Iron Angel

“Then you’re the White Sword?” Harper said.

The pianist gave a curt bow. “I’m more confident of that title now, although I can’t be certain until I have faced the remainder of Cohl’s Shades. I’ve heard of one Kirillin warrior who has collected twenty-two blades already.” He shrugged, and appeared to stifle a smirk. “Almost as many as myself.”

Jones helped Harper up. “How many of you bloody mercenaries are on board?” he asked. “I suppose Lovich was another one?”

“Hardly.” Ersimmin snorted. “He was just a terrible actor with a painted blade-an embarrassment to all of Cohl’s Shades. There was no need for me to challenge him to a fight.”

Harper inhaled deeply from her bulb. So this was the man who had ordered Hasp to kill Lovich? She was about to demand answers from him when her Locator shrilled.

Ersimmin eyed the device in her hands. “King Menoa foresaw difficulties, so he hired me to protect this mission and to allow you to do your job, Miss Harper. Can you stop this sabotage?”

“I don’t know,” Harper admitted. And, truthfully, she didn’t know if she wanted to stop the sabotage. The loss of an arconite would be a tremendous blow to Menoa. In a small way it would be revenge for what had happened to Tom. But if she failed Menoa now, she might never get close to him again. And she could not predict what the automaton would do if it were freed from the king’s influence.

A whisper of steel. Jones had drawn his own rapier from its sheath and now swept it in an arc from his hip towards the pianist’s neck. Ersimmin parried, before lashing out a fist at the side of the older man’s head. Jones ducked, striking the other man hard in the chest with his elbow. The pianist recoiled. Jones pushed his blade deep into the other man’s heart.

Ersimmin’s body slumped to the deck atop Pilby’s corpse.

“Arrogant bastard,” Jones muttered. He put one foot on Ersimmin’s pelvis and heaved the bloody sword free of the other man’s chest.

For a moment Harper stared at him in shocked silence. “Don’t tell me you’re…”

“The White Sword?” Jones picked up the pianist’s handkerchief and wiped his own blade clean. The metal shone a dull stony colour. “No. I suppose I’m actually somewhere in the mid-greys.” He grabbed both Ersimmin’s and Pilby’s discarded weapons and tossed them over the side of the ship into the lake below.

“Aren’t you supposed to hold on to those?” Harper asked. “In order to ascend the ranks?”

The old man grunted. “I’m just in it for the money. The moment you possess a pure white or black sword, then every one of Cohl’s Shades comes after you. Besides…” He hefted his own grey blade. “This one is just as sharp as the others.”

Edith Bainbridge stepped forward, raising her chin. “Mid-grey!” she shrilled. “This puts an entirely new perspective on our arrangement, Mr. Jones.” Her eyes became small and hard. “I was under the impression I had hired a grand master of Kiril, and yet you appear to be little better than a common cutthroat. Mid-grey indeed! You have misled me, sir.”

Jones shrugged. He glanced up at the automaton and then turned to face Harper. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “But I can’t let you stop this process. It seems that Pilby and I unwittingly shared the same contract. Had Ersimmin not slain him, there would have been no need to reveal my identity.”

“You’re Rys’s agent?”

He directed a nod to Edith Bainbridge.

“He works for me,” the small woman said. “And I work for the god of flowers and knives.” She smiled. “You Mesmerists think the human race exists to be used, moulded to any purpose that suits your warped ideology. Unlike you, dear, I chose not to abandon my own race.”

“We won’t hurt you,” Jones said. “Provided you do not interfere with our plans.”

“You brought a thaumaturge aboard? Who is he?”

Jones looked peevish. “Honestly, we don’t know. If Rys is behind this sorcery, he didn’t mention it to us.” He shrugged. “But then he said nothing about Pilby, either. It matters not. The thaumaturge’s actions suit our purpose, and so we will not interfere.”

The Sally Broom had by now steamed some sixty yards out from the base of the cliffs and was heading in a wide curve away from the automaton. A ribbon of froth bobbed up and down in her wake, carried by the swell of the grey lake waters. High above them the arconite appeared to be in a state of great agitation. The castle-sized skull stared down at the engine in its own chest, where the colourful fires now blazed. Flames of green and black danced deep within the machinery, illuminating gears, pistons, and blood vats. With a mighty creak and thump of metal, the arconite raised one huge hand and beat it against its ribcage. Gulls burst from nests within the titan’s shoulders and neck, their alarm cries shrill and distant.

“You don’t understand,” Harper said to Jones and Edith. “If the arconite is released from Hell’s influence, it will become independent, unpredictable. We’ll be put in grave danger.”

“Carrick,” Jones said, “would you be so kind as to inform the Sally’s captain of our predicament? I’d suggest to him he might want to increase our speed and move us directly away from the automaton.”

All this time, Chief Carrick had been sitting on the hurricane deck, slack-jawed, staring witlessly at the corpses of Ersimmin and Pilby. Now his glassy eyes darted up to meet Jones’s. “Yes, sir.” He scrambled to his feet and departed.

A great iron clamour fell from the clouds, like the clash of a hundred bells. The fires had contracted into a knot around the arconite’s chest, and drawn from it a cry of anguish. The five-hundred-foot-tall mechanical archon shuddered, then threw its arms and wings wide. A cold blast of wind rippled the surface of LakeLarnaig, lifting rags of spume, which blew across the steamship’s deck. The Sally rocked on her belly, riding each swell, chugging steadily away from the bone giant and the base of the Moine Massif…but not fast enough, for as Harper ran inside to fetch Hasp, she glanced up to see the giant’s skull turn slowly to fix its gaze upon the ship.

“Is it free?” Jones asked.

“Yes,” Harper replied. “Iril help us!”

“Good. Then Menoa has been deprived of a weapon.”

The arconite raised its fists to the heavens and roared. And then it began to march towards the tiny fleeing vessel.

Down the stairwell the engineer raced. The smack of her boots on the metal floor seemed distant, as though a queer silence had filled the air spaces between bulkheads, a stillness that muffled the drum of the Sally’s own engines, the heave and slap of waves against her hull. It felt like an omen, a taste of death. Hasp could not slay the monster outside. The automaton need only lift the ship and cast her far across LakeLarnaig, or push her decks down into the freezing waters. It would be the simplest thing. Harper plunged deeper into the vessel, though inside or outside, it made no difference; she would drown either way.

In the Eleanor’s slave pen she discovered a gruesome scene. Blood covered the floor of the cramped space. The corpses of most of the slaves lay heaped in the corner. Only two had survived: Hasp, and the young woman, whom the god held in his arms. She was unconscious but breathing.

“Our thaumaturge?” the engineer asked.

“Mina Greene, of Deepgate.” Hasp replied. “I fear she has exerted herself too much.”

“Come with me quickly.”

“More killing?”

Harper just stared at his glass skin and shuddered. Back on the uppermost deck of the Sally Broom, she watched the arconite stride through the lake towards them. Huge waves, formed by the movement of its legs, rolled across the surface of the waters and pounded the side of the vessel. Gulls swarmed around it like confetti.

It halted, filling the entire scope of Harper’s vision, and crouched beside the ship.

But rather than crushing the Sally’s hull, the bones of one vast hand curled, almost tenderly, around her bow, halting her forward movement.

And then it brought its skull close to peer at its captives.

Deep inside the dead eye sockets, the engineer saw black crystals glittering. She heard the continuous clatter of engines from its cranium and ribs, the slow thump of weird chemical blood. She smelled rust and grease, and