Blood Skies (blood skies)

by Steven Montano

  “ How do you feel?” she asked.

  “ Like hell,” he said. “I imagine I look great, too.”

  “ Spectacular,” she said with a smile. “I’m glad you’re back.” She paused, as if uncertain what to say next. “Thank you.”

  “ For what?”

  “ For saving my life.”

  “ Thank you for saving mine,” he said with an awkward nod. He held up the gauntleted hand for inspection. “Is this what I think it is?”

  Cristena just nodded.

  Well, damn.

  Warlocks were forced to rely on arcane implements in order to properly manifest the power of their spirits. The implements could take the form of gauntlets, rods, rings, even specially modified pistols or blades. Witches, on the other hand, had no use for them. No one had ever really been able to figure out why that was the case, just as no one really knew why only women could be trackers, or why a witch’s spirit manipulated existing matter while a warlock’s spirit formed matter out of nothing. Whatever the reason, a warlock who channeled without an implement to protect him from the touch of his spirit’s raw power was just asking for trouble. At best, he’d do physical harm to himself. At worse, he’d burn both he and his spirit to a crisp.

  “ I’m not sure what’s on your hand, exactly,” Cristena said. “Some sort of…necrotic bacteria. It was emitting an incredible amount of magic.”

  “ I know,” Cross said. “It’s what that stupid hound was made of. I took pieces of the hound’s body, sort of reshaped them, and used them as a weapon against it. I killed the hound with…pieces of itself.” He smiled weakly. “Cool, huh?”

  “ Stupid,” Graves said. Cross looked in his direction, but he didn’t feel like answering.

  “ The gauntlet is holding the necrosis in check, keeping it from spreading,” Cristena explained. “I wouldn’t recommend taking it off until we get you to a healer, or to a good hospital. It would start to eat you again.” She swallowed. “And I think it would spread really fast. Even if it wasn’t a bacteria, releasing that much pent up magic…”

  “ Would suck,” Cross finished. It would turn me into jerky is what it would do.

  “ Man, what the hell were you thinking?” Graves looked at Cross in anger. “You piss and moan because you’ve lost your spirit, so as soon as you get her back the first thing you do is try to get yourself killed. What the hell?”

  “ Graves!” Stone barked.

  “ Oh, screw you!” Graves shouted back, and Stone leapt to his feet. He did that in spite of a broken rib, which was probably why Graves backed away from him.

  “ I didn’t have time for anything else.” Cross stood up. It took a moment for the dizziness to subside. “I’m sorry, all right? But I wasn’t about to let Cristena die,” he said. “I killed it, didn’t I?” He looked at Graves. “Didn’t I?”

  Graves shook his head, and turned his eyes back to the plain.

  “ How close are we to Rhaine?” Cross asked.

  “ Not far,” Cristena answered.

  “ Half a day,” Stone added. He brought a bowl of steaming brown soup over from the fire and offered it to Cross. “You did good,” he said. “We’ll see if we can’t get you fixed up in Rhaine.” Stone glanced at Graves. Graves stepped over the edge of the ridge and moved a few paces down the hillside. “I don’t know what his problem is,” Stone said.

  “ He’s tired of watching his friends die,” Cross said quietly.

  “ We’re all tired of watching friends die. It doesn’t make him special.”

  “ Well,” Cristena said, “it doesn’t make it easy, either.”

  Stone shook his head and went back to the fire. Cristena waited for a moment, made sure Cross was all right, and then she went too.

  Cross stood alone with his spirit. She brushed against him like a soft blanket, and reassured him with her ethereal touch.

  I missed you.

  It was awkward for Cross to do anything without sensation in his left hand. He still had full mobility, but he had to concentrate just to make it perform even the most mundane task. He could imagine what the skin looked like underneath the gauntlet — black and blistered, covered in puss, maybe crawling with necrotic worms and larvae.

  The gauntlet’s spirit dampeners used to drive me crazy when I was an apprentice. Now it’s the only thing keeping me alive.

  After he ate, Cross experimented with his magic, both to reacquaint himself with the practice (it had been a few days, after all) and to make sure he could do it in his newfound state. Cross donned his normal gauntlet on his good hand to channel, and he only used his damaged hand for equalization and stabilizing. He conjured palm-sized flames and warped shadows into shields, hardened dust into spheres and summoned daggers made of ice. Every act was awkward, but he got the hang of it soon enough.

  It felt good to touch his spirit again. He’d felt so hollow without her, he never wanted to let go.

  Eventually, when he’d nearly worn them both out, he wandered away from the campfire. Stone and Cristena had both fallen asleep while he’d practiced.

  Graves walked a perimeter around the camp, keeping watch. There was a small shelf of flat land just a few feet beneath the top of the hill where they’d camped. Cross was surprised to see the camel carefully tethered there, down on its haunches and asleep.

  “ Wow,” he said with a laugh.

  Graves looked up at Cross as he came around the perimeter. After a moment he looked at the camel and laughed quietly himself.

  “ Yeah. The ugly bastard was waiting for us when we got out of the forest. He was the only one with enough brains to run for it when things went to hell.” He waited a moment. “You were right about the Wormwood following us. It spread around us to something like a two mile radius. Even Cristena said she’d never seen anything like it.” He paused again, out of things to say.

  “ I’m sorry,” Cross said after a breath.

  “ I’m sorry. I’m not angry at you. You’re a hero, whether you’ll admit it or not. If not for you, none of us would be here now. I mean… I’m the one who had to pick up a haunted branch. I just…” Graves shook his head. Cross knew that Graves wasn’t normally one to talk about his doubts. His emoting was usually done with a glass of whisky in hand and a stripper on his lap. “This shit is getting to me, Cross. I just want to wake up.” A cold gust of wind came at them. “Do you remember what things used to be like?”

  “ What, you mean before The Black?” Cross asked.

  “ Yeah.”

  “ Not really,” Cross said after he thought about it for a moment. “I was so young…five, maybe six when it happened.” He looked at Graves. “Same with you, right?”

  “ Yeah.” Graves looked out into the dark, his face half lit by firelight. “But I remember a lot, actually. I remember my dad pushing me on the swing. I remember sunlight that didn’t look all bloody.” He spat on the ground. “I wish I didn’t remember. I wish I had no idea. Then maybe I wouldn’t know how shitty this all is, because I’d have nothing to compare it to.”

  “ Sam…”

  “ Don’t worry about it,” Graves said. “I’m fine, and I’m going to do my job. We’re going to find that bitch Red, and we’re going to make her pay for what she’s done.” He looked up at Cross. There was something cold behind his eyes. “We’ll do it for Morg, and for Kray, and for Winter. And we’ll get your sister, and we’ll take her home.”

  Cross nodded.

  “ I’ve got your back, man,” he said. He offered Graves his good hand. “Thanks for everything.” Graves shook it.

  “ All right,” he said, “enough of this male bonding crap. Get some sleep. You’re on watch in four.”

  Cross sat quietly through his shift. His eyes were alight with white shadows. The gossamer threads of his spirit danced around him in a nimbus of spectral strands. She stayed anchored at the corner of his mind, poised and dangling in the thick gloom of the dead night. Cross watched the stillness of the plains, and stretched his arcane sens
es out across the deepness of the wastes.

  Something was wrong. There was something broken, something out of place.

  That sense of wrongness nagged at him all the next morning as they marched northeast, out of the hills and into the deep northern tundra. They were out of the Bone March now, nearing the most northern areas ever explored by the Southern Claw. Patches of frozen moss and blue-black lichen stood in shallow pools of briny slush and icy reeds. The deep red sky hung low and oppressive, and the air was bitter, sharp and cold.

  The earth seemed to be made of rust. The squad walked across the tundra, following trails of vaporous red clouds that stained the sky. They passed by drifts of great spider silk and sinkholes of frozen mud. Black pits of congealed tar lay like great footsteps to the southeast. Ahead, still at a good distance but so massive it was impossible not to notice, was the Carrion Rift, a cold black cut in the land. The entire landscape seemed to drift ever closer to the Rift, as if the ground were sinking toward it. Even at that distance the squad heard the black hounds in the Rift, its eternal prisoners. Their mournful brays carried in the dead wind.

  The squad spoke only sparingly. Graves and Stone had their weapons at the ready. Their eyes were constantly alert, as they expected to be ambushed at any moment. Cross kept his spirit at the edge of his thoughts, tethered to his consciousness by an emotive line, just far enough out that she could sense if anything approached. His legs ached, and he knew there had to be at least a few blisters on his weary feet. Cold sweat dampened the shirt beneath his armored jacket. They hadn’t rested for quite some time, and they wouldn’t until they found some sort of cover from both the bitter air and from any prying eyes.

  The tundra eventually gave way to cracked hills and rocky ridges of sharp stone. The path grew steep enough that even the camel seemed to complain by its reluctance to carry on.

  It was just past noon when they stumbled on the first signs of slaughter. Thin lines of dirty grey smoke spiraled out of the nadir of a low canyon to the north. Cross’ eyes followed the winding plumes down to the canyon floor. The amount of debris and carnage thickened closer to the source of the smoke: a smoldering husk of shattered trucks positioned in a crude defensive circle. Black stains marred the ground around the broken perimeter of vehicles, and as the wind shifted in their direction Cross gagged on the charnel musk.

  Despite their misgivings, the group investigated. Cross’ eyes and spirit were alert as they walked into the canyon. The walls down there were jagged and deep, and every cleft of rock was filled with shadow.

  The bodies were at least two days dead, most of them horribly burned. There were too many to count, and Cross didn’t care to try. He pulled his spirit in as close as he could to keep her shielded away from the worst of that deathly air.

  There were no barriers between arcane spirits and the spirits of the recently dead. To Cross and Cristena’s spirits, those dead souls in the canyon were like a pack of rabid wolves, just waiting for an opportunity to maul intruders that dared venture into their territory. Even with his spirit safely hidden behind every safeguard that he could muster, Cross felt the pain of those lost in the doomed caravan. He heard the haunted dirge and felt the stirring of the unquiet dead, forever trapped in a nightmare of their own demise.

  “ Settlers,” Stone concluded. “Probably bound for Rhaine.”

  “ Settlers, this far north?” Graves asked. “I’m surprised anyone would want to come this deep into dangerous territory.”

  “ There’s still unclaimed land up here,” Cristena said, clearly as uncomfortable in that butcher’s yard as Cross was. “Not everyone wants to be a part of the Southern Claw, and most of the good land south of here is claimed. Plus there aren’t many vampires this close to the Rift.”

  “ Well, there’s something up here,” Cross whispered.

  They searched the field of ashen bodies and open vehicles. There was scattered bedding, crockery, open bags of seed, grain and rations, tools broken apart and scatted by the chill valley winds.

  While most of the bodies had been burned, it didn’t take long for the squad to realize that fire wasn't what had killed those people. Skulls had been smashed in by hammer and boot, and a number of bodies north of the truck circle had been impaled on oversized barbed spears. Gaping bullet wounds were visible on many of the less burned corpses, and the holes left were far too big to be the handiwork of human weapons.

  “ Shit,” Graves said. “Sorn.”

  “ Yeah,” Stone said. He looked at the rest of them. “Only a large group would have been able to tackle a caravan this size. And I guarantee you there is no way that a Sorn raiding party would pass up a target as tempting as a remote human city. Not a chance.”

  “ We have to warn them,” Cross said. “We have to get to Rhaine, and warn them.” Everyone looked at him uneasily. He expected Stone to say something about how that wasn’t their mission, or how it was probably already too late. Instead, Stone looked at each of them in turn, finishing with Cross.

  “ All right. Let’s go.”

  NINETEEN

  RHAINE

  The remainder of the trek to Rhaine was grim.

  The air turned greyer the further they walked. Cross’ eyes hurt, and he almost fell asleep while they marched. Only his spirit’s anxiousness kept him conscious. Dread built up deep in his chest, as strong and as heavy as if he’d swallowed a chunk of lead.

  To a mage, being near death was like walking through a freezing waterfall. There was no mistaking its presence, and Cross had to constantly hold his spirit close and anchor her to his will. Otherwise, she might be drawn out and ambushed by free-roaming ghosts, or else so distracted by the deadly lull of lost souls that she’d never be able to return to him.

  The task of keeping her contained grew more difficult the further they went. The squad passed the ruined remains of a remote cabin, once the property of a trapper or a mountain seer, which had been partially crushed beneath some great concussive force. Bone weary and on edge, they passed through a field of dark soil, and while both Cross and Cristena felt the proximity of death they still managed to slosh halfway across the field before they noticed a pale arm that jutted out of the loamy earth. Their boots sank in thin pools of blood that were just beneath the surface, and soon they were ankle deep in crimson slush.

  They’d stumbled into a mass grave. Bodies addled by bullets and blades had been piled up and crudely buried beneath the surface of the rich mud. Soggy flesh sagged away from the corpses’ bones like melting fat, and everything was covered with worms. Cross and Cristena were forced to flee the scene.

  Cross was sick. He felt like someone had pulled his insides out through his mouth.

  He heard the screams of lost souls. He felt his spirit suffer as she was battered with clouds of pain that still surrounded the recently dead like a grim shroud. Everything Cross had ever seen and heard led him to believe that a person’s soul continued to exist long after the body had gone. They stayed, trapped in their last moments, forever locked in the eternal final seconds of life. Those souls were tortured to repeat their moment of death over and over and over again.

  The squad made haste to move away from the field of carnage, only to discover more bodies. This time they were located off of a wide trade road that Cristena thought led directly into Rhaine. The naked corpses had been burned and hung at unnatural angles, held up only by strands of razor wire affixed to metal poles in the ground. Dead eyes stared at the squad, almost accusingly. Cross did all he could to keep their voices at bay.

  “ We’re too late,” Graves said after they passed the bodies. They came around a bend in the hills. The sky had filled with sickly bulbous clouds. “These people were either bound for Rhaine, or else they came from it.”

  “ We’ll check it out,” Stone said. No one questioned the decision.

  They had to see Rhaine, but they already knew what they’d find. The Sorn did not take prisoners. If Rhaine’s residents were lucky, they’d been killed quickly. />
  They rested for a short time, drank some water, and calculated their position on the maps. No one ate, and they barely spoke. No one really wanted to move on, but they had to, and they all knew it.

  They caught their first sight of Rhaine over the next ridge. It was a large settlement spaced across a massive hillside and built right up against the edge of the Carrion Rift. The walls that protected the city were low but solid, and they were set with battlements and a large number of crude towers. The city rolled and curved with the hill, and its districts had been separated by short intervening walls, visible even from outside the city.

  Smoke drifted over much of Rhaine, filling the sky with red and gray war pollutants. Even from a distance the smell of burning fuel was strong. Cross saw a few large, gray-skinned figures moving around in the city even at the squad’s distance, and through his scope he confirmed their identity by their bladed armor, their black iron weapons, their heavy steam-powered firearms and the single, central eyes they bore on their smooth heads. Sorn.

  “ The easiest way to cross the Rift,” Cristena said, trying like the rest of them to ignore the fact that the city was likely filled with hundreds of dead people, “is to cross that bridge. We have to go through Rhaine to get to it.”

  “ Of course,” Graves said bitterly.

  “ There may be survivors,” Cross said quietly.

  “ Doubtful.” Stone took the scope and surveyed Rhaine’s smoking husk, starting at the gates and inspecting all of the way to the bridge at the far northern edge of the city. The bridge had been built into a tower set in Rhaine’s north wall, and it stretched across to a second tower on the far side of the Rift. From what Cross could tell, Rhaine’s north wall was flush with the canyon wall, which meant there was no other means of accessing that particular bridge from their side of the canyon.

  Cross tasted sorcery in the air, and it was as thick and as pungent as the pollution. It was known that the Sorn made use of powerful military technology, steam and gear-driven devices powered by arcane fuel, and machines that relied as much on magic as they did on gears or engines to operate.