Kasyx said, ‘This is it. This is
Yaomauitl’s army. The dead! Look at them!’
Xaxxa wrinkled up his nose. ‘Man,
they got to smell like the
worst.’
Tebulot raised his weapon, and aimed
it.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Kasyx.
‘They’ll tear us to pieces, if they ever get their hands on us.’
Samena was lifting her arms into the
firing position, when suddenly she stiffened, as if she had heard something,
and turned around.
‘What is it?’ asked Kasyx. But then
he looked for himself, and saw it.
The clockwork city was somehow
reassembling itself, changing, interlocking, like a gigantic child’s toy. With
an amplified mechanical clicking and clanking, it was rising into the
threatening sky, building upon building, chimney upon chimney, whole railroad
yards turning on their sides and interlocking into bridges; pyramid-shaped
office buildings grinding around on their axes and rumbling into diagonal slots
in the side of parking-lots. It rose, the city, and it darkened a sky that was
already dark; a huge construction of buildings and highways and bridges, still
glittering with light, still teeming with traffic, but a humanoid now, a city
in the shape of a man.
The Night Warriors stared up at the
clockwork city’s staggering bulk, and for the first time since Springer had
first invested them with the power of Ashapola and the ancient armour that had
protected their ancestors, they felt helpless.
Slowly, two gleaming yellow eyes
opened in the head of the clockwork city, and a voice thundered down at them
like a succession of trucks being hurled off a cliff top.
‘
You have dared to defy Yaomauitl, the Deadly Enemy, the Scourge of the
Church!
You have dared to destroy my beloved children! For this, there is no
forgiveness; no
mercy! For this, there is nothing but
eternal punishment, and the tortures of hell!’
With another piercing scream, the
tattered dead came running up the crimson hill towards the Night Warriors. They
were armed with baling-hooks and scythes and curves of broken glass, which they
clattered above their heads as they screamed.
‘Hit them!’
Kasyx
shouted; and Tebulot dropped to one knee and fired a blinding salvo of power,
one charge after the other in a tight quarter-circle. One after the other,
corpses screeched and exploded and burst into flames. One of them was detonated
in all directions – hands and feet flying one way, skull tumbling into the air
behind him. Another, blazing, cartwheeled away across the grass, a fiery
crucifix.
Samena dodged and skipped between
the grasping hands that were still rising up from the grass beneath their feet,
trying wildly to clutch at their ankles. She crossed her arms, and fired her
multiple arrowhead at nearly a dozen corpses which had broken into an epileptic
run and were heading up the slope towards Kasyx. The arrowhead whizzed on a
shaft of golden power until it was ten feet away from her, then split up like a
star-burst so that each individual part of the arrowhead could seek out its
target. The running corpses stumbled, collapsed, and fell.
Now Xaxxa flashed away from the
ground, soaring high above the field on his shining pathway of pure power. He
turned to the right, lifting himself higher than Kasyx had ever seen him
before, like a jet reaching the very top of its turn at an air-display. Then he
was sizzling back across the thunderous sky, his knees bent in perfect balance,
the surfer of the power-slide, his face concealed behind his mirrored mask.
Kasyx turned his head to watch Xaxxa as he flashed along the line of corpses,
just above their heads, and then turned again to come back and hit them with
everything he had.
This time, he was so fast that his
fellow Night Warriors could barely see him. He streaked along the ranks of the
dead, kicking and punching in a non-stop flurry of whirling arms and legs. The
dead dropped to the ground like harvested corn-stalks, thirty or forty of them,
one after the other; and then Xaxxa arched up and around again to knock down
some more.
His last pass along the line of
corpses was abruptly followed by a sonic boom, that swelled and banged and then
faded. He must have slid faster than a thousand kilometres an hour.
Tebulot began to fire quick
individual blasts, blowing up one corpse at a time with devastating accuracy.
Samena took to using flail-headed arrows, which opened out in flight and
released spinning wires with weights at each end, like bolos, which whistled
through the corpses’ necks and sent their heads flying like grey pumpkins.
Kasyx glanced behind him. The
clockwork city was slowly and noisily dismantling itself, returning street by
street and building by building to its original form; but it had been an
unnerving demonstration of Yaomauitl’s power. They were on Yaomauitl’s
territory now, fighting in the nightmare which
he
had selected, and Kasyx was beginning to feel that they were
already outnumbered, already outsmarted, and doing nothing more effective than
a fly can do, once it has been snared on a spider’s web. Struggling, yes;
fighting, yes; and still alive. But with no serious chance of ever escaping
unscathed.
More and more corpses rose from the
ground, white faced and maggoty, with earth in their hair – more than Tebulot
could shoot, or Samena could bring down with her arrowheads, or Xaxxa could
successfully slide-box. Kasyx shouted. ‘Back! Let’s get back! There are too
many of them!’
They fired off two or three more
bursts of power. Corpses flared and shrieked and fell to the grass, guttering
and crackling like burned-down candles. But more corpses rose behind them, pale
and screaming, a huge jostling multitude that overwhelmed the Night Warriors at
last. The four of them topped the ridge and began to run down towards the
clockwork city, while behind them the dead swarmed up to the top of the hill,
shrieking their rage and their agony up to the sky.
The Night Warriors were only halfway
down the slope when more corpses appeared on either side of them. Tebulot stumbled
and skidded to a stop, and fired a heavy multiple burst of energy, first to the
left, and then to the right. There were more fires among the corpses. A severed
arm flew high into the air, as if it were waving to oblivion. In patches, the
grass caught fire, but the corpses continued to come screaming through the
flames, some of them running with their dresses and their frock-coats on fire.
Now the Night Warriors were running
in earnest. The slope gradually flattened out into a wide, grey, dismal plain,
a place of ashes and wild timothy, which separated the hill from the clockwork
city. In the distance, about a half-mile away, a clockwork train sped along a
tinplate track, the windows of its passenger-cars alight, and high behind it a
clockwork crane rose up, tick-tocking as it turned.
Their feet crunched in the ashes as
they jogged nearer and nearer to the bulky skyline of the clockwork city. But
Kasyx glanced behind him and saw that they had very little chance of reaching
it. The armies of the dead had come running down the hillside; they had already
outflanked the Night Warriors on the left, and were quickly overtaking them on
the right.
Abruptly, Kasyx stopped running. The
other three went on for a few paces, and then stopped and turned, too.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Samena.
‘Kasyx? Are you all right?’
Kasyx said, ‘We’re making fools of
ourselves! Look at us, running! We’re doing exactly what Yaomauitl wants us to
do!’
‘What else are we going to do, man?’
Xaxxa demanded. That’s an
army!’
‘Yes, Xaxxa, but so are
we!
As long as we fight together,
instead of separately.’
‘What are you trying to say?’ asked
Tebulot.
‘You said it yourself, earlier
today. We have to fight together, and as equals. So let’s do it.’
The front-runners of the army of
corpses were only fifty or sixty feet away now.
Tebulot raised his weapon and zapped
off a burst of glittering explosive power that brought seven of them down.
Kasyx said quickly, ‘What we’ll do
is this. I’ll send out a field of power to bring them all closer together.
Xaxxa – you can fly behind them, and station yourself there. Then Tebulot can
fire charges at you, which you deflect with your power-slide into the back of
their ranks. Samena meanwhile can pick them off from the front.’
Tebulot looked uncertain, but Kasyx
said, ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I’m being authoritarian again. But it should work, if
we do it quickly.’
‘I’m game,’ said Xaxxa.
Samena said, ‘I’d rather fight it
out than run away. And I don’t fancy
that
place one little bit.’ She nodded towards the clockwork city.
‘Okay, then – let’s do it to them
before they do it to us,’ said Kasyx.
‘Oh, God,’ complained Samena.
‘You’ve been watching
Hill Street Blues.’
Kasyx frowned at her. ‘What on earth
is
Hill Street Blues?’
Xaxxa took up his slide-boxing pose,
and flashed off over the heads of the rapidly advancing corpses. Tebulot took
an extra charge of power from Kasyx, and then knelt down ready with his weapon
fitted up to his shoulder. Samena armed her finger with more flail-headed
arrows.
Kasyx stood just behind them, and
stretched out his arms. He closed his eyes, and concentrated deeply, and his
armour began to come alive with spitting electrical charges. Samena, who was
standing closest to him, could hear a deep generator hum that meant he was about
to build himself up to maximum power.
Kasyx strained harder and harder,
and at last opened his fingers, so that a vibrating sheet of pure electricity
streamed out on either side of him like some kind of impossible cloak. It
streamed wider and wider and wider, until it reached the corpses who had been
trying to outflank them, both on the left and on the right. The first corpses
ran right into it, shrieked and pirouetted and exploded into blazing pieces.
Behind them, the others hesitated
and then retreated, shuffling and pushing and panicking, and screaming even
more loudly.
Some of them tried to go back
towards the hill, but Tebulot fired a quick burst of energy at Xaxxa, and Xaxxa
dived and swooped in the air and caught the energy against the bottom of his power-slide,
so that it ricocheted off in a shower of sparks and zipped into the corpses
like red-hot daggers into ripe cheese. Bodies burned and toppled and crackled
into fragments.
Kasyx now brought his arms slowly
towards each other, so that the electric fence which he was radiating out of
his fingers began to close in on the corpses from either side. He was using
full power, and he knew that he would be unable to sustain it for very long,
but this was the only way he could think of to annihilate Yaomauitl’s army of
corpses quickly and completely.
Soon, the screeching corpses had
been herded by Kasyx’s fences into a narrow corridor, only a dozen feet wide.
Around them, the burning bodies of their fellow corpses lay littered on the
ashes of the plain. They began to wail and cry and mill around in desperation.
They were already dead; but if they failed Yaomauitl he would summarily deprive
them of their immortal souls. They were doubly afraid now – not just of being
dead, but of being sent by Yaomauitl to eternal nothingness. And the human fear
of eternal nothingness is the greatest human fear of all. It is the one fear
which every religion in the world seeks to assuage. It is the fear of being
totally gone.
Tebulot fired again and again, and
Xaxxa leapt and swooped and looped in the air, kicking at each energy-bolt so
that it tore through the corpses like lightning. Samena stood with taut
confidence in front of the corpses, bringing them down in tattered heaps with
volleys of bizarre arrowheads – whirling wires and multiple barbs and arrows
that exploded in one body, zipped through to the next, exploded a second time,
and then zipped through to a third.
One corpse – taller and stronger and
less rotted than the rest – although half of his naked jaw was leering from out
of the side of his face – came staggering out from the burning crowds of
Yaomauitl’s army, and lurched towards Samena with his hands clawing at the air.
Samena fitted a simple arrowhead to her finger, straightened her arms, and hit
him
zap!
straight in the middle of
his forehead.
The corpse swayed but kept on
staggering forward. Samena tried to reload, but she dropped her next arrowhead
into the ashes.
‘Samena!’ Kasyx yelled at her.
Screaming harshly, the corpse fell
against Samena, wrapping its rotted arms around her. Then it lifted her up into
the air, squeezing her and shaking her in an attempt to break her back. Samena
cried out in agony, and pummelled at the corpse’s arms, but even though she
broke off large chunks of decayed flesh, the corpse still clung on to her, and
squeezed her even more ferociously. Kasyx could smell the corpse from ten feet
away, and he saw with disgust and horror that every time it squeezed Samena
more tightly, it squeezed a liquid flood of yellow-and -grey putrescence out of
its own insides.
‘Tebulot!’ Kasyx shouted, and
Tebulot turned around and saw what had happened.