The Witch's Eye

by Steven Montano

  THE WITCH’S EYE

  STEVEN MONTANO

  Also by Steven Montano

  BLOOD SKIES

  Blood Skies

  Black Scars

  Soulrazor

  Crown of Ash

  The Witch’s Eye

  Chain of Shadows*

  THE SKULLBORN

  City of Scars*

  Path of Bones

  The Black Tower

  HORROR NOVELS

  Something black…

  Blood Angel Rising*

  * Coming in 2013

  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 © 2013 Steven Montano

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Barry Currey

  Released by Darker Sunset Press

  DEDICATION

  To Jim, Lucia, Ron and Steve.

  For teaching me how to do this, even though you thought genre writing was dumb.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  No book exists in a vacuum, and this one, like every book I’ve written, took a tremendous amount of help, support and patience from a lot of people.

  Thank you to Lib for being my strength, my soul, my voice of reason, my guiding light.

  Thank you Takenya and Sam for being my joy, my happiness, my reason to be the best that I can be. Even when you’re driving me completely insane.

  Thanks to Barry for continuing to make these books look great.

  Thanks to Jen, Alan, Mike, Bruce and Candice for having my back.

  And thank you to all of the readers who continue to inspire and support me. I couldn’t do this without you.

  THE WITCH’S EYE

  Salt waves crash against the icy shore. Drowning moments held frozen. Everything smothered by a tapestry of dreams.

  The gate hums with the sound of an engine. Burning runes on the archway slice through the fog and reveal a surface made of black ice. The doorway is ready to break. Some barely contained terror of the night lands pushes from the other side.

  The moment stretches out. She has to act now, because soon it will be too late. She descends into a smelted crater. Mounds of ash cover the charred bones of forest beasts.

  The six-armed woman is there. Her garbled arcane speech echoes into the storm of shadows above. Bloody light spills from her eyes. The Witch’s Eye is with her, leaking smoke and power.

  Cold light bleeds from the gate. Dark-skinned vampires stand rigid, entranced. Their flesh crusts and peels away. Necrotic energies drip from their fingers and stain the ground.

  Faces appear in the portal, the visages of long-dead horrors with bared fangs and dark eyes filled with centuries of hate. She senses the vastness beyond the barrier, the emptiness. Scintilla from a world filled with pain.

  The dream is long wiped from her memory by the time she wakes, but still she’s left with a sense of desperation, a need to prevent something terrible from happening.

  She doesn’t even know who she is. But she knows a storm is coming.

  PROLOGUE

  MARCH

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  He smelled blood in the night.

  Creasy woke from a familiar dream of an eyeless woman crossing the ice. She wandered through a bitter storm in the company of wolves.

  It was the same dream he’d had ever since he was a child, ever since he’d been old enough to know he was a warlock. He imagined the eyeless woman in his dreams was his spirit. Even though her visage was horrifying, it was a comfort to put a face to the presence. Many mages regarded their spirits as kin, or sometimes as lovers, but his had always been something of a mother figure.

  Just a very frightening mother figure.

  Creasy was worried. He only had the dream when something was wrong. Seeing her, sadly, was never a good omen.

  He rolled over and looked at Tanya’s naked and tattoo-covered back. Her dark hair spilled across the small pillow on Creasy’s bed, and her skin was warm against his thick and callused hand. They’d been in a relationship for over a year and had grown comfortable together, which both worried and warmed him. It was dangerous to get too close to people. No one seemed to last long in Wolftown.

  He looked around his room. As the most powerful warlock in the community, Creasy was given a private quarters in one of the small buildings near the center of town. Most of the settlement was made up of tents and bivouacs, but a few people – the leaders, the best hunters, the sick and infirm and pregnant – were granted better shelter from the harsh valley winds. Even then, the housed quarters weren’t heated, and most nights Creasy and Tanya could only stay warm either with the aid of his spirit or by staying tightly wrapped in the wolf-hide blankets.

  Creasy’s room contained little more than his bed and a small table where he kept a scant collection of books. Most of them were journals containing information about the landscape and the creatures of the world After the Black, as well as a few treatises on magic. Creasy had never received proper training in the arcane arts – he’d grown up in the wild and learned the craft from drifters and shamans, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  He sensed his spirit. She drifted across the floor like a pale white mist. Her presence was cold, always cold. Creasy sat up cautiously, as he didn’t want to wake Tanya, not until he knew what was going on. He’d smelled something, some presence that shouldn’t have been there.

  Creasy rose from the bed, and his feet chilled against the floor. He slid into his heavy wolf-skin cloak and quietly stumbled around the room searching for his boots. Creasy caught sight of himself in the mirror; as was often the case, he was taken aback. His dark skin was lined with scars from the unnatural age that came to all warlocks. He was thirty-one, but in warlock years he might as well have been fifty, and his body showed it.

  He smelled that presence again, a sharp tang of metal and blood. The odor drove up his nostrils with such pungent force he nearly gagged.

  Creasy dressed quickly. Tanya woke while he did, and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Her pale face shone in the dim candlelight, and her dark hair hung over her shoulder like a black tapestry. Tattoos of serpents and moons covered her upper chest and arms, and though she must have seen the concern on Creasy’s face she just smiled.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked. Her voice was dark.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I just have to check something.”

  “Has an alarm been raised?” She sat all of the way up and pulled the blankets tighter around her body.

  “No,” he said with a shake of his head.

  “Is this a warlock thing?” she asked with a wry grin. He loved that smile, a trace of sarcasm, a dash of spice.

  You love her, he told himself. You know you do. Stop acting like you don’t.

  “It is,” he smiled back. He adjusted his cloak and made sure his blades and boots were secure. “I’ll be right back.”

  It was not yet dawn, and the frost moon still hung low in the blue-black sky. Dead forests stood to the east, and the jagged Bone Hills were just visible over the shanty walls to the north.

  Blazing cook fires twisted in the icy wind. Creasy was greeted with the familiar smells of roasting meat and smoking hides as he made his way to the eastern walls. Shaila and Hassan busily prepped and cured jerky for the coming day’s hunting expeditions. If Creasy’s memory served, Task’s hunting party, which had set out for the Pale Drifts two days before, would return in just a few hours, hopefully weighed down with ice beaver pelts and moose hides. Wolves weren’t the only thing they hunted in Wolftown. Roth encouraged them to seek out different game, as it allowed them to build
up a variety of barter goods.

  “Besides,” he’d laughed, “it might be nice if not everything we hunted had a chance of killing us first.”

  Creasy was surprised Roth wasn’t about – the man never slept, quite a feat considering how often he enjoyed women and drink.

  He nodded at Joran and Hass, the sentries who stood watch with rifles and spears up on the central tower. They both wore extra-thick wolf hides to shield them against the bitter wind.

  Shaila brought him a cup of warm milk, and he nodded his thanks. He sipped and stood, letting his body build its resistance to the cold. He listened to the wind ripple the cloth tents of Wolftown.

  This is a good life, he thought. He’d almost forgotten what had woken him in the first place. Then he sensed it again, and this time the presence was almost overwhelming.

  Blood in the night.

  He smelled it, tasted it, a tang of salt and steel and fresh wounds. It came sudden and unbidden, a harbinger of something beyond the walls, something approaching fast. It stank with the taint of dark magic.

  Creasy moved swiftly. Fear gripped his heart.

  “Get Roth,” he told Hassan, and the big man moved without question. Everyone knew to listen to Creasy when he spoke, for he did so only seldom, and he made his words count.

  Creasy ran for the front gates. Jannick, Haggen, Bell, Greene and Korthos manned the flame cannons and machine gun nests. They looked sleepy and cold, but they snapped to attention as Creasy approached.

  His spirit raced ahead of him and tore across the plains. Creasy climbed one of the iron ladders that led to the top of the outer wall. The guards stationed there, Harris and Sayer, were barely boys, but they’d proven themselves against the wolves, and Creasy knew they were fierce fighters.

  But still…they’re so young.

  “Everything okay, Creasy?” Harris asked. He was a sharp boy with hawk-like features and blonde hair, and he gripped his assault rifle tight as Creasy leaned over the wall.

  The smell was intense now, but Creasy wasn’t surprised that no one else was alarmed: only a mage could have smelled this, this stain. This was magic, bad magic, tainted and twisted through the unnatural manipulation of souls, the kind of chattel sorcery used by the Ebon Cities.

  But this wasn’t the Ebon Cities, and Creasy knew it. This was human magic. And that’s what made it all the more frightening.

  “Ready the men,” Creasy said. “We have to leave Wolftown immediately.” Harris stammered, and Sayer looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “God damn it, somebody get Roth!”

  His spirit came back to him with such speed and force he almost fell from the wall. She was flushed with fear and revulsion.

  Things took shape in the distant night, visible only to his spirit-enhanced vision – engine fires, unholy lights, burning blood fumes spewed from monstrous vehicles. Low-flying aircraft released exhaust made caustic with the power of lost souls. War machines roared across the open plains and left dark steam in their wake. Soldiers rode thaumaturgically altered mounts and wore body-armor fused and hardened by the power of the dead.

  Creasy breathed deep, but couldn’t calm himself. A human legion armed with undead technology crossed the plains. They marched with grim purpose for the city-states of the Southern Claw.

  Creasy hoped Wolftown could be evacuated in time. They had to get a message to the other settlements in the area.

  They had to warn them that the armies of Fane were on the move.

  ONE

  REMAINS

  Ronan climbed. His fingers bled. His skin was raw with cold. He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to carry on after he’d lost so much blood, but that was what he always did: he survived, and kept on fighting long after he should have died.

  That’s a nice motto. I should put that on a business card.

  Ronan took a deep breath, and the air scraped down his lungs. He was trapped in a bottomless shaft he’d inadvertently tumbled down during an insane melee involving Cross’s team, the Revengers, some undead forces out of Koth, a full Wing out of the Ebon Cities, and fuck-knew who else. He’d have needed a scorecard to keep track of who was who.

  In his attempt to kill the Revenger’s leader, Rake, Ronan had dove through an obelisk made of razor-sharp crystal, fallen an indeterminate height, and landed hard on an outcropping of jagged stone.

  I have a habit for jumping into sharp things. Interesting.

  Blood ran down his arms and face. He’d bandaged himself as best he could by tearing up his shirt and wrapping the cloth around his wounds. Ronan had no idea how long he’d been climbing. His existence had become a monotony of crumbling green stone and aching limbs. His gear was gone – he was down to the katana strapped to his back and what was left of his clothing.

  Stinging wind blew up from the depths of the pit. He felt the emptiness of the open space beneath him.

  He saw Danica, Rake and the dead Razorwing fall in his memory, and his teeth clenched.

  God damn it. Almost all of us are gone.

  For all he knew, Maur was dead, too, as he and Jade hadn’t exactly been racking up a kill count when Ronan had fallen down the hole.

  And a lot of good my heroics did. I always seem to come up with the short end of the stick. He hesitated at that, and his grip faltered. You’re better off than Kane. Poor bastard. Rest easy, man. You had guts. That counts for a lot these days.

  Ronan grimaced. It took tremendous effort just to keep his body supported against the wall, and he couldn’t afford to stop moving. His footing was poor, and he expected the rock face to fall apart beneath him. His shoulders and arms burned.

  The pain in his upper back triggered memories of his childhood. He remembered being tied to a post and lashed for failing to stand at attention or cut his sparring opponent deep enough. Years of rigid training at the hands of the Crimson Triangle had left him hollow and hard, and by the age of twelve he’d already learned to tolerate levels of pain that would have broken most grown men. But he did have a threshold, and ever since he’d joined Cross’s team he’d found himself testing his limits more often than he cared to admit.

  Ambient green light shone through the thick and unnatural fog. The entire shaft reeked of sorcery. Ronan knew they didn’t call it sorcery, but he’d decided a long time ago he didn’t give a shit – he’d call it what he wanted. He’d been taught and raised to distrust magic. It didn’t matter it was the only thing keeping humans alive in the war against the vampires. The Crimson Triangle had glossed over that part: it was easier to hunt and kill mages if you didn’t believe they were doing the world any good. The people who’d raised him were twisted scholars and wise men whose idea of rearing a child was to push them to their physical and psychological breaking points. Ironically, his masters were all mages themselves, older men who’d been well past their primes when they’d gained their spirits in the early days After the Black. Normally only the young and strong could survive the burden of magic. Most of the older ones had died quickly.

  Except for bastards like the Crimson Triangle, who learned how to sacrifice others to keep themselves alive.

  Ronan’s memory flooded with images from his time in the Order. He saw red-cloaked men with hidden faces kneel beneath a desert sun; blood-washed stones and rune-cast altars; a stone courtyard filled with young men and women burning in the midday heat, their skin scarred by arcane chains and forced to stand rigid as they learned to fight, to kill, to forget everything they’d once been. He saw fields of torture, and remembered marches across endless white deserts. Some of the children had been too weak, and couldn’t take it anymore: they’d cried for their parents, as any child would, and at that point they’d been dealt with, most often at the hands of other youths in the Order.

  Only the heartless survived.

  He shook himself back to the present. He had no desire to re-live even a moment of that old life.

  He climbed hand over hand, ascending into darkness. Bitter smoke swept over him. His mind was adri
ft in a black sea. Ronan honed in on that cold hard place beyond conscious thought. Every student who’d survived that bloody courtyard had learned to do it, to eclipse the pain, to push their bodies to the limit, no matter the cost.

  The physical world grew distant and dark. His consciousness passed through an ashen drift. He fell away from his body, away from the hurt and the caustic air, away from the fear of never getting out alive.

  His mind entered a different place. The Deadlands.

  Voices echoed in the darkness. He ignored them, and climbed. Everything grew less stable. He passed through a shifting boundary, a border between realities. He recalled having passed through it before, when he’d fallen. Bits of rock broke away in his grip like crusts of old bread.

  A sound came from above. He looked up, took a breath, and waited. It came again, a cry of pain. It sounded real, like an actual human voice.

  Or maybe I’ve finally cracked. Kane always said I was crazy. I think he was right.

  Ronan steeled himself, and kept climbing.

  The shaft opened into the floor of the large room where their battle against the Revengers had taken place. Ronan pulled himself up to level ground.

  For a long time he couldn’t do anything but lay next to the hole and struggle for breath. His body was covered in cold sweat, and his chest felt like someone had stomped on it with iron-soled boots. Ronan had trouble keeping his eyes open. He hung at the edge of consciousness.

  The room slowly bled into view. Grey shards of broken glass, the remains of the shattered obelisk, littered the ground like hailstones. Ronan slowly stood, and walked up the slope. He smelled vehicle fuel and blood, and the ozone taste in the air signaled the presence of magic. Thick silver and iron smoke filled the area. Ronan stepped over a low wall of jagged crystal, the broken foundation of the obelisk.