Iron Angel (31 page)

More soul collectors were coming.

A caravan was moving through one of the canals. Great steaming oxenlike beasts dragged a train of huge wagons and cages along the shallow waterway. In deeper waters the Mesmerists used barges, but these canals were plowed by caravans. Strange machines and lurching wooden towers rumbled along behind. Wheels creaked and hooves churned the red slurry into froth. Banners and flags of many colours bobbed among the throng. From somewhere behind came a riotous tumult: the sound of lashing whips, the clicking of stilts, and the howls of men. Over it all sounded the deep, sonorous groan of horns.

There was nowhere for Dill to escape to, so he slunk back into his hiding place, crouched down low, and waited for the caravan to pass him by. Silently, he willed a short-sword to appear in his left hand, and a punching-shield in his right.

The first cages were full of partially altered souls: hot-eyed louts who screamed and rattled their metal limbs across the bars; cackling hags with oddly shaped skulls; huge warriors clad in plate and helms of exotic design, sitting quietly, sharpening the blades on their fingers. These were escapees of some kind, Dill surmised, for their transformations had not yet been completed. A column of box-wagons followed behind, sending thick waves through Dill’s doorway. Queer hieroglyphs drenched their slatted sides; the running boards below were chipped and scraped. Next came one of the Mesmerists’ living machines: a spherical metal device crammed with chains, wheels, and needles. After this, a cage full of dogcatchers.

Dill slid lower into the bloody pool to mask his own scent. Dogcatchers had keen noses.

The demons resembled cadaverous men, and indeed they had once been men, but now their skin glistened as red as the canal beneath their coop. They turned their eyeless heads this way and that, sniffing the air, gnashing their long white teeth. They could not speak, Dill knew, but they could howl, and the one who shifted his blind gaze towards the young angel howled now.

With many creaks and bellows, the procession grumbled to a halt.

Dill readied himself for battle.

They came for him. Anemic and gibbous, these Icarate soul collectors wore stained ceramic armour spattered with black corruption. Pale discs mushroomed from their hunched backs, crackling and dripping blue sparks. Dill presumed these creatures to be a lower caste than the Icarates he had seen before, for there were subtle differences in their appearance. Fractured reflections glinted in their cracked eye-lenses when they turned their heads, and when they grinned, the copper wires in their mouths showed verdigris. They were larger, bulkier, than the Mesmerist priests he had seen before, but they wore similar ill-fitting armour and carried the same hammers and tridents.

And Dill was getting used to dealing with those.

He stepped out into the canal, and ducked as a whip lashed out at his head. The tip of the whip struck a prisoner who had been gripping the bars of his cage, severing the tip of the man’s finger. The prisoner howled and flinched away.

Dill stared at the owner of the whip—an obese Icarate in badly rotted armour. He was hunched over like a cripple, seemingly barely able to stand at all. Rust covered half of the priest’s face, obscuring one of his eye-lenses, while a green crust had obliterated the wires in his mouth. The ceramic obtrusions on his back looked like stained teeth. The angel’s heartbeat quickened. That attack had been
fast.

The prisoners started to chant in their cages. “Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal, Fadder Carpal.” One man whooped and cried out: “That was the testing stroke, boy. The next one will take your fucking head off.”

The Icarate swept his whip back again.

Dill willed himself a suit of spider-silk armour—a hauberk, chausses, and a camail to protect his neck. He considered expanding his punching-shield to cover his entire forearm, but decided not to encumber himself any further. He needed to be fast.

The lash struck out again.

Dill simultaneously raised his buckler to block and his sword to sever through the whip. But the thin leather cord
twisted
in midair and changed direction. It folded around the edge of the tiny shield and struck Dill’s knuckle. The tip of the lash bit into the angel’s flesh and stuck there.

A flash of pain surged up Dill’s arm. He cried out, shaking his fist and shield madly, but the lash would not release him. He swiped at the leather cord with his sword—again and again—but the whip danced around his blows like a living thing.

The caged prisoners were chanting faster now: “Fadder Carpal…Fadder Carpal…”

The tip of the whip began to
burrow
into Dill’s knuckle. He felt it crawling through his flesh like an insect—a sensation that made him freeze and stare at his hand in shock. A lump had appeared on the back of his finger; it was moving rapidly under his skin towards his wrist. Dill beat at it with the pommel of his sword, but it continued to push into him.

Half in panic, and half in desperate rage, Dill charged at the Icarate. The Mesmerist priest made a motion with his hand—the whip sang between them, formed loops in the air, and then coiled around the angel’s neck.

Darkness crowded Dill’s vision as his camail compressed around his throat. The Icarate’s rusted face and broken lenses loomed before him—a dreamlike mess of rotting metal. Dill fell forward, lashed out wildly with his punching-shield. His buckler connected with
something.

He remembered struggling, gasping……the blare of horns, a lurch, and creaking wheels…

He was locked in a cage near the rear of the caravan with a drooling hag and a dwarf with hooks and needles for fingers. The dwarf sniggered and tried to pluck handfuls of feathers from Dill’s wings. He claimed to be the only thief in Hell. “I stole from egoists,” he said, “until Fadder Carpal caught me.”

“Fadder Carpal?”

“You hit him with your shield. It was his impotent master that stung you, his Penny Devil. Not a bad fight, considering.” He leaned closer and crooned. “You lasted longer than those gladiators did. Even longer than that scabrous thing we caught grazing in the Garden of Bones.” He grinned. “But nobody escapes Fadder Carpal.”

“The Icarate with the whip?”

The dwarf snorted. “Fadder Carpal is the greatest soul collector in the Maze. And that was no whip. You felt the insect at the end of it, eh? The kiss of a Penny Devil?”

Dill’s knuckle still throbbed. “It burrowed
into
me,” he said. “Like an—”

“Insect?” The dwarf chuckled. “
That
was one of Ayen’s debased. Liria, they used to call her on earth, the Queen of Fleas. If you think Ayen gave her lover and her sons a hard time…” He paused to pick at his misshapen teeth with one hooked finger. “Consider what she did to the angels she really feared: Orus, Basilis, and Liria—all royally fucked for eternity.”

“The
whip
was Liria?”

“Liria was the sting at the tip. And Fadder Carpal is her guardian, at least—” He broke off as the old woman beside him suddenly began to convulse.

“Look lively,” the dwarf said to Dill, “the madwoman is fading again. You’ll see the Icarates revive her.”

“Cruelty!” the hag wailed. “Flesh is the stuff of memories. I can’t recall fat and skin.” The fiery light that sloped through the enclosure bars seemed to find little resistance in her body, but rather pass through it as though through a mist. “Nobody here helps me to remember. They might as well have locked me in with the blistermen.” She pointed to the cage in front of them and snarled, “See where the flies lay their eggs.”

Dill recoiled.

“She’s mad,” the dwarf said. “Menoa can’t do much with woozy minds like hers. She’s bound for the flensing machines and the Veil, if she makes it to the portal at all.” His dark eyes glittered; he shuffled his crooked bones away from her. “Either she’ll fade completely and join the ghosts in the walls, or one day soon we’ll all be breathing her.”

The hag licked her gums and said, “They promised me a parrot.”

One of Carpal’s Icarates appeared outside the cage, and thrust his trident into the old woman’s side. The weapon crackled; the hag gibbered and slavered. But soon enough, her phantasmal form solidified again. She became corporeal once more. The soul collector peered in at the other two captives for a moment, his rotten mouth-grille buzzing, and then returned the way he had come.

The sky grew dark and the strange caravan lumbered on. Dill could not sleep. He lay curled in a bed of wet straw, and thought about Mina. Had she escaped the Legion of the Blind? Where was she now? When he finally closed his eyes he imagined he could smell her perfume oozing from the splinter in his wrist.

The caravan did not halt for three days. Axles rumbling ceaselessly, the wagon train meandered through the Maze, sloshing along one red canal after another, creeping up the slick rises and plunging into flooded depressions. The ghost-mists darkened again.

Dawn brought plumes of crimson steam and a metal taste to the air. The madwoman displayed her gums and cackled. The dwarf thief sniggered and rattled his needle fingers against his teeth.

“I stole pieces of souls,” he said, “and devoured them in Icarate temples. It kept me busy. You have to keep busy in Hell or you fade away.” He picked his nose. “Do you know what lies underneath those temples?”

Dill shook his head.

“The failed experiments, the things that didn’t function but didn’t die, either. There are rivers and pools full of them. And something else…” He leaned his damp face closer to Dill and whispered, “A
presence
that blows across the Rivers of the Failed like a cold breeze. All that anguish is incubating something nasty down there. The Mesmerists are afraid of it.”

“Iril?”

The thief shook his head. “Iril is almost burnt out. His archons sit on the brink of defeat.” He pointed to the smoke-darkened horizon. “See where Menoa’s armies have besieged the First Citadel? Icarates, Non Morai, Iolites, and demons born from a thousand of the king’s dreams. You should hear the machines. You know how the Mesmerists make them, don’t you? Persuasion.”

Suddenly the thief made a frantic gesture. “Shush…the soul collectors are coming back.”

Icarates filed past the cage, their armour dribbling blue sparks. The stench of burnt metal followed them. By now Dill had learned not to look at them directly. Their tridents crackled and stung whenever they shoved them through the bars into his face. They would punish him until he thanked them for it. Better to simply lie still and hope they wouldn’t notice him.

One red day turned into another. Their passage through the Maze became dreamlike, as if seen through a veil. Dill viewed the world in glimpses: barges moving in the deeper canals, the steaming oxen and the crack of Carpal’s whip, the hag lolling in wild dementia, and warriors in other cages scraping stones along the edges of their fingers. The old woman faded and was revived three more times. They rolled past walls of ghosts and broken temples, and bulky machines that breathed out plumes of vapor.

One day they passed a vast square pool in which floated three tall metal ships. Deep, forlorn moans resounded within the hulls.

“From Pandemeria,” the thief explained. “These vessels are the commanders who led Menoa’s fleet against Rys.”

“What are they doing there?” Dill asked.

“Watching eternity go by.”

The endless trek began to take its toll on Dill. Most of the time he lacked the energy to rise, and instead lay wheezing helplessly in his bed of straw. He woke regularly without realizing that he had been asleep. At night the prisoners gibbered and howled. The dogcatchers’ flesh glistened; they snapped their teeth. Flies swarmed over the blistermen and laid their eggs in appalling places.

And on and on the procession crept.

Many days later the dwarf beat his head against the bars of their cage and cried out, “I’m weary, I’m bored. Where can I find something to steal?”

“Steal this!” yelled a man in the next cage. He whirled a sling over his head, then released it.

A pebble shot between the bars. It ricocheted off the dwarf’s skull and pinged away.

Those captives in the nearest cages shrieked with laughter. The soul collectors silenced everyone with a flurry of burning touches.

Although Dill could not share the good humor, he had begun to appreciate his surroundings more. The Maze was as beautiful as it was complex. This crimson playground which had at first driven him to such despair had become, by degrees, less threatening. There were so many marvels to behold: the chuckle of fluids behind the cage wheels; the bright chunks that clung to the spokes like rubies; the madwoman’s scrawl of white hair. He relished these sights. Once he spied silver-robed figures floating high in the sky and he felt his dead heart soar with wonder.

“Don’t look at them,” the thief warned. “Dangerous, dangerous creatures.”

How much time had passed, Dill did not know. The soul collectors found new prisoners for their caravan and threw them into the cages behind. There was a naked man without teeth or eyes and a bruised shapeless thing that could not stand unaided, a thin pale woman who never made a sound but just gaped at her darkly stained hands, and an old, old angel with a tin hat and only one wing. Most of the other captives laughed at this last find, but Dill only smiled.

He thanked the Icarates daily.

A year passed, or maybe a hundred years. Dill’s skin crawled with the memory of burns, yet these sensations were important to him. In those moments when he forgot the pain of the Icarates’ tridents a desperate panic came over him. The agony anchored him; without it, he feared he might forget who he was and start to fade like the hag. The soul collectors’ tridents gave him vigor; the burns he received kept him focused.

He couldn’t stop smiling. His friend, the thief, was always there to encourage him. “Fadder Carpal knows his business well,” he said. “He takes good care of us, of his family. He won’t let us become like
them
.” He inclined his head towards the faces in the walls.

The phantasms gazed out at Dill from the stonework. Their lips were moving, but he could not hear their words, only the sound of Fadder Carpal’s whip.