Free Soul Stealers: The Clockwork Vampire Chronicles by Andy Remic Page A

shouts, no screams of battle; only an eerie silence and thudding of boots.
        A soldier fell on Saark and he parried the blow with a clash of steel, batting the ineffectual sword strike aside and drawing his blade across the man's throat. Flesh opened, parted, without blood – like slicing the throat of a corpse, thought Saark sourly – but all other images were slammed from him at the sheer number of soldiers in the armoury. Kell had been right, it was a set-up, a trap; they'd been waiting. Saark parried another blow, slammed his blade back in a shower of sparks, and exchanged several strikes before piercing his blade through the soldier's eye. Beside him, Kell's axe swung, but was hampered by the close confines fighting. He glimpsed the great blades behead an albino in a flail of long hair and gristle, and Saark shifted as the great Ilanna hummed past his own face.
        'Kell!' screamed Saark, his face thunder, and he skipped to the side to give the old man more killing space. He spun low under a warrior's blade, and shoved his own sword up, brutally, into the soldier's groin. The albino screamed and fell, slipping on his own unspooling entrails, and Saark spun to shout at Skanda to run – but the boy had vanished. Good, breathed Saark as he prepared himself. The armoury was full of the enemy, so many he couldn't count them; what had it been? A platoon? Twenty men? Or… Saark paled, even in the gloom. If a company waited, there'd be damn near a hundred soldiers. And even Kell could not battle such odds. There were seven down, now, and outside the sun dipped below the horizon. Darkness flooded the room. Swords gleamed. Boots stamped. The only light was a surreal glow, the sun's dying rays reflected off smashed glass; more soldiers ran at Kell and Saark, and the men defended themselves with skill, sword and axe rising and falling, deflecting blades and cutting into flesh with savage, sodden thumps . More albino warriors fell, and Kell slapped Saark's shoulder and pointed. They backed away across the chamber, only to hear boots thudding outside a short corridor. They were surrounded! Saark tasted fear. At the end of the day Saark was a swordsman, and an incredibly skilled one – once, he had been the King's Sword Champion, and although Saark had fought in battles before, he much preferred the consummate test of skill during one-on-one combat. In war, he hated the randomness, the chaos, the unpredictability; the threat of an axe in the back of the head when you least expected it. No, for Saark the honour and prestige was in single combat – where the victor took the spoils, wine, gold, women. But here, now… this was fast turning into a charnel house. It was out of control.
        The soldiers hung back, wary. Saark could just make out their ghost-white faces in the gloom. He reckoned on about thirty, but that didn't include those coming round behind.
        Thirty! If Kell and Saark had been caught on open ground, they would have been slaughtered. Surrounded and butchered like dogs. But the albino soldiers, perhaps knowing the inherent skill of their quarries, had sought subterfuge and covert attack; this had backfired, for close quarters combat meant Saark and Kell could fight a tight battle and not easily be surrounded. "They're coming in," snapped Kell through gritted teeth. His face and beard were covered once more in blood and gore, only this time white, and glistening in what little ambient light remained. Ilanna filled his terrible hands, the edges of the butterfly blades glimmering. "You cover this side, I'll–" but his words were left unfinished, as a blast of blackness, of energy, a series of pulses in concentric circles like the spreading ripples in a lake after heavy impact cannoned through the confines of the armoury, and Kell and Saark were picked up amidst a surging charge of debris, old hammers, bits of battered armour, tools and dirt and even an anvil, and they seemed to hang for a moment