Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

Steam curled from the cripple’s glass scales, yet he remained rooted to the spot. The other men looked on in shocked silence as the scales glowed red. The smell of burning skin wafted through the slave pen.

“I told you I know spells,” Mina said. “This isn’t even a hard one.” She made another hand gesture, and the crippled man collapsed on the floor before her. Even from here she could feel the heat radiating from him.

An hour later he had cooled enough to allow Mina to touch his scales. She pulled one of the glass plates off his shoulder and hid it inside the folds of her blanket. It would make a good addition to her collection.

The Pride of Eleanor Damask arrived at Cog Portal station shortly after nightfall. Steam billowed along the platform and around the tall cloaked figure standing alone on the platform. An aether light popped and flickered overhead, illuminating the message someone had scrawled across the wall of a metal storage shed:

Platform Two for Hell

There was no platform two, for beyond the solitary tongue of concrete beside the line the land sloped away in a steep embankment. At the base of this lay the Pandemerian door to Hell.

Harper had seen this place twice before, once on her journey to the Maze, and once on her return. After Cog’s great plague, the ground underneath the burial pit had sunk to form a vast basin. Over the subsequent years the steadily thickening Mesmerist Veil had turned this depression into a broad red lake.

Now as she filed off the train with Carrick and the Pandemerian passengers, Harper glanced down towards the pit again. Sections of one of the original steel tracks could be seen running along the base of the embankment, although the old station itself had been buried somewhere under their feet. Extra rails swept out to an engine shed, where Menoa’s old troop supply train had lain since the rains drowned these lowlands. Shades of grey and black defined the landscape down there; the low dykes and woodlands were as scrapes and smudges of charcoal on slate. Even in this weak light the engineer spied PortalLake. Dark masses of misshapen figures were waiting around it, peering into the greasy waters.

King Menoa stood on the platform. He had wrapped himself in a long dark robe and altered his mask to resemble the visage of an elderly man with a strong, proud jaw and kind eyes-exactly the sort of benevolent ruler he wished his human ambassadors to see. The hem of his robe blew raggedly behind him, although there was no wind.

By his side was a child-a thin, sad-eyed girl of about nine or ten wearing a grey dress. Lines of script had been tattooed in crimson ink into her arms and face. Her small hand clutched one of the king’s glass claws.

“Chief Liaison Officer,” Menoa said to Carrick. “How good to see you again.”

“The pleasure is mine, Your Highness.”

The king turned to Harper. “And my engineer,” he said. “Are you enjoying your new position with the railroad company?”

“It allows me to serve you, Your Highness.”

“Of course. I trust Chief Carrick has looked after you well?”

This civility was all for show, Harper knew. The king was presenting a human facade. Nevertheless she nodded.

The passengers had by now noticed the legions waiting around the Portal Lake, and the smiles they had prepared for the Lord of Hell were failing under a growing atmosphere of uncertainty. They shifted uncomfortably, their gazes returning again and again to the darkness below the embankment where the king’s demons waited. The thick wet air was already beginning to stain their fine clothes.

Menoa reassured them. “Reinforcements for the front lines,” he said. “A display of our power. When Rys kneels before you, he will know that the whole Mesmerist army stands at your back.”

As Harper’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw that this great dark horde stretched far across the fields beyond the portal. And she could hear them-the legions of beasts snuffling under the stars, the rumble of war machines moving in the distance. Reinforcements? This looked more like an invasion force.

“Friends,” said the king. “Mr. Lovich…Mr. Ersimmin…dear Edith. Between you, you own most of Cog City-the factories, the railroad, even the lives of the citizens themselves. Without your help, the process of change in Pandemeria would have been long and bloody.” He spilled a fist of soulpearls onto the platform and waited while the passengers scrambled after them. These would contain the lowest caste of demons and perhaps the odd human, worthless to anyone who used such trinkets for power, but they were scooped up by the guests like diamonds.

“You helped to shape this world in preparation for my coming,” the king went on, “and I thank you for that. You assisted me throughout this long campaign and, again, I am grateful.

“Tomorrow you will reap the rewards I have promised. After Rys abandons his foolish war against us, Pandemeria will become the center of our new world.” He urged the little girl forward. “Here is your treaty,” he said. “An unspoiled soul. Her name, of course, is Peace.”

Jones and Lovich frowned. Clearly this was not what they had expected; Harper could see their minds working to unravel this unexpected twist.

But then the child looked up at Menoa, and the king nodded.

The girl began to change, shrinking rapidly until she was a fraction of her original size. Her hair whirled around her, and then her body itself began to spin. She became a blur of tattooed script. Her flesh turned the colour of parchment. One of the female passengers took a sharp intake of breath.

Carrick stooped and picked up the scroll that had appeared in the child’s place.

“Bring Rys’s signature back to me,” King Menoa said. “And I will return the treaty to the Ninth Citadel. May it last forever.”

A great howl went up from the waiting armies, like the sudden onslaught of a storm. The platform shuddered as ten thousand boots, hooves, and claws beat against the earth around PortalLake. The passengers flinched. Mrs. Lovich buried her head in her husband’s shoulder as a cold gale tore across the platform.

King Menoa turned to face his horde.

Brands flared in the darkness below the embankment, tens of thousands of them, and Harper saw the king’s army clearly at last. There were ranks of Icarates and glittering Iolites and other, bulkier creatures with hammers for fists and great curling horns. The Blind composed a large part of this army, along with packs of dogcatchers and phantasms and Non Morai, and beasts like oxen or huge boars, and winged lesser demons and man-shaped gladiators in bronze plate. War machines covered the hills beyond the main force: great spiked spheres and smoking iron towers, lumbering armoured beasts carrying upon their backs cannon towers or crystal globes full of corpse mites and yellow flies. And in the middle of the plague pit stood an arconite.

A collective gasp came from the human onlookers.

Harper’s gaze roamed up from the creature’s skeletal feet, and up past its pelvis, and up to where the arcane engines thundered in its ribs, and up again to the skull still glistening red from the PortalLake. The creature was colossal; its tattered wings, outstretched, could have enveloped a mountain. In one bony fist it clutched an oak tree pulled from the ground nearby. In the other hand it held a locomotive shed. It had lifted the building up close to its eyeless skull, and was peering inside the way a child might inspect a new toy.

King Menoa sounded like he was smiling, but his glass mask gave nothing away.

“His name is Dill,” he said.

Dawn came: thin and grey and flecked with puffs of lead and pewter. The skies lightened, and The Pride of Eleanor Damask began to climb out of the Pandemerian Lowlands towards the Moine Massif. Wheels thumping, stack blowing, whistle screaming, she followed a long snaking route up through the black volcanic hills that bounded the edge of the plateau. King Menoa’s reinforcements meanwhile followed the Red Road two leagues to the southwest. A vast plume of smoke from the king’s war machines bent its way across the sky, while the troops marched in a long line behind. From this distance they looked like a river of ink flowing uphill from the portal basin. Only the arconite itself could be seen with any clarity. The giant had moved far ahead of its smaller brethren and now stood among the hills below the Moine Massif.