Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6)

by Montano, Steven

  He heard the creak of a rope in the other room. Creasy took a deep breath, coiled his spirit around him, and pulled open the door.

  The body was strung up by the arms and legs to form an X in the narrow chamber. The skin had been peeled from her bones, which themselves had been burned black and broken. Bits of blood-dried hair dangled from her scalp, and her eyes had petrified in the sockets.

  Someone had hurt her, though not in any traditional fashion. Her body seemed to have burst from within, and though it was evident that her flesh had been torn away he saw no blood on the floor, no evidence that a blade had been taken to her. Magic had been used to inflict this damage.

  But it wasn’t torture, he thought.. He’d seen arcane torture. Horrible as this was, it looked to be something different. Creasy circled the body, holding a cloth up over his mouth and nostrils to fight off the cloying stench. He guessed she’d been dead for a couple of weeks, no longer. Her clothing had been ripped away and left as rags on the floor. The lines holding her up had been secured to the rafters.

  Books had been thrown from the shelves of the study. Maps and charts had been torn down, their tattered shreds all that remained on the hooks and nails in the walls.

  Maybe I can figure out what she learned. Or some piece of it.

  Most of the room was in shambles. Whatever had killed her had also decimated the contents of her office, but Creasy didn’t think it looked like they’d actually searched for anything. He didn’t see any signs of a struggle in spite of all the damage done.

  There were no signs of battle outside either, he realized. Everyone in the city was gone, many of their bones strung up in the fields, yet there was no sign of an attack, no blast craters, no buildings flattened by artillery. He’d seen neither bullet holes nor blade marks, no evidence of combat. Just bones.

  He found texts about ancient places, rumored locales supposedly taken during The Black – the Runewarrens, the Bladed Tundra, the Zombie Fens; maps and diagrams of multi-dimensional planes connected by weylines and hex arrays, continents bound by folded space and jagged aerial cities; schematics for translocative tombs, notebooks filled with anti-possession rituals and metallurgy, drawings of shadow wolves.

  Creasy saw a picture of a glaring eye, half-closed and serpentine, staring out from the folds of a shadowy cloak. She’d drawn it many times, the same symbol repeated.

  He went back over it all again, searching for some pattern that connected the texts. The air grew colder. Creasy extended his spirit’s presence to the perimeter of the dark shop in order to keep watch. The sky outside continued to darken, likely from another storm formation moving in. He heard a rumble of thunder, and felt static in the air. A low drone teased at the edge of his mind.

  The treatises on anti-possession were hand-written, several pages of crude notes crammed into as small a space as possible, as if she’d tried to get down as much as she could in a short span of time.

  Just like with the table. The truth she’d seen.

  Each page of text had numerous notes written down the sides, scribbled notations set in a much less stable hand. At first he thought the notes were references to other texts, but as he read more he realized that the writings were nowhere near so coherent.

  Near the end of one of her journals the script was the most frenetic, written with a sense of desperation.

  I am filled with evil.

  They’re inside me.

  I feel them. Twisting. Pushing.

  Their voices call. Their howls. Not vampires.

  Something else.

  Help me.

  Creasy read further. His spirit tensed as she roamed outside. A chill rolled across his spine and made his skin tingle.

  The walls creaked as a hard gust of wind blasted through town. He watched the door to the shop. His spirit hung tethered to his consciousness, wary of danger.

  Creasy tried to ignore the fact that he was shaking.

  He read more.

  inside

  claw claw tear out

  can get it out

  have to

  They took the city

  inside us

  inside me

  I

  will

  get it out

  Creasy looked up at the ruined body. Fear flooded through him.

  “Shit,” he said out loud.

  The ghosts in the forest had possessed their victims. They’d invaded them and held them hostage, burned them out and used them as cannon fodder.

  That’s what happened here. They stole the city, somehow translocated it from another part of Nezzek’duul and then inhabited its people. As each body burned out they put the skeleton on display, a warning for others to keep their distance.

  He looked at the witch.

  She’d managed to escape for a time, and she tried to figure out how they’d done it, but they found her. She died exorcising herself, must have used her spirit to tie her body down so she couldn’t escape once the ritual began.

  He picked up his weapon and made to leave. His spirit whipped into a panicked frenzy as darkness enveloped the sky. Creasy heard sharp whispers and guttural voices, a cold presence just outside the shop.

  It was too late. They’d found him.

  THIRTEEN

  FADING

  Raijin was full of ash, dust and noise. The dusk sky was deep and crimson, and a smoky haze hung over the jagged rooftops like a shroud.

  Cross sat alone in a room in one of the central towers and looked out over the city. Hard gusts of wind shook the building and made him feel like he was trapped at sea. Prayer songs in the foreign Nezzek’duulian tongue rang through the hollow skies, eerily comforting even in their dissonance. Golden sunlight cut through the blood and cinder clouds. Raijin’s outline was rough, a sawtooth city, and the silhouettes of the rooftops were twisted like fibrous black claws. Dark angels stood atop many of the towers, featureless avatars who seemed to melt in the fading light. Streams of industrial smoke twisted through the molten atmosphere like drunken serpents.

  Cross leaned against the balcony railing with a glass of whiskey in one hand while the other held his robe closed to shield his body from the wind. People toting baskets and goods thronged the distant streets below, all of them dressed in black, many wearing shemaghs or chained headpieces. The market floor was full with chickens and monkeys and goats, and even hours after he’d been down there he still recalled the smells of roasting lamb and vegetables and the sound of discordant and enchanting music, tribal chants and drums filtered through metal and darkness.

  Something about it all had seemed oddly distant, even distorted. They hadn’t actually exchanged more than a handful of words with any of the city’s people, and they’d been asked by their escorts not to touch anything or accept any gifts until they were taken some place where they could rest. The city had been dark even in the daylight, and every street and vendor and person had been wreathed in shade. Cross had felt like a creature on display, a zoo animal being marched along.

  Hakim, the Magister of Raijin, had taken them through the city and shown them to their rooms there in the towers. They’d been encouraged to stay off the streets, at least this first night, as it would take Raijin’s citizens some time to come to terms with the fact that there were visitors from across the sea. Eyes had been on the procession, silent and in wonder, watching the survivors like they’d descended from the moon.

  Everyone from the Skyhawk had been given their own separate quarters, and they were treated like honored guests. It all seemed too good to be true.

  Which means it probably is, Cross thought glumly.

  The sun continued to set, bathing the city in burnished light. Cross turned back to his room, which was cloaked in shadow. Every window was tinted, every piece of furniture as black as a night sky. Grainy sunlight filtered through the shutters and illuminated dust motes like flakes of dirty snow. Flickering bulbs over the narrow sink and the low round bed offered only scant illumination, and the air inside was stuffy an
d stale, pumped by what Cross guessed were long-outdated recyclers. He left the sliding glass door cracked open behind him, willing to accept a bit of the night’s chill in exchange for a fresh breeze, as the slow rotary fan in the ceiling turned at a snail’s pace.

  Cross walked to the bathroom, which was little more than a dingy closet. Steam still curled from the standing shower and moisture dripped down the walls. He wiped the mirror clean and checked to make sure he’d gotten everything. Cross hadn’t shaved in what felt like years, but he’d managed to do the job without cutting himself, and Hakim had been kind enough to provide a pair of shears for him to trim down his hair to a manageable length since he was tired of looking like a mountain man. The bulb in the bathroom was neon white and easily the brightest thing in the entire apartment, but even it seemed to struggle against the darkness.

  He leaned in close and looked at himself, and marveled. There was no question his joined artifact blades had somehow managed to alter his aging process, as there was no way he’d pass for a man pushing fifty, especially with the toll of years and all of the combat he’d seen. His dark hair was receding and he had a few more scars, not all of which he remembered acquiring. His blue-grey eyes, however, were still sharp, and his skin bore the smoothness of youth. His jaw was aquiline and sharp, his nose fine.

  Not bad for an old man, he thought.

  Cross went and plopped himself down on the bed. The shower had felt heavenly; he couldn’t even recall the last time he’d had the opportunity to bathe. Everything about the place felt like a small paradise in spite of its relative grimy conditions. The round bed was rough and lumpy and the pillows smelled like lamb, and all of the food was gritty – he suspected the reason the Nezzek’duulians spiced it so heavily was to conceal the fact that everything held traces of dust. Even the water in the shower felt sticky, like it hadn’t been properly filtered, but compared to not showering it was still wonderful.

  He laid his head back and stared at the ceiling, letting the robe fall open and the cool breeze from outside slide across his scarred chest. He took a sip of whiskey and let the tumbler balance on his stomach. He drifted close to sleep.

  Don’t get comfortable, he told himself, and don’t get complacent. There’s something screwy going on around here, and even if Raijin is the real deal you still have plenty to do.

  And the first thing on his list was finding Danica and the others. He’d hoped against hope they were only a day behind the rest of the group, and since they theoretically would have traveled faster with their smaller numbers they should have made it to the city by now, but in spite of reminding Hakim to have the patrols keep an eye out for them there’d been no word. Now it was fast approaching night, and Cross’s chest ached with worry.

  I should have gone with them.

  He shouldn’t have been lying there, feeling clean and blissful while Danica, Creasy, Ronan and Grail were going through who-knew-what…which was why in less than an hour he and Reza were going to meet downstairs and head back out to the wastes to go search for them. He planned to ask for help, and hopefully they’d have some of Raijin’s scouts accompany them, but they’d already decided to go on their own if they had to.

  Wondering about the status of the rescue team was just one of the many things on his mind. There was no way to know what was happening back in the Southern Claw, which already had its hands full with the Ebon Cities and Fane’s revolt…and now they had to deal with the Maloj.

  Like we needed more problems.

  He lay there and gathered his strength. The whiskey was going to his head – it was sometimes easy to forget that he no longer had an arcane spirit to flush the alcohol from his system at a moment’s notice. Soulrazor/Avenger did many things, but keeping him sober wasn’t one of them. He put the glass down on the floor, sat up and grabbed a strip of roasted lamb from the table and took a bite. Again the wind buckled the tower and made it shake.

  He sat in the dark, feeling a great weight press down on him, and not just from his own burdens. Sometimes it all seemed so hopeless. The vampires had a near limitless supply of soldiers, and unlike the humans they were fully committed to allocating resources to researching and developing new weapons for their war effort, while the Southern Claw remained focused on just keeping their territories and populace stable. In the long run the vampire’s odds looked better.

  But it wasn’t just that. It seemed people were still holding onto some hope that the war would end someday…that maybe things would even go back to the way they’d once been.

  There is no going back, and there is no end. Not to this.

  Cross felt a wave of despair rise up from his stomach. His hands were shaking. Flashes of memory assailed him, battles, movement in the brush, explosions in Blackmarsh that turned his friends to paste. He smelled blood and brimstone and heard cackling voices, felt the sharp kiss of blades and wounds open his chest. Percussive blasts echoed through his skull. He saw empty tables in the mess and felt a cold void inside whenever he thought of his sister.

  He thought he’d buried that pain.

  He tried to shut out visions of Snow and Graves, of Dillon and Kane. He tried not to think about the old dreams, the dreams of flying through burning skies, of watching the world fall apart beneath him.

  Eric Cross sat alone in the dark and wept.

  A knock came at the door a short time later. At first he thought it might be Reza, but he wasn’t due to meet her for another half hour.

  Cross sat up, shaken. Tears stained his face. He did his best to compose himself, pulled on his trousers – he’d opted to stick with his dirty uniform rather than switch over to local fashion, at least for the time being, and hoped that doing so wasn’t an insult to Hakim or Raijin’s Masters – and crossed over to the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Flint.”

  Cross opened the door. The older man looked rejuvenated, if somewhat worried. Like Cross he’d decided against changing attire and stood there in his borrowed Southern Claw uniform. He also hadn’t bothered to shave, and his grey-brown hair looked a good deal shaggier than it had before, probably the result of a shower. He gave Cross a surprised look.

  “So that’s what you look like without a beard,” he laughed.

  “Handsome, eh?” Cross said. He gave the smarmiest smile he could manage.

  “Handsome? You look twelve.”

  Cross turned away.

  “Can I come in?” Flint asked.

  “Let me think about it.”

  Flint followed him inside and closed the door. Night had fallen, and Cross saw dim stars beyond the grisly clouds and primitive dirigibles. The room was a good thirty floors up, and the long windows afforded a panoramic view of the shadowed rooftops. The flickering light from the kitchen and bathroom were like torches in a black sea.

  “So what do you think of our hosts?” Flint asked him. Cross pulled on a shirt.

  “I’ve hardly talked to them,” he said. “Jaffe seems to genuinely want to help us. Hakim is friendly enough.” Cross stared outside.

  “Those Masters…” Flint said.

  “Yeah,” Cross said. “Still…can’t be any creepier than the White Mother, right?”

  “Have you ever met the White Mother?” Flint asked.

  “No. And that’s my point. At least here the people know what the folks in charge look like.”

  Flint nodded.

  “What’s bugging you, Flint?” Cross asked.

  “Where to start…?” Flint said.

  “Where’s Shiv, by the way?” Cross pulled on his belt.

  “Back in her room. Krieg is keeping an eye on her. Good lad.” The walls creaked. Cross took another bite of lamb. He decided it wasn’t his favorite, but he certainly wasn’t going to turn down free food. “This is some weird shit, Eric,” Flint said with a laugh. “It’s been nothing but weird shit since I met you.”

  Cross laughed. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

  “What do you make of this place?” Flint aske
d. He stood against the wall with his arms crossed.

  “It’s hard to say,” Cross said, looking around the darkened room like it would give him some answers. “In a lot of ways it’s not all that different from the Southern Claw.” He walked over to the windows. “Hakim said there aren’t many cities. The Masters seem to be the ones in charge, but he didn’t really want to talk about them.”

  “Have you heard of them?” Flint asked.

  “Very few people back home know shit about Nezzek’duul outside of its name,” Cross said. “You see some influence in the dress and food in the southern cities…you know, crime ports like Dagger and Blacksand…but you hardly ever run into someone who’s actually from here, and if they are they were so young when they left they hardly remember anything.”

  “And no one ever comes here,” Flint said. “Or if they do…”

  “…they never leave,” Cross said with a nod. He gave Flint a measured look. “Have you seen something to make you suspicious?”

  “No,” Flint said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve just…got a really bad feeling about this place.”

  Cross thought on that for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “You and me both.” He donned his armor coat.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Flint asked.

  “Danica and the others aren’t back yet. Reza and I are going to go find them.”

  “Give me a minute. You could use someone with brains.”

  “Well, that rules you out,” Cross said with a laugh.

  “Very funny. You little shit. Seriously…”

  “Seriously,” Cross said. “I need you here. Shiv needs you here. And I need you with Shiv.”

  Flint’s face grew grim. “What are you talking about?” he asked. His voice had an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. One of the many things Cross admired about the aging former Marine was his fierce protectiveness over his daughter. He was a rabid pit bull when it came to her.