The two men ate warm beans heated in tin cans. Cross thought they tasted like asphalt. The ground was hard beneath them, and it was so cold it more or less nullified the blankets they hid under.
Cross brought Dillon up to speed regarding his conversation with Danica Black. He left out what Black had said to him there at the end about saving lives not meaning much to her. He still wasn’t exactly sure what to make of that.
“ Shit,” Dillon said when Cross finished. “Man…this is turning out to be a real pain in the ass, Cross.”
“ Sorry,” Cross said. “What did you expect when they handed you the job of babysitting me?”
“ Trouble,” Dillon laughed. “Not like this, though.” He paused, and cast a furtive glance at Black. “You, uh…you buy her story?”
Cross took a sip of cowboy coffee. It tasted like they’d made it with dirt instead of coffee grounds.
“ I think so,” he said after a moment. “But we need to be careful.”
“ You think she’s setting us up?”
“ No,” Cross said. He stretched his arms out. He could have used a healing salve, but he wanted to hold on to what small supply they had in case they needed it later. Black and Vos had salvaged everything they possibly could from the Dreadnaught’s wreckage, but even with what they’d recovered there was still barely enough supplies for the five people from the ship. Cross and Dillon had enough of their own supplies, but there was very little they could spare. “No,” Cross said again. “I truly believe she wants her girlfriend back.”
“ I dig the fact that she has a girlfriend,” Dillon said with a wry smile.
I don’t, Cross thought.
“ Just because she wants to get her girl back,” Dillon continued, “doesn’t mean she won’t turn on us when the deal is done. You know, so she doesn’t have to keep up her end of the bargain.”
“ Yeah…in the end, she may not want to give up Lucan,” Cross said. His beans were gone, but his stomach still growled with hunger. “So like I said…we’ll be careful.”
Dillon threw the rest of his coffee into the fire, and pulled a licorice root out of his pocket, which he chewed on thoughtfully.
“ You got any family, Cross?” he asked. They’d been on the mission for weeks, but Cross realized he knew little about the ranger.
“ No,” he said with some hesitation.
He sees Snow, burning on the train.
“ You have a sister, right?” Cross asked him. “And a nephew?”
“ Yeah,” Dillon said. “Jeraline’s husband died a few years back. She’s been taking care of Dwayne on her own. He’s a good kid. Cute. Loud, though.” Dillon laughed. “I don’t see them too much,” he said. “But I would like to see them again.” He looked at Cross. “I’ll follow your lead. Just try not to get us killed, all right?”
Cross nodded.
“ Fair enough,” he said. “Shall we?”
They rose and went to speak with Black. There were some things that needed to be sorted out.
They took their seats by the fire and accepted more coffee, this time from a fresh kettle that Black had just made. It tasted slightly less gritty than what Cross and Dillon had been drinking.
Black sat bundled up in a blanket. Her face looked ashen in the firelight. Vos came over and stood with his weapon folded in his arms.
“ We’ll help you get Cole back,” Cross continued. “In return, you convince her to help us find what we’re looking for. In either case, when this is all over, Lucan Keth comes with us.”
“ Back to Thornn,” Vos said with an angry smile on his face.
“ Yes,” Cross answered. “Back to Thornn.”
“ Do you want us to bend over, too?” Vos asked.
Dillon blew Vos a mocking kiss.
“ I don’t like being bullied, Cross,” Black said. “But you have to protect what’s yours. Vos and I can’t do this on our own. If you help us get Cole out of there alive, and you help us get to safety…sure, I’ll let you have Lucan. And I’ll ask Cole to tell you what you want to know.”
“ So we have a deal?” Cross asked.
“ We have a deal,” Black said.
Vos bristled, but he didn’t say anything.
“ Where’s the exchange supposed to take place?” Dillon asked.
“ At some ruins to the east,” she said. “They should be about a day’s march, I think. If we still had the airship, we’d have been there by now.”
“ Wait,” Cross said. “When were you supposed to be there?”
“ Today,” Vos said. His words were cold.
Cross looked at Black, and she met his gaze. Her expression was controlled, but he noted the worry.
“ She’s fine,” Cross said.
“ Yeah,” Dillon said, sounding less convinced.
“ Of course she’s fine,” Black said firmly. “I don’t need you to tell me that. If Cradden went through this much trouble to get Lucan from me, he wouldn’t kill his hostage and wreck his chances. Besides, he knows damn well he’ll never get anything out of me if he hurts her. But…” She paused. That worry returned to her face. It was subtle, almost too subtle to notice, but her eyes creased ever so slightly, and the inflection of her voice cracked, just a hair. “If he thinks we’re cheating him, or if he thinks we’re not going to deliver…then there’s no telling what he’ll do. He can be a real spiteful bastard when he’s cornered. But he’s not stupid.”
“ He also has a good crew with him,” Vos said. “A half-dozen mercs, at least.”
“ Well, that’s great,” Dillon said quietly. “Do you have a layout for the ruins?”
Black produced a map. The ruins in question were those of a city, depicted in carefully cast lines of charcoal and ink on a faded piece of yellowed parchment. If the map was accurate, there were plenty of buildings in the ruins, at least ten square city blocks worth.
“ All right,” Black said. “So what’s the plan?”
“ Wait,” Cross said. “There’s one more thing.” The air stiffened as a cold and dead wind came at them. Cross rocked in place to try and stay warm. The sky was clear and vast. “What made the ship crash?”
Vos looked at Black, as if for permission to answer. Black swallowed, and she took a deep and shuddering breath.
“ We’re not sure,” she said. “Something…dark.”
“ Dark skinned?” Dillon asked.
“ Maybe,” Black said. “It wasn’t human. Royce…the pilot…whatever it was, it tore Royce and the entire cockpit in half. But right before it happened, he said he saw something, and whatever it was sent him into a panic.”
“ Well…what was it?” Dillon asked when Black looked away. “What is it the man said?”
“ He said it was a shadow,” Vos answered. “A ghost. A cold, dark ghost.”
He looked terrified.
“ Ebon Cities?” Cross asked after an uncomfortable silence.
“ I don’t know,” Vos answered. “I don’t think so.”
“ No,” Black said with certainty. Her eyes were lost out in the dark. The tiny campsite was a speck of light in the dark sea of the plains. “This was something…old. You could feel it through the walls of the ship. You could feel its presence, so cold and vast and…dead. Like a heartbeat that came from the bottom of a pit.” She looked back at them. “That’s the best I can describe it. It was like a hole. Like a void.”
Black’s eyes stared back into the memory, stuck inside the vision of whatever they’d seen when the ship crashed, and of what Black’s spirit had felt.
Vos watched Black as she sat there, quiet. Cross saw that the male Revenger looked at his superior officer with concern.
“ Whatever it is,” Vos said, “it tore the control room right out of the damned ship. We were mid-air when it happened. The whole crate just spiraled right out of the sky.” He spat on the ground, and rubbed it into the hard dirt with his boot. “We lost five men. Five.”
Again, there was silence.
Cross t
hought that he recognized what Black was talking about. It had been described as a dream, a nightmare of an absence, a dark void. An evil older than the new world, and it roamed free. It was a hunter, which meant that it might have been the same entity that he and Dillon had been sent to stop.
No, not to stop. To find out how to stop. No one can take that thing on alone.
It was out there. Waiting.
I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I hope that’s not what it is. Either way, we’re in it deep now.
After a while, they went over Black’s intelligence about the ruins where her lover was being held, and laid their plans.
FIVE
RUINS
The ruins where the Blacks were to conduct the exchange were of a place called Shul Ganneth, once a temple-city of the lupine race called the Maloj. Not much was known about the Maloj, save that they’d been bestial creatures with foul appetites and a talent for tribal magic. They were also thought to have been extinct for several years, possibly even before the remnants of their civilization had been fused with earth during The Black. Only bits and pieces of their culture remained in the form of ruins, artifacts and fossils found in the wilderness.
The mixed group of Revengers, Southern Claw soldiers and Black Scar inmates traveled at a good pace all through the next day. The air was moist, filled with a thick and freezing fog that blocked sight past half-a-mile and that left them constantly clammy and cold. The ground they traveled over was mostly flat plains covered in snow and beds of smooth ice-covered stone, stony ridges and partially frozen streams.
They traveled on foot and spared the horses and the camel the extra weight, save for those times when Dillon rode ahead to scout. The terrain they passed through was mostly wide open country, so they moved in a spread out formation, with the prisoners at the center, shackled and bound to each other by their wrists.
Cross’ legs ached. The effort of walking on slick ice and brittle ground was exhausting. The air was the color of milk, and thick with frost. Patches of ice covered Cross’ armored coat, and the blankets on the animals turned white with brittle snow powder.
“ Are we there yet?” Kane groaned after a while. No one answered.
“ What’s their story?” Cross asked Black. The two of them walked behind and a good distance away from the rest of the group, though not out of any intent. Cross was stuck leading the slower camel, while Black was busy checking maps of the area, which slowed her pace. Cross’ horse also clunked along beside them.
“ Kane and Ekko?” she said. “They’re stowaways.”
“ How’s that?”
“ They were trying to escape from Black Scar. I’m still not sure how they did it, but they managed to sneak out of general population and smuggle themselves onboard the Dreadnaught. I guess they thought they’d sneak away the next time it left.”
“ Which is when you ‘borrowed’ it,” Cross said.
“ There,” she said. She ignored his comment. “It’s just past that ridge, another mile or two.”
They reached the ridge, which was composed of a number of tightly clustered and jagged rock formations. Sizable clefts in the razor-sharp stones formed questionable paths that led to the other side. Those paths looked like they’d been sheared clean through the rock with some enormous blade.
Rather than pass through right away, the group rested. Dillon went on ahead to check out the ruins, which were barely visible about a mile or so off, at the edge of a thinning field of silver-blue mist.
He wasn’t gone long.
“ There’s no way to get into that place without being seen.” He drew a rough map of Shul Ganneth in the snow. He explained that the exterior wall was a massive dome that bore a single continuous crack down its western side. From what Dillon had seen, it was the only easy way to get in.
“ There are some doors on the far end near some separate ruins, but there’s no way to open them. There isn’t even a handle.” He scratched some squares inside of the circle he’d made to represent the dome. “These are buildings. They’re all over the inside of the dome. If I can get close enough to that crack without being seen, I can slip off and hide in the ruins. I might need a distraction so that I can pull it off, though.”
“ Can you scale the dome?” Black asked. “Maybe come in at the top, where the crack starts?”
“ Only if you and Vos have stashed away some pretty incredible climbing gear that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t wish that climb on anyone. That stone is smooth, old and unstable. I barely even trust walking in there…that place looks ready to collapse.”
“ Fine,” Vos said. “We’ll head straight in then. The way I like it.”
“ Good to know,” Cross said sarcastically. “So are we ready?”
They moved through mist made orange by the dusk sun. A hard wind drove across the plain and carried snow dust and white grit that made it suddenly difficult to see past a few hundred yards. They kept to a path clear of ground snow, a stretch of pale hard stone broken with age. The path twisted and curved through ripped ice. Cross felt a cold that gnawed down to his bones.
And then, Shul Ganneth.
It seemed to sneak up on them from out of the icy fog. It was squat and troglodytic, a broken shell like a preposterously gargantuan egg. Its outer walls were smooth dark stone coated in a layer of pale ice. The structure was much larger than Cross had expected.
The fog receded from the dark round walls as the group drew close. Its crumbling carapace looked like a vast stone crab.
Fields of eight-foot-high wooden stakes bordered the stone path that led to the city. The pale wooden poles were sharp and old, covered in dirty ice and dark stains. Cross tasted torment in the air, the whispered rants of long faded spirits whose physical bodies had died in great pain. Those spirits were long gone, but their suffering had been such that their voices left a spectral imprint on the area.
The group marched slowly through the path of stakes. They saw no bones or bodies. The dome of Shul Ganneth towered before them. It protruded from the bitter and frozen earth like a scab.
Vos led Lucan on the back of Cross’ horse. Kane and Ekko were tethered to the camel’s saddle, which Cross held at the rear of the party. Black rode on Dillon’s bay, and while it was clear that neither she nor the animal were terribly comfortable with the arrangement, they made a good show of it.
The vampire prisoner floated behind them, drawn by the power of Danica’s implement. It was a floating flare that snarled into the darkness, a moving undead torch.
Cross didn’t send his spirit out until they neared the entrance to the ruins, in part because he feared lost souls in the area, but also because doing so would alert Cradden Black earlier than they’d have liked. Cradden was a warlock, and even though Cradden’s gang was almost undoubtedly already watching them it would be difficult for him to read the strength of Cross’ spirit if she was reined in, at least until they got closer.
No need to make this more difficult for ourselves than it already is.
They passed into the crack in the ruined dome wall. It was a welcome relief to be in out of the wind, but the air inside of Shul Ganneth was so utterly still and cold it was almost paralyzing. Cross watched his breath crystallize, and felt his lungs burn.
The vampire’s bonds gave them a fleeting view of the ruins inside of the dome, which was good, because the light from outside seemed incapable of penetrating the unnaturally dense shadows. They walked in darkness as thick as oil. White firelight bounced off of jagged and broken structures made of crumbling limestone rimed with frost. The buildings were uneven and covered in sharp crenellations and dangerous edges. Doorways had tilted sideways and steps looked like blades. The ground was dry and covered with rubble and bones that were so soft they collapsed underfoot. The air smelled cold and dirty. Streets led off to nowhere. Structures seemed to float out of the darkness, which was so deep it could have stretched for miles. They walked through a sea of night, an ink stain addled with debris.
L
ess than a minute after they entered the city, Dillon slipped from his hidden position next to the camel and vanished into the shadows.
Cross’ chest was tight. There were eyes on them, and something more: a presence, vast and ugly and overwhelming. It was foreign, not borne of that place, but at the same time deeply rooted to it. It was an intruder that had melded with the ruins themselves — something vast, and dark, and very old.
Cross drew his HK45, and made his spirit ready. Her spectral skin smoothed over him like a warm tide. She spat at the presence that Cross had sensed. She was so miniscule compared to it, a firefly in a dark sky.
Shadows fell over them like black dust. Decayed facades and crumbling steps and massive doorways leered at them from the edge of the black air like bitter faces.
“ Daaaamn,” Kane muttered. His words echoed like a clap of thunder. “Sorry.” His second word carried even louder than the first, an avalanche in the dark.
Cross looked at him, and raised a finger to his lips.
A lantern appeared in the murk. Danica Black spurred the horse forward. They rode past rows of broken stone fence and between statues of half-eaten lupine warriors. Clumps of petrified clay littered the ground. The frost had gone gray with age. Cross smelled sage and animal musk.
The lantern bearer waited up ahead. He was a stocky and unshaved warrior with leather armor and a chain coat, and he wore a double-barreled shotgun on his hip.
He nodded towards an alcove behind him. It took Cross’ eyes a moment to make out the structure in the muted light — a temple that seemed to melt out of the shadows. The building was cylindrical and very tall, with crumbling columns and spiky protrusions that covered its shell like quills.
“ Danica,” said a voice from the dark. It wasn’t the shotgun bearer, but a second man, a small and wiry individual with a goatee and a black pilot’s coat straight out of World War I. Cross thought the man looked like he should have behind the controls of a Fokker…he even wore aviation goggles. Cross couldn’t begin to fathom how the man could see anything in the impenetrable murk, unless those goggles were some sort of arcane implement. “You made it,” the aviator said with a broad smile. “Cradden was starting to worry.”
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