The Cache by James Brogden (popular books of all time txt) 📕

she was glossy with it from knee to toe. The noises of fighting abated as the crawlers fled into their tunnels and Lyse hauled herself to her feet, using the iron bar as a makeshift crutch. When the first arbiter slid under the door, sweeping the chamber with a flashlight on the end of his gun, she put her free hand up in surrender.

‘Don’t shoot!’ she called. ‘I am Lyse Urretzi, first daughter of–’

‘We know,’ said Prime Adjutant Galla Domitia, sliding in after her soldier and standing. ‘And a merry dance you’ve led us, too.’ She was tall and carapaced in body armour, with a shock of close-cropped iron-grey hair and a hatchet face that looked like it had forgotten how to smile a long time ago. Nevertheless, surprise widened her eyes as she looked around the room and saw its riches.

‘Claim!’ Lyse declared. ‘This is mine!’ She took the iron bar in both hands, though it meant having to totter on one leg, and brandished it as if she were prepared to fight all of them.

One corner of Domitia’s mouth quirked and she inclined her head slightly. ‘Your claim will be honoured, have no fear.’ The rest of her squad entered the room one by one, and fell upon the loot with whoops and hollers, but Domitia barked at them to stand down.

‘Thank you, prime adjutant.’ Lyse almost allowed herself to relax, but then Hadzor Jaax squirmed into the room last of all. His armaments were much cruder than the arbiters’ – his gun looked like it had been cobbled together from plumbing and scrap metal, and as likely to take his own hand off as actually hit his target. Lyse ignored him. She could afford to now.

‘Cracius told you where I was going, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Domitia, ‘but don’t be angry with him. My chasteners didn’t leave him much of a choice, and after all, it saved your life. He also told us about the Seal. Where did you find it?’

It was only Jaax’s flicker of a glance at Domitia that saved her life. In it Lyse saw him weighing up the odds of shooting either the prime adjutant or herself – which one he could best get away with to suppress the discovery of his heresy. Lyse wasn’t conscious of the knowledge, however; it slithered straight down into her animal hindbrain and triggered her fight-or-flight instinct.

His gun shifted, and he shot her.

She fell to one side as something punched her in the shoulder, and she scrambled under the door and into the passageway outside. It was littered with the corpses of crawlers and slippery with their blood, and she skidded and limped through them.

She had to give Jaax his due, he was fast. He tried to slip out after her, and almost made it. She fought every instinct screaming at her to run, and turned back to the door. The prime adjutant was shouting with outrage, and maybe somebody was trying to hold Jaax back, but he was halfway out from underneath, grabbing at her.

‘Little bitch!’ he snarled, and seized her ankle. He was bringing his gun up to bear on her when Lyse plucked the Victualler’s Seal from its lock.

The door slammed down on his torso, crushing his ribcage, and a gout of blood spurted from his mouth. His eyes bulged and his arms spasmed, the gun went off but nowhere near her, and he was still.

Lyse fell amongst the crawler corpses, sobbing.

The prime adjutant’s shouts were faint and distant.

Hadzor Jaax began to move again.

Except that it wasn’t Hadzor Jaax any more.

Its hands gripped the lower edge of the door and began to push upwards, which was impossible because the door must have weighed a ton. But then the hands themselves were swelling, growing talons that left gouges in the metal as if it were paper. Everything about Jaax was growing and thickening, sprouting spines and horns, mutating into something new and terrible – the living nightmare of which the effigy, obscene as it was, had been only a shadow. It made the crawlers that had so nearly killed her look like mere rats in comparison, and she could only gape at it, her mind numbed by disbelief. Transfixed by its eyes, she felt the same kind of sick fascination as when she had looked at the blasphemous mural. It grinned at her, its tongue lolling across teeth as black as rot.

‘Don’t worry my dear,’ it drooled in Jaax’s voice. ‘You will still be my bride.’ It got to its knees, shouldering the door upwards with immense strength. Behind it, in the room, people were screaming, guns firing, and stray bullets zipped through the gap around her. ‘But first I have business to attend to.’ It ducked back inside, dropping the door behind it, and she heard the gunfire and screaming escalate to frenzied heights, accompanied by wet, rending noises and the laughter of something that gloried in its work.

Released from its gaze, Lyse fled.

This couldn’t last long, she knew. She was sobbing and slipping in her own blood and stumbling every other step, her leg burning with agony, her shoulder adding its fuel to the fire even though that whole arm was numb with pins and needles. She should have collapsed by now, but whatever she had eaten was still burning in her blood. All the same, she had no plan – she couldn’t lead the Outsider upwards to the hab-halls, nor was there much further down to drop; all she could do was slip through the smallest gaps and run from the inevitable for as long as possible.

The Outsider announced its pursuit, calling her name, laughing and jeering. Presumably it had finished with the arbiters. It would do to her clan – all the clans – what it had done to the best-armed of them, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Lyse’s attention was so consumed by the pursuing horror that she nearly fell headlong into the shaft that opened before