Old Man's Ghosts (38 page)

Many of the newcomers fell but the second of Rhe’s pair zigzagged towards him, thrown off-balance by the lead that ripped through its ribs but did not slow it down. Powerful strides covered the ground so swiftly that Rhe only just had time to drop his spent gun before it lurched within cutting range, hooked daggers slashing wildly.

Instinct drove Rhe forward. He slipped both hands around the sword’s grip and thrust straight. He caught the man high in the chest, felt the crackle of bone parting as the tip drove through and into the vital organs behind. Such was the pale man’s momentum he drove right up the blade, still flailing with his daggers, and Rhe felt a burning pain open on his bicep as his coat and flesh were sliced open. He gave ground, startled more by the unnatural ferocity than anything else, before finally managing to raise a leg and kick the staggering man in the gut.

The kick drove them apart, Rhe almost falling as the pale man finally came to a halt. Both were still for a moment, Rhe afforded a clear view of the man’s rounded face, strangely thin lips and lolling black tongue. His eyes were black, no gleam of infernal light there, but the light of the Gods illuminated slender fangs in his mouth and Rhe didn’t wait to see any more. A second kick and a renewed grip on his sword shoved the pale man off it before Rhe spun and slashed in one fluid motion.

Nearby there were others not faring so well, several of his comrades taken to ground by the attackers. No more rushed from the Minerild, however, and the remaining Lawbringers quickly went to their comrades’ aid, impaling the snarling defenders until they were at last silent.

All was quiet for a moment. Before anyone could speak or Rhe could assess the dead and wounded, a haunting howl rang out from somewhere deep within the great circular building. Despite himself, Rhe felt a tightening in his stomach at the unnatural sound. He straightened and let his sword fall so the guard rested on his boot, ready to flick up again in case of attack, hands already moving to reload his pistols.

‘Ready yourselves,’ he called and a cold knot of anger twisted inside him. ‘These streets are the Emperor’s own, we do not suffer demons to walk them.’

He finished one pistol and sheathed it, picking up the second and quickly reloading that too. One quick jerk of the foot and he caught his sword again, advancing forward with pistol and blade ready. If the others were behind him, he did not notice. He saw only the shadows ahead. As he entered the Minerild, the light of the Gods went with him.

Enchei didn’t speak. He didn’t need to; the stuttered whip-crack of gunshots told their own tale. With Irato close behind he ghosted forward, footsteps silent and weapons ready. Emerging into the open ground he found no one waiting for him, only the white flash of a Sea Snake devotee rounding the curve of the Minerild towards Rhe’s troops.

It didn’t last long. Just as they reached the nearest archway, recessed between a shuttered bakery and a blacksmith’s, a possessed novice came sprinting in the other direction. Barely an adult, the young woman had red burning eyes, huge lower canines and every finger had morphed into a hooked claw. She bounded towards them, hurling herself through the air.

Enchei shot her in the face, but it did nothing to slow her flight. He twisted, battering at her reaching arms as he dodged. She fell heavily, but landed on all fours. Before Enchei could bring his darts to bear a second time, Irato reached out and almost lazily grabbed her by the scruff of the neck.

The possessed snarled and wrenched around, scrabbling to tear Irato’s face open. The former goshe looked unperturbed—

—
no,
Enchei corrected himself,
Irato’s not even there now.

A blank expression on his face, eyes and mouth shining with bluish light, Irato swatted away the flailing claws and shook the novice like a rat. Enchei heard the crack of her spine breaking, saw the shudder of air around her as the hellhound inside was half-dislodged by the death of its vessel.

Should’ve run,
Enchei thought idly as some shadowy limb reached up from the dead novice’s body.
It’ll get you now.

Irato somehow grabbed the insubstantial limb and yanked it forward, hauling the hellhound out into the night’s sky before a bright flash of light tore through it and the shadows evaporated. The Apkai, or whatever fragment of its self it had left behind, let the corpse fall from its fingers – already forgotten – and stalked towards the arched entrance to the Minerild.

Enchei watched it for a moment as the scent of snow filled his mind, quite separate from the freezing weather that surrounded him. Memories of a mountain valley with fresh snowfall and glimpsed figures in the darkness. The place that would become known as the Fields of the Broken, the fragments of a waking god’s thoughts that brought horror and ruin to five armies.

A sudden and powerful sense of hatred filled him, though he knew the Apkai was nothing like what had been found in the valley tombs. For a moment it didn’t matter and he felt his arm rise, ready to fire at Irato’s back. Some scrap of revenge for the pain and death, the nights of horror that had strained the minds of even the Astaren among them, but he quelled the thoughts and forced his hand down again.

You killed it, there’s no more revenge to be had.

With an effort, he stopped his hand shaking, old instincts screaming in the cage of his memories until he was back in control. Just the memories were enough to nearly paralyse him. Every second he watched some demon avatar hunt in the darkness brought fresh reminders of those months he could not forget.

Enchei glanced back at the people following him. Wide-eyed Narin scurrying behind and veiled Myken moving with drilled purpose, Kesh taut and tense, his daughters standing tall and ready as they watched their flanks.

Always leaving folk behind, Enchei,
he said to himself.
And you left a part of you in that snow-choked valley. How much is left of the girls you once knew? Of the father they once knew? The dead lie in my wake, that’s what a survivor carries through the years, but sometimes I feel like more. Like some avatar of destruction – I break what I touch and leave the pieces of lives behind me.

He shook his head. His purpose was clear. Whether this was his last mission or not, success would make those girls a fraction safer. Whatever part of him had broken, the fracture had created enough jagged edges for a weapon and like it or not, that was how he was most comfortable. He turned and followed Irato into the Minerild, the edge of Irato’s long-knife laced with starlight even in the dark.

The blackness closed around them like the advancing grave. Enchei felt a tremble in his eyes as they sought to adjust, settling on a washed-out grey view just in time for another attack. Four Sea Snake devotees burst through a doorway in the side of the curved tunnel wall, daggers in their hands. He fired the baton at one and the man folded like a child’s toy, falling stunned under his comrade’s feet and getting trampled in the other’s desperation. That one Enchei dodged, rolling right around the reaching blades. He popped the man’s shoulder out of joint with a deft swipe, jerking the drug-fuelled warrior to a halt long enough to jam his dagger up through the base of his mouth. As the devotee dropped, Enchei was already finishing off the unconscious man.

Beyond him, Irato whirled and slashed with swift, awkward movements, his skill with a blade superseded by the demon avatar’s brutal speed and power. One Sea Snake threw himself under the blades and buried his fangs into Irato’s arm, only to be half-decapitated in the next instant and never see the venom of his bite fail.

‘Move,’ Enchei yelled, pointing towards where the brick passage opened out on a sliver of star-lit ground.

A set of stone steps led up the side of one building and Enchei ran past Irato to reach them. Another possessed was descending but it stumbled under the twin effects of the baton and darts ripping through its body. Enchei left it for Irato to finish as it tumbled down the steps, vaulting the first few as he ran for the rooftops.

Up there the starlight burned in his mage-sight – white against a dirty red haze around the shrines. The columns of pale stone fragments hummed with power, the wire surrounding them seemingly part of some complex web that snared power from the air. His eyesight fluttered again, shifting through complex colours and forms as it sought to identify a surge of power in the air so great that it set Enchei’s teeth on edge.

He could hear the calls of hellhounds more clearly from here – the howls and rushing wind of their home just a step away as the shrines thinned the wall between the worlds. He looked around, shot once, twice at a possessed creeping forward at him. The impact threw it off a rooftop to the ground below and won him a moment to properly inspect his surroundings. The configuration of the shrines had been changed, that much was obvious – the cone-shaped ones having been connected in a double prism, the columns in a horseshoe form. The heaviest chains now formed a gathering rune that led to a bound figure at the back wall, while lesser ones had been jury-rigged into a summoning rune with bent metal struts forming the vertices where there was no stone shrine.

As he took it all in, he sensed movement in the shadows. Great shapes circling around them. Enchei turned once then raised his arm and sent a volley of darts into the figure bound to the wall. It was a woman, he guessed, maybe House Gold by the look of her, but horribly injured and twitching under the force of the power being driven through her. Whether she was the summoner or not, what flowed through her needed to be stopped.

It wasn’t. Even though the woman stilled, the power continued unabated – but now it all flowed down, like water draining away. Behind him, Irato rose up, a contrasting light in Enchei’s mage-sight. The demon avatar turned left and right, inspecting the shrines and the shifting bulky shadows beyond them. He outstretched a hand and the nearest of the shrines burst apart in a flare of sparks.

Snarls came from the shadows; deep and threatening growls from the guarding hellhounds. In response Irato gathered more light to his hands, forming a cat o’ nine tails of spitting energy that he used to flay the nearer shadows. The hellhound there was torn open by the force of the blow and Enchei was already moving – content to leave Irato to deal with the remainder.

He ran over the rooftops, quick jumps taking him between buildings, until he was at the centre of the Minerild. There the power still flowed, running down through the roof of one unremarkable structure. He plunged forward, leaping for the small brick parapet around its half-rotten, pitch-stained roof. Whoever controlled the hellhounds, whoever was using the woman on the roof as a lens for their workings, had to be here.

Before he could drive down through the roof, it exploded. Enchei’s mage-sight went white as a hammer-blow of noise and roof fragments struck him face-on and threw him backwards. All-consuming white light, then the studded black of night, then a second impact and a long moment of silence.

Narin was halfway up the steps when he heard the explosion. He reached the top in time to see the after-glow of fire vomit up into the sky and a dark figure pinwheeling into the crumbling dirty brick of a neighbouring house. A section toppled inward under the impact and the body fell in a cloud of dust through the wall. Narin ran the last few steps up, Myken on his heels, and dodged around Irato. Light blazed from the former goshe’s hands, long spitting streams that raced around the rooftops with a will of their own.

A clamour of lupine sounds assailed Narin’s ears, howls of rage and pain, while shadows burst under Irato’s assault and the dust and embers of the shattered roof spiralled through the cold night air. He staggered forward through it all, trying to blank out the shrieks and growls, the gunshots echoing through the guts of the Minerild, and pushed on after Enchei.

He reached the edge of the rooftop and looked down. The central structure was burning, twisted fragments of metal glowing inside what remained of its walls. Just beyond that were two figures – a pale-skinned man poised in the act of firing a pistol at someone below Narin while supporting another, darker one. Nearer, half-inside a broken building, lay Enchei amid the rubble.

Something about the pale-skinned man demanded Narin’s attention. He was House Ghost – both his clothes and features confirmed it. That he was Astaren seemed likely when he fired a second time, then a third, with the same pistol. One glance up at Narin and he raised the gun to shoot. Narin found his body wouldn’t react at first – he was hypnotised by the slow, smooth movement, while around the man grey flowers of dust burst into life where the Lawbringers’ bullets struck brickwork.

At last his limbs obeyed and Narin dropped to his right as the man fired. His shoulder was slammed back as the crack of the pistol rang out and Narin realised as he flopped backwards that he’d been shot. A strange prickle ran through his fingers, then the numbness of a stinging punch filled his arm. Only then did the pain come and Narin gasped at the shock of it, too surprised to even cry out.

Sprawled on the edge of the rooftop, almost directly above Enchei, Narin watched the pale-skinned man direct one more shot in the direction of the Lawbringers down below. After that he fled, one arm slipped around the chest of his presumably-wounded companion. Narin watched them run into another dark archway tunnel before he found himself unceremoniously yanked back from the edge by Kesh. Above him, like some vengeful goddess, Myken stepped over his body with her musket levelled. She fired after the pair, but from the slight twist of her features, only half-hidden by the hanging cloth, Narin could tell she had missed.

‘Damn fool,’ Kesh snapped, closing her hand around Narin’s shoulder. ‘When are you going to learn some sense?’

The Investigator howled at that and squirmed under her grasp, but the pain was too great to wriggle free and he submitted.

‘Move,’ commanded another voice from behind Myken.

The Wyvern glanced back then stepped away, hands already moving through the motions of reloading her gun. Narin looked up in confusion, not recognising Irato’s voice until the man with shining eyes was staring down at him.

Irato crouched and removed Kesh’s hands from Narin’s wound. Narin’s vision blurred for a moment at that fresh stab of pain, but then Irato was touching two fingers to it and the Investigator properly understood what it was to scream with his every ounce of strength.

‘He will live,’ Irato stated once the red shadows of pain had receded and Narin once more gasped for air, that now stank of burned flesh.

‘Enchei,’ Narin croaked, flopping towards the edge of the rooftop again.

Kesh peered over. ‘He’s moving,’ she commented, far from concerned for the veteran. A grin flashed across her face as Narin heard a voice from down below – not clearly enough to make out the words, but the tone spoke volumes. ‘Oh aye, man’s back to normal already.’

‘The summoner,’ Narin pointed towards the tunnel he’d seen the two men retreat down. His arm was numb now – entirely absent and limp, but mercifully free from pain. ‘They went that way.’

‘The summoner is there,’ Irato said, pointing across the rooftops to a bloodied, brutalised body that seemed to Narin to have been nailed to the wall. ‘She is dead,’ the demon stated in a flat, lifeless tone.

Narin gave up trying to focus too greatly on the dead woman Irato pointed at. The sight was horrific in any case and making out details in the dark made his head swim.

‘The Ghost … he escaped that way. Had someone with him, injured I think.’

Enay’s sharp voice emerged through the staccato sounds of gunshots. ‘Ghost? The one who betrayed Father?’

As she spoke, Maiss crouched and extended an empty hand over the edge of the building. A moment later she hauled back and pulled the swearing, blank-visored Enchei back up on to the roof. The former Astaren looked unsteady to Narin, but with the world lurching underneath him, Narin was envious that Enchei could remain standing.

‘Bastard almost got me,’ Enchei growled. ‘Must be old to fall for somethin’ like that.’

‘The summoner is dead,’ Irato intoned. ‘Destroy the shrines and the remaining hellhounds in the city will be banished. Then my duty is done.’

‘As simple as that, eh?’ Enchei snapped. ‘You’re coming with us, I tell ya. That worm Sorpan tried to sell me to Gealann mercs and until I cut his balls off, nothing’s done.’

‘Narin saw him, he went that way.’

Enchei followed Kesh’s direction. ‘Good.’ He glanced down. ‘Got yourself shot?’