Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

At a second horn blast from beyond the gorge, Harper heard the hiss and squeal of the Eleanor ’s brakes. Carriage linkages compressed beneath her, then took up the strain again with a series of clanking jolts. The mist pumps exhaled, turning the air momentarily red and coating the surrounding rocks. The rhythm of the train’s pistons slowed. Through the billowing smoke ahead, Harper glimpsed the walls of a keep rising above a slope of black mud and quarried rocks. Flanked by two musketeers, a Company signalman stood behind the parapet on the roof of the building, waving a red flag.

The railway line branched here. The old line turned east and followed a sloping shelf cut from the rock of the Moine Massif, a gradual descent that took it down to the abandoned village of Larnaig at the water’s edge four hundred feet below. The new line was much shorter, and more dangerous.

Harper couldn’t drag her gaze from the red flag, which struck her as some dim portent of doom. They had a saboteur and a murderer aboard. Wouldn’t the perilous descent to Lake Larnaig provide the perfect moment for foul play? Harper studied the passengers carefully, searching for any emotion or expression which might betray a hidden agenda.

She saw nothing suspicious.

While the murderer was most likely to be one of Menoa’s own ambassadors, the saboteur need not be a passenger at all. She glanced back along the train. Stewards were busy inside each of the carriages, wrapping up loose and breakable items and stowing them away in preparation for the descent. The vague shapes moving inside the frost-walled accommodation cars would be more staff, performing this same task with the passengers’ belongings.

Finally the train huffed free of the ravine and out into the base of a quarry abutting the northern edge of the Moine Massif. Here the railway line which had brought them all the way from Cog Terminus finally came to an end, halted by a precipitous drop of four hundred feet down to LakeLarnaig itself. Crescent cliffs of ochre rock formed a basin between the slopes of Ialar Moor on one side and an ancient Arnic burial site in the shadow of Rael Canna Moor on the other. The unremarkable keep Harper had glimpsed earlier squatted to the left of the tracks among slopes of weatherworn scree, mud, and great wet mounds of anthracite. Opposite this, the flooded imprints of boots marked paths between hummocks of crushed limestone and shale, and sumps where old steam-diggers had been left to corrode in pools of orange rainwater.

The last excavations undertaken here had undermined the burial site itself, exposing the tunnels and chambers the ancients had burrowed in the clay subsoil. Someone had even packed these openings with lime to discourage Non Morai from gathering where the dead had once lain. Harper wondered vaguely what the workers had done with the bodies they’d unearthed. The remains of four cairns squatted above the cliffs, the tumbled mounds of stone patched with white lichen.

Ahead, the smoke cleared to reveal the end of the railway line. The Larnaig Ferry had already built up a head of steam; her funnels were pumping cords of white and grey smoke into the clouds. A pre-revolution eight-decked paddle steamer, the Sally Broom was a hulk of sepulchral metals. Ornate steel passenger decks clung to her superstructure like drapes of cobwebs, all lit by yellow oil lanterns which shuddered to the thump-thump-thump of her engines. Ten or so of her crewmen were busy at winches, lowering a wide gangway in the vessel’s stern which led into her hold. Chains rattled, and then the gangway boomed down, slamming neatly into an indentation in the quarry floor. The steel tracks now led all the way into the ferry’s hold-a cavernous space large enough to swallow The Pride of Eleanor Damask and all of her carriages.

Harper’s gaze traveled out beyond the lip of the quarry to where the bulk of the old steamship appeared to float, impossibly, in open air four hundred feet above Lake Larnaig, and it took her several moments before she was able to reconcile her preconceptions of the landscape with the sight of the four enormous skeletal fingers gripping the hull.

The arconite held the steamship in one bony hand, her stern pressed against the uppermost edge of the cliff.

With its feet lost somewhere in the swollen lake four hundred feet below and its skull hovering like a moon in the gauzy sky, the bone-and-metal colossus remained completely motionless, hunched low over the lip of the Moine Massif as though it had rusted solid while inspecting the connections between the railway line crossing the quarry floor and the steamship it held in its skeletal grip. Grease glistened on the cogs and pistons visible between its knuckles and on the many shafts and hydraulic rams in its forearms and spine. Countless souls swam in its chemically altered blood. It had two engines: one, the size of a locomotive shed, occupied its skull and controlled the movement between vertebrae and hence the flex of the spine; the second, much larger engine was housed within the ribcage and gave power to the automaton’s reinforced limbs. It had wings in proportion to its torso, yet they were tattered and useless, as thin as the clouds that now enveloped them.

There was a collected intake of breath from the passengers, and then Jones said, “Good grief.” The old reservist had taken an abrupt step back. “Up close it’s so…” he shook his open brolly at the sky, “…big.”

“The automaton is modeled on the form of the controlling soul,” Harper explained. “It’s less stressful for a spirit to accept a form it considers natural. Its size was merely dictated by what was possible. The larger the arconite, the more damage it can cause.”

“You mean this machine was once an angel?” Jones asked.

She nodded. “Dill was one of the guardians of Ulcis’s temple in Deepgate. We caught him in Hell.”

“Dill?” Jones laughed uneasily. “It suits him, I suppose.”

A horn sounded inside the easternmost keep, drowning out the passengers’ chatter. The signalman on the roof of the building lowered his red flag below the level of the parapet and The Pride of Eleanor Damask shuddered to a halt. Steam hissed from brake-piston pressure valves beneath her carriages.

“…until recently,” Carrick was answering a question from one of the group. “And yet the king thought this way would be smoother. He feared the constant movement would shake the ship too much and damage our captives. It’s only a short distance across the lake to Coreollis.”

“It’s hideous for a reason,” Edith whispered to one of her companions. “To strike terror into Rys’s Northmen.” She waited until the other lady nodded, before adding, “The king told me he might make more if this one is successful.”

Harper said nothing. King Menoa had already constructed twelve other arconites. All he required now was enough blood to release them from Hell.

Carrick grinned. “Even the gods cannot match our strength,” he said. “With warriors like this, Pandemeria will become the dominant world force. Menoa has given us a future.”

A laugh from down in the quarry distracted Harper. The train driver had hopped down from the engine and was now chatting amicably with two Company officiators in slate-grey uniforms who had strolled out from the keep to meet him. One of these men had apparently made a joke. After the officiators’ release forms had been completed to their satisfaction, the driver tipped his cap to each of the two others in turn and then climbed back aboard the train. At a wave from one of the uniformed men, the signalman on the keep raised his red flag again. The Pride of Eleanor Damask jolted, and then huffed forward, closer to the edge of the cliff where the Larnaig steamer waited in its cradle of bones.