And then there were the golems, in the vanguard. Four of them, not counting Bess, who stood shyly at their side. Pale light from outside spilled onto metal skin as the ramp lowered and the sound of shellfire became louder and more immediate.
The ramp thumped down onto the deck, and they charged.
When the echoes of their battle-cries had died away, when the ramp had closed behind them and the hold stood empty and silent, then she emerged from the shadows.
Everything was pain. Every movement stabbed her with a dozen hot knives. Her vision was a blur, blobs of weak colour and nothing more. She existed in a state of torment.
And yet, she existed.
Jez took a shuffling step out into the light. Red eyes with yellow irises squinted out from a mask of carbonised flesh. One trembling arm was held uselessly before her chest, mottled and weeping with sores. Her overalls — more fireproof than her flesh — still clung to her in pieces. Bits of burnt skin flaked away from her as she moved.
All but the vestiges of reason had fled, driven away by agony. But there was purpose in her, a single goal that pushed her on. It was instinct that guided her now. She put one foot in front of the other, and made her excruciating way forward.
The damage had almost been too much, the shock to her system too great. She’d burned; her flesh had cooked. Had she been living, she would have been overwhelmed. As it was, she’d come within a hair’s breadth of extinction.
But the damage, great as it was, was mostly on the outside. Manes whose bodies had become useless or inoperable were abandoned by the entity that linked them together, severed from the network. Jez’s had just enough left to salvage.
So the daemon began rebuilding her patiently, replacing what needed replacing, changing what needed to be changed. Cell by cell it reconstructed her from the inside out. Even now, it was working: dead nerves were coming back to life; eyes that had boiled and split were swimming back into focus.
She was healing.
In her mind she heard the howls of her brethren. They called encouragement to her, they shared her pain. They told her she was not alone. Their voices gave her the strength to keep going.
Hidden in the dark recesses of the Ketty Jay’s cavernous hold, behind crates of machine parts and who knew what else, she found a vent. The grate was loose, but stiff enough to defeat her at first, weakened as she was. She slid her nails into the tiny gap between the grate and the bulkhead, nails that had grown longer and stronger than ever before. The second time she pulled, there was more strength in her. The vent came away with a shriek.
No breath inflated her thin chest. Her heart was still. She reached into the vent, and took hold of a large grey metal casket. It crashed to the floor as she pulled it out, too heavy for her to hold up.
A pair of eyes glittered in the blackness at the end of the vent. Already her eyesight had sharpened enough to make them out. There was a scrabble of claws, and the eyes disappeared.
A cat. She fought to concentrate through the singing in her head. Was it Slag? Slag, who’d guided her to this treasure in the first place? No, not him. He had departed; his mind was silent. Then it was the other cat. The female.
She couldn’t hold on to the thought. It didn’t seem important. All that was important was what was in the box, the thing that Osger had died looking for, that Pelaru had wanted to destroy. What a repellent idea that seemed now. She could no more destroy what was in the box than she could destroy herself. It was part of her, just as her brethren were part of her. Pelaru had never seen that. And though he’d died attempting to save her, she felt nothing for him. He’d chosen to remain apart, too fearful to embrace what he was. He didn’t deserve her lament.
She opened the casket. Inside was a smooth sphere of deepest black. Silver lines ran all across its surface in curves and circles, crafted without symmetry or any pattern that the human mind could grasp. But she saw the pattern, and it was beautiful.
She reached inside and lifted it up, cupping it with both hands. It seemed to throb with energy. Her nerves crackled; the touch of it filled her with exhilaration. The voices in her head were overwhelming now, drowning out everything else. An immense compulsion came over her. The power in the sphere demanded to be used, demanded to be let free. She had no reason to deny it. And she knew how to do it, too.
This wasn’t the first time she’d held a device like this in her hands. She’d used one before, in Sakkan, at the insistence of Captain Grist.
The Awakeners hadn’t realised what they had in their shrine at Korrene until it was too late. By the time they did, by the time their spies had dug out the details of the tale of Captain Grist, the shrine was already lost, the city destroyed by an earthquake. Then the shrine had been found again, and the Awakeners rushed to reclaim it. But Osger had found it first. In following him, Pelaru obtained it. And now it had come to Jez.
It was a distress beacon, an alarm, taken from a Mane dreadnought some time in the distant past. It was a summons, a call to arms. It was Jez’s way home.
They wanted to fight. She sensed it. As she lay dormant, the daemon had picked through her thoughts and divined what she knew. It had learned of a deadly threat, the potential of a daemon nation to the south. If the Awakeners took Vardia, they’d be within striking distance of the Wrack. And that was something that would not be borne.
Call us, they urged her. Bring us. We are ready.
She held the sphere to her scorched breast and bowed her head over it, gathering it to her like the most precious of infants. Come and get me, she thought, and she let the wild power loose.
The golems roared and raged, smashing through the crew of the Delirium Trigger as they fought on the rain-slick deck. Bess roared with them, stamping here and there on her stubby legs, swinging her huge arms. She tore away limbs and crushed the fallen. Bullets bounced off her armour, and slowed her not a bit. One of Trinica’s pirates got the back of her hand and went sailing over the gunwale and out into the sky.
Frey aimed and fired, aimed and fired. His pistol was in one hand, his cutlass in the other. He shot at those men he couldn’t reach and cut down those he could, his blade guided expertly by the daemon within. Overhead and around him, great frigates slid through the downpour, engines rumbling and cannons blasting away. Frey hacked and killed and shoved, teeth gritted. These men were in his path; that was all he cared about.
The pirates boiled up through a half-dozen hatches and doors that led belowdecks. Some of them tried to turn back when they saw the invaders, cowed by the sight of the raging metal monstrosities and the Century Knights that darted between them. They were pushed forward by the weight of people behind, and found themselves on the battlefield anyway. For most, fear of their mistress drove them up into the fight, careless of the odds. They were many, and they fought with the savagery of desperate men; but against the soldiers of the Coalition, the golems and the Knights, they were outmatched.
Frey heard Celerity Blane’s pistols chattering. She never stopped moving, performing rolls and flips and aerials with a speed and skill verging on inhuman. Kyne lobbed something through the air at a group of pirates who’d taken cover on a higher deck. It was X-shaped, the size of a hand, and magnetic. It stuck to the hull where it hit, adhering to the barrier the pirates hid behind. An instant later there was a low pulse of bass sound, so deep that it was felt in the chest rather than heard through the ears. The pirates fell dead; they went out like lights.