became corporeal once more. The soul collector peered in at the other two captives for a moment, his rotten mouth-grille buzzing, and then returned the way he had come.
The sky grew dark and the strange caravan lumbered on. Dill could not sleep. He lay curled in a bed of wet straw, and thought about Mina. Had she escaped the Legion of the Blind? Where was she now? When he finally closed his eyes he imagined he could smell her perfume oozing from the splinter in his wrist.
The caravan did not halt for three days. Axles rumbling ceaselessly, the wagon train meandered through the Maze, sloshing along one red canal after another, creeping up the slick rises and plunging into flooded depressions. The ghost-mists darkened again.
Dawn brought plumes of crimson steam and a metal taste to the air. The madwoman displayed her gums and cackled. The dwarf thief sniggered and rattled his needle fingers against his teeth.
“I stole pieces of souls,” he said, “and devoured them in Icarate temples. It kept me busy. You have to keep busy in Hell or you fade away.” He picked his nose. “Do you know what lies underneath those temples?”
Dill shook his head.
“The failed experiments, the things that didn’t function but didn’t die, either. There are rivers and pools full of them. And something else…” He leaned his damp face closer to Dill and whispered, “A
“Iril?”
The thief shook his head. “Iril is almost burnt out. His archons sit on the brink of defeat.” He pointed to the smoke-darkened horizon. “See where Menoa’s armies have besieged the First Citadel? Icarates, Non Morai, Iolites, and demons born from a thousand of the king’s dreams. You should hear the machines. You know how the Mesmerists make them, don’t you? Persuasion.”
Suddenly the thief made a frantic gesture. “Shush…the soul collectors are coming back.”
Icarates filed past the cage, their armour dribbling blue sparks. The stench of burnt metal followed them. By now Dill had learned not to look at them directly. Their tridents crackled and stung whenever they shoved them through the bars into his face. They would punish him until he thanked them for it. Better to simply lie still and hope they wouldn’t notice him.
One red day turned into another. Their passage through the Maze became dreamlike, as if seen through a veil. Dill viewed the world in glimpses: barges moving in the deeper canals, the steaming oxen and the crack of Carpal’s whip, the hag lolling in wild dementia, and warriors in other cages scraping stones along the edges of their fingers. The old woman faded and was revived three more times. They rolled past walls of ghosts and broken temples, and bulky machines that breathed out plumes of vapor.
One day they passed a vast square pool in which floated three tall metal ships. Deep, forlorn moans resounded within the hulls.
“From Pandemeria,” the thief explained. “These vessels are the commanders who led Menoa’s fleet against Rys.”
“What are they doing there?” Dill asked.
“Watching eternity go by.”
The endless trek began to take its toll on Dill. Most of the time he lacked the energy to rise, and instead lay wheezing helplessly in his bed of straw. He woke regularly without realizing that he had been asleep. At night the prisoners gibbered and howled. The dogcatchers’ flesh glistened; they snapped their teeth. Flies swarmed over the blistermen and laid their eggs in appalling places.
And on and on the procession crept.
Many days later the dwarf beat his head against the bars of their cage and cried out, “I’m weary, I’m bored. Where can I find something to steal?”
“Steal this!” yelled a man in the next cage. He whirled a sling over his head, then released it.
A pebble shot between the bars. It ricocheted off the dwarf’s skull and pinged away.
Those captives in the nearest cages shrieked with laughter. The soul collectors silenced everyone with a flurry of burning touches.
Although Dill could not share the good humor, he had begun to appreciate his surroundings more. The Maze was as beautiful as it was complex. This crimson playground which had at first driven him to such despair had become, by degrees, less threatening. There were so many marvels to behold: the chuckle of fluids behind the cage wheels; the bright chunks that clung to the spokes like rubies; the madwoman’s scrawl of white hair. He relished these sights. Once he spied silver-robed figures floating high in the sky and he felt his dead heart soar with wonder.
“Don’t look at them,” the thief warned. “Dangerous, dangerous creatures.”
How much time had passed, Dill did not know. The soul collectors found new prisoners for their caravan and threw them into the cages behind. There was a naked man without teeth or eyes and a bruised shapeless thing that could not stand unaided, a thin pale woman who never made a sound but just gaped at her darkly stained hands, and an old, old angel with a tin hat and only one wing. Most of the other captives laughed at this last find, but Dill only smiled.
He thanked the Icarates daily.
A year passed, or maybe a hundred years. Dill’s skin crawled with the memory of burns, yet these sensations were important to him. In those moments when he forgot the pain of the Icarates’ tridents a desperate panic came over him. The agony anchored him; without it, he feared he might forget who he was and start to fade like the hag. The soul collectors’ tridents gave him vigor; the burns he received kept him focused.
He couldn’t stop smiling. His friend, the thief, was always there to encourage him. “Fadder Carpal knows his business well,” he said. “He takes good care of us, of his family. He won’t let us become like
The phantasms gazed out at Dill from the stonework. Their lips were moving, but he could not hear their words, only the sound of Fadder Carpal’s whip.
One evening soon afterwards, the caravan reached its destination. Dill had been dreaming, and didn’t notice the grey towers at first. Instead he first became aware of crowds of strange creatures around his cage. A few of them resembled humans, but most had been changed. There were the usual Icarates and dogcatchers, and even a tall cloaked figure with a blisterman on a leash. Other figures moved with metal limbs or wheels and leaked foul- smelling smoke from their lips. Two women with crystal skulls paused to peer into Dill’s cage. A constant hubbub of chatter and mechanical clunks filled the canal through which they were passing. This avenue was different from those they had passed along before. Its walls were taller, full of windows and doorways that crept slowly past one another.
“We are here,” the dwarf said. “Here for show and then sale to the king’s captains. Look! Over there you can see the First Citadel.”
They had arrived in a great city. Monolithic black buildings lined the canals here, their flat roofs bristling with needlelike protrusions and slowly turning wheels. Smoke and fresh red mist wheezed from valves set in walls, but the waters in this shallow avenue were tinged with green and smelled of fuel.
Over all this towered a group of six stone towers, each supporting a flat platform at its summit. On each such platform grew a tree. Arched bridges between linked the platforms together, although three of these had collapsed. Blue windows shone in the tower walls below the platform-as though reflecting a different sky.
“The trees repel shades,” the thief explained. “And it’s said that the roots grow all the way down through the towers themselves.” He gazed up at the fortress hungrily. “There’s no way in from the ground. I would trade my hands for wings to sneak in there.”
Dill nodded his head woozily. Sleep beckoned him, but he resisted.
On through the streets the soul collectors’ procession sloshed. The dwellings lining the canal became sparser, replaced by arrays of chattering mechanical towers. Eventually these gave way to low ziggurats that exhaled white fumes and groaned as if packed with people.
Now the procession rolled into a wide circular arena hemmed by tiered stone steps and wound around itself in an expanding spiral. Dill at last staggered to his feet and pressed his face against the bars to get a better look. The soul collectors were unharnessing their kine. Between the wagons, the great beasts bellowed and bulled and reeked of dung. For the first time, Dill saw the entire procession at close quarters. Wagons were being unloaded, structures erected all around: huge spiked wheels and gaudy towers, and metal huts, each with a single puffing
