my eye on it for a while.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t play that tune every time I speak,” the other man said.
Ersimmin said, “It’s from a famous play, you know.”
The other man sighed. Harper thought he looked familiar, but couldn’t immediately place him.
A young woman in a puffy peach dress and black elbow-length gloves sauntered up to Harper. A fat necklace of soulpearls looped her powdered neck. “I think it’s disgusting,” she said. “Do we really need to plunder Hell for workers? Aren’t there living people who can do
This elicited a chorus of stifled shrieks and giggles from the younger ladies present, a collected frown from the older women, and a unanimous expression of bemused innocence from the gentlemen, each effected with various degrees of skill.
Harper realized she was staring at the woman’s soulpearls, and lowered her eyes. The speaker had half a hundred of them, there, on display like ordinary jewelry for anyone to see.
A collector, then.
King Menoa had already rewarded this one well.
“Excuse me.” Harper moved to push on through the crowd.
An elderly, white-whiskered man in a crimson suit extended an arm, blocking her way. He wore an extraordinarily fine Mesmeric sword at his hip, the pommel an exquisite knot of silace and crystal, the sheath an alabaster spike to match his mustache. “Please…Miss Harper, isn’t it? Won’t you stay and join us for a drink? My name is Duncan Jones.” He gave a curt bow. “I served with your husband in the King’s Reservists. Damn fine young man. We fought together at Larnaig.” He paused a moment, his cheeks flushing. “I’m sorry about what happened. This must be a difficult journey for you.”
“How can it be difficult?” said the woman in the peach dress. “Demons don’t have feelings, Mr. Jones.”
“She’s not a demon, Edith.”
“Why? Because she still has breasts?”
Another flurry of giggles swept through the younger ladies. Jones’s face reddened further; his whiskers twitched. Several of the other gentlemen had the decency to look embarrassed, but not, Harper noted, Ersimmin. The pianist was grinning.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Edith went on, “if she’s come from Hell then she’s earned that title.” She eyed the heavy flask and rubber bulb attached to Harper’s belt. “Don’t let her appearance deceive you. This woman breathes human blood, just like the rest of those foul creatures.”
Harper was already beginning to feel woozy. The mist pumps had not been switched on in here, and the air in this carriage was too thin for her dead lungs. But the young lady’s words had stung her, and she resisted inhaling a breath of mist from her bulb.
“Please let me pass,” she said.
“Feeling faint, dear?”
“Leave her be, Edith,” Jones said. “She doesn’t look well.”
The young lady raised her chin and gave the old reservist a supercilious glance, but she stepped aside to let the engineer pass.
Harper didn’t meet her eyes for more than an instant. She’d possessed a temper once, but it had dried up long ago. She left the music car as Ersimmin began to play a new tune, each note perfectly timed to match her rapidly retreating footsteps.
Car C boasted a lounge of gilt-edged pastel furniture, plush recliners and low tables, and scattered reading lamps fashioned like jelly-fish. It was currently deserted. Reflections of the room bounced back from the etched glass walls and gave the impression of a multitude of identical lounges placed side by side, but behind those phantom copies Harper spied the dark shapes of buildings and abandoned demon ships in Knuckletown slipping past. She didn’t have much time. The train would soon be pulling in to its first stop.
The human passengers were about to meet their hellish leader in the flesh.
Harper felt dizzy. She slipped the rubber bulb from her tool belt, raised it to her lips, and inhaled deeply. The dense mist cloyed at her throat, but it cleared her head and brought some colour back to her skin. She replenished the bulb with a trickle of liquid from her flask, and then considered the job ahead.
The lounge had a glass floor. Harper did her best to ignore the upturned faces in the slave pens below, but their stares burned into the back of her neck. She didn’t know which was worse, the gaunt, pleading looks from the slaves or the baleful glare from the god imprisoned with them.
She unscrewed a copper grille set low on the interior frosted-glass wall and slipped her Mesmeric Locator from its pouch on her belt. In nature it resembled the sceptre she had once carried across Hell, but this device had been manufactured in the laboratories in Highcliffe-a physical tool with a metaphysical core.
Warm perfumed air blew up through the exposed vent. After she had wound the crystal device, Harper set it resonating. A range of ninety to one hundred and twenty Bael cycles would pick up all unauthorized soul traffic, with angel or demon emotae at the higher end of the spectrum. Most likely, one of the passengers had broken a soulpearl, and they now had a human ghost aboard.
While Harper waited for the Locator to react, she checked the mist-pump feeder tubes and pressure gauges inside the vent. Everything seemed to be in order for the king’s arrival. It gave her a certain amount of pleasure to think of the living passengers breathing the same foul air as their master while he remained aboard.
The tiny needle wavered from one ideograph to another before it settled in the center of the plate.
Then it went off the scale.
Harper stared at the Locator in astonishment, not quite comprehending. She shook the Locator, then stopped herself. It was operating correctly. She’d calibrated it against stored ghosts at the Pandemerian Railroad Company terminus on CogIsland. The reading was not at fault. Quickly, her hands trembling, she reset the device and broadened the spectrum. Ninety to one hundred and sixty Baels-the range required to detect gods. Once more she set the Locator resonating, watched the needle waver, settle, and then leap.
The needle went off the scale.
Either the device was malfunctioning, or the intruder was something she had never seen before-which meant that it could not have come from Earth or Hell.
She did not, however, get the chance to speculate. From the direction of the music car came a loud bang, followed by the sound of women screaming.
A restaurant and two accommodation wagons separated the lounge from the music carriage. Harper stormed through the restaurant, shouldered curious and apprehensive stewards aside, bumped against tables and chairs, and slammed through the door to the first accommodation car only to find her way blocked by a fat little boy trailing along a dog in a bag. She would have jumped over the lad had he been a few inches shorter. As it was, she was forced to slow and sidle by him, her back brushing the wall of the glass corridor. She stepped over the dog: a tiny thing, zipped tightly into a richly woven travel bag so that only its head was visible.
“Do you work here?” the boy said.
“Don’t have time, son, sorry.” She took off down the corridor at a run.
“I heard screams,” he said. “Is it a ghost? Aunt Edith said I can hunt them at Coreollis. Got my own gun and everything.”
“Not a ghost,” Harper called back. She was halfway along the corridor. “Something else.”
“A demon, then?” He ran after her, pulling his imprisoned dog after him. Apparently the bag had wheels underneath. “Aunt Edith said I can hunt them when I grow up. Should I get my gun? Can I let Wolf-thunder out of his bag? I want to train him to hunt demons but they won’t let him wander about in case he poos.”
She had reached the end of the corridor. “I don’t know what it is. Stay here, it might be dangerous.” Without pausing, she slammed into the far door and plunged on through. The rapid squeaking of wheels came from somewhere behind. Wolf-thunder yipped.
The music car was in chaos. Three of the ladies had swooned and lay on recliners where they were being attended to by several of the gentlemen. The piano had been smashed into what looked like a pile of heavily lacquered kindling, wrapped in a confusion of wire. Ivory keys and small hammers were strewn everywhere. The white-whiskered reservist, Jones, was busy brushing most of it into the corner with his foot, while Ersimmin the pianist watched him-a look of amused befuddlement on his face. A strange odor lingered: the earthy scent of a
