Iron Angel (6 page)

Captain Clay had been wrong. Deepgate’s apparitions were not born of the city’s recent catastrophes. These shades had died a long time ago. And they were surging up directly from the abyss.

But why?

Dill hadn’t been able to sleep. His wings chafed at their bindings and sent shards of pain up through his shoulders. He guessed the time to be well after midnight, so it ought to have been completely dark by now, except it wasn’t. Dim blood-coloured light, filtering in through the huge multipaneled windows, suffused the room, turning everything to hues of red. The folds of tapestries which had gathered in the floor depression looked like liver in a bowl. Cracks ran like veins through the surrounding stonework.

But Dill could not drag his gaze from the window. With a terrible fascination, he watched the ghosts beyond the glass.

Most of the shades appeared to be men and women dressed in queer, old-fashioned clothes, but occasionally Dill thought he glimpsed creatures with wings in the far distance, and massive, bulkier shapes rising through gloom. Whatever those were he could not guess.

He was so caught up in watching them that he did not at first notice the creature hovering immediately beyond the window, until a shadow crossing the glass alerted him.

This visitor was a tall, thin battle-archon in crimson, chain-link armour. At his side he carried a serrated cutlass, and he wore an odd helmet shaped like the head of a hawk. His wings thumped languidly behind him, keeping the archon level as he studied Dill with deep red eyes. He was older than Dill, and handsome, but there was a cynical twist to his lips. At times his body seemed to fade into the mist outside and reappear again as though it was drifting between separate realities.

The battle-archon flew to the very center of the window, and made an obvious sign that Dill should open it.

Dill shook his head. The Spine had already warned him against any such action. After all, priests had spent three thousand years blessing the temple’s stone walls and stained glass to keep any unwanted phantasms out. Now this barrier against the ghosts in the abyss served the Spine better than any other. At night the Church of Ulcis was the safest place in Deepgate—or it would have been had it not been hanging upside down and inexorably crumbling into the abyss below.

The angel on the other side of the glass beat his wings impatiently and descended until his face was directly level with Dill’s. He said something Dill could not hope to hear, then pointed insistently at the window latch.

Again Dill shook his head in defiance.

The stranger’s expression twisted into one of disgusted frustration. For a heartbeat he faded, becoming nothing more than a swirl of red mist, before his body solidified again. He raised a fist as though to shatter the window, but stopped himself. His lips parted in a sneer, then he jerked a thumb towards the latch again.

Dill retreated to the back of the room, trying to ignore the window. Instead he feigned interest in the shattered furniture and tapestries piled up in the sunken floor.

By now the battle-archon looked furious. Lifting his cutlass with both hands, he held it up only an inch from a windowpane, then he hovered for a minute, all of his attention fixed on just the sword. Slowly, he brought the blade forward against the glass.

Dill heard a tap.

The battle-archon grinned.

Morning finally arrived. As light filtered down through the chained city, the windows of Rachel’s cell turned a lighter shade of red. The mist thinned, though it did not dissipate entirely, and the ghosts stopped rising from the depths.

The sunlight, feeble as it was, had driven the phantasms away.

Stained glass windows before her depicted three scenes from the Deepgate Codex, each set one over the other: the fall of Ulcis from Heaven, the coming of the Herald, and the rise of Callis and the Ninety-nine from the abyss. Now that the panels were upside down, Rachel could reach out and easily touch the image of Callis and his warriors that otherwise would have been out of reach.

The door to her cell lay eight feet above what had now become the floor. The Spine would open it eventually, of course, if only to throw her down a bladder of water. She studied the heaped debris that had gathered in the floor basin: broken furniture, cloth, smashed porcelain, and even an old iron chandelier—a cornucopia of potential weapons.

Rachel touched the window again. Thankfully this thin barrier of priest-blessed glass had kept her safe all night, and none of the apparitions had been able to enter her cell. But other parts of the temple had crumbled away before her eyes, and the great building would not survive for much longer.

She stood for a moment, thinking.

Tempered Spine felt no fear, but they understood danger. They would not tolerate a threat to their precious temple. And if they wanted Rachel alive for tempering…

She made a sudden decision.

She picked up the leg of a broken chair and used it to smash the lowest pane, taking some pleasure in aiming directly for Callis’s painted face. Broken glass fell away into the abyss outside, leaving a jagged hole in the middle of the pane.

A chill breeze stirred Rachel’s hair. The phantasms would return at dusk. She had until sunset to find out if her terrible gamble had worked.

Carefully, she prised out loose shards of glass from the edges of the pane and arranged them in a line. They would serve as knives—too brittle to meet a Spine sword with, but deadly enough if they were thrown.

She first selected those shards with the best balance, and wound strips of tapestry around one end to make them easier to handle. This way she made six knives in all, although she doubted she’d get the opportunity to use more than one of them. Her first throw would have to be absolutely accurate. Next she used the chair leg to pound the smaller, less useful shards into a fine powder, which she gathered up into a makeshift pouch. Ironically, her Spine master had taught her the efficacy of using such substances to temporarily blind an opponent. The chair leg itself she set aside to use as a club; if she ever escaped the room, it might be handy for close combat.

A scream erupted from somewhere overhead.

Rachel pocketed the throwing knives she’d fashioned, then stood up to look out of the window. The Rookery Spire had been the tallest in the temple, so now it naturally housed the lowest dungeon. The smooth black walls outside would be impossible to climb, but overhead, a clutch of spires—fingers of stone and masonry—extruded like stalactites in a Hollowhill cavern. Beyond this, a black lattice of chains stretched on for miles, all wreathed in red fumes and silhouetted against an angry sky. In places, spikes of orange light punctured the city, and constant dull booming sounds drifted over the abyss, as though the bones of the city were snapping one by one. And in a sense they were, for Deepgate was still crumbling into the pit. Showers of dust and debris rained down from the temple and its surroundings, stirring up clouds of grainy air. Looking down, Rachel saw that the roof of the Rookery Spire had already disappeared, and stonework ended twenty yards below her in ragged chaos.

A door to Hell lay deep in the abyss below this very city, in the darkness below Ulcis’s palace. The god of chains had warned her of its existence. The things down there would tear you to pieces, he’d said. Had last night’s phantasms found a way through this door? Were they refugees driven from the Maze?

Or advance scouts?

Rachel shuddered. The gloom down there was as darkly crimson as a well of blood.
They are making demons for the war to come,
Dill had said in the temple antechamber.
A red veil heralds their coming.

A sudden, loud creaking sound came from behind her and, with a pang of dread, Rachel turned away from the window. A thin crack had appeared along the interior wall of her cell, just an inch above the edge of the floor, and now five yards long.

Shit.

The spire was clearly breaking up.

A tremor convulsed the room. Broken furniture shifted, settling deeper into the sunken floor that had formerly been a ceiling. The crack widened suddenly to the width of a finger, and shot through another five yards of stonework, instantly doubling in length. Now it stretched along two of the walls.

Rachel gazed in horror.

So this is how it was to end for her? She would return to the abyss after all: one more skeleton on Ulcis’s mountain of bones. And Dill, up in the cell above, would join her soon. A profound sense of melancholy struck her. The young angel had never shown signs of growing weary of her failure. But now? How could he forgive her now? She buried her head in her hands, exhausted.

And she waited.

Another rumble. The crack opened another inch, tracing a jagged line on a third wall as the mortar between its stonework split.

A sudden anger gripped Rachel. She rose and jumped up and down on the floor, stamping her weight down, kicking the now useless pile of smashed furniture to one side. Why shouldn’t it be over
now
? Why did she have to sit here and patiently wait for the end to come? Could she not at least be in charge of her own destiny?

Rachel picked up the chair leg she’d set aside in readiness and smashed it hard against the floor. Then she deliberately drove it deeply into the widest part of the crack, trying to prise the gap further apart. Nothing happened, however; the hanging tower would split under its own weight or not. Her efforts made no difference.

Suddenly she paused, breathing heavily, still staring at the piece of wood in her fist. Then she looked at the mound of debris…at the tapestries, at the broken furniture, and the heavy iron chandelier.

Gods below! How stupid I’ve been!

Rachel moved quickly. She snatched up a corner of the nearest tapestry and dragged it clear of the pile. About two yards wide and twice as long, it depicted a battle scene of archons and heathens, like most of the others in the temple. The cloth was ancient; the weave thin, frayed, and undoubtedly priceless. Good. Next she pulled out pieces of furniture, jagged panels, drawers, part of a bed, a chair back curved like a lute, kicking most of this stuff aside. She needed something to use as a grapple.

The sound of rending stone drove her to greater urgency. Along the wall, the crack had widened again.

The chandelier! She grabbed at it and pulled, but it was secured to the floor by a yard of stout chain. She heaved, then let it drop again when it refused to budge. No time to mess with it. With the stout wooden leg in one hand, the U-shaped chair back in the other, and one end of the tapestry bundled under her elbow, she rushed to the inside corner of the room, beneath the erstwhile door. She wedged the chair leg between the rough cornerstones where the two walls met, four feet above the crack and the same distance below the door, then stepped back and kicked it securely into place. Then she pulled down on it, testing this makeshift perch with her weight. It moved a little, settling into the rough stonework on either side, then held firmly.

Another crack. The gap now traced a line around all four walls. At its narrowest, it was as thin as a hair, but closer to the window it was large enough to push a fist inside. The floor could fall away at any moment.

Rachel hooked the chair back over her wooden perch, then, still holding on to the tapestry, hopped up beside it. She still had to fashion a rope, but reasoned that it was better to undertake that task while sitting safely above the disintegrating floor.

The weave parted with disturbing ease. It was almost rotten. Rachel considered fetching another tapestry—there were two more that she could see—but then rejected that idea. The floor had already become too dangerous to risk setting foot upon again. She’d have to make do with what she had. She separated the cloth into six long strips which she then draped over her makeshift seat for fear of losing them. Next she plaited two lengths of rope from three strands each, tied them together, and then bound one end to the curved chair back and the other to her perch. This would give her a long enough line to swing beneath the wall once the floor fell away. With a bit of luck she could then snag one of the stairwell wall sconces on the opposite side and pull herself up.

Until then all she could do was wait.

So she held the rope firmly, and waited.

And waited.

After several hours Rachel began to feel foolish. She eased herself forward, keeping most of her weight on the wooden perch, and pressed the toe of her foot gingerly against the floor. It felt solid, unyielding. Still gripping the rope, she carefully placed her other foot beside the first. Still no movement.

She then gave the floor a gentle kick.

Nothing alarming happened.

So she slid fully down from her seat and stood there, clutching the rope.

She jumped.

And then leapt again, bringing all of her weight down to bear upon the floor. The sound of her wooden heels striking stone resounded through the chamber, before the room settled to silence again. Rachel sighed deeply. She tied the rope around herself and sat down on the floor. It was already becoming very gloomy outside.

The Rookery Spire held together all afternoon. The crack in the wall did not lengthen and floor did not fall away from underneath the waiting assassin. She watched the red mist darken further outside the window. Somewhere overhead the sun would be dropping low in the sky, casting the shadow of the abyss’s rim over Deepgate. The ghosts would return soon, and now Rachel’s cell had a broken window.

She tried calling out, but nobody came. So she watched the door and waited, flipping the glass-shard knife between her hands.

Eventually, a key rattled in the lock.

Rachel tensed. She’d have one chance at this. The Spine would be wearing leather armour, which might be enough to deflect or break her fragile blade. Better if she aimed for the neck. If she could sever the carotid artery, death would come quickly.

The door opened.

Rachel lifted her arm to throw, but stopped.

A child stood in the doorway, a boy of about nine or ten, holding a water bladder. He was painfully thin and pale, dressed in a sleeveless brown jerkin and breeches, a cheap imitation of a Cutter’s training armour. His short red hair had been hacked roughly, probably with a knife, but it must have been beautiful once. Puncture marks and bruises marred his arms, evidence of Spine torture, and his eyes were as empty and haunted as any Adept’s. He hardly seemed to see her. They had tempered him.