Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6)

by Montano, Steven

  “So you can track her?” Danica said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “For a time.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Moving east. Deeper into those broken hills.” His eyes followed the railway. “But you’re heading south.”

  Danica ground her teeth in frustration. It was just another bad position she found herself in.

  We should have dumped them and moved on when we had the chance, she thought.

  “Creasy, forget about them,” she said. “They’re not worth it.”

  Creasy looked at the barren lands to the east. The region looked like it had been shaken apart and left in disarray, fields of broken sharp stones and bone dry hills the color of copper and rust. Brambles and thorn beds lay nestled between the rocks, which darkened closer to the clusters of dead forest and taller peaks.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “Those cloaked men wanted them for a reason. Whatever it is, I have to stop them.”

  “Then let me come with you,” Danica said. She didn’t want him to go. Something in her gut told her it was a terrible idea, that someone else she knew was about to go to his death and there was nothing she could do about it. They may not have been close friends, but they’d been through a lot together, and she knew he was a good and decent man. There weren’t many of those left.

  “Someone has to get Ronan to safety,” he said. “I’m sorry you have to do it alone. But this is something I have to do.”

  He started walking towards the hills. He already had his gear strapped to his back; the butt of the shotgun showed over his shoulder, and the hilt of his machete hung down near his hand.

  “Creasy…” she said.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he said without turning back.

  She watched him walk away. When it became clear he wasn’t going to stop she cursed under her breath and turned around. Ronan lay on the sled a dozen yards away, safely wrapped up. She’d have to pull him herself, and this time she’d have little choice but to use her spirit to help her.

  Shit, she thought.

  Danica waited until Creasy was well into the broken hills before she took hold of the cord attached to Ronan’s sled and started dragging him south.

  TWELVE

  DISTANCE

  Creasy pushed his way through the black hills. The terrain was rough and uneven, and he found himself moving up oddly angled slopes of slate and stone that looked like someone had shattered a mountain and dumped its remains. Dark mud beaches surrounded thick pools of sediment-enriched liquid; none of the water looked suitable for drinking, which was unfortunate, since the heat soon had him parched, but he drank only scant amounts from his canteen. He wasn’t sure how long he was going to be out there.

  The morning air was hot and dry. The terrain shifted from veldt to scrub to broken pyrite dust. He traveled past deep chasms, coiled valleys, peaks and arêtes. The earth had the feel of something fused, as if from a recent eruption. He saw dark clouds as he drew closer to the storm.

  His spirit had latched onto Jade’s location, but even though it had only been a couple of hours since the attack it would take him almost a day to reach her, assuming she remained stationary. Their attackers hadn’t traveled on foot, but had somehow flown on the unnatural storm. Those storm riders seemed to live in the shadows, and he guessed they were thralls of the ghosts they’d encountered in the dead forest.

  He hadn’t told Danica about the task set before him, about how his spirit had told him it would fall to him to defeat this evil. Of how he could trust no one. Now he understood why.

  They get inside you. They infect you somehow, transform you into something you’re not.

  He crossed over breadths of bone refuse. The land grew darker under the shadows of black clouds, and the earth leaked grey and bitter-smelling smoke. The terrain grew more and more difficult to cross, a thickly polluted landscape of blistered rock and drifts of wreckage. Pieces of ancient ships and buildings littered the ground, most looking to be hundreds of years old. He saw the husks of engines and long-drained fuel canisters, shards of rail and warped wood.

  Even as he approached the storm the air remained silent and hot. Sweat poured down his skin. He removed his armor coat and hooked it to his military pack; doing so left him vulnerable, but he couldn’t stand the extra layer of heat any longer. His spirit trailed and cooled him when she could, but he tried to keep her efforts minimal. He’d need her at full strength when they reached their destination.

  Do you really think you can do this? he asked himself. One old warlock against all of those forces? Even when you had help you couldn’t stop them from taking what they wanted.

  It will fall to you. To us.

  He had no choice but to believe, no way to go but forward. Danica would take Ronan to safety, and Creasy would do what had to be done to put an end to this threat. He trusted his spirit, and always had. She wouldn’t lead him astray.

  He came upon corpses. Bone-dry and twisted, they might once have been human, but it was hard to tell. Husks of flayed skin drained of all fluid, sacks covered by gangly hair and ragged clothing torn apart by the landscape. They’d crinkled in the heat, and didn’t seem real. Creasy had seen more than his share of dead bodies, but the manner in which these had been left, so desiccated they might have been plastic dolls, left him unnerved. He searched them for anything of value, found nothing, steeled himself and moved on.

  He finally escaped the twisted crags and blade hills and made it back to level ground and open country. Sun-dried peaks waited in the distance beyond a heat-haze that looked like something burning.

  The region hadn’t always been desert, he realized. Creasy passed sagebrush where copses of trees had once stood, scraps of burned farmland, ridges of turned earth that at some point had been olive or fig orchards. He saw craters filled with carbon and bone and deformed foundations of structures, farmhouses or wilderness shacks. Something had decimated the area and turned what had once been fertile to blackened ruins. The ground was as dark as the sky.

  Everything felt alien, even stranger and more unnatural here than back at the crash site. The deeper he went into the blasted realm the more his nerves were frayed. He was convinced there were eyes on him, some presence waiting off in the distance.

  Creasy was getting close. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was nearing some threshold, some boundary or border he wasn’t meant to cross.

  He was pulled forward by the sense of Jade’s spirit. She was east, close to the peaks, beyond those fields of ruin. He’d been walking for hours, and while he took short breaks to drink water and eat jerky or MREs he never stayed still for very long. He was worried what would happen to him if he stopped moving.

  Eventually he came upon recent tracks: cold claws and heavy bodies, some sort of cats or lions. A council of predators who’d recently moved through the area, traveling the same direction as he.

  Creasy approached a field of stakes. Bones hung from the wood, tethered there by razorwire and rope. Skeletons hung upside-down, their grinning skulls burned black. The smoking ruins of a city stood in the distance, shattered dark walls and leaning towers. It was a smudge on the landscape, a dark splotch beneath the red-black sky.

  Storm clouds curled overhead. The air took on a tension, as if ready to burst. He had memories of rainfall, so distant and vague it was like he’d dreamed it. He’d only been a boy when The Black had come; the fact that he even remembered what rain felt like was something of a miracle.

  Creasy waited. He knelt down and gave a silent prayer for all the dead he’d passed. He tried to take in the reality of where he was, tried to comprehend it all. There was something ancient about this place, something he couldn’t grasp. Had all of this, these verdant fields and remains of once-fortuitous farmland, not only been something else but somewhere else? Had all this been ruined before The Black, or after?

  What happened here?

  He had to get to Jade, had to stop whatever the storm riders planned to do. That they’d com
e specifically seeking Laros and the witch told him how important it was for him to stop them.

  Creasy looked at the city, so cold and silent. In order to reach it he’d have to pass through fields of corpse-addled stakes. His blood ran cold.

  Stay the path.

  He said another prayer, then continued on.

  The air seemed to grow darker as he drew close. He wound his way through the labyrinth of skeleton-weighted poles. Day-burning stars floated overhead, more than he’d ever seen at one time. The wind was still, and the air was so quiet he could hear crackling inside the city. Something still burned.

  He decided against an open approach, and skirted the open road which led to the darkened gates. The stone walls had cracked at the foundation and were slowly crumbling from the ground up, like fractured glass. He was dimly aware of his fear, sucking his insides tight like hunger.

  Quietly he wrapped his spirit around his body, and the pressure of her presence on his skin calmed him. He wore her like a shield, but when he saw the tracks on the ground he stopped and donned his armor coat. There were more claws in the earth, the marks of those cats, though now he wasn’t so sure they were cats at all.

  He was tempted to draw a weapon before he stepped into the city, but he doubted it would make any difference.

  The ground before the broken gates was riddled with signs of passage, none of them recent. He saw camel prints and foot falls, discarded coins and impressions made by wagon wheels. Thin trails of smoke curled off the ground and made the air thick.

  Creasy wished he wasn’t so tired. A week of hard travel had taken its toll. He felt his thoughts and reactions moving a beat too slow. He breathed his spirit in, let her cool his lungs and splash across his skin like freezing water. In spite of the heat the air smelled cold, a glacial frost, sediment and ice bound together with potential, the charge before a storm.

  Timber redoubts lined the interior roads, simple wooden structures that had been gutted and hollowed. The city’s spires and towers had been stunted by fire and wreckage and now were little more than stumps of metal and stone. No lights shone through the windows. The streets were narrow and empty. The stars had gathered into constellations he swore were shaped like wolves.

  Not a good omen, he decided.

  Creasy had no desire to step into any of the buildings if he could avoid it, so he sent his spirit out to seek Jade’s, and he sensed the witch still at her same location, somewhere on the other side of the city. Not far now.

  Nothing moved. The absence of life could be felt in the stillness of the air. Creasy quietly walked down the street. He heard something faint in the wind: a voice. It belonged to a woman, he was certain, but it was difficult for him to pinpoint her location. He drew his shotgun and moved down the road to find the source.

  The wind whipped dark dust across the road. He imagined presences just out of sight. Darkness crept up the nape of his neck as he walked down the empty streets.

  Creasy heard the sound again, closer than before, and followed it to a nearby tower with a rounded base like a dome of molten glass. Red sunlight shone off windows scorched black from within, making it impossible for him to look inside. Silver markings had been etched over the door, and he recognized the moons and waves, the ravens and blade-hawks. An image of an eye had been painted over the threshold, faded from time and whatever it was that had ruined the city. He stepped into the building, not stopping to consider what a terrible idea it was.

  The place belonged to a soothsayer, likely a witch. Mages were conscripted into military service at a very young age in the Southern Claw, but in other places witches and warlocks carved out useful existences for themselves, even if the people where they lived were superstitious towards the arcane. Often they found work as healers or doctors, masking their abilities as natural talents, if necessary, while in other places they could be advisers, secretly using their spirits to obtain important information for their patrons. Sometimes, like the proprietor of this shop, they chose to make their divination talents available for a price, not worrying if their customers believed their abilities were genuine or not.

  The floor of the shop was covered with iron shavings, and the air inside was thick with shadows. Flecks of ebon crystal hung in the air like iced tears, and the walls were lined with low shelves covered with debris and dust. Insects scuttled away from the light as Creasy pushed open the door and entered the main room, his shotgun held before him.

  The pulse in his neck started beating with the quiet force of his heart. Glass cracked and broke beneath his boots, and he winced at the contact, remembering that it had been some time since he’d replaced his footwear. Spiders scurried through the dust.

  A lone table had been upturned near the middle of the room. Glass trinkets had shattered on the floor, bits of broken unicorn and sand spider. The air was still. Occult shapes danced on the walls, shadows cast not by a light source but a latent hex set by whoever had once called the place home.

  His spirit lit the area so he could look around. There were splashes of long-dried blood on the floor, hidden among the broken glass and shredded raiment.

  Someone had died there, but her spirit was long gone. All of the spirits from that phantom city were gone, vanished without a trace.

  Cold terror grew in Creasy’s gut. He knew he should leave, but something told him it was important he find out what had happened there.

  This place wasn’t just randomly sacked. It was deliberately destroyed, its inhabitants wiped out, and the city itself has been…hidden.

  He was convinced it had once been somewhere else. The strangeness in the air, the utterly displaced quality his spirit noted…that entire city had been relocated. It was a preposterous notion, but no more preposterous than the Skyhawk being sucked halfway across the world, or of shadowy marauders from another dimension launching an invasion.

  Nothing is impossible anymore, he thought. When he was young, that would have been a hopeful notion. Now it was just terrifying.

  He knelt down and ran his fingers through the drifts of dust, which were made up of bone meal and ground silver, primitive components in a fairly outdated mode of divination, something a formally trained mage might not have even picked up on. Whoever owned the shop had been trying to determine what had happened to the city.

  Creasy pushed the table back with the shotgun and sifted through the broken fragments of glass, finding bits of antler and wood. Some of the dust was coarser and took on a darker hue, like it had been burned, and when he lifted it to his nostrils he smelled pitch. He crouched low and looked through the debris, setting down his shotgun and putting a hand on the surface of the overturned table for balance. His fingers ran across something carved into the oak, too intricate and patterned to be random. He had his spirit pulse over his fingers, setting them alight with a warm glow so he could see the symbols more clearly.

  His spirit burned cold against his skin while he worked. She didn’t like being in the presence of so much ruined magic, but he tried his best to calm her.

  “You’re the one who sent me here,” he said quietly. Even his whispers carried loud in the dead air. “So you just hold on…”

  He traced the patterns, arcane lines doubled and redoubled, twisted varicose veins burned into the grains of wood. He felt ellipses and slashes, marks designating moons and suns, thaumaturgic geometries and arcane algorithms, formulas all mages could intrinsically decipher even if they’d never been properly schooled. There were chains of shadow and razor flames, crawling seas and packs of wolves, half-closed serpent eyes.

  “What the hell…?”

  In her effort to uncover what had happened to the city – which the formulas and theories scribed in the wood confirmed had been forcefully relocated from elsewhere in Nezzek’duul and brought to this isolated place in the wastelands, people and all – the soothsayer whose shop this was had inadvertently stumbled upon some darker, larger truth. Not just the means by which the city was moved, but a glimpse into the mad purpose
behind it.

  If only I can decipher it.

  He pictured the witch and her spirit moving frantically to try and get all of the information down as it flowed through her, a myriad of flashing images and painful visions. Some soothsayers could only attain such sight in their sleep, but for others it came when and however it wanted. That seemed to be the case here. The information scribed on the table (Creasy found the dagger she’d used buried in the dust drifts on the floor, with faint traces of blood caked to the blade) was chaotic and incomplete. Many of the symbols meant nothing to him.

  A whisper sliced through the air, originating from behind the door at the back of the shop, which he hadn’t even seen until that very moment. The shadows grew heavy, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. In spite of the dull heat his skin went clammy and cold.

  He picked up the shotgun, stood and aimed it at the door. He glanced back and saw that the sky had gone red. The wind was slow but steady, kicking up bands of crimson dust and broken twigs.

  Creasy slowly stepped closer to the door, cracking more glass under his boots. He pushed his spirit ahead to investigate the room on the other side, only to find it protected by some sort of anti-divination aura. It only made sense for a witch whose specialty was uncovering information to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to do the same to her, especially since she’d know how to slip past the safeguards.

  He moved up to the door, and the whispers slithered around him like oil. Instead of directing his spirit to probe what was on the other side he used her to examine the whispers themselves, and he found to his relief that he was alone after all, that the voice was a triggered mechanism, another hex set to scare off intruders who’d come to the witch’s shop with plans to rob her.