Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

Before him loomed the arconite’s spine and skull. Hasp could see wires among the vertebrae. He ran across the plates of bone, his blade ready.

The skull turned.

For a heartbeat, something glimmered deep in the arconite’s eye sockets-in the crystals which had replaced Dill’s eyes. His huge jaws opened and closed with a crash.

“I have been ordered to slay you,” Hasp shouted. “And I cannot resist this order.” His mind swam under the strain of speaking. “Kill me and save yourself.”

A voice rolled out from the thing, as deep as an earthquake. “Hasp…”

“Slay me, Dill.” Hasp had reached the arconite’s neck. He raised his shiftblade and plunged it into a nest of wires and crystals and cogs between two vertebrae, trying to hack it all to shreds. But he could not dent nor even scratch the machinery.

The arconite howled.

Its massive fist came up and closed around the glass-skinned archon, and Hasp did not flee. He could not stop himself from harming Dill, but he had been given no orders to protect himself.

A cage of bones now surrounded him, and Hasp felt himself being suddenly carried out far across the waters of LakeLarnaig. The parasite in his skull demanded destruction. Before the god could stop himself, he turned his shiftblade into an axe, and began to hack at the skeletal fingers before him.

The fist opened.

And once more Hasp found himself staring up at that huge face. Dill’s dead eyes lacked expression. His grin could not express whatever emotions he felt. Yet Hasp sensed turmoil within that skull. Dill could easily have crushed the archon in his hand, and yet he hadn’t.

Hasp raised his axe again.

A voice cried out somewhere below. The words eluded Hasp. He clove his axe into the arconite’s wrist. No wound or gouge appeared under his blade, and yet the arconite cried out in agony. Hasp lifted his axe again.

“Stop…order…Hasp!”

This time Hasp recognized the voice. Chief Carrick was calling out from below. Had he just ordered Hasp to stop the attack? The glass-armoured god looked down.

Far down below on the deck of the steamship, Jones had a blade against Carrick’s throat. “Stop the attack,” Carrick shouted. “That’s an order.”

Harper was standing next to the pair, a look of vast relief on her face. Jones just looked up and grinned.

“When we saw how the arconite reacted to you,” Harper explained to Hasp, “Jones persuaded Carrick to intervene.”

“I-” Carrick began.

Jones moved his sword closer to the chief liaison officer’s throat. “Remember what we said about silence?” he reminded the other man.

Hasp had returned to the Sally ’s deck without further incident. The arconite had then lowered the steamship back into the water and now towered over them, peering down. Hundreds of birds had settled on its great tattered wings. The other passengers had retired to the saloon for a stiff drink.

“His name is Dill,” Hasp said.

Harper could only nod. Of all of them, she had played the greatest part in his downfall.

Dill had woken from a terrible dream, and yet he found the reality of his present situation identical to the memories of that nightmare. His body felt strangely numb, disconnected, with no sensation of cold or warmth-only pain. The skeletal arms and legs he saw before him could not be his, and yet-disturbingly-they moved in correspondence to his own conscious movements. He heard engines pounding somewhere nearby, but he could not at first locate them. The sound of gusting wind reached his ears, yet he felt nothing.

He was standing up to his shins in a pool, peering down at a tiny ship. From its deck tiny people stared back up at him. In his nightmare he had walked across a miniature landscape of small trees, grasses, desolate moors, or stone-hemmed fields left to grow wild. He had come to a steep bank and stepped down into a shallow pool. Voices had compelled him to lift this tiny vessel into the waters. And now that the voices had stopped, he found himself gazing down at the same vessel, and at an archon in glass armour whom he recognized.

“Hasp?”

His voice sounded like a collapsing mountain. It seemed to echo back from the ends of time. Dill was suddenly afraid. He lifted his hands and gazed down at hard dry bones. When he flexed his fingers, the bones moved.

“Hasp!”

The tiny archon was shouting, “-me up…your hand.”

Dill reached out towards the ship, and let the archon leap into his outstretched hand. The Lord of the First Citadel looked no larger than a glass bead. Dill lifted his hand close to his face.

“Don’t think about anything except my voice,” Hasp said. “Just listen to what I have to say.”

Dill nodded.

“You’ve been dreaming,” Hasp said. “But your soul is now free. You’re no longer in Hell. You don’t have to fear the Icarates anymore.”

“Hell?” Dill began. Memories of his time in the Processor assaulted him like a violent squall: the Icarates chanting, the screaming walls and sobbing machines, the knives, and the blood. He stared in horror at his skeletal hand.

“A physical form is transient,” Hasp said. “Only your soul is eternal. That’s all that matters now.”

“Where am I? Where is Deepgate?”

“You’re on the other side of the world, lad, and I don’t even know if Deepgate still exists.” The Lord of the First Citadel gave a long sigh, and then pointed southwest. “Do you see that stain on the horizon? That is Menoa’s army. They have taken the Red Road out of Pandemeria.”

Dill spied a series of dark shapes-rough squares and oblongs-a short distance beyond the perimeter of the pool, following a crimson track. Smoke trailed from the rearmost of these.

Machines?

“Now look to the northern shore.”

The earth here was stained red in a thick line extending out to the east and west beyond the shore of the pool. Masses of tiny black creatures crawled over this crimson landscape, and at first Dill took them to be insects. But then he realized the truth of it. An encampment had been erected there. It housed a second army-much smaller than the one approaching from the southeast, but a considerable force nevertheless. Beyond these legions the ground sloped gently up towards a pale city of slender minarets hedged by thick walls, all rising before a curious bank of mist which enveloped a large part of the northern skies. Earthen and timber barricades had been constructed on the open ground before the twin GateTowers, and flanking these were iron-banded ballistae.

“Coreollis,” Hasp explained. “The fortress of the god of flowers and knives. King Menoa expects my brother Rys to bend the knee before Hell’s ambassadors today-to sign away his soul to the Ninth Citadel. He must comply or face complete annihilation.”

“From that army?” The dark horde beyond the shore seemed so tiny and insignificant to Dill, but he began to understand the threat from Hasp’s perspective.

“No,” Hasp said. “From you. ” He looked towards Coreollis. “That fog must mean that Cospinol has arrived to fight beside my brother. Rys’s Northmen will use it to conceal their pitiful numbers.”

“Then they’ll fight?”

“Now that Menoa has lost you, he knows Rys will not sign the treaty. He has no choice now but to throw his whole horde against Coreollis and try to break her.” The god looked back up at Dill. “The forces of Hell and Earth will clash here today. If the Mesmerists win, King Menoa’s form of living death will replace all life here. This country will become the stuff of chaos.”

Dill watched tiny figures assembling along the shore. They were boarding low sleek boats and pushing them into the lake. Wherever these dark hulls met the water, they bled, leaving crimson trails behind them.