Soulrazor

by Steven Montano

  Well, we are just a bunch of party animals, aren’t we?

  They walked in silence for a time. The fires of Wolftown – blazes that set in massive iron braziers just outside the crude city-gates – grew larger by the minute, but the trek still seemed to take forever, and they certainly weren’t getting any warmer. Danica’s hands froze even beneath her gloves, and the wind sliced right through her armor. Her tall boots weren’t terribly well acclimated to hiking in the wilderness, but at least at the moment the team crossed relatively flat terrain. That would all change once they got deeper into the hills.

  Even though her spirit did his best to keep her warm, Black felt like an icicle. She wouldn’t let him do too much – she needed him to keep his strength in case they ran into trouble.

  “I spy…with my spying eye,” Kane said, “something…dark.”

  “Do you ever get tired of talking?” Ronan asked.

  “Not really, no.”

  “Maur is tired,” the Gol said.

  “Here,” Grissom said, and he stepped up and hoisted the little man up onto his shoulders. It was something of a comical sight – Grissom was easily eight-feet tall and as broad as a barn, and Maur was 4-foot-1 if he was lucky, now perched atop the big man like a child.

  “Now Maur is cold,” he said.

  Ronan laughed.

  “Dani?” Ash asked. “How much longer do you think it’ll be?”

  “Half an hour, maybe. I don’t want to stop to rest, not out here. We’re too close to Wolfland.”

  Wolfland. Black had flown over the area plenty of times when she’d transported prisoners to Black Scar, and it was one of the areas the pilots always talked about never wanting to get stuck in. Per its name, the area was dominated by Bloodwolves – massive lupines with deep red fur, fangs the size of sabers and vicious inhuman appetites, as well as a strange ability to mentally bond with vampires. Many of the wolves kept to the tundra called The Reach, but even more resided in the densely populated region of Wolfland, a series of forests and plains south of the white wastes but north of the mines and factories of Fane.

  The Southern Claw had briefly flirted with the idea of domesticating Bloodwolves, but that had ended in disaster. The Revengers had attempted the same, and while they found moderate success, the Ebon Cities had the clear advantage in working with the beasts. Even though Wolfland was over a hundred-and-fifty miles outside of vampire territory, they regularly sent clandestine vessels in to gather the creatures, who served as mounts for their cavalry.

  Black started to drift off as she walked. Her mind went back to Black Scar, to long nights of marching prisoners back and forth from the mines, to presiding over deathmatch races and battling beasts that emerged from the soiled dark. The screams of the past resonated in her skull, and she looked into the eyes of dying men, many of whom never deserved to have been sent to the prison in the first place. Even two years removed from her life as a Warden, Danica couldn’t leave that place behind.

  She sees the sky, burning. Cyclones of ash tear the city apart. Chunks of dark stone and flailing bodies fall up into a fold of molten sunlight, a blazing portal that leads to a place of jagged darkness, a city like a black mirror, a place wreathed in shadows and dust. Her eyes melt as she gazes into the blazing air and sees into the foreign necropolis, an unplace that is so familiar. She sees into the heart of another world and knows fear, because looking there feels like going home.

  Something waits on the other side. Something she knows, and cannot escape.

  “Dani?”

  It was Kane.

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah…why?”

  “Heads up.”

  A small band of riders approached them. At first she thought they rode Bloodwolves, and she motioned for everyone to stand ready. Grissom lowered Maur down to the ground, and Black let her spirit flow between her fingers. His presence brought sweat to her clammy skin, and his anger pressed against her like a smothering embrace.

  Kane and Ronan spread out to either side of her, while Maur and Ash stayed close to Grissom. Black stepped forward and greeted the riders, who rode to within a few hundred yards.

  Both her and Ash’s spirits moved out and returned with the truth of the rider’s identities: there were eight humans, armed with large rifles and riding Stonelizards.

  There was one mage among them, a warlock, but the rest seemed to defer to the tall and dark-haired warrior who rode at the head of their pack, a mountain of a man with a thick mane of hair and a scraggly beard.

  As the men came into sight, their giant mounts slowed to a walk. The stone-grey lizards were the size of horses. They were six-legged beasts with enormous black eyes and spiny ridges along the backs of their necks, and each creature wore a high-horned saddle. Their clawed feet tore into the soft earth, but with the exception of their footfalls and the slapping of their tails on the ground the creatures were nearly silent, almost ghostly.

  Their riders looked like they’d been born straight out of the pale sand. The men wore mismatched wolf hides as coats, belts and hoods. Serrated blades, claw-handles, saw bows, shotguns, axes and wide-bored pistols adorned bandoliers, slings, saddle-bags, holsters and cross-sheaths. What skin was visible beneath their hide and fur clothing was ruddy and covered in ash and pale dirt. Several of the men wore goggles, and none of them looked like they’d bathed or shaved in months.

  “Well, hello there,” the dark-haired leader said. His voice was thickly accented, something from the southern coast. Whatever it was, Black had trouble understanding him. “And what might ye be doin’ out here in our neck of the woods, Missy?”

  “‘Missy?’” she said. “Really?”

  “We’re on our way to Fane,” Kane said.

  The riders formed a semi-circular perimeter. The lizards were large enough to easily overtake the mercenaries, provided the team’s magic and firepower allowed them to get that close. The lead lizard stamped and scraped the ground with two of its fore-feet.

  “And what would you be needing in Fane?” the lead rider smiled. Black saw where women might consider him handsome, if not for the flash of madness in his eyes, not to mention the silver-caps he wore on several of his teeth.

  “Oh, you know, games, gambling…shopping…” Kane said.

  “A bachelor party,” Ronan growled.

  “Or, the short answer,” Black said. “None of your business.”

  She hoped they wouldn’t react badly to that. She was wrong. Hands moved towards side-arms, and the leader angrily ushered his lizard mount forward.

  Black took a step back and let her spirit swirl around her. He pulled dirt into the air and whipped it against the lizards, which clawed at the ground and were held still only with considerable effort from their riders.

  The warlock in the hunter’s party responded in kind. Black sensed his spirit coil and ready herself. Ash prepared her own spirit, and suddenly the air was impossibly colder than it had been just moments before. Danica smelled brimstone and charcoal. The harsh whispers of angry ghosts filled her ears like black song.

  Grissom, Kane and Ronan drew their weapons. Ash pulled Maur behind her.

  The lizard riders drew rifles and shotguns and ancient pistols and aimed them at the team.

  “Ho now!” the leader of the hunters called out. He might not have been able to hear the whispers of the spirits, but there was no mistaking their presence or intent. “All right, all right,” he laughed. “Let’s not get all bent out of shape.”

  “Tell your warlock to call his spirit back,” Black said. She was aware of the alien sound of her voice, the staccato echo that made it sound like someone else spoke through her.

  Maybe he does.

  The leader watched her for a moment, assessing. His expression shifted from amusement, to fear, to scheming, and then back to amusement.

  “Creasy!” he shouted. “Do it!”

  A dark-skinned bearded man armed with a large-bored revolver quietly lowered
his gun, and Black felt the shift in the air almost instantly. She never would have guessed he was the warlock.

  Black pulled her own spirit back. He didn’t want to come, but he allowed her to condense his incandescent and smoky form into a razor-hard shield around her body. Ash’s spirit had already calmed and faded to a background haze.

  “We’re not here to cause any trouble,” Black said, and she lowered her gun on its strap. “Believe it or not, we really are just passing through.”

  The leader hesitated a moment, considering them.

  “Well, then…I apologize,” he finally said. “We don’t get many visitors from this direction.” He dismounted, handed the reins of his lizard to another rider, casually walked up to Black, pulled off his glove, and extended his hand. “I’m Roth. Welcome to Wolftown.”

  TWELVE

  WOLFTOWN

  Protected by a series of metal walls bound together with razor wire and haphazardly set strips of concrete, steel girders and rebar, Wolftown wasn’t so much a town as it was a massive campsite that happened to be blessed with a few relatively stable structures. The blazing fires the team had spied from a distance stood at the far corners the settlement. There weren’t any real streets or roads, just crude paths, and there were only a handful of permanent landmarks. It was literally a temporary fort that had accidentally been turned into a permanent settlement.

  As Danica expected, the place was largely a ghost town, since the regular inhabitants were dedicated hunters and their families. Still, as Roth and his group led the team through a makeshift steel gate guarded by a pair of flame cannon nests and a .30 caliber machinegun mounted on a short metal tower, Black was surprised to see children and unarmed women and workers, especially out in the dead of night. Harsh wind pushed smoke away from a massive bonfire at the center of Wolftown. The team saw quarries filled with stone and huts lined with wolf hide. There were piles of tools and weapons.

  The air was bright inside the compound. The ground was covered in human and Stonelizard tracks, and Danica saw a number of Bactrian camels, which made her think of Cross. They hadn’t actually used a camel on a mission in quite some time, since they flew to practically all of their assignments. The ugly brutes in Wolftown were kept in their own stables, separate from the horses.

  Tents and open huts contained various services needed by the wolf hunters: there were tanners and knife sharpeners, dried goods merchants and medics, clothiers and arms dealers. The giant lizards were kept in a massive pen on one side of Wolftown, where a couple of half-Doj in fatigues stood guard with cattle prods. As the team passed by, the lizard handlers tossed the reptiles chunks of frozen meat.

  Black’s spirit hugged her tight. She was tempted to send him out so he could explore the rest of the camp city for her, but she’d already sensed there were a handful of mages besides Creasy, and every one of their accompanying spirits regarded she and Ash with hostile suspicion. There were, she guessed, roughly two hundred people in the ramshackle town, but only a quarter of those were hunters, at best. Sleep tents had been arranged between tall stands of hexed iron poles fixed with detection homunculi, tiny constructs who perched like miniature gargoyles to give early notice of trouble, which they could take note of easily thanks to their keen arcane sight.

  Roth led them to a large cooking pit. Black smelled the mouth-watering aroma of wolf meat. A single Bloodwolf could feed dozens of people if the portions were carefully controlled, which was exactly what they’d done here. Even as juices dripped from the carcass impaled on the spit – the freshly removed hide was still being cleaned in a nearby tent – a pair of surly women hacked slices away from the flank with long knives and threw them into a large bucket filled with salt, where the meat could be dried and preserved.

  “Sit,” Roth said. “Stay as long as you like.”

  “That won’t be necessary…” Black began, but Kane and Grissom had already sat down on thick rugs near the fire, as much for warmth, she guessed, as for the promise of something to eat. They were rewarded with both.

  Creasy, the dark-skinned mage who wore enough furs that he almost looked like a wolf himself, motioned to the blood-stained women who tended the meat, and without a word they sliced off two long strips and threw one to each of the two men.

  “Kick ass!” Grissom laughed.

  “Thank you, ladies!” Kane echoed as he dug into the fatty strip of flesh. He tore off a piece and threw it to Danica. “Eat, Skinny. Get something on those bones.”

  The meat was crisp and blackened and smelled wonderful, and as much as she wanted to distrust Wolftown’s hunters, Black devoured the strip with abandon.

  They all settled in. Given the time of night, it was unlikely they’d make any decent progress before morning. The temperature had dropped much more than Black expected, and in their haste she was afraid they’d run into something best not faced in the dark. Like Bloodwolves.

  I’d rather not face those at all, if we can avoid it.

  Roth was a boisterous man, and Black quickly got the impression he was the leader of the rag-tag community. Others brought him food and made space for him by the fire, hoisted blankets onto his back and handed him mugs of steaming liquor.

  “Welcome to our home. There are no rules but what we make, and no one to answer to but ourselves.”

  “So you really hunt the Bloodwolves?” Ronan asked.

  They all sat around the large fire. They were given more drink than meat, which worried Black just a bit, but she knew at least that hers and Ash’s spirits would keep them coherent in case any trouble arose.

  “We do,” Roth answered. “It’s an art, hunting the Bloodwolves, and not one that many men can master. Many die during their first hunt. Those who live have scars.”

  “Wow,” Kane said from behind a mouthful of minced wolf meat. “That sounds like fun.”

  “Much like being a mercenary, I imagine,” Roth laughed. “Neither of us is expected to live long. And neither of us answers to anyone but ourselves, and the men who buy our services.”

  The inhabitants of Wolftown were mostly human, ruddy-faced and unkempt. A few half-Doj and Gol were in the mix, but they primarily manned the pack animals or sold goods to the hunters.

  According to Roth, only about half of the people present in Wolftown at any given time were permanent residents. The rest were part-time hunters, merchants or traders, or others who used Wolftown as a stopping point on their way to Fane, but by the sound of things they didn’t get people actually bound for the city-state all that often.

  “Most of the folks are here to avoid Fane,” Roth told them.

  The man had put away six large mugs of what Black assumed was mead, but after she tried it she thought it tasted more like some sort of licorice barley. She drank very little of the stuff, largely because she wanted to conserve her spirit’s energy in case something went wrong. The fact that she thought it tasted terrible helped refraining from drink much easier.

  The team sat intermixed with Roth’s men, including the mage, Creasy. The dark man had runes cast all over his arms and face, and his eyes stared ahead like glass gems. His dark robes and fatigues were almost the same shade of brown as his skin, and he wore dark iron rings on his fingers.

  “Why?” Grissom asked. “What’s happening in Fane?”

  “They’re preparing for war,” Roth said. “At least, that’s what it seems like. They have mercenaries and monsters that protect the city. Everything, including the mines, is under full martial law.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Ronan said. “The entire Southern Claw is a martial coalition.”

  “You don’t understand,” Roth said. “Those merchants aren’t Southern Claw, but mercenaries. We think that Fane is seceding from the Claw.”

  Kane actually spat out his drink. Ronan laughed, but Black felt something go cold inside of her.

  That matches the information that Pike gave us. Crap.

  “Seceding?” Kane said. “What the fuck?”

  “Tha
t’s why a lot of us are out here,” Creasy said. It was the first words Black had heard him speak. His voice was deep and melodic, with an authoritative tone that made him sound almost royal. “It’s been happening slowly for several months now. At first the people in Wolftown were out here because they preferred the wild to the city-states. Now more come, and they stay longer, because Fane moves further and further away from the Claw.”

  “In what way?” Ash asked.

  Roth and Creasy explained, and others joined in as well, men and women around the campfire, all manner of people, ex-soldiers and merchants, farmers and factory workers.

  The Hammer and Fist had been bribing the commanders of the Southern Claw military compound in Fane, which allowed them to quietly influence decisions regarding the city’s infrastructure and security in exchange for offering more lucrative deals for weapons and supplies shipped to other city-states closer to the front lines of the war. In the meantime, Southern Claw presence in the city itself was slowly being whittled away – troops were deployed to reinforce other companies and never called back, Bloodhawks or tanks loaned out to other city-states were forgotten, and over the course of time the mercenaries hired directly by the Hammer and Fist became enumerate, exotic, and dangerous.

  “They don’t agree with the war,” Roth said. “Plain and simple.”

  “What the hell is there not to agree with?” Kane said with an angry laugh. “The vampires are trying to wipe us all out, for Christ’s sake! What do those morons think, that they just want to be neighbors?”

  “They want armistice,” Ronan growled. “God damned cowards.”

  “No,” Creasy said sternly. “That’s not what they’re about. That’s why they’re shoring their defenses. They expect the Southern Claw to react…aggressively. But they also don’t want the vampires to think they can waltz in and take control, like they did with Dirge.” He took a drink, and swallowed it bitterly. “Fane wants independence from both the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities. They want to be left alone.”