God of Clocks

“Anchor?” Mr. D said. “I demand an audience with your master.”

The tethered man sighed and lowered himself into the gaping hole. It was utterly dark down there. He felt a lattice of iron beams around him, jutting from brick facades, but there was enough space to climb down between it all. “An audience?” he called back, flexing his shoulders as he took up the strain of the Rotsward's rope. “It is no problem. Cospinol will be along in a moment.” Then he gripped an iron strut and began to drag himself down into the abyss.

Eventually John Anchor ran out of Maze. The girders and facades he had been using to drag himself down terminated suddenly. He broke through a floor and found nothing below but air. So he pulled in a mile or so of slack rope, and then jumped.

He fell for a long moment and landed in at least four feet of thick, cloying liquid. His head went under and then he came up again, spitting and gagging. He wiped his eyes, but could see nothing but a red blur. The stink of fouled meat filled his mouth and nostrils, and he spat repeatedly to try to remove it. The floor underneath the waters felt as smooth as skin. He heard echoes of his own coughs and gasps, the slosh and gurgle of fluid.

When he stood up again, the liquid flowed sluggishly around his belly and seemed to tug him in several directions at once. He rubbed sticky fluid away from his eyes, and then blinked them open.

He was in a space without walls, an immense gap underneath the twisted iron and redbrick roots of Hell. The base of the Maze formed an impossible ceiling overhead. Without any obvious means of support, the leagues of cluttered stonework and metal filled the heavens like a massive bank of thunderclouds. Rays of light fell from countless windows in the dwellings overhead, dappling the surrounding landscape.

The ground beneath was uneven and treacherous. Narrow channels of crimson water looped and spiraled and twisted back on themselves in an endless scrawl. Ribs of raised fleshy material separated the waterways, and in the patchy gloom, the swamp seemed to stretch to eternity. From all around came the constant sound of dripping, as the blood trickling down through Hell reached this open space and fell like rain.

A beam of harsher light flashed across the waters just to the left, revealing their dark, bloody colour, before vanishing once more. An instant later the same light reappeared overhead as Harper climbed down the Rotsward's rope. She was lowering herself down through a rift in the ceiling, and a wandlike crystal device gripped between her teeth proved to be the source of illumination. She stopped, dangling a few feet below the ceiling, and then shone the wand around her.

The Icarate cages had fallen nearby, and most of the twenty enclosures had toppled over and now lay on their sides, partially submerged, while four still stood upright on the raised banks. Long shadows reached out from the bars as Harper swung the light across them.

Every one of the cages was empty.

Anchor looked around for Mr. D. The proprietor had probably fallen somewhere nearby. After all, most of his collapsed emporium lay scattered around here. Cabinets and bottles bobbed in the red waters. A moment later, a smile came to his lips as he spotted Mr. D's strange wheeled box rolling across one of the raised banks, heading away into the darkness.

The metaphysical engineer swept her beam beyond the cages. The circle of light caught flashes like sparkling rubies, illuminated pockets of rippling water, and veins throbbing within a low, muscular bank. Falling droplets flashed in the gloom. And then the beam settled somewhere behind Anchor.

Harper let out a startled gasp. “John,” she said quietly, “we've found our ants' nest.”

Anchor turned to look.

They were standing in the water. Wet red figures like rude sculptures of men had risen up from the shallow depths and now stood motionless and glistening under the glare of Harper's wand. Anchor estimated there to be a hundred or more of them. He couldn't detect any eyes in those faces, but he noticed mouths and teeth.

Harper called down, “The waters are sentient. These creatures are not individual souls. They're extensions of the river itself, parts of the god of the Failed.”

Anchor faced the figures. “Hello.”

The figures spoke together in one fluid whisper. “Are you an Icarate?” Echoes hissed through the conduit like a breeze, so that it seemed like the air itself had spoken.

“Do I look like one?” Anchor replied.

They hesitated. “What do you want here?”

The rope at Anchor's back thrummed, and his master's voice sounded in his head:

Don't mention Menoa, Cospinol warned. This is treacherous ground. Ask it to grant us passage under Hell to the Ninth Citadel. We're seeking the source of the Icarate infestation.

Anchor relayed his master's words.

The figures were silent for a while. Finally they said, “You bring me food.”

Anchor frowned. He couldn't be sure if this was a question or a statement-or what it referred to.

“I think it means the gallowsmen,” Harper said. “If it can sense all the souls aboard the Rotsward, it would certainly regard them as sustenance, a veritable feast.” She untangled her legs from around the rope and slid further down. A foot from the surface of the water she hesitated and tightened her grip on the soul bottle clamped to her breast. Then she let go, plunging into the river up to her chest.

She faced the big man, her expression full of awe. “A river of disassociated dead,” she muttered. “John, this is vaster than I ever imagined. It could become anything.”

She cupped a hand in the water, raised it to her lips, and took a sip.

Anchor grimaced at the sight.

Cospinol spoke through the rope: It can have the damned gallowsmen if it lets us pass. Tell it we want an alliance. Tell it we're itsfriend. It ate those bloody Icarates we brought down with us, for god's sake. We need to spend time with it, and talk to it.

Anchor relayed the message.

The figures waited for another long moment. Finally they said, all together, “Follow me.”

The tethered man watched as, one by one, those glutinous figures slowly sank back into the River of the Failed. “Follow you where?” he inquired, but in that vast darkness only the echo of his own voice answered.

But then the currents eddying around him shifted and strengthened in one mighty surge. The channel in which he stood began to flow purposefully in the opposite direction.

Harper stumbled, but Anchor grabbed her and held her firm. She clutched the bottle and light wand to her chest as the crimson waters bubbled and frothed around her shoulders.

Carried by this new force, the empty Icarate cages slid away into darkness.

Anchor pulled the engineer close to him. “Don't lose your bottle,” he said.

She laughed. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

He frowned. “The water is very high. Your bottle might go whoosh”-he made a sweeping gesture with his hand-“and then you will lose your husband's soul.”

“Never mind,” she said.

Anchor began to heave the Rotsward's rope down towards the hungry river. “These gallowsmen aren't going to like this,” he said. “Nobody likes to be eaten. I know this from experience.”

But Harper wasn't listening to him. She was hugging her bottle and crying.

They waited in that same cramped crawl space above the boiling room for hours, until the slaves finally finished their shift at Carnival's brazier, only to watch in frustration as four more slaves appeared to take their comrades' places.

Monk crawled away from the hole and then dragged the boy close to him so that he could whisper in his ear. “Gods damned waste of time,” he said. “Why didn't you tell me they never leave her alone?”

“I did,” muttered the boy. He thought it rather unfair that Monk was putting the blame on him. The whole thing was the old man's idea in the first place.

The astronomer stretched out his legs and winced. “You'd think they'd be too busy smashing up Hell to stay at their brazier.” He drew a hand across his stubbled jaw. “What we need,” he decided, “is some sort of diversion.”