The Black Lung Captain - Chris Wooding [183]
“CAP’N! TO YOUR LEFT!”
Frey turned just in time to see one of them come lunging out of an alley, right by his shoulder. A flash impression of yellow eyes, a gaping mouth full of rotten teeth, an animal snarl. Terror paralyzed him but not his blade, which moved of its own accord. The cutlass slashed out in a horizontal arc and halved the creature’s head. Frey stepped aside instinctively as the Mane’s ragged, sinewy body staggered past him. It fell to its knees and tipped to the floor, gore spilling from its skull cavity.
They’d stumbled into a nightmare. The eerie light of the low sun combined with the black ceiling of cloud made everything seem fractured and strange. The dreadnoughts slid overhead, like the shadowed hulls of ships passing above the graves of drowned men. The grim, cold streets of Sakkan were littered with bodies and echoed with distant cries. And here were the Manes. The ghouls of the sky, terror out of legend, sprung suddenly to awful life.
The shout that saved him had been Malvery’s. Frey spotted him nearby. The doc was in trouble himself. He and Silo were backing down the street together, shotguns firing. Three Manes were approaching. They ran and leaped in jerky zigzags that made them tricky to hit. Malvery winged one, sending it twisting to the ground. The shock of the bullet would have taken a human out of action, but the Mane sprang back to its feet and came on again.
“Bess!” he yelled. He needed to give orders, take control. He pointed at the enemy. “Deal with ’em!” Then he aimed with the pistol in his right hand.
Three Manes. One was slow, one was damned fast, and the other one shifted restlessly from place to place like a jumpy kinetoscope he’d seen once in a traveling show. One moment it was there, the next a half meter to the left, then back again in the blink of an eye. He’d seen Jez flicker the same way, back on the All Our Yesterdays.
He sighted on the slower one: a bulky, muscular monster, skin stretched like parchment over taut muscle, wearing little more than tatters and rags in the arctic chill. His own hands were freezing and numb, but he still squeezed off a shot. Non-lethal wounds didn’t seem to slow them, and he knew from experience with Jez that they didn’t need a heart. Aim for the head, then.
He did, and he missed.
Bess pounded up the street to cover their retreat. She tackled the Manes fearlessly. The Manes faltered. Presumably, they were accustomed to their enemies being afraid of them, but Bess was afraid of nothing. Frey took another shot at the bulky one, who was too occupied with Bess to evade. The shot wasn’t good—his fingers slipped a little as he fired—but he got lucky. There was a small puff of red mist from the Mane’s head, and its legs crumpled beneath it.
The two remaining Manes swarmed over Bess. They battered and scratched at her uselessly. She flailed about like a bear who’d disturbed a wasp’s nest. The others aimed, but none fired. They couldn’t shoot without hitting the golem.
“Fall back!” he yelled at the others. “Bess can handle them! They can’t hurt her!”
They obeyed gladly. Nobody wanted to get into a stand-up fight with the Manes. They just wanted to get back to the Ketty Jay alive. Malvery, Crake, and Silo backed off while Frey and Jez covered them.
Frey cast a quick glance at Jez, who was standing next to him, sighting along a rifle. She’d shaken off the daze that had taken her after she’d activated the sphere, and now she was hard-faced and sharp.
“You okay?” he muttered to her.
“You mean, am I okay with shooting at my own kind?”
“Right.”
One of the Manes, a female with long, tangled hair, jumped off Bess’s back, giving up on her. It came running up the street toward them. Jez narrowed her eye and squeezed the trigger. The Mane flickered, shifting left and right so rapidly that it seemed it was in three places at once. Jez hit it anyway, dead in the forehead. It spun off its feet and crashed to the cobbles.
“I’ve picked my side,” she