Free Iron Angel by Alan Campbell

sound of clashing blades and staffs echoed through the whole torchlit maze.
    At last they reached the Rookery Spire. There the Spine herded their two prisoners down a steep, spiralling slope within the upturned tower: following the underside of the main stairwell. It was a disorienting experience in cramped semidarkness, a slip-sliding descent beneath steps cut into the roof. Rachel was forced to remove her wood-soled sandals and walk barefooted. She smelled sweat from her captors’ leathers, an honest human odor at odds with their ghoulish faces and dead-eyed gazes.
    Halfway down, they bundled Dill into one dark chamber, and then forced Rachel to descend another level before piling her into a second room and locking the door behind her. She fell all of eight feet in almost complete darkness, rolled over, and came to rest amid a pile of hard-edged debris.
    When her eyes finally grew accustomed to the gloom, she was able to survey her surroundings. The cell had previously been a rough-walled chamber with a highly arched stone ceiling—the bedroom of a high-ranking priest, she supposed—before it had turned upside down.
    The floor, once the ceiling, was a conical basin full of shattered furniture and dusty tapestries, dry rushes and broken porcelain, and the remains of fine furnishings that had come crashing down on top of an ancient iron chandelier. Her captors hadn’t bothered to remove any debris, and little wonder with the temple so crammed with prisoners. “Our holding facilities are stretched,” Rachel recalled.
    She got up off the floor and walked over to the window. A crimson mist wreathed the abyss beyond the glass and, looking up, Rachel could just discern the dark, cluttered bulk of Deepgate looming overhead, all wrapped in chains and illuminated in places by flickering firelight. Was this the red veil Dill had spoken of, or simply clouds of poison from the burning city? She was about to turn away, when a movement outside grabbed her attention.
    Vaporous figures were rising through the mist, the ghosts of countless men and women. With arms outstretched they drifted upwards, their gazes fixed longingly on the city above. The nearest of them passed by only yards from the window and she noticed that for the most part the men were dressed in the old-style suits and pudding-bowl hats once fashionable among Deepgate’s wealthier pioneers, while the women wore layered frocks and carried parasols as protection against a sun that no longer shone upon them. They were almost translucent, as though formed of the red mist itself, but in their faces Rachel glimpsed terrible white eyes and lunatic grins.
    Captain Clay had been wrong. Deepgate’s apparitions were not born of the city’s recent catastrophes. These shades had died a long time ago. And they were surging up directly from the abyss.
    But why?
             
    Dill hadn’t been able to sleep. His wings chafed at their bindings and sent shards of pain up through his shoulders. He guessed the time to be well after midnight, so it ought to have been completely dark by now, except it wasn’t. Dim blood-coloured light, filtering in through the huge multipaneled windows, suffused the room, turning everything to hues of red. The folds of tapestries which had gathered in the floor depression looked like liver in a bowl. Cracks ran like veins through the surrounding stonework.
    But Dill could not drag his gaze from the window. With a terrible fascination, he watched the ghosts beyond the glass.
    Most of the shades appeared to be men and women dressed in queer, old-fashioned clothes, but occasionally Dill thought he glimpsed creatures with wings in the far distance, and massive, bulkier shapes rising through gloom. Whatever those were he could not guess.
    He was so caught up in watching them that he did not at first notice the creature hovering immediately beyond the window, until a shadow crossing the glass alerted him.
    This visitor was a tall, thin battle-archon in