Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

She got up off the floor and walked over to the window. A crimson mist wreathed the abyss beyond the glass and, looking up, Rachel could just discern the dark, cluttered bulk of Deepgate looming overhead, all wrapped in chains and illuminated in places by flickering firelight. Was this the red veil Dill had spoken of, or simply clouds of poison from the burning city? She was about to turn away, when a movement outside grabbed her attention.

Vaporous figures were rising through the mist, the ghosts of countless men and women. With arms outstretched they drifted upwards, their gazes fixed longingly on the city above. The nearest of them passed by only yards from the window and she noticed that for the most part the men were dressed in the old-style suits and pudding-bowl hats once fashionable among Deepgate’s wealthier pioneers, while the women wore layered frocks and carried parasols as protection against a sun that no longer shone upon them. They were almost translucent, as though formed of the red mist itself, but in their faces Rachel glimpsed terrible white eyes and lunatic grins.

Captain Clay had been wrong. Deepgate’s apparitions were not born of the city’s recent catastrophes. These shades had died a long time ago. And they were surging up directly from the abyss.

But why?

Dill hadn’t been able to sleep. His wings chafed at their bindings and sent shards of pain up through his shoulders. He guessed the time to be well after midnight, so it ought to have been completely dark by now, except it wasn’t. Dim blood-coloured light, filtering in through the huge multipaneled windows, suffused the room, turning everything to hues of red. The folds of tapestries which had gathered in the floor depression looked like liver in a bowl. Cracks ran like veins through the surrounding stonework.

But Dill could not drag his gaze from the window. With a terrible fascination, he watched the ghosts beyond the glass.

Most of the shades appeared to be men and women dressed in queer, old-fashioned clothes, but occasionally Dill thought he glimpsed creatures with wings in the far distance, and massive, bulkier shapes rising through gloom. Whatever those were he could not guess.

He was so caught up in watching them that he did not at first notice the creature hovering immediately beyond the window, until a shadow crossing the glass alerted him.

This visitor was a tall, thin battle-archon in crimson, chain-link armour. At his side he carried a serrated cutlass, and he wore an odd helmet shaped like the head of a hawk. His wings thumped languidly behind him, keeping the archon level as he studied Dill with deep red eyes. He was older than Dill, and handsome, but there was a cynical twist to his lips. At times his body seemed to fade into the mist outside and reappear again as though it was drifting between separate realities.

The battle-archon flew to the very center of the window, and made an obvious sign that Dill should open it.

Dill shook his head. The Spine had already warned him against any such action. After all, priests had spent three thousand years blessing the temple’s stone walls and stained glass to keep any unwanted phantasms out. Now this barrier against the ghosts in the abyss served the Spine better than any other. At night the Church of Ulcis was the safest place in Deepgate-or it would have been had it not been hanging upside down and inexorably crumbling into the abyss below.

The angel on the other side of the glass beat his wings impatiently and descended until his face was directly level with Dill’s. He said something Dill could not hope to hear, then pointed insistently at the window latch.

Again Dill shook his head in defiance.

The stranger’s expression twisted into one of disgusted frustration. For a heartbeat he faded, becoming nothing more than a swirl of red mist, before his body solidified again. He raised a fist as though to shatter the window, but stopped himself. His lips parted in a sneer, then he jerked a thumb towards the latch again.

Dill retreated to the back of the room, trying to ignore the window. Instead he feigned interest in the shattered furniture and tapestries piled up in the sunken floor.

By now the battle-archon looked furious. Lifting his cutlass with both hands, he held it up only an inch from a windowpane, then he hovered for a minute, all of his attention fixed on just the sword. Slowly, he brought the blade forward against the glass.

Dill heard a tap.

The battle-archon grinned.

Morning finally arrived. As light filtered down through the chained city, the windows of Rachel’s cell turned a lighter shade of red. The mist thinned, though it did not dissipate entirely, and the ghosts stopped rising from the depths.

The sunlight, feeble as it was, had driven the phantasms away.

Stained glass windows before her depicted three scenes from the Deepgate Codex, each set one over the other: the fall of Ulcis from Heaven, the coming of the Herald, and the rise of Callis and the Ninety-nine from the abyss. Now that the panels were upside down, Rachel could reach out and easily touch the image of Callis and his warriors that otherwise would have been out of reach.

The door to her cell lay eight feet above what had now become the floor. The Spine would open it eventually, of course, if only to throw her down a bladder of water. She studied the heaped debris that had gathered in the floor basin: broken furniture, cloth, smashed porcelain, and even an old iron chandelier-a cornucopia of potential weapons.

Rachel touched the window again. Thankfully this thin barrier of priest-blessed glass had kept her safe all night, and none of the apparitions had been able to enter her cell. But other parts of the temple had crumbled away before her eyes, and the great building would not survive for much longer.

She stood for a moment, thinking.

Tempered Spine felt no fear, but they understood danger. They would not tolerate a threat to their precious temple. And if they wanted Rachel alive for tempering…

She made a sudden decision.

She picked up the leg of a broken chair and used it to smash the lowest pane, taking some pleasure in aiming directly for Callis’s painted face. Broken glass fell away into the abyss outside, leaving a jagged hole in the middle of the pane.

A chill breeze stirred Rachel’s hair. The phantasms would return at dusk. She had until sunset to find out if her terrible gamble had worked.

Carefully, she prised out loose shards of glass from the edges of the pane and arranged them in a line. They would serve as knives-too brittle to meet a Spine sword with, but deadly enough if they were thrown.

She first selected those shards with the best balance, and wound strips of tapestry around one end to make them easier to handle. This way she made six knives in all, although she doubted she’d get the opportunity to use more than one of them. Her first throw would have to be absolutely accurate. Next she used the chair leg to pound the smaller, less useful shards into a fine powder, which she gathered up into a makeshift pouch. Ironically, her Spine master had taught her the efficacy of using such substances to temporarily blind an opponent. The chair leg itself she set aside to use as a club; if she ever escaped the room, it might be handy for close combat.

A scream erupted from somewhere overhead.

Rachel pocketed the throwing knives she’d fashioned, then stood up to look out of the window. The Rookery Spire had been the tallest in the temple, so now it naturally housed the lowest dungeon. The smooth black walls outside would be impossible to climb, but overhead, a clutch of spires-fingers of stone and masonry-extruded like stalactites in a Hollowhill cavern. Beyond this, a black lattice of chains stretched on for miles, all wreathed in red fumes and silhouetted against an angry sky. In places, spikes of orange light punctured the city, and constant dull booming sounds drifted over the abyss, as though the bones of the city were snapping one by one. And in a sense they were, for Deepgate was still crumbling into the pit. Showers of dust and debris rained down from the temple and its surroundings, stirring up clouds of grainy air. Looking down, Rachel saw that the roof of the Rookery Spire had already disappeared, and stonework ended twenty yards below her in ragged chaos.