Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (38 page)

Scar
, it read.  There were other words, nonsensical references. 
Dawn.  Claw.  Avenger.  Soulrazor
. 
 

“
Scar?” Creasy asked.

“
Swords,” Ronan said.  “Cross has two of them.  Dani has one.”

The rest of the paper was covered with simple illustrations, crude hand-rendered images of blades.  They were measured out as if by schematic, and numerous notations and equations had been scribbled beneath each drawing.  Lines connected the swords like they were markers on a map.

It’s a diagram
, Creasy realized. 
The means to make something, some greater whole.  A weapon incorporating all of the blades into one.

Creasy thought of Cross, and Danica.  Was this, truly, the reason they’d been brought to Nezzek’duul?  Did their abduction have something to do with the blades, rather than the Maloj? 

They moved out into the street, where the funnel of shadow cast everything in darkness.  Something like lightning split the sky, painting the air red and causing the air to shimmer and bleed.  Creasy sent his spirit to signal Cross and Danica, but she couldn’t move beyond the confines of the road – some effect of the storm was blocking her ability to travel.  They’d have to proceed on their own and be ready to help the attack when it came.

They moved fast through dilapidated neighborhoods.  A merry-go-round creaked endlessly on its rusted bolts in a cold and empty playground.  The distant peel of thunder shook the air, which had grown thick with the tang of ozone.  Every house and open window felt threatening, like something inside watched the eight warriors as they made their way to the middle of the city.

The spiral of shadow was easily visible no matter where they went.  Its great height and bulk defied explanation, and within its swirling vapors Creasy saw faces, lost and moribund souls pulled apart into an ethereal soup, a wash of dead energies whose mouthless screams were the source of the fetid wind.  The funnel existed between two planes, the ground and the blood sky, darkness above and below.  Swirls of crystalline glass ran in a perimeter around the greater bulk of the cyclone, a barrier of shards stuck to the body of the vortex.

Seeing that horrible thing, hearing those spirit’s screams, Creasy found himself naming God, asking for his help.  It had been many years since he’d invoked the Lord’s name, too many.  Some believed God had no interest in helping warlocks, or any possessed of supposedly evil powers.  Creasy hoped they were wrong. 

They lowered their masks as they drew close to the heart of the City That Sleeps.  The shadows seemed less dense, and the air was brighter and cleaner.  When Creasy looked straight up he saw the night’s first stars through gaps in the storm. 

They’d come to a more open residential section, a place occupied by low houses and playgrounds, markets and small patches of once green grass.  Everything was quiet and dead, but Creasy could imagine what it must have been like when there’d been life there, how the air would have felt vibrant and fresh.  There was still no sign of the Skaravae.

The air grew bitingly cold.  Light bent around them and blurred their outlines.  Creasy kept his eyes alert, expecting an attack at any moment.

The towering coil of smoke stood just beyond a broken brick wall, in a clearing at the center of what appeared to be a ring of apartment buildings.  A storm of shadows spun above, solid as a bed of stone, and just beyond the twisting funnel Creasy saw the gold-red sky.  Bits of metal flew through the air like leaves. 

“I’m going to find the Witch,” Creasy said to Ronan.  “We’re close.”

Ronan nodded, and drew up his cowl as he unsheathed his sword.  Creasy knew he’d offer no argument. 

Creasy steeled himself.  He’d come this far.  He felt a sense of shame that he hadn’t been able to kill the Black Witch when he’d had the chance, and more people had died.

It will fall to you.  To us.

His spirit crusted against his flesh.  He wanted so badly to speak to her again, to tell her all she’d meant to him, and how he’d miss her.

About a hundred yards away from the edge of the clearing Creasy stopped, removed his pack and outer shit and donned his armor coat.  He secured his machete and brandished his shotgun and waited a moment while Ronan and the others caught up with him, keeping low to the ground as they neared the old buildings whose walls were cracked and yellowed with age.  Creasy tasted death on the freezing wind and smelled blood in the coming night.

They heard explosions in the distance.  The taint of magic stained the sky.  Shadows roamed the atmosphere.

Ronan was looking back, watching.  They heard the roar of beasts and the buckle of explosive pressure.  A storm within the storm, triggered as Cross’s team and the rest of the Sundered attacked.

Creasy watched Ronan.  When the swordsman’s eyes turned to him they were full of loss.  Creasy nodded.

“
I want to thank you for coming back for me,” Creasy said.  “Not once, but twice.  I owe you.”  Creasy handed him the roll of parchment he’d found in the soothsayer’s. 

Ronan nodded.  “I hope to hunt wolf with you someday, Creasy,” he said. 

“I look forward to it.”

The Sundered hesitated, sensing it was at this point that Creasy had to go on alone.  His and Ronan’s eyes locked once more.  He wanted to ask the swordsman to take a message to Tanya if he ever made it back to Southern Claw territory, to explain what had happened, but he knew he didn’t have to.  They were men of few words, and they both knew when nothing needed to be said.

Creasy turned and headed for the maelstrom.

The wide open clearing had once been paved, had maybe even housed another building, but now it was nothing but torn earth and butchered concrete.  The ground was black and the air was ice cold.

Creasy felt the passage of years inside him.  His gauntlet implement was as aged and tattered as he was, and like him it was failing.  Old wounds scarred his skin like scratches on glass, and his flesh felt as if it had been pulled taut with hammered nails.  His muscles ached as he stepped up to the edge of the courtyard.

The column of towering smoke was vast and opaque.  Creasy barely heard it, and even though he saw fragments of debris thrown by the wind he only felt the slightest breeze.  It hurt his neck trying to see to the heights of the black funnel, which reached up like a twisting ebon worm to a ceiling of black cloud.  Voices oozed from the smoking citadel, quiet and forlorn, the songs of the lost.

The moment Creasy stepped into the courtyard his spirit silenced.  She was severed from him, cut off.  He sensed her at the edge of the buildings, unable to come any closer, trapped on the other side of an unbreakable window.

It will fall to you.

Creasy kept walking.  Layers of brittle ground shifted beneath him, far less stable than he’d thought.  He moved slow, testing the earth, calling on his spirit to probe the layers, but she wasn’t there, and he was suddenly petrified with fear.

He stared at the cyclone, tried to gauge its depths, but he couldn’t see anything within the darkly frosted brume. 

What the hell am I supposed to do?
he wondered. 
I’m nothing without her, without my magic.  Just a tired old wolf hunter who thinks he can save the world.

He thought of Roth.  He thought of Kendrick and Hewer and the people of Wolftown, dead now, all dead.  He thought of Tanya, thought of her dark hair and the smoothness of her skin, the tattoos on her back and that wry smile that drove him crazy.  She could have had any of the men she wanted, but she’d chosen him, and he couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to her, of some evil he’d failed to kill setting events in motion that could result in her death.  It didn’t matter what the Black Witch planned – she wanted the Maloj, and that made her dangerous.  She had to be stopped.

I Love You
, he thought to Tanya, wishing there was some way she could hear him.

Creasy readied his weapon.  He scanned the area, wondering if he’d even be able to breach the arcane cloud without his magic.  What was an old man like him supposed to do aside from offer himself up as a distraction to give Cross and the others time to get there? 

Was that all there was to it?  Had his spirit led him there to die? 

The moon sat low in the sky, visible just above the line of dark buildings, a lean and silver sickle.  It was too dark even in the calm of the clearing to make out what lay inside the apartment buildings, though their walls had been torn open and debris and wreckage spilled out into the open courtyard like entrails. 

The spiral of smoke swirled directly ahead, pulling and pushing at once.  The drone of wind grew quieter as he drew close, even though the temperature continued to drop.  His breath frosted, and his chest ached from the chill.

Creasy kept a wary eye on the buildings as he walked towards the swirling storm.  He felt his blood stiffen, and he heard the distant blasts of combat and roars of war beasts.  He knew Cross and his valiant team would fight to the last.  He just hoped they wouldn’t have to.

Something troubled him: the marked tabletop and notebook from the soothsayer’s, those insane scrawls left behind by the witch.  There was more there, something he’d missed, he was sure of it, and for some reason he felt like his life, like
all
lives might depend on figuring out what.  He hadn’t had the opportunity to properly examine the writings, and what little he’d seen had appeared nonsensical.  He wished he’d had more to time to study her notes, or that he’d been able to show them to Cross to see if the other warlock’s city-trained mind might have been able to make more sense of it.

Creasy stood before the column of vapor, his heart iced with fear.  It was less than thirty paces away, so tall and dark it blocked out sight of everything else.  Swirling carbon fumes fused and danced, a towering presence whose constant and dizzying motion made him feel like he was about to be lifted off the ground.  The smoke held a strangely reflective quality, a shimmering mirror liquid just under the surface, like the face of a shifting obsidian lake.  The smell of thaumaturgy was strong, the sorcerous tang of smelted iron and burning wind. 

He saw his own reflection in the surface, a grey-haired black man in a tattered armor coat, his face crusted with age, his skin scarred from too many years spent in a world full with death.  The reflection showed the nearest of the apartment buildings at his back, its blank windows like eyes, its face scarred and pitted, with crude drawings of half-closed serpent’s eyes. 

I’m sorry it has to be you.

Serpent’s eyes. 

Creasy hesitated.  He turned around and suddenly had to kneel, for when he put his back to the cyclone the wind shifted to a gale force and the wind threatened to knock him forward.  The hurricane roar made his ears pop. 

Ignoring the pain, he made for the building.  The images of the serpent’s eyes were almost invisible beneath the scorch marks and rubble, runic markings forming a pattern in the chaos of wrecked plaster and stone.  If he hadn’t glimpsed those eyes in the storm’s reflection he might not have seen them at all, but now they were
all
he saw.  He recognized the image from the witch’s notes. 

They were markers, like the building was meant to be found.  He wasn’t sure why but he had the sense he was meant to enter that ruined structure.

He neared the entrance to the apartment building and the sound of his footsteps took on a hollow quality, like he walked across a frozen lake rather than the shattered dirt and concrete.  The front doors to the complex were broken, a mess of mortar, glass and steel.  The shadows inside were so thick they almost seemed solid.

Creasy saw more symbols on the building, all of them matching those from the soothsayer’s: crawling seas, wolf- beasts, lunatic spirals.  When he’d seen them in the witch’s tower they’d seemed utter nonsense, the maddened scribbles of a mind that had lost its tethers to reality.  Now he knew better. 

She saw this place, even if she didn’t realize it.

A threshold existed between the clear space before the storm and the open gap at the base of the apartment building, nothing tangible, nothing he could see, but one moment he tripped through the glacial gale and the next he emerged into a bubble of calm and still air. 

He entered a slithering cold realm, a darkness edged with whispers.  His skin turned gelid and his breath fogged.  He glanced back and saw the storm in the distance, and it might as well have been miles away. 

Creasy had entered some secret space between worlds.  The air was grey and caked with shadows and soot.  He sensed he stood higher than before, suspended in the atmosphere, like the shattered stone and the crumbling apartment had lifted into the sky.

He looked down at his feet and saw the serpent eye motif carved into the ground, staring up at him.  He was in a hidden cleft, an arcane redoubt secreted away from sight.  Something was there – the Black Witch, Laros, maybe even the sword called Scar.  Whichever it was, he had to move fast before he was detected. 

Creasy went further into the building, his nerves on fire.  He moved sluggishly – at first he thought it was just his slowed reflexes and aged body, which was no longer being shielded behind the protective arms of his spirit, but after a moment he realized it was the secret realm itself that was slow, so suffused with darkness and ancient magic it was like trudging through syrup.  Power dripped down the walls and stained the ground, a taint of burning ink and blistering cold tar.