Ascendance (32 page)

32

T
wo 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.

‘Oh gross!’ cried Jack.

Toby just shuddered with deep revulsion. Dave’s own body shuddered too, partly with revulsion, but partly with revelation and the strength of redemptive healing.

‘Yeah, let’s not tell Mom about that, okay?’ he grunted as something hot and powerful coursed through him. He reached for the broken skull of the Sliveen again, but caught himself at the last moment. Or perhaps he just caught the expression of shock and disgust on the faces of his children.

Either way, he stayed his hand. He did not need to eat again. The hunger was gone, even as his body burned with the heat of healing, the pangs which had crippled and threatened to end him dissipated as thoroughly as morning mist on a summer’s day.

That was when he knew they were doomed.

*

Threshy knew what was wrong. Those fucking meathead SEALs. Igor the giant fag, and Allen the corn-fed cunt. His Threshrendum had taken out Hooper’s warp drive, but the SEALs and the Russian woman had put out such a withering volume of fire that the first wave of Hunn dominants had been cut down, or tripped up by the fallen, burning bodies of their nest mates. And now Gaddis was putting out his own personal artillery barrage with that jeep-mounted grenade launcher.

Cowering behind a granite outcropping, cringing at every bomb burst, Threshy prayed that Gaddis wouldn’t raise the muzzle of the launcher and drop a few rounds right on top of him. If the SEAL knew he and Guyuk were out here, he’d target them in a heartbeat.

The lord commander gave every impression of having lost his mind in the maelstrom of fire and high explosive. Until Compt’n ur Threshrend realised Guyuk hadn’t cracked up. He was laughing. Roaring with laughter.

Maybe he had cracked up.

‘They fight well for cattle,’ the lord commander bellowed as long yellow and red streams of tracer fire snapped over his head. ‘They slaughter us like vermin, Superiorae. The scrolls will resound with tales of this night.’

‘You fucking looney,’ muttered Threshy. Or maybe it was Compton. Or maybe Trevor Candly. The empath daemon was so messed up with fear and shock he might even have reverted to thresh version 1.0.

The stupid old fuck was actually enjoying this. He was blowing his wad as the cattle blew the shit out of his thrall. Threshy dared not even raise an eyestalk for fear of having it shot off his head, but he didn’t need to. He could see perfectly well what was happening through the eyestalks of the veteran Threshrendum Majorae who observed the battle from all the points of the compass, and stopped Hooper from orbing – from
warping
– out here and killing them all. Threshy dug himself deeper into the damp sandy soil, watching the slaughter from six different vantage points, as though through the eyes of an insect.

The first wave of Hunn dominants who had led the charge had been broken by savage automatic weapons fire and expertly placed volleys of grenades. It seemed that both SEALs and the Russian were equipped with underslung twenty- or even thirty-millimetre launchers, and the popping
shunk-shunk-shunk
of their fat, high explosive rounds leaving the barrels preceded another storm of detonations amongst the Hunn, who still hadn’t learned not to bunch up under fire.

Not like the Grymm, he thought sourly.

Through the eyes of the Threshrendum he could see them fanning out, dispersing, sacrificing the power of the massed charge, but blunting the impact of the fiery hammer blows landing amongst the thrall.

He had seen one Sliveen scout make it through the intersecting fields of fire and even gain entry to the upper floor of the cottage, but there had been no falling away in the murderous barrage of armour-piercing and tracer fire. The scout was probably toast.

Guyuk’s laughter was threatening to drive him mad, before the gunfire wiped him out, and Threshy started to cast around looking for one of the portals maintained by the Masters of the Ways. It never hurt to have an exit plan.

*

‘Come with me,’ Dave said. ‘Quickly, and keep low. Try not to show your heads above the window sills.’

Toby and Jack did as they were told. They closed up behind Dave and followed him down the stairs. He paused, just the briefest of moments, at the top step, where he could see through a window looking out over the driveway that Igor was crouched in the back of the Growler. The thumping and thudding detonations were explained by the weapon he fired. The grenade launcher.

The giant SEAL laid down a sweeping arc of fire and destruction in front of the cottage, holding back the charge of the Dread Company. Zach stood beside him, raking the killing zone with the heavy machine gun. Between them, and Karen and Pat picking off flankers, they had broken the first assault.

But Dave knew there would be more.

Dave knew everything the Sliveen knew.

As he hurried down the stairs – ‘Careful on these bottom steps, boys, I think I broke them’ – he knew the forces arrayed against them were too great. He knew the Horde could absorb all of the firepower currently holding them at bay. Absorb it, survive it, and wait it out. Dawn was still too far away. They would wait until the calflings had exhausted their magicks and then they would simply overrun them. Hundreds of Hunn and Grymm and Sliveen pouring in through the doors and windows, hacking and slashing, stabbing and biting and tearing until they were done. And there was nothing Dave or Karen could do in return. Six ancient and powerful Threshrendum ringed the cottage, ensuring the champions could not warp, all of them answering to Compt’n ur Threshrend who sat safely some distance away, enjoying the spectacle in the company of Lord Guyuk ur Grymm.