They stood for several moments in the wake of Pitch's words.
"That's why he's never seen a gun," Saber said. "They hadn't been invented yet."
"Then..." Powder said.
"They could be among the first hired to destroy the Citadel," Pitch answered. "If not the first."
"Temker's Clock?" Dagger asked and Pitch nodded.
"The Citadel has removed itself from time," Vice said. "Only the gods are capable of such artifice."
"Apparently not," Pitch said.
"Alchemist," Vice said with a rare smirk, "can you say for certain this place is not the work of gods?"
"No," Pitch said, looking like he was trying to swallow a razor blade, "I can't. I also can’t explain why we seemed to be speaking the same language as a two-hundred-year-old kingdom."
Dagger turned to regard the revolving staircases and Powder moved up beside her.
"Up or down, captain?" Powder asked as she walked over to one of the constantly drilling spirals. The staircases, now that she was close to them, weren't actually moving up and down but perpetually curling their way up into the ceiling. "Never mind, captain. Left or right look like the only options."
"Unless we want to follow those guys," Saber said, thumbing at the doorway into which the four warriors had disappeared.
"They're not the job," Dagger said. "Vice?"
"Yes?" The monk was standing off to the side, staring at nothing with a troubled expression. Of all of them, he seemed the least fascinated with their surroundings.
"Can the Vigil's servants move us through time?"
"Possibly."
"Can you ask?"
"I have been trying to reach them."
"And?"
Vice shook his head.
"What are you orders, captain?" Powder asked.
"Forward. Always forward. We have a job to do."
"Wait," Saber said, "what if we just work our way back to first room? The queen said agents of the Citadel were able to go in and out. There must be another way back. Powder can bomb the clock thing into oblivion. Boom. Done."
Pitch thought about it. "You know, Saber, that's not a bad idea. One problem."
"Of course there is," the swordsman muttered.
"We can't be sure exactly how long we've been here. If we simply destroy the clock, we might find ourselves only minutes from when we left, or it could be decades. Centuries, even. We could be stranded in a time hundreds of years past our own."
"Pitch," Dagger said, "do you have any paper?"
"Of course," Pitch said, producing a notebook and charcoal pencil.
"Start charting our way through here, best you can."
Pitch took a moment, nodded, and sketched their path through the Citadel thus far. As maps went, it looked more like a stack of river stones. He shook his head.
"Is that going to be any use?" Saber asked.
"Probably not," Pitch said. "But we might be able to avoid where we've already been."
The Armory moved to the revolving staircase near Powder, stepped aboard, and rode its slow revolutions up, up, up into the next floor of the Citadel of Stairs.
They emerged under a dark sky filled with stars.
"You weren't kidding about the time thing," Saber said. "It was noon an hour ago."
"This is bullshit," Powder said. "That's not how stairs or buildings work. It's not how reality works, for fuck's sake."
"Maybe we're on the roof?" Saber suggested hopefully.
"Definitely not," Dagger said, pointing first at the ground and then at the sky.
They stood on one of hundreds of overlapping, uneven steel platforms that had been riveted haphazardly together with treacherous gaps between as if they'd been installed as the workers went. The Armory's steps were muted on the metal. The very air around them seemed to swallow sound. Above them was an endless black expanse decorated with glinting stars, and the steel flooring stretched ahead, longer than it was wide. It ended to either side perhaps a hundred feet in both directions. Behind them, where the staircase should have been, was more of the same. The spiraling stairs, even the opening they'd entered through, were gone.
Pitch was looking up at the black sky. "These aren't our stars," he said finally.
"What do you mean, our stars?" Dagger asked, "Stars are stars."
"No. I've never seen these constellations," Pitch said and pulled a loose rivet out of the floor. He walked to the edge of the platform and hurled the bit of steel. It flew for a moment, then paused with a hiccup, before continuing to drift at a much slower pace until it was out of sight.
Pitch peered down over the edge and grunted with surprise.
"You'd all better have a look at this," he said.
Dagger knelt near him. "Well, that's interesting."
The plates under their feet were riveted to bones.
They looked over the edge at the curve of a pale rib, big as a building. The far end of its curve vanished from sight into star-filled darkness. In one direction, the ribs ticked off the distance toward a broken stump of an arm and then a skull, face down and the size of a fortress. In the other, a pelvis. Below the bones, as above, more blackness yawned, dotted with bright, winking pinpricks.
They were on the back of a titan, interred in the sky.
Saber rubbed the back of his neck. "We're going to lose our fucking minds in here."
Powder patted his shoulder.
"Another question occurs," Pitch mused with a sly grin.
"Please don't," Saber said a bit plaintively.
"Is the skeleton really that big? Or have we shrunk?"
"Oh, fuck you," Saber said and stepped back from the edge. Pitch chuckled under his breath.
"There's something ahead," Dagger said, squinting in the direction of the skull. "Maybe it's another door."
"I don't think so," Powder said, her telescope at her eye, "unless doors move."
"Of course, doors can move here," Saber said. "This place follows the rules even less than we do."
They picked their way along, eyes firmly on the plates. Staring anywhere else, like into the winking, diamond-studded expanse of the sky, caused a kind of vertigo, as if one could fall up and into forever. The plates were rusty and pitted, like they'd been stolen from someplace that had rain and wind.
"Blood," Vice noted and pointed down. Under their boots were dark streaks.
"Something was dragged across this," Pitch said. He knelt and rubbed a finger against the stain. "It's relatively fresh."
"And heading in the same direction as we are," Dagger said.
As they neared the distant shadow that was not a door, it took shape in the starry half-light. Something — it looked like a very tall man in a cloak — was moving busily around a low structure. Chains dragged behind the figure. Dagger gestured the Armory to a halt.
Whatever the figure was, it hadn't noticed them yet. But the structure was clearly visible: It was an arranged pile of corpses, their armored parts interlinked in patterns. Limbs seemed to form language, though not any that could be spoken. Heads were arranged in trinities, balanced upon tripods of legs bound together by wire, string and intestines. One of the steel plates had been ripped free from the floor and driven horizontally into the mass embrace of the dead.
It looked like an altar.
The figure tending it turned its cloaked head to regard them. It did not behave as if threatened. It bound a severed arm and hand missing most of its fingers into place, stepped back to gaze critically at its work, and then turned again to face the Armory, its face still hidden. The cloak was a patchwork of skin and cloth, stitched together with stolen sinew. It lifted something to the shadow of its hood.
"Have you come to add to my work?" it said in the light voice of a young male human. Its tone was cheery, friendly and unmarred. "Welcome. Welcome."
"Who are you?" Dagger asked.
"You could not speak my name even if I told it to you, just as I could not speak yours before I made my translator. It was the same as these primitive soldiers. They babbled and mistook my silence for reticence, for hostility. They believed the height of their knowledge to be the height of all knowledge, that they were superior. Fools. You may call me the Craftsman, if you'd like, though that too is not quite accurate. You could think of me as a traveler, if the distances I have crossed could be conceived of by your minds."
Stolen story; please report.
Dagger nodded. "And what are you doing?"
"Trying to make a phone call," the craftsman said. Below its cloak, it seemed as if it had more arms or legs hidden away. It kicked a length of chain out of its way. The end of the chain had a broken steel base plate that looked like it had been twisted free of something.
"I think we found that escaped prisoner," Pitch whispered to Dagger, but she held up a hand for him to be quiet.
"A what?" Dagger asked the Craftsman.
"Phone call," the Craftsman said. "A word from your world, yes? A means of communication. Do you not know it?"
"Afraid not," Dagger said.
"Hmm," said the Craftsman, "I am forced to work with the memory of language I learned from the medium of my work," it gestured to the pile of arranged corpse parts, "perhaps an older word? Very well, though it will be less accurate. I am trying to send a telegraph."
Dagger shook her head.
"Still no? Judging by your more primitive appearance, an even older word would be better..." the cloaked figure paused a moment. "Ah, I am trying to send a letter."
"With corpses?" Dagger asked.
"How else?" The Craftsman said.
"Is this an altar to your god," Vice asked, stepping forward.
The figure's hood nodded. "God. Yes. This word. My medium used it as well, though with less reverence. In fact, all of my medium used it when they still walked and made the noises I now make with my device. This I learned in those moments before: You believe you are aided by beings more powerful than yourselves, yes? A strange idea."
"Oh, you have no idea," Saber said and nudged Vice playfully. The monk looked like he was about to swat Saber off the platform like the screw Pitch had thrown. The duelist wisely sidled out of range.
The Craftsman continued as if nobody but it had spoken.
"One of my medium called for one named Jesus Christ. Another for Allah. One begged for something called Basic Human Decency. Do you know any of these gods?"
"No," Dagger said.
"There were others," the Craftsman said. "In the tower before I escaped. They screamed their questions. I arrived disoriented, and so they were able to capture me. They kept me chained to a wall and tortured me with their nascent understanding of pain. Electricity! Can you imagine? Pumped by hand. It was almost amusing. So primitive they were, in method and question. At least my medium here, these who have been reconfigured, they were more advanced. Their weapons hurt."
The Craftsman lowered its hand and walked around the altar, chains dragging behind. It reached out to adjust and move the pieces and tighten twines of wire and gut. It tried to force the limp parts to balance differently. The patterns in the pile shifted as it did, and the jointed parts formed new, strange glyphs. As it did, the edge of the cloak slipped a little. The Craftsman looked as if it was wearing armor or made of armor. Its fingers were like needles of glass.
"It is frustrating," the creature said. "Your kind are too soft for me to work with properly. I am too sharp. I cut when I touch. My kind. My kind would be better. We hold our integrity after cessation. If I could work with such, I would already have made contact. I would already be going home."
"Sorry to hear that," Dagger said. "Have you a seen a way out of here?"
"There is a door at the far end," the Craftsman said absently as it continued to tinker. "Near one of the feet. The left. Left is the word my device suggests I use. Feet. Door. Your language takes an eternity to convey even a single idea. They tortured me not with pain, as they believed, but with wasted time. Boredom."
"Boredom's a bitch alright," Dagger said. "Thanks for the directions. We'll just be on our way. Good luck getting home."
"No," the Craftsman said. "Stay. Help me send my letter."
"Not that way," Dagger said, gesturing to the pile with her hammer.
The Craftsman stood to its full height and turned to the Armory. "No? No. I see. You will fight. A concept that my medium also believed in. Conflict. One suggested we would go to war. What is war? Is it also one of your powerful helpers? One of your gods?"
"Yes," Dagger said, "one we know well."
"You are not agitated. You are calm," the Craftsman said. "Why is this? My mediums were afraid. They made loud noises. They made threats in the moments before they joined my work. They did not converse as we do now. You do not behave as they did. Why?"
"Experience," Dagger said.
"And chemistry," Pitch said.
"Yes. Chemistry..." The Craftsman almost seemed to taste the word. "A framework of reason pressed upon the chaos of the world to give it shape, meaning, to help one understand. Yes. A primitive science."
"Wait," Powder said, and stepped around Dagger.
The gunner took something from her bag and approached the Craftsman, who towered over her. "This will let you signal somebody far away. If it works, will you let us pass without joining your work?"
"Perhaps," the Craftsman said, leaning down to peer at the cylindrical object in her hand. "How does it function?"
"It uses light."
"Light. That is clever. I have not tried light. There is not much light here."
"Just from the stars," Powder said.
"Stars, you call them," the creature said. "You see them as just lights, but they are distant worlds. How does your device work?"
"I have to light it first. With fire."
"Fire?" the Craftsman said.
"It's a way that we make light and warmth."
"Yes. My medium was very warm once. I could feel them as I could feel you. You are also warm. Your world must be very cold."
"Sometimes," Powder said and gestured for the Craftsman to take what she held. It reached out one segmented arm. This one ended in a bundle of delicate little appendages of different shapes, sizes, and perhaps purposes. Powder placed what she held in it — a thin, steel tube with a short fuse dangling from it. Powder took out her striker and flicked it, sparks dancing against the end of the fuse until it caught. The Craftsman flinched.
"So bright," it said. "It has been a long time since I have seen something so bright." Its hood leaned down to the hissing fuse.
"Yeah," Powder said, stepping back slowly, "very bright."
The fuse reached the metal tube. Powder leapt back and covered her eyes with one arm.
"Why are you—" the Craftsman said but was cut off when the device burst into a thousand sudden sunrises. The creature reared back, covering its cowl with one arm. The hand that held the flare was scorched black and crispy, and the device it spoke through fell to the ground.
Powder, eyes still shut and sighting by ear, dropped her hands and popped up her scatterguns. She cut loose with both into what might have been Craftsman's chest. The Craftsman flexed the body within the cloak but made no sound. Dagger rushed up behind her and yanked Powder back out of reach of the Craftsman's flailing arms as several more burst from its cloak. She swung her hammer low and crushed what Dagger hoped was a leg.
The blow ripped away the cloak.
The Craftsman was a collection of limbs and razors with no torso, almost like a long, glass sea urchin. The Craftsman's face — if that's what it was — was a blank ovoid somewhere near the top of its various spindles, blank except for dozens of tiny holes. It spread its limbs and gestured at the Armory in a silent battle cry.
Dagger backed away and the rest of the Armory formed up around her.
They circled the creature. The Craftsman spun its sharp limbs, and the chains attached to them flailed dangerously. The only sound it made was the skittering of sharpness upon metal.
Pitch heaved a jar, and the Craftsman smashed it from the air, but the acid inside splashed its limbs and ate several down to nubs. The Craftsman hunched and tucked the smoking, crippled appendages close. Other limbs took their place.
Vice and Saber moved in as a pair. The monk caught scalpeled strikes upon his gauntlets, picking up a dozen razor cuts as he trapped limb after limb and smashed them between his fists. Saber fared a little better, his entire craft was based on moving between slim, sharp things — but even he was bleeding in several places as he tried over and over to find a soft target for his thrusts. There seemed to be nothing of the Craftsman but limbs, and its eyeless head towered out of the duelist's reach.
When neither fighter could finish the Craftsman, they coordinated their attacks, occupying its limbs and dividing its attention. Dagger rushed between them, getting stabbed twice as she swung her hammer where the Craftsman's limbs met. She let the weight of her hammer carry her forward with total abandon, and at the last second let go. Her weapon struck the center of the Craftsman with a sound like cracking ice and pinned the creature to the metal floor. The Craftsman lay flailing as it tried to get out from under the heavy steel.
Saber looked down at the struggling creature in shock.
"It's fast and big," Dagger said, "but it's got almost no weight of its own. No mass."
"One side, captain," Powder said, and aimed at the Craftsman's pocked face with a pistol. The gun barked, and the creature's head caved in along one side. The Craftsman shook and went still, silver ichor pouring from the wound.
Dagger cautiously lifted her hammer off the creature. It did not stir.
Saber picked up to the device the Craftsman had been speaking with a grimace. "It's kinda wet," he said. "What's this made out of, anyway?"
"Let me see it," Pitch said, taking the contraption from Saber, who wiped his hand on his thigh. Pitch turned the device over and over in his hands. It was slightly ovoid and organic-looking, hollowed out with a hole at both ends. Stretched over one was a veil of strings or fringe. Pitch peered at them. "Interesting."
"What is it, Pitch?" Dagger asked.
"A human femur," Pitch said, knocking on the device gently with one knuckle. "A thigh bone. The marrow's been scraped out." He stroked the damp fringe on one end with his index finger. "And these are vocal chords," he gestured to the pile of bodies. "Several sets. Probably taken from the bodies. To allow it to speak, I would guess, though I have no idea how."
Saber swore. "He could make a bugle out of a neck, but couldn't find a way out of here?"
"I'd argue the "he" designation," Pitch said, "but, yes."
"Then we're fucked," Saber said wryly.
"It never said it couldn't get out of here," Powder countered. "It said it wanted to contact someone." She examined the altar. The metal plate that formed a sort of shelf had a human head on it. Powder picked up a weapon discarded near the pile: It was shaped like a rifle, but made of a light material she'd never seen. The helmets on the disembodied human heads that formed the base of the altar had glass visors and were made of the same light material as the weapon.
"I've never seen a gun like this before," Powder said, and pulled a lever around the gun's trigger. A glass tube popped out of the side and skittered away, lost forever between gaps in the metal floor. All around the Armory, space and stars revolved. There was not even wind to disturb the quiet and their voices all felt too loud even though the very air seemed to swallow any spoken word. Powder turned away, aimed into the starry blackness, and pulled the trigger. A beam shot from the end without sound or even a hint of recoil. She racked the lever and another tube popped out of the side.
"Oh, I'm keeping this," she muttered.
"You're going to trust your life to an untested tool?" Dagger asked.
Powder aimed at a steel plate a few feet away and pulled the trigger again. The beam burned a smoking hole in the sheet of steel. They all stared at it in shock.
Saber shook his head. "They had weapons like that, and this thing killed them?"
Vice grunted and crossed his arms. "You heard it speak. They panicked. They were not ready. They were not warriors." His tone held notes of both judgment and sympathy.
"They were armed," Saber argued. "They had armor."
"And still," the monk said with a sweeping gesture, "here they lie. In pieces."
"Perhaps they were explorers," Pitch ventured. "Maybe these suits were for something other than fighting."
"Like what?" Saber asked.
"Warmth? Who knows," the alchemist said.
"Does it matter?" Dagger asked, cutting through the debate. "We're not here to solve the mystery of the corpse pile. We have to move on. It said there was a door ahead. Powder, leave that thing here, I'm not having you get run through when it clicks on empty."
Powder sighed and laid down the strange weapon. "You're no fun, captain."
Saber removed the human head from the altar and put it on the ground, then went to the body of the Craftsman. Kneeling, he used a cleaver to severe the ovoid head. He picked it up, dripping silver across the ground, and placed it on the altar.
"Why did you do that?" Pitch asked.
"Don't know," the duelist said, "seems poetic. Didn't it say if it could use its own kind, it would have already made contact?"
"Your leaps of reason shock me, Saber," Pitch said. "It's like you do it without thinking."
"You have your science. I have instinct."
They moved down the wide expanse of steel plates to the place where it forked along the skeleton's left leg. At the end was a faint shimmer in the air. As they neared it, Powder looked behind them.
"Captain," Powder said in a tense voice.
Something new had appeared in the starry void — a negative blackness that blotted out the faint light where it sat. It nearly filled the sky and was made of sharp angles, some of which glittered back at the bouncing starlight.
"What the fuck is that?" Saber asked.
"It could almost be a ship," Pitch said, "but I don't see any sails."
The shadowy void seemed to grow. It was several times larger than the place they stood.
"Or if there was even wind out here," Powder noted.
"Time to go," Dagger said, and grabbed the duelist by the collar. "I think your little leap of reason worked a little too well."
"That happens sometimes," Saber said.
An even greater blackness opened in the side of the ship like a doorway or a hatch.
"Through the door! Now!" Dagger grated, shoving her crew one at a time through the shimmering portal until only she was left on the metal-plated skeleton in the emptiness of benighted space. She looked a moment or two longer at the vast sky ship.
"Go then," Dagger muttered to it. “Collect your dead."
She went through the door.