Alan Campbell - Iron Angel

There were no longer any docking spines available for use, but men appeared from bunkers and rushed over to guide the ship’s grapples into anchor hoops fixed into the desert floor. In time she came to rest and was secured. Her port hatch opened. Nine Spine assassins in leather armour and sand masks disembarked: eight Cutters carrying light steel crossbows, and an Adept with a sword slung across his back. Their mirrored goggles reflected the burning city. Through the boiling dust, two of the Cutters carried the body of an angel towards the edge of the abyss, to where a wooden walkway dipped away into the district called the League of Rope. The Adept meanwhile dragged a manacled woman from the airship and threw her to the ground.

Rachel Hael spat sand from her mouth and glared up at the masked figure. He had an unusually rough manner for an assassin of his high rank. The process of tempering normally removed all aggression from an assassin, along with the bulk of his mind. These temple warriors killed more efficiently without emotional burdens or base human desires.

The Adept removed his sand mask, then pointed to a standpipe set alongside the walkway. “Drink there,” he shouted above the howling wind. “Water is scarce in the city, and you will have no more until we reach the sanctuary of the temple.” He tapped the mask against his hip, dislodging sand, then pulled it back over his head so that its copper grille again covered his mouth.

Rachel Hael staggered over to the water tap, her tattered gabardine flapping against her shins. She could barely stand in this ferocious wind, but she managed to crouch by Dill’s insensate form and inspect him. “He’s barely breathing,” she said. “He could die before we reach the temple.”

“His lungs reacted unexpectedly to the gas,” the Adept replied, his voice now muffled by the sand mask. “Nevertheless, his death will be bloodless. We will cast his body down to our Lord Ulcis.”

“This is madness.” She pointed down into the smouldering bowl of the chained city. “Ulcis is dead. There’s nothing left down there.”

The Adept’s mirrored lenses surveyed the scene. “Reconstruction is under way,” he said. “Deepgate is as eternal as the abyss; it cannot be destroyed.” His pale fingers touched the tiny metal talisman fixed to his collar: the Knot of Ulcis, awarded only to the highest-ranking Church assassins.

Rachel had, until recently, owned a similar talisman. Her captors had demanded its return, but she’d already sold it to buy food in Sandport. “Reconstruction?” she cried in disbelief. “Half the city is on fire. The Warrens, the Temple Districts-most of it has already fallen into the abyss, and the rest looks like it’s going to go at any moment. The city is not eternal…it’s royally fucked. The League is little more than charcoal, and the temple…” She wiped dust from her eyes. “Where the hell is it?”

“The loss of some support chains caused the Church of Ulcis to invert,” the Adept replied, his tone flat and emotionless. “The bulk of the building remains intact, only suspended beneath the city.”

Rachel snorted. “And you’re going to pull it back upright, are you? With what? Horses and camels? How will you forge new chains to keep it in place? Didn’t you see what happened to the only machine capable of doing that? It’s now lying at the bottom of that fucking pit!”

“The logistics do present some problems.”

“You don’t say!”

At least one-third of the foundation chains had snapped, or had pulled their anchors out of the abyss bedrock. Collapsing chains had shredded miles of ordinary homes. Gashes ran from the outskirts all the way down to the hub, where, through the billowing fumes, Rachel glimpsed a mound of huge metal rings and spikes. The base of the temple? She recognized it now. The great building had indeed flipped over entirely, and had punched a ragged hole through sections of Bridgeview, Ivygarths, and Lilley quarters. Most of the other foundation chains had twisted over one another, buckling entire neighborhoods for miles. Whole districts of townhouses had been compressed to rubble. Cross-chains punctured roofs, windows, and walls. Bridges and walkways dangled like banners over open abyss, while entire sections of the city hung from the sapperbane links like monstrous chain-wrapped pendulums. The only city quarters that didn’t appear to be burning were missing altogether.

Rachel felt inclined to agree with her captor: the logistics involved in reconstruction would present some problems. Evacuating survivors would have been difficult enough, yet she saw no evidence that such an operation had been attempted. The newly constructed camp seemed scarcely large enough to hold a fraction of the population and, apart from the Spine who’d helped moor the airship, it appeared to be deserted.

Far below, a bright silver flash lit the area around the Poison Kitchens. The spreading fires had just claimed one of Deepgate’s airship-fueling vats, exploding a hundred tons of aether in an instant. A cloud of flames and debris mushroomed skywards into the smoke above the city. Tiny metal shards spun out over rooftops like a shower of stars.

A moment later Rachel heard the crack of that distant concussion, and the ground beneath her trembled. The walkway shook; its support poles rattled against the edge of the precipice and tugged at the massive chain anchor buried in the rock below. Puffs of dust rose all over the hanging city as parts of Deepgate simply disappeared into the abyss. The gale seemed at once to strengthen and to wail in approval. Down beside the Scythe, flames leapt higher up one side of the Department of Military Science. Rachel took an involuntary step back.

“The incendiaries in the Poison Kitchens,” she shouted, “you can’t have had time to remove them all?”

“Fires and noxious fumes within the Department of Military Science have precluded retrieval,” the Adept said. “The Poison Kitchens are inaccessible at present.”

“You haven’t moved any of the stuff out of there?” She was thinking about those vast caches of poisons, chemicals, and explosives that Deepgate’s chemists stored inside that building. They had barely had time to evacuate a quarter of it before Devon’s monstrous cutting machine had reached the city perimeter. “What about the workers?” she asked. “There must have been six thousand people in that building when the Tooth attacked.”

“All dead.”

“Shit,” she said. “You’d better hope they had the foresight to start dumping all that crap into the abyss as soon as the fires reached them.”

“Such actions are forbidden by Codex law.”

The mirrored lenses revealed nothing of the Adept’s expression, but Rachel knew his face would be devoid of emotion. Spine tempering had rendered him so thoroughly conditioned to serve the temple and the god of chains that he remained unable to reconcile himself to the loss of either. He would stay here in Deepgate until the very last chain-link snapped apart.

“Now drink,” he said.

While Rachel slaked her thirst, she considered their position. The Spine had declared martial law. Desertion was now decreed a crime against god, and therefore subject to punishment under Codex law. Even if she could prove to them that their god was dead in his abyss, it wouldn’t make much difference. The same tempering process that had peeled away their desires had also ensured that their faith remained unassailable and inviolate. Rachel could not bargain with them. She had to hope for escape or intervention. And soon-

Flames had taken firm hold of the Poison Kitchens by now, and the metal structure looked more like a great steaming cauldron than ever before. White fumes hissed from the funnels at its apex, while thicker yellow-black smoke poured from a hundred windows and engulfed the surrounding warehouses, engineering yards, and ship berths.