Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

“We’re leaving,” she said.

He accepted this without complaint. “Did you discover something while you were out?”

“Only that Olirind Meer is a slimy, black-hearted wretch. I think he’s just betrayed us.” She opened the wardrobe and took out the satchel containing her leather armour and knives. “I met him out on the street,” she went on. “He was hurrying back from the direction of the Avulsior’s residence, and he did not look happy to see me.”

“Maybe he happened to be in that part of town on his normal business. When he saw you, he just became worried that you’d be spotted.”

“We’ve passed each other on these streets before, and he knows well enough to look the other way-nothing more than a passing glance between us. Otherwise he’d implicate himself if I was discovered.” She laid her leather vest and breeches on the bed, then opened the dresser drawer and began stuffing loose clothes into the empty satchel. “But this time he wasn’t concerned about being seen outside with me. He even offered to walk me back to the tavern. He was far more worried that I wasn’t here in our room, where he could-”

She stopped speaking suddenly, listening, then rushed across to the door and turned the handle. The door remained firmly shut.

“Shit,” she hissed. “Did someone come here while I was out? Dill, did you see anybody tamper with this, with the frame around this door?”

“I…” He looked helpless. “I don’t know. I was sleeping.”

“Get ready to fly. We’re leaving right now.”

But just as Dill rose from the bed, the ceiling above his head collapsed in a shower of broken plaster. Something huge and metallic, like a spike, crashed down through the roof and embedded itself in the floorboards. Through the clouds of dust, Rachel spotted a trembling chain and a flexible tube leading back up through the hole above. Then she heard a low hiss and realized what was happening. “Poison gas,” she cried. “Don’t breathe.”

Ferrets, Deepgate’s aeronauts had called them. Fired from warship grapple guns, the huge iron spears were capable of delivering toxic gases most effectively into sealed buildings. They’d used them on the Southern Clearances to pump lime gas into an underground network of Heshette tunnels, killing thousands without ever having to land one of their warships. Even now such a vessel would be hovering overhead, pumping invisible fumes into Dill and Rachel’s room. The gas leaked through holes in the shaft, while the barbs along its length could be detached and repositioned to determine more precisely how deeply it embedded itself into a building. The process to seal the door had been more subtle: a chemical solution painted on the inside of the frame designed to foam and swell upon contact with some silently administered catalyst vapor.

Rachel cursed her own foolishness and she cursed that bastard Meer for his treachery. Why had she trusted him? Why had she trusted anyone in this godforsaken town?

The Spine would have anticipated that she would hear their footsteps in the hall outside, and they had used her recent excursion to prepare this trap. And now they knew she must try to escape through the window. Hacking through the walls or floor would take too long.

Holding her breath, Rachel threw open the windows, then leaped quickly aside. The expected flurry of bolts did not appear in the ceiling above her. Were there no Spine in the street below? No crossbows trained on the tavern? What did that mean? She had not yet breathed and yet she was already disturbingly confused and disoriented. A poison designed to permeate the cornea? She turned towards Dill, but the young angel had already collapsed and lay sprawled on the floor beside the hissing metal missile.

She dragged him closer to the window, not knowing if he was already dead or not, desperately hoping that the lack of a secondary attack meant that the temple assassins had decided to take their quarry alive.

He was heavier than she expected. She noticed how much his wings had grown, what a broad wake they left in the dust-covered floor. And then she was forced to drop him and lean out of the window to take a breath. A whiff of poison gas reached her nostrils, and she gagged; she didn’t recognize the toxin.

Something new?

From the effect that one tiny sniff had on her senses, it was more virulent than anything she’d experienced before. Sandport harbor swam before her eyes, a swarm of lights upon the dark river. She saw boat masts brawling, buildings melting into one another, the last blush of sunset. She heard the distant hum of an airship at high altitude.

They flew high so I wouldn’t hear their engines, she thought. And then consciousness left her.

The spine warship thundered over furrows of brown smoke clouds, her envelope flashing like a polished steel shield under the blue sky. In her wake came a flock of carrion birds: crows, eye-picks, and blackgulls, all shrieking and feeding on the corpses suspended from the ship’s aft deck and ballast arms.

She turned to starboard. Sunlight slanted across her gondola, granting the scrawls and abrasions in the metal hull a moment of crisp definition. Portholes gleamed dully like old men’s eyes. Sandstorms had stripped her deck timbers of any varnish, had scoured the arcuballista, net, and grapple guns down to their metal bones.

With her rudders hard to port and twin propellers blurring, the vessel turned until her bow faced east. Then she waited, her cooling engines ticking, while the crew moved inside to prepare their air scrubbers for descent into the turmoil below. Fumes tumbled under her gondola, curling around the feet of the hanging corpses and reaching across the empty decks, cables, and rails-lingering, it seemed, at the locked portholes and hatches.

The ship’s engines growled with a sudden surge of power. Elevators slammed back into dive position. Birds scattered, screaming, from the gruesome ballast. Reclamation Ship Twelve shuddered, purged air from her buoyancy ribs, and then sank into the boiling clouds.

Darkness engulfed the warship. Buffeted by turbulence, she rolled and pitched in upwards-rushing eddies of smoke. Cables shivered and moaned under the stress; her envelope shook and creaked. Ten heartbeats passed, then twenty, and then a thin, grainy light suffused the air. Three whistles shrilled within the gondola. The sound of thumping pistons rumbled through her superstructure, as engines pumped hot exhaust back into the ship’s exterior ribs. Her envelope swelled, slowing her descent.

She emerged in the amber twilight beneath a brooding ceiling of cloud, a hundred yards above the Deadsands, dragging corpses along like strung puppets.

Deepgate lay to the west, now half a league behind the airship. Torn and burning in a thousand places, the city hung in her surviving chains like a great blackened funnel over the abyss. Swathes of the League of Rope quarter had been reduced to a smouldering crust, or had crumbled entirely into the pit below, exposing further webs of chain. Ash swirled between the metal links. Fires raged out of control in the Workers’ Warrens, in Ivygarths and Chapelfunnel, and on the fringes of the Scythe where vast rents could be seen among the shipyards. Gases poured from ruptured aether vats and from the coal gas depositories around Mesa’s chain, forming ochre and white layers between docking spines and buckled gantries. Trunks of black, red, and silver smoke uncoiled from the Poison Kitchens, feeding the expanding clouds above, while the city below lay veiled in crimson vapors. The sun glimmered faintly, a copper-coloured smudge.

A camp had been built on the eastern curve of the abyss, where Deepgate’s foundation chains met the desert bedrock and the surface pipes from Jakka curled over the lip of the pit. It was to this ad hoc shamble of pulpboard shacks and bunkers that Reclamation Ship Twelve began to drift. Still with her stern facing the city, she relaxed the power to her twin propellers and allowed the howling gales to suck her into the low-pressure areas around the updraft. Orange sand fumed around her, battering and scouring her hull. The hanging corpses swung madly under her ballast arms.