Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (64 page)

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 & Blackhawks – Thrate & Crome – The Crawler – Trinica’s Cabin – The Belly of the Beast

T
here 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, when 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.

Silo ducked as a bullet chipped the stone near his head. He waved Malvery and Ashua down, conscious of his promise to the Cap’n to bring them back safely. Snipers hid among the ruins, the tips of their rifles visible through crumbling window frames.

But neither snipers nor machine guns deterred the Archduke’s golems. They thundered forward into the square, ploughing towards the barricades. Gatling guns pocked their armour, and bullets sparked on stone. Dynamite was thrown from behind the Awakener barricades. It cost one of the golems a foot and sent another one reeling.

Silo heard a percussive
thwip-thwip-thwip
noise from above. He looked up, and caught a momentary glimpse of a slender, dark figure on the rooftops. She was clad in armour that covered her whole body, moulded tight to her form, and was carrying a long-barrelled rifle of exquisite design. He spotted her only for an instant, and then lost her again: the colours of her armour shifted with the background, camouflaging her, making her indistinct.

That was all he saw of Zalexa Crome, the Century Knights’ infamous assassin. But where there had been Awakener snipers before, men lay limp with their arms hanging over the sills.

The soldiers ran in after the golems. With them went Graniel Thrate, looking half golem himself in his massive suit of thralled armour, a black metal sledgehammer in one hand and an enormous gun in the other. Bullets whipped back and forth across the square as the Coalition soldiers attempted to storm the enemy positions.

Then there was a low rumble, and the pebbles on the barricade under Silo’s nose began to jitter and dance. With a growl of engines, an armoured vehicle burst into the square, shunting a slide of rubble before it. It was squat and boxy, with a short, wide cannon turret on its humped back, and it ran on enormous metal tracks.

‘Oh, shit!’ said Ashua. ‘A Crawler! The militia used to set them on us in Rabban when things got
really
bad!’

She was drowned out by the explosion as the Crawler fired its cannon. They covered their heads and crushed themselves down as chips of stone peppered them. Silo’s ears were ringing when he came back up again. Through the dust, he saw the mangled wreckage of a golem lying in the centre of the square, surrounded by the bodies of soldiers.

The Crawler pushed onward, its tracks crushing the dead beneath it. Bullets pinged off its armour as the cannon turret swivelled. Coalition soldiers scattered in frantic retreat. Then the cannon boomed again, and the soldiers went flying, some in pieces.

The Awakeners rallied, spraying the square with bullets. The Coalition forces fell back before the armoured Crawler. Silo and the others helped cover their retreat, shooting at the enemy to keep them occupied.

‘We gotta get to the other side of that square!’ Malvery cried. ‘The anti-aircraft gun’s right over there! Used to get the tram past it on the way to my surgery.’

‘Ain’t goin’ anywhere with that Crawler there,’ Silo said, but then he saw someone come lunging out of cover. Graniel Thrate, his head made tiny his enormous armour, sprinting across the square towards the Crawler. It swivelled its cannon, but too slow. He shoulder-charged it in the side with the force of a steam train, and to Silo’s amazement he drove a great dent into it, collapsing its wheel assembly. The tracks on that side dragged uselessly as the Crawler was pushed back, skidding across the flagstones. It crashed into a low wall and tipped a little, its tracks lifting off the ground. Thrate got his hands under it and, with neck muscles straining, he hauled it upward. It rolled over the wall and crashed down onto its turret with calamitous screech of metal, and there it lay still.

Ashua stared open-mouthed. Even Silo looked amazed. It was hard to imagine, with warriors like that, how the Coalition had let itself get into such a desperate position.

‘That,’ said Malvery, adjusting his glasses, ‘was impressive.’

‘Attack!’ shouted one of the Coalition commanders, and his troops surged forward again. This time Silo, Malvery and Ashua joined the charge.

Now it was the Awakeners’ turn to retreat. They turned tail and fled as the remaining golems smashed through their barricades. Graniel Thrate was among them, swinging his sledgehammer left and right, broken men flying like rag dolls. Others dropped dead from neat headshots, the work of the invisible Zalexa Crome, somewhere up on the rooftops.

Silo, Ashua and Malvery ran with them, picking targets where they could. Silo saw a bearded merc, caught up in the suicidal desperation of a last stand, come running out from cover with his guns blazing. He wanted to die. Silo gave him his wish.

In a flurry, it was over, and the square was clear. They took a moment to breathe, to survey the carnage and destruction that surrounded them. All around, once beautiful buildings were scorched and shattered. The elegance of this great city had been lost in blood and fire. Silo saw the hurt in Malvery’s eyes. This had been his home for most of his life.

The Coalition troops were pursuing the Awakeners out of the square, in the direction of the anti-aircraft gun. Malvery turned his attention to the men lying on the ground, searching for wounded.