Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6)

by Montano, Steven

  She came to the bow of the small ship. Its rent metal hull was thaumaturgically treated black steel, and the vessel had been outfitted with razor edges so it could slice through simple magical barriers and resonance fields. The fore end was bent, and dark fuel leaked all over the ground; if was a wonder the ship hadn’t combusted in the desert heat. Twisted bits of shrapnel dangled like tree limbs, and she saw thick blood stains at the open edge of the cockpit.

  This is a bad idea, she thought.

  Danica looked to the aft end, which had partially sunk into the ravine. Powder burns and scorch marks marred the vessel, and from what she could tell the attack had occurred at close range. Her spirit pushed forward and pulled traces of dark iron from the blast marks, scant elements of metallic residue left by whatever shell had ripped the ship out of the sky, and he searched the air for some trace of where the attack had come from.

  More of the Pale, maybe, she wondered, but she doubted it. From what she’d seen they didn’t have access to modern weapons, especially not the sort of artillery they’d have needed to take this ship down.

  Her spirit found something further to the south, but it was difficult to determine what. Nezzek’duul’s air was leaden and interfered with arcane reconnaissance. She imagined it was the storm’s doing, and that the residue was in fact remnants of unstable spirit energy that had been churned out by the Skaravae as they traveled, like some sort of necrotic exhaust fumes.

  Danica carefully picked her way around the wreckage. The innards of the ship were strewn everywhere. Curves of metal like barrel straps of ribs protruded from the hillside, and that was where she saw the bodies. They were just smoking shells of humans, torn husks whose innards had dried brown and whose skin had been charred in the explosion. What little was left of their uniforms looked similar to those worn by the bodies they’d found back at the railway station, corpses she could only surmise belonged to members of the local military.

  She pulled herself up the side of the small ship using wrist-thick cables which dangled from the hull. The pale paint she wore was highly resistant to being scraped away, and even with her sweat it stayed pasted to her body like glue. Her bloodsteel arm groaned quietly as she worked her way up to the twisted deck.

  There were more bodies inside, huddled together and bent forward, so burned that few of their original features were clear. The gagging scent of melted flesh assaulted her, and Danica covered her mouth to shield herself against thick plumes of dark smoke. She narrowed her vision and pushed her spirit into the ruined cockpit, trying to get a better sense of what lie within. There had to be something to tell her if these had been humans or not. Anything.

  And there it was – a pulse of life, a spark of soul energy that refused to be pulled down into death. She sensed pain, incredible pain. One of the burned crew was still alive, but only barely, and his life signs were so weak even arcane healing would do nothing to help him.

  Her spirit flushed around her body and froze her skin. Something approached. Danica slid down and dropped into the depths of the ravine. Dirt flew up around her, and her heart pounded.

  She heard the groan of turbines. Scarred sails came into view overhead. Rotating engines blasted sand and stones. The new craft was twice as large as the ship it had brought down. It bore no markings, and its dark metal hull was pitted and stained and looked hobbled together from other, better ships. Air swirled around the vessel as it hovered in place. Chains capped with nails and teeth dangled as the ship turned. Ropes fell. Whatever crew piloted the craft was descending.

  She saw human shapes with skin and clothing so utterly black they might have been carved from darkness. Their tattered armor was leather and metal set with steel spurs and bladed gauntlets, and their eyes shone bright as they slid down the lines.

  Danica saw trace elements of a storm overhead, wisps of purple-black smoke and a haze of electric light. The smell of ozone pulsed out of the sky like exhaust.

  The intruders tore through the remnants of the sail and dropped on the deck. They moved in silence after that first footfall, specters in human bodies, careful and meticulous. Whispers cut through the air like razors.

  Danica waited, holding her breath until her chest felt ready to explode. A half-dozen wraith-possessed forms had touched down on the wrecked ship, while their own vessel continued floating overhead. These were clearly Skaravae, the undead at war with the Eidolos who controlled Raijin.

  She took a steadying breath and released her spirit. He spun up and around the wrecked vessel in a whirlwind of flame. White explosions rocked the remnants of the hull. The air ignited with deafening noise. Bodies flew out, incinerated as she set the wrecked vehicle’s fuel ablaze.

  Danica ran up the side of the ravine. She gripped Claw tight and jumped onto the front edge of the deck. Flames licked around her ankles. Her spirit sheathed her in a cloak of ice as the ghost soldiers came at her.

  Claw cleaved through possessed flesh. Spectral blood flew around her as she hacked down her opponents. Claw had been made to destroy creatures such as these – it was a Necroblade, attuned to the incorporeal thaumaturgic signatures that bound the phantom to the real, the lines which connected the world of shadow to the world of flesh. The weapon was crafted to slice into that subtle dimension, that layer of being normally invisible to the human eye.

  She tasted the Skaravae’s surprise and fear. The ghost soldiers tried to flee, but once her sights were locked on them they couldn’t escape. Her spirit burned their passage, delayed them long enough for her to propel her body forward and fight through their ranks. They came at her en masse, a horde of hollow eyes and melting faces.

  Her fire burned away their flesh shells. Danica pressed the attack, moving with grace and precision, guided by the violent instincts of her spirit.

  Rage boiled in her heart, rage at what had been done to her, at being stranded so far from home, at watching people she loved die, at being manipulated by the spider and used and exploited by the vampires of Lorn. As each phantom soldier came within striking distance she imagined it was the one responsible for all of her troubles, and with each strike she landed her hatred boiled up from the hard shell around her heart. The sound of her own animal cries filled her ears.

  Then, as quickly as the battle had started, it was done. She stood absolutely still, her breaths shuddering deep in her chest. Her spirit came away, depleted and fatigued, but he spread like a wave of burning water and circled both the wreckage and the vessel floating above and found them empty. Every trace of life and non-life has been eradicated from the area.

  For a moment she saw herself from her spirit’s perspective, calm and horrifying. Her milk-white skin was drenched with milk-white blood. She was a gore-smeared ghost, a figure so absolutely still she might have been a dripping statue.

  She climbed the dangling chains up to the Skaravae’s airship. It had been left on auto-pilot, and its horizontal turbines and uncoiled sails held it stable as it hovered almost soundlessly. Her muscles ached, but she refused to let her spirit aid with her ascent. He’d done enough for a while.

  Danica’s flesh arm was shaking with fatigue by the time she pulled herself onto the deck. The rush of violence had passed. She heard the screams of the possessed, the furtive cries of the people whose bodies had been taken, who she’d hacked to pieces so she could annihilate their ghost masters. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t heard them before.

  Because then you might have hesitated, she told herself.

  The ship seemed simple enough to pilot, as it was essentially the same design as a Bloodhawk, albeit smaller and not made to climb to high altitudes. The navigation panel and controls were written in what she assumed was Nezzek’duulian, but with her spirit’s aid she was able to translate enough of the words to make sense of how to operate the basic controls and read the primitive cartography displays to determine where she was, and where she needed to go.

  She located Raijin on the charts. Her destination was clear, even if her plan wasn’t
.

  The sails twisted back as she rotated the dials and knobs on the wide panel. The entire deck of the ship was a single large platform, like an old sailing vessel without a cabin. The setting sun melted into the iron clouds, and dark storms churned in the eastern skies. She flew south. The sun was low, highlighting Raijin in gold and green shadows.

  The ship made good time. She flew over rolling hills and dry riverbeds, past fields of cacti and salt estuaries. The hot wind sliced against her.

  Fear hammered in her heart. She’d never been so afraid. She couldn’t stop thinking about Lara, and Kane. She felt the pain of watching them die, that jolt of shock and fear. She never wanted to feel that again.

  Then you can’t panic, she told herself.

  She neared Raijin in a matter of minutes and put the ship down behind a low stand of abandoned wagons just a few miles outside the city. The air was thick with sediment and dust. By the time she set down it was nearly night, and Raijin was just a jagged tear against the blood-red sky. Dim light ebbed through the clefts between bladed towers as the air turned a grisly shade of violet.

  Exhaustion swept over her. She felt as if every spark of energy had been sucked away.

  Don’t stop now.

  With Claw slung across her back and her spirit gelled against her skin Danica pushed on towards the city, moving past rows of spikes and tents that flapped in the gelid wind. There was no one about, and it seemed that all of Raijin’s citizens had been pulled indoors. She decided that wasn’t a good start.

  Danica was sweating as she stealthily approached the wide city gates, which had been left unguarded. She kept watching for signs of sentries, and now and again thought she spied shadows moving in the distance, but she managed to get right up to the city walls without raising an alarm. She found the postern next to the main gates and forced it open with minimal noise. A short corridor led to the other side of the main barbican. Everything was silent, and seemed almost frozen. Danica kept expecting a sentry to locate her, for a cry of alarm to sound, but none did.

  She crept onto the main road. Even in daylight the city would have been hard to navigate, as every structure was wrought of dark iron and utterly black. Raijin seemed to have been sliced from the cold night sky. The dusty streets were thick with sewer water and oil, and wind chimes tingled in the steady wind.

  Her spirit moved a few meters ahead, checking for anyone in her immediate vicinity, but the streets were empty. Danica pressed against a wall, her breath caught in her throat.

  Sharp edges pressed in, and the tall structures leaned and loomed overhead. The darkness pained her eyes. She didn’t walk as much as swam through the charcoal darkness.

  A massive temple stood a few hundred feet inside the city gates. Tall columns of braided stone cast with grey and silver runes stood like marbled trees in the field of shadows. The thick iron doors were sealed. Danica smelled hex in the air, and as she drew closer she realized those doors throbbed and hummed with thaumaturgic energies. The portals had been blocked from scrying.

  She quietly ascended the wide stone steps. Walking so close to the temple felt like stepping into a freezer. Her breaths iced around her, and her feet found something frozen and grey on the ground that crunched and flaked like ice or ash, but was neither. The taste of age salted her tongue.

  Danica pushed at the doors with her spirit, gently at first, then harder. The seal was firm but not unbreakable, but she knew that opening the portal would draw attention. Unfortunately there was no way to know what was inside without breaching the doors – the seal made that certain.

  I don’t know where anyone is. Best not to raise an alarm just yet.

  She was about to turn and walk away when a scream sounded from the other side.

  Danica took a breath and sent her spirit forward. Arcane energies pounded at the seal and cracked it like ice. The door began to move, rock sawing against rock. A flaw flashed across the stone like a bolt of lightning. The barrier opened with a sharp snap, and Danica’s eardrums popped. Massive slabs of ice-veined granite fell away and revealed a cold darkness inside the temple, as deep as a starless sky. Her breath cooled in her lungs. The air was raw, and the floor inside was frost-colored lead.

  She breathed light with her spirit, a pulsing glow like a heatless torch. The temple was huge. The walls glowed red, as if the ziggurat had been built from frozen blood, and the granite was expertly hewn. Statues of men with hooked talons and razored jaws stood spaced around a small pyramid at the center of the chamber.

  Danica took a step forward, and her heart froze. The temple was filled with bodies.

  The naked corpses were the color of smoked fish, dried and hanging from leather-and-metal straps. Dried flesh fell from the bodies like brittle flakes of snow and bones pushed through the desiccated husks.

  Danica gaped at them in horror. The husks dangled like banners between the columns. She counted fifteen, twenty, but she soon lost track as her eyes trailed to the floor and saw the buckets and piles of clothing. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and cautiously moved forward.

  The bundles of clothing near the buckets were Southern Claw uniforms covered with noisily buzzing flies. Greasy remains filled the containers, a nauseating molten blend of intestines and blood, melted skin and boiled bones. The stench was thick, and Danica had to use her spirit to block out the odor and keep herself from retching.

  She heard a faint whisper push through the darkness. Sounds stirred in the temple. Her spirit extinguished his flame and Danica hid behind the nearest column, her eyes on the dim torches on the other side of the pyramid, opposite the main doors. Even with the entrance open the air in the ziggurat was drenched in darkness.

  A pair of figures wearing dark cloaks moved into the room, their heads bowed low, their hands on the hilts of twisted scimitars. Her spirit pulsed and tensed, ready to move. She thought of the bodies hanging there, thought of the pain they must have endured, the suffering. She thought of the families they’d never again see, the dreams left unfulfilled.

  Danica was done hiding.

  Her spirit flew forward and ripped the men to shreds. Bloody light caved in their skulls and ripped open their skin with smoking claws. They fell to the ground groaning in pain, the only sound they could make since her spirit reached down their throats and soldered their vocal chords.

  “I’m done fucking around with you pricks,” she said.

  Her heart hammered and her breath caught in her chest. She’d never admit how exhilarating it was to allow her spirit to slaughter, to let the violence rage like fire. It was sometimes hard to pull him back.

  The bodies of the men she’d just killed were ruined, and her stomach almost turned at the sight of them. She steadied herself, took one of their scimitars, searched their belts and took a ring of keys. Danica moved in the direction they’d approached from, this time using her spirit to create illumination only she could see. It was a more taxing effort, but with any luck it would help mask her movements.

  The new doorway led deeper into the temple, through a chamber filled with stone sarcophagi and closed caskets. She resisted the urge to look under any of the lids, but instead pushed on past the cold and cavernous room and through another door on the far side. The air smelled of hemlock and burning flowers.

  Corpses lined the next chamber, much older and solid than those near the entrance. The grey-faced bodies were stacked into alcoves, heads turned out so they seemed to stare in spite of their sewn-shut eyes. Organic tubes filled with dripping black fluids ran from the bodies to holes in the walls like grisly conduits.

  Puppets, she realized. These are the original bodies of the new forms, the ones attached to the Eidolos. The living it controls telepathically, but these have been physically replaced. That meant that the men she’d just killed, who hadn’t been tethered to the Eidolos by physical means, were telepathic thralls. She’d just slaughtered people with no control over their own actions.

  Shit. This keeps getting better and better.
>
  Danica wondered what would happen if she severed the ties binding those bodies, but after a moment’s consideration she decided against it. She needed to find the others first, if indeed there were any others left to find. She pressed on.

  The next room took her to a small labyrinth of dark corridors. A ghastly glow pulsed from the ice-laced stone. Dark smoke curled off the ground, and the air was heavy with frost.

  A shrill scream rang out from the hallway directly ahead. Danica followed the sound. Another scream came, and she recognized the voice. It was Shiv.

  The air shifted and moved around her like she walked on a swaying bridge. Her sense of balance felt askew, and shadows shifted and danced at impossible angles. Dizzy and disoriented, Danica came to a solid door sealed with some sort of arcane nullifying matrix. She was about to lash out at it when she remembered the keys at her belt; surprisingly, the first one she tried fit in the silvered lock, and the door swung open.

  Bodies had been laid out on cold iron tables. Dangling black tentacles writhed and twisted near the ceiling, part of a mass of shadows which loomed over the chamber. Greasy black fluid dripped like dark rain. Looking at the bulky shape pained her eyes, and Danica felt her body go weightless, like she was about to fall up into the thrashing darkness.

  The Eidolos was in the process of sucking the marrow from a female body. The ruined corpse was so decimated it took Danica a moment to realize it was Ankharra. Juices were being drawn out of a wound in the witch’s stomach where the tentacles had latched on, shadow limbs that flailed with a darkly sexual appetite. Danica smelled piss and fear.

  Shiv, Flint, Eric and a handful of others were strapped to the tables. Only Shiv was awake, staring at the shadow beast and screaming.

  Danica knew her magic was no good in that room – modifications to the structure made it impossible to call forth a spirit in that gritty and disorienting sepulcher, which explained why Ankharra had been held powerless – so she raced forward and sliced at the tentacle with Claw. Dull howls sounded through her mind and pain pushed at her skull with such force she feared her bones would crack.