Iron Angel

pencil in his hand snapped in two. He let out a long sigh and tossed the broken fragments away. “Two hundred thousand,” he muttered. “And I manage to slay less than thirty.”

“You gave up.”

He grunted.

Mina slouched back from him. The other slaves remained motionless, breathing gently. She recognized none of them, and none would meet her eye. Crystal chandeliers trembled in the lounge above them, illuminating the thin glass scales covering their faces and necks. Perhaps she ought to have spoken with them before this, but what was the point now? They had accepted whatever fate would befall them. Now they simply sat there and counted their own breaths. So she thought about her father instead, bumbling about their house in Lye Street, chattering about the badlands north of Deepgate and all the gold he hadn’t found and all the lead that he had. He had been a big man, like Hasp. And in all his life, she had never seen him give up.

She let her gaze roam over the fine furnishings on the opposite side of the ceiling: the soft gold curlicues of a table, an opaque blue vase, the leaves etched into a mirror. Beautiful, she supposed, and yet cold. She could not enjoy such objects. Mina imagined she could hear soft music over the insistent thump of the train, and she strained to see through the carriage roof to the stars beyond. Hasp had supposedly once been one of those stars; Ulcis and Rys, too. But the heavens were invisible from down here, obscured by a hundred aether lights. Wasn’t it funny how the most transient things could outshine the timeless?

She slid her body even closer to the angel, and then rattled one of his pencils repeatedly against his shoulder-guard, trying to time each of her taps to the pulse of his blood inside the glass veins. Hasp blew through his teeth, then hunched further over his sketch, evidently trying his best to ignore her. But had his heartbeat quickened? Mina fancied that it had. “Please,” she whined, “I’ll make it worth your while…” Now there was something to think about. Could Hasp still-?

“Get away from him!” The new voice had come from behind. Mina twisted round to see a female engineer unlocking the door to the slave pen. Beyond the woman, a gloomy corridor ran the length of the carriage; through its outer wall Mina glimpsed dark brickwork and steel blurring past.

“He’s not some animal to be prodded,” Harper said. She briefly inhaled mist from a rubber bulb. “And he’s dangerous. Carrick should never have put him in here with the rest of you.”

“He’s not dangerous.” Mina laid a hand upon the angel’s arm; his armour felt surprisingly hot. “Are you?”

“Leave.” Hasp jerked his arm away from her. “I have warned you…”

Harper ducked inside the slave pen. “They want you upstairs,” she said to Hasp. “Bring your shiftblade. Let’s go.”

The blood pulsing within the angel’s glass armour seemed to quicken even more. He trembled, his eyes blackened, and he snatched up his weapon. “Odd,” he growled, frowning at the blade with an expression of distaste and confusion, as though he’d just picked up a river snake and was trying to work out why. “Odd that I should recognize your voice.” He stared up at her. “Menoa has changed your form since the last time we met.”

The engineer nodded. “Alice Harper.”

“You were a serpent.”

Harper studied him a moment, then said, “I order you to drop the weapon.”

At once, Hasp released the shiftblade. The sword cracked against the glassy floor. Most of the slaves flinched away from the sound-all except Mina, who was watching intently.

Hasp winced. “I see nothing has changed.”

“The parasite in your skull,” Harper said slowly, “will obey any of King Menoa’s servants. Even the weakest of them could order you to slay yourself-” she inclined her head “-or your woman there, and you would be forced to comply without hesitation.”

Hasp glanced at Mina, but said nothing.

“If you try to resist it,” Harper said, “it will eventually kill you.”

The god’s massive shoulders bunched under two dozen plates of overlapping glass; tubes flexed; cords in his neck pushed against his transparent collar. “Before or after I reach Coreollis?” he said.

The engineer looked away. “It’s agitated because it has been removed from Hell. That’s why it’s causing you so much pain. I can stop that from happening.”

“My thanks.”

“Then you’ll come upstairs with me?”

Hasp snorted a laugh. “As long as you don’t order me to.”

The engineer crouched down beside him. She rummaged in her tool belt, and after a brief moment brought out a slender silver device about the size of a pencil, which she twisted at various places along its length. The tool crackled and then made a high-pitched whining sound. “Lean forward,” she said.

Hasp obeyed, and Harper inserted the device into a tiny slot at the back of his skull. “Tell me if this hurts,” she said, “or if you begin to feel dizzy.” She inhaled from her bulb again and then, gently, blew into the device. After a moment she paused and said, “You may experience a brief moment of confusion, some bright flashes of colour at the edges of your vision, unusual sounds or smells. If you think you’re going to pass out, tell me at once.”

The god gasped, and then bared his teeth, “Get that…thing out of my mind!”

Harper withdrew the device, and stood up. “It’s done,” she said. “The demon is calmer now. But you’re going to have to stop resisting it.”

“Stop resisting it?” Hasp pressed his fist against his breastplate, at the place where the blood spread from his heart in a crimson web across his chest, and took several deep breaths. “If I don’t resist it I’m dead anyway. When Rys learns that his own brother has become a tool, a weapon to be used by any of his enemies…” He shook his head. “Tell me, Alice Harper, what would you do?”

The engineer looked down at him with an expression that might have been pity. She shrugged. “I’d make friends with a Mesmerist.”

Hasp’s grunt was almost a laugh. He reclaimed his shiftblade and stood up. “You want me to kill something, I presume.”

From inside the slave pen, Mina Greene tried to follow the angel’s progress along the corridor and up the stairs to the lounge, but she soon lost sight of him among the confusion of glints and glimmers within the train. She glanced down at Hasp’s sketches, now strewn across the floor amidst the fragments of his broken pencil. She gathered up the sheets of paper, then flopped down and leafed through them.

Each sketch was different, but of a similar subject: stone keeps and towers of every shape and size, round or square, tall or stubby; each with battlements and high turrets, narrow windows and thick iron portcullises, deep moats and stout drawbridges. Mina tossed the drawings away. Ultimately they were all boring. Hasp sketched nothing but castles.

21

FLOWER

Hasp strode into the music carriage, and into the center of a circle of cold stares. The humans fell silent as he entered. His armour shifted and clicked, the blood-filled plates rasping over one another and over his skin, splitting the light from chandeliers and reading lamps into a mirage of rainbows. Since Menoa had imprisoned him inside the suit, Hasp had learned to ignore the physical discomfort. His body had hardened and no longer pounded with infection. But he had yet to grow accustomed to the profound sense of vulnerability.

He hated the Mesmerists for that feeling, and hated those who assisted them. Without his parasitic conscience he would happily have murdered every one of these odious bastards. They knew it, of course; he could read it in their flushed faces and their ridiculous affected postures of ease, in the way they toyed with their jewelry, soulpearls, or weapons. They were thrilled, frightened, entertained. The web of blood around the god’s heart seethed and boiled inside its glass prison.

These people had sold their souls for power.

All five of the men had armed themselves, two with crystal Mesmeric blades-the other three, including King