The Ace of Skulls

Forty-Three

Silo’s eyes flickered open.

He was face down on the ground. Cold, wet stone pushed into his cheek. His head rang like a struck bell, his neck was agonisingly stiff, and his limbs and torso blazed with pain.

He wasn’t sure where he was or what had happened to him. Automatically, he tried to rise. The pain made him grunt, but he pushed through it, and forced himself up onto his knees. The effort set off a pounding in his skull, which faded as quickly as it came.

Blinking, he looked about. He knelt amidst a broken landscape of stone and dust and flame. Hot winds blew smoke around him. People staggered here and there, like the wandering souls of the damned; vague blurred shadows, shouting things he couldn’t understand.

The frigate.

The memory of the enormous aircraft plunging towards him brought him another step closer to making sense of things. He was at the edge of a wide, shallow trench which had been scored through the city. Some way distant, a mountain of twisted metal smoked and flamed. In its wake, no building was left standing. The far side of the square had been entirely destroyed, but the near side, where Silo had been thrown, was still partially intact.

It had passed them by, then. But not by much. And it had taken a heavy toll.

He got to his feet, dazed. None of it seemed real. Bodies lay everywhere, red and black and twisted. Lipless jaws yawned, showing charred teeth. The air reeked of cooking flesh and prothane.

Malvery stumbled past him, moaning. The doctor didn’t even seem to see him. Instead he fell to his knees a few metres away, where a limp figure was lying beside the remains of a wall.

It took a few seconds for his stunned brain to slot her into place. Ashua.

Concern and alarm drove him to movement. He made his way over to Malvery on leaden legs. The distance exhausted him; he was forced to his knees again. There was no strength in his body. It had been knocked out of him along with his wits.

Malvery had Ashua in his arms, supporting her shoulders and head in the crook of his elbow while he felt for a pulse at her throat. Blood stained her short ginger hair and ran down her tattooed face; her skin was pallid and dirty.

‘Come on, come on, come on,’ Malvery was muttering frantically, broken glasses still hanging askew on his bulbous nose. He patted her face. ‘Don’t play games now. You ain’t dead. You ain’t!’

He looked around as if for help, and found Silo there. ‘I can’t see where she got hit,’ he said hoarsely, and he brushed back her hair to try to find a wound. There was something close to panic in his voice. He was as shell-shocked as Silo was. ‘I can’t find the wound!’

Silo just stared at her. She wasn’t moving. Malvery craned his neck and searched among the wandering ghosts that surrounded them, as if there was anyone more qualified than he to give aid.

‘Doc. .’ Silo croaked. His throat felt like it had been scorched.

‘I think she might’ve cracked her skull,’ Malvery muttered. ‘I think there might be a crack there.’

He put on big hand on her head, feeling clumsily around. At his touch, Ashua bucked and fell out of his grip. Malvery gasped and tried to gather her up, but she kicked out and fought him off, and ended up scrambling away on her arse, with one hand held to the side of her head.

‘Ow!’ she said pointedly, scowling at him. ‘That bloody hurts!’

‘You’re alive!’ Malvery cried out in delight.

‘Course I’m alive,’ Ashua said. She was slurring her words, and sounded drunk. ‘Reckon I’d rather not be, though.’ She stared about dreamily. ‘Crawler hit us?’

Malvery laughed, and went over to her and gave her an awkward hug. She winced as he squeezed her, but she didn’t protest. She laid her head on his shoulder, and let herself be held.

Silo got to his feet again, and this time found that he had more strength in his legs. The sense of dislocation was lessening moment by moment; he was returning to himself. There was something he was meant to do here, he just couldn’t remember what.

Above him, through the drifting black haze, he saw a great swirling vortex and explosions in the sky. They sounded distant and hollow, as if they were no part of the world he occupied here on the ground. But the longer he looked, the more the picture came together.

The Awakeners had been mostly scattered or destroyed now, but the core of the convoy remained. A dozen battered frigates hung static around the flagship, hemmed in by the Samarlans. But the Samarlans weren’t attacking them any more; instead, they were defending them from the Manes on their flank, whose terrible dreadnoughts were still arriving. The Awakener convoy struggled and fought, but they were bereft of leadership or tactics. They could do little but harass the craft that surrounded them.

Why are the Sammies helpin’ the Awakeners? Silo thought; but the answer came to him almost as soon as he’d posed the question. The Awakeners had the Azryx device. The Sammies must have known the Awakeners would guard the device at the heart of their fleet, and didn’t want to risk it being destroyed. They wanted the city guns neutralised until they could get their landing parties down to secure them; it was worth taking a few casualties for that.

The guns, he thought, and suddenly he remembered it all. He lurched away across the blasted square, stepping over rubble and bits of bodies.

The guns were their only hope now. With the Awakeners all but out of the game, it was between the Manes and the Sammies as to who would control the skies. Once the victor had beaten their opponents, they’d descend on the city in force. The Samarlans with their troops, or the Manes with their howling hordes. Slavery or conversion. Not much of a choice.

What were the Manes doing here? He didn’t know; nor did he know who’d summoned them. But if they hadn’t, the Sammies would have swarmed all over the city by now. The Manes’ intervention might just have bought the Coalition the time they needed.

‘Fall back!’ someone was shouting in the distance. ‘Fall back to the palace!’

Silo frowned, not sure if he’d heard the order right. A bloodied young soldier went stumbling past him, his uniform ragged and a wounded hand held to his chest. Silo grabbed him by his shoulder.

‘Where you goin’?’ he asked.

The soldier stared at him, bewilderment in his eyes. ‘The palace,’ he said, as if it was obvious.

‘You’re goin’ back?’ Silo asked in amazement. ‘You still got your gun, ain’t you?’

The soldier surveyed the scene of destruction around him. ‘Going back to the palace,’ he muttered blankly.

‘They’re dug in, you mad bloody Murthian!’ said another soldier. ‘Let him go.’

Silo let the young soldier wander off. The man who’d addressed him was in his late twenties, with a short moustache and a thick head of black hair mussed by the battle. Other than that, he looked relatively unharmed. ‘You seen the commander? Any sergeants?’

‘No,’ said Silo. ‘Where’s the gun?’

‘It’s over there,’ the soldier replied, pointing across the obliterated square. Through the flames, it was just possible to make out the barrel of an anti-aircraft gun tilted upward. ‘They’ve dug in, didn’t you hear? They retreated back up that road and shut the damn gates.’

Silo looked at him levelly. ‘Show me,’ he said.

Maybe it was something in his tone, or the determination in his eyes, but the soldier did as he was told. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, and he led Silo away.

‘Fall back!’ someone was shouting behind him. ‘Gather up! We’re falling back to the palace!’ They saw a golem wandering aimlessly, a dim giant without direction, searching for opponents.

The soldier, who introduced himself as Eltenby, guided Silo through the wreckage and bodies. On the far side of the square was a swathe of smouldering rubble where a row of buildings had been demolished. Beyond was a shallow rise in the land, and the anti-aircraft emplacement sat on top of that, surrounded by a wall. It had escaped the destruction. A short uphill stretch of clear ground led to the gate.

‘There,’ said Eltenby, pointing. ‘You can see them on the wall. The only way in is through that gate. They have another gatling gun up there, a three hundred and sixty degree field of vision and open terrain all around. Anyone tries to approach from any side, they’ll cut us down.’

Silo narrowed his eyes. ‘Not all of us,’ he said. ‘We gotta take that gun.’

Eltenby stared at him in surprise. ‘Are all your people as crazy as you?’

Silo didn’t bother to answer that. He got to his feet and stalked back across the square. Somewhere, a man was still shouting, ‘Gather up! Fall back!’ Silo headed towards the sound, with Eltenby tagging after him. The soldier seemed interested to see what Silo would do.

Silo found the owner of the voice behind a pile of rubble. He was a stocky man with short blond hair and broad, scowling features, and he was directing soldiers back up the road towards the palace. Silo wasn’t clear on the ranks of the Coalition Army, but he knew enough to see that this man wasn’t much higher than a grunt. If any commanding officers had survived, he couldn’t see them.

The sight of the soldiers leaving inspired anger in Silo. He didn’t know where it came from; usually he was good at mastering his emotions. But this. . This was wrong. He felt it powerfully, and it took him over.

‘Hey!’ he yelled. ‘Hey! Where you goin’? We ain’t done here!’

Several dozen soldiers, most of them dirtied and carrying wounds, stopped and looked back at him.

‘You all goin’ home?’ he cried. ‘Ain’t you noticed there’s a war on?’

‘Shut your mouth, foreigner,’ sneered a soldier as he passed. ‘Bet you can’t wait for your masters to get here.’

Silo’s eyes blazed, and he grabbed the soldier by the front of his uniform and dragged him close, until they were face to face. The man smirked nervously, but he couldn’t meet Silo’s gaze, and he wilted. Silo shoved him away.

‘Ain’t nobody the master o’ me,’ he snarled. He raised his voice, addressing the others. ‘I am a foreigner. This ain’t even my land. So how come I’m the only one here got any guts?’

‘Fall back to the palace!’ shouted the stocky soldier, ignoring him.

But Silo wasn’t in the mood to be ignored. ‘There ain’t time to fall back to the palace!’ he roared. The other soldiers had stopped retreating now; he had their attention, at least for the moment.

He pointed up to the sky, where the remnants of the Awakener convoy huddled within the Samarlan swarm. ‘There’s a man up there riskin’ his life to save this damn city! A man who got a million reasons not to give a shit, but he doin’ it anyway! And he gonna take out the Awakeners’ secret weapon, and we gonna have the use of those anti-aircraft guns again, and then we gonna rip those Sammie bastards all to pieces! But first we gotta take that gun! You all got them orders, didn’t you? Didn’t the Archduke himself give you that job?’

‘The sarge is gone,’ one of the soldiers protested.

‘Who in rot’s name is in command now, anyway?’ someone else called. ‘Where’s Thrate?’

‘Thrate’s gone too. I saw it. He was right in the path when that frigate came down.’

The news hit them hard. One of the Century Knights? Those men and women were the heroes of the Coalition. The best of them were legends. It didn’t seem possible that one of them could have been erased like that.

‘You don’t need no commanding officer!’ Silo shouted. ‘And you don’t need no Century Knights! You just gotta pick up your guns and fight! This is your home!’

There was silence among the soldiers. Even the stocky soldier had fallen quiet. Some of the men were shamefaced, some furious. They exchanged glances, each trying to divine what their neighbour thought, seeking consensus.

‘Shit, I’m with you,’ said a loud voice, and Malvery walked up to stand next to him.

‘Me, too,’ said Ashua. Her tattooed face was smeared with blood, but she joined them all the same.

Eltenby looked around at his companions in disbelief. When nobody else spoke, he stepped forward. ‘Are we going to let a foreigner show us how to fight?’ he asked them. ‘Are we going to let a man from Murthia defend our country?’

‘They’re dug in! They got gates and walls and a gatling gun!’ came the protest, but it fell on stony ground now. There was a murmuring among the soldiers. Their pride had been pricked, and they were shaking off the shock of the frigate crash.

‘Who cares what they’ve got?’ someone shouted. ‘We’re the Coalition Army!’ A rough cheer went up at that.

‘I ain’t running from a bunch of peasants and witchdoctors!’ came another voice.

‘Let’s show those rotting Sammies the kind of welcome we give in Vardia!’

Soon they were all firing each other up, yelling slogans and taunts. The camaraderie of warriors, momentarily broken by disaster, knitted them back together. Silo felt it too; he knew the strength of it, from his desperate days as a resistance fighter in Samarla, when he’d been second-in-command to a small army.

Exhilaration filled him. They were all on his side now; they looked to him to lead. The colour of his skin, the set of his features didn’t matter. He was an idea, not a person any more. A lens to focus them, to channel their hurt and fear, their bravery and their fury.

‘Let’s take back that gun!’ he shouted, and this time they shouted with him.

They went hustling across the square towards the anti-aircraft emplacement, gathering stragglers on the way. Once the majority had turned, the rest came. By the time they reached the smouldering barrier of banked rubble, they were seventy or more, and there was a golem with them.

‘Those things understand us?’ Silo asked Eltenby, as the huge metal creature lumbered up alongside.

‘As far as I can tell,’ Eltenby replied.

‘We’re gonna need him,’ he said.

He turned to address the others. ‘Once we get over this rubble, they’ll be shootin’ at us,’ he said. ‘Ain’t much cover out there, so hit the ground runnin’ and keep runnin’. Golem’s gonna lead. We get to the gate, and he gonna damn well knock it down! Now load up your weapons. Once we go, we ain’t comin’ back!’

The soldiers began stuffing rounds into their pistols. Some were pale and grey, some with taut faces. They were scared, now it came to it. Any sane man would be. But they took their courage from their companions.

Malvery and Ashua were standing near Silo, loading up with the rest of them. The doctor kept casting worried glances at Ashua, until finally she shook her head irritably and said: ‘What?’

‘Maybe you ought to sit this one out,’ said Malvery. He waved vaguely at her head. ‘Might be you have concussion.’

‘I’m not sitting out shit,’ Ashua said, and went back to filling the chambers of her revolver.

‘I just mean. .’ said Malvery. ‘You know, if you’re doing this to prove something. . I mean, you don’t have to. .’

‘I do,’ she snapped. She leaned close and prodded him in the chest. ‘Yeah, I do. Because somewhere inside you, you’ve still got doubts. You’re still wondering if I’m for real, or if I was playing you all along.’ She shoved him angrily. ‘So if it takes some dumb-shit death or glory charge to convince you, then that’s what I’ll do. ’Cause I’m damned if I’m letting you cast me off for one little mistake.’

Malvery opened his mouth to reply, then didn’t. He harumphed and looked ashamed.

‘Besides,’ she said. ‘Sammies screwed me good. Reckon a few shots up their arse from that anti-aircraft gun is the least I owe them.’

Silo pressed the last of the shells into his shotgun and levered it back and forth to prime it. He remembered how the Cap’n had charged him to bring Malvery and Ashua back safe. But there were more important things than safety.

‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

The golem roared, and the men yelled and howled, fired up with anticipation and fear. They went scrambling up the rubble slope, the golem in the lead, and Silo went up with them. Rocks shifted beneath his feet; he had to clamber, and was cut. But the slope rolled back, and he reached the crest, and then he was slipping and sliding down the other side, bouncing from foothold to foothold, and the sound of the guns began.

By the time his boots hit solid ground, he was past caring whether anyone was following him. Strength pounded through him, and he was hot with rage. His breath came loud in his ears. He felt powerful, invincible, ready to throw himself into death’s teeth.

Bullets pocked and whined around him. He’d get hit by one, or he wouldn’t. Nothing he could do about it but run.

Ahead of them lay a shallow rise, with a cracked road, scorched grass and little else until it met the stone ring of the anti-aircraft emplacement. Atop the walls, Sentinels aimed and fired with their rifles, and a gatling gun sat on a tripod, waiting for them to come into range. The sky above flashed and boomed as the Samarlans and the Manes traded cannon fire.

The golem led the way. More men caught up with Silo as they came off the rubble slope and on to the rise. They gathered into a charge, picking up momentum as they ran. A thunder of boots, the rasp of uniforms and the clatter of buckles and guns. Each person in their own private world, vision narrowed by adrenaline; each part of the mass, driven on by the crowd, taking strength from their allies. Someone shouted a wild battle-cry. A few soldiers fired at the Awakeners, hopeful shots, wasting ammo. Using their guns to boost their courage.

A man to Silo’s left was cut down, punched through the chest, blood puffing from a hole in his back. He stumbled to a halt, a puzzled look on his face, and pitched over. Silo heard another man fall behind him, screaming, wounded in a limb. The Sentinels’ shots were increasingly accurate now, and though they ran hard enough to burst their lungs, the emplacement seemed to come no nearer.

Then came the sound that each of them had dreaded and none had dared think about. The killing rattle of the gatling gun, spitting bullets down onto them from its position above the gate. Suddenly the scuff and whip of rifle shot became a hail, chopping up the ground, smacking into earth and flesh. Screams came from everywhere, choked gurgles and short yelps, swiftly cut short. Men to either side of Silo went down. Someone lost a finger. The back of one man’s head blew out, and Silo saw shards of white bone among the red.

The chaos overtook him. Silo tripped, running too fast for his own feet; he fell and skidded on his knees. A man behind him grabbed the back of his coat, tried to pull him up. Silo was dragged roughly forward instead, scrabbling to get his feet back under him. Then the man who was dragging him shuddered and fell onto his shoulders. Silo slipped out from underneath, skinning one hand on the road as he pushed himself upright. Somehow he managed to avoid falling flat on his face, and he stumbled on up the rise.

Most of the soldiers had overtaken him. He saw Malvery labouring near the rear of the crowd, too fat and unfit to outpace the others. Ashua was ahead of them both, her mouth stretched in a savage yell, eyes fixed on her destination. The dead were left in their wake, lifeless limbs flopping as they rolled to a halt.

The gatling gun swept across the group ahead of him. The golem sparked and sang as bullets hammered into it, but it charged on through them without pause. The people to either side of it weren’t so lucky. He saw men jerking as they were hit, saw them stagger and collapse. They fell like wheat before a scythe, and Ashua went down with them. She tumbled and hit the ground hard, rolling several times before she came to a stop.

Malvery gave a wordless cry of anguish. He surged forward and ran to her, heedless of the bullets flying around him. She was dragging herself up off the ground as he reached her, slack-eyed, leg-shot, her face lax with shock. He slung an arm round her shoulder, lifted her and propelled her on towards the gate, one foot dragging behind her.

Malvery knew what Silo knew: there was no turning back. Their only hope for survival lay in reaching the emplacement.

But they were too far away. Hope drained from Silo as he saw the distance still left to cover. Ahead of him, the soldiers were falling. So many, and so fast. He saw Eltenby die, red holes appearing in his back as he juddered and clawed at the air. And he knew then that there would be no escape for anybody. Even if they retreated now, they’d be cut down as they fled.

The cold horror of despair sank into him. What had he been thinking? What in damnation had driven him to such folly?

He’d always been a survivor, a man who did what was necessary to look out for himself and his own. Ashua was the same, and so was the Cap’n. Yet somehow they’d all become swept up in this, pushed to acts of foolish bravery by a sense of something bigger than they were. The unity of shared conflict had overwhelmed them, and they’d bought into the game when they should have stayed out of it.

War was a trick. An illusion to make men do things they couldn’t ordinarily do. For all the patriotic talk, all the glorious fervour of a righteous cause, every man and woman faced their deaths alone. It was only when you were staring at the end that you realised all that camaraderie didn’t mean a damn, but by then it was too late to take it back.

You the Ace of Skulls, he heard himself say to the Cap’n. How naïve and stupid it sounded now. If he hadn’t said that, the Ketty Jay would have flown on. He wouldn’t have been here, and he would never have led these soldiers and his friends to their deaths.

Shoulda kept your mouth shut, he thought. What a pitiful epitaph that would make.

Then the sound of the gatling gun changed. No longer was it firing into the front ranks of the attackers, but tipping backwards, sending bullets harmlessly into the air. Now it was spinning to a halt, and Silo looked up through the sweat that stung his eyes and saw that there was nobody manning it any more.

One of the Sentinels on the wall ran over to the gatling, seized its handles and tilted it down towards the road once more. Before he could press the trigger, blood sprayed from the back of his head, and he toppled backwards out of sight. The man to right of him looked across in puzzlement. An instant later, his head snapped back and he slumped forward over the rampart.

Despair turned to fierce exultation as Silo accelerated once again. He overtook Malvery and Ashua, catching up the golem at the head of the charge. If he looked over his shoulder, he’d see nothing but rubble and broken buildings; but then, Zalexa Crome was legendarily hard to spot. Somewhere back there the Century Knight was alive and kicking, her sniper rifle trained on the Awakeners. All of a sudden, they had a chance.

His doubts were thrown aside. A primal yell tore from his throat, a cry of savagery and triumph. He was flooded with new energy, driven by the promise of survival, of getting to grips with his tormentors and exacting revenge upon them for the murder they’d wreaked.

The riflemen fell into disarray as they saw their companions killed by some invisible assailant. They scrambled to get off the wall. More than half the Coalition troops lay dead in the road behind Silo, but the rest of them still lived, and they charged the emplacement with the golem at their head.

The golem bellowed and shoulder-charged the gate at full pelt, crashing into it like a freight train. Wood splintered and metal buckled. The gate crashed inward; the bar that secured it cracked in half. That first blow almost destroyed the gate entirely. The golem pulled itself free and drew back one colossal fist to finish the job. With one mighty swing, the gate was torn from its hinges and fell backwards.

Now the way was clear, the Coalition soldiers flooded past the golem, and Silo was swept along with them. Inside was a circular courtyard surrounding the massive anti-aircraft gun, which sat idle, pointing uselessly at the sky. There were Awakeners in the courtyard, and some on the walkway on the inside of the wall. The Coalition soldiers ran in headlong, guns blazing.

Silo found himself in amidst a close press of men. Allies and enemies jostled him. A figure in a cassock appeared out of the crowd, and Silo emptied his shotgun into the man’s belly. Blood spattered his face. He wiped his eyes, got his vision back, and cracked his shotgun butt down on the crown of a merc who was facing away from him.

A few riflemen up on the wall sent bullets into the fray, but they were still being plagued by Zalexa Crome, and one by one they went toppling off to crash down on the heads of the men below. The golem wrenched the gate up off the floor and hefted it at a group of mercs who were shooting into the crowd from across the courtyard. It spun through the air, end over end, and though they did their best to scramble out of the way, their best wasn’t good enough.

Dynamite went off somewhere. Silo felt the force of it, saw a group of men thrown aside, Awakener and Coalition alike. A Sentinel fell at his feet, half his face purple with bruising, eyes so bloodshot there were no whites left. Silo pumped his shotgun. A Speaker in a white cassock came running at him with a knife. Silo fired, and the man was blown backwards, crashed into someone else and knocked them to the ground too. A Coalition soldier nearby screamed and fell. Maybe Silo had hit him; he couldn’t tell. All this shooting in close combat was dangerous, but he’d long gone past the point of being sensible. He killed, and killed, and that was all.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, he found himself searching breathlessly for targets, and there were none to be found. The gunfire petered out and fell quiet. Silo saw men falling to their knees, holding their hands up in surrender. There were desperate, disbelieving smiles on the face of the Coalition soldiers. Silo looked around and found Malvery near the gate, a smoking shotgun in one hand, supporting Ashua with his free arm. Ashua hopped on one leg, but she was alive, and holding a revolver of her own. They’d come late, but they’d been there at the end.

Silo stood there, chest heaving, his shotgun hanging loosely in his hand. There were perhaps twenty soldiers left of the seventy who’d begun the charge, and a handful of Awakeners, but in that moment it didn’t matter. He hadn’t let the Cap’n down. His crew were safe, and they had the gun.

He lifted his shotgun over his head and gave a hoarse bellow of exhausted triumph. The other men joined their voices to his, a rousing cry that lifted up to the battle-hammered skies above, where the great aircraft fought on in ignorance of what they’d done.

A small victory in the grand scheme of things, and won with great sacrifice, but it was a victory. It was a foreigner’s victory, Silo’s victory, and all those cheers were for him.