Hiawatha could see the lie. He could see the red taint of dishonesty hanging above the stranger, glittering and mewing like a mutant cat. This man, this unstoppable Brit with his boring face and his quiet voice, he had no interest in the scavs gathered in Central Park. He didn't care one bit about punishing the wicked. He couldn't give a damn for doing the right thing.
All he had was an agenda – whatever the hell it was – and Hiawatha could see, burning bright in his third eye, that this man would do anything to get what he wanted. He would lie about an abducted family, just to make a crowd of allies empathise with his anger. He would slaughter his way through as many hostages as it took, to show them they didn't need to fear the Choirboys.
He wouldn't stop until he got his way, and whilst Hiawatha couldn't bring himself to admire such apathetic selfishness, such casual manipulation, it just so happened that the Limey bastard's goals and his own were – briefly – aligned.
So he smiled, and started to clap.
And the whole crowd picked up the applause.
Later, the second goon went the same way, though his resolve left him as the stranger's question went unanswered and the knife blurred upwards towards his throat. He cried out wordlessly, gurgled, then dropped.
The fifth man in the line – the wiry one with the thick glasses, whose aura seemed to crackle with an orange edge – shouted something to the two remaining thugs. Hiawatha caught the words 'reward' and 'heaven', and could imagine the rest.
The town goons sprang forwards, rushing the scavs who held them at gunpoint, shouting and snarling as their naked flesh rippled in time to their meaty swipes. The black man with the bandages dived to the floor, hands over his head; the stranger shouted – more angry than surprised – and the scavs opened fire.
The crowd shuddered. Muzzlefire lent the whole drama a lightning-storm animation, and between freeze- flashes specks of blood appeared across the faces of the crowd.
When it was over, when the gun smoke cleared and the scavs were cooling-off and the crowd was in uproar, four naked goons lay bleeding on the stage, and the rat-like bastard with the sunglasses was gone, pushing his way through the recoiling crowd, through trees and undergrowth, shouting and laughing all the way.
The stranger swore. Loudly.
The crowd swore with him.
By four in the morning it was no longer a crowd. It was an army.
It was a tired cliche, but that didn't make it inaccurate. As Hiawatha watched, buffeted by awe and abstraction, he could think of no better description:
It was like a tidal-wave.
The captured AV went first, followed by the smattering of vehicles the stranger had liberated from the Red Gulls. As their new de facto leader he was more than entitled to requisition them for his own ends, but a gutsy minority of the Klansmen had reacted badly to the idea of throwing-off the feudal yoke and rising-up against the tyrants, and had holed-up inside the Gulls' base to stop anyone getting in.
In the end, the stranger had had to kill pretty much all of them.
Hiawatha had stayed out of the way. It wasn't time yet. He'd sat to one side, beneath the great boughs of old, dead trees, and listened to the spirit-voices whispering mournfully inside them. As the first fires started burning deep inside the Gulls' lair, he had taken the stick of blacking-paint from the bottom of his pack, and began to slowly mark his face, chanting quietly to himself, feeling the silver needle in his pocket chiming-along with his words.
Afterwards, when the armouries were opened and their bounties distributed, the crowd didn't wait for the dawn. It was like a crusade; a great wedge of people, shifting together along empty streets, swelling as they went. A magnetic pull.
And on the edge of the city, in Hell's Kitchen, squished up against the black waters of the East River, they faced the United Nations building, and advanced.
He – the stranger, the man whose name no one had bothered to ask – went first. It was all deeply medieval. All deeply mythic. But as the crowd roared as one and the vehicles gunned their engines and the guards inside the compound shouted and shit themselves, it felt right.
The AV ploughed through the main gates of the UN headquarters like a harpoon through whale meat, bullets rattling off its sides; slivers of shredded steel and tangled barbed-wire thrashing in its wake. Even as it sat steaming in the forecourt, dents opening-up across it, the Clergymen in the guard-nest were realising their mistake. Betraying their positions in the darkness with tapered candles of muzzle-fire.
The second wave of vehicles thundered through, guns firing. Sandbag-packed nests ruptured, grenades tumbled from heavy-launchers and choked out red-black plumes of soot and smoke and people dying. Somewhere up on the roof of the Secretariat a heavy auto opened fire – thundering its payload down into the crowd – but at such a range and in such darkness its accuracy was far from perfect, and the spooky trails of tracer-fire stitched themselves neatly through panicky Clergymen as evenly as rioting scavs. Eventually someone had the presence of mind to order the ceasefire, and the artillery fell silent.
In odd corners, fires took hold. Sparks billowed and roiled, and beckoned with tongues of white light at the crowds waiting in the shadows, eyes gleaming. It was like an invitation.
The horde swarmed from the streets, in every hand a weapon, in every mouth a scream, and everything went straight to hell. Gunfire above grenade-blasts above human roars above dying screams above engine purrs and the horrified gasps of unprepared Clergymen.
Cy had forewarned them, maybe. But still. But still.
Yeah, Hiawatha thought. Just like a tidal wave.
It surged and boiled, fuelled by years of bottled anger. It lapped against the walls of the compound and spun in eddies of violence. Whirlpools with isolated Choirboys at their centres, screaming out as the mob circled and slashed and shot. It frothed at its edges; the glowing foam of muzzleflash and the warm spume of impact-craters, spitting dust and mortar and blood.
The AV gave up the ghost in a spectacular fireball, fuel-tanks finally punctured, hefting itself in warped fragments off the crowd to spin lazily in the air; but by then the crew were well clear, and its messy end served only as a distraction to the true violence, close and personal and vicious. In dark corners men and women pushed blunt blades into robed sides, struggled muzzle-to-muzzle to bring poorly-tended pistols to bear on the thugs who had terrorised their worlds, beat and battered with crowbars and tyre-irons at the tattooed faces of the pious pricks.
'Where are they?' They screamed. 'Where are the fucking children?'
Not much of a battle cry, but it worked.
Hiawatha stayed at the rear. Oh, not through cowardice – the spiralling dreamhaze had done away with that – and he lent his aid where he could; firing with a calm accuracy into Clergy lines where the other scavs hooted and panicked, picking-off stragglers in their grey robes with a savage sort of joy. He felt like all the Sachems stared through his eyes, and laughed and giggled and passed-around the beers with each new kill. The Haudenosaunee, it would be fair to say, did not much like the Clergy.
But no, no, that wasn't his major role, here. He worked his way carefully along the edges of the melee, eyes darting, dreamsenses spinning; seeking out the stranger.
'Almost time, now…' the wind said, hot with the breath of fuel-fires and roasting skin. 'Almost time.'
The purple cloud ran like a thread through the crowd, and Hiawatha realised with a start that the stranger had snuck away. He'd got what he wanted, access to this barbed-wire compound, and had left behind the agents of his aid the instant they'd ceased to be of any use. It was cold and brutal and logical, but it had worked.
The trail led into the Secretariat.
Hiawatha skidded on blood, marvelling deep-down at the raw apathy of a man who could bring about such wanton violence in the sole pursuit of… of what?
He stepped into the gloomy building, and went to meet his destiny.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I couldn't help smiling. The heat coming up from the fires, the smell of unpleasant things cooking, the acid
