His daughter Ellie and her husband Jack would receive a poor inheritance, he feared. Yet he'd done everything he could to ensue they wouldn't be burdened with the angel's curse. They were happy here in Deepgate. And that, after all, was the main reason he'd stayed in the chained city himself.
Tortured in a bottle of wasps for all eternity?
The prospector sighed.
The things I do to keep my family safe.
It was dusk when the ox carriage reached the chained city. In the west, only a red ribbon remained of the departing day, like a forest fire raging across the horizon. The air above the abyss rim remained cool and fresh, heavy with the smell of wet metal and rust.
The beasts snorted and steamed as the vehicle rumbled to a halt behind them, its yellow wooden slats bright in the sunset. It had halted close to the edge of the precipice, in what appeared to be a deserted settlement of adobe huts, all shadowed by great hummocks of stone, logs, slate and lime. The carriage door creaked open and a man hopped down. He strolled to the lip of the chasm, to where a broad wooden rope bridge dipped away into the city. He was of average height and weight, but with clear, quick eyes and an energetic gait. A tall black hat sat at a jaunty angle upon his head, and he wore an ancient red leather topcoat full of numerous pockets, heavily patched and patterned with black wire filigree, feathers and teeth. In one fist he clutched a walking stick (a gut-sticker, disguised) which he dug into the bridge planks to measure their strength and degree of decay.
The greasy wood crumbled under the point of his stick. "Rotten," he said.
"Just as I said, Sir," the coachman replied from his high sprung seat at the front of the carriage. "The main route down to the temple won't be finished for months, and that woodway's not strong enough for oxen and carts. If you don't mind, I'll have to drop you here."
Othniel Cope gave the man a curt nod, then turned back to admire the view. "This is fine," he said.
Deepgate spread out below him, a vast metal web suspended over the mouth of the abyss. Anchors driven into the bedrock around the chasm perimeter supported the weight of the chains, yet despite their obvious girth and strength, the city sagged towards the centre in an enormous bowl of ironwork and dismal dwellings. Only the Church of Ulcis rose to any significant height. And yet even that great black temple appeared to be unfinished, for Cope spied acres of scaffolding clinging to its distant spires and turrets.
He pointed with his stick. "When will the temple be completed?"
"The Church of Ulcis?" the coachman said. "Another ten years, Sir, if the priests are to be believed. But they've being saying that for the last five hundred years. I doubt we'll see the Rookery Spire finished in our lifetimes."
"Not in your lifetime, at any rate," muttered Cope.
The coachman turned on his seat and began to unstrap his passenger's travel bag from the roof of the carriage.
Building work appeared to be underway throughout most of Deepgate. A mass of townhouses clustered around the temple itself, all interwoven with arched bridges and streets suspended within wickers of chain, yet further out the structures thinned, becoming an unruly mess of hemp rope and timber shacks. Stanchions held pulleys and bucket lifts – evidently for moving materials and equipment – while slender walkways dipped, rose and zigzagged through it all like drapes of lace.
One of these walkways climbed, by way of a series of beams and platforms, in a crooked line from the centre of the city up to the very edge of the abyss before them. It was wide enough for two oxen to walk abreast, although it looked perilously fragile and steep in places. "Has something delayed the construction of these hanging roads?" asked Cope.
The coachman continued to untie knots around the luggage. "The workers are waiting on more sapperbane," he said, "but the Tooth won't be back from Blackthrone for another week. Once we get some decent cross-chains down there, we'll be able to bring beasts down into the Warrens." He tugged at a clasp. "Stone and timber has to be bucket-lifted or manhandled down a block at a time for fear of collapsing the woodways, and we keep losing ropes, pulleys and timber to the bloody scroungers."
"Scroungers?"
The other man grunted. "They live in those shacks on the fringes." He freed Cope's travel bag and handed it down to him, before returning to loosen the straps around his own luggage – bales of some foul-smelling animal skins, from what Cope could gather.
"Most of the new immigrants don't have a penny," the coachman went on. "Beggars and cut-purses coming in from the river towns. We put up woodways... they strip them for pulpboard and hemp, or steal what they can from the labourers' camps around the abyss. Then they build their own hovels on any bit of chain going free down there. No permissions, no planning, just leagues of rope. Half the Holy City is a slum."
"The Church does not object?"
The coachman shrugged. "Presbyter Scrimlock's been trying to get them all recorded on the census. But there's an endless stream of new arrivals." He heaved one bale over the luggage rack and let it fall to the ground, and then started untying another. "Some of them crawl around in the nets under the Warrens, looking for rubbish that's fallen from the streets above." He shook his head. "Even the children are at it, gangs of them. What kind of man would let his young ones clamber around in those nets, eh? Thieving little shits, just like their parents. They take what they want. It's not right when the rest of us are forced to pay so much for everything."
"Not even your refuse is safe from theft?"
"Principle of the thing, Sir."
Cope withdrew a silver watch from his one of his many pockets and glanced at it. "You have arrived precisely on time, despite the floods, and so you have earned the truppenny bonus I promised."
"Very kind of you, sir." He hefted a second bale over the side of the carriage. "Sir?"
"Yes?"
"Forgive me, but..." He hesitated. "...the folks in Sanpah know of you. They say you're a thaumaturge, that you can work magic." He glanced down at Cope, then quickly away again. "I was wondering if I could ask you a question?"
"By all means."
The coachman gestured towards the abyss. "What's really down there?" he asked. "I mean, the Church says this, and the heathens say that. I believe the Church, don't get me wrong, it's just that..."
"You can't be certain."
"Aye."
"And you'd like to know for sure."
"I would, sir. It seems to me that we're putting so much effort into building the city... and we're paying so much tax for it and all..."
"And you want to be sure your investment is sound?"
"Investment?" The man grinned. "That's it exactly, Sir."
"Glad to help," said Cope. He pulled his gut-sticker free from its sheathe and buried the thin metal spike in the nearest ox's rump. The beast bellowed and bulled against its harness and, kicking out with its back legs, struck the underside of the driver's seat. The coachman lost his balance and fell sideways across the leather cushions. Cope drove his gut-sticker deeper into the ox's flesh.
The animal bolted.
The carriage leapt forward. Dragged by the panicking beasts, the heavy vehicle clattered onto the walkway. Hemp ropes stretched under its prodigious weight. Planks dipped, buckled, and split beneath its wheels. As the driver struggled to clamber free, the carriage slewed to one side, buckling the walkway itself. One of the rear wheels slipped off the edge. The axle hit the deck, then chewed through dozens of boards as the oxen continued to drag their burden forward. Both animals grunted and stamped, their hooves scrabbling to find purchase on the planks. But the carriage weighed too much. It slid off the walkway, taking the harness, oxen and the coachman with it.
Cope watched the vehicle plummet fifty feet before it struck a foundation chain and burst apart. The driver and his animals slipped between the surrounding rope-work and shacks, and disappeared into the vast darkness of the chasm below. For a long moment, the surviving ropes all quivered.
The thaumaturge withdrew a tiny ragged dog from one of his topcoat's inner pockets, then held it up close to his face. "Happy now, Basilis?" he said.
The pup growled.
"Such a simple question to answer," muttered Cope. "Still, I've saved us a truppenny."
Cope returned the tiny dog to his pocket, picked up his travel bag, and set off down the walkway – cautiously, for it had been badly damaged.
The queer messages began to appear everywhere Carnival went, always one step ahead of her movements, as if their author had intimate knowledge of the dark and derelict places she frequented. In a basement of a pendulum house Ivygarths:
The TRUTH lies in LYe STREET.
In an attic in Lilley:
ReDeem your self, BITCH! The tower in LYE.
Each time she found another note, her terror grew. The words were becoming increasingly hostile and demanding, the charcoal lines more savagely scrawled across brick or plaster. And always, beneath each missive was the same rude drawing of the knife Carnival carried. These images seemed to mock her, for she feared that she knew who was behind them.
Her nightly flights through the city became desperate hunts for a place where she could hide, not only from the Spine, but from these written demands. The worst messages stirred deep memories, like flashes from long buried dreams, which she battled to contain.
A gallows noose...
A pocket book...
A feather dissolving in dark waters...
In an upper room of a tall flint townhouse, a place full of tallow pools and cobwebs, she found an old woman who had died in her bed and been partially eaten by an army of cats. The creatures sat on furniture, watching the angel with their emotionless blue eyes. All three of the dressing table mirrors had been smashed. Words had been cut into the wallpaper with a knife.
BEWARE A CAGe hdden. Lie Street.
MURDERER.
WHITTENWHITTENWHT. LYE STREET.
Carnival squeezed her hands over her ears, as if that might block out her internal screaming, and fled. She tore across the moonlit rooftops, stopping, searching, running from the words she found. She abandoned one hideaway after another, and then, when she could not think of another place to go, she fought her hideous fear of the abyss and dove down beneath the streets and houses of Gardenhowe.
Iron foundations loomed overhead, immense and black and scabbed with rust. The chains above her creaked and groaned under the weight of sixty thousand homes. The endless darkness waited below. A tangible presence, it seemed to compress the blood in Carnival's muscles. Her heart strained. On she crawled, through girders, pipes and filth. Welds cut her wings and hands, scratched her old leather vest and breeches, but she didn't slow. She scrambled through fallen detritus snagged in a hemp net, through broken furniture, booze bottles and tin cans, dead pigeons and rotting clothes.
Rust had eaten through the side of an under-floor rain cistern, forming a jagged hole. The angel folded her wings tightly against her back and climbed inside the tank. It stank of old water. Her hands moved through slime. Crouched, she rested her wings against the wall and closed her eyes.
She heard the city shifting above her, the ticking metal and grousing chains, and she could almost imagine echoes answering from the abyss below, deep mournful sounds like the cries of gods.
She opened her eyes.
Scratched into the rust before her was another message. It was faint, but Carnival's night eyes read it easily.
Listen to the corpse in LYE STREET.
The angel heard screaming, close to her own ears. It sounded like the shrieks of a madwoman.