Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  As he donned greaves and plate and, this time, hefted his honourably scarred and battered shield, the lord commander could not help but feel some measure of anxiety. Not for himself, for he had long ago accepted his own death in battle as the inevitable consequence of walking the one true path, but for the Horde as a whole and, if he were honest, for all daemonum. Unlike most of his kind he had been afforded an opportunity to study the ways of modern man. The little unnamed thresh, now raised to the rank of Threshrend Superiorae, had provided Guyuk with ample opportunities to ponder the changed nature of these creatures. The lord commander could clearly discern in humanity not just the brute savagery of a Hunn dominant in frenzy, but more worrying, much more worrying, the reserved and guileful warcraft of the Grymm. These creatures, this livestock raised so far above its place, would not simply fight battles of resistance, or even of conquest and subjugation. They would make war of a scale and intent to annihilate everything they deemed dar ienamic.

  Standing next to the lord commander, Compt’n ur Threshrend did not bother to armour himself.

  ‘You carry no shield, I note, Superiorae,’ said Guyuk. ‘You don no mail, while warriors with honour to shame you clad themselves as though for the last great battle.’

  ‘Meh,’ the Superiorae shrugged. ‘Chain mail chafes like a bitch and it won’t even stop vanilla-flavoured 5.56 millimetre. And fuck armour-piercing or tracer fire or fucking HE rounds. I played a lot of fucking COD, man, I know this shit. Best defence is being somewhere else.’

  Guyuk was sorry he’d mentioned it.

  A Lieutenant Grymm stepped up, smashing a mailed fist against the iron plate and boiled grosswyrm leather protecting his upper body.

  ‘My Lord,’ he roared, as though making up for the stealth and quiet discipline they would have to practise in the Above, ‘if it please you, the Master of the Ways pronounces the path clear.’

  ‘Proceed then,’ Guyuk grunted, acknowledging the officer’s salute with a crashing blow of his own.

  The Scolari Master was lightly armoured but even that was unusual. When they took the scrolls, the most learned of the Grymm put aside the trappings of their warrior days. And of all the disciplines, the navigators of the paths between the realms had, until recently, been amongst the least worldly and practical. After all, with the Horde sealed off beneath the capstone, there was scant call for their arcane knowledge. Only a sect with a memory measured in dark eons would have bothered to maintain the learnings of these particular masters. Guyuk knew that many of the other sects had not. This promised the Horde great advantages, tactical and strategic, against both human and daemonum enemies.

  The Master of the Ways intoned his chant of guidance, reading from a long scroll, dense with runes and lines of dried ichor. Guyuk was sure he saw some of those lines shift and twist on the parchment. The Lieutenants Grymm stood motionless against a small section of chamber wall, heavy with edged metal and thick protective armouring.

  The path to the human realm opened silently, a bloom of negative space, a blackness of infinite depth through which they must pass. As the Master of the Ways intoned his incantation the maw opened wider, like the mouth of dar Drakon as it swooped down on its prey. With the portal wide enough to take the cohort six abreast, the Captain of the Guard drew his war cleaver and lead the first rank toward the rift between the worlds.

  Next to Guyuk, Compt’n ur Threshrend gave himself a shake, as if throwing off a surfeit of nervous energy. It was, Guyuk thought, a peculiarly human gesture. The empath danced from one hind-claw to the other and grinned, showing off its fang tracks as it turned to the lord commander.

  ‘This is gonna be cool. I always wanted to be on TV.’

  07

  Dave wouldn’t care to wager his annual bonus on it – and couldn’t anyway, since he’d already blown his wad on those hookers from Reno – but he thought maybe the crowds were thinning out. Maybe people were getting smart and getting themselves off the damned streets. He couldn’t be sure, but the masses around Times Square seemed thinner, and moved with more purpose. He could hear gunfire and sirens and screaming, could hear them up and down the island if he wanted to. There were still huge numbers of people bumbling around in a panic, but perhaps they were starting to get themselves inside, under cover.

  A good thing, too. Sundown was well past. The full dark of night upon them.

  Lieutenant Trenoweth leaned over the hood of a patrol car, marking X’s onto a tourist map of Manhattan while Dave and Karen waited impatiently for him to tell them where they could best apply themselves. A chainsaw started up as city sanitation workers struggled to clear the intersection and surrounding streets of the tons of butchered meat they had made of the war band. The snarling whine of the chainsaw dropped into a deeper, meatier resonance as steel teeth bit deeply into dead flesh. Someone screamed, but it was a cry of revulsion rather than terror.

  ‘Come on,’ said Karen, jiggling impatiently in her boots and leathers. ‘Clock’s ticking here.’

  Dave passed her a couple of energy gels one of the cops had scored for them from the Walgreens just a short distance up Broadway. Trenoweth seemed just about ready to give them something to do when his phone rang. He checked the screen and ignored it, pocketing the big-ass Android while it was still buzzing for his attention. Dave heard more of the handsets going off around them. Canaries in the coal mine of the twenty-first century. He and Karen exchanged a glance, wordless, but containing a clear desire to somehow speed everything up. Officer Delillo jogged over with another cell phone, passing it to her boss.

  ‘You better take this, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Trenoweth,’ the cop answered the call, pissed off and short. ‘What? Stop. Slow down and say again . . .’

  He took in what the caller had to say, listening more attentively, and second time around the shock and dread on his face looked more deeply etched. He muttered a few words that sounded like ‘thank you’ and cut the connection, unseeing and oblivious. He passed the handset back to Delillo and drifted back to the tourist map weighed down on the hood of the patrol car by a couple of police radios and a riot baton.

  ‘What?’ said Dave.

  ‘Lieutenant Trenoweth?’ Karen grabbed him by the arm and turned him around with force enough to make him stumble.

  ‘Hey!’ Delillo protested, but Karen ignored her, focusing her gaze on the senior officer. Dave blinked as he thought he saw her connect to the cop, but not because she’d laid hands on him. It was in her eyes. They held Trenoweth at some level below the physical.

  He came awake all at once, as though slapped, or splashed in the face with ice water.

  ‘You gotta get over to Park Avenue,’ he said, his voice insistent but strong, completely unlike the stunned abstraction with which he’d spoken only a moment earlier.

  ‘Five hundred and thirty, Park. There’s monsters over there . . .’

  He stopped for a second and looked at Karen as though seeing her for the first time and not much liking what he did see. But he pressed on.

  ‘Hunn, Sliveen, two Threshrend and leashed Fangr. A couple of war bands. Not a Talon, maybe a cohort at least.’

  She nodded and started to turn away, ‘We’re on it,’ she said.

  ‘Wait, I need to brief you,’ Trenoweth called after her, the confident timbre of his voice faltering again. She was already striding away.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she yelled back over the crowd noise. ‘Come on, Hooper.’

  Dave was still staring at Trenoweth. He looked like a man who’d seen something he could never understand, or knew something now that he hadn’t a few seconds earlier. Something deeply wrong with the world, or within himself.

  ‘She was in my head,’ he said so quietly that nobody else could possibly hear him. Only Dave, and only because he was dialled in on the cop’s channel.

  ‘Yeah, she does that,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Trenoweth said. ‘You don’t understand. She was . . .’

  But he trailed off, una
ble to explain. ‘You better go,’ he said, moving onto something he could account for. ‘There’s monsters. Lots of them, inside a building. They’re inside. Pulling people out of their homes. Pulling them apart.’

  The horror was leaching back into his expression.

  ‘She’ll tell you,’ said Trenoweth, his gaze troubled, following the retreating figure of Karin Varatchevsky. ‘She knows about it now.’

  Dave was about to say something stupid, like goodbye or good luck, but Trenoweth could not hear him. He had been stilled, caught outside whatever strange, unknowable quantum stream Dave and Karen slipped into when they warped. She’d hit the accelerator again.

  Hefting Lucille, aware of her sub-aural humming again, he found Karen halfway up the block, headed west. She held a couple of mountain bikes aloft, one in each hand, as though showing off a clutch of shopping bags, triumphantly secured at a difficult sale.

  ‘Come on,’ she cried out, her voice easily pitched over the background rumble and whine of the city’s soundtrack on pause. ‘We trashed our last ride. Need some new wheels.’

  The foot traffic was definitely lighter, and he had an easier time of it, hurrying through the living statues. He could see in their faces and the resolved aspect of their flight – suspended as it was – that these people were not blindly scattering and fleeing in terror. Most of them seemed to have destinations in mind. Specific paths to deliverance. Karen came out to meet him, stepping down from the sidewalk where she’d taken the bikes. Stolen them, to be clear about it. One looked like it belonging to a courier. It sported tote bags emblazoned with a logo he didn’t recognise. The other owner was anonymous. Possibly dead. Karen had snapped the chains securing both bikes to a rack outside a 7-Eleven, pulling the steel links apart like taffy.

  ‘Someone might need those,’ said Dave, strangely troubled by the theft. Some bastard had stolen his son’s bike once. It left a bad feeling.

  ‘Someone does need them,’ she said. ‘Us.’

  She passed him the courier bike and threw a heavy motorcycle boot over the other one, looking more than a little incongruous in her torn and gore-stiffened leathers. But then he looked kind of weird pedalling away in his black combat coveralls.

  ‘Put your hammer in there,’ she said, pointing at the heavy canvas courier bags.

  He passed Lucille’s long wooden shaft through a couple of loops on one of the bags. They were probably for document tubes, but worked just as well for enchanted war hammers.

  ‘About ten minutes ago two full war bands hit an apartment building. Better part of a cohort, with two Threshrendum that we know of. Witnesses reported a couple of big toad-like daemons squatting in the foyer, eating the doorman. There are Sliveen up high somewhere, firing down on the approaches.’

  Dave steadied himself on the bike as he stood on the pedal to get going. It’d been twenty years since he’d last ridden one.

  After a moment or two of wobbling and almost knocking over a whole family, immobilised in their flight toward whatever safety beckoned them on the west side of the island, he settled into the once familiar rhythms of rising and falling pedals. But it wasn’t just familiar; it felt natural, the bike a part of him. He was soon moving at speed, catching up to the accelerating figure of the Russian spy, trying not to focus too closely on the shape of her ass. She was psychic after all and . . .

  ‘Eyes on the road, douche bag,’ she said in a loud, hard voice.

  Dave swore under his breath and concentrated on not crashing into anyone or staring at her derriere. He found he could even enjoy the ride, knowing he’d never been this fast or agile as a teenager. As the frozen city swept by in a blur he decided he could ride as well as Lance Armstrong, well enough to win the Tour de France, unless they blood tested him for magic nanobots or midi-chlorians or whatever.

  They shot back up 5th Avenue, weaving a path through the stationary river of traffic, before cutting east up 46th. Karen briefed him in during moments when they didn’t have to concentrate so much on avoiding the thousands of obstacles that lay between them and their goal.

  ‘These ones employed a different attack profile,’ she yelled back over her shoulder as they swept around the corner and onto Park Avenue. She reminded him of one of the SEALs, the way she talked. The double carriageway and divided traffic streams offered an easier passage here. Dave pulled level with her at the start of the 50s, where a whole block was clear. It was inexplicable, until they came upon a Fangr carcass, shot down on the median strip. Dave cast about quickly, looking for its leash holder, but found nothing.

  ‘The Hunn and Fangr smashed their way into this place,’ Karen said, keeping her eyes on the road, dodging around the tail of a yellow cab. ‘All the other attacks, all of the ones I saw through that Threshrend we put down, they were out in the open, for everyone to see. Maximum horror, maximum chaos. But these ones hit the apartment block and most of what happened then happened out of sight. At first anyway.’

  ‘Then what?’ Dave asked as they slowed to negotiate the cross-town traffic at the next block.

  ‘Then they started throwing people out of the windows. Or bits and pieces of them anyway . . . Kids,’ she added, and he could hear a tightness in her voice. The first sign of weakness or at least of human frailty he’d seen from her.

  She pulled up at a particularly thick traffic snarl and Dave thought she was about to dismount and push the bike through the blockage, but she didn’t.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, making it an order. There was none of the softness or invitation he’d grown used to hearing in the voices of women after the Longreach.

  ‘What?’ He almost jumped back when she surprised him by reaching for his face.

  Karen frowned.

  ‘You’re a tougher nut than the others but . . .’ He felt her fingers on his forehead. In his freshly regrown hair. She fixed him with her eyes and . . .

  Fuck.

  He understood what Trenoweth had been trying to say. This woman wasn’t just doing some Vulcan mind-meld party trick. She’d invaded him. Conscious and unconscious, id and ego. Memory, imagination, identity. She’d fucked them all, and not in a good way. For an excruciating instant, lasting less than a second, but feeling as though it dragged on for unbearable hours, he was all but gone. Erased from the world, at least as a wholly sentient being. It was as though she’d consumed his memories, his thoughts, his entire sense of self, leaving the merest shred behind to witness the . . . the rape of his mind.

  It felt like he’d been defiled with great force and no regard for how he might feel about it. But now he knew what she knew, what she had taken from Trenoweth.

  Dave felt as though he’d been gut punched. He was sick with it. Dizzy. Too shocked to attend to the fact that for the split second she’d been inside him, negating him, the world had stuttered back into motion around them. Just for that moment. And then she was out of his head and the warp bubble expanded again and he knew, that not only was she doing it, but that she was drawing directly on him to do so.

  He already knew that Karin Varatchevsky could not warp in exactly the same way he could. But she could dial into him somehow to achieve the effect. And he knew now why she called it orbing. She was more of a Charmed fan than a Trekkie.

  ‘Don’t do that again,’ he croaked.

  ‘If I have to, I will,’ she said, without apology. ‘Now you know what we’re headed into. I don’t have to waste time explaining.’

  She took off again, pedalling away from him, accelerating at an inhuman pace, driving the bike forward with legs that could probably kick a car or a small truck out of her way. Dave followed, speeding after her just as quickly, even as he struggled to regain his balance and composure.

  He knew why they had to move so fast. He knew because she knew.

  Trenoweth had taken a call from the commander of the Midtown North Precinct. The man was desperate. Dave could actually hear the voice in his head, as Trenoweth had heard it over the cell phone. The commander had already wasted
time and lost lives tracking them down. He needed Hooper and the woman he’d heard about. The one with the sword. He needed them a quarter hour ago at 530 Park Avenue. Everything they’d told people, to get off the streets, to stay inside and lock their doors and they’d be safe, it was wrong. These monsters – Trenoweth knew them to be Hunn, Fangr, Sliveen and Threshrendum because he’d learned that as soon as Karen had forced the entry to his mind – these fucking things had deliberately come in off the street. They’d rampaged through the building, not just killing the occupants, but displaying them as trophies. Draping them from smashed open windows. Throwing bodies and body parts into the street below. Men, women and children. They seemed to have taken particular care to ensure the children – the nestlings – could still be identified as such, and not just as smaller, random lumps of waste meat.

  The imagery was stuck in Dave’s head. Burned into his skull right behind the eyeballs, and there was no getting rid of it. No avoiding the connection to his own children. He almost lost control of the bike when he rode too close to a bright red hatchback that was well outside its lane. It could have been changing lanes. The driver – a young woman, his eerily improved memory recalled, unbidden, her shoulder-length black hair pulled back in a ponytail, tear tracks glistening on her cheeks, a small lap dog on the passenger seat beside her – was not watching where she was going; fixed instead on mashing her fingers against the glowing screen of a phone held in a cradle fixed to the dashboard.

  Dave hit her side mirror, catching it with the edge of his knee, and immediately after by the full force of Lucille’s heavy steel hammer head. It exploded in a shattering spray of plastic and glass, knocking his centre of gravity sideways. The wheel of the courier bike wobbled and caught in a rut or pothole. He was travelling at such speed that he had no time to think about what he was doing, only to sense the loss of controlled forward momentum, the sudden chaotic forces attempting to rip the handlebars from his grasp and tear him from the seat. As a teenager he’d had a similar experience; attacked by a neighbourhood dog, a thick snarling torpedo of teeth, gristle and bone which shot out of a vacant lot at him, snout down, head punching into his front wheel and tearing the bike out from underneath him. The dog would have done for him, if it weren’t for his brother, riding behind him, materialising over his bleeding body, wielding a fence paling like a battle-axe. Andy took out that mongrel’s eye.