The ship rattled along. Maur cursed to himself about the cold and how difficult it was to keep the ship straight in the dire crosswinds – Danica noted with some amusement that even in self monologue he referred to himself in the third person – and Delgado hummed lightly as he manned the guns.
“You mind if I ask you something, Danica?” Raine said. The dark-haired woman was slight and short, but almost all of her weight was raw muscle; Danica recalled how impressed she’d been when she’d seen the woman in her skivvies back in the locker room, and how amazingly toned she was for someone who when fully clothed looked all of five feet tall and a hundred pounds. Back before she’d hooked up with Cross, Danica knew she would have been all over Raine, and she fantasized about the mercenary sometimes in spite of herself. She hadn’t been with another woman in a long time.
“Go ahead.”
“Do you really think this Bloodhollow place exists?”
“I don’t know,” she said after a moment’s hesitation.
“Need to know basis,” Alvarez said with something of a sneer, though it wasn’t directed at Danica. “You think with something that important we’d have had better luck finding it, eh? I hear they’ve known about it for while, but they’re just getting around to telling us about it now.” By they Alvarez was of course referring to the Gol command, the strange council of Meldoarian rulers who’d opened their city to any human survivors who wanted to keep up the fight against the Ebon Kingdoms, though they’d maintained a low profile about it. Meldoar was a formidable city-state, but if the vampires or Wulf decided they’d had enough of the Gol’s interventions it wouldn’t stand for very long. Yes, the siege would be costly to their attackers, but it was only one city-state, and their enemies to either side had vast resources and relentless drive.
“They have their reasons for sharing what they share,” Danica said. “Just like any military leadership. I don’t begrudge them that.”
“I do,” Alvarez said. “They’re not even soldiers, for fuck’s sake, what do they know about tactics and secret missions?”
“Well, they must know what they’re doing, because their city is still here,” Raine said. Alvarez gave her a look, but she shrugged. “Just sayin’.”
“If you’re unhappy with the Gol, Alvarez...” Danica started.
“Maur is deeply offended by all of this,” Maur said off-handedly, in a tone that clearly indicated he wasn’t offended at all.
“...then I’m sure they’ll be happy to relieve you of your duties,” she finished, giving Maur a look she knew he couldn’t see from the small cockpit but hoped he at least felt. She considered releasing her spirit from the bloodsteel arm – she felt him roil inside the false limb, thaumaturgic pressure like cold steam and curled lightning, growing more and more agitated by the moment – to go and spark Maur’s chair or produce some other irritating but ultimately harmless effect, but she thought better of it.
“No need to go there,” Alvarez said. He forced a smile, but he was clearly irritated. “Like the lady said, I’m ‘Just sayin’.”
“Well,” Danica smiled back. “Don’t say anything. The world will be a better place.”
“Best order you’ve even given,” Delgado said from the gunnery seat above.
Another dreadful blast of wind buckled the vessel. They felt a moment of alarming weightlessness before Maur got the ship back under control.
“Where are the giants?” Alvarez said. “Shit, I lost them!”
“Hang on...” Raine said, focusing on the second lens on the nautascope, an ungainly device propped in the center of the open space behind the cockpit. It was one of the more advanced of its kind, allowing not only schematic readouts and three-dimensional map interfaces but infrared, microwave and arcane triangulation. One would never know how advanced it was just by looking at it – the nautascope looked hundreds of years old and weighed a ton, and without it the ship would have been infinitely more maneuverable. “I’ve got them. Jesus, they’re going fast all of a sudden.”
“Is there anything else in the area?” Danica said.
“Yeah, I’ve got bogeys coming in from the north,” Alvarez said. “Hard to tell what. No tech, some sort of primitive cavalry.”
“Maur sees them!” Maur yelled. “Mages!”
“Shit,” Danica muttered.
They gathered weapons and prepared their landing packs; it would be best to stay airborne, but when facing wild witches and warlocks it was always best to be prepared, because even with the ship’s arcane shielding a well-placed thaumaturgic attack could rupture the engines or breach the hull, and if they weren’t ready to set down at a moment’s notice they could all wind up dead before the battle even started.
Delgado started heating up the guns, while Raine stayed on the nautascope; Alvarez helped Danica pass out parachutes and land-packs, ready-made survival bags with everything one needed for a quick and dirty escapade into the wilderness.
Maur brought the ship in low, and Danica stood behind him and peered out through the forward glass. The sky was dark, a haze of red and black squeezing around a pale and fading sun, and the ground was rough and uneven and riddled with dagger-like hills and knifed peaks. Bolts of golden lighting shot up from below, a blaze of shifting pillars which briefly lit the silhouettes of a dozen humans blasting them with icy knives and scythes of flame.
Danica looked closer, and realized the attackers weren’t human at all, but Dracaj. Undulating scales pulsed in the grim light as fanwings spread from arms rippled with oily muscles and bone spurs. They had wide dark faces lined with rows of reptilian teeth, massive and perfect and squeezed together like bear traps. Their eyes were as black as pools, reflective and uncannily dark, and their clawed hands clutched ceremonial daggers and talismans of skin. The lower halves of their bodies were serpentine, great snaking tails which pulsed smoothly.
Little was known about the Dracaj, especially considering sightings were fairly common, especially along the western shores of Rimefang Loch. The lizard-like humanoids were renowned for their capricious cruelty and their strange magic, not spirit-bound like human sorcery or powered by souls like the mongrel enchantments of the vampires, but raw elemental power. Water, wind and rock shaped to their whims, but their applications seemed limited to inflicting pain, shaping weapons from their natural surroundings and launching hexed assaults.
Danica noted with some horror there were only a small band of the creatures – four, maybe five – and that the rest of their party were even more horrifying. The reptilian soldiers accompanying the Dracaj were small and quick, and they darted about with sharp talons and fanged maws which dripped putrescent slime. Their heads were vaguely avian, with eyes of red glass. Tails lashed as they moved lightning quick, and they easily dodged as Delgado fired at them with the chain guns.
“Maur, take us up!” she shouted. Danica moved to the starboard door and released the hatch. Her mind unlocked the safety catch on her bloodsteel arm, and within moments her spirit slithered across her flesh like a burning gel. His rage filled her, and it took effort on her part not to send him straight out as the hatch opened and icy wind blasted in at her. The dark hills loomed like ebon monuments, and immediately she noted the stench of zombie reptiles and the burning taint of elemental magic. Whorls of blood-red fire spiraled up at the warship, and Maur had to turn the ship hard to port to avoid being immolated. Choking smoke and flaming haze filled the hold, but Danica’s spirit shielded the opening and kept most of it at bay.
“Shit!” Raine shouted. “Weapons are offline!”
“Maur says hold on!”
Danica gripped the steel bar over the door. She sensed the openness of the space outside, felt her center of gravity shift as the ship tilted. Giant shapes moved below, their hammers and claymores crushing undead reptiles and pushing back barrages of ice-wreathed smoke and burning rain. The Dracaj hovered on their serpentine fin-tails, fluttering through the air like waves. Something smashed into the view port and cracked it like a ne
twork of varicose veins.
Maur brought the ship down hard. There was no avoiding it – elemental sorcery burned straight up through the turbines and twisted the metal so the Gol had no chance to shut both power and fuel to the engines before they ruptured and exploded. The upper wings were able to catch enough wind to guide them in safely, but Maur wasn’t able to avoid crashing against the side of the hill and cracking open the hull. Danica’s bloodsteel grip kept her from flying across the hold, but Alvarez wasn’t so lucky, and he pitched forward and smashed face-first into the steel.
Raine and Danica rushed over to him after the ship finally came to a halt. Smoke and steam were everywhere, and they heard monstrous growls outside. Danica felt blood in her eyes and realized she must have hit her head after all, and her meat arm and shoulder were sore from her being battered against the wall. Small fires burst all across the ship, and emergency venting engaged, blasting them with freezing and ionized air. Red lights flashed.
Something was at the door – a wide maw of drooling black teeth as sharp as daggers. Small hands made for gripping rodents latched onto either side of the open hatch.
Raine lifted a Mossberg and blasted the creature’s skull into grey paste. Another followed, and Danica cast a katar into its brainpan, the only way to put a zombie down for good.
“Maur, you alive?!” she shouted.
“Maur is,” the Gol responded. He clambered out of the awkward pilot’s seat, his red cloak stained with oil and grease that must have exploded from the overhead tubing when the ship collided with the hill. His bandolier contained a number of knives and grenades, and Maur grabbed a Mac-10 and a Model 36 revolver from holsters on either side of the pilot’s seat before he jumped down into the main room.
“How’s Alvarez?” Danica asked.
“He’s alive,” Raine said. Bloodstains pasted her short hair against the side of her face, but aside from a cut on her temple she appeared unharmed. “Unconscious, probably a concussion.”
“Delgado?!” Danica shouted, and she looked up at the gunner’s seat. Delgado’s headless corpse sat there – something topside had torn away everything from the neck up and left a jagged and oozing stump, though from below it was difficult to tell if it had been the impact or one of the reptile zombies. “Shit.”
“Incoming!” Raine shouted, and she pumped another shotgun blast out the open doorway. The shot went wide and only landed a small amount of buckshot into the reptile, but he was of minor concern – one of the Dracaj was at the zombie’s back, wide eyes perfectly black, grin dripping blood and amber drool. Totems of power dangled from around its neck, and smoke seeped from its nostrils. Danica smelled dead sealife and brimstone. The stain of the Dracaj’ magic was strong, a wall of sickness that pressed in on them with physical force. She felt the air turn toxic, and tasted black power.
Her spirit sliced forward in a wave of crimson light. She gave him full reign. Boiling light wrapped around the Dracaj, burned through its primitive magic and seared its skin. Its eyes melted and teeth burned away. Something dark exploded inside it, a black presence like a boiling void. The backlash from Danica’s spirit attack filled the inside of the craft with freezing vapor. She heard laughter, a cackling and inhuman mockery of human speech.
She tried to pull her spirit back, and found she couldn’t. Lines of necrotic power raced back towards the source: her bloodsteel arm. Intense pain lanced through her gut, and Danica felt a sick presence in her chest, like an oily beast had crawled under her skin and now intended to force its way out.
Like hell.
Claw and Scar slid from their sheaths almost without her realizing it. The black blades glistened in the bloody light, darker even than the void which threatened to engulf her. The weapon’s edges were so sharp they made the air bleed. The swords came down on her spirit, and for a moment his screams filled her mind.
The Dracaj fell back, its throaty voice filled with pain. The blade had been designed to slay arcane spirits, to sever souls from their source. Whatever the Dracaj had sent at her must have been some part of itself, raw elemental energy tied to its own life essence, for as Claw and Scar sliced through her spirit’s skin to get to the core of the taint that darkness raced back into its reptilian master.
Danica pressed the assault. Her spirit howled in pain, but she ignored him. He fell back into her golem appendage, cowed and hidden, his outer shell shredded by the deadly blades. His agony stained her soul.
I almost killed him.
The blades hewed through the Dracaj’s defenses. They glistened with dark reptilian blood, and even as the draconian wrapped itself in a burning shroud the weapons seared through the cracks in the arcane armor and sliced the creature’s head from its shoulders. It’s growls echoed through the ship as it fell to the rocks outside, and its slithering snake’s body lashed about violently for a moment before it sank to the ground.
Danica stepped up to the doorway, gasping for breath. Though he’d taken refuge in the armored limb she still felt her spirit’s pain and fear. His exhaustion tugged at her soul.
Jesus, what the hell did I do to him? They’d been through this before, back when she’d been Dragon, a brainwashed thrall of the Ebon Cities. She’d nearly destroyed him every time she’d channeled, for she’d used her limb/foci to push him well past his limits. Things had never been the same between them since, and while she’d tried her best to repair their bond in times of stress she sometimes forgot how tenuous their connection really was. That, and these damn swords. Claw and Scar weighed cold and heavy in her grip, shards of black ice that sent chills straight to her heart.
She heard fighting outside. Danica glanced out and saw that the smoking ground was covered with corpses, both giant and Dracaj. Shadows curled along the earth like banks of fog and cloud.
“On me,” she said, and she jumped down, both blades back in their sheaths and her G36C held ready. Gelid air swept against her, and her heart hammered in her chest. The grunts and sounds of fighting echoed all around them. She heard ballistic screams, smelled the crackle of ozone, felt heat from some unseen source.
Something launched out of the darkness, an amoeba of limbs. They fired into it and bullets shredded the unstable body, but the hulking creature ignored their shots and clawed towards them along the ground, its meaty fingers ripping into the stony hillside. Danica called her spirit from his refuge, but he was hesitant, and she knew that to draw him forth she’d have to force him.
If you don’t, you’re dead.
Danica never had to. A Doj stormed out of the fog, one side of his dark face marred by a massive claw wound. The muscular brute growled and swung a maul the size of a tree. The weapon tore through the elemental’s body and splattered earthen remains all over the ground in a rain of black and viscous blood. A Dracaj’s throaty scream sounded from beyond the walls of fog, the elementalist slain as his creation was slaughtered.
The giant stood there for a moment, face hidden behind a cloth mask, his crude leather armor tattered and torn. He turned, hunched, and looked out into the fog. Danica forced her spirit to leave the bonds of the eldritch limb, and though he resented the intrusion he succumbed and she cast him out into the smoke pouring down the hillside. Blades of bloody sunlight dripped through the brume, enough to illuminate the crystalline earth and make the slope sparkle like an upturned gem. Water warm with blood gashed through the cracked stone underfoot.
The rising sun made shadows in the folds of darkness, inhuman shapes, limbed clouds and smoking serpents, bladed tentacles and dying giants.
“Maur, you stay with Alvarez,” Danica said as she checked her weapon. Her spirit hadn’t gone far, and wouldn’t – the soiled presence of elemental spirits hung just out of sight, roaming like wild dogs in the darkness. “Raine, with me.”
Raine reloaded her MP5K and checked the machete tied around her hip. Danica saw a gash down her left side where the dark leather armor had been ripped open.
“Where are we going?” Raine asked.
/> “To help the other Doj.”
“They’re dead,” the giant said, his voice rumbling and thick. “They’ll die fighting, to make sure we escape.”
Danica watched him, her mouth agape. The giant’s eyes were the only thing visible beneath the cloth mask, pure white diamonds in the morning light.
“We can’t just leave them...”
“We can,” the giant said. “And we must. I am meant to show you the way. That burden falls to me. If I fail, they will have died for nothing.” He turned to go, his dark muscles tensing as he took up his maul. “I am now the last of my kind.” Without another word he moved up the hill, staying close to the ship long enough for Danica and Raine to prop Alvarez between them and carry his unconscious body along on their shoulders. Maur fastened a bug-out bag to his back, and they moved into the fog.
Danica could only assume the Doj had some directional sense or indication of where they needed to go, as the deep mists they waded into looked no different from the rest, a wasteland of silver-grey smoke filled with writhing shapes and echoes of slaughter.
They moved as fast as they could, keeping the giant’s great feet in sight. Danica’s skin crawled, and her spirit wrapped around her body with a freezing embrace.
She expected something to jump out at them at any moment. Their boots crunched on uneven stones as they made their way up the hill, past craggy stones which loomed like grim faces. The icy chill of the blood mists soaked them to the bone.
We’re not going to make it, Danica thought, but they kept going, deeper into the fog, on the trail of the dark giant.
SEVENTEEN
SUN
Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)
10 A.S.C. (After Southern Claw)
The truck pulled into the ruins of an old Southern Claw military base, and judging by the level of degradation and collapse Ronan guessed the place had been abandoned for well over a decade. Cold moonlight played off dented and broken guardhouses and torn fencing, and the bones of Bloodhawks and trucks rusted in the dusty field. Long shadows covered the ground on the other side of the shattered fence, and a pair of crumbling towers stood like ancient monuments near the main structure. Blast marks, burn stains and coils of moss plastered the sides of the building like scars, and large chunks of concrete had been torn away. An old sign stood near the main gates, mostly ruined; all that was left was the word “-sun”.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 21