Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (32 page)

Exhaustion swept over her.  She felt as if every spark of energy had been sucked away.

Don’t stop now.

With
Claw slung across her back and her spirit gelled against her skin Danica pushed on towards the city, moving past rows of spikes and tents that flapped in the gelid wind.  There was no one about, and it seemed that all of Raijin’s citizens had been pulled indoors.  She decided that wasn’t a good start.

Danica was sweating as she stealthily approached the wide city gates, which had been left unguarded.  She kept watching for signs of sentries, and now and again thought she spied shadows moving in the distance, but she managed to get right up to the city walls without raising an alarm.  She found the postern next to the main gates and forced it open with minimal noise.  A short corridor led to the other side of the main barbican.  Everything was silent, and seemed almost frozen.  Danica kept expecting a sentry to locate her, for a cry of alarm to sound, but none did.

She crept onto the main road.  Even in daylight the city would have been hard to navigate, as every structure was wrought of dark iron and utterly black.  Raijin seemed to have been sliced from the cold night sky.  The dusty streets were thick with sewer water and oil, and wind chimes tingled in the steady wind.

Her spirit moved a few meters ahead, checking for anyone in her immediate vicinity, but the streets were empty.  Danica pressed against a wall, her breath caught in her throat. 

Sharp edges pressed in, and the tall structures leaned and loomed overhead.  The darkness pained her eyes.  She didn’t walk as much as swam through the charcoal darkness.

A massive temple stood a few hundred feet inside the city gates.  Tall columns of braided stone cast with grey and silver runes stood like marbled trees in the field of shadows.  The thick iron doors were sealed.  Danica smelled hex in the air, and as she drew closer she realized those doors throbbed and hummed with thaumaturgic energies.  The portals had been blocked from scrying. 

She quietly ascended the wide stone steps.  Walking so close to the temple felt like stepping into a freezer.  Her breaths iced around her, and her feet found something frozen and grey on the ground that crunched and flaked like ice or ash, but was neither.  The taste of age salted her tongue. 

Danica pushed at the doors with her spirit, gently at first, then harder.  The seal was firm but not unbreakable, but she knew that opening the portal would draw attention.  Unfortunately there was no way to know what was inside without breaching the doors – the seal made that certain. 

I don’t know where anyone is.  Best not to raise an alarm just yet.

She was about to turn and walk away when a scream sounded from the other side. 

Danica took a breath and sent her spirit forward.  Arcane energies pounded at the seal and cracked it like ice.  The door began to move, rock sawing against rock.  A flaw flashed across the stone like a bolt of lightning.  The barrier opened with a sharp snap, and Danica’s eardrums popped.  Massive slabs of ice-veined granite fell away and revealed a cold darkness inside the temple, as deep as a starless sky.  Her breath cooled in her lungs.  The air was raw, and the floor inside was frost-colored lead. 

She breathed light with her spirit, a pulsing glow like a heatless torch.  The temple was huge.  The walls glowed red, as if the ziggurat had been built from frozen blood, and the granite was expertly hewn.  Statues of men with hooked talons and razored jaws stood spaced around a small pyramid at the center of the chamber.

Danica took a step forward, and her heart froze.  The temple was filled with bodies.

The naked corpses were the color of smoked fish, dried and hanging from leather-and-metal straps.  Dried flesh fell from the bodies like brittle flakes of snow and bones pushed through the desiccated husks.

Danica gaped at them in horror.  The husks dangled like banners between the columns.  She counted fifteen, twenty, but she soon lost track as her eyes trailed to the floor and saw the buckets and piles of clothing.  She wiped the sweat from her forehead and cautiously moved forward. 

The bundles of clothing near the buckets were Southern Claw uniforms covered with noisily buzzing flies.  Greasy remains filled the containers, a nauseating molten blend of intestines and blood, melted skin and boiled bones.  The stench was thick, and Danica had to use her spirit to block out the odor and keep herself from retching. 

She heard a faint whisper push through the darkness.  Sounds stirred in the temple.  Her spirit extinguished his flame and Danica hid behind the nearest column, her eyes on the dim torches on the other side of the pyramid, opposite the main doors.  Even with the entrance open the air in the ziggurat was drenched in darkness. 

A pair of figures wearing dark cloaks moved into the room, their heads bowed low, their hands on the hilts of twisted scimitars.  Her spirit pulsed and tensed, ready to move.  She thought of the bodies hanging there, thought of the pain they must have endured, the suffering.  She thought of the families they’d never again see, the dreams left unfulfilled.

Danica was done hiding.

Her spirit flew forward and ripped the men to shreds.  Bloody light caved in their skulls and ripped open their skin with smoking claws.  They fell to the ground groaning in pain, the only sound they could make since her spirit reached down their throats and soldered their vocal chords. 

“I’m done fucking around with you pricks,” she said. 

Her heart hammered and her breath caught in her chest.  She’d never admit how exhilarating it was to allow her spirit to slaughter, to let the violence rage like fire.  It was sometimes hard to pull him back. 

The bodies of the men she'd just killed were ruined, and her stomach almost turned at the sight of them.  She steadied herself, took one of their scimitars, searched their belts and took a ring of keys.  Danica moved in the direction they’d approached from, this time using her spirit to create illumination only she could see.  It was a more taxing effort, but with any luck it would help mask her movements. 

The new doorway led deeper into the temple, through a chamber filled with stone sarcophagi and closed caskets.  She resisted the urge to look under any of the lids, but instead pushed on past the cold and cavernous room and through another door on the far side.  The air smelled of hemlock and burning flowers.

Corpses lined the next chamber, much older and solid than those near the entrance.  The grey-faced bodies were stacked into alcoves, heads turned out so they seemed to stare in spite of their sewn-shut eyes.  Organic tubes filled with dripping black fluids ran from the bodies to holes in the walls like grisly conduits. 

Puppets
, she realized. 
These are the original bodies of the new forms, the ones attached to the Eidolos.  The living it controls telepathically, but these have been physically replaced. 
That meant that the men she’d just killed, who hadn’t been tethered to the Eidolos by physical means, were telepathic thralls.  She’d just slaughtered people with no control over their own actions.

Shit.  This keeps getting better and better.

Danica wondered what would happen if she severed the ties binding those bodies, but after a moment’s consideration she decided against it.  She needed to find the others first, if indeed there were any others left to find.  She pressed on.

The next room took her to a small labyrinth of dark corridors.  A ghastly glow pulsed from the ice-laced stone.  Dark smoke curled off the ground, and the air was heavy with frost.

A shrill scream rang out from the hallway directly ahead.  Danica followed the sound.  Another scream came, and she recognized the voice.  It was Shiv. 

The air shifted and moved around her like she walked on a swaying bridge.  Her sense of balance felt askew, and shadows shifted and danced at impossible angles.  Dizzy and disoriented, Danica came to a solid door sealed with some sort of arcane nullifying matrix.  She was about to lash out at it when she remembered the keys at her belt; surprisingly, the first one she tried fit in the silvered lock, and the door swung open.

Bodies had been laid out on cold iron tables.  Dangling black tentacles writhed and twisted near the ceiling, part of a mass of shadows which loomed over the chamber.  Greasy black fluid dripped like dark rain.  Looking at the bulky shape pained her eyes, and Danica felt her body go weightless, like she was about to fall up into the thrashing darkness. 

The Eidolos was in the process of sucking the marrow from a female body.  The ruined corpse was so decimated it took Danica a moment to realize it was Ankharra.  Juices were being drawn out of a wound in the witch’s stomach where the tentacles had latched on, shadow limbs that flailed with a darkly sexual appetite.  Danica smelled piss and fear. 

Shiv, Flint, Eric and a handful of others were strapped to the tables.  Only Shiv was awake, staring at the shadow beast and screaming.

Danica knew her magic was no good in that room – modifications to the structure made it impossible to call forth a spirit in that gritty and disorienting sepulcher, which explained why Ankharra had been held powerless – so she raced forward and sliced at the tentacle with Claw.  Dull howls sounded through her mind and pain pushed at her skull with such force she feared her bones would crack.

She fought through it.  Her bloodsteel arm pushed forward with supernatural strength, and she severed the shadow tentacle and sent it to the floor.  The Eidolos screamed and recoiled, howling in a liquid voice as it shrank up into the ceiling. 

Danica fell to one knee, battling the pain in her mind, but after a few more seconds the Eidolos evaporated through its escape hatch and vanished into obscurity.  The room shifted back into focus, and the diamond-splitting pain in her head faded.

Ankharra was dead.  Danica could only hope she’d hastened the witch’s death, and that she hadn’t suffered too much.  They’d had their differences, but no one deserved to die like that.

“
Danica!” Shiv yelled.  “Help!”

Danica cut the girl free.  Shiv bolted up and wrapped her arms around her, shaking and crying and gasping for air.  Danica put her flesh arm around the girl.

“It’s okay,” she said.  “It’s okay.  You’re going to be okay.”

“
It killed them…” Shiv gasped.  “It killed them…oh my God, Danica, I saw it kill them…they were all quiet, but I heard them screaming in my head…”

“
Shiv…” Flint said.  He and Cross and the others – there were only about ten of them left, including Reza and Wiley – were coming to now that the Eidolos was gone.  “Oh, God, girl, are you okay?”

“
Hang on,” Danica said, and she left Shiv just long enough to cut Flint loose.  He ran over and embraced his daughter while Danica freed Cross and the others.

“
Christ, my head…” Cross said.  He looked at her.  “Do I want to know?”  She’d completely forgotten about the masking body paint. 

“
It’s a long story,” she said.  “We need to get going.  The Eidolos ran when I injured it, but it won’t stay away long.”  She looked around.  “Where are the others?”

Cross looked at Ankharra’s ruined husk.  The color drained from his face.  “This is it.  The others are all dead.”

Those few in the room looked about in horror.  The walls seemed to shake.  The temple was rumbling, as if it the structure were coming to life.

“
Don’t give up,” Danica said.  “We aren’t dead yet.  I have a ship outside the city, and Ronan and Creasy need our help.  So let’s get the hell out of here while we still can.”

EIGHTEEN

SILHOUETTES

Ronan crossed the wastelands in the company of ghosts. 

The pale natives communicated with telepathic images and emotions.  He understood that they’d suffered, that they’d been stranded thousands of miles from their homes and had willingly succumbed to the control of well-intentioned spirits who meant them no harm, who in fact made them stronger so they could survive in this harsh realm.  He wasn’t sure how much of the original host’s personalities were left…not much, from what he gathered, but they were still there, vague echoes of the people they’d once been, now merged with these roaming spirit imprints.  They were the shadows of the lost.

Ronan moved fast, but the pale natives were more than capable of keeping up with him.  He entered the Deadlands from time to time, just long enough to gain quick bursts of strength and speed and to catch glimpses of the native’s true forms.  He saw the white spirits wrapped around their hosts, intangible clouds of pale vapor clutching to the skin of the living. 

They were a score of pale hunters crossing broken terrain of wind-scaled rock the color of rust and blood.  They left the roads and moved through barren hills littered with skeletal debris. 

He felt Jade, a distant and muted presence.  He wasn’t even sure if she was still alive.  For all he knew the Skaravae had already extracted the Maloj from Laros, and they were too late. 

The sun hid behind bleeding clouds and left the land shrouded in darkness; it would have been impossible to even know it was daytime if not for the burning heat. 

Ronan’s lips were chapped and his wounds scarred under his armor.  He left his face-wrap down so he could breathe.  He killed and ate geckos and desert snakes, avoided the hunter cats who used shifting scales and camouflaged fur to blend into the sand.