God of Clocks (16 page)

“Are you listening to me?” Mr. D sighed, and then made an attempt to sound reasonable. “Listen, I promise not to pursue you if you turn me the right way up.”

What are you going to do about him?

“Nothing,” Anchor replied. “He can rot here.”

“Who are you talking to?” said Mr. D.

“My master,” Anchor said.

“Your master? Where is he? I want to speak to him.”

Anchor grunted. He crouched over the hole in the floor and began to widen it by ripping up more boards. After it was wide enough for him, he stopped and peered down into the darkness. A chill breeze blew up from below. He could not guess how deep the chasm went.

“Anchor?” Mr. D said. “I demand an audience with your master.”

The tethered man sighed and lowered himself into the gaping hole. It was utterly dark down there. He felt a lattice of iron beams around him, jutting from brick facades, but there was enough space to climb down between it all. “An audience?” he called back, flexing his shoulders as he took up the strain of the
Rotsward's
rope. “It is no problem. Cospinol will be along in a moment.” Then he
gripped an iron strut and began to drag himself down into the abyss.

Eventually John Anchor ran out of Maze. The girders and facades he had been using to drag himself down terminated suddenly. He broke through a floor and found nothing below but air. So he pulled in a mile or so of slack rope, and then jumped.

He fell for a long moment and landed in at least four feet of thick, cloying liquid. His head went under and then he came up again, spitting and gagging. He wiped his eyes, but could see nothing but a red blur. The stink of fouled meat filled his mouth and nostrils, and he spat repeatedly to try to remove it. The floor underneath the waters felt as smooth as skin. He heard echoes of his own coughs and gasps, the slosh and gurgle of fluid.

When he stood up again, the liquid flowed sluggishly around his belly and seemed to tug him in several directions at once. He rubbed sticky fluid away from his eyes, and then blinked them open.

He was in a space without walls, an immense gap underneath the twisted iron and redbrick roots of Hell. The base of the Maze formed an impossible ceiling overhead. Without any obvious means of support, the leagues of cluttered stonework and metal filled the heavens like a massive bank of thunderclouds. Rays of light fell from countless windows in the dwellings overhead, dappling the surrounding landscape.

The ground beneath was uneven and treacherous. Narrow channels of crimson water looped and spiraled and twisted back on themselves in an endless scrawl. Ribs of raised fleshy material separated the waterways, and in the patchy gloom, the swamp seemed to stretch to eternity. From all around came the constant sound of dripping, as the blood trickling down through Hell reached this open space and fell like rain.

A beam of harsher light flashed across the waters just to the left, revealing their dark, bloody colour, before vanishing once more. An instant later the same light reappeared overhead as Harper climbed down the
Rotsward's
rope. She was lowering herself down through a rift in the ceiling, and a wandlike crystal device gripped between her teeth proved to be the source of illumination. She stopped, dangling a few feet below the ceiling, and then shone the wand around her.

The Icarate cages had fallen nearby, and most of the twenty enclosures had toppled over and now lay on their sides, partially submerged, while four still stood upright on the raised banks. Long shadows reached out from the bars as Harper swung the light across them.

Every one of the cages was empty.

Anchor looked around for Mr. D. The proprietor had probably fallen somewhere nearby. After all, most of his collapsed emporium lay scattered around here. Cabinets and bottles bobbed in the red waters. A moment later, a smile came to his lips as he spotted Mr. D's strange wheeled box rolling across one of the raised banks, heading away into the darkness.

The metaphysical engineer swept her beam beyond the cages. The circle of light caught flashes like sparkling rubies, illuminated pockets of rippling water, and veins throbbing within a low, muscular bank. Falling droplets flashed in the gloom. And then the beam settled somewhere behind Anchor.

Harper let out a startled gasp. “John,” she said quietly, “we've found our ants' nest.”

Anchor turned to look.

They were standing in the water. Wet red figures like rude sculptures of men had risen up from the shallow depths and now stood motionless and glistening under the glare of Harper's wand. Anchor estimated there to be a hundred or more of them. He couldn't detect any eyes in those faces, but he noticed mouths and teeth.

Harper called down, “The waters are sentient. These creatures are not individual souls. They're extensions of the river itself, parts of the god of the Failed.”

Anchor faced the figures. “Hello.”

The figures spoke together in one fluid whisper. “Are you an Icarate?” Echoes hissed through the conduit like a breeze, so that it seemed like the air itself had spoken.

“Do I look like one?” Anchor replied.

They hesitated. “What do you want here?”

The rope at Anchor's back thrummed, and his master's voice sounded in his head:

Don't mention Menoa,
Cospinol warned.
This is treacherous ground. Ask it to grant us passage under Hell to the Ninth Citadel. We're seeking the source of the Icarate infestation.

Anchor relayed his master's words.

The figures were silent for a while. Finally they said, “You bring me food.”

Anchor frowned. He couldn't be sure if this was a question or a statement—or what it referred to.

“I think it means the gallowsmen,” Harper said. “If it can sense all the souls aboard the
Rotsward,
it would certainly regard them as sustenance, a veritable feast.” She untangled her legs from around the rope and slid further down. A foot from the surface of the water she hesitated and tightened her grip on the soul bottle clamped to her breast. Then she let go, plunging into the river up to her chest.

She faced the big man, her expression full of awe. “A river of disassociated dead,” she muttered. “John, this is vaster than I ever imagined. It could become
anything.”

She cupped a hand in the water, raised it to her lips, and took a sip.

Anchor grimaced at the sight.

Cospinol spoke through the rope:
It can have the damned gallowsmen if it lets us pass. Tell it we want an alliance. Tell it we're its
friend. It ate those bloody Icarates we brought down with us, for god's sake. We need to spend time with it, and talk to it.

Anchor relayed the message.

The figures waited for another long moment. Finally they said, all together, “Follow me.”

The tethered man watched as, one by one, those glutinous figures slowly sank back into the River of the Failed. “Follow you where?” he inquired, but in that vast darkness only the echo of his own voice answered.

But then the currents eddying around him
shifted
and strengthened in one mighty surge. The channel in which he stood began to flow purposefully in the opposite direction.

Harper stumbled, but Anchor grabbed her and held her firm. She clutched the bottle and light wand to her chest as the crimson waters bubbled and frothed around her shoulders.

Carried by this new force, the empty Icarate cages slid away into darkness.

Anchor pulled the engineer close to him. “Don't lose your bottle,” he said.

She laughed. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

He frowned. “The water is very high. Your bottle might go whoosh”—he made a sweeping gesture with his hand—“and then you will lose your husband's soul.”

“Never mind,” she said.

Anchor began to heave the
Rotsward's
rope down towards the hungry river. “These gallowsmen aren't going to like this,” he said. “Nobody likes to be eaten. I know this from experience.”

But Harper wasn't listening to him. She was hugging her bottle and crying.

They waited in that same cramped crawl space above the boiling room for hours, until the slaves finally finished their shift at
Carnival's brazier, only to watch in frustration as four more slaves appeared to take their comrades' places.

Monk crawled away from the hole and then dragged the boy close to him so that he could whisper in his ear. “Gods damned waste of time,” he said. “Why didn't you tell me they never leave her alone?”

“I did,” muttered the boy. He thought it rather unfair that Monk was putting the blame on him. The whole thing was the old man's idea in the first place.

The astronomer stretched out his legs and winced. “You'd think they'd be too busy smashing up Hell to stay at their brazier.” He drew a hand across his stubbled jaw. “What we need,” he decided, “is some sort of diversion.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know! Ship isn't moving, is it? Gives you the chance to slip outside and do something unexpected. Take an axe to the hull—that'll soon get the bastards running.”

“You can't break the hull,” the boy replied. “No matter how rotten it gets, you can't break it, not even with an axe. I know that much.”

Monk frowned. He seemed ready to argue, but then the whole vessel gave a sudden lurch and began to creak and groan. “We're moving again,” he said. “They've eased the pressure on the hull. We're going deeper into Hell.”

In the chamber below them, Cospinol's slaves toiled at the brazier, shoveling coke and working the bellows and checking the contents of the condensing flask. Ghost lights whirled inside that glass tube and gave off a fierce illumination. Dull thuds continued to issue from the cooker as the scarred angel kicked at her tiny iron prison.

Hidden in the crawl space, the two conspirators waited.

After a while the hook-fingered boy heard the old man snoring. He had fallen asleep again. Lying there on his side in that confined
wooden space, he looked like something that truly belonged in a coffin. His forehead was the colour of ancient bone, and tufts of wild hair sprouted from his cranium like scraps of dry moss. The boy thought about piling him down through the hole. It would be fun to see the slaves grab him and string him up again. Gallowsmen were supposed to stay outside the
Rotsward.

But Monk was interesting in his odd way. The boy liked it when he talked about Pandemeria, the battles with the Mesmerists, and the first great automaton. And Monk knew how to get that pressure cooker open. The boy decided to wait until after he'd drunk some of the angel's essence.

He left the old man sleeping and crawled back through the sky-ship's maze of conduits. Once he reached the outer hull, he slipped out through one of the many gaps in it and onto the great scaffold that surrounded the vessel.

Now that the fog had gone, he could see the gallowsmen clearly. Most had moved to the outer reaches of the wooden matrix, ready to break down Hell's facades. The boy scuttled along one long spar and then leapt onto another one. He jumped again and his metal fingers gripped one of the empty nooses. He swung, let go, and landed next to a huge vertical timber that acted as a support column. Numerous ropes dangled around him, but these were for hoisting up debris and he couldn't risk using them, so he climbed down the timber itself. The
Rotsward's
hull diminished above him.

He wanted to see exactly where the ship was going.

In no time at all he neared the lower edge of the skyship's scaffold. The whole vessel sat atop what looked like a huge crushed labyrinth. A vast network of rooms with torn-open ceilings stretched away into the gloom on all sides, the scene illuminated in places by gallowsmen with flaming brands. The
Rotsward's
lowest spars had pierced the floors below, and many men were working down there, moving through the rooms or ripping up great chunks
of stone, tiles, and wood, and loading it into baskets to be dragged up to the skyship's decks. They would squeeze the living energy from this detritus and manufacture soulpearls to feed the god of brine and fog.

Crunch.

The scaffold jerked and sank further into the maze. The boy heard men and women howling. He climbed down even closer and saw that most of the rooms were occupied, but the gallowsmen were not loading the people up. They were butchering them instead.

Crunch.

Another jolt, and the
Rotsward
descended again. Floorboards shattered. Walls toppled. Scores of dwellings crumbled down into the ones below. Cospinol's slaves were working flat out to save as much matter as possible, but they could only recover a fraction of it. The rest simply dropped away, falling upon the unwitting denizens below.

The armoured gallowsmen moved over this devastated landscape like a swarm of strange metal insects, entering houses through corridors wherever possible and climbing over debris where the damage was too great. They used their eclectic armaments against any souls they encountered. An old woman sitting at a loom turned when a metal-suited soldier leapt down beside her. She smiled and then died on his sword, before he put his boot to her chest and slid her corpse free.

Crunch.

Two warriors suddenly reacted to a new breach in the floor of a large stone dwelling. A young man in rich finery looked up in time to see their spears fall before his twitching body left red stains across his tiled floor. Four others were meanwhile dragging a screaming woman from her tiny brick cell.

These men were the dead from a thousand armies, the corpses of those warriors Anchor had slain since the day he first hitched the
Rotsward's
rope to his harness. No two were alike. They wore
battered mail, plain plate, or enameled armour in bright yellows, greens, and blues—mercenaries and woodsmen in banded leather; archers with bone or yew bows; knights in steel, wearing colourful plumes; thieves, hooded gangers, and way-trappers. Some fought like brawlers with iron fist spikes; others used skinny blades in exotic flowing styles that the boy did not recognize. Blue-skinned and distended from years in their gins, these butchers moved in force through the steadily crumbling labyrinth.