Frey vaulted a rock and hit the ground running, looking for an escape route in the broken maze that surrounded him. The rest of the crew were yelling, trying to distract the daemon. A shotgun blast tore away a chunk of its shoulder. None of it mattered. It was intent on him, and nothing was going to stop it.
He turned, switching his cutlass to his good hand. The blade sang faintly in his mind, the daemon in the blade responding to the presence of another daemon. It had killed daemons before, and was eager for another taste. But as the creature powered towards him, screeching, Frey felt his confidence waver. There was no way he was winning a fight with that thing, cutlass or no cutlass. It would swat him like a fly.
The creature was suddenly thrown sideways as a blurred figure crashed into its flank. It tumbled and skidded away in a dusty muddle of limbs, entangled with its attacker. The two of them came apart as they rolled. One of them landed catlike on her feet.
Jez, and yet not Jez.
This was the thing that lurked beneath the surface of his navigator. This was the thing they were all afraid of. The change was subtle but its effect was great. A shift in aspect, a look of naked savagery in her eye, the feral way she moved. The sense of unease she inspired had sharpened to a terrifying pitch. She might be wearing the shape of the woman he knew, but she had the feel of a nightmare. This was her Mane side, unleashed.
She launched at the daemon, crashing into it before it could get to its feet. The impact sent it flying away and into a wall of rubble. As she came at it again, it lashed out with its oversized arm. Jez seemed to flicker in Frey’s vision, as if there were three of her at once in three different positions, and suddenly she was half a metre to the left of the spot where she’d been, and the creature swiped through thin air.
She seized its arm and flung it. It shot through the air, missing Frey narrowly, blasting his hair against his face with the wind of its passing. Jez sprang after it, not letting up for an instant, a hungry shriek escaping her.
Someone grabbed Frey’s shoulder, making him jump. He turned to see Ashua’s urgent eyes.
‘Let’s make tracks, huh?’
Frey stuck his cutlass in his belt, looked back at Jez. Deserting her felt wrong. She might have the creature on the ropes for now, but that thing was twice her size.
‘You can’t help her!’ Ashua told him.
She was right. He couldn’t. Not against that. And yet. .
‘Wait, wait! I can handle this!’ called Crake. He came hurrying into sight, labouring under the weight of his pack. The pinecone-shaped metal rods waggled above his head, and he clutched his makeshift controller in both hands, struggling with the wires that tangled around his arm. ‘Teething problems, that’s all!’
The daemon was thrashing about nearby. Jez was on its back, having sunk her sharp teeth into its neck from behind. She was trying to get a grip on its head to wrench it off.
‘She’s doing alright, Crake,’ said Ashua. ‘Now let’s go!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Crake. ‘Just give me a moment and. .’
He thumbed a switch on the controller to activate the flux thrower. Frey immediately got a splitting headache. There was no other effect that he could see.
‘Ow! Will you turn that bloody thing off and stop messing about?’ he cried.
‘It just needs tuning!’ Crake protested, twiddling with the dials. ‘Should be about. . here!’
Jez screeched, her body going rigid, teeth tearing free from the daemon’s flesh. Released, the creature took advantage. It reached over its shoulder with its huge arm, clamped its fingers round Jez’s leg, and flung her away. Frey watched in horror as she spun through the air and hit the side of a rubble pile with enough force to smash the rocks to powder. The side of the pile collapsed, burying her. When the dust blew clear, all that was visible was a hand and part of a knee.
Frey felt time slow down as the enormity of the moment hit him. He had no idea what she was capable of surviving, but that would have killed a normal woman several times over.
Oh please no.
Crake was agape, face slack as he realised what he’d done. The daemon turned its deformed head back towards Frey, a dreadful purpose in its gaze. Ashua surreptitiously edged away from him.
‘Crake. .’ Frey said quietly.
‘I. . It’s not. .’ Crake began, then snapped his mouth shut and set himself to frantically twiddling the dials on his controller. The daemon started loping towards Frey. Whatever Crake was doing, he wasn’t doing it fast enough. ‘Cap’n, I can’t! Run! Cap’n, run!’
Frey took his advice. The door to the sanctum was close now, and his way was clear. He turned tail and ran for all he was worth.
Jez. Oh, shit, Jez.
But all thoughts of his friend were swept away in the storm of instinctive terror that propelled him towards the door. If Jez couldn’t stop it and Crake couldn’t stop it, what hope did he have?
The daemon had built up speed now, heedless of the crew’s renewed attempts to distract it. Frey sprinted through the doorway. Too late he realised that he wasn’t carrying a lantern, and the corridor was lightless. Heels skidding down the twilit stairs, he reached the bottom and found it pitch black. It didn’t stop him. Going by memory, he ran into the darkness.
The daemon followed. He heard it come crashing down the stairs, carried into the far wall by its own momentum. It squealed, a sound like the maniac hunger of the damned, and then came thumping after him. His running feet kicked something aside, and he felt wetness spatter his face-
a severed limb. blood.
— but he went on blindly, heedless, as fast as he dared. The same instincts that made him run warned him against colliding with something unseen or breaking his leg in a hole. His hand trailed along the wall to his right, seeking an exit, looking for the cleft in the rock that he knew would be there.
Come on, come on!
He remembered Osger’s corpse an instant before he tripped over it. He went over hard, kicking apart the piled halves of the body. Pain blazed across his hands and forearms as he hit the floor. He pushed himself up again, his boots scrabbling at the floor, driven to his feet by desperation. The beast was behind him, thumping through the dark, so close that he thought he could smell its breath.
Not this way not now not yet!
Stumbling onwards, his bloodied hands scraping the wall to his right, searching for the nothingness that would lead him into the fissure, searching for-
There!
And he slipped inside, heading through the split in the corridor and into the narrow passageway of rock. Here he could run both hands along the wall, get a sense of where he was. He could only hope that the daemon was as blind as he was and that it would miss the fissure in the dark.
It didn’t. He heard it howl close behind him, and knew that it was inside the fissure with him. He gave up all care and redoubled his speed. The beast thumped and scraped and panted behind him, and damn if it wasn’t getting louder, damn if it wasn’t catching him up. His shoulder hit a protrusion of rock and sent him bouncing off, but he ignored the pain and kept going. He wouldn’t end up like Osger. He wouldn’t die down here in the dark.
Then: light! A faint glow up ahead, illuminating the end of the fissure. And he remembered Malvery, sitting there with his lantern in the cave where they’d left his stubborn arse. And he remembered the chasm. And he knew he’d reached a dead end.
He cast a terrified glance over his shoulder. The light fell on the face of his pursuer. It filled up the gap between the walls, a bulging, twisted mass of muscle, so close it could almost reach out and grab him.