Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (18 page)

“
End the war?  You should be all over that, Mace,” Terrell said, stamping loudly into the chamber.  He was a young man, just a few years older than Shiv, with curly blonde hair and a chiseled physique, boiled red leather armor under a flak jacket, armored boots and thick bracers.  He wore a Lith bow slung across his back, as well as M45 dangling from a strap.  “We’ve always known you were a pansy.”             

“
And you’re an asshole,” Mace said with a smile.  “So I’m glad we know where we stand.”

“
Yes,” Terrell said.  “In deep shit, just like yesterday.”  He looked at Shiv.  “You seem awfully convinced this fairy tale city is worth the trip.  I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that those foothills lie in contested territory, which means you won’t just have to deal with the Ebon Kingdoms.”

That was the problem so far as Terrell was concerned, and always had been.  The rumored location of Bloodhollow lay just north of Meldoar and at the western edge of the East Claw Coalition: so far as General Wulf was concerned anything within fifty miles of his borders was rightfully his, which was why he wasted so much time bombing Meldoar when he should have been more focused on repelling vampire shock troops and war wight battalions.  Once word of Bloodhollow’s discovery spread – and doubtless it already had – everyone would be trying to secure possession so they could profit from any who hoped to fulfill the prophecies of the city’s powers. 

“And why would that bother
you
?” Mace asked Terrell pointedly. 

“
Our war is with the vampires,” Terrell said.  “Not with Wulf, and not with the Gol.  And there’s no way we’re getting anywhere near this bullshit myth without bringing both of them down on top of us.”

“
Now who’s the pansy?” Mace laughed, but Terrell didn’t.  The young man stepped forward, his fists clenched, and by the time Mace had fully turned to face him the younger man had a hand on the hilt of his knife.

Shiv narrowed her gaze.  Her stomach lurched.  Voices clawed at her flesh and sickness boiled through her gut, and for a moment she was seized by such a gelid chill she thought she’d fall into herself.  Her fingers tightened and her gums bled, and in that moment a trio of ghosts – the remnants of people who’d died in the wastelands, victims of vampire purges and cannibal nomads and who were still tied to the area by the stain of Ebon Kingdom’s magic – moved in and swiped across Terrell’s body, flushing his flesh and forcing him back far enough that he couldn’t do her any harm.  The motion seemed more violent than it was, and he turned to Shiv in anger.

“Get your fucking poltergeists off of me!” he shouted, and he stepped forward as if to strike.  Mace moved to intercept him, but not fast enough. 

Shiv tried to stop the spirits before they moved to protect her, but she couldn’t react in time.  Terrell was thrown back hard, and this time the motion wasn’t gentle enough for him to avoid slipping off the stone bridge.  He fell out of sight and into the darkness, and though it was only a forty foot descent the angle was awkward, and before he’d even landed Shiv knew he’d break his neck.  The sickening crunch echoed through the cold stone chamber.

Shiv gasped as the spirits vanished back into the wastes, just shadows of sound and motion.  Her hands shook, and the cold feeling inside of her remained, like she’d just swallowed a chunk of ice. 

“
Mace...” she gasped.  “Oh, God...I killed him...”

Mace stood stoic and quiet.  His eyes were wide as he looked down into the hole. 

“No,” he said.  “You didn’t.”

“
Mace...”

“
No,” Mace said sharply.  “You were ordained by the White Mother herself, Shiv.  Your father died to get you to us, so you could
lead
us.”  He steadied himself.  “I believe this is a sign,” he said.  She shuddered – he’d once been a priest himself, before the war began, but he rarely spoke of portents or signs. 

“
A sign?” she asked, her voice weak.  Tears stained her eyes. 

He didn’t need to die,
she thought. 
I’m losing control.  The older I get the harder it is to keep the spirits in check. 

“
Yes,” Mace said, his gravelly voice loud in the chamber. 

“
A sign of what?”

“
He opposed the mission,” Mace said.  “He didn’t want us to find Bloodhollow.  It’s our last hope, Shiv.  The Lith prophecies foretold the end of the war would take place there: they spoke of a great rip being sealed, expunging intruders from our world forever.”  He looked down into the darkness.  “Terrell didn’t believe in that.  So he was dealt with.  Now, more than ever, I know this is what we were meant to do.”  Mace turned to leave.

“
Mace?” Shiv asked.

“
I’ll take care of Terrell,” he said.  “Ready yourself, child.  Bloodhollow is waiting for us.”

PART THREE

TRAILS

Slums and factories, torchlight and bones.  Flags ripple in the iron wind.  The air is thick with the smell of innards and flames.  Unclear storms and dirty fires smear the glass sky.  The face of Rimefang Loch looks almost polished.

They travel inland, the vampire warships some distance back as the undead scout team moves fast across the wastelands.  The entrance to Bloodhollow lies near the remains of Crucifix Point, and the very air there is deadly to vampires.  Lord Drake wants to know why, and he wants Harpy’s team to neutralize the threat. 

No vampire can approach within a mile of the ruined citadel without beginning to decompose, falling apart like in the stories of old, back before the Grim Father perfected the magic that allows vampires to walk in the sun with impunity.  In those early days, before the Empires, vampires had been forbidden to enter daylight, and those who did were torn apart from the inside out, shredded by some dire internal combustion, a reaction their oxidizing blood had to the radioactive rays of the intense star that held their world in orbit.  The sun on Earth was nowhere near as bright or as powerful, but before the Exodus the necrotheurges had still determined that exposure to direct sunlight on this new world would be hazardous for any vampire, which was why elixirs and treatments had been developed that would allow them to survive.  Every vampire was treated upon Turning, and great stores of vats in Tanith and Skane ensured that daylight could never be used against them.

Based on what Harpy tells him the area around Crucifix Point has the same effect on vampires as stepping into sunlight: weakness, decomposition, and within a few hours of exposure complete disintegration, a breakdown of flesh and blood. 

Reaver steels himself.  He can’t block memories of the girl dying, memories of pain.  He shouldn’t even know what that feels like, not anymore. 

My memory should have been wiped
, he thinks, but he is part of Harpy’s team now, and must do as she commands.  Harpy will have none of it – she wants his senses to be alert, and unaltered.  He thinks she’s trying to empower him, though he doesn’t understand why.  It is not his place to question orders.

But is she acting in the interests of the Kingdoms?  How can I know?

Reaver walks in silence.  Razor spurs and bone blades glint in the moonlight, and his tightly fitted iron mask conveys his surroundings to him in a series of schematics and readouts.  The night wind is cool and clear, and he tastes a memory of ice and salt on his dried and crusted tongue.  They aren’t real sensations – his body has deteriorated past the point of him being able to feel anything – but recollections of feeling.  His undead brain still processes what he experiences, and somewhere in his decaying mind he still remembers the true sensations, has cataloged those tangible details and stored them away.

He remembers, but none of those memories give him any identity, any sense of self.  Memories of physicality, of touch and taste and scent.  Of pain.  Loss.

It’s strange to retain the memories for so long.  He’s never gone more than a few days without having his mind wiped to prevent any internal conflict. 

Why is Harpy doing this to him?

He sees the girl’s face, remembers her dying in his arms.  He has to forget her, has to try not to remember.  It’s difficult, because he wants to keep her close.  He wants to know what it’s like to truly feel something.

Harpy leads them through the trees.  The lands just north of Seraph are burnished and coppery and devoid of vegetation but thick with industrial cable strung between Ebon Kingdoms communication towers.  Pools of gelid water reflect the golden moon, and the shelves of stone they traverse seem carved, engraved with striated lines and hand-crafted runes.  Dust scales across the ground and blows west towards the Loch’s ice-blue waters.  Shadows run long.  They move through the network of iron citadels and steel mesh, skeletons of steel tied together by razorwire and black cables. 

Harpy leads them, floating through the air on crossed legs, black hair fluttering behind her.  The wind causes the bone fetishes and fasteners in her hair to clink together like wind chimes.  Giant, Inferno and Talon follow close, their presence a weight.  Reaver feels himself bound to the others, all undead servants of the Ebon Kingdoms, long ago robbed of their life and will.  He wonders if they, too, have memories of their former lives.  He has a sense he hasn’t been this way for very long, at least not as long as the others, but there’s no way to know, and thinking on it makes his insides churn like fire.

He wishes he could stop thinking, stop wondering.  Stop trying to remember.

They pass a flesh farm, where bulbs of blackened meat spew puss and blood as they rapidly expand to form artificial bodies, cloned humans who’ll be Turned or processed into zombies or war-wights, mindless living organisms the theurges and lich surgeons can instantly recruit into the Ebon Kingdom’s ranks.  Great roving juggernauts of skin and bone patrol the outer markers of the black fields, their bladed tusks and grafted armor enameled black so they won’t stand out in the darkness.  Shadowed smoke leaks from bio-organic fruit as the bodies within grow beneath their chorians, expanding and developing at a supernatural rate.  Reaver imagines the blank eyes, the sealed mouths, and wonders if he’d been grown or born.

Too many questions.  No more questions.

The voices of the vampires grow more faint with each passing hour.  Reaver acknowledges that some part of him should be grateful, but the distant and floating sensation he has is uncomfortable.  He wonders if it’s fear.

They move in silence broken only when Harpy gives them instructions through their necro-telepathic link, a binding of their undead cortexes which allows them to transmit messages and raw information.  Harpy’s thick cloak ripples behind her in the black wind, and her smooth and carefully preserved flesh is as dark as the night sky.  Giant lumbers along, embalming fluids seeping from what of his grey-green flesh is visible beneath the armor plating, the teeth and bits of skull showing through where the skin has peeled away from his rotting visage.  Talon’s skull-like mask remains in place, and her gold and purple armor is riddled with exotic throwing blades and barbed nets she can wield even with her massive and ungainly claws.  Inferno floats behind them all, a halo of hot blue flame, the sound of his passage like a hiss of gas.

They are a strike force of the damned, moving towards the edge of their own territory.  The vampires informed them that multiple forces are converging on Bloodhollow.  This area must be secured to enable the quickest passage to the underground city.

The vampires will be saved by we, the remnants, the dregs. 

They edge across the plains, make haste without drawing attention.  Pillars of stone protrude from the landscape, scaled by sea wind and eroded by the excess of salt in the air.  Horizontal boughs of rock and rotting trees dot the area like corpses.  The air tastes bitter, and the entire region is thick with blue marsh water. 

They move in the cover of basalt spires and mounds of rounded rock.  Eventually they find more solid ground deeper inland, shallow valleys and crevices, a landscape of stone covered with calcified litter, tumbled scree and needles of frozen earth.

They want to maintain a low profile, as there’s no telling what sort of other creatures they might run into so close to the old fortress.  The destruction of Crucifix Point had once been a considered a major success for the Ebon Kingdoms, an elite attack launched deep into the heart of Southern Claw territory that struck fear and doubt into the hearts of the humans, but the mysterious disappearance of the fortress itself had always been something of a mystery none of the lich or necrotheurges could explain.  Something has happened to the human citadel, some by-product of the Exodus, or so claimed the dissident voices in Skane, who blamed Tanith’s over-indulgence in attempting to re-create the original dimensional warping technology that had allowed them to breach the walls between Malefia and Earth in the first place.  Why that effect would be adverse to the vampires now is unknown.

Ripples
, Reaver thinks, not knowing why. 
Ripples of a future event.  Things coming unraveled from some other point in time.

The thought flees.  He forgets he had it. 

The deeper inland they go the more Reaver notices variations in the sky and atmosphere.  The clouds seem frozen, the horizon more difficult to pinpoint.  Sounds echo, fade, and echo again.  The shadows grow tall, the wind is a whisper even when it gales, and it takes longer for the earth to sink beneath their footsteps.  Everything takes on a stained quality, myopic and dissonant, the sky too close and the ground too distant, the earth shifting even though it holds perfectly still.  Everything is disconnected, a step out of place.

They pass into a shallow bowl of earth, a wide grey and red space devoid of debris save for a few random stones and low pylons.  Salt stains indicate the place had once been some sort of a cove, much closer to the sea, and the broken shells and bits of salty bones and dead sea-life attest to that fact, though judging by the state of the place it hasn’t seen any sort of moisture in months, if not longer.  The edges of the slope lead into fields of unnatural fog.

Reaver hears something.  It comes sudden, a grind of machines and bursts of mechanical power that weren’t there moments before.

Lights hammer through the smoke.  Harpy’s missive goes out moments too late.  Rhythms of bomb blasts followed by caustic jets of fuel as they burn away the morning fog.  Sunlight bleeds through the gritty walls of fume as land vehicles crash into view. 

Coalition.

The crawler’s tank treads rip open soil and crush rock.  Gleaming floodlights illuminate debris that seems frozen in motion, like rubbish in the water, petrified in glass.  The undead scatter into defensive positions. 

The crawlers are behemoths of iron and steel, wide-backed vehicles with enormous treads and weapons mounted on top.  Grills like shark’s teeth tear apart the path.  Reaver fires his bone rifle, but the explosive shells barely dent the armored rovers.  There are three of the vehicles, their mechanical groans suddenly deafening. 

Animals scatter from the field, rodents and scavengers that had been invisible just moments ago.  Creatures are smothered in the bed of flame, boiled into a broth of dead.  Inferno basks in those fires, impervious to the throwers, and retaliates with flames of his own – he immolates the lead vehicle and sets the driver and gunners alight.  Reaver’s head fills with the sound of their screams as they writhe and thrash and die.  The air tastes like diesel fuel, another memory Reaver can’t suppress.  He’s reminded of something, some place he’s been, a city by the sea.

Harpy twists the ground in front of the second crawler.  Giant hammers the vehicle with massive undead fists, and he dents the grill and cracks the window.  Reaver sees the panicked driver inside.

The East Claw Coalition soldiers are far from defenseless.  20mm cannons mounted on the front of the vehicle tear through Giant’s chest and pull him apart in a storm of bullets and undead meat.  The zombie doesn’t go down easy, and he crushes the vehicle’s cockpit and its screaming driver like a pimple before he falls.  The gunners up top keep firing, relentless, until the barrage splatters Giant’s head into fragments.  Maggots rain down.

Reaver’s shots rip the men from the top of the ruined vehicle one by one, and they go flying off the side and down the slope.  Their bodies catch alight as the flamethrower from the ruined vehicle sweeps over them.

One crawler remains, but Reaver hears an airship hover low over the landscape.  The grind of turbines roars through the atmosphere, and the dull hammer of chain guns echoes into the meat red sky.  Earth explodes around them.

Inferno is gone, consumed by the flames he basks in.  He loses himself, allows his form to dissipate, incapable of maintaining the focus and identity necessary to keep himself stable. 

Talon is on the ground in front of the vehicle, ripping Fanian soldiers to shreds with her sizable claws and soundlessly throwing their ruined corpses to the ground. 

The vehicle stops, brought to a halt by Harpy, who hovers in the air in a nimbus of pseudo-arcane energy, her cloak rippling in the wind, dead eyes focused straight ahead on the driver who thrashes violently in the cockpit, throwing himself against the walls and window with such speed and force he breaks open his skull.  Blood and gooey bits of bone paint the interior of the crawler.

Reaver picks off men with carefully aimed bursts.  Each shot is a staccato boom in the morning still, putting holes the size of fists into armored chests.  He takes aim at the warship as it swings around, a sleek Fane design resembling some sort of armored sand crab, edged wings and spiked guns gleaming red in the morning light.  Dust and debris circle beneath the engines as the vehicle flies low.

Chain guns bore through Harpy and scatter her skeletal remains across the face of the crawler.  Talon leaps forward with superhuman strength and latches onto the ship, digging claws the size of machetes into the front of the craft and weighing it down just enough to tip it forward.  The guns roar, annihilating what’s left of the crawler below but unable to hit the war-wight due to the angle.  Reaver fires at the engines, detonating one so it sends out a jet of black and greasy smoke.  The warship pushes forward against the side of the slope, slicing Talon in half and smearing her remains against the limestone floor.