Chris Wooding - The Ace of Skulls

Not that , he begged her silently. Not that .

His thoughts, his desires, his innermost feelings. All his regret and shame, all his triumph and glory. Every secret he’d guarded in a lifetime of secrecy. The daemon was peeling him back in layers, digging into him, dragging him out in pieces to be scrutinised and cast aside. It was reading his mind.

He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear to be seen without illusion, to have his life autopsied before him. The physical pain he’d suffered was nothing compared to this.

He saw childish rebellions at the orphanage. He saw the day he’d first brought Slag on board the Ketty Jay , a mewling kitten, there for luck and for dealing with all those damned rats. He saw himself arguing with Trinica about the wedding and the baby, a young man who didn’t even understand why he was angry. He saw himself charming women and then leaving them, saw himself cutting deals with low-lifes and ripping off the weak. He saw moments of tender camaraderie with his crew.

His life was laid out in his mind, exposed to an alien regard, and it was terrible. In that merciless light, he was no longer special. Everything precious was cheapened and made tawdry. Every failing, stripped of excuses or equivocation, showed up stark and shameful. Viewed coldly, his history seemed wretched, the tale of a cheat and a philanderer, a narcissist and a liar. A man of small importance, always trying to be something greater than he was, doomed to defeat and doomed never to realise it.

No , he thought. No, I was worth something. I was! I lived!

A picture came to his mind then. A picture of himself, a ferrotype on a handbill, WANTED printed in large letters above him. He was young and smiling in it. They’d distributed that handbill all over Vardia after the death of Earl Hengar, back when Duke Grephen and Gallian Thade were trying to frame him, back when the Awakeners were first trying their hand at insurrection.

He’d been enraged when he first saw it, because that portrait they’d taken was only a part of a larger ferrotype, one he hadn’t wished to be reminded of at the time. But now he unfolded it in his memory, and found himself standing in a meadow with mountains behind him, and Trinica there, clinging to his arm and laughing. Laughing at the camera they’d set up on a tripod, laughing with unforced delight, laughing just to laugh. Laughing because she was a young woman in the throes of first love, brimming with a pure, naïve, dreamer’s passion, and she knew nothing of the troubles of the world.

He held on to that picture, forced his thoughts upon it. The daemon was trying to tug him away, to move on to other things, but he wouldn’t let it go. He clutched it tight in his mind, and the picture opened out again until it was no longer a picture but a scene.

Now he stood in the meadow with her, the sun warm on his back and the hiss of the long grass in his ears and clean mountain air in his lungs. He felt as he’d felt then, when he’d lived in a time free of responsibility and commitment, when he was just a cargo pilot who’d fallen for the boss’s daughter. A time when he’d been filled with the heady joy of love without precedent, and he’d felt like an explorer on an uncharted frontier.

In that moment, he’d loved her completely. It filled his mind, crowding out everything else. This place, this time. He never wanted to leave it. He never should have left it. And while he held on to it, nothing else could get in; not the past or the future, and not the cruel eye of the daemon. Nothing could sully this memory. It was untouchable. It was perfect.

And somewhere in the bittersweet bliss of reverie, he became aware that the daemon was no longer pawing at his consciousness. Trinica no longer gripped his jaw, and her face had changed. Instead of the hateful creature that inhabited her body he saw her staring out at him. Those odd-coloured eyes shimmered with sorrow; her stained and smeared lips trembled.

He wanted her to look at him for ever, but she had only seconds. She’d mastered the daemon briefly, but it wouldn’t stay down for long. With her terrified gaze, she implored him.

Ignoring the pain that wracked him, he laid his left forearm on her shoulder to steady himself, his shattered hand dangling uselessly at the end. He leaned in close, so that his bloodied lips brushed her ear, and he could feel the flutter of the pulse at her throat.

‘I love you,’ he said. And he drove the point of his cutlass into her with all the strength in his body.

A soft whimper escaped her as the blade passed through her and thrust out of her back. Her eyes, still fixed on his, tautened with the agony of it. She took in half a breath, and then her eyes rolled up, her head tipped back and her legs gave way.

He caught her with his left arm, clutched her to him and kept her there as she jerked and shuddered. The air warped and bent, distorting their surroundings like a fairground mirror; aethereal screeches filled the hold; a hurricane raged around them. He held on to her with one arm as if she was the only thing that would stop him from being blown away. With his other, he gripped tight the hilt of the cutlass.

He’d slain her once before with this blade, back in the Azryx city, when the Iron Jackal had taken on her form as a ploy to delay him. The daemon in his cutlass had destroyed the daemon then, just as it fought the daemon inside her now. But that had been a deception; this time it was real. To save her, he’d killed her.

He’d killed her.

The wind died and the screams died with them, and still he held Trinica. He held her till the shivers stopped and the trembling ceased and she hung there in the circle of his arm, her cheek against his shoulder, her eyes closed. He held her till the silence returned.

It was that silence, in the end, that broke him. The absence. He took in a breath, not caring how his broken ribs stabbed at him, and he let out a raw cry of rage and anguish that echoed from the cold walls of the hold. He pulled the blade from his lover’s body and threw it aside, and with Trinica still held against him he drew his second pistol and fired it over her shoulder at the Azryx device: once, twice, three times. The transparent casing that kept the gas inside cracked in two places, and a chunk of the bonelike exterior was blown away, revealing strange machinery which sparked with dangerous energy. He fired till his drum was empty, and kept firing after that, and would have gone on if a gloved hand hadn’t closed around the revolver and taken it from his hand. He turned his head and glared into the impassive mask of Morben Kyne.

‘It’s over,’ said Kyne.

Frey pulled Trinica hard against him, encircling her with both arms now, and sobbed helplessly, like a child. He felt her blood seeping through his shirt; or maybe it was his. He didn’t know. He didn’t know where his wounds ended and hers began any more. He just knew that she was gone, and that knowledge was everything.

The light in the hold dimmed and changed. The gas in the Azryx device had begun to change colour, moving from shades of putrescence and bile to a deep arterial red. Gangrenous black swirls appeared at its heart, and little worms of lightning crawled around the cracks in the casing, questing fingers seeking a way out. One of the cracks shot out a new branch, doubling in length under the stress from inside. A low pulsing sound was coming from the device, threatening in tone, getting louder.

‘We have to go,’ Kyne told him, his voice a flat buzz.

But Frey didn’t want to go anywhere. He didn’t care about the device, or the war, or the dull boom of artillery from beyond the Delirium Trigger ’s hull. He’d been emptied out. All he wanted was to bring Trinica back, as if by force of will he could undo what had been done.