If I get that far.
Cross made his ascent sometimes by walking, sometimes by climbing. Loose shale crumbled beneath his feet and pitched into the open void. The dank wind smelled of meat and boiling tar, and the calls of alien birds and distant predators echoed up from the cavernous depths.
The uneven ledge he walked on was littered with ossified bones, fish skeletons and elk antlers. The air was colder than the inside of a tomb. He tried to see the top of the Rift, but its height was dizzying, and the longer he looked the more the plane edges of the canyon walls seemed to draw together, like they were closing in. Spirals of frosted stone and lenses of ice lay embedded in the frozen rock. Sometimes the ledges turned into paths that led to cave networks or massive fissures in the wall, bowls of earth that further split into channels of rime ice, glacial clefts, and petrified waterfalls.
Cross moved slowly. In the Whisperlands he’d been young again, and his body never tired. He could walk a hundred miles and feel little fatigue, and he could recuperate from injuries at an accelerated pace. Here…
Here I’m…me again. Just an older me.
Even though he hardly remembered any of it, he’d been Red’s prisoner for almost twenty years. Somehow his body was still in decent physical shape, but there was no question he’d aged, even though he’d only started to feel the effects since he’d escaped through the Shadow Lord’s portal.
His back and legs ached from hours of walking up slopes and traversing the cliff face. He had no food, and what little water he found trickling down the sides of the Rift was stained with sediment, so he only dared drink scant quantities. His insides felt twisted and raw, and his skin was covered with cold grime. So much dirt was caked to his flesh he thought it would never come off. His clothes were tattered and ragged, and the only piece of equipment he had with him was his blade. It was a fused amalgam of two arcane swords, one black and one white. Avenger and Soulrazor, bound into one. The weapon gave him strength, and at times even granted him near magical abilities.
But only when it wants to, he thought bitterly.
He climbed. His thoughts weighed him, as did the near silence. He’d lost twenty years of his life. He had no idea where his team was, or if they were even still alive.
He didn’t even have his spirit. He was alone.
Ever since he’d caught a deadly fever at the age of ten, Cross had been in the company of his arcane spirit. Her voice, her proximity, had been a constant in his life. He’s grown with her, a part of her, and she a part of him. Losing her had been like losing a piece of himself, and even though Margrave had been nothing more than a false substitute, she’d still been a presence. It had been like living a beautiful lie.
Now it’s just me.
Sometimes he talked to himself while he walked. He made observations about the pale lizards on the rocks or the number of wriggling ice worms that dropped out of holes in the canyon walls, just so he could hear a voice. The solitude was unnerving. When he wasn’t talking all he heard was the wind, and the haunting echoes of the Rift.
He had to stop and still his shaking nerves. His gums ached and his hands clenched. He’d suffered withdrawal from magic before, but this felt different…worse. He yearned to touch his spirit. His eyes watered, and his spine ached. Every inch of his body was wracked with need.
Only the thought of Danica kept him going. She was in the spider’s clutches – the spider who’d manipulated him. Once, Cross had imagined the creature was fate intervening, an oracle or a guide who kept him on the right path. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
For in reality the spider was a malign entity called Azradayne. Cross had no idea where it came from or what its ultimate goal was, but he believed it had changed the trajectory of his life to alter the course of human history. In the Whisperlands Cross had seen possibilities in the spider’s eyes, different versions of himself dangling from the threads of fate. Azradayne had seen them, too, long before he had. Her vision ran far and deep.
You used me to get Danica, he thought. Something happened to her, someone changed her, and that was what you wanted. You wanted her transformed, and you wanted her delivered right to you.
And manipulating Cross had made it happen.
He climbed. In his mind’s eye he saw Danica, snatched by the spider. He saw Snow, burning on the train.
Cross navigated steep paths of dark rock and crossed mounds of bleached bone. The air was leaden with the scent of smelted iron and sulfur. Caustic fumes burned his eyes. His shins ached like they’d been pelted with a club, and his throat and sinuses turned gritty with ice dust.
The path widened. He jumped over pools of black brine and moved around once massive animal skulls time had worn down to brittle and crumbling shells.
He felt eyes on him.
Cross checked the weapon strapped to his back. He still wasn’t comfortable with the hand-and-a-half sword’s weight, but whenever he had to fight the blade somehow filled him with ability, and the need to use it. It bothered him that the weapon seemed to use him more than he used it, but it was better than being left defenseless, especially since he seemed to be the only person capable of yielding the artifact.
The path came to an end on a flat platform adjacent to an enormous cave. He’d have to venture inside to find the way to keep ascending the walls.
The cave was wide and dimly lit. Lenses of ice in the limestone refracted the dim crimson light. Dozens of smaller caves littered the uneven walls like gaping mouths. Cross saw crude ladders and scaffolding made of wood and bone.
Someone lives here.
Large mounds of ice-salt and crusts of black snow covered the floor. Strings of wire and bone rattled in the wind. The air in the cave was raw and cold. Cross’s breaths frosted, and his fingers ached from the chill.
He felt a presence in the cave, something waiting in the shadows. Cross looked back and thought about the path he’d taken to reach that point in the Rift, but he couldn’t think of any spot where there’d been a different route he could have taken.
The only way up is through here.
He thought about Danica. She was counting on him.
Cross moved deeper into the cave.
He pulled his armor coat tight and breathed into his hands. The soles of his shoes had worn down to almost nothing, so he watched his step as he crossed a floor sheeted in ice. Dark bones were frozen inside the walls, ancient and twisted things, reptilian and monstrous, massive jaws and talons, bone carapace tails and shattered limbs. These creatures had been blasted apart, their remains petrified. The air tasted pungent, like oil and decay.
The smaller caves loomed overhead in the still grey air. Thin lines of silken cobwebs drifted in the frigid breeze. He watched the holes, and felt himself watched in return.
Something moved up ahead, a scurrying beyond the mounds of dark sand and charred bones. He heard a tapping, like light feet. He tensed his fingers, thought about drawing his blade, and decided against it. He willed his spirit to move ahead and scout the area, and remembered with a heavy heart she no longer existed.
He heard whispers. Not a spirit’s whispers – actual whispers, hushed voices in the still air, something hidden in the folds of cave shadow.
A net fell over him from out of nowhere. It had been camouflaged, a translucent shred of wire and bone, webbing so razor-thin that even when it came down he barely saw it. The strands pulled tight. Blood sluiced from his hands as he tried to protect his face.
He saw movement from the corner of his eye. He tore open skin as he reached for the hilt of his blade. Cross heard the crack of a whip. Sharp pain lashed around his ankles and folded his feet together. He fell and landed hard on the floor.
Ignoring the pain, he opened his scabbard, freed the sword-edge and sawed his way out. It was an awkward position – the blade was still behind his back, and he winced as the double-edged weapon cut into him, but in moments he was free.
A woman came out of the shadows. She was covered in grea
se and silt, a crude camouflage of silver sand and black mud, and she wore a loincloth and loose top made from some sort of animal hide. Her eyes were pale, and her hair had been darkened with oil and secured back with bone fetishes and twine.
Cross only barely deflected her barbed spear in time. He grabbed her sandaled foot with one hand as she kicked at him and threw her onto her back. Her skin was numbingly cold.
Another woman came at him. This one had white-blonde hair and blue and black runes painted on her face. And then another, a black woman whose hair was a mass of tangles and whose eyes glowed sapphire green. He raised his blade and knocked aside a crude stone hammer, but the impact jarred his elbow. Rock-hard fists smashed into his jaw. Blood spurted from his mouth, and his brain ached in his skull.
Cross fell. The first woman rose and kicked him in the chest, and the black woman came down on top of him and wrestled his arms behind his back. Cross roared, bleeding everywhere, and threw her to the ground. Another woman tackled his legs from behind. He pitched forward and fell onto his face. His blade went flying, and he cried out as a sandaled foot ground his hand against the stone.
“Get off me, bitch!” he yelled, and he tried to push backwards, but the blonde woman brought the hammer down on his head. He felt blinding pain, and then nothing.
He woke in the sky.
Cross rolled over and accidentally tipped the bone cage, which dangled at the end of an old rope attached to a massive pole jutting from the wall. His naked and scarred skin was blue and cold.
He felt weightless. Smoky mist curled beneath him like an iron sea, barely concealing the cave floor a hundred feet below. Dark cave mouths peppered the walls. The wind froze him to his joints, making him shiver so hard his teeth rattled.
The blonde woman stood in an elevated cave next to the pole. She used a long staff to jab at his ribs, and the strike sent a wave of pain that doubled him over and caused the cage to shake violently. The bones creaked and stressed beneath his weight. Cross sensed the emptiness below him. He readied himself for the fall, knowing that at any moment he’d plummet and be smashed to a bloody pulp.
“Ok…” he said. He put his hands up in surrender. He remembered he was naked, but didn’t care. His skin was raw and slick with ice crystals, and he could barely speak or keep still. Every inch of his body was weak, frozen and sore. “Ok,” he said again through chattering teeth. “Just tell me…what you want…”
The woman smiled. He wasn’t sure if she could understand him.
I’m not sure if she’s even human.
She was a good ten feet away, but it was the first time Cross had been able to get a good look at her. The woman was lithe and thin, not unattractive but alien-looking and covered in grime and strange war paint. Her shirt was a tattered mess, ripped open at the stomach and one shoulder, and the cloth she wore around her waist only barely concealed her sex. She wore tall sandals that reminded Cross of the gladiators of Krul, and her arms were muscular and layered with crude runes cast with charcoal or oil paints. She wore a dark metal band around her right arm, and her blonde and white hair was held back with bone clasps. Her nails were black, and her unnaturally pale skin was layered with cold sweat.
“What do you want?!” he repeated, angrier this time, and still she said nothing. She looked him up and down and then silently walked back into the cave, where she faded into the darkness and smoke. Cross thought about calling out again but decided against it. He just sat shivering in the icy wind over a field of frozen stone, naked and afraid.
He woke in the sky. Again and again.
Cross lost track of time. Deep fog filled the cave. Dim torches in the walls below filled the bone-dry air with pale light.
At one point the blonde woman used twine to attach a pair of small vials to the end of her wooden staff and sent them into the cage. One of the vials contained water, while the other held a thick and pasty gruel that tasted like an unhealthy mixture of corn and milk. It made his stomach sour, but he forced it down anyways.
Cross tried his best to keep his wits about him. He urinated into the air, not caring if he hit anyone. He slept as best he could, but it was a nerve-wracking experience in the cage, and he was afraid he’d unbalance his prison and make it shift so much that the rope holding it in place would snap and he’d plummet to his death. He watched the mist and waited for some sign that the women actually wanted something. His eyes were heavy, and his skin was frozen. His insides felt twisted and foul, and the slop they fed him clung to his throat and nostrils. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and his blood-crusted wounds ached from exposure.
He wished there was a way to know how long he’d been there. He heard the women’s shuffling feet and whispered voices in the distance. At one point he thought he heard an animal howl from somewhere in the caves. Fear gnawed at him.
So helpless, he said to himself. Without magic, you’re nothing. Even with that blade you let three women overpower you. Now you’re going to die here, alone in a cave. Some hero you turned out to be.
His mind drifted. He thought he saw shapes in the fog, the phantom forms of men and women. He heard the sounds of battle and the distant calls of ravenous birds and rumbling from deeper in the Rift. He heard crashes and echoes, stone collapsing on stone, metal explosions. Something was shifting.
The train, he thought. The remains of the train are still falling. I left her there. I left her on the train.
He thought of Snow, and he wept.
They took him down. Cross wasn’t sure how long it had been.
He tried to rub warmth back into his body, but he was so cold it hurt to touch anything. His limbs trembled from lack of sleep and malnutrition. His senses were blurry, and his mind was slow.
The blonde woman hooked the cage with a new staff, a grey shaft of bone and wood covered in wire and capped with a jagged hook. The bones creaked beneath his weight as he was pulled close. He felt the void of space beneath him, the distance he’d fall.
The cage was brought to the cave high in the wall. The woman opened the door. She seemed unafraid of him, as she just turned and walked away. Cross slowly stepped out of the cage and stood on solid ground, naked and freezing. He had no choice but to follow.
The cave curved into a tunnel lit with icy white flames. The air was almost silent save for the whistle of the dry wind. Darkness seeped in around him like oil.
He heard something ahead, a deep and guttural growl. He hesitated, steeled himself, and moved forward.
The tunnel ended at a short round chamber filled with bones and teeth. Black ice covered the walls. Thick liquid dripped from short stalactites and pooled on the floor.
A man waited there, large and pale and as naked as Cross. His hair was long and unkempt, and his muscular arms were covered with ice scars, blade burns and runes like those the women wore, eyes and slashes and moons cast in rough ink made from charcoal or shale oil and burned onto his skin. The man’s eyes looked frozen, and his fingernails were black and jagged, like he’d spent hours clawing at the stone.
He held an old and oddly-shaped sword, a wide-bladed weapon with a short hilt. The sword looked unbalanced and heavy. The steel was red and shone with an unusual sheen, like shaved diamonds. Cross’s blade was embedded in the floor at the center of the room.
The man growled and leapt forward. Cross’s blade was suddenly in hand, heavy and familiar. He brought it up and deflected the other man’s crimson weapon. Sparks flew against the wall.
The tunnel and cave were too tight to allow much maneuvering. Cross and the berserker went at each other blade to blade, fist to bone, snarls and teeth. He saw flashes of steel. Cuts went deep, and blood flew everywhere. Cross felt his skin hammered and sliced. He fell against the wall, lashed out, fell against the other man, beast versus beast.
He was outside himself. When it was all done and he stepped away he was covered in blood and his blade was soaked in the other man’s viscera. Oozing wounds covered his chest.
Cross looked at the bod
y where it lay on the ground. He was out of breath and dizzy with fatigue and blood loss. He felt himself back in the gladiator pits of Krul, awash in remains, separated from his own actions. Kill, or be killed.
The corpse was barely recognizable. He’d torn his opponent to bits. Cross fell to his knees, exhausted. His breaths came cold and hard, and his vision swam. His frozen skin ran with fresh blood, both his and the other man’s.
Blackness invaded his mind. He felt himself floating, and then he faded away.
Days passed. Maybe it was longer. It was difficult to tell.
Cross swam in and out of consciousness. He remembered being nursed back to health. His wounds were stitched together, and healing salves were applied to his skin. He was wrapped in warm furs and put near a fire.
He was no longer caged. There was no need: he was barely conscious, and when awake his mind drifted through haze. It occurred to him they’d drugged him, that they fed him some alchemical medicine or else filled the air with mind-altering fumes. Either way he was barely cognizant. Everything seemed distant. He felt adrift.
He slept and ate in the small cave. His strength slowly returned as he healed. His world consisted of jagged obsidian walls riddled with tiny holes dripping oily water into the corners. The floor was covered with wolf and bear hides. White frost mist filled the air, which smelled of melted silver and burning roses.
Cross had fitful dreams of the man he’d killed. When he sliced the man apart in his dreams, his own heart exploded in his chest and spurted thick dark blood that stained his insides.
He woke to the sensation of the blonde woman touching him. He was kissing her, and didn’t even remember her arrival. He knew it was wrong, knew they’d brought him here for this. He’d been pit against their other, their old male, to see which of them was stronger.
Her breasts pressed against his scarred chest, and the cold of her flesh burned, but Cross wasn’t in control of himself, could just look on, a spectator, not sure if he would have been able to resist her even if he had been in control. Body aching, he found himself virulent and eager, and he knew from the start that whatever they’d drugged him with to keep him compliant also enhanced his stamina, because he made violent love to the blonde woman, needful, angry. His body ached worse when they were done, and he was covered in fingernail marks.
The Witch's Eye Page 3