Scar Night

31

On the Brink

Devon slammed the cell door open. “Get up,” he said.

Sypes flinched. The old priest had not moved since the Poisoner had last seen him. He was still lying naked and shivering among the fragments of his walking stick.

“Put this on.” Devon threw the Presbyter’s cassock towards him.

Sypes still did not move.

Devon dragged him upright, and thrust the cassock into the old man’s arms. “Wear it. You must be recognisable.”

Without his stick, Sypes had to lean against the wall for support. His thin arms and legs trembled as he pulled the cassock over his shoulders, and let the hem tumble to his feet.

“There,” Devon said. “Now you look almost human again.”

But that was a lie. There was nothing much human left in the old priest. He was all skin and sinew, mottled with purple and yellow bruises, more corpse than man. The cassock engulfed him, seemed to drag his stooped frame even closer to the ground. Grey eyelids drooped over misty eyes that did not lift to meet Devon’s.

The Poisoner had to help him from the cell. He all but carried the old man along the crew quarters companionway and into the innards of the Tooth. Sypes shivered and coughed and his knees buckled constantly, despite Devon’s assistance. The priest weighed almost nothing.

By the time they reached the corridor leading to the outer hatches, Sypes had started to drift in and out of consciousness. Devon had to shake him whenever he sensed him fade. “Just a few more steps, old man. We’re nearly there.” The Presbyter mumbled incoherently and batted his hands about as though dismissing invisible servants.

Heshette bowmen packed the hot, cramped corridor. They were loosing off arrows through rents in the hull left by the barrage of scorpion spines, whose serrated shafts had been knocked away and dragged aside to leave room. Piles of them now lay against the inside wall, their poisoned barbs covered in rugs and heavy blankets. Outside, war drums boomed a constant dirge over the clash of steel and the shouts and screams of the attacking army.

“Over here”—Devon dragged Sypes the last few feet—“by this hatch.”

The hatch door had been ripped away and pitch-smoke wafted through the gaping hole. Two bowmen crouched there, sheltered one at each side, alternately firing arrows along the length of the hull. Outside, burning wood keened and snapped and whistled. Arrows and bolts whizzed and whined and tore screams from their targets. Great wooden wheels grumbled, boots clumped, and hoofs thundered. Over it all, the war drums endlessly beat out the pace of battle. Bataba waited over to one side, half his tattooed features lit up by flames.

“Most of the ladders have been repelled,” the shaman explained. “But the siege-towers are moving into place and we have no more pitch. We cannot hold them back any longer, so this is your last chance, Poisoner.”

Devon peered outside, then jerked his head back as an arrow smashed to splinters against the wall behind him. Two more followed it in quick succession. He frowned, then grabbed Sypes’s cassock and pulled him over, exposing him to view at the open hatch. Firelight washed over the priest’s face for an instant, before Devon yanked him aside. Another arrow shot through the gap, and whistled past the old man’s ear. Sypes did not appear to notice it. Instead he muttered something about stonemasons.

“There’s always one,” Devon muttered. He waited a moment, and then thrust Sypes back to the opening, like a marionette. This time there were no arrows.

A chorus of shouts outside: “Hold your fire. Hold your fire.”

Bataba echoed the command to his own bowmen. The sounds of battle died. The drums stopped beating.

Devon edged behind the priest and peered over his shoulder.

Fully half of the Tooth’s hull was already on fire. Glinting armour and flames seemed to stretch to the horizon. Visored helms looked up at him from the crush of shields. Corpses, peppered with arrows, littered the battlefield. Pockets of flame sent up boiling columns of tar-smoke. Four intact siege-towers loomed black against the bloody sky. Two others were closer, but ablaze; embers raced skywards through their charred skeletons like tiny fleeing souls.

Trumpets sounded and, beyond the main mass of infantry, scattered units of cavalry regrouped. Three riders broke from the nearest unit and urged their horses forward. Ranks of soldiers parted to let them through.

Devon muttered to Bataba, “Tell your men to keep their bowstrings slack. Shoot these men and it’s all over. We need time.”

The three riders threaded through the army. Devon recognized the insignia emblazoned across the breastplate of the nearest. This was Gullan, sergeant of the cityguard regulars—a tall, broad-shouldered man astride a fierce courser that snapped at foot-soldiers who got too close. The other two, Devon presumed, represented reservist infantry and cavalry divisions. The soldier to Gullan’s left wore dented plate and a peaked helm with winged cheek-guards. He carried a short-sword and had a wooden buckler strapped to his left arm. The man to his right wore a chain hauberk over boiled leathers, and rested a light crossbow on his saddle-horn. Gullan sat easily on his courser between them, ignoring the horse’s ill temper, his eyes fixed on Devon.

Devon shouted down, “I have a proposition for Clay.”

Shouts and jeers went up from the nearest foot-soldiers. Gullan raised a hand and the noise died. “I’ll hear it,” he said.

“I’ll speak with Clay,” Devon said, “not his boot boy.”

“I have Captain Clay’s authority to parley.”

“Is your leader afraid to approach me himself?”

A score of crossbows rose at this remark. In response, Devon pushed the Presbyter forward, so that the old man leaned precariously over the edge.

“Hold.” Gullan held his hand out, palm down. Most of the weapons lowered. “I will escort you to him, Poisoner.”

“Perhaps. Withdraw this army, and I will consider it.”

This caused indignation among the closer ranks of infantry. Swords rattled on shields. Gullan said, “Say what you need to say, Devon.”

“This is not a matter of need. This is a matter of mutual benefit. Why else have I halted this machine on the brink of Deepgate?”

“The Tooth of God is finished,” Gullan said. “Its only purpose now will be to serve as your tomb.”

“Shall I start the engines again before we speak further? How many more of your men should I crush before you hear me on equal terms?”

The reservist sergeant with the peaked helm spoke urgently to Gullan. There was a heated exchange between them, and then the regular said, “Release the Presbyter and we’ll talk.”

Devon felt a faint rumble through the floor. He edged Sypes forward an inch. It was a hundred-foot drop to the ground below. The Presbyter made no move to save himself. He remained as slack as a puppet in Devon’s grip.

“You wish me to release him?” Devon asked. Then he whispered to Sypes, “What do you think? Should I release you?”

Another rumble sounded within the Tooth, louder this time.

Sypes frowned down at the army, apparently confused.

“Wake up, old man.” Devon shook him. “Better for us all if you appear lucid.”

The Presbyter’s face tightened. He gazed over the upturned faces of the men beneath him, and blinked. And then he twisted, grabbed Devon’s shirt with both hands and pulled hard.

Devon shot out his free arm to grab the lintel above his head, but his stump could grip nothing, and he fell forward, still holding on to Sypes with his good hand. The world swirled under him.

But instead of dropping into the mass of soldiers way below, he thumped against the hull just under the hatch, and swung back out. The Presbyter’s cassock had snagged on something. They were both now hanging underneath the hatch. Devon wrapped his damaged arm around the priest’s neck, and struggled to get a better grip with the other. Sypes gasped and choked.

Bataba and the two bowmen were pulling on the priest’s cassock, trying to heave both men back inside the Tooth. Devon twisted, collided against the hull again, and rebounded. Flashes of steel and fire and sky wheeled all around him. The cassock tightened around Sypes’s neck till the old man’s eyes bulged. His face was turning red but his fists still gripped Devon’s shirt.

And then all at once they were being hoisted up, as the Heshette dragged them back inside the Tooth. Sypes lay wheezing on the floor. As Devon rose unsteadily, three crossbow bolts thudded into his chest and knocked him back down with the force of a hammer blow. A fourth caught him in the neck even as he fell. He felt his jawbone shatter. The steel tip jarred into his palate and blood flooded his mouth.

Devon rolled aside as a further shower of bolts and arrows shattered against the wall behind him.

The bowmen in the corridor returned fire.

“Gahh,” Devon croaked, lying on his back on top of the Presbyter. He could feel the wooden shaft lodged in his neck, its end pressing against his chest where the other bolts protruded. Air burbled in his lungs. Grimacing, he ripped the bolt from his throat and threw it away. Agony blossomed in his jaw. “Gahh…” One by one he yanked out the others.

“Da…ness take you.” Devon spat blood and hauled himself upright. “Damn you, Sypes. Tha…was sore.”

Presbyter Sypes lay motionless at his feet. None of the missiles had struck him.

“You had better be dead,” Devon growled. “Tha…was unfeasibly—”

The corridor shook as, deep within the Tooth, engines grumbled to life. A roar went up from the bowmen in the corridor, answered by a savage bellow from the troops outside. Bugles and trumpets shrilled renewed orders. War drums began to pound.

“We’re moving!” Bataba shouted.

Devon could feel it: the Tooth had begun to crawl forward once more. Its tracks were already crushing a wide path through Deepgate’s army. A savage grin split his bloodied face. He felt the elixir answer his wounded body’s demands, felt it curl around his lungs and heart—repairing, strengthening—and for a moment he even thought he heard the keening of thirteen souls. He grabbed Sypes by the loose skin of his neck and yanked him to his feet. “Do you hear it, old man? Do you feel it in those brittle bones of yours? The end now. Everything you’ve done has led to this.”

Sypes’s head lolled drunkenly.

“These deaths are your doing, Sypes.”

“Please,” Sypes gasped, “Alexander…”

Devon smashed the priest’s head against the hull, once, twice, thrice, until fragments of bone and brain covered the bulkhead. Then he pitched him out of the hatch.

“That damn repair had better hold,” he roared.

Bataba stared at him in shock.

“What?” Devon snapped. “We’re moving, aren’t we?”

* * * *

It’s alive, is it? Good, now we can kill it again.” The god of chains was still fuming. Occasionally he pinched his nostrils and examined the blood on his fingers with a mixture of horror and disbelief.

Rachel couldn’t tear her eyes away from Dill as he tried to rise, but flopped back to the floor, where he sat trembling and rubbing his arms. His face was chalk-white on one side, black on the other where the blood had pooled. And started to decompose. The stench from him turned her stomach.

Dill reached to pick up his sword and frowned at it, opening and closing his mouth as though struggling to remember the name of the object. A black, swollen tongue slid between his lips. “Word,” he said. “Min.”

“Dill?”

No response.

“Dill!”

When he looked at her, Rachel saw that his eyes were colourless, not the sharp white of fear but a misty gelid hue. “Dill, what do you remember?”

Dill wrapped his arms around himself and his gaze dropped to the empty syringe protruding from his chest. He plucked it out and let it clatter to the floor. Then he stretched out his wings…and winced.

Carnival and Ulcis were watching him intently: she with a look of lost hope; he with mounting ire. Swords unsheathed, two of the god’s lieutenants blocked the exit from the cell.

Dill was healing fast. As Rachel watched, the bruises on his face paled and his missing feathers grew back with astonishing speed. His eyes seemed clearer than just moments before. He placed a finger inside his mouth and pulled back his lower lip to reveal several missing teeth. The finger came away bloody. “Cold,” he whispered.

Ulcis sniffed contemptuously, and turned to leave. “Lock the cell door,” he said. “Let the freak devour her—”

With a clatter of iron, Carnival suddenly cast a loop of chain around his neck and yanked. The links snapped rigid and jerked the god off his feet. He crashed to his back on the flag-stones.

She was at his neck in an instant, twisting the chain tighter. Ulcis gasped, and both archons at the door moved to attack her. But the god held his hand up, and they paused, uncertain.

“I want you to remember this pain,” Carnival hissed.

The god’s face contorted with rage. He tried to say something, but Carnival drew the chain even tighter, and all that escaped his throat was a snarl.

“Send them away.” She loosened her grip and let Ulcis suck in a breath. His face bright purple, he tried to reach round for her, his mighty wings thumping for leverage against the floor.

“What do you—?” he began.

“Shut up!” Carnival twisted her fist again. She leaned closer, her teeth an inch from his neck. “Get rid of those bastards or your head comes off. Then we’ll see if you can grow a new one.”

Ulcis slumped, holding up his hands. “Wait,” he gasped. “Rebecca—”

The links bit deeper into his flesh. “My name is Carnival!”

Blood bubbled from the corners of Ulcis’s mouth as veins ridged his neck and his eyes swelled.

The archons edged closer. Rachel slashed the air in front of them with her sword.

“Last chance,” Carnival warned. “Do you want to see another eon? Another day?”

Dill had finally found his feet. The bruises on his face had almost disappeared, and his eyes had changed colour. He regarded Carnival for a moment with a pale gold gaze, then turned to Rachel, a slight frown creasing his brow.

“Domestic,” she explained.

Ulcis waved a panicked hand at the archons. They backed off.

“Into the cell opposite,” Carnival growled.

The chain stretched just far enough to allow Rachel to pick up Mr. Nettle’s keys and lock the door.

“Now go,” Ulcis wheezed. “Leave me.”

Carnival grinned. “I won’t abandon you like this, Father.” She grabbed his wrist and forced it, struggling, to her mouth. “Tonight is Scar Night—or had you forgotten?”

The angel bit deeply.

* * * *

The Poisoner shouldered several bowmen aside, then headed upstairs, past runners, warriors, and wounded, through the cacophony of booming drums and clashing metal, rumbling engines and screams.

When he reached the bridge, he was in no better mood. He glowered at the Heshette councillors assembled, batted their questions aside with his stump, then slumped heavily into his control seat to peer out of the cracked and blackened windows.

Dawn turned the scene outside into an inferno. A handful of churchships hung in the smoke, like angry red welts in a poisonous sky. Deepgate troops broke in waves against the now static cutters, falling over each other to scramble away from the advancing Tooth. Knots of Spine among them kept loosing off bolts in a concentrated assault on the bridge windows. Scores of men disappeared beneath the great machine. Some managed to jump up to the cutting arms and hang there. Many others tried and failed.

“Mow them down, you said,” Devon snarled.

Bataba did not answer. The shaman had withdrawn to the far edge of the bridge, his face pinched and ashen.

Devon slammed a lever forwards and the sharpened cogs began to turn. Most of the men on the cutting arms dropped quickly into the scoop below or were crushed beneath the Tooth’s revolving tracks. A few held on longer, but as the cogs quickened they too were thrown back against the hull or down into the panicked mass of soldiers desperate to escape. The Tooth drove mercilessly over them all.

He banked the great machine to the left to intercept an abandoned siege-tower. The whirring cutters connected and ripped the structure into a cloud of splinters. Men leapt clear or died; a bloody mist fell over the jostling infantry. Devon resumed his southerly course, steering the machine up the ridge surrounding the abyss. Iron groynes broke under the Tooth’s tracks with hollow booms, and all at once Deepgate appeared before them.

The city looked as Devon had seen it on countless mornings before: the dusty shambles of wood and tin of the League; the curved shadow thrown by the eastern scarp; the pool of smog over the Scythe, pierced by chimneystacks, cranes and mooring spines; clumped tenements furrowed by endless winding lanes. And above it all, wreathed in mist, rose the temple. Gaslights still glimmered weakly among the chains. Had anyone bothered to evacuate the city? Devon doubted it. Deepgate had always been a place to die.

The cutters were a churning blur beneath him. Cogs hummed and ticked and sent nervous vibrations through the bridge. Devon eased the Tooth to a halt, just yards from the edge, his eyes fixed on the city before him. He clicked a short lever back.

Bataba edged closer.

“This is what you want?” Devon asked.

“For Ayen,” the shaman whispered.

The cutting arms extended. Devon eased back another handle. Spinning blades lowered and ripped through a clutch of peripheral timber shanties. The houses exploded into shards of wood and tin. A soft ripping sound, and then the cutters bit into a foundation chain with a metallic shriek. Sparks geysered, cascading over the rooftops of the League two hundred yards away.

The foundation chain parted with a colossal crack. It collapsed and sagged among skewed streets and walkways, and then the League of Rope gave way like so much dry wood. Lesser chains snapped under the additional strain, cables broke and whipped free, and the great chain itself ripped a path through the city. Flames bloomed along both sides of the rent as gas lines tore open. Half a thousand buildings toppled, then slipped into the abyss. At the heart of Deepgate, the temple shook and tilted.

“Man or god.” Devon manoeuvred the Tooth around the rim towards the next foundation chain. “Whatever Ulcis may be, this ought to get his attention.”

* * * *

They left Dill’s cell and for some time followed a sequence of gloomy passages before emerging at the mountain of bones below the abyss. The hunger had left Carnival’s eyes; in its place shone something Rachel had never witnessed in the angel before. Not peace, but perhaps…something akin to calm . Carnival was drenched in blood, but she bore no fresh wounds. Her father’s death had not, it seemed, grieved her.

Of the scrounger there was no sign. Rachel hoped the big man was still alive, that somehow he had escaped the Palace of Chains.

Dill stood to one side, quietly regarding the city of Deep. The forges were now silent. Ulcis’s army had stopped making weapons and now seemed utterly confused, wandering listlessly through Deep’s sculpted hollows and passages. Thousands of tapers winked in the gloom, threw long shadows over the slopes of bones.

Dill turned as Rachel approached, but his expression didn’t change.

She held up her lantern. “Are you strong enough to fly?” Physically, he seemed fine, but there was a faraway look in his eyes. One hand rested lightly on the sword at his hip.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“Do you remember anything ?”

“Something.” He studied the chain linking Rachel and Carnival. It lay in a blood-soaked coil between them. “Why are you two chained together?”

“Tradition.” Rachel shrugged. “Do you remember my name?”

No answer.

“Rachel,” she said. “And this is Carnival.” But if he recognized them, it didn’t show.

Carnival was staring straight up, her head tilted to one side.

A whine, a rush of air, and, thirty yards away, something huge fell from the darkness above and hit the mountain of bones with a colossalcrump . Bones flew everywhere.

Rachel jumped, grabbing Dill’s sleeve, and scanned the darkness overhead. Her sword was now in her hand, although she didn’t remember drawing it. Strips of tin roofing floated down like enormous leaves. “Was that a house?” she gasped.

Carnival nodded. “More are on their way down.” She wiped blood from her mouth. “A lot more.”