Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

Dill left Hasp’s castle without ceremony. The god willed a small door to appear in the lower battlements, and a narrow set of steps to take the young angel down to the surface of Hell. The skies churned like poison overhead, lending a ruby hue to the obsidian walls. These partitions divided the Maze into a nest of devious veins, interspersed with rooms and corridors and houses and castles: the living incarnations of the souls who dwelt within them. There were archways and oddly shaped portals, and steps that sank down to bubbling sumps or drowned quadrangles, or rose up to nowhere. Standing beside Hasp at the top of the stairs, Dill noticed that the stonework of the Maze was rotten in places: mirror-black where it hadn’t yet crumbled, but porous and dull where the constant flow of those red waters had eroded it.

Half a league away the canals opened into a wider space, a quadrangle where the alien remains of an Icarate temple loomed above the crimson slough and hexagonal pillars rose amidst mounds of polished white bones. The air was muggy and warped, buzzing with flies and larger winged shapes that circled through the haze. Everywhere could be heard the sound of fluids leaking from broken walls and windows, gurgling and trickling into deep stone throats.

Hasp warned him to stay clear of the deeper channels. Living barges plied these thoroughfares: heavy wooden vessels with iron funnels and heaps of cages upon their narrow decks. These were called the Wailing Ships, for each vessel was a soul reshaped by Menoa’s will-their captains could never leave their vessels because the captains were the vessels. And yet on the upper decks Mesmerist soul traders moved freely: dark figures fused to metal stilts, watching while stout-armed slaves pushed tillers or fed coal into screaming furnaces.

“Avoid those barges,” the god explained. “Soul traders will try to capture you and sell you on to the Icarates. Stay away from locks, too, indeed from anywhere where the canals change level. The machinery that operates the lock gates was once human. It is notoriously deceitful.”

“Can I trust anything?”

“Trust the walls which separated the canals. Trust steps and wells. They will not betray you because they have no memory. But do not trust doorways. Menoa deliberately constructed them from the bricks of broken minds. Many don’t realize that they are now doorways and will be angered by your passage through them.”

From the steps of Hasp’s castle Dill could see hills composed of these canals and walls, rising in tiers like ziggurats. He decided to avoid them. There would be locks between each level and he saw no point in trying to reach higher ground. And yet the plains looked equally dangerous, a great wet labyrinth of narrow channels and rotting temples.

“Where do I go?” he asked. “How do I reach the First Citadel?”

Hasp lifted his hand and pointed to a place on the horizon where the red mists appeared thickest. “There,” he said. “To the place where every soul catcher in Hell brings his goods. The First Citadel is under siege, encircled by Menoa’s armies. That is where you must go.”

At another blast from the hunting horn, the Legion of the Blind came to a halt two hundred yards back from the battlements of Hasp’s castle. The demons passed around their borrowed eyes among their ranks to survey the scene. Standing on the summit of a low ziggurat, Harper let her gaze travel up across the building’s pitted stone and rusted armour plating. It had settled in the center of a wide quadrangle, encompassing a morass ankle-deep in blood. Little power could be drawn from this shallow lake.

Cracks zigzagged across the castle’s facades, and even the spires appeared to slump. The Lord of the First Citadel was evidently exhausted. A consultation with King Menoa by way of her sceptre had confirmed the engineer’s suspicions as to the castle’s occupant. This particular archon could only be the god Hasp, youngest of Ayen’s seven sons. No other entity within the Maze possessed enough power to move such a vast building so far across Hell at such speeds. Even the Blind had been unable to gain ground on the castle until it had finally slowed down.

Now Hasp was stranded here, and the Mesmerist hordes faced a much weakened foe. Unease still roiled in Harper’s gut, however. The coming battle would not be easy. Hasp had proved himself to be a brilliant tactician, and his campaigns of terror had been a thorn in King Menoa’s side for thousands of years.

The Blind, however ferocious, fought with nothing but a savage instinct to destroy. One could not marshal or direct them in any complex way. One merely set them loose.

A flash in the sky grabbed the engineer’s attention. A great glass lizard, surely the largest of Menoa’s Iolite spies, shimmered and blurred against the seething clouds. Crimson light washed through veins in its transparent wings and skull, so that it appeared to merge partly with the sky, fading and reappearing at will. In its invisible phase only the tiny red heart in its breast betrayed its position to careful observers.

The winged lizard swooped low over the Blind, and then thrashed its wings to slow itself. With a sound like the wind blowing through crystal chimes, it settled on the ground beside Harper.

Call me Forgotten, it said. The king has sent me to direct this battle and supply him with visions of our victory.

“He sent a spy to do that?”

Forgotten clicked its beak. A spy who has seen much conflict. I carried the news of the BrokenPeak skirmish to Menoa, and of the destruction of the Third and Fourth Citadels. I have observed Hasp on many battlefields, the Lake of Temples, the Garden of Bones.

“Then you’re a harbinger of ill luck.”

Luck is meaningless. I have Menoa’s authority, engineer. He required a leader with combat experience. You have none. The great glass lizard then turned its long head towards the doomed castle, momentarily turning a deep shade of red as a surge of blood passed through its clear veins. Then it sent a vision to the waiting demons.

Harper registered the unvoiced command in her mind. Forgotten had conjured an image of a battlefield- this very same battlefield-in which the Legion of the Blind rushed forward to tear Hasp’s castle into fragments. They would assault the god’s soul in one powerful strike, relying on brute savagery to bring its manifested defenses down.

And the Blind obeyed without question. As one, they charged across the open quadrangle, their claws reaching out towards the tired stone and battered iron facades.

The castle shimmered and changed.

Hundreds of doorways appeared along the base of its walls, stone portals leading into the bowels of the building. Hasp had dismissed his defenses with one sweep of thought, leaving his own soul exposed to the advancing horde.

Why? Harper suspected a trap. What horrors were waiting to greet the attackers in those dark passages?

But Forgotten’s thoughts still shrilled loudly in every mind able to receive them. Hasp has relented. He hopes for a quick death. He sent another vision to the Blind, urging them to pour inside and rip out the heart of the building.

The demons streamed into the castle at a furious pace, hacking the living masonry apart as they went.

“Wait!” Harper shouted to Forgotten. This reckless assault was foolish. Hasp must have preserved something of his power. What traps did he have hidden within that battered old castle? What could possibly repel so many invaders?

A heartbeat later she received her answer. The Lord of the First Citadel possessed no secret legion, no manifested warriors to fight for his cause. All that remained of his power-of his very soul-stood naked before them now. Hasp had nothing left but his own tired castle.