Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘You want some?’ he asked, around a mouthful of half-chewed meat.

  Her face curled into a disgusted expression, but she took the proffered bone and bit off at least half the remaining flesh. She chewed and swallowed quickly, as if not wanting to be caught at it.

  ‘You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?’ she said, wiping blood from her chin.

  ‘They had fries. Smelled good too. I could grab some?’

  ‘No. Hurry up and finish.’

  He did as he was told, throwing the bone into the gutter. Seated securely behind her again, he leaned forward slightly as they accelerated away. His cheek touched the hilt of her sword; the same sword which had cut down the agent who’d tried to grab it during Trinder’s raid on her art gallery. It wasn’t even giving Dave a close shave. He wondered if Varatchevsky would be able to pick up Lucille. Only he had, so far.

  The early evening traffic along 5th Avenue whipped past them in a neon blur. The roar of the big bike drowned out the weird background rumble and hiss of the city he’d been aware of since they’d entered warp. Warat weaved through the river of light and steel with fluid grace. A slight shift of her hips to one side, a faint lean to the other and the speeding motorcycle threaded this way and that with Dave doing his best to flow with it. He bet she’d never crashed a dirt bike through a fence because she panicked and forgot the difference between the throttle and the brake. She slowed down appreciably as they hit the intersections, but only to about half speed, and only long enough to pick a course through the cross-traffic. On the far side of the barrier they roared away.

  Dave recognised the lions in front of the New York Public Library from about a block away, at the same time as he felt Lucille grow warm and light in his right hand. Her song started to fill his head, as it had every time they raced into a fight with the Horde. The traffic seemed thicker at 5th and 42nd, in a way it hadn’t been at the previous cross street. Warat slowed and approached the intersection with greater caution, taking them through the dense, frozen parade at something approaching a reasonable speed, maybe thirty or forty miles per hour.

  As they rounded the corner and sped up again he noted the first signs of a change. Far ahead of them the street was jammed with pedestrians and vehicles. He could see people caught sprinting away from something. Some looking back over their shoulders. Some with their heads down and their arms pumping like they were in the last few seconds of a dash for the hundred metre Olympic gold. All of them immobile, trapped by the magic spell that allowed Dave and Varatchevsky to warp from E91st to 42nd Street in less time than it would take those sprinters to move a few inches through space. Karen laid them on a fast track down the centreline of 42nd, and the Honda shrieked as she cranked the throttle. Buildings blurred past, the greenery of Bryant Park a verdant smear on his left. They were moving too quickly for Dave to make out the features or even the outlines of any individual pedestrians, but by the time they were a block down from the library he could tell that the crowd was a mob in full, terrified flight. Lucille felt as light as bamboo in his clenched fist, her battle hymn something he felt as well as heard, the chorus of unseen angels. It filled him with her needs. Her hungers. He felt himself press into Karen Warat’s leathers, into the scabbard and hilt of her sword as she slammed on the brakes.

  ‘Jump,’ she said.

  And then she was gone and he was airborne as the bike impacted with the side panel of a yellow cab.

  03

  He was aware of time stuttering back into motion just before they struck the vehicle. Warat was there and then she wasn’t. Her body tensing, muscles contracting before she seemed to fly directly up, as though launched from an ejector seat. Dave, who wasn’t ready and who didn’t jump, saw the yellow cab move suddenly. Not toward him, but across his field of vision as they dropped out of warp and the world transitioned from stasis to movement without the slightest lurch of inertia. He heard screams, and the honking of horns. He heard the crunch of metal on metal, and had time enough to realise it wasn’t the bike hitting the taxi. And then the bike hit the taxi anyway and he was thrown into the sky and over the roof.

  Everything slowed again, but not with the strange temporal distortion of whatever magic powered his ability to warp time. It was that purely subjective, deeply human experience of his senses coming fully alive. The same way perfectly normal people recalled time slowing down in a car crash, or some other non-mystical catastrophe. The simple biological quickening of a nervous system flooded with neurotransmitters.

  Dave hit the accelerator, thinking to stop his flight, but of course that merely stopped the world around him and he flew on just as quickly as before. He grunted in agony as his vision pixelated and his brain seemed to press painfully against the inside of his skull.

  What the fuck?

  He dropped out of warp, the pixelation and the pain receding immediately. He saw the cab shunted sideways by the force of the Honda striking it, but the larger vehicle did not shear in two or fly apart, as he’d half expected. The windows exploded outwards in a shower of safety glass and he heard more screams.

  At least he wasn’t spinning, tumbling end over end, but his flight was uncontrolled, and he could see he was going to hit the asphalt and skittle half a dozen people. Even though Warat was spinning and tumbling, she looked like a gymnast executing a routine. She spun once, twice and landed on the road, boots thudding down, knees flexing as she dropped into a shoulder roll and came up with her sword drawn.

  And Trinder expected me to kick her ass?

  Dave shook off the thought as his own landing fast approached, undignified and dangerous. Without any of the Russian’s skills or native grace he simply tucked himself around Lucille in a ball, and swore as he hit the road surface and felt his shoulder break. Again. The pain was huge but dull, as it always was now, and washed away almost immediately in the bathing warmth of endorphins and whatever magical fucking fairy-bots coursed through his bloodstream to make good broken bones and torn flesh. He felt the muted impact of those unfortunate enough to be caught in his path as he landed among them. He tried to close his mind to the muffled cries and startled shouts, and one sickly snapping sound, which had to be somebody’s leg breaking. There was nothing to be done for them. Not yet. He knew, from Lucille’s battle hymn filling all his secret places, that the Horde were upon them.

  But where was Warat?

  Dave climbed to his feet, muttering apologies and cringing at the sight of the seven – no, eight – people he’d just knocked down. One of them, an old woman in a bloodied head scarf, wailed and clutched at her leg that was bent all wrong at the knee. He struggled to reconcile the banal with the bizarre. A Gap Kids store, the Walgreens on the opposite corner, neon lights and giant posters for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and Amazon’s Man in the High Castle, gunshots cracking out ahead of him, muted only slightly by the roar of the fleeing mob, a dead Fangr, cleanly decapitated, midnight dark daemon ichor pulsing from its neck stump.

  More shots, fired rapidly, but singly. Not the automatic weapons fire he’d grown used to, or thought he had, in Omaha and New Orleans. Probably cops and probably only two of them.

  He was about to punch the accelerator when somebody else did. Warat, of course.

  The crowd stopped. The screams and honking horns and general chaos died away to that familiar distant rumble and hiss. But his vision fell apart in broken pixels again. The pain, the iron fist squeezing his head from the inside was back, and his hunger . . .

  The bubble popped and all around him chaos and human madness surged back into motion. The uproar of thousands of voices hammered and clawed at his ears. Frantic, horrified, unbelieving. Dave was buffeted and knocked off balance, almost losing his footing in the surging tide of the terror-struck mob.

  He tried one last time to pause the world, and failed. The pain and blinding disorientation was too great. He pushed through the crowd, trying to exercise some care, but keen to break free. To find Warat. He moved about ten y
ards, when his stomach cramped and his head swam. He almost stumbled to his knees, but he was clear, or relatively clear, of the worst of the crush and he could see the Russian spy again.

  She stood in a clear space at the meeting of Broadway and 42nd, a rough circle surrounded by nine daemons. Three Hunn. Five leashed Fangr. And one of a type he had only seen once before, on a screen in New Orleans, but which he, or rather Urgon, recognised as thresh.

  No.

  Not as thresh, but Threshrend. A fully mature adult. Battle scarred and grown into its power.

  A daemon superiorae.

  A boss motherfucker.

  Two cops, both looking freaked out, stood a short distance behind Warat, pointing their guns at the monsters. The showdown had locked up the better part of the intersection. From the crushed and burning vehicles Dave could only assume the Hunn and their thralls had just jumped in and started laying about them with heavy war hammers and battle-axes.

  The daemons looked wary, even fearful, of the naked flames from burning cars and the firewall kept them from rampaging up toward Times Square or further down into the theatre district. Traffic was piling up behind the obstacle, and getting worse as people abandoned their vehicles and fled.

  The only thing stopping the tiny monster war band from forcing their way out of the intersection and charging down the terrified masses was Colonel Karin Varatchevsky, and two of New York’s finest, looking very much like two of New York’s most freaked out.

  Bodies lay everywhere, extravagantly mutilated. But human corpses were not the only lifeless remains at Broadway and 42nd Street. Dave counted two Hunn and three Fangr down. Two of the Fangr looked like they’d been shot but a third, like the dead Fangr he had seen a few seconds ago, had obviously been carved up by Karen and her blade, which was dripping darkly. The surviving daemonum snapped and snarled at her, hunkering down on their powerfully muscled haunches, which twitched and spasmed as they either restrained themselves or tried to work up the courage for another rush.

  None of the Hunn had Warat’s full attention, however. That she reserved for the final member of their war party. The Threshrend daemon. As best Dave knew, they were empaths who amplified the feelings and, to a lesser extent, the thoughts of friend and foe alike. Urgon regarded them as little more than meat trumpets for blowing before battle.

  Warat held the gore-streaked katana toward the warrior beasts as a warding totem, but to the toad-like monstrosity with the forest of wandering eyestalks, the Threshrend, she held out her free hand, like a traffic cop. Dave supposed she had to know what she was doing.

  Whenever a Hunn would inch forward she turned her body a few inches to meet the possible attack, but her gaze was focused on the ugly, wart-covered empath daemon.

  Unsurprisingly, the crowd was thin around them. No sane person wanted to put themselves into that killing field. But that didn’t mean it was entirely free of nutjob bystanders. Dozens of witnesses remained, either too shocked and frightened to flee, lest that movement draw attention to them. Or because they were just dumbfucks with camera phones.

  Dave carefully approached the cops, hefting Lucille into a two-handed grip. His head seemed fuzzier the closer he drew to them, and his hunger increased. Not ravenous yet, but already uncomfortable in spite of the nearly raw meat he had only just consumed.

  ‘Coming up behind you,’ he said, loud enough to be heard over the crowd noise.

  ‘Get back, you idiot,’ one of the police officers barked, never taking his eyes off the Hunn. Or rather, off their nut sacks which, as always, were swinging low beneath coarse chain mail and Drakon-hide armour. Dave had to admit, Hunn junk was a horribly mesmerising sight.

  ‘He’s with me,’ Karen said over her shoulder, still not taking her eyes off the empath.

  The cop risked a glance back at Dave. His name tag read Chadderton. It took a moment but Dave saw the recognition light up the man’s eyes.

  ‘You. Oh thank Christ.’

  ‘Hey,’ Karen said sharply. ‘Who got here first and saved your asses?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ said the other cop. A woman. Dave couldn’t see her name tag.

  The snarls and grunts of the Horde, the musky scent of them, recalled visits to the zoo with his kids. Happy days. Or happier than this at any rate. The moment seemed finely, if not perfectly, balanced, with Karen unable to do any more for some reason, undoubtedly related to her psychic face-off with the Threshrend, and the Hunn unwilling to take a chance that she’d carve them up the same way she had their nest mates. Dave thought about breaking the stand-off by taking one of the cops’ guns and shooting the biggest Hunn in the balls, if only to teach them the wisdom of wearing pants. But he wasn’t sure he could pull off the feat – walking up, smoothly taking the gun and making the shot.

  He’d look like a bit of a dick if he couldn’t, and there were all those cameras on them, so maybe not.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he asked, ‘You know. Besides monsters.’

  ‘Having a battle of wits here, Hooper,’ said Karen, nodding tightly at the Threshrend. He noticed for the first time just how strained her voice was.

  ‘Is this daemon bothering you, ma’am?’ he asked. But he could see from the way veins were starting to stand out on her neck that it was. The air seemed to crackle between Warat and the beast, the atmosphere so charged that he could feel the hairs on the back of his arms standing up. The terrible pressure inside his own temples had to be connected to whatever was going down between them, and he wondered if it was also affecting the Hunn and their leash.

  Dave rolled his shoulder again – it felt good now – and he hoisted Lucille, smacking the hardwood handle into his palm. Crazy bitch was fairly whistling her happy tune, and he suspected it might even be soothing the sharp pain in his head and behind his eyes. He had the very strong impression that were it not for the enchanted splitting maul, he’d probably be as paralysed as those Hunn appeared to be.

  Carefully sliding up beside Chadderton he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Hey, my name’s Dave. Who are you?’

  ‘Chadderton,’ the man answered, his voice steady but tense with the effort of keeping it so. ‘Ted,’ he added, and shook his head as if surprised by something he’d said. ‘And this is Officer Delillo.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Dave. The woman didn’t reply or add anything to her partner’s introduction. Her eyes remained fixed on the largest Hunn. Dave could see she was aiming at its centre mass, which would do no good at all.

  ‘So. Ted. Officer Delillo. You guys got enough ammo left to put down that ugly-ass hell toad over there. The one with all the eyestalks and the warts?’

  ‘I got three rounds left,’ said Chadderton.

  ‘Two,’ his partner offered.

  ‘Think you can shoot out the base of those stalks?’ Dave asked. ‘Its thick skull is a lot thinner there.’

  ‘Can try,’ said Delillo, her eyes flicking to Dave and widening a little. She had some trouble focusing on the Threshrend again. Dave held back his sigh. She dug his magic Old Spice. But she wasn’t hot, and this wasn’t the time.

  ‘That’s all we can ever do,’ he said. ‘Karen? Karin?’ he added as quietly as he could while still being heard. ‘You good to go?’

  The Russian, who looked about a thousand miles from being good to go, jerked her head up and down and Dave continued his slow sidestepping shuffle toward her, leaving the cops behind, but making sure not to get between them and the Threshrend. Even ducking low at one point to give them the shot.

  ‘Don’t. Try. Orb.’ Warat grunted each word separately, and for a moment he wasn’t sure what she meant. And then he recalled her saying she’d ‘orbed’ out of the consulate to get him. Some Russian word for ‘warp’ maybe.

  ‘Yeah, already figured that. Old daemon Kermit there is fucking with us, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she said, almost a gasp. She was sweating and tremors ran through her upper body, causing the blade she still held to waver a little.
One of the Hunn stepped forward uncertainly, but stopped as Dave turned on him. The beast’s nasal slits flared, as though he smelled something he really didn’t like.

  Dave addressed them as a group, speaking in the Olde Tongue.

  ‘So, you boys aren’t from round here, are you?’

  He expected the Threshrend, which he suspected was the superiorae of this small group, to answer, perhaps giving him a chance to try warping over there while it was distracted. Instead one of the Hunn spoke. The one with the biggest balls, of course.

  ‘You are the champion of this village?’ it growled, its deep, guttural voice noticeably slurred.

  ‘Dude,’ laughed Dave. ‘Are you drunk?’ But his smile faltered when he realised that yes, it was, and why it was so shit-faced.

  Bloodwine.

  ‘You are the Dave,’ growled the Hunn, which had no leashed Fangr, either because Karen had slain them all, or because it was a free-roaming thrall-boss. The growl sounded garbled and indistinct. The creature’s face was crimson with fresh blood and dead meat hung in grotesque strips and chunks from its jagged fangs. ‘I have heard tell of your prowess in combat but it does not impress me, for I am Jägur and I shall have my battle name from you this night.’

  ‘Dude, really, you’re embarrassing yourself,’ said Dave. ‘You don’t even have a battle name yet? Bet your little weenie blade doesn’t have a name either.’

  He was moving slowly as he trash-talked the daemon, moving away from Karen who was still locked into her Thunderdome duel with the enormous psychic toad.

  ‘Am I right? Or am I right, Jerker. Was that your nest name? Jerker of the Hunn. And that mighty blade you’re packing, what are you gonna call that, urmin-tickler or something?’

  The Hunn swayed from side to side, unsteady on its giant haunches. Its yellowed eyes squinted at Dave, or maybe just against the light of the burning cars. In a lower voice, and speaking directly to the Hunn now, Dave grinned nastily and channelled his inner python.