Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (28 page)

He moves past beaches of bone and bodies, their stench staining the air like garbage. Grim totems stand on the shore, stacks of skulls bound together by razorwire and tar.  The swordsman floats down channels of blood and filth.  Engorged women feed on the corpses of their young and old men dance around charnel fires.  They burn the remains of the people he’s killed, so many he can’t count them.

He’s been here for a very long time. 

The blonde boy stands next to the waters.  His stomach still bleeds and leaks snake-like coils of intestine where he took his own life rather than returning to the Crimson Triangle to admit his failure.  His eyes burrow into Ronan as he floats by on a river turned greasy with cadavers. 

I let you live
, Ronan wants to say, but he can’t speak in that place born of his sins.

Soon the blonde boy is gone.  Ronan drifts further down the channel.  Chunks of iron rail and shards of spike and steel push up from the ground.  The flow takes him between rows of corpse flesh on opposing shores.  The bodies of his victims stand at attention and watch him float by as if ready to pass judgment.  Their eyes are cold and dead and their flesh has rotted and gone sour.  Bits of earth slime and worms dangle from their corroding fingertips.  He sees women and men, adults and children.  He sees beasts and vampires and marauders, Gorgoloth and Lith.  He sees foreigners and Southern Claw, Troj and horses.

I’ve killed just about everything
, he realizes. 
It’s all I’ve ever been good at.

Sickness claws at his stomach as he slips further down the river.

He climbs a dark slope under a dark sky.  He doesn’t remember how he got there.

Iron mist curls off the ground.  His boots crush piles of dust and bone.  A dirty chill scales against his skin, and he smells fire smoke and rot.  Clouds of acid paint the sky. 

He passes shattered mausoleums, standing redoubts of cracked granite painted with symbols of death and fear.  Skeletons hang suspended by burn-black chains attached to iron poles and massive crosses. 

Ronan is clothed and armed.  For a moment he feels he’s actually awake, but the dream haze is still there, the sluggishness that keeps his senses dulled.  He’s locked in a world of laggard thoughts, this realm inside his mind.

He hears the wolves.  Low and throaty growls carry through the distance like approaching thunder.  He smells their musk, hears the drip of saliva from their razor teeth.  The air is made stale by their presence.

They pulled him here, but they no longer hold any interest in him.  They’ve found another, someone more valuable, but still they’ve left Ronan mired in the black universe of his own subconscious, a prisoner to his nightmares. 

Skulls and rocks roll down the hillside.  Drifts of black dust cling to his body like a second layer of skin. 

Something waits at the top of the hill, a shanty of twisted rebar and broken steel.  Gaps in the walls reveal fires within.  The hut stands alone under bitter skies bejeweled with ember stars.  Sharp stones covered with the semblance of leering faces stand perimeter around the structure. 

He steps inside.

Wolves, feasting on the living.  Caverns of pale night.  Broken stalactites drip blood like rain. 

The creatures squat like troglodytes in the darkness of the caverns, sucking flesh from the bones of the recently fallen.  Streams of blood form mazes on the floor.  The subterranean realm is a landscape of bones, and the air is rank with musk.

He hears sounds from deeper in the caves, the mewling of pups and the moans of the dying.  The brutalized warren trails off into the shadows.

This was where they began – the wolves, the things that would in the fullness of time become the Maloj.  Once they were just simple-minded beasts with a taste for flesh, nothing at all like the world-ending marauders they’d ultimately become. 

The sound of their feeding echoes into the darkness.  He’s a spectator there, not really a part of the scene.  He passes through fogs of blood and floats over rocks turned slick with gore and saliva.  He moves through batholitic stones, under waterfalls of piss and intestines. 

He phases up through the rock to the darkness on the surface, a land of arctic storms and intelligent rain.  There is dire intellect to the natural environment, a predatory consciousness.  Electrical blasts carry thaumaturgic mutterings.  Tempests of dark thought coil within maelstroms of broken souls.

The storms hammer the ceiling of the wolf’s den.  Eventually they will break through, and the Maloj will be born.

Another time, another place.  He wakes from one reality to another.

He walks through a broken city with bladed streets.  The sky is dark with storms.

Ronan stands alone, a stranger on a strange road.  Ice wind scalds him with bone dust.  Bone howitzers stand in the distance and pale dead litter the ground.  He smells artillery as he passes scorched walls and shattered towers, the collapsed ramparts of a dead city. 

A battle took place here, only no one won.

Beautiful, isn’t it?
a voice says.  A woman’s voice.  She has dark skin and braided black hair and wears a tattered black and green dress and a necklace of shark’s teeth.  Her eyes are green-gold pools, and her smile is utterly cold.  The darkly gilded runes on her flesh glow like burning coals.

What the hell is it?
he asks.

Part of a truth you can only guess at
, she says. 
Even I know only some of it. 

And who are you?
he demands.

Edged tentacles shoot up from the ground in answer.  Mirrored blades latch into his flesh and pull him down.  Pain shoots through his limbs as hooked ganglia cinch tight around his body.

I am the Black Witch,
she says.  Her accent is sweet and dark, like poison fruit. 
And if you know what’s good for you,
she says
, you’ll mind your manners.

Fuck off.

She turns her head and smiles, and a blade appears in her hand, bone thin and blood red.  It reminds him of Cross’s swords, Soulrazor and Avenger, but this one is crimson and nearly translucent, like glass filled with blood.  Its wide bone handle is set with runic carvings, and power oozes from the tip of the weapon like mucus.

Where is it?
she asks sharply.

Where it what?

The wolf inside you.

She doesn’t wait for an answer, but drives the keen blade into his stomach.  The edge is so sharp he doesn’t feel the cut.  He smells his blood as it hisses to the ground like hot oil.

Grave dust drifts down from the tops of the structures.  He realizes this was once a city of vampires, one of their countless cold fortresses, ravaged by warfare in some distant and forgotten time.  The dust is actually the ashes of the dead, and the scorched scent is that of undead burned by theurgic artillery, some grisly creation of their own foul war labs.

(This he thinks as he lies there on the ground.  His limbs fail him.  He feels the blade split open his sternum.  Blood and gristle part effortlessly beneath the phantom edge, dimensional steel so sharp it cauterizes the wounds as soon as it creates them.)

It isn’t here,
she says.

He wakes elsewhere.  He’s not awake.

Predatory shadows fill the sky.  He finds himself in a hollow wasteland.  Cracked earth stained with chemicals stretches around him like a cankerous wound. 

The sky is blue-black, the color of hurt.  Drifts of coal dust have piled on the ground.  Every motion he makes is slow and painful, and the air is so cold it burns.

He looks around.

The Black Witch is nowhere to be seen, and he’s alone in the wastes, a refugee in a place with no sound. 

The wound in his stomach pulses with pain, and he bears a wide scar from sternum to waist.  His insides feel twisted and raw, and it seems as if something is still lodged in his chest.  The strength has drained from his body, and it takes monumental effort just to stay standing. 

The black sky drips dark water, freezing to the touch.  A deep rumble sounds from underground.  His boots shuffle on thin soil that cracks and sinks beneath him.

He walks. 

It isn’t long before he loses track of time.  He has no sense of his direction or the distance he’s traveled.  It’s hard to know such things in a realm of nightmares.

So he just keeps walking.

His mind wanders.  He recalls tests he underwent as a boy – being dropped in a pit of snakes with only a knife to protect him; sent into an orphanage with instructions not to return until he’d taken a life; held face down while they branded him with hot irons. 

Left alone in the desert.  Survive, or die.  He’s always survived.

I was younger then.

The lifeless earth never changes.  The sky remains the same, the shadows constant.  He follows or is followed by some dripping mass of darkness, but he isn’t afraid, and never has been. 

He can’t feel his body, can’t feel anything.  He’s a walking ghost.

There are voices in the distance.  He tries to follow them, but he can’t determine what direction they’re coming from, just whispers in the dark.

Here.

Where?

It’s a voice he recognizes, someone he knows.  He turns around and sees a silhouette in the distance.  Another person, wandering, just as he does.  She’s just close enough for him to know she’s there, but still too far for him to make out any details.  He stumbles towards the other wanderer.

Jade
.

Help me,
she says.  But before he can answer she’s gone, and again he’s left alone.

The head of a black railroad stretches out across the sea of sand.  Iron gleams in the pale moonlight.  He sees broken windows in broken buildings, lonely and decrepit shacks left as stranded as he, just prisoners of the wastes.  He tastes carbon fog and smells incendiary rain.  His legs are weak, and scorch marks riddle his flesh.  The wind burns in his throat.

Ronan approaches the ruins cautiously.  Chalk and dust kick up into clouds.  The black sky is deep and cold, and the ground is so pale and stark it’s like walking on the face of the moon. 

People.  He isn’t sure if he’s really seeing them or if they’re just hallucinations, random images conjured by his hazed and exhausted mind, but as he draws closer to the structures he becomes more certain of their existence.  They wait and hide, watching him with bows and spears held ready.  They’re painted as pale as the landscape, walking phantoms who move without making a sound. 

They look back and forth at one another, as if confirming that what they’re seeing is real.

Why wouldn’t I be real?
he wants to say to them. 
This is
my
hell,
my
dream.  I’m the
only
thing that’s real.

They inch closer as he approaches.

He sees Danica, and that’s when he knows he’s truly lost his mind.  She’s as pale as the others, her skin painted with some sort of dense alabaster clay, her hair greased together with blue-white paste that gives it a gritty and gnarled appearance.  Her bloodsteel arm and black steel Necroblade lend her color, as do her ice-green eyes.  He’ll never forget her eyes.

Ronan.

Hi, Dani,
he says.
  You’re not real.

I am.  And so are you.  But I need to get you out of here.

And how do you plan to do that?
he asks
.

Trust me,
she says.

Danica unsheathes Claw.  Ronan watches her warily.  His hands tense near the hilt of his katana, which he knows wasn’t there a moment ago. 

I saw Jade,
he says.  He walks in a circle, crouched into a fighting position.

She and Laros were taken again
, Danica says. 
Creasy went to find them. 

I think Laros has something,
he says.

What?
she asks.

Something evil.

Ronan watches her.  He wants to trust her, but something about this doesn’t feel right. 

His primal drive to survive, to kill or die, takes over.  He lunges at her.

He’s a better swordsman than she is, and always has been, so when she feints left he expects the move and drives right, cuts her blade off with a pair of quick strikes and forces her back.  He nearly takes her head off with a quick swing, but her bloodsteel arm lifts and blocks it just in time. 

He presses the attack, not wanting to give her a chance.  He sees something move at the corner of his vision – the pale men, those aboriginal ghosts.  Spears and knives point in his direction, but the phantom warriors are cautious, not ready to commit. 

Danica moves in on him again, and he hacks at her blade and pushes it aside, wheels around and draws his kodachi with his off-hand.  In another heartbeat it’ll be at her throat.