Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (13 page)

Ever the diplomat
, she thought.  She left them to it – Ankharra had things well in hand.  Danica walked off alone, closer to the edge of the ship’s giant shadow.  She smelled the burning air and heard the thrum of the heat haze.  Insects swarmed low to the red-brown earth.  The shimmering distance wavered like a glass image.

“
Danica.”

She turned, surprised her spirit hadn’t alarmed her to Shiv’s presence.  Cross had found the girl and her father near the Carrion Rift, prisoners to a slave trading crew who had no idea as to her potential.  Even Cross himself hadn’t been sure, not at first.  Not a witch herself, Shiv could awaken the latent arcane potential in others, even non-humans, and that made her incredibly dangerous even though she couldn’t have been a day over eleven. 

Her lanky brown hair hung down just past her chin, and her big green eyes were reflective and bright.  The girl’s face seemed perpetually dirty.  She wore a simple tan shirt stained with desert grime and a loose pair of cargo pants; a bandana had been tied around her neck.  Her expression was dour, and she watched Danica with her lips tense and her hands fidgeting with the canteen at her belt.

“
They’re giving out water?” Danica asked with a nod towards the girl’s belt.

“
This one’s mine,” Shiv said after a moment.  “They said I could keep it.”

“
Good of them.”

“
I need to talk to you, Danica,” Shiv said after a moment.

“
Everyone needs to talk to me today,” Danica said, with a bit more acid in her tone than she’d intended.  “Where’s your father?  I’m surprised he isn’t with you.”  Shiv turned and pointed out Flint, who was helping sort the supplies.  A gruff man in his early fifties, Shiv’s father had thin white-grey hair and a trim beard, and a no nonsense brusqueness about him that Danica appreciated. 

“
He’s never far,” Shiv smiled.  The wind ruffled her hair.

“
What do you need?” Danica asked. 

“
You’re in danger,” she said.  Shiv’s voice was suddenly darker. 

“
What?”

“
They’re coming for you.” 

Danica felt like Shiv had whispered right into her ear even though the girl stood several feet away, and the sensation sent a chill down her spine.  Something in Shiv’s eyes seemed distant, and lost.  She wasn’t looking at Danica, not really.  Her gaze was trapped on something far away.

“Are you okay?” Danica asked.  She stepped closer.  Shiv stood rigid.  The air around her was cold even in the stifling heat, like she wore a glacial cloak. 

Shiv blinked, and looked up at her.  “What?” she said.

“Are you okay?” Danica asked.  She realized she was shaking.

Shiv looked around.  She seemed confused.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Why?”

Danica watched her carefully.  “What were you telling me just now?” she asked.

“
Nothing,” Shiv said.  “You asked me to come over here, didn’t you?”

Danica had always been good at reading people.  She’d gained the skill as a Warden in Black Scar, sniffing out lies and using her spirit to read the subtle variations in a person’s aura, to gauge their level of anxiety and fear in order to tell if they were being deceitful or not. 

Shiv was either the best damn liar she’d ever met, or else the girl was telling the truth.  Or at least thought she was.

Flint came trotting up.  Sweat basked his face.

“Everything okay?” he asked with a smile.  He looked at Shiv, then at Danica.  “She’s not giving you any trouble, is she?” he asked amiably.

“
No,” Danica said, putting up her own forced smile.  “No, of course not.”

“
You okay?” he asked.  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

What’s going on? 
She considered telling Flint what had happened, what Shiv had said to her, but thought better of it.

“
I’m fine,” she said.  “I think this heat is getting to me.”  She held up her metal arm, listened to its gears and arcane joints creak and grind in place.  “This damn thing doesn’t help.”

“
I imagine,” Flint said.  He looked at her like she’d just fallen off the crazy wagon.  “Can I get you something?” he asked.

Danica looked at Shiv.  Shiv watched her, confused. 

“I’m fine,” Danica said.  “I should get going.”  And she took her leave without another word, heading back towards the ship.

Calm down.  It’s probably nothing.  The heat playing tricks on you.  Or maybe she’s just crazy.

Danica remembered the blood pool in Lorn.  Lynch groping her body and filling her head with lies.  Dissonant echoes of the vampire nations searing through her skull.  Nightmare flashes of dead cities and flesh streets, pale vampire feasting ceremonies and the shores of a necrotic sea.

She walked in a daze, found the cliff wall and leaned against it, ignoring how hot it was to the touch.  Sweat beaded down her face and her skin flushed, and yet she felt cold inside, like she’d swallowed a ball of ice.  The shadows seemed to thicken overhead.

They’re coming for you.

You’re in danger.

Was something wrong with Shiv?  Or with
her
?  She’d spent weeks under vampire control, and before that she’d been Azradayne’s captive, that otherworldly six-armed witch who controlled the Black Circle.  The memories of what had happened during her time in Lorn were only beginning to come back to her, but her time spent with Azradayne was a black hole in her mind.  All of it, remembered or not, felt like another lifetime ago.  It had been months since the shadow Rake had transformed her into a living conduit for her own spirit, but it might as well have been years.  She still felt disconnected and unfocused, and concentrating on anything took supreme effort.  She was quicker to anger now, and she felt herself growing distant from everyone without even meaning to.

What if it isn’t Shiv?
she wondered. 
What if it’s me?  I was tapped into the vampire collective consciousness for weeks....what if I’m still there?

You’re in danger.

She heard the voice.  It wasn’t Shiv’s, but it was hauntingly familiar.

They’re coming for you.

Danica put her hand over her face and begged the voices to stop.

EIGHT

PROPHECY

They returned to camp just before sundown.  As Creasy had predicted the temperature dropped rapidly, and the smothering and intense heat quickly turned to a dry and baneful chill.  The climate might have been different, but staying alive in this desert was going to be no less daunting than surviving in the Reach.  Creasy had spent his life in the wilderness, living outside the comfortable realms preferred by people of the Southern Claw.  He’d witnessed limbs taken by frostbite and madness brought on by dehydration, had seen people die of exposure and waste away because they couldn't find food. 

             
In a way he was almost more comfortable with the notion of the coming night: cold was his element, what he’d grown up with and survived in all his life.

They can have this heat.  This shit is something I can do without.

Part of him kept hoping he’d wake up, and that the string of ill portents brought by the vision of his spirit had never come to pass. 

That was when it all started
, he realized. 
That night in Wolftown when I last saw her.  The night when Fane attacked us.

He’d lost his world that night, but it had been bound to happen sooner or later.  He should have been ready.  He’d taught himself not to grow attached, not to fall into any sense of comfort or complacency.  He and Roth and Tanya and all of the people who lived in Wolftown or Fangtown or Heartbane or any of the other hunter-trapper settlements of the eastern wilds knew they’d chosen a difficult path.  They lost people every week, sometimes every day. 

There’s no time for tears in the wastelands. 
It sounded like romanticized nonsense, but it was the truth of things.  Everyone was hurt; everyone had scars.  If you were lucky you had a
lot
of scars.  In Gorgoloth culture scars were considered a badge of honor, a proof of prowess in battle.  In Wolfland it was much the same, but the scars were evidence of durability.  They proved you could take what the world threw at you and come back for more.

We survive and suffer, or we die.  Those are the choices we face.

For Creasy it had never really been a choice at all.  He’d lost too many people, suffered too much to just give in now.  Tanya had called him stubborn, but she didn’t know the half of it.  He’d go on surviving because he wasn’t going to give the Bloodwolves or the Gorgoloth or the wastelands raiders or even the world itself the satisfaction of watching him die.  When his time inevitably came, it would be on his terms.

He, Ronan, Grail and Reza made a wide perimeter sweep of the area around the crash. 

The hills to the north formed a twisted labyrinth of sharp rocks and deep crevices.  The air smelled of wood and tar smoke, and the jagged walls in some of the deeper clefts and dry ravines resembled animal spines.  They decided against venturing too deep into that maze of asperous rock.  The shadows in the network of slopes were thick, and Creasy’s spirit detected presences there, hidden hunters confined to the shadows. 

Based on their findings, they decided they wouldn’t be traveling north.

It was going to be difficult to reach the ground west of the crash, since there seemed to be no easy means of scaling the cliffs.  The top of the canyon wall the ship leaned against was several hundred feet up.  After a bit of searching they eventually found the means to get to the top by way of a steep slope located a half-mile southwest of the crash, buried behind a cluster of sandy hills. 

The going was arduous in the heat, but Creasy used his spirit to scout ahead when they rested just inside a shallow cave about halfway up the slope.  His spirit told him that the ground up top was flat, barren and devoid of any life or cover, and nothing but another stretch of plains leading west into the blank and burning desert.

They decided to avoid that higher ground.  The effort required to make the ascent would be devastating to the band of survivors unless they could find some reason to make the trip, and until they could be sure that going south or east wasn’t a better option both Creasy and Reza determined their limited time would be better spent scouting in those directions.  Ronan offered to go to the top on his own, convinced he could use his ability to “enter the Deadlands” to give him enough stamina and drive to make a successful reconnoiter, but Creasy convinced him to hold off, at least for the time being.

Ronan was a strange man, calm and level-headed, which likely came from his being raised as an assassin.  Most everyone treated him with a great deal of fear and apprehension, and after a time Creasy started to see why.  In the wake of the slaughter at Wolftown Ronan had shown bravery and determination in helping Danica Black fulfill her mission, but now as they scouted he kept insisting on going further, not heeding the fact that prolonged exposure could be deadly or worrying about concealing their presence from potential enemies or predators.  He’d become more brazen than before, angrier. 

I can’t imagine it’s the stress of the situation
, Creasy thought. 
He’s not the sort who’d crack under pressure. 
It was something else, then, but Creasy couldn’t tell what, and so he decided he’d keep his eye on Ronan. 
From a distance.

More signs of civilization lay just a few miles to the south.  The cracked remains of the old road crossed what appeared to be a failed railway.  Sand covered the iron beams, and twisted shreds of metal protruded from the ground like rusted fingers. 

The train tracks came to a stop a few miles southwest of the crash-site, abruptly ending at the edge of a jagged ravine nearly a hundred feet deep.  Old bones and cold shadows waited in the depths, and from the age of the claw marks it appeared they’d found the lair of the Simar.

The ravine didn’t seem a logical reason to completely halt construction of either the tracks or the road, which ran south as far as the eye could see.  The Southern Claw ranger Reza deduced that whoever constructed them might have used the rift as a suitable excuse to end construction.  “There must have been a reason it ran out here,” she said.  “I wonder if there
is
something north of us that we haven’t seen yet.”

“
Maybe,” Ronan said.  “But I
guarantee
there’s something south of us.  This road came from somewhere.”  It wasn’t flawless logic, but they decided it was their best option.  Patches of the dark road were visible beneath the sand, and the construction ran like a broken ribbon into heat haze and what appeared to be more hills and possibly even the semblance of human-made structures in the distance, those shadowy towers they’d spied earlier. 

Creasy sent his spirit out.  It was risky – he’d already noted the presence of hostile arcane energies in the area, and he was worried if he sent her too far it would be difficult to maintain control – but with few options he decided it was worth the risk.