Scar Night

27

Imprisonment and Sabotage

There were disconnected moments of lucidity. Chains scraping. Constant pain. Air inhaled like broken glass. Hammering metal. Glimpses of iron bars, roaring flames, seared rock, melted rock. Manacles. Black and yellow bruises, soft as rot. Bolts snapping. Rattling keys. Fat cauldrons frothing, sucking, stinking. Blood and meat. Rusted hooks heavy with slabs of butchered flesh. Shards of light on steel—hacking, hacking.

Darkness.

Then cold, hard eyes. Teeth. Scars.

And screams, terrible screams.

At some point Rachel realized the screams were coming from her own throat.

Someone was cradling her head, gently.

“Drink.”

Foul water sluicing over her parched lips.

Pain.

She was gagging, spitting.

Drowning…

* * * *

…light from somewhere.

“Don’t die on me, bitch.”

Get away from me, bitch. A Glueman with long, greasy hair, folding himself into the shadows, eating.Scar Night is her night…. The dark of the moon…One soul .

“Who?”

Intolerable pressure on her chest. “Leave me alone!”

“Drink.”

“Dill?”

He was smiling, waving his lantern, rainbow eyes and feathers glowing softly in a golden sunset. He snuffed the light. Day snapped to night.

Catch me.

“The pain!”

Scars flared in the dark, then withdrew, leaving her alone with the pain.

* * * *

Rachel woke, choking, heaving for air. A river of nails brushed against her skin. Dried blood crusted the corners of her mouth like rust. Tongue swollen, dry.

“Dill?”

She lifted her head from rough stone, and gasped. Renewed pain drove spikes into her neck, along her spine, into her stomach. Cracked ribs? Something clawed at her ankle. She reached down. Found more blood. A manacle.

“I’ll light the lantern.” A woman’s voice; a voice she knew.

She heard a flint wheel turn.

Tangles of dark hair did little to cover the bruises on Carnival’s face. Her scars seemed fresh and full of blood. The angel narrowed her eyes as the lamp glowed. They were in a stone cell with an iron grate for a door.

“They threw this in here with us,” Carnival said as she lifted the lantern and shuffled over to Rachel. A length of chain rattled across the floor in her wake. One of her wings slumped at an odd angle. “Water too. And food.” Her tone was clipped, angry. “You don’t want to eat the food.”

Rachel tried to speak, but her throat felt full of blisters. Only a weak guttural sound escaped her.

“Look at you.” Carnival spoke through gritted teeth. “You’re almost as pretty as me.”

“What…?” Rachel swallowed. “What happened?”

Carnival merely grunted.

Rachel tried to remember the fight. Images of blood and skull-like faces crowded back to her, indistinct, blurred. At once the blows she’d received seemed to cry out anew, pinched by the memory. She winced. She’d killed…how many? Clearly not enough.

Carnival was rubbing the manacled flesh at her own ankle. Rachel stared numbly at the manacle for a moment before she realized it was connected to her own by a length of chain. A feeling of sick dread took hold of her.

“Dill?” Suddenly she remembered his pale, panicked face, his eyes white as sunlit snow. “Oh my God, what happened to Dill?” He’d looked so completely alone. But the army had reached her then, and she’d been forced to turn and fight.

“In the cell opposite,” Carnival said. Something in her tone, a hint of pleasure, made Rachel feel uneasy.

Groaning, the assassin pushed herself upright, her legs shivering in protest. She picked up the lantern and staggered over to the iron grate, chain scraping after her. The lantern illuminated broken flagstones beyond the cell, and bars opposite, a mirror of their own. A passageway divided the two cells, stretched away into darkness on either side. “Dill?” she called.

No answer.

“Dill, please, are you there?”

Carnival spoke from the edge of the lantern light. Her face was hidden by shadow but she sounded like she was smiling. “There was a lot of blood.”

“Dill!” Echoes of Rachel’s voice receded down the passageway. Only thetap, tap, tap of dripping water answered. Anguish swelled in her stomach, engulfed her. She felt as if she were drowning in it. She collapsed to her knees and gripped the iron bars as though they could keep her afloat. Please, God, let him be alive .

Suddenly Rachel didn’t know who she was praying to. Ulcis? There seemed to be no hope of salvation down here.

Carnival said, “They’ll gut him soon enough.”

“How can you say that?” Rachel snapped. “He might still be alive!”

“He doesn’t heal,” Carnival said, “not like me .” Her last words were thick with venom.

My poor Dill. Rachel thought of him flying around the temple spires, laughing, his stupid toy sword banging against his hip. She thought of the stupid, useless chain mail they had given him. His stupid bucket of snails. Tears prickled the corners of her eyes and she hugged her knees to her chin, dragging the chain closer. “I was supposed to protect him.”

“From those things ?”

“From you.”

Carnival snorted a laugh. “He’s safe from me now.”

“He wanted to help you,” Rachel said, “after you’d been injured. He tried to move so he could stand at your side. But I stopped him.”

Carnival said nothing.

Silence stretched between them. Rachel studied Carnival. Carnival peered back from behind her tracery of scars. The chain between them lay still, heavy on the cell floor. The angel’s expression was blank, just a scrawl of ancient knife cuts. But was there a glint of something predatory in her eyes?

Finally Rachel asked, “Why are we still alive?”

“Someone down here doesn’t like you,” Carnival said flatly.

“How long till Scar Night?”

“Soon.”

The assassin found the flatness of Carnival’s tone more disturbing than her anger. Anger could be steered, antipathy and malice were malleable. A glimmer of emotion might have offered a pathway, no matter how narrow, through those scars. But this detachment seemed absolute, as if its purpose was to separate Carnival from her hunger.

To protect her.

Rachel felt a twinge of pity. The angel had spent millennia constructing her defences. But they weren’t enough. Rachel had seen Carnival lapse into fury too many times.

She can’t detach herself completely. Darkness take me, even now she’s still trying. But it won’t hold. And so…the rage, the scars. How long now was it until Scar Night? Seven days? Six?

Carnival appeared to read her mind. “Three days,” she said.

Rachel’s hand went to her belt.

“They took your weapons,” Carnival said.

In Carnival’s eyes, Rachel thought she saw misery.

* * * *

There was a problem with the Tooth.

It didn’t work.

Callis, that pseudo-mythological feathered fop, had seen fit to sabotage it, and if Devon ever found himself in the Sanctum corridor again he meant to drag the angel’s damn skeleton down and show it what a mortar and pestle was for.

He was starting to hate the confinement of the Tooth’s bridge. Three days in the sun and the stink of the dead saturated everything around him. A score of ropes tied to the base of the skeletal control panel disappeared through an open window. After the crash, there had been that many survivors from the Adraki for the Heshette to hang. For a desert people this method of execution might have seemed unusual, but the mimicry of the Avulsior’s stage was not lost on the Poisoner. The Heshette didn’t seem overly concerned with the smell, but then they didn’t have to remain in here every hour of every day.

He opened the primer valve, an artefact like a boar’s tusk, and pulled back the first ignition lever—a slender, rib-like appendage. Blood—no, oil—surged within the controls.

The floor vibrated slightly, then stopped.

“Darkness take me!” Devon swung a fist at the mound of controls, only to strike himself on the leg with his stump, when the fist turned out to be no longer there. He slammed the lever back and pinched the bridge of his nose. If that shaft had broken, it would take a full day to repair. He almost spat. They didn’t have much time before the armada returned, reloaded, for a fresh assault.

Not that it would be any more effective than the first attack. The Tooth was well sealed against gas, impenetrable to crossbow fire, and shrugged off incendiaries as effectively as a rock. But the Poisoner was not about to suffer more of the Heshette and their damp-rag-wrapped faces. That joke had soured as quickly as the air around him.

What was more, the main city force would soon be assembled and ready to march against them. Heshette scouts reported massive construction work under way in the Deadsands, on Deepgate’s northern perimeter. They were building weapons: catapults, scorpions, rams, and siege-towers, cannibalizing half the League of Rope in the process. If he didn’t hurry, there wouldn’t be much left of the city for him to destroy.

And there was Scar Night to consider. If he could attack when the population were afraid to venture out, so much the better. Moondark would breed unease, dissension—if not mass desertion—among the reservists.

Devon left the bridge and trudged down the corridors to the engine room, where a hundred tapers burning among the piston shafts and walls of gears showed him the awful truth.

The propeller shaft they’d stripped from the Adraki had jumped from its mount.

Big Beard and Bigger Beard were straining against the steel mountings they’d fashioned to fit the bony depression in the ignition engine, trying to push the shaft back into place. Bataba had assigned these two to work for him. They had some clucking, unpronounceable camel-herder names, but Devon wasn’t interested.Big Beard andBigger Beard summed up their talents well enough. Wearily, he approached them. “What happened?”

Bigger Beard glanced over his shoulder. “It came out.”

“I can see that. Did the main engine turn?”

Bigger Beard gave him a blank look.

“The pistons, man. Did they move?” Devon sighed. “These…pillars, these.” He pointed with his stump.

“No.”

Devon inspected the damage. The securing bolts had sheared. Steel did not meld well with this strange ceramic, and at the speed required for the ignition engine to fire the primary, their hotchpotch assembly was too eager to fly apart. Not a disaster, provided they could find some more bolts in the wreckage of the two fallen warships. He sent the Beards out to look.

Despite the setbacks, he was getting there. Apart from this one shaft that Callis had removed like a key, the engines appeared to be intact. Enormous crystal vats held fuel enough, he supposed, for a journey around the world. The external lights—apparently a derivative of aether—were functional, although most of the internal lights had succumbed to the rigours of Heshette infestation.

But without main power, and with the hull air vents stuffed with rags and mud, the inside of the Tooth was like the inside of a labourer’s sock. Devon stole a taper and set off deeper into the machine, haunted by the echo of his boots. Lately he had been thinking more about Sypes’s refusal to speak. The old man was terrified not just of his god, but of anyone finding out his secret. Now Devon thought he understood why.

Toppled buckets and shreds of cloth littered the passages, which stank of urine. The mess hall was mouldering, the galley a cave of rusted sinks and taps. A single bottle of brown fluid stood on a shelf like something feared or revered, but the pots, pans, and cutlery had long since disappeared into the Heshette hovels.

At last he came to the crew quarters, a maze of interconnecting tunnels riveted with small, identical doors, each stamped with a hieroglyph. An air of rot suffused the place, as though after all these centuries the crew were still locked within. He found Bataba’s guard asleep outside the makeshift cell, snoring like a warship. Devon kicked him. The fat man woke with a start and wiped drool from his bearded lips.

“You’re supposed to be watching him,” Devon said.

“Bara Sahbel!”the guard cried. “I do not take orders from you.” He heaved his great bulk upright with a series of greasy exhalations. “You do not visit this prisoner without the shaman.”

“Fine. Go fetch him.”

The guard looked like he was about to argue, then he grumbled something in a dialect Devon didn’t understand and trudged away, still half asleep, but willing, it seemed, to take orders from almost anyone. Devon, meanwhile, ducked inside the cell.

The smell made his eyes water. A slop bucket lay on its side in one corner. Sypes was naked and curled up opposite, eyes closed, the smashed remains of his walking stick scattered about him. His skin seemed devoid of muscle or flesh, draped like loose cloth over a jumble of bones, bruises darkening every inch of him. A heartbeat passed before Devon saw the shallow rise and fall of the old man’s chest, the tremble in his ink-stained fingers, and realized that he was still alive.

“We’ll be on our way soon,” Devon said, righting the slop bucket before he squatted down beside the priest.

Sypes did not open his eyes.

“There’s no hope of rescue now, Sypes. No further need for your silence.” He paused, then spoke again in a whisper. “Your god is rising, isn’t he? But Ulcis isn’t what your Church would have us believe. That’s why you’re so afraid.”

“I wanted to protect them.” The old man swallowed. “I wanted to free Deepgate from her chains.”

“The only way to do that is to break them.”

“No,” Sypes said, “you’re wrong, Devon. Even chained, the city flourishes with life. Why can’t you see that?”

Devon sighed. “I once said how I was the only living man in Deepgate. I meant that everyone else takes, consumes, for no other reason than to feed the blood that feeds the abyss. That’s not life, it’s a hunger—as mindless as a poison or a disease. But I was wrong to claim life as mine alone. You and I stand each at the apex of twin pyramids, Sypes. Religion and science. There’s nothing beneath us but snapping mouths. But there’s life in you too, old man.”

“I can’t accept that as a compliment. You’re too arrogant. Besides, you’re insane.”

Devon smiled. “Can I get you anything to relieve the pain?”

“No. The pain is no more than I deserve after all I’ve done to them. If I die, it will be some comfort.”

“That reeks of martyrdom, Sypes, which doesn’t suit you.”

“If I’m a martyr, then it’s one to my conscience, not my god.”

“I fail to see the difference.”

Silence fell between them. Finally Devon said, “Tell me about Ulcis. Who is he really?”

“He’s Ayen’s son! A god!” The outburst triggered a coughing fit.

“All right.” Devon raised his hand. “Let’s not kill ourselves over semantics. Sometimes I think we’re both looking at the same thing through different ends of a sightglass. Our perceptions differ, but whatever we are trying to perceive doesn’t change.”

Sypes drew a long ragged breath. “Ulcis,” he said, “consumes the souls of the dead and leaves them empty. The lucky ones remain as vessels for his will. As long as he exists, they linger…like walking husks. Others suffer an even worse fate.” He winced. “Better to wander the Maze than to be used like that, to be stripped of everything that makes us human.”

“That,” Devon said, smiling, “depends upon which god a soul is used to empower.”

Sypes snorted. “Even Ulcis himself would struggle to match your arrogance. You think thirteen souls make you his equal?”

“I find that comparison demeaning. He is, after all, a parasite.”

“After the first holy war, his army grew too large to sustain itself. Without sustenance the dead rot. He could not swell their ranks and continue to…feed them. And so he has since allowed them to feast for a long, long time. For three millennia, the god of chains has waited, growing powerful on stolen souls while his slaves fed on his leavings.” The old man shook his head. “Now they are coming, and they will harvest our world for their master. Oblivion awaits us all. If you cut the city down, you’ll do nothing but aid him.”

Sudden convulsions gripped the priest. His body curled up like a fist, eyes screwed shut, fingers clenched, and coughs racking his emaciated frame.

Devon crouched and seized hold of the Presbyter’s shoulders until the worst of the tremors had passed. Then he pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and, having no clean water to dampen it, pressed it into the old man’s hand. Sypes clutched it like a lifeline.

Devon felt suddenly sorry for the Presbyter. Like all the city’s priests, his faith was anchored in that pit. He hoped Sypes would survive to witness the city fall. It would be a kindness, for only then would he see the truth. The dead did not walk. There was no army in the darkness beneath Deepgate’s chains.

“I’m getting you out of here,” he said.

“No,” Sypes gasped. “I don’t care any more. Help the temple guard instead. Ease his pain.”

Devon had forgotten about Angus. “He’s still alive?”

Sypes nodded. “I heard that he’s deranged, like a rabid dog, biting, and scratching himself. They’ve had to restrain him.”

“You!”

Devon turned to see Bataba standing in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Interrogating the prisoner,” Devon said.

“You too are a prisoner.” The fetishes in Bataba’s beard formed a crooked ladder up to his chin, under the welt across his ruined eye. “What were you talking to him about?”

“Matters of faith—issues we don’t see eye to eye on.”

The shaman bristled. “Leave the priest. You are coming with me.”

* * * *

The hatch swung open on to the full fury of a cinderblock sky. A blinding-white stairwell coiled up towards the sun. Below, the Deadsands hissed and shimmered.

“Up!” the shaman said.

Devon climbed.

On the roof of the huge machine it was worse. Soot-blackened funnels bisected the sunlight into searing slabs of white so painfully dazzling as to leave impressions in the eye. Blackthrone blazed, its serrated cliffs skeined with flashing copper, hot mineral seams, and incandescent crystal.

Bataba led him to the precipitous edge of the Tooth.

On the desert below some sort of game was under way. Horses jostled and thundered amid dust clouds, their riders swinging long, hooked poles. Every so often one of them would strike at the ground and send a fist-sized knot of rags hurtling through the air.

“Kabarah,”the shaman explained. “They are contesting for the fat priest’s jewels.”

Shrilling loudly, a handful of men spurred their mounts after the makeshift ball.

“An army is gathering against us,” the shaman continued. “Soon there will be little time for games.”

Beyond the improvised pitch, the wreckage of the two airships lay strewn across the desert. Old women still picked through a shattered gondola, bickering over finds. From this height Devon could not tell which ship it had belonged to. Strips of silver from the envelopes fluttered in the sand like party decorations.

Bataba’s gaze did not shift from the game. “They do not trust you,” he said. “I do not trust you.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Devon said.

“You have no respect for life.”

Devon snorted. “You are just as keen as I am to go to war.”

“For different reasons, Poisoner. We seek to pull a thorn from Ayen’s side, to crush her outcast son and those in this world who sustain him. But you—”

Renewed shouts went up from the riders below. Someone had hit the knot of rags into a roughly marked area of the pitch. A small boy picked up the bundle and scurried back with it to the centre.

“You,” the shaman continued, “do not flinch at murdering thousands to revenge some perceived injustice to yourself.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t long for justice for your own people, for the decades of war that have decimated your tribes.”

“I won’t deny we feel outrage. But our purpose is higher. We fight because it is Ayen’s will.”

“And if Ayen does not exist, has never existed, then what difference is there between us? My motivations at least are founded on belief rather than simple faith.”

“Another reason we do not trust you,” the shaman growled.

Devon felt like pitching him over the side, but he took a measured breath and swallowed his anger. He was growing accustomed to the angelwine’s violent demands. It seemed his consciousness had deliberately tightened around the seething knot inside him. His anger still flared when he least expected it, but he was gaining control.

A horseman struck the knotted bundle and sent it arcing towards the edge of the pitch. The other players surged after it, their mounts raising fresh plumes of dust.

Bataba said, “The skyship survivors told us how the fat man roused the chained city against us. An army to rival the greatest in history, they said. It is fitting. Yet when I saw his perfumed corpse wrapped in silks, he seemed more woman than man.” His gaze returned to the game. “We did not expect to find he had balls.”

A shrill ululation went up from below. Another rider had apparently scored. Devon felt faintly nauseous.

At that moment the Tooth shuddered. The roof vibrated and then settled into a steady, rhythmic booming. Curtains of built-up sand hissed loose from the funnels.

“It is time,” the shaman said, “to go to war.”