The window exploded outward. Frey fired until his pistol was empty, shooting into the scattering crowd. The Lord High Cryptographer was pulled into cover by the men surrounding him. One of the armoured honour guard went down; the crimson-robed Interpreter took a bullet through the head. When Frey’s first pistol was done, he jammed it in his belt and pulled out a spare.
He looked over at the echo chamber that Trinica was sealed inside. Magnified in the window, ballooned and distorted, he saw her face turned towards him. One huge black eye stared out. She pinned him with that gaze. He didn’t know what he saw there — Sorrow? Resignation? Love? Or the dead cold eye of a daemon? — but in that instant time seemed to stand still, and the unutterable horror of what was to come crushed him.
Then Malvery grabbed his arm and hauled him back into the room, just as a salvo of gunfire ripped through the spot where he’d been standing.
‘Come on!’ the doctor was yelling. ‘You can’t do anything! Let’s go!’
And they hauled open the door, and they ran. A daemonic shriek followed them down the corridor, a sound that was half Trinica and half something else. To Frey, it sounded like the world ending.
Malvery shoved his way past a frightened Speaker, leading the way down the corridor, his lever-action shotgun in his hands. The others came behind: Jez, mad-eyed and on the verge of turning; Frey, shell-shocked, a shattered look on his face; Ashua, alert, at home with danger; Pelaru, enigmatic and untrustworthy, not a hair out of place; Pinn, uncommonly quiet, which worried him. Pinn only ever shut up when he was about to do something stupid.
Malvery had wanted to be part of the war. He’d wanted to weigh in on the Coalition side. But he needn’t have worried. He should have known the Cap’n’s talent for finding trouble would get them tangled up in it eventually.
Well, we’re all in it now, like it or not.
A pair of Sentinels came running round a corner to investigate the commotion. But rifles were cumbersome at close range; they didn’t get them up fast enough. Malvery gunned one down without breaking stride. Pelaru shot the other neatly between the eyes.
Malvery didn’t feel a thing about their deaths. With what he’d just seen, he didn’t care any more. Anyone who signed up to be on the Awakener team was fair game now. They were ruled by daemons. They put daemons in innocent people. And they had a plan to smash the Coalition that sounded very much like it might work.
Someone had to get to the Coalition and tell them. At any cost. He felt a determination and purpose such as he hadn’t felt since he was a young man.
They found stairs leading down, and took them. The alarm was spreading through the building now. Shouts and running feet. They had surprise on their side, but it wouldn’t last for long. They had to get out, and fast.
A Sentinel appeared at the bottom of the stairs and loosed off a shot. It missed Malvery and headed squarely for Jez, but she flickered and it seemed to pass through her as if she wasn’t there. Malvery opened up the Sentinel’s chest with his shotgun, thumped past the falling body and out into the ground floor corridor.
They found more resistance there. A group of Speakers, who fired on them with rifles. They were forced to retreat to cover, and ended up pinned down in doorways and behind corners, trading shots while unarmed Speakers ran for their lives.
Ashua hunkered down next to him, squeezed off a few shots. ‘This isn’t exactly the best place to make a stand,’ she muttered.
She was right. They were stuck at a three-way junction at the bottom of the stairs. Too many directions for the enemy to come from. They needed Bess to get them out of this, but she was back on the Ketty Jay.
Ashua looked over at Frey, who was crouching in a doorway across the corridor with Pinn. He was shooting mechanically, an empty look on his face. ‘Cap’n’s in a bad way,’ she said.
‘We’re all gonna be in a bad way if someone doesn’t do something quick,’ said Malvery.
Fear crashed over them like a wave, dragging him under. He could barely squeeze the trigger any more; he could hardly support his own weight. Walking up the corridor were two masked men dressed in black. They were not tall, but they loomed in his mind, and dread flowed from them.
The Sentinels stopped firing to make way. They were not afflicted: they were the faithful. But Malvery, Ashua and the rest of the crew were driven into cringing heaps by their unreasoning fear of the Imperators.
He wanted to run, but he couldn’t make it. He wanted to be sick, but nothing would come. He saw Ashua’s face, wide open with terror, and the Cap’n pressing himself against the door jamb as if he could crush himself into the wall and disappear. He staggered backwards, turned as if to flee, and came nose to nose with Jez.
Or at least, what used to be Jez.
He cried out. He couldn’t help it. She was right in front of him, fully Mane in aspect, a primal, terrifying savagery on her face and her sharp teeth skinned back like a snarling dog. She radiated an otherworldly fear, less intense than the Imperators did but awful all the same. Caught between one horror and another, Malvery spun away, seeking a way out, and found Pelaru.
Or at least, what used to be Pelaru.
The handsome, sculpted face, the olive skin and dark eyes were still as they’d always been. But now it was no more than a covering, a skin tent stretched over a something unspeakably threatening, an appalling blasphemy against the world of the sane and the real. He was hunched, eyes mad, veins standing out at the base of his neck.
‘Is anyone on this crew not half Mane?!?’ Malvery screamed.
They leaped past him in a blur, out into the corridor. Some of the Sentinels were quick enough to fire off a shot, but Jez seemed to be in three places at once and Pelaru flowed like a snake. They leaped on the Imperators, bore them to the ground, and tore at them like animals. Malvery saw Pelaru rip a black-clad arm from its socket; Jez punched at the other Imperator’s chest until the ribs broke and her fist burst out of the back.
At once the fear lifted from them. Frey reacted first, and came lunging out of hiding, firing his pistol with reckless disregard for his own safety. Malvery saw a fury in him that had nothing to do with the Sentinels and everything to do with Trinica. Malvery himself was not so quick. He checked on Ashua, helped her back to her feet, and by the time he was ready the Sentinels were either fleeing or dead. Jez and Pelaru chased them, screeching.
Pinn wandered out into the corridor, looking dazed. Ashua followed, and Malvery went with her, until the four of them were standing in the midst of the battleground. The Imperators had been taken apart like dolls. There was blood everywhere, mostly from unfortunate Sentinels who’d suffered the same fate. Distantly, they heard screaming and gunshots.
‘Are we going?’ Malvery prompted, and that seemed to shake them all out of it. They ran off in Jez and Pelaru’s wake, because they had no other direction to go.
The main doors to the building were not far down the corridor. The half-Manes had cleared the way with gory efficiency. Malvery had seen horrific gunshot wounds and injuries that would make a lesser man faint, soldiers pleading and gaping as they tried to gather their relentlessly slithering intestines back into their bodies. But there was something in the primal savagery of the Manes that frightened him more than the mechanised death which men visited on one another. The Manes were berserkers, all rage and appetite; they strewed sundered corpses as they passed.
The doors were already ajar, having been slid open to the width of a few feet. Evidently some people had already fled the building. Malvery and Pinn looked out. Someone shouted ‘That’s them!’ and they pulled themselves back in as bullets smacked into the door, pinging off the metal. There were a couple of Sentinels out there, covering the exit. There would be a lot more arriving shortly.