Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (33 page)

They passed ruins, small villages and downed ships and smeared bodies baked on the desert floor.  He glimpsed bones that glowed like burning embers, rock spurs covered with old blood, thin trees sharpened like stakes and the husks of dangling corpses that had dried like old fruit.

The Pale were silent.  They’d seen all of this before.  In their old lives they might have even known these people, maybe even seen the Skaravae perform those horrors.

They came upon more of the land’s natives, but these people weren’t possessed by the white ghosts, even if they moved like them.  The figures unfolded from the desert landscape like serpents coiled around stones.  Ronan hadn’t seen them before they’d appeared, and he wasn’t used to being taken by surprise.  Their skin was painted with sand and dried mud, and they wore skins and spines and bits of bone for armor.  The natives were the color of desert sand and undoubtedly alive, their eyes wide and full of fear and rage.

They were a small army.  Several rode on the backs of massive six-legged reptiles with horned heads and thick claws or small elephantine beasts with barbed snouts and tusks of yellowed bone.  They raised spears, thickly barbed arrows and bone-swords.

“Wait!” Ronan said, his arms up so they wouldn’t attack.  “Just…wait.”

They stared at him blankly.  They didn’t understand his words, and had no idea what to make of him.  He held his arms up high and kept his katana sheathed.  The Pale said nothing but stayed close, and for some reason he had the sense these strange and painted desert people weren’t on the friendliest of terms with his ghostly allies. 

“Friends,” Ronan said, though he wasn’t really sure why, because if they didn’t understand him it didn’t matter what he said.  He could have been giving them Grissom’s old recipe for French toast and it would have carried the same meaning, so he wasn’t surprised when a pair of the desert people carefully walked up, took his sword and stood there with their bows aimed at his face.

Based on the way they gawked and gaped at him Ronan realized he was something they’d never seen.  They, on the other hand, were clearly people of Nezzek’duul, for their skin was dark and their hair was coal black under the outer layer of desert camouflage.  They were thin and athletic and looked like they could have run for days.

And here I am, pasty and scarred and probably scary as hell.  I look like Frankenstein's monster, for fuck’s sake.

He equated these natives to the hill people and tribe-like nomads of the eastern plains of the Southern Claw, areas south of the Reach and west of the Scorpion Desert.  But even that wasn’t a fair comparison – those nomads still maintained some contact with stable communities like Wolftown, places they traded and did business with, even if living in the wastelands had robbed them of most of their social graces. 

These natives were almost another breed.  There was no way he could know for sure, but both their appearance and the way they carried themselves bespoke of hard living in a hard world without the benefit of MREs or modern firearms.  These were natives in the truest sense of the word – they wore bone piercings, their tribal markings were cast with some sort of animal ink, their weapons and scant armor were hand-crafted, and they wore sandals or nothing at all on their feet in spite of the burning desert sand and sharp stones.

They looked at Ronan like he was from some other world, like he’d fallen out of the sky.

I guess I did.

“
Friends,” he said again.  “Fighting the shadow.”  He tried to think of some other way to communicate who he was, what he was doing. 

Let us
, the voice of the Pale said.

Well it’s about time
, he thought back, not sure if his thoughts transmitted or not.

After a few moments the bows were lowered, and the tall desert warriors watched him with awe.  He saw their eyes glitter in the failing light.  Memories played out for him like they were being projected on a wall as the Pale established a crude telepathic communication between himself and the natives. 

He learned that the Skaravae held thrall over most of the Chain of Shadows, the name of that largely desolate region of Nezzek’duul.  The natives, who called themselves The Sundered, knew of cities far to the south and east, but Raijin was the only one of its kind for many miles, and its every attempt to secure more control over the Chain had met with disaster both because of the elements and the efforts of the Skaravae and their leader, the Black Witch.  She held utter control over the dark spirits of the wilderness, and used them to impose her cruel will.

The ruins they’d passed had once been Raijin’s attempts at expansion.  They’d built settlements meant to harvest precious fruits or dig for fossil fuels, tried to build a railway stretching to the coast so they could secure control of those distant waters. 

The Black Witch had allowed none of it.  Her forces swept over the land and wiped the worker crews out. 

And what she and her Skaravae didn’t take, the Eidolos did.  They weren’t exactly sure when the otherworldly horror arrived in Raijin – no one did, and that was its power.  It struck from the shadows, took over one mind at a time, then two at a time, then ten at a time.  It nested itself under the city, enthralled Raijin’s rulers and worked in secret to subvert and destroy from within.  Eventually the entire city was under its control and the Eidolos starting feasting on Raijin’s citizens to fulfill its dark and terrible appetite, maintaining a façade to trick desert travelers so everything appeared normal and intact, though the illusion would be exposed under any close scrutiny. 

The Eidolos and the Black Witch weren’t allies, and never would be.  They battled constantly for control of the Chain of Shadows and waited for other Nezzek’duulian cities to come and challenge them.  Meanwhile the Sundered survived off of the land, sometimes working with the Pale to battle the Skaravae or Raijin’s forces, but most often just doing their best to stay alive. 

They know why we’re here
, the Pale said. 
They will help us.

“
Good,” Ronan said out loud.  “Should I ask why?”

Because they know that a new evil has come
, the Pale said. 
They know of the wolf, and the harm it can do.  And they know how terrible it will be if the Black Witch or the Eidolos get their hands on it.

“
Do they know who brought us here?” he asked.  The Sundered remained silent.  They gave him his katana and rifle back. 

No,
the Pale voice said. 
And that’s not their concern.  They just want the wolf gone, and since the Black Witch has the wolf the best way for them to accomplish their goal is to defeat her, to stop the Skaravae and cleanse her taint from the land.

They traveled east.  Ronan had been right when he’d guessed the Sundered were in peak physical condition – he had to enter the Deadlands just to keep pace with them as they trekked across the desert.

The sky continued to darken, like they’d stepped into an oiled night.  Pillars of black cloud danced in the distance, and lightning illuminated the vague silhouettes of lumbering elephantine beasts on the horizon.

The Sundered gathered their forces, a veritable nation hidden in the shadows of Nezzek’duul’s stained chemical deserts.  As they made their way across the barren fields of stone they were joined by corps of spear-throwers, knife-runners, archers in bone-armor and riders on feral cats.  Behind them marched a company of hard-shelled beasts like fanged turtles, slow and laborious but fearsome. 

They were a battalion of painted warriors.  The Pale stayed close to Ronan, their insignificant numbers dwarfed by the growing legion of desert nomads.  Ronan kept his mind focused, made sure his weapons were ready.

They were silent as they raced through dead fields, leapt over narrow ravines and dodged past blasted dunes of stone-filled sand.  Ronan’s muscles groaned, but like the rest of the host he was silent as they moved double-time across the desert, closing in on the cluster of moving shadows in the distance. 

The desert nomads loaded down their lizard mounts with bags of sharp stones and clusters of barbed spears.  They let Ronan and each of the Pale up on the back of their mounts. 

The lizards took massive strides, crushing sage brush and cacti under their clawed toes.  Ronan felt the wind ripple around him as he held tight to reins made of leather and twine.  Animal calls passed between the riders, the throaty voices of desert birds, so utterly real that at first Ronan couldn’t even identify them as human.  Information passed back and forth.

Skaravae ahead
, the Pale thought to him.

They were eager to be in the battle, so the lizards locked on course and ran.  Soon they came to a stop as the desert moon started to rise and the sun melted away.  They were at the edge of a savannah, just west of the shadow city.  Storm-lights played in the folding mountains of fog.

Who are they?
The Pale voices asked him. 
The ones you seek?

A warlock,
he thought back.
  Creasy.  A witch named Jade.  And the piece of shit with the Maloj in him is called Laros.

Silence.  They were readying to ride again into the desert plains.

All alive,
the Pale voices whispered into his mind. 
And there is one other living creature ahead, a witch.  The Black Witch.

You are a fool
, a new voice said, and Ronan immediately knew it was her. 
We’re waiting for you.  And we’re ready to extract the wolf god from your friend.  You’re too late.

Ronan gestured so all of the desert people could see him.

“We need to go!” he shouted.  “Now!”

They rode hard over shattered rocks and crossed dry riverbeds and bubbling pools of something like tar.  A haze rose over the plains of dead grass, dust smoke fused with grey. 

“
There they are,” Ronan said.  All around him the desert nomads readied themselves. 

They saw the silhouettes of massive horned elephants in the distance, shifting towers of darkly scarred flesh near the low city walls; the great beasts stamped the earth and tore at the ground with spine-covered tusks.  Possessed Skaravae warriors floated in the air like candles on water. 

The Sundered shifted the blades and armor on their leonine and lizard mounts.  They readied bows and dipped arrows in caustic and explosive poisons, hammered the hilts of their blades against their chests and pushed forward, eager to expunge the nightmare invaders from their lands.  Unnatural lightning and the stark and massive moon bathed the desert in bone white light.

“
I don’t suppose we have a plan of attack?” Ronan asked, expecting no answer, and naturally none came. 

The ground trembled.  Small desert animals scattered and fled into holes in the ground, sensing the coming conflict.  Stones cracked and shattered as the Skaravae bombarded the plains using trebuchets and mangonels located just outside the city walls. 

There were more than a score of the massive elephantine brutes and easily a hundred Skaravae, men with pale glowing eyes and shifting cloaks of shadow vapor and oily blood.  The smoke wrapped around the advancing horde and made them difficult to see.  The corbelled rickshaws on the backs of the shadow beasts were the size of small boats, laced with barbed perimeters and masked by strips of black cloth and chainmesh veils.  The creatures tore up earth as they started their slow and deliberate charge. 

The Sundered surged forward.  The Pale separated themselves from the nomads and spread out in a phalanx formation of spectral white skin and bone blades. 

We’re screwed
, he thought.  He still didn’t know where Creasy or the others were.

On the largest beast
, a voice told him.  It was her – the Black Witch. 
I have what you want.  I won’t hide from you, assassin.  Come to me, and die. 

Ronan found the calm inside of him.  He took deep and steady breaths, felt his chest rise and fall as his heartbeats slowed.  He narrowed his vision.  The already polarized landscape lost its last shreds of color: black and white, noise and silence.  Everything twisted to sharp edges.

He stepped into the Deadlands.

I’ll be right there
, he thought to her
. 

The Pale and the Sundered spread out.  Mobility was their greatest asset against the superior size and numbers of the Skaravae.  The elephantine beasts charged and filled the black sky with cacophonous booms.  Ronan dismounted and ran through clouds of dust.

Magic sounded and catapults fired.  Icy missiles tore through the air like comets.  The lizards and cats roared forward, easily dodging around the bombardment as they fearlessly dove at the elephant beast’s legs.  Great tusks plowed into bodies and talons broke through skulls.  Bones snapped and skin ripped as creatures from both sides of the battle fell.

The Pale flew through the dust in a white blur.  The battlefield smelled of brimstone and burning sand.  Skaravae descended from the black heavens with shadow bolas and curved blades, and they slashed through Sundered warriors even as nets and arrows brought their possessed bodies to the ground, where they were hacked and clawed to pieces.