Emergence (30 page)

A quick glance at the thresh confirmed that it, too, had come to the same conclusion and was as stunned and defanged by the revelation as he.

They were going to need more than a company, more than a legion. Something terrible had happened in the Above. Man had been allowed to rise far beyond his natural station. The vast wall of light on the horizon, a towering gap-toothed edifice that soared as tall as a mountain range, was greater – heresy to say it, but it was true – in size and scale (and possibly even power, he whispered in his silent places) than all but the mightiest of Her Majesty’s strongholds.

Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn let FoeSunder drop to the guard position, the point of his great blade striking the ground in a shower of sparks.

‘Unholy minion shit,’ he grunted just before a titanic war drum boomed a challenge not two strides from where he stood.

28

D
ave Hooper flew, and the city passed beneath him. Failed husband, absent father, wastrel, and asshole, he flew through the night air holding Lucille to his chest, knees bent and eyes slitted against the wind of his passage. Beneath his boots slipped the rusted roofs of shotgun shacks and cinder block apartments, some of them slumped and all but tumbled down, others maintained with the best of intentions in the face of the crushing, relentless weight that bore down every day on those people, those countless millions, who lived at the bottom of the heap. Dave Hooper flew over them all. Over stunted, leafless trees, rubbish-strewn vacant lots, lovingly maintained church gardens, darkened homes, and great fires ablaze where vehicles had collided and exploded, where flames consumed houses that lay cheek by jowl, and where some idiot was having a barbecue on his back porch. He was watching the Apocalypse engulf his neighbourhood on a small portable television he had carried out onto a card table and plugged into an extension cord. Dave soared over it all. A quick turn of the head, as though he were driving his car and checking the side mirror, and he could see Heath leading his men and Ostermann’s away from the Horde. So quickly was Dave moving that they appeared as tiny, static figurines arranged by a model maker.

Turning his attention to
dar ienamic,
he measured his progress toward the pack of slavering man-eaters and was content with his calculations. He would land exactly where he had intended: two strides from the figure that stood noticeably separate from the mass of daemons. He would land in the tray of a pick-up abandoned in the street by an owner who had tried to flee on foot and who now lay in pieces by the front wheel. Maybe the car had stalled. Maybe the driver had panicked. It didn’t matter. Dave flew toward his intended destination, powered in his flight by one great leap of such prodigious motive force that his rational human mind had doubted his ability to make it in spite of all that had happened.

His rational human mind was wrong, and Dave flew. He flew down upon them like an avenging eagle, talons out, ready to rip and tear and rend limb from limb. As he flew from the flat-topped roof of the Advance Auto Parts depot, he measured his foe. There stood the BattleMaster at the head of his fighting column, the tip of his sword resting on the surface of the road as though he were lost and pondering his next move.

‘Should have checked Google Maps, dickhead,’ Dave muttered.

Like gargoyles, two Grymm lieutenants stood shield- and dagger-wise to the Master of Hunn. Dave contemplated the representatives of the ancient warrior order, as much priests as they were soldiers. The BattleMaster towered over them, naturally, and even the rank and file of the Hunn had the advantage of them in size and reach. All of which meant nothing, he knew. The Grymm lieutenants were combat-adept, as were all the members of that clan and order. He searched for a word from his human vocabulary that would do them justice. A couple suggested themselves: ‘fanatics’, ‘jihadi’.

They would do nicely.

As he began his descent toward the BattleMaster’s thrall, Dave took the measure of their power. There were still over 200 daemonum afoot down there, frozen in tableau by the hyperaccelerated speed of his approach. But from their posture, from the way they appeared to be standing rather than leaping and running at the nearest prey, he was reasonably sure that they had ceased their charge into the housing projects while the BattleMaster issued his orders. Dave guesstimated there to be a reduced Talon of Hunn and their leashed Fangr. The Hunn were down to half of their original number. As he dropped through the night toward the tray of the pick-up, he noted the distance between the rearguard of the BattleMaster’s thrall and the lead elements of the pursuing marines and gangsters. He hoped that Heath would get word through to the pursuers to disengage before they made contact again.

He needed the Horde to focus. Not on the marines, the SEALs, or the gangbangers, and certainly not on the hundred or more terrified residents he could see within a few lazy strides of some of the outermost members of the daemon pack.

He needed the Horde to focus on him.

Dave flew down upon his prey, swinging Lucille in a great circular arc like a cathedral bell ringer or that guy who used to swing the big puffy mallet to make the gong go
boom
at the start of the old movies.

He landed, boots crashing into the open tray of the pick-up, the twelve-pound steel head of Marty Grbac’s enchanted splitting maul slamming down on the roof of the empty driver’s cabin with an explosive, head-splitting detonation that blew out not just the windows of the truck but all the windows up and down the street. As he decelerated, the world around him sped up, with thousands of tiny twinkling shards of automotive glass spraying outward, and some of the closest daemons flinching away from the fearsome noise; even the BattleMaster of the Hunn took one involuntary step backward. Car alarms blared up and down the street. Gunfire fell silent, then roared up again out of nowhere. People screamed, and dogs barked with such abandon that they sounded authentically mad.

‘Hi,’ said Dave. ‘My name’s Dave. And I hear someone sent out for an ass kicking.’

*

The thresh flinched from the enormous, volcanic noise, but it did not retreat. It was proud of that depth of self-possession, for even the BattleMaster could not help taking one unthinking step back from
dar ienamic
. That was hardly the fault of Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn.

This human had allowed his fellow warriors to sacrifice themselves in battle; a brutal, noble act. A sacrifice that the scrolls had explicitly described. The thresh realised that they were dealing with something far more dangerous than human warriors or skyborne riders in the night’s clouds. They were dealing with the supreme human champion – for that was what he had to be, their ur-Champion. Nothing else could explain the calamity that had befallen the Dread Company.

The ur-Champion had come out of nowhere. Or rather, appeared to. But the thresh had seen it coming. This was not to boast of its superior thinkings and attention to the battlefield minutiae; rather, it had been a stroke of luck. The human form, impossibly suspended high in the air, silhouetted against the bright background of the mysterious city in the distance, just happened to be exactly where the thresh was looking when this warrior, the ur Dave as it called itself, appeared.

It was just for the briefest of moments, a fraction of a fraction of the tiny space between one beating of the hearts and the next. Indeed, when the thresh turned over its thinkings and feelings on the matter later, it decided that it had not in fact seen the Dave but rather a shadow, a ghost image of this Dave as it passed in front of an opportune light source at just the right moment. The Dave simply moved too quickly to keep one’s eyestalks on it.

‘What?’
Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn roared in confusion. ‘Seize him!’

But the Dave seemed unperturbed. As one of the Hunn set two Fangr on the solitary man, the thresh scuttled forward to advise caution.

‘He knows the Olde Tongue, my lord,’ the thresh hissed. ‘He comes upon us like a great boulder, afire and falling from the sky. We should –’

The world turned upside down as the BattleMaster cuffed the lesser daemon across the head, knocking it end over end. When the thresh came to rest at the foot of one of the Lieutenants Grymm, it saw what was happening to the acolytes as they tried to carry out their orders. The Dave did not so much as twitch when they approached. Not until they passed within reach of its lower limbs, which suddenly struck out with such speed that none could see them move, certainly not the hapless Fangr. Each squealed when struck, but the shriek of pain and shock was cut off by whatever damage the blow did, and they fell broken and dead to the ground many strides away.

‘What’s your name, big fella?’ the Dave said, speaking directly to the BattleMaster in the Olde Tongue with the slightly guttural, snouty tone of a Hunn from the Fourth Legion. The daemonum of the war party remained as still as bedrock. Only the Lieutenants Grymm moved, and only to lean toward one another and whisper in the secret voices of their clan.

Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn was at a loss. His talons clenched and unclenched around the urmin-hide hilt of his long blade. He snarled and bared his fangs at the upstart human.

‘Are you the champion of this village?’ he demanded to know.

‘A champion?’ the Dave replied. ‘Hell, no. I’m just a guy. So who are you again?’

The insolent creature rearranged its facial features in a way the thresh did not much care for. If it did not know better, it would have said the Dave was mocking them. Both Lieutenants Grymm tried to speak with the BattleMaster, but he pushed them away as they approached. One even stumbled and fell on its tail, sending a jolt through the assembled host.

‘Pity I don’t have my phone,’ said the Dave. ‘That would’ve made a great BuzzFeed GIF. So, really, who are you assholes?’

The shock that ran through every sinew in the BattleMaster’s body could have been no greater if the queen herself had inserted a white-hot branding iron into his cloaca.

‘I am the BattleMaster of this thrall,’ roared Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn. He drew his sword, the point screeching across the hard black surface of the street, a shower of sparks pouring from the tip. ‘This is my great blade, FoeSunder. With it I have slain
ienamicae
without number –’

‘Wait a minute, hold on,’ the Dave interrupted, holding up one of its small pink hands. ‘Did you say your gay blade? I mean, not that’s there’s anything wrong with that, but I noticed that none of you are, like, wearing pants, and if I’ve ruined a special moment here
. . .’

The BattleMaster drew himself up to his full height, standing at least again as tall as the human champion, although they did stare level into each other’s eyes because the Dave still stood atop the beastless chariot onto which he had jumped with such a great booming report to announce his arrival.

‘I am Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn,’ bellowed the commander of Her Majesty’s Vengeance.

Again the Dave did that strange unpleasant thing with its face that made the thresh feel it was being mocked.

‘Seriously?’ he said. ‘Well, same as before, I’m Dave.’ He spread his hands wide. ‘And these are all the fucks I don’t really give about who you are.’

The thresh twitched its ears in the direction of a new sound, a high-pitched keening that reminded it of claws scraping on a rock. The sound was growing. It risked taking a few of its eyestalks off the human champion for just a moment, and what it found was even more disturbing. Villagers were gathering at the edge of the confrontation, pointing and staring and – it was sure of this –
mocking
them. The screeching and squealing it could hear was the sound of human mockery. It chanced a furtive look at the Lieutenants Grymm who had also noticed the change while most of Scaroth’s thrall remained mesmerised by the confrontation between their master and this arrogant calfling.

Arrogant with reason, thought the thresh.

The BattleMaster let loose such a roar that his thrall retreated from him. The sound of human screechings and mockery ended abruptly, replaced by a few satisfying cries of alarm. But not from the Dave. It merely quirked the edges of its mouth in a gentle way that suggested it was not much concerned by anything. Certainly not by Scaroth.

The BattleMaster raised FoeSunder on high, making ready to cleave the Dave in two, but even then the curious expression on the human’s face did not change. It did deign to speak, however, before the BattleMaster could bring the giant blade down upon its head.

‘I challenge you, Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn, leader of this feeble pack,’ the Dave cried out, stunning the assembled host. ‘I challenge you according to the lore of the ancient scrolls and by virtue and warrant of my worth to make this challenge. You shall answer it or your name shall be etched into the scrolls forevermore as a byword for shame and cowardice and failure. I challenge you, Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn, and you shall answer this challenge in front of your thrall.’

The proper and prescribed form of the old words hung like a blade over Scaroth’s neck. They stayed his weapon from the downward strike against the Dave. The BattleMaster’s shock, his indignation, and his disbelief rippled out across the entire thrall, transmitted from Hunn to Fangr to Grymm and even down to the lowly thresh.

The BattleMaster’s blade, dark with ichor and gore and bloodwine, did not waver at the apogee of its killing stroke. Scaroth drew the great sword down slowly but deliberately, as though he could not believe this was happening and so was forced to handle his blade with added caution lest in the madness of the situation it turn on him, too.

‘You dare not do this,’ Scaroth hissed at the human.

‘Oh, you’d be surprised how often I hear that,’ the Dave replied. ‘My wife, the IRS, Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.’

Hackles suddenly flared up all along the back of the thresh. The Lieutenants Grymm, too, it noticed, suddenly fell into a huddle of silent quickthinkings. Scaroth had the sense to look, if not troubled, then at least intrigued.

‘What news have you of our brother Urgon?’ Scaroth asked quietly.

The Dave twisted his face again into that annoying challenge that made his eyes squint and bared what few and tiny fangs he had.

‘I kicked his ass. And I intend to kick yours in a few minutes, but by the lore of the scrolls we must settle on terms. And my terms are pretty simple. I’ll kick your ass, and you’ll get the fuck out of here while the getting is good. Once your ass has been kicked, I promise to let all of your friends here leave without kicking theirs, too. But you will agree to withdraw from this realm without harming one more of these villagers. And you will not return. These are the terms of my challenge, now laid before you in the presence of your thrall. Disgrace your nest if you have not the stomachs for this fight.’

The entire thrall was focused on the confrontation between the BattleMaster and the human champion now. None could imagine how it had come to know the ancient forms of address and challenge. But it did, and the BattleMaster was bound by honour to respond. The thresh, being concerned with actual thinkings and feelings rather than with the baser pursuits of mere slaughter, was free to let its considerable mind wander, however. The Lieutenants Grymm, too, of course, were known to be wise in the thinking of things, although they seemed to have fallen into a dispute over whether Scaroth should accept the challenge. The thresh was more concerned, even disturbed, by the change that had come over the villagers. There were at least a company’s worth of them now, edging up through the shadows to watch their champion. Some had even begun a war chant.