Igor spoke up again. ‘Hey, Compton, you won’t be coming with us. So feel free not to piss your pants now.’
Allen’s intervention restored some calm to the cabin. Not that the SEALs had been in open rebellion. Nobody besides Igor had even spoken during the set-to between Dave and the academic, which he found amazing. If he’d been flying into a shit fight with a dozen or so of his guys from the rig, they’d have landed the chopper surrounded by a little cartoon storm cloud with lightning bolts and fists and the occasional comic
BIFF!
coming out of it.
The SEALs checked their gear, pointedly ignoring the fracas. For his part, Compton folded back in on himself, muttering something of no consequence.
‘Ten minutes,’ said the pilot, Dave guessed, the voice crackling over the intercom.
Dave could see the coastline. New Orleans was a smear of light through the bubble canopy at the front of the chopper. The Mississippi River curled around the city, bringing to mind the childish notion of a castle protected by a moat. Barges and other vessels made their way up and down the river, oblivious to any peril that might befall them. Water was no barrier to the creatures of the UnderRealms.
The city of Mardi Gras and spring break hotties seemed remarkably tame and quiet from the open door of the Seahawk. No explosions lit up the night. No jets flew in low to attack swarms of Sliveen or Grymm, Fangr or Hunn. No flaming pyres were in evidence, no blood pots overflowing with tribute for the Low Queen.
Blood.
Tribute.
Dave was positive he was forgetting something important. Or worse, as Emmeline had said earlier, he needed to know something but didn’t know what to ask himself. Lucille was definitely humming now. Singing to him. The vibrations thrumming up his arms and into his neck were starting to give him a low-grade headache, a bit like a six-beer hangover.
‘Hey, Dave.’
He dropped back into reality, such as it was. Allen leaned forward to talk to him. If possible, he looked like he was carrying even more weapons than on the trip out to the Longreach.
‘S’up, Chief?’
‘The profs gave us a pretty basic briefing package about the likely vulnerabilities of those things you killed. But a few of us were wondering if you had any advice. You know, where to aim. That sort of thing. They’ve got more than one heart, right? Will they keep going if we put a round through the big ticker but not the backup?’
Compton looked as though he wanted to answer, but Allen turned a shoulder to shut him out. Even in the darkness of the cabin, with the chief’s face blackened by camouflage paint, Dave could see the concern in his eyes.
‘And like, how fast are these things?’ Igor asked. ‘I heard they’re like fucking cheetahs over open ground.’
Dave really was the centre of attention now.
Compton was ticked off but quiet. Ashbury licked her lips and seemed nervous on Dave’s behalf. The fighting men in the chopper all hung on his response.
‘Just gimme a moment, would you?’ he asked.
Dave Hooper closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. Then in. Slowly. It was some bullshit yoga thing Annie had tried to teach him years ago. When she decided he needed to find an alternative to calming himself down with a couple of fingers of Jack Daniel’s every night.
He hadn’t stuck with it, of course. It made him feel like a dick. The yoga, not the Jack. But he had to find a way to clear his thoughts so that he could concentrate, and there was no bar service on the Seahawk. He was still just learning to search the Hunn memory. It didn’t come with an index. But he found it did come easier if he didn’t force things. Pushing too hard could lead him down any number of blind alleys.
What would Urgon do? He tried to imagine fighting the Hunn as a Hunn. As a member of the Horde. What would he do? Where would he strike?
. . .
. . .
. . .
He opened his eyes.
‘Unless you got a clear shot at the face or you’re packing armour-piercing rounds, the head isn’t such a great target,’ he said. ‘Not on the Hunn, the big ones, and definitely not on a BattleMaster Hunn, who you won’t miss because they’re even bigger. But the nasal cavity is a weak spot. And the throat. And there’s a bunch of vital organs down the lower left of the torso. If I was gonna hit one of them, that’s where I’d aim. The hide is thinner, and the bone cage around the body mass sort of peters out above that. They’ll be armoured there because of it. But it’ll be boiled leather and maybe some mail or plating.’
‘Armour?’ one of the SEALs asked with real doubt in his voice. He seemed very young.
‘It’s not like a vest, son,’ Dave explained. ‘It’s not meant to stop penetrating strikes, more to deflect slashes and swipes with edged weapons. So don’t go getting into any knife fights with them.’
He was serious, but it brought forth a few appreciative grins from the commandos who sported their fair share of cutlery on their vests and belts. Gallows humour, he supposed.
‘So, if you got armour-piercing rounds, that’s good. And tracers, too. They hate fire.’
‘Way ahead of you,’ Allen said. He tapped his ammo pouches. ‘Prof’s orders. Got us some tungsten polycarbonate rounds mixed in with tracer. That ought to do it.’
‘And Willy Peter,’ Igor said, fingering something shaped like a soda can on his equipment vest.
‘Make you a believer!’ chorused a couple of his squad mates.
‘Willy who?’
‘White phosphorous,’ Allen explained. ‘Burns like the devil’s own curried egg farts.’
‘What about the smaller ones?’ somebody asked. ‘The fangers?’
‘Fangr,’
said Dave, drawing out the second syllable. ‘They’re faster than Hunn. But easier to kill. Smaller, weaker. But there’s more of them, and they run in packs. Three or four, controlled by a Hunn dominant. Hose ’em down if you got the time and distance.’
Professor Ashbury nodded. ‘We examined one of them first. They are definitely vulnerable to small arms fire: multiple redundant organs but none of them well protected. No evidence of armour or tools among them. Dave, they tend to rely on their claws and their fangs, correct?’
‘Definitely.’ Dave nodded, happy for some useful assistance while Compton sat with his arms crossed. If he didn’t know better, he’d have sworn the professor was pouting.
He had a sudden moment of recall from his own life for once.
‘You remember that dinosaur movie.
Jurassic Park
? You remember the sneaky little dinosaurs?’
‘Raptors,’ Ashbury supplied.
‘Yeah, them,’ Dave agreed. ‘The Fangr are just like them. They’ll tag-team you and try to flank you. One suddenly pops on your left, shoot right first. Cover each other.’
‘Then they’ll rely on speed and their strength?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Don’t try going to a hand-to-hand brawl with them,’ Dave said. ‘They’ll pull you apart like a Tyson chicken.’
He could see a few of them repeating the advice to themselves over and over.
‘Five minutes to the X.’
They were over the city now, just under the few remaining storm clouds and thunderheads. It was a terrible night to be flying. A section of the metro area was blacked out and emergency vehicles seemed to be speeding everywhere, but that might have been normal for New Orleans.
‘Thanks,’ Allen said, tapping the side of his boot against Dave’s.
Hooper leaned forward to ask him a question. With the change in angle he saw just how much air traffic seemed to be up tonight.
‘What’s the X?’ he called out. ‘Is that like on a map?’
Compton closed his eyes and shook his head.
‘Like on a map,’ Allen agreed. ‘The X is the target. Used to be we’d assault there, on top of the enemy. Vertical envelopment. Kick down the door, go in hard.’
‘Like in that movie about the army guys in Africa, right?’ Dave asked.
‘Rangers, yeah. Right,’ Allen said in a way that sounded a lot like ‘Rangers, no, fuck off’. ‘Anyway, Iraq taught us differently. Now we like to insert farther away and walk in. Quietly. Sometimes so quiet that we’d be standing over their beds before they knew it.’
‘But we’re not doing that tonight?’
Allen smiled. ‘I’m not sure what we’re doing tonight. Other than what you’ve given us, we can’t get clear intelligence. We’ve got reports of everything from rabid animals to escaped apes eating people in Central City. We don’t have a clear picture of what is happening at all,’ he said. ‘Fog of war.’
‘It is like they’re beaming down from the fucking
Enterprise
,’ Igor said. ‘They could turn up anywhere, right?’
Dave shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, man. That I don’t know. Until today they were trapped underground. Or, in a different, sort of lower dimension, or something. I dunno. And I don’t know if that barrier is completely gone or if there are just holes in it.’
At that moment, Dave saw the first explosion.
21
T
he solitary thresh had never known solitude. From the earliest sentient moments of clawing its way out of the egg into the seething tangle of its newly hatched nest mates, it had always known their thinkings and they had known its. The mind of the nest was as much a part of its existence as the dark ichor running through its body or the pus oozing from its hide. To be without the thinkings of its nest mates, even just the one with whom it had squeezed through the rent in the barrier to the Above, was as painful as a shaft of daylight falling across its face.
Not that the thresh had ever seen daylight, of course, but the nest legends spoke of it in tones of awe and horror. And the thresh could understand why. Even the bright moonlight that had kissed its hide shortly after it emerged from the ooze at the bottom of the flooded caves had set its bright opalescent pus tingling. And from what it remembered of legend, moonlight was nothing more than the merest reflection of sunlight. Oh, what horrors must await the thresh caught on its own and staked out by men to meet the dawn as told of in the tales whispered to newly hatched nestlings.
No errant beam of moonlight had shattered the skull of its nest mate, however. That had been some arcane magick of the Above. It remembered the nest mate rubbing its forehead, disgruntled and snarling from tripping over the ruined masonry. It remembered.
A flash of lightning.
A thunderclap.
A searing white, hot spike of pain that ended abruptly with the very sinews of sentience shredded into bloody mush.
The solitary thresh felt its ichor run cold at the memory.
No matter what thinkings the thresh thought of, it could not reconcile the fate of the slaughtered nest mate with what it knew of Above. No myth or legend spoke of magick that tore thresh apart with the violence of sunbursts. It was certainly not the lesser hazard of falling moonlight that had taken its mate, for what little moonlight there had been had most agreeably disappeared shortly after they’d arrived. The work of Sky Lords, no less.
The floor of the flooded cave system under the calfling settlement was a treacherous place, rotten with a maze of tree roots and sucking ooze and hard rocks that banged and scraped the hide as the thresh fumbled about under the surface of water that ran thick with human waste. With a gut full of fermenting Man blood it could stay submerged for very long periods, but even so the creature was beginning to feel the burn in its lungs as it searched anxiously for the passage below. The torment of solitude was greater, however, calling it back to the nest, where it no longer would be alone with its own thinkings.
A splash a short distance away startled the thresh and almost drew it back to the surface for an unnecessary breath of air. Forcing itself to swim lower, the thresh might have cursed the fickle nature of the Sky Lords had it not immediately swum under a smooth arch of rock and found itself at the site of the breach. The thresh praised the Sky Lords for leading it there and offered abject grovelling thinkings in recompense for having doubted them. When it kicked down for the floor of the cavern, its claws soon found the thick, gluey mud littered with the bodies and bones of small surface-dwelling creatures that sank down to decay in the ooze.
With a silent cry of triumph it drove its claws in deep and pulled itself down. The mud closed around its head, and for the briefest moment panic threatened to overwhelm the daemon inferiorae, but the choking claustrophobic feeling quickly cleared as the thresh found itself emerging up through the floor of one of the sulphur pools in a cavern a short scuttle away from the nest it had left earlier.
Instantly the soothing balm of the nest mind spread over it. The chattering, skittering thinkings of its nest mates, the slower more considered ponderings of Threshrendum superiorae and nest elders, and beneath them all the slow hot beat of the infinitely vaster and all but imponderable mind of the Low Queen. She of the Horde.
The thresh let go of all the pent-up fears and questions and shock and horror and awe and delight and wonder at everything it had experienced with its slain nest mate since they had stalked the minion all the way into the Above. This unexpected outburst of thinkings and feelings spread out through the nest in a wave of propagating shock. Hatchlings, newly broken through the shells of their eggs, ceased to tear and rake at one another, winnowing out the weakest of their litter. Nest elders stood staring at one another in blank disbelief at the thresh’s memory of the Above, a place none but the queen herself had seen. Hunn dominants murmured darkly at each other, skinning back thin lips from fangs and flexing long talons at the whispers of the minion that had stolen into their realm before somehow finding its way Above.
Shame upon unutterable shame suffused the collective mind of the warrior class that they should have been so humbled. First by a minion that avoided their watch and then by a thresh of so few years that had stalked the minion into the very Above, slaughtered the filth, and returned with a belly full of tribute. Returned also with a worrying memory of inexplicable and hostile magick.
The nest in its entirety released a silent gasp at the memory of the thresh that had died Above for no apparent reason. The survivor hurried down and down through the honeycombed tunnels toward the heart of the nest, encountering more of its kind the closer it got. Talons clacked and scratched at dripping walls as Threshrendum hissed and snarled quickthinking praise on the young adventurer for its triumphant return. Beneath their thoughts, however, the thresh also knew their hunger for the meat fermenting in its belly, jealousy that one so low might now be raised higher in the thinkings of the queen, and fear and even disbelief at the recall of that moment when the other thresh had died. The prodigal daemon increased its speed, not conscious of any plans but driven by a need to return to the deepest, safest part of its nest, where it might sit and share its thinkings with those who might just understand them. Just outside the central chamber, where tunnels from all over the Horde realms converged, its progress was stopped by a short, simple command that landed in its mind like the hammer blow of a BattleMaster of Hunn.
Attend to your queen, now, thresh. Guardians Grymm! Bear forward my tribute and attend.
The thresh staggered under the force of its monarch’s will. The press of daemonum that had been gathering around it, slowing its approach to the heart of the nest, all but dissolved as two Grymm warriors, standing at least thrice as tall and noticeably thicker in limb and longer of fang and talon, appeared beside it. They did not restrain the thresh, did not even seize it, in fact. They may well have snapped off a limb had they done so. Instead, the two formidable killers took up an escort position on either side and began to move forward, carrying the thresh along with them and parting the crowd by force of will.
They passed into and through a grand chamber of the nest, where a host of curious daemonum sniffed the air and observed the returning hero with shining black eyes and jaws agape. The small party hastened on through the crowd, past the communal blood pots, and on into a wide channel at the rear of the chamber that climbed away to one of the queen’s private parlours.
Fear licked like flames at the edge of the thresh’s thinkings as the small party approached their ruler and progenitor. The thresh was aware of an uneasy silence falling over the nest behind it as it climbed into the small winding tunnel leading to her chambers. All would be aware of what had happened, of where it had been, and none could understand. The Above had been barred to their kind for so long that some even doubted its existence. Not individually, of course. To question the memory of the nest and, more important, the queen would never do. Such insolence could only end in the blood pot. But if one sat in one’s cave very quietly and opened one’s thinkings as wide as possible, one could just detect a faint stirring of doubt, almost beyond perception. Doubt, perhaps, in the idea of ever returning to the Above rather than doubt in its existence at all.
Yes, thought the thresh. That was how it would prefer to imagine any such lack of faith should the queen question it on the matter.
The queen’s thoughts grew oppressively strong as they approached some of the innermost chambers. The thinkings and feelings of its nest mates, all of them, seemed to be crushed out of its mind by her presence. As though she filled the thresh completely with her power and her knowing. By instinct, the thresh dipped its head and fell to the floor in supplication as they entered. On either side of it the Praetorian Grymm likewise went down, retracting fang and talon and dipping their heads, baring their necks for a killing stroke.
– You have tribute.
The queen’s voice rumbled in the thresh’s mind like the grinding of tectonic plates. The thresh abased itself, sliding even closer to the hard rock floor of the chamber.
– Attend me, thresh, and allow me to sup of this tribute that I might judge its worth and your fate.
The thresh cautiously inched forward, a little too cautiously, earning it a kick in the rear from one of the warrior attendants. That was enough to send it scuttling forward until a thought from the queen brought it to a halt. The thresh concentrated and heaved, regurgitating the better part of the meal it was carrying in both of its stomachs. It retched and retched, emptying its guts lest there be any question that it had not rendered full tribute. So fulsomely did it vomit up the fermenting remains that its vision blurred and the room began to spin.
It felt the presence of the queen in its mind, stroking it and calming its fears as only a mother could.
– You have done well, nestling. I can smell the rotting hide of the minion you defeated. Praise be to you for your victory. And praise, too, for this gift of sweetmeat. It has been an age since we last fed on this delicacy.
The thresh was aware of movement in the dim red-lit cavern as something immense and powerful shifted in the gloom and dragged itself forward. It felt vibrations in the bedrock as the queen pulled herself toward the steaming pile of human offal. It could sense fear leaking out of the closely guarded minds of the Grymm on either side of it and wondered how much of its own abject awe and terror they sensed by mere observation. Possibly none. The Grymm remained kneeling with heads bowed down. The queen alone knew its thinking now. Jaws distended with a wet creaking sound, and one of her tongues shot out with a rasp, scooping up the pile of remains in one motion. The thresh felt her satisfaction, indeed her pleasure, at the meal as its own. It sensed regret at the meagre provisions but excitement at the prospect that she might feast properly soon.
– There were others, you said.
The thresh was almost paralysed by the majesty of her presence, but she insinuated soothing feelings into its mind and the small daemon was seized by a new and unexpected confidence.
– Yes, Majesty. Another of the Men. Larger and darker of flesh. We attempted to take it, but my nest mate was destroyed by strange magicks
.
It felt the queen’s scepticism at its thinking but knew that she could not deny the clarity of its memories. She knew its thinkings and feelings as though they were her own, and she could see in her own mind how the other thresh had been destroyed as they moved forward to seize the prey. The thresh had the unprecedented and wholly unsettling experience of examining the memory with the queen, pondering it with some of her reflected intelligence and her vast accumulated store of knowledge and lore. It learned more of men in that brief moment than it would have learned in a lifetime of listening to stories around the blood pot.
Men, it learned, had pleaded with their gods to spare them. From all the sects daemonum. And most especially from the blood pots of the Horde, the mighty Hunn and leashed Fang and the heavy claw of the Grymm. For whatever reasons the gods had seen fit to separate the realms, turning daemon on daemon for millennia. Of men’s world now, the queen knew nothing. But she well remembered them as feeble creatures. Not enemies, just food. They had no magicks. They cowered in caves and behind trees waiting to be eaten. They lashed together thin branches to shelter them from the sky and beat useless implements out of soft metals. Iron was unknown to them. Pushed to extremes, they might fight to preserve their young. But nowhere in her memory, which stretched back across oceans of time, had any men ever conjured up magick enough to reach out and slay a daemon in such fashion.
The thresh had the merest idea that the Sky Lords may have separated the realms for that very reason: lest men and their beasts be hunted out. It also knew the contempt of Her Majesty for such thinkings. Who were the Sky Lords to banish them? But just as important, where were these gods now that the barrier between the realms had been breached? The thresh was just beginning to get an inkling of its monarch’s thinkings on the matter when she withdrew from its mind and it found itself prostrated on the stone floor with only its thin and meagre thinkings and the silence of the Grymm guardians for company.
As it lay exhausted and sickened, it retained but one clear memory of the privileged violation.
It had not been her only servant to pass through the barrier. Her Majesty knew of others. Some great change was upon the world.
When next it heard Her Majesty’s thoughts, they came at a remove, not arising within the thresh’s own mind as before but arriving within it as she spoke to all of them.
– This shall not stand. We shall not be mocked thus. Not by the likes of men. My captains ur Hunn and ur Grymm, you shall gather the necessary forces and return to the Above with this thresh if the path lies open still. You shall secure our passage there. You shall learn the nature of these magicks that destroyed our nestling, and you shall lay our vengeance on those responsible. Come hence to me when these things are done and I shall make due preparations for my return to the world of men.