Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

He couldn’t stop smiling. His friend, the thief, was always there to encourage him. “Fadder Carpal knows his business well,” he said. “He takes good care of us, of his family. He won’t let us become like them .” He inclined his head towards the faces in the walls.

The phantasms gazed out at Dill from the stonework. Their lips were moving, but he could not hear their words, only the sound of Fadder Carpal’s whip.

One evening soon afterwards, the caravan reached its destination. Dill had been dreaming, and didn’t notice the grey towers at first. Instead he first became aware of crowds of strange creatures around his cage. A few of them resembled humans, but most had been changed. There were the usual Icarates and dogcatchers, and even a tall cloaked figure with a blisterman on a leash. Other figures moved with metal limbs or wheels and leaked foul-smelling smoke from their lips. Two women with crystal skulls paused to peer into Dill’s cage. A constant hubbub of chatter and mechanical clunks filled the canal through which they were passing. This avenue was different from those they had passed along before. Its walls were taller, full of windows and doorways that crept slowly past one another.

“We are here,” the dwarf said. “Here for show and then sale to the king’s captains. Look! Over there you can see the First Citadel.”

They had arrived in a great city. Monolithic black buildings lined the canals here, their flat roofs bristling with needlelike protrusions and slowly turning wheels. Smoke and fresh red mist wheezed from valves set in walls, but the waters in this shallow avenue were tinged with green and smelled of fuel.

Over all this towered a group of six stone towers, each supporting a flat platform at its summit. On each such platform grew a tree. Arched bridges between linked the platforms together, although three of these had collapsed. Blue windows shone in the tower walls below the platform-as though reflecting a different sky.

“The trees repel shades,” the thief explained. “And it’s said that the roots grow all the way down through the towers themselves.” He gazed up at the fortress hungrily. “There’s no way in from the ground. I would trade my hands for wings to sneak in there.”

Dill nodded his head woozily. Sleep beckoned him, but he resisted.

On through the streets the soul collectors’ procession sloshed. The dwellings lining the canal became sparser, replaced by arrays of chattering mechanical towers. Eventually these gave way to low ziggurats that exhaled white fumes and groaned as if packed with people.

Now the procession rolled into a wide circular arena hemmed by tiered stone steps and wound around itself in an expanding spiral. Dill at last staggered to his feet and pressed his face against the bars to get a better look. The soul collectors were unharnessing their kine. Between the wagons, the great beasts bellowed and bulled and reeked of dung. For the first time, Dill saw the entire procession at close quarters. Wagons were being unloaded, structures erected all around: huge spiked wheels and gaudy towers, and metal huts, each with a single puffing chimney and its walls etched with hieroglyphs. Hammers pounded, ropes skreaked in pulleys. Thin metal boxes, as long as a man, were carried from one flat cart and stacked upon the sodden ground. Gladiators clashed their swords against their shields and whooped. Everywhere, men were shouting and thumping their cages.

“Now the Mesmerist captains will see what we can do!” the dwarf cried. “They will witness a dance of steel the like of which has not been seen since Hasp met Ayen’s bodyguards in the War Against Heaven. We’ll cut through dead men and demons and beasts from nameless worlds and give them wounds that will amaze them even as they sink into the mire.” He grabbed Dill and shook him. “Here is our chance to bathe Fadder Carpal in glory.”

Dill’s heart surged with joy.

The Icarates took three days to assemble their market. They beat Dill until he felt alive again. On the evening of the third night a heavy silence settled over the arena and the ad hoc collection of structures which had sprung up within its boundaries. The sky brooded, dark as a velvet shroud. Green and yellow lights bobbed on ropes between the cluttered towers, wheels, and huts, bathing all in harsh and sickly radiance. Soul collectors glided between the gladiator cages, their queer armour sparking brightly, their eye-lenses gleaming.

Dill was curled up on the floor of the cage, imagining the battles to come. He would shine for Fadder Carpal and fetch him a good price at the warrior’s market.

A strange crystal voice sounded nearby, like the chiming of tiny glass bells: “A thorough job as always, Fadder, although the process took much longer than the king expected.”

Silence.

“I understand, Fadder, but we cannot delay any longer. Menoa has already constructed the thirteenth arconite. His surgeons have now finished with Hasp and his woman. There are plans in motion. He needs the angel’s soul now. ”

Another moment of silence.

“Of course we know about the splinter. The king is satisfied. It is time to bring Dill to the Processor.”

The train to Coreollis rumbled along a narrow slag embankment above Upper Cog City, dragging mountains of smoke behind it. The lower districts remained flooded, but here the waters had receded some fifteen yards below the raised steel tracks, leaving streets clogged with silt and rusting warships. From the embankment’s slopes to the horizon, ten thousand vessels had been left to rot among the waterlogged shops and houses. Mangled heaps of gunboats and destroyers filled the plazas of Highcliffe and the Theater District, while the cries of these adapted souls rose higher still. Battleships loomed like great red headlands above rows of townhouse roofs, their hulls scarred by cannon-fire or scraped and dented by rubble from collapsed buildings, their groans of pain long and low. A Mesmerist-adapted war barge had come to rest against the roof of the cathedral in RevolutionPlaza, her bow pointing skywards, her stern deep in cafe tables and mud. The late-evening sun gave a molten edge to those funnels, decks, and gun batteries that rose above the chimneystacks, and bathed the brickwork between ships in soft amber light.

South of the terminus the embankment sank with the surrounding streets towards SillRiver, and here the waters rose to within a foot of the newly laid railway sleepers. Flooded lanes looped around the Offal Quarter factories like a giant fingerprint or like the canals of Hell, all choked with flotsam, furniture, and corpses. Nacreous swirls of oil and yellow, aquamarine, and ochre froths revolved between hull, keel, and lamppost. Cannon boats drifted in the deep square pools of old workhouse yards or lay beached on tenement roofs, their lines fouled in weather vanes. The bloodied waters in Emerald Street, Minster Street , and Canary Row were clogged with steam yachts and with painted dolls from the Low Cog Puppet Workshop. A breeze came up from the city: bitter, engine-scented air full of hot dust and strange metallic cries.

To Harper it seemed that the ships were singing laments she understood. These iron voices were no longer human, and yet they evinced human suffering clearly. The Mesmerist Veil had thinned over this old battleground, though blood could still be seen on the townhouse walls and in stagnant pools across the city. The train, however, had been adapted, not metaphysically, but mechanically. Pumps wheezed out clouds of crimson vapors behind the engineer.

King Menoa had granted her a human shape for this trip to the front. She had become a pale woman in a stiff, ash-coloured uniform. Now she stood on the hunting platform at the very rear of the train, idly fingering the tool belt at her hip. She had taken her cap off and her hair tumbled like red smoke. Up ahead, a whistle sounded. The train shuddered, then smacked across a bridge where the ruby-bright waters had eaten through the bank below. Shaken from her reverie, Harper turned away, dimly aware that she had been reading the names Menoa’s reservists had painted on the ships’ hulls, searching for one in particular.