‘You have no idea,’ muttered Malvery.
Ashua nudged the doctor. ‘Leave him alone. I think it’s kinda sweet. Never pegged him as a romantic.’
‘Fellers, can we stop discussing my love life?’ Frey complained.
‘Or lack of it,’ Pinn put in. ‘When was the last time you got your pods jiggled, Cap’n?’
Malvery coughed to suppress a laugh. Ashua, who wasn’t suppressing it quite so well, said, ‘Yeah, Cap’n. Spill it. When was the last time someone, er, jiggled your pods?’
‘I’ll have you know my pods have been jiggled by some of the finest bloody females in the land!’ Frey said. ‘Now shut it, I’m trying to listen.’
Malvery leaned over to Ashua, covered his mouth and pointed at the vehicles on the road below. ‘Saving himself,’ he stage-whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear. Even Silo smiled at that.
‘Swear I’m gonna dump you all at the next port,’ Frey murmured, shaking his head.
The vehicles halted in front of the gate and a pair of Sentinels emerged from the guardhouse. After a brief exchange with the driver of the first vehicle, they waved them through. The second vehicle stayed where it was. The passenger door in the flank slid open, and a dark figure stepped out.
Oh, shit, thought Frey, as his stomach sank.
It was an Imperator.
He was dressed head to foot in close-fitting black leather. A smooth black mask showed beneath the cowl of his cloak. The eyes were the only evidence that there was a person inside there at all, but Frey had seen beneath an Imperator’s mask before, and he knew they were not people. They were more daemon than man, the husks of the faithful turned rancid by monstrous symbiotes from the aether.
The Imperator stood in the middle of the road, bathed in the harsh light of the floods, alone. Slowly, suspiciously, he turned his head, scanning the swamp on the side where Frey and his crew were hiding.
He senses us, Frey thought, and panic burst in his mind at that. He’s gonna find us!
Fear sank down upon him, pressing him into the undergrowth. It wasn’t just a desire to remain unseen, it was a need. He wanted to dig into the mud and disappear. Anything to avoid that dreadful accusing gaze. He was guilty, an unbeliever, a heretic, and if the Imperator saw him it would be as if a light shone through him, turning him transparent, exposing his soul in all its filthy grotesquery. He clawed at the ground and whimpered like a child.
The others felt it too. Their faces were distorted in horror, despair in their eyes. How could they possibly triumph against this kind of terror? Frey knew this feeling to be caused by the power of the Imperators; he’d felt it before. But knowing that didn’t lessen the fear one bit.
He looked back over his shoulder, and saw Jez there. On Jez’s face was not fear but rage. Her teeth were bared, and seemed sharper than before. Her eyes rolled like a maddened beast. She was turning; the daemon in her was forcing its way out. But it couldn’t, it mustn’t! Even though Frey had seen her kill an Imperator before, it seemed inconceivable that she could fight the force that oppressed them.
Driven by one fear to overcome another, he grabbed on to her wrist to hold her back. Her head snapped round and she glared at him as if she was about to rip his throat out with her teeth. Then another hand closed round her other wrist. Pelaru’s. Of all of them, he seemed the calmest, the least affected. He stared hard at Jez, and she stared hard back at him, and the intensity between them was such that Frey felt almost ashamed to witness it, as if he was intruding on something intensely sacred and private.
But Jez stayed where she was, pinned by that gaze, and she didn’t move.
The Imperator’s searchlight gaze swept away, and the fear lifted from them. Frey lay there panting. He heard the door to the Overlander close and the vehicle drive away. He didn’t dare lift his head until silence had returned and the road was empty again.
‘What was that?’ Ashua asked, her eyes round.
‘That’s what we’re up against,’ said Frey. ‘That’s what we’ll get if the Awakeners win.’ The experience, now that it had passed, made him feel angry. That wasn’t the first time he’d been humiliated by an Imperator. Suddenly he was very keen to prevent the Awakeners doing that shit to him again.
‘What about your woman, Cap’n?’ Silo asked.
Frey was reminded to listen to the earcuff again. He put his hand over his ear to block out the noise of the swamp and listened.
And heard nothing.
His face clouded. ‘These things have quite a range, right? I mean, we use them when we’re flying around, don’t we?’
No one needed to answer that.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ he said, and panic fluttered anew in his chest. ‘It’s like she’s disappeared.’
‘Well,’ said Pinn. ‘That’s Plan A buggered.’
‘We’ve got to get in there,’ said Frey. ‘Something’s wrong. It shouldn’t just have gone dead. Something’s-’
Malvery’s hand landed heavily on his shoulder. ‘We’re with you, Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a look inside, eh?’
The swamp teemed with life. The dark was thick with a thousand sounds and sights and smells. What seemed a bewildering barrage of noise to the others was a wonderful complexity to Jez. She heard everything: the flutter of a sleeping bird stirring in its roost; the footsteps of something many-legged as it rattled through the undergrowth; the squeal of a frog as it was caught up in a predator’s jaws. Insects burrowed through detritus; night-midges were busy over the torpid water washing down towards the sea.
So much life, and she, dead, in the midst of it.
Yet she didn’t feel dead. Her body rang with the presence of the Imperator. Her daemon had stirred inside her, risen close to the surface, and still it lurked there. She felt the power of it. Once she’d feared it, but now she knew it was not something to be feared. It was simply a part of her.
Beyond the swamp, she heard the distant howling of the pack. The Manes, in their cities beyond the Wrack, the great cloud-cap that shrouded the northern pole of the planet. It was like music to her, igniting a yearning, a promise of home. Each surrender was easier. She’d given up her resistance outside the Azryx city, and since then the change had gathered speed and she’d embraced it.
But then came Pelaru.
She shook her head. Concentrate. The Cap’n gave you a job. Concentrate.
She crouched in the branches of a gnarled tree, high up in the dark. Before her was the wall, and beyond it the buildings and tents of the compound itself. Floods cast pockets of rude light, driving back the shadows. The air was moist and close.
There were Sentinels on the wall, enough to make it impossible to approach along the ground unseen. But the branches of the trees spread wide and leaned close, and nobody looked up at them.
The floods faced outward, shining on the swamp. The Sentinels were shadows by contrast. Once the crew were in behind the lights, they’d become shadows too, and nearby guards would find it hard to spot them. But first they had to get up the wall.
The perimeter of the compound was uneven, built to follow the landscape. She’d chosen a place where the wall bulged out, where the foliage helped screen it from the other guards. Here there was a single Sentinel, standing idly, having ceased even any pretence at patrolling. He leaned on the wall and smoked, looking outward. The tip of his roll-up glowed behind the blinding shine of the floods.
When she judged the moment was right, Jez moved. She raced along the branch and leaped, passing silently through the air to land on the walkway atop the wall. The guard saw something move out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t appreciate the danger until he saw her running towards him. Not until he saw the look on her face and the glitter of her eyes, and he saw her teeth bared like an animal. She pounced on him and broke his neck before he could utter a word.