The Ace of Skulls

by Chris Wooding

  Silo and Pinn came into view, weapons held ready, and joined them in their retreat towards the door. Silo exchanged a glance with Frey. They didn’t need words. They’d been in enough spots like this before. They knew how bad it was.

  ‘There!’ Ashua cried. They caught a glimpse of a dark shape dropping through the air. It landed with a heavy thump in front of the door, compressing to a crouch, blocking their path.

  It raised itself to its feet. Frey’s mouth went dry.

  He’d seen Manes, and he’d seen Imperators unmasked. He’d looked the Iron Jackal in the eye. But this was the most horrifying yet, this grotesque, malformed, swollen wreck of a thing. The very sight of it appalled him.

  There was enough humanity in its form to see how it had started out, but it was far from human now. Piled cords of veined muscle bulged unevenly all over it, gathered into huge straining knots. One of its arms was three times as thick as the other. Its back was twisted beneath a lopsided hump of gristle and scaly hide. Tendons stood out stark on two-fingered hands.

  He’d seen how daemons could change a person, but there had always been purpose and symmetry in it before. This one was a wild jumble of flesh and bone, as if its insides had grown unchecked and in all directions, barely contained by the stretched sack of its skin.

  It opened its jaws and shrieked again. Its face had slumped. One eye faced forward; the other was a third of its size, and sat low on its cheek looking sideways. Half its mouth was toothed, the other was bare. Saliva dripped from its gums.

  ‘Cap’n?’ said Pinn quietly.

  ‘What?’ Frey croaked.

  There was a pause. ‘Aren’t you gonna say hello to your mum?’

  Ashua snorted with suppressed laughter. The tension dissipated. Leave it to Pinn to get a dig in at a time like this. He was too stupid to be afraid of death.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ he said, and opened fire.

  The daemon shuddered and jerked as a hail of bullets tore into it, sending it staggering back towards the doorway. The crew’s faces were lit up by muzzle flashes, teeth gritted, eyes hard. They emptied their chambers, and when they were done, the monstrous thing lay on the floor in a heap, tattered and torn.

  Then it groaned and, slowly, it began to get up.

  ‘I bloody knew it was going to do that,’ said Frey, as the crew backed off and began to scatter. ‘Crake! Where are you?’

  But the daemon was on its feet now. Its skin was ripped and its flesh full of holes but it didn’t bleed and it didn’t appear any the worse for wear. It fixed an eye on Frey and snarled.

  ‘Don’t come after me!’ Frey cried. ‘Eat Pinn, he’s fatter!’

  His generous advice fell on deaf ears. The daemon came lumbering towards him, accelerating as its powerful legs drove it forward. Frey darted to the side, hoping to put a pile of rubble between him and his pursuer. It angled to intercept him, smashing through the edge of the pile and causing a landslide behind it. The impact barely hindered it; it bore down on him like an express train.

  Frey vaulted a rock and hit the ground running, looking for an escape route in the broken maze that surrounded him. The rest of the crew were yelling, trying to distract the daemon. A shotgun blast tore away a chunk of its shoulder. None of it mattered. It was intent on him, and nothing was going to stop it.

  He turned, switching his cutlass to his good hand. The blade sang faintly in his mind, the daemon in the blade responding to the presence of another daemon. It had killed daemons before, and was eager for another taste. But as the creature powered towards him, screeching, Frey felt his confidence waver. There was no way he was winning a fight with that thing, cutlass or no cutlass. It would swat him like a fly.

  The creature was suddenly thrown sideways as a blurred figure crashed into its flank. It tumbled and skidded away in a dusty muddle of limbs, entangled with its attacker. The two of them came apart as they rolled. One of them landed catlike on her feet.

  Jez, and yet not Jez.

  This was the thing that lurked beneath the surface of his navigator. This was the thing they were all afraid of. The change was subtle but its effect was great. A shift in aspect, a look of naked savagery in her eye, the feral way she moved. The sense of unease she inspired had sharpened to a terrifying pitch. She might be wearing the shape of the woman he knew, but she had the feel of a nightmare. This was her Mane side, unleashed.

  She launched at the daemon, crashing into it before it could get to its feet. The impact sent it flying away and into a wall of rubble. As she came at it again, it lashed out with its oversized arm. Jez seemed to flicker in Frey’s vision, as if there were three of her at once in three different positions, and suddenly she was half a metre to the left of the spot where she’d been, and the creature swiped through thin air.

  She seized its arm and flung it. It shot through the air, missing Frey narrowly, blasting his hair against his face with the wind of its passing. Jez sprang after it, not letting up for an instant, a hungry shriek escaping her.

  Someone grabbed Frey’s shoulder, making him jump. He turned to see Ashua’s urgent eyes.

  ‘Let’s make tracks, huh?’

  Frey stuck his cutlass in his belt, looked back at Jez. Deserting her felt wrong. She might have the creature on the ropes for now, but that thing was twice her size.

  ‘You can’t help her!’ Ashua told him.

  She was right. He couldn’t. Not against that. And yet . . .

  ‘Wait, wait! I can handle this!’ called Crake. He came hurrying into sight, labouring under the weight of his pack. The pinecone-shaped metal rods waggled above his head, and he clutched his makeshift controller in both hands, struggling with the wires that tangled around his arm. ‘Teething problems, that’s all!’

  The daemon was thrashing about nearby. Jez was on its back, having sunk her sharp teeth into its neck from behind. She was trying to get a grip on its head to wrench it off.

  ‘She’s doing alright, Crake,’ said Ashua. ‘Now let’s go!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Crake. ‘Just give me a moment and . . .’

  He thumbed a switch on the controller to activate the flux thrower. Frey immediately got a splitting headache. There was no other effect that he could see.

  ‘Ow! Will you turn that bloody thing off and stop messing about?’ he cried.

  ‘It just needs tuning!’ Crake protested, twiddling with the dials. ‘Should be about . . . here!’

  Jez screeched, her body going rigid, teeth tearing free from the daemon’s flesh. Released, the creature took advantage. It reached over its shoulder with its huge arm, clamped its fingers round Jez’s leg, and flung her away. Frey watched in horror as she spun through the air and hit the side of a rubble pile with enough force to smash the rocks to powder. The side of the pile collapsed, burying her. When the dust blew clear, all that was visible was a hand and part of a knee.

  Frey felt time slow down as the enormity of the moment hit him. He had no idea what she was capable of surviving, but that would have killed a normal woman several times over.

  Oh please no.

  Crake was agape, face slack as he realised what he’d done. The daemon turned its deformed head back towards Frey, a dreadful purpose in its gaze. Ashua surreptitiously edged away from him.

  ‘Crake . . .’ Frey said quietly.

  ‘I . . . It’s not . . .’ Crake began, then snapped his mouth shut and set himself to frantically twiddling the dials on his controller. The daemon started loping towards Frey. Whatever Crake was doing, he wasn’t doing it fast enough. ‘Cap’n, I can’t! Run! Cap’n, run!’

  Frey took his advice. The door to the sanctum was close now, and his way was clear. He turned tail and ran for all he was worth.

  Jez. Oh, shit, Jez.

  But all thoughts of his friend were swept away in the storm of instinctive terror that propelled him towards the door. If Jez couldn’t stop it and Crake couldn’t stop it, what hope did he have?

  The daemon had built up speed now, heedless of the crew
’s renewed attempts to distract it. Frey sprinted through the doorway. Too late he realised that he wasn’t carrying a lantern, and the corridor was lightless. Heels skidding down the twilit stairs, he reached the bottom and found it pitch black. It didn’t stop him. Going by memory, he ran into the darkness.

  The daemon followed. He heard it come crashing down the stairs, carried into the far wall by its own momentum. It squealed, a sound like the maniac hunger of the damned, and then came thumping after him. His running feet kicked something aside, and he felt wetness spatter his face—

  a severed limb. blood.

  —but he went on blindly, heedless, as fast as he dared. The same instincts that made him run warned him against colliding with something unseen or breaking his leg in a hole. His hand trailed along the wall to his right, seeking an exit, looking for the cleft in the rock that he knew would be there.

  Come on, come on!

  He remembered Osger’s corpse an instant before he tripped over it. He went over hard, kicking apart the piled halves of the body. Pain blazed across his hands and forearms as he hit the floor. He pushed himself up again, his boots scrabbling at the floor, driven to his feet by desperation. The beast was behind him, thumping through the dark, so close that he thought he could smell its breath.

  Not this way not now not yet!

  Stumbling onwards, his bloodied hands scraping the wall to his right, searching for the nothingness that would lead him into the fissure, searching for—

  There!

  And he slipped inside, heading through the split in the corridor and into the narrow passageway of rock. Here he could run both hands along the wall, get a sense of where he was. He could only hope that the daemon was as blind as he was and that it would miss the fissure in the dark.

  It didn’t. He heard it howl close behind him, and knew that it was inside the fissure with him. He gave up all care and redoubled his speed. The beast thumped and scraped and panted behind him, and damn if it wasn’t getting louder, damn if it wasn’t catching him up. His shoulder hit a protrusion of rock and sent him bouncing off, but he ignored the pain and kept going. He wouldn’t end up like Osger. He wouldn’t die down here in the dark.

  Then: light! A faint glow up ahead, illuminating the end of the fissure. And he remembered Malvery, sitting there with his lantern in the cave where they’d left his stubborn arse. And he remembered the chasm. And he knew he’d reached a dead end.

  He cast a terrified glance over his shoulder. The light fell on the face of his pursuer. It filled up the gap between the walls, a bulging, twisted mass of muscle, so close it could almost reach out and grab him.

  Frey burst from the mouth of the fissure onto the ledge beside the chasm. On the other side of the gap, he saw Malvery, holding up his lantern, shotgun in one hand and a look of alarm and surprise on his face.

  The creature howled as it reached for him, running full pelt in pursuit. Frey gave everything he had to put himself beyond it. A heavy claw glanced off his back, pushing him forward, off balance.

  The momentum was too great to stop now. Stumbling, skipping, he leaped across the chasm.

  He couldn’t have made the jump even on his best day.

  For a heartbeat, he was airborne, gaping emptiness below him, the dread of death in his gut. His arms and legs flailed wildly in the air. He screamed, high and raw and despairing.

  And then his hands closed on one of the ropes that spanned the chasm. His flight arrested, his legs whiplashed out beneath him and his grip came loose. He fell, but instinct made him reach out, and the lower rope slammed into his chest and armpits and somehow, somehow he held on to it, clinging to that last slender thread that kept him from extinction.

  Something flying through the air towards him. Something huge. He pulled his feet out of the way just in time to avoid the daemon’s reaching hand, and it plummeted past him with a shriek, tumbling into the chasm where it was swallowed up in the dark.

  That shriek went on for a very long time before it stopped.

  ‘Cap’n! Cap’n, take my hand!’ Malvery was reaching across the chasm towards him, but he was too far away to be of use. Frey had the rope under his armpits but he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself up and the damn thing kept moving. He swung his leg up to hook his boot heel over the rope. On the third try he made it. He tried to get himself upright but balance was impossible. He began to panic.

  ‘Cap’n! Hang off it and crawl towards me!’

  Malvery’s directions were less than clear, but Frey got the gist. He hooked his other foot over the rope. His hands were almost too painful to hold it, but he gritted his teeth and made them grip.

  Laboriously, inch by inch, he crawled towards Malvery, moving hand over hand and sliding his crossed legs up behind him. The doc reached down and he grabbed on, adding Malvery’s not inconsiderable strength to his own. He scrabbled and struggled and found himself at last with solid ground beneath him, where he lay collapsed for a while, joyous with the various hurts of being alive.

  Malvery sat next to him, panting. ‘That was, er, quite a scream you gave, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Almost girly, you might say.’

  Frey’s cheek was pressed to the stone floor and his eyes were closed. ‘Not a word to the crew, Doc,’ he said out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Right-o,’ said Malvery, and patted him heavily on the back.

  Jez. Spit and blood, Jez. Please be alright. Please.

  Crake dug frantically into the rubble pile, pulling out rocks and tossing them aside. Pinn, Silo and Pelaru worked with him to uncover the small figure beneath. She looked less than fearsome now. Covered in dust, her overalls torn in several places, she seemed terribly fragile.

  I’ve killed her. Oh, no, I’ve killed her.

  He’d been so eager for the opportunity to try out his new techniques. He hadn’t thought how it might affect Jez. Clumsily sweeping the frequencies like that, he was just as liable to hit her as his target. Caught up by pride in his new machine, keen to show it off, he’d messed everything up. And now she might be dead. Really dead.

  Just like what happened with Bess.

  He plucked out stones, threw them away and went back for more. He’d already lost one person close to him through meddling with forces beyond his control. He couldn’t bear to lose another.

  They pulled her out and laid her on the floor. She looked wan in the lantern light, but then she’d always been pale. There were cuts and scratches, but they didn’t bleed; they just lay open and red.

  ‘Is she breathing?’ he asked frantically.

  Pinn gave him a look. ‘She wasn’t breathing before, thick-arse.’

  Crake was so distressed that the absurdity of Pinn mocking his intelligence passed him by. He crouched down next to her, and was about to listen for a heartbeat before he remembered that she didn’t have one.

  ‘She’s already dead! How do we know if she’s alright?’ he asked helplessly.

  ‘Any bones broke?’ said Silo.

  Crake hesitated to touch her; it felt improper. Pinn had no such compunctions, and began mauling her all over until Pelaru pulled him away.

  ‘Have some respect,’ the Thacian told him harshly.

  Pinn shook him off. ‘Last I checked, you weren’t shit to me, mate,’ he snarled. ‘Put your hands on me again, I’ll kick your face off.’

  ‘This isn’t the time!’ Crake snapped. Pinn reluctantly subsided before Pelaru’s infuriating calm.

  ‘She always went like this after she flipped, yuh?’ said Silo. ‘Out for a while. Might be she’ll be alright. Just needs time.’

  Pelaru knelt down next to her and laid his hand gently on her forehead. He seemed to be listening. After a moment, he drew back, with a deep breath of what might have been relief.

  ‘She’s alive,’ he said. ‘Or as much as she ever was. She’ll recover.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Crake asked. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I knew Osger for a very long time,’ he said. ‘I know the signs.’
/>
  Relief flooded through Crake. There was such certainty in the Thacian’s voice. Crake didn’t question his assurances. He wanted to believe, so he did.

  Ashua came hurrying through the doorway to the hall, holding up a lantern. Her face was alight with amazed happiness.

  ‘The Cap’n’s okay!’ she said.

  ‘What about the daemon?’ Crake asked.

  ‘He killed it!’

  Pinn spluttered. ‘He bloody killed it?’

  ‘That was pretty much my reaction. How’s Jez?’

  ‘Hard to tell,’ said Silo. He thumbed at Pelaru. ‘This feller says she’ll be alright.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Ashua absently. She wasn’t all that bothered. She hadn’t been with Jez as long as the rest of them. The others recalled with fondness the Jez of earlier days, before she became frightening. Ashua had never really known those times.

  Pelaru picked up Jez, hoisted her over his shoulders, and picked up his pack with his free hand. ‘I’ll take care of her,’ he said gravely.

  No one argued. ‘Cap’n says we’re to grab what we can and get gone,’ Ashua told them.

  The others headed off to fill their empty backpacks with treasures. Crake had no interest in that. He just wanted out of this place. When Pelaru left to carry Jez back to Frey, Crake went with him to carry the lantern.

  They followed the corridor past the ruined bodies of the expedition members, and finally came to Osger’s body. The two halves were scattered now. Pelaru looked at the horrifying corpse for a long moment. Then he stepped over it and walked on.

  When they reached the chasm, they found Frey and Malvery on the other side, swigging from a bottle that the doctor had brought along ‘just in case’. Frey looked shaken up, but the news that Jez would survive cheered him.

  After some deliberation about how they were going to get Jez across, Pelaru had them tie Jez to him with a pair of belts, and he crossed the rope bridge while bearing her on his back. Then he came back for his pack. The man seemed to have a gymnast’s strength and balance: the rope bridge bothered him not at all, nor did he show any strain from carrying Jez. Crake noticed as he picked up his pack that there was something heavy in it, and he thought then of the casket that he’d seen the whispermonger examining.