wildly with his punching-shield. His buckler connected with something.

He remembered struggling, gasping……the blare of horns, a lurch, and creaking wheels…

He was locked in a cage near the rear of the caravan with a drooling hag and a dwarf with hooks and needles for fingers. The dwarf sniggered and tried to pluck handfuls of feathers from Dill’s wings. He claimed to be the only thief in Hell. “I stole from egoists,” he said, “until Fadder Carpal caught me.”

“Fadder Carpal?”

“You hit him with your shield. It was his impotent master that stung you, his Penny Devil. Not a bad fight, considering.” He leaned closer and crooned. “You lasted longer than those gladiators did. Even longer than that scabrous thing we caught grazing in the Garden of Bones.” He grinned. “But nobody escapes Fadder Carpal.”

“The Icarate with the whip?”

The dwarf snorted. “Fadder Carpal is the greatest soul collector in the Maze. And that was no whip. You felt the insect at the end of it, eh? The kiss of a Penny Devil?”

Dill’s knuckle still throbbed. “It burrowed into me,” he said. “Like an-”

“Insect?” The dwarf chuckled. “That was one of Ayen’s debased. Liria, they used to call her on earth, the Queen of Fleas. If you think Ayen gave her lover and her sons a hard time…” He paused to pick at his misshapen teeth with one hooked finger. “Consider what she did to the angels she really feared: Orus, Basilis, and Liria-all royally fucked for eternity.”

“The whip was Liria?”

“Liria was the sting at the tip. And Fadder Carpal is her guardian, at least-” He broke off as the old woman beside him suddenly began to convulse.

“Look lively,” the dwarf said to Dill, “the madwoman is fading again. You’ll see the Icarates revive her.”

“Cruelty!” the hag wailed. “Flesh is the stuff of memories. I can’t recall fat and skin.” The fiery light that sloped through the enclosure bars seemed to find little resistance in her body, but rather pass through it as though through a mist. “Nobody here helps me to remember. They might as well have locked me in with the blistermen.” She pointed to the cage in front of them and snarled, “See where the flies lay their eggs.”

Dill recoiled.

“She’s mad,” the dwarf said. “Menoa can’t do much with woozy minds like hers. She’s bound for the flensing machines and the Veil, if she makes it to the portal at all.” His dark eyes glittered; he shuffled his crooked bones away from her. “Either she’ll fade completely and join the ghosts in the walls, or one day soon we’ll all be breathing her.”

The hag licked her gums and said, “They promised me a parrot.”

One of Carpal’s Icarates appeared outside the cage, and thrust his trident into the old woman’s side. The weapon crackled; the hag gibbered and slavered. But soon enough, her phantasmal form solidified again. She