Reaver steps out of the cave. He senses the dull peat of the Scarecrow’s footsteps, the creak of leather armor. They are neither subtle nor quiet creatures, and ultimately the lack of light will end up being a bigger benefit to him than it is to them.
Night frost clings to the rocks and stunted trees. Reaver crouches low in the shade of a twisted pine as wind trills down the hillside, keeping the nearest shadow in sight as it brushes through mounds of dried leaves. Seconds pass as he waits, blade held ready.
A shot rings out, so loud and piercing it’s like the world has cracked. A shell strikes the hill not a meter from the edge of the cave, sending up a hail of loose leaves and pebbles. Dust and stones sweep down the slope. Reaver moves to intercept the shooter when something takes hold of him from behind.
Not just Scarecrows. They have a revenant of their own.
By the time he turns the once-female creature is already upon him. Her chained knives rip chunks of dead flesh and metal from Reaver’s back.
He senses the nearest Scarecrow level its rifle and take aim. He has only seconds to act.
Reaver moves, and the Scarecrow’s shot goes wide and splinters a dead tree into pieces. He ducks beneath the revenant’s knives and rams his blade into her steel breastplate, cracking through the metal and using the heel of his hand to jam the edge home and split her black and oozing heart.
She doesn’t go down – the blade is scant inches too short to punch all of the way through, and another shot from the Scarecrow comes much closer, smashing stone near Reaver’s feet and forcing him to leap to the side. Leaves and dead twigs fall around them in the dark. He raises his weapon just in time to deflect the edged chains.
Reaver dances back, and the revenant leaps at him. He listens for the click, waits for the blast.
He moves at the last possible moment, brings his blade sideways and cuts into the revenant’s face, throwing her off course so she flies into the path of the 20mm shell jut as the Scarecrow fires. Her torso is torn into chunks of rotted meat.
He turns, gathers his feet beneath him and rolls forward. Concussive blasts tear into the hill. The second Scarecrow moves to flank him: they have him in a V-shaped field of fire, so both have open shots without any chance of hitting one another.
Reaver’s instincts drive him. Whoever he’d been in life, whatever he’d been, that creature had been a capable warrior, and those natural skills have been enhanced and improved by hard-wired memories and the processed skill sets of other fallen soldiers. He doesn’t need to think. He knows no fear. This is his purpose.
He launches his body forward and sends the curved blade through the air as another 20mm shell passes close. Undead muscles tense as he lands face-first on the downward slope, knowing even before the blade is out of his hand that his aim is true. Eldritch steel rams into the Scarecrow’s face, splitting its misshapen skull and sending it to its knees as its body convulses, cut off from the necrotic cortex which feeds it information.
The blasts from the bottom of the hill strike the ground behind him. Reaver rises and runs, races behind gnarled trees and low rocks as they explode beneath the barrage. The second Scarecrow advances, and as its cannon runs dry it draws a wickedly serrated sword as tall as a man, black iron burning with runes and hex.
Reaver reaches the first Scarecrow’s body, grabs its massive rifle and fires. The force of the blast throws him onto his back as the shot rips the other Scarecrow’s head from its body in a greasy blast. Putrid remains spread across the hillside.
He stands, and waits. The black night is again silent, but he isn’t about to take chances. Three New Koth undead wouldn’t be wandering the area alone, especially so far from their own territory. He races back up the hill, keeping the 20mm rifle ready as he watches the area for more signs of danger.
The woman lowers her head when he re-enters the cave. She’s clearly been hoping he wouldn’t be the one to come back.
Reaver isn’t sure why, but the notion that she would want him dead gives him pause. Memories lie buried there, a notion of sorrow, but he can’t afford to let it surface, so without further delay he throws the woman’s bound body over his shoulder. She growls and screams as loud as she can beneath the gag, but after a few minutes of him holding her securely the fight goes out of her. Eventually he unties and ungags her, and they carry on their way as the sun starts to rise over the jagged line of the western hills.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
Reaver doesn’t look at her. They sit at the edge of a cool wall of mist. Some aboriginal marauders once made their way through the area, for he and the girl had passed crude territorial markers when they’d descended into the valley.
“I don’t have a name,” he says.
He’d killed a fox for the woman to eat. He’d expected her to balk, but he should have known Fanian warriors were of a sturdy stock, with many of their numbers culled from the ranks of those they’d conquered, including the various wolf hunting tribes along the eastern plains. She’d asked for a knife, and once he gave her one she skinned, spit and roasted the game over a small fire she built from scratch, and after the meat had cooked the woman was soon greedily licking the fat and juices off of her fingers after she’d scarfed the healthy portions down. Bits of red juice are gathered on her cheeks, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“That sucks,” she says. “Mine’s Muse.”
“Muse?”
“Yeah,” she says with a bit of an edge to her voice. “Muse.”
“I don’t think that sounds like a name,” Reaver says.
“Oh, so you can think now?” she says after a moment. “I thought everything that wasn’t a vampire just stumbled around and moaned for brains to eat, or some shit like that.”
“It seems I’m not the one with trouble thinking,” Reaver says, and he keeps his eyes on the night. Dew has formed and frozen to frost along the brown edge of the grass, and paths lead into the dead trees like tunnels. Things gather on the horizon where salt water smokes into gas. They’re close enough to the Rimefang to taste water in the air, and the land is softer, moister, the trees larger, if still dead. Cedars and blood woods almost show signs of life, but their roots are black and draw fluid that isn’t water from the grim soil.
“A smart-ass zombie,” Muse says. “Fuck, I’ve seen everything now.”
“Revenant,” he says quietly. “Not a zombie.”
“What’s the difference?” she asks.
He doesn’t answer, and for a time she’s silent.
“So where the hell are you taking me?” she asks after they’re back on the march. The moon is a sickle of silver just barely visible through the drifts of iron cloud, and the forest canopy is blue and black like a molten bruise. They step across icewood and frozen bog so stiff they couldn’t sink into it if they tried.
“Bloodhollow” he says.
“What’s there?”
Reaver turns and looks into the girl’s eyes. He sees fear in Muse’s gaze, the first true fear since she’d started talking to him earlier that day. They’ve carried on with little rest, but she’s grown bold, assertive. He needs to quash that.
Even though I don’t want to.
“Why are you here?” he asks. He notes the strangeness in his voice. He can almost recall what he used to sound like, even hears it, two speakers, present and past, echoing each other with the same words that sometimes feel like they come from anywhere but inside his head.
“You captured me...”
“Don’t play dumb,” he says coldly. She gulps. “What were you doing on patrol when you destroyed my team?”
“I don’t know what...”
He grabs her throat and squeezes, and her eyes bulge. Her bones feel so slender and brittle in his hand, so easy to crack, but he keeps his iron grip just tight enough to panic her.
“What were you looking for?”
She gasps for air. He slackens his grip and hopes she doesn’t notice, because if she detects weakness in him she’ll dou
btlessly exploit it.
You and me against the world.
The memory of those words comes unbidden. Reaver has to stop himself from reacting, from closing his fist and snapping Muse’s neck. The voice from his past is clear, like the one who first spoke it
the girl the one Muse reminds you of
stands right at his shoulder. More memories come, as if released from a stoppered bottle – making love in a cave, fighting in the arena, robbing Southern Claw caravans, escaping across the desert. He’d never known anything good before he’d met her, and he’s been left hollow without her, a shell, a corpse already, even if his heart had kept on beating.
Reaver backs away and lets the girl go. She falls to the forest floor, heaving for breath. The walls of mist are thick, the night utterly dark and silent around them. They might as well be the last two creatures left in the world.
Just you and me against the world.
He stands there, trying to compose himself. Reaver isn’t meant to lose control, and never has before. Being severed from the vampire collective is doing horrible things to him. The memories twist his charred and blackened mind and leave him confused. He isn’t sure if he wants to punch Muse in the chest and crush her heart or just hold her tight in his arms, but he knows neither is right, neither is what needs to be done.
So he stands there, and watches as she gets back on her feet.
“Same as you,” she coughs. “You undead piece of shit. We’re looking for the entrance to Bloodhollow. We can take control of the war, maybe even win it.”
She stares at him, defiant. He can practically feel her hatred.
She so reminds him of someone he’d once loved it’s hard not to reach out. Reaver knows that if she were somehow the same person from his old life he’d turn back then and there, leave the mission and defect from the Ebon Kingdoms. It’s an impossible notion – he isn’t even an individual anymore, just a cog in a machine, an automaton hard-wired into a vast network of murderous thoughts and carnivore ambition. The very urge to leave that collective should be impossible.
And yet it’s happening. How?
He looks at her. Muse watches him, and after a moment her rage and fear are replaced by puzzlement. Reaver wants to ask for her help, wants to tell her what power she has over him, but he doesn’t know how.
He never gets the chance. A blast of rancid wind sweeps down around them. Floodlights break through the curtain of night and tear away the fog, and suddenly the world is a cavalcade of noise and light. Two vampire gunships – Marauder Class, attack vessels large enough to house sizable contingents of troops – hover overhead. Barbed chains dangle down, their hooks snarling in the dead trees. Rotary bone cannons and flame launchers cover the underbellies of the dreadnaughts. The blasting turbines issue the smell of death.
Muse screams, and Reaver feels something inside him, some spark of hope as it sputters and dies.
The Ebon Kingdoms have found him.
EIGHTEEN
BORDERS
There were fires in the night. Gold, cold red and jade, globes of crackling light that cast long shadows across the floor of the underground city. Dust motes froze in the air. Corridors were lit from within by ghastly green glows, dancing lights like will-o-wisps.
Cross took in the breadth of the ruins. The subterranean complex stretched impossibly deep into the underworld, columns of leaning stone, cracked granite and shaved limestone parapets. The domed ceilings bore jags of sharp rock aimed downward like teeth. It was an irregular and sprawling complex, vast and broken, an abandoned and forlorn necropolis. The cavern ceiling was at least a mile high, filled with crevices and inverted canyons and layered with a sea of fog. Massive chains dangled from the squat structures, their rusted links covered with bits of hair, cloth and bone.
Smoke oozed from grates in the ground, broken grills and shattered manholes. Oil eddied from pores in the buildings and leaked onto the streets. A constant odor of death hung petrified in the air, old waste and rot and something cold and rancid like the breath of a dying man. Beyond the glare of fires and dancing lights were miles of unending darkness, as if the city drifted through outer space.
In spite of the prevalent stench of death the place was full with signs of life. These people, these aboriginal spell casters and wastelands warriors, had carved an existence for themselves in those ancient ruins. Children peeked out from old shop windows or ran across the street while Cross was led down the wide avenue with his hands tied behind his back. Just beneath the tang of decay he smelled roasted meat, wine and tobacco. Crude paintings covered ruined blast doors, and concertina wire had been twisted to form fences holding in chickens and mules. He heard voices and hammering, laughter and arguments.
Up above in the sea of fog Cross saw crude dirigibles, Gol designed vessels retrofitted for subterranean combat. Their turbines were smaller, their beds wide to compensate for the fact that they didn’t need to fly as high but could hold extra weight. Various weapons were mounted along the edges of the short decks – an old Browning machine gun, a flamethrower, even what appeared to be a harpoon launcher – and the pilots and gunners kept their eyes alert and fingers near the triggers as they roamed the underground sky in search of potential intruders.
There was no question the people living there were desperate, and had fallen on the hardest of times. Most everyone Cross saw was dirty and unkempt, dressed in mismatched garb and covered in dirt and grease. The citizens of the hidden redoubt were as brown and dingy as the city itself, and like the complex they seemed to be bonded with the shadows, made slippery to the eyes by their suffusion in darkness. They watched him warily, but he doubted he was the most fearsome thing they’d seen.
They led him down wide lanes cracked by some long passed calamity. Chunks of stone lay strewn along the sides of the roads, and many of the curved and irregular buildings seemed to be on the verge of collapse.
Cross walked half-alive. His throat burned from the caustic subteranean atmosphere – he imagined most of the people living there likely had some sort of lung disease or emphysema, but that was preferable to living somewhere on the surface where they’d be found and wiped out by the vampires – and his eyes were gummy from the constant layers of soot that seemed to drift through the air. He fumbled on in dragged-out time, clumsy and stumbling.
The warlock who led the party that had captured him was a tall, lean man with thin blonde hair and an angular face. He looked familiar, somehow, but Cross couldn’t quite place him. Like the other members of his party he wore no uniform or badge – indeed, what had allowed them to take the Coalition soldiers by surprise was their innocuous appearance, since they’d seemed like just another group of refugees ripe for slaughter. Cross had watched the man use magic to massacre Scarn and his squad, and he saw a cold silver shine behind the warlock’s eyes, the glint of becalmed madness.
The other men bore simple weapons, and quite a few of them were warlocks. Cross sensed their spirits roiling through the air in a chaotic fog, a host of volatile female presences clawing at each other like a pack of wild dogs. He wondered if accidents sometimes happened when the spirits behaved too violently towards one another, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they’d lost more than a few of their own due to such spontaneous internal conflicts.
They led him towards the heart of the dismal city, a place easily twice as large as Thornn. They crossed a bridge of pipes spanning a river of purple sludge. Mounds of inhuman skulls – mostly Dracaj – were set at the intersections, and that deep in the city the structures were more industrial, bulging silos and pounding metal. Sparks of excessive green light rendered the air ghastly. Stinging wind from the district smothered him with the stench of smelted metal and raw fuel.
They turned a corner, and the band started to scatter off into the side streets. The blonde man turned and regarded him. Something about him bespoke of power and presence, and Cross realized the warlock was intentionally letting his guard down, allowing his captive to truly
see him for the first time, as if he’d before been wearing some sort of heavy shroud. His stony face was covered with stubble, and his thick blonde hair was pushed back in the semblance of a mane.
“Let him go,” the man said. He looked at the warlocks and soldiers and shooed them away once they cut Cross’s bonds. “That’s fine, I’ve got him.”
“What about his sword?” one of the warlocks asked.
“He’ll need it. For now, give it to me.”
Cross heard the whisper of the blade as it was handed off to the leader of the subterranean people. The moment the man touched the weapon a jolt of cold shot up Cross’s spine like he’d been punched by an icy fist. His eyes blanked, and for a moment all of his strength left him.
In that instant he saw things he’d hoped never to see again: cities on fire, vampire warriors marching across fields of bone. He saw a citadel by the sea, brightly lit by an icy moon stained with blood. An ancient face of an ancient man, cold and uncompromising. Darkness leaked from the borders of the sky. Pale dancers on a vampire shore, looking out on gangrenous waters. Ranks of dead soldiers repelled waves of fanged shadows.
He was back in Koth, walking streets paved with human skin as he stared out at a dark and roiling sea. Looking to the island, the place where the Old One had waited to try and turn him into a sacrifice. He saw Snow, burning on the train. Kane, his ruined body lying in the dark. Danica, writhing in pain as her arm was cleaved from her body.
He saw Shiv, staring at him with tears in her eyes. Suffering near the ice, slowly tortured under the baleful gaze of the Maloj.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 25