Iron Angel

something else…the odor of bones and tombs. For a long, long moment the automaton seemed content to watch them.

Dill?

Was there anything left of the young angel in there? Did he realize who or where he was? Could the Lord of the First Citadel now reason with him? She had to hope so.

But Chief Carrick had other ideas. “Kill it,” he ordered.

And the words rewoke the parasite lodged in Hasp’s mind.

The order had been given, and the glass-sheathed god remained compelled to obey it. He broke away from the group, vaulted over the balustrade towards the front of the ship. He tore a coil of rope free from one of the Sally’s lifeboats, and ran towards the bow, his shiftblade gripped in one huge fist.

Harper cried out for the angel to stop, but Hasp ignored her.

Jones called out his own command, but the angel still refused to halt. “It seems the parasite no longer considers us to be loyal servants of the king,” the old reservist said. “I daresay Menoa did not approve of what he saw through the arconite’s eyes. We have been cut loose.”

Harper faced Carrick. “Hasp can’t kill that!” she said. “But he knew the young angel in Hell. He helped him, protected him. Just let him try to talk to Dill.”

The chief liaison officer glared at her with utter hatred in his eyes. “You’ve chosen your side, Alice. You’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of your…miserable existence.” He shot a glance at Jones’s sword. “The glass bastard’s too far away to hear any more orders now.”

The automaton’s grinning skull filled the dismal sky. Tiny white gulls wheeled in slow circles around it or settled, finding rude perches among so many acres of bone, dropping specks of shit. Still the machine made no move. Its eye sockets were caverns. In its stillness, it had once more become an inanimate thing: of ridges, cracks, and hollows-dead spaces to be eroded by the wind, places where the rain might gather and pool. But Harper knew there would be anguish, even despair, boiling at the creature’s core. The thaumaturge’s strange fires had wrapped around its soul, like a fist squeezing the poison from its beating heart, and then they had retreated, freeing the creature from Menoa’s grip. Now Dill’s soul would be exposed to the agony of metal and bone and chemical blood, and to the knowledge of what he had become.

Hasp had by now reached the place where the automaton’s hand gripped the ship. He leapt from the deck to the back of the creature’s knuckle, then set off again, scrambling along the vines of steel hydraulic tubing which wrapped the forearm. The automaton, if it sensed his presence, paid him no more attention than it would have given to a fly. Clearly Hasp was too insignificant to be worth the effort of swatting. At the elbow joint, the god slipped between two pistons and began to climb the upper arm, into the shade of the clavicle.

The arconite chose this moment to unleash its fury. Its right hand remained pressed against the bow, while the left, a clawed fist, suddenly loomed overhead and smashed through the superstructure near the stern of the vessel. Metal buckled and tore. The concussion knocked Harper from her feet; her head struck the deck hard. When she looked up she saw a sky full of teeth, and then the clouds seemed to fall towards her.

The automaton had hefted the steamship airborne in its right fist. The deck lurched, sloped away at a dizzy angle. From inside the saloon came the sound of smashing crockery or glass, the thud of heavy objects breaking against interior bulkheads, the smell of burning lamp oil. A metal groan trembled through the wooden planks beneath her; cables stuttered and pinged. There was a series of snaps and one of the Sally’s two funnels toppled forward, plowing through the ship’s bridge with a jaw-breaking boom. Harper glimpsed heaving grey waters far below the bow of the vessel, flecks of white foam. She clung on desperately. Pistons rumbling, the Sally plunged suddenly backwards through the air.

The automaton drew back its arm to throw the ship.

From somewhere Harper thought she heard the sound of battle.

The parasite chattered inside Hasp’s skull, insisting on destruction even as the angel raged against the command he had been given. This giant was Dill, the very archon he had fought so hard to save in Hell. And now he had been ordered to slay him. A red mist blurred the god’s vision, a veil his fury sought to cut through with his sword. He had tied his rope to a pipe near the automaton’s scapula, the other end around his own midriff. Now he reached the creature’s shoulder.

Before him loomed the arconite’s spine and skull. Hasp could see wires among the vertebrae. He ran across the plates of bone, his blade ready.

The skull turned.

For a heartbeat, something glimmered deep in the arconite’s eye sockets-in the crystals which had replaced Dill’s eyes. His huge jaws opened and closed with a crash.

“I have been ordered to slay you,” Hasp shouted. “And I cannot resist this order.” His mind swam under the strain of speaking. “Kill me and save yourself.”

A voice rolled out from the thing, as deep as an earthquake. “Hasp…”

“Slay me, Dill.” Hasp had reached the arconite’s neck. He raised his shiftblade and plunged it into a nest of wires and crystals and cogs between two vertebrae, trying to hack it all to shreds. But he could not dent nor even scratch the machinery.

The arconite howled.

Its massive fist came up and closed around the glass-skinned archon, and Hasp did not flee. He could not stop himself from harming Dill, but he had been given no orders to protect himself.

A cage of bones now surrounded him, and Hasp felt himself being suddenly carried out far across the waters of LakeLarnaig. The parasite in his skull demanded destruction. Before the god could stop himself, he turned his shiftblade into an axe, and began to hack at the skeletal fingers before him.

The fist opened.

And once more Hasp found himself staring up at that huge face. Dill’s dead eyes lacked expression. His grin could not express whatever emotions he felt. Yet Hasp sensed turmoil within that skull. Dill could easily have crushed the archon in his hand, and yet he hadn’t.

Hasp raised his axe again.

A voice cried out somewhere below. The words eluded Hasp. He clove his axe into the arconite’s wrist. No wound or gouge appeared under his blade, and yet the arconite cried out in agony. Hasp lifted his axe again.

“Stop…order…Hasp!”

This time Hasp recognized the voice. Chief Carrick was calling out from below. Had he just ordered Hasp to stop the attack? The glass-armoured god looked down.

Far down below on the deck of the steamship, Jones had a blade against Carrick’s throat. “Stop the attack,” Carrick shouted. “That’s an order.”

Harper was standing next to the pair, a look of vast relief on her face. Jones just looked up and grinned.

“When we saw how the arconite reacted to you,” Harper explained to Hasp, “Jones persuaded Carrick to intervene.”

“I-” Carrick began.

Jones moved his sword closer to the chief liaison officer’s throat. “Remember what we said about silence?” he reminded the other man.

Hasp had returned to the Sally’s deck without further incident. The arconite had then lowered the steamship back into the water and now towered over them, peering down. Hundreds of birds had settled on its great tattered wings. The other passengers had retired to the saloon for a stiff drink.

“His name is Dill,” Hasp said.

Harper could only nod. Of all of them, she had played the greatest part in his downfall.

Dill had woken from a terrible dream, and yet he found the reality of his present situation identical to the memories of that nightmare. His body felt strangely numb, disconnected, with no sensation of cold or warmth-only pain. The skeletal arms and legs he saw before him could not be his, and yet-disturbingly-they moved in correspondence to his own conscious movements. He heard engines pounding somewhere nearby, but he could not at first locate them. The sound of gusting wind reached his ears, yet he felt nothing.

He was standing up to his shins in a pool, peering down at a tiny ship. From its deck tiny people stared back up at him. In his nightmare he had walked across a miniature landscape of small trees, grasses, desolate moors, or stone-hemmed fields left to grow wild. He had come to a steep bank and stepped down into a shallow pool. Voices