Ascendance Read online

  It was all going so well. Even Guyuk, the stale old fart, was impressed by how much they’d achieved with a comparatively small cohort of untried Hunn, driven to frenzy by the need to prove themselves where proven warriors had failed.

  And then the fucking Dave turned up.

  ‘Compt’n, attend! You ordered this withdrawal, now you lag behind.’

  It was old Guyuk, storming and stomping toward the portal.

  Threshy shook off his troubles and laid aside his resentment at being knocked on his ass by the two Lieutenants Grymm. He scowled and made a special effort to remember their ugly faces and stupid tattoos. He’d settle with them later.

  ‘Coming, my Lord!’

  The guard withdrew through the gateway to the UnderRealms in perfect order, Guyuk and Threshy surrounded by the giant warriors. Their mailed and armoured forms towered over the tiny empath and their disciplined minds were all but closed to him. The transition from Above to below was the same as before, even though this time the rift between the realms was held open by a Master of the Ways, one of the few Scolari Grymm adept in the arcane study of the paths between the realms. Their party proceeded into the darkened cutting, the artificial light of the city dying in the gloom. The natural darkness of night in the Above gave way to the deeper and more profound darkness of the UnderRealms at some point after they passed between the worlds.

  Threshy knew exactly when they left the world of men behind because he lost the connection to his thralls. The portals weren’t like a Stargate. You couldn’t send signals through. Only flesh and metal. There was much he did not yet understand about the portals, or the discipline of those too few masters still able to navigate them. Were they wormholes, some sort of quantum string tying alternate worlds together? How did the Masters of the Ways manipulate them to open a gate to the Above in just the right spot?

  Be a hell of a lot simpler if Guyuk would just let him chow down on a few Scolari brains so he could get up on this shit. He’d be a double-plus awesome Threshrend if he knew how to teleport between the realms, but of course, they wouldn’t let him do that. Masters of the Ways, who were so recently about as useless a Scolari as you could imagine, were now more precious than Bulgari Edition Apple Watches.

  He skinned his fang tracks back at the sweet and sulphurous familiarity of the Horde’s one true realm. They were home, the guard drawn up in the large cavern beneath the regimental training fields from where they had ventured Above. Armour clinked and edged metal rasped as the Grymm divested themselves of their fighting gear under the supervision of their captain.

  ‘Best you attend me in my chamber, Superiorae, and we will discuss what just happened.’

  ‘What just happened, boss, is that we didn’t get our scaly asses handed to us by the fucking Dave, that’s what. But one of my Threshrendum did. A really gnarly old superiorae too.’

  ‘You saw the Dave through your thrall?’

  ‘Yep. The Dave and his sexy lieutenant. Had eyestalks on them right up until the crazy ninja lady chopped them off. And sorry, el jefe, but they were close. Too close to you, and to old Threshy too. No point having a cunning plan that’s like totally fucking with the enemy if you’re not around to enjoy all the fuckin’ because the Dave stomped you to monster jelly, is it?’

  Lord Guyuk seemed to weigh up the equation, and perhaps Compt’n ur Threshrend’s usefulness and life expectancy with it. But then he grunted.

  ‘No. It is not.’

  The old prick surprised him once again. Scaroth would have roared some bullshit about his honour and his code and stupid gurikh or something. Probably would have charged back up top and got himself killed by Hooper all over again. But Guyuk was smarter than that. Even if it cost him his honour and his code and his stupid gurikh.

  Or something.

  None of them were concepts Compt’n ur Threshrend understood down in his meat and ichor. He wondered, and not for the first time, whether throwing in with the lord commander was the smartest thing he’d ever done, or the dumbest.

  05

  After killing the monsters, they had cheesesteak. And they talked. The cheesesteak guy, a large-bellied Turk, comped them the food and kept mugs of thick Turkish coffee coming while Dave and Karen fuelled up. It wasn’t a leisurely meal. They ate quickly, filling the tank.

  The cheesesteak guy babbled at them in his native tongue, and a teenage boy, presumably a son or a nephew, translated his thanks for all the monster killing. The fast food joint was strangely empty, given the mad crush out on the street. But their privacy was guaranteed by a couple of huge bodybuilders, also related to the cheesesteak guy in some abstract way. They stood vigil at the door, holding back the crowd which had piled up out there. The kid wore a Cubs jersey and spoke without a trace of any foreign accent. He took selfies with both Karen and Dave, but he seemed most proud of the one with Karen. That one went to Reddit. Dave only rated Flickr. He tried not to feel a little put out about that. Tried and failed.

  The cheesesteak joint was only half a block from Broadway and 42nd, and Dave promised the cop, Chadderton, they wouldn’t just disappear without letting him know. Mobs still thronged the streets outside. Some milled around, as if unwilling to leave the uncertain safety of the area where they knew, or had heard, that Super Dave was kicking ass. Some of them were pressed up against the window, watching him eat, and he worried about the glass shattering under their weight. Others surged past in huge pulses of foot traffic, some heading uptown, some headed down, all of them just wanting to get the hell away.

  ‘Excuse me, do you have tea?’ Karen asked the owner, a question translated by his young relative, who then answered without waiting for the reply.

  ‘Yes. You like your tea black, lady?’

  Karen told him black tea with lots of sugar would be fine as she picked the meat from another platter of cheesesteak rolls. The older man started babbling his own questions from the hot grill, perhaps worried that she did not like his food, but she spoke a few words to him in his own language, or so Dave assumed, and he calmed down.

  ‘You speak Turkish?’ he asked, although he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised with this chick.

  ‘He’s Armenian,’ Karen said, not really answering him. ‘The protein,’ she added, removing another greasy slab of meat from a soft, gravy-sodden roll. ‘Just eat the protein, Hooper. It has much higher energy density than the sugary carbs in the bread. And we’re on the clock here.’

  Dave did love him a steak sandwich, and these were pretty damn good, especially for freebies, but he did as she suggested and started to dismantle the meal. He set the bread aside as they sat under faded posters of Turkish beaches, or maybe Armenian, while the street heaved with frightened crowds and throbbed with the flashing lights of first responders. Lucille was leaned up against the booth where they sat, humming somewhere deep inside his head, wanting to be gone, wanting to be about her business.

  ‘We have to go as soon as we’re ready. There are more of them, all over the city,’ she said.

  ‘LA too,’ the kid put in. ‘See?’

  He pointed at an old TV, suspended from the yellowed ceiling tiles in a rear corner of the shop. Dave had to turn all the way around in the booth to check out the boxy antique. The screen was a distorted wash of faded blues and greens. The sound was down and it was hard to make out what was happening, but the news ticker scrolling across the bottom was legible. ‘Zombies in LA,’ it screamed.

  Dave frowned. He’d just come in from the west coast this morning, although it felt like days ago. There’d been no monsters out there when he left. Just Boylan, his lawyer. Now it looked like they had a Tümorum infection. Or maybe just a Revenant Master working his mojo – if they were lucky. Dave shook his head, and went back to wolfing down fistfuls of hot meat and melted cheese. Nothing he could do about it from here. He’d told Heath and the army guys how to handle that shit.

  ‘You have cheese on your chin,’ said Karen, handing him a napkin. ‘Wipe it off.’

  �
��Yes, Mom,’ he said, but did as she told him anyway.

  He’d already washed his hands in the little sink behind the counter, but his black coveralls were stiff with daemon gore. It didn’t bother him as much as it should. And not as much as his cheesy dribbles seemed to gross her out.

  ‘I know where some of them are,’ she said between rapidly chewing and swallowing. ‘The war bands. I saw them when I was hooked up to the Threshrend. We can’t fight them all. We should take the really bad ones the cops can’t handle.’

  ‘I don’t reckon they can handle any of them,’ said Dave, still hurrying through his meal. ‘Not until they get some heavy backup. Chadderton and his partner. Delillo. They strike you as having that shit locked down before?’

  Karen’s tea, poured from a samovar, arrived in a tall, ornate glass. She took care to keep her sword well away from the teenage Turk, or Armenian, or whatever he was. Wouldn’t do to have the boy touch the thing and come apart on them.

  Dave stood, draining a mug of thick, black, sweetened coffee. He gathered up another handful of fried meat. Felt the need to be moving.

  ‘That big toad-looking freak,’ he said. ‘The thresh.’

  ‘Threshrend,’ she corrected him, drinking her tea, but not rushing to follow him. ‘Thresh are just nestlings. Threshrend are fully grown, come into their power.’

  ‘Yeah. The psychic ones. That’s how you know where the others are?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she said, sipping at the tea again, making no move to leave or even stand. ‘It’s good,’ she said, raising the glass and smiling sweetly at the older Turk as he fired up more meat for them. For a moment Dave could see just how deeply she’d inhabited the character she played. Karen Warat. All-American girl. Not a treacherous Russian spy or human killing machine.

  ‘We should get moving,’ he said.

  ‘Almost. I need to hydrate properly. You should too. It’s important and we need to think about how we take these things down. The most powerful Threshrend, they can get into our heads. That why we couldn’t orb before. That thing was stopping us.’

  ‘By orb, you mean warp, right? Be the Flash?’

  ‘Yeah, if you want. Anyway, just so you know, we won’t always be able to run rings around them at . . . warp speed. Not if they have a Threshrend to run signals interference on us.’

  Karen stood then, and they gathered their weapons. He started to ask her about the empath daemons but she was already talking to the Armenian again. The man beamed at her, his eyes lighting up. They exchanged something that felt like a formal greeting or ritual of some sort, tossing the word ‘Inshallah’ between them a few times. The boy gave them a plastic container, filled to the brim with cheesesteak, the lid held on with thick rubber bands.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Dave. ‘And, er, inch . . . allah, or you know, whatevs.’

  The kid grinned.

  ‘Yeah. Whatevs.’

  The two steroid giants by the door pushed a path through the crush of onlookers and out into the street. Karen tapped the accelerator to let them weave through the press without anyone coming into contact with her sword.

  ‘We need to hurry. Come on.’

  They stepped it up through the inert mass of the crowd.

  ‘Should’ve done this while we were eating,’ said Dave. ‘Would’ve saved some time.’

  ‘We can’t save everyone,’ said Warat, which wasn’t exactly relevant to his point, but he sort of got it.

  ‘So how many war bands?’ asked Dave.

  ‘Across the city? A hundred or so. Maybe a thousand-plus Hunn. Call it half a legion’s worth. A lot of them with Threshrendum. But not all on Manhattan. They’re across the rivers too.’

  Karen stopped in the middle of the road, frowning. Dave was struck by the strangeness of the utterly static diorama in which they stood. Like they’d been caught in some sort of giant art installation recalling the atrocities of 9/11. New Yorkers frozen in flight from something they didn’t understand, but knew well enough to flee. One obvious difference though; this close to Times Square there were fewer suits, more children. Tourists.

  ‘They’re not hitting counter-force targets,’ said Karen. ‘Just counter value.’

  ‘Counter what?’ said Dave.

  She carefully threaded a path through a knot of young women. Swedish backpackers, Dave would have bet. They had that Nordic look about them, underneath the terrified bafflement.

  ‘They’re not going after hard targets,’ Karen explained. ‘Military assets, that sort of thing. They’re hitting hardest on the soft tissue. Going for maximum shock and awe. Civil disruption, not military.’

  She favoured him with a cruel smile.

  ‘What’s that feel like? Being attacked by a hostile imperial power.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Dave said. ‘You up for this or not?’

  ‘Oh, I’m up for it. But there’s something else,’ she said as she set off again, running into clear space now, dodging through a part of the crowd where the crush wasn’t as heavy, forcing him to run to stay in contact. The crowds were as bad as anything he’d experienced, like New Year’s Eve with a terrorist strike thrown in. He carried Lucille gripped just below the heavy steel head. There were half a dozen police cars at the intersection where they’d cut down the war band. Or where Karen had cut them down. Dave hadn’t done that much, really.

  ‘What else,’ he said, catching up with her in a relatively clear patch of road around a headless Fangr corpse. He’d just picked Chadderton and Delillo out of the confusion when Karen took them out of warp and they ‘popped’ into the world of real time again. The roar and chaos of a city in convulsion hit him like a storm surge. Way louder and more shocking than he’d expected. He was certain things had gone south while they’d been filling their faces.

  Chadderton jumped in surprise. His partner let go a little squeal. In a moment of perfect incongruity Dave was certain he could hear a big band playing ‘Mack the Knife’ somewhere nearby. The strobing lights of the squad cars and ambulances laid a stuttering filter of primary colours over the scene. The slaughtered daemonum lay where they’d been cut down. The human casualties had been cleared away. Some assholes were still shooting the scene on smart phones. Even bigger assholes were using iPads.

  ‘There was something about that empath daemon,’ Karen said, raising her voice to be heard over the roar as they hurried up to the cops. ‘Something unusual. I don’t know what yet.’

  ‘Mr Hooper! Ma’am,’ Chadderton called out, looking relieved to see them, even if he was a little freaked out by the way they’d materialised in front of him again. ‘This is Lieutenant Trenoweth,’ he said, introducing a plain clothes detective, a tall rangy man with iron grey hair. Trenoweth put his hand out to shake and Dave took care not to crush his fingers by gripping too hard. Karen bobbed him a quick nod.

  ‘First,’ said Trenoweth, ‘thanks for this.’ A half-turn and a hand gesture took in the crime scene. They’d actually run up crime scene tape. Dave couldn’t help but shake his head at that. ‘Officer Chadderton said you guys really helped out here.’

  ‘They cleaned house, Lieutenant,’ the patrolman said with great enthusiasm.

  ‘Yeah, anyways. I’m supposed to tell you, Mr Hooper, your bosses need you to get in contact right the fuck now.’

  Dave shrugged.

  ‘Which bosses?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Trenoweth, looking like he wanted to spit somewhere. ‘My captain’s taking heat from the commissioner and the mayor who are getting it in the ass from the Pentagon, the navy, all sorts-a fucking spooks. Whoever your fucking boss is, Hooper. Call him. Or her,’ he added, with a nod to Karen. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘If you’re the Russian, I’m supposed to escort you to your consulate. Or arrest you and hold you until some FBI jerk gets here. Neither of which I’m gonna do,’ he said. A slow pan around the carnage at the taped-off intersection was explanation enough for why he wouldn’t be doing that.

  ‘The jerk’s not FBI,’ said Karen ov
er the background roar. ‘And Hooper has better things to do than check in at the office.’

  At that moment Hooper was eating another cheesesteak, the last one, from the plastic take-out container, but he nodded his agreement.

  ‘Any heavy weapons teams you can put on the streets, you’ll need them,’ said Karen. ‘NYPD Swat. Feebs. National Guard. Army. The 10th Mountain out of Fort Drum if you can get them down here. The 2-25th Marines up at Garden City. You need them all, Lieutenant.’

  Dave enjoyed the expression of utter confusion on Trenoweth’s face as he tried to process the advice from the attractive blonde art dealer in the bloodied motorcycle leathers who he’d been told to assist as a Russian diplomat, or to arrest as a Russian spy.

  ‘Do you have a map of the city, Lieutenant?’ she asked, cutting across the police officer’s uncertainty. ‘With the incidents flagged? The attacks?’

  ‘Not a map, no,’ said Trenoweth, putting aside whatever thoughts he had about Colonel Karin Varatchevsky. ‘Everything’s moving too fast. These fucking things are all over the place. Got them surfacing in New Jersey now too.’

  ‘Give us the worst one nearby,’ said Karen. ‘We can take that for you at least.’

  ‘If we split up, we could do twice as many,’ said Dave, who had finished his take-out. He was about to throw the container away but thought better of it with so many cops around. Weird to be worried about a fine for littering, with burning cars, screaming idiots and tons of butchered monster meat lying around, but he couldn’t help it. Cops always made him feel guilty about something, because he usually had something to feel guilty about. Karen shot down the suggestion anyway.

  ‘I told you, Hooper, that Threshrend was messing with us. You can’t count on being the Flash. And I can’t guarantee the next one won’t be able to paralyse you just by thinking about it.’