Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

“His armour is standard temple issue,” the Adept said to his men. “How would you seek to improve this design against ranged attacks?”

“Find and eliminate weaknesses,” one of the Cutters replied. He removed his sand mask, revealing a youthful face with a high forehead and a weak chin. Bruises and needle marks under his eyes indicated recent tempering. “I would test the joints for strength.”

“Then do so.”

The Cutter raised his crossbow and shot a bolt into the captain’s neck guard. The stone missile ricocheted off the metal with a hideous peal. Clay gnashed his teeth and groaned. The young assassin reloaded.

“Stop it!” Rachel yelled. “You’re just tormenting him.”

“Restrain those two. Bind the angel’s wings.”

The remaining Spine surged forward, dragged Rachel and Dill to their feet, and forced them up against the wall. One of them produced a set of chain-and-burr cuffs, a torture implement like a short leash, and tightened them around the angel’s wings, drawing them closely together behind Dill’s shoulder blades. Meanwhile the young Cutter standing over Clay aimed down a second time. This time the bone-breaker struck the captain in the crook of his elbow. The big man howled and tried to push himself upright, but he could no longer move his broken legs. Four more bolts followed before the young Cutter finally stopped shooting. “I don’t see any weaknesses beyond the obvious gaps in the knee joints,” he observed.

“Give your crossbow and quiver to me.”

The younger man complied.

The Adept rewound the windlass, set the latch, and then selected a fresh bolt from the borrowed quiver. This missile had a yellow glass bulb full of oily liquid attached to its tip. “Your mistake was to test only the efficacy of what you perceived,” he said to the Cutter, “while failing to consider what was absent from the design altogether. These older suits lack fireproofing.”

“No!” Rachel tried to break free from her restrainers. She struggled, every muscle in her body fighting against their grip, but it made no difference. She wasn’t strong enough. The Adept aimed the crossbow down at the helpless man and squeezed the trigger.

The incendiary struck Clay’s back and exploded, engulfing his whole body in crackling, spitting green flame. He screamed in agony as the burning chemicals trickled down through the tiny gaps between the plates of his armour. Rachel could feel the searing heat from the other side of the chamber.

“A productive lesson,” the Adept said, handing the bow back to the young assassin. “Obstacles cannot necessarily be overcome by brute force. You must make yourself familiar with the entire breadth of your arsenal.”

He smiled, just for an instant, but long enough for Rachel to notice. Her eyes widened in surprise. This Adept had taken pleasure in murder. His stoicism was just a carefully maintained facade. Like Rachel herself, he hadn’t been tempered.

They left the antechamber and Clay’s charred corpse, and proceeded through a warren of interconnected metal tunnels. Aether lights set into the floors bathed each junction in soft green luminance, while leaving the passageways between shrouded in darkness. Eerie metallic tones with no determinable cause or origin haunted the spaces around them.

Their route gradually led them down into the temple. The sapperbane conduits gave way to passages constructed from cut black stone and then finally to a lofty chamber with a sunken, bowl-shaped floor. Rachel did not recognize the place until she tilted her head, thus viewing the room the other way up. This had once been a hallway right below the Spine sleeping quarters. Smoke rose from cressets arranged along one side of the depression and hung in a thin blue layer over the heads of the nine assassins and their captives. The room also smelled vaguely of sweat. Shards of glass littered the floor, although there were no windows here. In the center, a rickety scaffold had been constructed out of timbers and hemp: a series of ladders and platforms that rose twenty yards to connect two small doors positioned on either side of the flat polished ceiling that had once been the floor.

“Climb,” the Adept said flatly. His face still revealed no emotion, but Rachel now knew him to be a fraud. If he hadn’t been tempered, why go to the trouble of pretending that he had been? His Spine masters would know the truth. Only the low-ranking Cutters would not be aware of his deception.

“Why aren’t you tempered?” she asked him.

“All Adepts are tempered.”

She snorted. “I’m living proof that they’re not, and so are you. You enjoyed what you did to Clay, didn’t you? Torturing him gave you pleasure. My problem was always the opposite. I didn’t particularly enjoy the messier aspects of my work.”

He stared at her, but his eyes betrayed nothing. “Your Spine status was revoked,” he said. “Indeed, you were never truly an Adept. You always lacked the ability to focus.”

This was the one Spine technique Rachel had been unable to master during her former training. The brutal process of tempering through torture and the administration of neural toxins vandalized an Adept’s mind, destroying his or her ego, yet it also granted the tempered assassin mastery of his or her own physiology. Focusing enabled Spine to temporarily heighten their senses, and to push their bodies far beyond the limits of normal endurance. Such combatants were far quicker and stronger than normal humans.

Rachel had struggled for years to learn the technique, but still her untempered mind had resisted. Every attempt at focusing had ended in failure.

Except once.

In the deep abyss under the city, the Spine technique had saved Dill’s life. In that one desperate moment when she had most needed to become more than human, she had somehow succeeded.

“Climb,” the Adept repeated.

He led Dill and Rachel up the scaffold, and through one of the upturned doorways. The Cutters followed in a pack, their fingers never far from their weapons’ triggers. One corridor led to another and yet another. In the loftier passageways catwalks had been erected above the floor to provide access to chambers on either side. Rachel glanced through doorways into tiny sleeping cells and vast training rooms full of sparring combatants. The sound of clashing blades and staffs echoed through the whole torchlit maze.

At last they reached the Rookery Spire. There the Spine herded their two prisoners down a steep, spiralling slope within the upturned tower: following the underside of the main stairwell. It was a disorienting experience in cramped semidarkness, a slip-sliding descent beneath steps cut into the roof. Rachel was forced to remove her wood-soled sandals and walk barefooted. She smelled sweat from her captors’ leathers, an honest human odor at odds with their ghoulish faces and dead-eyed gazes.

Halfway down, they bundled Dill into one dark chamber, and then forced Rachel to descend another level before piling her into a second room and locking the door behind her. She fell all of eight feet in almost complete darkness, rolled over, and came to rest amid a pile of hard-edged debris.

When her eyes finally grew accustomed to the gloom, she was able to survey her surroundings. The cell had previously been a rough-walled chamber with a highly arched stone ceiling-the bedroom of a high-ranking priest, she supposed-before it had turned upside down.

The floor, once the ceiling, was a conical basin full of shattered furniture and dusty tapestries, dry rushes and broken porcelain, and the remains of fine furnishings that had come crashing down on top of an ancient iron chandelier. Her captors hadn’t bothered to remove any debris, and little wonder with the temple so crammed with prisoners. “Our holding facilities are stretched,” Rachel recalled.