God of Clocks

2

In the last moments of twilight a heavy gloom settled upon the forest. An owl hooted, and was answered by a distant cry from deep in the fog. Rachel waited beside John Anchor, and yet in this darkness she could discern little of the giant but the whites of his eyes. He remained as still and as darkly imposing as the oaks around him. They had moved a quarter league further north, to rendezvous with Dill. The bone-and-metal angel was somewhere nearby, but Rachel could not have said where exactly. He might have been standing just ten yards away.

She heard the Rotsward's elevator creaking before she saw it descend out of the murk, materializing amidst the forest canopy overhead. It was a simple basket suspended from ropes, hauled by slaves on the midships deck. The elevator's two occupants, Mina Greene and Hasp, looked like a strange pair of heavenly ambassadors in their grey cowled robes, their bloody glass-scaled hands clasped before them.

The basket landed with a soft thud. Hasp leapt out, seemingly unconcerned that a single crack in that Maze-forged armour would have spilled his lifeblood and returned his soul to Hell. Rachel realized she was staring. She looked away. Mina lifted out her demonic little dog, Basilis, and set him on the ground before cautiously climbing out after Hasp.

The pup sniffed at Anchor's feet and then bounded off into the shadows.

“Cospinol's slaves have transferred provisions and gold from the Rotsward,” Mina said. “Our friendly arconite made an impressive packhorse. They've stored tons of wheat and dried fish inside his ribs, and caskets of coins in his jaw.” She smiled. “Cospinol wasn't happy to see that gold go. His mood now suits this sorcerous weather.”

Rachel glanced at Hasp. The Lord of the First Citadel scowled, lifted his hand inside his cowl, and pressed it firmly against the side of his glass helm as though a sudden headache had gripped him. His red eyes flinched, and he bared his teeth.

“Hasp?” Rachel ventured.

He ignored her.

Hasp had become increasingly irritable and sullen since King Menoa had implanted a parasite inside his skull. A tiny demon of brass and flesh, it compelled the Lord of the First Citadel to obey Mesmerist orders. And poor Hasp, who had once stood alone against Hell's armies, had already been abused by the weakest of Menoa's servants.

His mouth tightened. He muttered soft curses to himself.

Such a cruel punishment. Menoa had stripped Hasp of everything that defined him, denying him even the glorious death in battle Hasp had coveted. She looked up, but she couldn't see or hear anything of the work going on overhead. “What about Menoa's Twelve?” she said to Mina. “Can you sense their presence?”

The thaumaturge inhaled a deep breath of the misty air, and then hesitated. “I can observe them while they remain in this fog,” she said. “Four are waiting at the western edge of the forest. Another two stand in the Larnaig Field south of Coreollis, guarding the portal. But the remaining six are moving north. They're following us.”

“Who are they after? Dill or Cospinol?”

“Both, I imagine.”

“How long can you maintain this fog?”

She shrugged. “That all depends on Basilis.” She picked up the hideous little pup, cuddled it in her arms, and kissed its ear. “Doesn't it, sweetie?”

The dog growled.

Anchor beamed. “I must be on my way to Hell now. The priests who control these golems won't kill themselves, eh? Good luck with Ayen, Mina Greene.”

Rachel looked between the two. “Hell is one thing,” she said, “but Heaven is an altogether different matter. Even Ayen's own sons didn't consider themselves powerful enough to intrude in their mother's realm. The goddess of light and life will butcher us all.”

A myriad of tiny glass scales around Mina's face crinkled. “But she'll kill the enemy, too.”

The young thaumaturge planned to use Dill to attack the gates of Heaven, reasoning that if the goddess of light and life perceived a threat from one arconite, she might destroy the rest of them, ridding the world of Menoa's unholy Twelve. Yet not even her son Cospinol knew exactly how to find the gates of Heaven, nor how to breach them in order to reach the goddess shuttered within. His kin had never been ones to share their knowledge, it seemed. The thaumaturge's plan was nothing more than a leap into the abyss. Yet it was still the best plan they had.

“We'll search Sabor's palace,” Mina explained to Rachel, “and then Mirith's. If anyone knew how to reach the goddess, it was them. They had to know something if they were planning to storm Heaven themselves.”

A hunting horn sounded somewhere to the west.

John Anchor stepped forward. “Hasp, Mina, I will not shake those glass hands of yours, but I must go now. Hell awaits.”

Mina rushed up and hugged him, while Rachel merely nodded. Hasp fixed his dark eyes on Anchor. “Give my regards to King Menoa,” he said.

The tethered man laughed, and strode southwards across the glade and then faded into the misty trees. The great rope trailed after him, cleaving a path through the forest canopy. The sound of snapping branches could be heard long after he vanished from sight. And then he started singing.

That's his idea of stealth? Rachel shook her head. The fog hid him and the skyship above, but it couldn't hide the noise of his passage. How can he hope to slip past his hunters and drag that vessel into Hell unnoticed? Rachel didn't really believe he expected to. King Menoa would know the precise moment when the portal was breached but, from what she had seen of Anchor, the big man from the Riot Coast relished confrontation.

And so Rachel found herself standing there in a forest in a strange land with a thaumaturge, a dog, and a debased god in glass armour. The hunting horns called again from somewhere closer. Hasp winced at the noise and clutched his head, but he said nothing.

They encountered Dill several hundred paces to the north. Or rather, they found his shins rearing amongst the oak and elm. The rest of him stood obscured in the misty grey heights. They stood beside his heel and looked up. From the heavens came the distant sound of machinery.

“Dill?” Rachel called.

A bony fist descended, snapping through branches, and formed a cradle on the ground. The three climbed into his upturned palm.

And then they were rising up through the chill damp air. Rachel clung on to Dill's knuckle as they surged through the forest canopy. The trees soon fell away below them, dissolving into the mist. Huge bones wrapped in metal tubing loomed on her left as they soared up past the arconite's pelvis and spine-their pitted yellow surfaces etched with the same complex whorls she had once seen on the hull of Deepgate's Tooth. A citadel of machinery shuddered behind the giant's ribs, composed of dark metal forged in Hell-perhaps from the broken chains of the city she had been born in. The mechanics of it were vast and unknowable. She smelled oil, and another ripe and coppery odour, like that of butchered meat or the killing fields of Larnaig, yet tainted in some chemical way she couldn't identify. Lime? It reminded her of the poisons in Cinderbark Wood. She sensed the pressure of tons of blood and hydraulic fluid within those piston housings and tubes and vats.

Dill's skull finally came into view-huge and naked and hideous, and devoid of anything that suggested a living mind inside. The cavernous eye sockets held naught but echoes and pools of dank water, providing shelter for birds or bats, whose shit spattered the lower ridges of bone. His jaw was partially open, and the yellow teeth stood motionless. Green moss clung to the underside of his jawbone. Rachel could see the barrels Cospinol's slaves had unloaded heaped in the darkness deep within that maw-enough coin to buy an army.

Dill's hand came to a halt beside his mouth and Rachel realized that he meant for them to step inside, beside the gold. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes but she could not say exactly why. They climbed from the hand and into the giant's mouth.

Mina set her dog down and headed into the gloom at the back of this dim bone-and-metal cave. Her glass-shod feet echoed on metal floor panels. Hasp stood looking up at the golem's palate above his head, his face in shadow. Rachel sniffed the damp air. It stank of the battlefield, of iron and blood.

“Dill?” she whispered.

For a moment she imagined that the floor had trembled, yet there was no answer but the echo of her own voice.

Mina looked up. “I warned him not to speak,” she said. “He has a voice like thunder, quite loud enough to betray our position to our enemies.”

Rachel stared at her. “I need to talk to him.” She hesitated. “I need to know that he understands where we're going.”

Mina beckoned her over and then took her hand. The thaumaturge led the Spine assassin over to the very back of the oral cave, where a dark crawl space led up out of the main chamber. “This leads to the topmost vertebrae of the spine,” she explained. “From there you can climb up into the skull.”

“His skull?”

“It's not a living creature,” Mina said quietly. “The arconite is simply a machine, a golem, a rude simulacrum of an angel. King Menoa chose this form to ease the stresses put upon the soul trapped within. This way Dill's subconscious can still function. He can move his limbs without having to consciously direct any unfamiliar mechanisms. It is a suit of armour for his soul, brash and hideous, yet functional.” She stared at the crawl space above her, perhaps unwilling to meet Rachel's eye. “Climb up inside the machine and you'll find your friend's soul. Speak to him there.” She looked at the floor. “He won't need his larynx to answer you.”

Rachel climbed. Crystals encrusted the walls, less like jewels than chunks of tarnished glass. The passage rose steeply, then opened into a dark atrium a little wider than her shoulders. She reached out in the darkness and felt a tangle of arm-thick pipes running vertically, more crystals, and hexagonal metal pins. She stood there in the dark for a long moment. It isn't you. It's just a prison … like Ulcis's abyss or Cospinol's ship.

Mina was right. This was armour: a suit created by the Lord of the Maze to allow his servants to walk freely amongst mortals-and to destroy them. When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she noticed a dim light shining overhead. The passageway now rose directly above her head. She gripped the pipes and pulled herself up.

A room had been created inside the arconite's head. There were no windows. The light she had previously seen came from another source entirely.

Rachel put her hand over her mouth and began to sob.

King Menoa allowed the Ninth Citadel to glut itself with power from the Maze, and then he gave the walls and steps within that living stronghold his permission to breed. Aeons had passed since these Mesmerist constructs had been human, but their souls remembered lust and exulted in the freedom granted to them. Flesh born of subconscious thought flowed and melded with uncountable partners in an orgiastic frenzy that pushed thousands of souls over the brink into madness. They produced sentient offspring to strengthen the citadel's own hive mind, but occasionally they also birthed mutants: fragments of dreams or memories that could not think in any useful way and merely mimicked the shapes of the faces around them. And these faces shouted and barked or simply licked their teeth and stared.

Whenever such deviants were discovered by functioning constructs they were murdered and absorbed back into the citadel. Hunters with fists grown into knives flowed through walls and ceilings in pursuit of imperfection. The whole process of unfettered copulation continued until Menoa's fortress had grown by almost thirty levels and the House of Faces set high upon the building's teetering summit had sprouted many new chambers, stairwells, and eyes.

When it was over, the citadel exhaled. Bloodmists hissed from vents in the foundations, and then drifted out over the great wet labyrinth of the Maze.

Menoa stood upon a freshly birthed balcony high on one side of the House of Faces and watched the mists recede. Ribs of new bone and crystal eyes glistened in the platform floor and made the surface uneven, yet he was prepared to allow that for the moment. He would wait and see how it matured before determining its value to him.

Far below him a witchsphere was rolling through the Maze on its way to the citadel. Barges lolled in deeper channels, their decks crammed with cages full of souls for the Processor. The great inverted pyramid continued to whisper and issue gouts of steam, but its forming ovens and arconite pens were empty now.

All of the king's children had now left Hell, yet the instrument of their passage still dominated the skyline. Menoa's portal writhed above the Maze like a vast ribbon of flies. From a fixed base of scorched and blasted stone the portal rose to impossible heights, becoming narrower and narrower until the last thread of it vanished somewhere inside that dark sun that lay at the very heart of the Maze. Both ends remained fixed in place, but the length between them undulated like a whip. It had lost most of its substance since the arconites had passed through, Menoa noted. He could almost see through it in places.

A fly settled on one of the claws of Menoa's black gauntlet. He glanced down and changed the tiny creature from living flesh to glass, then crushed it.

His reverie was broken by an unspoken query from the citadel. The witchsphere had reached the base of the fortress and it wished to speak to him.

Admit it. Allow it to pass through the citadel unmolested.

A short while later the witchsphere rolled onto his balcony. Menoa had no name for this construct, but he recognized it nevertheless. Its scraped and dented metal panels were evidence of the many years it had spent in the living world.

“We bring word from the Prime,” it said in the voices of numerous hags. “They have confirmed your expectations. The thaumaturge has conjured a mist to hide the traitorous arconite. It engulfs Cospinol's own fog and reaches far across the lands beyond.”

“And the portal, too?”

“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.

“One summer's day on Heralds Beach,

I met a girl who had no teeth.

I kissed the collar of her pretty frock

and she-”

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?

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.