Lord Guyuk ur Grymm marched into the Above, away from the dark portal to the UnderRealms, maintained here by not one, but three Masters of the Ways, two of them at the far end of the connection, as suggested by Compt’n ur Threshrend. Motherfucking redundancy, he called it and Guyuk recognised the sense of the practice. It would not be wise to assume that because they had the Dave isolated and at some supposed disadvantage, the damnable human champion could not yet do them great harm. To lose a Way Master, for instance, and find themselves trapped on this small peninsula in the hours before dawn would not do. If the accursed sun did not burn them from the earth, some equally accursed human magicks almost certainly would.
A Dread Company of Grymm fanned out through the forests ahead of them. Two more Talon of Hunn stood ready in the staging area at the other end of the Way, waiting their turn to pass through and join them. They would fight without leashed Fangr, lest a single dominant losing control for just a moment give them all away. It should not matter. Every moment brought more forces of the Horde onto this headland. Every moment, Guyuk hoped, brought the Dave closer to his ending.
As they stole through the night, the lord commander tried to take a measure of confidence from the success of the diversionary attack on the nearby hamlet. The Hunn there had died of course, but they had died well and their names would be added to the scrolls no matter what came of this next chapter. Their mission was done. The Dave had been drawn here, away from the main human armies, and having so easily accounted for the threat he could see, Sliveen confirmed the champion had repaired to his nest, unaware of the much greater threat he could not yet discern.
‘My psychic Super Friends are ready to rock, boss, just in case you were wondering.’
‘I was not wondering, no, Superiorae. But thank you for informing me anyway. The finest warriors of the Regiments Select of Grymm are of course well known for their incompetence and without your constant blathering I am sure I would faint away with worry that they would fail to escort the Threshrendum to their required station as ordered.’
‘Wow,’ Compt’n replied. ‘That was like, wow. You laid down some choice snark there, boss. Good for you! You’ll be, like, doing irony and shit soon.’
‘Yes. Yes my . . . snark is coming along. Thank you for noticing.’
Compt’n ur Threshrend did indeed appear to be quite genuine in his appreciation for Guyuk’s use of the strange human form of communication known as sarcasm. It was, he had learned, a particular favourite of the Dave. He seemed to speak in high snark and nought else whenever he challenged a member of the Horde. Guyuk did not intend to look foolish should he ever have to cross wits with the man.
‘But be quiet now, Superiorae,’ Guyuk cautioned. ‘We draw closer to the quarry and this, after all, is your plan. Best that we afford it the highest chance of success.’
They advanced through the forest, the smell of salt and seawater strong in his nasal slits as he listened to the crashing boom of surf on rocks. The rumble rolled in from the darkness dagger-wise, the direction from which the sun would rise soon enough. Too soon indeed for his peace of mind. Beside Guyuk, shield-wise and a few steps behind him, Compt’n ur Threshrend hurried to keep up. Although he was the smallest of the daemonum investing the headland he was by far the loudest. Even the Hunn were able to advance on their prey with greater stealth.
‘If you stomped a little harder through the dead fall of this forest I’m sure the Dave might actually hear you coming,’ said Guyuk.
‘Pfft. The Dave has probably fallen into a barrel of rum by now,’ the Superiorae replied. Guyuk was not sure what he meant, but the empath did appear to take a little more care to soften the fall of his hind-claws.
The small hovel where Compt’n ur Threshrend had promised they would find the Dave’s nestlings slowly appeared through the trees. It was an unimpressive structure compared to the great towers Guyuk had seen in Manhatt’n, but far sturdier than anything recalled in the annals of the war scrolls. One of the human chariots waited in the clearing in front. The Superiorae surprised him by leaping into the lower branches of a tree, and scaling quite nimbly into the upper canopy. The lord commander suppressed the urge to scold him or even to ask what he was doing. He had to remember that, as perverse as the Superiorae could appear at times, he was their only expert in the ways of dar ienamic.
We must hasten to acquire more experts, Guyuk thought, as the Threshrend scuttled down again.
‘Lookin’ good, boss,’ Compt’n said in a low voice. ‘You want I should tell my peeps to start blocking his WiFi?’
‘If you mean, should the Threshrendum begin their attack? No. The last of the Hunn are still to move into position. I fear that fate shall gift us no more than one lunge at this foe. I would not wish to strike before we are set.’
‘Okay, okay, not judging. Just saying,’ the tiny empath daemon said hurriedly, throwing up its fore-claws. ‘It’s just, you know, sunrise and everything. And I don’t really tan. I burn. We all burn. Like, you know, horribly. So . . .’
‘I am aware of the danger, Superiorae. But war is risk. And this is a risk which might win us not just the human realm but the greater struggle against the other sects. It is a risk worth taking.’
*
It was totally fucking not worth taking. Or at least, not in person. Or not in monster.
Threshy stopped and frowned, an even uglier expression on this face, riven with scars and suppurating boils, than it had been on all his previous human faces. Or the faces he’d eaten. He snarled and shook off the thought. Sometimes the persistence of his old ways of thinking fucked him up.
Like when he thought of Polly Farrell. And all the things he’d like to do to Polly Farrell with his monster loins.
He quickly pushed those thoughts aside.
He was here, and not rotting in some Grymm dungeon, because he could think in those ‘old’ ways, the human ways of those whose brains he’d sucked up like an offal slushy. There was no pay-off in worrying about what might have happened if he hadn’t been spared by Guyuk.
It was enough to unsettle a motherfucker. Even a motherfucker who’d eaten the brains of a genius like Compton. Hell, even those SEALs he’d chomped had been a lot smarter than most people you’d eat. But not as smart as Compton, and that was why they were here. Because Compton had known Hooper would eventually make his way to his family.
Didn’t mean Threshy needed to be here though. Or even Guyuk. They could have sent the Dread Company without adult supervision. They’d have killed every motherfucker who needed killing. And then everyone else. No need for Threshy to bother with anything but the celebratory kegger back at the palace. He didn’t even need to be here to control the Threshrendum. They were all battle-worn badasses and they knew now how to stop Hooper and his little dominatrix friend from speed-whoopin’ their asses like the Flash.
He sniffed at that, as the last cohort of Hunn moved quietly into position around them, the dominants slipping through the darkened forest with a stealthy silence that belied their size and the great weight of armour they all now wore. These were not mere warrior Hunn. They were dominants-exceptional. The finest of their clan. Nobody was going into this cage match with their dumb nuts hanging out.
It bugged the hell out of Threshy that he couldn’t figure out how Hooper and the Russian bitch were orbing around. Or warping, to use Hooper’s term. It also bugged him that he tended to think of the mysterious power as orbing, because that’s how the woman thought of it, and his empathic link was to her, not the so-called fucking Dave.
Warping was much cooler.
But the fucking Consilium Scolari took their lead from the Threshrendum in the field, not Threshy, and like him, the Threshrendum were linked with Varatchevsky, not Hooper. So orbing it had to be.
Even though nobody knew what the fuck it even was. There were no such things as orb daemons or warp monsters. The power seemed indigenous to Hooper, which was fucking bullshit.
Threshy sniffed as his nostrils ca
ught the scent of something in the breeze. Gun smoke. Faint and almost faded. It gave him a start for a moment and he saw, and felt, that Guyuk caught it too. He could not see the bulk of the Dread Company, but he felt them suddenly freeze.
‘Human weaponry.’
The Sliveen MasterScout surprised Threshy. He had not sensed him there in the shadows. Sneaky fucker.
‘Explain yourself, MasterScout,’ Guyuk growled quietly. ‘You reported the Dave and his thrall were unaware of our approach.’
The Sliveen warrior sniffed at the night air again.
‘It has been some time since the calfling weapons were used, my Lord. And then not more than once or twice. None of my scouts reported being taken under fire by their magicks. It must have happened before we arrived.’
‘Ha!’ Threshy snorted, remembering at the last moment to keep his voice down. ‘Maybe his ex-wife shot the asshole. That’d be like her from what Hooper said. Or the Russian? Man, we shoulda just cut a deal with the bitch. Made her Queen of the Above for whacking him. She’d have done it for fucking free.’
He understood from the expressions on the faces of Guyuk and the MasterScout that they had little or no idea what he was talking about.
‘Meh. Too late now. Let’s just go kill ’em all.’
‘You are convinced this is not some trap, Superiorae?’ Guyuk asked.
‘Not convinced, no,’ said Threshy. ‘But it’s probably not. I reckon we should fire up the Threshrend and see what happens.’
‘Are the Hunn in place?’ Guyuk asked the MasterScout. The Sliveen bowed.
‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘In that case, Superiorae have your Threshrendum engage dar ienamic.’
‘You don’t have to tell me twice, Jefe.’
32
Two Sliveen arrakh punched through the window where Igor stood watch. He was safely hidden behind the window frame, but the daemon scouts had a clear shot at Annie. Or they should have. They did not anticipate her collapsing under the cudgel of Karen’s psychic hammer blows, and they were unfamiliar with the flaws of handmade imitation colonial glass of the type Annie O’Halloran had pestered her formidable father into installing. For the sake of authenticity.
Annie’s ethically wavy window panes, and her unexpected collapse, meant that the pair of harpoon-sized war shots that came crashing through the glass passed harmlessly through the lounge room to embed themselves deep in the plaster wall, rather than deep inside Dave’s ex-wife.
He warped and . . .
. . . cried out in pain as his vision broke up into shattered slivers of mirror glass and pixel chaff.
‘Threshers!’ Karen shouted as the SEALs opened fire, adding the strobing white light of muzzle flashes to the schizoidal effect which seemed to shatter the world into a thousand jagged pieces until Dave stopped trying to warp. The thundering report of a shotgun added its deep bass notes to the industrial hammering rattle of machine-gun fire. Dave heard a male voice, Igor’s perhaps, shout ‘Cover me,’ as Hooper rolled around on the hard floor, having forgotten how he got there.
Lucille wailed and keened for his touch, but he had no idea where she was. He was vaguely aware of screams. Small, terrified screams somewhere nearby but too far away and then he remembered.
Toby and Jack.
His boys.
They were upstairs, dispatched by Karen to change into travel clothes. The realisation struck him at the very moment he heard the crunching, crashing explosion of Palladian window frames on the upper floor, and remembered where he might find his weapon. Probably lying on the front porch where he’d dropped it when O’Halloran had tried to shoot him through the door. Already moving, sick and disoriented by the Threshers’ brain-spasm, he stumble-tripped across the room, yelling at Annie to stay the fuck down and banging his shoulder so hard into an internal door frame that it splintered under the impact.
He heard bones crack – his bones – and his head swam as he burned up more energy knitting them back into place. The gunfire behind him was a constant, coughing roar, almost loud enough to drown out the roars of the attackers outside. Almost, but not quite.
‘Hunn. Hunn. Hunn ur HORDE.’
Arrakh missiles thudded into the brick work, their Drakon-stone arrowheads exploding in bursts of orange-red fire. Windows shattered under storms of iron bolts. The boys’ screaming redoubled and Dave, whose hunger pangs had become sharp and constant, accelerated up the narrow staircase to the second floor. The board cracked under the force of his boots and he realised that if he was running toward a fight with an armoured Hunn or Grymm, or even a Sliveen, he was probably running to his death, and the death of his children. He had barely recovered from his injuries. His metabolism was burning at white heat on an empty tank. He had no armour, no weapons. Not even a knife.
He kept going.
The upper floor was dark but not to him. His night vision rendered everything into a bright clear palette of cool blues and greys. He could not see his boys, but he could hear them, sense them in their room. Something was in there with them. Dave Hooper sprinted down the narrow hallway, his boots hammering on the uneven hardwood board like a hundred horse hooves in stampede. The thing in the bedroom was stooped under the low ceiling. Too thin, too angular and insectile to be a hulking dominant or squat, brutish Grymm.
Sliveen, he thought as it bent to up-end the bed under which Toby and Jack were cowering. Dave caught a glint of moonlight on a curved and wicked blade. Half scythe, half peeling knife, it was designed to skin the hide from small prey like urmin and wulfin cubs. The boys’ screams were hysterical, louder and more imperative than any of the guns firing downstairs. The rangy daemon stopped and turned, aware of the threat at its rear. Dave was afforded the merest glimpse of Toby’s little face, tear-streaked and hollow-eyed, before the Sliveen scout turned fully toward him and blocked the view. The daemon whipped out a second blade, longer and straighter than the first, but nothing like the claymores or cleavers favoured by the other Clans. The Sliveen hissed and flew at Dave, blurring the air in front of it with a complicated pattern of slashes and feints and looping bladework. Had he been able to, Dave would have simply warped safely around the creature and taken it from behind, driving his fist into the base of its neck. But he could not warp, and he could not even get around the thing that had charged out of the bedroom and into the confined space of the hallway. They flew toward each other like speeding cars. In a fraction of a second they would collide and Dave would be cut into chuck steak.
He leaped.
Not at the beast, or the whirring steel, but at the floor, balling himself up, tucking in his head, passing under the threshing machine it had made, and crashing into the shins and knees of the Sliveen scout. They hit each other with a combined speed of well over a hundred miles per hour and Dave felt the bones and knee joints of the monster give under the impact.
Mass and speed, he thought. Bones splintered and cracked. Complex arrangements of cartilage, gristle, muscle fibre and meat separated at high speed with a loud popping sound. Dave did not escape entirely. A fierce, burning spike of pain raked his back, as one of the blades cut through the filthy, stiffened fabric of his coveralls and, beneath them, his flesh. But as the creature shrieked and fell backward, Dave used his body weight to trap its flailing arms and claws, and the blades beneath. He felt steel puncture his skin again, but ignored it as the tingling heat of healing sewed his flesh back together.
Then he was astride the Sliveen, face to face with its snarling features. Mouth full of broken fangs, nasal slits flaring and snorting acidic mucus at him, huge shark-like eyes black with the killing fury. Before it could roll out from underneath him, or just use its massive animal power to throw him off, Dave drove his thumbs into those eyes. The daemon shrieked, a horrible, gruesome sound as the human champion gouged deeper and deeper, feeling the membrane of the eyeballs rip under his thumbnails, and the hot vitreous fluid come spurting out. Dave roared his own animalistic shkriia, gripped the head of the Sliveen like
a watermelon and smashed it into the hard oaken board until the skull gave way and the brains came pouring out. The creature shuddered underneath him and went limp.
He slumped to one side, and fumbled in his pockets for an energy gel, a protein bar, anything. His hunger was a fire now, burning him from the inside. It would consume him if he did not consume something else, anything. His search for some kind of sustenance grew frantic, but he had nothing.
‘Help me, son,’ he croaked, not sure which of his boys he meant. ‘I need –’
He blacked out for a second and came to with Jack kneeling over him.
‘Dad? Dad?’
Toby stood a few feet away, his face a frightened mask.
‘I need food,’ said Dave. ‘Anything. I need –’
He faded out again and when he came to he coughed. Choked. Both boys were kneeling by him. Jack held a water bottle to Dave’s lips, the warm water running down his chin as much as his throat. Dave coughed again more violently. The storm of gunfire had been joined by something else, a thumping series of dull concussive thuds followed by the distant roar of explosions. He could make sense of none of it. He was too far gone. He almost shouted at Jack that water wouldn’t help, but it did. A little. Just enough to clear his mind for a second and show him what he had to do. There was food aplenty here. Meat for the taking.
All it would need was one bite. Just one. That first forbidden taste.
‘Dad?’ said Toby. ‘What is it?’
‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked.
Dave blinked and this time his eyes were crusted with blood and daemon ichor. He could still see clearly though. The bright eyes of his children. The delicate curves of their cheeks and necks. Their slender arms.
Just one bite.
He pushed them away, reached a fist into the shattered skull of the Sliveen warrior and scooped out a handful of blue-green pulp. It was still hot and seemed to shiver in his hand. Before he could stop himself he shovelled the lump of daemon offal into his mouth and swallowed, forcing it down past the gag reflex.
Ascendance Page 31
