Resistance (31 page)

‘So I noticed. Agent Madigan appeared to have quite an attack of vapours around you.’

The chick in the Suburban? She’d hidden it well.

‘But just so we’re clear, Trinder. I’m saying yes now. Doesn’t mean I’ll always say so. Don’t come to me with a laundry list of shit jobs you need done, or shit
people
you need done. I’m not your hired killer, or your step-n-fetch-it bitch. If you got a monster problem, yeah, okay, I’ll be your very own ghostbuster. Otherwise, you better send Nikita or 007.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Trinder.

27

The Diwan dar Sliveen ur Grymm joined them in Guyuk’s private chambers. She expected to find the Marshals Select in attendance but Lord Commander Guyuk had already dismissed them to their duties. Only Guyuk and his little Thresh were present. Or Threshrend now, she supposed, to pay the creature its due. After all who was she to question the judgment of the lord commander in elevating the daemon inferiorae to his new exalted status.

‘Yo bitch! Threshy’s been embiggened!’

Who indeed?

‘Threshrend, please, some respect for the Diwan.’

The tiny empath grinned so widely she could see the fresh meat still trapped in its fang tracks.

‘I’m on it, boss. Respect to the Diwan. She be a sexy biatch and I am all over that like a cheap suit. Er, made of skin. A cheap suit made of human skin,’ he said, and bowed to her. The Diwan dar Sliveen regarded the creature with some curiosity, examining it the way she might a particularly difficult rune cast or one of the more arcane Seer Stone readings from the older scrolls. She had from the Masters Scolari not merely an explanation of the process by which the Thresh had consumed the cranial sweetmeats and thinkings of the captured calflings, but the latest thinkings of the Consilium itself as regards their understanding of the processes and magicks involved. She could sense some of the empath’s power emanating from the creature which now referred to itself as Compt’n ur Threshrend, but the rites of the Threshrendum and the Diwanae were not entirely sympathetic disciplines. She could not read it. She did wonder if it could read her.

‘Indulge the creature in its eccentricities, my Lord. It fascinates me. These are interesting times and the Sanctum Diwanae would learn as much as we might of man and his thinkings.’

‘I thank you for your indulgence, your Worship,’ said Guyuk.

‘I think she likes me,’ said Compt’n in an exaggerated whisper. ‘You think she’d ever date a Threshrend? She’s kind of hot in a Cate Blanchett sexy vampire way.’

Lord Guyuk shook his great armoured head and rolled his yellow, slitted eyes toward the rough-hewn stone of the chamber roof.

‘He has been like this since he ate the human Scolari,’ Guyuk explained. ‘Much less . . . diffident.’

‘So the cattle have their own Scolari?’ the Diwan asked. The Masters of the Scolari Grymm had not thought to mention as much.

‘Not many with my mad thinking skills,’ boasted the Threshrend while it scooped freshly peeled urmin eggs and fried insectivore from bowls that Guyuk’s personal attendants had laid out for his guests.

‘Threshrend!’ Guyuk barked. ‘Attend to your masters and restrain the worst of your base calfling urges lest I crush them from you with my very claws.’

Startled, the Threshrend jumped and went rigid with the congenital terror that flickered still in some remnant of itself beneath all the layers of human infection.

‘Yes, my Lord,’ it said, and for just that one moment the Diwan could see the small, frightened daemon inferiorae at the centre of this bizarre psychic mutant. And then it was gone again. And Compt’n ur Threshrend was back.

‘My bad, sorry. Guess we should play through the tutorial and get on with the missions, right?’

The Diwan looked to Lord Guyuk. The lord commander sat atop an old and favoured rock, its surface worn smooth and contoured to his hind quarters.

‘That would be excellent, Threshrend. We must not delay the Diwan from her stations.’

‘What would you have of me, my Lord Commander?’ she asked.

‘A family-sized bag of Sliveen McNuggets,’ the Threshrend answered out of turn.

‘What?’

Her tone was cold. The creature, or amalgam of creatures she supposed, was indeed fascinating. But the Diwan dar Sliveen ur Grymm was used to a reflexive respect bordering on natural-born terror, and this
. . .
this thing seemed incapable of paying her the respect she was due.

‘Threshrend!’

‘Sorry!’

Guyuk levered himself up from his rock and shuffled over to the granite slab, which offered a fine spread of delicacies. Besides the urmin eggs and crunchy insectivore skins which the Threshrend seemed intent on eating all by itself there were trenchers of slow-roasted Drakon tail, long strings of blood pudding, Black Shuck pies, Chupacabra on skewers, and what looked like a plate of jellied worms but which on closer inspection turned out to be hundreds of the soft little digits that humans had instead of claws. They had been pre-chewed and part-digested by the lord commander’s own master of the blood pots, then regurgitated fresh onto the huge iron plate stamped with the crest of his former regiment.

‘Finger food,’ said Comtp’n ur Threshrend when he saw her looking at the unique treat. ‘It’s awesome. You should try some.’

The Diwan demurred, but Guyuk picked at the light refreshments.

‘Worship,’ he said, ‘we have need of your finest. And not just a band, but a full talon of them.’

‘I see,’ she said quietly.

‘No,’ quipped the Threshrend. ‘We’ll all see, once you’ve eaten their braaaaainz.’

The Diwan ignored the tiny empath daemon which now appeared to be shaking with laughter. It was, she had decided, not far from the grey lands of madness. The minds it now contained, the alien reasoning through which it must by necessity filter its own thinkings, had disordered the thing, pushed it toward insanity. And yet did not the scrolls speak of the wisdom of seers which manifested in seemingly mad and tortured visions?

Yes. Yes they did.

‘And to what ends would a full talon of my finest be put to the sacrifice, my Lord?’

She half expected the Threshrend to answer but it was too busy stuffing an entire string of blood pudding into its maw.

‘Compt’n ur Threshrend and I have deliberated at some length, Worship,’ Lord Guyuk explained. ‘When Thresh took the thinkings of the captured human warriors we were gifted with some insight into the horrifying capabilities these creatures have developed during our banishment from the Above.’

‘The Masters Scolari caution their magicks are indeed strong,’ she conceded.

Guyuk grunted dismissively. Not at her, but at the warnings of the Scolari.

‘Pah! The masters cannot bring themselves to admit there are no magicks. No human magicks at least. They have not changed that much. What they calls magicks men know as their learnings, no more arcane than the curriculae of the Gnarrl. They are no arcanists, Worship. They are merely engineers. But if it aids comprehension to think of their power as magicks, then do so. Threshrend here,’ Lord Guyuk waved a claw at the little daemon who waved back with a length of fire-grilled Drakon tail, ‘was much better able to explain exactly what befell Scaroth and the Queen’s Vengeance in the village of New Orleans after he had taken up the thinkings of the captured human warriors.’

Hard to believe, thought the Diwan, controlling her disgust as half-chewed chunks of Drakon meat and cartilage flew everywhere.

Lord Guyuk, who seemed to have reconciled himself to the creature’s baffling manners, pressed on, as though the floor of his chamber was not being buried in scraps of food.

‘The human Horde is not to be trifled with, Worship. We have seen as much more than once now. Indeed your finest have assisted us to that understanding. The other sects remain wilfully ignorant of the great and terrible changes come upon the Above, and this, I believe, affords us the chance, if seized, to defeat both humankind and our traditional
ienamicae
.’

‘Defeat humankind, Lord Commander?’

The Diwan could not keep the scepticism from her voice.

‘You speak of them as though they were true
ienamic
, not food.’

‘You ever seen a regiment get owned by a fucking cheeseburger?’ said Compt’n ur Threshrend, pausing in his gluttony. ‘Oh, yes, you have. Remember when those Djinn motherfuckers got smacked down by a bunch of fucking calflings.’

‘Threshrend,’ growled Guyuk. ‘You overstep yourself.’

‘Yep, sorry. Shutting up.’

‘Your plan, Lord Commander?’ said the Diwan.

‘My plan really.’

‘Threshrend!’

Lord Guyuk picked up the tiny empath and carried him to a corner of the receiving chamber. As he passed along the banquet table he also lifted up a whole roasted leg of man meat, depositing both in one corner.

‘Sit and eat. Do not speak again.’

*

Compt’n ur Threshrend went ‘oof’, once as he landed on his tail bone, and again when Guyuk jabbed him in the guts with the heavy end of the broiled leg. He was happy enough to sit and feed himself as the higher-ups discussed their plans. Or his plans, really. Probably better this way. For all of the clarity and insight which had come on him when he finally got some decent brains into him, he couldn’t shake the influence of that first dumbass he’d scarfed up.

Trevor the doughnut-eating fiend.

It seemed it didn’t matter how many fucking head-melons from how many professors and black ops ninjas he cracked open and sucked down, he was stuck with Trevor. Fucking mind like Einstein, he had now. If Einstein had been a badass navy SEAL. But every time he opened his jaws he came off like Beavis or fucking Butthead. Whichever was dumber.

Compt’n ur Threshrend unhinged his lower jaw and jammed half the fucking leg in there, just to stop himself running off at the mouth.

‘The Threshrend, speaking as my Pro-Consul and Adept of War, Scolari Compt’n, advises that even the combined forces of the Grande Horde arrayed in Dread Order would not be enough to best even the modest forces of a middling human sect,’ Guyuk told the Diwan.

Credit to the bitch, she didn’t get all snippy like those Grymm motherfuckers before. Didn’t hardly say or do nothing. She just stared at Guyuk all frosty and shit, waiting on the explanation.

‘This is not to say the human Horde is invulnerable however. As an Adept of War, the one called Compt’n was himself responsible for adapting the tactics of the greatest human war sect when they were beset and laid low in battle by lesser clans hardly worthy of the name.’

You got that right
, Compt’n ur Threshrend snarled to himself.

The Diwan looked at him again, as he stripped the last of the soft thigh meat from the upper bones of the roasted leg. Compt’n could feel the bitch pressing at his mind, trying to feel out the contours of his thinkings, but she was a seer, not an empath, and he easily held off her attempts to read him – wondering again whether he might have her thinkings as he’d taken those of the calflings.

Guyuk ripped off a small piece of blood pudding and gnawed at it while he thought.

‘The Threshrend, again speaking with the knowledge of the adept he consumed, advises that wherever the Horde or any of its clans might mass for battle, they will be destroyed, just as the Djinn were. And just as other clans have been at our connivance this last turning.’

That got the Diwan’s attention. She tried to play it cool, but Threshy could tell ol’ Guyuk had really goosed her with that one.

‘I have not seen this, my Lord.’

‘I did not ask it of you, Worship. Again, it was a suggestion of Compt’n ur Threshrend and one I wished to test before involving you or my Marshals Select. All of the sects now know of the breach in the capstone between the realms. Some of them pushed through of their own volition. Others did the same, encouraged through the effort of my own spies and provocateurs long emplaced within their war councils.’

‘And what of the
Sectum
Ienamicae
, my Lord. How stand their forces in the Above?’

The Threshrend, having finished eating, and feeling kind of stuffed, belched enormously and threw aside the last of the leg roast.

‘They don’t stand at all,’ he said. ‘They got knocked on their asses.’

‘All of them?’ she asked Guyuk, ignoring Compt’n.

‘The Djinn, Morphum and Skarr’ash all lost entire regiments. The First Legion of the Gorgon, the Second of the Toth, annihilated. Smaller sects and clans lost smaller formations. The Churel did best of all, but again Threshrend predicted it would be so. The Churel emerged into their traditional feeding grounds, a mountainous region where it is all but impossible to mass great forces. Even so, while not destroyed, they were repelled by those human clans which now control the area.’

‘Tribes,’ Compt’n ur Threshrend corrected. ‘Not even clans. Just motherfucking tribes.’

Again the Sliveen Seer did not protest the news, or try to deny it as the Marshals Grymm had done at first. She took a moment to digest the information before asking another question.

‘And what of daemonum minorae and roninum?’

‘They also spill through into the Above,’ said Guyuk, ‘but not in any organised fashion, of course. The filthy Tümorum have already spread throughout the rift thanks to the Djinn. And of course,
dar Drakon
too.’

‘Burning light! And what of them?’

‘Toast,’ said Compt’n with an evil grin. Although, when your mouth is three feet of fang track, it’s hard not to look like a scary motherfucker when all you’re really doing is smiling.

The Diwan’s facade seemed to slip and she lowered herself down on Guyuk’s favourite rock, her petite backside taking up only a quarter of the groove worn into the dark basalt over the centuries by his butt cheeks.

‘It vexes me still that the calflings can bring down
dar Drakon
.’ she said.

‘From such distances with such speed and surprise that the great beasts have no warning,’ Guyuk said, almost sadly.

‘And the calflings do all this with
. . .
engineering? Like mere Gnarrl mechanics?’

‘Indeed, Worship.’

She seemed to lose herself in her own thoughts for a moment and when she finally returned it was Compt’n ur Threshrend to whom she spoke.

‘And what say you, Pro-Consul and Adept of War? How are we to contend with this foe? How are any of the Horde?’

Threshy was so full of hot meat and smug satisfaction it was all he could do to lever himself up from the floor where Guyuk had deposited him.

‘No problemo,’ he grunted, almost groaned really. ‘I got a plan to beat these motherfuckers like a drum. And to put every other sect under the fucking yoke while we do it. Wanna know how?’