Blood Skies (blood skies)

by Steven Montano

  They emerged with their pistols in hand. Cross struggled with his standard issue warlock’s gauntlet, which was hooked by electric wiring in his belt to a portable battery pack secured with iron clamps. He nearly tripped on the top step. Cross felt his spirit surge and curl against him, tasted the hot hex of her power in his blood as she desperately tried to purge the alcohol out of his system. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his stomach lurched.

  “ Wait.”

  Thornn’s streets were tall and drenched with shadow. A dank yellow moon hung like a sulfur stain in the blue-black sky. Cross felt his guts explode as he vomited toxic yellow sludge against the side of the building. He threw up so hard it ached down to his groin.

  “ That’s beautiful, man,” Graves laughed. Graves never had any trouble holding his alcohol. Chances were he was already sober, and he hadn’t needed his spirit to force the liquor from his system to reach that state.

  “ Shut up,” Cross stammered. The shivering night was fish blue, tremulous and thin. Thornn’s buildings were so dark they might have been splashed there in ink. “Where are we going?”

  “ I got a message from Morg,” Graves said. Cross saw the sending stone in Graves’ fist. “There was an attack in the Hightower district. Nasty stuff.”

  “ And we’re supposed to help?” Cross asked hesitantly. “Unarmored and half-inebriated?”

  “ Maybe,” Graves laughed. “Let’s go, man.”

  Klaxon alarms sounded through the night. There weren’t many people on the streets — Thornn’s citizens were intelligent enough to observe the loosely enforced nighttime curfew — and those few who were about appeared only long enough to peer up the hill towards Hightower, a richer part of town marked by its tower-like buildings and elevated position, before they scurried back indoors. Cross sent his spirit ahead. He felt her race through the thin air, and she twisted and danced across the city in search of danger. Normally he only allowed her to roam a few hundred feet away, as his connection to her grew tenuous and the information he received from her was less reliable the further from him she was. Only witches had the talent to send their spirits out for long range reconnaissance. Cross’ spirit flowed in and out of buildings and deep shadows like a racing raven. She found the source of the danger, but by the time Cross and Graves caught up with her, sweat-laced and out of breath from a mostly uphill run over the course of fifteen blocks, it was all over.

  The area near the tower where the disturbance had taken place was spare, just a few brick and mortar buildings, a small stables and a well. The air was quiet and still, and nothing moved in the buildings at the tower’s base. Cross looked up. The tower was ebon, and every window had long since been boarded up. The entry door stood ajar at the top of a short set of stairs. A dozen or so city guards, led by the enigmatic Moone, were in the process of securing the area. Arcane currents had been laid out in a fence-like pattern, weaved together tightly enough that no undead spirit could possibly escape. Green flames in iron sconces had been wedged into the ground, and they painted the air an eerie jade. Thornn citizens stood at the outskirts of the iron poles, huddled together and staring in at the scene of what had been a grisly slaughter.

  “ There,” Graves pointed, and he led them into the throng of city guards. They were almost stopped, but Morg spotted them and motioned for them to be let through.

  “ You missed the fun,” he said in his baritone voice. Morg was a tower of a man, standing a full head taller than Cross, and he was intimidating even in his loose tunic and sweat pants. He’d either been home relaxing or out for a jog, based on the sweat that still beaded down his dark-skinned forehead. “This one looked nasty.”

  “ This is weird for the attack to come in the middle of the city,” Graves said. Cross could only nod.

  Moone, the leader of Scorpion Squad, was a gaunt and bearded man with grey hair and steely blue eyes. He was one of the senior Southern Claw officers in Thornn — only Cross’ mentor, Winter, had anywhere near as many years of service as Moone did. Moone approached them with a grim look in his eyes.

  “ We were just talking about that,” Morg said. “Strange for a suck-head to attack this deep in.”

  “ It had been in hiding,” Moone said in his gravelly voice. “Mother isn’t going to like this.”

  “ You mind if we take a look?” Morg asked.

  “ I was hoping you would,” Moone said. “I think you’ll find what’s inside…interesting.”

  The bottom level of the bell tower was an open space. There were a few chairs where people could sit and rest, and a table for meals and games. Now, everything was covered in knives. There were thousands of blades, and they covered every visible surface in a sea of razor quills. There couldn’t have been more than an inch of space left between the jagged edges. It looked as if ten thousand points had been jabbed into the walls, floor, ceiling and bodies and then broken off. Morg had to kick blades out of his path just so he could step into the room.

  Three corpses lay in unrecognizable heaps on the ground, their bodies perforated head to toe by the rusty blades. Shreds of clothing clung to their decimated bodies. Bloody messes of hair and skin had spread like grisly jam across the room.

  “ Wow.” Cross gagged and covered his mouth with a gloved hand. The smell of opened intestines and spilled bowels filled the air with the scent of an outhouse in summer. Neither Morg nor Graves showed any such signs of being repulsed. They moved slowly, in an effort to avoid the pools of blood on the floor and not to trip on or break any more of the blades. “I haven’t seen a vampire that used weapons like this in a while.”

  “ Me, neither,” Morg said.

  “ We think,” Moone said from behind them, “that the suck-head had been hiding out here in the tower. This building was condemned for safety reasons a month or so ago.”

  “ Sir, who are the victims?” Graves asked Moone, but it was Cross who answered.

  “ Two girls, one boy,” Cross said. His spirit clung to him as if for dear life. The spirits of the victims, severed from the human hosts, were close by. He felt them in the air, and their presence made it heavy and sick. They were lost and confused, and they would try to take Cross’ spirit with them, or else claw at her and attack her in their rage and confusion. “They were just having fun,” he said as the information came to him. “They were going to do some drinking, maybe some black powder.” He swallowed. His skin was frozen, and his fingers shook. It took everything he had to keep her close, to hold her back from those lost and tormented souls. They’d be gone soon, and she’d be safe.

  “ There,” Moone said, and he indicated the far wall of the downstairs room. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”

  Scrawled markings covered the wall. Runes had been drawn over a rough map, and coded notes, arrows and cross-marks connected dots and triangles and pictures of what looked like eyes. The entire wall had been hidden behind a sliding panel, a removable plate secured by old magic that the vampire had apparently torn away. The map was of the northwest part of the country, and it bore location markers for the Wormwood, the Bone March and even the Carrion Rift. The markings were coded, but from what Cross could determine they seemed to be arcane calculations, geo-empathic equations and cartothaumaturgic drawings. Someone had worked out a location, a place where they wanted to go.

  “ What happened here?” Morg said out loud.

  “ From what we can tell, the vampire came here for this map,” Moone said. “Either he meant to read it, or to destroy it. Then these young people came along…” They stood in silence for a moment. Soldiers barked outside at bystanders to back away. “My squad got the bastard.”

  “ This map,” Cross said. “I’ll need some time to decode it, but at a glance…it looks like directions.”

  “ To where?” Graves asked. “And who made it?”

  Cross stepped closer. It would have taken an extremely experienced mage to make those calculations, to work out the geometry and arcane algorithms. He had no idea where the raw da
ta had come from, but the work itself was complex. Only a few mages could have done it.

  “ The Wormwood,” he said. “Red made this map. And if it leads where I think it does, she’s headed for the Wormwood.”

  FOUR

  WHISPERS

  Cross woke to a knock on his door.

  It was difficult for him to actually rise from the blankets, since his head felt like it had been filled with lead before being rammed against the wall several times and left out in the sun to dry like a piece of fruit.

  Light fell into the apartment in broken shards. Judging by the dull red color of the air and the cloying chill, it was just past dawn. Cross had fallen asleep face down and completely nude, which was one of the normal side effects of his drinking too much. Sadly, he rarely woke in anyone’s company. Dry mucus filled his mouth, and when he coughed Cross thought he was going to spew a mouthful of nails. His muscles were locked, and when he tried to move he almost fell off the bed.

  This is why I don’t drink.

  His spirit had no response. She drifted just at the edge of his thoughts. Power pulsed through him as she tried to flush his system of toxins. That power churned like boiling hot liquid in his gut. It spread through his limbs so fast he almost vomited again.

  The knock on the door came again.

  Oh. Damn.

  “ What?!” he shouted. He didn’t know any of his neighbors, and it was rare that anyone who came to his apartment in order to summon him actually bothered to knock. He never locked the door — the runic wards over the doorway made it very clear that a warlock lived there, which was usually enough to deter most would-be human intruders. Non-human intruders actually brave enough to hunt down a warlock weren’t likely to be dissuaded by a mere door.

  Whoever it was, they didn’t respond to his question. But the knock came again.

  Cross blinked, let his spirit’s energies pulse through his body, and then quickly threw on his pants and picked up his HK45 from the desk. The pistol felt heavy in his hand, and the runes carved into the grip were cold against his skin. Cross walked along the rugs, waited at the door for a moment, and opened it.

  A homunculus stood in the doorway with a stupid grin that was a disturbing parody of a human face. The golem was made of red clay and black brick, its eyes were slits cut over the mawkish grin, and its nose was an ill-constructed protrusion filled with arcane powders that allowed the brute to use scent to find its way around the city, since it was generally considered too expensive and foolish to provide the constructs with vision or hearing, especially with how short-lived a homunculus tended to be. They were a lesser construct, among the simpler implements that a mage could create.

  “ Deliver,” Cross said, not sure if he really wanted a message sent to him so early in the day.

  When a homunculus spoke, it was a magical audio recording, a reproduction of the voice of whoever sent it in the first place. Normally it was the crafter, but Cross knew that there were a few mages in Thornn who had a surplus of prefabricated golems they sold for use by whoever was willing to pay their sometimes inordinate fees.

  It spoke with a woman’s voice. Cristena’s voice.

  “ Sorry to track you down like this. I was wondering…well, I need to ask you something. If you’re interested, I’d like to meet with you…do you know a good place for breakfast?”

  After Cross recovered from the initial shock of hearing her voice, he gave the golem a return message, and then sent it on its way. He was ready inside of just a few minutes, and without even really thinking about it he was out the door and on his way to the other side of town, unaffected by the bitter morning air.

  Krugen’s was a spacious and well-lit establishment, a fact that made it somewhat different from nine out of ten of Thornn’s other watering holes. Krugen’s bore wide booths and a round bar that stood in the middle of the alabaster stone room. The air smelled of whiskey and fresh bacon. Heavy curtains covered the exits, and at that early hour Cross was alone save for the serving ladies, all of whom wore solid white dresses made to look like they’d come off a movie set from the 1940’s. The place felt like it was made from milk, and the color scheme made Cross (and, when she arrived, Cristena) stand out in stark contrast.

  Cross was there for a short time all alone. He drank strong black coffee and nibbled on black bread and white cheese. Most of Thornn’s food was grown in arcane greenhouses, where foods natural to the region — potatoes, greens, flax, turnips and carrots, milk and meat and cheese from safely guarded chickens and goats, honey and rhubarb — were given magically prepared serums and hormones and were bedded in arcane soil that promoted their growth. Krugen’s, however, maintained its own plot of well protected land right there in the city, and if their prices were a bit steep it was because they offered some of the only fresh beef, cheese and home-ground bread in the city, and maybe in the all of the Southern Claw Alliance.

  Cristena arrived a short while after Cross did, but still well before any other patrons. She wore a loose black dress that hung over her flexible leather armor, and her dark hair was pulled back tight save for a single lock that dangled down over the left side of her face.

  Cross tried not to stare. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe.

  “ Hi,” she smiled, and she set a weapons harness laced with knives and guns onto the table.

  “ You look lovely,” Cross said, and he was sorry he’d said it moments later, but if Cristena took any offense she gave no indication. Instead, she stood and looked at him quizzically.

  “ Is that the same outfit you wore yesterday?” she said with a grin.

  “ It may look eerily similar to what I wore to the Black Hag last night, yes…but it’s not.”

  Cristena sat down and pulled out a pack of cigarillos. They were Raams, a brand of smokes out of Fane, which was one of the few places that could afford to grow its own tobacco and not have it taste, as Graves liked to say, “like weeds soaked in yesterday’s piss”. Cristena lit two and handed one to Cross. He would normally have been reluctant, but he took it without hesitation and pulled the sharp licorice and herb infused smoke into his lungs, which he was pretty sure he felt crack and shrivel as he inhaled. They ordered breakfast — Cross has Egg-in-the-Hole, Cristena ordered a salad and fresh local eggs — and they drank coffee.

  “ How do you like Thornn?” he asked after they’d finished. There was a palpable tension in the air. Cross pushed his plate aside. He had eaten the egg and the thick toast, but there were enough hash browns left on his plate to choke a warhorse. As it was, he was so full he felt he’d sink like a stone if thrown naked in a river.

  “ I like it a lot,” she said after she hesitated for a moment. “But I’m not sure if it’s for me.” She lit another cigarillo. “Cross…I need to ask you something. And I want you to know it’s…perfectly all right if you don’t want to answer.”

  “ Ok,” he said. Cross knew that in a perfect world, she would have been coming on to him. He also knew that it was far from a perfect world. “What is it?”

  “ I need to know what’s happening with the hunt for Red.”

  Cross took in a deep breath. His pistol suddenly felt heavy in the holster inside his coat. His spirit tensed and collected near him, and he could sense Cristena’s spirit do the same. He felt them feel and test one another, pushing and prodding, not quite angry but tense and brimming with potential violence.

  “ And why would I tell you anything about that?” he asked. “What makes you think I even know?”

  “ Your eyes just confirmed that you do,” Cristena said with a nod. “And I don’t expect you to tell me anything, Cross, except that…I’m asking. I’m asking because I need to know…” Something in her manner, in her sudden change of demeanor, took Cross off guard. He hadn’t seen her look at all vulnerable up to this point, and it was disarming.

  Careful, he told himself. She could be setting you up.

  His hands shook, but he did his best to keep them steady as he pressed them flat a
gainst the table. Slowly, he pushed his left hand inside of his coat and felt the gun handle. Both of their spirits were poised, coiled like snakes.

  Please don’t be an agent for the Ebon Cities. That would be just my luck.

  “ Renaad,” she said. “My husband. His name is…was…Renaad. He was member of Talon Squad.”

  Cross swallowed, nodded, and pulled his hand away from his jacket.

  “ I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I doubt I’ve heard anything you haven’t.”

  “ Please,” Cristena said quietly. Her transformation was startling. She seemed just a shadow of the strong and charismatic woman he’d met the night before. “Anything…anything you can tell me.” The air felt suddenly colder than before. “I hear him,” she said quietly. “I hear him whispering to me.” Her voice was broken. Cross thought he saw tears in her eyes. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If he’s dead, I shouldn’t be able to hear him. He should just be…gone.”

  Cross didn’t know what to say. There was very little that he could say. When the criminal witch Red — Cross would think of her in no other way, regardless of who she’d once been or what she’d once meant to the Southern Claw — had taken flight with vital information in her possession, the White Mother ordered her hunted down, stopped and eliminated. Ebon Squad, an elite team out of Glaive, had been the first sent after her.

  After it set off after Red, Ebon Squad was never seen alive again. Their remains were found east of Thornn, in the white wastes of the Reach. It hadn’t been Red who’d killed them — powerful though she was, she couldn’t take on an entire Hunter squad on her own — but the team had instead been ambushed by a powerful Ebon Cities kick murder squad out of Rath. The Ebon Cities, it seemed, were also tracking Red. Prior to the destruction of Ebon Squad, it had been assumed Red was bound for one of the Ebon Cities to give the vampires her stolen information. Intelligence gathered since her disappearance, however, hinted that while her actions would ultimately help the vampires, it was not the Ebon Cities who she planned to sell the Southern Claw’s secrets to.