Iron Angel

3

They entered the temple via a near-vertical Spine conduit in what had once been the building’s foundations. Flanked above and below by the Church assassins, Rachel and Clay clambered down a series of rungs bolted to the metal walls. She watched the captain’s agitation grow as the circle of crimson sky gradually diminished above them. The big man seemed to become increasingly gruff and surly, cursing and muttering under his breath whenever his armoured boots or elbows clanged against the inside of the narrow passageway. He made as much noise as a blacksmith at his anvil.

For the first time during their trek, he seemed genuinely afraid.

With the help of a rope, the Spine manhandled Dill down after them. To Rachel’s great relief, she heard her friend moaning faintly at his mistreatment. He had regained consciousness at last.

The ladder terminated at a spherical antechamber from which a score of other tunnels radiated at all angles. An ancient aether light set into the floor gave a green cast to the sapperbane plates and rivets in the curved walls around them. When the Cutters finally lowered the young angel to the floor, Rachel rushed over to his side.

“Dill?”

His head lolled drunkenly but he didn’t open his eyes or reply.

“He’s breathing more easily,” she said to Clay.

“Good,” Clay said. “I don’t think your captors planned on sending for a doctor.” His gaze moved from the Spine Adept down to Dill’s tattered chain-mail vest. “It’s all shit, you know-the armour, the gold swords they gave the temple archons. It was all for show.”

“I know.”

“They shouldn’t have lied to him.”

“Be silent,” said the Adept.

Rachel eyed the man’s mask, then turned back to Clay. “Dill was never cut out to be a warrior,” she said. Her manacles clunked suddenly against the floor. The sapperbane panel had tugged at the iron cuffs with what felt like a strong magnetic attraction, but then immediately released its hold. “That’s strange,” she said.

“It’s the sapperbane,” Clay whispered. “It does all sorts of weird things. I never liked coming down here, not even when the temple was the right way up.” He paused, listened for a moment, then shook his head. “These tunnels bend sound in odd ways. They say you can hear a conversation spoken in any room in the temple if you stand in exactly the right place. Some folks even swear that you can hear conversations from the past.”

Dill gasped and threw back his head.

Rachel grabbed his shoulders.

He opened his eyes. “Rachel? I smell poison.”

“You inhaled a soporific gas,” she said. “But it’s gone now; you’re going to be fine.”

“No,” he said. “They mean to poison us all and bring their paradise to earth. There is no more room for them in Hell. They are coming here.”

“Who is coming? Who are you talking about?”

“The Mesmerists.”

Clay shot an inquiring look at Rachel.

“Dill died,” Rachel explained. “After we reached the bottom of the abyss, he was killed in battle. I used Devon’s angelwine to resurrect him, but by then he’d already spent several days in the Maze. Since then he hasn’t been able to explain what happened to him there. His memories are muddled, fragmented; they come to him in nightmares.”

“Was what he said just then true?”

“I don’t know.”

The Spine Adept removed his sand mask; his lifeless eyes now turned towards the captain of the temple guard. “This conversation is illegal. I advise you to keep silent.”

“Didn’t you hear what the lad said?”

“The Maze is a place for sinners. Salvation lies only with our Lord Ulcis.”

Clay ignored him. “Who are these Mesmerists?” he asked Dill.

“They whisper to the dead,” the young angel replied, “and change them. They are making demons for the war to come. A red veil heralds their coming.”

“What war?”

“The war between Hell and Earth.”

The captain rubbed a big hand across his stubble. “Fucking gods,” he growled. “Ulcis offered slavery, and now Iril wants to wipe us out completely. You can’t trust any of them.”

“Ulcis offers salvation,” the Adept said.

Clay punched him, or tried to.

The temple assassin neatly sidestepped the blow. Behind him, his men loaded their crossbows with bone-breakers, the heavy bolts they reserved for use in holy places. The round stone tips could crush a man’s skull without drawing blood.

“Clay!” Rachel warned.

But the captain’s face had darkened with fury. He lashed out at his opponent a second time. He was quicker than Rachel expected him to be, much quicker than an old man in heavy plate had any right to be. But he wasn’t nearly fast enough.

The Adept grabbed the other man’s fist and turned it effortlessly against the force of Clay’s own attack. Rachel heard bones snap in the captain’s wrist. Clay roared in pain, and then threw himself forward, trying to use his own weight to slam the smaller man against the wall.

But the assassin flowed around his opponent’s charge, almost lazily it seemed. He motioned to his men to lower their weapons, then drove a savage kick into the back of Clay’s knee, one of the few weak spots in his armour. A second bone snapped. The captain crashed to the floor, his broad face creased in agony.

“That’s enough,” Rachel cried.

“Not quite,” the Adept said.

“But he can’t even get up to fight back.”

The assassin shrugged. He broke Clay’s other knee with a second kick, then paused for a moment, studying the metal suit. Clay remained facedown on the sapperbane floor panels, unable to turn over. He sucked in gulps of air through his teeth. “Fuck…you,” he gasped. “And fuck…your…”

“His armour is standard temple issue,” the Adept said to his men. “How would you seek to improve this design against ranged attacks?”

“Find and eliminate weaknesses,” one of the Cutters replied. He removed his sand mask, revealing a youthful face with a high forehead and a weak chin. Bruises and needle marks under his eyes indicated recent tempering. “I would test the joints for strength.”

“Then do so.”

The Cutter raised his crossbow and shot a bolt into the captain’s neck guard. The stone missile ricocheted off the metal with a hideous peal. Clay gnashed his teeth and groaned. The young assassin reloaded.

“Stop it!” Rachel yelled. “You’re just tormenting him.”

“Restrain those two. Bind the angel’s wings.”

The remaining Spine surged forward, dragged Rachel and Dill to their feet, and forced them up against the wall. One of them produced a set of chain-and-burr cuffs, a torture implement like a short leash, and tightened them around the angel’s wings, drawing them closely together behind Dill’s shoulder blades. Meanwhile the young Cutter standing over Clay aimed down a second time. This time the bone-breaker struck the captain in the crook of his elbow. The big man howled and tried to push himself upright, but he could no longer move his broken legs. Four more bolts followed before the young Cutter finally stopped shooting. “I don’t see any weaknesses beyond the obvious gaps in the knee joints,” he observed.

“Give your crossbow and quiver to me.”

The younger man complied.

The Adept rewound the windlass, set the latch, and then selected a fresh bolt from the borrowed quiver. This missile had a yellow glass bulb full of oily liquid attached to its tip. “Your mistake was to test only the efficacy of what you perceived,” he said to the Cutter, “while failing to consider what was absent from the design altogether. These older suits lack fireproofing.”

“No!” Rachel tried to break free from her restrainers. She struggled, every muscle in her body fighting against their grip, but it made no difference. She wasn’t strong enough. The Adept aimed the crossbow down at the helpless man and squeezed the trigger.

The incendiary struck Clay’s back and exploded, engulfing his whole body in crackling, spitting green flame. He screamed in agony as the burning chemicals trickled down through the tiny gaps between the plates of his armour. Rachel could feel the searing heat from the other side of the chamber.

“A productive lesson,” the Adept said, handing the bow back to the young assassin. “Obstacles cannot necessarily be overcome by brute force. You must make yourself familiar with the entire breadth of your arsenal.”

He smiled, just for an instant, but long enough for Rachel to notice. Her eyes widened in surprise. This Adept had taken pleasure in murder. His stoicism was just a carefully maintained facade. Like Rachel herself, he hadn’t been tempered.

They left the antechamber and Clay’s charred corpse, and proceeded through a warren of interconnected metal tunnels. Aether lights set into the floors bathed each junction in soft green luminance, while leaving the passageways between shrouded in darkness. Eerie metallic tones with no determinable cause or origin haunted the spaces around them.

Their route gradually led them down into the temple. The sapperbane conduits gave way to passages constructed from cut black stone and then finally to a lofty chamber with a sunken, bowl-shaped floor. Rachel did not recognize the place until she tilted her head, thus viewing the room the other way up. This had once been a hallway right below the Spine sleeping quarters. Smoke rose from cressets arranged along one side of the depression and hung in a thin blue layer over the heads of the nine assassins and their captives. The room also smelled vaguely of sweat. Shards of glass littered the floor, although there were no windows here. In the center, a rickety scaffold had been constructed out of timbers and hemp: a series of ladders and platforms that rose twenty yards to connect two small doors positioned on either side of the flat polished ceiling that had once been the floor.

“Climb,” the Adept said flatly. His face still revealed no emotion, but Rachel now knew him to be a fraud. If he hadn’t been tempered, why go to the trouble of pretending that he had been? His Spine masters would know the truth. Only the low-ranking Cutters would not be aware of his deception.

“Why aren’t you tempered?” she asked him.

“All Adepts are tempered.”

She snorted. “I’m living proof that they’re not, and so are you. You enjoyed what you did to Clay, didn’t you? Torturing him gave you pleasure. My problem was always the opposite. I didn’t particularly enjoy the messier aspects of my work.”

He stared at her, but his eyes betrayed nothing. “Your Spine status was revoked,” he said. “Indeed, you were never truly an Adept. You always lacked the ability to focus.”

This was the one Spine technique Rachel had been unable to master during her former training. The brutal process of tempering through torture and the administration of neural toxins vandalized an Adept’s mind, destroying his or her ego, yet it also granted the tempered assassin mastery of his or her own physiology. Focusing enabled Spine to temporarily heighten their senses, and to push their bodies far beyond the limits of normal endurance. Such combatants were far quicker and stronger than normal humans.

Rachel had struggled for years to learn the technique, but still her untempered mind had resisted. Every attempt at focusing had ended in failure.

Except once.

In the deep abyss under the city, the Spine technique had saved Dill’s life. In that one desperate moment when she had most needed to become more than human, she had somehow succeeded.

“Climb,” the Adept repeated.

He led Dill and Rachel up the scaffold, and through one of the upturned doorways. The Cutters followed in a pack, their fingers never far from their weapons’ triggers. One corridor led to another and yet another. In the loftier passageways catwalks had been erected above the floor to provide access to chambers on either side. Rachel glanced through doorways into tiny sleeping cells and vast training rooms full of sparring combatants. The sound of clashing blades and staffs echoed through the whole torchlit maze.

At last they reached the Rookery Spire. There the Spine herded their two prisoners down a steep, spiralling slope within the upturned tower: following the underside of the main stairwell. It was a disorienting experience in cramped semidarkness, a slip-sliding descent beneath steps cut into the roof. Rachel was forced to remove her wood-soled sandals and walk barefooted. She smelled sweat from her captors’ leathers, an honest human odor at odds with their ghoulish faces and dead-eyed gazes.

Halfway down, they bundled Dill into one dark chamber, and then forced Rachel to descend another level before piling her into a second room and locking the door behind her. She fell all of eight feet in almost complete darkness, rolled over, and came to rest amid a pile of hard-edged debris.

When her eyes finally grew accustomed to the gloom, she was able to survey her surroundings. The cell had previously been a rough-walled chamber with a highly arched stone ceiling-the bedroom of a high-ranking priest, she supposed-before it had turned upside down.

The floor, once the ceiling, was a conical basin full of shattered furniture and dusty tapestries, dry rushes and broken porcelain, and the remains of fine furnishings that had come crashing down on top of an ancient iron chandelier. Her captors hadn’t bothered to remove any debris, and little wonder with the temple so crammed with prisoners. “Our holding facilities are stretched,” Rachel recalled.

She got up off the floor and walked over to the window. A crimson mist wreathed the abyss beyond the glass and, looking up, Rachel could just discern the dark, cluttered bulk of Deepgate looming overhead, all wrapped in chains and illuminated in places by flickering firelight. Was this the red veil Dill had spoken of, or simply clouds of poison from the burning city? She was about to turn away, when a movement outside grabbed her attention.

Vaporous figures were rising through the mist, the ghosts of countless men and women. With arms outstretched they drifted upwards, their gazes fixed longingly on the city above. The nearest of them passed by only yards from the window and she noticed that for the most part the men were dressed in the old-style suits and pudding-bowl hats once fashionable among Deepgate’s wealthier pioneers, while the women wore layered frocks and carried parasols as protection against a sun that no longer shone upon them. They were almost translucent, as though formed of the red mist itself, but in their faces Rachel glimpsed terrible white eyes and lunatic grins.

Captain Clay had been wrong. Deepgate’s apparitions were not born of the city’s recent catastrophes. These shades had died a long time ago. And they were surging up directly from the abyss.

But why?

Dill hadn’t been able to sleep. His wings chafed at their bindings and sent shards of pain up through his shoulders. He guessed the time to be well after midnight, so it ought to have been completely dark by now, except it wasn’t. Dim blood-coloured light, filtering in through the huge multipaneled windows, suffused the room, turning everything to hues of red. The folds of tapestries which had gathered in the floor depression looked like liver in a bowl. Cracks ran like veins through the surrounding stonework.

But Dill could not drag his gaze from the window. With a terrible fascination, he watched the ghosts beyond the glass.

Most of the shades appeared to be men and women dressed in queer, old-fashioned clothes, but occasionally Dill thought he glimpsed creatures with wings in the far distance, and massive, bulkier shapes rising through gloom. Whatever those were he could not guess.

He was so caught up in watching them that he did not at first notice the creature hovering immediately beyond the window, until a shadow crossing the glass alerted him.

This visitor was a tall, thin battle-archon in crimson, chain-link armour. At his side he carried a serrated cutlass, and he wore an odd helmet shaped like the head of a hawk. His wings thumped languidly behind him, keeping the archon level as he studied Dill with deep red eyes. He was older than Dill, and handsome, but there was a cynical twist to his lips. At times his body seemed to fade into the mist outside and reappear again as though it was drifting between separate realities.

The battle-archon flew to the very center of the window, and made an obvious sign that Dill should open it.

Dill shook his head. The Spine had already warned him against any such action. After all, priests had spent three thousand years blessing the temple’s stone walls and stained glass to keep any unwanted phantasms out. Now this barrier against the ghosts in the abyss served the Spine better than any other. At night the Church of Ulcis was the safest place in Deepgate-or it would have been had it not been hanging upside down and inexorably crumbling into the abyss below.

The angel on the other side of the glass beat his wings impatiently and descended until his face was directly level with Dill’s. He said something Dill could not hope to hear, then pointed insistently at the window latch.

Again Dill shook his head in defiance.

The stranger’s expression twisted into one of disgusted frustration. For a heartbeat he faded, becoming nothing more than a swirl of red mist, before his body solidified again. He raised a fist as though to shatter the window, but stopped himself. His lips parted in a sneer, then he jerked a thumb towards the latch again.

Dill retreated to the back of the room, trying to ignore the window. Instead he feigned interest in the shattered furniture and tapestries piled up in the sunken floor.

By now the battle-archon looked furious. Lifting his cutlass with both hands, he held it up only an inch from a windowpane, then he hovered for a minute, all of his attention fixed on just the sword. Slowly, he brought the blade forward against the glass.

Dill heard a tap.

The battle-archon grinned.

Morning finally arrived. As light filtered down through the chained city, the windows of Rachel’s cell turned a lighter shade of red. The mist thinned, though it did not dissipate entirely, and the ghosts stopped rising from the depths.

The sunlight, feeble as it was, had driven the phantasms away.

Stained glass windows before her depicted three scenes from the Deepgate Codex, each set one over the other: the fall of Ulcis from Heaven, the coming of the Herald, and the rise of Callis and the Ninety-nine from the abyss. Now that the panels were upside down, Rachel could reach out and easily touch the image of Callis and his warriors that otherwise would have been out of reach.

The door to her cell lay eight feet above what had now become the floor. The Spine would open it eventually, of course, if only to throw her down a bladder of water. She studied the heaped debris that had gathered in the floor basin: broken furniture, cloth, smashed porcelain, and even an old iron chandelier-a cornucopia of potential weapons.

Rachel touched the window again. Thankfully this thin barrier of priest-blessed glass had kept her safe all night, and none of the apparitions had been able to enter her cell. But other parts of the temple had crumbled away before her eyes, and the great building would not survive for much longer.

She stood for a moment, thinking.

Tempered Spine felt no fear, but they understood danger. They would not tolerate a threat to their precious temple. And if they wanted Rachel alive for tempering…

She made a sudden decision.

She picked up the leg of a broken chair and used it to smash the lowest pane, taking some pleasure in aiming directly for Callis’s painted face. Broken glass fell away into the abyss outside, leaving a jagged hole in the middle of the pane.

A chill breeze stirred Rachel’s hair. The phantasms would return at dusk. She had until sunset to find out if her terrible gamble had worked.

Carefully, she prised out loose shards of glass from the edges of the pane and arranged them in a line. They would serve as knives-too brittle to meet a Spine sword with, but deadly enough if they were thrown.

She first selected those shards with the best balance, and wound strips of tapestry around one end to make them easier to handle. This way she made six knives in all, although she doubted she’d get the opportunity to use more than one of them. Her first throw would have to be absolutely accurate. Next she used the chair leg to pound the smaller, less useful shards into a fine powder, which she gathered up into a makeshift pouch. Ironically, her Spine master had taught her the efficacy of using such substances to temporarily blind an opponent. The chair leg itself she set aside to use as a club; if she ever escaped the room, it might be handy for close combat.

A scream erupted from somewhere overhead.

Rachel pocketed the throwing knives she’d fashioned, then stood up to look out of the window. The Rookery Spire had been the tallest in the temple, so now it naturally housed the lowest dungeon. The smooth black walls outside would be impossible to climb, but overhead, a clutch of spires-fingers of stone and masonry-extruded like stalactites in a Hollowhill cavern. Beyond this, a black lattice of chains stretched on for miles, all wreathed in red fumes and silhouetted against an angry sky. In places, spikes of orange light punctured the city, and constant dull booming sounds drifted over the abyss, as though the bones of the city were snapping one by one. And in a sense they were, for Deepgate was still crumbling into the pit. Showers of dust and debris rained down from the temple and its surroundings, stirring up clouds of grainy air. Looking down, Rachel saw that the roof of the Rookery Spire had already disappeared, and stonework ended twenty yards below her in ragged chaos.

A door to Hell lay deep in the abyss below this very city, in the darkness below Ulcis’s palace. The god of chains had warned her of its existence. The things down there would tear you to pieces, he’d said. Had last night’s phantasms found a way through this door? Were they refugees driven from the Maze?

Or advance scouts?

Rachel shuddered. The gloom down there was as darkly crimson as a well of blood. They are making demons for the war to come, Dill had said in the temple antechamber. A red veil heralds their coming.

A sudden, loud creaking sound came from behind her and, with a pang of dread, Rachel turned away from the window. A thin crack had appeared along the interior wall of her cell, just an inch above the edge of the floor, and now five yards long.

Shit.

The spire was clearly breaking up.

A tremor convulsed the room. Broken furniture shifted, settling deeper into the sunken floor that had formerly been a ceiling. The crack widened suddenly to the width of a finger, and shot through another five yards of stonework, instantly doubling in length. Now it stretched along two of the walls.

Rachel gazed in horror.

So this is how it was to end for her? She would return to the abyss after all: one more skeleton on Ulcis’s mountain of bones. And Dill, up in the cell above, would join her soon. A profound sense of melancholy struck her. The young angel had never shown signs of growing weary of her failure. But now? How could he forgive her now? She buried her head in her hands, exhausted.

And she waited.

Another rumble. The crack opened another inch, tracing a jagged line on a third wall as the mortar between its stonework split.

A sudden anger gripped Rachel. She rose and jumped up and down on the floor, stamping her weight down, kicking the now useless pile of smashed furniture to one side. Why shouldn’t it be over now? Why did she have to sit here and patiently wait for the end to come? Could she not at least be in charge of her own destiny?

Rachel picked up the chair leg she’d set aside in readiness and smashed it hard against the floor. Then she deliberately drove it deeply into the widest part of the crack, trying to prise the gap further apart. Nothing happened, however; the hanging tower would split under its own weight or not. Her efforts made no difference.

Suddenly she paused, breathing heavily, still staring at the piece of wood in her fist. Then she looked at the mound of debris…at the tapestries, at the broken furniture, and the heavy iron chandelier.

Gods below! How stupid I’ve been!

Rachel moved quickly. She snatched up a corner of the nearest tapestry and dragged it clear of the pile. About two yards wide and twice as long, it depicted a battle scene of archons and heathens, like most of the others in the temple. The cloth was ancient; the weave thin, frayed, and undoubtedly priceless. Good. Next she pulled out pieces of furniture, jagged panels, drawers, part of a bed, a chair back curved like a lute, kicking most of this stuff aside. She needed something to use as a grapple.

The sound of rending stone drove her to greater urgency. Along the wall, the crack had widened again.

The chandelier! She grabbed at it and pulled, but it was secured to the floor by a yard of stout chain. She heaved, then let it drop again when it refused to budge. No time to mess with it. With the stout wooden leg in one hand, the U-shaped chair back in the other, and one end of the tapestry bundled under her elbow, she rushed to the inside corner of the room, beneath the erstwhile door. She wedged the chair leg between the rough cornerstones where the two walls met, four feet above the crack and the same distance below the door, then stepped back and kicked it securely into place. Then she pulled down on it, testing this makeshift perch with her weight. It moved a little, settling into the rough stonework on either side, then held firmly.

Another crack. The gap now traced a line around all four walls. At its narrowest, it was as thin as a hair, but closer to the window it was large enough to push a fist inside. The floor could fall away at any moment.

Rachel hooked the chair back over her wooden perch, then, still holding on to the tapestry, hopped up beside it. She still had to fashion a rope, but reasoned that it was better to undertake that task while sitting safely above the disintegrating floor.

The weave parted with disturbing ease. It was almost rotten. Rachel considered fetching another tapestry-there were two more that she could see-but then rejected that idea. The floor had already become too dangerous to risk setting foot upon again. She’d have to make do with what she had. She separated the cloth into six long strips which she then draped over her makeshift seat for fear of losing them. Next she plaited two lengths of rope from three strands each, tied them together, and then bound one end to the curved chair back and the other to her perch. This would give her a long enough line to swing beneath the wall once the floor fell away. With a bit of luck she could then snag one of the stairwell wall sconces on the opposite side and pull herself up.

Until then all she could do was wait.

So she held the rope firmly, and waited.

And waited.

After several hours Rachel began to feel foolish. She eased herself forward, keeping most of her weight on the wooden perch, and pressed the toe of her foot gingerly against the floor. It felt solid, unyielding. Still gripping the rope, she carefully placed her other foot beside the first. Still no movement.

She then gave the floor a gentle kick.

Nothing alarming happened.

So she slid fully down from her seat and stood there, clutching the rope.

She jumped.

And then leapt again, bringing all of her weight down to bear upon the floor. The sound of her wooden heels striking stone resounded through the chamber, before the room settled to silence again. Rachel sighed deeply. She tied the rope around herself and sat down on the floor. It was already becoming very gloomy outside.

The Rookery Spire held together all afternoon. The crack in the wall did not lengthen and floor did not fall away from underneath the waiting assassin. She watched the red mist darken further outside the window. Somewhere overhead the sun would be dropping low in the sky, casting the shadow of the abyss’s rim over Deepgate. The ghosts would return soon, and now Rachel’s cell had a broken window.

She tried calling out, but nobody came. So she watched the door and waited, flipping the glass-shard knife between her hands.

Eventually, a key rattled in the lock.

Rachel tensed. She’d have one chance at this. The Spine would be wearing leather armour, which might be enough to deflect or break her fragile blade. Better if she aimed for the neck. If she could sever the carotid artery, death would come quickly.

The door opened.

Rachel lifted her arm to throw, but stopped.

A child stood in the doorway, a boy of about nine or ten, holding a water bladder. He was painfully thin and pale, dressed in a sleeveless brown jerkin and breeches, a cheap imitation of a Cutter’s training armour. His short red hair had been hacked roughly, probably with a knife, but it must have been beautiful once. Puncture marks and bruises marred his arms, evidence of Spine torture, and his eyes were as empty and haunted as any Adept’s. He hardly seemed to see her. They had tempered him.

“You must not approach the door,” he announced in a high clear voice. “I will throw you the water, and you must catch it. If it bursts there will be no more water for you today.”

Despair swamped Rachel. She had a clear shot at the boy’s neck. The glass blade remained steady in her hand. Yet she hesitated. A child? Had the visitor been an Adept or even a Cutter, it would already have been too late to make a throw. But this boy obviously lacked the training and reflexes to react to this situation. He had been ordered to deliver water, and instructed on what to say. All he could do was obey.

“You must be ready to catch this,” he repeated, holding out the bladder.

Rachel felt the weight of the glass blade in her hand. She knew the position of the artery in the child’s neck. In her mind she watched herself throw the dagger, saw it flash across the room and bury itself into his flesh. She imagined the jetting blood, the wet, gurgling sounds he would make as he fell. It would be an easy throw, over in a heartbeat. Then she’d be free, and able to help Dill.

The child had been tempered, hadn’t he? He was one of them.

Rachel threw the knife.

Dill had not slept. The phantom battle-archon had remained outside his window all night, tapping his cutlass against the glass. This simple persistence had evidently taken a lot out of the intruder, for his body had faded as the night wore on, becoming more gaseous and more insubstantial with each blow. When dawn finally came, the ghost had returned to the abyss, then little more than a shadow of his former self.

But he had managed to make a crack in the window.

Dill studied the broken pane for the hundredth time, and with mounting apprehension. Shades should not be able to affect the physical world around them, and certainly not the blessed glass that protected the Church of Ulcis. In fact, no spirit had damaged the temple in three thousand years. Yet this dead warrior had managed a remarkable feat, seemingly determined to reach Dill at any cost.

But why?

And there was something else worrisome. Of all the ghosts Dill had seen that night, this armoured phantom was the only one to have now returned to the abyss.

Now Dill was exhausted, and the crimson mist outside was growing dark again. The chain-and-burr cuffs cramped and chafed his wings, sending jolts of pain through his shoulders whenever he moved. Broken feathers now covered the floor of the cell.

Time passed, yet nobody came to check on him, or to bring him food or water. Once he thought he heard a child crying out somewhere below him, but it might just have been a rook squawking. He must have slept because it was suddenly much darker. The tall windows shone dully, bathing his cell in a queer red radiance. Outside, the ghosts were again rising from the abyss: more of them this time.

And then the phantom archon returned.

He floated outside Dill’s room, his huge wings entirely filling the window frame. His body was solid, more corporeal again, and his eyes gleamed with malice. He raised his cutlass before the cracked pane and struck it hard.

The glass finally shattered.

Dill instantly heard a howl, like a powerful gale. The archon’s form warped and faded until it became as thin as a plume of smoke. Curling and twisting, the smoke then began to flow through the broken window into the room. In a dozen heartbeats, the ghost had re-formed. His wings unfolded behind him, trailing wisps of red mist, and he stared down at the young angel with terrible eyes.

“You should have opened the window,” he said in a voice like leaves blowing through a forest. “And that way saved us both some pain. This meeting has cost me dearly.”

Dill did not realize he’d been backing away until own his wings brushed against the wall. He stammered, “Who are you?”

The battle-archon’s eyes narrowed. “My name is Silister Trench,” he said. He exhaled slowly, releasing drifts of red smoke from his nostrils. “I am the champion of the First Citadel and commander of Hasp’s Archons.” He gave a small bow, and his hand settled on the hilt of his cutlass. “I am your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, or something similar-the exact details of our family connection are not important. Needless to say, I am one of your ancestors, and your ancestors have need of you now.” He started towards the young angel. Crimson vapors rose wherever his boots touched the floor.

“Wait,” Dill cried. “I don’t understand. Why…?”

“I require your wings, your heart, and your blood,” Trench said. “My own form would soon fade under Ayen’s sun, and yet I have an urgent message to deliver to one in your world.” He held out his gaseous hands and peered through them at the other angel. “You see? This body is too insubstantial to survive here for long. It will only last long enough to provide a vessel to carry your own soul back to the Maze.”

Dill glanced frantically about for escape. Grinning, the battle-archon bore down on him, his intangible armour wreathed in bloody vapor. There was nowhere to run to. The young angel dropped to his knees and cowered.

“That’s it,” Trench said. “This will only hurt a little.”

“A foolish and desperate maneuver.” The Adept peered over the lath of his crossbow, aiming the weighty stone tip of a bone-breaker at Rachel’s abdomen. “You might have killed the child.”

Rachel looked up at him from the floor of her cell. “He moved at the wrong moment.”

“Your skills have waned,” the other assassin remarked. “Any ordinary Cutter could have thrown the blade more accurately.”

Her glass knife had caught the lad’s ear, grazing him just enough to draw blood. If the Adept had known that this was exactly Rachel’s intention, he might have been less dismissive of her skills. The boy had, of course, dropped the water bladder and run back to his masters. Subsequently, the Adept who’d brought her here had been forced to visit.

“Why do you pretend you’ve been tempered?” Rachel asked. “Why keep up the facade?”

“I do not pretend,” he snapped.

She laughed. “Are you so afraid of the procedure?”

“Be silent.”

“I used to yearn for them to temper me,” she said, “but my brother wouldn’t sign the consent forms. He did this to hurt me. He knew I couldn’t cope with the strain of what my Spine masters expected me to do. I could never kill children. Yet you don’t seem to have a problem with morality, do you?” Suddenly she thought she understood him. “That’s why you don’t want them to temper you. The procedure would strip away your desires, deprive you of the joy you get from your work.”

“My master died on the night he was due to temper me,” he said with a cruel smile. “Quite suddenly, and inexplicably. With all the recent confusion, the destruction of the city, nobody thought to confirm that he’d actually carried out the procedure.”

“Bravo,” Rachel said. “It couldn’t have been easy to kill a Spine master.”

The man inclined his head. “Over the years he had built up a resistance to every poison we stocked. I was forced to use less subtle methods.”

“I’m impressed. What’s your name? It isn’t often I get to meet an Adept who actually remembers it.”

“Culver.”

“So, Culver, are you going to shoot me now, or take me away to be tempered?”

He lowered his crossbow. “You’ll go under the needles eventually,” he said. “We need all the battle fodder we can get. Unfortunately we have rather a long backlog to work through.”

“A shame,” she muttered, “because I’ll be dead by tomorrow.”

Culver’s hard eyes narrowed. “Suicide is against Codex law. Any attempt would be punished by-”

“By what? Death?”

He did not answer.

Rachel snorted. “Save your sermons. I’ve no intention of killing myself. Look over there, corpse face.” She gestured towards the broken pane, the glass she’d smashed to make her knives. Already there were ghosts rising through the dark red mist beyond. It would only be a matter of time until one of them noticed and came to investigate. “I’m afraid it broke,” she said. “Quite suddenly and inexplicably.”

Culver cursed. “You stupid bitch. Did you want to get yourself possessed? The whole room will have to be blessed now.” He dragged a hand through his short hair, thinking for a moment, before he looked back at her. “Sod the waiting list,” he said. “We’ll temper you and the angel tonight.”

The long slow death of the soul by torture. It was almost a relief.