Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

All this time, Chief Carrick had been sitting on the hurricane deck, slack-jawed, staring witlessly at the corpses of Ersimmin and Pilby. Now his glassy eyes darted up to meet Jones’s. “Yes, sir.” He scrambled to his feet and departed.

A great iron clamour fell from the clouds, like the clash of a hundred bells. The fires had contracted into a knot around the arconite’s chest, and drawn from it a cry of anguish. The five-hundred-foot-tall mechanical archon shuddered, then threw its arms and wings wide. A cold blast of wind rippled the surface of LakeLarnaig, lifting rags of spume, which blew across the steamship’s deck. The Sally rocked on her belly, riding each swell, chugging steadily away from the bone giant and the base of the Moine Massif…but not fast enough, for as Harper ran inside to fetch Hasp, she glanced up to see the giant’s skull turn slowly to fix its gaze upon the ship.

“Is it free?” Jones asked.

“Yes,” Harper replied. “Iril help us!”

“Good. Then Menoa has been deprived of a weapon.”

The arconite raised its fists to the heavens and roared. And then it began to march towards the tiny fleeing vessel.

Down the stairwell the engineer raced. The smack of her boots on the metal floor seemed distant, as though a queer silence had filled the air spaces between bulkheads, a stillness that muffled the drum of the Sally ’s own engines, the heave and slap of waves against her hull. It felt like an omen, a taste of death. Hasp could not slay the monster outside. The automaton need only lift the ship and cast her far across LakeLarnaig, or push her decks down into the freezing waters. It would be the simplest thing. Harper plunged deeper into the vessel, though inside or outside, it made no difference; she would drown either way.

In the Eleanor ’s slave pen she discovered a gruesome scene. Blood covered the floor of the cramped space. The corpses of most of the slaves lay heaped in the corner. Only two had survived: Hasp, and the young woman, whom the god held in his arms. She was unconscious but breathing.

“Our thaumaturge?” the engineer asked.

“Mina Greene, of Deepgate.” Hasp replied. “I fear she has exerted herself too much.”

“Come with me quickly.”

“More killing?”

Harper just stared at his glass skin and shuddered. Back on the uppermost deck of the Sally Broom, she watched the arconite stride through the lake towards them. Huge waves, formed by the movement of its legs, rolled across the surface of the waters and pounded the side of the vessel. Gulls swarmed around it like confetti.

It halted, filling the entire scope of Harper’s vision, and crouched beside the ship.

But rather than crushing the Sally ’s hull, the bones of one vast hand curled, almost tenderly, around her bow, halting her forward movement.

And then it brought its skull close to peer at its captives.

Deep inside the dead eye sockets, the engineer saw black crystals glittering. She heard the continuous clatter of engines from its cranium and ribs, the slow thump of weird chemical blood. She smelled rust and grease, and something else…the odor of bones and tombs. For a long, long moment the automaton seemed content to watch them.

Dill?

Was there anything left of the young angel in there? Did he realize who or where he was? Could the Lord of the First Citadel now reason with him? She had to hope so.

But Chief Carrick had other ideas. “Kill it,” he ordered.

And the words rewoke the parasite lodged in Hasp’s mind.

The order had been given, and the glass-sheathed god remained compelled to obey it. He broke away from the group, vaulted over the balustrade towards the front of the ship. He tore a coil of rope free from one of the Sally ’s lifeboats, and ran towards the bow, his shiftblade gripped in one huge fist.

Harper cried out for the angel to stop, but Hasp ignored her.

Jones called out his own command, but the angel still refused to halt. “It seems the parasite no longer considers us to be loyal servants of the king,” the old reservist said. “I daresay Menoa did not approve of what he saw through the arconite’s eyes. We have been cut loose.”

Harper faced Carrick. “Hasp can’t kill that!” she said. “But he knew the young angel in Hell. He helped him, protected him. Just let him try to talk to Dill.”

The chief liaison officer glared at her with utter hatred in his eyes. “You’ve chosen your side, Alice. You’ll have to live with that decision for the rest of your…miserable existence.” He shot a glance at Jones’s sword. “The glass bastard’s too far away to hear any more orders now.”

The automaton’s grinning skull filled the dismal sky. Tiny white gulls wheeled in slow circles around it or settled, finding rude perches among so many acres of bone, dropping specks of shit. Still the machine made no move. Its eye sockets were caverns. In its stillness, it had once more become an inanimate thing: of ridges, cracks, and hollows-dead spaces to be eroded by the wind, places where the rain might gather and pool. But Harper knew there would be anguish, even despair, boiling at the creature’s core. The thaumaturge’s strange fires had wrapped around its soul, like a fist squeezing the poison from its beating heart, and then they had retreated, freeing the creature from Menoa’s grip. Now Dill’s soul would be exposed to the agony of metal and bone and chemical blood, and to the knowledge of what he had become.

Hasp had by now reached the place where the automaton’s hand gripped the ship. He leapt from the deck to the back of the creature’s knuckle, then set off again, scrambling along the vines of steel hydraulic tubing which wrapped the forearm. The automaton, if it sensed his presence, paid him no more attention than it would have given to a fly. Clearly Hasp was too insignificant to be worth the effort of swatting. At the elbow joint, the god slipped between two pistons and began to climb the upper arm, into the shade of the clavicle.

The arconite chose this moment to unleash its fury. Its right hand remained pressed against the bow, while the left, a clawed fist, suddenly loomed overhead and smashed through the superstructure near the stern of the vessel. Metal buckled and tore. The concussion knocked Harper from her feet; her head struck the deck hard. When she looked up she saw a sky full of teeth, and then the clouds seemed to fall towards her.

The automaton had hefted the steamship airborne in its right fist. The deck lurched, sloped away at a dizzy angle. From inside the saloon came the sound of smashing crockery or glass, the thud of heavy objects breaking against interior bulkheads, the smell of burning lamp oil. A metal groan trembled through the wooden planks beneath her; cables stuttered and pinged. There was a series of snaps and one of the Sally ’s two funnels toppled forward, plowing through the ship’s bridge with a jaw-breaking boom. Harper glimpsed heaving grey waters far below the bow of the vessel, flecks of white foam. She clung on desperately. Pistons rumbling, the Sally plunged suddenly backwards through the air.

The automaton drew back its arm to throw the ship.

From somewhere Harper thought she heard the sound of battle.

The parasite chattered inside Hasp’s skull, insisting on destruction even as the angel raged against the command he had been given. This giant was Dill, the very archon he had fought so hard to save in Hell. And now he had been ordered to slay him. A red mist blurred the god’s vision, a veil his fury sought to cut through with his sword. He had tied his rope to a pipe near the automaton’s scapula, the other end around his own midriff. Now he reached the creature’s shoulder.