Chris Wooding - The Ace of Skulls

She darted towards Kyne. Her hand lashed out, and came away trailing a thin chain: Kyne’s amulet, torn from his neck. Now unprotected, the Century Knight gave a yell of terror, distorted through the mouthpiece of his mask. He flailed backwards, tripped to the floor and went scrambling away on his hands and knees.

Crake grabbed for her, clumsily trying to pin her arms. She slipped from his grip and smashed him across the face with a backhand fist. The daemonist’s eyes went dull, and he collapsed to the ground, out cold.

Trinica’s head snapped around and she fixed Frey with a freezing gaze. He withered before her, and backed away slowly, the collar held uselessly in one hand. There was no way he’d get it on her now.

She bared her teeth. Her breath hissed through them. She’d been hurt, and she wasn’t playing around any more. There was deadly intent in her eyes.

— Darian ~

Not knowing what else to do, Frey pulled a pistol from his belt and held it out shakily. She looked at it with a puzzled frown, and then cocked her head to one side, as if to say: Really? Fast as a snake, she knocked it from his hand and it went skidding away across the floor, into the shadows.

Frey stumbled back a step, but she was on him in an instant. He felt himself lifted with inhuman strength, pulled up by the lapels of his coat. Then he was flung bodily through the air, twisting, helpless. He hit a stack of crates, and pain blasted his senses. The impact knocked the breath from his lungs. He was battered from above as more crates came down on top on him. The edge of one of them struck him on his crown, sending him reeling close to unconsciousness. He came back to himself, half-buried in boxes, his head swimming and his vision blurred, his body ablaze with agony.

Somewhere out there was a threat. He blinked and tried to clear his mind, searching the gloomy hold. There: a blurred figure, walking slowly towards him. Trinica. The daemon. Trinica.

Get up. Get up, or you’re gonna die. Get up, or you’ll fail her.

He fought to rise. The crates on his back shifted and toppled, but the effort was too much. He slumped back to the ground.

Trinica approached without hurry. He could hear the soft rasp of her breath, the tap of her boots on the metal floor, the drip of water from above. Behind her, the Azryx device rose like some dread edifice to the forbidden goddess of the Delirium Trigger , encased in bone. Decay and rot swirled at its heart.

There was no one to help him. Crake was out of it, Kyne and Crund reduced to cringing cowards by her daemonic power. He struggled to get to his feet, not knowing what he’d do once he got there, only that he wouldn’t die on his knees. This time there were no crates on his back. He got halfway before her hands seized him again, and he was pulled up, and brought face to face with her.

She dangled something in front of him, too close to focus on. Kyne’s amulet.

— How? ~

Somehow, that single word expressed all its intention. The daemon wanted to know how they’d learned to negate its powers. But more, it wanted to know how this had all come to pass. How had the Awakeners been defeated? Where had it all gone wrong? Why were the Manes here? Who was he, this Captain Frey that had plagued them for so long? It would learn, and it would share that knowledge, and next time there would be no mistake.

— How? ~ she demanded, though her lips never moved.

Frey began to laugh. Hysteria brought it out of him, and though it hurt like bastardy to do it, it felt good all the same. ‘You want to know what’s going on?’ he said. ‘Sweetheart, you’re asking the wrong feller.’ He coughed and gave her a shit-eating grin. ‘I just work here.’

She snarled, and with one quick movement she threw him across the room. He tumbled and turned in the air, his senses a whirling blur of vertigo and fright, dominated by the awful anticipation of impact.

He smashed into one of the great girders that held up the roof of the hold. Something gave as he hit; the snap of bone resounded through the hollow room. He crashed to the floor in a pile. He couldn’t catch his breath; his mouth flooded, and tasted like tin. He retched and blood splattered the floor. The dizzying agony as his stomach clenched made his head go light and his vision sparkle.

He managed to inhale. Razors scored his back. Something was broken inside. Couple of ribs, maybe worse.

Shit, shit, shit.

Each new movement brought new pain. He wanted to lie still and surrender himself to whatever was to come. Instead he gritted bloody teeth and forced his trembling limbs into action. It seemed like he’d spent his whole life getting back to his feet, and he wasn’t stopping now. Even when he didn’t have anything else, he had defiance.

That was the thing about underdogs. They never knew when they were beaten.

He’d made it to his hands and knees by the time she reached him. He raised his head and looked at her, like a battered dog before its mistress, waiting for another blow.

Come on, Trinica , he thought. I know you’re in there. Fight it. Help me. Fight it .

She raised her foot and brought her heel down hard on his left hand. He tried to scream as bone splintered, but all he could manage was a silent wheeze. He snatched his hand back and clutched it to his chest. It had become a clumsy mitten of meat encasing a jumble of broken crockery, burning like it was on fire.

Unable to hold himself up any more, he lost his balance and fell onto his side. The jolt brought tears to his eyes. The pain was more than he’d thought it possible to suffer. He lay there curled up, wishing for the dark of unconsciousness, but there was no respite. He coughed again, and more blood came up.

I’m dying. Oh shit, I’m dying.

He was hauled up by his lapels once more, and held up before her. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to stand on his own, but he shuffled his feet, dragged his ankles, got his boots under him. His head lolled on his neck, and his breath came in rasps; the effort to draw in air was immense. He choked on the blood filling his mouth. Punctured lung? Ruptured spleen? Did it matter any more?

The daemon bared its teeth. ~ How? ~

Trinica’s face swam before him. No, not Trinica. The ghost of her, the nemesis she’d fashioned to torment him. Maybe it was always heading to this, ever since that day he left her standing pregnant in front of the wedding party, and never showed up. Everything since had sprung from that single act of selfishness. Earl Hengar’s death, Retribution Falls, the Mane attack on Sakkan, the destruction of the Azryx city in Samarla, the civil war; all mere sideshows to the main attraction: his elaborate and extended self-punishment for that one moment of youthful idiocy. For the death of his unborn child and what he’d done to the woman who’d carried it.

He’d fought so hard to win her back. He’d dreamed of the chance to atone. But in the end it had been a fool’s chase. There would be no forgiveness for him. There was only the vengeance he deserved, and it was fitting that it should be delivered at her hands.

Finish it, then , he thought, and he waited for the end.

But there was no new blow, and he wasn’t thrown again. Instead he felt a creeping sensation along his scalp, slipping through the bone until it was inside his skull, dirty little fingers grubbing at his brain. Those mismatched eyes bored into his. Horror took him, and he tried to pull away; but she clamped his jaw roughly in one hand, and he couldn’t.

Pictures were forming in his head. Memories, uncovering themselves against his will, scenes from the buried past brought out into the light.