Resistance (33 page)

He felt Lucille move again and this time he went with her, rolling backward over his shoulder, grimacing as he waited for the pain to surge through his body when the movement ground broken bones and bleeding flesh together. He felt nothing beyond a staggering dizziness and feverish heat. Dave heard the crash as the Russian spy’s body hit something. A heavy oaken desk that looked like a naval museum piece. It splintered under the impact and he felt Lucille pull him forward, felt her raise herself on high for a killing bow, the edged metal of the axe head turned toward Karen Warat for the down stroke.

‘Nuh-no,’ he grunted, forcing the trajectory of the steel head to waver and veer away from her skull at the last moment. It crashed into the antique table, which exploded under the force of the blow, throwing long wooden shards out in all directions.

Too late. She’d moved anyway. Rolling out from under the line Lucille had tried to describe and away from the uncontrolled, wobbling descent Dave had forced upon the magic weapon by trying to save the woman.

The room suddenly spun around him, and he found himself looking, dumbly, at his own boots as they swept up where his head had been. The ceiling of the office was now beneath him, as though he could walk across the plaster roses embedded up there, while the rich red carpet, now thoroughly ruined, rushed up to meet his head.

‘Ughnh.’

He crashed into the floor, vaguely aware she’d somehow swept his legs out from underneath him and now he was looking up at her.

‘Stop!’ he tried to cry out, feeling weak and stupid for doing so.

But she didn’t stop. She raised the sword again and it whistled down at him, aimed to cut him in two. Again, Lucille was there to check the stroke, the steel head jabbing upward and bunting the blade away while Dave felt the base of the maul’s handle dig sharply and painfully into his side, knocking him in the opposite direction. It was just enough to move him out of the way of the blade’s tip, which dug into the wooden floor.

He felt himself dragged up, as though somebody was pulling him out of a pool or into a boat away from the jaws of a shark. But there was nobody. Only him and Warat and Lucille.

And her sword, of course. He wouldn’t want to forget that, because she’d wrenched it from the floorboards and was carving up the air in front of him again. The 400-year-old steel fang bit into air, cleaving it with a hissing whisper that seemed almost to sing in the same note as Lucille. He backed away from it, unsure of his footing, no idea where he was heading, just desperate to get away from the keening song of edged metal.

The woman wasn’t even looking at him. She was staring through him as though he wasn’t there, or if he was, as though he were simply a door through which she must pass. Dave held the splitting maul in a sort of improvised guard position in front of him. At random times it darted forward and struck the sword from a path he had no hope of anticipating, and no chance of turning with any design for his own safety.

He tried to talk to her, to beg her to stop, but he was panting so hard, and concentrating so furiously on not getting cut, or tripping over the obstacles that littered the floor, that it was impossible. Plus, of course, the woman was a homicidal maniac. Metal clashed and clanged and sparks flew and he felt the impact of every blow run up his arms like electric shocks. He had backed halfway across the office, a large airy space with indirect glimpses up to Central Park, when he bumped into someone and nearly lost balance.

It was a man. Frozen in the world outside the slipstream where he was fighting for his life against a pretty blonde woman who was doing a better job of trying to kill him than any member of the Horde had yet managed.

He doubled down on his speed, pushing the warp drive out as far as he dared, but she simply came along with him. Lucille continued to jab and parry and occasionally thrust aside slashes and strokes meant to cut him down or hack off one limb or another. The din of it was deafening. Occasionally he even leaped forward, surprising himself, and without a doubt the crazy Russian bitch, with a counter-attack of sorts. In that fashion they had destroyed most of the fine antique furnishings when he bumped into the under-secretary or over-attache or whoever it was he’d frozen on that side of the room. Lucille dragged him off balance and to the left, forcing him down onto one knee. He went with the motion, turning it into a roll to escape the threshing machine of Warat’s katana, but nothing stopped her, including her countryman.

Dave gasped and then gagged as the poor bastard flew apart in gross, gory chunks and extravagant blood sprays as the old Japanese sword carved right through him without slowing down. It was like watching a man being fed to a daemonic Cuisinart.

Dave found himself on his feet again, standing unsteadily next to an old wooden globe, one of those massive free-standing numbers you only ever saw in museums or libraries. Lucille swung in his hands, looped around and scooped up the globe, shovelling it into the air where it flew into the sharp steel cloud that floated around Karen Warat. It came apart with a bang, a whole series of them, and he was suddenly dragged forward again by Lucille, who was charging into the gap she had just created by destroying the piece of furniture.

Now it was Dave who advanced, Dave who was shielded by a blurring orbit of heavy metal. Warat gave up ground, falling back in a much more controlled fashion than he had managed, but she did fall back, retreating all the way across the ground she had made up on him before disengaging by jumping backward through the hole he’d made in the wall. He was momentarily stunned by the vision, as though he’d hit rewind on a video player. But Lucille drew him on, never slowing. Indeed she seemed to grow heavier and more massive as they approached the breach in the wall and then punched through it like a wrecking ball. Plaster and wood chips exploded in white clouds all around them and Dave squinted and crouched into the storm of debris. He expected to be ambushed again but saw Warat disappearing down the stairs.

He leaped after her, not thinking. Just following Lucille. She seemed to hold him aloft as he dropped down the stairwell. He landed with a terrible splintering of floorboards beneath his boots. Another convulsive leap and he cleared the last flight of steps landing with another thudding crunch of shattered beams in the hallway leading back to the main office. He charged after Warat, only to find himself sandbagged from the left as she appeared from nowhere and crashed into his flank, where he was protected, yet again, by Lucille suddenly tearing herself around and into a guard position. Dave hit another wall and punched through it, feeling bones dissolve and skin tear, microseconds before the same dull heat of hyper-accelerated healing repaired the damage. He grunted and bit his tongue, tasting hot coppery blood in his mouth, just before a white-hot hand grenade exploded in his chest and he flew up and back again, this time hitting a window which disintegrated around him with a crash of glass and the searing pain of his skin being sliced open.

More heat. More light. More pain as he crunched to earth, this time hitting hard pavement. She had kicked him out of the consulate. Literally kicked him to the kerb. She came at him in a rush, the sword high over her head, in a posture he recognised from old samurai movies. Dave didn’t think or act. He didn’t do anything. He felt his grip tighten around the lower end of the hardwood shaft. Lucille blurred out like the sweep of a clock hand, and Dave felt the dull metal head slam into the woman’s thigh just as she landed ready to strike home the last, lethal blow. Instead he felt, he actually
felt
, her thigh bones disintegrate under the hammer blow. She screamed and flew sideways, hitting the solid brick wall of the building like a bag of wet shit. The sword clattered out of her hands and before Dave even knew he was up on his feet, he’d scampered over and knocked it away with Lucille, mindful of the story Trinder had told him about the FBI guy who lost an arm trying to pick the thing up.

His eyes grew wide as he watched Warat’s broken leg straighten and presumably mend itself. That’s what it must look like to people when he pulled that sort of shit. But her face remained ashen and she did not climb to her feet or attempt to restart the battle again. She stared at him coldly, wheezing and panting for breath, and he kept his distance, wary of getting too close to a woman who probably knew a dozen different ways to snap his neck.

The street, where the day had darkened toward dusk, remained in stasis. That was interesting then. Time still passed even when nobody moved through it. From the lengthening shadows and deepening twilight it felt close to sundown. Dave carefully reached into one of his pockets and fetched out an energy gel tube. He tossed it to her.

‘That faith-healing trick, it tires a body worse than getting kicked through a wall,’ he said. ‘I’ve done both today. Dave Hooper,’ he added as he she warily bit the cap off the gel tube and sucked greedily at the contents.

He slowly withdrew a protein bar for himself, but didn’t take his eyes off her while he ate it. It was crushed into a chocolatey pulp.

He held a hand up, then carefully put Lucille down, and held up the other, as if to signal his surrender.

‘I don’t fancy going another nine rounds with you, lady. You got my number. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to talk about what’s been happening. To us, to the rest of the world.’

‘You fought well,’ she said, still breathless, but recovering. He was taken aback at her broad American accent, perhaps a little more New England than New York, but then he remembered she was a deep cover agent. She’d been here most of her adult life.

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Lucille fought well. I was just the donkey she rode into battle.’

Karen Warat frowned.

‘Lucille?’

‘My friend here,’ he explained, holding up the splitting maul again. ‘Mind of her own. Like yours, I suppose?’ he said, nodding to the sword.

He could tell from the look in her eye she knew exactly what he meant.

‘You give it a name, yet? That’s what seems to power them on. Naming them.’

She looked down the street to where the sword lay on the pavement.

‘It had a name already.
Ushi to yasashi to.’

‘Okay?’

‘Sorrowful and unbearable,’ she explained.

‘Catchy.’

‘It is from a poem. “I feel the life is, sorrowful and unbearable, though, I can’t flee away, since I am not a bird.” I didn’t name the blade, but I knew the name. It is my job to know.’

Dave sighed in exhaustion and nodded.

‘Look. Let’s not get off on the wrong foot.’

She smiled at that. A small smile, but an honest one.

‘Little late for that, cowboy.’

‘Okay. Zing. But let’s try again anyway. I know who you are. I know what you are.’

‘Back at you. Although I thought you stuck to monster killing, not politics.’

He dropped to one knee, grateful for the pads he wore there. He opened another gel sack and ate it before replying.

‘Yeah. I don’t much care for politics. I got a feeling that sort of shit might be redundant now. Might even get us all killed.’

She watched him carefully, but said nothing.

‘They sent me in to get you, Karen. Is that what you prefer. Karen, not Karin or Ekaterina? I was supposed to bring you out, or bring your body out.’

‘Karen,’ she answered. ‘I’m Karen, in here.’ She touched a blooded finger to the side of her head. ‘Not such a great first day on the job for you then, Super Dave?’

The way she said that, it didn’t sound like she thought him very super at all.

‘Not so much, no. But maybe we can turn it around.’

Karen Warat pushed herself into a slightly more comfortable sitting position and leaned against the walls of the consulate.

‘How do you figure that?’ she asked.

‘Well, I figure if you and I don’t kill each other, maybe we could help each other out. Maybe kill a few things desperately need killing. Like the daemon that you put down.’

‘A Threshrend daemon,’ she said.

‘And who told you that?’ asked Dave.

‘It did. After I killed it.’

It was his turn to nod.

‘I thought I was the only one,’ he said, as much to himself as to her.

‘So did I, for a day or two. Until I saw you in the news out of New Orleans. That was when I knew I had to exfiltrate. Get home.’

It felt weird, listening to that American voice coming out of that pretty American face, talking about getting out of the US to go home. To Russia.

‘What are you going to do, Karen? I think we both know I can’t stop you.’

‘I’m going to kill more Threshrend. And Morphum, and Krevish and Djinn and whatever needs killing I suppose.’

‘In Russia.’

‘That is my motherland. I am vowed to defend her.’

‘Well, I’m supposed to put a bag on you, but I think we can both see that’s not going to happen. And you’ve already figured out I’m not good enough to do that anyway.’

She shrugged noncommittally.

‘But do you think you and I could talk for a bit, before you go?’

‘About what?’

‘All of it. I know some stuff. I killed a Hunn. You must know different stuff. Don’t suppose your Threshrend had any idea what the fuck you turned into. What we are?’

She shook her head.

‘No.’

‘Any idea if there’s any more of us?’

‘I think there might be twelve,’ she said.

He was surprised enough by the answer to make a face which made her laugh.

‘Why?’

‘Because there are twelve realms. You knew that right? Maybe it’s as simple as there being one of us for each realm?’

Dave blinked at her. Stunned.

‘I never thought of that. And Urgon sure as shit wouldn’t. He’s kind of a dumb lug. Like me. So the thresher you killed. Where was it from? Which realm? Or sect or whatever?’

Dave found himself frowning, trying to interrogate Urgon’s understanding of UnderRealms geopolitics, but he’d been right. The BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion was kind of a dumbass who only ever thought of rivals to the Horde, all the sects from the other realms, the same way he thought about everything. Crush, kill, destroy.