Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (39 page)

He felt the presence of black souls: the Skaravae.  He saw them take shape in the air – their true selves, the free-roaming spirits without any inhabited bodies.  Masses of undulating spectral matter twisted like trapped schools of phantom fish.  They were infinite but compressed, multitudes of fluid bodies wrapped tight in the cold and dark space.  He saw pale splayed limbs and open mouths, twisted insides and greyed meat, pipe-like innards frozen mid-motion.  Their eyes were open pits, devoid of form or thought. 

The spirit hordes of the Black Witch were tethered, tied to their master by some thaumaplasmic net which spliced through their ghost-flesh and hooked into their tattered souls, a web of blood and pain.  They weren’t an army: they were slaves. 

What manner of witch commanded such power that she could bend an entire legion of lost spirits to her will?

Darkness spilled across his path like water bursting from a dam of shadow.  The air was heavy with ice and filth. 

He walked through that barrier, his shotgun held ahead of him.  The metal cooled and radiated down the barrel, numbing his fingers.  He felt frost rime his skin as he stepped into a core of perfect blackness.  Creasy saw images from his life and other people's lives, all those who’d come before, the origins of the subjugated spirits now called the Skaravae.  He heard their voices in the dark wind and saw their stories unfold before his eyes, entire lives replayed in the space of moments.

He understood the truth then, understood that it wasn’t the Skaravae who’d seized this City That Sleeps, a place once called Tenjin.  They’d never willingly taken the bodies of those helpless people, for they’d once been victims themselves, stolen from their homes, slain by the power of the Black Witch – the woman with the sword called Scar. 

The blade doubled her power and made her more dangerous than any other mage in Nezzek’duul.  With that weapon she’d laid waste to villages and stolen the spirits of those who’d lived there, transforming them into a phantom army.  She used Scar as the tether, the anchor with which she maintained control over her ghost minions.  At first she focused on smaller areas so as not to draw attention to herself, but with each strike she grew bold and more powerful.  As the months passed she killed hundreds, and with each conquest her soul twisted and turned blacker.

She no longer remembered her real name.  She and the blade had been conjoined for so long she’d become a part of it, and it a part of her.  It twisted and warped her consciousness.  Her ghost horde prowled the Chain of Shadows, building their power.  Only the Eidolos, which had slowly been carving out its own territory, proved a challenge to her reign. 

Black fog coated Creasy’s face and clothing as he pushed through to the other side.  He’d only penetrated a few inches into the crust of frost and black slime, yet the step seemed a journey.  Ice lanced through his heart.  Creasy felt his life being sucked away.

He saw Tanya, and he kept the image of her face locked in his mind’s eye.  Every motion, every step, was for her.  He would keep her safe. 

The air split as he came through.  Strength leeched from his limbs as Creasy fell to his knees.  He found himself in a red chamber coated with frozen blood, which gummed and flecked away under his fingertips.  Air smelling of a butcher’s yard washed over him.

Laros was in the room.  His eyes were glazed and his mouth moved incoherently, like he was reciting a poem or song.  His blonde hair had been ripped away, and his bare chest was riddled with oozing cuts.  The warlock lay tethered to a slab of grey rock which seemed an extension of the apartment floor, like it had somehow grown up out of the brick and mortar. 

Something black seeped from Laros’ body, a sticky ebon fluid that dripped to the ground with caustic bursts of dark smoke and the smell of burning bones.  The shadow pool formed slowly, congealing and sizzling in place. 

Creasy saw eyes in that pool, the semblance of claws.  He smelled animal musk and blood.  The Maloj was reforming as it was drawn from the mage.  Creasy raised the shotgun to end Laros’ life before the ritual was complete. 

He was too late.  A blade sank into his back. 

Creasy tried to cry out, but his breath left him.  He heard a distant sound, like air leaking from a tire, and realized it was air seeping from his lung.  The air fractured like glass.  He could smell the battle now, the blood and the fear. 

Thunder pounded through his head as the Black Witch drove Scar in deeper, until it pushed through his chest and the cross hilt banged against his spine.  Creasy craned his neck back and saw the silhouette of the cityscape, the broken buildings and shadows of fallen men, and he realized the Black Witch was still there, leading her armies, and that she’d merely shifted the black blade through a dimensional cleft to eliminate the intruder who for some reason had been left untouched by her spirit warriors.

Because they want to be free
, he thought
.  Because they want you to die.

It will fall to you.

Numb and cold with fear, Creasy lifted the shotgun and pushed it into the shifting hole between where the Black Witch stood and where he was now.  He was too slow to hit her, and he knew it, but he still forced the barrel through and fired.  The echo of the blast rang like a metal storm. 

He sensed as the door bled shut, sealed from the other side by a searing force.  Scar was still embedded in his back.  His blood stained the dark metal.  He smelled his body burning, felt something tear at the edge of his mind, an intangible pressure like he was deep underwater.  He grabbed the hilt and ripped the weapon free before he fell to the ground. 

Blood pooled around his knees and covered his hands.  Flashes of intense pain ripped up and down his torso.  He couldn’t breathe as he shuffled forward, grimacing, using Scar as a crutch.  He crawled across the floor.  It seemed important he not die before he reached Laros.

He saw the creature in the black pool on the floor, its flesh oily and dark beneath razor quills of fur.  Peels of bone were visible through tears in its ebon skin.  Its claws were thick and black, slowly taking shape.  Pale and cankered eyes stared up at him. 

Shadows leaked from Laros’ mouth like wine.  The warlock’s body convulsed. 

Creasy saw the Maloj’s heart take shape, a glistening black thing pulsing in time to his own labored breaths.  Its torso was twisted, not quite whole.  Metallic skin grew over the husk. 

He couldn’t begin to fathom its original purpose, couldn’t deduce why it had smuggled itself inside Ronan, and then Laros.  What had the Maloj hoped to accomplish?  There must have been somewhere the group was going, someone they were supposed to meet…

The White Mother. 

It was going to kill the White Mother.  It was going to smuggle itself past her safeguards, elude her sentries and seemingly omnipotent means of protecting herself, but its plans had been ruined when it was brought here, where others sought to exploit its power for their own dark purposes. 

The world is full of evil. 

Razor hurt wracked his body.  He knew he was bleeding out and that his wounds were cauterizing somehow, fusing together with the same sticky black substance that seeped from Laros’ skin.  Creasy tried to lift the blade, but his arms were too weak.  His vision faded in and out.

It will fall to you.

He thought of Tanya.  He had to protect her.

Creasy cried out in pain, lifted Scar and brought the point down into Laros’ chest.  The man’s limbs jerked, and his mouth opened in a silent scream.  The black mass that was the Maloj fell apart like clouds blasted by scalding wind.  Icy frost sluiced up the blade and into Creasy’s arms, and in that instant he witnessed horrors. 

He saw the Maloj, massive lupine forces, endless entropic energies compressed into bodies his mind could barely comprehend.  Claws and teeth, shadows darker than the night.  Unearthly cold stained and froze the air as Creasy drowned in the truth of the wolves’ absolute and destructive purpose. 

They would finish what they started so long ago.  They would destroy the world, all worlds, and leave nothing but darkness in their wake.  Voices like storms crashed through his mind.

Die.  All die. 

Their cold gazes bore into his heart even as he pushed the blade home.

All die.

Creasy shoved Scar all of the way through Laros’ body until it struck the stone underneath.  Shadows exploded around him.  He saw Tanya, saw the eyeless woman on the ice, and then he saw nothing.

TWENTY-TWO

MARKED

They came to a place where the ground had been planed smooth.  Blades rained down all around them, a cavalcade of icy steel and black smoke.  Dark vapors curled across the sky, greasy plumes of oil and ice.  Shouts echoed as they pushed through the black city, launching arrows, bullets and magic into the shadows. 

Cross’s face was soaked with sweat.  Danica was by his side, firing hexed bullets at the buildings, her spirit burning around them like a frayed whirlpool. 

He’d lost all sense of time’s passage.  The battle had started abruptly, as battles always did, a moment of peace and breathing before opening the gates of hell.  Noise rattled through his head: the growl of the pirate vessel’s engines, explosive magic, bursts of gunfire and bestial roars.  The Sundered and the Skaravae were both silent, living and dead possessed of an eerie calm as they battled one another with blades, arrows, spirit artillery and weapons carved from rock and bone. 

Monstrous mounts leapt through the air, spine-backed lizards and horned cats that threw themselves at one another with such speed it was hard to keep clear which creatures belonged to what side.  Silhouettes of Skaravae moved through the darkness. 

The air above was full with blood clouds and black lightning, an ebon murk lit by caustic energies.  Sundered fought their way through the streets, towards the towering bastion of dust and smoke at the center of the city. 

The ship had been brought down so fast Cross barely even remembered it.  His hands still burned from pulling the door free and getting Shiv to safety before the fuel had detonated.  Fluid oozed around his fingers, lukewarm and yellowed like egg yolk.  He’d pulled his gloves on and hadn’t looked at his hands since, but the pain where he gripped Soulrazor/Avenger was fierce. 

He wasn’t sure why the blade hadn’t healed him, save that it seemed distracted.  It pulled him towards the Maloj. 

They hid in the rubble on the road, patches of pale stone in the valleys of half-ruined buildings.  The burning husk of the ship was lit by a ring of stars just visible through the black-grey murk.  The moon looked as blue as ice. 

The shadows of the Skaravae fell across the ground.  Danica shouted and sent her spirit up in a crimson blaze.  Bodies burned, and screams carried in the wind.  Shiv huddled in her father’s protective embrace, her eyes flaring with ghost light every time one of the Skaravae approached.  The deep and soulless gazes of those possessed bodies burned like charnel pits, and the ghost soldiers smelled of charred bones and maggots.  Cross sliced through corpse warriors, his joints dull with fatigue. 

They hadn’t even made it ten blocks from the burning craft.  The bodies of Sundered littered the ground – for every Skaravae they killed they lost three of their own, and their numbers were dwindling.

Where are Ronan and Creasy?

“
We have to keep moving!” Danica shouted.  They heard something stamp in a side alley, the lumbering motion of an unseen creature. 

Cross took Shiv’s hand and led them in a different direction.  He marveled at her strength.  Never once had she backed away or showed fear. 

He saw Snow, burning on the train. 

No,
he told himself. 
Get your head together. 

Snow was lost, and she wasn’t coming back.  But he’d defend Shiv to his dying breath.

They pushed into a rubble-filled alley.  Cross heard fighting ahead but saw no Sundered, which meant it was Ronan and Creasy’s group.  Fires burned behind them, ectoplasmic bombs dropped by silhouette fliers.  The night sky was thin and dark.

You shouldn’t have come here. 
The voice sliced through his mind and made him reel. 

Darkness took shape in the air, soiled shadows like bloody milk.  Large figures formed, looming colossal frames of twisted fangs and dripping jaws.  They moved in time around a smaller presence, a rippling flutter of black like a flock of time-frozen birds.  The murk at the end of the alley parted long enough to reveal pale slits of eyes. 

Shiv looked into that gaze and screamed.  Cross moved to help her when the voices came at them, a choir of razor sounds that tore at his skull.

Peel the flesh

Boil your blood

Rip your soul

Pain ripped through his head, so intense it was hard to keep his eyes open, but Soulrazor/Avenger poured strength through his body.  It desperately wanted him to keep moving, and he had to fight the urge to charge ahead and dive into the fray.  Never had the sword been so reckless and out of control.

Tides of energy drove away from the Black Witch, who stood within a protective corona of ebon flames. 

Foreign energies washed over them.  Danica held the dismal magic at bay, but the Skaravae were relentless.  Cross lifted his blade and his dual sword sparked against ghost weapons hewn from dripping white shadows.  He sawed through phantom flesh.  Soulrazor/Avenger drove him, guided him.  His heart pounded and his skin flushed with fear.