The Witch's Eye

by Steven Montano

  “At least,” Maur nodded in agreement. “A ship would be best.”

  “Do you have a ship?” Moone asked with a sarcastic growl. He was a clean-cut and brown-haired man in his early thirties, with just a trace of stubble on his face and penetrating green eyes. His grimy fatigues were covered in pale dust and blood, and he wore a Raven Legion tattoo prominently on each forearm. Ronan didn’t think he had much of a personality, but he thought that about most soldiers.

  “No,” Jade said. “We don’t have a ship, and I doubt we’re going to find one that’s in working order any time soon. So you may want to come up with another suggestion, Maur.”

  “Maur made no suggestion,” the Gol said, looking put out. “He was just thinking wishfully.”

  “Out loud?” Moone asked.

  “Maur does everything out loud,” Ronan said.

  “What about food?” Taara interrupted. “Thank you for sharing your rations, Ronan, but this won’t carry us far.”

  “No, it won’t,” he nodded. “And there isn’t much to be had here in Voth Ra’morg. I’ll guarantee you that.”

  “Can we hunt?” Kyleara asked.

  “There isn’t much out here aside from carrion birds and Firehorns,” Ronan said. “We can try and scavenge remains from that Gorgoloth camp, but I doubt there’ll be much left.”

  “Speaking of which,” Jade said, “should we be worried about those Gorgoloth?” She sat hunched up in a wad of dirty blankets and cloth, looking small and tired. She was anything but. A mercenary witch in the employ of Blacksand crime boss Klos Vago, Jade had been sent as a liaison when Ronan, Kane and Maur were sent to carry out a job for Vago in return for his sending the team home. The job was never completed. Instead, Kane would up dead, and the rest of them had found themselves in the middle of a war at Voth Ra’Morg.

  She’d used her magic to start the fire, and occasionally Ronan felt a wave of heat from her spirit pass through his body. He got the sense she was doing this only for him, and maybe Maur.

  You’re not with me, he wanted to tell her. The only reason I saved your skinny ass is because you helped us escape. But you’re on my Shit List, honey…you and your boss. If not for you, we wouldn’t be out here in the first place. Kane would still be alive, and Dani wouldn’t have been captured.

  “No,” Ronan said out loud. Both Greer and Moone looked at him questioningly. “The Gorgoloth lost at least half their numbers to the Firehorns,” he said. “They’ll retreat back into the Reach and rebuild their band before they do any more raiding. They’re brave en masse, but not in small groups.”

  “And what if you’re wrong?” Greer demanded.

  “Then we’ll kill them,” he said with a shrug. “Nothing too complicated there.”

  “Well,” Greer said, obviously a bit uneasy at Ronan’s response, “that still doesn’t solve the issue of what we need to do next.”

  “You mean what you need to do,” Ronan said. “Maur and I have our own problems.”

  “Wait a second,” Moone said. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” Ronan said with a forced smile, “that I’m thrilled you all decided to eat my food and share my shelter, but my Gol friend and I need to get back to Thornn. Babysitting an entire village’s worth of idiots isn’t exactly on my To-Do list.”

  “We need your help,” Taara said. Her accent was strong – she was probably from one of the fringe islands near Nezek’duul – and her green eyes shone in the firelight. Ronan just shook his head.

  “Look…I got your asses out of Gorgoloth hands,” Ronan said. “Instead of telling me what I need to be doing, you ought to be thanking me.”

  “Thank you,” Taara said. “But if you just leave us now…”

  “Fine,” Moone said. “Thanks for the assist, then.” He walked over from the window. “We don’t have time for this. I know your type: you’re a mercenary, through and through. Without a profit involved, you’re just not interested.” He looked at the fire. “Thanks for helping out. If you need to go…then go. Kyleara and I will take care of things from here.”

  Ronan nodded.

  “Ronan…” Jade said, and he gave her a look.

  “Don’t talk to me,” he said, and he stepped away. The corners of the warehouse were buried in shadows. He kicked an empty can and ran his fingers across layers of cold dust that had gathered on the walls.

  His mind went back to the training fields, to the days of grass and blood. He remembered skin bloodied from lashes and cudgels, remembered running through ankle-deep sand and dodging snakes the size of dogs. The boys couldn’t stop running or they’d be overtaken. If another boy fell, you left him, or you died.

  “Ronan?”

  It was Maur. He was just a short silhouette in the darkness. The Gol’s grey flesh and milk-white eyes reflected the pale firelight, and his breath came out as steam. Ronan could see him shivering in spite of the heavy wool blanket he wore over his shoulders.

  “What?”

  “Why won’t you help these people?”

  Ronan coughed. Cold air and dust had frozen to the back of his throat.

  “Because I don’t do charity work.”

  “Maur doesn’t understand you,” the Gol said after a moment. The group talked on in the distance, and Ronan heard Moone laying plans for how they’d reach Thornn. Jade wrapped herself in a blanket and moved off on her own.

  “What do you mean?” Ronan asked.

  “You risked your life to save Cross, and then Danica,” the Gol said. “And then Maur.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “You’re not strangers. You deserve saving.” He nodded towards the group. “They’ll slow us down, Maur. You and me…we might be all that’s left of the team. Kane is dead. Ash. Grissom. Black is most likely dead, and even if she isn’t, there’s no telling what those bastards at Black Scar did to her. And Cross…”

  Ronan was still trying to piece together what had happened to Cross. His unconscious body had been with them in Blacksand, and then it had been stolen away by the Revengers. During the battle at Voth Ra’morg Cross had been used as a hostage and a shield, and the Revengers had intended to use him as part of some elaborate ritual that would grant them control of an artifact.

  Maur had told Ronan that he and Jade had secured Cross’s body, and they’d been making their way out of Voth Ra’morg when Cross had quite literally disappeared right out of their hands. If Jade had told him that, Ronan would have assumed she was lying. But Maur…Maur was the most practical creature Ronan had ever met. If he said Cross had vanished, then Cross had vanished.

  But where the hell is he?

  “These people deserve saving,” Maur said quietly.

  “Says who?”

  “Says Maur.”

  “You don’t even know them,” Ronan said angrily.

  “And that doesn’t mean they’re bad people,” Maur said. He kept a very patient and even tone.

  “I didn’t bail your ass out of the fire so you could tell me I need to lead a herd of stupid humans to safety,” Ronan said. He knelt down so his and Maur’s faces were just inches apart. “They knew the risks the moment they chose to leave the safety of the city-states. It’s not my job to bail them out because they can’t handle what’s out here.”

  Maur shook his head. It was hard to read the Gol’s expressions – the race was entirely made up of false bodies, mishappen dwarf-shaped vessels with trapped consciousnesses – and yet Ronan had always been amazed by the human-like quality of Maur’s eyes, which now held Ronan in their gaze.

  “Explain to Maur…why you saved him,” Maur said.

  Ronan stood up, and ground his teeth. He looked at the Gol, looked at Jade, looked at the crowd of survivors.

  “I don’t have to explain myself,” he said.

  “Maur wants to understand.”

  “Maur can’t understand,” Ronan growled. He turned and walked towards the sliding door. A young man with a thin beard had taken Moone’s place by th
e entrance while the group discussed their options. He looked at Ronan nervously as he approached.

  “Move,” Ronan said.

  The boy looked at Moone, who nodded. Ronan slid the door open and walked into the fresh night, his cloak wrapped tight around his body and his blade in hand.

  He was fifteen when he’d escaped, just steps away from his final test. One-hundred steps away, to be precise.

  He was about to become a full Blood Blade of the Order, an elite soldier-assassin for the Crimson Triangle and one of the most capable killers in all of the southern territories. The mages would rent his services out for an inordinate fee, and he’d be given tasks even hardened soldiers feared to undertake. His specialty would be hunting down and slaying mages.

  Ronan had been raised since childhood to obey, to push his body past its limits and focus his mind so he could do things no normal person could or would do. He could enter the Deadlands at will, and kill without hesitation.

  His training had been brutal. The mages pitted their pupils against one another in bloody trials meant to dehumanize them. Ronan had strangled other boys and beaten them to death with his fists. He’d survived for days on end in the glacial fields of the Reach with nothing more than a sword and the clothes on his back. He’d killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents, had emerged as the lone victor from rooms filled with crazed gladiators pumped up on arcane narcotics, and had been forced to march across the western deserts carrying a corpse over his shoulders. His flesh had been hardened, scarred, and scoured with lashes and blade wounds. His heart had been made cold and dead.

  He’d been taken to an abandoned temple in the southern wastes, an old shrine that sat atop a hill. The only way to reach it was to climb a tall staircase made of crumbling sandstone. Veins of red quartz permeated the rock – Ronan remembered thinking the steps bled – and the sun was setting. The horizon was gold and crimson, and the trees glowed like they were on fire. The hot dry wind carried dead leaves and dust, and the sounds of the Ebonsand Sea roared behind him.

  There were no other initiates there, which had been strange. They’d always been tested in groups before, or in pairs. Originally there’d been a section of twenty initiates, but over the course of the years they’d slowly died off or been taken away by the mages because they were unfit.

  Looking back, Ronan wasn’t sure why they’d been grouped that way. They had no names, and no bonds. They weren’t allowed to help one another. So while the faces of the other initiates were familiar, the boys themselves had remained strangers. Strangers he’d grown up with.

  Maybe that was it. They were the only family I had, even if it wasn’t much of a family…even if we spent most of our time competing and battling each other.

  By the time Ronan was fifteen and prepared for his final test, two of them were considered the top of their class. The other boy was a tall blonde kid, lean and muscular and handsome. He’d started growing a beard early on, and by the time he and Ronan were nearly full Blood Blades the blonde one looked more the man. He was a cold and efficient swordsman, possibly the best among them.

  They’d been raised to be emotionless, and they were punished for succumbing to attachment or sentiment…and yet Ronan remembered envying that boy. He was the better between them, and always had been. Ronan wanted that, wanted to be that.

  The walk across the dead beach to the bottom of those stone steps seemed to take a lifetime. His katana weighed heavy on his back, and he’d smelled dead fish and fused metals. He’d heard distant music, tinny and mournful, like a funeral march.

  He saw his reflection in a pool of water on the beach, dank red liquid that looked like rust. The face staring back at him was that of a thin boy with unruly black hair and large eyes, who wore ill-fitting leather armor and a sword that jutted out from the scabbard on his back.

  Ronan looked at himself, and for the first time in his life he felt lost. He saw death in his visage, death in the form of a pale and skinny boy. He had the blood of countless lives on his hands. Nothing Ronan had ever seen had ever shaken him like the sight of himself looking so dead and withered. He was less alive than any of his victims: more a corpse than anyone he’d ever killed.

  Ronan knew the other boy was there, up in that shrine, and that he’d been given instructions to kill whoever came for him. The two best pupils from their group were about to determine which would become a full initiate, the next graduate from their grisly class.

  He had no love for the blonde boy – he didn’t even know his name. They’d competed, had even fought, but always in controlled circumstances. In spite of the other boy’s abilities Ronan had always known he could best him in one-on-one combat. He had no doubt of that.

  Ronan left without taking his final test. He fled across the wastelands. At the time, he wasn’t really sure why.

  He spent the next decade in a haze of motion, blood and sex. He chose a name and then changed it several times, dodged in and out of free city-states and border towns, passed through criminal ports and joined roving gangs. He hired himself out as a thug, killer and mercenary, robbed and killed and dueled, protected and rescued, executed and defended. His skills with a blade and for survival were rare, and he quickly found there was money to be had almost anywhere he pursued it.

  Ronan didn’t stop killing, and had no desire to. It was the only thing he knew. He sometimes lamented the loss of his soul, but he saw no reason to change. He’d been trained so long in the art of taking life it had become the core of his existence. That he felt a pang of regret knowing he could have been something else was strange. He wished the nagging thought would go away, but it hung there at the back of his mind like a parasite.

  He had to deal with Crimson Triangle bounty hunters several times over the next few years: the mages hadn’t wanted to let their commodity slip away, not after they’d invested so much time and effort into creating such a valuable asset.

  Eventually they sent the other boy to kill him, the blonde boy, just as Ronan knew they would. Of course he was a boy no longer by that point – he was a man when he and Ronan met again, tall and lean and handsome, but with those same empty eyes, the same shell of humanity stretched around his hollow soul.

  The assassin caught up with Ronan in a dive in Kalakkaii, and they did battle in a back alley. They fought a vicious fight, an inevitable confrontation delayed by a decade.

  I could have killed you, Ronan thought when they were done.

  But he didn’t. He let the boy live, yet again. He didn’t understand why.

  Until now.

  Ronan wandered Voth Ra’morg’s streets through the dead of night. The burned stench of bodies and the caw of carrion birds filled the air. Night smoke curled off the ground, and thick stars burned in the dead sky. Everything felt cold, empty and vast. Standing in that forlorn city, Ronan felt as alone as he ever had in his life.

  I let you live, he thought. Not once, but twice, because I wanted to believe we held some kind of kinship. You and me. Brothers.

  Killing you would have been like killing myself.

  He looked back at the warehouse where Maur and Jade and the survivors waited. He wanted to get Maur to safety. That kinship he’d once felt for the blonde boy had spilled over to the team, the only people he cared about.

  I’m not ready to die yet.

  Reluctantly, Ronan walked back to the warehouse.

  FOUR

  ASCENT

  The Rift glowed red in the dawn light. Grease ice and broken slate crumbled beneath Cross’s grip as he climbed. The ledges and walkways were connected by a shambling web of stone stairs and ancient steel cables that seemed to moor the canyon walls together like drifting ships. Scores of caves marked the way, their outer orbits cratered and flaking.

  Cross had climbed for nearly a day after he’d dispatched the savage women. He’d found scraps of leather armor, a second blade, and an old Colt .45 that was barely in working condition. Bits of frozen meat and edible leaves
had given him some sustenance, though he remained wary of the water in the canteen he’d found, as the liquid smelled like sulfur and salt.

  The walk up the steep path went by in a haze. There was no question he’d been drugged, and the aftereffects of whatever narcotic they’d forced into his system still lingered. There were times when the vertigo and dizziness were too much, and he had to stop and steady himself. Sometimes he felt like he was moving even when he stood perfectly still.

  The Rift was impossibly deep. If he fell, he’d die against the jagged blood rock walls well before he ever reached the bottom, if indeed there was a bottom. All he saw was a flat and dismal void filled with iron smoke and shadows the color of deep water. Looking down into that gulf was like gazing into a night sky, and there were times when Cross flattened himself against the wall and almost felt like he was lying on his back, trapped on a plane between opposing nowheres.

  You won’t get anywhere like this. You have to keep moving.

  Thick clouds covered the sky. The air pressed down on him as he made his ascent. Pockets of blue mist shifted across the void below, and the longer he looked into it, the deeper it became.

  His muscles ached with fatigue, but he pressed on, careful not to push himself too hard, but unwilling to stop. He was afraid if he did he’d never be able to start moving again, that his body would betray him and he’d hang there at the edge of oblivion, frozen to the wall like an aged and forgotten bat.

  He thought of Danica. He thought of Snow. There was no telling how much time he’d lost in that cave as a slave to those feral women.

  He climbed through curtains of curled green and black smoke. Crumbling limestone fell into his hair and on his skin. He became an ash silhouette.

  Cross avoided the caves wherever possible. He didn’t want to risk running into more of the Carrion Rift’s denizens. The most horrid things – the tentacled beasts, the shadow nightmares, the twisted mutations they talked about in the stories – must have dwelt deeper down, but he still didn’t want to take any chances.