Alan Campbell - God of Clocks

The boy couldn't say how long they spent together in that room, but when it was finally over the scarred angel rested on the bloody floor, her back pressed against one of the bulkheads. Her leathers hung in tatters about her wiry body, her muscular thighs and small hard breasts. Carnival was barefoot, and for some reason, the boy thought that strange.

“Your name,” she said. “What is it?”

He shrugged. “Don't know.” Then he thought about it. “Maybe John. After my father.”

“Okay then, Maybe John.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Leave here while you still can.”

“I don't see Cospinol's slaves coming back anytime soon.”

“Get out.” She said this through her gritted teeth. The anger was building inside her again. “You stupid, ignorant… get the hell out of here!”

The boy fled. He rushed to the door and pulled it open and ran through, leaving it to slam against its frame. Now he was in one of the ship's main companionways, but he didn't recognize it. He was used to the Rotsward's darker spaces, the cramped tunnels behind the bulkheads and between the decks. But nobody was about to see him. Where were all the slaves?

He skidded around a corner and ran straight into Cospinol.

The god of brine and fog occupied the whole of the passage. His sagging grey wings stretched from wall to wall. His lank hair fell over the shoulders of his crab-shell armour, that cracked and useless suit that still stank of distant oceans. In one fist he held an axe.

“You!” the god said.

The boy turned to run away, but Cospinol grabbed him. Instinctively the boy's skin began to morph. It became pliant and slippery. He felt claws extend from his feet to give him greater purchase on the floorboards.

“Oh, no, you don't.” Cospinol struck him across the back of the head. “You'll keep that mangy shape, you little demon.” He wrenched the boy around to face him. “What have you done?”

The boy realized that Cospinol's hands were trembling.

“What have you done?” the god repeated. “Slippery little Mesmerist shit. I heard her screaming.”

“Nothing,” the boy wailed. “I didn't do anything.”

“Is she in there?”

“Let me go.”

“Did you let her out?” Cospinol shook him roughly. “Where is she?”

A female voice answered, “Here.”

Carnival hovered at the end of the companionway. Her wings were smaller than Cospinol's and very black. But she stood taller than before. Her limbs had reset and now looked almost normal. Her attitude evinced litheness and power. Only her tattered armour and pallid flesh spoke of her months-long ordeal in the boiling room. Countless wounds burned fiercely red against her pale skin. The blood around her lips had darkened and dried, and now cracked when she spoke.

“Cospinol,” she said in a low and even voice.

Cospinol released the boy. “I am Ayen's eldest son,” he said in a tone that managed to sound both defensive and indignant. “Heaven's shipwright. I am the god of brine and fog…”

She walked towards him. Her eyes were dark and devoid of any recognizable emotion, as unknowable as those of a wild beast.

She stopped just beyond the reach of his axe, and stared mutely at him for a long moment.

And then she killed him.

The attack came so fast that the boy did not see it. Carnival's wings flickered like a passing shadow. Cospinol had no time to raise his weapon. By the time the god's instincts compelled him to flinch, the scarred angel had ripped off his jaw. He gaped at her in-credulously as she dropped the bloody chunk of bone. Then she rushed forward again. It seemed to the boy that she embraced the god, held him close as a lover would. It took him a moment to register that the snap he heard was Cospinol's spine. Carnival buried her teeth in her victim's neck. He spasmed once, but the life had already left his eyes.

She was a long time drinking.

When she was done, she let the old god's body crumple to the floor. She then turned to face the boy, staring at him without recognition, her eyes seeming unfocused. Blood sluiced down her neck and arms. The clawed fingers twitched at her sides.

“You killed a god,” he said.

“A long time ago.”

“What? No, I mean Cospinol. Him! You killed him.”

She glanced at the corpse, then back at him. Awareness tightened the corners of her eyes, and her expression became suddenly suspicious. “I know you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don't you recognize me?”

She continued to stare at him as her bloodied chest rose and fell rapidly, her breaths coming in quick rasps. For a moment she looked uncertain. Her hands twitched again. A drop of blood fell from her fingernail and hit the floor. Finally she said, “Maybe John.”

“That's right.”

“After your father.”

“Please let me go.”

The scarred angel lifted her eyes and gazed into the far distance. She licked the palm of her hand and then licked her knuckles. Then she turned around and walked away, leaving the boy alone with the corpse of the Rotsward's master: the god whose will had bound the rotten skyship together…

“Oh, no,” said Maybe John, suddenly realizing.

The first beam broke before he had even scrambled to his feet. A mighty crash sounded somewhere overhead, and the companionway ceiling collapsed as heavy timbers plunged through the thin wainscoting. Clouds of dust rolled into the narrow passage. Coughing, the boy shuffled away-on his knees and elbows-from this scene of collapse. A section of floor gave way behind him and he was pitched backwards down a steep wooden ramp.

He struck solid boards again inside one of the Rotsward's many crawl spaces. Overhead, the ceiling joists snapped and a mass of rotten wood and dust crumpled into the companionway he'd just vacated, filling it entirely. Now trapped in the gloom of the narrow conduit below, Maybe John glanced around. Debris blocked both directions. There was no way out.

He changed his human form for another, more suitable, shape, though shape-shifting had never come naturally to Maybe John. He had resisted the Mesmerist implants all along, and the priests in turn had almost given up on him. They'd threatened to put him to work in the Ninth Citadel simply as a door, before he'd finally stopped fighting them. He hadn't liked the idea of people walking through him. He'd told himself that it would be better, after all, to become a shiftblade.

He clasped his hands and stretched out his arms, allowing his skin, muscles, and bones to flow together into a long ribbon. His metal fingers twisted around each other and became a slender cone. He forced the rest of his body to tighten and elongate behind that cone, becoming serpentlike. As an afterthought he grew metal scales along his back for protection.

Finally transformed, Maybe John slithered through gaps in the rubble and thus cleared the crawl space blockage. Around a bend he found another conduit, similarly congested, but this likewise proved to be no problem now. All the while, the skyship continued to break apart around him. Great booming noises issued from somewhere outside the hull. The Rotsward's gallows? Insects scurried everywhere, shaken out of the rotten wood. The boy spotted a tiny hole that seemed to lead in the right direction, and squeezed himself through. He slipped down between decks and reached what was left of the outer hull. Here dozens of the heavy gallows crossbeams had punctured and crushed the skyship's skin as if it were paper.

The boy coiled around one such timber and slipped outside through the narrow gap surrounding it.

Nothing recognizable remained of the vessel he had known. The shafts of light that fell from the lowest windows of the Maze revealed dark tangles of broken wood and knotted rope scattered over the River of the Failed. Curious souls peered down through the squares of glass above, as though from portals of a far grander vessel than the Rotsward had been. Cospinol's ship had ceased to exist in any true sense. Stripped of his protection, she had simply disintegrated.