Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

“The Icarate with the whip?”

The dwarf snorted. “Fadder Carpal is the greatest soul collector in the Maze. And that was no whip. You felt the insect at the end of it, eh? The kiss of a Penny Devil?”

Dill’s knuckle still throbbed. “It burrowed into me,” he said. “Like an-”

“Insect?” The dwarf chuckled. “ That was one of Ayen’s debased. Liria, they used to call her on earth, the Queen of Fleas. If you think Ayen gave her lover and her sons a hard time…” He paused to pick at his misshapen teeth with one hooked finger. “Consider what she did to the angels she really feared: Orus, Basilis, and Liria-all royally fucked for eternity.”

“The whip was Liria?”

“Liria was the sting at the tip. And Fadder Carpal is her guardian, at least-” He broke off as the old woman beside him suddenly began to convulse.

“Look lively,” the dwarf said to Dill, “the madwoman is fading again. You’ll see the Icarates revive her.”

“Cruelty!” the hag wailed. “Flesh is the stuff of memories. I can’t recall fat and skin.” The fiery light that sloped through the enclosure bars seemed to find little resistance in her body, but rather pass through it as though through a mist. “Nobody here helps me to remember. They might as well have locked me in with the blistermen.” She pointed to the cage in front of them and snarled, “See where the flies lay their eggs.”

Dill recoiled.

“She’s mad,” the dwarf said. “Menoa can’t do much with woozy minds like hers. She’s bound for the flensing machines and the Veil, if she makes it to the portal at all.” His dark eyes glittered; he shuffled his crooked bones away from her. “Either she’ll fade completely and join the ghosts in the walls, or one day soon we’ll all be breathing her.”

The hag licked her gums and said, “They promised me a parrot.”

One of Carpal’s Icarates appeared outside the cage, and thrust his trident into the old woman’s side. The weapon crackled; the hag gibbered and slavered. But soon enough, her phantasmal form solidified again. She became corporeal once more. The soul collector peered in at the other two captives for a moment, his rotten mouth-grille buzzing, and then returned the way he had come.

The sky grew dark and the strange caravan lumbered on. Dill could not sleep. He lay curled in a bed of wet straw, and thought about Mina. Had she escaped the Legion of the Blind? Where was she now? When he finally closed his eyes he imagined he could smell her perfume oozing from the splinter in his wrist.

The caravan did not halt for three days. Axles rumbling ceaselessly, the wagon train meandered through the Maze, sloshing along one red canal after another, creeping up the slick rises and plunging into flooded depressions. The ghost-mists darkened again.

Dawn brought plumes of crimson steam and a metal taste to the air. The madwoman displayed her gums and cackled. The dwarf thief sniggered and rattled his needle fingers against his teeth.

“I stole pieces of souls,” he said, “and devoured them in Icarate temples. It kept me busy. You have to keep busy in Hell or you fade away.” He picked his nose. “Do you know what lies underneath those temples?”

Dill shook his head.

“The failed experiments, the things that didn’t function but didn’t die, either. There are rivers and pools full of them. And something else…” He leaned his damp face closer to Dill and whispered, “A presence that blows across the Rivers of the Failed like a cold breeze. All that anguish is incubating something nasty down there. The Mesmerists are afraid of it.”

“Iril?”

The thief shook his head. “Iril is almost burnt out. His archons sit on the brink of defeat.” He pointed to the smoke-darkened horizon. “See where Menoa’s armies have besieged the First Citadel? Icarates, Non Morai, Iolites, and demons born from a thousand of the king’s dreams. You should hear the machines. You know how the Mesmerists make them, don’t you? Persuasion.”

Suddenly the thief made a frantic gesture. “Shush…the soul collectors are coming back.”

Icarates filed past the cage, their armour dribbling blue sparks. The stench of burnt metal followed them. By now Dill had learned not to look at them directly. Their tridents crackled and stung whenever they shoved them through the bars into his face. They would punish him until he thanked them for it. Better to simply lie still and hope they wouldn’t notice him.

One red day turned into another. Their passage through the Maze became dreamlike, as if seen through a veil. Dill viewed the world in glimpses: barges moving in the deeper canals, the steaming oxen and the crack of Carpal’s whip, the hag lolling in wild dementia, and warriors in other cages scraping stones along the edges of their fingers. The old woman faded and was revived three more times. They rolled past walls of ghosts and broken temples, and bulky machines that breathed out plumes of vapor.

One day they passed a vast square pool in which floated three tall metal ships. Deep, forlorn moans resounded within the hulls.

“From Pandemeria,” the thief explained. “These vessels are the commanders who led Menoa’s fleet against Rys.”

“What are they doing there?” Dill asked.

“Watching eternity go by.”

The endless trek began to take its toll on Dill. Most of the time he lacked the energy to rise, and instead lay wheezing helplessly in his bed of straw. He woke regularly without realizing that he had been asleep. At night the prisoners gibbered and howled. The dogcatchers’ flesh glistened; they snapped their teeth. Flies swarmed over the blistermen and laid their eggs in appalling places.

And on and on the procession crept.

Many days later the dwarf beat his head against the bars of their cage and cried out, “I’m weary, I’m bored. Where can I find something to steal?”

“Steal this!” yelled a man in the next cage. He whirled a sling over his head, then released it.

A pebble shot between the bars. It ricocheted off the dwarf’s skull and pinged away.

Those captives in the nearest cages shrieked with laughter. The soul collectors silenced everyone with a flurry of burning touches.

Although Dill could not share the good humor, he had begun to appreciate his surroundings more. The Maze was as beautiful as it was complex. This crimson playground which had at first driven him to such despair had become, by degrees, less threatening. There were so many marvels to behold: the chuckle of fluids behind the cage wheels; the bright chunks that clung to the spokes like rubies; the madwoman’s scrawl of white hair. He relished these sights. Once he spied silver-robed figures floating high in the sky and he felt his dead heart soar with wonder.

“Don’t look at them,” the thief warned. “Dangerous, dangerous creatures.”

How much time had passed, Dill did not know. The soul collectors found new prisoners for their caravan and threw them into the cages behind. There was a naked man without teeth or eyes and a bruised shapeless thing that could not stand unaided, a thin pale woman who never made a sound but just gaped at her darkly stained hands, and an old, old angel with a tin hat and only one wing. Most of the other captives laughed at this last find, but Dill only smiled.

He thanked the Icarates daily.

A year passed, or maybe a hundred years. Dill’s skin crawled with the memory of burns, yet these sensations were important to him. In those moments when he forgot the pain of the Icarates’ tridents a desperate panic came over him. The agony anchored him; without it, he feared he might forget who he was and start to fade like the hag. The soul collectors’ tridents gave him vigor; the burns he received kept him focused.