God of Clocks (4 page)

“Yes.”

Menoa sensed his glass mask contort as it mimicked his own
expression of grim contemplation. “I did not expect this fog,” he admitted, “but certainly treachery. Cospinol cannot kill my warriors, so his agents must attempt to kill their controllers.” Menoa's Prime Icarates were ensconced within the Bastion of Voices deep inside the Processor, their minds watching the living world through the eyes of his arconites, their thoughts steering those vast iron limbs that had crushed Coreollis. He had already taken steps to protect them. The thaumaturge's fog was an unnecessary precaution, amateurish. Did they truly expect that he had not anticipated and planned for an attack on the Maze? “Perhaps his smokescreen has been engineered to allow an assassin to enter the portal?”

“They will send the arconite Dill?”

The king shook his head. “That young angel alone possesses enough strength to resist my own warriors. Cospinol needs him to remain on earth.” He turned back to the portal. The vast ribbon writhed and spun, but the twelve angels had all but drained it of power, and it was growing weaker with every passing moment. “Cospinol owns another assassin, the Riot Coast barbarian who drags his skyship. That is who he will send.”

The balcony had not yet grown itself a parapet, but the witchsphere rolled closer to the edge of the precipice. “Without Anchor, Cospinol will be grounded and helpless,” it declared.

“He cannot allow himself to be stranded,” the king agreed. “And so the god of brine and fog must accompany his slave. After all, he has an entire army of men hanging from the gallows of his ship. No doubt he plans to set them upon us as some form of
distraction.”

“Shall I instruct the Icarates to stoke the furnaces within the flensing machines?”

“Yes,” Menoa said. “All of the furnaces.”

John Anchor took a deep breath. He relished the smell of this old woodland, the wet leaves, the cool rain-laden air. If he was ever
required to walk across the bed of an ocean again, then this was the sort of air he'd prefer to fill his lungs with. It was a fine place in which to take a stroll. The soft brown mulch compressed under his feet and bounced back up in his wake. As he walked he scooped up a handful of soulpearls from the pouch at his hip and tipped them into his mouth. Then he began to hum a tune.

The rope thrummed.

He laughed. “You worry too much, Cospinol. My voice is no louder than the sound of these snapping branches. And we can't silence the woodland, eh?”

His master's voice came through the rope.
The arconites are bigger than you, John.

“But not stronger.”

Now is not the time to test that theory. Save your strength for Menoa's Icarates, I beg you.

“But I am quicker than the golems, Cospinol. Like a rat around their ankles, eh? I jump in the portal and pull you down after me while the giants stumble after us. Easy as swinging a boar.”
You are tethered to me, John. Do not forget that.

Anchor grinned. In truth he hoped to confront at least one of these arconites. He felt strong today: A million souls howled in his blood, their voices like a war cry at the back of his mind… so long as he didn't listen too closely. If he concentrated too hard on it, he would recognize their moans and pleas, and that would take the edge off his good humour. He ducked under a low-hanging branch and then heard it catch on the
Rotsward's
rope behind him and snap loudly.

A hunting horn again bellowed in the west.

Anchor altered his direction subtly, moving more in that direction.

I'm warning you, John,
Cospinol said.
Mina Greene conjured this fog to
disguise
our own camouflage. Don't ruin it by trying to confront these things. I want to reach the portal without incident. Turn back to the southwest, away from that horn.

“You are reading my mind now?”

No, John, I just know what you're like.

The big man sighed and did as Cospinol instructed. Fog shrouded the view ahead, but he could see that the woodland here sloped down towards the south. In places he spied low walls amongst the oaks—the remains of some long-abandoned settlement now soft with moss and wrapped in snarls of black bramble. Fungi clumped in earthen hollows, like bones protruding from graves. He could not recall if he had visited this place before, and he wondered what tragedy had befallen the owners of these dwellings. As if in response, a lone soul cried out in the back of his mind. Anchor frowned and ignored it, not wanting to know. He began to hum again, half singing under his breath.

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?