Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

The sun sank lower in the west until it slipped behind the vast silhouettes of the Mesmerist war-behemoths and god-smashers on the outskirts of the city. The train thundered on, building speed, cleaving through the river districts towards NewSillBridge and Knuckletown. Before the war, her engine had been nickle-plated and inlaid with silver filigree. But four years ago she was stripped of her decoration, rebored for power, and from that day forth the exhaust from her stack had stained her skin a deeper, more honest black than the hulls of her saltwater cousins.

Harper had loved the train the moment she’d first set eyes on her in the yards at Cog Island Terminus. The Pride of Eleanor Damask had been proud and unforgiving: eighteen coupled driving wheels powered by eight high-pressure cylinders. For four years now she had dragged shale, steel, and machinery for the railway reconstruction project. She had pushed the newly raised tracks closer to Coreollis and the front lines while Harper rotted in Hell. The Eleanor had once been a worker, a symbol of mankind’s determination to overcome impossible odds. For Harper, the train had once represented the human struggle-but to look at the old engine now inspired nothing but pathos.

Tonight the Eleanor was transformed. Her new glass carriages were all aglow and sparkling in a celebration of light and gold: observation cars crowned with faceted domes, a dining carriage of crystal geminate panes and spars of beech, two frost-walled sleeping wagons, and a music car in which chandeliers trembled over artfully etched mirrors. Only the demon carriage at the front of the train remained dark. Even the hunting platform had been constructed from crushed-composite glass and festooned with aether bulbs. All human work, and paid for with looted gold, for the King of the Maze had found allies in Pandemeria.

From this height Harper could see through the glass roofs immediately ahead of her. Mesmerist resonance muskets and shiftblades packed the racks in the train’s armoury. In the music car beyond, she spied fractured glimpses of revelry: gentlemen and ladies dancing, laughing, and chatting. Through the confusion of glass, three men in the same plum red suit appeared to be playing a white piano at different angles, although she could not hear the music above the pounding wheels and rushing air.

These were Cog’s elite, those men and women who had backed the Mesmerist campaign against Rys and his brothers. Tonight they were having a party at Menoa’s expense, and tomorrow morning the god of flowers and knives would kneel at their feet.

She spotted Carrick. The chief liaison officer was untangling himself from the revelers, nodding greetings and heading this way, and so Harper shook out her hair and gathered it up to tie back. By the time he opened the armoury door below the hunting deck, she had replaced her cap.

“Glorious, they tell me,” Carrick said happily, climbing the narrow steps to join her on the platform. “The lights, mirrors, glass. Menoa has surpassed himself.” He was a solid man, hard-faced, but not ugly. One hand tugged, as always, at the neat viridian collar of his new uniform, where Harper glimpsed a length of the pewter chain he wore with such pride. It had been given to him by the same Pandemerian Railroad Company financiers he had just been entertaining below. “It’s fitting, I suppose,” he said, “if a trifle ostentatious. Must have cost a fortune. They’re burning enough aether back there to light up Heaven.”

He reached her and put an arm around her waist and pulled her close. His hand slipped inside her jacket and found her breast. His skin was hot, hers cold and dead. She breathed in a lungful of Mesmerist mist. Harper had learned not to flinch, but she couldn’t hide the way her jaw tensed, and she couldn’t smile for him.

“How can you be so cold?” Carrick said. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? To be among the living again…” He squeezed her hard enough to make her gasp, before releasing his grip. “Now why don’t you just loosen up and enjoy the party?”

Harper said nothing. She gazed across CogCity, and when she narrowed her eyes the sea of roofs and funnels became a different sea: of towering grey and black waves, vigorous and storm-lashed and angry. But then the vision faded and she was looking once more at the drowned ruins and rusting graveyard. Half a mile away, a pale blue rag, snared on a cable, snapped and fluttered. It might once have been part of a naval uniform.

“I already bought salvage rights,” Carrick said, inclining his head towards the piles of rotting steel and iron scattered throughout the city. “When Menoa issues claim edicts, I’ll have money, Alice, lots of it. I could buy you a house of your own in the city, a private place-”

“Out of sight of your friends.”

He didn’t look at her. “I’m offering you a comfortable life. You could get back your old job at Special Engineering. Keene would have to rehire you. You wouldn’t need to return to the ReadjustmentCenter.”

Harper gave his offer serious consideration. In the month since her departure from Hell, her life had felt like a leaf tossed about in a storm. She had not been spared the ReadjustmentCenter: the examinations, the mountains of paperwork, and the endless interviews with social integration officers.

Just another few days, Miss Harper. There are some more questions we need to ask you. If you’d be kind enough to look at this list and tell me the names you recognize…

Cog’s Readjustment Center had been built to accommodate a hundred and fifty citizens, but Harper’s room had been the only one occupied. The curtains, towels, and bed linen had all been brand-new.

Those souls before her had left the Maze via a different route.

Carrick was still gazing at the derelict ships. “That’s a gold mine,” he said. “It would be a shame to let it all go to waste.”

The ships had been forged in response to Rys’s rain: paddle steamers created for the Supply Effort; cruisers and pickets, cannon boats and destroyers-all built from the souls of Cog’s dead. Some wit had since named this place the Sea of Invention. Harper remembered when there had been nothing here but shops and taverns and homes.

Cog Island had changed so much in her life and deathtime: from urban sprawl to boiling sea to this weeping landscape of scrap. Rys had conjured the endless rain, his promise to wash away the Mesmerist Veil and restore human rule to Pandemeria. But his plan had failed. The waters were now draining, the pools and canals-poisoned and starkly beautiful in the failing light-sinking back into the earth, or perhaps back into whichever pocket of that god’s imagination they had come from. But wherever they went, they left in their wake a thick red scum.

And for all their glory The Pride of Eleanor Damask ’s pretty carriages would one day dull and shatter. The human passengers didn’t care. They would be gone by then, dancing at some other venue. Tonight they were burning enough aether to light up Heaven.

“Tomorrow will mark a turning point in history,” Carrick said. “No god has ever knelt at the feet of humans before. It’s a new beginning for us all. After Rys signs the treaty, you’ll see great changes around here. King Menoa has promised to reward his most loyal servants. He’s going to release two thousand souls in the first year. You won’t be alone much longer, Alice.”

Metal winds moaned in the distance.

“I’m not alone,” she said. “Can’t you hear the ships singing?”

“You know that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about the unaltered : the families of those people who stood by Menoa throughout this war.”

Harper moved a hand to her chest, feeling for the empty soulpearl she wore on a cord inside her blouse. For a breathless moment she couldn’t find it, and then her hand closed on the familiar jewel and she breathed. The pearl was there, close to her heart, cold against her cold skin.