The Witch's Eye (8 page)

The walk
across the dead beach to the bottom of those stone steps seemed to take a lifetime.  His katana weighed heavy on his back, and he’d smelled dead fish and fused metals.  He’d heard distant music, tinny and mournful, like a funeral march. 

He
saw his reflection in a pool of water on the beach, dank red liquid that looked like rust.  The face staring back at him was that of a thin boy with unruly black hair and large eyes, who wore ill-fitting leather armor and a sword that jutted out from the scabbard on his back.

Ronan looked at himself, and for the first time in his life he
felt lost.  He saw death in his visage, death in the form of a pale and skinny boy.  He had the blood of countless lives on his hands.  Nothing Ronan had ever seen had ever shaken him like the sight of himself looking so dead and withered.  He was less alive than any of his victims: more a corpse than anyone he’d ever killed.

Ronan
knew the other boy was there, up in that shrine, and that he’d been given instructions to kill whoever came for him.  The two best pupils from their group were about to determine which would become a full initiate, the next graduate from their grisly class. 

He
had no love for the blonde boy – he didn’t even know his name.  They’d competed, had even fought, but always in controlled circumstances.  In spite of the other boy’s abilities Ronan had always known he could best him in one-on-one combat.  He had no doubt of that.

Ronan
left without taking his final test.  He fled across the wastelands.  At the time, he wasn’t really sure why. 

He spent the next decade in a haze of motion, blood and sex.  He chose a name and then changed it several times, dodged in and out of free city-states and border towns, passed through criminal ports and joined roving gangs.  He hired himself out as a thug, killer and mercenary, robbed and killed and dueled, protected and rescued, executed and defended.  His skills with a blade and for survival were rare, and he quickly found there was money to be had almost anywhere he pursued it.

Ronan
didn’t stop killing, and had no desire to.  It was the only thing he knew.  He sometimes lamented the loss of his soul, but he saw no reason to change.  He’d been trained so long in the art of taking life it had become the core of his existence.  That he felt a pang of regret knowing he could have been something else was strange.  He wished the nagging thought would go away, but it hung there at the back of his mind like a parasite. 

He had to deal with Crimson Triangle bounty hunters several times
over the next few years: the mages hadn’t wanted to let their commodity slip away, not after they’d invested so much time and effort into creating such a valuable asset. 

Eventually they sent the other boy to kill him,
the blonde boy, just as Ronan knew they would.  Of course he was a boy no longer by that point – he was a man when he and Ronan met again, tall and lean and handsome, but with those same empty eyes, the same shell of humanity stretched around his hollow soul. 

The assassin caught up with Ronan in a dive in Kalakkaii, and they d
id battle in a back alley.  They fought a vicious fight, an inevitable confrontation delayed by a decade.

I could
have killed you
, Ronan thought when they were done. 

But he di
dn’t.  He let the boy live, yet again.  He didn’t understand why.

Un
til now.

Ronan wandered Voth Ra’morg’s streets through the dead of night.  The burned stench of bodies and the caw of carrion birds filled the air.  Night smoke curled off the ground, and thick stars burned in the dead sky.  Everything felt cold, empty and vast.  Standing in that forlorn city, Ronan felt as alone as he ever had in his life.

I let you live
, he thought. 
Not once, but twice, because I wanted to believe we held some kind of kinship.  You and me.  Brothers. 

Killing you would have been like killing myself.

He looked back at the warehouse where Maur and Jade and the survivors waited.  He wanted to get Maur to safety.  That kinship he’d once felt for the blonde boy had spilled over to the team, the only people he cared about.

I
’m not ready to die yet.

Reluctantly, Ronan walked back to the warehouse.

FOUR

ASCENT

The Rift glowed red in the dawn light.  Grease ice and broken slate crumbled beneath Cross’s grip as he climbed.  The ledges and walkways were connected by a shambling web of stone stairs and ancient steel cables that seemed to moor the canyon walls together like drifting ships.  Scores of caves marked the way, their outer orbits cratered and flaking. 

Cross
had climbed for nearly a day after he’d dispatched the savage women.  He’d found scraps of leather armor, a second blade, and an old Colt .45 that was barely in working condition.  Bits of frozen meat and edible leaves had given him some sustenance, though he remained wary of the water in the canteen he’d found, as the liquid smelled like sulfur and salt. 

The
walk up the steep path went by in a haze.  There was no question he’d been drugged, and the aftereffects of whatever narcotic they’d forced into his system still lingered.  There were times when the vertigo and dizziness were too much, and he had to stop and steady himself.  Sometimes he felt like he was moving even when he stood perfectly still. 

The
Rift was impossibly deep.  If he fell, he’d die against the jagged blood rock walls well before he ever reached the bottom, if indeed there
was
a bottom.  All he saw was a flat and dismal void filled with iron smoke and shadows the color of deep water.  Looking down into that gulf was like gazing into a night sky, and there were times when Cross flattened himself against the wall and almost felt like he was lying on his back, trapped on a plane between opposing nowheres. 

You won’t get anywhere like this.  You have
to keep moving. 

Thick clouds covered the sky
.  The air pressed down on him as he made his ascent.  Pockets of blue mist shifted across the void below, and the longer he looked into it, the deeper it became.

His
muscles ached with fatigue, but he pressed on, careful not to push himself too hard, but unwilling to stop.  He was afraid if he did he’d never be able to start moving again, that his body would betray him and he’d hang there at the edge of oblivion, frozen to the wall like an aged and forgotten bat.

He thought of Danica.  He thought of Snow.  There was no telling how m
uch time he’d lost in that cave as a slave to those feral women. 

He climbed through curtains of curled green and black smoke.  Crumbling limestone fell into his hair and
on his skin.  He became an ash silhouette. 

Cross
avoided the caves wherever possible.  He didn’t want to risk running into more of the Carrion Rift’s denizens.  The most horrid things – the tentacled beasts, the shadow nightmares, the twisted mutations they talked about in the stories – must have dwelt deeper down, but he still didn’t want to take any chances. 

Growls and dissonant echoes floated
on the dank and lifeless wind.  Day-burning stars shone through rips in the smoke overhead.  Patches of ice appeared underfoot.  He followed a path that had been crudely cut long ago so creatures could ascend the rock face.

The
atmosphere was raw and bloody.  He tasted oxidized metal and heat, likely the result of toxic fumes spilling down from above.  He waited for his spirit to wrap around him and mask him from the poison, and when she didn’t it took him a moment to remember she was gone. 

Everything grew darker.  Broken r
ays of light fell like shattered raindrops.  The ledge he followed came to a sudden end, so Cross hoisted himself up onto another.  Tiny shards of stone painfully pushed under his fingernails as he climbed.  One of his pant legs tore open at the knee and exposed a bloody scrape. 

Cross
put his back against the wall and caught his breath.  He worried about inhaling too much of the foul-smelling air. 

If I make it out of here, the first thing I need to do is find a healer. 
Maybe Ash can fix me up.

The steady Rift winds felt strangely soothing
.  He hadn’t realized how long he’d been climbing without a break.  His skin was cold and covered with rock grime. 

The ledge was barely big enough
for him to stand on.  If something happened and it crumbled – the cracking sound the Rift constantly made did little to instill him with confidence – he had little hope of grabbing hold before he plummeted to his death. 

Cross
bowed his head and closed his eyes.  He tried not to think about how much further he had to go. 

Your choices are to keep going until you make it out of here, or to give up now.

He shuddered. His throat tightened at memories of Snow, who was buried down there in the Rift. 

H
e didn’t want to die.  It wasn’t easy: sleep pulled at him, and the thought of closing his eyes and never opening them again was more appealing than he would ever dare admit. 

Cross grit his teeth and
smacked his palms against his face.  The new ledge he’d climbed onto offered no more choices than the path below.  There was no direction for him to go but up. 

His eyes scanned
the chasm.  Icy wind scarred his skin as he searched for a handhold so he could keep ascending.  He pondered the notion of backtracking until he found another path, some other ledge he should’ve used but hadn’t, some other trail through the web of salted stone and frozen rock. 

What h
e saw instead was an ancient and rusted ladder bolted into the canyon wall.  The ladder was made from a combination of thick wire mesh and bendable rebar plate, and it ran for hundreds of feet straight up into drifts of red smoke.  A piece of dark metal, its inscription long burned away by acid and time, was set in the rock at the base of the ladder, right at Cross’s eye-level…on the
other
side of the Rift, at least five-hundred feet away. 

Shit
.

He looked around, desperate.  There had to be a
way to get across.  A handful of wires stretched across the chasm beneath him – thin cables that moored the Rift walls together, ancient and gnarly tethers that must have once been used to support pulleys used by Southern Claw excavation teams who’d searched the Carrion Rift for precious minerals or magic.  Those expeditions had all ended in disaster…but the fact that he’d found signs of the cables meant he was closer to the top than he’d thought.

I
’m almost there.  Almost free. 

He didn
’t want to backtrack, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice.  The thought of climbing back down filled him with dread.  He knew the descent to the cables would only take him an hour or so, but going down meant staring straight into the void. 

The wind sang.  He
’d heard tales of early Rift explorers.  At least a handful of men from every crew went plunging into the Rift, and not always because of an accident, but because their eyes and minds became lost.  They heard the songs in the wind, dark siren calls that enticed them to leap down like sailors jumping into an empty sea. 

Even if those stories weren
’t true, scores of explorers and workers had died from natural accidents and wound up in the deep canyon floor.  It was impossible to know how many dead lay at the bottom of the Rift.

Cross steadied himself.  He shook his head, and started the climb down.  Immediately his fingers burned from the pressure.  He was more exhausted than he
’d thought.  His muscles shook.  He hesitated, took a breath, kept going.  Ice cracked and shifted.  Cold sweat dripped down his face.

He felt the air beneath hi
s body as he scaled down the rock ledge.  Cross carefully pushed himself against the wall as soon as his feet were back on the rough path he’d walked before.

The trip down didn
’t take as long as he’d feared it would.  Most of the time was spent on the steep path, and while he had to take extra care to secure handholds in case his feet slipped on the ice, Cross moved with decent speed.  It helped that the wind came crossways and didn’t interfere too much with his momentum. 

His arcane blade clanged against his new weapon, the dead man
’s squat and ugly red-metal sword.  He felt the old .45 at the back of his waistline.  Weapons wouldn’t do any good against the fall, but he felt eyes on him.  Something watched him from within the caves, and as Cross approached the stretch of cables a chill ran up his spine.  Even then, he felt sprightly by the time he finished the descent.  Aching and exhausted though he was, he was renewed by a sense of hope.

Cross drew as close to the cables as he could
.  Short of jumping down, he found he had to take a circuitous route to get close enough to reach the lines.  He wound up on a stone ledge about four or five feet
below
a pair of the ancient cables, which ran straight into the crumbling limestone like puncture wounds.  Drilled holes in the rock leaked oil and rust.  The lines were frayed and partially corroded.