Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6)

by Montano, Steven

  It has taken her out of fear and desperation, hoping she can reverse the damage she’s done. It’s afraid, and like a wounded animal retreats to its den.

  He follows. The terrain shifts from desert to sandstone bluffs to broken hills. The sky is a flat red blade.

  He feels her thoughts. She’s unharmed, at least for the moment. The Maloj wants her alive. It’s never known fear, not like this, not in all the millennia of its existence, not on any of the thousands of worlds and realities it and its brethren have conquered.

  The wolf scars the earth in its wake, leaving a black and tainted river. Realities bleed through the horizon, alternate places and distant times. He sees vampire cities under siege, witnesses the rupturing of a great black dome. He sees thousands die in a desperate attempt to stave off destruction.

  Understanding dawns on him. He sees the cold origins of The Black, sees the vampire nations broken apart by their own relentless drive to destroy.

  The wolf stops. He knows this place: the ship. The ruins of the Skyhawk. It’s fallen since they were last there, now just a tumbled monolith. Dust clouds surround the wreckage. The Maloj enters the downed vessel, holding Shiv hostage within its rippling shadow body. He hears her screams as she’s slowly unmade.

  It wants to manipulate her life force the way she manipulates spirits, use her to heal itself and rejoin its brothers.

  Creasy moves against ebbing tides of twisted power and passes through the walls like a ghost. He propels himself at the beast, hammers its smoldering wolf flesh and knocks it aside.

  The Maloj tears at him with midnight claws. Even in this dreaming form he feels pain as talons lance through him. He screams.

  But Shiv is free. Spirits race to her aid, the wandering souls of the wastelands, liberated Skaravae and Pale, but he knows they won’t reach her in time. He can span great distances in the blink of an eye, split the seams of realities. He’s no longer confined to one place, or one time. His soul travels to Black Dust Station.

  (A sliver of his life energy crosses the sea, moving through ice-cold winds and churning storms, past bone tributaries and acid mists. He flies past the ruins of burning ships, over coral jags and saltwater marshes. He closes in on the far continent, on their home.)

  Grisly howls scrape the sky as the spirits race to help Shiv. Rocks and sand are swept up in blasted explosions of spectral matter, a roiling maelstrom of white light and bleeding fire.

  They won’t make it in time. Creasy tears the space open between the downed ship and Black Dust Station, peels back the dimensional fold like a layer of skin.

  “Go,” he whispered.

  Creasy lay on his back. Danica, Ronan and Cross stood over him. He saw Flint next to him on the ground, not moving, and he hoped Shiv’s father was all right.

  “Creasy…” Danica said. She looked at him with tears in her eyes. He knew what she must have seen, how he must have looked. “What…?”

  “It’s Shiv,” he said quietly. It hurt to speak. Blood dripped from his mouth and ran down his cheek. “I can only hold the gate open for a short time. After you save her, I can send you home.” He felt his mind slipping. He wanted to fall back, back into that void, that unreality. Back to where his body wasn’t broken, where part of him still raced across the ocean, looking for Tanya.

  It will fall to you. His spirit was consuming herself, burning both of their lives away so they could see this last vital task through to the end.

  “Go!” he shouted. The air shimmered around him. He felt his body failing.

  They looked at him one last time before they hoisted Flint up and moved through the rip. He expended what was left of his soul to push them through, first to one place, and then home.

  He moves low over the last stretch of the sea, past stony shores and stained wastes, into the burning skies over Ath.

  He wants to see her one last time. He isn’t sure if he’ll even be able to talk to her as this void spirit. Already he’s forgetting his name, forgetting who he was…but he remembers her.

  Tanya. And he has to tell her how important she was to him. How she’d filled an old and bitter man with life.

  But something’s wrong. She isn’t there. Ath isn’t there. The sky is thick with smoke and the land is covered with bones. He’s enveloped in clouds of sickness and rot. Everything seems wrong.

  He finds another place, a safer place to send his friends after they save the Kindred. It’s the last thing he’s able to do.

  He wants to call out for her, wants so desperately to find her, but her name fades from his mind as his soul scatters to the wind. He’s gone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  vessel

  They stepped into the rip. Ronan felt himself twisted inside out. Echoes and ghastly voices pounded against his skull. His vision bled to shards of glass as his consciousness was stretched and torn. He fell through a hole into nothingness, a whirling black void.

  He felt himself young again, an initiate to the Crimson Triangle. He saw bloodied knuckles and felt the whip scourge his flesh, saw scorpions in the sand and heard the mages shout threats of torture if he or the other boys failed their tests: walking over hot irons, beating their fellows to death with their fists, raping the young girls they’d dragged kicking and screaming from their homes.

  The distance beneath him was vast as he plummeted through Creasy’s portal. He was floating, flying, falling, and then suddenly he and the others were there, back at the ship.

  The sky was dark, and for a moment it was difficult to tell which direction was up. Purple clouds swirled overhead. They heard a distant sound, a tidal force picking up momentum. The smell of decay was heavy and the earth shook.

  The crushed vessel lay before them. It had fallen from its vertical position and collapsed into a mess of torn and dented steel and sparking thaumaturgy. Oil and grease sprayed across the ground from snapped wiring.

  Jagged shadows pulsed at the edge of his vision. Ronan heard the black wolf’s voice, something like growls, and something like knives.

  I know you’re here, you fucker. You and I aren’t finished.

  Anger burned through him. It lent him strength in spite of his exhaustion and wounds.

  He knew what the Maloj had planned to do, how it had intended to sabotage the human race by smuggling itself inside him, to use him as a vessel to bypass the White Mother’s formidable arcane defenses and kill her when he and the others were granted audience. Somehow, some way, everything – the war, The Black, the Ebon Cities, all of it – was tied to some older, more primal conflict, some age-old enmity between the Mother and the Maloj.

  “Stay tight,” Cross said. He, Danica and Ronan circled away from Flint, who they left lying on the ground. They moved close to the shadows. The only light came from the cold blue moon and the swords Soulrazor/Avenger, Claw and Scar, which Ronan gripped even though its touch was bone-jarringly cold. Each weapon was circled by dank and icy blue light.

  Ronan stepped through a tear in the hull of the ruined ship, into darkness that was iron hard and deep. The wind whistled past them, the only sound to be heard aside from the incessant breathing of the wolf, which seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  He freed his mind, let his body go. His breaths slowed, and his heartbeat steadied. He stepped away from the physical world, shifted to a realm of cold black shadows.

  Ronan entered the Deadlands.

  Grey wind pushed dust and sand across his path. He felt a sense of calm inside. His soul had been born dark and nurtured to become even darker. His body was just a vessel for the killer inside.

  He sensed the wolf in the dark, and sensed her, Shiv, struggling to keep it at bay. A sandstorm rolled across the desert to the south, a silent army of phantasms and bladed ghosts comprised of every spirit the girl could call to her aid. They tore across the Nezzek’duulian landscape like a razor tide. Ronan’s Deadlands vision told him they’d be there soon, but not soon enough.

  That’s why Creasy sent us through. We have to stop i
t now.

  Ronan moved. Cross shouted for him to stop, and Danica tried to pull him back, but the swordsman was already in motion. He’d pinpointed Shiv’s heartbeat, alien and discordant but undeniably hers, and he’d use her to find the beast.

  He wouldn’t be stopped, not now. He ripped through the cold interior of the downed Skyhawk.

  Ronan had seen this before. He’d lived this reality, this battle, and he’d failed. He’d fallen in the cold riverbed on the island and the Maloj had smuggled itself inside him, impregnated him with its soiled presence. He’d traveled to Ath and met the White Mother, beheld her beauty, and killed her, and the world had paid the price.

  No. Not real. Another trick.

  The Maloj was manipulating his mind, trying to reach the human element, the crippling emotions which in the end always kept people from doing what needed to be done. The Maloj knew no such things, and never had. Their hearts were as hard as stones.

  Cross and Danica both fell, overtaken by drowning visions that thrust at their minds like blades from out of the dark. Ronan glimpsed the tide of energies around them and saw dead siblings and dead friends, past failures and dark futures. They saw what the Maloj wanted them to see in its last desperate attempt to hold them at bay.

  Ronan left them behind. Even when not in the Deadlands he was less alive than they were, and though Danica, Maur, Creasy and Cross had taught him much he still bore a burden they’d never know: he could cease being human whenever he needed to.

  Shiv was on her knees, crying, struggling to hold the Maloj back with a spirit-crafted barrier the color of ice and marble. Shimmering electric currents burst across the shield. Faces twisted and pulsed, willing ghosts forged into a barricade to try and keep her safe, but they dissipated like broken wisps of steam beneath the Maloj’s relentless assault.

  Its vast frame bled dust and shadows as its frozen claws raked Shiv’s defenses. Its body flickered in and out of sight, the uncertain darkness folding in on itself.

  Ronan sensed the beast’s core. Screams and howls fused to an eye of shadow. Darkness everlasting, legions made singular, a turgid pulsing sea of psychotic consciousness. In that instant he glimpsed its world, what could be called its home, and his mind was nearly torn apart.

  They writhe and claw at the barrier to the void, no longer possessed of any notion of identity. If they’d once been individuals they’ve since melted into one, a dark sea of madness and shadows. Hunger drives them to thrash against the bonds of their black prison. They sense meat on the other side, and yearn for it.

  All this time they’ve waited. Insane and hungry. And at last they have their chance.

  A crack appears in the dome, merely a hairline fracture, but it grows. The Black pushes against it. A turgid flow of slime crashes against the glass. The flaw widens, lances like a lightning fork, a bolt of white in the unending dark.

  New sounds leak through. There’s been nothing but the screams of the wounded for centuries. Now this rip, a glacier breaking.

  Wind howls through the abyss, cold and sharp, and pulls the world open like a cut.

  “No,” Ronan said, not his voice, something more distant. He heard himself outside of his own body, struggling through the folds of memory and pain.

  You can’t hurt me. You already tried that, and I’m still here. There’s nothing you can do.

  He felt Shiv’s spirit army claw its way across the landscape. The ground rippled like water pushing through broken ice, and the air turned bitterly cold. The darkness recoiled, blasted back by the light of Shiv’s burning eyes. Ronan saw the wolf-beast, its molten limbs and lunar gaze. Smoke poured from its wounds.

  He had to buy Shiv time until her forces arrived. Scar felt heavy and unfamiliar in his hands, twice the weight and half the length of weapons he normally used. He saw himself through a lens, gazing in at his own body from the Deadlands.

  His vision focused, and he found the grisly and rotting heart. He tasted metal on his tongue, the stain of that other world. The Maloj’s imperfections were clear to him, the cracks in its leathery surface where it was coming unraveled.

  Ronan had its heart in his sights. He leapt forward. Time slowed.

  Talons slashed across the face. He heard his own screams echo through the darkness, heard Cross and Danica and Shiv cry out for him. His vision failed and his skin exploded with pain.

  The blade sank home. Metal hissed through iron flesh. The bubbling shell of shadowed fur burst with black bile as Claw drove into its chest. The runes on the sword glowed like hot embers.

  Ronan’s body struck the ground. He felt his bones snap and his skin rip. The world turned on its end, and he felt himself slipping away.

  Cross and Danica attacked the Maloj, following Ronan’s aim as they sliced into the blackened heart. A dull explosion echoed through the confines of the ruined ship.

  Still it wouldn’t die. It writhed and clawed through metal and stone.

  Ronan stood up, unsteady. He couldn’t feel anything. Even as his blood pooled on the ground he shut it all out, the damage, the fatigue. He pulled his katana from its scabbard and stumbled forward.

  The Maloj turned, its eyes taking him in. His broken visage was reflected back in those glittering dark orbs.

  Shiv’s army hit the ship in a wave of screams and thunder. Faces and teeth and bodiless mouths swam in a maelstrom of ice and death. Ronan was thrown back.

  The lost souls tore the Maloj apart. Weakened by the artifact blades, its body couldn’t withstand the onslaught. Crusts of black flesh fell like sludge. Howls echoed through the sky.

  After just a few moments, everything was silent. The Maloj was gone, scattered to dust. Ronan stepped out of the Deadlands and fell hard to the ground.

  He thought of Danica, and Maur. He hoped they’d be able to take care of themselves, because he knew he wasn’t going to be around to do it.

  Ronan saw the blonde boy waiting for him as everything faded. He’d finally come to the end.

  TWENTY-SIX

  BANNERS

  Cross carried Shiv away from the wreckage, her body limp in his arms. Her eyes wouldn’t open, and she was hardly breathing.

  “Shiv!” he yelled. “Come on!”

  Not again.

  The same had happened at the gate on the island, the first time she’d tried to prevent the Maloj from crossing over from The Black. His heart had broken seeing her lying there after all they’d been through, after how far they’d come.

  Now it was happening again, but this time he had no idea what to expect. There was no precedence for this new form she’d taken, no prior knowledge for him to tap into about what she was really capable of or what was happening to her. She’d already proved to be vastly more powerful than Ankharra or Wara had thought possible. Shiv had manipulated hundreds of lost spirits and forged them into an incredible force. The fact that the energy was so unfocused and wild was frightening in and of itself, because if she somehow managed to gain better control…

  But none of that mattered if she didn’t live. He’d promised to protect her, to make sure nothing happened to her.

  Just like he had with Snow.

  “Shiv,” he said. “Shiv, God damn it, wake up!” He laid her on the ground. Her chest moved up and down, so he knew she was breathing, but she didn’t stir, and seemed beyond his reach. “Shiv,” he said again. He kept expecting her to answer, to ask him why he was so worried. It was easy to forget she was still a child – she’d had to grow up so fast, faster than even he or Danica.

  She has to make it. She has to. He saw Snow, burning on the train. No. This is different. This time she’ll live.

  Fear iced through him. He looked up at the darkening skies. The bloody sun was rising in the distance, the promise of a new day. The night’s cold was fading.

  He waited for something to launch at them from out of the dark. Cross’s body ached all over. Tears stung his eyes as he knelt down on wounded knees next to Shiv.

  How do we do it? he wondered. How
do we keep this up? It’s too much, too much for anyone.

  He watched her. All he wanted was to rest, but he knew more pain was coming. More pain was always coming.

  “Eric,” Danica said.

  He breathed deep. He had to catch his breath.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Ronan’s alive, but barely. Flint is dead.”

  And there it was. He barely heard the words, like they’d been told to someone else. He saw the soldier’s face and heard his laugh, felt his hard handshake and the resolve in his eyes. He heard his voice

  “No, God damn it, this is my daughter! She’s going to live! I…you…are going to get her home, you understand me?”

  and all Cross could think about was how he’d failed him, how he’d failed them both.

  He crumpled forward. His body wracked with sobs until his chest ached. Dirty hands pushed his tears away. He felt like he’d swallowed glass.

  “Eric.”

  Danica was there at his side, her flesh arm on his shoulders, pulling him close. She held him and let him cry into her hair. He smelled the oil and blood on her skin, felt her spirit wrap around them. Cross put his hand against the small of her back and pulled her tight against his body.

  He didn’t want to let go. Not ever.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened. I’m…”

  “Enough,” she said. She pulled back and looked him in the eye. “All right? Enough. You did everything you could. You did more than that. You’ve kept us alive and together and fighting even when you weren’t with us. I wouldn’t be alive if not for you. None of us would have gotten as far as we had if not for you. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get your shit together, because we are not finished yet!”

  He looked into her eyes. He could melt in them.

  Cross looked down at Shiv and Ronan, unconscious in the dirt, and at Flint’s corpse, so quiet and still. The spirits were gone, yet the air moved fast. A silent storm approached from the south.