The spirit wind rose, shrieking, into a tighter spiral of twisting, gauzy figures that raced up towards a hole in the arconite's skull. In a heartbeat, they had departed, leaving one last ghost behind.
“You got your wings back,” Rachel said.
Sort of.
His translucent feathers seemed to glow faintly blue in the gloom. He looked much stronger and taller than the angel Rachel remembered from Deepgate all that time ago, but he was dressed in the same tattered old mail shirt and breeches and carrying the same old blunt sword his ancestors had used. A few lines now etched his brow, but his eyes radiated calm confidence. He lifted a hand up in front of his face and looked straight through it, smiling.
I'm thinner, too, he said.
Hasp threw open the huge copper doors of the Obscura Redunda, and bellowed, “Sabor! Where are you? I'm sore, hungry, and in need of a drink.”
The god of clocks eyed his younger brother with obvious disdain. “Welcome back from Hell, Hasp,” he said. “You've lost your wings, I see. And your skin.”
Hasp grunted. “That bastard Menoa got the better of me. He only sent a million demons, mind you, but it had been a tiring week.”
Sabor raised his chin, regarding his brother coolly from under half-closed eyelids. “I'm sure the battle was tremendously impressive.”
They continued to converse, but Rachel stopped listening. She was watching Dill carefully from the corner of her eye. The young angel stood between Mina and Iron Head, gazing up in awe at the array of tubes and lenses packed within the high chamber. Had his body become more translucent, or was she just imagining it? It seemed to her that he faded in bright light, only to solidify once more when he stepped into the shadows.
“I don't suppose ghosts eat,” Hasp said, “but the rest of us are starving, brother. We've had nothing since Dill abandoned the Rusty Saw.”
Sabor sighed. “I'll have Garstone prepare supper.”
Rachel turned to face him. “Do we have time for this?” she said. “There are still eleven arconites out there somewhere”—she pointed back towards the main doors—“and now we have no way of defending ourselves against them. We've no plan, no idea where Heaven is, and no way to provoke Ayen even if we could reach her.”
Sabor merely raised his eyebrows. “Time?” he said, incredulously. “You ask me if we have time?”
They sat down to dinner in a sombre wainscoted and darkly paneled hall that, mercifully, existed in the here and now. The adjoining kitchen, however, bounced backwards and forward in time by as much as half an hour, which meant that the main courses arrived before the starters and the pudding appeared three minutes before it had been ordered.
Dill stood a little way back from the table, glowing faintly and with a half-smile upon his lips, content to watch the others eat.
Not one of them could fault the fare, however. Garstone cooked and waited on all four of his guests simultaneously, edging past alternate versions of himself as he carried plates to and from the dining hall. He walked through Dill constantly, but apologized unfailingly.
“The doors to Heaven,” Sabor said between mouthfuls of roast lamb, “lie within a temple at the summit of this very mountain.”
Rachel started. “Here?”
Sabor nodded. “However, knowing their physical location does not help us. The doors cannot be opened.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Ayen removed us, her lawful sons, from Heaven after our up-rising against her failed, but she expelled this fortress for an altogether different reason.”
Iron Head drained his cup. Garstone hovered close by, trying to pour him more wine from a carafe, but Iron Head snatched the vessel from his brother's hands and filled his cup himself. “I won't have you serve me, Eli,” he declared. “It isn't right.” Then he turned to Sabor. “She couldn't allow the castle to exist in Heaven?” He paused. “With all these doors leading into the past, and who knew how many multiple versions of yourself living within, she would never feel safe.”
“Precisely,” Sabor said. “She moved the Obscura Redunda into this world, and by doing so moved the entire history and future of the castle out of her realm. It no longer exists in Heaven, nor has it ever existed there.”
Hasp hunched over the table, ripping meat from a bone with his teeth, then rubbed one of his greasy glass gauntlets against the tablecloth. “Took a lot of power,” he mumbled.
“The effort exhausted her,” Sabor explained. “In that one instant of fury, she created a door inside her earthly temple, and through it she expelled every hint of our presence from Heaven. Our armies, our archons, our weapons—all were expunged from her sight. We had no idea she could summon up so much… wrath.”
“But why?” Rachel asked. “What did you do to anger her?”
Hasp snorted into his wine cup.
The god of clocks smiled thinly. “We are her lawful sons,” he said. “Ulcis, Cospinol, Rys, Hafe, Mirith, Hasp, and myself, all born of Ayen and her husband, Iril. By rights we should have inherited Heaven.” He took a sip of wine. “But she never loved us. Never doted on us like she did her favourite child.”
“Ayen had another child?” Rachel said.
He nodded. “A bastard, a half-human boy conceived after Iril had already taken our mother as his bride. She betrayed our father in the most unconscionable manner. She bedded a mortal, and you can imagine how Iril reacted to that.”
Hasp gave another snort of derision, and then held out his wine cup for one of the Garstones to fill.
“Not well, I take it?” Mina said. She sniffed at her cup. “Is this wine off?”
Two Garstones appeared beside her at once. “I am terribly sorry, Miss Greene. It is so hard to keep track of the vintages in our cellar. Please let me replace it.” One of him snatched the offending cup out of her hand and drifted away with it, while the other disappeared to find a fresh bottle.
“Not well,” Sabor agreed. “Iril slew our mother's mortal lover and ate him. He would have murdered the bastard son, too, if she hadn't hidden the child away. Our father demanded that she give the boy up, but Ayen refused. And so began the War in Heaven.”
“So the child lived?” Rachel said.
“For a short while,” Sabor said. “Ayen was vulnerable after the war, you see? She had used every scrap of her power to expel us. So her bastard son left Heaven, sacrificing his own life to seal the doors behind him. He damned himself to Hell just to protect her.”
Iron Head grunted. “Some folks might regard that as a noble gesture.”
Sabor and Hasp both shot him a dark look.
“Some folks,” Iron Head added. “Fools and traitors and such.”
“But Iril ruled Hell,” Rachel said. “What happened to the bastard there?”
“Our father had never seen Ayen's illegitimate son,” Sabor explained. “None of us even knew his name. By the time we discovered the youth's identity it was already too late. In Hell the bastard rose through the ranks of Iril's followers. He distinguished himself, becoming one of our father's elite. But all the time he was plotting Iril's downfall.” The god's lips thinned to a grim line. “Ayen's eighth, and favourite, son is Alteus Menoa, the creature who now calls himself Lord of the Maze.”
A hush fell upon the room, only to be broken a moment later by the arrival of one of the Garstones from the kitchen.
“Pudding!” the small man announced.
“We didn't ask for any,” Mina said.
“You will, Miss Greene, once you've tasted it.”
They ate in silence for a while, but then Rachel had a thought. “If the doors to Heaven are impenetrable,” she said, “why don't you just go back in Time and stop Menoa from sealing them in the first place?”
Sabor simply glowered at his pudding.
Hasp guffawed, and drained more wine.
After a long moment, Garstone said, “Shall I tell them, my lord?”
The god of clocks nodded.
Garstone turned to Rachel. “That has already been attempted,” he said. ?
??Lord Rys used the labyrinth of Time to return to the exact moment Alteus Menoa left Heaven. He tried to prevent the bastard from killing himself in his mother's temple.”
“He failed,” Sabor said. “But by leaving this castle, Rys corrupted our timeline and put the whole cosmos in danger. His meddling with history gave birth to a second universe running parallel to this one.”
“And now both of them are failing,” Garstone added. “You can see the evidence of it everywhere—glitches and bubbles in Time wherever the two streams overlap.” He shrugged. “We've made adjustments here and there to try to keep our timeline from collapsing entirely, but the damage was done three thousand years ago.”
“You don't get out of debt by borrowing more money,” Sabor muttered. “I tried to explain that to Rys, but he wouldn't listen. The fool wanted to return to the source of the problem a second time, to try to capture Menoa again!”
“So you killed Rys?” Rachel said.
The god of clocks grunted. “The farther back one travels into the past, the more profound the consequences of one's actions. A third attempt to stop Menoa could destroy the entire cosmos.”
Mina frowned. “Is the Lord of the Maze aware of all this?”
“Yes and no,” Sabor said. “In this timeline, Menoa was not accosted when he spilled his blood in my mother's temple. But in the other timeline—the one Rys created—he understands what has happened. In that universe, his arconites have already reached the Obscura Redunda. If he conquers us there, he'll gain access to the labyrinth of Time, thereby allowing him to wander through both his own past, and ours.”
Garstone cocked his head suddenly. “Did anyone else feel that?”
Rachel had felt it too: a tremor through the floor. No sooner had it passed, than another, stronger, vibration succeeded it. And then another.
For the most part, Hell's Ninth Citadel seemed to be constructed of people. There were no doors or windows here. Mouths set into the floors and ceilings shouted at her, and the walls… a mass of grey eyeless torsos reached out from those walls. They gnashed their teeth and groped at Carnival's wings, mewled and sniggered and spat at her, before she began to kill them.
After that they howled. Screams of terror and panic ran through the whole mad fortress as Carnival butchered a path through the writhing figures. Her demon sword flashing, she broke through into a second room, and then a third and a fourth…
The naked figures clawed at each other in their frantic attempts to flee, but they were already so knotted together that escape was impossible. And so they gibbered and died under the scarred angel's blade. She hacked off arms and heads and carved out chunks of flesh to make the openings through which she passed.
In this manner she reached a much larger room where the brawling figures reached to dizzying heights above. Many clutched slabs of pale stone that formed a rude and crooked stairwell arranged around the interior void of this tower. Others waved tin lanterns, bathing the scene in shifting yellow light.
Was this the center of the citadel?
She heard a trickling, rushing sound and turned to see the River of the Failed seeping up through cracks in the floor behind her. It quickly filled the rooms she had previously occupied, but it did not come any closer. Defying nature, the wall of water trembled at the rough-hewn entrance to this larger chamber, as though waiting for Carnival to proceed.
Carnival couldn't have explained why she was here. She had merely followed the river's current. But reason or motive did not matter while the blood in her veins screamed for battle. Everything around her had become an enemy. She needed to hurt this place.
The figures within the walls hissed and wailed. And then a terrible ripping noise issued from all those massed bodies. They parted in places, forming portals in the three undisturbed sides of the room.
Carnival raised her sword. She felt it tremble with fear.
The things that rushed, lurched, creaked, and hobbled into the tower were unlike anything the scarred angel had seen before. She rolled the blade in her hand, testing the weight of it. And then she dived in amongst them.
… warriors in pale ceramic armour that crackled and dribbled sparks upon the floor, and skinless figures with skulls full of teeth, and winged shades that could only be seen out of the corner of the eye, and human men bolted inside brass carapaces, and clattering wheels of bone or steaming machines full of spinning blades, and black jackals and aurochs and ragged howling priests on metal stilts, and dwarves with mirrored eyes and iron limbs, and swords, spikes, maces, pikes, bludgeons, whips, spears…
Carnival slaughtered them all.
And still they came, until she stood atop a mound of corpses and hacked at them from above. Her scars burned with the pleasure of the battle, as her hair clung to her face in a bloody net. Carnival snarled and laughed and spun in circles behind her demon sword, gutting and slicing, painting the walls with blood. She inhaled the dying breath of her foes and exulted in the taste of it. And the blade in her fist only wailed in agony.
The horde stopped.
And a soft male voice called down from above: “Those souls within your veins… are they all unbroken?”
Carnival looked up.
A tall warrior sat upon one of the steps some twenty feet above her. He wore darkly sculpted glass armour bristling with spikes and extrusions like wind-blasted ripples of ice. His opaque mask had been fashioned to resemble the face of a young man with arching cheeks and a narrow sloping chin, but Carnival imagined she saw another, even more beautiful, face behind it. Golden eyes peering out through the glass? There was something odd about the way the light fell on him, as if his translucent garb altered reflections in subtle ways.
“I can see through you,” he said. “My Icarates should have known better than to pander to your desires. You came here deliberately looking for slaughter, didn't you?”
Carnival just stared at him.
“Not one for conversation, are you?” the man said gently. “I am Alteus Menoa, son of Ayen and destroyer of Iril, and,” he paused, “father to the river god that brought you here.” He raised his gauntlet, indicating the flooded chamber below her. “The poor thing loves me like a puppy dog, but I see it is fond of you, too.” He let loose a burst of bright, musical laughter. “All Hell is mine,” he said, “and you are most welcome here. Will you stroll with me upon the citadel balconies? The view is extraordinary.”
Carnival stood knee-deep in gore upon a mounded summit of her victims, her heart thundering. The stink of death filled her nostrils, and her bloody leathers hung in rags about her. She couldn't drag her gaze from this strangely compelling figure. Something about him … She became suddenly aware of her scars, and shifted awkwardly in a pointless attempt to hide them from him. The demon sword shuddered in her grip and wept.
“You've used that shiftblade badly,” Menoa continued kindly. “By the way it's trembling, I'd say it is unaccustomed to the demands you've put upon it. Allow me to forge you a better one, a sword with purer memories of war.”
“It cuts,” Carnival said, and felt immediately ashamed of her own voice. What was wrong with her? Her own self-disgust fueled a fresh surge of anger. She lashed her wings and snarled, “Come down here and I'll show you just how well it cuts.”
The sword let loose a terrible wail.
Alteus Menoa stood up. From greaves to helm his armour warped and rippled before settling around his body once more. Had he grown in size? He seemed at once more imposing than a moment ago.
He removed his mask and helm.
The face beneath was extraordinarily beautiful. Arched cheeks and eyebrows framed almond-shaped eyes that shone like gold. His skin was pale, faultless. He tossed his head, and hair like polished silver cascaded upon his glass gorget and shoulder guards. He smiled at her.
“All souls arrive here naked,” he said, “freed of the natural constraints that so limited them in life. In your world they existed merely to survive, but such order is crude and animalistic. Nature has no ot
her purpose than the continuation of itself.” He swept a gauntlet across the disparate demons that still surrounded Carnival. “Observe these constructs. They have been given a higher purpose, one only possible because of Hell's nondeterministic nature. Your own sword is more beautiful than you in every way. Its purpose is granted by divine will, whereas yours is not.”
He made a gesture with his hand.
Carnival's heart stopped beating. She felt the muscles in her arms and legs twitch. Her fist opened and she dropped the sword. Her scars tightened and seemed to crawl across her flesh. She fell to her knees and exhaled sharply. But her lungs would not draw in another breath.
“All those souls in your blood may empower you,” Menoa said, “but they have never been in harmony with you. They are trapped in the hell that is you, but what can you offer them except rage and murder?” He shook his head. “Yet now that they are here, I can offer them so much more.”
Carnival tried to breathe, tried to scream, tried to move. But her own body refused to obey her demands. Her hand made a claw in front of her eyes. She couldn't open her fingers. The ancient scars writhed upon her wrist and palm like thin red worms. Her flesh seemed to turn pale and crystallize.
She was changing into something else.
Another vibration. Sabor whipped the map from the obscura table and called up to the many Garstones on the balconies overhead, “Lens zero, please, and snuff the lights. Show us what's happening outside now.”
The lights dimmed. In the darkness Dill's vapourous form cast its own blue light. A series of whirrs issued from somewhere overhead, followed by a clunk. Rachel, Mina, and Iron Head gathered around the table, on which a blurred image was forming. Hasp stood back from the group and downed another cup of wine, while his brother Sabor reached under the table and cranked a handle around. The image on the table became suddenly sharper.