Read Ascendance for Free Online Page A

than their lumbering Hunn masters, dying in profligate blood sprays on the edge of her hissing sword blade. She moved in a blur of fluid power, inhumanly fast with the speed and surety of long practice and elemental grace. Karin Varatchevsky – he had no doubt he was seeing the woman reduced to her essences now, without the layers of pretense and assumed identity in which she had cloaked herself for years – Colonel Karin Varatchevsky danced between the hulking, slow-moving carcasses of the Horde. Her blade flashed and hummed and described great, blurred arcs of lethal intent, and wherever she danced, Hunn and Fangr died. They came apart in big raw pieces and Dave was sure that he could discern the unnaturally drawn-out, grating shrieks of their deaths somewhere beneath the rumbling sibilance of the city’s elongated soundtrack.
    The Threshrend, clutching at the gunshot wounds, which had further disfigured its ugly face, was dropping toward the road surface like a redwood felled by the axeman. Steaming loops and bags of internal organs, purple and green and yellow, spilled from a long diagonal slash which had opened its belly before Karin had turned her attention to the rest of the war band. But with the warrior daemonum now all slaughtered she spun back toward the slain empath, perversely reminding Dave of a ballerina in her leathers and heavy black boots. Her knees flexed as she crouched and leaped a good couple of yards toward the collapsing Threshrend. The sword twirled like a baton major’s party trick, raised on high at the last moment, and . . .
    The bubble popped.
    She brought the blade down in real time with terrible swiftness and resolution, neatly severing the creature’s eyestalks at the already ruined base. The sound of screaming all around them redoubled and changed in tenor, as people now cried out more in shock than fear. Warat stood without moving for a few seconds, and then she reached down to pluck a Subway sandwich wrapper from where it had become stuck to one boot. She used it to clean the worst of the gore from her sword. Dave, like the cops, was stunned into silence and stillness. His eyes fell to Lucille, recalling how she had come to life during the fight in the Russian consulate. He was convinced that if she hadn’t, Warat would have carved him up as easily as she had the war band.
    ‘Gonna have to ask you to put that away, ma’am,’ said Officer Chadderton. He was pointing his gun Karen’s way, his eyes flitting anxiously over to the chunks and slabs of cooling monster meat that lay all about them. ‘Somebody might get hurt.’

04
    L ord Guyuk ur Grymm could admit to himself, if to none other, that the scale of this human settlement, the brute size and weight of it, conspired to crush all gurikh from him. To extinguish his warrior spirit, to draw his claws and dull his fangs. It was just too . . . too much. Too vast and wrong to be endured. He tried to shield his thoughts, lest Compt’n ur Threshrend discern his weakness, but everywhere he turned, evidence of profound human dominion confronted him. Even worse, it seemed not to bother the Threshrend at all. But then, why would it? The creature was part human, at least in its thinkings.
    ‘Awesome, right?’ said the empath daemon, as if it knew exactly the blasphemy that had soiled Guyuk’s mind.
    But, no, that could not be. Even Threshrend Superiorae were not given to the subtle reading of individual minds as strong and shielded as Guyuk’s. The Lord Commander of all Her Majesty’s Regiments Grymm dragged his gaze away from the towering palaces beyond the edge of these woods, a reserve of sorts according to the Threshrend.
    ‘Dude, I love it when a plan comes together, and my plans always do, because they’re not just awesome. They’re like the internationally recognised benchmark for awesome,’ boasted Compt’n ur Threshrend.
    So. He had not been attending to Guyuk at all, or taunting him in the leastways, and the lord