Scar Night

Part III War


23


The Abyss

Blackthrone rose in layers of jagged escarpments and wrinkled gullies, gleaming hot and blistered in the sun. Veins of yellow and green trickled around scattered glints of crystal. The quarry at the base of its southern slope had bitten deeply into the mountain itself, opening a gaping crescent of metal cliffs. House-sized boulders and hills of scree broke against the base of the grinning rock, but they were like so many pebbles and mounds of grit in the shadow of the Tooth.

The Tooth towered over the quarry. Yellow streaks marred its smooth white hull. Sand drifts a hundred feet high smothered the base of one side and partially obscured the river-wide trails in the packed earth behind. A dusty scoop like an enormous jawbone jutted from the front, beneath rows of cutting wheels on retracted mandibles. High above the cutters a strip of windows flashed violently, and higher still blackened funnels punched up from the roof, wrapped in gantries and stairwells.

Devon eased the ship’s wheel around. “Now, that,” he said, “is one big tooth.”

Presbyter Sypes’s eyes fluttered open, then closed again. He resumed snoring.

Signs of habitation were evident below. Work had been done to clear some of the sand around the vast machine, to give access to the shade below the hull. Trails led up the surrounding sand drifts and disappeared into a line of rag-covered holes a quarter of the way up one side. Rope ladders hung from holes higher up, but the Heshette themselves were keeping out of sight. Devon knew better than to assume that they were unaware of the warship’s presence.

He spoke into a trumpet on the control deck. “Purge the ribs, Angus, slowly. We’re going down.”

After a moment a hiss issued from the envelope overhead and theBirkita began to descend.

Devon spun the wheel to bring the warship round in a circle above the quarry. A clutter of stretched-hide roofs and poles came into view, packing the shade between the far side of the Tooth and the cliff wall. Animal tracks pocked muddy earth around them.

A spring? Of course, Blackthrone traps the rain.

But still nothing grew in the poisonous earth. The machine was just a temporary home to the Heshette and their animals, a harsh oasis between the seasonal plains around Dalamoor and the bandit villages west of the Coyle.

The warship descended, and Devon swung her away from the cliffs to bring them back around the Tooth’s crown.

“More lift, Angus,” he said into the trumpet.

Another hiss. They dropped two fathoms.

“I said lift, man. Not purge. Lift.” Devon’s voice was steady, but the vibrations from the engine shook his hand on the wheel. The quarry floor unfolded below, rose quickly to meet them.

The cliffs loomed closer. Devon throttled the starboard propeller and wrenched the rudder hard to port. The warship rolled slightly and began to nose away from the rock. Cables pinged overhead.

“Lift, Angus.”

Angus’s voice came through another trumpet. “Drop dead.”

“Unlikely,” Devon said. “I would walk free from any crash. This course of action will do nothing but kill you and the priest.”

A barrage of tinny obscenities erupted from the engine-room trumpet. Another hiss, and suddenly they were dropping even faster.

Damn him to hell.

The ground came up at them. Devon nudged the front of the envelope away from the cliffs. Through the portside windows he saw massive funnels rising quickly past. They were now between the Tooth and the rock face, falling too quickly to manoeuvre safely past the huge machine.

“Lift, Angus, or you’ll never see another drop of serum.”

Angus did not reply. Devon swung the wheel hard to starboard. He slammed both elevator levers back, then cranked the propellers full.

Engines rumbled, then roared. The bridge shuddered. To port, the shadowed hull of the Tooth rushed upwards. Cliffs hemmed them in to starboard. Clouds of dust billowed through the front ducts. Devon coughed and blinked furiously, trying to see through the bridge windows. The ground was close, rising. He felt the bridge tilt.

“Last chance, Angus,” he shouted. It might have been into the wrong trumpet—he didn’t look, didn’t care. They were going to crash. He had to level the ship. He cut the propellers, forced the elevator controls forward.

Dust choked the forward view, a storm caught between two rising walls, dull white on one side; sharp, ragged rock on the other.

A heavy grinding sound from behind. A loud crack. Ropes fretted, twanged. Wood snapped, splintered, and they hit the ground with a bone-breaking crunch.

Devon’s chin smacked hard against the wheel. The bridge windows shattered in an explosion of glass and dust.

The warship settled with a series of long creaks and groans. The gondola listed to one side, and came to rest with a final hiss.

Devon cut the engines and turned to check on the Presbyter. Sypes’s chair had slid across the floor and rested against one wall, but the old man was still slumped there, snoring lightly.

“Incredible,” Devon muttered.

Bleating noises forced his attention back outside. Through the falling dust he saw goats bucking and kicking among piles of broken wood and torn hide. Chickens fluttered and squawked, scattered feathers everywhere. TheBirkita had landed on the Heshette animal pens. A cockerel hopped through the bridge window onto the control deck and cocked its head at him.

“Bother,” Devon said. He shook Sypes awake.

The Presbyter blinked and rubbed his eyes, then squinted at the cockerel. “Good landing?”

“We’re down, aren’t we?”

“Not the best start for your proposed alliance,” Sypes said. “I urge you reconsider. The Heshette will murder us on sight for this.”

Devon grunted, picked up his bag of poisons, and left to survey the damage. Angus, if he was still alive, could stay where he was and rot.

Extricating himself from the wreckage proved to be a lengthy process. Devon picked his way through the shattered pens, dragging aside sun-bleached poles to clear a path. Frightened goats clambered over each other as they struggled to escape, bleating incessantly.

The Birkita was in poor shape. The gondola listed at a shallow angle. Splinters of teak formed a jagged line where the aft deck had buckled. The starboard propeller hung loose and the port one had sheared, a foot shorter on both blades where it had collided with an outcrop of rock. Three of the four main aether-lights were smashed. But, incredibly, the envelope was still intact. It rested against the hull of the Tooth, hardly reaching an eighth of the way up the giant machine.

The Tooth rose like a pale citadel, its sheer walls tapering to scorched funnels high above. Underneath, rows and rows of massive wheels sat in shadowed tracks among piles of crushed rock. Fine lines had been etched into the hull in endless whorls and curls.

Some sort of ceramic? Three thousand years and there is hardly a mark on it. Light too, or the whole thing would sink into the desert. The refuse of a civilization so much more advanced than our own, abandoned here like a broken shovel.

Devon walked the entire length of the machine, looking for a pattern in its hull etchings, some clue as to how it had been assembled. He was so caught up in his observations that when he reached the scoop at the front he was startled to find the Heshette there waiting for him.

They looked like figures sculpted from sand. Sun-faded gabardines hung shapelessly about them. Dust-coloured scarves wrapped their faces. A dozen men assembled in the sunshine beyond the shadow of the Tooth, mostly armed with hunting bows and spears, but there were other weapons: clubs, bone axes, long knives, hooked swords, and bandit rapiers—weapons scavenged from a hundred conflicts.

Only the shaman stood out from the group. His long beard hung below the folds of his scarf like a frayed and knotted rope adorned with feather and bone fetishes. In one gnarled fist he clutched a bleached wood staff as tall as himself.

This is the man who shapes the minds of the tribe, who fuels their hatred. This is the man I need to convince.

The tribesmen were approaching. Devon flexed his shoulders, squared his jaw, and went to meet them. This was going to be difficult. And, he suspected, it was going to hurt.

After a dozen steps he found out just how much.

There was no parley, no negotiation, no trade of insults. There was only pain.

An axe slammed into his chest. Devon landed on his back.

The man who’d thrown the axe didn’t shout or run. He didn’t break his stride. The scarf around his head hid whatever expression of hate or satisfaction he wore.

Devon pressed fingers to his chest and they came away bloody. He wrenched the axe free and stared in disbelief at the blood glistening on the sharpened-bone blade. Then he struggled to his knees. “Now look here,” he said.

None of the Heshette uttered a word. But the weapons came hard and fast.

A stone glanced off Devon’s temple. A second axe drove high into his shoulder and opened half his neck. Arrows hissed. One struck his thigh, another tore a strip from his cheek, another pierced his stomach, another ripped through his ear, another grazed his scalp, another thumped into his lung. Something heavy smacked against his skull and the world reeled.

Devon was confused. He wanted to shout Stop, but a second stone struck him clean on the forehead. As he crumpled, the Tooth’s massive hull slid across his vision like a dirty, bone-coloured sky.

Still the blows rained. Metal and stone struck him, ripped him, beat him back into the sand. He heard constant thuds all around. A spear entered his groin. He grabbed it and pulled himself upright, tore the weapon free. Knives thumped into his shoulders, his belly, his chest, his neck, and he was looking up at sky again. Something broke a rib: he heard the bone snap, clear and loud in the desert silence. He tried to stand, but a heavy weight cracked into his arm and the force spun him round.

Devon turned back. The Heshette were raising and aiming bows, picking up rocks. He looked down at his ruined body. Flesh hung in strips from bloody wounds. A shard of bone pierced the flesh at the back of his arm. Blood darkened the sand at his feet. His breaths came wetly. He opened split and swollen lips, ran his tongue over a loose tooth. Fluids gurgled inside him when he tried to speak. A knock to the head blurred the vision in his right eye. He reached up and found the shaft of an arrow there, jutting from the eye itself. He snapped off the shaft. Behind his skull, he located the tip, grabbed it, and pulled it through.

Small pieces of his brain clung to the wood.

The pain crept almost tenderly upon him, like an itch he wanted to scratch. It circled the tips of his fingers and trembled on his skin. He sucked in a breath and the pain found him, and tore at him. It howled in his blood and his skull and his tongue and his teeth. It clamoured and clawed behind his eyes and screamed in his ears.

Devon began to laugh.

* * * *

Darkness. Dill could see nothing. He couldn’t see his outstretched hands or his chain mail rattling against his chest as he dived deeper. He plummeted with his wings folded tight against his back, a scream lodged in his throat. Cold air rushed up at him, streamed through his fingers, ripped tears from his eyes. He screwed them shut but it made no difference. Everything was black. With every heartbeat he was falling deeper into death. He opened his eyes again and let the tears flow freely.

“Rachel!” he cried. The void swallowed his voice before it even reached his ears.

Fear begged him to stop. The abyss couldn’t go on for ever; he would hit the bottom sometime. But he had no choice. If he stopped he’d be just as alone in the dark and Rachel would surely be lost. And he couldn’t go back—not without her.

I trust you.

In his mind he saw her face. The image stirred in him a desperate hatred: hatred of himself, hatred of the Battle-archons who had gone before him. Hatred of everything they had been and he wasn’t. He screwed his eyes shut again.

He dived and dived, and screamed and screamed, “Rachel! Rachel!”

The abyss sucked him under like tar; it filled his lungs, leached into his flesh and his mind until it became everything. Dill’s terror was absolute.

Catch me.

How could he catch her? She was falling somewhere below, or above, or a foot to his left or right. How could he expect to find her in this? He was blind. And she was dead. She had been dead the moment she threw herself into the abyss.

I trust you.

Those words were wrapped around his heart and wouldn’t let go. They would still be wrapped around his heart when he died. Dill opened his eyes, tears trickling from the corners, and stared into nothing. Rushing air forced his lips open and he screamed again. An army of ghosts waited for him below. Would her spirit already be among them? Would he see them before he felt the slam of rock that ended his own life? And then?

What then?

There would be no priests to bless his corpse. Ulcis would offer him no salvation, no place in his army. Would the Maze come for him? Could it reach into the city of Deep to claim him? Or would he lie for ever in the darkness, broken and forgotten?

He would never see his father again. The thought struck him like a fist. Dill furled his wings even closer to his back and extended his fingers and dived and dived.

“Rachel!”

Above the torrent of air he thought he heard a distant voice.

“Rachel!”

Had he heard anything at all? How close was he to the end? Had he merely heard the wails of ghosts, warning him? Calling to him to stop his descent?

“Rachel!”

A voice called back from below. It might have been calling his name—but he wasn’t sure—somewhere off to his left. He checked his dive, banked in that direction. One hand moved to the storm lantern at his belt, the other gripped the hilt of his sword until it stung.

“Rachel!”

“Dill.” The voice seemed to echo across eternity.

He swept towards the sound of it, not daring to hope, his mind full of the pounding of blood and mocking darkness.

“Dill, here, below you!”

Dill flexed his wings to ease his descent. Air dragged at his feathers. He didn’t understand. She couldn’t still be falling; she couldn’t possibly see him to call out. But it sounded so like her.

Or her ghost? Am I already dead? Did I hit the bottom?

“Dill, left, above you, thirty yards.”

Above?He snapped his wings open and let the uprising air pull him to a stop.

“Rachel?”

“Above you, to your left.”

“Where are you?” he pleaded. His voice disappeared into the dark.

“Light your lantern.”

It took an age to locate the lantern at his belt. Then he fumbled for the spark wheel, beating his wings to keep him level, not even knowing if his eyes were open or closed. After three tries the lantern brightened. His hands, belt, and trousers became illuminated. The sword guard gleamed gold. Rusted steel links glistened at his chest. But there was nothing else visible. All around him the blackness of the void stretched on, untouched by the light, and seemed even denser than before. His chest began to tighten; his breathing came quicker. “Rachel?” he called.

“I see you!” she cried. “Above you, not far. I’m here.”

In a daze, Dill followed the sound of her voice.

Rachel had one arm around Carnival’s shoulders, the back of her knees supported in the crook of the angel’s scarred arm.

Carnival’s wings thumped with sluggish force. She bobbed slightly, supporting Rachel as though she weighed nothing. “Turn down the lantern,” she hissed.

For a moment he was too shocked to comply. He just stared.

Carnival’s jaw clenched. Her lips drew back from her teeth.

Dill dimmed the light.

“She saved me,” Rachel said. “She saw you diving after me. She told me where you were.”

Carnival’s face was a shocking white: even her scars seemed to have paled. But her eyes remained cold and empty. “Dark here, isn’t it?” she rasped. Her voice sounded as though she was suffocating. “There’s a ledge over there”—she jerked her head—“where you can rest.”

They flew there in silence. By the light of his lantern, Dill saw Rachel glance back at him over Carnival’s shoulder, and smile. His heart stuttered.

A narrow rim of metal, the ledge jutted from rock as smooth as glass. Vertical ribs of the same metal, an arm-span apart, stretched away on either side. Dill landed a few feet from the others. His sword struck the ledge with a hollow peal.

“The abyss must narrow as it descends,” Rachel said, her voice strangely hollow and metallic. She peered down into the depths, then lifted her head to gaze above. “I think this wall slopes inwards.”

For the first time Dill looked up. Deepgate shimmered far above, faint wisps and pearls of light, like sunlight filtering through a clutch of jewellery. “How far down are we?” he said.

“Half a league at least,” Rachel said. “Perhaps more.” She placed a hand on the abyss wall. “This surface…is melted.”

Reflections from his lantern shone deep in the rock. Dill’s reflection peered out at him, like another angel trapped in glittering black ice. Pale, forlorn, it reminded him of the archons in the temple tapestries.

Carnival left them and moved to perch some distance away, out of the lantern light, her footfalls soundless.

Once they were alone, Dill sat down beside Rachel and whispered, “What about her? What are you going to do?”

“She could have let me die.”

“Why didn’t she?”

“I don’t know, Dill. She won’t speak to me. There’s something different about her, something…deeply wrong with her. I’ve never seen her like this before.” She lowered her voice. “I think she’s terrified.”

“Can you stop her before she reaches Deep?”

Rachel’s hands curled around the lip of the ledge she sat on, and her eyes seemed to dull. She said flatly, “I can’t fight her like this. Here. We have to wait.”

“Until when?”

“Until we reach the bottom.”

“But if Ulcis finds us?”

She shrugged. “There’s nothing else I can do.”

Dill leaned back, feeling his feathers brush the abyss wall. A thousand tons of darkness crushed him. Deafening silence. He closed his eyes, trying to shut it all out, but that only made things worse.

I could take you back; I should take you back up.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. Dill had been ordered to recover the angelwine, not Rachel. If he’d been stronger, braver, she wouldn’t be here at all. She’d jumped because she’d known Dill couldn’t face the abyss on his own. She’d jumped because he was a coward. And now his cowardice had put her in danger again.

“Thank you,” Rachel said, “for coming after me.”

Dill could not find his voice.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m…sorry I didn’t catch you,” he said.

“No.” Rachel placed a hand on his arm. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I was so furious with Mark and Fogwill, I didn’t stop to think. How could you ever have found me down here in this darkness? I realized that the instant I jumped.” She stole a glance at Carnival. “I thought I was dead.”

Dill turned away so that she couldn’t see the light of shame in his eyes.

“I jumped,” Rachel said, “and suddenly it dawned on me what I’d done. I called and called until my voice was hoarse. She caught me. One moment I was falling, the next I was in her arms. At first I thought it was you.”

Dill pulled his arm away from her grasp.

She moved closer, but did not reach out to him again. “At least you tried.”

They sat in silence for an age. Dill’s mind replayed the events in the Sanctum over and over again. He watched Rachel slip away. Catch me . That brittle moment when no one breathed, then her brother was grabbing him, dragging him towards certain death.

Dill had hesitated. Even the weight of darkness couldn’t crush that memory.

Rachel whispered, “You were so brave.”

Dill could not look at her. He didn’t hear Carnival approach, but her voice cut through his thoughts with a welcome sharpness. “I can’t see the bottom.” Face tight and pained, she clutched at the rope-scar on her neck as though the rope was still there. Her voice was hoarse. “Can you carry her now, or must I?”

“I can do it, I think,” Dill said.

“Then do so.”

They stood up and the assassin wrapped her arms around his neck. Her touch sent a shiver through him.

Carnival was watching them, dark eyes unreadable, her scars a map of hate and murder.

Each scar a life. She’s made a mask for herself. But perhaps there’s still an angel hidden somewhere deep beneath those scars. She knew I would never reach Rachel in time. She could so easily have let her fall to her death. But she didn’t.

“Thank you,” Dill said, “for saving her.”

Carnival spoke without emotion. “Don’t thank me, angel. I don’t know what’s down there or how long it will take me to find the Poisoner’s angelwine. But I do know one thing.” She looked at Rachel and hunger flashed in her eyes. “This bitch still has blood in her veins.” She smiled. “And Scar Night is coming.”