It looks familiar.
Heavy leaves fall in his path. He sees women assembled near the tree line.
She’s there. She has to be there.
He goes to find her. His feet splash in ankle-deep freezing waters that hadn’t been there a moment before. Tears of joy run down his face.
No, Vala screams, but he doesn’t listen. He can’t.
He only takes a few steps when tentacles wrap around his leg. Their touch is so cold they burn. The water bubbles and pulls back, no longer icy and cold but hot and turgid and filled with blood. Foamy eyes take shape in the murk.
The dark tentacles tighten around his limbs and lift him into the air. A great maw like an open wound rises from the water beneath his feet. It pulls open like a tear. Thousands of tiny teeth glisten with poison and filth.
He hacks through the tentacles and falls into the water. He twists and kicks and swallows the sick fluid, emerges and gasps for air. Another tentacle wraps around his throat.
Vala charges in and hacks off the leathery appendage with an axe. Kyver grabs Cross’s arm and pulls him free. They struggle out of the water and make their way back to shore. Cross’s body is wracked with hurt.
The rest of the Grey Clan is all dead. The vampires feast on the remains and howl into the sky. Several of the undead turn and look and run after the three survivors as they struggle to escape the tentacle beast, a bulbous sack of meat limbs and drooping mouths. Teeth grind and twist in the gaping holes all over its body.
The forest is now nothing but dead branches. Whatever Cross thought he’d seen had just been an illusion. The same is true of the mountain: it’s actually a stout metal citadel made of twisted edges and serrated walls, towers like spikes and portals like wounds. The Citadel is fused to a smelted hill of granite and stained quartz. Jagged crenellations reach towards the sky like hooked claws.
The Black Citadel.
They run for the doorway in the base of the Citadel. Vampires snarl at their backs. The tentacle beast lashes out, grabs some of the undead and pulls them to the water, but that doesn’t deter the relentless mob as they scrape their way through bloody remains and tear across the open ground. Long tongues drip acid drool and claws scratch against the ground.
Vala shoves him forward through the doorway
and time slowed. The dark walls came into focus. The light brightened as they moved away from the shadow grime of the Whisperlands.
Kyver shoved Cross ahead and looked back at the door. The crowd of bestial vampires was less than thirty yards away.
“Go!” Kyver shouted. “This is as far as we can take you!”
“What…?”
“I hope your Eidolos friend told you what to do!” he shouted, and he turned back. Vala slammed the door shut, and they barricaded it with a thick wooden beam and propped up iron bars that looked like they’d once been part of a portcullis.
Hazy torchlight suffused the Citadel. Bits of sharp metal protruded from every wall, which was dirty and covered with rust and dried blood. Dangling iron braziers swung back and forth on metal chains that ran up to the height of the narrow ceiling. Thin curls of grey smoke filled the hall with the smell of burning coals. The corridor that led from the entrance ran for as far as Cross could see.
The door buckled behind them, and they heard the wild growls of rabid vampires. Claws raked the door from the other side and filled the air with the song of knives.
“Go!” Kyver yelled again. “We’ll hold them for as long as we can…find Azradayne! Stop her from getting the Obelisk!”
Cross nodded, and ran. He wanted to say ‘thank you’, but it seemed ridiculous given the circumstances. They’d used him just as much as he’d used them. They all had something to gain, and plenty to lose.
He just hoped he wouldn’t fail them all.
The door buckled again. The growls grew louder. He glimpsed back, but Kyver and Vala faded into the darkness behind him as he ran.
He didn’t have much time.
The hall emptied into a sort of amphitheater. Wide and rounded steps led up to a platform covered with large cages and slabs of ice turned grey with age. Multiple halls led away from the chamber.
Each cage held the skeletal remains of a creature, and not all of them were human: he saw Gol and Vuul, Gorgoloth and thin and mouthless Lith.
White-grey illumination bled down through dirty skylights in the tall ceiling. Thin sheets of grease ice covered the steps and the upper platform, and old gnarled bones and rocks littered the floor.
Cross looked down the hallways and saw nothing but shadows. He heard the growl of monsters in the distance.
The air tasted like smoke. With Soulrazor/Avenger in hand he crossed the chamber. His boots felt like they were ready to come apart. He looked down at himself and saw that his rotting clothing was brown and black with dirt and shadowy filth. He looked like a beggar.
It felt strange not having his spirit with him. In the confusing atmosphere of the Whisperlands it was easy to forget he was so alone because everything there was always in flux, and the unintelligible spectral voices in the black wind never ceased. Here, the isolation struck him, and he felt naked. He had no ability to scout ahead or determine what lay down the corridors short of investigating them himself. He couldn’t sense if anything approached. He was just Cross, barely armed and alone.
Which means I don’t stand a chance.
All he had was the arcane blade, which, though powerful, remained something of a mystery. He was still unsure of its full potential. It could heal him, and it seemed capable of shielding him from harm. It could destroy powerful creatures, and it granted him more sword fighting skill than he actually possessed.
Still, it decided when it did all of those things. He had little control over the blade, and little notion of what it wanted. He sensed intelligence in it, a dark and powerful presence, but he couldn’t communicate with the weapon. It frightened him.
Cross stopped to catch his breath. His body shook all over. Now that he was back out of the black winds all of his aches and fatigue caught up with him. His muscles were sore and his bones felt bruised.
He remembered his old life, back with the team. He felt like he’d just seem them, like no time had passed at all. Maybe he’d just wake up from that nightmare and be back in the manor, ready to eat eggs made by Ash’s homunculi and trying not to trip on Grissom’s damned giant cat. He’d listen to Ronan and Kane bicker, and he’d watch Maur tinker with explosives at the dining table. And he’d see Danica, and maybe, just maybe, he’d tell her how he felt.
But that’s not going to happen on its own. You have to get there first. You have to earn it.
He steeled himself. He’d get nowhere standing around.
Cross made his way across the room. Drifts of dust and floating ice crystals hung in the air.
A sense of dread overtook him, and he stopped in his tracks. Something else moved in the chamber.
He looked up at the ceiling and saw a massive white spider, easily the size of an automobile. It nested on an iron web, and its behemoth stomach stretched like it was ready to burst. Hundreds of milk-pale eggs pulled taut against its cadaverous sack. Diamond black eyes shone darkly in the grey-white light.
The spider watched him. Cross stared up at it, petrified. Dozens of his reflections looked back at him, one from each of the spider’s many dark eyes, and each image was slightly different from the others. He was a different man in every one of them.
The spider sat as still as a stone. He knew for a fact he’d seen it before.
It can’t be. It’s just another hallucination.
He ran.
Cross found himself in a maze of halls. There was no sound. He moved through crypts and past archways made of antler and bone. Razorblade tapestries and iron mirrors lined the corridors. Some areas were bound in darkness so thick it nearly suffocated him.
Eventually he slowed his pace. His heart raced, and his skin was flushed with cold sweat. Grime covered him, a la
yer of muck so dense he’d never shake it off. He felt dirt beneath his fingernails and around his eyes.
He looked around.
Dark murals covered the walls of a wide and long chamber, a sort of meeting hall or assembly area. Blood-red carpets lined the floor, but like everything else in the Black Citadel they’d been eaten by age, and were covered with moth holes and frayed edges. A long table made of silver and stone took up the middle of the chamber, but it, too, had been ruined by the passage of time.
Things didn’t seem to last there. That was the Whisperland’s curse: nothing went untarnished. Decades passed in that realm while only weeks went by in the solid world, but the darkness of the Whisperlands corroded everything, living and otherwise. It decayed material things, caked the brain, and soiled the soul.
He cautiously moved deeper into the chamber. Blood welled up beneath his feet when he stepped on the thick carpet. He stepped away. Even with everything else he’d been through, for some reason he didn’t want that crimson filth on his boots.
He approached the murals. They all showed a spider – the spider, his spider, an enormous and pale monstrosity ready to burst with young. She devoured cities. Mounds of humans fell before the creature’s onslaught. In the murals she was vast, a legged insectoid moon. Buildings and monuments collapsed beneath her. People, their faces pale with horror, fell into dark rips made in the earth by her monstrous razor limbs.
It can’t be, he thought.
He stepped away from the murals and moved on.
He went deeper into the Black Citadel. Nothing challenged him. He had the feeling nothing would.
Cross passed through cold chambers filled with ice wells and shattered bone masks. He saw blood runes on the walls and floor, half-completed sculptures of man-beast symbiotes and gigantic insect skulls.
The inside of the Citadel was vast, much larger than it should have been, but he’d learned long ago not to trust anything he saw in the Whisperlands.
He knew he was near the Carrion Rift, the place where the obelisk had fallen. He could feel it.
Only the living are lost. That was what the Eidolos had told him, the knowledge he’d need once he breached the Citadel and faced its masters. It had told Cross he’d understand what it meant when the time was right, and that it could mean the difference between failure and success. Only the living are lost.
The air was colder the further he went. He walked through drifts of grave dust, and the stone halls grew darker. The muted light from the hanging braziers dimmed. Burning fog covered the floor. Cross walked slowly, careful to keep his distance from the bladed walls.
Everything was deathly still. He tightened his grip on his sword as he passed crossroads that led to bone-dry rooms. Everything was cold and dead. He selected a corridor at random, and walked down it.
I can’t have escaped notice, he thought. They know I’m here. They’re toying with me.
He’d made a mistake. He had no idea how to find the entrance to the Carrion Rift, or if he could be sure the Obelisk was truly in the Citadel.
Maybe I should have circumvented the Citadel, and looked for the Rift itself.
Only the living are lost.
Cross pressed on. He passed hanging cages filled with cadavers long sucked dry of their blood and fluids. He tasted arcane fumes in the air; they were intoxicating, and he shook with need. Bodies had been submerged in pools of formaldehyde, and he saw workshop chambers populated by half-constructed automatons. There were rooms filled with sarcophagi and swords.
Cross’s anger mounted the further he went. He was nothing to the masters of this place. Azradayne and the Shadow Lords had no fear of the man who wandered the halls of their lair. He was insignificant, not even worth challenging.
The shadows deepened. After a while he could barely see. He held his blade steady, ready for something to leap out of the darkness at any moment. He used it to probe the ground and the walls.
We search.
Only the living are lost.
Cross walked on. He was not afraid.
Shapes bled into view. The silence melted into the sound of distant fires and the echo of alien birds.
He came to a wooden bridge decorated with bones. The bridge spanned a deep chasm.
He was no longer in the Citadel. He’d found the Carrion Rift.
Cross looked around. The Black Citadel was behind him, with its bladed halls and piles of bones and its utterly dead smell. He stood on the edge of a plain of smashed black ice and oily stone. Purple mist curled against the ground. The sky was dead black.
The Rift lay before him, a massive rent in the dark earth. Green and black fumes filled the depths of the canyon, roiling poison smoke filled with vague shadows and monstrous calls. The walls were broken and jammed with jutting bones and gaping holes. Mounds of smelted quartz formed a crude ledge near the iron-chained bridge. Massive skulls – likely Doj – decorated the poles supporting the chains. The bridge rocked and creaked in the acid breeze. A path paved with glittering black scales led to the bridge.
Cross slowly stepped forward and looked over the edge.
We search.
The Obelisk of Dreams would be below, in the depths of the canyon, but there was little chance he’d be able to descend and find it, at least not without magic. He doubted his hybrid blade would grant him the ability to fly.
What, then? What the hell am I supposed to do?
He looked ahead. Dark shapes moved in the distance, silhouettes hidden in walls of grisly steam. They were giants, and they hauled some large boxes or crates.
Or the obelisk. Shit.
He crouched low and stepped onto the bridge. It rattled and shook, and for a moment he gazed into its impossible depths. Stories told of the Carrion Rift being filled with deep channels of blood water and the half-submerged remains of cities destroyed during The Black. Monstrous aberrations and mutated horrors lurked there, things that had never known sunlight or clean air.
Cross carefully made his way across, holding onto the chain railing for support. The bridge pitched and almost threw him over the edge. Fumes filled with acid whispers slithered around him.
One hand on the chain, he jogged across as quickly as he could, his eyes on the silhouettes within the smoke on the other side. He knew what was waiting for him.
Once off the bridge he ducked behind a low wall made of smoking dark ice filled with stone sediment. The ground was cold and hard. He waited, and watched.
As he’d feared, the giants beyond the smoke were Sorn: nine-foot tall humanoids with stony grey skin and mismatched steel and leather plate armor, short capped helmets and steaming thaumaturgic equipment, steam-driven hammers and large repeating pistols. Each had a single yellow eye in the middle of a wide forehead covered with short horns. The four Sorn moved in and out of the smoke. They circled a twenty-foot wide hole in the ground. The hole was uneven and jagged, like something had fallen from the sky and punched through the earth.
The Sorn shifted large crates and steel-rimmed boxes filled with iron tools, welding torches, chisels and hammers. Another broken wall of ice granite stood on the other side of the hole, and beyond that the world spilled into open dark plains.
Cross watched the giants erect a trio of iron beams to form a pyramid over the hole. Bolt guns punched thick iron nails through the metal and into the ground. One Sorn wore a facemask and used a massive acetylene torch to bind the tips of the beams together. Another Sorn gathered lines of cable and a pulley.
They planned to descend.
That must be where the rip is, he thought. The way back to the real world. The place where they’ll take the Obelisk.
Something sounded in the distance behind him. He heard a booming sound, like dropping bombs. The dark sky rippled with twisted arcs of chain lightning. He smelled the tang of ozone and rain, a distant and half-remembered memory from his childhood.
Something was happening at the Black Citadel.
They’re looking for me, he realized. How they c
ouldn’t have known he was there already was beyond him. He felt sure the spider had been a guardian pet of the Shadow Lords, a minion or a marauder in their service. And he knew it had seen him. Never mind that. They’re looking for you now. You don’t have a lot of time.
He continued watching the Sorn from his hidden position. His body was tired and cold, and the hexed fumes that poured out of the Rift made the air taste sick.
One of the Sorn hauled some sort of generator or engine towards the hole. Thick rubber tubes and hoses pumped translucent fluids into vibrating nozzles. The device sounded like an airship’s turbines, and soon it filled the air with such noise it was impossible to hear anything else, even the distant echoes as the Black Citadel came to life. The Sorn plugged pneumatic filters into the engine and sprayed pale grey smoke into the hole. Cross guessed they were sending purifying fumes to make the air below less poisonous.
It’s now or never.
He raced forward. The grinding engines masked the sound of his movement. He ducked low and kept close to the shattered walls, and he used the columns of fused mountain rock for cover as he darted between the crates. He dug around near the top of a box until he found what he was looking for. Cross stayed low and kept his breaths shallow and even so he wouldn’t be heard.
With the Sorn’s attention on the hole, Cross stepped up and sliced open the fuel pump on the machine. Foul-smelling liquid ran all over the ground and formed sticky pools.
The Sorn turned soundlessly, and one moved to inspect the damage. Cross slipped back into the shadows and kept his body pressed tight against a twisted wall of glacial rock. He was thankful the Sorn had poor night vision.
His mind flashed back to the city of Rhaine. He saw Graves and Cristena and Stone. He’d watched them all die at the hands of the Sorn, and even though the giants responsible had all been killed, a hatred for the predatory race still burned deep in his heart.
He aimed the flare gun between the Sorn’s legs and fired. The engine fuel caught alight. Cross ran. He heard weapons being readied behind him, and he half expected to be shot in the back by massive nail shots or ball rounds.
Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) Page 20