Iron Angel

expected him to ask how much. But, given the present company, she doubted even Carrick would be so crass.

“Well, yes,” Pilby remarked. “It’s only fair. Return me to the terminus at CogCity and we’ll discuss some payment for your services. I am a man of considerable means. Indeed, if I had known the Pandemerian Railroad Company had reopened the route, I would undoubtedly have bought a ticket myself.”

Carrick grinned. “Harper, find this gentleman some shoes, will you?”

But before the engineer could go and find Pilby some footwear, a cry came from one of the stewards. There had been a terrible accident. Edgar Lovich was dead. The passengers rushed back inside to discover the actor’s body lying sprawled in one of corridors. Lovich’s wife, Yve, let out a shriek of horror and dropped to stem the flow of blood from her husband’s body. But it was already too late. Edgar Lovich had died within the last hour. Someone had stabbed him in the chest.

Yet nobody, it seemed, had seen anything.

Harper gave instructions to the crew to mop up the spilled blood, and left the ladies to accompany the sobbing wife back to her bedroom. Then, ignoring Carrick’s quarantine, she told Hasp to follow her back to the slave pens. As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, she asked the god, “Did you kill Lovich?”

“Yes,” he replied without hesitation.

“Why?”

Hasp shrugged. “I can’t think of a plausible reason or motive.”

“Did someone order you to do it?”

“No.”

The engineer frowned. Not only was Hasp incapable of violence against any of Menoa’s ambassadors without a direct order, but if someone had ordered him to slay the actor, then couldn’t they also have ordered the god to lie so as not to implicate the real culprit?

She tried again. “I order you to answer my next question truthfully. Did someone order you to kill Lovich?”

Hasp winced. He reeled, staggering against the carriage wall. And then he dropped to his knees on the floor, clutching his skull and moaning.

“Forget that order,” Harper said quickly. “Hasp? Don’t answer my question.”

The tension left the angel’s face. “No more questions,” he breathed. “The parasite…”

Harper understood. Menoa’s parasite was punishing him for failing to answer her question. But it was also preventing him from answering that same question. The angel had been given two mutually opposing orders-he could not obey one without disobeying the other.

“If you were instructed not to reveal the identity of the murderer under any circumstances, then any question that threatened that order-”

“Might kill me,” Hasp finished in a despondent tone.

Harper was thinking hard. How could she get to the truth of this if Hasp could not speak?

If a passenger could get away with one murder, what else would they use the doomed god for? Would the engineer be at risk herself? She phrased her next question carefully. “If I asked you to detail your exact movements since Carrick released you from the slave pen, would you wish to answer?”

“No,” the angel said.

Of course not. Even that information would implicate someone. “Let’s get you out of the passengers’ way, then,” she said.

Back in the slave pen, Harper studied the remaining captives. After the cripple’s death, eight of Rys’s Northmen remained, together with Hasp’s young female companion from his palace in Hell. The men sat apart from one another in silence, their scaly bodies wrapped in blankets. Not one of them would meet the engineer’s eye. “Did any of you see what happened?” she asked.

The girl spoke up. “Why? What happened?”

“A passenger was killed.”

“Someone was killed in here, too, but you don’t seem so bothered about that.”

Harper shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about it?” The truth was Carrick had actually threatened to put her off the train for pursuing the matter. He cared nothing for these people. Ten slaves or nine, it made no difference to him. Harper doubted that it made much difference to Rys, either. The handover was nothing more than a gesture of goodwill-intended to show the citizens of Coreollis that their new king was benign and just.

The presence of Menoa’s vast and terrible army at their doorstep would merely reinforce the point.

A low sky and ceaseless drizzle shrouded The Pride of Eleanor Damask’s arrival at the southern end of the IalarPass. Smoke from her stack boiled up between wet granite cliffs on either side, rock faces which still bore the pickax scrapes of those slave labourers who had widened the natural ravine here in recent years. Overhead the clouds bunched together in clumps like dirty sheep’s wool. The train slowed, the solid thump of her pistons reverberating in the narrower space. Then she sounded her whistle. Echoes bounced among the hidden, cloud-wrapped mountain peaks, before a horn blast from the Sally outpost answered the call. The soldiers stationed ahead, just beyond the pass, would now be preparing to wake the ancient steamer which would carry them across LakeLarnaig to Coreollis.

Another voice answered the whistle, this one a long low roar which rumbled across the heavens. Menoa’s arconite came into view, striding between the foothills at the base of Rael Canna Moor. Its skull and shoulders were lost above the clouds, giving it the appearance of a decapitated giant. Engines thundered behind its ribs, powered by some arcane system of blood and fuel the Mesmerists had developed in Hell. Its voice echoed like thunder over the hidden mountain peaks:

“I am ready to serve.”

It turned away and strode quickly into the mists ahead, shaking the ground under its feet.

To watch this spectacle of divine engineering, the passengers had gathered upon the viewing platform of Observation Car One. Rain dripped from colourful umbrellas as the party waited: the men in one group, smoking cigars while they discussed in layman’s terms the mechanics, torque, and forces about to be employed; the ladies in an excited huddle, whispering about some duke and his mistress and what she had said to so-and-so three months ago.

Harper stood back from the group in an attempt to avoid the occasional acerbic glances from both Isaac Pilby, who still blamed her for the loss of his brogues, and Edith Bainbridge, who held the engineer accountable for everything else that had gone wrong, including the weather. She breathed mist from her bulb whenever she felt her strength begin to wane.

Jones had given the lepidopterist a pair of shoes from his own wardrobe, while Ersimmin, being of a closer size to the newcomer, had donated several of his own crimson suits. Both the pianist and the elderly reservist seemed to have taken a special interest in Pilby, for they rarely left the small man’s side. The three of them together, in their dark red suits, reminded Harper of the fractured glimpse she’d seen of the pianist through the music car ceiling.

Did the trio have more in common than the white sword sheaths they each wore? She didn’t dwell on the matter. Whatever common ground they shared would be cinched by the social circle in which they moved-a closed world to someone from Harper’s background.

Yet Jan Carrick seemingly remained unable to see the gulf of this class divide. Pilby had come to some financial arrangement with Menoa’s chief liaison officer, who had evidently regarded this as the first rung of a ladder that would raise him to a position of equality with the very guests he fawned over. The passengers tolerated the chief, of course, but they would never welcome him into their fold. They smiled and chatted with him, but with a barely concealed contempt Carrick utterly failed to notice.

At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the Eleanor’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.

The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four