Warfield’s crew piled out of the M2 and took up position on the ground, backed by a band of lizard-riding Lith warriors she’d apparently recruited out of the wastelands. The half-dozen men fell in outside the truck, and the ten Lith warriors silently dismounted, their bladed bows and curved swords held ready as they moved to defend the blasted gate and prevent anything from following. With Ronan and the two men up front in the truck, that put Warfield’s forces at just under twenty.
Not exactly intimidating.
“Clear,” Torbin said. He was a wiry and bearded gunman with wide eyes and a slight German accent. He, Abraham and two others took point, while Ronan, the thauma-techinician Felix and Warfield herself followed close behind. The driver and co-pilot, both thickly tattooed men Ronan thought looked like convicts out of Black Scar, stayed with the truck and watched the silent yard for signs of trouble. A few Lith spread out and moved into the wreckage.
“Then let’s go,” Warfield said. “You know what to do.”
“Do we?” Ronan said. Warfield didn’t respond.
The graveyard of vehicles was eerily silent. Bits of twisted rebar littered the ground, and in the dead and starless night the towers seemed ready to pounce. The field couldn’t have been 100 yards across, but as they traversed the broken ground and dodged between ruined vehicles it felt like miles. They moved towards the gutted building at the edge of the rubble-strewn wasteland.
Ronan remembered Shadowmere Keep, storming it with the rest of the team in search of Cross. He’d have given anything to be back there, in that time before, or earlier. Before his world had gone to shit.
Who are you kidding? he chided himself. Your world has always been shit.
The black-clad mercenaries converged on the nearest opening to the concrete structure, a gaping hole like a tear. Iron framework jutted from the edges of the hole like metal finger bones. The rails twisted to form a sort of web which led to the darkness inside, a thick and oily sea of shadow.
Warfield walked ahead with confidence, held up a gloved hand and illuminated the way with a roiling ball of oily yellow light. Her cloak swirled around her body and her tall boots clacked loud on the floor. Though no longer a young woman it was easy for Ronan to see why Cross had been infatuated with her for so long. Warfield practically oozed sex appeal even when she wasn’t doing anything, just a natural beauty and self-assurance that made her desirable.
The arcane torch illuminated the interior of the broken structure. Most of the walls and floor between the first and second floors had been ripped away, leaving chunks of shattered stone and bent metal, discarded doors and broken glass, rent pipes and open holes where some massive force had clawed its way through the base. The air was thick with dust motes, and even with Warfield’s torch and the flashlights the darkness felt thick and deep. Ronan sensed motion just out sight, things in the shadows. He had one hand gripped on a Norinco Type 56 and the other hovering near the hilt of his katana.
For some reason I thought a backdoor to Bloodhollow would look a little more glorious.
Ronan stepped careful across loose bricks and concrete that had been overgrown with weeds. Their backs were to the night as they pressed deeper into the gloom. The two mercs accompanying Abraham took point, crouching low as they pushed forward, their shaved pates sweaty in the thaumaturgic light. Ronan saw ruined piles of equipment, steam-pipes and loose wires, the clasps from munitions stands, cracked monitors and sputtering junction boxes.
The stillness in the air was solid, a wall of silence. Lights cast on dust-covered door frames. Debris created a snarled maze in the dark, but Warfield moved steady, directing the others to carry on deeper into the complex. They came to a set of twisted stairs leading up to what was left of the upper floor. Ronan brought up the rear, his gun aimed into the cobwebbed shadows.
“We’re close,” Warfield said from above. “Ronan, get up here.”
He took a breath, wondering if he was being played. He’d never had a thing for Warfield, but in her days peddling black market weapons and tech back in Thornn she had a reputation for being a deft manipulator of men, and he had no reason to believe she’d turned over a new leaf just because she now sold protective hex technology to the White Children. Still, finding Bloodhollow meant finding Shiv, and that was all that mattered.
Hang in there, kid. I’m coming for you.
Ronan moved up the stairs quickly, nearly falling when one of the metal steps threatened to give way beneath his weight. He slung the Norinco over his shoulder and came to a narrow landing about five feet wide and twice that long, which ran ahead of several open doorways and terminated at a pair of hallways leading deeper into the structure. The air was filled with dust and smelled of rot and engine grease. Even with Warfield’s spectral orb hanging high in the ceiling the shadows were unnaturally thick, signaling that some sort of thaumaturgic disturbance occupied the area, low-level energies which likely accounted for the structure’s terrible condition.
“The portal should be up here somewhere,” she said.
“Terrific,” he said.
The Southern Claw had experimented with translocative portals without much success early in the war, but that hadn’t stopped scientists from continuing to try and make them work, searching for the proper combination of hexes and stolen bits of vampire or Gol tech that might allow them to finally reach a breakthrough and create stable gates, ones that would both open and close on command without scrambling people’s physiology in the process. Ronan knew it could be done – he’d stepped through a few of those portals himself, and not always willingly – but no one in the Southern Claw had ever figured it out, and those few gates that did exist were permanent and tied to specific destinations. Supposedly this one would lead to a network of secret caverns beneath Bloodhollow, but there was no guarantee the gate would even function.
Still, it’s better than nothing.
Ronan tried not to think about what seeing Shiv again would do to him. He never should have left, and he wasn’t sure if she’d want him back.
Suck it up, he told himself. Get this done.
Ronan moved ahead to where Felix indicated, the others right behind him.
In his mind’s eye he saw Shiv, alone and afraid. He wanted so bad for her to be ok it pained him.
I can do this one thing right. Just one thing.
The hall resisted the light, and even with Warfield’s magic at his back Ronan couldn’t see more than a few feet down the corridor. The darkness turned claustrophobic and tight and he felt pressure from all sides, like he’d been squeezed into a black box. Ronan breathed deep, checked to make sure the rest of them were still there, and pushed forward, drawn down the hall. He narrowly avoided a gaping hole edged with snapped stone and shards of metal and backed up just in time to prevent Abraham from tumbling into it.
“You owe me,” he snarled, and he didn’t give Abraham a chance to answer before carrying on.
Something waited on the other side of the third door, some hexed potential he could practically taste, a haze of brimstone and power, dark and sweet like old wine, and Ronan felt his brain buzzing just from the proximity of magic. Warfield, Abraham, Torbin, Felix and the two others whose names Ronan hadn’t bothered learning all trained their weapons on the door. He took a breath, and he’d no sooner kicked the door open when something launched out of the darkness.
It was a bulk of skin moving with arachnid gait. Knife-like limbs scissored out at them, and it wasn’t until one of the nameless soldiers was decapitated and Torbin was speared through the gut that Ronan saw it clearly – a bent over humanoid with preposterously long arms edged with curled bone as sharp as razors. His thick legs were knotted with bone and muscle and his grinning face was a mask of sliding flesh, disproportionate and mostly featureless, some mutation that had left this once-Lith turned grotesque. Living in proximity to the unstable magic of the gate had doubtlessly played its part in twisting the scavenger’s body and making him malleable, his bones and skin a shifting a
malgam, a puzzle monstrosity.
Gunfire erupted in the dark, peppering the creature’s torso and bouncing back, captured in its rubbery flesh and ejected to the floor in a shower of metal. Another bone limb snapped out of the dark and cleaved Abraham’s skull in two. Ronan ducked beneath a blow, threw Felix aside and sliced down with his katana, severing the appendage. He moved through a sludge of shadow, his heartbeat slow, his motions exaggerated. Passing into the Deadlands, painful as it was, allowed him to guide his blade true and snap through the few stable tendons left in the creature’s body while ignoring its morphing arcane flesh. Dull screams called out, and the creature raised both arms to hack through Ronan when Warfield’s hostile male spirit shot through its skull with glowing hot blades. Brains and blood spattered on the walls as the caricature marauder collapsed to the ground.
“Jesus...” Felix managed. The thin man’s glasses were stained with someone else’s blood. Only he, Ronan and Warfield were left of those who’d entered the building. “What the...”
“There,” Warfield said. “Look.”
Ronan wiped off his katana, stood and looked into the room; the door still swung back and forth on its hinges. The barracks was small, barely enough for a pair of bunks and a single desk, all of which had somehow been melted into cold slag, collapsed by the presence of the throbbing blue-white portal hanging there on the wall. It was ovular, and in spite of being made of pure light it pulsated with a sickly slurping sound every time the orifice opened and closed, opened and closed, a black heartbeat. The air in the room was leaden and thick, and when Ronan stepped inside he passed into a terrible heat. Sweat instantly glazed his skin, and his eyes grew heavy.
Ronan looked at Felix, who was already adjusting the dials on a small hand-held device roughly the shape and size of a palm pilot. Thaumaturgic nodes sparked in the half-light, and every time he adjusted a switch the module clicked and whirred.
“You should be fine,” he said. “So long as you move fast.”
“You’re coming too, Felix,” Warfield said.
“Do I have to?”
Warfield looked at him sternly.
“The White Children died trying to reach Bloodhollow,” she said. “I could have saved them, but I swore I’d keep Shiv away until she was ready. Now Shiv may be dead, and we may all be fucked.” Warfield’s cold eyes seemed to bore straight into Felix’s chest. After a moment’s hesitation he nodded.
“All right,” he said. “If we have to...”
“For fuck’s sake...” Ronan muttered. “So now what?”
“Just step through,” Warfield said. “We’ll be right behind you.”
“Great.”
This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
Ronan steeled himself. The darkness swirled as he moved towards the gate, gelid energies slipping around him like blasts of ice water.
The moment he stepped into the portal a heart-stopping cold lanced into his heart. Something shrieked in the back of his mind, a pained call that sliced through the darkness. Ronan sensed motion at the edge of his thoughts, coiled shadows twisting against his skin from out of the aether. Shadows latched onto him, threatened to pull him down. He heard teeth in the night, gnashing and grinding, and after another step the ground vanished from under his feet.
Forks of blood lightning over black seas, dark waters and churning liquid. Dim glass cracks as lurching shapes pound against the shell. The sound of snapping bones rings through the endless dark.
There are eyes in that sea, pale cuts like icy wounds. Thousands of them, all from the same face, a collective given multifarious form. A legion of one.
They push against the crystalline borders of reality, a vast creep of shadow and night. Black blood fills the void in a never-ending tide. The howls of the damned echo into the sky.
He falls alone, but isn’t alone. He sees Cross and Danica and Shiv on an island of black ice, a cracked drift melting into the boiling waves. Seams race across the surface.
They reach for each other, but the chunks of glacier drift apart, pulled towards a vortex at the edge of the black sea.
Ronan falls. Cold scalds his flesh as he’s sucked into the waters. He sees his friends pulled under, swallowed into the iron dark ocean. Oily liquid sears down his lungs and burns his eyes, and as frosted hands drag him below the last thing he sees is the pale and burning sun, corroding like paper in a flame.
Ronan woke on his back, which was knotted with pain and pressed against some uneven surface. His head throbbed, and the first thing he smelled as he breathed in was burning leaves. Hand gripped around the hilt of his katana, Ronan rose to his knees.
The chamber he found himself in was wrought of cracked stone; seams in the walls leaked dust and vines which snaked into the eyes and mouths of frescoes of wolf-headed creatures. The air was damp and warm, and every breath echoed.
Warfield and Felix both lay on the ground, unconscious. Black smoke curled away from their bodies. Ronan tried to stand, but weakness shot through his legs, and a wave of nausea rolled deep in his stomach and nearly doubled him over.
Did we make it?
A stone door slid open with an ear-shattering groan. Ronan lifted his blade as silhouettes appeared against a backdrop of jade light. Human voices drifted through. The light blurred his vision, but Ronan’s ears picked up the sounds of people entering the room, and even squinting he was able to make out guns and drawn bows.
A presence approached, powerful and familiar.
“Ronan,” Cross said from the doorway. “Jesus...”
“Cross.” He lowered the sword. “You…you died.”
It was the last thing he said before he passed out.
interlude
the black
Dark seas boil. The barrier cracks, ripples like the forks of a jagged sea. The darkness building, roiling, one world to the next.
Unseen eyes of the horde gaze inward, blood and ice, burrowing white fire and acid cold. Monstrous presences, but truly they are a single presence. One made many, many made one. A bulk of darkness pressed against the dome of worlds, black mirror walls stretching from impossible horizon to impossible horizon.
Whispers cut like razors through substance so thick it could never be air. Agony. Their pain has carried on since the inception of time. Shadow vapors and cold storms.
They wait at the border, tasting the promise of life on the other side, and it is intoxicating. They want it, need it. The very smell of an untainted reality makes their maws slaver with anticipation and need.
They are mass, a churning sea of black skin, a molten aggregate. The flowing tide of onyx souls rises and falls against the boundary. Liquid consciousness, histories of torment. The barrier stretches, pulses, expands as the cracks grow and rain shards of iron dust.
It will never break, not from this side. Their jailors made sure of that.
They writhe in the dark sea, the liquid remains of the dead they’ve made. Trapped in a bubbling void of the lost, an ocean of dead souls.
They writhe, twist, push, no longer possessed of a notion of identity. If they were once individuals they have all since melted into one. A dark singularity.
They are the Maloj. The world destroyers. Reduced to ash, burned and boiled down to a form from which they can never escape, constrained in this dismal prison, this oubliette for the damned.
Centuries pass. The mindless sea shouts and slams against the translucent bonds of its world. There’s no longer any semblance of multiplicity – they have corroded into a single mass, a murderous ooze of power and hate.
It has become The Black.
Its rage and loathing know no bounds. It pushes and howls, desperate to escape, to feed. It knows it was once free, that it was many, the Maloj, destroyers of worlds. Death’s messengers. The solution to a universe that had grown fat and weak.
It will escape. It is only a matter of time. The Black has weakened the barrier as far as it can. There’s nothing left to do now but wait.
Cent
uries pass.
The Black has watched worlds. It has seen empires rise and topple, watches species and realities come and fade. It witnesses the passage of history, the destruction of futures and pasts. It sees the evolution of those who imprisoned it.
It no longer has a identity outside of its collective and monstrous form, but it recalls what it was, the Maloj, wolf-headed arcanists who designed magic and weapons capable of bringing whole civilizations to their knees. Their power was as legendary as their cruelty.
Now, there is just The Black: a sea of worlds, a bubbling black void of darkness. Planets drown in the morass. Its waters span galaxies. It submerges planes of existence and shards of time.
But still it is trapped.
It cannot consume, cannot conquer. Once the Maloj had purpose, and reason behind their madness. They had motive and drive, some call or destiny behind their need to destroy others.
Those reasons are lost, but the drive is not. The Black seeks to envelop all. It was defeated and left in this horrifying state, but that won’t stop it. Losing its identity has only given new life to its intent.
It will escape. And it will have revenge.
Centuries pass.
The Black watches, and waits. It sees societies come and go, hungers for them, needs them. Its desire to devour
We were something, once
is all it has. There is nothing else.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 22