Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (42 page)

With the Sorn
’s attention on the hole
, Cross stepped up and sliced open the fuel pump
on the machine
.  Foul-smelling
liquid
ran all over the ground
and formed
sticky pools. 

The Sorn turned soundlessly, and one moved to inspect the damage.  Cross slipped back into the shadows and kept his body pressed tight against
a
twisted wall of glacial rock.  He
was
thank
ful
the
Sorn
had
poor night vision. 

His m
ind
flashed back to the city of Rhaine.  He saw Graves and Cristena and Stone.  He’d watched them all die at the hands of the Sorn, and even though
the
giants
responsible had all been killed
,
a hatred for the predatory race still burned deep in his heart.

He
aimed
the flare
gun
between the Sorn’s legs
and fired
.  The engine fuel caught alight.  Cross ran.  He heard weapons
being
readied behind him, and he half expected to be
shot
in
the back by massive
nail shots
or ball rounds. 

The blast shook the air.  Heat washed
against
him
.
Cross
leapt over
a
low wall and
threw himself back against the stone to use it as cover
while he
brought his arms up to shield his neck and head
. 
His eyes stung from explosive fumes.  His skin felt like it was melting, and when he breathed in it was like swallowing jet fuel.

He waited.  After a few moments the
series of
explo
sions stopped.  He heard flames and smelled toxins and burning
skin
. 

He carefully stood up
and checked himself
. 
He hacked up bloody phlegm, took a deep breath.  He was okay.

The dig site was in ruins.  The engine was split open and spewed ghastly spirit unguent that looked like slime milk.  Thick bursts of oil bubbled and sank into the ground.  A handful of the rock walls had shattered and fallen to pieces in the blast.  Drifts of yellow smoke from the plains billowed across his path as he quietly
walked
back
towards the hole with
his
blade in hand.

Two of the Sorn were dead.
T
heir grey flesh
had been
blown open
by
the blast
,
and their innards
were
exposed to the salty air.  Their central eyes were still. 

A third giant still lived, and it struggled
a
nd
dragged itself across
the ground.  Its back and head were covered with burn marks, and the skin had torn away from its abdomen, where meat gristle and dark blood spilled
out
. 

It
looked at
Cross as he stepped up and sliced open its throat.  It died
silently
. 

Cross scanned the perimeter.  There was no sign of the fourth Sorn, and that worried him.  Strange alarms blared in the distance, booming drum pattern beats mixed with arcane klaxons. 

Maybe the spider he’d seen hadn’
t been associated with the Shadow Lords after all.  Maybe it truly
was
his spider, there to ensure him
he was on the right path
.

He tried not to think about the murals…about the images of the spider
as it destroyed
cities.
 

Dark cries sounded through the
sky
.  There was nothing beyond the mists and smoke around him
except for
pitch black plains
.  He felt like he stood in the middle of nowhere.

We search.

Only the living are lost.

Cross checked the iron beams.  As
he’d
expected
,
most of the device had been damaged in the blast, and two of the beams had fallen
down
into the hole
.  The third, however, was still bolted
into the ground
,
and
it
hung over the
opening
at a forty-five degree angle.
  The pulley mechanism was gone
,
but there was still plenty of cable, and he
thought that
if he secured a
line
tight enough
he could lower himself down.

The fourth Sorn was down in the hole,
where it clu
n
g
desperately
to the wall.  The rock in the shaft was blasted obsidian that shone like dark stars.  The one-eyed giant’s face and body were riddled with cuts, and it looked to have lost
some
of its fingers.  It blinked up at Cross and grimaced. 

He found a crate
filled with machinery
and
slowly
pushed it
into
the hole.  He heard the Sorn fall as the box of equipment tumbled and struck
the creature
, and they both crashed down the sides of the shaft. 

Cross couldn’t get the image of friends long dead out of his mind.  He
was
shaking, and
had to take
a moment to right himself.  He saw them, remembered them, and vowed to waste no more time.

It took him a handful of minutes to locate enough cable.  He tore cloth
from
the Sorn’s clothing and wrapped it around his hands so he wouldn’t slice himself apart
with the frayed
metal line
on
the way down.  He wound one end of the cable around a low column of quartz, then looped the other end twice
around
the beam and dropped the
rest
into the
darkness of the
shaft.  He searched the Sorn’s bodies and used the smallest
carabineer
-like clamps he could find
to
secure himself to the
line
.  He
lowered himself into the hole with a handful of flares in his pockets.

The air was bitterly cold.  It was like sinking into a pool of ice.  Subterranean wind kicked up from below and sent shivers up his spine.  His lungs itched from rock dust.  Shards of crystal protruded from the walls.  He lit a flare as he descended, but it would be tricky to hold it and repel at the same time, so he dropped it down the length of
the shaft.  To his great relief
he saw it hit the bottom,
which was
several hundred feet below. 

He repelled slowly, and his arms soon ached from the effort.  He carefully kicked off from t
he
walls.  The grey
blood
stains left on the jagged stone indicated how sharp it was.

Another blast of ice wind came up at him.  Dread whispers filled the air, lost voices that hissed at him to leave.  The black quartz was threaded with gold and radiated a primeval chill.

He thought about the spider as he made his descent. 

Something wasn’t right.  Something had happened when he’d looked into its many eyes, something he’d been unable to piece together.  In the past, a white spider had always appeared when he was on the right path, when he was moving to where he was supposed to be.  It had helped him prevent the Obelisk of Dreams from being destroyed, and it had helped him stop the Sleeper.  It had been strangely absent from his life
ever
since the team had
been
formed, just a memory.  He’d taken that to mean he hadn’t
needed
it – that he’d been making the
correct
choices,
and
that
the
path
he’d
walked
had been the right one.

He felt cold inside.  His breaths crystallized.  The pull of gravity seemed to intensify the deeper he
went
down the shaft, an inescapable draw
that led
to the fused core of the mountain.  He smelled iron and sulfur as he
dropped
closer to hell.

He remembered looking up at the spider in that cold chamber.  He’d seen his own reflection
s
in its many eyes, and those reflections had a
ll been different. 

Different angles?  Or something else?

The walls seemed to move as he made the descent.  Everything rolled around him
like
he was stuck on a ship in a violent sea. 

The light of the flare below him
went out
, leavi
ng him in darkness.  He stopped
and dropped a second.  The new light flickered as it fell, turned at odd angles.  It seemed to phase in and out of existence, and when it landed he swore it was somehow different than when it had left his hand. 

A different flare.  A different possibility.

Reflections.  Many eyes.

He realized the truth.

It wasn’t just different angles of myself I saw in the spider’s eyes
. 
I was seeing different
versions
of myself.  It was me, moving along different courses of action.  Possible selves.

Cross
’s
mind
had always been overly analytical
.  He had a naturally photographic memory, a keen sense of calculation and data analysis.  He could read a text once and commit it to memory, compare it to a similar text and see the differences and similarities line-by-line.  He had a natural knack for solving arcane algorithms and hex theories, for unlocking codified texts and discordant formulae.  He could see patterns and variations where many others couldn’t.

He analyzed the events of his own life, from the first moment
he’d seen
that white spider with Snow
in
the cemetery outside of Thornn up to where he was now, lowering himself
down
a frozen shaft, trying
once
again to save human magic
from annihilation
.  He broke down every choice, every crossroads he’d
ever
stood at.  He tried to determine what might have happened differently, how events might have changed if he’d made different choices.

The spider saw them all.  She (he wasn’t sure, still, why he thought it was female, but he did) had known
all
along, had guided him.

Guided…or manipulated?

He stopped. 

I’d
always assumed she was some sort of…guide.  Fate, maybe, showing
me
where to go, what to do.

But to what ends?

He saw the Sorn’s mangled corpse below his feet, so he kicked off and twisted himself around to avoid landing on the body.  H
e
touched down on the rock at the nadir of the massive
shaft.  The black stone cracked
under his feet
: it was
brittle as ice.  A single wide corridor led off from the shaft towards a distant chamber filled with golden light.

His vision shifted, halted, and started again.  The air felt uncertain, out of synch.  It was like when he’d been dipped in the black fluid in the Bonespire
and had
stepped outside the normal flow of time.  This entire place was disconnected, and it shifted away from the possible realms.

Cross paused, gripped by a cloying chill inside and out.

He knew in his gut that the spider in the Citadel was Azradayne.

Something not of our world
,
or any world we know
, was what Vala had said about her.  The Grey Clan hadn’t said what she was. 

The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.

She’s moved me where she wants me to be.  If she can see different possibilities, different versions of what would happen, then she could have seen how my being in certain places could alter the course of history. 

It didn’t mean
that
he was all important.  Chaos theory, the notion of a hurricane caused by butterfly wings, held to the principal that minor events led to greater events, distant chain reactions, small occurrences potentially initiating world-changing sequences.  It could have been anyone.  All that mattered was seeing the pattern, knowing what threads led to what.