The Ace of Skulls

by Chris Wooding

  There were two dozen Awakeners there, including the Lord High Cryptographer and his retinue, and two Imperators. They stood at the edge of the chamber, outside a circle of metal masts that were attached by cables to a control console, worked by three men. More cables ran from generators and other large brass machines he didn’t recognise.

  He’d seen this kind of thing before, on a smaller scale. He’d seen it in the back of the Ketty Jay’s cargo hold. This was an industrial-sized sanctum. No doubt this was the source of the interference that was messing with the earcuffs.

  In the centre of the sanctum was a great riveted sphere, supported by struts, a hollow chamber that had been split in half horizontally. Bubbles of thick glass were set into it, windows to the interior. The bottom hemisphere was secured to the ground; the upper hemisphere was several metres above it, slowly descending on the end of a hydraulic arm.

  In between was Trinica.

  They’d strapped her to a grid, lying on her back, her wrists and ankles secured. Her eyes were wide and black in her corpse-white face, staring upward as the upper hemisphere was lowered towards her. She wasn’t struggling: she had a kind of paralysis of terror upon her, a rabbit gone limp in the jaws of a fox.

  Frey watched, unable to act, as the upper half of the sphere met with the lower. There was a hiss, and locks clanked into place, sealing Trinica within. Through one of the portholes Frey could see Trinica’s face, warped and smeared by the domed glass. She lay still, gazing into the middle distance.

  He turned away and seized one of the hostages, pulling him out of the group. It was a black-robed Prognosticator, the highest-ranking Awakener there. He had a shaven head, a bristling beard, and a scrawny, unhealthy look to him that made Frey want to batter him for the sake of it.

  ‘How do we get down there?’ he demanded.

  ‘You can’t,’ the Prognosticator said, cringing away from the pistol Frey shoved in his face. ‘The entrance is on the floor below.’

  ‘Guards?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! This place is just for observation.’

  ‘Observing what?’

  ‘So the young ones can see the glory of the Allsoul made flesh. The faithful attuned to the great Code through science. So that the Allsoul can enter them and leave them transformed . . .’

  ‘I’d can the theatrics if I were you, mate,’ said Malvery, who’d seen the murderous look on Frey’s face.

  ‘What. Are they doing. To her?’ Frey said through gritted teeth, finger hovering over the trigger.

  The Prognosticator opened his mouth but then closed it again, scared to say the wrong thing.

  ‘Last chance.’

  The Prognosticator swallowed. ‘They’re turning her into an Imperator.’

  Frey felt the bottom fall out of his world. His legs went weak, and he staggered. No. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t!

  His head was swarming and his skin prickled. There was a sense of building power in the room. Jez began to whine, low in her throat. She backed away from the window with her teeth bared. From the chamber the throb of generators could be heard.

  He felt trapped, caged, wild. An enormous rage filled him but there was nowhere to vent it. He had to do something, he had to save her! She needed him!

  He seized the Prognosticator by the collar, jammed the gun against his forehead. The other hostages cried out in fright. ‘Stop them!’ he demanded.

  ‘I can’t!’ the Prognosticator blurted.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ Frey said. ‘Swear to shit I will.’

  ‘It’s already begun! If you interrupt it, it’ll kill her!’ Frey cocked the revolver, and the Prognosticator’s eyes squeezed shut. ‘I’m telling you the truth!’ he wailed.

  Frey swore in frustration and pistol-whipped the Prognosticator across the face. The man collapsed and Frey backed away, face red, breathing heavily. The faces of his crew seemed strange to him now, full of suspicion and plots. They were watching him, noting his loss of control, criticising him for his foolish pursuit of Trinica. And he saw wicked amusement in the eyes of the Awakeners, as if they relished his suffering, safe in the knowledge that their ultimate victory was secure.

  Paranoia. Delusion. A daemon was coming.

  And they were putting it into Trinica.

  He couldn’t contain his fury any longer. He ran to the window, aimed his pistol down at the Lord High Cryptographer, and pulled the trigger.

  The window exploded outward. Frey fired until his pistol was empty, shooting into the scattering crowd. The Lord High Cryptographer was pulled into cover by the men surrounding him. One of the armoured honour guard went down; the crimson-robed Interpreter took a bullet through the head. When Frey’s first pistol was done, he jammed it in his belt and pulled out a spare.

  He looked over at the echo chamber that Trinica was sealed inside. Magnified in the window, ballooned and distorted, he saw her face turned towards him. One huge black eye stared out. She pinned him with that gaze. He didn’t know what he saw there – Sorrow? Resignation? Love? Or the dead cold eye of a daemon? – but in that instant time seemed to stand still, and the unutterable horror of what was to come crushed him.

  Then Malvery grabbed his arm and hauled him back into the room, just as a salvo of gunfire ripped through the spot where he’d been standing.

  ‘Come on!’ the doctor was yelling. ‘You can’t do anything! Let’s go!’

  And they hauled open the door, and they ran. A daemonic shriek followed them down the corridor, a sound that was half Trinica and half something else. To Frey, it sounded like the world ending.

  Malvery shoved his way past a frightened Speaker, leading the way down the corridor, his lever-action shotgun in his hands. The others came behind: Jez, mad-eyed and on the verge of turning; Frey, shell-shocked, a shattered look on his face; Ashua, alert, at home with danger; Pelaru, enigmatic and untrustworthy, not a hair out of place; Pinn, uncommonly quiet, which worried him. Pinn only ever shut up when he was about to do something stupid.

  Malvery had wanted to be part of the war. He’d wanted to weigh in on the Coalition side. But he needn’t have worried. He should have known the Cap’n’s talent for finding trouble would get them tangled up in it eventually.

  Well, we’re all in it now, like it or not.

  A pair of Sentinels came running round a corner to investigate the commotion. But rifles were cumbersome at close range; they didn’t get them up fast enough. Malvery gunned one down without breaking stride. Pelaru shot the other neatly between the eyes.

  Malvery didn’t feel a thing about their deaths. With what he’d just seen, he didn’t care any more. Anyone who signed up to be on the Awakener team was fair game now. They were ruled by daemons. They put daemons in innocent people. And they had a plan to smash the Coalition that sounded very much like it might work.

  Someone had to get to the Coalition and tell them. At any cost. He felt a determination and purpose such as he hadn’t felt since he was a young man.

  They found stairs leading down, and took them. The alarm was spreading through the building now. Shouts and running feet. They had surprise on their side, but it wouldn’t last for long. They had to get out, and fast.

  A Sentinel appeared at the bottom of the stairs and loosed off a shot. It missed Malvery and headed squarely for Jez, but she flickered and it seemed to pass through her as if she wasn’t there. Malvery opened up the Sentinel’s chest with his shotgun, thumped past the falling body and out into the ground floor corridor.

  They found more resistance there. A group of Speakers, who fired on them with rifles. They were forced to retreat to cover, and ended up pinned down in doorways and behind corners, trading shots while unarmed Speakers ran for their lives.

  Ashua hunkered down next to him, squeezed off a few shots. ‘This isn’t exactly the best place to make a stand,’ she muttered.

  She was right. They were stuck at a three-way junction at the bottom of the stairs. Too many directions for the enemy to come from. They needed Bess to get
them out of this, but she was back on the Ketty Jay.

  Ashua looked over at Frey, who was crouching in a doorway across the corridor with Pinn. He was shooting mechanically, an empty look on his face. ‘Cap’n’s in a bad way,’ she said.

  ‘We’re all gonna be in a bad way if someone doesn’t do something quick,’ said Malvery.

  Fear crashed over them like a wave, dragging him under. He could barely squeeze the trigger any more; he could hardly support his own weight. Walking up the corridor were two masked men dressed in black. They were not tall, but they loomed in his mind, and dread flowed from them.

  The Sentinels stopped firing to make way. They were not afflicted: they were the faithful. But Malvery, Ashua and the rest of the crew were driven into cringing heaps by their unreasoning fear of the Imperators.

  He wanted to run, but he couldn’t make it. He wanted to be sick, but nothing would come. He saw Ashua’s face, wide open with terror, and the Cap’n pressing himself against the door jamb as if he could crush himself into the wall and disappear. He staggered backwards, turned as if to flee, and came nose to nose with Jez.

  Or at least, what used to be Jez.

  He cried out. He couldn’t help it. She was right in front of him, fully Mane in aspect, a primal, terrifying savagery on her face and her sharp teeth skinned back like a snarling dog. She radiated an otherworldly fear, less intense than the Imperators did but awful all the same. Caught between one horror and another, Malvery spun away, seeking a way out, and found Pelaru.

  Or at least, what used to be Pelaru.

  The handsome, sculpted face, the olive skin and dark eyes were still as they’d always been. But now it was no more than a covering, a skin tent stretched over a something unspeakably threatening, an appalling blasphemy against the world of the sane and the real. He was hunched, eyes mad, veins standing out at the base of his neck.

  ‘Is anyone on this crew not half Mane?!?’ Malvery screamed.

  They leaped past him in a blur, out into the corridor. Some of the Sentinels were quick enough to fire off a shot, but Jez seemed to be in three places at once and Pelaru flowed like a snake. They leaped on the Imperators, bore them to the ground, and tore at them like animals. Malvery saw Pelaru rip a black-clad arm from its socket; Jez punched at the other Imperator’s chest until the ribs broke and her fist burst out of the back.

  At once the fear lifted from them. Frey reacted first, and came lunging out of hiding, firing his pistol with reckless disregard for his own safety. Malvery saw a fury in him that had nothing to do with the Sentinels and everything to do with Trinica. Malvery himself was not so quick. He checked on Ashua, helped her back to her feet, and by the time he was ready the Sentinels were either fleeing or dead. Jez and Pelaru chased them, screeching.

  Pinn wandered out into the corridor, looking dazed. Ashua followed, and Malvery went with her, until the four of them were standing in the midst of the battleground. The Imperators had been taken apart like dolls. There was blood everywhere, mostly from unfortunate Sentinels who’d suffered the same fate. Distantly, they heard screaming and gunshots.

  ‘Are we going?’ Malvery prompted, and that seemed to shake them all out of it. They ran off in Jez and Pelaru’s wake, because they had no other direction to go.

  The main doors to the building were not far down the corridor. The half-Manes had cleared the way with gory efficiency. Malvery had seen horrific gunshot wounds and injuries that would make a lesser man faint, soldiers pleading and gaping as they tried to gather their relentlessly slithering intestines back into their bodies. But there was something in the primal savagery of the Manes that frightened him more than the mechanised death which men visited on one another. The Manes were berserkers, all rage and appetite; they strewed sundered corpses as they passed.

  The doors were already ajar, having been slid open to the width of a few feet. Evidently some people had already fled the building. Malvery and Pinn looked out. Someone shouted ‘That’s them!’ and they pulled themselves back in as bullets smacked into the door, pinging off the metal. There were a couple of Sentinels out there, covering the exit. There would be a lot more arriving shortly.

  Frey came up to them, and stood there panting. Malvery had a quick go with his shotgun and then ducked away to avoid the return fire.

  ‘Cap’n,’ he said. Frey didn’t appear to hear him. ‘Cap’n!’ he barked.

  Frey jerked and looked at him. Malvery couldn’t imagine what was going on in his head right now. He’d just seen the woman he loved condemned to become a monster. Malvery wasn’t Trinica’s biggest fan by a long chalk, but he knew how Frey felt about her.

  It didn’t matter. They needed a leader now. Malvery wasn’t that, and Silo was elsewhere. Frey needed to get himself straight.

  ‘We need a plan,’ Malvery said firmly.

  Frey nodded. Malvery and Pinn popped out and started blasting while Frey peered between the doors. They retreated at the same time, and let the Sentinels take their turn at shooting.

  ‘Ashua!’ Frey called. Ashua was looking down the corridor, in the direction that Jez and Pelaru had gone. She scampered over.

  ‘They’re on their way back,’ she reported. ‘Jez is out; looks like she overexerted herself again. Pelaru’s carrying her.’ She looked from Frey to Malvery and back again. ‘Did you lot know he was a half-Mane and just didn’t tell me?’

  Malvery shook his head. ‘Although we probably should’ve guessed, thinking about it.’

  ‘Ashua. Come here,’ said Frey. He pointed through the gap in the doors, careful to stay out of the line of fire. ‘Think you can drive one of those?’

  Malvery looked. There were two Overlanders parked out there, off to one side. Bulky, six-wheeled all-terrain vehicles: it was the convoy Trinica and the other captains had arrived in.

  Ashua shrugged. ‘There’s not much on four wheels I haven’t stolen at some time or another. Can’t see that an extra two will give me much of a problem.’

  ‘Then that’s our plan,’ said Frey. ‘Ready to run for it?’

  ‘Shit, why not?’ said Ashua. ‘Gotta die sometime.’

  Pelaru came sprinting up the corridor, Jez slung over his back like a sack. With him came a wave of fear, the instinctive repulsion that Manes inspired in humans. It was the impetus they needed. Driven from behind, they went forward. They tore open the doors and let loose with their guns.

  Before them was the camp, laid out muddily beneath the harsh white floods in the sweaty, buzzing night. Men were running towards them from nearby tents and buildings, two dozen or more. A few Sentinels squatted down behind a row of crates, hiding from the volley of bullets. Frey picked off a man who unwisely tried to get a pot-shot in.

  The distance between the building and the vehicles wasn’t far, five seconds at a run, but they were long seconds. The Sentinels were mostly taken by surprise, but some return fire came their way, and out in the open they were exposed. Perhaps it was the presence of Pelaru that saved them. He drew the horrified eyes of everyone around, and bought the crew precious seconds to reach the shelter of the vehicles.

  Frey pulled open the driver’s door of the nearest Overlander. Ashua slid in while the others fired round the side. Bullets came spanging off the metal around them, forcing them to duck. Malvery hauled the passenger door aside and they piled into the dark interior of the vehicle, where metal benches sat against the walls. Last came Jez, slung inside by Pelaru before he launched off and away, leaping towards the enemy.

  ‘Is he coming?’ Malvery asked, as he bundled Jez’s unconscious form away from the doorway.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Frey. He slammed the door shut. Bullets smacked against the Overlander. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ he shouted, and the engine bellowed as it came to life.

  ‘Hang on to anything!’ Ashua called. The vehicle lurched forward and they were away.

  Twenty-Two

  Dangerous Driving – The Fear – A New Passenger – Outside Intervention

  Ashua hunched over
the steering wheel, foot pressed hard on the accelerator, staring out of the reinforced windglass slit at the chaos outside. Sentinels fired helplessly at the Overlander. Bullets bounced off thick armour plate. The vehicle surged and bounced, six huge wheels spinning on the muddy ground as they roared away into the heart of the camp.

  Awakeners ran this way and that, fleeing out of her path. She took the dirt road that led away from the building. The Overlander skidded and slipped until it found traction: it wasn’t meant to be driven at speed over terrain like this. They drifted right, swung back too hard to the left. The edge of the vehicle clipped a supply tent and brought the whole thing down in a tangle of sticks and tarp.

  A grin spread across her tattooed face. Here she was, dressed in a Sentinel’s grey cassock, running rampant through the middle of an Awakener base. Damn, this was fun. She was usually so careful, a survivor, weighing risk and reward and looking out for herself before anyone else. She hadn’t done anything this reckless or stupid in a long while.

  She looked back over her shoulder at the crew, absurd in their cassocks, some of them with Ciphers painted on their foreheads. Pinn and Frey were getting into their bench seats, grabbing on to whatever they could. Malvery was crouched over Jez, keeping himself steady with one hand and trying to secure the unconscious half-Mane with the other. It looked like the aftermath of one of Maddeus’ fancy dress parties, gone horribly wrong. Then again, they’d always gone horribly wrong.

  ‘Everyone alright back there?’

  ‘Just drive!’ Frey snapped at her. He was right on the edge. They all were.

  She turned her attention back to the road, just as an Imperator stepped out into it.

  Her first instinct was to swerve. Her second was to plough the bastard into the earth. She went with that.

  But the Imperator stood there in her path, hooded and cloaked and clad in black, face hidden behind a smooth black mask. And he looked at her through the windglass.