“I'm surprised that even a copy of Rys agreed to sacrifice him self.”
Garstone smiled. “An astute observation, Miss Hael. A temporal replica believes himself to be the real person, the definitive one, and of course in a sense he is. They all are. Rys was not at all the magnanimous type—a character trait shared by his own replica—and each of them was quite incapable of sacrificing his life for the benefit of the other.” He reached for his pocket watch, but stopped himself. He smiled again. “My master found a way around the problem, however. On that fateful day, both temporally distinct versions of Rys were inside the bastion. Each schemed to betray the other, and thus secure his own escape. Sadly, the collapsing building killed them both while they fought each other inside.”
Rachel laughed. “I knew I'd seen two of him in there. There's more to your master than meets the eye.”
“He is used to thinking in parallels, Miss Hael.”
At last they reached Burntwater. Jetties and wooden buildings loomed out of the grey air. They tied up against a wharf at the easternmost end of the settlement and clambered up onto the muddy promenade flanked by old shingled houses. This waterfront street ran all the way to the warehouses at the center of the town's dock area. Rachel recognized the buildings from the earlier battle that had taken place there… would take place there. The fight, the mass evacuation—none of it had happened yet.
“You have a plan,” Rachel's older self said.
“I did, but now I don't know what to do. Anything I try might destroy the future.”
“Stick with your plan. I'll be watching for the instant that something may go wrong.”
“But you don't know what my plan is.”
“You intend to meet with Iron Head and warn him about what's about to happen. You'll plead with him not to attack Dill—and to keep all of this a secret from the version of yourself now approaching. And then you'll get him to pass a message on to Dill himself, so our giant friend knows exactly how to escape his enemies.”
Rachel gaped. “How did you know that?”
“Because it's exactly what I did.”
“But… you stayed in Herica and built decoys. You were never here.”
The other woman nodded. “I put the Hericans to work on their rafts, but did you really think I'd stay with them and merely chop wood when Burntwater was only an hour across the lake?” She lifted her blouse and withdrew a short knife hidden there. She examined the blade and then stuffed it back into her belt. “No, sis, while the Hericans laboured, I rowed across here and did exactly what you are about to do now. I was waiting here in Burntwater before you ever reached the town. Didn't you think it strange how Iron Head used your surname before he could have known it?”
So what's the truth, Miss Hael? Rachel recalled the captain's words.
“And didn't you wonder why he wanted to crawl inside Dill's skull?” the other Rachel added. “He was delivering the same message you are about to give him. He told Dill how to escape from Menoa's arconites.” She paused while Rachel took this in. “When you met me there on the lake,” she said, “I was actually on my way back to Kevin's Jetty.”
Rachel's thoughts spun. She felt somehow betrayed. “So now it's my turn to do what you did?” she said. “Except the only difference this time round is that I didn't contact the Hericans. There are no decoys out on the lake. You could have met me at Kevin's Jetty and just told me the truth. Why didn't you do that?”
Her older self said nothing.
“What are you hiding?”
She shook her head. “I'm sorry, sis.”
Garstone checked his timepiece. “Ladies, might I suggest—”
“I know!” both women said at once.
Rachel took a deep breath. “Where do we find Iron Head?”
“I can't say. Who knows what else I might change if I told you? You'll find him, sis.”
So Rachel walked up to the first house in the street and banged on the door. After a moment the door opened and an old woman peered out.
“Where do I find Captain Iron Head?” Rachel asked.
“Captain who?”
“Garstone,” Rachel said. “Reed Garstone, the captain of the Burntwater militia.”
The old woman scrunched up her eyes. “On the wall, of course. Where else would he be at a time like this? Ask them at Headquarters. They'll know exactly where he is.”
After a short march up the main thoroughfare they found Headquarters located beside Burntwater's southern gate. A squat, rectangular log building, it was barely large enough to contain forty men standing shoulder to shoulder. Lean-to sheds set against two of the walls held pigs and chickens. The entrance had been left unguarded, so Rachel simply barged in. Her older self chose to remain outside. To preserve the integrity of the timeline, she explained.
Nevertheless, when Rachel opened the door she was relieved to find Iron Head himself seated at the room's only table. The captain had removed his cap, revealing a lank mop of dark hair, and hung his sword and hammer on hooks on the wall behind him. He looked up from the map he was reading and frowned at her. “Can I help you?”
Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but then realized that she hadn't exactly thought through what she intended to say. However she put it, the news she was about to divulge would sound like the ravings of a madwoman.
And then Garstone walked in.
Iron Head's brows rose. His gaze flicked to Rachel, and then back to his brother. “Eli!” he said. “Long time, no see.”
Garstone consulted his pocket watch. “Technically, Reed, it's less than a day since—”
The captain raised a hand. “Don't bother, Eli. It's the same old thing every time we meet. It's always disconcerting when you recall conversations with me that haven't happened yet.” He grinned at Rachel. “He never remembers my birthday, though.”
Rachel felt a surge of relief. “I have something… odd to tell you,” she said.
Iron Head leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “It wouldn't be the first time,” he replied.
King Menoa was seated in his newly formed library at the top of the Ninth Citadel when the whole fortress began to howl. He set down the book he had been reading and said, “Enlighten me.”
The walls and floors within his fortress, like the very books in this library, had each been adapted from Hell's dead to serve whatever purposes Menoa required of them. But, unlike his Icarate priests, these simple constructs had limited intelligence. Unable to define the exact cause or nature of its distress, the floor simply gibbered nonsense.
“Word from the foundations!” it yelled from a single grey mouth in the very center of its tiled expanse. “Subsidence and fire! A presence. The citadel is flooded. There has been an earthquake, my lord. Lightning struck the clock tower. Your precious library is burning to ashes.”
“The library is not burning,” King Menoa replied. “Such a thing is impossible here.”
But the books moaned and trembled nervously upon their shelves all the same. Menoa wondered briefly how many of their stories might have changed in that instant of panic. Fear was too often the source of misrepresentation, and the dead lied no less than the living. He approved of change—chaos suited his nature—but did not condone the unknown event that had caused this particular change. Surprises irritated him.
“A star has plunged through the guts of the fortress,” the floor wailed, “and left us vulnerable to intruders.”
The king rose from his chair. “What intruders?”
“A great army is within, my lord.”
“There is no such army in Hell! Has the Ninth Citadel lost its mind? Send a witchsphere to me. Order my Icarates to attend.”
Perhaps he had allowed this building to grow too quickly too soon. It now contained three thousand and three levels, and so afforded him a striking view across Hell. But, by forcing such growth, had he also stretched the building's capacity for rational thought?
“Slaughtered, all slaughtered,” the fl
oor howled, “their minds sucked out by the red water.”
The red water? A sudden chill gripped Menoa's heart. Had the River of the Failed breached his fortress? From where had it acquired the courage and the wits to do such a thing? He growled at the floor, “Stairs, down.”
The surface of the floor rippled suddenly and then melted away, forming a square spiral of steps that descended to the lower levels of the Ninth Citadel. The king snapped his fingers and torches flared all the way down in that well, suddenly bathing the library ceiling in their shifting light. He moved to throw his book away, and then stopped and glanced at the final page.
… formed a staircase down to the lower levels of the king's magnificent fortress. His Glorious Majesty, the Lord and Ruler of all the Maze, swung his arm to cast the poor, frightened—although loyal—book aside, but in his wisdom he stopped and stole a glance at the final page.
Useless thing. It was now trying, in its own fawning manner, to describe the events around it. He tossed the offending tome hard against the library wall, and then stormed down the stairwell he had just made, wondering how the book would interpret that response.
All the rooms below were equally agitated. The king strode purposefully down the shaft leading through the heart of the citadel, past writhing walls of eyeless constructs that held the very slabs of stone he now used as steps. Others raised yellow lanterns to light his way, or simply reached out towards him like beggars. Menoa bent the shapes of those who dared come too close. He created doors wherever he felt like it and portals so that he might gaze into the rooms beyond the walls. The steps quivered under his boots, while the blind figures in the walls moaned and cowered. These constructs were terrified, but not of him.
Not of him!
Anger was not something the Lord of the Maze had much experience with. He found that it clouded his vision. He preferred to detach himself from his emotions, for only then could he analyze them and alter them to suit his purposes. But now his glass mask changed to form new and feral expressions, almost against his will. He endeavoured to calm himself.
Could the River of the Failed actually have entered the most powerful fortress in Hell? It certainly had the strength to do so, but he doubted it possessed the desire. Despite its power, the river was merely a child. Since it had learned who its father was, Menoa had taken swift steps to discipline it. He could not harm it, but he could make it respect him.
The king paused on the stairs, as a splinter of doubt entered his mind. What if Cospinol had somehow managed to turn the river against him? After all, there had been no sign of the sea god's vessel since the portal broke. Had the Rotsward gone underground?
Menoa willed the walls to cease their moaning. Hundreds of voices fell silent, though the lanterns still trembled in their grips.
For the first time since his rise to power, the Lord of the Maze felt fear. He gazed up at the vast spiral he had made through the building's heart, the myriad doors he had unconsciously created around the shaft's perimeter. Why had he done that? He looked down into the hazy depths, where a hundred levels stood between him and the citadel's dark foundations.
Where were all his Icarates? They ought to have responded to the building's cries of distress.
He faced the wall and made a gesture with his hand. The constructs parted with a soft rending sound, allowing the king to step through.
This led him to an unattended suite in which items of old furniture, left for aeons without a guiding will, had crowded together into one corner as though trying to escape. The king waved a hand and returned them to their rightful places. He opened another portal in the wall beyond.
A moment later he reached the outer facade of the Ninth Citadel. Here he willed the stonework to blister and form a balcony, which he stepped out upon.
His glass claws gripped the fresh bones and tendons of the balustrade he had just constructed. From this height he could see far across the canals of Hell. Temples and ziggurats of rotten black stone crouched amidst the red haze like huge dead spiders. Heavy barges plied the soul routes to every corner of the Maze. The skies were unusually busy with Iolite movement, he noted abstractly.
And then he looked down.
His Icarates were indeed responding to the citadel's pleas. Great numbers of them massed around the huge pyramidal Processor, driving dogcatchers and Non Morai and every other sort of demon and spectre before them. Thousands more of the king's creations were pouring into the citadel itself.
A flash of light drew his attention back to his own level. One of Menoa's many spies, an Iolite in the shape of a glass-winged lizard, alighted on the balcony. Its transparent feathers clashed and glittered, and then in a calm and pleasant voice it said, “The Ninth Citadel is under attack, my lord.”
“From whom?” Menoa asked. “Is it the river?”
“The river accompanies her,” the lizard said. “It hounds her heels like a dog, consuming the demons and Icarates that fall under her sword.”
“Her?”
“She is an angel, my lord.”
Menoa's glass mask assumed the visage of a frowning human. “Is she from the First Citadel?”
“She is not dead, my lord.”
Realization struck Menoa. A warrior hidden aboard Cospinol's skyship? Perhaps he had underestimated the old god…
But who was she? Where had Cospinol found someone powerful enough to attack the greatest stronghold in the Maze—by herself?
“Are you quite certain she is not from Hell?” he asked.
The Iolite snapped its beak impatiently. “She is alive.”
King Menoa's mask began to change again, its glass mouth turning upwards into a cold smile. He strode back into his for tress and further descended the central shaft without a tremor of hesitation in his pace, for Cospinol had just given him an unexpected and wonderful gift.
“We don't have any explosives,” Iron Head replied, as he adjusted his steel cap.
“But you must have,” Rachel insisted. “You said they'd been ready since the battle at Coreollis. They were put in place before the enemy arrived.”
“Clearly I lied, then. How many did you see?”
“How many bombs?” She tried to recall the sequence of explosions that had destroyed the town. “I don't know… at least twenty, I suppose.”
The captain thought for a moment and then nodded. “That sounds about right,” he said. “We ought to be able to scrape together that much powder before the Red King's automatons arrive. We've enough coke and saltpeter, although we're low on sulphur.”
Garstone clicked shut the cover of his pocket watch. “If the original Miss Hael—which is to say the version currently approaching this town in an arconite's jaw—is to reach the Obscura Redunda in time to return to this moment, we must evacuate Burntwater by sixteen minutes past three this afternoon.”
Iron Head nodded. “So we have about four hours.” He rose from his seat and plucked his scabbard and hammer from the wall behind. “I'll make the necessary arrangements. Miss Hael, will you show one of my lieutenants exactly where to place the powder kegs? I'd like to position them as closely as possible to the locations where you saw them explode.”
Rachel agreed.
Outside, she wasn't surprised to find that her older self was nowhere to be seen. She exchanged a glance with Garstone, who pressed a finger to his lips. Maintaining the integrity of the timeline. No doubt the other Rachel was still watching events unfold from somewhere nearby.
The captain gathered a group of his men together and issued his orders, and soon the whole settlement began making preparations for both the battle and the evacuation to come.
Burntwater became a labour camp for the next two hours. Rachel wandered the streets with Garstone and one of Iron Head's soldiers, a studious young man who scribbled notes on his slate with a piece of chalk. They chose the locations for the powder kegs to match, as precisely as possible, the places where Rachel had witnessed explosions going off. Armoured soldiers ran between the stockpil
es, laying fuses. Sailors and fishermen readied their boats for a sudden departure. Citizens were informed of the evacuation plan and told to pack food and water, but nothing more.
Later in the afternoon, the same watchtower lookout whom Rachel had allowed to escape arrived in town. She was already waiting with the captain and Garstone outside Headquarters when the young man reined in his mount. Iron Head's lieutenants helped him down from the saddle.
Barely older than a boy, and dressed in oversized leathers, he spoke in breathless fits. “An arconite… Captain, it destroyed our tower… killed Bennett and Simons. It was huge… Captain… Armed with a blade as big as a barge. It's coming this way.”
“It's all right, son,” the captain said. “We've been expecting just such an attack since Coreollis fell. Get yourself down to the docks and report to Cooper. He'll get you onto a boat.” He turned away, but then paused and looked back at the boy. “You did well, son. You've given us plenty of warning.”
Once the boy had gone, Iron Head said to Rachel, “We're manning the walls now, Miss Hael, so if I were you I'd make myself scarce. I suggest you take your boat out onto the lake and wait for me to turn up with your other self.”
“You can't let her know about all this,” Rachel pointed out. “I'm supposed to be the one who explains things to her.” And punches her. Rachel suppressed a wince. She now found herself in almost exactly the same position as the future twin she had met out upon the lake.
Almost exactly.
“Don't worry, Miss Hael. I've never met you before. We'll fling our arrows at the monster, and dodge the missiles he throws at us.”
Rachel nodded. She needed to find her older self now, though with any luck she wouldn't require her help after all. The powder kegs were all set, and her approaching self would be kept in the dark about all the preparations made here today. The whole situation looked set to replicate the events she remembered.