God of Clocks (18 page)

She faced the thaumaturge. “You said Oran would probably find some new leverage soon? I assume that's why we haven't just told Dill to abandon those bastards in the forest. We don't
need
Abner's inn that much.”

Mina nodded. “Hasp is still down there.”

Now Rachel understood. The woodsmen might use the Lord of the First Citadel as a hostage, as soon as Oran figured out that Rachel didn't actually want Hasp dead.

Or did she? The bruise on her jaw throbbed evilly. “That glass bastard deserves to be used as a hostage. Why did he react like that? I was only trying to protect him.”

“He's not himself.” Mina let her dog jump down from her lap. “Hasp can't come to terms with what Menoa did to him. The parasite in his head will force him to betray his friends, and for an archon of the First Citadel there can be no greater crime. When the king's arconite attacked Dill, it became brutally evident to Hasp that he couldn't resist its influence. He thereby lost his honour, and turning on you was just a reaction to that loss. I think he deliberately angered Oran's men because he truly wanted to die. You denied him that escape by intervening. In his eyes, you diminished him.”

Rachel sighed. “Spine have never been very good at reading people,” she admitted. “I really should just stick to murdering peo-ple in dark alleys.”

“There aren't any dark alleys here.”

The assassin grunted. “I think I need to speak to Dill.” She left the rest of her thoughts unvoiced. She needed to speak to someone human and, absurdly, Dill's voice was the most human one she knew.

A dark blue radiance filled the inside of the skull chamber. The tiny motes trapped within the crystals set into the ceiling appeared to be unusually active. Agitated, Rachel reckoned. She eased her body between the banks of shining machinery, leaning for support against a metal panel as the chamber lolled like a ship at sea.

Dill's ghost still shared the glass sphere in the center of the room with thirteen others. The phantasms floated through each other and shoved and brawled silently. White light pulsed faintly inside that huge bauble, occasionally erupting into glimmering fits that seemed to correspond to moments of conflict between its gauzy prisoners.

She laid her hand against the sphere.

… back … she's back … Murder on her … Don't let her see your thoughts… The agony … I was once within a room and then… Stop screaming! Who are you …?… in that place …men in the river… Shush … Quiet, quiet, quiet… Who …?

“Dill?”

The voices faded, then she heard her young friend.
Sorry, Rachel.

“Sorry? For what?”

They almost killed you.

She pretended to laugh, but failed even to convince herself. She shook her head, thinking their situation was already dire enough without Dill's angst. “You got us out of there, Dill. Now Oran and his would-be avengers are in the palm of your hand. I'm actually pleased you've resisted the urge to crush them.”

Not entirely. Mina yelled at me to stop once I started to squeeze. I think I cracked one of the walls.
He paused.
They were so fragile.
Everything
seems so fragile now.

“But you're not.”

Tell that to the other eleven arconites. The big ones.

This time she gave a genuine laugh. “That's one fewer than there were two days ago. Who taught you how to fight like that?”

Hasp.

Hasp? Ayen's youngest son remained an enigma to Rachel. The goddess's other sons had adopted grandiose titles for themselves: the god of chains, the god of clocks… But not Hasp. They knew him only as the Lord of the First Citadel—ruler of a mere stronghold, a human position—and now he seemed to have wholly embraced this comparatively diminutive status. He was currently as drunk and suicidal as any mortal man.

That meant he'd given up.

Mina had once informed Rachel how Hasp had gone willingly to Hell. While his brothers raised armies and harvested power from the world of men, Hasp accepted the role of looking after the dead. The First Citadel belonged to mortal archons, the bastard descendants of gods and men.

Rachel.
Dill's voice interrupted her thoughts.
I've been seeing more strange things… Visions, or waking dreams. I don't know exactly what they are, but they're becoming more frequent.

She recalled his nightmare of the stone forest, soon after they'd left Coreollis. “What sort of things?” she asked.

A crack appeared in the world, stretching all the way from one horizon to the other. It was full of…
emptiness.
Not darkness, but emptiness, as if something fundamental was missing from the world.

Rachel frowned. Mina had experienced a similar vision, she recalled. And Rachel herself had witnessed a number of strange happenings since leaving Coreollis: those two identical versions of Rys inside his bastion, moments before it fell; the inexplicable change of the steam tractor's and Rosella's hair colour; Oran's strangely
repetitive conversation. As isolated incidents, she had dismissed them as nerves, dizziness, or confusion. But now that she thought about it, couldn't these glitches, when put together, be the result of some greater force at work?

“Thaumaturgy?”

The whole chamber swung violently to the left, then to the right, and then left once again.

Rachel heard an abrupt yell of protest coming from the crawl space behind her. “Stop shaking your head, Dill,” she said absently. “Mina's skin is made of glass.”

I don't think this is thaumaturgy,
Dill went on.
It feels… bigger than that. It's like we're walking through a ghost world, as if the whole of creation is somehow
wrong.
I can't explain it. The closer we get to Sabor's castle, the more powerful the feeling becomes.

Could the god of clocks be responsible?

Mina cried out again, from somewhere nearby.

Rachel turned to find the thaumaturge poking her head into the room. The blood inside her glass-scaled cheeks looked hot and angry. “Dill,” she yelled, “are you aware that you've just killed two men and sent another fleeing for his life?”

Abruptly the chamber stopped moving.

What men?
Rachel heard the angel's reply through the glass, but Mina remained oblivious to it, because Dill had not spoken aloud. The assassin repeated her trapped friend's question for her.

Mina said, “He just trod on a watchtower.”

“A manned watchtower? Where?”

The thaumaturge nodded. “An outpost belonging to the settlement I told you about, the town on the shore of the Flower Lakes. They didn't even have time to light their warning beacon. There are two really flat corpses lying back there, while the lone survivor is now riding for the main settlement.”

Rachel let out a long breath. “How soon until he reaches their palisade?”

“His horse's legs aren't as long as Dill's,” Mina replied. “If our giant friend just moved now, he could catch up and crush him.”

The chamber lurched to one side again, quite suddenly. Mina grabbed the side of the passageway to stop herself from falling.

I see the horse,
Dill said.
The rider… he's only a child.

Rachel glared at Mina. “You didn't mention that.”

The other woman shrugged. “You didn't ask. Does it make any difference? When that lad tells his people what bonehead has done, it might just cast a shadow over our attempts to parley with them.”

Rachel raised her hand. “Dill is not killing anyone else today. And certainly not a child.”

“I could—”

“No, Mina!” the assassin cut her off. “You're not going to do anything. Let the boy go. We'll face the consequences of this mishap if we have to.” She hissed through her teeth. “Either we avoid the place entirely and leave its populace prey to Menoa's arconites, or we try to ally with these people. We've nothing to lose by speaking to them. They pose no threat to Dill.”

The bloody scales on Mina's face transformed into a smile. “Fine,” she said. “Then you can handle the negotiations. I'm sure the town militia will listen to you, since you're so good with people.”

The hook-fingered boy scrambled back up the
Rotsward's
scaffold. The sudden emptiness of those timbers chilled him more than he had expected, for he'd never seen the skyship without her complement of gallowsmen. When he reached the hole in the hull he ducked inside, swinging Monk's sightglass on its tripod, and looked around. The old astronomer was probably still asleep above the boiling room. He'd obviously missed the whole battle.

The boy set off through the narrow skyship passageways, heading
back towards the boiling room. All around him, the interior of the vessel shuddered, clicked, and groaned. These noises seemed much louder since Anchor had started dragging her sideways again, and he could feel the wooden boards bending under stress. The
Rotsward
sounded like she was falling apart.

But she wasn't. The old vessel was as indestructible as she'd ever been.

One more bend before he reached the crawl space above the boiling room, the boy suddenly became wary. Something was wrong. Something—he couldn't put his finger on it exactly—sounded
different.

He stopped, lying on his belly in that dark and narrow conduit, and listened hard.

The bellows had stopped working.

He shuffled forward again, more quickly now, suddenly angry. What if Monk had decided not to wait for him? What if the old man had spotted an opportunity while the gallowsmen were being slaughtered? Where were Cospinol's slaves?

“You'd better not have taken a sip of her without me,” he muttered. “Better not, better not.” They were supposed to have
shared
the scarred angel's essence.

Dragging himself around that final bend in the passageway, his worst fears became realized. There ahead was the hole in the floor above the boiling room, the roof of the crawl space flickering overhead with the brazier light.

Monk was nowhere to be seen.

“Rotten, rotten…” The boy rattled his metal fingers against the wood and then clawed his way up the crawl space towards the hole.

And then he peered down, and stopped dead.

She crouched there, glaring up at him, her eyes as black as the scorched bulkhead behind her. The iron cooking pot had been wrenched from its vice above the brazier and now lay in one corner, heavily dented. The angel's body was misshapen, too, crooked
as a scare-for-crows, her arms and legs and wings all bent at odd angles. The leathers she wore had rotted and burst open in places, revealing patches of scarred white flesh beneath. Blood covered her mouth, jaw and neck. Thin lines of red extended upwards from this gruesome stain and wrapped around her eyes and crosshatched forehead.

Scars.

Pieces of Monk's corpse lay scattered around her feet amidst shards of glass. She had broken the condenser flask. Carnival coughed, regurgitating water.

And then she threw her head back and screamed—a cry of such desperate fury that it froze the boy's wits. No creature should have been capable of uttering a sound like that. He tried to move, but his muscles would not respond. He simply stared down at her.

Her cry subsided. Her eyes met his again. She tried to step forward, but her leg buckled and twisted horribly underneath her. One tattered wing flapped. One arm hung limply at her side; the other remained at her chest, as gnarled as an old root. She moved again, dragging her body closer to the hole in an awkward shuffle. Then she gave a snarl that tapered into a wail of frustration.

“Break my bones,” she said.

The boy continued to stare.

“Break my bones.”

He said nothing.

Her chest rose and fell in rapid motions. “Get down here and help me or I will rip open your throat.” Her white teeth flashed suddenly in the red mess of her face. “Help me!” she cried, the pitch of her voice seesawing. “Help me!”

Before he even knew what he was doing, the boy obeyed. He gripped the edge of the hole and then swung his body through it, heels over head. In one quick somersault he dropped to the floor in front of her. His left foot slid sideways an inch across the slick boards before he recovered his balance.

The room smelled of fire and meat. The brazier still burned
bright red in that confined wooden space, turning the scarred angel's body into a demonic silhouette. Her crippled wings shuddered.

“The hammer,” she said.

He spotted the tool lying amongst pieces of offal. An old man's hand still clutched its handle. The boy stooped and picked it up. He peeled away Monk's hand and let it drop.

“My arms,” she said.

The boy hesitated. “I don't—”

“My arms!” she screamed, dragging herself a step nearer. Her terrible shadow loomed over him. Scars slid under the scraps of leather that still clung to her. “Break them at the elbow and the wrist, the shoulders…”

The whole process happened in fits, so he could hardly recall it afterwards. He remembered the weight of the hammer, the momentum as he swung… Pauses between the sounds of snapping bones in which he wiped sweat from his brow… Carnival's voice, growing steadier as time passed.
The hands. The knees. This foot. My wings. My spine.
She did not scream again. She stumbled occasionally. Once she collapsed. Scars flared like lines of fire around her eyes. He remembered her eyes, at least.

The boy couldn't say how long they spent together in that room, but when it was finally over the scarred angel rested on the bloody floor, her back pressed against one of the bulkheads. Her leathers hung in tatters about her wiry body, her muscular thighs and small hard breasts. Carnival was barefoot, and for some reason, the boy thought that strange.

“Your name,” she said. “What is it?”

He shrugged. “Don't know.” Then he thought about it. “Maybe John. After my father.”

“Okay then, Maybe John.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Leave here while you still can.”

“I don't see Cospinol's slaves coming back anytime soon.”

“Get out.” She said this through her gritted teeth. The anger
was building inside her again. “You stupid, ignorant… get the hell out of here!”