The Ace of Skulls Read online

  Ahead and slightly above the Ketty Jay was the freighter, a dark slab in the storm, its thrusters aglow as it pushed across the canyon towards the slowly swirling wall on the other side.

  ‘Where are the aerium tanks on a thing like that?’ Frey asked Jez, as the Ketty Jay powered towards its target. She was the daughter of a craftbuilder: she tended to know these things.

  ‘On the underside, set central, one ten metres fore of the tail assembly and one just aft of the nose.’

  Frey gauged the distance between him and his target. ‘Only gonna get one shot at this before we lose it in the cloud again,’ he muttered.

  ‘Then don’t miss it,’ said Jez, helpfully. A smile touched the corner of Frey’s mouth. That was more like the navigator he knew.

  The trick to bringing down a freighter was to hole the ballast tanks. Once it was leaking aerium, it would become too heavy to stay in the sky. As long as the leak was slow enough, the pilot would be forced to land. But if the hole was too big, they’d drop too fast, and there wouldn’t be much left to salvage afterward. Frey didn’t have more than a passing concern for the people on board – they’d signed up with the enemy, after all – but he was very keen on keeping the cargo intact.

  The gap between them closed up fast as he came at it from below. Either the freighter crew didn’t see him, or it didn’t have any guns worth firing. The Awakeners must have been stretched thin on resources to trust their treasures to such a light convoy.

  Doubt brushed him. Too easy? Too late now.

  Frey picked his spot, zeroing in on the aft tanks. There was nothing there to suggest a vulnerable point; it was only Jez’s knowledge of aircraft that guided him.

  Closer, closer, and the freighter’s nose had almost reached the cloud.

  Now.

  The Ketty Jay’s machine guns rattled and a barrage of tracer fire whipped away through the night. Bullets scored the underside of the freighter. Then it slid into the cloud, and was lost to sight.

  Frey throttled back and pulled away. He wasn’t chasing that thing in there, not after the scare he’d got last time. ‘Did I get it?’ he asked Jez.

  She held up a hand to shut him up while she listened. Frey waited impatiently. Pinn’s triumphant whooping in his earcuff told him that his outflyers had polished off the escort.

  ‘Jez?’ he said again, when he could stand it no longer.

  ‘She’s losing altitude,’ Jez said, and gave him that ever-so-slightly frightening grin again. ‘She’s going down!’

  Frey let out a little laugh, half of triumph, half of amazement at their triumph. ‘She’s heading for the deck, fellers,’ he said to his outflyers. ‘Come and watch the show.’ And he put the Ketty Jay into a shallow dive, thankful to be heading out of the storm at last.

  Below the clouds, the Ossia wetlands spread out beneath them, a glittering muddle of weeds and water, of wide, shallow streams and islands shaggy with trees. Far to the east was the shore of Lake Atten, barely visible, stretching from horizon to horizon. Overhead, the procession of clouds following the storm channels flashed and grumbled. Lightning jabbed at the ground in the distance.

  The freighter sank through the floor of the storm and kept sinking. It was a huge, ungainly thing, without wings, only stumpy ailerons for steerage. Something more like a whale than an aircraft, something that didn’t look like it belonged in the sky at all. Frey watched its grand, slow trajectory towards the earth. There was something majestic in its decline.

  ‘Will you look at that?’ said Frey. He felt expansive in the aftermath of the battle, taken by a new appreciation of the world. ‘That’s kinda beautiful.’

  ‘I bet the hundred or so people panicking inside it don’t think it’s so beautiful,’ Jez observed.

  ‘Hey, we gave them a soft landing,’ Frey protested, pointing at the wetlands below. ‘Besides, it’s their fault for being Awakeners. There’s a civil war on, y’know.’

  ‘A civil war that we kind of, er, started.’

  Frey didn’t need reminding of that. ‘It was going to happen anyway,’ he said, as he’d said to himself many times over the past three months. ‘We just made sure the good guys didn’t get taken by surprise.’

  ‘Get your retaliation in first,’ Jez said, quoting one of Frey’s favourite maxims.

  ‘Damn right.’

  Pinn and Harkins joined them as they descended, following the freighter down, predators tracking their wounded prey. The Awakener pilot managed to keep his craft mostly level right until the last moment. Frey held his breath in anticipation as they reached the ground.

  Bring her in safe, he told the pilot.

  The freighter touched down, landing on its belly and skimming across water and turf, raising huge fins of spray to either side. As its weight gathered, it ploughed deeper into the earth, the back end fishtailing out, a colossal slow-motion skid accompanied by the hiss of water and the screech of tortured metal. Even from up high, and far removed from the chaos, it was awe-inspiring.

  When the water settled, the freighter lay still. Partly submerged, missing a few parts, but almost entirely intact.

  It had worked. Their plan had worked. Frey could scarcely believe it.

  ‘Alright, boys and girls,’ he said. ‘Time for the hand-to-hand. Let’s get down there and rob the shit out of ’em.’ He flopped back in his seat. ‘Somebody wake up Bess.’

  Two

  The Intruder – Sentinels – Crowd Control – Marinda – Pinn Receives a Prophecy

  From the darkness, a monster emerged.

  It loomed into sight, filling up the passageway: a shadowy hulk, hunched and massive. The crash had shorted out the lights of the Awakener freighter, but emergency backups flickered fitfully, providing horrific glimpses of the intruder.

  It was an ogre of tarnished metal and chainmail, standing eight feet high and five broad. Its face – if it had a face – was set low between its enormous shoulders and hidden behind a circular grille. Two malevolent and inhuman eyes peered out, cold chips of light shining in a void.

  The Sentinels crouched in doorways or took what cover they could find. They were the guardians of the Awakeners, soldiers for the cause. They wore grey cassocks with high collars and the emblem of the Cipher emblazoned in black on the breast.

  They aimed their rifles and let fly. Bullets sparked off the creature’s armour. It flinched, bellowed, then came stamping onward with a roar. The foremost of the Sentinels broke cover and ran. Seeing him falter, others followed, backing away in fear. One man, full of the zeal of the faithful, stepped bravely out into the centre of the corridor.

  ‘Stand your ground!’ he cried. ‘For the Allsoul!’ And he fired his rifle at point-blank range through a gap in the creature’s face-grille, right between its eyes.

  He hit nothing. There was a series of sharp, metallic echoes as the bullet ricocheted about inside the monster’s body. The Sentinel had only an instant to wonder how an empty armoured suit was storming an Awakener freighter, before he was backhanded into the wall with the force of a steam train. The other Sentinels lost all taste for the fight then, and they fled shrieking. The monster thundered off in pursuit.

  When the coast was clear, Frey and his crew stepped into the passageway, revolvers and shotguns in their hands. They followed warily in the monster’s wake, pausing only for the captain to examine the spread-eagled form of the dead man, who was still embedded in the wall in the midst of an artistic splatter-pattern. He was wearing a startled expression, as if surprised to find that he was a corpse.

  ‘Good ol’ Bess,’ Frey said approvingly.

  ‘She ain’t subtle, but she gets the job done,’ Malvery agreed.

  Grayther Crake, the Ketty Jay’s daemonist and the man behind the monster, felt vaguely sick. Bess’s rampages never failed to distress him. It wasn’t the sheer ferocity with which she maimed and crushed her opponents. It was because she took such childish glee in the carnage.

  The whole crew was here, with the exception of
Harkins, who was even more useless with a gun than Crake was. Leading the way was the Cap’n, sporting a daemon-thralled cutlass and a surplus of charm to hide his many and varied flaws. Next to him was Malvery, a man of great size and enormous mirth, with a ring of white hair and round, green-lensed glasses perched on his wide nose. Silo, the Ketty Jay’s Murthian first mate, walked alongside. Bringing up the rear was Jez. Jez, half Mane and getting more so every day, in Crake’s opinion.

  There was a jostling at his elbow, and Pinn pushed past him down the corridor. Oh yes, he’d forgotten Pinn. He had warm feelings for the rest of the crew, even the cowardly Harkins, but Pinn he didn’t like at all. Crake was a man who valued intelligence, and Pinn was only slightly more intelligent than yeast.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Pinn asked impatiently, eager to shoot something.

  ‘After you,’ said Crake, barely concealing his disdain.

  Pinn went off up the passageway. Behind him, the man embedded in the wall peeled away and slumped into the corridor. Crake focused all his concentration on keeping his supper where it was meant to be.

  He found Ashua at his shoulder, the ginger-haired, tattooed girl from the slums and most recent addition to the crew. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You know Awakeners. They’re pushovers.’

  ‘Unless they’ve got Imperators on board,’ Crake said.

  ‘On a craft like this? Doubt it,’ she said. She gave him a pat on the shoulder. ‘Besides, that’s what we’ve got you here for, isn’t it?’

  Crake laughed nervously and stepped over the dead man, doing his best not to look.

  They caught up to the others just as they were preparing to burst into a room off the passageway. The door was shut, and Frey and Malvery had taken position on either side. Bess was around the corner, terrorising those Sentinels who hadn’t run far enough the first time.

  Frey gave the nod to the doctor, who pulled the sliding metal door open. Screams of fright came from within. Frey peered inside, then relaxed and waved to the others. Silo, Ashua and Jez covered the passageway while Frey, Pinn and Malvery went in. Once Crake had judged it was safe, he followed.

  It was a small assembly chamber, with benches arranged in rows and screwed into the floor, facing a low platform. Huddled against one wall were a group of Awakeners. They were mostly women and old men, wearing the beige cassocks of Speakers, the Awakeners’ rank-and-file preachers. Each of them had the Cipher tattooed on their forehead.

  ‘Calm down,’ Frey was saying, as he checked between the benches. ‘No one’s getting hurt. We’re just after your stuff.’ He had one hand held up reassuringly, while the other pointed a pistol at them. It was a rather contradictory message, in Crake’s opinion.

  ‘We don’t have anything!’ protested one young woman. ‘We’re Speakers. We only spread the word of the Allsoul.’

  ‘Really?’ Frey cocked his head. ‘Word has it you lot have been transporting all your relics and valuables from your hermitages to a hidden base on the coast, ’cause you’re afraid the Archduke will get hold of them. You wouldn’t have any on board, would you?’

  The group stayed quiet. Frey and Malvery slipped between the benches and approached them.

  ‘Listen,’ said Malvery, in a friendly fashion. ‘We’re gonna ransack the place anyway. Save us some time, eh?’

  ‘Those relics are the property of the Allsoul!’ snapped one old man, bald and wrinkled like a turtle.

  Frey grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of the crowd. ‘And you just volunteered to tell me where they are.’

  ‘I’ll never tell!’ he declared shrilly.

  Malvery cranked his lever-action shotgun and pressed it to the side of the old man’s head.

  ‘Follow the corridor! Third door on the left!’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Frey, giving him a slap on the shoulder. He turned to Pinn. ‘Keep an eye on ’em. We’ll go get the loot.’

  Pinn looked appalled. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re who I asked. Just do it. Can’t have them running about all over the place.’

  Pinn cursed and kicked one of the benches, then went very quiet, bit his lip and tried to pretend he hadn’t almost broken his toe. Frey and Malvery headed off out the door. Crake moved to follow them.

  ‘You!’ said the old man suddenly. Crake realised that the Speaker was pointing at him. ‘Are you responsible for that thing out there?’

  If only you knew how responsible, thought Crake. But the old man’s tone inspired defiance and a quiet anger. He turned calmly to face his accuser. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  The crowd muttered in horror. The old man sneered. ‘I thought so. None of these others had the look. How do you live with yourself, daemonist? What bargains have you made with the unnatural?’

  ‘Your own Imperators are daemons,’ Crake said. ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Lies, perpetrated by daemonists like you,’ said the Speaker, waving a gnarled hand to brush the words aside. ‘You’ve always despised and feared the Awakeners.’

  ‘You have hanged quite a lot of us,’ Crake pointed out. Then he grinned nastily, and his gold tooth glinted in the faint glow of the emergency lights. ‘Unfortunately for you, you missed one.’

  Pinn listened to the distant gunfire with a resentful scowl on his face. The others were all out there having fun while he was stuck with guard duty. On top of that, his toe hurt like buggery. It was all so bloody unfair.

  He leaned against the wall of the assembly chamber, shotgun cradled in his arms. The Speakers watched him fearfully, huddled together like sheep. He glared at them, blaming them for the whole woeful situation.

  One of them, a man in his sixties who still had a full head of blond hair, cleared his throat. ‘We’re not men of violence, friend,’ he ventured.

  ‘Well, maybe you should learn,’ said Pinn. ‘Stop people like us robbing you.’

  ‘What I mean is, there’s no need for the gun. We won’t cause any trouble.’

  Pinn hefted the shotgun in his arms and made a show of studying it. ‘What, this? You want me to put it away?’

  The blond Speaker nodded hopefully.

  ‘But what if I want to shoot one of you?’ Pinn asked.

  The Speaker’s face fell, and some of the women gasped. Pinn’s lips curved into a nasty smirk. He wasn’t above enjoying a little cheap bullying now and then.

  ‘I’ll tell you why you won’t give me any trouble,’ he said. He brandished the shotgun to show them, patting the barrel for emphasis. ‘Because this little baby will put a hole in you big enough to—’

  He was interrupted by a deafening boom as the shotgun went off in his hands, blowing a chunk out of the bench next to him. The Speakers all began to scream at once, falling over each other in their desperation to get away from him. Pinn was no less panicked. He chambered a new round and pointed his weapon at the crowd.

  ‘Stop screaming!’ he screamed, desperate to shut them up. But all they saw was a pudgy red-faced man waving a shotgun at them, and that made them scream all the more. They scattered across the room, scrambling for cover, tripping over their cassocks.

  Not knowing what else to do, Pinn ran away. He fled clumsily over the benches, through the door, and yanked it shut behind him.

  Out in the passageway, he leaned against the wall, catching his breath. He needed a moment to get over his fright. The freighter was quiet and deserted in Bess’s wake. Even the gunfire in the distance had stopped. He listened as the screams from the assembly room gradually died down.

  A movement to his left made him bring up his shotgun sharply. But it was only Silo, sauntering round the corner. He regarded Pinn with a long, slow stare. Emergency lights reflected in dim arcs from his shaven skull.

  ‘Cap’n asked me to check on you,’ he rumbled.

  Pinn raised a hand. ‘All under control,’ he said breezily.

  Silo stared at him a moment longer, then turned and disappeared without a word.

  Pinn blew out his cheeks, waite
d a few moments, then opened the door again. There were yelps of fear from the cowering Speakers. He held up one hand as he entered the room, the shotgun dangling from the other.

  ‘Everybody calmed down a bit?’ he said. ‘Good.’

  He shut the door behind him, then walked over to the low platform where he could command a good view of the room. The Speakers’ eyes followed him from their hiding places behind the benches.

  ‘Now, as I was saying,’ he continued, in a soothing tone suitable for explaining things to infants and particularly dull domestic animals. ‘This shotgun here, it’ll put a hole in you big enough to fly a frigate through. So if everyone will just—’

  Someone shrieked in the audience, and one woman slumped to the floor in a dead faint. Pinn looked down and realised he was patting his shotgun again.

  ‘Oh, right.’ He stopped patting it and held it up instead. ‘Hair-trigger. Very sensitive. Better watch out.’

  At the far end of the room, one of the Speakers slowly stood up, her hands in the air. She had a cloth satchel hanging from one shoulder. ‘May I approach?’ she asked.

  Pinn had never had anyone ask him that before. It made him feel rather grand. ‘If you like,’ he said.

  She made her way out from the benches and walked up the aisle on one side of the room. As she got closer, Pinn got a better look at her. She was young, about his age, with chin-length strawberry-blonde hair and wide, honest eyes. Despite her lack of make-up and the unflattering cassock she wore, Pinn decided she was really quite attractive. It was a pity she had a great big Cipher tattooed in black on her forehead. It seemed like a waste of a good face.

  She lowered her hands as she came closer, and spoke softly. ‘What’s your name, brother?’

  ‘I’m not your brother,’ Pinn replied. Mostly because it would make the things he was imagining into incest.

  She smiled anyway. ‘We are all brothers and sisters in the Allsoul. Each of us is connected, each a part of its great code, its wonderful communication.’