Rachel stole another glance up at the building's delirious facades. The stonework blurred like ten thousand storm-blown flags, a riot of colour that contracted and then expanded to such heights that it seemed to reach beyond the surrounding mountains themselves.
The god of clocks dwelling within now expected her to enter his domain and, by some temporal trickery, travel back ten hours to meet her own self. And then? To force another Rachel to return here once more? To travel back through those same ten hours? Would some part of her soul remain forever trapped here in a loop of Sabor's devising? Rachel's head spun with the consequences of it all. She felt angry and tired and sick.
She swallowed hard and followed Iron Head inside the massive building.
The River of the Failed would not be beaten, but neither would Carnival. She dragged her wings through its bloody waters and used her demon sword to hack down the foes it raised against her.
There was no end to them.
They came at her in endless waves, thousands upon thousands: simulacrums of Cospinol's gallowsmen, warriors from unknown continents and ages past, crimson giants and angels made after her own image, and queer bestial things of the river's own devising. They shrieked and howled. They bullied and taunted her and tore at her with claws and teeth and bloody weapons formed of the crystallized fluid itself. She should have flown above their reach and smashed her way back into Hell.
But she didn't. She stayed in the river because the butchery was here, and her rage would not otherwise be sated.
She fought tirelessly, not knowing or caring if she truly damaged the river, for those she slew died shrieking, only to rise again and confront her in new forms. They were cunning and fast, but Carnival was faster and more treacherous than all of them. She murdered with a terrible efficacy honed by aeons of survival.
Yet their numbers were vast, and sometimes those watery blades nicked her flesh. The scarred angel was well used to that pain and returned tenfold the wounds she sustained.
She fought just for the sake of the battle, without any motive other than a desperate and unquenchable need to hurt the world around her. Cold rage steered her hand, but she had no final destination in mind. In the grip of war, she strode wherever the river currents took her, and murdered everything she encountered in her path.
Hell loomed above, like a sky of brick and iron and glass, and through its myriad bright windows the souls of the damned watched her pass below. She glimpsed them shudder and turn away, but felt nothing for them. The damned did not concern her.
How long she fought she could not say. It seemed like many days and nights. The river was endless, the creatures it birthed uncountable. This army had no limits, and neither did the angel who walked amongst them.
But the demon sword began to fail.
A low wail issued from the weapon. The shape-shifter was tiring, his steel edge growing dull. Carnival put more muscle behind the cuts she made. She didn't question or demand more from the sword; she simply fought harder. Her anger rose to meet the demon child's failings. And the red figures fell in even greater numbers than before. She drank in their screams as she carved through them.
Soon she noticed changes in her opponents. Now the great majority of her foes had assumed winged forms. Was this done in mockery of the scarred angel herself? Carnival didn't understand the river's motives, nor did she care. Her own brutality exceeded any violence these crimson forms could inflict, and so she used them as a necessary anathema toward which to direct her thirst for destruction.
In time the sword lost its edge entirely. The shape-shifter had reached his limits, and he could no longer sustain the sharpness such a blade required to cut through flesh. The metal moaned woefully in her fist. In mortal hands the failing weapon would have now merely broken bones. Carnival simply put more of her strength behind each blow. The sword cried out in agony, but Carnival ignored it. A million enemies still waited to be slain.
By degrees the attacks against her lessened. Her winged opponents hesitated. Often they held back entirely, reluctant to be the next to meet her blade.
Carnival's fury bucked again inside her, and she threw herself amongst them. If they would not bring the fight to her, then she would take it to them. She leapt at them and spun, and hewed them down. Arcs of blood followed her wailing sword. Dragging her wings through the weakening currents, she moved ever onwards, now grinning desperately as she tried to incite bloodlust from her reluctant foes.
Suddenly they stopped altogether.
She rushed at them, and they collapsed back into the bloody waters. She wheeled and threw herself at new foes, but those also dissolved into nothing.
“Fight me,” she cried.
But they would not. The myriad figures around her returned to the bloody river. The waters receded, draining into nearby channels as they drew back from her thighs. Soon Carnival stood alone on a slick red riverbed. “Fight,” she insisted.
But the River of the Failed had rejected her.
She felt the sword tremble. The demon weapon sighed and then flowed out of her fist, as the shape-shifter resumed his human form.
He became a child once more. He crouched by her feet, seemingly unable to stand. He looked boneless, partially dissolved. His thin metal fingers splayed across the moist ground. One of his eyes swiveled round to meet her gaze. The other followed a moment later. “It was testing you,” he said.
Carnival just stared at him.
“Why else would it keep fighting?” he added. “It can't be destroyed. You can't even really hurt it. It was just testing you.”
“Why?”
The shape-shifter appeared to shrug, but his shoulders moved in odd directions. “Cospinol said the river was an infant,” he said. “He said that it doesn't know what it is, that it is still learning what to become. I reckon that's why it formed itself into all them angels. It was trying to copy
Carnival gazed out across the subterranean realm. Twenty paces away the red waterways flowed all around, but they came no nearer. Standing in this shallow depression, she had the impression that the river was waiting for something.
“I'm tired,” the boy said. “I want to go home.” He leaned back and closed his eyes.
The scarred angel grunted. Her heart continued to hammer, as her scars writhed and itched. The battle with the river had not been enough, and she still hungered for war. Her dark gaze dropped to the demon child, and a sudden knot of rage tightened in her gut. It took all of her will to stop herself from ripping out his throat.
She needed a blade desperately.
Mercifully, the shape-shifter hadn't noticed her anger. His face had paled and he was staring up with wide eyes. “No, no, no,” he said. “Not here.”
Carnival looked up.
Overhead the sky looked different. Instead of the usual cluttered mass of brick and iron, a series of black iron conduits led up into the Maze from here. The stonework around these pipes appeared smooth and uniform, apparently the result of some grander design than simply the chaotic crush of countless souls. This looked
“Not here,” the boy wailed. “I won't go back… I won't!”
“What is it?”
“The Ninth Citadel,” he sobbed. “This is where they made me!”
The boy sobbed, and rubbed tears from his eyes. “King Menoa is up there,” he said. “The Lord of the Maze and all his armies and his Icarates.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose. “The river brought you here to meet its father.”
Iron Head led the party into a tall stone gatehouse and, while his men waited there, he took Rachel and Mina on through a massive copper door and into the heart of the castle of the god of clocks.
Whatever Rachel had been expecting, this wasn't it. Iron Head put his shoulder to the metal door behind them, and it swung shut with a resounding boom. The subsequent echoes gave the sense of an immense chamber,
