The old cripple sniggered. “I’ll enjoy that. I haven’t heard a woman scream in months.” He reached for her foot.
She kicked out. The glass scales on her heel clicked against those on his hand.
“Careful,” he hissed.
“I’ll kick you harder next time.”
He grinned. “Bad news for one of us.” Again he approached.
Mina sighed. “I did try to warn you.” She made a quick gesture with her hand, as if drawing a knot in the air. Then she bit her lip, drawing blood.
The cripple suddenly froze and stared at her uneasily. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He began to wheeze. “What…did you just do?”
“I didn’t do anything. You’re the one who got all hot.” It made her smile every time she used that line. “And look at where it’s got you now.”
The man let out a gasp. “I…”
“Can’t…” Mina said, mimicking him, “…breathe?”
Steam curled from the cripple’s glass scales, yet he remained rooted to the spot. The other men looked on in shocked silence as the scales glowed red. The smell of burning skin wafted through the slave pen.
“I told you I know spells,” Mina said. “This isn’t even a hard one.” She made another hand gesture, and the crippled man collapsed on the floor before her. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from him.
An hour later he had cooled enough to allow Mina to touch his scales. She pulled one of the glass plates off his shoulder and hid it inside the folds of her blanket. It would make a good addition to her collection.
22
The
There was no platform two, for beyond the solitary tongue of concrete beside the line the land sloped away in a steep embankment. At the base of this lay the Pandemerian door to Hell.
Harper had seen this place twice before, once on her journey to the Maze, and once on her return. After Cog’s great plague, the ground underneath the burial pit had sunk to form a vast basin. Over the subsequent years the steadily thickening Mesmerist Veil had turned this depression into a broad red lake.
Now as she filed off the train with Carrick and the Pandemerian passengers, Harper glanced down towards the pit again. Sections of one of the original steel tracks could be seen running along the base of the embankment, although the old station itself had been buried somewhere under their feet. Extra rails swept out to an engine shed, where Menoa’s old troop supply train had lain since the rains drowned these lowlands. Shades of grey and black defined the landscape down there; the low dykes and woodlands were as scrapes and smudges of charcoal on slate. Even in this weak light the engineer spied PortalLake. Dark masses of misshapen figures were waiting around it, peering into the greasy waters.
King Menoa stood on the platform. He had wrapped himself in a long dark robe and altered his mask to resemble the visage of an elderly man with a strong, proud jaw and kind eyes-exactly the sort of benevolent ruler he wished his human ambassadors to see. The hem of his robe blew raggedly behind him, although there was no wind.
By his side was a child-a thin, sad-eyed girl of about nine or ten wearing a grey dress. Lines of script had been tattooed in crimson ink into her arms and face. Her small hand clutched one of the king’s glass claws.
“Chief Liaison Officer,” Menoa said to Carrick. “How good to see you again.”
“The pleasure is mine, Your Highness.”
The king turned to Harper. “And my engineer,” he said. “Are you enjoying your new position with the railroad company?”
“It allows me to serve you, Your Highness.”
“Of course. I trust Chief Carrick has looked after you well?”
This civility was all for show, Harper knew. The king was presenting a human facade. Nevertheless she nodded.
The passengers had by now noticed the legions waiting around the Portal Lake, and the smiles they had prepared for the Lord of Hell were failing under a growing atmosphere of uncertainty. They shifted uncomfortably, their gazes returning again and again to the darkness below the embankment where the king’s demons waited. The thick wet air was already beginning to stain their fine clothes.
Menoa reassured them. “Reinforcements for the front lines,” he said. “A display of our power. When Rys kneels before you, he will know that the whole Mesmerist army stands at your back.”
As Harper’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw that this great dark horde stretched far across the fields beyond the portal. And she could hear them-the legions of beasts snuffling under the stars, the rumble of war machines moving in the distance. Reinforcements? This looked more like an invasion force.
“Friends,” said the king. “Mr. Lovich…Mr. Ersimmin…dear Edith. Between you, you own most of Cog City-the factories, the railroad, even the lives of the citizens themselves. Without your help, the process of change in Pandemeria would have been long and bloody.” He spilled a fist of soulpearls onto the platform and waited while the passengers scrambled after them. These would contain the lowest caste of demons and perhaps the odd human, worthless to anyone who used such trinkets for power, but they were scooped up by the guests like diamonds.
“You helped to shape this world in preparation for my coming,” the king went on, “and I thank you for that. You assisted me throughout this long campaign and, again, I am grateful.
“Tomorrow you will reap the rewards I have promised. After Rys abandons his foolish war against us, Pandemeria will become the center of our new world.” He urged the little girl forward. “Here is your treaty,” he said. “An unspoiled soul. Her name, of course, is Peace.”
Jones and Lovich frowned. Clearly this was not what they had expected; Harper could see their minds working to unravel this unexpected twist.
But then the child looked up at Menoa, and the king nodded.
The girl began to change, shrinking rapidly until she was a fraction of her original size. Her hair whirled around her, and then her body itself began to spin. She became a blur of tattooed script. Her flesh turned the colour of parchment. One of the female passengers took a sharp intake of breath.
Carrick stooped and picked up the scroll that had appeared in the child’s place.
“Bring Rys’s signature back to me,” King Menoa said. “And I will return the treaty to the Ninth Citadel. May it last forever.”
A great howl went up from the waiting armies, like the sudden onslaught of a storm. The platform shuddered as ten thousand boots, hooves, and claws beat against the earth around PortalLake. The passengers flinched. Mrs. Lovich buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as a cold gale tore across the platform.
King Menoa turned to face his horde.
Brands flared in the darkness below the embankment, tens of thousands of them, and Harper saw the king’s army clearly at last. There were ranks of Icarates and glittering Iolites and other, bulkier creatures with hammers for fists and great curling horns. The Blind composed a large part of this army, along with packs of dogcatchers and phantasms and Non Morai, and beasts like oxen or huge boars, and winged lesser demons and man-shaped gladiators in bronze plate. War machines covered the hills beyond the main force: great spiked spheres and smoking iron towers, lumbering armoured beasts carrying upon their backs cannon towers or crystal globes full of corpse mites and yellow flies. And in the middle of the plague pit stood an arconite.
A collective gasp came from the human onlookers.
