then set her dog down on the ground. “Menoa tricked us at Larnaig. We managed to free Dill because the Lord of the Maze wished us to do so-and now we face the consequences of our actions.” She sighed. “He used us like puppets, Rachel. Basilis is furious about it, and yet he's reluctant to commit himself to a fixed plan of action until he understands the king's motives. My master does not want to be fooled again.”
“What do
“I think we don't have a choice. If Menoa is steering our actions, then we risk helping him in whatever we do. But if we do nothing at all, we die.”
Dill carried them onwards, the tiny island of humanity cradled in his dead hands. The smell of Maze-forged bones and metal filled the night. His gait spanned swaths of dark forest, heels pounding the earth, a deep rhythm that seemed to stir an unspoken presage in the hearts of the waiting militiamen.
Now Rachel could hear the noise of the pursuing arconite clearly. She turned to Mina. “We'll make a stand now. I'll tell Dill to set us down.”
“Wait.” Mina bit her lip. “Rachel, I think there's a way we can beat this thing. I just need to get inside its head.”
“In what way?”
“Physically!”
Rachel understood. If the construction of Menoa's arconite mirrored Dill's, then they would find within it a chamber containing the trapped soul of an angel. “Shit, Mina, we'll have to get inside its jaw.”
But by then they had run out of time, for Menoa's arconite was already upon them.
The automaton came crashing out of the fog. In its Maze-forged armour it was far bulkier than Dill. Dull green soul lights lingered around the edges of its bracers, cuisses, and greaves, like the remnants of some queer electric storm. It moved stiffly and unnaturally, issuing gouts of steam from its shoulder joints. Its ironclad limbs were darkly spattered with human and Mesmerist gore from the killing field at Larnaig. Half of its skull had been burned black by some unknown inferno. In one massive gauntlet it held a steel cleaver the extent of a city wall.
Oran's men fell back cursing and gasping as the stink of the creature fell upon them: an odour of the dead, of those tens of thousands slain at Larnaig and Coreollis. The arconite brought with it the stench of war.
“Dill,” Rachel cried, “set us down.”
Dill turned and stooped and set the inn down roughly upon the forest track. The Rusty Saw's timbers creaked in protest. One corner of the building tilted and sank into its now-crumbling island, forcing great clumps of earth aside. Oran's militiamen leapt down, carrying ropes and axes, and spread out into the trees on either side.
Dill stood and faced the other arconite.
The automaton paused. It stood back in the fog. Its metal armour, though dark with blood, grease, and soil, was limned by a queer green radiance-like a star-festooned fortress emerged from the moonlit clouds. Its useless wings reared up behind it like great tattered sails. Engines ticked within its cuirass and scorched skull. Smoke gusted from its joints and uncurled around the naked vertebrae of its neck. With a massive shriek and groan of metal, it took a step forward and swiped sideways with its cleaver.
Dill moved to intercept.
The earth around them shuddered.
Dill met the other automaton's blow with his open palm. The concussion bleached all sound from Rachel's ears except for a shrill painful monotone. She saw men on their knees on the ground with their hands pressed against the sides of their heads. For several heartbeats she heard nothing but the sharp whine inside her own skull…
… Until she became aware of movement again, of the frenzied crunch of shattered trees and bushes, the screech of grinding metal. Somewhere in the dark skies overhead the two arconites fought. The moon vanished and then reappeared, as Menoa's great warrior grabbed Dill's neck and shoved him back. Dill retreated, his heels ramming craters into the earthen road on either side of the displaced inn. Voices cried out in the fog all around- women, howling children, all fleeing the Rusty Saw, scrambling away through mud and mist. Shadowy figures loped through the surrounding forest as Oran's men closed on the intruding arconite.
Mina tugged Rachel's arm, whispering urgently, “Tell him to bring it down.”
Rachel looked up. She could make out little but vague shapes looming in the mist, the flicker of green light around armour and bone, the flash of the enemy's monstrous cleaver. Another massive concussion shook the ground. Someone screamed in terror.
“Dill!” Rachel cried over the voice, “knock the bastard's feet from underneath it. Topple it.”
One huge ironclad heel thumped into the ground ten paces from Rachel. Mina stumbled and fell. Rachel grabbed her grey cassock roughly and pulled her aside as branches rained down upon them both. The assassin slipped in the mud, her wrist striking a rock buried in the clay. She dragged Mina into the darkness beneath the trees as great shadows moved across the heavens. Behind her rose a wall of blood-soaked metal. Sounds of weapons rang out from somewhere nearby, followed by another momentous clash as the arconites exchanged blows. Green lights rippled and flashed through the canopy overhead, like chemical fires.
Mina's sorcerous mist rolled and broke across the area around the track and the inn, glowing in the moonlight as though imbued with some spectral energy of its own. Rachel caught glimpses of the scene: Dill's bone limbs moving amidst columns of rank red metal, the roots of upended trees reaching from banks of wet earth, crushed bodies lying half buried in the mire or trapped under dark masses of smashed boughs. Through a break in the fog Rachel spied a score of Oran's woodsmen advancing upon the intruding automaton with ropes, trying in vain to bind its shins to trees. The great bone-and-metal limbs shifted again. She heard death cries, and then yells of rage and grief.
“What's happening back there?” Mina cried.
Rachel shoved her on, into the dark forest. “I don't know. But we need-”
A sudden clash of metal stole her words. She looked back, her ears ringing. The two giants now stood locked together, struggling in the mist. Dill's heel slid backwards and exploded through a dirt bank. Clods of earth spattered the inn and the forest canopy beyond. He turned, twisted, and thumped his foot back down. Oran's voice sounded distantly, barking orders at his men. A woman wailed somewhere to the south. The green lights in the sky moved suddenly, violently, and then seemed to
Menoa's arconite fell.
Vast wings flashed across the heavens. A blast of dank air tore through the forest. The automaton struck the ground with such force that it threw Rachel off her feet. She landed in soft earth, mud and humus filling her mouth and nostrils. The bandage had unraveled from her head and now hung in loose loops around her neck. She spat out dirt.
Mina was now crouching against an earth embankment, panting heavily. Back in the clearing around the inn, Oran's woodsmen let out a roar of triumph. Rachel could see little through the trees but vague green lights pulsing in the mist. She extended a hand and helped the thaumaturge to her feet. “Hurry,” she said. “We might only have a few moments. I don't know how long Dill can keep that big bastard down.”
A strange scene greeted them as they left the forest gloom. Menoa's arconite had fallen headlong along the track, just beyond the Rusty Saw, with one arm trapped underneath its cuirass, and its vast mothy wings bent over at a shallow angle. Its huge metal cleaver rested against a nearby tree like a toppled monolith. Dill knelt on the giant's back, crushing one of its wings under his shin, while gripping its neck in his fist as he pinned it to the ground. He had forced its blackened skull down into the mud, and it lay there motionless, stinking of death and wreathed in gouts of its own engine smoke.
Enraged and emboldened with whisky, a group of Oran's men had climbed upon the arconite's back to probe for weaknesses in its armour with their axes. As Rachel hurried under the fallen giant's wing and around its shoulder, she noticed the whorls and scrawls etched in those metal plates: esoteric looping designs that again reminded her so much of the hull of the Tooth that had cut through Deepgate's chains. And yet this construct was very much from Hell.
Mina noticed Rachel's puzzlement. “Heaven and Hell have more in common than most would suspect,” she advised. “Remember that Ayen and Iril were once lovers. They came from the same unknown place.”
“What about King Menoa?”
Mina shrugged. “That's a more difficult question to answer. Menoa has been in Hell since the very beginning.
