“One summer's day on Heralds Beach,
I met a girl who had no teeth.
I kissed the collar of her pretty frock
and she—”
The rope shuddered. Please try not to enjoy this, John. That's all I ask.
Anchor snatched up a stick and swung it before him like one of the swords he so despised. “Since you deny me the arconites, Cospinol, I can only hope that all Hell awaits, and that Menoa has had the good sense to arm them.”
That, Cospinol said, is something I can promise you. The Lord of the Maze will not have wasted the souls of all those he slaughtered.
The tethered man left the wood not far from the place where he had first entered it. The rope snagged on the last of the branches and then tore free. Anchor's eyes were long used to this grey gloom, and he saw a series of low humps in the ground and the remains of a palisade wall to the southeast. Earthworks dug by Rys's Northmen. He was near the edge of the Larnaig Field.
He scanned the mists all around, but saw no sign of Menoa's Twelve. He frowned. “Why would Menoa leave the portal unguarded?” he said. “A smarter man than me might suppose the king wanted us to enter Hell.”
There was a pause before Cospinol answered. I suppose it's possible—perhaps even likely. If I were to die here on earth, my soul would become lost somewhere within the Maze. His spies might search for it for years. But killing me at the door of his Processor would spare him all that trouble. The Ninth Citadel is the seat of his power. It will not be undefended.
“Good. Then we needn't waste any more time being stealthy.”
We were being stealthy?
Anchor began to jog down the slope towards the Larnaig Field.
Soon they came upon the dead. Armoured bodies covered the killing field like some queer steel crop, harvested but then left to rot. The metal took on the dull lustre of the surrounding fog, scattered weapons and shields as grey as stone. Gas had distended the bellies of soldiers and now whistled softly through punctures in their flesh. Ravens cawed and hopped through the stink, pecking at lips and eyes. Here and there the colourful blue and gold plumes of helmets stood out like exotic birds come to feast alongside their ragged black cousins. And there were Mesmerists, too: machines of flesh and iron, jackal-like beasts, dark stains left where Non Morai had dissolved. They had been butchered in their thousands. Anchor stepped amongst them, his good mood rapidly fading.
Rys's warriors had been cruel men, but they had not deserved to die in this way. That he would soon face their souls in battle offered Anchor no consolation.
He had proceeded less than a hundred yards when he spotted Silister Trench. The First Citadel Warrior who had possessed Dill's body lay partially buried under the summit of a huge heap of Mesmerist scrap, his dead eyes staring at Heaven. He had lost most of his teeth. Something blunt had cloven in his skull.
Anchor walked up the pile and then gripped the corpse's shoulders and dragged it out. It was incomplete, for Trench's legs remained inside the crush of broken machine parts. “He fought well,” Anchor said. “There are many more Mesmerist corpses here than elsewhere. He was making a hill out of them.”
Up ahead, said Cospinol. The portal.
And Anchor saw it. It had indeed been left unguarded.
A large chamber occupied the inside of Dill's skull, yet there was so little space amongst the crowded machinery that Rachel could barely move. Banks of gears surrounded her in the semidarkness, the cogs clicking like hundreds of little black teeth. Wheels whirled inside wheels. Piston shafts heaved up and down in a sequence of irregular whooshes and thumps. Crystals hummed and threw out gouts of white light that splayed briefly across the metal surfaces. The whole room smelled vaguely like the air after a thunderstorm.
Rachel sensed all of this at the periphery of her vision, for she was staring at the glass sphere in the center of the chamber. Almost all of the illumination came from this device, or from the phantasms within it.
So many!
She counted at least a dozen of them trapped inside that sphere: human men and women, all naked, a brawling knot of figures crammed into a space hardly large enough for one or two people. All were struggling against their confinement and against each other, yet there was no substance to their gaseous forms. Their fists passed easily through each other's faces and torsos. Their lips mouthed silent cries or curses. They grinned and frowned and spat. Forks of light rippled and flashed between them like manifestations of unheard revilement. She glimpsed Dill's tortured expression before it became lost again in a tangle of elbows and legs. His mouth had been open wide, as if pleading.
But there was no sound in the room bar the persistent tick and thump of machinery, the icy crackle of crystals. The sphere grew momentarily brighter and then diminished. Wreathed in lightning, the ghosts continued their silent brawl.
Rachel had seen soulpearls, the beads John Anchor consumed to give him such great strength, and she knew that ethereal consciousness did not necessarily need body shapes to exist. With the right technology a soul could inhabit almost anything. Alice Harper's Mesmerist devices had once been alive, and still remembered fear. Yet it seemed to Rachel that some deliberate action had been taken to keep these particular figures here in their physical forms.
She wormed through the banks of machines, stepping over cables as she approached the sphere. Reaching it, she pressed her palms against the glass wall of the globe—
killed him … move to that place …no I can't do … my head, stop shouting at me …no …me …and it was so dark in there … I hate you, I hate you… I don't want to remember that… isn't me … it's you, stay away …no knives… liar, I talked to her …nothing but the dark …the murderer … don't speak, don't…
—and then jerked away, her head reeling from the cacophony of voices that had assaulted her mind. She took a deep breath. “Dill?”
The whole room gave a sudden jolt to the left. Rachel squatted instinctively. From below came the hiss of steam. The room turned again, more gently this time, in the opposite direction.
The faint sound of the young angel's voice came from the glass sphere. Rachel? Once more the chamber yawed from side to side as the arconite looked around him. She saw his face reappear amongst the struggling phantoms.
“Dill, I'm not outside. I'm… in your head.”
There was a pause, and then Rachel heard her friend whispering inside the glass. You can hear my thoughts? He sounded worn out. Your voice is… odd.
“Can you see me?”
I see fog, he said. Trees down below.
Inside the sphere the angel's lips moved, but his glazed eyes stared inwards, betraying no awareness of her.
Gingerly, Rachel touched the smooth surface of the sphere once more, but the voices in her head remained silent. “I'm with your soul,” she said. “I can see it before me. It's trapped in a sphere of glass like a huge soulpearl.” She hesitated. “Dill, there are other souls in there with you.”
The lights within the glass prison erupted in a frenzy of gold sparkles, and then dimmed and became white again. Twelve others, Dill explained. They were the people in Devon's elixir. They're angry because they don't want to be here and now they're trying to hurt me. He paused. Rachel, they can see you.
Rachel realized that the other figures inside the sphere were all staring at her. Their faces moved into and out of each other, the different expressions merging and flowing between them. A young woman pressed a hand against the inside of the glass. Rachel recoiled. The phantasm appeared to smile, but there was an ugly twist of madness in her expression.
“They're not connected to this automaton in the same way that you are,” Rachel said. “You can see through its eyes, move its limbs, but they can't do anything. These people have nothing but this sphere.”
Can you release them?
“I don't know.” Her thoughts tumbled as she stared at the jostling figures. “Dill, I can't break this glass. Not yet, do you understand?” She needed him in his current
form if they were to have any chance of escaping their pursuers.
She felt the chamber tilt forward suddenly and then right itself. The automaton had nodded.
He was silent for a moment longer, and then he said, Rachel? What's happening to the forest?
“What do you mean? Right now?”
No… The chamber trembled as though Dill had started to shake his head again, but then caught himself in time. It happened soon after we left Coreollis. The trees turned to stone.
“What trees? Dill, I don't know what you're talking about.” Anchor and Mina had made no mention of any sorcerous events taking place while Rachel had been spying on Coreollis.
The fog dissolved and the forest turned to stone, he went on. It looked like those petrified woods we used to see in the Deadsands whenever the shifting dunes uncovered them. Do you remember?
An age had passed since she'd last visited the desert around Deepgate. As a Spine adept, Rachel had once traveled through those thousand-year-old petrified forests, across lands poisoned after Mount Blackthrone had fallen from the sky. Yet here the forest remained verdant and alive. Was Dill confusing his memories with reality?
Or had the thaumaturge been up to something secretive and sorcerous during Rachel's absence?
Mina's calling you, Dill said suddenly. She wants us to leave now. We have company.
“An arconite?”
The room gave a sudden lurch forward.
Broken shapes littered the dark battlefield like strange volcanic outcrops. John Anchor stood at the lip of the portal, his fists on his hips, and gave a huge sigh of disappointment. “If Menoa intends to lead us into a trap, he might at least have left one of his twelve giants here as a ruse.”
A ruse? Cospinol sounded weary.
“To make us believe he feared intruders. A ruse would have been most sensible!” He gazed around him but could see little in the darkness except Cospinol's fog. “It would have tired us before the assault to come. A last battle on the Larnaig Field!”
Perhaps he decided we'd see through such a ruse too easily?
Anchor grunted. “I am beginning to dislike this king. An honourable warrior is never unpredictable. He obeys the time-tested rules of combat.”
The Rotsward's great rope seemed to hum a melancholy note.
Anchor stared down into the depths of the portal. He had been in grimmer places, but not many. The gate to Hell looked like a lake of tar, but the stench of death that arose from it burned in his throat. How many souls now swam in those foul waters? Mist hung over the entirety of the lake and moved in layers like drab curtains dragged to and fro across an empty stage. A crust had formed around the banks, as hard and brittle as black glass. Pale unappealing lumps floated on the viscid surface.
It felt cold.
He judged the portal to be some three hundred yards across, and Cospinol's skyship was considerably wider than that. But the Rotsward was much stronger than she appeared. Whereas Ayen's sun made her vulnerable, there was no sun here, and in the darkness her ancient timbers took their strength from Cospinol's own will. The portal would expand to accommodate the Rotsward. If the god of brine and fog did not falter, then neither would his ship.
Are you waiting for one of the arconites to show up?
Anchor grunted again. He rolled his massive shoulders and slapped his hands together. Then he took a long, deep breath, closed his eyes, and jumped into that hideous lake.
An icy chill enveloped him. He heard the gurgle and rush of the surface waters closing over his head, until the pressure of fluid against his eardrums stifled those noises to near silence. A dull hum reverberated in the air within his own sinuses, and then Cospinol spoke:
Our best chance of success relies upon your finding the portal spine before the Rotsward reaches the ground above you. Seek the place where Menoa's thaumaturgy is strongest. The spine should appear much denser than the surrounding liquid, like a cord or rope. Use it to pull us down through the portal opening.
Anchor opened his eyes but he dared not open his mouth for fear of swallowing any dislocated souls. He could see little in this darkness but a faint crimson glow emanating from the depths. He curled his body and dived down, pulling at the thick waters with his massive hands. The rope trailed after him, dragging Cospinol's ship down from the skies above. His lungs cramped once in sympathy with those instincts that remained from the days when Anchor had been merely human, but he ignored the discomfort. Down and down he swam until he began to relax into the rhythm of his labours.
He descended in an inwards-turning spiral until he felt the fluid becoming thicker in certain areas. Motes of white light darted past his head. He reached for them but they shot away into the distance. He adjusted his course to take him into the denser, more central part of the portal.
After a while he spotted a black thread hanging vertically in the distance. It drifted sluggishly back and forth like a strand of kelp in an unseen current.
That's it. The portal spine. Be careful not to damage it. It's already weak and it's the only link to Hell we have.
It was twice as wide as the tree trunks in the forest he had just left, yet slippery and pliant like an umbilical cord. Menoa had woven it from souls and blood magic to form the core of his birthing channel between Hell and earth. Anchor's skin burned where he touched it—a reaction to its deeply unnatural composition. Gripping the cord firmly, he used it to drag himself downwards more rapidly.
After some time the Rotsward's rope suddenly jerked him to a halt.
Cospinol's great skyship had reached solid ground around the portal opening. In Anchor's mind he saw the Rotsward's gallows, for the lowest edges of that great matrix of greasy spars would now be lodged into the earth of Larnaig Field far above.
Anchor floated in a red gloom while he gathered his strength for the job to come. He flexed his hands, opening and closing his fingers. They felt as if he'd been using them to squeeze wasps inside their nest. Now he must drag the whole skyship deep enough down through the earth and rock to allow the portal to expand around it. The blood magic should then draw power from the dead suspended from the Rotsward's gallows. It would actually feed on those damned men. Anchor smiled at the thought of his master's old army hanging up there amidst those gallows, gazing down at the fate that awaited them. Those miserable whiners would not be happy about this.
Cospinol's voice came to him through the rope. Harper is picking up a surge of what she calls “soul traffic” on her Pandemerian device.
Anchor paused. He had last seen Menoa's former metaphysical engineer walking the battlefield after Rys's Northmen had slaughtered their Mesmerist foes, drawing power from the bloody ground. The woman might be a corpse, but he didn't doubt her wits. Alice Harper had been the one who had first realized that the king would use his own dead to open this very portal, but it had been too late by then to do anything about it.
She thinks that something is rising from the portal, Cospinol went on. Something huge.
Another arconite? How could that be possible? The giant dived down sharply and gave the Rotsward a sharp tug. In all of history he had never heard of a battle fought inside a portal between two worlds. The trial to come might offer him a treasure chest of memories to savour until his dying days.
The tethered man cracked the knuckles of both his hands and then tensed the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Set, he grabbed the spine of the portal and dragged himself further down, straining against the massive rope attached to his back. The rope seemed to stretch, but here in this darkness it could not snap. Far above him, on the Larnaig Field, the Rotsward's gallows would be groaning and bending as they pushed down into the earth, but they too would not break. Between the divine will of Cospinol and the unlimited strength of his slave, the only thing to bend would be nature herself.
Anchor heaved against his harness until he felt the land around the portal mouth crumble under the insurmountable pressure. Slowly and inexorably, he dragged Cospinol's great skyship down into the dep
ths of Hell.
3
THE PORTAL
Rachel spent the night in Dill's mouth. She had curled up under a blanket with her back pressed against his molars, but she couldn't get comfortable. Air seeped in through gaps in his front teeth and turned the space into a cold, dank cave. Mina had suggested building a fire, but Rachel had snuffed that idea. It just hadn't seemed right. From far below she heard the constant judder of machinery and the crash of broken trees each time Dill took another step through the forest.
Living forest. Dill's vision of petrified trees could only have been a flash of memory or a dream. Since leaving Deepgate, the young angel had been thrust from one horrific reality to another, from the fathomless pit beneath the chained city to the corridors of Hell itself. It was a wonder he had maintained any of his sanity at all.
They had tied up Cospinol's stores as best they could. The stacked barrels and crates had been inclined to topple over each time Dill turned his monstrous head—prompting Mina and Hasp to leap aside in order to avoid damaging their fragile skins. Now both the thaumaturge and the debased god were slumped against the piled goods. Hasp looked twice as exhausted as Mina, the parasite in his skull having tormented him throughout the night. Only Mina's hideous little dog, Basilis, had managed to sleep easily.
Cospinol had provided them with rude furnishings: rugs, blankets, lanterns, and even an old table and chairs. The chairs and lamps had fallen over, and now stood in a heap against one side of the jaw, but the table remained where they had set it—a huge rotten old slab of wood that smelled faintly of brine.
The sky lightened. They had no view but one of fog. Occasionally Mina closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the mist, announcing the position of those arconites she could sense. Six of Menoa's twelve golems remained within the fog, following them to the south. The others were lost, somewhere beyond the reach of her sorcerous vision.