Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6)

by Montano, Steven

  I am the Black Witch, she says. Her accent is sweet and dark, like poison fruit. And if you know what’s good for you, she says, you’ll mind your manners.

  Fuck off.

  She turns her head and smiles, and a blade appears in her hand, bone thin and blood red. It reminds him of Cross’s swords, Soulrazor and Avenger, but this one is crimson and nearly translucent, like glass filled with blood. Its wide bone handle is set with runic carvings, and power oozes from the tip of the weapon like mucus.

  Where is it? she asks sharply.

  Where it what?

  The wolf inside you.

  She doesn’t wait for an answer, but drives the keen blade into his stomach. The edge is so sharp he doesn’t feel the cut. He smells his blood as it hisses to the ground like hot oil.

  Grave dust drifts down from the tops of the structures. He realizes this was once a city of vampires, one of their countless cold fortresses, ravaged by warfare in some distant and forgotten time. The dust is actually the ashes of the dead, and the scorched scent is that of undead burned by theurgic artillery, some grisly creation of their own foul war labs.

  (This he thinks as he lies there on the ground. His limbs fail him. He feels the blade split open his sternum. Blood and gristle part effortlessly beneath the phantom edge, dimensional steel so sharp it cauterizes the wounds as soon as it creates them.)

  It isn’t here, she says.

  He wakes elsewhere. He’s not awake.

  Predatory shadows fill the sky. He finds himself in a hollow wasteland. Cracked earth stained with chemicals stretches around him like a cankerous wound.

  The sky is blue-black, the color of hurt. Drifts of coal dust have piled on the ground. Every motion he makes is slow and painful, and the air is so cold it burns.

  He looks around.

  The Black Witch is nowhere to be seen, and he’s alone in the wastes, a refugee in a place with no sound.

  The wound in his stomach pulses with pain, and he bears a wide scar from sternum to waist. His insides feel twisted and raw, and it seems as if something is still lodged in his chest. The strength has drained from his body, and it takes monumental effort just to stay standing.

  The black sky drips dark water, freezing to the touch. A deep rumble sounds from underground. His boots shuffle on thin soil that cracks and sinks beneath him.

  He walks.

  It isn’t long before he loses track of time. He has no sense of his direction or the distance he’s traveled. It’s hard to know such things in a realm of nightmares.

  So he just keeps walking.

  His mind wanders. He recalls tests he underwent as a boy – being dropped in a pit of snakes with only a knife to protect him; sent into an orphanage with instructions not to return until he’d taken a life; held face down while they branded him with hot irons.

  Left alone in the desert. Survive, or die. He’s always survived.

  I was younger then.

  The lifeless earth never changes. The sky remains the same, the shadows constant. He follows or is followed by some dripping mass of darkness, but he isn’t afraid, and never has been.

  He can’t feel his body, can’t feel anything. He’s a walking ghost.

  There are voices in the distance. He tries to follow them, but he can’t determine what direction they’re coming from, just whispers in the dark.

  Here.

  Where?

  It’s a voice he recognizes, someone he knows. He turns around and sees a silhouette in the distance. Another person, wandering, just as he does. She’s just close enough for him to know she’s there, but still too far for him to make out any details. He stumbles towards the other wanderer.

  Jade.

  Help me, she says. But before he can answer she’s gone, and again he’s left alone.

  The head of a black railroad stretches out across the sea of sand. Iron gleams in the pale moonlight. He sees broken windows in broken buildings, lonely and decrepit shacks left as stranded as he, just prisoners of the wastes. He tastes carbon fog and smells incendiary rain. His legs are weak, and scorch marks riddle his flesh. The wind burns in his throat.

  Ronan approaches the ruins cautiously. Chalk and dust kick up into clouds. The black sky is deep and cold, and the ground is so pale and stark it’s like walking on the face of the moon.

  People. He isn’t sure if he’s really seeing them or if they’re just hallucinations, random images conjured by his hazed and exhausted mind, but as he draws closer to the structures he becomes more certain of their existence. They wait and hide, watching him with bows and spears held ready. They’re painted as pale as the landscape, walking phantoms who move without making a sound.

  They look back and forth at one another, as if confirming that what they’re seeing is real.

  Why wouldn’t I be real? he wants to say to them. This is my hell, my dream. I’m the only thing that’s real.

  They inch closer as he approaches.

  He sees Danica, and that’s when he knows he’s truly lost his mind. She’s as pale as the others, her skin painted with some sort of dense alabaster clay, her hair greased together with blue-white paste that gives it a gritty and gnarled appearance. Her bloodsteel arm and black steel Necroblade lend her color, as do her ice-green eyes. He’ll never forget her eyes.

  Ronan.

  Hi, Dani, he says. You’re not real.

  I am. And so are you. But I need to get you out of here.

  And how do you plan to do that? he asks.

  Trust me, she says.

  Danica unsheathes Claw. Ronan watches her warily. His hands tense near the hilt of his katana, which he knows wasn’t there a moment ago.

  I saw Jade, he says. He walks in a circle, crouched into a fighting position.

  She and Laros were taken again, Danica says. Creasy went to find them.

  I think Laros has something, he says.

  What? she asks.

  Something evil.

  Ronan watches her. He wants to trust her, but something about this doesn’t feel right.

  His primal drive to survive, to kill or die, takes over. He lunges at her.

  He’s a better swordsman than she is, and always has been, so when she feints left he expects the move and drives right, cuts her blade off with a pair of quick strikes and forces her back. He nearly takes her head off with a quick swing, but her bloodsteel arm lifts and blocks it just in time.

  He presses the attack, not wanting to give her a chance. He sees something move at the corner of his vision – the pale men, those aboriginal ghosts. Spears and knives point in his direction, but the phantom warriors are cautious, not ready to commit.

  Danica moves in on him again, and he hacks at her blade and pushes it aside, wheels around and draws his kodachi with his off-hand. In another heartbeat it’ll be at her throat.

  She’s faster. He’s miscalculated – she isn’t aiming for him at all, but something attached to him, a shadowy umbilical he hasn’t even noticed before now, long and dripping like a milky wound. The cable runs off into nowhere, an organic tether binding him to the darkness. Now that he senses it he feels a bitter cold sensation, a sickness running up his spine like a diseased weight. Suddenly his senses are dulled and he feels turgid, stuck in a murk that won’t allow him to move.

  Claw snaps through the cord like it’s made of butter. Tendrils twist and break and pain flares down his back. Ronan screams

  and bolted upright. Slithering shadows bled from his vision. Something dark clutched his insides. His chest seized, and the pain made him double over.

  He was on a barren and lifeless plain. Blood dripped from his chest, and his skin had been painted the color of ghosts. When he tried to stand he bumped into the underside of a leaning rock, a tipped stone which hung over his head like some sort of shell.

  White faces surrounded him, the same pale men from his dreams. Most of them were locked in meditative trance, their legs crossed and their arms folded, eyes slightly open as they stared up at nothing and
chanted silently. Grey smoke poured over them, thick with the smell of volcanic ash and burning mud.

  “Ronan!” Danica shouted. She stood over him, Claw still in hand. White puss dripped from the black blade.

  “Danica…” he gasped. “What the hell…?”

  “I severed your tie to whatever was holding your mind prisoner,” she said. “I’d actually done it once already, but apparently it only works if you do it from inside the dream.”

  He looked around in a daze. Sharp pain flared through his skull.

  “Who the hell are these guys?” he asked.

  “I’m still working on that,” Danica said. “But I think they’re exiles, like you and me.”

  Ronan stood up slowly. His eyes were filled with gummy glaze, and every breath was like icy vapors. The sun was veiled behind cold dark clouds, casting the wastes around the city in a bed of shadow.

  “Did they make it?” he asked with a nod towards Raijin.

  “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “But there’s a problem. The people in charge of the city aren’t really people. They’re Eidolos puppets.”

  Ronan nodded. He spat on the ground and squinted against the sunlight. “Well, that figures,” he said. “I’ve never killed one of those things.”

  “Before we can, we have to go help Creasy get Laros and Jade back. The only trouble is…”

  “I know where they are,” he said. “Do you have my armor?”

  Danica watched him. She looked so bizarre painted up in that pale chalk. He imagined he didn’t look much better.

  “How?” she asked.

  “The leader of those weird shadow people is a witch, and she tried to break into my dreams, like you guys did,” Ronan said. “My armor?”

  Danica pointed to a bundle on the ground. The day was growing hot, but Ronan’s skin felt surprisingly cool because of the arcane paint they’d spread all over his body. He found his armor, his face-wrap, his sword and his other blades.

  “I know about the witch,” Danica said. “How do you know where she is?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Jade tried to communicate with me, and I can still sense where she is, maybe fifteen miles east of here.” The white warriors didn’t make a sound, just kept their distance and watched.

  “Ok,” Danica said. “Then let’s get going.”

  “Wait a second,” Ronan said. “Tell me what’s going on. I get that these guys are survivors, but they don’t look Nezzek’duulian to me, and I understand that the city isn’t really a city but a giant mousetrap for morons like us to walk into…but who the hell is this witch, and what was inside of me that everyone wants so fucking bad?”

  She is the Black Witch, a voice said.

  Though the speaker didn’t identify himself – if indeed the voice was even male – Ronan knew it was one of the pale warriors, speaking to him through his mind.

  She’s very dangerous, they said. An exiled mage, once a Princess of Nezzek’duul.

  “Of course,” Ronan said. “Who are you guys?”

  Exiles, like you. Bound to this land, to the spirits who wander here.

  He looked at Danica.

  “The best I can figure is that most of the people in this part of Nezzek’duul are dead,” she said. “But their ghosts are still here, and they can possess living creatures.”

  “How does that work?” he asked. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of shit…but I’ve never seen any shit like that.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “The Black Witch controls one faction of the ghosts – the ones we ran into back in the forest. They call them the Skaravae.”

  “Then who are your friends?”

  We are the Pale, the voice said. Ronan just nodded.

  “These natives don’t seem to actually possess people who aren’t willing,” Danica said, “but I get the feeling they can help folks survive by taking control of them.”

  “Gotcha,” Ronan said quietly. “So these guys all got sucked down here, same as us, but rather than running the risk of not making it they put out the FOR RENT sign for the happy ghosts. They’re fighting the not-so-happy ghosts, these Skaravae, who work for the Black Witch.”

  “That about covers it,” Danica said.

  “So now what?”

  “Now we get Creasy,” she said. “And then we help Cross and the others. But Creasy first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they may have been sucked down here by accident,” Danica said, pointing at the pale warriors, “but we were brought here on purpose. Because of what was inside you.”

  “And that was…?” Ronan asked.

  He had a memory of claws, and the snarl of hungry beasts. The more he tried to remember the worse the throbbing in his brain. The details were buried deep and refused to be unearthed.

  Danica watched him. She must have seen how he struggled, but when it became clear there was little more he’d be able to tell her she sighed.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I think it might have been one of the Maloj.” Danica’s milk-colored skin shone bright in the fading darkness. Dust whipped by in the acid wind as the dozen or so warriors gathered their weapons and kicked dirt over the runic circles they’d drawn on the ground. “It isn’t in you anymore,” she said. “It’s in Laros. And whatever it is, the Black Witch wants it badly, and so does the Eidolos in Raijin. I’m not sure which of them brought us here, but I’m pretty sure the reason the Skyhawk was hijacked was so one of those factions could get their hands on our stowaway.”

  Ice lanced down his spine. He needed to know.

  Maybe now that it’s left me I can find the answers I need.

  Ronan focused his mind to enter the Deadlands. He felt his pulse quicken, and his blood ran cold like rapidly freezing water. His heart drifted, out of synch with time. He watched the world go cold and grey, saw Danica and the white warriors fade to moonlight silhouettes.

  A void shape. Lupine and vast. It came at him with claws and iron-white teeth. He felt its carrion breath as its bulk loomed over him. The air turned sharp.

  He barely fell back in time, right into Danica’s arms. Talons had raked across his torso, and blood spattered from his mouth. It had tried to kill him in the Deadlands, tried to stop him from seeing what it really was.

  “The Maloj,” he gasped. “Fucking Christ, Dani, you were right…one of those damned things was inside me. It was hiding…probably trying to get to the White Mother. And now it’s in Laros.”

  “Imagine what an exiled witch or an Eidolos could do with one of those things…” Danica said. “Shit.” She looked at the blood on Ronan’s chest. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said angrily, and he tried to dust himself off. The blood looked stark against his painted flesh, but in moments Danica’s spirit cauterized the wound. “Yeah. And I’m pissed. So let’s go kill something.”

  Danica hesitated. “I wish I knew a way for us to warn Cross and the others,” she said.

  They’d been here before, when they were separated from Creasy and Maur on their way to find the Witch’s Eye. Danica and Ronan had decided to abandon the men to a vampire Creed in order to complete their mission. They’d eventually changed their minds and gone back, and though they were delayed they both knew they’d made the right decision by putting their friends first.

  Sometimes making the right choice isn’t easy.

  “You can go,” he told her. “I’ll find Jade.”

  “But I won’t know where to find you,” Danica said. “Damn it.” She looked at Raijin.

  “It’s okay,” Ronan said. “I’ve got this.”

  Danica didn’t look pleased. She glanced at the warriors – they didn’t seem to be slowing down any – and then back at the city.

  “This will be the second time I’ve let someone run off on me so I could go find Eric,” she said. “That doesn’t seem right, somehow.” She took a deep breath. “This paste seems to shield us from the cold, and it provides some protection from magical scryi
ng,” she said. The wind whistled, the only sound to be heard aside from the subtle metal clank of her bloodsteel arm. “How am I supposed to find you after I get Cross?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” Ronan said. “But assuming I don’t find you first…I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He wanted to say more, but couldn’t.

  She hugged him. It was the second time she’d ever done that. Now, just as then, he didn’t know what to do, so he just hugged her back.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he nodded. Her cold and gelled hair pushed against his face. “You, too.”

  And they parted without another word. Danica moved south into the black shadow of Raijin, while Ronan led a cadre of near invisible warriors east, into broken hills and ravines filled with salt and lime, towards a dry storm of drifting shadow.

  Hunting a wolf, and the witch who chased it.

  SIXTEEN

  WALKERS

  Creasy raced through the shadows. The sky was full with razor darkness, and the streets behind him were awash with twisted coils of serpent smoke and acid moans of pain.

  He was at the edge of the shade city, and had been for a whole day, eluding capture. They searched for him. Phantom howls rumbled through the hot night. Another cry issued from miles off, so shrill and deep Creasy felt it in his guts.

  Again and again they sounded, hollow calls, not quite animal, certainly not human. Glass warbles like throats exploding. Shadows lurked at the edge of the city, filled with the glint of blades and random starlight.

  His spirit was with him, cooling his skin and calming his nerves. Creasy crouched in the ravines west of town, dry gulches that had once been filled with saltwater and life. Even in the near darkness his boots uncovered dried bits of kelp and the husks of shell-fish. The ground smelled of meat and salt. He knelt on the side of the hill, balanced on piles of sea rock and mirror-glass.

  The brooding sky bled to black. He’d been in the ravine for hours. Sharp pain ran down his spine from spending so much time on the uneven stones, and hunger pains twisted his stomach. He smelled his own sweat and stench and licked lips long gone dry. He breathed slow and even and kept one hand on the rocks, the other on the shotgun. His eyes ached from trying to see in the low light, as he had little more than the trace elements of red sunbeams over the distant peaks to guide his way. The walls of the ghost city loomed like a predator.