Soulrazor

by Steven Montano

  SOULRAZOR

  STEVEN MONTANO

  Also by Steven Montano

  BLOOD SKIES SERIES

  Blood Skies

  Black Scars

  Soulrazor

  Crown of Ash*

  The Witch’s Eye**

  Storm of Skulls**

  Vampire Down***

  The Ending Dream***

  Darker Sunset****

  * Coming in 2012

  ** Coming in 2013

  *** Coming in 2014

  **** Coming in 2015

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2012 Steven Montano

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Barry Currey

  Released by Darker Sunset Press

  DEDICATION

  To Takenya & Sam.

  You make me a better person by letting me see the world through your eyes.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would be nowhere without the love, aid and support of my wife Liberty, whose undying passion to help me recognize my dream literally makes my head spin.

  Thanks to Jen Kirchner and Alan Edwards for their belief, support, and good sense of humor, which is more invaluable to me than they know.

  Thanks to Barry for putting together such a fantastic cover on such short notice.

  And thanks to all of the authors I’ve met online, who inspire me every day with their enthusiasm and their diligence. Keep it up, gang. The best is yet to come.

  SOULRAZOR

  Bladed ice tears hang in stasis. The air is frozen plasma. Firmaments of debris lie embedded in the atmosphere like dead flies in honey.

  He stands in a clearing of crimson stone. The sky is dead and dark. The shadows of broken hills loom behind him.

  He sees figures locked in unmoving strife and bullets frozen in the air, blazing scorches of metal trapped in clouds of motion. He hears the promise of explosions hidden in the cracks and crenellations of unceasing seconds.

  His lungs swell. They are petrified in mid-scream. No sound can escape his lips, as he is held still in this perpetual moment.

  He stands immobile beneath a sky of blood and black clouds, in the company of ice shards that fill the unmoving air like glass raindrops.

  Plumes of smoke made smudged and blurry by the sphere of petrified time rise into the sky, the smoldering remains of the place that he once called home. Cold and ghostly unguent turns the air molten.

  This is not the first time that he has been frozen here, and it will not be the last. He is forced to this spot, again and again, trapped in this moment, this instance, and it has dug into him and holds him, as if with claws.

  If he could turn he would see the ruined city behind him, where seven combatants converge towards a blade made of dark metal. He would see where the shadow sword has smelted into the shattered blood stone of the earth, a sliver of dark meteorite driven into wounded ground. He can smell its iron aroma, the burning meat scent of fallen worlds. He can feel the sticky wind on his face, and he tastes the salt cloud of blood in the air.

  He can feel and hear and see, but he cannot move. All he can do is watch, and wait.

  Another chance will come to escape these temporal bonds, but it will not come soon, and that chance will not be for him. He has become a monument – a spectator.

  His mind recalls the time before, when he stood in the chamber of necrovats and angel's bodies, a nightmare of blood ice and diseased oil.

  He remembers the conflicts and the lives lost, and he sees fallen comrades stuck in dying momentum. He sees his own memories as they revolve around him, an orbit of regret.

  The effluvia of dreams and the dread filigree of a world that leaks shadow crumble around the unseen walls of the tempest clearing. He sees the inevitability of the end.

  Worse, he feels her as she moves around walls that have become intangible and passes through sluggish doorways. He hopes that the outcome will be different, that the storm will not rip everything he cares about asunder. He hopes not to lose all that he has fought so hard to protect.

  But there is no way to escape, and there is no warning or sign that he can send. All he can do is think back through the revolving halls of his mind and recall the moments that led to this one, this final and dreadful place, where he stands frozen at the edge of a dying world.

  PART ONE

  VESSELS

  ONE

  SPIRE

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  The ship passed through a fog of ghosts.

  Spectral faces leered at them from out of the dark of night, pale wisps of unstable and desolate energies, the ectoplasmic remains of the long dead that had been stitched together to form a dismal net in the sky around the Bonespire.

  Grisly energies coagulated in the gritty air. Bolts of cold black lightning danced in a spider web pattern around the mile-high obelisk of dark bone. Necrotic effluvia congealed into a thick liquid substance that fell on the ship like black rain.

  The Darkhawk had been stripped of its primary sails, outfitted with an arcane engine set with silencing mufflers, and broken down to only its most necessary components and weapons. Its armor was lightweight and hexed to ward off sensor leeches, echo mines and necrotic plasma: all standard defense measures that the vampires were known to deploy in the air around the Bonespire.

  The bow of the ship had been re-cut to form a sort of wedge-shaped blade, which lent the vessel – which was just big enough to house the team without the benefit of a tremendous amount of elbow room, an interior crafted from pale grey sheets of riveted steel – a much more sleek and aerodynamic design. Compared to a standard Bloodhawk, this mercenary vessel wouldn’t be able to withstand as much direct damage, but it could outrun and outmaneuver almost anything, and resonant temporal field dynamics applied to the eldritch hull helped it escape notice in situations where it should have stuck out like a beacon.

  Getting the ship retrofitted had cost the team almost everything they’d earned from the reconnaissance, rescue and seek-and-destroy missions they’d undertaken during their first year of operation, but they all agreed that having the Darkhawk through that second year had been well worth the investment.

  No matter how nice the ship is, I still hate to friggin’ fly, Cross thought.

  He didn’t have a full-blown fear of flying, by any means. Cross has flown plenty of missions, and he would continue to do so as long as he needed to, especially since flight was really the only efficient means of transporting the team to their mission destinations, as they based themselves out of the relatively remote city-state of Thornn.

  But Cross did have a strong dislike of being in the air. He pined for the ability to teleport. A few years back, Southern Claw mages and scientists had explored the notion and possibility of transubstantive locationism – or, as the layman liked to say, “gateway teleportation” – but the research was abandoned when it became clear that there was no way for humans to shift vast distances the same way that some other races could, at least not if they wanted to remain human. Cross would’ve given anything for that to have worked.

  I’d be able to travel without getting banged up, nauseous and dizzy all of the time. What a novelty.

  Turbulence shook the vessel as they slipped into the inner perimeter around the Bonespire. Cross grabbed onto the overhead beam and gazed out the starboard viewport. Greasy rain and chunks of ghostly matter slid down the glass like melting ebon fat, which made it even more difficult to see through the unnatural darkness that hung over and around the upper reaches of the structure as they approached.

  Cross saw the field far below, where some sunlight still penetrated: there
were bone cannons and catapults, war machines made of steel and blades, tattered skin flags, cold iron howitzers, and clouds of molten shadow that congealed into solid masses of eyes and teeth, pale and faceless shades with translucent razor swords and organic projectile weapons.

  Dark spikes protruded from the ground in vaguely organized patterns around the obsidian battlements, and dark trenches stood next to short pillars of white flame. Vampires wreathed in spirit unguent marched in armor made from enchanted crimson steel.

  “That,” Kane said as he traced the path of a wad of dark matter that slid down the glass, “is nasty. It looks like a ghost puked on the window or something.”

  “Nice image,” Black said from behind them. “Thank you for that, Mike.”

  Cross turned and looked at his team. Everyone was huddled together and stood practically shoulder-to-shoulder – the confines of the ship didn’t allow for them to do much else.

  Danica Black and Mike Kane had been with Cross from the moment that the unnamed mercenary group had formed, in the wake of a Southern Claw victory at the icy ruins of Karamanganji. Both of them had been associated with the corrupt and terrifying prison called Black Scar, but in vastly different capacities: Danica had been a warden who’d gotten herself into personal trouble with her criminal brother, while Kane had been a prisoner of that self-same prison, not to mention an intended trade commodity that would allow Danica to get her kidnapped lover back in an under-the-table deal. In the end, both of them had wound up helping Cross resurrect an avatar’s power so that they could destroy a walking shadow the size of a mountain.

  That sort of situation had become distressingly all-too-familiar to them.

  The rest of the team were all newer faces, but only the swordsman, Ronan, had been with the group for less than a year, just long enough for the excessively paranoid Kane to decide that the blade-yielding mercenary wasn’t a vampire spy or another aspect of The Sleeper. Ronan was a tall and imposing man, thin and bony, with wild dark hair that stuck straight up, an angular and skeletal jaw, dark armor and pale skin. He had a habit of concealing his face behind a face-wrap, and he bore at least two razor-sharp swords at all times.

  “How many?” Ronan asked. They couldn’t see his face, but the tone of his voice made clear that he was smiling.

  “How many what?” Kane asked grumpily.

  “How many vampires are down there?”

  “Dude, how in the hell should I know?” Kane snapped. Just because he’d grown used to Ronan didn’t mean that he actually liked him – quite the contrary, in fact, and while Ronan acted fairly indifferent towards Kane, Kane talked Cross’ and Black’s ears off about how much Ronan drove him crazy.

  “Because you and Cross are the ones staring out the window,” Ronan said flatly. “Duh?”

  “Tell you what,” Kane smiled, “you can go down and ask.”

  “Girls,” Black groaned. “Please.”

  Grissom laughed from behind them, a sound that seemed to shake the vessel and rattle the steel walls. The half-Doj had coffee-colored skin and no hair, save for a thin mustache and beard. His considerable muscles were covered by his dark armored coat, but there was no mistaking his mass, since the big man stood over eight feet tall and was as wide as a truck. An AA-12 automatic shotgun dangled from a strap around his shoulders, and enormous blades and hammers dotted the bandolier he wore over his massive chest.

  His sister, Ash, twenty years his senior, was his opposite in a number of ways. She was fully human and darker skinned, but like her brother was also bald. Her lithe and athletic frame was covered in snow-colored leather armor worn mostly as a formality, since she was rarely exposed to direct combat. Rather, Ash was the group’s tracker and healer.

  Finally, there was Maur, a Gol engineer and pilot who insisted on referring to himself in the third person. Like every member of his strange race, Maur resided in a stolen body: he was a diseased and pestilent dwarf with no memory of who or what his people had once been. Maur had an uncanny knack for repairing things, and for making very creative use of seemingly ruined equipment. He also had a skill for driving everyone crazy with his sometimes nonsensical ramblings.

  Everyone looked ahead through the main viewport. Maur moved the vessel as close to the Bonespire as anyone in the Southern Claw had ever dared to get.

  For almost two years, the dark tower that stood west of Thornn had remained quiet, even though the threat of a direct conflict had always loomed. Just a few months prior, the Bonespire’s campaign against Thornn had begun in earnest, and it had turned into a long and bloody affair. Luckily, the Southern Claw had anticipated the conflict, and it had met the vampires in the fields west of Thornn so as to keep most of the fighting away from the city itself.

  A number of land and aerial exchanges had to that point resulted in something of an uneasy standoff. But there was more to come – Southern Claw intelligence had discovered that the Bonespire housed some new Ebon Cities weapon that had not yet been unveiled. Cross’ team had been sent to find out more about the weapon and, if possible, to destroy it.

  Lucky for us, we’re too used to these kinds of jobs to complain about how impossible it’s going to be.

  Cross didn’t make a habit of complaining. After a mission ended with the death of every member of his old squad, Cross was given the option to pick his own future in the Southern Claw military. He spent a year acting as a “special operative”, and eventually he was assigned the mission that introduced him to Black and Kane. That same mission had resulted in many deaths before the threat of The Sleeper had been quelled, among them close to two full Platoons out of Talon Company, Kane’s lover Ekko, and a good-hearted ranger named Jamal Dillon.

  After that, Cross decided to no longer be a part of the Southern Claw, at least not directly. His new team, made up of mercenaries and soldiers-of-fortune, took on dangerous missions for the Southern Claw, but they were not officially a part of the military. They were a rescue team, assassins, a clean-up crew, and rangers. Above all else, they were incredibly adept at getting themselves into insane amounts of trouble.

  In the two years since they’d formed, they’d never chosen a name for the group, even though Cross’ Cutthroats and Mage Gunners had both been tossed around by the military (who loved them) and by other mercenary outfits (none of which liked them). Neither Cross nor the others cared for any of the nick-names they’d heard. Likely they’d continue to go without any official title for their band, at least for the time being.

  Cross surveyed the faces of his team. He’d never expected to be doing this, to be…leading. He was responsible for others, and he was the one they looked to for decisions and direction. He’d lost six team members in two years, which, all things considered, wasn’t that bad. The most recent casualty had been Zane, a young war mage who’d died in a skirmish with Vuul bandits about ten months earlier, and his death had given them a need to find another hitter, which was when they’d recruited Ronan.

  Cross got to know the members of his team well. The group always worked on their own, and they rarely turned down a job. They were paid well enough to stay in operation, and none of them really had much of a life outside of the team.

  “Maur says we’re about two minutes away from the drop point,” Maur said from the front of the ship. The diminutive pilot looked entirely too small to be flying the aircraft, even though they’d reconfigured the pilot’s seat to accommodate him. The vessel was controlled by a fairly standard steering stick and a set of levers and pulleys that ran into the starboard wall casing. A pair of foot pedals controlled the vertical tilt, and there were so many gauges and screens and batholitic charts that Cross couldn’t even tell how much fuel they had, let alone determine anything complicated about the craft.

  Luckily, both Maur and Black knew how to pilot the ship, which meant that the team wouldn’t be entirely up a creek if something happened to one of them.

  Now if something happens to both of them…well, then we’re screwed.

  T
he vessel tilted forward. A hard gust of soul-tainted wind slammed against the side of the vessel.

  “Everyone ready?” Cross shouted out. He still felt awkward doing that, calling out commands and signals to action. It felt like it should have been someone else doing it, not him.

  “I’m first, right?” Ronan asked. He sounded eager.

  “You’re a wacko,” Kane said.

  “Thank you,” Ronan smiled.

  “Kane goes first, along with Black. I’ll follow right behind them, and Ronan and Grissom will cover the rear.”

  “Maur will wait here,” Maur said.

  “Thanks,” Cross answered. “We figured as much.”

  “Don’t forget these,” Ash said. She handed each of them an inhaler made out of dark metal. Wisps of pale steam escaped from the devices, like they housed bottled fog.

  “Do we have to?” Kane whined.

  “Only if you don’t want to vomit up your insides the moment you inhale the poison air in the Bonespire,” Ash smiled. She handed one to Grissom, and her younger brother dutifully inhaled, even though he clearly didn’t want to.

  “It feels like swallowing a mint…covered in piss,” the half-giant coughed.

  “Well, good,” Ash said. “Since you’re so big, you get to take two hits.”

  The vessel flew through what they hoped was the final layer of dark clouds. Caustic grease rolled across the windows and left a dark film. The smell of burning fish filled the vessel and burned their eyes. They heard dead winds and spirit moans and the pound of sick rain against the hull.