Ascendance by John Birmingham Read Free Book Online Page A

portal prevented by a pair of hulking Lieutenants Grymm. Armed with pikes and short swords they barred any escape, crashing the shafts of their principal weapons together to form a giant cross as Threshy charged them at a gallop. He paid them no heed. They were so tall, the point at which the big iron polearms met so far above his eyestalks, all he needed to do was put his head down and boogie on through to deliverance, perhaps even biting one of them on the ass as he shot past. Teach these ugly fucks to show some respect.
    Oof!
    Threshy flew backward, in exactly the opposite direction to that in which he had intended to keep moving at high speed. Sparks flared across his vision, standing out brightly against the darkness which bloomed in his head. He rolled through leaf litter and dirt, the little copse in the woods of Central Park spinning around him until he came to a stop thanks to a kick from another of the Lieutenants Grymm. A second kick, really, the first one having sent him flying backward. But who was counting?
    The security detail, a half Talon of Lieutenants and Sergeants Grymm, ringed the entrance to the portal, a region of darkness a few steps into a stormwater drain, noticeably denser and deeper than the surrounding night. Mail and armour clinked and creaked in the darkness. They cut off his passage as effectively as a high castle wall.
    ‘Step to me, would you, motherfucker?’ grunted Compt’n ur Threshrend, but not too loudly, in case they heard him. The little empath daemon had a moment of recall that was both profoundly familiar and alien; the memory, not from its own experience in the nest, but from one of the minds it had consumed. It could not tell which, but knew the reminiscence to be from either the calfling called Trev’r or the Scolari Compt’n. A human nestling very young, very frightened, and ashamed, surrounded by its nest mates – no, its schoolmates, Compt’n corrected – kicked and mocked and spat on and . . .
    The tiny unnamed, unlamented thresh, which endured somewhere under all of the layers of memory and understanding it had recently consumed, struggled to understand. But Threshy, the strange, protean personality it had become, remembered well and understood implicitly.
    Motherfuckers were pelting him with their filthy jockstraps after gym class.
    The daemon shuddered in recall of a humiliation which was not, in truth, its own. Compt’n ur Threshrend glared at the lieutenants from across the vast unfathomable gulf which separated them, anticipating sneers and taunts. Expecting a mouthful of moist jockstrap. But it did not come.
    The Lieutenants Grymm merely returned to standing watch.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Threshy, very quietly. ‘Didn’t think you’d fuckin’ cowboy up for a second round. Bitches.’
    He could hear the approach of Guyuk and his escorts. They didn’t crash through the little forest, but there was no way a score of eight and nine foot tall warrior daemonum could move with complete silence.
    At least they weren’t Hunn, he thought.
    Those dumbasses would’ve charged up Broadway the second they heard the Dave was there. Unable to do the smart thing – get the fuck out of Dodge – Compt’n ur Threshrend used the time left in this realm to reach out for his thrall.
    Yeah. That’s right.
    He had thrall now.
    Dozens of Threshrendum. Minorae, majorae and even a couple of motherfucking superiorae. He shut himself off to his immediate surrounds, to the shadows and smells of Central Park, so strangely familiar and alien all at once. Compt’n ur Threshrend reached out across the city with his thinkings, gathering up the sights and senses of all his thrall. Knowing as they knew. He stood atop high towers looking down on scenes of slaughter. He leaped from the roof of a flower delivery van as it spun out of control. He raced through a mall behind a small war band of unnamed Hunn, thrilling with them at the blood and horror. But he did not see the Dave or the terrifying