Iron Angel

“And what about you, Alice Harper?” The battle-archon grinned savagely. “Who hurt you?”

Instinctively, Harper grabbed for the soulpearl hidden inside her blouse, then quickly dropped her hand. She could feel the empty jewel against her rapidly beating heart. Had Hasp noticed?

He simply turned and marched ahead, whirring, clacking, and leaking smoke from the mechanism behind his head like some ghastly automaton. His shiftblade scraped the carriage floor. “This parasite Menoa put in my skull is such a fickle thing,” he snarled. “So fickle.”

He threw open the door at the end of the corridor, ducked through, and stormed down the next carriage. No one had told him where to hunt for the demon. But Hasp had evidently decided to start the hunt as far away from the passengers as he could get.

The night outside smelled of rotting engines and old blood. Stars jostled with torrents of embers from the locomotive’s stack. Aether lights illuminated the embankment ahead of the train, exposing swathes of the black mud and wrecked shacks which had once been Knuckletown. To the south Harper could make out the shadow of Sill Wood, a low dark mass against the dark purple sky. She stood with Hasp on a narrow scaffold at the rear of the coal tender, buffeted by wind and noise: the rasping shovels of engineers feeding coal into the firebox, the Eleanor’s wheels drumming the tracks, the shuddering glass of the wagons curving away behind the engine like a string of jewel boxes.

Harper aimed her Locator back along the length of the train, and wound its frequency range to its broadest setting. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. More worryingly, her Locator didn’t know. The soul trapped within the device now appeared to be agitated-its needle oscillated wildly between ideographs, until Harper whispered to it to calm it down. Then the needle became still. “Nothing,” she shouted to Hasp over the thumping engine. “We’ll have to get closer to the source, or get lucky. I doubt I’ll measure a reading until we’re right on top of it.”

Hasp was watching the dark scenery rush past. “Promise me something,” he said.

“What?”

“Don’t ever let that girl in the slave pen become a Mesmerist.”

“I think that’s unlikely to happen. Let’s walk slowly. Be ready.”

“Is that an order?” he asked, dryly.

“If you like,” she said.

They worked their way back from the coal tender through the staff accommodation cars. The coal-shovelers, pressure engineer, and driver who made up the midnight shift were still asleep in their cots on either side of the central passageway, snoring like bulls. Harper swept her Locator over the men, but registered nothing unusual. Two stewards and a cook were playing at cards at a low table in the second bunk-wagon. Harper nodded a greeting to them, but didn’t linger.

Beyond this, they came to Carrick’s private quarters where a frost-glass wall divided the chief liaison officer’s suite from a sixty-foot-long corridor. Harper slipped inside the room she shared with her new boss.

Hasp followed close behind.

Dark opulence defined the suite. Gold thread fringed heavy wine-coloured drapes along the exterior wall. A tall Ellonese wardrobe stood at the far end of the room beside a mirrored dresser with claw-shaped ivory handles. Shelves on the interior wall displayed Carrick’s collection of melodiums, those sumptuous golden music boxes he had brought with him from his Highcliffe home. She knew every one of the tunes intimately.

Harper scanned the walls and finally the bed: a wide high-sided cot smothered in red silk and gold pillows. Her position in Hell had been determined by success or failure at given tasks. Now her rise through the ranks of the Pandemerian Railroad Company might be measured by the quality of bed linen on which she rested each night.

I could buy you a house of your own in the city, a private place.

Why had Carrick pursued her with such enthusiasm since her return from Hell? He’d never shown much interest in her while she’d been alive.

She sucked in a temporary breath of life from her bulb, thinking of the bed she’d once shared with Tom.

Hasp leaned on his shiftblade and glared around at the room with distaste. Harper noticed the frayed pile where the ragged tip of the angel’s sword pressed into Carrick’s ermine rug, and couldn’t suppress a smile. The chief would probably have a fit when he saw it.

“I’m reading something,” she said finally. “But it’s faint, a residual echo.”

The angel sniffed, and his forehead creased. “This room smells rotten. Your demon has been here.” He picked up one of Carrick’s melodiums and examined it.

Harper couldn’t smell anything unusual. “I don’t think it’s a demon,” she said. “My Locator didn’t recognize it.”

Hasp grunted. “It’s a demon all right. Just not something your device has encountered before. Do you think you’ve witnessed everything there is to see in this world? There are old and powerful things lurking in places that the Mesmerists never imagined. But those things stay away for a good reason-you know why?”

She shook her head.

“Because there’s nothing for them here. They don’t seek power, and they don’t need to creep into this world like stray dogs to lap at spilled blood.”

“Then why is it here?”

“How should I know?” He gave her a humorless smile. “Your Mesmerist toys aren’t going to bother this thing much. You won’t be able to damage it with a Screamer, I warn you. This intruder is a warrior.”

“Like you,” she said.

The smile left Hasp’s face. His eyes darkened and the mechanism behind his skull made a low crackling sound. He released the melodium, which clattered to the floor and began a chiming tune. Hasp glanced down at it for a moment, and then crushed it beneath his glass-sheathed heel.

“Careful,” Harper said. “Your armour is more fragile than you think.”

Hasp kicked the broken pieces away.

The engineer gazed blankly at the scattered fragments of the music box, thinking. Beyond the Veil all known demons and shades haunted only those dark places of the world: the black city of Moine, Spire Nine back on Cog Island, the old whaling station down at Nigel’s Folly before Rys’s rain had flooded Pandemeria-places where battles had been fought and men had died. They came like flies in the wake of murder. The Mesmerists had long known that portals into the Maze could be opened only with the blood of the dead. But what could have caused such a powerful entity to manifest here? If it had no interest in blood…

“It was summoned?” she said.

Hasp’s smile was almost warm. “Clever girl. Now you’re beginning to understand. You have a saboteur aboard. Someone or something doesn’t want us all to reach Coreollis alive.”

“But who would gain by disrupting the peace treaty?”

“Only those with no future to lose.”

A vision of Tom came to her then: as one of many sailors boarding the tender that would take them out to the Karlsbad, the last god-smasher-class warship to sail for Larnaig. Menoa had constructed the huge vessel from a single archon’s soul. The Mesmerist Veil smothered the drowned city that was once their home. Crowds of onlookers had jostled on the temporary wharfs and pontoons built around the ever- shrinking islands of Highcliffe. Red waters sloshed against the piles under her feet. She remembered seeing the spire of Cog Cathedral, the only part of that great building which had remained above the rising waters. Somebody had contrived a way to make the bells ring, and they were clamouring now. Tom laughed, waving from the deck. He called out above the noise:

If I end up dead, you better ask Menoa to return my ghost. I’m not spending eternity in Hell with all these bastards. You should hear their awful jokes.

She called back to Tom as the tender cast off:

You think I’m going to spend my life saving up for a soulpearl? She had laughed with him. Don’t you dare get yourself killed. We can’t afford it.

That had been the last time she’d seen her husband. For all King Menoa’s promises, the soulpearl next to Harper’s heart remained empty.

The melodium lay in pieces scattered across the rug. Harper suddenly realized that Carrick would be furious at the loss of such a precious toy. She felt like destroying the rest of them then, snatching them off the shelves and hurling them against the wall. But she needed Carrick’s help. She needed to stay firm.