Alan Campbell - God of Clocks

“Sorry, madam.” Anchor got to his feet. “That was me. I fell through your soul. The pain will go away after a while.”

“Have you seen Dory?” she said.

Anchor shook his head. “No, madam.” He jumped up and grabbed the floor joists of the room above.

“Dory said she'd come by, but I haven't seen her in ages,” the woman persisted. “I don't know what's become of her.”

Grunting, Anchor heaved himself up onto the next level. He looked down to see the twins still standing under the hole. He gave them a wave.

“Don't you go rummaging through the attic,” shrilled one of them. “Our costumes are up there, and they mustn't be unpacked. They're very fragile.”

“Who's that?” said the woman in the bed. “Dory? Is that you?”

So many potted plants filled the third room that it looked like a garden. Walls of naked brick supported trellises covered with green vines. Some old chests of drawers and wooden tables stood around the edges, but pots of yellow, pink, and red blooms adorned every flat surface and even the floor itself. At first Anchor thought the room was empty but then he spotted a young man curled up in the corner. In one hand he held a pair of shears, and he appeared to be unconscious.

Anchor walked over and crouched to feel for a pulse. Then he shook his head. These people were all dead, of course; if they had a pulse, it would be because they remembered having one and not because blood still flowed through their veins. Nevertheless he propped the young man up and gave him a gentle shake. “You all right, lad?”

The young man opened his eyes and peered at Anchor. “I must have fallen,” he said. “Where am I?”

“You don't know where you are?”

“No.”

“Good. Then I've done you a service.”

Anchor left him alone and went back to the edge of the open shaft. He looked up to see that some of the holes above him had already begun to close as the consciousnesses within began to reassert their influences upon their environments. Down below, the twins' room was sliding away at a walking pace, underneath the bedridden woman's chambers. Those two spinsters had evidently decided to move.

“John!”

Alice Harper's head had appeared at the uppermost entrance to the shaft. Now she was looking down at him. “Are you all right?”

“This is a very strange place,” he called back.

“Stranger than you realize,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

He clambered up through the remaining chambers with barely a glance at the occupants within, then swung himself up out into open air. A fierce gale slammed into him. Harper waited on a nearby stone shelf, from where she could see far across the Maze. Her red hair whipped about her pale face.

From up here Anchor could see that they were standing upon the summit of a strange conglomerate of souls. It looked as if an entire Pandemerian street had been compacted together into a rude lump. But this mass of dwellings altered shape continuously, as facades stretched and compressed against neighbouring stonework. It was crawling across the surface of Hell, devouring walls under its shifting foundations. In its wake it left a shallow trench of subterranean rooms now ripped open and exposed to the flooded labyrinth surface, as streams of blood rushed into these open wounds and gurgled down through any spaces revealed amidst those smashed quarters.

Harper turned her head away from the force of the wind. “Can you hear them?” she said.

“Hear who?”

“The voices in the wind.”

Anchor listened. After a moment he heard what sounded like human voices-very faint-amidst the howling air, as though the wind had carried the cries across a great distance. He could not make out what they were saying, nor even catch enough of their words to recognize the language.

Harper reached into her tool belt and took out a black circular lens. “Non Morai,” she explained. “See for yourself.”

Anchor peered through the lens, and into what looked like another world entirely. Seen through the dark glass disc, the crimson landscape appeared green. Winged creatures filled the skies, batlike figures with gaunt faces and red grins. They swarmed around paler yellow lights, like wisps of glowing lace, and they appeared to be herding these lights towards the surface of Hell.

He yanked the lens away, and the scene returned to normal-naught but an empty red sky. Yet when he raised the glass disc again, the winged figures and their gossamer charges reappeared, wheeling in their thousands against the verdant heavens.

“I spotted them shortly after we left the portal,” Harper said. “They're steering souls here, to this particular part of Hell.”

Anchor had encountered Non Morai before, but never in such numbers. On earth such phantasms often haunted scenes of violence, battlefields and places where men had been murdered. Human thaumaturges sometimes employed them to gather souls. “Why? Is Menoa behind this?”

The engineer looked doubtful. “Menoa uses Iolites for aerial work and his Icarates to collect souls,” she explained. “Besides,” she pointed down towards a point on the surface of Hell, “there's that to consider.”

Anchor looked. At first he couldn't see what Harper was indicating, but then he spotted it. The Midden on which they stood was creeping away from a strange object on the surface of the Maze. It looked like an iron funnel rising from a crush of bloody stonework. Its huge maw, almost large enough to swallow a house, expanded and contracted continuously like a mouth. He raised Harper's spirit lens again and saw a swarm of Non Morai flitting around that opening, guiding soul lights inside.

“Why bother to travel far across Hell when there are countless souls trapped in the walls all around here?” Harper said. “These Non Morai are capturing newly arrived spirits-the souls who haven't yet become part of the Maze.” She continued to watch as the queer opening consumed scores of lights. “When Menoa wants souls, his Icarates simply smash up swaths of the Maze and take them. Whoever or whatever built that funnel is being a lot more subtle. It's like they don't want to draw attention to themselves.”

Anchor grunted. “Then why drag us here?”

“When the portal broke, the Non Morai would have rushed to claim all those newly released souls. We just happened to be caught up in their gale.”

The tethered man lowered the spirit lens and grinned. As far as he was concerned, this could be regarded as an act of aggression against the Rotsward, and was therefore justification for a battle. However, he doubted that Harper or Cospinol would agree to a de-tour. They had bigger boars to fry. “Wouldn't take us long to go down into that funnel and have a look,” he said.

She looked away, shrugging, but to Anchor it seemed that she was feigning indifference. Did she actually want to go down there?

The Soul Midden jerked under Anchor's feet, and then tilted gently backwards. He peered down over the forward facade in time to see the base of the great creeping conglomerate flow up over another one of the low Maze walls. Stonework rippled, and broke into an irregular arched colonnade. The columns between these arches bent and then stepped, insectlike, over the wall, reforming into a solid facade on the other side. The Midden consumed a huge chunk of the wall and then moved on, ever further from the strange funnel.

A shudder ran through the great skyship rope, and Cospinol's voice entered Anchor's thoughts. No, John. As confident as I am in your ability to defend us, I see no reason to seek trouble. We don't know what's down there.

Anchor grunted. “Well, we can't ride this thing all the way to the Ninth Citadel.” He stomped a heel down. “At this rate, it could take centuries, even if we could be sure we're going the right way.”