God of Clocks (13 page)

He dropped past windows and portholes through which he barely glimpsed rooms. They passed in the blink of an eye, like sudden memories.

Anchor came to an abrupt halt as the rope attached to his back snapped taut, a sudden jarring that tore the breath from his lungs.
Somewhere overhead the
Rotsward
had come to rest against the mouth of the funnel. The big man hung there for a few moments, gazing down at the horizontal beams of light that crisscrossed the dark shaft below. He could not see the bottom. He glanced up and spied a similar sight: Light from many windows cut across the narrow space, illuminating dust motes and lozenges of the rusty shaft interior.

He wrung his hands together, swung himself over to the side of the shaft, and smashed a fist through the nearest window. Beyond lay a room no larger than a cupboard, full of old boxes and chests. Something wailed and shuffled deeper in the shadows, but Anchor paid it no heed. He took a deep breath, then pulled himself further down the shaft, breaking more windows to make handholds for himself.

From overhead came the sounds of crumbling stone, rending metal, and screams. Anchor just bulled his muscles and dragged the
Rotsward
even further down through the living fabric of Hell. The landscape above would move, or be destroyed. He didn't care which.

After a while he began to hum an old shanty he'd once been taught by Pandemerian fishermen off the Riot Coast. The rhythm of the song matched his exertions.
Heave the anchor, pull her up,
he sang in his head,
smash that window, pull me down.
Chunks of bloody masonry from the Maze above fell constantly, battering his harness and shoulders.
Smash that window, pull me down.

Eventually he reached the bottom. Here the shaft opened into a larger chamber below, a metal sphere perhaps fifty feet across. Anchor heaved in enough slack from the
Rotsward's
rope to allow himself to drop down into that gloomy space.

He landed on a pile of detritus that had been shaken loose by the skyship further up the shaft. Four circular steel doors, one at each compass point, offered potential exits from the chamber, but only one of them was open. In this doorway stood a little girl.

She was about eight years old and painfully thin, dressed in a
stiff black dress with white ruffs at the neck and wrists. Her huge blue eyes regarded Anchor from under a burst of blond hair. In her sticklike arms she cradled an odd-looking spear, with a glass bulb at the rear and a fragment of clear crystal at the business end. This weapon made an intermittent crackling sound, like footsteps on gravel.

“You're not a ghost,” she said.

“No, lass.” He beamed at her. “I'm John Anchor.”

“What you doing in my ghost trap?”

“Your
ghost trap
?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “Mr. D's ghost trap, I mean. You're not even supposed to be here anyway. Why have you got a rope on your back?” She jabbed her spear at the mounds of rubble all around him. “And what's all that stuff there? Mr. D won't be pleased about
that
at all.”

“Where is Mr. D?”

“Back in the shipyard, of course,” she said. Suddenly she blinked. “You're not here to trade for those Icarates, are you?”

Anchor raised his brows. Had she meant
trade on behalf of the Icarates
? Or did she actually expect him to trade something
in exchange for
Menoa's priests? Was it possible that this Mr. D could be holding Icarates as
hostages
? Anchor was curious. And what did the girl mean by
the shipyard
? This whole operation clearly had nothing to do with King Menoa. “The Icarates?” he replied. “Yes, I am here to trade.”

Now she looked uncertain. “Maybe I don't believe you.”

Anchor shrugged. “Why else would I be here? Mr. D won't be very happy if we keep him waiting, will he?”

She bit her bottom lip and looked at the rubble again. “All right,” she said. “Let's go then. You'll need to leave that rope behind because otherwise I won't be able close the
Princess's
door.”

“The rope stays,” Anchor said.

She glanced back nervously, then shrugged and walked away.

He followed her out of the chamber, ducking inside the open
doorway, but then stopped when he saw what awaited him on the other side.

It almost looked like the interior of an airship envelope. A series of concentric steel rings ran along the inside of a long metal hull that tapered to points at both ends. Anchor was standing at one of the narrow ends. In the center of this enormous space a complex clockwork engine squatted amidst a tangle of pipes. The engine ticked steadily as its many wheels and shafts rotated. Various metal racks stood amongst the pipes, each holding what appeared to be coloured glass bulbs. Anchor shook his head. It could
almost
have been an airship. And yet the entire floor was covered in grass.

He plucked a blade of grass and sniffed it, then rolled it between his thumb and forefinger.
Grass.
A whickering sound from the front of the vessel made him look up. In the distance, just past the widest part of the hull, stood two ponies, a tan-and-white and a chestnut. The animals eyed him warily.

“What are we going to do about that rope?” The little girl was looking behind him, when her eyes suddenly widened. “Who's
she
?”

Anchor turned to see Harper duck inside the open doorway. The metaphysical engineer stepped over the
Rotsward's
rope and looked up at the girl. “Hello,” she said. “My name's Alice. What's your name?”

“Isla.”

Anchor smiled at Harper. “Cospinol didn't warn me you were coming down.”

“You've been blundering through one soul or another since you jumped into that funnel,” she said. “I think he's worried about speaking through the rope. Too easy for someone to overhear him.”

“Thank the gods for small mercies, eh?” Anchor waited a moment to see if Cospinol would respond to his jibe. When his master remained silent he grinned wildly. Finally, some peace and quiet. He'd only had to come to Hell to find it.

The little girl had noticed Harper's tool belt. “Are you a Mesmerist?” she asked. “You've got a Locator,
and
a Screamer, and what's—”

“And you have a ghost lance,” Harper said, nodding at the girl's spear. “Where did you get that, Isla?”

“It's Mr. D's,” she said.

“Mr. D? Is he—”

“We're off to the shipyard to speak to him about those Icarates,” Anchor interrupted. “Isla is going to take us there now.”

Harper nodded slowly. “Right.”

Anchor stepped past the engineer and heaved the door shut behind her. The rope didn't break—but the door itself buckled. He got it closed, more or less, and forced the handle down into a bracket in the metal frame. Then, hoping that Isla hadn't noticed, he said, “All good and shipshape. This is a ship, yes?”

“She's called the
Princess,”
Isla said. “And she's not a ship.” She giggled, and then ran over to the massive engine, and began to pull levers. “Mr. D made her for me,” she called back. “He calls her a submarine.”

Anchor looked at Harper. “I've heard of buildings moving through Hell, but what's a submarine?”

She shrugged. “I've no idea.”

The
Princess
was a vessel, Harper soon came to realize, able to sail through the very fabric of Hell. She moved through living stone and iron as easily as if through water, her tapered hull pushing the flesh of the Maze aside and allowing it close again in its wake. Her single engine was of a design Harper had never seen before. For fuel it burned the dead.

Before engaging the engines, Isla had connected glass bulbs containing phantasms to four inlets in the engine's housing. The terrible vessel had already sucked in the first of these souls and somehow used it to propel herself forwards. Her exhaust was located
in the rear. Harper pinpointed it by listening to the screams of agony it emitted.

Her engines rumbling steadily, the
Princess
ploughed a course under the surface of Hell. As far as Harper could tell, nobody was navigating. Either the ship herself knew where she was going, or someone outside the vessel was able to direct her.

Isla didn't seem in the slightest bit concerned. As soon as the engines had started she ran to the front of the submarine to play with her ponies. The two animals ambled across the grass floor beside her, cropping.

Anchor was crouched beside the engine with his back to Harper, peering into its complex workings.

“Have you ever seen such a vessel, John?” she asked.

He didn't turn around or acknowledge her.

“John?”

She approached him, and saw that he was gripping the engine housing so tightly that the muscles in his arms looked as solid as marble. His eyes were closed and sweat glistened on his brow. “Are you all right?” she said. “John? What's the matter?” She noticed blood trickling down his forearm from one of his palms. “John! You've hurt yourself.”

“No,” he grunted. “Get away.”

“What—”

His eyes flicked open, his neck snapped round, and he hissed, “The
Rotsward.”

Harper suddenly understood. The
Princess
lacked the power to drag Cospinol's ship on her own, so Anchor was feeding the vessel's engines with his own indomitable will. She glanced again at the tethered man's bleeding hand, and realized that it was pressed over one of the engine's intake ports.

How many souls were pouring out of him to power the ship?

“What's wrong with him?” Isla had appeared behind Harper, sitting on one of her ponies. “Is he sick?”

“He doesn't like traveling in ships,” Harper said.

“Mr. D is like that, too. He never goes anywhere outside the shipyard. He never even leaves his stupid box.” She blushed. “Don't tell him I said that, will you? He gets really angry sometimes.”

Harper steered the girl and her pony away. “Let's give John some peace, will we? Why don't you tell me all about Mr. D?”

For the next few hours she kept Isla occupied at the front of the vessel, while Anchor remained at the engine, feeding his tremendous power into its arcane machinery. The little girl didn't have very much to say about Mr. D except that she collected souls for him, but he never liked the souls she brought back and so he always sent her out again for more. Isla thought he was looking for one soul in particular, and she thought that was sad.

And Alice Harper, clutching her own empty soulpearl, agreed with her.

The submarine finally slowed and came to a halt. Anchor released his grip on the engine housing and slumped to the floor. He smeared his bloody hand against his thigh and took a deep, shuddering breath. A slack length of rope meandered over to the rear of the hull, where it had jammed tightly between the door and its frame, but outside the vessel this same rope would form a taut line back to the
Rotsward.
For hours they had dragged Cospinol's sky-ship under the surface of Hell.

Anchor breathed a heavy sigh of relief. His heart continued to pound. Alone, he could have pulled the
Rotsward
for days without tiring, but this strange vessel had drawn hungrily upon his power. With trembling fingers he dug out three soulpearls from the pouch tied to his belt, and then tipped them down his throat. He felt his heart rate slow.

“We're here,” Isla announced. “This is the shipyard. Come on, I'll show you. Mr. D keeps the Icarates in his shop.”

Anchor got the submarine door open with a little help from his
shoulder. The skyship rope whizzed out past his feet, as the
Rotsward
took up the slack. He stepped out into a passageway lined with red brick. The
Princess's
circular hatch had fused into one wall of this corridor. Similar doors occupied both sides of the passage-way, dozens of them, retreating back into darkness to Anchor's left. Evidently this dock was used by other vessels. The rope trailed away in this direction, but the skyship itself was not in sight.

To the right, the docking corridor led to a much larger space awash with green light. Through the opening Anchor could see the tops of gaslights, the source of the luminance, and what appeared to be the facade of a shabby hotel. A painted sign above the door proclaimed:

D's Emporium. Rooms for Rent. Souls Bought/Sold.

“I don't believe this,” Harper said. “Renting a room in Hell is tantamount to taking possession of another person's soul.”

Isla ran ahead towards the opening. “It was Mr. D's idea,” she said. “He owns the hotel, and the shop, too. That's where the Icarates are.”

A strange chime issued from Harper's belt. One of her Mesmerist instruments, Anchor supposed. The engineer fumbled for the device and adjusted something, silencing it. Then she set off down the corridor after the little girl.

“Are you watching all this, Cospinol?” Anchor muttered to the rope. Then he shook his head and laughed. “A hotel in Hell. I wonder how much Mr. D charges for a room, eh?” He flexed his shoulders, took up the strain, and marched on, dragging the rope behind him. From far behind came the inevitable sound of breaking stone.

He arrived in a vaulted underground cul-de-sac, where the gaslights burned with a sickly verdant hue, illuminating the crumbling facades of half a dozen tired old buildings on either side. Planks had been nailed across almost all of their windows and doors. Only the hotel at the far end looked ready for business. Its doors had been flung wide open and faced the opening through which the three travelers now passed.

Harper lifted one of her spirit lenses to her eye. “This place is swarming with Non Morai,” she noted. “They're watching from the derelict buildings.”

“Is it a problem?” Anchor said.

She shrugged. “You're a demigod and I'm a corpse. You can't blame the Non Morai for hiding.”

“What about the child?”

“That little demon?” Harper said. “It's her they're most afraid of.”

As they wandered down this unlikely underground street, Anchor became aware of a deep rasping sound from behind. He stopped, and looked back over his shoulder. The buildings on either side of the road had retreated slightly back into the surrounding walls, revealing a yard of scraped cobblestones where their foundations had been a moment ago.