Ketty Jay 04 - The Ace of Skulls (46 page)

And she hurried off down the stairs to find her companions, buoyed by a new belief that they might just live through this after all.

Where are they? Where is everyone?

Crake fled through the darkened mansion. Panes of wan light striped chilly and still rooms. He clattered and shambled, fighting with his pack. Wires tangled his legs. He tore them away, pulled off the damper sphere that dragged along behind him. He fumbled at his belt and tugged at the screamer and its battery, fighting to remove them without breaking stride. After a short struggle, they came loose, and he tossed them aside too. They were useless now, their charge used up.

He broke out into a corridor. The sonic flux emitter in his backpack jogged and clashed against the battery inside. The pinecone transmitters sticking out of the top wobbled and jerked. It was a makeshift design, not built to withstand violent shaking. It wouldn’t hold together long.

But it wasn’t that which brought him up short in the end. It was the recollection that he had dynamite in his pocket. Wasn’t that supposed to be dangerous if you shook it around too much? Or was that only when it was old? He didn’t know, but the thought was enough to check his panicked run. He came to a halt, gasping, leaning on his knees.

Calm down, Grayther. Calm down.

Spit and blood, he was frightened. The first time he’d met an Imperator was bad enough, but then it had been one Imperator against a half-dozen targets or more. This was three Imperators against three, and the sheer
force
of them was awful. He was in no doubt that his heart would have given out under the stress if he’d been subjected to much more of that. The Imperators wouldn’t have even needed to enter the room to kill their opponents.

He’d nearly died. The reality of that thought wormed its way into him.

What about the others? Did they get away? Plome wasn’t exactly in great shape: had he even survived that first assault? Where were they now?

And where were the Imperators?

From outside he heard the sound of gunfire over the wind. They were still fighting out there. Good. It was when the gunfire stopped that he’d really begin to worry. He wanted to put his earcuff on, to found out what was going on, to see if Samandra and his friends were alright. He wanted the comfort of other voices. But he didn’t dare. Imperators were somewhere nearby; he couldn’t afford the distraction.

A creeping sense of dread began to build up behind him. His finely-tuned senses rang a warning. He looked over his shoulder. Was it his imagination, or was the darkness thickening at the end of the corridor? Was it just his fevered mind that told him the walls were closing in, ever so slightly? Did he hear a soft, gasping breath, like the last exhalation of a dying man?

Fear clawed its way up his throat from his belly, and he had to move again.

He went slower this time. Now that he had a lid on his panic, stealth was needed rather than speed. He wished he could shuck off his pack entirely, but the sonic flux emitter was his most potent weapon, and he couldn’t abandon it.

He needed to find the others, that was all. Most importantly, he needed to find Kyne. He couldn’t go up against the Imperators on his own.

But the house was silent, and if his companions were out there, they were staying quiet.

He slipped into a dining room dominated by a long table. Another fire was burning here, casting welcome warmth and light into the monochrome nightmare that Crake had found himself in. Feeding the flames to make the mansion look occupied had kept them busy during their preparations. A pointless ruse, in the end. The Awakeners had them outmanoeuvred from the start.

There were three doors from the dining room: one at each end and another between them. Crake snuck through the room, reached the door in the middle and looked through it.

Beyond was a corridor with several rooms and a stairway leading off it. At the end was a large rectangular window, its pane frosted and its sill piled with snow.

Silhouetted in the drab light from outside was a tall figure wearing a cloak and hood. Crake thought for an instant that it was Kyne.

It wasn’t.

The terror hit him again, but he was already running, sprinting as fast as he could towards other side of the dining room. His muscles seized and the strength fell out of them, but his momentum carried him forward, and somehow he stumbled through the doorway and into the small sitting room beyond.

To his relief, his strength came back. The fear was huge but bearable. And the more distance he put between himself and the Imperator, the more it diminished. He crossed the room, out into a corridor, turned a corner.

It’s lost me
, he thought.
They cast their power like a net, and I slipped out from under it.

The Imperator didn’t know where he was for the moment, but he’d been seen. His pursuer would come hunting.

He reached into the side pocket of his pack and pulled out the control panel for the sonic flux emitter. It was a thin metal board with several dials and a switch, attached by wires to his pack. Like most daemonic equipment, it ate up power, and even with Kyne’s specialised batteries it wouldn’t last more than a couple of minutes. But the transmitters had quite a broadcast range. Maybe he could blast it out, find the Imperators’ frequency quickly. When they started to scream, he’d know he had it. It would serve as a warning shot across their bows. Drive them back, make them think twice.

He just needed to know if it would work. He needed to know if he had any way to fight them. It was fear more than tactics that made him hit that switch.

Nothing happened.

He toggled it on and off again frantically. There should have at least been a hum of power from the pack.

The wires.

Some connection had come loose during all that running about. Maybe the battery, maybe something else. It was a haphazard, slipshod design, but they hadn’t exactly had the time to make something perfect. And now it wasn’t working.

The darkness gathered through the doorway. The cold press of dread gathered with it. He heard a footstep.

Oh no
, he thought, and fled again.

He ran through corridors and rooms, he ran downstairs when stairs presented themselves, but the Imperator was relentless. Whenever he stopped for breath, the air began to thicken behind him again, a nameless, primal horror bunching and growing there. Then he was forced to move on.

The mansion was large, and in his fright he became lost in it. He heard banging from somewhere below him, and remembered the staff locked in the basement. The gunfire and explosions from the hamlet had panicked them, and they wanted out. The fools: if they knew what waited out here, they’d stay quiet.

An idea had grown in him, that he might abandon the others and flee, out into the snow where his friends and his lover fought the Awakeners. Jez was there, at least. If the Imperators followed him, she could—

Wait! His eyes went wide. Jez! She could save them! The half-Manes, the best weapons they had against the Imperators, were out there on the battlefield.

Trying to catch the Imperators was the last thing on his mind now. He just wanted to live.

He stopped, felt in his pocket for the earcuff. Quickly he drew it out, put it to his ear.

An Imperator stepped round the corner.

Crake yelled, staggered backwards, tripped on his heels. The earcuff fell from his hands and rolled onto the floor. He threw out his hand to balance himself. It found a door handle, which turned beneath his grip. The door swung open and he fell through just as he felt the icy grip of the Imperator’s power seize him again.

He swung the door shut behind him as he staggered into the room. It was a pantry, large and well stocked with deep shelves full of canned goods and preserves. A small window, high up, gave a little light. Crake was still off-balance as he wheeled in. He turned and fell on his side; there was a loud crash as the pack on his back took another heavy knock.

Panic. Blind panic. No way out. A closed room. No way out anywhere.

He scrambled backwards towards the far wall, reaching for his gun as he went, digging in his pockets, looking for anything that would prevent the awful thing outside from coming in. His searching hand closed on a hard waxy cylinder as his pack bumped up against the shelves, allowing no further retreat.

He pulled out a stick of dynamite from his pocket.

A desperate cry escaped his lips. Spittle flecked his beard. He reached into another pocket and tugged out a box of matches, which scattered as they came. He picked one up and struck it against the stone floor.

All he saw was a weapon. He was made automatic by terror, stripped down to survival instinct alone. The match flared, driving back the dark for an instant; he touched it to the fuse; then he flung the dynamite away from him with a futile blind motion, as a child might cast a stone at a man three times his size. The dynamite hit the door, bounced and rolled into the corner of the pantry, beneath the shelves, its fuse fizzing.

The fact that Crake was alone in a room with a lighted stick of dynamite was drowned out by the landslide of horror that came down on him. His throat tightened. He couldn’t breathe. His heart wrenched against its moorings.

The handle turned, and slowly the door opened, and Crake knew that when he laid eyes on the creature that had come to claim him, he’d die on the spot. Yet when the Imperator stepped through, he realised he was wrong, that there was another level to terror previously unimagined. The Imperator turned his atrocious gaze upon Crake and pinned him there, and Crake mewled and whimpered and would have screamed if he could, but there was no breath left in his body. His heart was going like a machine gun, and it burned in his chest like he’d swallowed hot coals.

Then it was as if someone had clapped two hands over his ears, hard. As if he was a boy on a beach, hit by a wave too big to withstand, brought under where the world was a dull roar, to be dashed on the stones. His legs were seized and he flipped round so that he was thrown face-first into the shelves. The air was full of projectiles; he was battered from above by falling jars and cans. He covered his head as best he could, too shocked to make sense of what was happening.

Peace returned, except for the clink and clatter of falling glass and rolling cans.

He let out a breath. His heart was still pounding fit to burst. He listened to it slow, his back to the room. Every part of him was pummelled. His pulse and breath seemed amplified, but all external sounds were dull, as if his ears were clogged with cotton wool.

With numb fingers, he undid the belts that held his backpack to his body. He slipped his arm out and sat up and looked.

The room had been destroyed. Shelves had collapsed, shedding their contents. Glass was everywhere. A black and broken heap of leather and flesh lay on the floor by the door. There was little blood. But the monster was still, and the fear had gone.

Gritting his teeth in advance of the pain, Crake got to his feet. He could still do that, then. He looked at himself. He was bruised and cut everywhere, but with effort he could move everything. Dry-mouthed and battered, but alive.

‘I killed you,’ he croaked at the dead Imperator. He was almost as surprised by that as the Imperator must have been. ‘I killed you.’

A defiant bravery crept over him, and any notion of escape was pushed aside. He still had breath in his body, and the enemy was proven fallible. He wouldn’t call on the half-Manes. He didn’t need them.

One down
, he thought.
Two to go.

Thirty-One

Bess, Unleashed – Frozen Up – Line of Sight – The Runt of the Litter – A Slaughter

F
rey scrambled down a snow-laden bank, bullets clipping the trees behind him. The slope was steeper than it looked beneath the drifts; his heels skidded and he fell on his arse, slithering the rest of the way. He rolled onto his belly as he went, and ended up with his pistol out, aiming back up the slope.

A figure appeared in the flurrying murk. He was wearing a thick coat and furred hood, and was carrying a rifle. Frey shot him before he had a chance to use it.

He heard footsteps rasping in the snow. Two men came running round the side of the bank, having taken a shallower way down. One of them shouted and pointed at him. Frey rose up on his elbow and aimed at them through the stark black trees, but before he touched the trigger, two shotguns fired simultaneously and the men flailed and went down.

Samandra came jogging through the trees. She halted before him and spun her twin lever-action weapons, chambering new shells with a quick jerk of her wrists. Then she holstered them and offered a hand to Frey.

‘Think that’s the last of ’em,’ she said, as she pulled him from the drift.

‘Persistent sons of bitches, weren’t they?’

‘Reckon they got orders saying nobody leaves alive.’

‘Well, I bloody am,’ said Frey. ‘Come on, can’t be far now. Swear I’ve got frostbite.’ He rubbed his hands together. They were numb and aching, but he couldn’t aim worth shit wearing his gloves, so he was forced to endure it.

Samandra was listening to the distant gunfire. ‘Strikes me my talents might be more use back there with them,’ she said.

‘By the time you get back there, there won’t be anything left. We gotta do something about their air superiority, and I need you on the autocannon.’

She didn’t argue the point any further. They hurried onward. Both were tired: ploughing through the snow was hard work. To their right the land rose, busy with the dark bristles of a hibernating forest. To their left there were no trees, just the howling emptiness of the gorge. Frey navigated by that.

As they went, he took his earcuff from his pocket and attached it with some difficulty. The snap of gunfire sounded in his ear, closer now, coming through Malvery’s earcuff.

‘Doc! How we doing?’