Iron Angel

chimney and its walls etched with hieroglyphs. Hammers pounded, ropes skreaked in pulleys. Thin metal boxes, as long as a man, were carried from one flat cart and stacked upon the sodden ground. Gladiators clashed their swords against their shields and whooped. Everywhere, men were shouting and thumping their cages.

“Now the Mesmerist captains will see what we can do!” the dwarf cried. “They will witness a dance of steel the like of which has not been seen since Hasp met Ayen’s bodyguards in the War Against Heaven. We’ll cut through dead men and demons and beasts from nameless worlds and give them wounds that will amaze them even as they sink into the mire.” He grabbed Dill and shook him. “Here is our chance to bathe Fadder Carpal in glory.”

Dill’s heart surged with joy.

The Icarates took three days to assemble their market. They beat Dill until he felt alive again. On the evening of the third night a heavy silence settled over the arena and the ad hoc collection of structures which had sprung up within its boundaries. The sky brooded, dark as a velvet shroud. Green and yellow lights bobbed on ropes between the cluttered towers, wheels, and huts, bathing all in harsh and sickly radiance. Soul collectors glided between the gladiator cages, their queer armour sparking brightly, their eye-lenses gleaming.

Dill was curled up on the floor of the cage, imagining the battles to come. He would shine for Fadder Carpal and fetch him a good price at the warrior’s market.

A strange crystal voice sounded nearby, like the chiming of tiny glass bells: “A thorough job as always, Fadder, although the process took much longer than the king expected.”

Silence.

“I understand, Fadder, but we cannot delay any longer. Menoa has already constructed the thirteenth arconite. His surgeons have now finished with Hasp and his woman. There are plans in motion. He needs the angel’s soul now.”

Another moment of silence.

“Of course we know about the splinter. The king is satisfied. It is time to bring Dill to the Processor.”

PART THREE

PANDEMERIA

19

ALICE ELLIS HARPER

The train to Coreollis rumbled along a narrow slag embankment above Upper Cog City, dragging mountains of smoke behind it. The lower districts remained flooded, but here the waters had receded some fifteen yards below the raised steel tracks, leaving streets clogged with silt and rusting warships. From the embankment’s slopes to the horizon, ten thousand vessels had been left to rot among the waterlogged shops and houses. Mangled heaps of gunboats and destroyers filled the plazas of Highcliffe and the Theater District, while the cries of these adapted souls rose higher still. Battleships loomed like great red headlands above rows of townhouse roofs, their hulls scarred by cannon-fire or scraped and dented by rubble from collapsed buildings, their groans of pain long and low. A Mesmerist-adapted war barge had come to rest against the roof of the cathedral in RevolutionPlaza, her bow pointing skywards, her stern deep in cafe tables and mud. The late-evening sun gave a molten edge to those funnels, decks, and gun batteries that rose above the chimneystacks, and bathed the brickwork between ships in soft amber light.

South of the terminus the embankment sank with the surrounding streets towards SillRiver, and here the waters rose to within a foot of the newly laid railway sleepers. Flooded lanes looped around the Offal Quarter factories like a giant fingerprint or like the canals of Hell, all choked with flotsam, furniture, and corpses. Nacreous swirls of oil and yellow, aquamarine, and ochre froths revolved between hull, keel, and lamppost. Cannon boats drifted in the deep square pools of old workhouse yards or lay beached on tenement roofs, their lines fouled in weather vanes. The bloodied waters in Emerald Street, Minster Street, and Canary Row were clogged with steam yachts and with painted dolls from the Low Cog Puppet Workshop. A breeze came up from the city: bitter, engine-scented air full of hot dust and strange metallic cries.

To Harper it seemed that the ships were singing laments she understood. These iron voices were no longer human, and yet they evinced human suffering clearly. The Mesmerist Veil had thinned over this old battleground, though blood could still be seen on the townhouse walls and in stagnant pools across the city. The train, however, had been adapted, not metaphysically, but mechanically. Pumps wheezed out clouds of crimson vapors behind the engineer.

King Menoa had granted her a human shape for this trip to the front. She had become a pale woman in a stiff, ash-coloured uniform. Now she stood on the hunting platform at the very rear of the train, idly fingering the tool belt at her hip. She had taken her cap off and her hair tumbled like red smoke. Up ahead, a whistle sounded. The train shuddered, then smacked across a bridge where the ruby-bright waters had eaten through the bank below. Shaken from her reverie, Harper turned away, dimly aware that she had been reading the names Menoa’s reservists had painted on the ships’ hulls, searching for one in particular.

The sun sank lower in the west until it slipped behind the vast silhouettes of the Mesmerist war-behemoths and god-smashers on the outskirts of the city. The train thundered on, building speed, cleaving through the river districts towards NewSillBridge and Knuckletown. Before the war, her engine had been nickle-plated and inlaid with silver filigree. But four years ago she was stripped of her decoration, rebored for power, and from that day forth the exhaust from her stack had stained her skin a deeper, more honest black than the hulls of her saltwater cousins.

Harper had loved the train the moment she’d first set eyes on her in the yards at Cog Island Terminus. The Pride of Eleanor Damask had been proud and unforgiving: eighteen coupled driving wheels powered by eight high-pressure cylinders. For four years now she had dragged shale, steel, and machinery for the railway reconstruction project. She had pushed the newly raised tracks closer to Coreollis and the front lines while Harper rotted in Hell. The Eleanor had once been a worker, a symbol of mankind’s determination to overcome impossible odds. For Harper, the train had once represented the human struggle-but to look at the old engine now inspired nothing but pathos.

Tonight the Eleanor was transformed. Her new glass carriages were all aglow and sparkling in a celebration of light and gold: observation cars crowned with faceted domes, a dining carriage of crystal geminate panes and spars of beech, two frost-walled sleeping wagons, and a music car in which chandeliers trembled over artfully etched mirrors. Only the demon carriage at the front of the train remained dark. Even the hunting platform had been constructed from crushed-composite glass and festooned with aether bulbs. All human work, and paid for with looted gold, for the King of the Maze had found allies in Pandemeria.

From this height Harper could see through the glass roofs immediately ahead of her. Mesmerist resonance muskets and shiftblades packed the racks in the train’s armoury. In the music car beyond, she spied fractured glimpses of revelry: gentlemen and ladies dancing, laughing, and chatting. Through the confusion of glass, three men in the same plum red suit appeared to be playing a white piano at different angles, although she could not hear the music above the pounding wheels and rushing air.

These were Cog’s elite, those men and women who had backed the Mesmerist campaign against Rys and his brothers. Tonight they were having a party at Menoa’s expense, and tomorrow morning the god of flowers and knives would kneel at their feet.