Iron Angel dc-2

  Iron Angel

  ( Deepgate Codex - 2 )

  Alan Campbell

  Alan Campbell

  Iron Angel

  CODEX EXCERPTS FOUND IN THE WRECKAGE OF RECLAMATION SHIP TWELVE

  (Follows from remaining fragment BofP, Vol II, pg 783)…

  The god of flowers and kni(ves?) could not kill this foe. He flew above the burning town of Skirl. And among the fire and smoke walked an arconite.

  The corpses of (illegible) thousand Northmen filled the streets. And one hundred thousand more stood upon the backs of their (unknown term, trans-cold?) brothers in order to reach the great winged demon.

  They hacked the arconite with steel and burned it. But the demon (laughed/howled?) and walked among them and slew the Northmen. All the men of Coreollis came forth to fight, and the men of Brownslough and those of (charred). One half of the (handsome?) god’s men died beneath the arconite’s club. The rest tried to flee. But the god of flowers and knives was wrathful.

  (following two lines charred/indic. collateral PF impact)

  Chains of bane were brought forth from (unknown term, trans-“city of voices,” see appendix 4a) to bind the arconite’s feet. It stumbled and fell and crushed many (dwellings?) in Skirl. But still it slew the warriors around it, for it would not return to Hell so easily.

  (Excised) from Oxos came to poison the fallen demon. It would not die. (Excised) brought Worms to devour it.

  It would not be consumed. Slaves (charred) from the Riot Coast, and set about the beast with hammers and (illegible). And after two moons the arconite had been pinned.

  Even then they could not slay it, and so they buried it under the earth.

  The god of flowers and knives brought forth a great rain to cleanse Pandemeria of (excised). But in his castle he brooded, for his army had been decimated. And under the drowned earth, the arconite still breathed.

  PROLOGUE

  OBLIVION OR SLAVERY

  Saltwater fog had engulfed the old galleon for as long as her crew could remember. The briny air had warped her joints and planking, eaten holes in her decks and bulkheads, and turned her interior into a dank, rotten hive. Everything creaked, dripped, and groaned in the gloom. Even the throne upon which Cospinol sat had wasted, its once finely carved surfaces now reduced to so much mulch.

  The old god was wearing his best armour, but the layers of hardened red crab shells had cracked and tarnished millennia ago and no amount of paint and glue had been able to restore the suit to its former glory. His wings slumped from his shoulders like the tattered grey and white sails this ancient vessel had once possessed. His eyes peered out through a bedraggled net of his own hair as he studied the axe in his hand.

  “My Lord?”

  This corruption would be the end of him. Like the wooden axe handle in his fist, his vessel, the Rotsward, could only barely support her own weight. She would not survive another century. Her bones had atrophied, her skin had split, and now things moved through the dank spaces in her belly that had no right to be there. Cospinol lifted his eyes from the axe and listened for the patter of small feet.

  “My Lord?” The slave girl kneeling before him clutched the hem of her smock. “Your brothers are here.”

  Cospinol made a dismissive gesture. A child sniggered in the passage outside the captain’s cabin, and then a shadow darted past an open gap in the nearest bulkhead.

  The old god raised his axe. “This runt has been pestering me for days,” he growled. “I intend to have the little bastard’s head on a plate before they arrive.” He rose from his throne and took a step towards the source of the sound. Planks sagged under his shell-plated boots. Looking down though a hand-sized gap in the floorboards in one corner of the cabin, he noticed a much larger hole in the Rotsward’s outer hull. A small figure clambered through this and slipped out into the fog beyond, followed by a chittering mass of living red crabs. “The boy is a damned spider,” Cospinol muttered. “How is he able to climb underneath my ship?”

  “He has hooks for fingers,” the slave girl said.

  “Hooks? Since when?”

  She shrugged.

  The sea god grunted. “This infestation is a conspiracy. The last thing I need is for my brothers to find Mesmerist scum loose aboard this vessel. How do you imagine that will look?”

  She made no reply.

  “Those bastards might even try to supplant me,” Cospinol went on. “They’ll say I’m harboring the enemy, then call a vote and have me expelled from my own dominion. They’ve been eyeing the RiotCoast for centuries, just waiting for an excuse like this.”

  “The war in Pandemeria keeps them fully occupied, my Lord.”

  Cospinol opened one of the cabin’s rear windows and looked down upon the Rotsward’s stern and rudder. He could see little beyond the vague outlines of the scaffold that enveloped his entire skyship, the great floating nest of yards and ropes all wreathed in fog. A gull hopped along one of the timber spars and then took off, circling down towards the ground far below the hull and scaffold, until it disappeared entirely in the grey mist. Cospinol could see nothing of the landscape down there, but he supposed the Rotsward must be drifting somewhere to the west of Pandemeria. “Evidently not occupied enough,” he said, “as they’ve left mortal generals in charge of their armies while they traveled out here.” He closed the window again. “Besides, what does a dead girl know about the war? You weren’t Pandemerian, were you?”

  She lowered her head. “No, my Lord. I lived and died in Brownslough.”

  The god nodded. “Hafe’s realm. I suppose you’re one of the lucky ones. Just be thankful that Pandemeria is far from here, lass.” He wandered across the cabin to inspect the banquet table beneath the stern windows: the white linen napkins; the silver platters, cutlery, goblets, and candlesticks-all far too ostentatious for his simple tastes. He picked up a knife, wondering how his slaves had restored the blade to such a high sheen, before he noticed a rash of black spots along one edge. Not even his best-kept silverware had survived the slow decay.

  This endless fog was to blame, that dismal pall of brine on which Cospinol looked out every day, and which tumbled behind the windowpanes even now. Yet the god did not dare expose his vessel to the sun of this world.

  Not yet.

  “Where are they?” he grumbled. “What’s taking them so long?”

  “My Lord…” The girl’s chin sank even lower to her chest. “Your guests brought something overland with them. It is being hoisted up here now. Your Lord Brothers chose to oversee the operation from the Rotsward’s yards.”

  “What is it?”

  “I do not know, my Lord. They found it in Pandemeria.”

  Cospinol felt suddenly uneasy. Nothing good had ever come out of that war-ravaged land. Whatever Rys and the others had discovered would undoubtedly have some wicked purpose. He sighed and made for the door, beckoning his servant after him. “Let’s go and see it then.”

  They left the captain’s cabin and took one of the aft companionways up to the quarterdeck. From here Cospinol could look out across the Rotsward’s upper decks.

  Fog wreathed the skyship on all sides. In Heaven she had been a square-rigged galleon made for salt seas-but her keel had not split waves in over three thousand years. Her mainmasts were missing: the tough oak had long since been cannibalized for vital repairs to other parts of the ship. Now her remaining tattered sails hung limply from the main starboard and larboard yards, far out beyond the ship’s sides. To reach these, the Rotsward’s crew were forced to clamber like ants among the lattice of greasy beams around the hull-a perilous task in the ever-present fog-with nothing but sky between them and the ground so far below.

  Work was under way amidships. Two of the crew were resting, exhaust
ed, against the larboard winch handles, while six others wrestled a loaded net onto the deck. This net contained a spherical and dully metallic object, like an oversized cannonball-and just as heavy, judging from the way his crew were struggling with it. Cospinol looked around for his brothers, but couldn’t see them anywhere.

  The Rotsward’s crew wore the same queer assortment of clothes they had died in. They had once been sailors on the seas below, hailing from Oxos and Meria, and a dozen other human ports. Now their pallid faces evinced grim determination as they laboured to free the sphere from its net.

  “What is that thing?” Cospinol mused.

  A harsh laugh came from above him. “It is the key to your freedom, Cospinol!”

  The sea god turned his gaze upwards to see his brother, Rys, flying down to join him on the quarterdeck, his great white wings cutting through the fog. His mirrored steel plate gleamed like freshly minted coins, while the naked scimitar and many tiny blades in his silver belt shone with the brilliance of starlight. He wore a cloak of Battlefield Roses, as red as the bloody ground from which they had sprouted-and just as poisonous. The god of flowers and knives looked every inch the champion-and Cospinol hated him for it.

  Then, from out of the misty sky behind emerged the others: Mirith, Hafe, and Sabor. These three gods remained a respectful distance behind their elder brother: Hafe obese and sweating under cauldrons of copper armour; dour, grey-haired Sabor in his dark suit of mail; poor mad Mirith in the motley of tin plates, leathers, and garish velvets that Rys had given him to wear. It seemed that even their wings had grown to complement the stature of each god. If an ox could fly, its wingspan would resemble Hafe’s, while Sabor had the look of a rook, and Mirith’s wings were lopsided and stitched with tiny bells.

  Rys landed lightly on the quarterdeck. “This floating gaol continues to amaze me,” he said. “How do you keep it from completely disintegrating about you?”

  Cospinol noted the insult in his brother’s choice of words. Of all the five gods present, only Cospinol himself still lacked the power to leave his stronghold. This detail had forced the others to come here, and Rys would not be pleased about that inconvenience. “The Rotsward is tougher than she looks,” he said darkly.

  “As are you, brother,” Rys said. “You appear so frail one wonders how you are able to remain upright without assistance, and yet somehow you stand here before us, tall enough to be mistaken for an equal.”

  The whole skyship gave a sudden lurch as Hafe landed with a mighty thump beside the god of flowers and knives. Sabor set down lightly a short distance further back, before Mirith landed with a clash of tiny bells and a whoop of glee.

  Rys glanced over his shoulder and said, “Don’t feel disheartened, Cospinol, for I am now surrounded by cripples.”

  “I am no cripple,” Hafe protested.

  “This airboat pitches and shudders with every beat of your fat heart,” Rys remarked. “Your very presence here is likely to bring this whole sorry vessel crashing down out of the sky.”

  The god of dirt and poison’s face reddened. “It’s not my fault,” he grunted. “This ship is rotten. A flock of gulls could tear it to shreds.”

  Mirith sniggered behind his hand, then gave a ridiculous jester’s bow. “But I am a cripple.”

  “And a lunatic with it,” Rys agreed. “Yet we find ourselves in this floating wreck partly because of your uncanny foresight.”

  Cospinol’s mood darkened further. He was about to respond when a commotion from amidships distracted him. Rys’s strange metal sphere had come loose from its net and rolled away, knocking a crewman to the deck and crushing his chest. The sailor wailed in agony while his companions struggled to roll the object off him.

  “Be careful with that,” Rys yelled.

  “Perhaps,” Cospinol suggested, “they would be more cautious if you explained exactly what that object is. It is a Mesmerist weapon, is it not?”

  “Much more than that,” Rys said. “Come, brother.”

  The god led the others down the quarterdeck staircase to the wide mid-deck, where the remainder of the Rotsward’s crew had freed their trapped comrade, and were now jamming blocks of wood under Rys’s sphere to keep it from rolling away again.

  Cospinol now saw that the sphere was comprised of ill-fitting metal plates, triangles and trapeziums loosely bolted together so that a network of gaps ran between them like the broken earth in a dry riverbed. The metal shone dully, like old pewter, yet each panel was heavily dented and scratched, as though the globe had spent much time rolling across rough terrain. A faint geometric pattern could just be discerned behind the scrawls.

  Rys approached the globe and ran a finger lightly across the surface of one of these metal plates, as though tracing the outline of some obscure esoteric design. Then he pushed the panel inwards. It clicked once, and then sprung back out like a flap on its hidden hinges.

  Behind the open panel was a face.

  Cospinol stepped closer. The visage appeared human at first: an old woman with creased skin, a flat nose, and blind white eyes. But then her mouth opened to reveal a snakelike black tongue and three stubby yellow glass teeth. She gave a sudden desperate wail.

  “Close the sphere! The sun burns us so!”

  “There is no sun here,” Rys growled. “Be silent, hag, until I give you permission to speak.”

  Cospinol’s eyes widened. “You found a witchsphere?”

  Rys nodded. “My soldiers discovered it after the battle in Skirl. This thing had been observing the conflict for its master.”

  “Menoa’s dogcatchers will be searching hard for this.”

  “Let them search,” Rys grunted. “It is far beyond their reach now.”

  The hag inside the sphere cried out again. “Traitorous dogs! We curse the sons of Ayen. We inhaled your blood in Skirl and in Pandemeria, and now we will exhale it in Deepgate. You have no more men to throw against us.”

  “Silence!” Rys slipped a knife from his belt and plunged it through the open panel into the interior of the sphere. The hag screamed and spat blood at him, but the handsome god only twisted his blade and pushed it in deeper, until the wailing died away.

  Wincing, Cospinol turned away from the gruesome sight. “I see your talents of persuasion remain as keen as ever,” he said to his younger brother. “But what did the witchsphere mean? How can the Mesmerists hope to attack Deepgate?”

  Mirith giggled manically. “All is not well on the other side of Hell.” His tin-plate armour rattled like beggars’ cups as he danced away across the Rotsward’s deck.

  Rys wiped blood and spittle from his face. “Mirith is more astute than he appears,” he said to Cospinol. “His madness masks a cunning mind.” He faced the old sea god, his eyes grim, and said, “Ulcis has been slain.”

  So startling was this news that Cospinol actually laughed. “Slain?” he snorted. “A god slain? Impossible.”

  “It is true,” Rys insisted. “Mirith had a spy in Deepgate, a hell-walker by the name of Thomas Scatterclaw. He stole through the Maze to confirm this witch’s tidings. Ulcis’s death has left a second door to Hell unguarded. Now King Menoa’s forces are gathering behind it.”

  Cospinol hissed. “But how could this have happened? How did our brother become so lax?” he asked. “How could he allow the Mesmerists to get a corporeal assassin into this world? How did they kill him?”

  “They didn’t,” Rys said. “The god of chains died at the hand of his own daughter.”

  “His daughter?” Cospinol stared at him in disbelief. “He had a daughter? And he let her live?”

  The god of flowers and knives nodded. “His folly has put us all in grave danger. The battle at Skirl has decimated our forces. We cannot spare the troops necessary to halt a second Mesmerist incursion. The portal beneath Deepgate lies wide open, and the lands around the abyss are undefended. Ethereal entities are already rising from Hell and moving into the chained city within a veil of bloody mist. Icarate shape-shifters will follo
w soon, and then the full force of the Mesmerist horde will pour out of the Maze at their heels. They will corrupt the Deadsands as they have corrupted Pandemeria.”

  While Cospinol considered this grim turn of events, Rys returned his attention back to the witchsphere. The hag inside was gurgling pitifully now, choking on her own blood. Rys closed the panel and then opened another flap on the top of the globe. A second hag peered out: a woman even uglier and more ancient than the first. Her single white eye lolled in a skull-like face as black as burnt oak. “Mercy for my sisters!” she cried. “Let us return to Hell, son of Ayen.”

  Rys grinned. “When you have told my brother all you know,” he said.

  “We have told everything,” the hag wailed.

  “Tell him.”

  The hag moaned. “Our master is building a second arconite, even greater and more powerful than the first. Forged of bone and iron and leashed to the soul of a powerful archon, it will move in sunlight and walk freely across unblooded earth.” Her face twisted into a hideous sneer. “It will crush the remnants of your armies like ants!”

  Rys set about her with his knife. All the time the smile never left his face.

  The god was panting when he finally finished with the witchsphere. “So far the Mesmerists have been confined to Pandemeria,” he said, “simply because they cannot survive for long without drawing power from blood. In order to remain in this world, Hell’s creatures must walk upon the red earth of battlefields or upon land already saturated by the Menoa’s bloody mists. But these arconites…” He balled his fists. “We could not kill the first one, Cospinol.”

  “And when the second one leaves Hell,” Cospinol said, “you will lose your hold on this world.”

  “We will lose our hold,” Rys said.

  But that wasn’t true. Cospinol owned none of the wealth or kingdoms his brothers possessed. He had been trapped in this rotting ship for three thousand years, wreathed in fog to hide himself from the destructive power of the sun. Only Ulcis, the eldest of all the goddess Ayen’s sons, had been similarly trapped-hidden beneath the earth while he harvested souls to join Rys’s army. But now Ulcis was dead, leaving Cospinol as the last of the gods to remain imprisoned.