Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)

by Steven Montano

  And yet somehow he had the strangest sense they’d done no harm to him…that they’d somehow prepared him for something important.

  Those creatures in the vision were the same race as these guys on the ship. They showed me something that’s happened to them…maybe even the reason they’re here now.

  He was dizzy and disoriented and felt like he’d been drugged. His limbs were tired and the inside of his chest was raw, like he breathed through a filter of dust and ice.

  He gave Sol a nod when they brought the criminal below and returned Kane topside. They secured his wrists in front of him and chained him to an iron loop on the deck.

  Ronan seemed to be in the same state of disconnect as he was. Even though he felt tired and drugged, Kane’s vision seemed somehow sharper. Colors looked clearer, details seemed more defined.

  Too bad there isn’t shit to see in the middle of the cold-ass desert.

  The skiff travelled for over another hour. The cool desert sky was pregnant with steel clouds. Dark fliers skimmed close to the distant dunes, and signs of recent conflict showed on the sandy landscape: shards of wrecked vehicles, charred bodies, drifts of greasy smoke that hung over the remains of ruined settlements.

  They saw the bones of tusked creatures and flew through the dank stench of the burning dead. They saw the remains of sacrifices. Tall crosses made of bone and sharpened bamboo had been erected on islands of jagged rock littered with eviscerated bodies. The oozing corpses had been burned and left for the desert predators.

  All of the corpses were reptilian.

  They never came for Jade or Maur.

  “Can you use your magic?” Kane asked Jade quietly. She looked as exhausted and as worn out as he was.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. She closed her eyes and focused for a moment. “I think it would be dangerous.”

  “Figures,” Kane said.

  “Not because of them,” she said with an eye towards the roving crewmen. They’d more or less left the team alone since they’d brought back Sol, who’d been left as dazed and weak as Kane and Ronan. “This entire area feels unstable.” Jade looked around and shook her head. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Who are these freaks?” Ronan growled. He looked at Jade. “You still think they’re Grey Clan?”

  “It would make sense,” Jade said. Ronan seemed unconvinced, and Kane had to agree with him: last he’d checked, the missing people of the fallen city-state of Desh weren’t exactly reptiles.

  Once a significant port city, Desh had been an early member of the Southern Claw Alliance. Besides having to deal with vampire hostilities, Desh had been also plagued by creatures out of the dangerous and unexplored Ebonsand Seas. Mutated sea horrors, Vuul pirates, and wave after wave of violent weather churning with dark sorcery had battered the city-state.

  Then, one early morning in the year A.B. 9, the city-state of Desh vanished without a trace. No one could explain how it could have been there one day and suddenly be gone the next. All intelligence gathered indicated that the Ebon Cities vampires weren’t responsible for Desh’s disappearance, and that they were just as confounded as the Southern Claw as to what had actually happened. There was nothing where the city had once stood: it had quite literally vanished without a trace. Everything from its citizens and curtain walls had evaporated into thin air. It was like Desh had never been built at all.

  Then, around 16 A.B., humanoid wanderers started to pop up along the Ebonsand Coast. They were surprisingly well-armed and piratical nomads who traveled on arcane-driven vehicles and eked out an existence along the rocky shores and sandy wastes. No one in the Southern Claw ever got close enough to learn any more about the creatures who’d come to be known as the Grey Clan, but it was widely accepted they were human, albeit somewhat more primitive and bestial in spite of their apparently sophisticated technology…technology that seemed to be based on that of the Southern Claw. Heightened activity on the front lines of the war prevented any further investigation of the Grey Clan, who deftly became even more difficult to find from that point on. They’d kept to the shadows, never posing any threat, but they were always on the Southern Claw’s watch list due to their mysterious origins.

  But nothing I ever heard said they were frickin’ snake men.

  Whatever they were, now that Kane, Ronan and Sol had been “treated”, the prisoners had been left alone. They’d even been given canteens of water and loaves of dark bread, which they vanquished hungrily. Kane felt like he hadn’t eaten in days, and since he’d actually been in that exact situation before he cautioned everyone to eat slowly for fear of making themselves ill.

  Of course, it hadn’t been days, but whatever they’d done to him below deck had robbed him of most of his strength.

  “Jade…what did they do to us?”

  She’d been watching all three of the men carefully ever since they’d been brought back on deck. The fact that the reptilians had left her and Maur alone was confusing. Had the humans been prepared for some sort of sacrifice? Or did they need some measure of protection that mages and Gol had no need for? None of it made any sense.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “How do you feel?”

  Kane had to think about that for a moment.

  “Like I’ve been drugged, only without the groovy buzz.” He looked up at the sky, then down to the sand. “My head feels weird. Clearer, I think.”

  “Like you’ve been enhanced?” she asked.

  “No, it’s just like…I can see more,” Kane said. “Things I don’t think I’d notice normally.” He looked at Jade, and he saw every curve of her pale smooth skin, the richness of her silky black hair, the etched details of the tribal tattoos on her neck, the subtle motions and sweat on her chest as she breathed in.

  Everything was clearer and brighter. He was overwhelmed by the sight of things that he would have missed before.

  They gave me HD vision. Terrific.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “My breathing is strange,” he said. “I feel like I have asthma or something. And I told you about the…vision. Hallucination. Whatever.” Jade nodded. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  Jade looked out at the desert. Kane had the sense she knew something she wouldn’t say.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  A behemoth city of pale rock and sea stone appeared in the wasteland of grey sand. Rickety bridges made from petrified sinew connected iron towers that looked shoved into the ground like wayward spears. Rings of blasted sandstone surrounded deep pits, and flags stitched from whale flesh flapped in the breeze. There were no streets, just sandy walkways that wound between rugged towers and houses thatched together with rope and metallic netting. Drifts of sand covered the buildings like metal snow. The Ebonsand Sea was just beyond the city, and it reflected the radiant light of the melting sun.

  Large walrus-like beasts shuffled outside the city perimeter and left lines of acidic glue in their wake. More of the grey-skinned humanoids rode the slug-tailed creatures. Skiffs docked on rusting metal planks next to crashing ocean waves. A number of ATVs and dune-buggies drove in and out of a network of tunnels beneath the city.

  Cold ocean air blew in from the dark sea. Kane tasted salt and engine oil.

  The vehicle flew close to the ground. Something appeared over a dune just south of the city.

  It was another skiff. It flew in low over the dune bank, and was also bound for the city. The vehicle was equipped with fewer guns and a wider deck than the vehicle Kane and the others rode, which meant there was more room for the dead and wounded on board.

  There were at least two dozen of the grey-skinned humanoids. They bled green or were missing limbs, and had been flayed open or turned inside out. Their grisly wounds were crudely bandaged with wraps of linen. Some of the wounded thrashed about violently as they clawed at some imaginary threat. Others couldn’t stop screaming, or bled constantly from both eyes. Several others had decaying appendages turned to stumps of c
lay or ash.

  The two crafts drew to within a hundred yards of each other. Kane heard dissonant whispers in the wind, a gritty chant made by gargling and guttural voices. It took him a moment to realize that what he heard was a chorus of the wounded. They all spoke jointly in a vagrant and sibilant tongue. Their eyes were blank as their mouths moved without their knowledge.

  “What the hell…” Kane whispered.

  “Anarchotech,” Jade said.

  “Bless you,” Kane said as he looked at her. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide.

  “And what the hell is ‘anarchotech’?” Ronan asked.

  “It’s Ebon Cities experimental magic,” she explained. “They fuse chaotic energies with captured soul power to create a new type of energy. It’s unstable. And it’s incredibly debilitating towards living creatures.”

  “Why don’t they use it all of the time, then?” Ronan said with a grim laugh. “And why haven’t we heard of it before?”

  “They just started experimenting with it recently,” Jade explained as their skiff drew closer to the city. “It’s still in the early stages, I think. Most Southern Claw mages know about it, but they haven’t spread the word.” She shrugged. “I guess your military doesn’t want a panic on its hands. I understand it’s dangerous for the vampires, too…it’s just a lot more dangerous for living creatures.”

  “So what does it do?” Kane asked.

  “It destabilizes you,” Jade said. “Melds you with other possibilities, or something to that effect. No one knows just how powerful it is.” She looked back at the ship of the wounded. “Hopefully we won’t find out.”

  “It looks like someone already has,” Kane said. “So it would seem these people are enemies of the vampires, too.”

  “Big deal,” Ronan said.

  The skiff came to a stop over an enormous landing platform hedged in by jagged towers. A seven-foot tall grey man with a lizard-like tail waited on the platform with a small contingent of guards armed with bolt-action rifles and wearing heavy cloaks to shield them from the icy wind.

  “Now what?” Ronan groaned.

  “Maybe they want to surrender,” Kane said.

  Kane and the team were led off the ship and brought to stand before the large reptilian. Their wrists were still shackled in chains, and the armed sentries kept a watchful eye.

  The massive draconian looked down at them. Kane watched more skiffs fly by in the distance.

  “Hi,” Kane said. “Nice place you have here. Like an amusement park, only minus the amusement.”

  The draconian grunted, then turned and walked away.

  “What the hell?” Sol said, almost in a laugh.

  “I get the impression we’re supposed to follow him,” Jade said.

  “Maur thinks that’s a terrible idea.”

  “For once, Ronan agrees with Maur,” Ronan said.

  “Jade?” Kane asked without taking his eyes off of the giant. “Do you or your spirit have anything to add here?”

  “There are no other spirits anywhere in the vicinity,” she said. “But this complex is shielded somehow. I can’t see past any of the outer areas.”

  Well, that’s about as unhelpful as you can get. He cursed under his breath and followed the giant.

  The complex was even larger than it appeared from the outside. They stepped through a pair of iron double doors and came into the guts of the refinery-city, a noisy industrial complex filled with dark metal and distant klaxons. The entire locale looked jury-rigged, a mismatched amalgamation of rusted steel towers and crooked iron girders, tube-shaped buildings with yellowed windows and stream pipes that filled the air with hot white smoke.

  Scaly Grey Clan moved with purpose through uneven narrow streets that had been hobbled together with patchworks of asphalt, rock, and cobblestone. The air in the city was green and tasted like some sort of cleaning agent. The atmosphere was vitriolic and liquid, and moving through it felt like walking through a dissolving gel.

  Kane noticed that the reptilians didn’t wear masks there in the city.

  Strange organic creatures somewhere between jellyfish and seagulls navigated the space between the haphazard rooftops. Workers carted sacks of sea rock and vats of burning liquid. Everything smelled of industry and machines. The loud grind of gears and metal hammers sang into the sky.

  The air took on a turgid quality. An enormous gel shield surrounded the city. Kane knew it hadn’t been there before, when they’d been on the skiff and on the landing platform, which meant the barrier was only visible from within. The Ebonsand Sea and the beach and the sky were all on the other side of a gigantic and sickly green lens. Everything in the reptile city was suffused with green muck, and every particle of air was weighed down by intangible sludge, making it difficult to breathe.

  Kane and the others were marched through the streets. Reptilian humanoids parted and watched the procession. The Grey Clan all wore faded grey overalls or simple patchwork clothing that allowed for the subtle variations in their specific body types: prehensile lizard’s tails, multiple arms, spiked ridges along the back, undulating chest cavities that rose and fell like organic accordions.

  The giant reptile-man led them with the help of an entourage of guards. The mercenaries were marched towards what appeared to be the center of the metropolis of metal and recycled industrial parts, old ships and re-invented watercrafts. The streets ran low between elevated platforms filled with ramshackle housing. Thin walkways made of metal and sinew ran between the taller buildings. Kane looked up through the green air and saw the compressed sky.

  “What the hell is this place?” Ronan said, but he didn’t really speak, even though his words sounded in the air. Kane answered, and that was when he realized they really did walk through liquid. The air was a chemical substance: they moved through a gelatinous atmosphere. Even though they’d been breathing it for several minutes, it wasn’t until Kane tried to speak that he actually felt the sticky fluid push down his throat. He almost gagged, but the words still escaped.

  “Not Kansas,” he said.

  Kane looked around. It was difficult to discern one building from the next. He saw vague outlines of old sea vessels and the shells of converted fuel tanks, the husks of land rovers and sheets of tin plating scoured with burn marks and scratches.

  The other reptile folk watched them silently. They seemed a silent people, a direct counter to the industrial din of the city they inhabited.

  “Jade?” Kane said, fighting his desire to gag on the floating muck. He felt himself moving slower. “What the hell is this place?”

  It’s New Desh, his own voice echoed back in his mind. It was the voice of the giant, filtered though Kane’s brain. Yes. We are the Grey Clan. And you are here to help us.

  “What?!” Kane said out loud, but no other answer was given.

  Enough of this shit.

  He stopped walking. When the lead reptile realized he wasn’t following, it turned and walked back with loud and deliberate steps. The other sentries waited stoically.

  Motion ceased all around them. Dozens of reptilians stopped what they were doing and cast their eyes to the scene as the enormous leader moved towards Kane.

  Move, Kane’s own voice echoed in his head, the voice of the Grey Man. Now.

  “Screw you,” he said, and he leapt forward and kicked the Grey Man’s knee. Even in the heavy air the force of the blow was enough to crack the bone with a sickening squelch. The creature growled and fell.

  “Jade!” Kane yelled.

  He was glad she decided to ignore her concerns about the area being too unstable and finally use her magic. The gritty air turned thin, melted by the presence of her spirit. Sol and Ronan struck out and knocked two of the armed guards aside. Ronan even managed to disarm one and steal its barbed spear. He swung it around and downed another sentry, leaving eight immediate threats for them to deal with. Jade’s spirit swept four of them aside, while Kane kicked the leader in its lizard’s nose. Sol grabbed two and kno
cked their heads together.

  More Grey Clan descended from above. They came down slowly, altered the air’s viscosity to make it so they almost flew. They wore armored masks and bladed bracers and yielded double-edged swords. Their armor was covered in razor-tipped spines.

  Kane kicked one in the face as it came down and sent it flying back through the air. He pulled a blade away from another and used it to defend himself. Even in that goop atmosphere he moved as fast as he ever had – if anything, he was faster, as the pain that had bothered his leg for the past few days seemed to vanish in that gel air.

  Reptilian citizens scattered all around them. Window panels slammed shut and klaxon alerts blasted out like air-raid signals.

  Most of the Grey sentries hesitated, as if unsure of what to do. Even though Kane and the others were surrounded, the soldiers held back, and those who did engage didn’t use their blades but instead tried to grapple the captives, who in spite of being shackled at the wrist still put up a valiant fight.

  They want us alive. They didn’t expect us to give them this much resistance.

  Jade shaped her spirit into a cone of razor air and scattered the scaled soldiers. Bodies flew and fell hard to the steel city floor. Sol pelted reptilians with his considerable fists, and Ronan hacked at anyone who came close. Maur stayed close to Ronan, spotting for him and barking orders as to who to slice up next.

  Enough! Kane’s own voice shouted at him.

  The Grey Clan sentries stopped in their tracks. Jade was held still with a dazed look in her eyes. A nimbus of crackling black fire surrounded her head in a net of ebon steel. Sharp points aimed in towards her skull from the inside of the sphere, solid midnight knives that hovered less than an inch from her skin.

  A tendril of shadow energy ran from the sparkling orb back to a reptilian hand. Unlike the others, the creature that held the arcane whip was largely human, save for a greenish tint to his skin and scaly ridges on his brow and jaw. His fingers ended in dark claws, and he was dressed in an armored coat made from oily skins and toothed shoulder plates. The arcane harness slithered and wrapped around his hand like a snake made of electric smoke.