God of Clocks (17 page)

Crunch.

Why were they killing these people in the Maze? Could these souls not be better used by Cospinol? The blood of those slain was now being wasted. Their essence mingled with the blood from the walls and floors, and leaked down into the depths of the Maze.

To where?

The slaves harvested scraps of living stone and wood, but they would not touch the corpses. The whole bloody scene felt like a giant
sacrifice.

Crunch.

The scaffold dropped again. But this time something unusual happened.

The ground gave a sudden rumble, and great sections of it simply fell away. Several gaping chasms appeared amongst the network of interconnected rooms, corridors, and rows of brick partitions. The
Rotsward
appeared to have broken through into a vast cavern. The boy could see nothing down there except impenetrable darkness, but he heard the unmistakable sound of rushing water.

There was a pause.

And then John Anchor heaved on the rope again.

The
Rotsward
broke her way through the base of Hell. The network of gallows shuddered and groaned, and then suddenly dropped twenty fathoms. The lowest spars struck something solid, and the whole skyship came to an abrupt halt.

At that point, had the boy not shaped his own fingers to grip his environment, he might have lost his hold on the wood and fallen. Cospinol's gallowsmen were not so lucky, however. Dozens slipped from the greasy timbers and plummeted. To the boy's surprise, most of them landed in water.

It was an entire maze of waterways separated by low, greasy banks. Its layout reminded him of the old spiral patterns that the ancients had painted on rocks back in Brownslough: a single line looping back on itself again and again, to form a labyrinth. Like the lines of a finger, the channels did not intersect each other. They were all part of the same river.

Debris rained down, sending up thick gouts of liquid. Islands of rubble formed quickly. The waterways were shallow, not even reaching as high as a man. Brands fell from the scaffold and hit water, fizzling out, or else landed on banks and islands and threw wildly flickering shadows across the landscape. By the light of these torches, the boy saw that the watercourses were as thick and red as blood.

A sacrifice?

A great cheer went up from the gallowsmen. Those still left on the scaffold were now climbing down towards these subterranean shallows. Even the slaves abandoned their baskets of debris to join them. Those warriors who had already fallen splashed around and roared and laughed and drank their fill of the waters. Some of them climbed upon the islands to reclaim brands, their armour darkly stained and dripping. They hollered and clashed blades against their own armour, and then knelt on the shore to sup. Evidently Cospinol had promised them a feast.

The boy glanced up.

In the torchlight, the base of Hell looked as gnarled as the thickest forest. Around the rift created by the skyship, twisted iron girders extended like black roots through the brickwork.

The
Rotsward's
main hull sat lower than this ceiling, but her
upper scaffold still remained lodged in the Maze above. There was not enough room here to fully contain her great size. Bloody streams still trickled down through her joists and spars, and also from the edges of the well John Anchor had made by dragging the skyship down here.

The boy returned his gaze to the shallows, hoping to spot the tethered man. Torches moved over the waters and over the islands between the skyship's masts, but the spaces between them remained dark. Anchor was nowhere to be seen, so the boy looked for the great rope instead.

It had curled around one of the scaffold's lower joists, a few hundred yards away, and was tightening, drawing in slack as Anchor pulled on it. The boy peered in the direction of the rope and spied a faint aura of white light receding in the distance. The
Rotsward
would soon be moving horizontally again.

He had to tell Monk. This celebration might be the distraction they needed. While Cospinol's gallowsmen and his slaves feasted, they could sneak into the boiling room.

But just as he was about to turn and climb back up the scaffold, he spotted the red figures rising from the water below.

She was drowning and had been drowning for months or years or perhaps even centuries. Carnival could not remember how long she'd been trapped in this hell. Scalding water filled her eyes, her mouth, and her lungs. It flayed her skin. Her wings and legs had been broken once, but now they had healed, though the bones had reset themselves in awkward positions. That made kicking at the inside of her prison difficult.

But she kicked again anyway, as there was nothing else for her to do. The pain gave her strength. She savoured it and used it, compressing the agony up inside herself and then releasing it with another vicious blow to the walls of her container.

She felt, however, that she was growing weaker by degrees. The
scalding water seemed to sap the very life from her. She wondered if she would die. On one level the idea of an end to her suffering was appealing, as it offered her some consolation, a hope of peace. At the same time it enraged her.
Someone
had put her in here.

And so she lashed out again.

This time she felt the wall of the container give.

T
he River of the Failed was quick and cunning and carnivorous. In its many disparate parts it tore the fallen gallowsmen to pieces. Columns of lamplight dropped from windows in the base of Hell and lit up the scene. Red figures rose from the bubbling waters and set upon their foes with no weapons except their newly forged hands and teeth. Their hardened liquid forms could be mutilated and scattered by blades and spears, yet the Failed themselves remained immune to death, for the river was their common flesh.

Anchor turned his back on the slaughter as the screams of Cospinol's warriors filled that vast emptiness underlying Hell.

They fought with increased desperation but ultimately they fought in vain. The river learned from its mistakes, and it adopted new tactics to trick its foes. Giants rose in places where the smaller constructs were destroyed, great brutes with clubs for fists that terrified the gallowsmen and caused them to flee. Long muscular shapes with fins and jaws lashed through the water. Red threads reached up and wound themselves around the gallowsmen's weapons,
entangling them. Vortexes chewed at their shins, forcing them to retreat to higher ground. But the red river swelled around them and hardened itself into walls that funneled its victims into pens where they could be murdered more efficiently.

For a brief time it rained upwards. The tiny droplets were as cunning as their source and trickled up across the warriors' skin and into their mouths and eyes. So afflicted, a knight in blasted-steel plate rushed blindly through a frothing channel and scratched at his eyes and cried, “Teeth, teeth!”

Downstream from him a short, wiry way-ganger clung to his useless bow as he struggled against the red threads that tried to pull him under.

Three warriors clad in coloured enameled armour stood back to back atop one of the larger islands, driving spears into the crimson shapes that crawled up the rubble towards them. Before long this trio became the only effective resistance that Anchor could see. The river seemed to have momentarily neglected them, but then the waters receded suddenly and surged back over the warriors' island, knocking them into the surrounding channel.

As Anchor walked away, he felt a chill in his heart. He dragged a hand through the fast-flowing waters around his midriff. Surely no army could defeat such an amorphous foe. Here was the antithesis of Iril—brute power without any structure that could be dominated by physical force. How could one fight absolute chaos?

Anchor carried Harper, his large hands grasping her waist. She had stopped supping the fluid. “The river would have taken the gallowsmen anyway,” she declared. “Cospinol had no choice but to sacrifice them. By doing so, he has gained its favour.”

“For now,” Anchor said. “We are still at its mercy, I think. If it decides to eat us, I do not know how to stop it.”

“Then let's try not to do anything to upset it.”

“How do you upset a river?”

“The river is a god, and this god is a child. Anything might cause a tantrum.”

After some distance the
Rotsward's
rope tugged at Anchor's harness and he felt the familiar pull of the skyship against his back. He took a deep breath and bulled forward. The skyship felt so much lighter than before. He hardly noticed as, behind him, the great wooden vessel shifted and scraped across the drowned floor of this subterranean realm. The upper part of the scaffold remained buried in the base of the Maze, but its timbers would not be broken by mere bricks and iron.

“This is a very strange place,” Anchor said.

“You get used to it,” Harper replied. “Hell, I mean. I don't know if this place down here can still be called Hell. The Maze ends up there.” She slipped the luminous wand behind her ear, and nodded at the ceiling. “That was my home for a very long time.”

The big man grunted. “The way you speak… I think you miss it.”

“I do. Your soul imposes its own order on its surroundings. You become a world amongst many others, but still joined. If it wasn't for overcrowding and the Mesmerist threat, it would be paradise. Imagine the sex.”

He laughed.

“It's when others impose their will upon you that things become difficult.” She looked at him meaningfully. “Wouldn't you agree?”

“I chose to become a slave.”

“But you regret it now.”

He chose not to answer. “Do you think Heaven is like the Maze?”

“Not while Ayen remains dominant. She expelled her own sons just to maintain order.
Her
version of order. If there are still any souls left in Heaven, I doubt they're at all free.” She gazed up at the ceiling. “No, Heaven is for sheep, and Hell is for—”

“Goats?”

“Wolves, John,” she said. “Wolves.”

The fierce current made walking difficult, but Anchor held her firmly and caught her when she slipped. She kept Tom's soul close to her heart, and imagined she could feel the warmth of it through the glass. In this unnaturally engineered state, he would not be aware of anything around him. His spirit was trapped in a suspension of some esoteric fluid, an elixir like those rumoured to have been distilled in Pandemeria before the war. In such a form he would merely be dreaming.

Removing his soul from the liquid wouldn't be difficult. She could simply find a man—living or dead—to drink the elixir, and thereby become host to her husband's personality. Yet that person wouldn't
physically
be Tom, not as she remembered him.

Nevertheless, a return to any physical body was infinitely better than an eternity spent in a soulpearl. This way she wouldn't just
possess
her husband's soul. She would have Tom back.

If she could find a man to act as host for Tom's spirit, she and her husband could finally be together again. A couple, a home. In time they might even create a nice apartment in Hell, something far from the Ninth Citadel, something with a view.

But who would be the host?

The crimson river continued to rush past them, urging them on to their destination. Drips fell from above and bloodied their skin and clothes. They followed a path as twisted and tortuous as a deathbed scribble, but when they tried to leave the waters to cross one of the many adjoining banks, the currents sucked at them, urging them back into the center of the channel. Harper's light bobbed ahead, glistening on the waters, while in the darkness far behind, the grounded skyship scraped a terrible gouge through the ceiling of this thin realm.

Finding a hale physical form down here wasn't going to be easy, Harper realized. As far as she knew, in all of Hell there was only one such body available. And John Anchor wasn't about to give it up.

Before long the Failed reappeared again, rising from the waterway as though they had been submerged all this time. Thousands stood in the main channel and in all the surrounding ones. Harper shone her light around, revealing more of them everywhere. They had become more defined, Anchor noticed. He could now discern features in their faces—mouths and noses, yet none of them had yet developed eyes. Many now resembled the gallowsmen they had so recently butchered. Their wet red skins had the appearance of armour, and they carried blades, bows, and spears.

Anchor and Harper halted.

As the Failed spoke, a single voice issued from many mouths. “What is that object you drag?” they said. “There is food within.”

“The
Rotsward
is my master's ship,” Anchor replied. “There's no food aboard.”

One figure stepped closer. It was larger than its neighbours and appeared to be wearing red plate armour, yet the steel panels of its suit did not move in the way layers of metal should. This armour was merely an affectation. “There are many souls inside the
Rotsward,”
it said, and the group chorused its words. “Souls everywhere.” It tilted its head and seemed to be studying the pouch of soulpearls tied to the tethered man's belt. Then it reached out towards them.

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.