He tapped on the walls, and tried the door. The steel was lined with thick patches of grey-red rust, but it was free of handholds, and impossible to climb.
Time passed. Cross tried to reach the chains, but he couldn’t. He paced and limped through the grimy waters. He tried the walls again.
They’d taken his gauntlets. Even if his spirit hadn’t been so weak and their bond hadn’t been as damaged as it was, it was incredibly dangerous for him to call on her. At best, he’d scar them both forever.
I know better than to have even tried. His mind felt numb and slow. What the hell is wrong with me?
He walked, back and forth, and memorized the particular smudges on the wall, the spots where the steel had been damaged in peculiar ways. One pattern of scratches looked like some ancient language. He thought that another looked like a lizard wearing a hat, and that was when he understood that he was losing his mind.
His skin was cold and clammy. He was afraid to look at his feet under the boots. His stomach growled.
Cross closed his eyes, and hours seemed to pass in the space of that hands with claws reach out of the water grab pull you down slide the skin off your bones suck lick chew our way up your body blink. He slept standing up. Horrid images assaulted him in his dreams, so he did his best to stay awake.
They’re trying to break you, he told himself. This is what they do.
This is what they did to Snow.
He thought about his sister. He tried not to, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He missed her. Her death was his fault, because in the end he hadn’t been able to save her. His chest tightened at the memory. His hands shook. He saw her face, younger than when she’d died, when she was maybe ten years old. He heard her voice.
Cross wept.
He sees her on the train, burning.
The light grew dimmer. He saw things move in the shadows, things he hoped weren’t really there. The chains rattled now and again, blown by some phantom wind. There was no breeze in that dank pit, of course, no clean air at all. Cross tasted poison on his tongue and bile in the back of his throat.
He pissed in the corner, not caring that it would blend with the other water in his cage.
Cross lost time. It might have been only hours since they’d deposited him there, or it might have been days. It soon became very difficult to tell if he was awake or asleep.
He guessed awake, because there were no hands or voices that came out of the water to claim his mind or his flesh.
Cross started to cough unceasingly. He used his spirit to fend off sickness. Doing so without a thaumaturgic implement burned his fingers, and they sizzled with pain, but Cross was thankful for the reminder that he could still use them. He was happy to be awake.
“ Hello?” he said. His voice echoed and faded. Only the chains answered.
He tried to count the hours, and realized that he had no way to even start. There was nothing he could use to mark the passage of days aside from his own blood, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
Cross stared at the wall. He was exhausted.
I’m never leaving, he thought. This is my grave.
NINE
FADE
He walks on a mountain, but it isn’t really him. Whatever body he inhabits now is light and lithe and moves with feline grace.
He slithers through the shadows of a falling forest. The sky is bright and cold. Azure light shines down and melts thick patches of dark ice at the base of petrified trees.
He smells sap and winter flowers. There is snow beneath his bare feet, and he tastes nectar and honey in the air.
Leaves rattle as a hard wind pushes its way up the steep mountainside.
Below and behind him is a valley filled with burning trees.
The blaze rages silently. The smoldering fire gives off no heat: it is a cold blaze. Wind carries bitter frost and charcoal mist that lands on his tongue. The flames are black and blue, the color of hurt.
Everything around the mountain is on fire. The world below is lit with dark flames.
Where am I?
He fears that he is back at the glade, looking into the soul prison within the obelisk. But this is something else, a landscape that is unknown to him, an undiscovered land. This place serves as a refuge for some lost and lonely mind.
Deep clouds cling to the air like grease on glass.
Something deep inside the mountain stirs. The stone under his feet groans and shifts. He hears a distant crack, like an enormous stone has fallen.
He runs.
It is not his body. She is tiny, whoever she is, short and light, and she is used to running, used to pushing herself beyond her limits. It is what she has always done.
The air is sluggish and thick. He moves as if through deep snow.
The light fades. Shadows spill across his vision like dark wine. Leaves crash and shatter on the ground like glass and stone.
Whoever’s mind he has intruded on is tearing itself apart.
Help.
He doesn’t know the voice. He feels that he should. He feels her words, and they cut across his ethereal skin like dull razors.
Help me. Please.
He stumbles up the mountain, moves deeper into a forest as it collapses into drifts of dry ash. The air swallows itself, becomes a cyclone that shines through the eye of an oily storm.
Everything turns hot. Mercurial wind scrapes through the bone trees. White dust falls from the sky.
A dissolving silhouette melts in the cold white eye of the liquid storm. It is a dark human outline that pulls apart like snow in water.
He reaches for the figure with a hand that isn’t his. The mountain shifts, and everything spins. Dismal breath washes over him. He silently plummets back down the mountain, into the heart of a raging cold inferno.
Cross wasn’t sure how he’d slept, or even if he’d slept. He stood against the wall, hurting everywhere. His knees felt like they’d been pelted with hammers. His back and shoulders ached with knots of tension, and his eyes were raw. His body was soaking wet. He shivered miserably, and sneezed.
He had no idea how long he’d been awake. He didn’t actually remember waking, just as he didn’t remember falling asleep.
Cross wandered through the ankle-deep waters of his oversized cell. His feet were sodden within his boots. His sinuses burned. The air felt toxic.
The oubliette was a nightmare of cobalt blue steel littered with dark detritus that floated in the air like clouds of heavy soot. The chains above his head rattled and clanged, forced by some breeze that wasn’t there.
Sometimes Cross imagined bodies up there in the darkness of the ceiling, lost in the jungle of chains. If there were corpses, they had to be as bored as he was.
He only barely felt his spirit, and her presence faded with each passing breath. They were killing her slowly. Her whispers were barely audible above the water and the chains.
What have they done to us?
Cross drifted. He felt like a shadow. Every time his consciousness started to fade he sloshed through the waters and tried to stay focused. He felt like he’d just woken up. H e had the dazed sensation of having just stepped into an unfamiliar room, over and over again. He had to remember what had just happened, had to re-establish some sense of place, of self. He felt like he was dreaming.
Maybe I am.
It was a nightmare of isolation, a dismal end to a dismal tale that would finish with him alone and in the dark, trapped in a metal coffin filled with water, shadows and chains.
His body was weary to the bone. He’d barely sat since he’d been brought to the prison. His legs had gone dull with pain. His muscles were so stiff it was a wonder he could move at all.
Cross couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He had moments when he couldn’t recall much of anything, and that frightened him, but fear, he decided, was good. It meant they hadn’t broken him yet.
He tried desperately to hold on to whatever thoughts he could, but it was difficult with his bra
in shifting in and out of focus. The world was a dark and noisy blur.
He thought of Snow and her dolls and her faceless boyfriend Geoff who he never actually got to meet; of Mom and Dad and his childhood, swings and plastic basketball hoops and bikes with training wheels; of the world turning black, The Black, shifting out of focus, the sky tearing open like a bloody and festering wound and raining blood and ash and spewing forth things that roamed the streets and ate people; he thought of days of sickness, floating in and out of consciousness, feverish and at the edge of death while nightmares lurked outside of his window; staring off into a hot darkness, a nightmare of eyes and teeth and the shadow of a cold and vast mountain; Drogan, an old mystic, a man from the mountains, who’d healed him, who’d explained to his wailing mother how her son was a warlock, a freak like the things that were destroying the world.
Cross remembered Razorwings and their vampire riders as they flew low through a red sky and searched for survivors, for refugees and lost children that they stole away and took back to the Ebon Cities’ feeding vats and skin factories.
He remembered the red-haired beauty he lost his virginity to, a whore whose name he couldn’t even remember but whose face and body he would never forget.
He remembered Samuel Graves, his best friend, so full of trouble and life and piss and grit, covered in mud and grime at his side in Blackmarsh, a prisoner of the very city Cross was lost in now, but Graves was dead, killed back in Rhaine in what felt like another lifetime now.
He recalled the study halls of Glaive and the cracked and listing monument on Ghostborne Island and the cold fields west of Thornn.
Cross recorded and catalogued his mind. He tried desperately to remember it all, to shelve away every ridiculous detail and fact about himself, to hold onto them, to place them somewhere and keep them there without having to even try. The memories blasted through his brain with staccato rhythm. It was difficult to keep up with them.
Soon, he lost track of everything but his mind.
He felt his spirit as she struggled. She stayed close, tied to him like a drowning swimmer in a pitch black sea. Cross couldn’t call on her for much more than fending off his pain, and even that strained her. He felt her whispers, so quiet they were like rustling leaves in a soft wind, completely out of place in the grime and stink and eye-numbing darkness.
Easy. Easy, I won’t let them hurt you.
It struck Cross as mildly insane that this was the first time since he’d acquired his new spirit that she wasn’t driving him crazy.
The light faded to a blur. It was hard to see even his own hand in front of his face.
Hours passed, or maybe days. There was no way to know.
Dark waters churned and chains rattled in ghostly echo. Cross stumbled in and out of awareness. He soon had no sense of where he was. He focused his mind and forced himself to remember things. Sometimes, he couldn’t do it.
He is trapped in an eternal midnight. Dry twigs are in his hair. He stands, shaking, and feels the bitter mountain air as it courses through the dead trees. Churning fires and distant howls fill the night with grim noise. His muscles are stiff. His feet crush twigs frozen in muddy ground as thick as tar.
He looks between the trees, and he sees a sliver of dead sky. Drifts of molten copper clouds lay smeared over the horizon like metallic stains.
The forest burns in the valley below. Cold smoke drifts up through iridescent rain and forms an ocean of cobalt cinders. Blades of dark ash, like smelted leaves, float dead in the air.
Behind him, the air twists into a funnel of translucent ice. Dirt and debris form a solid wall of choking haze. He sees a portal through the drifting fog, a pale passage that hangs there like a white scar.
I'm not here, he realizes.
There is a cold-throated scream. He doesn’t realize the absolute and utter silence until the cry rings out. He sees that silhouette, a vague female shape, a shadow that comes undone. The form dissolves like a shard of black ice in pure white water. Limbs fall away from the core. The doorway is too bright to look at.
Wait.
He feels a presence there, weak and distant. Fragile. It is known to him, familia r.
Help me, says the voice from the doorway. A voice he knows, or should know.
The mountain growls beneath his feet. He looks into the trees, and he sees eyes and teeth that fill the black void of shadows between the leaves. Black flames leap up the mountainside behind him. Cold fire rushes like waves, a blazing inverted avalanche.
Help me, the voice says again.
He turns to run, and is engulfed.
At some point, Cross was shackled. He didn’t remember it happening. Heavy gauntlets made his fingers feel as thick as sausages and dampened any hope of channeling his spirit. Barbed chains ran from his wrists to his ankles, and they scraped against his knees and cut him as he walked. His wounded leg blazed and throbbed with pain.
Everything was a haze. His senses were dull. The world was shades of dark and light, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. He felt separated from his own body, distant.
Cross was led down a hall by a pair of black-clad vampire guards. They wore moon-curve blades and blank white masks. It had been so long since he’d been out of water that he almost forgot how to walk, and he stumbled as he moved down the dry steel corridor. The chains didn’t help: the shackles gave him sharp cuts that sent thin rivers of blood down the insides of his already-soaked pants.
He was pulled into desert sunlight, and his eyes burned. Everything went white. He tasted sand and felt unbearable heat that cooked his skin. The sounds of the chained city filled his head in a catastrophe of metal noise.
Cross fell painfully to his knees. He couldn’t rise. His left leg was so wracked with pain he couldn’t summon the will to try.
He slowly and painfully regained his vision. Images bled into view. The world was uneven and unstable, like he saw it through a crooked lens. He was pulled to his feet. Cross rocked and swayed in place.
They’d brought him to some sort of prisoner’s commons. His shackles were removed, and he was left standing on a floored metal area surrounded by spike-topped walls the color of rusty nails. The commons was the size of a baseball diamond, wide and open, and the walls curved where they met the ground at sharp angles. There were no doors. Grey-skinned gargoyles with thick and stony wings hovered overhead.
The sky was vast and bright. The iron clouds seemed translucent, and they receded away from the blood red sun. Sticky air coursed up and over the wall, and Cross felt the slightest shudder in the ground when the wind blasted with its gale force. They were on top of a tall structure, he guessed, some open courtyard at the apex of one of the city’s tallest buildings, which explained why nothing but the sky was visible from within that bowl.
The commons was filled with prisoners. Each one of them was dingier than the last. Greasy inmates, most of them human, shuffled across the yard in packs. A few half-Doj towered over the others, their broad and chiseled jaws painted with desert soot. Cross saw some Lith, a handful of Gorgoloth, and even a Regost, the so-called Hollow Men, whose smoking spectral breath could be smelled across the commons. Cross spied a pale-skinned Vuul, whose translucent flesh had been rendered opaque with grime and dried blood. He briefly saw a Gol, who quickly vanished behind the taller prisoners.
The prisoners moved like zombies. They shuffled along as they walked, seeming to lack the strength or the will to do anything more. Their eyes looked forward, listless and dead. Their clothing was torn and shredded and soaked, but it dried fast beneath the blistering heat of the sun. Everyone looked like they’d lived through a bomb blast, or worse. Fingernails had turned black. The gray film they wore made them all siblings.
Cross smelled heat and sewage and sweat and piss and fear. The air was a miasma of body stink and hot metal. It burned just to stand in it.
There were a few women, Cross noted, and they were as caked in cuts and filth as the rest. Cross didn’t want to imagine h
ow life was for them here, with so few females compared to the number of men.
Panels in the floors slid back to reveal shallow recesses filled with thick brown gruel that was vaguely the color of beans. The prisoners ate the stuff voraciously with their hands, the only option available.
Cross felt as if it had been days since he’d eaten. The sludge was thick and oily, and it felt like cold clay in his trembling hands. Worse, it tasted like some sort of congealed lard, and he fought to get it down his throat and keep it in his stomach. He was so ravenously hungry it was difficult not to shovel more of the stuff down, but he knew that if he ate too fast he’d choke and be sick.
No water was provided. That worried him.
They were watched by gargoyles, mindless and violent brutes who could sit still for days on end without having to move, obedient lackeys from the shores of Rimefang Loch who would serve either vampires or humans without discretion, so long as they were paid. Cross saw no vampires, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by…he heard their guttural calls just on the other side of the walls, low growls and throat songs that sliced open the air like knives. He heard the slurp and smack of vampire feedings even over the sounds of the prisoners gorging themselves, and the roar of the city’s vast chains.
Several of the prisoners couldn’t handle their food, and Cross guessed they were as new to the prison city as he was. They vomited noisily onto the ground, sometimes right back into the feeding troughs.
A new series of sounds assaulted them. He heard babies being hurt, children screaming, sounds of torture and pain that came from just out of sight.
None of it is real, he told himself. They’re just screwing with our heads.
Some of the prisoners looked around, afraid. Others didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Cross needed something to drink. Again, he didn’t seem to be the only one. The gruel dried painfully in his mouth. He smelled and tasted basalt and corn.
“ Just take it slow,” the Gol said. He was short, which was normal for that race, barely four-feet-tall, with diseased looking skin that was riddled with scars and pores. He kept most of his face concealed beneath a heavy cloth wrap and a thick red cloak that looked as tattered as a battle flag, but the diseased flesh was difficult to completely hide away. His hands look withered, and old. “Small bites. Let is dissolve in your mouth. Eat too much, and you’ll choke.” The Gol’s yellow eyes had no pupils. His voice was gravel and stone. “There will be no water. You drink your piss, or the water in your cell.”
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