Iron Angel (24 page)

“Why?”

“So we can detach you from it.” He rolled his shoulders, causing the armoured plates there to rasp together; then he lifted his globe. Crystals gleamed behind the brass filigree. “We don’t have time to acclimatize you, and less time to train you, so we’ll cheat.”

Dill stared at the orb in Hasp’s hand. “What is that thing?”

“It’s a tool for creating voids, neutral spaces between the crush of souls in Hell. It will allow us to meet without damage to either of our souls, but it exerts pressure on all those around us. Open your window shutters. We need to know who’s nearby.”

The young angel strode back across his apartment. He felt his bare feet pad across the floor as though he was walking on his own skin. And in a sense he was. He was standing on his own soul.

The shutters towered over him, six feet high and three wide. A weird sensation ran through his flesh as he unlatched one of them and pulled it back to reveal a window composed of many small panes.

Through the glass he saw another chamber, much grander and gaudier than his own, shrouded in gloom. Shadows cloaked dim marble walls and pillars that retreated into deeper darkness. In the half-light, Dill could just make out a cupola overhead painted with scenes in which angels hunted queer piglike beasts through a forest. But the shallow alcoves set in the walls boasted a still stranger display. The shelves within these alcoves were laden with the skulls of long-toothed creatures.

Dill strained to see.

Wolves or hounds?

In the center of the room, a young woman sat at a desk. Dark brown twists of hair tumbled over the shoulders of her rainbow-coloured dress as she leaned forward to scribble in a journal. For a moment Dill stared at her slender wrists, as smooth as honey, and then noticed the swell of her bosom against the fabric of her dress.

Suddenly she looked up at him and smiled.

The wallpaper, curtains, and rugs in Dill’s room turned a sudden bright shade of pink. He looked away quickly.

“Who is it?” the god called from the doorway. “Who do you see?”

“A girl,” Dill said. He glanced back through the window, but his neighbor had resumed writing in her book. “I can’t see her very clearly.”

“What size of room?”

“What? It’s…” He thought for a moment. “It looks expensive.”

Hasp grunted. “Then she has an overly inflated ego. Most of these poor bastards are lucky if they can grow hovels around themselves. But does she appear human to you?”

He nodded.

“Then she’s no threat. She probably got near us when we fought the crowds in the portal, or I might have been using her as a club. I can’t honestly remember. Close the shutters. She won’t cause us trouble.”

Dill returned to the doorway, but he didn’t close the shutters. The other room had no lanterns, no source of light. He couldn’t bring himself to shut the girl in the dark. “She can’t see the doorway from her desk,” he said. “It’s so dark in there.”

The armoured god shook his head. “This is Hell, Dill. Do someone a favor and they’ll just turn against you.” He flipped the orb, and snatched it out of the air. It glowed with renewed brilliance. Hasp set it down at the base of the doorway where the two chambers met.

Light burst from the device, and it began to swell, quickly increasing in size. The air around it shimmered and blurred like frosted glass. A bubble was forming. Dill backed away as the sphere grew larger than the doorway,
pushing
the walls outwards on each side. Now voices were issuing from the expanding ball of light, strange whispers in a language the young angel did not recognize.

“Step inside,” Hasp said.

Dill hesitated. The space before him writhed with threads of light and hissing voices.

“Do it!” Hasp demanded.

The young angel stepped into the sphere. A feeling of terrible disorientation overcame him, and for a heartbeat he lost all sense of connection to the world around him. He was floating in a sea of light.

And then his feet struck solid ground with a resounding boom. The swarm of lights faded, revealing a spherical glass chamber as large as a planetarium. Opaque walls curved up over the young angel’s head, full of scintillations. Standing before him was the god, Hasp.

Hasp’s armour had changed. Instead of his old battered steel, he wore a suit of silvered metal. His grey wings and hair had turned as white as starlight, but his eyes held the same wry humor. “We’re standing inside a fragment of Iril,” he said, “the god of death and darkness himself.”

“Iril?”

“Our father was shattered during the War Against Heaven. The Mesmerists constructed this tool from one of the pieces of him they managed to recover.” He grinned. “Then we stole it from them.”

Dill gazed up at the swarms of stars. “It’s…beautiful.”

“Here we can meet without setting foot in each other’s souls.” Hasp clasped Dill’s shoulder. “You must learn how to adapt and control your environment, and how to arm and armour yourself properly. Just look at your current armour…”

Dill’s tattered mail shirt hung like curtains of rust from his shoulders. It was an identical manifestation of the armoured garment he had worn since leaving Deepgate, the one he had died in.

“You’re only dressed in that sack of rust because you remember wearing it when you died. So change it. Visualize yourself in something stronger and finer.”

The young angel envisioned himself wearing a suit of silvered plate, like Hasp’s own armour. Nothing happened; he was still standing there in his old rusty mail.

Hasp grunted. “So far so bad. Try on that suit behind you.”

Dill turned. A few feet behind him stood a wooden mannequin dressed in shining new armour. “You made this?”

“There’s enough power left in this sphere to create armour and weapons for ten thousand archons. But it’s only one of two pieces of the shattered god we possess, and we daren’t drain it too much.” Hasp helped Dill into the suit, strapping the light plates together. “The other fragment is all that keeps the Mesmerists from storming the First Citadel.”

The suit felt as light as silk, and yet the hardened plates were as tough as steel. Dill flexed his wings, then lifted his arms; the metal gleamed under the swirling lights.

“Now a sword,” Hasp said.

Dill turned again, expecting to see a weapon beside the now-empty mannequin, but he was disappointed.

“Create it yourself,” Hasp said. “Simply will it to appear in your hand.”

Dill concentrated. He felt the grip swell inside his closed fist and watched the air solidify into a long heavy blade. A gold guard extended over his hand. And suddenly he was holding his old sword again, the very weapon he had inherited from his forebears.

“Hmm…” The god frowned. “This blade is too fragile and unwieldy. Try again.”

And so Dill focused his thoughts on the weapon again. The steel flowed like liquid silver, the blade shortened, and the guard retracted to form a simple crosspiece.

“Much better,” Hasp said. “Now defend yourself. Show me what you can do.” A blade suddenly appeared in the god’s hand and he lunged at Dill.

Dill had never been combat-trained, and his inexperience was soon evident. Hasp disarmed him in a heartbeat. Dill’s newly manifested sword clattered across the glass floor.

“This is not good, lad,” the god said darkly. “Ulcis’s priests have been woefully lax in their duties. They ought to have shown you how to take care of yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Pick up your sword. We have a lot of work to do.”

Training lasted until long after Dill was exhausted. And then it began again. Hasp showed him how to shrug off his weariness by force of will alone. Fatigue meant nothing in Hell, where the body was simply a manifestation of the soul.

“Souls,” Hasp explained, “do not tire.”

Days seemed to pass within that sphere, but the shimmering lights kept the same level of brilliance. Dill thought about nothing except the next attack and how to foil it. And Hasp attacked him relentlessly. The battle-archon did not waver or spare his opponent once. When Dill made a mistake, he suffered for it.

“Souls,” Hasp said, “do not feel pain.”

Dill winced up at him from the floor of the sphere, and clutched two bleeding fingers in his other fist. This soul was in a lot of pain.

“Bah!” Hasp gestured with his sword. “It’s all in your mind, lad, and yet your mind isn’t strong enough to let go of it. If I plunged this weapon through your heart right now, you’d die.” He frowned. “If we can’t detach you from this fiction with which you’ve surrounded yourself, then we can’t take you back to the First Citadel. Do you want to be trapped here? No? Then stop whining about spilled blood that does not exist and
get up
!”

Dill rose, but the blood on his hands still felt warm and slick.

Time passed in endless dazzling coruscations: weeks or years, he could not say. Dill parried and lunged, made feints, ducked and wove around the god’s blade, until Hasp was suddenly grinning.

“Drop the sword,” Hasp said.

The young angel tried to comply, but he couldn’t. The weapon’s hilt had fused with his hand. Welds had appeared where his fingers touched the metal. In panic, he flailed his arm to separate himself from the sword. It would not budge.

“Good,” Hasp said. “Now it’s time to rest.”

“Do souls need rest?”

“Ha! Perhaps I should have said ponder. You need to remember who you were before you stepped inside this sphere. And then we’ll begin again.”

Blood now soaked the ground between the Soul Middens; it flowed from broken masonry and woodwork and gathered in pools. The Icarates had smashed through a full third of the nearest Midden, ripping out the consciousnesses and loading them into cages which now crackled with Mesmeric energy.

Bones and debris continued to fall from the sky, scattering across a wide area. And this was the problem. There was no way to tell exactly where the temple angel had fallen. He might already be buried somewhere deep inside one of the great, growing buildings. So far Harper’s sceptre had not been able to locate him, or any battle-archon.

The souls in this particular Midden had sensed the Icarates’ attack on their outer reaches. Now this mountainous building, this composite of individual manifested souls, had begun to change. The stubs of rude battlements and defensive towers were forming in places. Doors were growing reinforced iron bands across their planks, or simply shrinking and becoming stouter.

It was an unconscious reaction to the perceived threat. None of these souls had been in Hell long enough to learn how to adapt their surroundings with any skill. These battlements and towers would not be effective—they were merely affectations, a reflex display. And yet some of the souls were now working together in an altogether stranger way.

Three hundred yards away, one of the older Soul Middens had begun to creep away. This hill-sized mass of houses, balconies, and towers was moving, sluglike, across the bloody ground. Somehow, the thousands of souls within the Midden had contrived a way to flee.

Harper watched with fascination. Those dwellings at ground level had sheared away from the souls trapped below. Mortar crumbled and wood split as the Midden inched further away, leaving behind a nest of rooms without ceilings…and a trail of blood. The souls at the base of the Midden were sacrificing themselves for the good of those above. They were
screaming
.

And yet this painful separation and flight was doomed to fail. The cluttered mound of buildings could not move fast enough. The Icarates paid it no heed, aware that whenever they decided to take their hammers to the shifting edifice, it would be nearby for the taking.

While those souls trapped inside the Icarate cages moaned, the dogcatchers had returned to the basin to feed and to wallow. Like most creatures in Hell they drew energy from the red mire, the endless pools, canals, and gurgling channels within the Maze. Here they feasted on fresher fare than normal.

Harper’s sceptre hummed suddenly, and the lights within the glass orb pulsed. Icarates paused in their destruction to turn and stare.

Something…?

The engineer swept her sceptre across the scene before her. A ghostlike figure appeared within the glass: a powerful battle-archon. The image was vague, but the angel appeared to be clad in armour. He was striding through a long stone vault. He slotted a sword into a weapon rack, and then stooped to place a small glowing object inside a chest. The sceptre purred, and then the scene faded once more.

“An archon,” Harper said, pointing one of her glass limbs towards the ripped-open rooms left by the creeping Soul Midden. “He’s deep underground.”

“The ability to change,” Hasp said to Dill, “is everything in Hell. King Menoa has exploited the uncanny nature of this realm to forge demons. A soul can be persuaded to assume any shape and to serve any master, and the Mesmerists are
very
good at persuasion.”

They were facing each other through the open doorway between their chambers. Hasp had deemed Dill’s progress with the sword to be satisfactory, although the young angel suspected that the god was secretly pleased.