Alan Campbell - God of Clocks

But Harper wasn't listening to him. She was hugging her bottle and crying.

They waited in that same cramped crawl space above the boiling room for hours, until the slaves finally finished their shift at Carnival's brazier, only to watch in frustration as four more slaves appeared to take their comrades' places.

Monk crawled away from the hole and then dragged the boy close to him so that he could whisper in his ear. “Gods damned waste of time,” he said. “Why didn't you tell me they never leave her alone?”

“I did,” muttered the boy. He thought it rather unfair that Monk was putting the blame on him. The whole thing was the old man's idea in the first place.

The astronomer stretched out his legs and winced. “You'd think they'd be too busy smashing up Hell to stay at their brazier.” He drew a hand across his stubbled jaw. “What we need,” he decided, “is some sort of diversion.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know! Ship isn't moving, is it? Gives you the chance to slip outside and do something unexpected. Take an axe to the hull-that'll soon get the bastards running.”

“You can't break the hull,” the boy replied. “No matter how rotten it gets, you can't break it, not even with an axe. I know that much.”

Monk frowned. He seemed ready to argue, but then the whole vessel gave a sudden lurch and began to creak and groan. “We're moving again,” he said. “They've eased the pressure on the hull. We're going deeper into Hell.”

In the chamber below them, Cospinol's slaves toiled at the brazier, shoveling coke and working the bellows and checking the contents of the condensing flask. Ghost lights whirled inside that glass tube and gave off a fierce illumination. Dull thuds continued to issue from the cooker as the scarred angel kicked at her tiny iron prison.

Hidden in the crawl space, the two conspirators waited.

After a while the hook-fingered boy heard the old man snoring. He had fallen asleep again. Lying there on his side in that confined wooden space, he looked like something that truly belonged in a coffin. His forehead was the colour of ancient bone, and tufts of wild hair sprouted from his cranium like scraps of dry moss. The boy thought about piling him down through the hole. It would be fun to see the slaves grab him and string him up again. Gallowsmen were supposed to stay outside the Rotsward.

But Monk was interesting in his odd way. The boy liked it when he talked about Pandemeria, the battles with the Mesmerists, and the first great automaton. And Monk knew how to get that pressure cooker open. The boy decided to wait until after he'd drunk some of the angel's essence.

He left the old man sleeping and crawled back through the sky-ship's maze of conduits. Once he reached the outer hull, he slipped out through one of the many gaps in it and onto the great scaffold that surrounded the vessel.

Now that the fog had gone, he could see the gallowsmen clearly. Most had moved to the outer reaches of the wooden matrix, ready to break down Hell's facades. The boy scuttled along one long spar and then leapt onto another one. He jumped again and his metal fingers gripped one of the empty nooses. He swung, let go, and landed next to a huge vertical timber that acted as a support column. Numerous ropes dangled around him, but these were for hoisting up debris and he couldn't risk using them, so he climbed down the timber itself. The Rotsward's hull diminished above him.

He wanted to see exactly where the ship was going.

In no time at all he neared the lower edge of the skyship's scaffold. The whole vessel sat atop what looked like a huge crushed labyrinth. A vast network of rooms with torn-open ceilings stretched away into the gloom on all sides, the scene illuminated in places by gallowsmen with flaming brands. The Rotsward's lowest spars had pierced the floors below, and many men were working down there, moving through the rooms or ripping up great chunks of stone, tiles, and wood, and loading it into baskets to be dragged up to the skyship's decks. They would squeeze the living energy from this detritus and manufacture soulpearls to feed the god of brine and fog.

Crunch.

The scaffold jerked and sank further into the maze. The boy heard men and women howling. He climbed down even closer and saw that most of the rooms were occupied, but the gallowsmen were not loading the people up. They were butchering them instead.

Crunch.

Another jolt, and the Rotsward descended again. Floorboards shattered. Walls toppled. Scores of dwellings crumbled down into the ones below. Cospinol's slaves were working flat out to save as much matter as possible, but they could only recover a fraction of it. The rest simply dropped away, falling upon the unwitting denizens below.

The armoured gallowsmen moved over this devastated landscape like a swarm of strange metal insects, entering houses through corridors wherever possible and climbing over debris where the damage was too great. They used their eclectic armaments against any souls they encountered. An old woman sitting at a loom turned when a metal-suited soldier leapt down beside her. She smiled and then died on his sword, before he put his boot to her chest and slid her corpse free.

Crunch.

Two warriors suddenly reacted to a new breach in the floor of a large stone dwelling. A young man in rich finery looked up in time to see their spears fall before his twitching body left red stains across his tiled floor. Four others were meanwhile dragging a screaming woman from her tiny brick cell.

These men were the dead from a thousand armies, the corpses of those warriors Anchor had slain since the day he first hitched the Rotsward's rope to his harness. No two were alike. They wore battered mail, plain plate, or enameled armour in bright yellows, greens, and blues-mercenaries and woodsmen in banded leather; archers with bone or yew bows; knights in steel, wearing colourful plumes; thieves, hooded gangers, and way-trappers. Some fought like brawlers with iron fist spikes; others used skinny blades in exotic flowing styles that the boy did not recognize. Blue-skinned and distended from years in their gins, these butchers moved in force through the steadily crumbling labyrinth.

Crunch.

Why were they killing these people in the Maze? Could these souls not be better used by Cospinol? The blood of those slain was now being wasted. Their essence mingled with the blood from the walls and floors, and leaked down into the depths of the Maze.

To where?

The slaves harvested scraps of living stone and wood, but they would not touch the corpses. The whole bloody scene felt like a giant sacrifice.

Crunch.

The scaffold dropped again. But this time something unusual happened.

The ground gave a sudden rumble, and great sections of it simply fell away. Several gaping chasms appeared amongst the network of interconnected rooms, corridors, and rows of brick partitions. The Rotsward appeared to have broken through into a vast cavern. The boy could see nothing down there except impenetrable darkness, but he heard the unmistakable sound of rushing water.

There was a pause.

And then John Anchor heaved on the rope again.

The Rotsward broke her way through the base of Hell. The network of gallows shuddered and groaned, and then suddenly dropped twenty fathoms. The lowest spars struck something solid, and the whole skyship came to an abrupt halt.

At that point, had the boy not shaped his own fingers to grip his environment, he might have lost his hold on the wood and fallen. Cospinol's gallowsmen were not so lucky, however. Dozens slipped from the greasy timbers and plummeted. To the boy's surprise, most of them landed in water.