The Witch's Eye (4 page)

Fifty
Gorgoloth.  Fuck.

He lowered himself back
down and propped his feet against a jutting stone.  He had to think. 

The dim ice-yellow glow
of the rising sun melted the mists.  He saw the extent of carnage in the marshy fields below.  Ronan stayed in that position, listening to the Gorgoloth and the sobs of prisoners. 

The sunrise was beautiful.  He
’d seen many in his life, and they never ceased to amaze him.  They were one of the few things of pure beauty left in the world.

After a few minutes
he’d come up with a plan to free Maur.  It wasn’t a terribly
good
plan, but it would have to do.

TWO

BREED

Cross walked through a land of ice and blood.

The Carrion Rift was a damp and hellish place.  Its lower cliff walls were a maze of walkways, stone platforms and sloped outcroppings that protruded from the cliff on either side of the half-mile wide chasm.  Beneath him waited curling black smoke and the distant roar of churning waters, dark silhouettes of wild Razorwings and the echoing calls of subterranean creatures.  He looked up and saw jagged rocks and broken cliffs of salt-encrusted granite and blood quartz.  Rancid mist flowed down the stone.  The rift walls over his head were devoid of paths, and he’d have to figure out how to continue once he got that far.

If
I get that far.

Cross made his ascent sometimes by walking, sometimes by climbing.  Loose shale crumbled beneath his feet and pitched into the
open void.  The dank wind smelled of meat and boiling tar, and the calls of alien birds and distant predators echoed up from the cavernous depths. 

The
uneven ledge he walked on was littered with ossified bones, fish skeletons and elk antlers.  The air was colder than the inside of a tomb.  He tried to see the top of the Rift, but its height was dizzying, and the longer he looked the more the plane edges of the canyon walls seemed to draw together, like they were closing in.  Spirals of frosted stone and lenses of ice lay embedded in the frozen rock.  Sometimes the ledges turned into paths that led to cave networks or massive fissures in the wall, bowls of earth that further split into channels of rime ice, glacial clefts, and petrified waterfalls. 

Cross
moved slowly.  In the Whisperlands he’d been young again, and his body never tired.  He could walk a hundred miles and feel little fatigue, and he could recuperate from injuries at an accelerated pace.  Here…

H
ere I’m…
me
again.  Just an
older
me.

Even though he hardly remembered any of it, h
e’d been Red’s prisoner for almost twenty years.  Somehow his body was still in decent physical shape, but there was no question he’d aged, even though he’d only started to feel the effects since he’d escaped through the Shadow Lord’s portal. 

His back and legs ached from hours
of walking up slopes and traversing the cliff face.  He had no food, and what little water he found trickling down the sides of the Rift was stained with sediment, so he only dared drink scant quantities.  His insides felt twisted and raw, and his skin was covered with cold grime.  So much dirt was caked to his flesh he thought it would never come off.  His clothes were tattered and ragged, and the only piece of equipment he had with him was his blade.  It was a fused amalgam of two arcane swords, one black and one white.  Avenger and Soulrazor, bound into one.  The weapon gave him strength, and at times even granted him near magical abilities.

But only when it
wants to,
he thought bitterly. 

He climbed.  His thoughts weighed him, as did the near silence. 
He’d lost twenty years of his life.  He had no idea where his team was, or if they were even still alive. 

H
e didn’t even have his spirit.  He was alone.

Ever since he
’d caught a deadly fever at the age of ten, Cross had been in the company of his arcane spirit.  Her voice, her proximity, had been a constant in his life.  He’s grown with her, a part of her, and she a part of him.  Losing her had been like losing a piece of himself, and even though Margrave had been nothing more than a false substitute, she’d still been a presence.  It had been like living a beautiful lie.

Now
it’s just me
.

Sometimes he
talked to himself while he walked.  He made observations about the pale lizards on the rocks or the number of wriggling ice worms that dropped out of holes in the canyon walls, just so he could hear a voice.  The solitude was unnerving.  When he wasn’t talking all he heard was the wind, and the haunting echoes of the Rift.

H
e had to stop and still his shaking nerves.  His gums ached and his hands clenched.  He’d suffered withdrawal from magic before, but this felt different…worse.  He yearned to touch his spirit.  His eyes watered, and his spine ached.  Every inch of his body was wracked with need.

Only the thought of Danica kept him going.  She was in the spider
’s clutches – the spider who’d manipulated him.  Once, Cross had imagined the creature was fate intervening, an oracle or a guide who kept him on the right path.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.

For in reality t
he spider was a malign entity called Azradayne.  Cross had no idea where it came from or what its ultimate goal was, but he believed it had changed the trajectory of his life to alter the course of human history.  In the Whisperlands Cross had seen possibilities in the spider’s eyes, different versions of himself dangling from the threads of fate.  Azradayne had seen them, too, long before he had.  Her vision ran far and deep. 

You used me to get Danica
, he thought.
  Something happened to her, someone
changed
her, and that was what you wanted.  You wanted her transformed, and you wanted her delivered right to you.

And manipulating Cross had made it happen.

He climbed.  In his mind’s eye he saw Danica, snatched by the spider.  He saw Snow, burning on the train.

Cross navigated steep paths of dark rock and crossed mounds of bleached bone.  The air was leaden with the scent of smelted iron and sulfur.  Caustic fumes burned his eyes.  His shins ached like they’d been pelted with a club, and his throat and sinuses turned gritty with ice dust. 

The
path widened.  He jumped over pools of black brine and moved around once massive animal skulls time had worn down to brittle and crumbling shells. 

He felt eyes on him. 

Cross checked the weapon strapped to his back.  He still wasn’t comfortable with the hand-and-a-half sword’s weight, but whenever he had to fight the blade somehow filled him with ability, and the need to use it.  It bothered him that the weapon seemed to use
him
more than he used
it
, but it was better than being left defenseless, especially since he seemed to be the only person capable of yielding the artifact.

The path
came to an end on a flat platform adjacent to an enormous cave. He’d have to venture inside to find the way to keep ascending the walls.

The
cave was wide and dimly lit.  Lenses of ice in the limestone refracted the dim crimson light.  Dozens of smaller caves littered the uneven walls like gaping mouths. Cross saw crude ladders and scaffolding made of wood and bone.

Someone lives here.

Large mounds of ice-salt and crusts of black snow covered the floor. Strings of wire and bone rattled in the wind.  The air in the cave was raw and cold.  Cross’s breaths frosted, and his fingers ached from the chill.   

He felt
a presence in the cave, something waiting in the shadows.  Cross looked back and thought about the path he’d taken to reach that point in the Rift, but he couldn’t think of any spot where there’d been a different route he could have taken.

The only way
up is through here. 
 

He thought about Danica.  She was counting on him. 

Cross moved deeper into the cave.

He pulled his armor coat tight and
breathed into his hands.  The soles of his shoes had worn down to almost nothing, so he watched his step as he crossed a floor sheeted in ice.  Dark bones were frozen inside the walls, ancient and twisted things, reptilian and monstrous, massive jaws and talons, bone carapace tails and shattered limbs.  These creatures had been blasted apart, their remains petrified.  The air tasted pungent, like oil and decay.

The
smaller caves loomed overhead in the still grey air.  Thin lines of silken cobwebs drifted in the frigid breeze.  He watched the holes, and felt himself watched in return.

Something moved
up ahead, a scurrying beyond the mounds of dark sand and charred bones.  He heard a tapping, like light feet.  He tensed his fingers, thought about drawing his blade, and decided against it.  He willed his spirit to move ahead and scout the area, and remembered with a heavy heart she no longer existed.

He heard w
hispers.  Not a spirit’s whispers – actual whispers, hushed voices in the still air, something hidden in the folds of cave shadow.

A
net fell over him from out of nowhere.  It had been camouflaged, a translucent shred of wire and bone, webbing so razor-thin that even when it came down he barely saw it.  The strands pulled tight.  Blood sluiced from his hands as he tried to protect his face. 

He saw
movement from the corner of his eye.  He tore open skin as he reached for the hilt of his blade.  Cross heard the crack of a whip.  Sharp pain lashed around his ankles and folded his feet together.  He fell and landed hard on the floor. 

Ignoring the pain, h
e opened his scabbard, freed the sword-edge and sawed his way out.  It was an awkward position – the blade was still behind his back, and he winced as the double-edged weapon cut into him, but in moments he was free.

A
woman came out of the shadows.  She was covered in grease and silt, a crude camouflage of silver sand and black mud, and she wore a loincloth and loose top made from some sort of animal hide.  Her eyes were pale, and her hair had been darkened with oil and secured back with bone fetishes and twine. 

Cross only barely deflected
her barbed spear in time.  He grabbed her sandaled foot with one hand as she kicked at him and threw her onto her back.  Her skin was numbingly cold.

Another woman came at him
.  This one had white-blonde hair and blue and black runes painted on her face.  And then another, a black woman whose hair was a mass of tangles and whose eyes glowed sapphire green.  He raised his blade and knocked aside a crude stone hammer, but the impact jarred his elbow.  Rock-hard fists smashed into his jaw.  Blood spurted from his mouth, and his brain ached in his skull. 

Cross fell.  The first woman rose and kicked him in the chest, and the black woman came down on top of him
and wrestled his arms behind his back.  Cross roared, bleeding everywhere, and threw her to the ground.  Another woman tackled his legs from behind.  He pitched forward and fell onto his face.  His blade went flying, and he cried out as a sandaled foot ground his hand against the stone.

“Get off
me, bitch!” he yelled, and he tried to push backwards, but the blonde woman brought the hammer down on his head.  He felt blinding pain, and then nothing.

He woke in the sky.

Cross rolled
over and accidentally tipped the bone cage, which dangled at the end of an old rope attached to a massive pole jutting from the wall.  His naked and scarred skin was blue and cold. 

He felt weightless.  Smoky mist curled
beneath him like an iron sea, barely concealing the cave floor a hundred feet below.  Dark cave mouths peppered the walls.  The wind froze him to his joints, making him shiver so hard his teeth rattled.

T
he blonde woman stood in an elevated cave next to the pole.  She used a long staff to jab at his ribs, and the strike sent a wave of pain that doubled him over and caused the cage to shake violently.  The bones creaked and stressed beneath his weight.  Cross sensed the emptiness below him.  He readied himself for the fall, knowing that at any moment he’d plummet and be smashed to a bloody pulp. 

“Ok…” he said
.  He put his hands up in surrender.  He remembered he was naked, but didn’t care.  His skin was raw and slick with ice crystals, and he could barely speak or keep still.  Every inch of his body was weak, frozen and sore.  “Ok,” he said again through chattering teeth.  “Just tell me…what you want…”

The woman smiled.  He wasn
’t sure if she could understand him. 

I
’m not sure if she’s even
human
.