Anchor paused. He had last seen Menoa's former metaphysical engineer walking the battlefield after Rys's Northmen had slaughtered their Mesmerist foes, drawing power from the bloody ground. The woman might be a corpse, but he didn't doubt her wits. Alice Harper had been the one who had first realized that the king would use his own dead to open this very portal, but it had been too late by then to do anything about it.
She thinks that something is rising from the portal, Cospinol went on. Something huge.
Another arconite? How could that be possible? The giant dived down sharply and gave the Rotsward a sharp tug. In all of history he had never heard of a battle fought inside a portal between two worlds. The trial to come might offer him a treasure chest of memories to savour until his dying days.
The tethered man cracked the knuckles of both his hands and then tensed the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Set, he grabbed the spine of the portal and dragged himself further down, straining against the massive rope attached to his back. The rope seemed to stretch, but here in this darkness it could not snap. Far above him, on the Larnaig Field, the Rotsward's gallows would be groaning and bending as they pushed down into the earth, but they too would not break. Between the divine will of Cospinol and the unlimited strength of his slave, the only thing to bend would be nature herself.
Anchor heaved against his harness until he felt the land around the portal mouth crumble under the insurmountable pressure. Slowly and inexorably, he dragged Cospinol's great skyship down into the depths of Hell.
3
Rachel spent the night in Dill's mouth. She had curled up under a blanket with her back pressed against his molars, but she couldn't get comfortable. Air seeped in through gaps in his front teeth and turned the space into a cold, dank cave. Mina had suggested building a fire, but Rachel had snuffed that idea. It just hadn't seemed right. From far below she heard the constant judder of machinery and the crash of broken trees each time Dill took another step through the forest.
Living forest. Dill's vision of petrified trees could only have been a flash of memory or a dream. Since leaving Deepgate, the young angel had been thrust from one horrific reality to another, from the fathomless pit beneath the chained city to the corridors of Hell itself. It was a wonder he had maintained any of his sanity at all.
They had tied up Cospinol's stores as best they could. The stacked barrels and crates had been inclined to topple over each time Dill turned his monstrous head-prompting Mina and Hasp to leap aside in order to avoid damaging their fragile skins. Now both the thaumaturge and the debased god were slumped against the piled goods. Hasp looked twice as exhausted as Mina, the parasite in his skull having tormented him throughout the night. Only Mina's hideous little dog, Basilis, had managed to sleep easily.
Cospinol had provided them with rude furnishings: rugs, blankets, lanterns, and even an old table and chairs. The chairs and lamps had fallen over, and now stood in a heap against one side of the jaw, but the table remained where they had set it-a huge rotten old slab of wood that smelled faintly of brine.
The sky lightened. They had no view but one of fog. Occasionally Mina closed her eyes and breathed deeply of the mist, announcing the position of those arconites she could sense. Six of Menoa's twelve golems remained within the fog, following them to the south. The others were lost, somewhere beyond the reach of her sorcerous vision.
This troubled Rachel. Had those giants now gone after Anchor and Cospinol? If they had managed to stop the tethered man before he reached the portal, then all hope rested on Mina's crazy plan to attack Heaven.
She stretched her neck, then rose and peered out of Dill's mouth. Nothing but a flat greyness in the sky ahead, a bleary carpet of forest below. “How much further does this woodland stretch?” she asked.
“A hundred and twenty leagues,” Hasp replied. “It once covered most of Pandemeria, but the Pandemerian Railroad Company cut vast swaths of it down during the railway reconstruction project. All that's left are the old forests beyond Coreollis. The Northmen were once woodsmen, you should remember.”
“We must have covered at least eighty leagues during the night,” Rachel said, “if Dill managed to keep a straight course, that is. Aren't we supposed to have reached the Rye Valley by now?”
They had decided to head for the Flower Lakes, a system of deepwater reservoirs Rys had formed by damming two of the rivers in the north. The lands around there were reputed to be the garden of Coreollis, and there they hoped to lose their pursuers. Dill's trail through the Great Pandemerian Forest was too easy to follow but, if his giant footprints could be hidden under deep water, they might yet slip away from Menoa's arconites in the dense fog.
Hasp shrugged. “I have no idea where we are, nor where to find the Flower Lakes from here.” He winced and pressed a hand against his head. “No doubt Mina or Basilis has an inkling. Everything in this grey gloom seems evident to her.”
Mina looked up. “The land keeps rising northwards and forms a low ridge. I can see a forest trail half a league to the northeast. It seems to have been used recently by a large number of people-refugees, I think, from an abandoned loggers' town lying to the southeast. The road runs on through a second, much smaller camp next to a sawmill, but that looks deserted, too. Just a group of workers' houses, storage sheds, and a shuttered inn. There's a huge yellow machine-an abandoned steam tractor-but it doesn't look like anyone's been working there recently.”
“So, where are we?”
She shook her head. “I've no idea.”
Hasp grunted. “Would that Cospinol had possessed a map.”
Sabor's realm lay to the north of Pandemeria and the Flower Lakes. It was a wild, ice-blown land-a place named Herica since before man's memory. Cospinol had described it as a country of white bears and five-limbed beasts larger than aurochs. Sabor's fortress-the oddly titled Obscura Redunda-stood atop the summit of an outcrop of black volcanic glass in the shadow of the Temple Mountains. But not even Cospinol had known exactly where to find it. He'd never been to visit his brother.
None of this helped Mina, who could sense, in the minutest detail, the leagues of forest within the surrounding fog and yet couldn't explain how their immediate environs corresponded to the wider world. Without sun or stars to guide them, they were forced to rely on dead reckoning. And they were lost.
Rachel gazed down through the gaps in Dill's teeth. From this height she could see an unbroken canopy of misty trees. Acres of dismal grey forest swept by them with each of the arconite's steps. “We could stop and ask for directions,” she suggested.
Hasp laughed.
It was the first time Rachel had heard the god laugh. She turned to look at him and noticed that the strain had left his eyes.
“I'm serious,” she said. “In this gloom we can't even be sure if we're heading in the right direction. Mina, how close is that camp?”
Even the thaumaturge was smiling. “A few minutes away. I can't see anyone about, although there may be people in one of the houses.” She looked at Hasp.
“Why not?” he said.
Rachel gazed up at the arconite's palate. “Dill? Did you hear us?”
The bony chamber tilted sharply forward and then back, causing the chairs and lamps to slide across the floor and crash against Dill's barrier of giant teeth. Hasp and Mina clung on for their lives.
Hasp let out a snarl and righted himself, his face contorting with anger. “Would you remind him to stop doing that?” he growled at Rachel. “Nine Hells, it's bad enough being trapped in this damn cave, without him almost killing us every time he nods his head.” He grabbed both sides of his head roughly, then twisted away in pain and stormed off to the back of the chamber.