What do you want?
Not the Obelisk. He was sure of that. Was giving the Obelisk of Dreams to the Shadow Lords just a matter of convenience, a means to an end? Had the spider so deftly manipulated Cross to arrange for one of his friends to wind up where it needed them to be? Did Black or Kane have something it wanted, or did they serve some greater purpose it needed them to fulfill?
Cross’s heart chilled. He could only dare guess at the spider’s goals, at how great its vision extended through the network of space and time.
But he felt with dread certainty that his friends were in danger.
Cross gripped his blade with hands gone numb from the cold. He wiped rancid steam from his eyes, shook himself, breathed deep.
He’d make his stand there. With any luck, it wouldn’t be his last.
It can’t be. I have to find them. I have to save them.
Shadows moved in the distance. He heard the industrial grind of heavy machines and the ring of metal on stone. The air crackled and hummed with thaumaturgy, and he smelled iron and smoke.
They were coming. He pushed thoughts of Danica and Mike and the others from his mind.
They come for him. He’s waited, watched the inky darkness in anticipation of this assault. He believes he has no chance, but he knows, in these last moments of his life, at this final crossroads, that he can’t allow himself to fail.
Hand-cannons lined with blades push through the darkness. He sees giant silhouettes and central single eyes. He sees grey armor fused with iron plate as Sorn enter the chamber.
Cross moves in a blur, not sure where his sudden speed comes from, not even cognizant of what’s happening until he cuts the first giant down, slices it from groin to neck and feels hot purple blood splash onto his face.
The blade is in control.
He swipes, ducks and weaves like a bladed dancer. He moves in and out of shadows like he’s a shadow himself. He sees other versions of himself, alternate possibilities. He steps and steps again, cuts and cuts again. He strikes the same creature only once, but from many angles. His stutter-strikes punch out from different dimensional possibilities. He is as the spider sees him: himself at a crossroads, the many paths conjoined into one. He is himself, striking from different futures, different pasts.
Blasts deafen his ears. Iron shot and nail spikes rip into the stone walls. The Sorn pour through, grim and silent, their enormous bodies blocking the way out. Monsters from the Carrion Rift scream as ballistics punch through the walls and rip into them.
He steps, strikes, steps away, strikes again. He hamstrings grey giants and severs fuel couplings, yanks grenades away from belts and tosses them at other Sorn. He sends hails of exploding flesh and fuel sailing through the air in molten waves.
He has become a walking nightmare, a shade. He sees them in blurs, barely aware of his own motions. The blade cuts up and through and across. Fingers and shells fall to the ground.
The Sorn are confused. He’s everywhere and nowhere at once. They accidentally fire into one another, send flames back into their own ranks. Six are dead in the space of a minute.
One grabs him. It guesses correctly, or else the probability of his slipping past becomes too miniscule, even in this confused and chaotic place. He’s thrown against the wall, and feels his back break.
Another Cross steps up and kills the offending Sorn, tears through its chest with his arcane sword. He sees a third Cross cut down by rotating gun barrels and stamped into gristle.
He is all of the versions of himself. The spider has joined more than one Cross to this battle: it has sent them all.
Condemned me to die. Every one of me.
He ducks back, hides in the dark. Sorn draw bludgeoning melee weapons and pursue him. He dodges around massive stalagmites. The giants spray the area with chain guns and nail launchers. Shards of stone and steel rain down around him.
He howls and leaps back into their midst. Soulrazor/Avenger hacks through flesh and tears through armor. He hears low grunts and watches bodies ooze purple waste onto the ground.
He stands alone. He has defeated all of them. Over a dozen Sorn bodies lie in ruins. They sag and fade and bleed out without a sound.
He regards the other versions of himself. They stand as if in council, half-concealed by shadows, wavering in and out of existence. They are barely recognizable. Some wear full beards, some are clean-shaven; one is missing an eye, while another is dressed as a Revenger; one still possesses his spirit, and he can even taste her in the air, her scent, her power. None of them is whole: they are half-illuminated shades, flickering ghost images. None of them is really there, and yet they all are.
They vanish. He is alone with the corpses.
Impressive, a voice says, and he turns around.
They’re there. The mages.
There are six Shadow Lords, each identical to the last, tall men in charcoal robes and high leather boots. Iron belts and bracers adorn their shadow-drenched skin. Each wears a simple and featureless mask, a bisected segment of skin-tight steel with dark eye slits. They are doppelgangers of one another, and the air is alive with the force of their arcane might.
He readies his blade. He knows he can’t hope to defeat them all, but he has to try.
The first mage sends a blast of fire. He slices it in half, and the pale flames sear out and strike another warlock, who dies screaming. Cross doesn’t give his attacker a second chance: he charges and removes the man’s head with a clean swipe.
Another warlock attacks him with gauntlets covered in crackling green waste. A fourth forges an ice sword and meets him in battle.
He shatters the ice sword and sends the mage back, then turns and severs the gauntlet-yielder’s hands. He spins and finishes the sword bearer, and both mages fall to the ground and die at the same moment.
But the last two mages have him. The first warlock slices his arm open with a blade made of black steel and diamond edges. He cackles like a child as he watches Cross stagger and bleed. The other mage hammers Cross with a cone of gravitational force that sends him to his knees and blasts the wind from his lungs.
Well done, Tregoran.
And you, Marklahain.
He falls onto his back. The uncertain world shifts even further. His sword is on the ground, well out of his reach.
What did the Eidolos tell me? He struggles to remember its words, to bring to mind the secret that had been imparted to him by the dread psychic. He feels certain the knowledge will save him.
The last two mages stand over him. One of them eyes their prize: the frozen obelisk. They both laugh coldly.
He looks for the other versions of himself, but their connection to this place is gone. He’s all alone, left with the burden of his failure, with the knowledge that he’d nearly stopped these mad warlocks.
But that doesn’t matter, he realizes. Because even if I’d beaten the Shadow Lords, Azradayne will still get what she wants.
He struggles for breath and gropes for his weapon, but it’s buried deep in the folds of shadow that creep across the floor.
Only the living are lost. He remembers the words the Eidolos had given him. Only the living are lost.
Arcane energies fuse around him. His skin goes rigid, and his lungs freeze. He knows that it’s too late.
NINETEEN
WARZONE
Kane took a deep breath.
“Relax,” Turner told him.
“Are you my therapist?” he asked her sharply.
“No.”
“Then stop telling me to relax.”
Kane smelled ice, oil and gunpowder as the ship skimmed over the brittle surface of the Dark Sea, a largely frozen marshland between the Bone Hills and the vast tundra called The Reach. According to Burke, that was where they’d find the ruins of Voth Ra’morg, where The Revengers and the Kothians planned to enter the Whisperlands.
It was also where Rake and his cronies would likely kill Cross and Black in their attempt to get…something. No one seemed clea
r as to what it was Rake was actually looking for, but everyone seemed to agree that if he was going through this much trouble, it had to be something bad.
The cold ship rattled as it sped along. Kane saw the black and marshy landscape through the wide windows. The land was littered with icy reeds and mounds of frozen lichen, islands of damp earth and giant petrified mushrooms. The setting sun shone red and gold as it sank behind grey-black clouds. Dark mountain peaks loomed in the distance.
Grey Clan skiffs, bulky grey vessels with industrial turbines and heavy guns, trailed Burke’s squat and ugly warship.
Turner finished giving Kane his injection, an arcane healing solution made from a blend of salt water, holy oils and Type A Blood. Supposedly it would help purge whatever was left of the vampiric infection from his system. Turner shot the fluid into his arm with a needle he thought was roughly the size of a broadsword.
Under normal circumstances, a single injection should have been sufficient. Unfortunately, time progressed differently in the Whisperlands than it did in the sane world, and so far as Turner knew – and the book-smart Revenger seemed to know quite a bit – no one had ever been bitten by a vampire while they were in the shadow realm and then transferred back to the physical world before the infection had set in. Supposedly, coming back had actually saved his life, since the slower flow of time delayed the infection process.
“But that also means,” Turner told him, “that the necrotic insects have actually been in your blood longer than normal. So we’ll need to continue giving you treatments, just to be sure.”
“I hate getting shots,” he said plainly. “They make me feel like I’m going to puke or fall over. Or both.”
“Good thing you’re a big tough guy, then,” Turner said matter-of-factly. “Because you’re going to be doing this for quite some time.”
Great, he groaned in his mind. As if things weren’t bad enough.
Turner walked away with the empty syringe, leaving Kane holding a wad of sterile cloth up to where he’d received the shot.
The bridge of Burke’s airship was wide and tall. The steel was grey-green and sterile.
Maur stood near the cockpit, where he watched the mostly reptilian pilot operate a complicated-looking network of handles, wheels and levers. Ronan, Sol and Marcus checked their weapons, while Burke went over schematic readouts of the area.
How did things get this screwed up? Kane wondered. We’ve been away from Thornn for what feels like forever. None of us expected that getting Cross back would be so damn complicated.
Or so costly. They’d lost Ash and Grissom, and now it looked like they were in danger of losing Black, too. And maybe even Cross himself.
Never really thought this was how things would end, he thought.
“Kane?” Jade came and sat down next to him on the long and uncomfortable steel benches that ran along the back wall of the deck. The growl of arcane turbines filled the air with such noise she practically had to shout to be heard.
“What?”
“Are you okay?”
He looked at her. She was a gorgeous woman, far too alluring to be wrapped up with a scumbag like Klos Vago. He knew what she really was: a cold-blooded criminal, an enforcer more concerned with a paycheck than with who she had to hurt to get it.
“What do you care?” he asked, and he turned back to the long window so he could watch the marsh.
She grabbed his hand until he turned to look at her.
“Because I feel like caring,” she said sternly. “Look, you and I started off on the wrong foot, but that doesn’t mean things have to stay that way.”
She was thin, practically a waif even in thick leather armor and armed with a veritable arsenal of knives and hex grenades. Her hand felt good in his.
“Decided to finally be nice to me now that we’re all marching to our deaths, huh?” he grinned.
“Try to stay positive,” she said. The way she said the words made it sound like she actually meant them. “We’ve made it this far, and from the sounds of things you’ve made it through worse. We should be okay…”
“Should be isn’t good enough,” he said. I want to live. I want Dani and Cross to be okay. God damn it, things were good before that mission into the Bonespire. I just want to go back to the way we were. “Look, just…don’t try to make me feel better, OK? As things stand, we don’t have much of a chance of getting your bosses’ job done. Speaking of which…why are you still even here?”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“What’s your stake in all of this? It’s not like you guys give a crap about Cross, or anything.”
“Burke hasn’t exactly offered to send us home,” she said plainly. “What else are we supposed to do?”
“You could stay out of it,” Kane said matter-of-factly. “Mind your own business.”
“Is that what you’d do?”
“It’s what I’d do if I knew I wasn’t wanted.”
She gave him a wry smile.
“Did it ever occur to you that we may actually want to help?”
Kane looked into her eyes.
God, I want to believe her.
“You mean you and Sol?”
She hesitated, just for a moment, and nodded.
“Yes. Me and Sol.”
“No,” he answered. “Your interest in me extends only so far as getting Vago what he wants.”
Jade laughed. He could tell she was exasperated.
“Ok,” she said. “Never mind then,” she said.
He almost stopped her from leaving, but he didn’t.
For a few minutes, while the rickety airship flew low over black waters and the sun started to set and they approached the ruined city-state of Voth Ra’morg, Kane sat alone. He longed for things to return to a place they never could. He was afraid, so afraid, because he knew this couldn’t end well, that more of them would die. A fist of pure fear slammed down his spine.
He would do what he had to do. He’d fight to his last breath to save his friends. But Kane knew they were already lost.
Voth Ra’morg was a shell.
The ruined structure came into view just as the sun set over the eastern horizon. Jagged stone walls and rusted steel towers glowed faint grey-gold in the light of the dying sun. Black and icy marshlands surrounded the ruins. A thin and crumbling network of earth and wooden walkways provided safe passage across the dark bog. Tendrils of green mist hovered just over the water, and wooden stakes surrounded the desolate city like a ring of black blades.
They weren’t the first to reach the ruins: The Revengers had beaten them there.
A large airship hovered just over the island, tethered by a mooring chain. Two smaller ships flew in a perimeter pattern around the structure. Both vessels were heavily armed with repeating cannons and arcane ballistae.
Dark war machines moved on the ground. The black juggernauts had massive iron wheels and swinging turrets, blade-rams and flame-cannons, and they crashed through the laggard waters and flattened the mounds of earth and old wooden walkways in their path.
The vehicles moved quickly. Dark water burst skyward as explosions struck the ground. The air was riddled with machinegun fire.
The Black Scar invaders were under attack.
Kane moved to the window, stood next to the others and looked out at the scene. Ronan broke out his binoculars.
At first Kane thought Rake and his crew had run afoul of some natural creatures in the area, or squatters who’d claimed the ruins. But he doubted the airship would have moored there if anything in Voth Ra’morg hadn’t already been dealt with. At worst, The Revengers might have had to contend with tundra barbarians or Gorgoloth who roamed the area in search of plunder.
Instead, the creatures who attacked the Revengers were Troj – massive red-skinned humanoids with draconic faces, knotted muscles and heavy armor, thick swords and rifles as big as motorcycles. They were no swamp vagrants, but elite mercenaries, their loyalties marked by the slashed eye and fang sigils on their
dark armor.
“Ebon Cities,” Ronan said.
“Damn it, they’re already here,” Burke said. “Signal the attack!”
Blasts tore the swamp apart. Mud and dirt exploded in bursts of black water. Troj raced through the swamp, nine-foot tall brutes that moved with alarming speed. Thunderously loud rifles pelted the dark iron tanks. The Troj moved fearlessly, well aware of their own near invulnerability, for their thaumaturgically modified metabolism healed most wounds with ease and they were bred to know neither pain nor fear. The fact that their barbaric minds were artificially infused with the latest military tactics and ordnance training made them all the more dangerous.
Creatures of equal size from Black Scar met the Troj in battle. They were tall and gangly undead with burn-black skin pulled taut against distorted bones, and their skeletal bodies were covered with thick body armor. The gaunt undead giants were armed with what Kane guessed were 20mm cannons.
Shells tore the marshy earth apart as the two ground forces advanced across the field. The Troj moved towards the ruins, the undead defended it.
“Scarecrows,” Turner explained. “The first gift Rake accepted from Koth to seal the alliance.”
“Shit, there’s more,” Ronan said. He’d turned his binoculars north.
A number of vampire warships drifted over the horizon, followed by a Coffin: a long and rectangular iron vessel that served as a troop transport for the Ebon Cities. Dark mist trailed the Wing of airships and painted the sky black.
Mist rolled ahead of the Ebon Cities ground forces. Thick fumes curled forward in a wave of fog that buried the marsh in blue-black smoke. Massive silhouettes were barely visible within, a host of slow-moving behemoth humanoids that moved jerkily. Patches of rotting green flesh appeared as the figures came to the edge of the smoke. Blank eyes stared ahead. The Doj zombies dragged broken tree-trunks or planks of wood dotted with steel shards and nails. They walked with terrifying precision, and stamped their way through the swamp.
Many of the giants held large iron spheres the size of cauldrons. Small holes in the spheres leaked blue-black flames.
Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) Page 24