Where are you? he thought, as he crept onward. His senses were on edge now, suspicion gnawing at him. The Imperator was close. Should he go back instead? But what if it was sneaking up behind him?
He passed an open doorway, and looked inside. Nothing. He walked on, and a moment later was seized from behind.
A hand clamped around his mouth. He was pulled backwards into the doorway, tottering on his heels. He tried to struggle, but suddenly he was grabbed and turned, and found himself face to face with
an Imperator.
Morben Kyne, his green eyes shining beneath his hood, one finger held up to his mouth-grille in an urgent demand for silence. Crake’s cry of alarm died in his throat. Slowly, Kyne pointed off through the wall, in the direction Crake had come from.
There’s one of them following me.
Kyne had turned his head away from Crake, and was staring at the blank wall. Looking through it.
He can see them. He really can. Spit and blood, what knowledge he must have, what resources! A daemonist sanctioned by the Archduke! The things I could do, if I didn’t have to hide away like a criminal. The things I could learn from him!
Kyne drew his large-bore pistol and stepped out into the corridor. Crake peered round the edge of the doorway. He could sense the presence of the approaching Imperator, the dread of it. Kyne aimed down the corridor, his arm out straight.
‘Kyne!’ Crake whispered. ‘What are you doing? They’ll bring down the terror on us before you get line of sight.’
Kyne didn’t appear to have heard him. He was impassive, still as a statue. The dark at the end of the corridor began to curl and clot. Crake watched helplessly, half in hope and half in fear, because if the Imperator laid eyes on them it would all be over.
The bullet ignited as it left the chamber. A streak of blue flame shot down the corridor in an arc, slanting left towards the windows until, impossibly, it curved in its flight, swung the other way, bent round the corner. There was a dull explosion. Body parts and chunks of smoking flesh wheeled through the air, thumped onto the floor, smashed a window.
Kyne turned his head towards Crake, regarding him coldly with those mechanical eyes. ‘I don’t need line of sight,’ he said.
Crake’s face was slack with amazement. Thralled bullets. A weapon that sought out daemons. He’d never imagined such a thing. To make a bullet move like that! It was laughing in the face of physics!
Just around the corner, they found the rest of the Imperator. It wasn’t much more than a pair of legs and a pelvis now. The corridor stank of burning meat.
Kyne looked down at the body. ‘They caught me by surprise the first time,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’ Then he raised his head and turned his masked face to Crake. ‘Let’s find Plome. We need to take the last one alive.’
Crake grinned.
In the whiteness she moved between them. She sensed them before they saw her. She anticipated the gunshots and was gone before the bullets arrived. She flickered in the whirling snow, a trick of the eye.
But when she reached them, oh, then she was all too real. Then they felt her, a hurricane of inhuman strength and flashing fangs. She bit and tore and took them apart, leaving them dismembered in the snow, lying in a blast-pattern of their own insides.
Jez’s hair had come loose and it whipped around her face in wet lashes. Her eyes were wild, her arms bloodied to the elbows, her teeth and chin and cheeks sodden with gore.
The howling of the Manes was loud in her head, rejoicing in her, celebrating her. The song of her brothers and sisters throbbed through her, beating in her ears as her heart once had.
This was freedom. To be, and nothing more.
‘Jez?’
He called for her in a human voice. This strange one, this denier. He had the gift but he wouldn’t open the box. He kept it closed and hidden away, and pretended it wasn’t there. But look at him, coming through the snow! How fast he moved, how easily he evaded the enemy as he tracked her by the trail of dead. He was more than human now, and he could be more still; but he was afraid. Afraid to be what he was.
She loved him. She couldn’t help but love her own. But she pitied him too, like the runt of the litter.
‘Jez! Come back! You can’t fight them all!’
But she didn’t want to come back. There were more men on the way, a dozen of them, a concerted force sent against her. These were organised and determined men, not panicked prey. They found their courage in unity.
She recognised the danger, but it did nothing to deter her. She was drunk with slaughter, giddy with abandon. She was Mane, and only that. She’d chosen them and she embraced them entirely.
A dozen? She could take on twice that.
Behind her, rumbling and steaming in the snow, was the hamlet’s generator. It stood some way apart from the other buildings, a knot of pipes and levers and tanks the size of a small barn. With that at her back, they couldn’t get around her, and they’d be forced to watch their aim or risk blowing themselves up. Hesitation and uncertainty would undo them. She’d go among them like a wolf among sheep, and they’d scatter like their fellows.
‘Jez!’
It was Pelaru, running out of the whipping snow. She ignored him, her eyes on the approaching men. They hadn’t seen her yet; their sight was not as keen as hers. They were still searching.
He grabbed her arm and she turned her head sharply, teeth bared. He didn’t let her go. His fine clothes were sodden, all his poise and elegance gone, but still she softened at the sight of him.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘There are too many. Your friends need you.’
She was unmoved. The words swept past her without meaning. ‘Fight with me,’ she said.
‘They’ll be overrun! We must help defend the hamlet until your captain can-’
Fight with me! This time she used her mind rather than her mouth, thrusting the thought at him like a sword held out for the taking.
But he didn’t take it. He heard, and he recoiled. Mane speech horrified him. He let her go and stepped away, shocked.
She turned from him in disgust. Someone shouted nearby. They’d seen her. It was time.
Bullets flew as she sprang towards them. Some went wild, ringing dangerously off the pipes that surrounded the generator. A voice rose over the wind, barking orders, trying to minimise panic fire. A leader. She went for him first.
She dodged and flickered as she came, zigzagging out of the snow. Despite their discipline, fear seized them: fear of the daemon, fear of the Mane. She darted between them and pounced on their leader. He raised a pistol. Too slow. She had his throat out in an instant, and was gone before he’d even fallen.
‘The sarge! She got the sarge!’
Their formation fell apart as she tore at them from the inside. They stumbled and swore and spun around, trying to catch sight of her. They tried to shoot her but ended up shooting each other instead. She howled with glee as she swept from prey to prey, leaving corpses in her wake, turning the snow red.
Was this the best they had?
And here came another one, waddling through the snow, made ungainly by his heavy backpack. And what was that in his hand?
Jez had fought in many battles, but never in a war. She knew guns, rifles, shotguns and hidden blades, but she’d never seen a flamethrower before. By the time she realised the threat, it was too late. Even for her.
A jet of fire spewed from the nozzle of the flamethrower and into the melee, sweeping across the group. Scared out of his wits, the operator made no distinction between friend and foe. Jez could have evaded a bullet, but this cloud of burning death was beyond her. She leaped, but the fire caught her in mid-air, and suddenly the world turned to pain.