“Who are they after? Dill or Cospinol?”
“Both, I imagine.”
“How long can you maintain this fog?”
She shrugged. “That all depends on Basilis.” She picked up the hideous little pup, cuddled it in her arms, and kissed its ear. “Doesn't it, sweetie?”
The dog growled.
Anchor beamed. “I must be on my way to Hell now. The priests who control these golems won't kill themselves, eh? Good luck with Ayen, Mina Greene.”
Rachel looked between the two. “Hell is one thing,” she said, “but Heaven is an altogether different matter. Even Ayen's own sons didn't consider themselves powerful enough to intrude in their mother's realm. The goddess of light and life will butcher us all.”
A myriad of tiny glass scales around Mina's face crinkled. “But she'll kill the enemy, too.”
The young thaumaturge planned to use Dill to attack the gates of Heaven, reasoning that if the goddess of light and life perceived a threat from one arconite, she might destroy the rest of them, ridding the world of Menoa's unholy Twelve. Yet not even her son Cospinol knew exactly how to find the gates of Heaven, nor how to breach them in order to reach the goddess shuttered within. His kin had never been ones to share their knowledge, it seemed. The thaumaturge's plan was nothing more than a leap into the abyss. Yet it was still the best plan they had.
“We'll search Sabor's palace,” Mina explained to Rachel, “and then Mirith's. If anyone knew how to reach the goddess, it was them. They had to know something if they were planning to storm Heaven themselves.”
A hunting horn sounded somewhere to the west.
John Anchor stepped forward. “Hasp, Mina, I will not shake those glass hands of yours, but I must go now. Hell awaits.”
Mina rushed up and hugged him, while Rachel merely nodded. Hasp fixed his dark eyes on Anchor. “Give my regards to King Menoa,” he said.
The tethered man laughed, and strode southwards across the glade and then faded into the misty trees. The great rope trailed after him, cleaving a path through the forest canopy. The sound of snapping branches could be heard long after he vanished from sight. And then he started singing.
That's his idea of stealth? Rachel shook her head. The fog hid him and the skyship above, but it couldn't hide the noise of his passage. How can he hope to slip past his hunters and drag that vessel into Hell unnoticed? Rachel didn't really believe he expected to. King Menoa would know the precise moment when the portal was breached but, from what she had seen of Anchor, the big man from the Riot Coast relished confrontation.
And so Rachel found herself standing there in a forest in a strange land with a thaumaturge, a dog, and a debased god in glass armour. The hunting horns called again from somewhere closer. Hasp winced at the noise and clutched his head, but he said nothing.
They encountered Dill several hundred paces to the north. Or rather, they found his shins rearing amongst the oak and elm. The rest of him stood obscured in the misty grey heights. They stood beside his heel and looked up. From the heavens came the distant sound of machinery.
“Dill?” Rachel called.
A bony fist descended, snapping through branches, and formed a cradle on the ground. The three climbed into his upturned palm.
And then they were rising up through the chill damp air. Rachel clung on to Dill's knuckle as they surged through the forest canopy. The trees soon fell away below them, dissolving into the mist. Huge bones wrapped in metal tubing loomed on her left as they soared up past the arconite's pelvis and spine-their pitted yellow surfaces etched with the same complex whorls she had once seen on the hull of Deepgate's Tooth. A citadel of machinery shuddered behind the giant's ribs, composed of dark metal forged in Hell-perhaps from the broken chains of the city she had been born in. The mechanics of it were vast and unknowable. She smelled oil, and another ripe and coppery odour, like that of butchered meat or the killing fields of Larnaig, yet tainted in some chemical way she couldn't identify. Lime? It reminded her of the poisons in Cinderbark Wood. She sensed the pressure of tons of blood and hydraulic fluid within those piston housings and tubes and vats.
Dill's skull finally came into view-huge and naked and hideous, and devoid of anything that suggested a living mind inside. The cavernous eye sockets held naught but echoes and pools of dank water, providing shelter for birds or bats, whose shit spattered the lower ridges of bone. His jaw was partially open, and the yellow teeth stood motionless. Green moss clung to the underside of his jawbone. Rachel could see the barrels Cospinol's slaves had unloaded heaped in the darkness deep within that maw-enough coin to buy an army.
Dill's hand came to a halt beside his mouth and Rachel realized that he meant for them to step inside, beside the gold. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes but she could not say exactly why. They climbed from the hand and into the giant's mouth.
Mina set her dog down and headed into the gloom at the back of this dim bone-and-metal cave. Her glass-shod feet echoed on metal floor panels. Hasp stood looking up at the golem's palate above his head, his face in shadow. Rachel sniffed the damp air. It stank of the battlefield, of iron and blood.
“Dill?” she whispered.
For a moment she imagined that the floor had trembled, yet there was no answer but the echo of her own voice.
Mina looked up. “I warned him not to speak,” she said. “He has a voice like thunder, quite loud enough to betray our position to our enemies.”
Rachel stared at her. “I need to talk to him.” She hesitated. “I need to know that he understands where we're going.”
Mina beckoned her over and then took her hand. The thaumaturge led the Spine assassin over to the very back of the oral cave, where a dark crawl space led up out of the main chamber. “This leads to the topmost vertebrae of the spine,” she explained. “From there you can climb up into the skull.”
“His skull?”
“It's not a living creature,” Mina said quietly. “The arconite is simply a machine, a golem, a rude simulacrum of an angel. King Menoa chose this form to ease the stresses put upon the soul trapped within. This way Dill's subconscious can still function. He can move his limbs without having to consciously direct any unfamiliar mechanisms. It is a suit of armour for his soul, brash and hideous, yet functional.” She stared at the crawl space above her, perhaps unwilling to meet Rachel's eye. “Climb up inside the machine and you'll find your friend's soul. Speak to him there.” She looked at the floor. “He won't need his larynx to answer you.”
Rachel climbed. Crystals encrusted the walls, less like jewels than chunks of tarnished glass. The passage rose steeply, then opened into a dark atrium a little wider than her shoulders. She reached out in the darkness and felt a tangle of arm-thick pipes running vertically, more crystals, and hexagonal metal pins. She stood there in the dark for a long moment. It isn't you. It's just a prison … like Ulcis's abyss or Cospinol's ship.
Mina was right. This was armour: a suit created by the Lord of the Maze to allow his servants to walk freely amongst mortals-and to destroy them. When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she noticed a dim light shining overhead. The passageway now rose directly above her head. She gripped the pipes and pulled herself up.
A room had been created inside the arconite's head. There were no windows. The light she had previously seen came from another source entirely.
Rachel put her hand over her mouth and began to sob.