fathomless pit beneath the chained city to the corridors of Hell itself. It was a wonder he had maintained any of his sanity at all.
They had tied up Cospinol's stores as best they could. The stacked barrels and crates had been inclined to topple over each time Dill turned his monstrous head-prompting Mina and Hasp to leap aside in order to avoid damaging their fragile skins. Now both the thaumaturge and the debased god were slumped against the piled goods. Hasp looked twice as exhausted as Mina, the parasite in his skull having tormented him throughout the night. Only Mina's hideous little dog, Basilis, had managed to sleep easily.
Cospinol had provided them with rude furnishings: rugs, blankets, lanterns, and even an old table and chairs. The chairs and lamps had fallen over, and now stood in a heap against one side of the jaw, but the table remained where they had set it-a huge rotten old slab of wood that smelled faintly of brine.
The sky lightened. They had no view but one of fog. Occasionally Mina closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the mist, announcing the position of those arconites she could sense. Six of Menoa's twelve golems remained within the fog, following them to the south. The others were lost, somewhere beyond the reach of her sorcerous vision.
This troubled Rachel. Had those giants now gone after Anchor and Cospinol? If they had managed to stop the tethered man before he reached the portal, then all hope rested on Mina's crazy plan to attack Heaven.
She stretched her neck, then rose and peered out of Dill's mouth. Nothing but a flat greyness in the sky ahead, a bleary carpet of forest below. “How much further does this woodland stretch?” she asked.
“A hundred and twenty leagues,” Hasp replied. “It once covered most of Pandemeria, but the Pandemerian Railroad Company cut vast swaths of it down during the railway reconstruction project. All that's left are the old forests beyond Coreollis. The Northmen were once woodsmen, you should remember.”
“We must have covered at least eighty leagues during the night,” Rachel said, “if Dill managed to keep a straight course, that is. Aren't we supposed to have reached the Rye Valley by now?”
They had decided to head for the Flower Lakes, a system of deepwater reservoirs Rys had formed by damming two of the rivers in the north. The lands around there were reputed to be the garden of Coreollis, and there they hoped to lose their pursuers. Dill's trail through the Great Pandemerian Forest was too easy to follow but, if his giant footprints could be hidden under deep water, they might yet slip away from Menoa's arconites in the dense fog.
Hasp shrugged. “I have no idea where we are, nor where to find the Flower Lakes from here.” He winced and pressed a hand against his head. “No doubt Mina or Basilis has an inkling. Everything in this grey gloom seems evident to her.”
Mina looked up. “The land keeps rising northwards and forms a low ridge. I can see a forest trail half a league to the northeast. It seems to have been used recently by a large number of people-refugees, I think, from an abandoned loggers' town lying to the southeast. The road runs on through a second, much smaller camp next to a sawmill, but that looks deserted, too. Just a group of workers' houses, storage sheds, and a shuttered inn. There's a huge yellow machine-an abandoned steam tractor-but it doesn't look like anyone's been working there recently.”
“So, where are we?”
She shook her head. “I've no idea.”
Hasp grunted. “Would that Cospinol had possessed a map.”
Sabor's realm lay to the north of Pandemeria and the Flower Lakes. It was a wild, ice-blown land-a place named Herica since before man's memory. Cospinol had described it as a country of white bears and five-limbed beasts larger than aurochs. Sabor's fortress-the oddly titled
None of this helped Mina, who could sense, in the minutest detail, the leagues of forest within the surrounding fog and yet couldn't explain how their immediate environs corresponded to the wider world. Without sun or stars to guide them, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning. And they were lost.
Rachel gazed down through the gaps in Dill's teeth. From this height she could see an unbroken canopy of misty trees. Acres of dismal grey forest swept by them with each of the arconite's steps. “We could stop and ask for directions,” she suggested.
Hasp laughed.
It was the first time Rachel had heard the god laugh. She turned to look at him and noticed that the strain had left his eyes.
“I'm serious,” she said. “In this gloom we can't even be sure if we're heading in the right direction. Mina, how close is that camp?”
Even the thaumaturge was smiling. “A few minutes away. I can't see anyone about, although there may be people in one of the houses.” She looked at Hasp.
“Why not?” he said.
Rachel gazed up at the arconite's palate. “Dill? Did you hear us?”
The bony chamber tilted sharply forward and then back, causing the chairs and lamps to slide across the floor and crash against Dill's barrier of giant teeth. Hasp and Mina clung on for their lives.
Hasp let out a snarl and righted himself, his face contorting with anger. “Would you remind him to stop doing that?” he growled at Rachel. “Nine Hells, it's bad enough being trapped in this damn cave, without him almost killing us every time he nods his head.” He grabbed both sides of his head roughly, then twisted away in pain and stormed off to the back of the chamber.
Rachel placed a hand against the side of Dill's inner jaw. She didn't even know if he could sense her touch or not. “Head for the settlement, Dill. Let's find someone who knows where we are.”
The village hugged one edge of a broad clearing in the forest. Several hectares of the nearby woodland had been cut to provide grazing land for animals, but it looked like most of the wood had been brought in from other places via the many smaller cart tracks that radiated out from the central sawmill. Wedge-shaped piles of fresh logs waited in the fog behind a row of shacks with tin chimneys. The shuttered inn stood at one end, but Rachel did not see any signs of life. The sawmill itself was a long low shed with an overgrown sod-and-grass roof. A belt ran through the shed wall to a bright red steam tractor positioned outside, but the machine was not currently operating.
The former assassin glanced at Mina. Hadn't she said that tractor was yellow? It seemed like an odd mistake to make, but hardly an important one. Perhaps Rachel had simply been mistaken.
“It's safe enough,” the thaumaturge said. “But don't take too long.”
Rachel slipped out between Dill's teeth and onto his hand, and he lowered her to the ground. His four- hundred-foot-high body crouched over her, his useless wings blurring into the sky above him. As soon as he became motionless, all vestige of life seemed to desert him. He was a mountain, or an ancient and hideous piece of sculpture, as much a part of the landscape as was the settlement. The smell of chemicals and grease appeared to ooze from the scratches and whorls in his impossible bones. He had kept his skull raised level while he stooped, and the dark caves of his eye sockets now stared ahead at nothing.
She hopped down from his palm onto a deeply pocked and rutted track showing signs that a large number of people had been this way recently. Beyond the road, the row of shacks waited in the mist, their glassless windows dark. A wall of conifers stood behind them, the boles stripped of lower branches and tinged broccoli green.
Rachel approached the dwellings cautiously.
She searched three of them in turn and found nothing. They were simple one-roomed huts with bunks for six workers in each. The bedding and mattresses were missing. In the fourth shack she found a freshly cut pile of firewood beside the potbelly stove, and four human skulls lying on the floor. She placed her hand on the iron cooking plate. It still felt warm.
The inn was a larger, two-story building, constructed from heavy interconnected logs and painted grey. A wooden sign hung above the door, bearing the words
Rachel walked around the building's perimeter, trying both of the locked doors and many of the small shuttered windows. After she returned to the front she banged on the main entrance door. Nothing. She kicked the door in.
A broad saloon took up most of this floor. Shelves packed with whisky bottles occupied the wall behind the
