*
Aleksandar smashed the skull of a wailing, faceless horror with his lightning hammer, bursting the creature’s head apart in a spray of bone and brain. The Kapitán kicked the flailing corpse back into the oncoming wall of flesh, introducing another abomination’s face to his shield. His arms were slicked in black blood, the ground beneath him a mire of melting snow and gore, the stench bringing tears to his eyes. All around him, men were fighting and screaming and dying, swords and hammers falling, the crunch of bone and the spray of blood interspersed with the buzzing choir of chainsaw katanas. Shreddermen were reaping demons by the armful, but for every dozen that fell, a brave man was borne to the ground and torn asunder, a shredderman was toppled and the pilot inside ripped limb from bloody limb. There seemed to be no end to the hellspawn, all glowing eyes and reeking flesh and snik-snak claws. His lungs burned and his sight blurred, and every step felt a tortured mile.
Worse, there was the song. Rising in intensity, so loud he could almost hear the words. It was bloody fingernails drawn across a chalkboard of skin. A sliver of metal behind his eyeball, a constant, conscious, breathing wrongness in the marrow of his bones. Some men fell still at the sound, stupefied, staring into the gaping wound in the island’s face and lifting not a finger as the demons fell upon them, smiling like simpletons as they were dismembered.
Aleksandar recognized it—the dulcet tones he’d not heard since he was a boy. The voice of his mother, calling across long and empty years. He felt the need to be held, cradled to a warm breast as he’d been as a babe, when all the world revolved around her, her, the one who bore him, who carried him inside her, who would always be a part of him no matter how tall and strong he grew. He felt the wrongness of it all, the mother betrayed, left alone in darkness to rot and plot and dream of revenge. A revenge now come unto the world she had died birthing.
But he knew it was a lie. Some evil magik born of the Shiman’s hell. Whatever this Dark Mother was, she was not his Goddess. And so he clutched the pendant about his throat and prayed for vision, for clarity and will, and smashed another demon’s head from its shoulders.
“Do not listen!” he roared. “Do not listen to the song!”
The ground shook, the abyss rippling as if a stone had been dropped into black water. He looked beyond the demon lines and saw the vast carrion bird rising from the pit, the reek of old death and worms like a hammerblow to his face. A vast and terrifying shadow fell over the battlefield, throwing all into chaos and darkness.
“Everliving Goddess,” he whispered. “Protect us now.”
*
The mighty carrion bird screamed, swooping across the smoke and rolling black, a cyclone reeking of open graves beneath its wings. The repeating chatter of shuriken fire rang in Yukiko’s ears, the revving of sky-ship engines pushed to full burn. Blackbird, Kaori and the crew of the Kurea were engaged in bloody battle with a deck full of the smaller corpse-hawks; the Lotus Wind had been overrun, but the rest of the fleet had set course for the beast, scrawling exhaust across the sky as they charged. At the forefront, Yukiko could see the Honorable Death, Hiro standing at the prow with chainswords drawn, roaring at the top of his lungs.
Hiro …
THEY BUY US TIME. WE CANNOT WASTE IT.
Hana screamed into the choking wind. “Yukiko, go! Go!”
Sukaa swooped past, first into the breach, the buck’s words burning in her mind.
FLY, MONKEY-CHILD. FLY!