“Who did? Carrick?”
He nodded.
“An hour ago Carrick forbade me or anyone else from going anywhere near you.”
“Some of the ladies,” Hasp said, “thought my armour would look splendid in the sunlight. Your boss obliged them, and then took the opportunity to demonstrate his power over me. Sadly, I remain compelled to obey the orders of Menoa’s lackeys, so here I am. Who is this idiot on the wall?”
“Isaac Pilby,” Harper said. “He collects butterflies.”
The angel studied the man for a moment. “Let’s get back, then.”
“Excuse me,” Pilby called after them in a high voice. “I say! Excuse me?”
The angel and the engineer kept walking.
“You can’t leave me here,” the lepidopterist protested.
The
“Wait!” Pilby yelled after them. “Listen! I have a magic stone.”
“Oh, that’s funny,” Harper muttered. She faced Hasp. “How are you feeling now?” The angel’s eyes had remained the same dark, brooding grey since she’d last seen him. “Have you suffered any dizziness since…?” Since Carrick had forced him to murder.
“I’m fine,” Hasp said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t.
A shrill voice came from behind them. “I can pay. That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Mercenaries! You’re no better than Cohl’s Shades. Very well, you’ve made your point, now name your fee.”
“The chief enjoys power,” Harper said to the glass-armoured god. “That’s why he orders you to do these things. But your resistance to his commands will kill you. If you obeyed without question, without thought, he’d lose interest and you might stand a better chance of reaching Coreollis alive.”
Hasp grunted. “If I obeyed without question or thought, then I wouldn’t deserve to live.”
Harper sucked in mist from her rubber bulb. “What would you do if you
Hasp glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “I’d try to kill Menoa.” He shrugged. “In this armour, I’d pose no threat to him, but it would be a worthy end.”
The engineer was silent for a while. “I joined the Mesmerists for one reason,” she said at last. “My husband Tom was an officer in the King’s Reservists. After he died at Larnaig, I begged for an audience with Menoa. I wanted to convince him to give me Tom’s soul.” She remembered the months of pleading with Carrick at the Cog Island Liaison Centre. “I was rising quickly through the special engineering branch of the PRC, working on adapting Mesmerist technology to work in this world. It wasn’t easy-we had to engineer solutions for metaphysical devices the king could simply will into existence in Hell. Carrick refused to pass on my requests to meet Menoa, but after I had a breakthrough with the first Locators, the king actually asked to see me.”
“He thought you had potential?”
“The special engineering branch was crucial to the War Effort, and I was a crucial part of the branch. Once the king had heard my plea, he agreed to return Tom’s soul in exchange for a guaranteed term of service.”
“And he reneged on that deal?”
“He applies his philosophy of change to everything, including his promises. I soon learned that I couldn’t trust him.” She paused. What she was about to say, she had never told another person before. “So I went to Hell myself to find my husband.”
Hasp nodded. “You’re not the first to try it.”
“But of course Menoa expected me to try just that. I ended up working for him in Hell instead.” She sucked in another long breath of mist from her bulb. “And now I’m back here, and I’m dead, and I’d like someone to kill that bastard for me. Do you know anyone strong enough to accomplish such a feat?”
“I used to, but he’s not the same god he was before. He’s much more fragile now.”
Turning the corner, they stepped over the network of rusted steel tracks that led out from the engine shed. Harper glanced inside the building’s wide door but there were no locomotives inside, just a vast cavernous space pierced by dusty shafts of sunlight. Weeds reached through glassless metal windows in the outer wall and spread out in green veins across tired brickwork. Ahead of them, the
The majority of the passengers had alighted and stood some distance from the train in groups of three or more, chatting or smoking clay pipes. Some carried porcelain cups of tea or flutes of white wine. Harper noticed Jan Carrick talking to a group of three ladies who were laughing and beating the air with their fans. Slightly closer, Ersimmin appeared to be engaged in a fierce debate with Jones. The pianist gesticulated wildly in Harper’s direction, although he hadn’t turned and thus could not be aware of her arrival on the scene. The older white- whiskered man shot a glance her way, and his face flushed.
“I should probably have helped him,” she said to Hasp, “the man on the wall.”
The archon grunted. “What kind of man asks a lady to carry him through a pool of sludge?”
“A lady?”
Hasp’s neck buzzed. “That was the demon talking,” he said.
A call came from behind them: “I say!”
They turned.
Isaac Pilby had evidently resigned himself to the fact that he’d have to rescue himself. Shoeless and covered in tar up to his shins, the lepidopterist strode across the yard towards them, brandishing his folded parasol like a rapier, while his real sword swung in its white leather sheath at his side. He had been successful at keeping neither brolly nor blade entirely free of Moine’s pollution, for the tips of both now sported six inches of black gloop.
“You,” he said, jabbing the parasol at Harper, “abandoned me. And you,” now he jabbed the umbrella at the angel, “are an abomination in glass. Now both of you are completely responsible for and deserving of whatever amercement the Pandemerian Railroad Company sees fit to extract from you as a result of this incident. I have powerful friends!”
“If someone ordered me to kill him,” Hasp muttered, “I don’t think I’d resist
Either Pilby didn’t hear him, or he was choosing to ignore the angel. Chin thrust out, the little man strode on towards the train and her staring passengers, rocking his thin shoulders in an almost comical gait, as though desperate to squeeze every last shred of majesty from his sorely blemished appearance.
Jones was the first to approach him. “My dear sir,” he said, eyeing the other man with what appeared to be a degree of suspicion, “what on earth are you doing out here? Carrick, fetch a brandy for this man at once.”
Carrick looked up from his audience, a line of annoyance creasing his brow, then he saw Pilby and the frown deepened.
“I do not require alcohol,” the shoeless lepidopterist said, “merely a change of raiment and transport away from this foul place.” He planted the soiled tip of his parasol on the ground and raised his nose in an expression of haughty indifference. “I will compensate you handsomely for the inconvenience of returning this locomotive to CogCity. But know that I fully intend to write a severe-”
“We’ll take you with us,” Harper broke in, more to stop his endless prattling than from any great fear of reprisal. The sun was already making her feel nauseous and weak. “But we’re not heading back to Cog until the day after tomorrow. This train is bound for Coreollis.”
“Coreollis?” Pilby looked vaguely confused. “But they closed the Larnaig Ferry. There’s no way to reach the city by train now. And Coreollis is
“The PRC have just reopened the ferry.”
“Well, that’s bold,” said Edith Bainbridge, moving through the crowd of onlookers. She was wearing a different peach-coloured frock from the one she’d worn earlier. If anything it was peachier. “You, sir, are interfering with a diplomatic mission,” she said to Pilby. “Besides, why should you have a free ticket when we are financing this whole event? The idea is ridiculous. We’ve little enough room as it is.”
“Madame-” the lepidopterist began to object.
But Carrick broke in. “Compensation, you say?”
Harper exhaled quietly through her teeth. Carrick had a familiar distant, calculating look in his eyes. She half
