Anchor stepped back. He felt Harper's grip tighten on his arm. She hissed something urgent in his ear, but he couldn't make out what she had said.
The figure crouched there in the waterway, dripping and sniffing the air. Then an angry voice cried out from all directions at once. “You have food.”
This time Anchor heard Harper whispering clearly. “Give it everything it asks for. You can't fight this thing.”
Anchor hesitated. Without those soulpearls he would soon lose his strength.
“Do it,” Harper urged.
An urgent shudder ran through the skyship rope. She's right. Cospinol sounded wary. We need to build up trust. We can't anger it now. Give up the pearls, John. I have many more.
Anchor snorted. “Then you should get used to walking, Cospinol. If it takes these, it will only want more. How much power are you prepared to give up?” The river heard him, but Anchor no longer gave a damn. “It's broken one deal already. There's no honour in it, just hunger.”
Right now its hunger is the only part of it we can communicate with.
The figure tilted its head again. A thousand voices whispered, “Where is the person who speaks through the rope?”
“He's in the ship,” Anchor retorted.
John! What's the matter with you? If I didn't know you better I'd say you were afraid of this thing.
The tethered man clenched his jaw. “Afraid?” he said. “The river should fear me!” He untied the leather pouch and emptied the glassy beads into his cupped palm. The soulpearls emitted their own weak light, the ghosts inside sparkling in the darkness. Anchor tipped the lot into his mouth and swallowed.
Then he grinned. “Now I've eaten them all,” he said to the dripping figures. “No more souls. You've had enough today already.”
The Failed threw back their heads and howled. The air filled with their furious cries. The waters rose and quickened to a torrent, buffeting against Anchor and Harper. Red foam rushed past. The current threatened to rip the engineer from the tethered man's side, but he held on grimly.
“Enough!” he shouted.
The voices dwindled to a chorus of wails.
“I said, enough!”
The Failed fell silent. The river torrent slowed to a more gentle flow. Every one of their heads was now turned towards Anchor. In the surrounding darkness they shifted uncomfortably.
Anchor rested his hands on his hips and studied them. “Now take us to the Ninth Citadel like you promised,” he yelled. “You get nothing more from me until after we arrive. You understand?”
Abruptly, the figures dissolved back into the waters, disappearing as quickly as they had appeared. After a moment there was no trace of them, no sound but the incessant drip of blood from the Maze above.
Harper squeezed his arm. “John, that was…” She paused. “I don't know if that was stupid or brilliant. How did you know to do that?”
“Stupid, maybe,” Anchor said. “You said this god was a child, and it behaved like a child. But I had children once; I know what they are like. It is bad to spoil them, yes?” He grunted. “Bad to give them all the things they want.”
“You have children?”
He shook her off him. “Had,” he said. “I do not want to talk about it.” He rolled his shoulders, took up the strain of the rope, and then marched forward. From far behind came the rumble and crash of Hell being further destroyed in his wake.
How many times had Rachel woken in agony? For a Spine assassin, she thought, it had been once too many. She raised herself onto her elbows and groaned. Her muscles felt like beaten strips of leather. It was dark and foggy, and she didn't know where the hell she was. The whole room seemed to be swaying.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
Rachel recognized Mina's voice, and then she recognized her surroundings. Caskets of coins, an old table and chairs, a rug. The room was indeed moving, after all. She was inside Dill's mouth again. A wall of teeth separated her from the grim daylight outside, and the crump of his great footsteps sounded far below. Mina sat with her back against the leftmost incisor, her glass-scaled face floating, hazy and red, above the shoulders of her robe. She was stroking her devil pup, Basilis.
Rachel winced. Her jaw felt bruised and tender. She lifted a hand and touched it gingerly and located some swelling. “The good news, please.”
“You're alive.”
“That's the best you could come up with?”
“Sorry,” Mina said. “I tried to think of something better to offset the bad news, but there really wasn't anything else.”
“Don't tell me the bad news,” Rachel said.
“Okay.”
Rachel sighed. “What is it?”
“Hasp tried to beat you to death. Then when Oran's woodsmen realized what you'd done to their friends, they tried to kill you, too. And that just pissed off Hasp even more. We're only alive because I dragged you out while they were hurling abuse at each other. Now this miserable cave is the only safe place left. Oran is threatening to burn the inn if we don't come down to face their justice. He won't do it, though, because it's the only shelter they have. But he'll probably find some other leverage soon enough. The whole situation could get quite messy.”
“How did I get up here?”
“I asked Dill to intervene. He lifted the building rather quickly, and we made our grand escape. Your head made really weird knocking sounds as I dragged you down the inn's front steps.”
“Thanks.”
Mina looked down at her hands. “I'm afraid I had to kill one of them… Well, Basilis…”
“You?” The assassin shook her head, and then regretted it immediately, as she groaned again. “I don't want to know. Needless to say, you're now an outlaw, too?”
“The bastards fired arrows at me.”
Rachel got to her feet and moved over to peer through the arconite's teeth. Down below she glimpsed the tops of evergreen trees sliding past in the mist. The inn still rested on the cleaver Dill had taken from the fallen arconite, but its log walls looked even more lopsided and battered than before. Part of one eave had fallen away, and the timbers comprising it now rested on the automaton's huge bone wrist. The earthen island on which the building sat had all but disintegrated. A ribbon of smoke rose from a hole in its shingled roof. Nobody was outside.
She faced the thaumaturge. “You said Oran would probably find some new leverage soon? I assume that's why we haven't just told Dill to abandon those bastards in the forest. We don't need Abner's inn that much.”
Mina nodded. “Hasp is still down there.”
Now Rachel understood. The woodsmen might use the Lord of the First Citadel as a hostage, as soon as Oran figured out that Rachel didn't actually want Hasp dead.
Or did she? The bruise on her jaw throbbed evilly. “That glass bastard deserves to be used as a hostage. Why did he react like that? I was only trying to protect him.”
“He's not himself.” Mina let her dog jump down from her lap. “Hasp can't come to terms with what Menoa did to him. The parasite in his head will force him to betray his friends, and for an archon of the First Citadel there can be no greater crime. When the king's arconite attacked Dill, it became brutally evident to Hasp that he couldn't resist its influence. He thereby lost his honour, and turning on you was just a reaction to that loss. I think he deliberately angered Oran's men because he truly wanted to die. You denied him that escape by intervening. In his eyes, you diminished him.”
Rachel sighed. “Spine have never been very good at reading people,” she admitted. “I really should just stick to murdering peo-ple in dark alleys.”
“There aren't any dark alleys here.”
The assassin grunted. “I think I need to speak to Dill.” She left the rest of her thoughts unvoiced. She needed to speak to someone human and, absurdly, Dill's voice was the most human one she knew.
A dark blue radiance filled the inside of the skull chamber. The tiny motes trapped within the crystals set into th
e ceiling appeared to be unusually active. Agitated, Rachel reckoned. She eased her body between the banks of shining machinery, leaning for support against a metal panel as the chamber lolled like a ship at sea.
Dill's ghost still shared the glass sphere in the center of the room with thirteen others. The phantasms floated through each other and shoved and brawled silently. White light pulsed faintly inside that huge bauble, occasionally erupting into glimmering fits that seemed to correspond to moments of conflict between its gauzy prisoners.
She laid her hand against the sphere.
… back … she's back … Murder on her … Don't let her see your thoughts… The agony … I was once within a room and then… Stop screaming! Who are you …?… in that place …men in the river… Shush … Quiet, quiet, quiet… Who …?
“Dill?”
The voices faded, then she heard her young friend. Sorry, Rachel.
“Sorry? For what?”
They almost killed you.
She pretended to laugh, but failed even to convince herself. She shook her head, thinking their situation was already dire enough without Dill's angst. “You got us out of there, Dill. Now Oran and his would-be avengers are in the palm of your hand. I'm actually pleased you've resisted the urge to crush them.”
Not entirely. Mina yelled at me to stop once I started to squeeze. I think I cracked one of the walls. He paused. They were so fragile. Everything seems so fragile now.
“But you're not.”
Tell that to the other eleven arconites. The big ones.
This time she gave a genuine laugh. “That's one fewer than there were two days ago. Who taught you how to fight like that?”
Hasp.
Hasp? Ayen's youngest son remained an enigma to Rachel. The goddess's other sons had adopted grandiose titles for themselves: the god of chains, the god of clocks… But not Hasp. They knew him only as the Lord of the First Citadel—ruler of a mere stronghold, a human position—and now he seemed to have wholly embraced this comparatively diminutive status. He was currently as drunk and suicidal as any mortal man.
That meant he'd given up.
Mina had once informed Rachel how Hasp had gone willingly to Hell. While his brothers raised armies and harvested power from the world of men, Hasp accepted the role of looking after the dead. The First Citadel belonged to mortal archons, the bastard descendants of gods and men.
Rachel. Dill's voice interrupted her thoughts. I've been seeing more strange things… Visions, or waking dreams. I don't know exactly what they are, but they're becoming more frequent.
She recalled his nightmare of the stone forest, soon after they'd left Coreollis. “What sort of things?” she asked.
A crack appeared in the world, stretching all the way from one horizon to the other. It was full of… emptiness. Not darkness, but emptiness, as if something fundamental was missing from the world.
Rachel frowned. Mina had experienced a similar vision, she recalled. And Rachel herself had witnessed a number of strange happenings since leaving Coreollis: those two identical versions of Rys inside his bastion, moments before it fell; the inexplicable change of the steam tractor's and Rosella's hair colour; Oran's strangely repetitive conversation. As isolated incidents, she had dismissed them as nerves, dizziness, or confusion. But now that she thought about it, couldn't these glitches, when put together, be the result of some greater force at work?
“Thaumaturgy?”
The whole chamber swung violently to the left, then to the right, and then left once again.
Rachel heard an abrupt yell of protest coming from the crawl space behind her. “Stop shaking your head, Dill,” she said absently. “Mina's skin is made of glass.”
I don't think this is thaumaturgy, Dill went on. It feels… bigger than that. It's like we're walking through a ghost world, as if the whole of creation is somehow wrong. I can't explain it. The closer we get to Sabor's castle, the more powerful the feeling becomes.
Could the god of clocks be responsible?
Mina cried out again, from somewhere nearby.
Rachel turned to find the thaumaturge poking her head into the room. The blood inside her glass-scaled cheeks looked hot and angry. “Dill,” she yelled, “are you aware that you've just killed two men and sent another fleeing for his life?”
Abruptly the chamber stopped moving.
What men? Rachel heard the angel's reply through the glass, but Mina remained oblivious to it, because Dill had not spoken aloud. The assassin repeated her trapped friend's question for her.
Mina said, “He just trod on a watchtower.”
“A manned watchtower? Where?”
The thaumaturge nodded. “An outpost belonging to the settlement I told you about, the town on the shore of the Flower Lakes. They didn't even have time to light their warning beacon. There are two really flat corpses lying back there, while the lone survivor is now riding for the main settlement.”
Rachel let out a long breath. “How soon until he reaches their palisade?”
“His horse's legs aren't as long as Dill's,” Mina replied. “If our giant friend just moved now, he could catch up and crush him.”
The chamber lurched to one side again, quite suddenly. Mina grabbed the side of the passageway to stop herself from falling.
I see the horse, Dill said. The rider… he's only a child.
Rachel glared at Mina. “You didn't mention that.”
The other woman shrugged. “You didn't ask. Does it make any difference? When that lad tells his people what bonehead has done, it might just cast a shadow over our attempts to parley with them.”
Rachel raised her hand. “Dill is not killing anyone else today. And certainly not a child.”
“I could—”
“No, Mina!” the assassin cut her off. “You're not going to do anything. Let the boy go. We'll face the consequences of this mishap if we have to.” She hissed through her teeth. “Either we avoid the place entirely and leave its populace prey to Menoa's arconites, or we try to ally with these people. We've nothing to lose by speaking to them. They pose no threat to Dill.”
The bloody scales on Mina's face transformed into a smile. “Fine,” she said. “Then you can handle the negotiations. I'm sure the town militia will listen to you, since you're so good with people.”
The hook-fingered boy scrambled back up the Rotsward's scaffold. The sudden emptiness of those timbers chilled him more than he had expected, for he'd never seen the skyship without her complement of gallowsmen. When he reached the hole in the hull he ducked inside, swinging Monk's sightglass on its tripod, and looked around. The old astronomer was probably still asleep above the boiling room. He'd obviously missed the whole battle.
The boy set off through the narrow skyship passageways, heading back towards the boiling room. All around him, the interior of the vessel shuddered, clicked, and groaned. These noises seemed much louder since Anchor had started dragging her sideways again, and he could feel the wooden boards bending under stress. The Rotsward sounded like she was falling apart.
But she wasn't. The old vessel was as indestructible as she'd ever been.
One more bend before he reached the crawl space above the boiling room, the boy suddenly became wary. Something was wrong. Something—he couldn't put his finger on it exactly—sounded different.
He stopped, lying on his belly in that dark and narrow conduit, and listened hard.
The bellows had stopped working.
He shuffled forward again, more quickly now, suddenly angry. What if Monk had decided not to wait for him? What if the old man had spotted an opportunity while the gallowsmen were being slaughtered? Where were Cospinol's slaves?
“You'd better not have taken a sip of her without me,” he muttered. “Better not, better not.” They were supposed to have shared the scarred angel's essence.
Dragging himself around that final bend in the passageway, his worst fears became realized. There ahead was the hole in the floor above the boiling room,
the roof of the crawl space flickering overhead with the brazier light.
Monk was nowhere to be seen.
“Rotten, rotten…” The boy rattled his metal fingers against the wood and then clawed his way up the crawl space towards the hole.
And then he peered down, and stopped dead.
She crouched there, glaring up at him, her eyes as black as the scorched bulkhead behind her. The iron cooking pot had been wrenched from its vice above the brazier and now lay in one corner, heavily dented. The angel's body was misshapen, too, crooked as a scare-for-crows, her arms and legs and wings all bent at odd angles. The leathers she wore had rotted and burst open in places, revealing patches of scarred white flesh beneath. Blood covered her mouth, jaw and neck. Thin lines of red extended upwards from this gruesome stain and wrapped around her eyes and crosshatched forehead.
Scars.
Pieces of Monk's corpse lay scattered around her feet amidst shards of glass. She had broken the condenser flask. Carnival coughed, regurgitating water.
And then she threw her head back and screamed—a cry of such desperate fury that it froze the boy's wits. No creature should have been capable of uttering a sound like that. He tried to move, but his muscles would not respond. He simply stared down at her.
Her cry subsided. Her eyes met his again. She tried to step forward, but her leg buckled and twisted horribly underneath her. One tattered wing flapped. One arm hung limply at her side; the other remained at her chest, as gnarled as an old root. She moved again, dragging her body closer to the hole in an awkward shuffle. Then she gave a snarl that tapered into a wail of frustration.
“Break my bones,” she said.
The boy continued to stare.
“Break my bones.”
He said nothing.
Her chest rose and fell in rapid motions. “Get down here and help me or I will rip open your throat.” Her white teeth flashed suddenly in the red mess of her face. “Help me!” she cried, the pitch of her voice seesawing. “Help me!”
Before he even knew what he was doing, the boy obeyed. He gripped the edge of the hole and then swung his body through it, heels over head. In one quick somersault he dropped to the floor in front of her. His left foot slid sideways an inch across the slick boards before he recovered his balance.