The Ace of Skulls

Forty-Four

Darian

His name was like the exhalation of a ghost, a hoarse whisper that came from all around him, seeping from the shadows of the Delirium Trigger’s hold.

He stepped out from behind the metal pillars and into the cavernous central space. His pistols and cutlass were in his belt, but his hands hung by his side, palm up and empty.

‘I’m here,’ he said.

She stood there in the sick glow of the Azryx device, half in darkness and half in light. She was as he’d expected her, dressed in close-fitting black. A corpse-white head floated like an apparition above her shoulders, her hair hacked into clumps. Blood red lipstick was smeared across chin and cheek. She’d lost one of her contact lenses, and now her eyes were mismatched, one pupil black and huge and the other. .

The other had changed. Once that eye had been green. Once he’d known every fleck and flaw of it. But even in the uneasy luminescence cast by the swirling gases, he could see the colour had changed. It was bright yellow, an eagle’s eye. The eye of an Imperator.

Her sheer presence was oppressive. The air was heavy with dread, and his skin crept. The darkness beyond the pillars was full of furtive movements glimpsed from the corner of his eye. The steady drip of water from the ceiling had become sinister. Susurrant murmurings chased around the edges of the room.

Here was the dark goddess she’d always pretended to be. Here was the legendary terror of the skies, Trinica Dracken, the pirate queen.

But it wasn’t his Trinica.

— You’ve come to save her ~ breathed the voice. He heard a slow, croaking chuckle, the dry wheeze of something ancient and rotten. The mockery in the daemon’s tone slid off him. Usually, being near Trinica disarmed him, made him awkward and uncertain. Not now. He didn’t see the woman he loved, but the creature that held her, and he was filled with cold purpose, his will like the tempered edge of a blade.

He heard Crake and Kyne move up warily alongside. Balomon Crund wasn’t with them; he’d scurried off to the periphery of the hold, afraid of his mistress’s wrath. Crake pressed a thin metal collar into his hand. ‘Remember the plan, Cap’n,’ he murmured. ‘We can do this.’

Yes, the plan. Crake and Kyne would subdue her long enough for Frey to snap the collar round her throat. The collar would suppress the daemon and keep Trinica quiescent until they could get her to a sanctum and drive it out. If it worked. The last Imperator they’d tried that trick on had died in agony. Kyne had assured him they had a better chance this time: now they knew the Imperators’ frequency, he’d been able to tune the collar accurately. But the Century Knight wouldn’t lie, either. If it wasn’t suppressed correctly or destroyed quickly, the daemon in Trinica would kill her before they could get it out.

It was a gamble, and the stakes had never been higher. But Frey was a man accustomed to long odds.

Trinica lowered her head, her face falling into shadow, and a moment later the fear hit. Frey felt the weight of it push down on him. Freezing fingers clutched at his heart and panic coiled in his belly. He heard Crund scream from somewhere in the darkness at the edge of the hold. Crake’s amulet was useless; nothing could withstand the awful, crushing, maddening horror of the Imperators. His breath became short, and he took a step back in panic. He wanted to run, as far and fast as he could.

Then he felt a warm hand on his back, preventing him from moving any further. He looked across and saw Crake there, his friend. The daemonist’s eyes were calm.

‘You can beat it,’ Crake said. ‘It’s only fear.’

Frey took strength from Crake’s composure. If Crake could master it, he could too. The amulet was working; he could feel it now. The chill in his heart was the amulet, sucking at him. He took in a breath, blew it out through pursed lips, and felt himself steady. Crake nodded at him, and gave him a reassuring pat on the back.

‘There you go,’ he said.

Frey raised his head, and looked the daemon in the eye. ‘That the best you’ve got?’ he asked.

Kyne held up a metal sphere and pressed the stud with his thumb. A piercing shriek cut through the hold, and Trinica shrieked with it. She stumbled back against the Azryx machine, clutching at her head, pawing at the air. The sight of her in such pain would have been more than Frey could bear in other times, but it didn’t move him now. It was a necessary cruelty. Whatever it took to get that creature out of her.

Kyne and Crake moved past him, splitting up to take position either side of Trinica. Each had a cylinder in one hand, with a pinecone arrangement of small rods at the tip, linked by a cable to the cumbersome backpacks they wore. Frey had forgotten what they were called, but he remembered how they’d worked on the Iron Jackal. They could cage a daemon between them, but care was needed. If the operators didn’t stand exactly opposite each other, the daemon could slip out.

Kyne was still holding up the screamer with his free hand. Trinica thrashed and writhed and threw herself about; she slipped to the floor and scrambled back up again, a wild creature tortured. In the strange light it was like some hellish dance. As Kyne and Crake manoeuvred to get an angle on her, Frey advanced steadily, the collar open in his hand. He caught a glimpse of Crund’s frightened face by one of the girder pillars, before the bosun looked away. Crund couldn’t stand to watch his mistress’s suffering, but Frey didn’t have the luxury of mercy. He pushed his feelings down and shut them away tight. He’d do what he had to.

Kyne thrust out his arm, pointed the cylinder at Trinica and pressed the stud on it. She shrieked with new vigour, stumbling away from him as if repelled. But Crake was waiting on the other side with a cylinder of his own. Suddenly she was trapped, paralysed, straitjacketed by invisible frequencies.

Kyne tossed the screamer aside and took hold of the cylinder with both hands, struggling against Trinica’s efforts to escape. ‘Now, Frey!’ he cried.

Frey stepped towards her, the jaws of the collar ready to snap shut on her neck. Her mismatched eyes were fixed on it. Her face, the face he’d loved for so long, was contorted in fear. For a moment, the look she wore shook his resolve. What if he killed her? What if this collar was a death sentence as sure as a bullet to the head, and she knew it?

Well, what if it was? Better than this half-life, her body in thrall to a daemon. He knew what she’d have him do, and he loved her enough to do it. No matter what it cost him.

‘Now!’ Kyne said again.

He reached forward to snap the collar round her neck.

The Mane shell that exploded against the Delirium Trigger’s flank was a big one, and it scored a direct hit. Even with all her armour, she shuddered violently and listed hard in the air. Everyone in her hold staggered with the impact. Crake threw out an arm for balance; the cylinders went out of alignment; the cage was broken. Frey saw the danger and lunged, but Trinica pulled her head back and the collar clicked shut on nothing.

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.

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.

But he’d learned enough of the world to know better. There were no second chances, just illusions to grasp for. Phantoms, in the end.

He heard a strangled cry, and there was Balomon Crund, his swart face aghast. Behind him was Crake, gazing at his captain with sorrow in his eyes. Frey couldn’t stand it; he had to look away. Let them leave him here with her. Let him stay in this place, and be done with it.

There was a banging on the door they’d come through. Crake seemed grateful for the distraction, and he hurried over. ‘Crund. The code for the keypad,’ he said. When the bosun didn’t reply, Crake snapped at him. ‘Crund!’

Crund grunted a few numbers at Crake, and he punched them in. The door opened this time, and Samandra came through.

‘ ’Bout time!’ she said. ‘What’s the idea, locking me out there? I had to shoot ten of the bastards before they got the idea and buggered off. .’ She tailed away as she saw the look on Crake’s face, and then noticed Frey and Trinica, standing in the centre of the hold. It might have been the end of a slow dance, the last lovers clinging to each other, reluctant to quit the floor. But the music was over now.

The pulse from the Azryx device was getting louder. Crake ducked in fright as an arc of lightning crackled and jumped across the hold to feel its way up one of the pillars. The air stank of burnt ozone, and the hair on the backs of Frey’s hands stood up on end.

Samandra eyed the machine uncertainly. ‘Er, fellers? Remember what happened when we took out that generator back in the Azryx city? This might not be a hundredth the size, but damned if I want to be near it when it goes.’

Crake walked over to Frey. He reached down and picked up the cutlass. ‘Frey,’ he said.

‘Leave me,’ Frey whispered.

‘I can’t do that, Cap’n.’

‘I said leave me!’ he shouted.

And then Trinica coughed, and blood ran from her lips down the side of his neck.

The two men exchanged a look of pure disbelief. Crund shouted: ‘She’s alive!’

Frey felt himself ignite. ‘She’s still alive,’ he said. ‘She’s still alive!’

‘Well, it was a daemon blade you stabbed her with,’ said Crake. ‘I mean, it always did know what you wanted. Maybe it missed the vital organs on purp-’

‘Stop explainin’, honey,’ Samandra told him gently. ‘Ain’t really the time.’

‘She’s alive!’ cried Frey again. He hadn’t heard a word of what Crake had just said. He was dazed by the sheer wonderful, impossible joy of it.

‘Well, if you want her to stay that way we best get out of here and get her to a doc,’ said Samandra. ‘Give her here, Frey, you look like you can barely walk.’

‘I’ll carry her!’ said Crund fiercely. When Frey hesitated, the bosun pulled her from his arms. Frey staggered, and Crake slung his arm round his friend to stop him from falling. The pain of his bruises and his shifting ribs stole the breath from him, but he forced it down, stayed on his feet, spat out the blood that kept coming up into his mouth. Balomon picked up Trinica with ease, holding her like a baby in his brawny arms.

Another bolt of lightning snapped across the hold, and a pile of crates exploded. ‘Let’s get goin’!’ Samandra cried. Together, they hurried towards the exit as fast as they were able, while behind them the Azryx device began to tear itself apart.

She’s alive, Frey thought. She’s alive. She’s alive.

But for how much longer?