Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (29 page)

She’s faster.  He’s miscalculated – she isn’t aiming for him at all, but something attached to him, a shadowy umbilical he hasn’t even noticed before now, long and dripping like a milky wound.  The cable runs off into nowhere, an organic tether binding him to the darkness.  Now that he senses it he feels a bitter cold sensation, a sickness running up his spine like a diseased weight.  Suddenly his senses are dulled and he feels turgid, stuck in a murk that won’t allow him to move.

Claw snaps through the cord like it’s made of butter.  Tendrils twist and break and pain flares down his back.  Ronan screams

and bolted upright.  Slithering shadows bled from his vision.  Something dark clutched his insides.  His chest seized, and the pain made him double over.

He was on a barren and lifeless plain.  Blood dripped from his chest, and his skin had been painted the color of ghosts.  When he tried to stand he bumped into the underside of a leaning rock, a tipped stone which hung over his head like some sort of shell. 

White faces surrounded him, the same pale men from his dreams.  Most of them were locked in meditative trance, their legs crossed and their arms folded, eyes slightly open as they stared up at nothing and chanted silently.  Grey smoke poured over them, thick with the smell of volcanic ash and burning mud.

“
Ronan!” Danica shouted.  She stood over him, Claw still in hand.  White puss dripped from the black blade.

“
Danica…” he gasped.  “What the hell…?”

“
I severed your tie to whatever was holding your mind prisoner,” she said.  “I’d actually done it once already, but apparently it only works if you do it from inside the dream.”

He looked around in a daze.  Sharp pain flared through his skull.

“Who the hell are
these
guys?” he asked.

“
I’m still working on that,” Danica said.  “But I think they’re exiles, like you and me.”

Ronan stood up slowly.  His eyes were filled with gummy glaze, and every breath was like icy vapors.  The sun was veiled behind cold dark clouds, casting the wastes around the city in a bed of shadow.

“Did they make it?” he asked with a nod towards Raijin.

“
Yeah,” she said after a moment.  “But there’s a problem.  The people in charge of the city aren’t really people.  They’re Eidolos puppets.”

Ronan nodded.  He spat on the ground and squinted against the sunlight.  “Well, that figures,” he said.  “I’ve never killed one of those things.”

“Before we can, we have to go help Creasy get Laros and Jade back.  The only trouble is…”

“
I know where they are,” he said.  “Do you have my armor?”

Danica watched him.  She looked so bizarre painted up in that pale chalk.  He imagined
he
didn’t look much better. 

“
How?” she asked.

“
The leader of those weird shadow people is a witch, and she tried to break into my dreams, like you guys did,” Ronan said.  “My armor?”

Danica pointed to a bundle on the ground.  The day was growing hot, but Ronan’s skin felt surprisingly cool because of the arcane paint they’d spread all over his body.  He found his armor, his face-wrap, his sword and his other blades. 

“I know about the witch,” Danica said.  “How do you know where she is?”

“
It’s hard to explain,” he said.  “Jade tried to communicate with me, and I can still sense where she is, maybe fifteen miles east of here.”  The white warriors didn’t make a sound, just kept their distance and watched. 

“
Ok,” Danica said.  “Then let’s get going.”

“
Wait a second,” Ronan said.  “Tell me what’s going on.  I get that these guys are survivors, but they don’t look Nezzek’duulian to me, and I understand that the city isn’t really a city but a giant mousetrap for morons like us to walk into…but who the hell is this witch, and what was inside of me that everyone wants so fucking bad?”

She is the Black Witch
, a voice said. 

Though the speaker didn’t identify himself – if indeed the voice was even male – Ronan knew it was one of the pale warriors, speaking to him through his mind. 

She’s very dangerous,
they said
.  An exiled mage, once a Princess of Nezzek’duul.

“
Of course,” Ronan said.  “Who are you guys?”

Exiles, like you.  Bound to this land, to the spirits who wander here.

He looked at Danica.

“
The best I can figure is that most of the people in this part of Nezzek’duul are dead,” she said.  “But their ghosts are still here, and they can possess living creatures.”

“
How does that work?” he asked.  “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of shit…but I’ve never seen any shit like that.”

“
Tell me about it,” she said.  “The Black Witch controls one faction of the ghosts – the ones we ran into back in the forest.  They call them the Skaravae.”

“
Then who are your friends?”

We are the Pale
, the voice said.  Ronan just nodded.

“
These natives don’t seem to actually possess people who aren’t willing,” Danica said, “but I get the feeling they can help folks survive by taking control of them.”

“
Gotcha,” Ronan said quietly.  “So these guys all got sucked down here, same as us, but rather than running the risk of not making it they put out the FOR RENT sign for the happy ghosts.  They’re fighting the not-so-happy ghosts, these Skaravae, who work for the Black Witch.” 

“
That about covers it,” Danica said.

“
So now what?”

“
Now we get Creasy,” she said.  “And then we help Cross and the others.  But Creasy first.”

“
Why?”

“
Because
they
may have been sucked down here by accident,” Danica said, pointing at the pale warriors, “but we were brought here on purpose.  Because of what was inside you.”

“
And that was…?” Ronan asked. 

He had a memory of claws, and the snarl of hungry beasts.  The more he tried to remember the worse the throbbing in his brain.  The details were buried deep and refused to be unearthed. 

Danica watched him.  She must have seen how he struggled, but when it became clear there was little more he’d be able to tell her she sighed. 

“
I don’t know,” she said, “but I think it might have been one of the Maloj.”  Danica’s milk-colored skin shone bright in the fading darkness.  Dust whipped by in the acid wind as the dozen or so warriors gathered their weapons and kicked dirt over the runic circles they’d drawn on the ground.  “It isn’t in you anymore,” she said.  “It’s in Laros.  And whatever it is, the Black Witch wants it badly, and so does the Eidolos in Raijin.  I’m not sure which of them brought us here, but I’m pretty sure the reason the Skyhawk was hijacked was so one of those factions could get their hands on our stowaway.”

Ice lanced down his spine.  He needed to know. 

Maybe now that it’s left me I can find the answers I need.

Ronan focused his mind to enter the Deadlands.  He felt his pulse quicken, and his blood ran cold like rapidly freezing water.  His heart drifted, out of synch with time.  He watched the world go cold and grey, saw Danica and the white warriors fade to moonlight silhouettes.

A void shape.  Lupine and vast.  It came at him with claws and iron-white teeth.  He felt its carrion breath as its bulk loomed over him.  The air turned sharp.

He barely fell back in time, right into Danica’s arms.  Talons had raked across his torso, and blood spattered from his mouth.  It had tried to kill him in the Deadlands, tried to stop him from seeing what it really was.

“The Maloj,” he gasped.  “Fucking Christ, Dani, you were right…one of those damned things was inside me.  It was hiding…probably trying to get to the White Mother.  And now it’s in Laros.”

“
Imagine what an exiled witch or an Eidolos could do with one of those things…” Danica said.  “Shit.”  She looked at the blood on Ronan’s chest.  “Are you okay?”

“
Yeah,” he said angrily, and he tried to dust himself off.  The blood looked stark against his painted flesh, but in moments Danica's spirit cauterized the wound.  “Yeah.  And I’m pissed.  So let’s go kill something.”

Danica hesitated.  “I wish I knew a way for us to warn Cross and the others,” she said.

They’d been here before, when they were separated from Creasy and Maur on their way to find the Witch’s Eye.  Danica and Ronan had decided to abandon the men to a vampire Creed in order to complete their mission.  They’d eventually changed their minds and gone back, and though they were delayed they both knew they’d made the right decision by putting their friends first.

Sometimes making the right choice isn’t easy.

“You can go,” he told her.  “I’ll find Jade.”

“
But I won’t know where to find
you
,” Danica said.  “Damn it.”  She looked at Raijin.

“
It’s okay,” Ronan said.  “I’ve got this.”

Danica didn’t look pleased.  She glanced at the warriors – they didn’t seem to be slowing down any – and then back at the city. 
             

“
This will be the second time I’ve let someone run off on me so I could go find Eric,” she said.  “That doesn’t seem right, somehow.”  She took a deep breath.  “This paste seems to shield us from the cold, and it provides some protection from magical scrying,” she said.  The wind whistled, the only sound to be heard aside from the subtle metal clank of her bloodsteel arm.  “How am I supposed to find you after I get Cross?” she asked.

“
I have no idea,” Ronan said.  “But assuming I don’t find you first…I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”  He wanted to say more, but couldn’t. 

She hugged him.  It was the second time she’d ever done that.  Now, just as then, he didn’t know what to do, so he just hugged her back.

“Be careful,” she said.

“
Yeah,” he nodded.  Her cold and gelled hair pushed against his face.  “You, too.”

And they parted without another word.  Danica moved south into the black shadow of Raijin, while Ronan led a cadre of near invisible warriors east, into broken hills and ravines filled with salt and lime, towards a dry storm of drifting shadow. 

Hunting a wolf, and the witch who chased it.

SIXTEEN

WALKERS

Creasy raced through the shadows.  The sky was full with razor darkness, and the streets behind him were awash with twisted coils of serpent smoke and acid moans of pain. 

He was at the edge of the shade city, and had been for a whole day, eluding capture.  They searched for him.  Phantom howls rumbled through the hot night.  Another cry issued from miles off, so shrill and deep Creasy felt it in his guts. 

Again and again they sounded, hollow calls, not quite animal, certainly not human.  Glass warbles like throats exploding.  Shadows lurked at the edge of the city, filled with the glint of blades and random starlight.

His spirit was with him, cooling his skin and calming his nerves.  Creasy crouched in the ravines west of town, dry gulches that had once been filled with saltwater and life.  Even in the near darkness his boots uncovered dried bits of kelp and the husks of shell-fish.  The ground smelled of meat and salt.  He knelt on the side of the hill, balanced on piles of sea rock and mirror-glass. 

The brooding sky bled to black.  He’d been in the ravine for hours.  Sharp pain ran down his spine from spending so much time on the uneven stones, and hunger pains twisted his stomach.  He smelled his own sweat and stench and licked lips long gone dry.  He breathed slow and even and kept one hand on the rocks, the other on the shotgun.  His eyes ached from trying to see in the low light, as he had little more than the trace elements of red sunbeams over the distant peaks to guide his way.  The walls of the ghost city loomed like a predator.

The voices sliced at his mind.  They were there, always there, cutting at the edge of his thoughts.  He was too terrified to move.

Creasy had managed to elude the storm riders when they’d arrived, and he’d kept out of sight by staying hidden in the husks of abandoned buildings and pressed against the walls of narrow alleys. 

He saw them from a distance: pale and empty people tethered to the sky by smoking tendrils of dust and grease.  Their eyes were blank and lifeless, pale orbs shining like lightning-fused glass, and they moved with deliberate harmony and precision, conjoined in their motions.  They stood before each house and focused on it, concentrating, apparently not needing to enter in order to determine what lay inside.  They were Nezzek’duulians, for the most part, but he saw Southern Claw people as well.  No matter their origin their skin was ashen and washed of color and their clothing was scorched black, like grisly uniforms.  Their faces were expressionless.  They never blinked, and made no sound save for their communicating calls, those animal grunts that didn’t even seem to truly come from their bodies.