Alan Campbell - God of Clocks

“Put that down,” Rachel said.

The other woman immediately lowered the axe. “Abner made me do it,” she said. “It was his idea. He said since I was younger than him I'd be the best one to frighten you off. I never meant to hit you. Abner said I should…” She stopped herself and gave a small wince. “But I couldn't do that anyway. We were just trying to scare you away.” Her throat bobbed. She glanced down at the axe on the floor. “Please don't kill us. There are four hundred copper marks hidden in the well. You can have them all.”

“Where is Abner? Is he your husband?”

The woman's gaze darted momentarily past Rachel to the room she'd just come storming out of, before returning to the assassin. “My husband? Yes. He ran out back when the fog and the golem came. He'll be hiding in the woods somewhere. He didn't mean you no harm.”

Rachel had turned so that her back was now against the landing wall. She was not surprised to spy movement to one side, a figure beyond the open doorway through which her unlikely attacker had just come.

A stout man wearing scruffy green breeches and a white shirt stood in the doorway. Abner was twice the size of his wife. His cynical little eyes fixed on Rachel as he aimed a musket at her face.

He said, “She's not getting my money.”

Then he pulled the trigger.

John Anchor had carried the weight of the sea on his back before and therefore he understood pressure, but in this strange realm the fluid was becoming thinner and more transparent as he descended. He felt like he was adrift in a red sky. Hundreds of motes of light had been drawn to him, and the whole constellation sparkled and danced all around like pieces of living aether; these were souls trapped in the portal.

Anchor reached out again and again, grabbing fistfuls of cord as he pulled himself even deeper, Cospinol's great ship ploughing through the waters above him.

All the while he kept his eyes on the depths, watching out for the entity that Alice Harper had detected on her Mesmerist device.

Soon he began to perceive objects in the waters around him: physical things like Anchor himself that must surely have fallen down from earth, and other, weirder detritus that looked like it belonged below in the Maze. An oak tree floated several yards to his left, complete with roots, its twigs still bearing acorns. Three steel helmets hung suspended in the waters as though they had come together to confer. In the far gloom Anchor spotted an iron vessel, a small Pandemerian steamer of some kind. He could just make out its funnel and bridge.

And everywhere there were corpses of both men and beasts: hundreds of the Northmen who had fallen at Larnaig; a score of dead horses like huge pale foetuses suspended in amnion; jackals and hunting dogs and countless scraps of other unidentifiable remains.

The Mesmerist refuse was even stranger: different-sized spheres composed of human bones, two figures on long black stilts-quite dead-clusters of vicious metal shapes, and dozens of vaguely humanoid warriors and flayed red men. But there was also debris that Anchor suspected had never seen the sun: broken chunks of carved black stone and arches, and entire sections of churches or temples. The lights seemed attracted to these things and looped around them in constantly slow orbits.

Opening the portal, Anchor realized, had caused a cataclysm not just on earth but also in Hell. Now the detritus from opposing universes mingled here in the limbo between them.

And then he saw something moving through the debris to his right-a long sleek shadow with a pointed head and a crescent tail. It disappeared behind a section of temple wall.

A shark?

Anchor paused his descent. Surely it was impossible for any normal living creature to survive down here. The tethered man and his master, however, had consumed enough souls over the aeons to bend the very substance of nature to their wills. Everyone else aboard the skyship, with the sole exception of Carnival, had been dead for centuries. Dead slaves, dead sailors, dead warriors hanging in the Rotsward's gins. Even Alice Harper did not require air to survive, simply a supply of blood.

Was this the creature Harper had detected earlier?

The skyship rope thrummed against his back. What's wrong, John? Why have you stopped? Some sort of trouble?

Anchor wrapped his legs around the spine of the portal, and then used both fists to jerk down on the rope three times in order to relay his uncertainty back to Cospinol.

Harper isn't reading anything unusual on her locator. Some ghostsnearby, but nothing that wasn't once human. The soul traffic she detected earlier is still quite far below you. I'm afraid it's much further away and larger than we previously thought. The sheer scale of it has confused her device. But the closer we get the more information she can decipher. It's certainly not an arconite, John.

The tethered man peered into the murky red waters. Human souls swarmed amongst the suspended debris like jack-o'-lanterns at play, illuminating facets of the queer drowned architecture. He looked again for the creature but saw nothing more.

No doubt it was simply a Mesmerist construct that had somehow failed to die at Larnaig. Still, he did not recall seeing such an animal on the battlefield.

He began his descent again.

Further down it grew brighter. The waters thinned and cleared, and soon Anchor could discern just how vast the debris field was. It stretched as far as he could see in every direction, men and beasts and machines and pieces of black masonry all floating in fluid as thin as air. Strange gold and crimson clouds stained the far horizon, as if backlit by a hidden sun, and from these issued an amber radiance that slanted through the fluid like evening sunshine.

The pressure had fallen to such an extent that Anchor was tempted to open his mouth and inhale. He resisted that urge. This was not air.

The rope trembled again. John, our metaphysical engineer is obtaining clearer readings from the portal below you. There is a vast number of souls down there. Cospinol paused. I can't explain it, John, but this looks like another army rising from the Maze.

An army of what? King Menoa had slaughtered his entire Mesmerist force to open this portal. He had nothing left but the arconites that walked the earth. And yet here appeared to be a second force as vast as the first. Hidden reserves, perhaps? Or had the Lord of the Maze managed to bend the souls of Rys's slain Northmen so soon after Larnaig?

Either seemed unlikely.

Then what was this new force?

The tethered man grinned. King Menoa had exceeded all of his expectations, a worthy foe indeed. Anchor slammed his hands together and chuckled deep in his throat. In all his long life he had not heard of another being fighting an army within a portal. Men would sing about this battle for centuries to come.

John, they're rising fast. Drag the Rotsward down towards you. My gallowsmen have centuries of saved anger to spend.

Anchor felt a twinge of disappointment, but he was neither proud nor selfish enough to deny his master's gallowsmen their share of sport. He gripped the portal spine between his knees and then tugged on the skyship rope. Again and again he pulled on that briny hemp, allowing a great loop of it to sag into the portal below him.

After a while the rope continued to fall past him without his aid; he had given Cospinol's skyship enough momentum to descend on her own. He looked up to see a vast dark moon burgeoning in the heavens above, the edges made ragged by countless crosshatching gallows.

And when he looked down again, he saw the opposition Menoa had brought to meet him. Not warriors. Not Mesmerists, either.