God of Clocks (5 page)

Or had the thaumaturge been up to something secretive and sorcerous during Rachel's absence?

Mina's calling you,
Dill said suddenly.
She wants us to leave
now.
We have company.

“An arconite?”

The room gave a sudden lurch forward.

Broken shapes littered the dark battlefield like strange volcanic outcrops. John Anchor stood at the lip of the portal, his fists on his hips, and gave a huge sigh of disappointment. “If Menoa intends to lead us into a trap, he might at least have left one of his twelve giants here as a ruse.”

A ruse?
Cospinol sounded weary.

“To make us believe he feared intruders. A ruse would have been most sensible!” He gazed around him but could see little in the darkness except Cospinol's fog. “It would have tired us before the assault to come. A last battle on the Larnaig Field!”

Perhaps he decided we'd see through such a ruse too easily?

Anchor grunted. “I am beginning to dislike this king. An honourable warrior is never unpredictable. He obeys the time-tested rules of combat.”

The
Rotsward's
great rope seemed to hum a melancholy note.

Anchor stared down into the depths of the portal. He had been in grimmer places, but not many. The gate to Hell looked like a lake of tar, but the stench of death that arose from it burned in his throat. How many souls now swam in those foul waters? Mist hung over the entirety of the lake and moved in layers like drab curtains dragged to and fro across an empty stage. A crust had formed around the banks, as hard and brittle as black glass. Pale unappealing lumps floated on the viscid surface.

It felt
cold.

He judged the portal to be some three hundred yards across, and Cospinol's skyship was considerably wider than that. But the
Rotsward
was much stronger than she appeared. Whereas Ayen's sun made her vulnerable, there was no sun here, and in the darkness her ancient timbers took their strength from Cospinol's own will. The portal would expand to accommodate the
Rotsward.
If the god of brine and fog did not falter, then neither would his ship.

Are you
waiting
for one of the arconites to show up?

Anchor grunted again. He rolled his massive shoulders and slapped his hands together. Then he took a long, deep breath, closed his eyes, and jumped into that hideous lake.

An icy chill enveloped him. He heard the gurgle and rush of the surface waters closing over his head, until the pressure of fluid against his eardrums stifled those noises to near silence. A dull hum reverberated in the air within his own sinuses, and then Cospinol spoke:

Our best chance of success relies upon your finding the portal spine before the
Rotsward
reaches the ground above you. Seek the place where Menoa's thaumaturgy is strongest. The spine should appear much denser than the surrounding liquid, like a cord or rope. Use it to pull us down through the portal opening.

Anchor opened his eyes but he dared not open his mouth for fear of swallowing any dislocated souls. He could see little in this darkness but a faint crimson glow emanating from the depths. He curled his body and dived down, pulling at the thick waters with his massive hands. The rope trailed after him, dragging Cospinol's ship down from the skies above. His lungs cramped once in sympathy with those instincts that remained from the days when Anchor had been merely human, but he ignored the discomfort. Down and down he swam until he began to relax into the rhythm of his labours.

He descended in an inwards-turning spiral until he felt the fluid becoming thicker in certain areas. Motes of white light darted past his head. He reached for them but they shot away into the distance. He adjusted his course to take him into the denser, more central part of the portal.

After a while he spotted a black thread hanging vertically in the distance. It drifted sluggishly back and forth like a strand of kelp in an unseen current.

That's it. The portal spine. Be careful not to damage it. It's already weak and it's the only link to Hell we have.

It was twice as wide as the tree trunks in the forest he had just left, yet slippery and pliant like an umbilical cord. Menoa had woven it from souls and blood magic to form the core of his birthing channel between Hell and earth. Anchor's skin burned where he touched it—a reaction to its deeply unnatural composition. Gripping the cord firmly, he used it to drag himself downwards more rapidly.

After some time the
Rotsward's
rope suddenly jerked him to a halt.

Cospinol's great skyship had reached solid ground around the portal opening. In Anchor's mind he saw the
Rotsward's
gallows, for the lowest edges of that great matrix of greasy spars would now be lodged into the earth of Larnaig Field far above.

Anchor floated in a red gloom while he gathered his strength
for the job to come. He flexed his hands, opening and closing his fingers. They felt as if he'd been using them to squeeze wasps inside their nest. Now he must drag the whole skyship deep enough down through the earth and rock to allow the portal to expand around it. The blood magic should then draw power from the dead suspended from the
Rotsward's
gallows. It would actually feed on those damned men. Anchor smiled at the thought of his master's old army hanging up there amidst those gallows, gazing down at the fate that awaited them. Those miserable whiners would not be happy about this.

Cospinol's voice came to him through the rope.
Harper is picking up a surge of what she calls “soul traffic” on her Pandemerian device.

Anchor paused. He had last seen Menoa's former metaphysical engineer walking the battlefield after Rys's Northmen had slaughtered their Mesmerist foes, drawing power from the bloody ground. The woman might be a corpse, but he didn't doubt her wits. Alice Harper had been the one who had first realized that the king would use his own dead to open this very portal, but it had been too late by then to do anything about it.

She thinks that something is
rising
from the portal,
Cospinol went on.
Something huge.

Another arconite? How could that be possible? The giant dived down sharply and gave the
Rotsward
a sharp tug. In all of history he had never heard of a battle fought inside a portal between two worlds. The trial to come might offer him a treasure chest of memories to savour until his dying days.

The tethered man cracked the knuckles of both his hands and then tensed the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Set, he grabbed the spine of the portal and dragged himself further down, straining against the massive rope attached to his back. The rope seemed to stretch, but here in this darkness it could not snap. Far above him, on the Larnaig Field, the
Rotsward's
gallows would be groaning and bending as they pushed down into the earth, but they too would
not break. Between the divine will of Cospinol and the unlimited strength of his slave, the only thing to bend would be nature herself.

Anchor heaved against his harness until he felt the land around the portal mouth crumble under the insurmountable pressure. Slowly and inexorably, he dragged Cospinol's great skyship down into the depths of Hell.

R
achel spent the night in Dill's mouth. She had curled up under a blanket with her back pressed against his molars, but she couldn't get comfortable. Air seeped in through gaps in his front teeth and turned the space into a cold, dank cave. Mina had suggested building a fire, but Rachel had snuffed
that
idea. It just hadn't seemed right. From far below she heard the constant judder of machinery and the crash of broken trees each time Dill took another step through the forest.

Living forest.
Dill's vision of petrified trees could only have been a flash of memory or a dream. Since leaving Deepgate, the young angel had been thrust from one horrific reality to another, from the fathomless pit beneath the chained city to the corridors of Hell itself. It was a wonder he had maintained any of his sanity at all.

They had tied up Cospinol's stores as best they could. The stacked barrels and crates had been inclined to topple over each time Dill turned his monstrous head—prompting Mina and Hasp to leap aside in order to avoid damaging their fragile skins. Now
both the thaumaturge and the debased god were slumped against the piled goods. Hasp looked twice as exhausted as Mina, the parasite in his skull having tormented him throughout the night. Only Mina's hideous little dog, Basilis, had managed to sleep easily.

Cospinol had provided them with rude furnishings: rugs, blankets, lanterns, and even an old table and chairs. The chairs and lamps had fallen over, and now stood in a heap against one side of the jaw, but the table remained where they had set it—a huge rotten old slab of wood that smelled faintly of brine.

The sky lightened. They had no view but one of fog. Occasionally Mina closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the mist, announcing the position of those arconites she could sense. Six of Menoa's twelve golems remained within the fog, following them to the south. The others were lost, somewhere beyond the reach of her sorcerous vision.

This troubled Rachel. Had those giants now gone after Anchor and Cospinol? If they had managed to stop the tethered man before he reached the portal, then all hope rested on Mina's crazy plan to attack Heaven.

She stretched her neck, then rose and peered out of Dill's mouth. Nothing but a flat greyness in the sky ahead, a bleary carpet of forest below. “How much further does this woodland stretch?” she asked.

“A hundred and twenty leagues,” Hasp replied. “It once covered most of Pandemeria, but the Pandemerian Railroad Company cut vast swaths of it down during the railway reconstruction project. All that's left are the old forests beyond Coreollis. The Northmen were once woodsmen, you should remember.”

“We must have covered at least eighty leagues during the night,” Rachel said, “if Dill managed to keep a straight course, that is. Aren't we supposed to have reached the Rye Valley by now?”

They had decided to head for the Flower Lakes, a system of deepwater reservoirs Rys had formed by damming two of the rivers in the north. The lands around there were reputed to be the garden
of Coreollis, and there they hoped to lose their pursuers. Dill's trail through the Great Pandemerian Forest was too easy to follow but, if his giant footprints could be hidden under deep water, they might yet slip away from Menoa's arconites in the dense fog.

Hasp shrugged. “I have no idea where we are, nor where to find the Flower Lakes from here.” He winced and pressed a hand against his head. “No doubt Mina or Basilis has an inkling. Everything in this grey gloom seems evident to her.”

Mina looked up. “The land keeps rising northwards and forms a low ridge. I can see a forest trail half a league to the northeast. It seems to have been used recently by a large number of people—refugees, I think, from an abandoned loggers' town lying to the southeast. The road runs on through a second, much smaller camp next to a sawmill, but that looks deserted, too. Just a group of workers' houses, storage sheds, and a shuttered inn. There's a huge yellow machine—an abandoned steam tractor—but it doesn't look like anyone's been working there recently.”

“So, where are we?”

She shook her head. “I've no idea.”

Hasp grunted. “Would that Cospinol had possessed a map.”

Sabor's realm lay to the north of Pandemeria and the Flower Lakes. It was a wild, ice-blown land—a place named Herica since before man's memory. Cospinol had described it as a country of white bears and five-limbed beasts larger than aurochs. Sabor's fortress—the oddly titled
Obscura Redunda
—stood atop the summit of an outcrop of black volcanic glass in the shadow of the Temple Mountains. But not even Cospinol had known
exactly
where to find it. He'd never been to visit his brother.

None of this helped Mina, who could sense, in the minutest detail, the leagues of forest within the surrounding fog and yet couldn't explain how their immediate environs corresponded to the wider world. Without sun or stars to guide them, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning. And they were lost.

Rachel gazed down through the gaps in Dill's teeth. From this
height she could see an unbroken canopy of misty trees. Acres of dismal grey forest swept by them with each of the arconite's steps. “We could stop and ask for directions,” she suggested.

Hasp laughed.

It was the first time Rachel had heard the god laugh. She turned to look at him and noticed that the strain had left his eyes.

“I'm serious,” she said. “In this gloom we can't even be sure if we're heading in the right direction. Mina, how close is that camp?”

Even the thaumaturge was smiling. “A few minutes away. I can't see anyone about, although there may be people in one of the houses.” She looked at Hasp.

“Why not?” he said.

Rachel gazed up at the arconite's palate. “Dill? Did you hear us?”

The bony chamber tilted sharply forward and then back, causing the chairs and lamps to slide across the floor and crash against Dill's barrier of giant teeth. Hasp and Mina clung on for their lives.

Hasp let out a snarl and righted himself, his face contorting with anger. “Would you remind him to stop doing that?” he growled at Rachel. “Nine Hells, it's bad enough being trapped in this damn cave, without him almost killing us every time he nods his head.” He grabbed both sides of his head roughly, then twisted away in pain and stormed off to the back of the chamber.

Rachel placed a hand against the side of Dill's inner jaw. She didn't even know if he could sense her touch or not. “Head for the settlement, Dill. Let's find someone who knows where we are.”

The village hugged one edge of a broad clearing in the forest. Several hectares of the nearby woodland had been cut to provide grazing land for animals, but it looked like most of the wood had been brought in from other places via the many smaller cart tracks that radiated out from the central sawmill. Wedge-shaped piles of fresh logs waited in the fog behind a row of shacks with tin chimneys. The shuttered inn stood at one end, but Rachel did not see
any signs of life. The sawmill itself was a long low shed with an overgrown sod-and-grass roof. A belt ran through the shed wall to a bright red steam tractor positioned outside, but the machine was not currently operating.

The former assassin glanced at Mina. Hadn't she said that tractor was yellow? It seemed like an odd mistake to make, but hardly an important one. Perhaps Rachel had simply been mistaken.

“It's safe enough,” the thaumaturge said. “But don't take too long.”

Rachel slipped out between Dill's teeth and onto his hand, and he lowered her to the ground. His four-hundred-foot-high body crouched over her, his useless wings blurring into the sky above him. As soon as he became motionless, all vestige of life seemed to desert him. He was a mountain, or an ancient and hideous piece of sculpture, as much a part of the landscape as was the settlement. The smell of chemicals and grease appeared to ooze from the scratches and whorls in his impossible bones. He had kept his skull raised level while he stooped, and the dark caves of his eye sockets now stared ahead at nothing.

She hopped down from his palm onto a deeply pocked and rutted track showing signs that a large number of people had been this way recently. Beyond the road, the row of shacks waited in the mist, their glassless windows dark. A wall of conifers stood behind them, the boles stripped of lower branches and tinged broccoli green.

Rachel approached the dwellings cautiously.

She searched three of them in turn and found nothing. They were simple one-roomed huts with bunks for six workers in each. The bedding and mattresses were missing. In the fourth shack she found a freshly cut pile of firewood beside the potbelly stove, and four human skulls lying on the floor. She placed her hand on the iron cooking plate. It still felt warm.

The inn was a larger, two-story building, constructed from heavy interconnected logs and painted grey. A wooden sign hung
above the door, bearing the words
The Rusty Saw
alongside a skillful carving of a bowed and serrated logging blade.

Rachel walked around the building's perimeter, trying both of the locked doors and many of the small shuttered windows. After she returned to the front she banged on the main entrance door. Nothing. She kicked the door in.

A broad saloon took up most of this floor. Shelves packed with whisky bottles occupied the wall behind the bar, framing an old mirror etched with the words
Pandemerian Railroad Company.

Rachel walked amongst empty chairs and tables, the floorboards creaking under her boots. “Hello?” she called out. The room smelled of sawn wood, that bitter-fresh yet aged aroma of seasons past. She peered up the staircase rising at the rear of the room.

“Hello? Anybody up there?”

No answer.

The hairs on her neck tingled suddenly. She sensed a glimmer of movement at the edge of her vision, like a passing shadow, and wheeled round.

Nothing.

Her own reflection stared back from behind the scratches of the old mirror. The leather jerkin Cospinol's slaves had given her looked too bulky for her slender frame. Her hair appeared darker in this gloom, almost honey-coloured. She noted the hilt of her newly acquired Pandemerian sword protruding from its roughly woven scabbard. Unconsciously her hand had slipped down to grip the weapon.

A crack divided the mirror from top to bottom. It bisected her pale face, giving her mouth a crooked appearance. Had that fracture always been there? For some reason it unnerved her.

One of the two doors from the saloon brought her into a passage that offered a way out back leading to the well and the privy, but also to a small kitchen through a further door on the left. This room had a water tank and a pantry still stocked with tinned food, jars of preserves, and boxes of fresh vegetables. She returned to the
saloon and opened the second door. This must have been the owner's office: a wardrobe, an overstuffed chair before a desk, papers crammed into cardboard file boxes, and a narrow camp bed set against the rear wall. A pendulum rocked back and forth beneath a clock on the wall. Just as she turned away, the clock gave two brassy chimes.

Rachel heard a footfall behind her and spun round to face the saloon once more.

Nobody there.

From her position here by the office door, it looked as if she possessed two distinctly separate reflections in the old mirror behind the bar. They stared back at her from either side of the fracture. The glass must have warped, for each image appeared to have a subtly different expression. The one on the left looked…

Crueller?

Rachel shook her gaze away.
I must be going mad. First Rys, and now this.
Had she really seen Rys's double appear in his own bastion moments before it fell? A growing number of recent strange events troubled her, lurking in the back of her mind.

She sighed. This creepy place had let her nerves take control of her imagination once more.

Nevertheless, the footfall had sounded real enough, and such a noise could easily have carried from the building's upper floor. To dismiss it too easily would be rash.

Slowly, Rachel walked up the stairs.

Four doors led from the upper landing: three open, one closed. Gripping the hilt of her sword, Rachel edged past the first open doorway. Musty furniture filled a small bedroom: a bed, chest of drawers, rug, small stove, and grey lace curtains backed by fog.

The second room was similarly furnished.

Then she came to the closed door. “I'm not going to hurt you,” she announced. “I just need some directions.” She waited and then tried the doorknob.

A slender young woman in a floral dress burst out of the doorway
immediately to Rachel's left and flung herself at the assassin, screaming like a witch loosed from the pyre. She hefted an axe in her raised fist. Her staring eyes and hollow, painted cheeks formed a mask of utter terror. She swung wildly, so completely wide of Rachel's shoulder that the assassin barely had to move an inch to let her attacker simply bull past. And then the woman was sobbing, visibly shaking, and turning on the landing to deliver a second blow.

Rachel could see instantly that this opponent was no warrior. “Wait!” she yelled, and held out her hand mere inches in front of the other woman's face. “What do you think you're doing?” she demanded. “You almost hurt me.”

The slim woman halted, uncertain, her axe still quivering. Her lips seemed as thin as a red wire in that powdered white face. Sweat stained her dress under the armpits and across her chest. Strands of orange hair were spilling out of the loop of ribbon she'd used to restrain them, yet underneath the hideous makeup she might have been attractive. She looked at Rachel with a mixture of fear and desperation—and perhaps just a shade of hope.

“Put that down,” Rachel said.

The other woman immediately lowered the axe. “Abner made me do it,” she said. “It was his idea. He said since I was younger than him I'd be the best one to frighten you off. I never meant to hit you. Abner said I should…” She stopped herself and gave a small wince. “But I couldn't do that anyway. We were just trying to scare you away.” Her throat bobbed. She glanced down at the axe on the floor. “Please don't kill us. There are four hundred copper marks hidden in the well. You can have them all.”