Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  The air in the ship stank of blood and smoke, bile and death. The nausea I had felt aboard the biplane returned in more force.

  “Where is everyone?” Ivan asked quietly. “There would be many more passengers and crew than this.”

  I looked at the latest dead body, bisected to spill its entrails across the tilting corridor in front of us. “They’re on the Emperor’s airship.”

  “What?”

  I knelt by the upper half of the body and pulled the shreds of the dead man’s jacket and shirt away from the skin of his back. Above the massive wound and smears of blood, parts of a Mark were visible traced into the skin. “The dead they left. They’re all Walkers.” I stood up.

  “But the other people? This airship carried dozens.”

  “That’s who was attacking you.”

  “My Lady?”

  “The Shadows came from this airship’s passengers.” I looked up from the corpse and realized that Ivan wouldn’t have understood anything my sister had said. “She talked of making Shadows.”

  “What?”

  I described what she had said, and Ivan responded with a horrified expression. “Just using Shadows is abominable enough. Creating them . . .”

  I felt a rumble through the floor of the deck, and suddenly the floor tilted against itself, throwing me against one wall and forcing me to step into the gore left by the bisected corpse.

  “What’s that? Ballast again?”

  “Maybe they’re venting gas,” Ivan said. “Trying to straighten us out.”

  The floor had flattened out side to side, but it still tilted downward, even more steeply toward the nose of the aircraft. I felt my stomach lurch.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Ivan grabbed the wall as the tilt became more pronounced, and my gut felt like I was in an elevator in free-fall. “Why—”

  He must have felt the same thing I had, the sense of being torn through the skin of the world and into Chaos.

  “The airship?” Ivan whispered incredulously. “She’s moving the whole airship?”

  “And diving to pick up speed,” I said.

  We started running toward the bridge.

  FORTY-TWO

  WE WENT FORWARD along the steeply inclined deck. As we moved, I felt corresponding movement through Chaos like an invisible windstorm blowing across my Mark; like the feeling on your skin when you hold your hand out the window of a moving car, if the car was doing ninety through a hurricane-force ice storm.

  The corridors of this airship were more cramped and less ornate than the spaces in the Emperor’s. Most of the signage was in Spanish rather than French, and as we made our way past a couple of more corpses, Ivan said something about it being a troop transport out of South America or Cuba.

  “How could such an invasion slip by us?”

  “It was only a few people . . .”

  “Even one person couldn’t Walk into the Emperor’s demesne unnoted.”

  “Maybe they didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “If another ‘Prince’ showed up on the Empire’s fringes with her retinue, what would be done with them?”

  “They would be bound and taken to—” He broke off, cursing in Russian.

  “You’d cuff them like you did me, and transport them in an airship so they couldn’t just Walk away. Right?”

  He continued cursing in Russian. He got it. They had given my sister and her people the same treatment they’d given me. But, unlike me, she had the ability to create Shadows out of otherwise normal people. Somehow, she could infect people with a piece harvested from someone’s Mark. Even if she only managed to do so with one or two, having those loose on a cramped ship like this, spreading the infection, could easily overwhelm a crew that wasn’t prepared.

  Their overwhelming attack worked in our favor. The door leading down to the bridge had been busted open badly enough that it could no longer be dogged shut. We took up positions on opposite sides of the door. We hadn’t run into my sister’s remaining troops on the way here, so they had to be waiting in ambush.

  Ivan stood on the hinge side of the door pointing his weapon along it as he pushed it inward with his foot. A diffuse gray light spilled in from the corridor beyond, washing out the weak electric light from the corridor. For a few moments as the door swung, everything was ominously silent except for a distant thrum of engines.

  Then a rifle shot exploded and we were in the midst of a gunfight. For several seconds we exchanged gunfire with them down a short flight of steps that led into what I presume was the bridge. They had similar cover to us, ducking around the doorway into the bridge.

  I ran out of ammo first.

  The others ran out in quick succession. Then a bearded barbarian was charging up the steps toward us, brandishing a sword. I though briefly of jumping with my Mark past him, as I’d done with the Shadows, but I felt the pressure of the entire airship moving through Chaos and wasn’t certain I’d be able to repeat the trick while we were moving in those nameless directions.

  Ivan quickly shifted his grip on the rifle and swung it up to parry the attacker’s sword. I scrambled back, and without the time or the space to flip my rifle around, I simply thrust it as if I had a bayonet. I aimed for his face, but just grazed the side of his head. I only managed to attract his attention.

  But that gave Ivan enough of an opening to bring the butt of his rifle down on the bridge of the man’s nose. His face erupted into a flower of blood as he fell back down the stairway, thudding like a sack of concrete and moving with about as much animation.

  The door hung open in front of us, and Ivan dove to grab for the sword the man had dropped. As he did, the last of my sister’s anachronistic guards stepped out on the foot of the stairway above his fallen general. He was bringing a pistol to bear at Ivan. With only a fraction of a second to act, I screamed and dove at the man, my reservations forgotten. I leaped over Ivan’s crouching form. The man drew up the gun to cover me rather than Ivan.

  I pushed with the Mark just as he fired. Instead of a gunshot, I only heard the dull gray silence of empty Chaos around me, I pushed back the way I had come immediately. Even so, it felt almost too late, despite my pushing my Mark as hard as I could, it seemed I fell for a full second through Chaos before the airship surrounded me again.

  Then I was face-to-face with the guard, less than an inch between us. I had no time to brace before plowing him down, stunning myself as much as I stunned him. My empty rifle sailed somewhere off into the bridge. Before I came completely to my senses, I saw the man next to me, scrambling to sit and bring his pistol up. Ivan ran him through before he got the chance to fire again. The pistol flew from his hand and landed by me, and by then I’d recovered enough sense to grab it.

  I scrambled to my feet to face the bridge.

  Men in uniform stood in front of various control stations covered with panels of obscure-looking dials, levers, and meters. A large table in the center of the room had been covered with charts that had half slid off in the ongoing descent.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows dominated the front of the room, half-spidered by multiple bullet holes. Beyond them swirled Chaos that wiped away any sense of up or down. Ivan stood up and took a step into the room, holding his bloody sword.

  “Nyepravda. Something’s not right.”

  Our quarry, my sister, stood before the windows, facing Chaos, ignoring us.

  Something tingled my Mark’s senses. The sense of so much mass moving through Chaos was overwhelming, but I still felt the sense of something familiar and corrupt underneath it.

  Ivan, oblivious, pointed his sword at the blonde robed figure across the bridge from us. “We have you. Free your hostages and return this ship from whence it came.”

  “Ivan! Those men aren’t hostages—”

  The crew manning the various stations on the
bridge sprang into motion before I completed my sentence. The moment they turned, the ink-black eyes told what they were even if there weren’t dark scars carving across their faces. I braced my wrist and fired my newly-acquired pistol at the one leaping at Ivan’s back. The shot hit off-center down and to the right of the sternum, but my appropriated weapon had a kick like a Magnum, and the Shadow went down clutching a black-bleeding hole in its abdomen.

  I saw Ivan swing his weapon, as another Shadow leaped up in front of me. I couldn’t aim, I just fired twice, and the attacker fell back without most of his lower face. But that was enough of a distraction to have two others grab my arms. My gun went tumbling into the bridge as I was dragged to the ground.

  As I fell back in the doorway, I heard the sounds of a sword hacking from Ivan’s direction. I heard cracking glass, a whistle of wind, and livid curses in Russian. My attackers had me pinned, immobile, but I could lift my head enough to see Ivan silhouetted against one of the huge windows overlooking the roiling Chaos the airship descended through. Cracks webbed the window, emerging from a pair of bullet holes.

  Three Shadows leaped on him, slamming into the cracked window.

  “No!” I yelled as I saw the window bulge outward with the impact, the spiderweb of cracks multiplying. For a fraction of a second the glass turned opaque—right before it exploded, sending Ivan and the three Shadows tumbling into the Chaos. I stared at where Ivan had stood, eyes wide and burning in the sudden wind from the missing window.

  “Ivan!”

  No answer, of course.

  In the back of my mind, I think I’d always expected to die in the line of duty, like my dad. In a moment of clarity, now that that moment was imminent, I understood that in some sense I wanted it all to end like that. For years I’d been chasing after my dad, pushing things, hoping on some level to share his fate.

  But not like this. Not torn apart by half-human cannibals.

  The Shadows snarled at me and, after a couple of seconds I realized that they weren’t tearing into me the way I expected. Then their heads turned away from me, toward an approaching form silhouetted against the broken window.

  “You think to challenge me?”

  “You didn’t give me much choice.”

  “Yet you bedevil me for no good end.” She shook her head. “I had you before, and I have you now.” If anything, it was that arrogant, dismissive attitude that infuriated me. I was still trying to process the fact Ivan was gone, and this mockery of family showed little more than irritation over losing her own men. They might as well have been the Shadows she sent to destruction for all she seemed to care. I struggled against the Shadows’ grip, but they were large men and the infection they suffered seemed only to increase their strength.

  She picked up the pistol I had dropped when the Shadows had overpowered me. “The General gave good council, but the cost is too high.” She leveled the gun at me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am Ulrika, daughter of Ulthar, heir to House Wealcan, and I shall not leave you to challenge my power.”

  “Please, don’t.”

  “Pleading shall not aid you.”

  “The fact we’re sisters means nothing to you?”

  “It means you are a threat to my power.”

  I raged internally. The threat on my life almost didn’t matter. What gripped me more than anything was the violence this evil bitch had done to my idea of family. She had taken something I had deeply longed for and perverted it as much as she had perverted these Shadows.

  She leveled the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. I’d emptied the gun before the Shadows had jumped me. I saw her eyes widen, and felt I had the only opening I was going to get.

  I pushed out with my Mark, the way I had with Ivan, shoving my own phantom fists into the mass of rotting fingers reaching for me. The Shadows let me go as if my blows had been physical. Ulrika scrambled back, her composure finally broken. Her expression said she had not expected this.

  My sister screamed at them, “Grab her! She’s not me! Tear her apart!”

  They didn’t move to grab me as I struggled to my feet. It was harder now, the angle of the floor steeper. She dropped the empty gun and reached for her belt, I didn’t know what she was reaching for, but I wasn’t about to let her get it out. I tackled her from a crouch, and we both fell backward toward the windows.

  Grabbing her was like shoving a live electrical cable into myself. Every nerve inside me flared with sudden rough awareness of her Mark slamming into mine. My Mark slammed into hers like a fist into a brick wall. I might have screamed in pain before we smashed into the deck.

  I felt the world around us, dimly, at the edge of my perception. The feel of my hands around her neck seemed an incidental afterimage in the face of the steel hands of her Mark crushing my own. My reality became nothing but a point of sensation tumbling through the void of Chaos, demon winds abrading away the parts of me that weren’t battered at the hands of Ulrika’s Mark. I felt her tear at me and it felt as if she had torn open my belly to feed on my entrails.

  Fool, I heard her voice clearly, though she hadn’t spoken. Somehow, I was still aware of my fingers locked around her throat. As if it mattered.

  Demon claws dug into the invisible substance of my Mark, tearing pieces of it away.

  You think you can fight me like this?

  I could feel her hard alien touch cut into me, wrap itself around the heart of my Mark, pulling it as if grabbing the base of my spine. Everything inside me flared in agony. Nothing was left but pain and my sister’s voice.

  You are nothing, a mistake, an obstacle to restoring . . . to restoring . . .

  I felt the painful grip slip slightly before digging in deeper. Twisted in pain as I felt, that one slip gave me a sudden resolve. She was feeling it, weakening herself. For all her arrogance, we weren’t as mismatched as she’d thought.

  Somewhere in the real world, I whispered into the shrieking Chaos. “I. Am. Not. Nothing.” I pulled my awareness away from the feeling of her Mark tearing me apart to focus on where we were. My eyes focused on her face staring up at mine. In the periphery of my vision I saw the light on the deck change as the airship fell out of Chaos into a real universe somewhere, my sister unable to maintain the movement between the worlds.

  I will kill you! I heard her in my head as her phantom talons pierced the heart of my Mark and yanked it as if she was an eagle ripping the liver out of my body.

  “And I’m going to kick your ass!” I screamed, bringing my forehead down to slam into her face. The impact was hard enough to stun me. My grip on her neck slipped and I collapsed on top of her, but the claws of her Mark withdrew from my own, leaving her touch draped across me: inert, suffocating, and impossible to push away.

  It took a moment to recover from my own attack, but I managed to move before she recovered. I pushed myself away from her, and the suffocating presence of her Mark receded when I no longer touched her.

  She groaned, semiconscious, bleeding from split lips and a broken nose, and I pushed myself to my hands and knees and looked madly around for something I could use as a weapon without touching her. Then I saw the view out the windows.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Nothing was visible out the windows except the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. For one moment all I saw was sunlight glinting off the crests of the waves, sunlight that disappeared as an ominously large shadow grew across the water.

  We hit.

  FORTY-THREE

  THE NOSE OF the airship, above and ahead of us, hit the water first. The impact might have been slow compared to a typical aircraft crash, but it sent shuddering groans through the airframe around us and stopped our forward motion hard enough to throw me from my crouched position to tumble forward. I slammed on my back against the windows, and for a moment it seemed the floor was now vert
ical, the Shadows and my half-conscious sister falling toward me.

  One of the Shadows fell out the broken window next to me. More groans shook the airship, and the floor started falling back down as the gondola slammed into the waves. Water rushed in the open window in a sudden torrent. I grabbed the edge of the window frame to keep the inward rush of water from slamming me into a pulp against the walls.

  The water was already chest-high.

  I gathered my strength to push my wounded Mark to get out of here. Something grabbed my leg, throwing a crushing weight against my efforts, heavier than the rushing water. I looked down and couldn’t see anything but a grinning shadow in the flickering remnants of the surviving electric lights.

  You don’t escape that easy.

  “Fuck you, sister!” I yelled at her, taking in half a lungful of water as I did so. I ran every day, and my legs were not to be trifled with. Barefoot or not, when my free foot connected with her face, I felt flesh give way, and her neck snap back. Her grip weakened enough for the rush of water to carry her off, deeper into the bridge, away from me.

  The water slid above my chin, and I took in a last gulp of air as the lights died, plunging me into a cold, wet darkness. My Mark throbbed with the violence done to it, and I felt as if I was bleeding inside. The water rushed over my head, the splashing rush subsiding to a muffled underwater roar.

  I felt the current ebb as the pressure equalized. I let go of my anchor and drifted away from the window. I couldn’t tell up from down now, in from out. The darkness was complete.

  It didn’t matter, I just needed to move a small bit. I drifted, and I took my wounded Mark and made it push. The effort felt as if it tore flesh from inside my body, but the darkness changed to dimness.