Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) (40 page)

The Witch’s frame was roughly cut from the shadows.  Light sucked in towards a dark blade shaded with moonlight.  Blood-carved runes sparked on its face.  The outer razor’s edge was reamed with white ice, and as Cross drew close the runes glowed like a silvered moon.

Danica shouted at him to drop so she could gave a clear shot, but he couldn’t.  His blade wouldn’t let him, just as Claw wouldn’t let Danica fire her magic. 

They wanted the sword. 

He felt their voices more than heard them, a harsh muttered conspiracy among the deadly artifacts.  They communicated in the pulses between the moments, the silent spaces hidden in the clefts of thought.

Scar
, he realized. 
Another one of the blades.  A sibling.

In that instant Cross understood
that
was why they’d truly been brought to Nezzek’duul.  Someone had cast those runes in the earth and had made the ship crash – maybe the Spider, maybe the Eidolos or the Black Witch.  Likely they’d never know, and ultimately it didn’t matter. 

Because in the end it was all about the swords finding their way home, back to each other, and the thought that those intelligent and ancient blades had somehow conspired to unite themselves utterly terrified him. 

Something about his movement drove the Witch back.  She pulled away from the alley, still wreathed in shadows.  Danica immolated the Skaravae with bursts of dark fire.  Sweat burned down Cross’s face as spirits exploded around him.  Ectoplasmic gore rained down.

When he could see again the alley was quiet, and the Black Witch was gone. 

“What the hell happened?” Flint shouted.  He looked at Danica.  “You had a clear shot at that bitch!”

“
I don’t understand,” Danica said, winded and out of breath.  Her spirit paint had started to bleed away.  “I tried to, but…”

“
Claw wouldn’t let you,” Cross said.  “It was afraid you’d damage Scar.”

Flint looked at Cross like he was a crazy.  Danica blinked. 

Battle raged on behind them.  Up ahead the column of smoke grew larger, more solid.  Trickles of black energy rippled around it. 

Shiv watched it with eyes wide, and Flint looked ready to fall over.  Everyone was covered with grime and gore and looked exhausted.  Beasts growled nearby, and blades and arrows whizzed through the air to either side of the wide alley. 

“Is everyone okay?” Cross asked.  “We have to hurry.  Come on.” 

Shiv walked up and grabbed his hand, and she stayed at his side.  Her touch gave him strength. 

The alley spilled out into another city block filled with bodies and debris.  Sundered and Skaravae lay on the ground, hacked apart by blades and cruel mounts.  One of the cats lay dying, staring at its own reflection in what was left of a shop window.  A razored war-boar’s spine had been partially ripped from its greyed flesh as it bled out noisily near the middle of the road.

The air shuddered.  Cross guessed the cyclone was where the Maloj was being extracted from Laros, and it continued to grow larger.  A deep growl rose from the ground near the base of the twister, low and constant. 

They kept moving, keeping to the shadows.  The sound of fighting started to trickle off as both sides slowly ran out of combatants.  The group heard more of the battle than they actually witnessed, always just out of sight, a few blocks away or around the next corner, and they came upon the aftermath of skirmishes.  Cross moved with his skin tensed, ignoring the pain in his spine. 

We’re close now.  One way or another, it’ll be over soon.

They closed in on the column of smoke.  It stood miles high, vanishing into a bed of black clouds.  When he looked at the icy cylinder he saw a cold metal surface, reflective like broken glass.  Black fire burned within.  Cross saw lupine shapes, an unstable and massive body of claws and teeth, nightmares made flesh.  The roiling soul trapped in that maelstrom was the Maloj’s pure form, a chaotic mass of night that had yet to be compressed into its bestial shell.

The inhuman growls echoed through the dying skies.  The Maloj had almost been extracted from Laros.  Using Scar, the Black Witch would somehow be able to use the wolf’s life energies to fuel her own magic, a reservoir of power so corrupt there was no limit to the damage she could do.

Shiv pulled her hand away.  He hated to let go.  She felt his resistance and looked at him, and as her eyes met Cross’s something died inside him. 

She was changing.  She seemed older than even a few minutes before.  Her eyes were permanently taking on that milky hue, and her hair was getting darker.  Her jaw was set with determination. 

“I have to do this,” she said. 

“
Do what?” he asked.

“
Stop the Witch.  She has a sword like yours, but she’s learned to tap into its power, to control it.  If you fight her you’ll die.”

“
And what will happen to you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, just looked at the cyclone.  Cross felt Flint’s eyes on him.  His skin crawled with fear, and even though he comprehended little of what was happening he understood one thing clearly: he couldn’t help Shiv with this.  No one could.  She had to go alone.

They carefully moved into an open clearing, in a ring of old apartment buildings that had been ruined with age.  Pale bodies bled out on the ground. 

Shadows shifted around them and ice pricked his flesh.  Danica turned, her metal arm surrounded with white-hot flames as a Skaravae burst forth and rushed at her from behind.  Cross called out and ran at it with his blade held high, but before either of them could act the Skaravae fell in a heap, its head lolling from its shoulders.  They smelled rotting fruit as the corrupted spirit leaked from the corpse like water. 

Ronan and a handful of Sundered stepped into sight, their body-paint running with blood and scorch marks.  The swordsman looked ghastly in that pale camouflage, like a gore-stained phantom. 

“
Nice of you to join us,” he said. 

“
Where’s Creasy?” Cross asked.

“
He went ahead a few minutes ago.  We were trying to find you, but we got pinned down by those bastards.”  He nodded at the cyclone.  “He went to finish this.”

“
He can’t,” Cross said.  “Not on his own.  He needs our help.”  He hesitated and looked at Flint, then nodded at Shiv.  “
Her
help.”

“
What?” Flint said.  “What are you talking about?”

Cross was about to explain, and realized he couldn’t.  He understood so little of what was happening, what was
really
happening.  He’d never been at such a loss.  Here they were, trapped thousands of miles from everything they knew, embroiled in the middle of some spirit’s war in a far-off land.  The thought of how much damage might have been done to the Southern Claw in their absence drove him mad.

But there was no need to explain.  Shiv stepped up and hugged her father tight, and though he was caught unaware he hugged her back, and looked as though he’d never let her go.  The rest of them stood close by, watching for signs of trouble.  The glow of the storm bathed the area in blood light. 

“I’ll be okay, Daddy,” she said.  “We’ll be okay.” 

He held her close, and nodded. 

“You’d better be,” he said.  A tear ran down his weathered face and into his scraggly beard.  “You’re everything to me, girl.  Everything.”

She nodded into his chest.  Cross knew what strength it took to hold back her tears, but she did, she
had
to, for her father’s sake. 

Shiv squeezed Flint again, then broke away and nodded at Cross.  Whatever instinct she had took her straight past him and towards the storm at the center of the doomed city. 

“I’ll go with her,” Cross said.  “I don’t think there’s much I can do except watch her back.”

“
We’ll secure the perimeter,” Danica nodded.  She grabbed his hand.  “Come back,” she said.

“
I will.”

He followed Shiv to the heart of the storm.  She walked in silence, her soft shoes cracking earth turned brittle as ice.  Voices came at them from every direction, harsh and manic, terrified and violent. 

Cross knew that the two of them were somehow being shielded by Soulrazor/Avenger, held in an intangible field which surrounded them like a bubble of hardened air.  Ghastly skeletal faces pushed against the barrier and dissipated into wisps of dripping steam. 

Shiv kept her head high through it all, ignoring the battery of murderous phantoms and the deep cold that felt like the inside of a tomb.  Her breaths quickened as she drew spirits from the air and gathered them around her. 

Cross’s skin tingled with fear.  He hoped she could control them all.

The sky glittered like dark fire, its borders flickering as the cyclone picked up in intensity.  The unclean scent of thaumaturgy and hex soiled the atmosphere. 

The Black Witch waited near the center of the courtyard.  Her dark eyes locked on the sky.  Icy wind twisted her long braided hair and rippled her black cloak.  The air around her thickened and warped into a blood nimbus. 

Cross’s face burned from the cold.  Whatever the witch was doing, she was nearly finished.  Shiv didn’t move, just stood there at the edge of the buildings and watched.

Something drew the Witch’s attention away.  Her eyes flickered down.  She didn’t seem to have noticed Cross and Shiv. 

With a growl she drew the blade – Scar, its pure black face set with blood runes, a short sword with an edge so keen Cross could taste the razor sharpness from thirty yards out – and sliced the air open with a sickening sound like muscles ripping.  Black ice bled from the cut.  Cross glimpsed a figure on the other side, a human male caught unawares as the Black Witch stabbed him between the shoulders with the arcane sword.

It was Creasy.  Before him, secured to a stone slab in a room just visible through the dimensional cut, was Laros, his eyes glazed, a note of horror in his screaming voice.

At the instant that the Witch struck Creasy, Shiv reached out her hands. 

Later Cross would remember her darkened purity as she stood there, limed in blood light, her fingers outstretched and her eyes set, twisting those ghosts, commanding them. 

The Black Witch’s legions had been subjugated and controlled with Scar, but during those scant seconds it took for her to cut a translocative hole to where she’d hidden Laros and reach her weapon through to stab Creasy in the back, Shiv was able to wrest control of the Skaravae away and turn them on their former master.

Shiv’s fingers glowed hot white, like she’d placed them in burning embers.  Her mouth opened and she screamed without a sound, a silence so forceful and deafening it nearly brought Cross to his knees. 

His blade protected him by encasing him in a bitter-tasting black shell that cut him off from Shiv, cut him off from everything.  It was the only thing that kept him alive.

Spirits tore through the clearing like a burning storm.  The air shook.  Everything rumbled with a deep bass note. 

They took the Black Witch off guard as she dodged a shotgun blast from the other side of the rip.  The hole in the air sealed and Scar vanished, still stuck in Creasy’s body.  With the sword gone her control over the Skaravae was broken, but she was still far from defenseless. 

She bent the spirits around her body even as their bladed touch sliced into her skin.  Fresh wounds lanced across the dark woman’s flesh.  She pushed against the onslaught of wraith energies with a wedge of purple and golden flames. 

Grotesque black power bulged and bled around the Witch.  The air shook with tension, ready to explode. 

All Cross could do was watch as Shiv urged those spirits forward, not controlling them but pushing them, a medium, one voice lost in the horde.  They’d avenge themselves on this woman who’d twisted them to her own ends and send her kicking and screaming into hell.

Cross’s shield trembled and cracked.  Pressure burst against the buildings and concrete broke and fell to the ground, the sound of the impact drowned out by the torrent of screaming souls.  His skin burned in the scalding black wind, and he was pushed backwards across the dirt and pavement.  The air turned so cold it burned.

Black fire streamed from the Witch.  She pulled what energies she could from the Maloj even though the ritual hadn’t been completed, even as the beast screamed from somewhere close by.  Cross sensed as the wolf was ripped from its host body, torn away and cast out, vulnerable and naked.  He saw through its eyes, things he’d never wanted to see. 

Dark seas like boiling water lap against the shell.  Dim glass cracks.  The sound of breaking, like snapping bones, echoes through the dark.

There are eyes in that endless sea, pale cuts like icy wounds, thousands of them, but all from the same face.  A collective given singular form, a legion of one.

They push against the crystalline borders of their reality.  Black blood fills the void.  The howls of the damned reach into the sky.

Whispers cut through substance so thick it could never be air.  Agony.  Their pain has existed since the inception of time.  Shadow vapors and cold storms.