Lucan’s eyes were open and clear. Hot white lightning danced on his open palms.
Cross smelled ionized wind, and he tasted ozone. Everything shifted around Lucan, like he was a bubble of pure air that moved through polluted waters. The darkness split around him and recoiled. Lucan walked without hesitation straight onto the black lake and towards the massive humanoid that had formed out of the steel hard shadows.
Lucan is the weapon we were meant to find, Cross realized. His ancient and primal spirit is what we need, not the Woman in the Ice.
Why were we sent to find the Woman, then?
Cross hauled Black to her feet. Cole and Dillon were slower to rise, but they seemed to be all right. Everyone was dazed and weak. They looked pale, and their clothing and hair were covered with dust.
The darkness receded, and left them. It focused on its new enemy.
Lucan and the Dra’aalthakmar battled on the lake. It was a constrained melee, a bottled maelstrom. Cross felt the lick of hex energies and the ripple of arctic flames. He smelled acetone and heard dull explosions issue from the inside of a fog made of alternating light and dark.
They saw little of the actual battle from their vantage. Everything was a storm of white shadows and black dust.
No one spoke. Even Cross didn’t fully understand what it was they saw.
They were so distracted by the fighting that none of them noticed the vampires until it was too late.
Shadowclaws – Ebon Cities elite soldiers – flew at the group on Razorwings, large flying reptiles with bone spurs that jutted from their leathery skin. The beasts had huge hinged jaws, like those of a piranha, and their oily flesh smelled of turpentine and smoke.
A dark net weighted with black spheres caught Dillon and Cole and brought them to the ground. Danica fired her pistol and readied her spirit, but whatever she planned to do was interrupted as a bone spear pierced through her shoulder. She fell, screaming.
Cross watched the riders approach. He hadn’t realized it was dawn. The wine-dark sky bled orange with the rising sun.
His spirit exploded out of his hands in an arc of blue fire. She incinerated two Shadowclaws and their Razorwing mounts, and they dropped from the sky like meteors.
A whirling black chain flew at him. Cross saw only a blurry line and heard the clank of metal as the weapon coiled around him. He collapsed with his arms painfully pinned against his body. Bladed hooks pierced his flesh.
A dread ship made of bone floated into view. Its turbines blasted necrotic exhaust that smelled of brimstone and that burned the ground white. Black sails curled in the wind, and bloody chains dangled down from the deck. The pale hull was covered in spikes and bladed cannons.
Cross tried to move, but he couldn’t. His strength was gone. He felt his spirit, weak and torn and as sundered as he was by the dismal energies storied in the black chains.
The Ebon Cities warship descended to claim its prisoners, while a battle between primordial forces raged on at the center of an ancient and frozen lake.
Blades of light and dark crash into each other and send polarized sparks through an air turned brittle and raw. Tendrils of steam twist away from an icy ground made black by the touch of cold fire. Ice melts beneath them and shatters like dark glass.
It had not known that its old enemy had survived this long, or in this new world. It should have sensed it upon awakening.
It has lived for this chance to destroy the servant of its jailor.
Obsidian skin folds into a diamond hard edge that cuts through soul matter like smoking hot meat. The air is filled with a haze of flaming dust. Bone vapor engulfs the battle, a necrotic unguent that catches in the wind and makes storms from razor-sharp fragments.
The souls of lost ages entangle on the lake. They pierce and twist against one another. They strip away shadow flesh and carve through arcane limbs.
The battle rages on. The combatants reform themselves. They become liquid and uncertain. Their multifarious bodies collapse into one another in a hail of broken darkness and white crystal. Their bodies lose dimension as they struggle on, ignorant of the damage caused to their surroundings.
The land folds and ripples away from the epicenter of their destructive struggle. The sky browns and cracks. The ice ripples and sinks and collapses in on itself.
Blades of white and ebon steel pierce each other’s forms. Oil and lightning explode as they grapple. They have fought this war for eons, and will fight if for eons yet to come. Their conflict is their prison, and their demesne.
They weaken. The sky is bleached white from the touch of their soiled power, sucked clean of its life by impure energies. The ground smolders. It is a scar of pale ash.
The primal warriors weaken, until at last the Sleeper lands a devastating blow. The enemy is no longer distinct: it dissipates and spreads into shards. The fragments of its being sink and fuse into the living mages nearby.
White energy bleeds into them, an ethereal transfusion. The Sleeper’s enemy becomes a refugee hidden in human souls.
Weakened and suddenly alone, the Sleeper withdraws. Its enemy has gone.
The battle has fused the land into karsts. The devastation is frozen in a shattered epitaph of melted ice and fused black rock. They have destroyed the lands around them in their war of dust.
Victorious, the Sleeper disregards the mere human shell left behind by its enemy. Its jailor has escaped, scattered like ice crystals in the wind.
The Sleeper sinks into the earth, and rests.
Soon, it will hunt again.
PART TWO
CHAINS
EIGHT
KRUL
Cross woke. He sensed that he’d woken before, but that might have been a dream. He had only vague memory of what had happened after he’d witnessed the battle between Lucan Keth and the Dra’aalthakmar.
He remembered razor claws and barbed chains; leering vampire faces and black laughter; a grey room with dark scratches on the walls; cages made of bone; falling through skies filled with blood clouds.
Cross had seen the frozen city in his dreams. Something waited for him there.
That memory faded, and he was left alone in suffocating darkness. His body ached down to the bone. His wrists were bound behind his back. The air was hot and moist. Cross was on his knees, on top of something cracked and sharp. Dank wind washed over his body, and for a moment Cross felt weightless.
He felt his spirit. She was weak and hovered just out of reach, like a firefly held in a glass jar.
Something tore away his hood. Hot air stung his face and his eyes, and the bright sky temporarily blinded him. For a few seconds Cross thought that the blazing crimson sun would crush him.
He knelt on top of a steel city wall. A bitter rot taste clung to the air and turned Cross’ stomach sour. The roar of arcane turbines filled his ears, and waves of heat pushed against him as low flying warships passed overhead.
Cross gazed into a metropolis of chains: tall and crooked buildings made of metal and bone, bound together in a massive web of iron links. Everything was the color of blood and rust. Every surface in that steel jungle of towers and parapets and jagged bridges was dented and browned from the touch of desert storms.
Endless drifts of ochre sand surrounded the city. There were hills and mounds and ridges of crimson rock and dust. It was as if the world had been trapped in a stain. The hot and dry desert wind carried grit that clung to the eyes and teeth.
“Rise,” a voice commanded. It was not a human voice. The mouth that spoke the words was concealed behind a strip of red cloth that covered the lower half of a pale and ashen face. The vampire wore the red combat armor of a Shadowclaw. It held a large-bored rifle in its hands, and six black-clad vampires stood behind it, one for each prisoner, each of them with its considerable claws on display. Their eyes were solid coals, their skin was waxy and pale, their jaws were too large for their heads, and their hair was unnaturally black.
Black, Cole, Dillon, Kane and Ekko were
there with Cross. Each of them was battered and bloodied and covered in dark desert grime. The prisoners were unceremoniously hauled to their feet. Cross felt vampire claws on his back, and his wounded leg nearly gave out as he rose. Sharp pain shot from his thigh into his abdomen, and he almost cried out.
There was no sign of Lucan.
The prisoners were brought to a pitted steel platform covered in scorch marks. Cross looked down. It was difficult to gauge the breadth of the city, but he suddenly respected its depth. Layers of rooftops and platforms and cross-sections of thick barbed chains lowered into dizzying metal canyons filled with black smog. Cross could barely make out the image of a dirt street far below. The height at which they stood was dizzying, and for a moment he felt his center of gravity shift and threaten to pull him from the precarious ledge.
The city moved. The groan of machinery sang through the air in a choir of metal. Something shifted deep in the city’s iron bowels, and other areas groaned back in response. The vampire metropolis shifted. The wall shuddered beneath their boots. Chains dragged across pathways and guide beams, pulled and lifted and squeezed sections of moveable city, which rotated like the interior of some vast clock. Gears slid in with one another, great joints snapped together, and locking mechanisms loudly shifted into place. Drifts of red dust exploded off of the buildings and fell like dry rain.
Dark fliers circled the skies: Razorwings with black and leathery skin, mighty claws and saber-like teeth. Stout aerial warships covered with spikes and guns floated above the city walls. Cross saw vats of hot blood and buildings covered in razors, temples made of bone and obelisks made of blackened skulls. Everything leaked shadow. Great brutish work beasts with silvered horns and thick ebon flesh roamed the oversized walls, hauling carts of goods and slaves and platforms packed with vampire soldiers.
They were in Krul. The City of Scars.
The six prisoners were lined up and held tight. The platform lurched beneath their feet. Steel ground against steel. Buildings seemed to grow taller all around them as they gradually descended into the shadows below. They sank into a metal sea.
Cross tasted acetone and tar. Industrial vents spat yellow gases into the air. Spectral visages like golden skulls swam in the poison fog.
The prisoners looked into the depths of a city of towers as the platform descended. Chains hung like cobwebs from every surface. Massive stone wheels and spokes of black bone turned with grating audible force. The network of chains pulled buildings together like jaws. Reverberating booms shook the city with bone-rattling resonance.
Cross grit his teeth against the pain in his leg; he had no choice but to place weight on it, since the vampire who held him did so at an awkward angle that left him unbalanced. He chanced glances at the others, but their eyes were cast down or sealed shut. They might as well have been miles away.
The dank yellow sunlight shrank to a box over their heads, and the darkness swelled as they descended. They sank into an atmosphere that was thick and dark. He saw cold steam and tight spaces between buildings carved from black iron. Dark fluids leaked and trickled down the walls. The air smelled like death.
The platform sputtered and stopped, and it struck the nadir of Krul with a hollow boom. They were half-a-mile beneath the top of the city walls.
They wanted us to see how deep we are, Cross realized. They’re making a point: escape is not an option.
Cross looked at the others. They reminded him of scared animals. No one spoke. Each vampire escort held its prisoner with just one cold claw around an arm.
Something inside of him went sour and sick. Every breath was ragged, and something painful churned in the depths of his stomach. He shook all over, partly from fatigue and hunger, but partly because he was so terrified he could barely hold himself together.
We’re going to die here. If we’re lucky. His thoughts went back to Lucan, and the Dra’aalthakmar. And if Lucan didn’t destroy that thing, we won’t be the only ones who’ll suffer. If only they’d been able to send some sort of warning to the Southern Claw.
The platform rested at the end of a long street that ran between caged walls. Dark steam flowed through the air. Cross heard something on the other sides of the walls, but it was difficult to tell what. The air was cold, and dripped shadow.
The vampires marched the prisoners down the lane single file. Cross went first. Pools of brackish water filled pits in the cracked street. The decayed remains of small animals lay in gray clumps in the path, issuing a horrid smell.
The caged walls loomed to either side. Iron fog crept through razor bars like gray blood. The air was cold and heavy and crystallized in their lungs. Things waited on the other side. Cross’ spirit, weak though she was, sensed many living creatures, not all of them human.
The distant window of the sky was barely perceptible at that depth, a bright slit in the dark city above.
They brought Cross and the others to a sturdy iron door at the end of the caged gauntlet. The door led into the side of a plain stone building so preposterously tall it might as well have led up to the sun. The wall was covered in runes, claw marks and scorch stains. A wheel-shaped handle made of obsidian and bone turned in place, and gears moved deep in the wall.
The prisoners were ushered through the door and down a dank staircase that led to a hall filled ankle-deep with water and muck. The walls were covered in blood stains, nicks and arcane graffiti set there with black chalk. The air shifted, and the walls groaned. It was as if they’d stepped onto a ship.
The march was relentlessly paced. Kane complained and was pushed to his knees and struck in his lower back with the butt of a bone rifle. He didn’t complain again.
The vampires brought them to a wide vaulted hall with a half-dozen side corridors that led into the obscurity of shadows. Pale blue lights that looked like radioactive ice clung to the iron ceiling. Cross made out vampire script cast in blood paint. His High Jlantrian was shoddy, at best, but he thought it read CELL BLOCK 13.
“No!” Black called out as she and Cole were separated. All of the prisoners were taken away, one by one. “Cole!” she screamed.
“It’s ok, Danni,” Cole said with a nervous smile. A vampire hauled her down a corridor. She put all of her weight against the creature as it led her away and forced it to drag her through the murky water, but since Cole only weighed maybe a buck-ten, Cross didn’t think she really gave the undead too much trouble. “I’ll see you soon!”
“God damn it, you bastards!” Black screamed. She struggled, but not enough.
None of us has the strength.
His spirit, as if in reply, stirred and pressed against him like a frightened pet. He could barely feel her, she was so weak.
What the hell did they do to you?
Kane stole a kiss from Ekko before they dragged him away. He knew exactly how to throw his weight and drag his feet and generally make things as difficult for their vampire jailors as he possibly could without actually getting himself disciplined again.
He’s been here before. Cross couldn’t imagine that Kane and Ekko’s history with this place boded well for them. As brutal as Ebon Cities jailors would be with captured Southern Claw soldiers, they’d be even less gentle with prisoners who’d escaped their grasp once already.
Dillon was taken down another hall. He and Cross exchanged glances as he was dragged away. Cross shook his head, and he wanted to explain that he was sorry, that he hadn’t wanted things to end up as they had, that he wished they weren’t hundreds of miles away from home and behind enemy lines and far from where they were supposed to be, about to die or worse.
For his part, Dillon just nodded back, stoic, quiet and reserved, just like always.
This isn’t your fault, that nod seemed to say. This is what happens sometimes.
Cross’ stomach clinched. He thought of Dillon’s sister and nephew. He thought of Snow, burning alive on a train as it plummeted to the bottom of a nightmare rift.
The lead vampire and a black-clad jai
lor hauled Cross down a long hallway. Dank water that reeked of feces and charcoal leaked through Cross’ damaged combat boots, and he felt greasy matter mash between his toes. The sound of their feet splashing down the hall filled Cross’ head like a song, but it was drowned out by the groan of the metal walls.
There was less light the deeper they went. Soon Cross’ eyes strained to see the filth-covered hallway. Something brushed against his leg just below the surface of the water; whatever it was, it was so cold that its touch nearly froze him in his tracks.
He was pushed around a corner. Water flowed down a short set of steps and into a dark, vast room. The vampires pushed Cross down the steps. He stumbled and fell headlong into the freezing water
screams teeth gnashing claws at his throat rain of acid blood nails fire tearing through the sky is a giant mouth parting to tear the flesh ground into holes like eyes like pits fire burn hold you down falling forever into screams teeth gnashing
Cross gasped, and jumped back up to get his head out of the water. He was soaked through to the bone. His clothes clung to his skin. A smell like the inside of an old drain clung to his nostrils. Dank water dripped off of him like he’d spent an hour in the middle of a rainstorm.
The water level in the room had risen up to his knees. Even though he’d only been submerged for a few moments, he had the feeling that hours had passed. He felt out of synch, like he’d just woken up. The door had been sealed shut, and the air was still.
Cross stumbled around in near darkness. A dim glowing orb – some arcane vampire trinket the size of a softball – dangled from one of the enumerate chains that hung overhead. The orb leaked steam and smelled like gasoline.
He inspected the chains. Dozens of them hung down from the high ceiling, but the lower ends of the chains were still several feet over his head. Bits of molded meat, ragged cloth and bone dangled from the hooks.
He sloshed his way back to the steps and the sealed iron door. The steps had been swallowed up by the water, and even when he ascended he was still submerged up to his ankles.
Black Scars (Blood Skies, Book 2) Page 9