Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

Harper felt dizzy. She slipped the rubber bulb from her tool belt, raised it to her lips, and inhaled deeply. The dense mist cloyed at her throat, but it cleared her head and brought some colour back to her skin. She replenished the bulb with a trickle of liquid from her flask, and then considered the job ahead.

The lounge had a glass floor. Harper did her best to ignore the upturned faces in the slave pens below, but their stares burned into the back of her neck. She didn’t know which was worse, the gaunt, pleading looks from the slaves or the baleful glare from the god imprisoned with them.

She unscrewed a copper grille set low on the interior frosted-glass wall and slipped her Mesmeric Locator from its pouch on her belt. In nature it resembled the sceptre she had once carried across Hell, but this device had been manufactured in the laboratories in Highcliffe-a physical tool with a metaphysical core.

Warm perfumed air blew up through the exposed vent. After she had wound the crystal device, Harper set it resonating. A range of ninety to one hundred and twenty Bael cycles would pick up all unauthorized soul traffic, with angel or demon emotae at the higher end of the spectrum. Most likely, one of the passengers had broken a soulpearl, and they now had a human ghost aboard.

While Harper waited for the Locator to react, she checked the mist-pump feeder tubes and pressure gauges inside the vent. Everything seemed to be in order for the king’s arrival. It gave her a certain amount of pleasure to think of the living passengers breathing the same foul air as their master while he remained aboard.

The tiny needle wavered from one ideograph to another before it settled in the center of the plate.

Then it went off the scale.

Harper stared at the Locator in astonishment, not quite comprehending. She shook the Locator, then stopped herself. It was operating correctly. She’d calibrated it against stored ghosts at the Pandemerian Railroad Company terminus on CogIsland. The reading was not at fault. Quickly, her hands trembling, she reset the device and broadened the spectrum. Ninety to one hundred and sixty Baels-the range required to detect gods. Once more she set the Locator resonating, watched the needle waver, settle, and then leap.

The needle went off the scale.

Impossible.

Either the device was malfunctioning, or the intruder was something she had never seen before-which meant that it could not have come from Earth or Hell.

She did not, however, get the chance to speculate. From the direction of the music car came a loud bang, followed by the sound of women screaming.

A restaurant and two accommodation wagons separated the lounge from the music carriage. Harper stormed through the restaurant, shouldered curious and apprehensive stewards aside, bumped against tables and chairs, and slammed through the door to the first accommodation car only to find her way blocked by a fat little boy trailing along a dog in a bag. She would have jumped over the lad had he been a few inches shorter. As it was, she was forced to slow and sidle by him, her back brushing the wall of the glass corridor. She stepped over the dog: a tiny thing, zipped tightly into a richly woven travel bag so that only its head was visible.

“Do you work here?” the boy said.

“Don’t have time, son, sorry.” She took off down the corridor at a run.

“I heard screams,” he said. “Is it a ghost? Aunt Edith said I can hunt them at Coreollis. Got my own gun and everything.”

“Not a ghost,” Harper called back. She was halfway along the corridor. “Something else.”

“A demon, then?” He ran after her, pulling his imprisoned dog after him. Apparently the bag had wheels underneath. “Aunt Edith said I can hunt them when I grow up. Should I get my gun? Can I let Wolf-thunder out of his bag? I want to train him to hunt demons but they won’t let him wander about in case he poos.”

She had reached the end of the corridor. “I don’t know what it is. Stay here, it might be dangerous.” Without pausing, she slammed into the far door and plunged on through. The rapid squeaking of wheels came from somewhere behind. Wolf-thunder yipped.

The music car was in chaos. Three of the ladies had swooned and lay on recliners where they were being attended to by several of the gentlemen. The piano had been smashed into what looked like a pile of heavily lacquered kindling, wrapped in a confusion of wire. Ivory keys and small hammers were strewn everywhere. The white-whiskered reservist, Jones, was busy brushing most of it into the corner with his foot, while Ersimmin the pianist watched him-a look of amused befuddlement on his face. A strange odor lingered: the earthy scent of a forest or a swamp mingled with something else-something bestial. Harper inhaled it deeply, trying to identify it.

Carrick stood in the center of the room, reeling, seemingly unsure of where to turn or who to speak to. He still had a flute of wine in his hand.

Edith was shrieking. The colour seemed to have drained from her face to her thin chest, which heaved against the confines of her peach bodice. She had removed one of her gloves and clutched a bloody handkerchief in her naked fingers. A handsome man and his young wife, in matching raven-dark suit and frock, were attending to her. Harper now recognized the man as Edgar Lovich, an actor who’d made his fortune tramping the boards of Cog’s theaters before the war. Lovich was holding the young lady’s uninjured hand while his wife sought to inspect her wound. “Please, Edith,” she said. “I can’t help you unless you let me look at it.”

“It took my finger off,” Edith cried. “It took my finger off!”

“Let me see, then.”

“What happened?” Harper demanded.

Carrick wheeled to face her. “Where in hell have you been? While you’ve been off slacking, we’ve had a manifestation. Miss Bainbridge has been injured.”

“What kind?” Harper made a point of staring at the drink in Carrick’s hand.

“What?” The chief gaped at her.

“What kind ?” she repeated. “A dogcatcher? An Icarate? Was it one of the Non Morai? If I’m going to get rid of it, it would help if I knew what it was.”

“What are you talking about?” Carrick said. “It manifested itself. Here. It smashed up the piano.”

The actor’s wife had succeeded in extracting the handkerchief from Edith’s hand. Now she was examining the young woman’s bloody fingers. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just a cut. The piano wire must have caught your knuckle just here.”

“The finger’s gone,” Edith moaned.

“No, dear. Look…” She counted the fingers. “One, two, three, four, and five. All digits present and correct, see?”

“It’s gone!” The young woman turned tear-filled eyes on Harper. “And it’s her fault. She’s supposed to prevent things like this from happening in here!”

Harper let out a long breath. “Would somebody please tell me exactly what happened?”

“Ersimmin was playing one of his new compositions,” Lovich said, “when this thing appeared from nowhere, destroyed the piano, and then vanished. Just like that!” He made a flamboyant gesture with his hands. “The whole incident was over in a heartbeat.”

“What did it look like?”

“Hideous, utterly hideous. It was quite dark and…” He frowned. “Chunky.”

“Seven hells, Edgar!” Jones exclaimed. “You make it sound like one of your wife’s muffins.” The former reservist approached Harper, his expression grave. “It was about five feet tall,” he said, “but bulky, powerful. Damn thing had muscles like the biggest navvy you’ve ever seen…and it was hairless, all covered in grey blisters.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t recall that it had a face as such…just blistered skin.”