Better the Devil Page 4

  But the other three had waited, and as he half stumbled into their midst, they scooped him under the arms and propelled him onward between them, fog already beginning to lap at their heels.

  "Are ye or are ye no' gonna explain ta me wha's goin' on?" Ness said. "Only reet now ah'm no' sure whether it's these rippers or you ah should be takin' a bleedin' pop at."

  Brand stared at him. Christ, this was hardly the time or place! But then, he supposed he owed Ness an explanation. Chapter and Verse, too, come to that. "Rippers are assassins manifest from the middle plane," he gasped as they ran. "Agents of ultimate sanction - not judge, not jury, just executioner - when there has been a major breach of the Accord. Most of the breaches are mundane and policed by a body here in London - a special branch of the Home Office, a man named Harry Absolam - but when particular articles of the Accord are-"

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa," the Scotsman interrupted. "The Accord? Ah know yer said we breached the thing, bu'-?"

  Brand shook his head, incredulous, breathless. He tried to work out how he could make this as concise as possible, given current circumstances. "The Accord is a diplomatic treaty between the throne of England and the powers of hell... years, hundreds of years, old," he explained. "Like all such treaties, it includes a mutually acceptable code of behaviour, certain things that the parties involved are and are not permitted to do, either in their own or in each other's territories."

  "The articles ye mentioned," Ness said, "aye, got that. So when the hell-whore up ahead used this Deus invocation she-"

  Christ, Ness. "Used prohibited magic, yes. Let alone that article the fifth states that no denizen of hell shall trespass within London without consent - which, of course, she hasn't got anyway - by using a Deus invocation she's in breach of at least four major articles that I know of, and probably mo-"

  "With ya, pal. This Deus shite is like WMDs, right? Or nukes in Iran. The big boys dinnae like it 'cause they wanna keep the toybox for 'emselves."

  "Yes, Ness."

  The Scotsman sighed, then nodded. "Okay then, thas fine. As I see it, we dinnae have a problem here."

  Brand glanced behind them. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "Brand, we didnae use this apocalyptic shite... We didnae even know she was gonna use it. In other words, it's nowt ta do wi' us. So why don' we jus' stop runnin' an' hand the bitch over?"

  "A few minutes ago the bitch saved your life," Lawrence Verse interjected.

  "All our lives, dammit," Hannah Chapter added. "And anyway, by the look of 'em, I don't think these guys are gonna bother playing eeny-meeny-miney-mohhhh, Christ!"

  Brand and the others looked down. The rippers had, as he'd feared, already gained ground on them, and the bank of fog they generated had flowed under them and passed beyond the safety margin they'd so far maintained. Brand knew the debilitating fog would not take full effect for a few seconds, but as he watched it already seemed as if his legs were beginning to blur. How long, really, he wondered, before he felt the first of many ripper blades slicing into him without him even seeing them coming?

  "Keeeeep moooviiing!" Verse yelled as he, along with the others, turned and fired again on their closing attackers. The priest was irritated to find his panning field of vision as slow and as jerky as a modern videogame on a low-spec machine, and, his hearing as affected as his sight, his weapon's discharges sounding like long and ominous rumbles of thunder... krak-a-dooom, krak-a-dooom...

  As he watched the bullets spraying towards the rippers, Brand could do nothing but gape as he scrambled back behind their firewall. The fact was, this was probably the closest anyone ever got to rippers, and they were fascinating to him. Fine. Maybe they wouldn't have been his first choice of last thing to see but, what the hell, what else was he going to do while he died?

  The rippers had closed to little more than one of their blades' length, now, though admittedly it was one of their longer blades, in this case a sharp and sinister, scimitar shape dyed dark with the blood of ages. Blades of varying types, in fact, formed the majority of the make-up of these demifernal creatures, and the parts that didn't looked no less threatening than the knives themselves. Humanoid but almost stick-figure thin - little more than skeletons, really - any weakness on their part this might have suggested was rapidly dispelled by a cartilaginous and sinewed overskin that wrapped around their frames and limbs in tight and leathery cords. Not that they were limbs, not in any normal sense, but merely appendages that sleekly morphed into their instruments of death. Even their legs ended in blades, sickle-like things that reminded Brand of metal cloven hooves, and the terrifying thing about these was that they did not so much walk on the ground as simply scrape, sparking, along it.

  The things were killing machines, Wolverine and Krueger doubled by way of Giger and Bosch.

  A cadaverous, angular and socketed but eyeless face suddenly thrust in towards Brand, screeching out of a mummified mouth, and the academic lost his half scrambling footing and collapsed to the ground. Ness blasted the attacker with a shotgun at point blank range.

  The ripper staggered back, came again.

  "No good," Brand gasped. "They... they can't be killed."

  Ness fired again, sending the ripper staggering - but just staggering - once more, and grabbed Brand by the shoulder, dragging him away. The Scotsman fired again. "Listen ta me, Brand," he growled. "You know these bastards an' ah doon't, bu' far as ah'm concerned everythin' that kills can be killed, d'ya hear wha' ah'm sayin'? Eventually, everythin' can be killed."

  "Not rippers! They're too powerful."

  "Aye?" Ness said. He fired again, and then again, and this time the ripper screeched, a tiny bit of cartilage blown away from its arm. But still it came on. "Well, mebbe it's jus' a matter o' bein' bloody persistent."

  "No, Brainiac's right!" Hannah shouted across the shots from her own weapon. "We're barely scratching them here!"

  "There are too many and we're too close," Verse agreed. "Maybe if we could split them up, take them on one on one, we'd stand some chance, but-"

  "They're too fast!" Brand insisted.

  "Och, fine then, man," Ness declared, loosing his hold on the academic's shoulder. "You can either jus' stay here an' die or do wha' yer paid for an' think of a way outta this crap. So wass it gonna be, yer whingin' little shite?"

  Brand scrabbled back as the others continued to fire into thickening fog. "All right, all right. There's one chance, but it's a long shot," he said, thinking fast. "If I remember correctly, there's a reference in the Accord to the rippers' manifestation sphere being restricted. A decree relating to their first summoning, stating they can only hunt inside the heart of London."

  "Which we just happen to be bang in the middle of, yes?" Verse asked.

  "The London Eye's dead centre," Hannah nodded. "Brand, what you're saying is that if we can get outside that sphere...?"

  "Yes, yes, we should be safe" Brand announced hurriedly. "But I'm not sure the decree still applies. And even if it does, I don't know where the boundaries are."

  "Jeezus Christ, does it matter?" Ness chirped up. "We jus' pick a direction an' keep goin'."

  "But not into the river, though, eh?" Verse said, smiling and firing.

  "O' course no' inta the bleedin' riv-" Ness began, and stopped, giving the priest a dangerous look. "Why don't ye just foo-"

  "Much as I hate to spoil this little love-in," Hannah interrupted, "we still need to gain ground on these bastards in the first place, or had you forgotten that?" She fired a volley from her twin Colts into the rippers. "And as the cars are back that way I am wide open to suggestions."

  "Actually," a voice said, "that is where I might be able to help."

  The four of them looked behind them, finding that their rear manoeuvring had brought them level with a now stationary Ravne and Jenny Simmons.

  "You thought I was running away?" the bearded consultant said with a knowing look. "That may indeed have been true of Miss Simmons here. In fairness, in her weakened st
ate she could really do little else. But I, on the other hand, needed time to prepare this."

  Ravne held up the Lamp of Alhazred, the arcane lantern glowing with the light of strange and rare oils. It flared as he did so, sending out a coruscating mote of brightness that caused Brand and the others to rub their eyes. This was not due to the brightness, but rather the fact that from it sprang three groups of phantoms identical to themselves.

  The phantoms fled in different directions, and the rippers faltered, shrieking loudly.

  "Rippers stalk their prey with a preternatural radar," Ravne said. "I suggest we take advantage of their confusion while we can."

  Nobody needed telling twice, the six of them racing away from Jubilee Gardens and into the quiet night-time streets, veering from their path when necessary but maintaining as straight a line away from the centre as they could. For a while there was no sight or sound of ripper pursuit, but eventually a distant shrieking resumed.

  It began to grow louder.

  "This way!" Brand shouted. "There's a way through the-"

  The academic led them around a corner and then stopped dead. "What the hell?"

  Massive construction hoardings blocked their path, the frontage for a building site that seemed to engulf the whole area, and from behind which came the roar of mechanical diggers and drills. Huge spotlights around its perimeter illuminated the unseen workers.

  Strange enough that the site seemed to be in full swing at this early hour of the morning, but stranger still that the hoardings were marked with the logo of the company at work.

  It was Capek Construction.

  "Is it just me?" Verse asked. "Or is that just a little too weird to be a coincidence?"

  Unfortunately, there was no time to investigate further. The seconds that had been lost during the unexpected discovery had been seconds that the rippers had gained, and from the end of the road they spun into view. Though Brand and the others immediately ran for an alternate route, one of them brought Jenny Simmons down. Cursing, Ness raced back into its fog and began to open fire. As earlier, his first few shots were simply slowed and then dodged or absorbed once again, but this time Ness continued firing and simply didn't let up. Roaring with rage, he emptied everything he had chambered into the ripper and then repeatedly booted it back out of slashing range while he housed more rounds. As the Scotsman flailed and dodged in slow motion, anticipating the ripper's moves with a soldier's eye, the sweep of his arm as it reloaded the gun seemed to take forever, but, when he was finally done, the hail of bullets continued, on and on and on.

  The ripper was blown back off the weak and desperately scrabbling Jenny Simmons, and Ness swept her up.

  "Persistence," he said, as they caught up with Brand.

  There was only straight road ahead of them now, and the rapidly tiring group headed unerringly up its length. They did not look back because what would be the point? The rippers would either have them now or they would not.

  The rippers' screeching continued and then suddenly quietened.

  They looked back.

  The rippers had stopped dead in their tracks.

  "We made it," Brand gasped, and then whooped. "Jesus Christ, we made it."

  Brand hobbled towards the rippers, but they did nothing. There did indeed seem to some invisible line in the road beyond which the hellspawn could not move, could not act further in any way. Emboldened by the knowledge, the exhausted academic continued to approach, stopping only when he came directly nose-to-nose with one of the infernal killing machines. Brand's panting breaths were loud in the surrounding silence - though with eerily no sounds of exertion at all coming from the ripper itself. Pursuer and pursued stared at one another for a long moment, the grey, cadaverous face of the ripper cold and hostile, but ultimately impotent, Brand sweating like a pig, triumphant but swallowing hard. The clicking of his throat was answered by the dry crack of the ripper's mouth slowly opening, and then, without warning, it emitted a screeching and foul-smelling shriek of frustration right into Brand's face that sent him staggering back.

  Screech all you want, you ugly bastard, Brand thought, you can do nothing now.

  Suddenly he laughed out loud, hysterically almost, and plucked his hip flask from his pocket. He took a couple of swigs and then a deeper one, and then returned a long and alcoholic roar back into the ripper's face.

  He spun to face the others and took another swig. "We made it," he said again.

  "Brand," Verse said, pointing back, and the academic looked quizzical and turned around.

  Most of them had made it. Whether the man had tried once more to confuse the rippers' advance, Brand did not know, but it looked as though the rippers had taken advantage of whatever had held him back.

  Near the perimeter of the Capek Construction site, Ravne's Lamp of Alhazred burned dully on the ground, but of Ravne himself there was no sign.

  Chapter Four

  Distant shrieking and an incessant drip, drip, drip.

  Solomon Ravne groaned lengthily and stirred in the dark.

  The sound of the rippers was muted where he was - down was all he knew - but still audible, and he forced himself to slow his heartbeat and to quieten his breathing lest their preternatural senses detected him as they clattered by above. He used a yogic technique to do so, keeping himself fully alert at the same time his body calmed. He might have evaded the rippers for the moment, but there was still a chance that one of them might find the dropshaft down which he had plunged in to make his escape.

  Ravne waited one minute, two, his exhalations harsh still but softening gradually, echoing less in the darkness. The image of Brand and the others retreating quickly before him, their backs to his gaze, stuck in his mind, and he wondered with startlingly fleeting concern whether any of them still lived. He could have called out to them minutes ago, of course, shared the escape route he had quite literally stumbled onto, but that would only have drawn unwanted attention to him. And as he had survived a very long lifetime avoiding unwanted attention, he wasn't about to start soliciting any now.

  Naturally this was a tactical decision made for the benefit of the whole group and had nothing to do with his only being interested in saving his own skin.

  His respiration even, Ravne strained once more to listen for any ripper presence, heard none, and smiled with satisfaction to himself. The infernal assassins had gone at last, moving on in what would be a no doubt relentless pursuit of the others, and his immediate surroundings could be considered safe and silent. As silent as a place such as this could be, being fed ceaselessly as it seemed to be by round, dark mouths.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  Ravne tried not to think of the stuff that slowly trickled out of the pipes he could just make out around him, though the stench made it hard to ignore. By Christ, where was it he had ended up? The sewers, certainly, but far from the clean and expansive sewers so beloved in filmic lore, where even lights were provided, presumably so that when the chase sequence was over, the turds, condoms, syringes and bloody sanitary towels could nod to each other as they bobbed along in their noxious river of waste. These were not even the mainstream city sewers, the concrete lined conduits that carried the bulk of waste from the city above. No, from what he could see in the little light that filtered down from above, these were older tunnels - much older - perhaps Bazelgette originals, low and narrow and lined with brick that had for the most part crumbled away, revealing the glistening brown clay through which they had been carved so long ago.

  It was like being inside an intestine.

  Ravne peered back up the shaft through which he had found himself deposited in this vile canal, and sighed. As much as these were not really sewers, the object of his attention was not a shaft at all, but little more than an old drainage hole that had been opened out perhaps as the result of some subsidence. It was about fifteen metres back to the surface and there was not a single hand- or foothold in sight, only more of the glistening gunk through which these tunnels had been bored.
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  He wasn't getting out that way.

  He would have to move ahead, away from the light and into the darkness, deeper into the fetid canal.

  Ravne started to twist himself into a crawling position, but collapsed again onto his backside as an excruciating pain lanced up his right leg. He must have landed badly, though he had felt nothing during the adrenalin rush. He explored the limb with his hand, hissed as he felt a sharp knob of bone protruding just below his knee. Now that he knew the bone was there he could make it out in contrast, glisteningly white against the torn dark cloth of his trousers. Around it his leg was bleeding heavily and hurt like hell. Damn. As if getting out of here wasn't going to be bad enough he now needed to find something to act as a splint for the bone. And down here he somehow doubted that was going to be sterile. Slowly, he began to drag himself along.

  More tunnels, he thought. The last thing he needed was more tunnels. As if the bunker near Peenemunde hadn't been bad enough. He remembered how he had aroused Chapter and Verse's suspicions with his knowledge of the place, and how he had bluffed his way out. But the fact was, he knew what he did because as an SS Obergruppenführer at the time he had been instrumental in developing the Sonderkommando Thule homunculus programme. Not that he had been privy to each and every project involved - the one near Peenemunde, for instance - but he liked to think they would not have got as far as they had without him.

  Oh, they had been good days, perhaps some of the best of the many hundreds of years he had been alive. Sometimes he even desired to share his memories of them with the others, but of course he couldn't, because no other member of Caballistics, Inc was aware of his true nature. He missed still his morning arrival at the hangar where they processed the raw materials - captured British soldiers and French resistance fighters in the main. The containment capsules in which they were held always echoed with such pathetic pleas.