The Ace of Skulls totkj-4

by Chris Wooding

  Either the gunners were busy with other matters, or they thought that nobody was foolish enough to try what Frey had in mind. By the time someone realised and swivelled one of the deck guns towards him, it was too late.

  The Ketty Jay landed heavily and too fast, throwing Frey forward in his chair. She slammed onto her skids with a scream of metal, and magnetic clamps locked on. Frey felt a blaze of pain in his back as his spine was jolted, and Samandra went sprawling on her hands and knees. The Ketty Jay’s hydraulics howled as residual forward momentum threatened to rip her from her skids, and for a moment Frey thought she’d topple forward and collapse in a heap of twisted metal.

  But then, just when it seemed she couldn’t strain any further, she rocked back again and settled. When they looked up, the deck of the Delirium Trigger spread out before them, big enough for a dozen of his craft. Despite the gunner’s best efforts, they were too low to be shot at: safety mechanisms prevented the cannons firing when they might hit their own aircraft.

  ‘We’re down,’ said Frey.

  Samandra looked up from the floor and tipped her tricorn hat back from where it had fallen over her face. ‘You don’t say,’ she replied drily.

  Frey released himself from the pilot’s seat and snatched up his cutlass and pistols. Samandra was already out the door, heading down to the hold where the others waited ready. It would only be moments before the crew of the Delirium Trigger came swarming out on to the deck.

  Frey took a breath. It wasn’t the thought of the fight to come that scared him. It was the thought of facing Trinica.

  Time to do this.

  He went out into the corridor. Dull explosions from the battle outside rang through the Ketty Jay’s hull. The soldier in the cupola had descended the ladder and was disappearing down the stairs into the hold. Frey was about to follow him when something caught his eye further down the corridor.

  The door of the infirmary was open. Something black was poking through the doorway, moving slightly.

  Frey knew he didn’t have time for it, but there was something urgent in the sight, something that needed investigating. He walked closer, warily, until it became clear that the black thing was a strip of tarp, quivering under the influence of the Ketty Jay’s air filters. He went to the doorway and looked inside.

  The strip of tarp was part of a larger piece, a sack that lay on the floor near the door, which had been ripped open. It took him a moment to realise that it was the remains of the body bag they’d stored Jez’s charred corpse in. Events had moved so fast that there hadn’t even been time to bury her, so they’d left her on the operating table.

  Frey looked from the empty table to the ripped body bag and back again. She wasn’t there now.

  He turned and ran, heading down to the hold, his mind awhirl. What did it mean? Had somebody been aboard and taken her while they were imprisoned?

  Had she got up and walked away?

  The cargo ramp was opening as he hurried down the stairs. Crake and Kyne were near the back of the assembled forces, wearing big backpacks and weighed down with daemonist paraphernalia. The Coalition soldiers clutched their weapons, taut with anticipation. Other Century Knights stood among them: Samandra Bree with her tricorn hat and her shotguns; Celerity Blane with her rotary machine-pistols, her face dirtied and eyes fierce; Eldrew Grissom, with his straggly grey hair and his duster full of blades. Colden Grudge had stayed behind; autocannons would be useless here, where the fighting would be at close quarters.

  And then there were the golems, in the vanguard. Four of them, not counting Bess, who stood shyly at their side. Pale light from outside spilled onto metal skin as the ramp lowered and the sound of shellfire became louder and more immediate.

  The ramp thumped down onto the deck, and they charged.

  When the echoes of their battle-cries had died away, when the ramp had closed behind them and the hold stood empty and silent, then she emerged from the shadows.

  Everything was pain. Every movement stabbed her with a dozen hot knives. Her vision was a blur, blobs of weak colour and nothing more. She existed in a state of torment.

  And yet, she existed.

  Jez took a shuffling step out into the light. Red eyes with yellow irises squinted out from a mask of carbonised flesh. One trembling arm was held uselessly before her chest, mottled and weeping with sores. Her overalls — more fireproof than her flesh — still clung to her in pieces. Bits of burnt skin flaked away from her as she moved.

  All but the vestiges of reason had fled, driven away by agony. But there was purpose in her, a single goal that pushed her on. It was instinct that guided her now. She put one foot in front of the other, and made her excruciating way forward.

  The damage had almost been too much, the shock to her system too great. She’d burned; her flesh had cooked. Had she been living, she would have been overwhelmed. As it was, she’d come within a hair’s breadth of extinction.

  But the damage, great as it was, was mostly on the outside. Manes whose bodies had become useless or inoperable were abandoned by the entity that linked them together, severed from the network. Jez’s had just enough left to salvage.

  So the daemon began rebuilding her patiently, replacing what needed replacing, changing what needed to be changed. Cell by cell it reconstructed her from the inside out. Even now, it was working: dead nerves were coming back to life; eyes that had boiled and split were swimming back into focus.

  She was healing.

  In her mind she heard the howls of her brethren. They called encouragement to her, they shared her pain. They told her she was not alone. Their voices gave her the strength to keep going.

  Hidden in the dark recesses of the Ketty Jay’s cavernous hold, behind crates of machine parts and who knew what else, she found a vent. The grate was loose, but stiff enough to defeat her at first, weakened as she was. She slid her nails into the tiny gap between the grate and the bulkhead, nails that had grown longer and stronger than ever before. The second time she pulled, there was more strength in her. The vent came away with a shriek.

  No breath inflated her thin chest. Her heart was still. She reached into the vent, and took hold of a large grey metal casket. It crashed to the floor as she pulled it out, too heavy for her to hold up.

  A pair of eyes glittered in the blackness at the end of the vent. Already her eyesight had sharpened enough to make them out. There was a scrabble of claws, and the eyes disappeared.

  A cat. She fought to concentrate through the singing in her head. Was it Slag? Slag, who’d guided her to this treasure in the first place? No, not him. He had departed; his mind was silent. Then it was the other cat. The female.

  She couldn’t hold on to the thought. It didn’t seem important. All that was important was what was in the box, the thing that Osger had died looking for, that Pelaru had wanted to destroy. What a repellent idea that seemed now. She could no more destroy what was in the box than she could destroy herself. It was part of her, just as her brethren were part of her. Pelaru had never seen that. And though he’d died attempting to save her, she felt nothing for him. He’d chosen to remain apart, too fearful to embrace what he was. He didn’t deserve her lament.

  She opened the casket. Inside was a smooth sphere of deepest black. Silver lines ran all across its surface in curves and circles, crafted without symmetry or any pattern that the human mind could grasp. But she saw the pattern, and it was beautiful.

  She reached inside and lifted it up, cupping it with both hands. It seemed to throb with energy. Her nerves crackled; the touch of it filled her with exhilaration. The voices in her head were overwhelming now, drowning out everything else. An immense compulsion came over her. The power in the sphere demanded to be used, demanded to be let free. She had no reason to deny it. And she knew how to do it, too.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d held a device like this in her hands. She’d used one before, in Sakkan, at the insistence of Captain Grist.

  The Awakeners hadn’t realised w
hat they had in their shrine at Korrene until it was too late. By the time they did, by the time their spies had dug out the details of the tale of Captain Grist, the shrine was already lost, the city destroyed by an earthquake. Then the shrine had been found again, and the Awakeners rushed to reclaim it. But Osger had found it first. In following him, Pelaru obtained it. And now it had come to Jez.

  It was a distress beacon, an alarm, taken from a Mane dreadnought some time in the distant past. It was a summons, a call to arms. It was Jez’s way home.

  They wanted to fight. She sensed it. As she lay dormant, the daemon had picked through her thoughts and divined what she knew. It had learned of a deadly threat, the potential of a daemon nation to the south. If the Awakeners took Vardia, they’d be within striking distance of the Wrack. And that was something that would not be borne.

  Call us, they urged her. Bring us. We are ready.

  She held the sphere to her scorched breast and bowed her head over it, gathering it to her like the most precious of infants. Come and get me, she thought, and she let the wild power loose.

  The golems roared and raged, smashing through the crew of the Delirium Trigger as they fought on the rain-slick deck. Bess roared with them, stamping here and there on her stubby legs, swinging her huge arms. She tore away limbs and crushed the fallen. Bullets bounced off her armour, and slowed her not a bit. One of Trinica’s pirates got the back of her hand and went sailing over the gunwale and out into the sky.

  Frey aimed and fired, aimed and fired. His pistol was in one hand, his cutlass in the other. He shot at those men he couldn’t reach and cut down those he could, his blade guided expertly by the daemon within. Overhead and around him, great frigates slid through the downpour, engines rumbling and cannons blasting away. Frey hacked and killed and shoved, teeth gritted. These men were in his path; that was all he cared about.

  The pirates boiled up through a half-dozen hatches and doors that led belowdecks. Some of them tried to turn back when they saw the invaders, cowed by the sight of the raging metal monstrosities and the Century Knights that darted between them. They were pushed forward by the weight of people behind, and found themselves on the battlefield anyway. For most, fear of their mistress drove them up into the fight, careless of the odds. They were many, and they fought with the savagery of desperate men; but against the soldiers of the Coalition, the golems and the Knights, they were outmatched.

  Frey heard Celerity Blane’s pistols chattering. She never stopped moving, performing rolls and flips and aerials with a speed and skill verging on inhuman. Kyne lobbed something through the air at a group of pirates who’d taken cover on a higher deck. It was X-shaped, the size of a hand, and magnetic. It stuck to the hull where it hit, adhering to the barrier the pirates hid behind. An instant later there was a low pulse of bass sound, so deep that it was felt in the chest rather than heard through the ears. The pirates fell dead; they went out like lights.

  ‘Over there!’ Frey cried, pointing towards a nearby doorway that led down into the depths of the craft. It was crowded with corpses, but nobody defended it now.

  He’d meant the shout for Crake and Kyne, but Samandra took it up too, and she went running over in that direction, shotguns crossed in front of her, firing to either side. Frey scampered low across the deck; Crake came scurrying behind him, labouring under his cumbersome pack. Most of the pirates were too busy with the golems to notice them.

  Kyne met up with them at the doorway, along with several Coalition soldiers. Narrow stairs led to a dimly lit corridor below.

  ‘Stand back,’ said Kyne, and he sent another of his X-shaped devices spinning down there. It stuck to the floor; there was a dull bass pulse. ‘Clear,’ he said, and the soldiers began hurrying through. Frey was about to follow him when Crake grabbed his arm.

  ‘What?’ he said irritably, angry that anything should delay him in his mission to get to Trinica.

  The expression on Crake’s face stopped him. Crake was looking at the sky; Frey followed his gaze. A slow chill crept through him.

  There was a disturbance in the layer of grey overhead. The clouds were darkening, swirling in a colossal slow circle, accelerating as they neared the centre. Here and there, pulses of light flashed in the blackness.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got to be bloody joking me,’ Frey murmured.

  Some of the combatants on deck had stopped fighting and were staring upwards, transfixed. Like Frey, recognised it. They’d been at Sakkan that fateful day.

  Lightning jumped across the maelstrom. The clouds churned faster, and the pulses of light got faster with them, gathering towards the centre. Faster the pulses came, and faster still until they were a dazzling flicker, and finally they burst in a blinding light too bright to bear.

  When the light had faded, the clouds had collapsed inward, and there was a hole in the sky, a great swirling tunnel at the heart of the vortex. Frey felt fear then, for he knew what was at the other end. An icy waste, thousands of miles to the north behind the forbidding cloud-wall of the Wrack that shrouded the pole. A place where dead things built strange cities, from which few men had returned alive.

  Frey ran down the stairs, into the belly of the Delirium Trigger, where his daemonic love waited for him in the gloom. He didn’t wait to see the first of the dreadnoughts come sailing through the gap. He didn’t need to. They’d be here, as inevitable as fate. And they’d bring death and terror with them.

  The Manes were coming.

  Forty-Two

  Dreadnoughts amp; Blackhawks — Thrate amp; Crome — The Crawler — Trinica’s Cabin — The Belly of the Beast

  There weren’t many that hadn’t heard tales of Sakkan, or of the Manes which haunted the northern shores and ravaged whole towns when the fogs came. But rumour couldn’t compare to the sight of the first dreadnoughts coming through. Vast, black, tattered things; great anvils of riveted metal, tarnished and ugly, bristling with spikes and strung with a webwork of chains. The dark frigates of the Manes.

  A supernatural fear fell upon the city. The terror of the raiders was not only due to reputation; the dreadnoughts seemed to broadcast it. Their mere presence was enough to send the citizens into even greater panic. More dreadnoughts came, and more, until they mottled the sky like corrupted flesh. From their hulls issued Blackhawk fighters, a swarm of flies rising from the rot. The Blackhawks had wings swept forward like the tines of a meat-fork, in defiance of the laws of aerodynamics, and they flew in tight clusters of three or six, so close together that they were practically touching. Yet their pilots moved as one, each knowing the others’ minds, and they never crossed paths.

  The dreadnoughts’ cannons opened up, and the Blackhawks raced to attack.

  The sky was filled with flame. Explosions large and small billowed and burst as far as the eye could see. Broken craft rained down on the city, trailing fire as they descended, destroying buildings and streets where they hit. It was like a battle out of myth, a titanic conflict between gods of old, while mortals scurried like mice in their shadows, fighting to hang on to their small lives.

  ‘Can this possibly get any bloody worse?’ Malvery roared in exasperation, crouched down in cover with one eye on the battle overhead.

  Ashua held her hand out, palm up. ‘At least the rain’s easing off,’ she said optimistically.

  Silo popped up from behind their shield of rubble, aimed his shotgun, then ducked back without firing. ‘Looks clear,’ he said.

  A half-dozen Coalition soldiers went hurrying past, shoulders hunched, splashing down the cobbled road. Silo broke cover and followed; the others stuck tight to him. They were moving faster and with less care than he’d like, but speed was of the essence. The Cap’n, if he succeeded, wouldn’t be long in knocking out the Azryx device. By then, they had to have as many of the city’s guns under their control as possible.

  Course, if he don’t succeed, all this effort ain’t worth shit, Silo thought. But he trusted the Cap’n to do his part. Hard to stop a man like that, whe
n he finally set his mind to something.

  He kept his eyes peeled for ambush as they ran. He glimpsed movement through broken walls, figures flitting down cross-streets, but it was hard to tell the citizens from the enemy at a glance. Many of the Awakeners wore no uniform, just a Cipher painted or stitched somewhere on their clothes. They were all Vards: only the trappings differed.

  Once this had been a proud and wealthy shopping street not far from People’s Park in the lee of the great crag. Now its windows were smashed, its roofs bowed and fallen in, and flames flickered in the rubble behind unsteady façades. The street was full of debris left by the bombs. Bodies lay hidden among the ruins, an arm showing here, a head there, with blank eyes and bloodied hair. Some lay in plain view, bullet ridden. Silo jumped over them without a thought; they’d become scenery now.

  Ahead of him were golems and soldiers, and Century Knights ran among them. The electroheliograph masts were down across the city, so runners had been sent to contact more distant pockets of resistance, while a portion of the palace forces split up to take back the nearest guns. Many of the anti-aircraft emplacements were gathered near the palace, the better to defend Thesk’s heart. Some, presumably, were still under Coalition control, being fortified positions and easily defensible. But that left a lot which weren’t. With three enemies overhead tearing chunks out of each other, a concerted attack from beneath would be devastating.

  If they could win back the guns. If the Cap’n came through.

  A gatling gun clattered ahead of them, followed by a volley of rifle fire. Silo hunkered down at the end of the street, where it opened into a square. There had once been a tall stone column at its centre, but it had broken midway up and toppled. A heaped bank of rubble pointed westward from its base, like the shadow of a sundial marking the hour of its own destruction.

  The Awakeners had dug in here, Sentinels and mercs and peasant volunteers all jumbled up together. Desperate, frightened men, huddled behind piles of fallen stones, lashing out at anyone who came near. First the Sammie ambush, and now the Manes. They saw their great coup crumbling around them, and they had no plan of retreat.