The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [172]
"Jury's still out on that," I managed to mumble through swelling lips.
Cy leant down and belted me full in the nose. I felt the snap of bone breaking, an electric jolt all the way up into my sinuses.
The alarms were getting louder and more strident. The deck was tilting ever more steeply. I could just see the windscreen, and filling it was the bulk of Yggdrasil, canted at a crazy angle. Nagelfar was heading for the World Tree. A computerised voice added itself to the cacophony of warning sounds. "Collision Imminent," it intoned, loud but calm. "Collision Imminent."
Cy set about pummelling me methodically and relentlessly. In his eyes there was nothing. Only blackness. The same blackness that was in me, the berserker rage that could take you beyond reason, beyond sense, make you fight and want to fight and only ever want to fight.
Then Nagelfar gave an abrupt lurch, and all at once the deck veered to almost vertical. Cy and I started sliding. We rolled helplessly, limbs tangled. I tried to latch onto something with my free hand on the way down but couldn't. We thumped up against a bulkhead, Cy taking more than his fair share of the impact. I wasn't sure but I thought I heard, above all the ruckus, one of his ribs crack.
I still had the knife. Had no choice about that. Soon as I'd got my bearings, I stabbed down with it. Cy caught my forearm with both hands and held me off. The blade of the knife had become oddly distended, mottled. Hot blood had melted its surface and then become frozen to it, adhering in blobs and greasy swirls. As far as I could tell, though, the thing was still sharp enough to do what it was supposed to.
I drove down with all my strength, spare hand pressing on the pommel. Cy continued to resist. The knife point quivered above his mouth, which was wide open in a rictus grimace of strain. I could see all of his teeth, his tongue, even that dangly bit of flesh at the back of his throat. Nagelfar was tipping over even further, not even on its side any more but starting to turn turtle. Yggdrasil's trunk filled the windscreen.
"Collision Imminent. Collision Imminent."
"You got Backdoor killed," I growled at Cy. "It wasn't me. You. But know what? Him getting executed bought Heimdall the time he needed. If Backdoor hadn't been blood eagled first, I wouldn't be here now to stick this down your fucking gizzard."
The knife descended, slowly but surely. The tip was now framed by Cy's teeth. The blackness in his eyes began to be replaced by something else - bright terror.
"Collision Imminent."
I put a knee on his chest and dug in with it, managing to locate the fractured rib, or near enough. A noise came out of Cy's throat, a cross between a grunt and a shriek. His grip slackened, just for a split second, and I rammed the knife all the way home. I felt the soft pressure of the blade slicing meat, splitting his tongue down the middle. Then the firmer pressure of the top of the blade grinding against his palate.
With the pain of his mouth being carved open came a sense of inevitability. Cy knew he couldn't win any more. He couldn't survive this.
Resignation entered his gaze, and now the knife point was piercing the back of his throat, sinking in deep. Blood frothed up. His body started to go into convulsions. His eyes rolled up in their sockets.
"Collision -"
No longer imminent.
Nagelfar, all but upside down, plunged prow first into Yggdrasil. The crash sent me somersaulting rearwards. My hand was torn from the ice knife, which was firmly embedded in Cy's jaws. Skin ripped free, but that was the least of my concerns. Huge branches punched through the windscreen, shattering it to smithereens. An immense hollow groan was either metal tearing or the World Tree crying out, I wasn't sure which. Nagelfar bore down on Yggdrasil, and there was a profound, resonant cre-e-e-eak like nothing I'd ever heard, the sound of timber splintering, magnified a thousandfold, as though an entire forest was being flattened in one fell swoop. All I could do was lie in a helpless