Blood Skies (blood skies)

by Steven Montano

  OBELISK

  Buildings took shape in the mist as the boat drew closer to the isle. The shore was rocky and jagged, like a fan of blades. White waters heavy with green slime and putrid sludge crashed against the stones. The structures on the shore stood like gravestones in the white fog. Ghostly calls sounded through the chill of the afternoon. The air was icy and thick, and it pressed against Cross’ skin like a razor’s kiss.

  The boat came ashore at one of the few points in the labyrinth of deadly stones where the beach was accessible. Cross disembarked and waded through polluted waters to a beach of pure white sand. He noted something odd about the sand, so he knelt down and took up a handful. Tiny bits of broken bone and tooth, so fine they were almost invisible, drifted between his fingers. The beach was ground bone: he stood on a shore of the dead.

  Behind him, the ship silently cast off, as Cross knew it would.

  Cross marched toward the structures. The dark chain of buildings was arranged in a semi-circle near the edge of some craggy foothills, similar in their appearance to the dagger-like rocks of the shore. The white fog blocked his vision beyond the buildings, which loomed wraithlike in the mist.

  The air was shockingly cold. Cross walked through a floating curtain of ice that coated him in a brittle shell of frost. His lips and eyes felt numb. He breathed warmth into his hands and quickened his pace. Unnaturally dark cobblestone streets ran right up to the bone sand. Cross stepped up carefully, so as to avoid slipping.

  The buildings were mostly wood, and they, too, were utterly black — the siding, the porches, even the windows were pitch, as if they’d been dipped in tar. The rickety wooden shacks were in a general state of disrepair.

  The buildings encircled a solid ebon obelisk apparently made of black ice. The monolith stood twice as tall as Cross, and it was covered with silver runes and glyphs that Cross recognized as High Jlantrian script. Similar markings had been set on a disc of dark stone which served as a sunken, inverted platform that supported the obelisk. The disc and the ice pillar looked like a dial, or a clock. A short set of steps descended from the platform to the ground.

  Even without his spirit, Cross felt drawn to the pillar. The obelisk emanated cold so absolute it made the air raw. Bitter steam curled off the stone.

  Cross stared, and he moved closer without at first even realizing it. There was something intimately familiar about the obelisk, like the feeling of coming home, just as there was something terrifying about it, a danger that he couldn’t put a name or a face to. He saw voices in the obelisk, and he felt something claw at the stone from inside of it. As Cross drew closer he realized the obelisk wasn’t black at all — it was transparent, and it was filled with a desolate midnight smoke.

  Cross’ legs grew weary. Each step was a trial, like his feet had melded into the stone. He felt as if he could fall to the ground and never rise again. The obelisk seemed to grow further away, to recede in his vision even as he felt himself draw close to it. Each step forward took him back.

  And yet, he saw inside it. He saw the mountain, and the silver mists. He saw the glade.

  “ I wouldn’t recommend touching it.”

  Red stood behind him. Cross felt like he was stuck in a dream. His movements were sluggish, and the air stretched and twisted in front of his eyes like watercolors. Words sloughed toward him like congealed liquid.

  There were two others with Red. One of them was Snow, beaten and bruised. She wore a grey cloak that had been cast over her like a shroud, but it barely concealed the scars and welts on her once beautiful face. Cross’ chest seized up in pain at the sight of her. She looked barely alive, and her eyes were blank, not willing or capable of meeting his gaze.

  The other individual was a tall and lean man with eyes like white pits. His hair was silver and cropped short, and his bone-thin arms were covered in old military tattoos. He wore a purple and black cloak over an infantry uniform, and his rotted flesh had taken on the pallor of the north.

  The Old One. Dane Knight.

  “ It will kill you to touch it,” Red continued. “But I suspect you gathered that, didn’t you, Cross?”

  Cross tried to pull himself together. His thoughts were forming too slowly, and he felt like he’d been drugged. Worse, he feared he might pass out at any second.

  “ So you…tell me,” he struggled. Every breath was almost a gasp for air. “Why did I come here? You let me get through. Why would you…do that?”

  “ I’d rather show you,” Red said with a smile.

  The Old One nodded, but remained silent.

  Something reached out to Cross. Black smoke emanated from the obelisk, a serpent made of vapor. It curled around him. Cross looked through the ebon murk and saw through the cracks of time. He fell into liquid clouds and uncertain storms.

  The bullet tears the child apart, and her tiny head explodes in a spray of blood. Knight screams, not believing he did this, knowing, as they all did, that he had no choice. The girl is dead, and the cursed candles spaced around her on the floor consume her soul. Their fires burn bright.

  The ritual, prepared over the course of days, has awaited this final sacrifice.

  He doesn’t know how this part works, but he knows it should have been done before now. He’d wanted to find an alternative, wanted to find some other way. Before The Black, Knight didn’t believe in magic or in vampires. But the world is different now. The world he knows is gone.

  The vampires came to stop them from making the sacrifice, because they knew it would change everything.

  The air grows dark. The vampires and their grisly weapons force their way into the chamber and Cross realized he was in the remains of that chamber now, decades later, but the walls were now gone, everything was gone but the disc of stone by crashing through the door and walls. He sees a silver stream of smoke bellow out of the child’s ruined corpse. A voice is trapped in the fumes, something that forms there in the core of the sacrifice. Beams of unlight slice up from the ground and cut the air apart. The candles snuff out and the light solidifies and congeals into something that is invisible and yet more solid than steel. It is a prison. It is a weapon.

  Black energies tear out of the sacrificed soul and fill the air with a whirlwind of shadows. Knight dies at that moment, but he also remains, and he screams in terror as he witnesses the apotheosis. He is flung through the unlight, bathed in a maelstrom of darkness that spills out of the breach he has created.

  He has made a hole, and then sealed it up again. He has created a prison of souls — a cage without bars, an endless source of unwilling power. Humankind has searched for it for centuries, but until The Black they never understood what had to be done to acquire it.

  The sacrifice is complete. In order to combat hordes of undead invaders, Knight has opened a doorway to an even blacker power.

  “ Now,” he utters from his newly undead lips. “We have magic.”

  Cross fell to his knees.

  “ Magic…” he coughed. “You… you made it possible?”

  Yes, the Old One spoke without speaking. Its voice was a vast echo, a howling wind from the depths of a great pit. A weapon was needed. When conventional means of survival failed, we turned to the supernatural, the very thing that was destroying us. We consulted religious and so-called arcane texts. There were many failures and many lives lost before the answer was finally uncovered.

  “ And…this?” Cross looked at the obelisk. His body grew weaker by the second. Life leaked from him.

  It is the anchor. The prison. It tethers the souls of the departed to this world so that they cannot escape to the next. We use them — they are the fuel that powers our magic. Without the exploitation of the dead, humankind would have been lost long ago. They are our saviors, and our weapons.

  The glade, Cross realized. The glade is inside the obelisk. “How are they…tied to warlocks, then…and witches…”

  “ No one really understands that part,” Red interrupted. “ You know that. Even the greatest ar
cane scholars understand just enough about magic to make it work.” She smiled. “Until I came along, none of us even knew where it came from.”

  Cross was on his knees. He struggled to keep himself from falling onto the midnight stone. He could barely breathe. Pain flared at the base of his spine and wrapped up his back until it reached the crest of his skull.

  “ This is it, isn’t it? Magic is our only hope…without magic…Christ, it’s the only thing that’s kept us alive…”

  He could almost hear the Old One smile. Cross fought off unconsciousness even as it swept over his eyes like a welcome warmth. He saw faces in the obelisk, distorted and half melted, smeared against the inner walls of the translucent stone.

  It is my promised gift to the Ebon Cities, the Old One said. I created it, but as you surely saw, I didn’t know much about it, nor did I know how to destroy it. I am the only one left of that doomed expedition, and by the time I made the sacrifice the rest of the ritual had already been prepared. The act of killing was all that remained. The secrets of the prison were lost, consumed with the souls of my squad.

  But Red found those secrets, Cross thought. Somehow, in her tenure as Thornn’s leader and while acting as the voice of the White Mother, Margrave Azazeth had uncovered some vital details about the obelisk, probably buried away in some obscure text or noted in an elliptical reference in a forgotten calculation book. Knight was no mage, and no scholar. He didn’t know the first thing about how to destroy the stone. Everyone else in the expedition had died, and only Knight had been brought back to undeath. He probably hadn’t known where to look for the information, and, more importantly, he hadn’t needed it. By the time he wanted to know how to destroy the obelisk it was too late for him to find it… until Margrave Azazeth came along and handed him the secrets he’d been looking for.

  No one knew, Cross realized. People assumed that humankind’s mastery of magic had been just another byproduct of The Black, another shift in reality to accompany all of the ancient cities and dread races. No one knows about the obelisk, or the glade. All this time, the key to our survival, the source of what’s kept us in the war for so long, has been held in this bastard’s hands, and we never even knew it.

  Cross felt sure that if Knight had known how to destroy the obelisk before Red had come along, he’d have already done so.

  “ So…” Cross was on the brink of passing out. He felt a hand on his shoulder, soft and warm. “Why…why am I…?”

  “ Alive?” Red frowned. “Well, just as the obelisk needed a sacrifice to become, it requires a sacrifice to be undone.” Cross looked up at her. It took nearly all of his strength. “We had a candidate picked out,” Red said playfully. “Things have changed, however.”

  Snow stood over him. Her once beautiful face was bloodied and bruised. Deep cuts lined her pale features. Her eyes looked hollow and sunken, and innumerable wounds had been inflicted on her forearms and her chest. She bore ritual scarifications, fetishes, and brandings. She’d been tortured and marked.

  “ I’ve changed,” Snow smiled. “Red was going to make me the sacrifice, but now it’s going to be you, Eric: a warlock cut off from his own magic. You’re just what we need. That’s why Red stole your spirit. You’d already lost her once on your own…back in the crypt…”

  “ Snow…” he stammered.

  “ So your spirit was still vulnerable,” Snow went on. “It was easy for Red to take her from you again.” Snow leaned close. “Margrave has secrets, Eric,” she whispered. “She knows how to do things that you and I will never be able to do. And now…” Snow stood up and smiled at Red, a cold and distant smile. “She’s made you into the perfect sacrifice.”

  Snow had become something different. It was as if someone had stolen her skin and now wore it.

  “ Snow,” Cross stammered. “Listen to yourself…”

  She glared at him. There was nothing but darkness behind her familiar eyes. Cross felt his heart freeze.

  They broke her, he realized with horror. She’s one of them, and she’s not coming back.

  Cross could barely hold on. Tears welled up in his eyes. Images of Snow, young and bright and warm and alive with love, all flashed through his mind. His baby sister was gone.

  “ I came here for you, Snow,” he sobbed. “Please…”

  It was the last he thing he managed to say before everything went black.

  Cross drifts over cyan seas. He passes through clouds of steam and drifts on crystal winds.

  He stands in the glade, and he senses her on the other side of an iron fog. She screams soundlessly. He reaches for her, desperate, but she is pulled into the sky by unseen hands, straight towards the melting silver sun.

  I’m sorry, he says, but she can’t hear him. She is well and truly gone, and Cross collapses in the waters, left alone to bear the weight of his failure. It’s over.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SACRIFICE

  Cross woke to the metal screams of a train.

  It was a Necronaught, an undead locomotive, a massive and ugly beast of a machine. It soared down an ethereal track, a rail that existed in a space between the worlds of the living and the dead. The train appeared to float above the ground and the dead rivers, as if it traveled through the air. It hovered just out of synch with everything else.

  The vehicle was a horror to behold, a monstrosity of black iron. The behemoth was all spikes and bones and razor wire, gun turrets and massive wheels greased with human remains, growling engines that sounded of screams and smoke that colored the sky with its hexed black fumes. The train was twenty cars long, and each car was twenty feet tall and littered with impaled bodies. The Necronaught’s whistle cut through the air like a draconic war cry.

  Cross stood waiting, a prisoner. His hands were bound in front of him with metal shackles that cut deep into the wrists of his gauntleted hands. He was weary and sick, terrified, resigned and withdrawn.

  A pair of black clad undead attended him. Their claws were the size of knives and their lean ebon bodies were encased in leather and steel armor that left their elongated heads exposed. They had wide fanged mouths and oversized white eyes.

  War wights.

  They waited with Cross on the train platform. More war wights stood near the obelisk, which floated just inches above the ground, lifted by Red’s magic so that it could easily be pushed.

  The Old One, Red and Snow were all there. The station was dilapidated and ancient. The platform was made of rotted wood that had been pitted by acid stains and termite attacks, and the main building listed sharply to one side, ready to collapse.

  Cross breathed slowly. He had to shut out the pain of losing Snow, the pain of his own futility. He tried to calm himself.

  I was wrong. This isn’t over yet.

  Cold red dust blew across the ground. They were no longer on the island, Cross realized, but south of the necropolis, at what appeared to be the remains of a shattered frontier town overtaken with rust. The train tracks before them were ages old and had fallen to pieces, and the whole area had been consumed by weeds and red-white ash. The sky was the color of undercooked meat.

  The train drew closer. It churned black smoke into the sky. Dead steam blasted from the engine. Cross watched as the foreword crenellation pushed dust and bone out of its path, stirring up a maelstrom of debris. The massive wheels cut like saw blades through the ground. The Necronaught ignored the physical tracks there at the station, and created its own. The air turned heavy as the train groaned to a halt in front of the platform. The world bubbled and swelled, and Cross was pushed back by an unseen telekinetic force.

  The Necronaught was even more hideous when viewed up close. Its black iron skin leaked crimson fluids that steamed and stained the ground. The windows had been charred black by some forgotten explosion. Deep white markings, like war paint, had been cast on the exterior of the tank-like shell of the main car. War wights manned gun turrets at the fore and aft of the second and third cars: cylinder guns, nail launchers, ice c
annons. The smell of acid stains and burning tar hung so thick in the air Cross nearly choked on it. The train came to a halt with a grinding snap. A final banshee scream wailed from within the unearthly engine.

  The war wights loaded the obelisk onto the train, carefully guiding it onto a large car. Cross was forcefully seized by his bound arms and hauled towards another car that was closer to the engine. Great iron doors slid open with a bone-jangling groan. The interior of the car was outfitted with a wrought iron cage and a collection of twisted blades, razor chairs, chain straps and needle harnesses, all of which had been hung with disturbing precision on a weapons rack on the far wall. Cross was taken inside — he offered little resistance — where another pair of war wights waited, commanded by a thin lich with short-cropped, almost monkish hair. The lich wore fine silver and grey clothing.

  “ Happy day,” the lich grinned. “I’m Jebedar Krannor. Your host.”

  “ Great to be here,” Cross smiled. “You look pretty good for a lich.”

  “ I take care of myself,” Krannor laughed. Cross thought it sounded almost like a giggle.

  “ A foppish lich? That’s new.”

  Krannor smiled, and then dealt Cross a backhanded blow that sliced open his face. Blood ran out of the painful cluster of sharp cuts, and Cross recoiled at the rotten smell of the lich’s hand. The war wight’s bone-chilling grip tightened on Cross’ arms and forced him into the cage. The door closed behind him with a redolent slam.

  The train surged to life, and the walls shuddered. Cross heard dismal screams through the ducts in the train. He looked around. The screams issued from massive pipes that ran along the ceiling of the car, leading, it seemed, to the adjacent cars on either side.

  Access tubes, Cross guessed, placed so incorporeal undead could pass through the otherwise magically shielded outer walls of the cars, which looked nigh impenetrable.

  The massive iron door started to close. Cross was thankful for the modicum of light provided by electric lamps in the corners of the grim car. He didn’t want to be stuck in there in absolute darkness.