Iron Angel (7 page)

“You must not approach the door,” he announced in a high clear voice. “I will throw you the water, and you must catch it. If it bursts there will be no more water for you today.”

Despair swamped Rachel. She had a clear shot at the boy’s neck. The glass blade remained steady in her hand. Yet she hesitated. A child? Had the visitor been an Adept or even a Cutter, it would already have been too late to make a throw. But this boy obviously lacked the training and reflexes to react to this situation. He had been ordered to deliver water, and instructed on what to say. All he could do was obey.

“You must be ready to catch this,” he repeated, holding out the bladder.

Rachel felt the weight of the glass blade in her hand. She knew the position of the artery in the child’s neck. In her mind she watched herself throw the dagger, saw it flash across the room and bury itself into his flesh. She imagined the jetting blood, the wet, gurgling sounds he would make as he fell. It would be an easy throw, over in a heartbeat. Then she’d be free, and able to help Dill.

The child had been tempered, hadn’t he? He was one of them.

Rachel threw the knife.

Dill had not slept. The phantom battle-archon had remained outside his window all night, tapping his cutlass against the glass. This simple persistence had evidently taken a lot out of the intruder, for his body had faded as the night wore on, becoming more gaseous and more insubstantial with each blow. When dawn finally came, the ghost had returned to the abyss, then little more than a shadow of his former self.

But he had managed to make a crack in the window.

Dill studied the broken pane for the hundredth time, and with mounting apprehension. Shades should not be able to affect the physical world around them, and certainly not the blessed glass that protected the Church of Ulcis. In fact, no spirit had damaged the temple in three thousand years. Yet this dead warrior had managed a remarkable feat, seemingly determined to reach Dill at any cost.

But why?

And there was something else worrisome. Of all the ghosts Dill had seen that night, this armoured phantom was the only one to have now returned to the abyss.

Now Dill was exhausted, and the crimson mist outside was growing dark again. The chain-and-burr cuffs cramped and chafed his wings, sending jolts of pain through his shoulders whenever he moved. Broken feathers now covered the floor of the cell.

Time passed, yet nobody came to check on him, or to bring him food or water. Once he thought he heard a child crying out somewhere below him, but it might just have been a rook squawking. He must have slept because it was suddenly much darker. The tall windows shone dully, bathing his cell in a queer red radiance. Outside, the ghosts were again rising from the abyss: more of them this time.

And then the phantom archon returned.

He floated outside Dill’s room, his huge wings entirely filling the window frame. His body was solid, more corporeal again, and his eyes gleamed with malice. He raised his cutlass before the cracked pane and struck it hard.

The glass finally shattered.

Dill instantly heard a howl, like a powerful gale. The archon’s form warped and faded until it became as thin as a plume of smoke. Curling and twisting, the smoke then began to flow through the broken window into the room. In a dozen heartbeats, the ghost had re-formed. His wings unfolded behind him, trailing wisps of red mist, and he stared down at the young angel with terrible eyes.

“You should have opened the window,” he said in a voice like leaves blowing through a forest. “And that way saved us both some pain. This meeting has cost me dearly.”

Dill did not realize he’d been backing away until own his wings brushed against the wall. He stammered, “Who are you?”

The battle-archon’s eyes narrowed. “My name is Silister Trench,” he said. He exhaled slowly, releasing drifts of red smoke from his nostrils. “I am the champion of the First Citadel and commander of Hasp’s Archons.” He gave a small bow, and his hand settled on the hilt of his cutlass. “I am your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, or something similar—the exact details of our family connection are not important. Needless to say, I am one of your ancestors, and your ancestors have need of you now.” He started towards the young angel. Crimson vapors rose wherever his boots touched the floor.

“Wait,” Dill cried. “I don’t understand. Why…?”

“I require your wings, your heart, and your blood,” Trench said. “My own form would soon fade under Ayen’s sun, and yet I have an urgent message to deliver to one in your world.” He held out his gaseous hands and peered through them at the other angel. “You see? This body is too insubstantial to survive here for long. It will only last long enough to provide a vessel to carry your own soul back to the Maze.”

Dill glanced frantically about for escape. Grinning, the battle-archon bore down on him, his intangible armour wreathed in bloody vapor. There was nowhere to run to. The young angel dropped to his knees and cowered.

“That’s it,” Trench said. “This will only hurt a little.”

“A foolish and desperate maneuver.” The Adept peered over the lath of his crossbow, aiming the weighty stone tip of a bone-breaker at Rachel’s abdomen. “You might have killed the child.”

Rachel looked up at him from the floor of her cell. “He moved at the wrong moment.”

“Your skills have waned,” the other assassin remarked. “Any ordinary Cutter could have thrown the blade more accurately.”

Her glass knife had caught the lad’s ear, grazing him just enough to draw blood. If the Adept had known that this was exactly Rachel’s intention, he might have been less dismissive of her skills. The boy had, of course, dropped the water bladder and run back to his masters. Subsequently, the Adept who’d brought her here had been forced to visit.

“Why do you pretend you’ve been tempered?” Rachel asked. “Why keep up the facade?”

“I do not pretend,” he snapped.

She laughed. “Are you so afraid of the procedure?”

“Be silent.”

“I used to yearn for them to temper me,” she said, “but my brother wouldn’t sign the consent forms. He did this to hurt me. He knew I couldn’t cope with the strain of what my Spine masters expected me to do. I could never kill children. Yet you don’t seem to have a problem with morality, do you?” Suddenly she thought she understood him. “That’s why you don’t want them to temper you. The procedure would strip away your desires, deprive you of the joy you get from your work.”

“My master died on the night he was due to temper me,” he said with a cruel smile. “Quite suddenly, and inexplicably. With all the recent confusion, the destruction of the city, nobody thought to confirm that he’d actually carried out the procedure.”

“Bravo,” Rachel said. “It couldn’t have been easy to kill a Spine master.”

The man inclined his head. “Over the years he had built up a resistance to every poison we stocked. I was forced to use less subtle methods.”

“I’m impressed. What’s your name? It isn’t often I get to meet an Adept who actually remembers it.”

“Culver.”

“So, Culver, are you going to shoot me now, or take me away to be tempered?”

He lowered his crossbow. “You’ll go under the needles eventually,” he said. “We need all the battle fodder we can get. Unfortunately we have rather a long backlog to work through.”

“A shame,” she muttered, “because I’ll be dead by tomorrow.”

Culver’s hard eyes narrowed. “Suicide is against Codex law. Any attempt would be punished by—”

“By what? Death?”

He did not answer.

Rachel snorted. “Save your sermons. I’ve no intention of killing myself. Look over there, corpse face.” She gestured towards the broken pane, the glass she’d smashed to make her knives. Already there were ghosts rising through the dark red mist beyond. It would only be a matter of time until one of them noticed and came to investigate. “I’m afraid it broke,” she said. “Quite suddenly and inexplicably.”

Culver cursed. “You stupid bitch. Did you want to get yourself possessed? The whole room will have to be blessed now.” He dragged a hand through his short hair, thinking for a moment, before he looked back at her. “Sod the waiting list,” he said. “We’ll temper you and the angel tonight.”

The long slow death of the soul by torture.
It was almost a relief.

4

A MAN WALKS INTO A BROTH SHOP

F
OG ALWAYS BROUGHT more victims to the Widow’s Hook. The damp grey air had filled the lanes around the broth shop for three days now, softening mud walls and wilting the eaves of gin dens and hovels until the whole neighborhood seemed about to sink back into the wet brown earth. In such weather newcomers easily became lost in Sandport, and there had been no shortage of those recently: rich refugees who’d arrived by churchship after the chained city of Deepgate fell. Inevitably, some of these would wander into places they would have preferred to avoid. So when Jack Caulker heard the piper outside the Hook squawk out his warning medley, he leaned back on his stool, downed the last of his fishbeer, and gave the nod to Hammer Eric by the door.

It seemed another stranger was about to venture inside.

They had robbed and murdered nine so far—if you didn’t include the beggar woman, who’d had nothing worth selling but her long yellow hair—and dragged their bodies down to the river for the crabs to pick clean. And still the victims came. Few of Sandport’s barges or skiffs would risk sailing for Shale or Clune in this unholy murk, and so plenty of Deepgate’s merchants and nobles had been trapped here. So many had been turning up at the Widow’s Hook recently that Jack Caulker had been able to afford himself a room upstairs. Now he spent his nights in drunken stupor, swilling the finest fishbeers and raising a toast each time the fog bells rang out by the docks. By day he gorged himself on eel broth and chowder while he waited for the next job. He was growing fat around the waist and fatter in his purse. It was a nasty, immoral business, but somebody had to do it, and Caulker had paid the Hook’s proprietor a handsome sum to ensure that that somebody was him.

He scraped his stool back, shared a grin with his accomplice, stood up, and froze on the spot—

—as the door opened to reveal the oddest-looking person he could have imagined.

The stranger blocked the doorway like a fifty-ton boulder, a half-naked giant with darkly painted skin. He wore brown leather shorts and little else, exposing more painted flab than Caulker would have thought possible for one man to carry. Some sort of enormous wood and leather construction engulfed his upper body: a flotation aid perhaps—for it seemed too sparse for armour.

As the giant ducked out of the fog and squeezed his great bulk inside the Widow’s Hook, all conversation withered around him. Spoons slid back into bowls of chowder; half-raised cups were lowered. By the light of the cooking fires Caulker suddenly saw what those closest to the door had already noticed. The fat man’s body had not been painted: the colour was due to skin as dark as hull tar. His huge black fists were as big as mast-hammers, while his chest rose and fell like a deepwater swell.

But the rope was the strangest thing of all. A taut, arm-thick span of greased hemp stretched out from behind the man’s shoulders, straight as a dock pole, and curved taut around the underside of the door lintel, where it disappeared from sight. His wood and leather construction appeared to be a harness of some kind; the man must be tethered to something outside the Widow’s Hook, and something high up by the look of it.

“My name is John Anchor,” the stranger announced. “I am told there is an angel’s corpse here, yes?”

Nobody spoke. The regulars in the Hook were freshwater men: crabbers, river fishers and boat builders, a couple of barge pilots down from the Shale Forests, and few—if any—would have heard any whisper of the Gallows Fog before. But Jack Caulker, who had worked on missionary cogs before his cutthroat days, and had sailed to the Volcanic Isles, knew the legend well enough for the sight of this stranger to bring a furrow to his cynical brow. Temple sailors had spoken often of the Adamantine Man who walked across the ocean floors. A queer mist was said to accompany him: the Gallows Fog, which hid the floating hell he dragged across the world. Salt sailors feared such weather greatly, for east of the Isles, it was claimed, no ship could sail through such a miasma. All superstitious piss, of course, Caulker reckoned, yet Deepgate’s seamen blamed every deepwater wreck on the Gallows Fog, and you’d be damned before you’d find one of them who’d sail a league beyond the Isles for fear of encountering it. Caulker studied the visitor with a mounting sense of wonder. Here was a man dragging a rope. It had to be fixed to
something
outside.

But a skyship full of the dead?

Here? In
Sandport
?

Hammer Eric had backed away, the namesake weapon at his hip looking more like a toothpick now than a carpenter’s tool, next to this tethered giant. Most of the broth shop clientele had turned their eyes to Caulker; in their own small way they respected him. The cutthroat had been educated, he had traveled, and he knew how to handle himself in a fight.

It would do his reputation no good to let them see him spooked.

“Come in, friend.” Caulker raised his empty cup to the stranger. “Merrigan Foley, the boss of this fine establishment, charges nobody nothing but a bowl of chowder to see the damn thing. It’s there, plain as you like, on the wall above the counter.” He gestured over to where the bloody black corpse had been nailed up. A group of Ban-Heshette goatherds had arrived carrying it two days ago, claiming to have discovered the boy in a ditch somewhere south of Deepgate. It was the temple angel, they’d claimed. Its wings had been convincing enough for Foley to dip into his purse, though not nearly as deep as the desert folk had wanted him to. As curiosities went it was rather pathetic: just a mess of tanned bones and white feathers pinned to a rude cross, barely even recognizable as an archon—not nearly as impressive as the shape-shifting demon that show-woman had displayed recently. Yet news of the angel had brought a steady stream of curious patrons into the Hook, for which both Foley and Caulker were glad. They’d even had a group of Spine take lodging here just to study the thing at their leisure.

John Anchor studied the gruesome exhibit for a moment, then frowned. “The angel I hunt has dark wings,” he said. “This is not her corpse.”

Caulker raised an eyebrow. The angel he
hunts
? “Well, if it’s angels and their whereabouts you’re after, you’ve come to the right place. Nothing goes on south of Clune without somebody in the Hook knowing the meat and bones of it.”

This was not entirely a lie. The river men’s gossip was as thick here as anywhere along the banks of the Coyle.

“Explain your problem,” he added. “Sandporters are known for their generosity and their friendship to foreigners. If we can help, we will.”

John Anchor nodded. “I seek a
scarred
angel.”

Caulker’s brow furrowed. “Carnival?” Folks said she had risen from the abyss when Deepgate fell, and then fled into the Deadsands. Nobody knew for certain what had happened to her since, but that small fact need not affect the potential profit to be made here. The cutthroat was happy enough to sell rumors and lies, and he’d even embellish them some for an extra coin. He gave the stranger a smile and a knowledgeable nod. “Aye,” he said. “I think we can do business.”

The tethered man smacked his hands together and strode forward purposefully, heaving the massive rope behind him. Yard after yard of tough hemp scraped splinters from the underside of the door lintel. The timber creaked and bowed under what must have been enormous pressure, then suddenly snapped. Smooth as a wire through cheese, the rope tore upwards through three feet of mud-brick wall above the door and then came to rest against a stout ceiling beam. This joist gave an ominous groan. Anchor did not appear to notice the destruction behind him. He marched up to Caulker as though he had forgotten he was tethered. “Well met,” he said. “I am a stranger here. Does salt have value in this land?”

The cutthroat flinched. Everyone in the place was staring intently at him now, and at this queer rope that stretched all the way from the back of the big man’s harness to the creaking ceiling joist directly above the door lintel. “Salt?” It took him a moment to regain his composure. “You want to buy information with salt?”

Anchor frowned. “It is good salt, from the Riot Coast.”

Caulker let his shoulders droop. He’d never heard of the Riot Coast, but the man spoke Low Coyle well enough to make him wonder if Deepgate missionaries had once been there. “My friend,” he said with affected resignation, “an exchange would be most welcome, I promise you, but I fear that salt would cast your homeland in…how shall I say, an ungenerous light. Salt is common here. Now if—”

“Pearls, then?” John Anchor suddenly beamed. “You would like pearls? I have many.” He withdrew a bulging leather purse from his pocket and held it up. “How many should I offer? One…or three? Six pearls? All right, ten.”

The cutthroat gave the purse a dismissive glance, while skillfully keeping the smile from his face. This was more like it. There had to be a pound of pearls in the newcomer’s fist, and yet he’d whipped them out in full view of the Hook’s patrons without a care. Big as the stranger was, he wasn’t even armed. Why were foreigners always so ignorant of the simplest rules of life? And why were they always so bloody affable?

“Pearls?” Caulker feigned confusion, and then lifted his chin. “Oh, yes, I see…those beads the fishwives sometimes wear? We find them in little shells out in the bay.” He pretended to think for a moment while he exchanged another glance with his colleague by the door. “Well, they’re quite pretty, I suppose, and our women like their trinkets. A few sacks would—”

John Anchor interrupted him. “This pouch,” he shouted out, turning to face the room, “to any man who tells me where to find my quarry, a scarred angel. I have no more patience now.” He flexed his shoulders, and the rope behind his harness thrummed like an enormous lute string, working more dried mud free from the gash above the door.

Forty men yelled at once.

“…north into the Deadsands…”

“…west to Scarpa Well, but she…”

“…no, no, it was the chemist, listen!”

“…an angel, four of them and a hundred swords…”

“…Spine, you want. Sure as I’m sitting here…”

“…heard, but listen, she was scarred, black wings, brought down…”

“Too many voices!” Anchor boomed. “Too much!” The room fell silent. “One of you will now speak, please. No more than one! I offer this pouch for the truth. You!” He shoved the leather bag towards a lean crabber in a frayed red shirt and patched breeches who was seated at the nearest table. “You know where the angel is?”

The man moistened his lips. “Aye, sir, she fled southeast, hunted by skyships. Poison arrows took her down near Cinderbark Wood. They hacked her up into little pieces ’fore she could recover from the drugs.” He extended a hand to receive his reward.

Anchor snatched the bag away. “Dead?”

“Killed,” the crabber confirmed, still holding his palm out. “It’s true, I swear to Ayen. The Spine assassins got her, not two leagues away from where they grabbed this other one”—he pointed to the winged corpse on the wall—“if the nomads told it true. There was an assassin captured with them, a deserter. The three were seen traveling together right after the temple fell.” There were many murmurs and nods of agreement from the Hook’s other clientele on this last point.

Anchor grunted. “An assassin?”

The crabber nodded.

“And where is she?”

“Why…she’s lodging here now, sir.” Grinning, the man leaned back and put both hands behind his head. “In this very house: top floor, last door on the right. The Spine took their needles to her, see? And numbed her mind. They came to claim the archon’s bones, but Foley’s been stalling them with his talk of all the refugees hiding around these parts. The assassins have been well busy of late, redeeming folks like they do. She’s up there now with her Spine friends, and you’d best hire yourself a bunch of swords if you’re thinking of speaking to her. Fifty men should do it. Happens I can get you just the fellows to do the job, for a small fee.”

“Here?” the giant asked. “She is in this place? Now?”

“Spine don’t like daylight, do they? They only come out at night, when there’s redemption needs doing.”

Caulker understood the crabber’s plan at once, and cursed him for it. Fifty men would make no difference. When the temple assassins lodging upstairs had finished hacking this big idiot and his newly hired help to a bloody mess, those pearls would be lost. No, the Spine weren’t likely to give up such a treasure. He had to intervene now, get Hammer Eric to thump the stranger as he left the Widow’s Hook to recruit his sellswords. He gave his accomplice another secret nod, and smiled inwardly as the other man’s hand slid down to his weapon. Salt sailors’ tales of fogs and hellish skyships had little value here in the Hook.

But John Anchor did not turn and walk outside. Instead, he pulled a thin reed from his other pocket and blew into it. This rude flute produced no sound, or rather, none that Caulker could hear, for after a few moments he realized that Anchor had played a note not meant for human ears. From outside came a faint sound: a scratching, chittering noise that Caulker recognized from his midnight forays to the banks of the Coyle. The customers heard it, too; they were rising uneasily from tables, shifting gazes between each other and the open door as the sound grew more distinct. Caulker backed away; he had an idea what was coming.

Crabs!

Hundreds of thousands of the tiny red crustaceans poured into the room, all scrambling along John Anchor’s rope and over one another. The hemp strands seemed to bubble and then drip with them as scores fell to the ground and then shot across the floor towards their master. Those crabs on the rope reached the big man first and surged over his shoulders and arms in a scarlet tide. Countless more scuttled across the floor, then swarmed up Anchor’s legs and over his chest. In a heartbeat the giant was covered from head to foot in a writhing, clicking red suit.

Panic broke out. Customers yelled and shoved one another aside, knocking over stools and tables to get away from the tethered stranger and his pets. Cups, tankards, and bowls fell to the floor and smashed.