Ascendance by John Birmingham

path clear.’
    ‘Proceed then,’ Guyuk grunted, acknowledging the officer’s salute with a crashing blow of his own.
    The Scolari Master was lightly armoured but even that was unusual. When they took the scrolls, the most learned of the Grymm put aside the trappings of their warrior days. And of all the disciplines, the navigators of the paths between the realms had, until recently, been amongst the least worldly and practical. After all, with the Horde sealed off beneath the capstone, there was scant call for their arcane knowledge. Only a sect with a memory measured in dark eons would have bothered to maintain the learnings of these particular masters. Guyuk knew that many of the other sects had not. This promised the Horde great advantages, tactical and strategic, against both human and daemonum enemies.
    The Master of the Ways intoned his chant of guidance, reading from a long scroll, dense with runes and lines of dried ichor. Guyuk was sure he saw some of those lines shift and twist on the parchment. The Lieutenants Grymm stood motionless against a small section of chamber wall, heavy with edged metal and thick protective armouring.
    The path to the human realm opened silently, a bloom of negative space, a blackness of infinite depth through which they must pass. As the Master of the Ways intoned his incantation the maw opened wider, like the mouth of dar Drakon as it swooped down on its prey. With the portal wide enough to take the cohort six abreast, the Captain of the Guard drew his war cleaver and lead the first rank toward the rift between the worlds.
    Next to Guyuk, Compt’n ur Threshrend gave himself a shake, as if throwing off a surfeit of nervous energy. It was, Guyuk thought, a peculiarly human gesture. The empath danced from one hind-claw to the other and grinned, showing off its fang tracks as it turned to the lord commander.
    ‘This is gonna be cool. I always wanted to be on TV.’

07
    D ave wouldn’t care to wager his annual bonus on it – and couldn’t anyway, since he’d already blown his wad on those hookers from Reno – but he thought maybe the crowds were thinning out. Maybe people were getting smart and getting themselves off the damned streets. He couldn’t be sure, but the masses around Times Square seemed thinner, and moved with more purpose. He could hear gunfire and sirens and screaming, could hear them up and down the island if he wanted to. There were still huge numbers of people bumbling around in a panic, but perhaps they were starting to get themselves inside, under cover.
    A good thing, too. Sundown was well past. The full dark of night upon them.
    Lieutenant Trenoweth leaned over the hood of a patrol car, marking X’s onto a tourist map of Manhattan while Dave and Karen waited impatiently for him to tell them where they could best apply themselves. A chainsaw started up as city sanitation workers struggled to clear the intersection and surrounding streets of the tons of butchered meat they had made of the war band. The snarling whine of the chainsaw dropped into a deeper, meatier resonance as steel teeth bit deeply into dead flesh. Someone screamed, but it was a cry of revulsion rather than terror.
    ‘Come on,’ said Karen, jiggling impatiently in her boots and leathers. ‘Clock’s ticking here.’
    Dave passed her a couple of energy gels one of the cops had scored for them from the Walgreens just a short distance up Broadway. Trenoweth seemed just about ready to give them something to do when his phone rang. He checked the screen and ignored it, pocketing the big-ass Android while it was still buzzing for his attention. Dave heard more of the handsets going off around them. Canaries in the coal mine of the twenty-first century. He and Karen exchanged a glance, wordless, but containing a clear desire to somehow speed everything up. Officer Delillo jogged over with another cell phone, passing it to her boss.
    ‘You better take this, Lieutenant.’
    ‘Trenoweth,’ the cop