God of Clocks (7 page)

Anchor reached the
Rotsward's
hull and kicked up from a horizontal joist and swooped over the drowned balustrade. The Failed were still busy with the gallowsmen and had not followed. Dragging his great rope over the midships deck, Anchor headed for a hatch in the weather deck at the stern of the vessel. He yanked it open and peered down into the dark bowels of the vessel. Which way to Cospinol's cabin? He tried to remember.

He had not been here for over three thousand years.

When he finally opened the correct door, he found Cospinol and Alice Harper waiting for him. The metaphysical engineer was drifting about a foot from the floor; her red hair floated behind her like an underwater fire. She smiled with full blue lips, then pointed up at the ceiling. The god of brine and fog floated up there, gently flexing his great grey wings to keep himself level.

Anchor and Harper swam up to join him.

The uppermost foot or so of the cabin held an air pocket. Anchor broke the surface of the water to see Cospinol's bedraggled face looking back at him. The tethered man's head knocked against a roof joist. There was a splash and then Harper emerged, too, her hair now lank and dripping.

God and slave regarded each other.

“You can breathe if you wish,” Cospinol said. “The air is rank and probably poisonous by now, but I don't suppose that matters much to any of us.” He gave Harper a nod. “More important, it carries sound.”

Anchor coughed and spat out water, then looked around him.
“You have really let this place go, eh?” He took a deep breath, and then wished he hadn't. The old sea god was right about the air.

“The
Rotsward
still exists because
we
will it to. If it's old and rotten, then what does that say about us?”

Anchor snorted a laugh.

Cospinol smiled. “It's good to see you again after all these years, John, though I wish the circumstances were different. This battle is clearly not one you relish.”

“These cripples lack the brains to know when they're dead,” he grumbled. “This is no battle, Cospinol. It is butchery.”

“And with little purpose,” Cospinol agreed. “I'm not convinced that this enemy can be destroyed, not here at least. If all of them were present, then perhaps, but these few thousand…” He gazed down into the waters under his neck.

Anchor frowned. “What do you mean
if all of them were present
?” he said. “There are already thousands down there. That is the problem, yes? Too many foes?”

Harper shook her head. “You can't kill them,” she said, “because they are not individuals. They share a common will, perhaps even a common soul.”

Anchor didn't understand.

“It's like a colony of ants,” she explained. “The group purpose is greater than any of its parts. But in this case, the colony is sentient. The Failed are not an army—they are a single entity, a god if you like. These crippled warriors may not even be aware that they are part of an idea that is larger and more complex than their individual selves. Destroying a handful of ants doesn't much harm the operation of the colony, and it has no effect on the
idea
of a colony. While any of the Failed remain, the idea that gives them power is unassailable.”

The big man grunted. “So we must kill them
all
?” he said heavily.

“That's the problem,” Cospinol said. “They aren't all
here.
Menoa's
Icarates tortured these people until their minds broke. Without minds they could no longer maintain their individual shapes in Hell. Their physical bodies dissipated and dripped down through the Maze, forming a vast subterranean river. But now the River of the Failed has become sentient. It is rising again—a new god with a single mind that is able to give shape to its legion components once more. To destroy the Failed, we must destroy the whole river. But how does one destroy a river?”

Anchor felt somewhat relieved. He had shed enough blood for one day. “So what do we do?”

“Reason with it,” Harper said.

Anchor grunted. “Before or after it finishes slaughtering Cospinol's gallowsmen? It hardly seems capable of listening.”

“This is only a tiny part of it,” she retorted. “A handful of ants separated from the colony. If we reach its source, its mind, we might be able to talk some sense into it. After all,
Menoa
convinced it to fight for him.”

The god of brine and fog suddenly looked old and weary. “That's what frightens me. What Menoa has done here would seem to be impossible. The Lord of the Maze shouldn't be able to influence the Failed. His own Icarates ruined those people to begin with. The priests damaged them until they simply could not be damaged anymore, and now their Mesmerist techniques are useless. If Menoa has made a bargain with this new god, then he must have tricked it in some way.”

“You think it is still afraid of him?” Anchor said.

“Perhaps,” Cospinol replied. “If it doesn't know Menoa is no longer a threat, then we have a chance. But I'm worried it's more complicated than that.” He shook his head.

A sudden burst of white light flashed under the surface of the waters. Harper lifted out a small silver and crystal device, smeared away water from its face, and then studied the readout. “They're on the decks now,” she said.

“Well?” Anchor turned to Cospinol and raised his eyebrows. “One way or another, this portal is soon going to look like meat broth.”

The god of brine and fog pinched his nose and then sniffed. “I will not continue to harm such a pitiful creation for no good reason,” he declared. “If King Menoa spoke with the source and survived, then so can we.” He looked hard at Anchor. “Break the spine of the portal. We're more than halfway down now. When it collapses the blast should scatter the Failed and throw us all into Hell.”

“You don't know that!” Harper protested. “We might end up back on earth, or…” She wrung her lifeless hands. “… somewhere, anywhere in Hell. A million leagues from Menoa's citadel! Nobody has ever broken a portal before.”

Cospinol looked to Anchor.

The big slave grinned. “I've no wish to kill any more of these cripples,” he said. “If there's still a chance to reach Hell without further bloodshed, then I do not mind a bit of a walk at the other end.”

Cospinol nodded.

This time the tethered man did not attack his foes. He met dozens of them in the
Rotsward's
passageways and shoved them all aside. And when he finally burst out onto the
Rotsward's
deck, twenty of the enemy erupted out into the waters ahead of him.

Anchor swam.

The portal spine had already been weakened by the passage of the arconites, so it would have torn apart before long. Now Anchor simply helped that unnatural process along. With hundreds of the Failed clawing at his back and harness, John Anchor grabbed the burning membrane in both his fists and pulled.

White light erupted from the sundered material. Anchor felt the water around him contract, a sudden momentous pressure on his flesh and bones. The force of it would have crushed a normal man.

But John Anchor had not been a normal man for thirty centuries and, when that sudden implosion reversed and then burst outwards again, he merely clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, suffering the blast because he had no choice in the matter. He had long ago decided not to succumb to something as foolish as death.

In that first instant, a thousand tons of debris and bodies battered against him and threw him backwards. He felt the skyship rope slacken behind him, and then snap taut again, slamming him hard against his harness.

He was falling.…

And when at last he opened his eyes, he saw the crimson skies of Hell churning around him. Far below, the Maze stretched to the horizon—an endless labyrinth of gemstone-red canals and rotting black walls. Temples and ziggurats squatted on outcrops of dark stone or in glutinous pools. The scene was hazy with flies and hot gusts of vapour and yet the atmosphere up here remained as cold as frozen blood. He cast his gaze around, hoping to spy the Ninth Citadel or the Processor from where the Icarate Prime controlled their murderous giants.

But those structures eluded him. Menoa's fortress was nowhere in sight. There was nothing below him but a million leagues of Hell.

Dill heard the musket shot, a sudden crack. It rang out over the logging camp and reverberated in the drab grey mists. The body he occupied did not belong to him, and therefore he knew that the pain he felt in his heart could not be a physical reaction to his distress. But it still hurt.

He reached down towards the inn on the ground below him, but then stopped. His hand would not fit through the door without ripping the building to shreds.

“Dill, wait!” Mina's shrill cry emerged through his teeth. “Let us down.”

Dill stared down at the shingled roof. To hell with it. He leaned forward and dug both his huge hands into the earth on either side of the inn, and lifted the whole building clear of the ground. The chimneystack leaned away from the side of the logbuilt wall and then fell and shattered against his thumb, but the walls and roof remained intact.

Screams came from within.

Dill held the tiny inn upon his two upturned palms. It rested upon a fat clod of earth and grass that he had scooped up along with it. He raised it close to his face and peered through one of the windows.

An empty room.

He turned the building slowly around in his hands.

“Dill!” Mina cried. “Open your goddamn mouth, and let us out of here.”

He opened his mouth and then brought the building and that great lump of compacted earth nearer to his jaw. Mina and Hasp clambered across the barrier of his teeth, while mud and rock slipped through his bony fingers and spattered across the ground a hundred feet below. Hasp ran inside the building and Mina followed. Dill tilted the inn so that he could peer through the open doorway.

The Lord of the First Citadel went sprinting up the stairs from the main saloon. A sudden lurch made him growl and clutch the banister to steady himself. Mina stumbled across the sloping floor, and called out, “Dill, for the gods' sake try to keep this building level! I break too easily.” Hasp had, by now, reached the top of the steps and disappeared from view.

Dill rotated the building carefully in his hands. Most of its windows were shuttered. He could not find an opening that looked in upon the upstairs landing, and with both hands full he could not flick open any of the shutters without dropping the entire inn. Its little sign flapped against the wall above the door.

He almost roared in frustration. For all his great size, he was useless.

He lifted the building again, more gently this time, and looked back in through the open doorway. Mina had halted halfway up the stairs, but Hasp and Rachel were nowhere in sight. Most of the tables and chairs had slid away, gathering like flotsam against the far wall. Dozens of bottles still rolled this way and that, spilling whisky across the floor. The smell of alcohol wafted out. The whole building creaked ominously.

Dill could not restrain himself. “Where is she?” he roared. His voice resounded across the heavens, metallic and hideously loud even to his own ears. The thaumaturge's dog began to bark frantically, still inside Dill's mouth.

Mina pressed her ears. “Try not to speak, Dill. Your voice tends to
carry.
Hasp is looking for her now. Hold on, I can hear…”

And then the Lord of the First Citadel came striding back down the stairs, holding Rachel's limp body in his arms. The former assassin was bleeding profusely from a wound in the side of her head.

Alice Harper sat on the edge of her bunk while the skyship plummeted towards the surface of Hell. The whole cabin creaked and whistled around her. She kept her gaze averted from the single tiny porthole, focusing instead on the array of instruments and their tiny accoutrements laid out on her narrow mattress. To keep herself occupied she made an inventory.

One Screamer. One Locator. Spare Mesmeric and parasitic foaming crystals. A knot of seeker wires in three states of agitation. Soul oil. Three phials of murderers' blood to feed the Locator and the Screamer. A silver screwtwist with a level-three shape-shifting head. Pincers and other tiny torture implements for keeping the instruments obedient. A Bael-Lossingham adaptive whistle from Highcliffe. Spirit lenses.

Her soulpearl.

Bathed in the bloody light from the window, this small glass bead seemed to emit a fierce radiance of its own—as if it could actually sense, and was reacting to, this new environment. That was impossible, of course. Only the Screamer, Locator, and screwtwist were sentient. The pearl itself was empty.

Harper clutched it to her chest and closed her eyes, listening to the winds of Hell bawling outside the skyship. A million leagues of rotten, cackling labyrinth might lie between this vessel and King Menoa's great living fortress, but she could not feel safe. The Lord of the Maze would have countless spies looking for them.

For her?

She dared not dwell on such thoughts. Menoa had previously taken a personal interest in her suffering, repeatedly breaking his promises to return her husband's soul to her.

The Locator made a tinny trumpeting sound.

Harper opened her eyes, picked up the device, and watched the silver needle dance between the glyphs etched into its metal display panel. She had instructed it to search for one particular emotive frequency—and now it was announcing its success.

“Too soon,” she said. “I don't believe you.”

The Locator crackled. To Harper it sounded like a tiny metallic laugh. Was the machine teasing her? She had never known it to lie before.

The needle wagged back and forth like an admonishing forefinger, then settled on a glyph shaped like a teardrop falling from a crescent moon. The Locator whined and then trumpeted again.

“Tom
can't
be here,” she said. “The odds are…”

What
were
the chances? Harper had spent more than one lifetime in Hell searching for her husband, yet all her efforts had been in vain. To pick up his emotae
now,
at the very moment she had arrived back in the Maze, was too much of a coincidence for her to blindly accept. She sensed someone else's hand in this.