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along like strung puppets.
    Deepgate lay to the west, now half a league behind the airship. Torn and burning in a thousand places, the city hung in her surviving chains like a great blackened funnel over the abyss. Swathes of the League of Rope quarter had been reduced to a smouldering crust, or had crumbled entirely into the pit below, exposing further webs of chain. Ash swirled between the metal links. Fires raged out of control in the Workers’ Warrens, in Ivygarths and Chapelfunnel, and on the fringes of the Scythe where vast rents could be seen among the shipyards. Gases poured from ruptured aether vats and from the coal gas depositories around Mesa’s chain, forming ochre and white layers between docking spines and buckled gantries. Trunks of black, red, and silver smoke uncoiled from the Poison Kitchens, feeding the expanding clouds above, while the city below lay veiled in crimson vapors. The sun glimmered faintly, a copper-coloured smudge.
    A camp had been built on the eastern curve of the abyss, where Deepgate’s foundation chains met the desert bedrock and the surface pipes from Jakka curled over the lip of the pit. It was to this ad hoc shamble of pulpboard shacks and bunkers that
Reclamation Ship Twelve
began to drift. Still with her stern facing the city, she relaxed the power to her twin propellers and allowed the howling gales to suck her into the low-pressure areas around the updraft. Orange sand fumed around her, battering and scouring her hull. The hanging corpses swung madly under her ballast arms.
    There were no longer any docking spines available for use, but men appeared from bunkers and rushed over to guide the ship’s grapples into anchor hoops fixed into the desert floor. In time she came to rest and was secured. Her port hatch opened. Nine Spine assassins in leather armour and sand masks disembarked: eight Cutters carrying light steel crossbows, and an Adept with a sword slung across his back. Their mirrored goggles reflected the burning city. Through the boiling dust, two of the Cutters carried the body of an angel towards the edge of the abyss, to where a wooden walkway dipped away into the district called the League of Rope. The Adept meanwhile dragged a manacled woman from the airship and threw her to the ground.
    Rachel Hael spat sand from her mouth and glared up at the masked figure. He had an unusually rough manner for an assassin of his high rank. The process of tempering normally removed all aggression from an assassin, along with the bulk of his mind. These temple warriors killed more efficiently without emotional burdens or base human desires.
    The Adept removed his sand mask, then pointed to a standpipe set alongside the walkway. “Drink there,” he shouted above the howling wind. “Water is scarce in the city, and you will have no more until we reach the sanctuary of the temple.” He tapped the mask against his hip, dislodging sand, then pulled it back over his head so that its copper grille again covered his mouth.
    Rachel Hael staggered over to the water tap, her tattered gabardine flapping against her shins. She could barely stand in this ferocious wind, but she managed to crouch by Dill’s insensate form and inspect him. “He’s barely breathing,” she said. “He could die before we reach the temple.”
    “His lungs reacted unexpectedly to the gas,” the Adept replied, his voice now muffled by the sand mask. “Nevertheless, his death will be bloodless. We will cast his body down to our Lord Ulcis.”
    “This is madness.” She pointed down into the smouldering bowl of the chained city. “Ulcis is dead. There’s nothing left down there.”
    The Adept’s mirrored lenses surveyed the scene. “Reconstruction is under way,” he said. “Deepgate is as eternal as the abyss; it cannot be destroyed.” His pale fingers touched the tiny metal talisman fixed to his collar: the Knot of Ulcis, awarded only to the highest-ranking Church assassins.
    Rachel had, until