Blood Skies (16 page)

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Authors: Steven Montano

BOOK: Blood Skies
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Cross looked, read, stored, and recalled. He had no idea how much time passed, as it blurred while diagrams and lines and encrypted layers of meaning spun through his mind.
Finally, he saw an answer.
It was a map.
This isn’t a crypt at all
, he thought.
It’s a message. She came here to learn something. That map in Thornn had told her how to get here, to find the second map. She came to gather information that the Old One had left behind for when he
wanted
someone to find him.
Red had come to find her way to Koth, the Necropolis. A place of legend and whispered terror. A city that even the mighty vampires of the Ebon Cities feared and despised. It was bane to humans and vampires alike, a black city of outcasts and evil forces controlled by the Old One, who plotted and schemed in order to further his own nefarious agenda.
That was where Red was going, and now Cross knew how to find it.

 

 

 

 

 

PART THREE
SHADOWS

 

 

 

 

 

He walks in the cold shadow of the mountain.
He wears the same clothes as he had back in the physical world, but instead of being filthy with blood they are filthy with brine. He sinks ankle deep into thick pools of salty bog made grey with sediment.
He makes his way to an island of dry ground. The boundary between the land and the water is marked by a thin vein of silver mist. The air is cold and still, and every splash of his boots echoes like thunder. The water is bordered by thick trees so tall and dark they seem like walls. Thick leaves heavy with moisture drift down from indeterminate heights and fall lazily to the ground.
The mountain looms above him. It is so large it is nearly impossible to see anything else. It looms overhead like a giant, replacing the sky.
Ice shards float past his feet. The riverbed is uneven, for it alternates between deep pools and shallow runs of silt and sediment. His feet find dry ground and he steps out of the cold flow, through mist that feels electric as it runs over his legs. He hears something faint in the distance, a mournful song. There are eyes on him, watching from somewhere in the darkness of the trees.
A white spider scuttles across the back of his hand.
He knows she is there, trapped in a prison of smoke and rain. The demonic whinnies of black steeds echo through the trees, and the brimstone stench of their tainted sweat carries on the hard wind. Voices come and fade. He walks through thick clouds of forest steam and arcane frost.
Black leaves fly through the air and gang together in flight like flocks of ravens. He hears her screams in the wind. He feels her pain press against him like a shower of glass shards.
I’ll find you
, he promises, even as the world bleeds away.
I’ll find you.

 

 

 

 

 

ELEVEN
WOUNDS

 

 

They walked beneath a blue-black sky that looked like a vast and seeping bruise. It felt like it might rain, but they all knew that wouldn’t happen. It hadn’t rained much After The Black.
They walked across drifts of hard red clay and fine white dust. The air was cold and bone dry, and it tasted of salt even though they were far from any sea.
They rested only sparingly. They made cold camps and feasted exclusively on MREs, which tasted like wet paper.
Cross slept as he walked, or at least he came close. His entire body was sore, but thankfully, even with the continued march, his ribs had healed considerably, and the dizziness that had earlier plagued his every step had faded. He had a minor concussion, he concluded, at worst.
But the pain of his loss was greater, and it hurt deeper than any physical wound he could ever sustain. Cross’ nerves were on edge, and he was anxious to the point of nausea. On top of that, his temperature was high and he suffered bouts of extreme chill, so he’d probably contracted a fever.
He tried not to think about which loss was worse. Thinking about Snow sent chills through his stomach and down his spine. He tried to push the images of her young face from his mind, his memories of her as a young girl, which was who she was to him, and who she’d always be. Every time he thought of her face, he saw Red standing beside her, drowning her with dark magic and pain.
The loss of his spirit was more physically painful, and in its own right just as bad. He suffered withdrawal at her loss, plain and simple. His spirit was gone, and he’d never before been without her. It was like losing a part of his self. He felt incomplete, and hollow. A void grew at his core.
He, Graves and Stone marched towards Dirge, a borderland outpost and armistice town controlled by the Ebon Cities that stood west of Thornn and north of the Wormwood. It was directly en route to Red’s destination, at least so far as Cross’ crudely translated map indicated. Cross had determined that she was bound for the Carrion Rift, a vast canyon filled with the remains of the tens of thousands slaughtered by the Grim Father’s vampire legions in the early days after The Black. It was Cross’ guess that Koth, the necropolis ruled by the vampire outcast called the Old One, was there. It was the Old One that Red intended to give her information to; he was the one she planned to hand the key to destroying what was left of humankind.
It was midmorning, but they’d only been walking for a couple of hours. The three of them had originally been air-dropped northeast of the Wormwood, and they’d entered the haunted forest on foot, since the Wormwood was far too hazardous for them use mounts in it. Even pack animals were out of the question.
The airship, unfortunately, was not an option for getting to Dirge.
They’d come across its smoking remains just outside of the Wormwood. The pilot’s bodies had been flayed and their bones burned. Nothing was left now but timber. The vampires had hit it hard and fast. Eventually, someone would ask questions back in Thornn when the ship didn’t return, but that would take some time…several days, at the very least, and it wasn’t like the remnants of Viper Squad could expect any backup. Squads had been deployed far and wide in search of Red, and many of the Southern Claw’s most elite hunters and soldiers had perished during searches in the vampire-controlled wilds of the Wolfland, the harsh tundra of the Bone March, the trap-filled Razortooth Hills, and the barbaric winter lands called the Reach. Cross had known members from many of the doomed Squads. Others, like Renaad, he learned of later.
There was, quite literally, no one left to be deployed without leaving the major cities of the Southern Claw almost entirely unguarded, a potentially lethal option to all of the cities, but particularly to Thornn, given the hordes of Gorgoloth that waited perched to strike at it from the Reach. And the Gorgoloth weren’t even the biggest threat – the Rath battalion staged at the Bonespire west of Thornn constantly waited for the city’s defenses to suffer, and the dark tower housed a formidable array of Shadowclaws, blood wings, razor golems and bone-blade shock troops, a force that could do horrendous damage if they were to gain an advantage against one of the most populated human city-states left in the world. The Southern Claw Alliance would live on, but the loss of Thornn would be difficult to recover from.
“
Are you up for this?” Graves asked him. Cross got the impression Graves had already asked him that question at least once, and he just hadn’t heard him. He drifted in and out of awareness. When he was alert, he felt pain. He wasn’t sure how much more he could handle.
“
Yes,” Cross said after a considerable pause. “I just…I feel…”
“
You look like Hell,” Graves said when Cross didn’t finish his sentence. “I can only imagine how you feel.”
“
No,” Cross said, aware of how weak his voice sounded. “No. You can’t.”
“
Let’s pick up the pace,” Stone said from ahead of them. “I want to make Dirge before nightfall. The last thing we need is to spend another night outdoors. Pick up your feet and move, Cross.”
“
You’re all heart, Stone,” Graves said. Stone gave him a look. Morg would have laid Graves out for that. Cross was glad Stone wasn’t quite so aggressive. In fact, Stone was actually pretty quiet, though when he did say something it was usually something unfriendly.
There were dead trees in the distance, and the low and jagged hills seemed to circle the three of them like predators. The deep red sun fell fast behind a thick flotilla of iron clouds. The temperature continued to drop, but they kept walking. Cross wasn’t sure how he managed to maintain the pace.
“
She’s gone,” he said after a time.
“
What?”
“
She’s gone, Sam. Snow…my spirit. Both of them. I didn’t think it could happen.”
They walked in silence again. A wolf howled in the distance, and the sound echoed with bloodcurdling resonance through the menstrual sky.
“
How…” Graves didn’t seem to know what to ask.
“
Is it...is it always like this, for you?” Cross asked. “This…quiet?”
“
I don’t understand.”
“
I’m used to hearing her. My spirit, I mean. I’m used to hearing her voice, her whispers. The spirits, they…they don’t really say anything, but they’re
there
. Always. And I feel her…felt her, I mean…wrapped around me, like a shroud. I’m cold now. And it’s so quiet.”
Graves didn’t say anything.
Cross had no way of knowing if he would ever have her back. He’d never heard of a warlock or witch who’d lost their spirit in the first place. The two were supposed to be inextricably linked, a joining of souls, tied together by an invisible and unbreakable bond. Killing one meant killing the other, or so Cross had always believed.
I was wrong. That, or I actually am dead. I
feel
dead.
It bothered him that he was focused more on the loss of his spirit than that of Snow. Maybe it was easier that way…after all, losing his spirit seemed like
his
pain. Snow, for all he knew, could have been suffering horribly at that very moment.
Stop thinking that. It doesn’t help.
He knew that Graves was keeping an eye on him, probably to make sure he didn’t pass out. Cross walked in a zombie state. His mind didn’t process the act of moving, nor was he really aware of what was around him. He was used to being able to send his spirit out, to feel his surroundings, to search for what was there and what wasn’t, and that act was as natural to him as breathing. He felt blind now. Empty and alone.
Near sunset they stopped at the top of a hill with a cave filled with heaps of animal bones. Mounds of dry red dust stood to either side of a crudely dug path that led away from the hill and into some dead plains. The path ran like a crooked river to the edge of the small city of Dirge.
Dirge was a squat and ugly town, a shell of haphazard buildings made of brick, clay, steel and timber. It was surrounded by a fifty-foot-tall wall of corrugated black iron held together with rivets cast from hexed steel. The parapets of the city were manned by masked sentries armed with crossbows and assault rifles. Thick streams of black smoke churned from Dirge’s smithies and factories, and near the center of the city stood a black stone tower eighty-foot high whose apex was set with a circle of black barbs that formed the semblance of a crown. The sounds of industry churned from within the unforgiving city walls. The gates were made of black steel and surrounded by a defensive perimeter of sandbags and caltrops.
“
God, I hate this place,” Graves muttered.
“
I haven’t had the pleasure,” Cross said. Even looking at Dirge filled him with a sick sense of foreboding. Normally he would have interpreted such a feeling as a warning sent by his spirit.
“
OK, let’s lay some ground rules,” Stone said quietly. “This is an armistice town, so vampires are as welcome here as humans. Humans are only allowed if they aren’t associated with the Southern Claw.”
“
Okay,” Cross said. “So how do we explain where our equipment came from?”
“
Mercs and hunters use Southern Claw equipment all the time,” Graves shrugged. “It’s the best stuff on the black market.”
“
So we bought it, we stole it, or we traded for it,” Stone added. “But we need to keep the specialty items hidden. Hex grenades, arcane salts, those gauntlets of yours…anything on us fancier than a gun is going to raise eyebrows.”
Luckily, their dark fatigues and armor didn’t bear any insignias of the Southern Claw, and the design was standard enough issue that it would be easy to pass the three of them off as mercenaries. They stowed Cross’ more unusual gear: the grenades and the salts, the alchemy tubes, the entropy stones, all of his gauntlets, the wires and battery packs, the arcane fuses. They hid this contraband inside of thick blankets, coats and other bulky items they carried with them. They decided to keep Winter’s oversized battery pack on hand, which they would claim they scavenged in the wilderness. With even a decent trade for the battery they’d be able to restock their ammunition and acquire extra supplies for the arduous trek north. To pursue Red, they had to drive straight through the heart of the Bone March.

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