The Witch's Eye

by Steven Montano

  She drew Claw and motioned Renaad and Cristena to approach at her flank. Their lean silhouettes pushed through the maze of fog as they closed in on Wolftown’s collapsed gates.

  She released her spirit. He growled against her in anger until she reined him in to remind him who was in charge. He cowed easily, as he sensed the same imminent danger as she did.

  The atmosphere tasted blue and sharp. Glassy eyes and frozen faces stared up at them as they made their way through the smoke. The bodies had been ripped apart, their insides opened to the crisp night. There was no need to fear reanimation, as the Witchborn only Turned other vampires. But as the carnage indicated, humans and other living creatures still had plenty to fear.

  The sunset turned bloody. Dragon’s falchion was heavy in her hand, and it’s cold and alien core resonated in her grip. Whatever power made it possible to remove spirits from their hosts pulsed against her living hand like a many-chambered heart.

  The revenants moved in silence. Renaad yielded a crimson-bladed katana, while Cristena carried chained knives. They dodged between structures with such silence as only the dead possessed.

  There were as many Bloodwolf corpses as human. The beasts who’d desperately sought a way into Wolftown for so long had finally found their opportunity after the city was slaughtered, only to perish themselves at the hands of the Witchborn.

  But what destroyed these people?

  Wolftown’s citizens hadn’t died from claws or fangs. The gunshot wounds, craters and shrapnel seemed to indicate the recent presence of a military force.

  Her spirit slid across the ground like a pale snake. He slipped through the hollow shells of abandoned buildings and between mounds of smoking corpses. He found truck and tank and humanoid tracks.

  I should have had my spirit scout ahead before we landed, she thought, but she wondered how she’d have known to do that. It was an instinct from her old life, the life that was dead and gone and no longer mattered. Here, as Dragon, she’d never had to track her prey before, for they were always presented to her. She was a killer, not a hunter.

  Someone had assaulted the settlement and executed the people who’d lived there. She found evidence to support her theory near the center of town. Corpses had been set into neat rows, their faces and chests riddled with bullets and larger shells, firearms that could only be yielded by Troj or Doj. The bodies had been stripped of anything useful. Many of them had been chewed on or eviscerated since their deaths, just like the men near the gate. There were over a hundred dead in Wolftown. A good number of them filled the large bonfires she imagined

  remembered

  had once been used to cook wolf meat. The stench of the dead was strong, but her spirit filtered out the noxious fumes so she could breathe clean air.

  She stepped closer to the flames. Renaad looked at her expectantly. Cristena steered herself towards the shadows.

  “The Witchborn came later,” Dragon said. “They feasted on dead humans, and killed the Bloodwolves who’d come looking for easy prey.”

  She circled the fire while Renaad watched her. His undead eyes unnerved her. Something about him was familiar, as was the case with Cristena. She knew their names, had heard them before

  Your old life. It doesn’t matter.

  There were things about Wolftown that were also familiar. She’d been there before, as a guest. But she hadn’t been there to visit…nor had she been interested in hunting wolves.

  I was hunting a man.

  The thought stopped her dead in her tracks. The smell of burning wolf hide was overpowering, but she recalled other scents: heavy mead and cooked wolf, tobacco being smoked by the fire. Men and women had sat around the flames, and not all of them had been strangers to her.

  Her spirit raced up her flesh arm and chilled her blood. His whispers lanced across her skin like ice, and the information he’d gathered about their surroundings rushed through her mind.

  She looked at the central structure, a shell of mortar, concrete and brick. Something waited there.

  Dragon approached the building with the revenants close behind her. A wolf called from the distance, its hollow voice filled with loss. A cold snap crisped the air.

  Dragon had memories of being in the building, of sleeping there. Noises. The cry of wolves. Someone she cared about, in pain.

  Get a hold of yourself.

  Renaad and Cristena fanned out and faded into the shadows. Dragon narrowed her sight and calmed her breaths. Her spirit flowed around her.

  They didn’t make it to the building. Dark flesh was everywhere. Witchborn seemed to explode up from the ground: flailing claws and ravenous fangs, wild ice-white hair and eyes like sunken pools.

  Dragon deflected an attack from a blade-yielding Witchborn. Blade scissor-crossed against blade and the weight of the assault drove her to her knees. Her muscles groaned with effort.

  Her assailant wore diamond-edged armor made to grind down blades, so Dragon avoided the torso and swung for the skull. The Witchborn was quick and ducked away.

  Her undead cohorts fared no better. Blades sliced through pale bodies, but the Witchborn were numerous, and they moved with insane ferocity. They made the revenants seem slow by comparison.

  The Ebon Cities hunters fell back-to-back-to-back. Swords and chained knives and gunfire launched into the mob of vampires. A hand-cannon shot a Witchborn in the face. Meteor steel ground against razor edges. Dragon’s spirit tore through bodies like a frozen scythe. Ice nails and flame blades scoured the undead. Howls echoed through the night.

  Grisly smoke masked the Witchborn’s movement. The magic that infected their blood also camouflaged their rancid bodies, and the black-skinned vampires moved with such speed they were almost impossible to see. Razor claws and curved bone blades lashed out from the shadows.

  “Get inside!” Dragon yelled. She wasn’t actually sure that was a good idea, since her spirit told her the building was the nest, but it would get them out of the open, where they were exposed to attack from all sides.

  Witchborn screamed as she ran for the building. Claw severed heads and cracked open skulls. Angry spirits exploded like dust beneath her blade, and bodies fell steaming to the cold ground.

  Something sounded within the structure, a dull boom like the beating of a massive heart. Dragon whipped her spirit ahead in a cyclone of energies that shaved through two more Witchborn. The cries of their charred spirits froze in her chest like ice vapor.

  The revenants were with her, hacking away at their enemies. Dark blood covered their faces.

  She kicked open the door. The inside was covered with dust that looked like moon-blued snow. The walls were black with age and flame. Witchborn rose from the frozen ashes and transformed before her eyes: their bodies charred and blackened, and their whispers crackled like burning meat. Two of them arose, then three. The air smelled of pitch.

  More Witchborn came from the outside.

  “Destroy them!” she ordered.

  Renaad flew at the ebon warriors with a red-bladed sword in one hand and a hand-cannon in the other. Cristena sent jolts of churning electric force through her chained blades and ripped Witchborn apart. The vampires kept coming, and they didn’t die easily.

  Dragon stormed into the building. Her spirit melted in around her, a flowing carapace of steel and heat. Three Witchborn came at her, their dark bodies colored with moon-white veins. Alien eyes locked with hers. Bloody lips and curled fangs dripped with venom.

  Her spirit roared out and met the Witchborn’s night-tainted magic. Energies collapsed and exploded in a rain of stars. Dragon sliced through the first Witchborn, and its blood sheeted across the ground. The others rushed forward in a blur of razored teeth. She slid between them, and their claws raked her back. Her spirit encased her body in a shell of armor. The walls tensed and bled. Dark cords pushed up from beneath the white drift, sickly umbilicais like bloody straps of leather.

  The Witchborn were determined to keep her from the center of the room. She
sensed something concealed beneath the crypt dust and bone shards. Pale faces in the walls spat black blood. Dragon smelled something like the inside of a womb.

  A small blood-red stone barely the size of a fist floated near the center of the chamber. A dark slit at the center of the gem made it resemble a bleeding feline eye. The jewel hovered inches above the floor and pulsed in tune to a dissonant heartbeat, a crumbling staccato biorhythm that held the ruins of Wolftown in its dismal grip.

  She peered into the Eye, and felt herself lost.

  She sees him at the edge of a black nowhere. Mountains like blades cut into the red-black horizon. The moon is on fire.

  She calls out, but he can’t hear her. He’s drifted too close to the shadows, fallen too far from the world of light. He sinks further and further away.

  You were supposed to come for me, she says as he falls into the Stygian folds. The mountains unfurl and wrap around him. Night collapses in a tide of ink.

  Something pale looms over her. She turns and sees the spider. It is an enormous pale moon, an insectoid horror standing a mile tall. Its many eyes glitter like soiled diamonds. Razor limbs scissor together and bladed mandibles crush something into its sphincter-mouth. Thin tendrils of dark webbing lace down and trap her.

  You are mine.

  She sees twisted mountains and burning fields. Dark waves crash against a black and rocky shore covered with pillars of bloody ice. A scarred disc of stone stands alone at the center of a vast crater.

  The floating orb is there, but it’s larger now, more dangerous. Wreaths of ice smoke trail its movement. Blackened corpses stand sentry on the beach, held as if by puppet strings.

  The Eye pulses dark red and ice black. It is the color of veins stretched over bone. She smells brine and salt and death, feels dank ocean winds and hears exploding ice.

  She knows where she must go.

  She brought her blade down, and she knew in that moment before it landed this was not the only nest, and this was not the only Eye. This was only a fragment, a shard of the greater whole already bound for a place where it could do more harm.

  Claw shattered the gem into fragments. Blood ice exploded and threw her back. Wind exploded from her lungs and the air ignited. Her steel arm sparked against the wall as she fell to the ground. Dragon’s head spun, and her body ached.

  She slowly rose to her feet. Her true name hung at the edge of thought. She saw a dark-haired man she once knew. His eyes were sunken with pain, his heart hard from all he’d lost. She tried to cling to the image, tried to hold him close, but he faded and fell away.

  The room was still. Outside, the fighting had stopped. Renaad and Cristena had survived, and they were now covered in oozing scars and scrapes.

  She held up her hand. Blood ran down her fingers, and it took her a moment to realize it was hers. Her metal arm was burned black from the touch of the tainted dead.

  She grimaced as her spirit roughly sealed her broken flesh. Just like her, he was harsher now, not gentle like he’d once been. He didn’t plead with her as much as he used to, didn’t beg for her to heed his warnings.

  He knew that she was lost.

  “I know where we have to go,” she said as they left the building. Grisly Witchborn remains lay everywhere. The air tasted rancid.

  The sun was gone, and the matte-black sky was littered with iron clouds. Flames still raged all over Wolftown, rippling black-orange blazes that bent in the dry wind.

  Renaad and Cristena nodded in unison. The clothing beneath their long armor coats was tattered and stained.

  I don’t belong here.

  That feeling, that voice again. She had vague recollection of something she’d seen, some memory that had resurfaced when she’d learned the location of the Witch’s Eye.

  That man again. He was someone important.

  Her spirit roared to life. At first she tried to force him back into his steel prison, but then she heard what had alerted him. The revenants heard it too, and they turned towards Wolftown’s gates.

  Whoever it was moved quietly, but not quietly enough. Dragon cast out her spirit. The revenants readied their weapons and vanished into the shadows.

  She heard the shuffle of feet. Her spirit detected four life-forms – all human – as they entered Wolftown. One of them was a warlock, and before she could call back her spirit he noted its presence. The intruders stilled, and waited.

  Dragon breathed in. She felt Renaad and Cristena’s eyes on her. She motioned them to hold. The humans were on the other side of the barricade, just inside the gates. Dragon saw the machinegun nest above her. Large sandbags were piled to either side of the smoldering building.

  Her spirit dangled at the edge of her grip. She heard hands grip weapons, leather on metal. Claw in hand, Dragon crouched in the shadows. Her stomach clenched with anxiety. It shouldn’t have – she’d killed before, many times before, but this was different.

  These weren’t vampires.

  Renaad and Cristena must have sensed her hesitation, for she saw them ready for combat. Their dark blades glittered in the crackling firelight. She wanted to call out for them to stop, but she knew they wouldn’t, and she had no choice but to follow.

  She was one of them now.

  They rounded the corner and faced the humans. Gunfire split the air. Spirits collided in exploding blade shards and acid smoke. Swords and chains crashed, and the air turned to a chorus of howls.

  The battle only lasted a few seconds before the first mortar blasts struck the city.

  TWELVE

  COLLIDE

  Ronan dreamed of corpses.

  He stood on a black field beneath a skeletal moon. The bodies waited for him, just like always, dozens of naked grey cadavers neatly arranged in rows of cold meat.

  Ronan stepped carefully through the field of flesh. He was nude and unarmed, and his skin was as frozen as the corpses he’d left there on the ground. He remembered how and when he’d killed each and every one of them, whether he’d performed the deed as a young initiate, or later as a mercenary or criminal.

  His breath turned to ice. Doubt gnawed at him.

  What can my worth be, he wondered, when all I leave behind are bodies?

  Ronan jerked awake. He’d dozed off in the back of the dune buggy.

  The distance from the southern edge of the Bone Hills to the walls of Wolftown was further than it looked. Cunningham was a capable driver, but the ground was littered with holes and cracks that forced him to make numerous turns to avoid overturning the vehicle.

  “Maur?” Ronan said. He had to talk loud to be heard over the dune buggy’s engine.

  “Yes?”

  “Was the ground this chewed up when we were here last?”

  “Maur doesn’t think so.”

  “Look,” Moone said.

  “Cunningham,” Traven said. “Slow down.”

  The flames they saw weren’t from the bonfires that normally burned in Wolftown to warm its citizens and cook its meat – the settlement was actually on fire. Grimy smoke plumed from piles of smoking bodies outside the city.

  “Shit,” Moone said.

  “Stop,” Traven ordered Cunningham. “We’ll go on foot from here.”

  “Should we leave the buggy this far out?”

  A boom sounded from inside the city. Traven’s eyes glowed ice white as he stood up and held his palm out. A corona of flickering light danced along his fingers like he’d stuck his hand in a flame.

  They were just under a klick away from town. Ronan narrowed his mind and entered the Deadlands. The world slipped away. He heard the sounds of combat, blades and skin deep in the settlement.

  “Can you mask the sound of the engine with your spirit?” he asked Traven. “It may be a good idea to have a quick way out, and that means having the vehicle close.”

  Traven considered, clearly unhappy with the notion, but as his spirit transmitted information back to him Ronan watched his expression change to one of worry.

  “Vampires,�
�� he said. “Lots of them.” He narrowed his eyes. “Take us closer, Cunningham. Be ready to split at a moment’s notice.”

  “I’m ready to split now…” Cunningham answered.

  “Maur agrees,” the Gol spoke. “Is it necessary to get any closer? It’s been discovered that vampires are in Wolftown…what more is needed?”

  “We don’t know what they’re up to,” Reza said.

  Traven took a breath, and nodded.

  “Cunningham…take us in.”

  They readied their weapons. Ronan flexed his fingers and readied the Norinco 56-1. Maur had his Mac-10, Cunningham and Moone were both armed with MP5A2s, and Reza had a FN F2000 Tactical fitted with a long scope.

  The buggy drew close to the gates. The holes in the ground smoked darkly. Ronan thought the wounds in the earth had been made by explosive blasts, probably mortar shells. Clawed footprints in the dark soil indicated they’d been made by non-humans, likely Troj.

  “Fane,” Ronan said. “They must have come through here.”

  “There’s a lot of malign spiritual activity,” Traven said. “My spirit is having trouble detecting anything.” He signaled Cunningham to stop about 200 yards from Wolftown. There was no sign of movement. “It may be dangerous for me to go in with you…”

  A sharp blast of cracking steel and exploding metal rang through the air, followed almost immediately by what sounded like some maddened animal’s scream. The smoke and haze in Wolftown was lit from within by a flash of red and black.

  “Screw this,” Cunningham said, and he was ready to peel away, but Ronan reached up and put his hand on the younger man’s arm.

  “No. We need to check it out.”

  “There may be dozens of vampires in there,” Cunningham said, “and we’re too damn close.”

  “Can you detect anything?” Ronan asked the warlock. Traven shook his head, and said his spirit was still confounded by the overabundance of death energies in the area. Mage spirits were vulnerable and sensitive to the fading ghosts of the recently slain. With time and experience most mages learned to shield their spirits from those desperate and dangerous phantoms, but sometimes there were too many to avoid, or else they were too maligned for even an experienced witch or warlock to combat. That had become especially true with the Ebon Cities’ recent advances in using death energies as fuel for their war machines.