Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (31 page)

Damn.  Well, you really got us into it now, didn’t you?
he thought to his spirit. 
So what do I do?  I’m here, I know I need to get them free…and I have absolutely no way to do it.

As he hung there, thinking, Creasy felt something in the air – another spirit.  He quickly pulled his own back, hoping he’d managed to move her before she’d been detected.  There was another mage nearby, a witch.  He considered using his magic to run a trace pattern and determine her exact location, but after a moment he realized he didn’t have to, for she came to the front of the platform on the back of the same beast Laros and Jade were mounted on. 

The witch was stunning and terrifying at once.  Dark skin somehow managed to shine even in the storm of smoke and shadows, and she wore a black cloak covered with bones and bits of razored steel.  Her braided hair flowed well past her waist, and her eyes glittered like bronzed stars.  A sense of power and presence surrounded her, and looking at her felt like gazing into the core of a frozen sun.

She seemed to be staring right at him, even though he knew he was hidden from sight.  The air around her body shimmered like plasma. 

I am the Black Witch
, a voice said deep inside his skull, so full and present it pierced his brain like a blade. 
You shouldn’t have come here.  Because now you’re going to die.

Creasy’s heart froze.  He sensed the storm riders as they floated on the wind, closing in on him from every direction. 

He was trapped.

SEVENTEEN

COILS

She came across the wreckage near dusk.  The airship had gone down in a steep ravine south of the main road, maybe within the last hour.  The sound of its descent might have been concealed by the black storms raging in the distance, effusions of iron light and crackling dark explosions somehow linked to the Skaravae.  Those storms had been appearing more and more over the course of the past day, and they were getting closer. 

Trails of debris led her from the hills just south of the road to the edge of the slope.  The earth was littered with broken shards of steel and fragments of hatch and door.  Oil and fuel melted the ground, and she smelled vehicle guts and burning hex.  The ship was smaller than a Bloodhawk, probably a short-range reconnaissance vehicle used for area patrols or survey missions.  The sleek design seemed suited for navigating through harsh desert winds, and the fore and aft sails were constructed with an eye towards protecting the small and open cockpit from the bitter sun. 

Danica looked into the blood-stained sky for signs of other fliers, but there were none.  She glanced around, shielding her eyes from the dying light, looking for whatever might have brought the vessel down.  The air was utterly quiet save for the familiar moan of the merciless wind, which blasted down from the north and pushed against the natural rock barrier at her back.  Her spirit roamed and circled, anxious and on edge. 

Shit.

Something didn’t feel right.  The ship bore the same symbol on its unfurled sails as the one she’d seen on the flags in the railway station, a fist clenched around a handful of knives.  Her spirit noted the presence of death energies, roaming ghosts of the recently dead still wandering the plains, lost and afraid.

She stood and watched as blades of orange sunlight cut through the distant black clouds.  Dust and sweat clung to her skin.  She tensed and shifted her bloodsteel arm to make sure no sand had gotten lodged inside, licked her lips, and took a drink from her canteen.  The wind shifted in her direction and carried the smell of death.

Danica steeled herself and started down the side of the hill, making her way towards the crash.  Her boots crunched through broken soil, and she used her golem arm to maintain enough of a grip that she didn’t spill headfirst down the slope.  A small cloud of dust heralded her descent.

She came to the bow of the small ship.  Its rent metal hull was thaumaturgically treated black steel, and the vessel had been outfitted with razor edges so it could slice through simple magical barriers and resonance fields.  The fore end was bent, and dark fuel leaked all over the ground; if was a wonder the ship hadn’t combusted in the desert heat.  Twisted bits of shrapnel dangled like tree limbs, and she saw thick blood stains at the open edge of the cockpit. 

This is a bad idea,
she thought. 

Danica looked to the aft end, which had partially sunk into the ravine.  Powder burns and scorch marks marred the vessel, and from what she could tell the attack had occurred at close range.  Her spirit pushed forward and pulled traces of dark iron from the blast marks, scant elements of metallic residue left by whatever shell had ripped the ship out of the sky, and he searched the air for some trace of where the attack had come from. 

More of the Pale, maybe,
she wondered, but she doubted it.  From what she’d seen they didn’t have access to modern weapons, especially not the sort of artillery they’d have needed to take this ship down.

Her spirit found something further to the south, but it was difficult to determine what.  Nezzek’duul’s air was leaden and interfered with arcane reconnaissance.  She imagined it was the storm’s doing, and that the residue was in fact remnants of unstable spirit energy that had been churned out by the Skaravae as they traveled, like some sort of necrotic exhaust fumes. 

Danica carefully picked her way around the wreckage.  The innards of the ship were strewn everywhere.  Curves of metal like barrel straps of ribs protruded from the hillside, and that was where she saw the bodies.  They were just smoking shells of humans, torn husks whose innards had dried brown and whose skin had been charred in the explosion.  What little was left of their uniforms looked similar to those worn by the bodies they’d found back at the railway station, corpses she could only surmise belonged to members of the local military.

She pulled herself up the side of the small ship using wrist-thick cables which dangled from the hull.  The pale paint she wore was highly resistant to being scraped away, and even with her sweat it stayed pasted to her body like glue.  Her bloodsteel arm groaned quietly as she worked her way up to the twisted deck.

There were more bodies inside, huddled together and bent forward, so burned that few of their original features were clear.  The gagging scent of melted flesh assaulted her, and Danica covered her mouth to shield herself against thick plumes of dark smoke.  She narrowed her vision and pushed her spirit into the ruined cockpit, trying to get a better sense of what lie within.  There had to be something to tell her if these had been humans or not.  Anything.

And there it was – a pulse of life, a spark of soul energy that refused to be pulled down into death.  She sensed pain, incredible pain.  One of the burned crew was still alive, but only barely, and his life signs were so weak even arcane healing would do nothing to help him. 

Her spirit flushed around her body and froze her skin.  Something approached.  Danica slid down and dropped into the depths of the ravine.  Dirt flew up around her, and her heart pounded.

She heard the groan of turbines.  Scarred sails came into view overhead.  Rotating engines blasted sand and stones.  The new craft was twice as large as the ship it had brought down.  It bore no markings, and its dark metal hull was pitted and stained and looked hobbled together from other, better ships.  Air swirled around the vessel as it hovered in place.  Chains capped with nails and teeth dangled as the ship turned.  Ropes fell.  Whatever crew piloted the craft was descending. 

She saw human shapes with skin and clothing so utterly black they might have been carved from darkness.  Their tattered armor was leather and metal set with steel spurs and bladed gauntlets, and their eyes shone bright as they slid down the lines.

Danica saw trace elements of a storm overhead, wisps of purple-black smoke and a haze of electric light.  The smell of ozone pulsed out of the sky like exhaust. 

The intruders tore through the remnants of the sail and dropped on the deck.  They moved in silence after that first footfall, specters in human bodies, careful and meticulous.  Whispers cut through the air like razors.

Danica waited, holding her breath until her chest felt ready to explode.  A half-dozen wraith-possessed forms had touched down on the wrecked ship, while their own vessel continued floating overhead.  These were clearly Skaravae, the undead at war with the Eidolos who controlled Raijin. 

She took a steadying breath and released her spirit.  He spun up and around the wrecked vessel in a whirlwind of flame.  White explosions rocked the remnants of the hull.  The air ignited with deafening noise.  Bodies flew out, incinerated as she set the wrecked vehicle’s fuel ablaze. 

Danica ran up the side of the ravine.  She gripped Claw tight and jumped onto the front edge of the deck.  Flames licked around her ankles.  Her spirit sheathed her in a cloak of ice as the ghost soldiers came at her. 

Claw cleaved through possessed flesh.  Spectral blood flew around her as she hacked down her opponents.  Claw had been made to destroy creatures such as these – it was a Necroblade, attuned to the incorporeal thaumaturgic signatures that bound the phantom to the real, the lines which connected the world of shadow to the world of flesh.  The weapon was crafted to slice into that subtle dimension, that layer of being normally invisible to the human eye. 

She tasted the Skaravae’s surprise and fear.  The ghost soldiers tried to flee, but once her sights were locked on them they couldn’t escape.  Her spirit burned their passage, delayed them long enough for her to propel her body forward and fight through their ranks.  They came at her en masse, a horde of hollow eyes and melting faces.

Her fire burned away their flesh shells.  Danica pressed the attack, moving with grace and precision, guided by the violent instincts of her spirit.

Rage boiled in her heart, rage at what had been done to her, at being stranded so far from home, at watching people she loved die, at being manipulated by the spider and used and exploited by the vampires of Lorn.  As each phantom soldier came within striking distance she imagined it was the one responsible for all of her troubles, and with each strike she landed her hatred boiled up from the hard shell around her heart.  The sound of her own animal cries filled her ears.

Then, as quickly as the battle had started, it was done.  She stood absolutely still, her breaths shuddering deep in her chest.  Her spirit came away, depleted and fatigued, but he spread like a wave of burning water and circled both the wreckage and the vessel floating above and found them empty.  Every trace of life and non-life has been eradicated from the area.  

For a moment she saw herself from her spirit’s perspective, calm and horrifying.  Her milk-white skin was drenched with milk-white blood.  She was a gore-smeared ghost, a figure so absolutely still she might have been a dripping statue. 
             

She climbed the dangling chains up to the Skaravae’s airship.  It had been left on auto-pilot, and its horizontal turbines and uncoiled sails held it stable as it hovered almost soundlessly.  Her muscles ached, but she refused to let her spirit aid with her ascent.  He’d done enough for a while.

Danica’s flesh arm was shaking with fatigue by the time she pulled herself onto the deck.  The rush of violence had passed.  She heard the screams of the possessed, the furtive cries of the people whose bodies had been taken, who she’d hacked to pieces so she could annihilate their ghost masters.  She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t heard them before.

Because then you might have hesitated
, she told herself.

The ship seemed simple enough to pilot, as it was essentially the same design as a Bloodhawk, albeit smaller and not made to climb to high altitudes.  The navigation panel and controls were written in what she assumed was Nezzek’duulian, but with her spirit’s aid she was able to translate enough of the words to make sense of how to operate the basic controls and read the primitive cartography displays to determine where she was, and where she needed to go. 

She located Raijin on the charts.  Her destination was clear, even if her plan wasn’t. 

The sails twisted back as she rotated the dials and knobs on the wide panel.  The entire deck of the ship was a single large platform, like an old sailing vessel without a cabin.  The setting sun melted into the iron clouds, and dark storms churned in the eastern skies.  She flew south.  The sun was low, highlighting Raijin in gold and green shadows.

The ship made good time.  She flew over rolling hills and dry riverbeds, past fields of cacti and salt estuaries.  The hot wind sliced against her. 

Fear hammered in her heart.  She’d never been so afraid.  She couldn’t stop thinking about Lara, and Kane.  She felt the pain of watching them die, that jolt of shock and fear.  She never wanted to feel that again. 

Then you can’t panic,
she told herself. 

She neared Raijin in a matter of minutes and put the ship down behind a low stand of abandoned wagons just a few miles outside the city.  The air was thick with sediment and dust.  By the time she set down it was nearly night, and Raijin was just a jagged tear against the blood-red sky.  Dim light ebbed through the clefts between bladed towers as the air turned a grisly shade of violet.