Resistance (15 page)

‘Okay, got it,’ said the Dave, apparently having thought the matter over. ‘You’re a bad motherfucker. I’m toast. So, are we done with the mutual dick measuring now?’

‘No!’ Guyuk snarled. He took a deep breath to find his calm. ‘We are not done with the mutual measuring of these dicks. Champion, a regiment of Djinn has invested one of your settlements, yes?’

The voice of the Dave crackled out of the human artifact.

‘A regiment of what? If you mean a bunch of your buddies are camped outside of Omaha working on some bitchin’ sunburn? Yeah, I knew that.’

‘And at this very moment you speed toward them to give battle, would I be correct in that too, Champion?’

‘Well that would be for me to know and you to find out when I speed toward you and kick your scaly ass,’ said the Dave. ‘What, you think I’ve never played
Gears of War
? Like I’m gonna tell you where my space marines are?’

Guyuk pondered this phrase, the ‘gears of war’. Was the Dave not just a champion, one chosen by fate to carry all his people’s hopes, but a marshal of armies too? Guyuk was reminded again of how little they knew of this enemy, and how dangerous he could be because of that.

‘I neither know nor care where these puny space marines of which you boast might be. Come the time and I will destroy them too. But, Champion, and please do not interrupt me now, I seek to counsel you against precipitate action.’

‘Hey, if I want to precipitate some action, action is gonna get fucking precipitated and –’

‘It is a trap, you idiot! You are marching into a trap!’

All patience exhausted, Guyuk roared at the man.

That shut him up for a moment. The lord commander felt irrationally pleased with himself, at least until the Dave spoke again.

‘Well of course it’s a trap. Duh. But why tell me? Isn’t it your trap?’

‘No, it is not,’ said Guyuk, gesturing at the Thresh to control its prisoner, which was squirming about with increasing vigour, whining like a skinned urmin.

‘Wait,’ came the Dave’s voice. ‘Who’s that you got there? What’re you doing to them?’

Without being ordered to, the Thresh quickly punched a hole in the prisoner’s head and sucked out its brains. The whining stopped and Guyuk signalled his satisfaction to the underling.

‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘There is nobody here. Let us discuss this trap, Champion.’

‘Your trap?’

‘No! I just told you that!’

The Dave made a sound the lord commander could only interpret as mocking laughter. ‘Just fuckin’ with you,’ he said, causing Guyuk even more confusion. Why the human champion would want to couple with him he did not know. But the thought did not please him.

‘I have many enemies, Champion. You are just the latest, and to be honest, the least of them. Encamped within a trebuchet arc of your settlement you will find the First Regiment of the Djinn. Not the Hunn. Their legions manoeuvre near my monarch’s borders. The Djinn were emboldened by your humiliation of Scaroth and so now they seek to test our resolve. This is why I tell you that you face a trap, Champion. Because I have no desire to see my enemies further emboldened by killing or capturing you. The worthless scum stay their claws only out of fearful caution. They do not know what happened at the village you call New Orleans; only that cattle rose against their
superiorae
and threw them down. So they come upon you with the full power of a regiment and seek to entrap you, further humiliate my queen, and still the quavering in their cowards’ hearts that has ever kept them in the second rank of all the Sects.’

The Dave did not speak immediately, leaving Guyuk to endure the stab of hunger pangs at the smell of the bloodwine jetting from the corpse the Thresh had made of their captive human. Guyuk turned away from the sight, the better to resist the temptation, staring instead out of the cave mouth across the emerald lands of the Above.

‘So, let me get this straight,’ the human champion finally replied. ‘Scaroth getting his ass kicked made you guys look weak, and now all the other gang lords are moving in on your turf, but some of them want to throw down with me just to prove the point that you guys are even bigger pussies than they’ve been saying?’

Somewhat confused by the Dave’s reply, Guyuk shuffled around as hurriedly as he could in the confined space to fix the Thresh, or rather Thresh-Trev’r, with an imploring look. What was he supposed to say? The human had spoken in the Olde Tongue, with almost perfect enunciation, but the words did not entirely make sense. They did, however, remind Lord Guyuk of the unusual rhythms of speech and choices of phrase the Thresh employed whenever he spoke as Thresh-Trev’r. The Master Scolari gave the little daemon a brief jab with his staff to draw his attention away from the corpse.

‘Well, Thresh? Does this human have the truth of it? I know not his strange use of the dialect.’

‘Oh yeah, Boss. ’Zactly.’

The Thresh shook its head as though emerging from a slime bath and gathered his wits from wherever they had fled, presumably following the thinkings of Thresh-Trev’r.

‘My apologies, Lord Commander. The Dave puts it crudely, of course, as is his nature, but he is essentially correct. You may agree with him.’

The voice of the human shouted from the amulet.

‘I heard that!’

Lord Guyuk felt his shoulders slump. If this was what dealing with the Dave entailed, he really was beginning to think Scaroth may have got the best of
dar Drakon’s
egg.

‘Yes, Champion,’ he hissed in exasperation. ‘You heard me. Excellent. Might we now move on?’

‘Sure, buddy. What’s next?’

Was it this easy? Was the Dave proposing that they intrigue together against the Djinn? He had all but destroyed the survivors of Scaroth’s detachment with admirable treachery. The stroke of a master tactician, to accept the surrender, to promise safe passage, and to slaughter them all as they slunk from the field. Did he intend to lure Guyuk into such an arrangement? The lord commander wanted to ask Thresh-Trev’r all of these things, but the power of the amulet was such that he feared his words would fly to the Dave as though the champion stood before him in this cavern.

‘What is next, Champion, is you hopefully surviving your encounter with the Djinn so that they might not aspire to greatness far above their station. Tell me, do you intend to take the field with your lieutenants as you did in New Orleans?’

Again the mocking laughter brayed out of the amulet.

‘Why don’t you give me your email address and I’ll send you a dot point rundown of exactly everything we’re planning to do. Even better why don’t I come over and give you a PowerPoint presentation?’

Guyuk looked to Thresh-Trev’r again, imploring him to translate in some way that the Dave would not overhear. The Thresh made a face that told its commander he should pay no heed to what was obviously an empty taunt.

‘This PowerPoint of which you speak will not be necessary, Champion. I understand if you do not wish to discuss your battle plans, but I will tell you for my own sake that whatever snare the Djinn have laid in your path will prove hazardous to yourself, and certainly lethal to your inferiorae.’

The Dave spoke in his native tongue, not to Guyuk obviously, but rather to someone standing nearby the human champion, wherever that might be.

‘Ha ha. He called you my inferiors.’

The lord commander summoned the Thresh, and bade him attend closely so that he might translate any such exchanges. Other human voices seemed to leak from the amulet, but they were not loud enough for Guyuk to make out individual sounds or words. Not that he would have understood them, of course. But Thresh-Trev’r might overhear some background exchange of tactical or even strategic import, especially if the Dave was even now conferring with his lieutenants. The Thresh scurried over and listened attentively, but it was quite obviously distracted by the scent of carnage.

‘Okay, I’m back,’ announced the Dave. ‘Sorry about that. Ran out of beer. So, yeah, okay. Omaha is a trap. Got it. Anything else? Like, you guys, your sect or clan or whatever, er, Guyuk, you planning on coming back at all? Like, swarming over the surface of the Earth, taking, you know, dominion or anything like that? I’m asking for a friend.’

Lord Guyuk ur Grymm and Thresh-Trev’r traded a silent and brief but significant communication. Thresh-Trev’r had suggested the humans would seek this assurance, and that they would not believe the lord commander if he promised peace.

Another sign the human cattle were not as stupid as they once were.

‘Champion, a reckoning will come between us, be assured. But the world is not as we left it. Man is not as we once knew him. I will study your world, Champion, and I will take it from you and reduce your people to feedstock. But I am patient, and I am not foolish. I am not Urspite Scaroth ur Hunn. If an eon should pass while I study the problem of man and another eon while I determine a final solution, I am, as you say, Champion, cool with that. It is my judgment that your kind are as like to destroy yourselves for me.’

A pause and then, ‘So, you’ll be back, but not until you invent gunpowder and the wheel, is that it?’

‘If it pleases you, Champion. And while I wait and ponder these matters, should mankind spend himself contending with my real foe, my rivals across all the Sects, perhaps reducing them as you did Scaroth, that will not displease me.’

‘That’s awesome, because keeping you happy is what I’m all about,’ said the Dave.

Guyuk’s nostrils wrinkled as he tried to interpret that statement. It was as though the Dave said one thing but meant another, but also as though he meant Guyuk to understand that he meant something other than that which he had stated, perhaps even its opposite. Which would be that the Dave was not at all about keeping the lord commander happy. Oh, this was a confusing human. It lied, certainly, but did so honestly.

‘So, Guyuk,’ the Dave continued, ‘my friends were wondering where you were hanging out at the moment. Because cell reception in the UnderRealms sucks. Unless you’re with AT&T I guess, ’cause they got that whole deal with Satan going.’

The lord commander bared his fangs at the Thresh, which was jumping from one talon to another now, even daring to tug lightly at Guyuk’s fighting dagger. He gestured at the tiny imp to remain still and quiet but that only inflamed the Thresh’s anxieties.

‘Boss, we gotta split, like now,’ hissed Thresh-Trev’r. ‘This asshole is stringing us along.’

‘Be still, Thresh-Trev’r,’ the lord commander rumbled in as low a voice as he could. ‘I parley with the champion.’

*

Thresh-Trev’r had remembered something. Something very important. A whole bunch of things actually. Stories and legends of other human champions. The Bourne. The Bond. The Terminator, although that last was a very confusing legend. A golden thread ran through these stories however, ran through them and across the leagues and into this very cave where Thresh-Trev’r could all but see it leading across the dusty white floor, through the spreading pool of cooling bloodwine and up onto the chalky white rock where Darryl’s Razr2 sat channelling the presence of the Dave into their midst.

The humans could trace the filaments of magick that animated the Razr2 amulet –
the cell phone,
Thresh reminded itself – and if there was one thing the champions of human legend knew not to do, it was to spend too long talking with their mortal foe on an open amulet.

Generous pots of bloodwine and trenchers filled to overflowing with hot human offal had restored Thresh to its former self. Apart from a few larger scars and deeper furrows on its hide it no longer showed any sign of the injuries done it in the Above or down in the volcanic flumes of the Inquisitor Grymm’s dungeons. Thresh was not disordered in its thinkings. Not fuckin’ crazy, as Thresh-Trev’r would say. Thresh knew with the certainty of a war hammer coming down on its neck that they were in terrible danger and the Dave was conniving to keep them there.

‘My Lord,’ it hissed as urgently as it dared. ‘The human Drakonen
. . .
the, the
. . .
the fire that disassembles as it burns
. . .
the
. . .’

It was hopeless. Thresh had no words for what he needed to say. He shifted uneasily, all of his scales itching with the need to get out of this cavern. The green and soft brown fields of the human world seemed peaceful enough outside, but he knew that meant nothing. Even lesser humans, with none of the Dave’s enchanted powers, could send flaming javelins straight in through the mouth of their hiding place from many, many leagues away. Thresh-Trev’r knew. Thresh-Trev’r could imagine the fucking cruise missiles screaming toward them right now. Or Blackhawks full of spec ops dudes loaded for orc.

‘Boss! It’s a trap,’ cried Thresh-Trev’r, curling his claws into a hammer fist and smashing it down on top of the cell phone which shattered with the sound of a poorly forged dagger breaking on armour. ‘We have to get the fuck out of here now, man. Er, I mean
el Jefe del Horday
. They know where we are. They’re coming. The Dave’s lieutenants riding in iron Drakon, spitting fucking lances of fire or some shit. Whatever the fuck. That old scrote
. . .’
Thresh-Trev’r jabbed a claw in the direction of the Way Master who navigated them here, ‘he’s gotta beam us off this planet, because any fucking second now it is gonna suck like a toothless crackwhore.’

The shock of the elder Scolari was total.

Not at the revelation that they were all about to get blown into finger food, but at the fucking cheek of a minor Thresh daemon daring to do as Thresh-Trev’r just had.

The two guards were the first to react, lowering spears and advancing on him.

‘Wait,’ Lord Guyuk roared. ‘What sort of a trap, Thresh?’

‘Omigod! The sort that fucking traps you!’ Thresh-Trev’r wailed. ‘Come on. We’ve gotta move now. You, old dude,’ Thresh-Trev’r yelled at the aged Scolari Grymm, ‘spool up your fucking walking frame and open the portal or beam us out of here or whatever you do. But now!’