Ascendance (13 page)

He had seen plenty of fires in his line of work, but nothing like this. The flames did not spread. The small, intense blue-green inferno was strangely contained, never making the leap from the burning remains of the Hunn to the lacquered joinery or the carpets of the closet or the clothes hanging in there. He saw the plastic wrapping shrink on some freshly dry-cleaned suits nearest to the pyre, but that was all.

‘Huh,’ he said. ‘That’s weird.’

And then he and Lucille set to laying some righteous payback on the two remaining Hunn.

13

‘N
ow we kill as champions,’ Karen said. ‘Until the second Thresher finds us.’

‘You mean until we find it? Right?’

Her expression told him otherwise.

‘The only certain way to find an ambush is to spring it,’ she explained. ‘And so . . .’

They warped.

The noise of the dying city fell away, replaced by the sibilant hiss and droning hum of a world held in suspension. The bizarre, self-contained flames that licked at the corpses of the slain Hunn danced no more. Dave could still feel the heat coming off them, and he sensed that he could pass his hand as easily through frozen flames as living ones. But he wasn’t that dumb.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘So, this thing . . .’ He twirled his finger around, indicating the warp field. ‘You really can’t do this on your own, can you?’

‘No,’ she confirmed. ‘But I can borrow the ability from you. As long as we’re within range of each other.’

‘And that range is?’

‘Unknown.’

‘Okay. Just thought it might be useful to know.’

‘It would be.’ She sighed. ‘But later. For now, we should put down as many daemonum as we can before we move into the range of the other Threshrend.’

‘It’ll be upstairs, right?’ Dave said, looking at the ceiling. ‘At least, what, a hundred yards or so up?’

‘A few floors, yes.’

‘All righty then. Let’s get to work.’

They took their time. Leaving Karen’s followers behind, stopping back in the kitchen to fill themselves with more fuel. Dave couldn’t come at the tofu, but he found tins of tuna and sardines in the cupboard.

‘Your breath will be enough to wither the enemy,’ Karen said as she finished off the last of the tasteless white goop.

‘Whatever it takes,’ Dave grinned, wiping olive oil from his chin. ‘Except tofu.’

He licked the oil from the back of his hand, dug the last sardine out of the final tin with one dirty finger, and then drank the remaining oil in that tin for good measure. He had reason to ponder Zach’s good sense while he ate. Again. The Navy SEAL had been right more often than not. They weren’t in a video game. There was no power bar telling him he was running at fifty or sixty percent. Both he and Karen had eaten massively before, mostly fat and protein too. But how much energy had he burned since? How much was left and what reserves had they just consumed? His metabolism seemed to be settling down fast after New Orleans. It’d burned like a runaway nuclear reaction when he first woke up after the Longreach. It wasn’t doing that now, but he was still having to consume four or five times as many calories as he’d once eaten. When he was a fat bastard.

Zach had told him he would need to know all this one day. All this and more. And here Dave was with no fucking idea. He’d been hungry after the fight with the unnamed Hunn at Broadway – and after healing himself, a process over which he had no control. He did not feel as hungry now, after scarfing down the tinned fish and cheese, a combination which once would have made him gag. But he did not feel sated either. Not even close. He knew he should keep eating, but they had to be about their work.

Naively, Dave had expected to enjoy it, if only in the grim way that finishing a hard, unpleasant job was enjoyable. Warping through the condo, revenge-killing orcs who couldn’t fight back? What’s not to love? But he was forgetting why it was necessary. On the next floor he had a reminder, as they chanced upon the remains of what looked, from the decorations, like a kid’s party – before three Hunn and their leashed Fangr had turned the apartment into a charnel house. They were caught now, in the warp field, eating the last of the scraps.

Even Karen, who seemed unaffected by the most hideous of scenes, blanched at this and went about the business with a cold efficiency. She drove the tempered steel chisel point of her sword into the nasal cavity of one beast after another, with enough force to punch it out through the back of their skulls. Dave had room enough in the high-ceilinged apartment to work up a good swing with Lucille, who was singing a fine sweet song of vengeance, keen to get in amongst the foe. But, like his companion, he gave in to no flourishes or extravagant gestures, simply crushing the skulls of the Hunn and their slaved
daemonum inferiorae
like a worker on a production line. Whenever his eyes strayed to a corner of the room where the children or their carers had died, he quickly averted them again.

They left the apartment in less than a minute.

Karen could tell him when a group of monsters or an individual daemon was nearby. She could sense them. Dave found he could too, if he concentrated fiercely, but he had nothing like her radar for picking them out and he deferred to her amplified senses. In this way they passed by those apartments where the doors remained locked and the inhabitants unmolested, or where entry had been forced and the occupants slain, but where no members of the Horde remained.

Lucille seemed to understand his dark mood, and her battle hymn quieted into a lament after a while, a soothing tune that settled his frayed and raw emotions. In this way they moved from floor to floor, dispatching the beasts without passion or relent, until, eight floors later, they found their second Thresher in a large apartment with an open floor plan.

Dave had just half a moment’s notice when Lucille came fully alive in his grip again, her murder song suddenly roaring up out of the funeral lamentation he’d been humming along with. He heard Karen call out her warning.

‘Hooper! It’s here . . .’

And then his vision fell apart and they dropped out of warp and into a wild storm of pain and disorientation. It passed, quickly, but not before their exit from the suite was blocked by a wedge of snarling Hunn, while other daemonum poured out of the rooms where they’d been hiding. Dave heard the crack of Karen’s pistol, firing rapidly, muzzle flash stabbing out into the dark. Her aim was good and she dropped the better part of a whole war band which had come screaming through the double doors of a room to her left. Headshots, all of them. Sparks flew when one round struck a helmet, but the extravagant fireworks he’d come to expect when hot lead hit chain mail and armour plate were missing. Monsters roared in fury, screeched in shock and pain, and fell to the hard wooden floor with great muffled thuds and thumps. But more of them came on.

Dave was briefly aware of city lights flashing on a 400-year-old katana blade and then he was swinging his own weapon with barely directed savagery. Unlike Karen he had no combat training. But he did have Lucille and he could still move with terrible speed. He fell back on his football training, the only real training he’d had in the art and science of physical confrontation – a couple of weeks judo classes as a small boy notwithstanding. Dave ran straight at the nearest war band, the closely packed threshing machine of yellow teeth and bared talons that Karen hadn’t targeted.

‘HUNN UR . . .’

He hit them before they could get their war chant rolling, scything into the group with Lucille, who seemed to glow in the pale electric light pouring through shattered windows and billowing silk curtains. Lucille’s cutting wedge swept aside the initial thrust of half a dozen blades and axeheads, splintering an ironwood shaft, and smashing aside the sharp and hungry steel with a discordant clanging. And then he was in among them, swinging wildly, jabbing, lashing out, feeling the blunt fist of Lucille’s hammerhead crushing armour, the thick axehead crunching and tearing through boiled leather and chain mail. Claws raked at him, a blade ran through his shoulder and he screamed, but he fought on, a mad turning gyre of violence. He pistoned out a kick and connected with the unprotected balls of some unnamed Hunn. They popped like rotten melons. The Hunn roared in pain and outrage as it doubled over, unable to control itself. Before Dave knew what he was doing, Lucille described a tight, blurring arc, impacting the back of the Hunn’s skull, blowing it apart in a hot burst of gore. He swung again, and again, the magical weapon beginning to describe fast, whirring loops that broke legs, severed arms and cleared a fighting space around him.

Lucille’s battle song swelled inside his head. An aria of killing. Dave burned with healing heat and with the energy of his counter-attack. He was dimly aware of crashing glass and breaking wood, of indiscriminate destruction, but none of it mattered. He gave himself over to Lucille’s hungers. As she had when he’d fought and defended desperately against Karen at the Russian consulate, the enchanted weapon seemed to need only his touch to unleash bloody mayhem. Dave felt himself less the perpetrator of this terrible violence than its channel. He did not use the weapon. She used him.

And then it was done.

‘Through here, Hooper.’

He fell back to earth, found himself on his knees, bloodied and corporeal, surrounded by piles of dead monster meat.

‘Whu . . .’

He croaked, desert-mouthed and gagging on it.

‘Where? What?’

The words were barely audible, but Warat seemed to hear and understand.

‘Through here,’ she said.

He found her in a bedroom, extracting her magical sushi sword from the ass of a mid-sized Thresher which had tried, in the final moments of its cursed existence, to climb out through a window that was way too small to afford it an escape route.

‘Damn,’ he grimaced as the sword came free and she flicked off the intestinal gore. ‘That’s nasty.’

‘We need to fall back,’ she said. ‘Gather reinforcements. Send them ahead . . .’

In spite of the toll taken by the combat and the damage done, Dave arced up.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘We’re not doing that again. You’re not sending a bunch of your little meat puppets into the next ambush just to give us a heads up.’

The Threshrend let go with a gurgling moan as it died. A gush of foul-smelling bodily fluids poured out of the gaping wound Karen had made of its ass. She ignored the mess as she advanced on Dave, but not menacingly. She looked a picture of reason and poise.

‘Hooper, be real, we need to –’

Lucille came up between them, the oversized steel head dripping gore and blocking Karen’s path, preventing her from laying hands on him.

‘We need to get on and finish these bastards,’ said Dave. ‘Without getting anyone else killed. Is there another Thresher in the house?’

He could try to fire up the warp drive, but he was starting to dread the pain and madness that came with it when a Threshrend empath got inside his head.

Karen returned her katana to its scabbard and reloaded the pistol she’d used to cut through the first wave of attacking Hunn.

‘You’re not thinking straight, Hooper.’

‘Maybe not, but I’ll do my own thinking from now on. You just keep your distance and tell me, is there another Thresher? Because if not, I say we hit pause and grab a snack.’

Karen raised her eyes to the ceiling, and frowned as though displeased by a crack in the plaster she found there.

‘That was a helluva fight we just won,’ Dave explained. ‘But they weren’t even Hunn dominants. They didn’t have names. And we handled them without getting all Speedy Gonzales about it. We can take these things, Karen. We can.’

She jacked the slide on the handgun. Still frowning.

‘And if the next ones are dominants. Or Grymm?’

The window behind her crashed in before he could answer.

Two Sliveen scouts swung in, one firing a crossbow from its free hand, the other flicking a brace of throwing stars directly at Dave’s face. It was only the fact he already had Lucille up to ward off Karen that saved him. The enchanted maul twitched and bunted away two of the dark, spikey missiles, but missed the third, which sliced open his ear before embedding itself in the wall behind him. He tried to warp, instinctively, but the world broke up in shattered mirror shards and bright silver spikes of pain to go with the scorching sensation that burned half of his head.

He heard the handgun bark twice before the sound of gunfire was lost inside a louder maelstrom, an eruption that blew him forward off his feet. The ruined apartment whipped around him in a dizzying blur and he landed on something soft and hard and moving.

Karen.

‘Get off me,’ she grunted, and Dave felt himself thrown into the air again, with such strength that for a moment he worried he might fly out of a window and drop all the way to the sidewalk.

Trinder had wondered in LA whether he might survive such a fall.

Dave remembered that, as he also remembered partying with Paris Hilton and lunching with Brad Pitt and having drinks with Pitt’s ex-wife.

And Dave’s ex-wife, where was Annie? How was –

He crashed into something again, and this time the impact was nothing but hard angles and machined surfaces. He’d landed in the kitchen. His vision was clear again but what he saw made no sense. The apartment was bigger. Much bigger, as though the owners had knocked down a wall, and extended their living room into the neighbour’s place next door. That was understandable, he thought groggily. This place was a mess. They needed to renovate.

His head swam and the floor seemed to shift underneath his butt. He was sitting down? Why was he sitting down on the job?

Work to be done, Dave.
They’d roared at him in their big dumb booming voices.
What the fuck, Dave? Are you on board for the big win or what? There’s six billion fucking barrels down there. Let’s just go git ’em!

But he wasn’t sitting down on the job in Houston or out on the Longreach. He was in New York. With a Russian lady. And there weren’t six billion barrels of oil here. There were Grymm. Six billion Grymm.

No. Scratch that, he thought as his wits returned to him.

There were a dozen of them. No. Thirteen Warriors Grymm. They muscled into the apartment through a breach in the wall. Flames licked at the ragged edges of the hole, which had not been there a moment or two before. Plaster dust choked the air and Warriors Grymm scrambled through, climbing over shattered masonry and around the twisted, buckled licorice whips of steel I-beams warped out of shape by . . .

An explosion.

There had been an explosion.