TWENTY-ONE
FALLING
Do you?
She floats in pale seas, adrift in the void. There’s no sound and no feeling: just her and the light.
It isn’t real, and she knows it, but she no longer knows what is. She hangs outside of time, held in a web. Here she is still whole. They’ve not yet robbed her of her arm and replaced it with some bastard arcane creation that doubles as a prison for her spirit. Here she still exists as she once was, not as some monster, a fusion of living and undead, flesh and steel.
Here, she’s not yet become their sacrifice.
Where am I?
This is not where she is. This time, these events…they’ve already happened. She’s a prisoner again. Trapped to witness her own collapse, to watch as a life she once knew is brutally erased.
Kane died, and Danica screamed.
Rake shot him in the face, then shot him again as the body fell soundlessly to the ground. Mike’s body crumpled in a bloody heap.
Her vision flashed white. The vampire voices in the back of her mind silenced as her spirit howled with rage. Her vision focused. The space between she and Rake seemed to close. Her heartbeat filled her ears. Blood poured from her side.
“Raaaaaaaake!” she screamed.
She felt nothing in the blood steel appendage, but as the soul flame leapt from her metal fingers the false arm burned the tender flesh where it had been mounted into her scapula. Heat painfully radiated across her upper body. She cried tears of hurt.
Rake was too fast, and his spirit was too strong. Blue fire burned around his shield. He narrowed his eyes and moved towards Danica. His spirit shimmered like a moving glass cage.
Ronan tackled Rake from behind. He found a hole in the warlock’s shield and rammed his katana through the Revenger’s shoulder. Rake cried out and backhanded Ronan with a fist covered in cold fire, but the swordsman held on and twisted his blade.
Danica lumbered to her feet. Her eyes caught on Kane’s corpse where it lay on the ground.
She thought about Cole.
Sickness welled in the back of her throat. She fought the whispers, the lunatic vampire dirge that lingered at the edge of her thoughts.
Maur screamed for her to watch out.
The Scarecrow came at her with its claws. Danica leapt back, and her spirit pulled her into the air. She barely felt his presence. Nothing seemed real. She moved as if in a dream.
She barely dodged the Scarecrow’s attack. A cold arcane blade grew out of her false knuckles and hacked away a giant limb. Black puss oozed to the ground. The Scarecrow bit at her with blunted teeth. Its blackened skull rammed against her body and knocked the wind out of her.
She felt nothing. Without even realizing it, she was back on her feet. Her blade severed its massive head. The Scarecrow sank to its knees and crashed to the floor.
Cross was tethered and tied to its back, unmoving.
Maur ran over to them. Explosions erupted from out of the tunnel. Dark fumes and shrapnel filled the icy air.
Danica looked at Cross, and she looked at Kane.
You don’t have to lose them both.
Ronan screamed.
Rake had drawn a Bowie knife and pushed it clean through Ronan’s forearm. Energy leapt from the Revenger’s fingers and poured into Ronan, whose eyes filled with bloody light.
“No!” Danica shouted.
The ceiling exploded with a deafening blast. Burning cinders fell like red snow. A small airship crashed outside, just over their heads. Jets of fire seared down like blades. She saw red sky filled with fire and caustic fumes.
A flaming Black Scars tank rolled across the hole in the roof and blocked out the world. It hovered, impossibly, before it fell down through the crumbling ceiling. The groan of metal and stone filled the air. The steel juggernaut twisted and crashed to the floor with a deafening boom that shook the entire structure. Chunks of granite and rebar fell in its wake. Waves of dust and debris filled the chamber in a rolling cloud.
Maur threw his body over Cross to shield him as war wights and kaithoren ripped through the walls. A sickly mass of soldiers made of grave flesh and boiling rot flooded the chamber. Whirring blades and tentacles lashed everywhere.
Ronan somehow pushed through Rake’s arcane assault and head-butted him, breaking the other man’s nose. He pulled away and kicked the Revenger in the stomach.
Overhead, gargoyles and vampires and Killravens twisted and fired and tore at one another. Bullets and hexed fire roared back and forth. The sky was filled with screams.
Danica blasted undead soldiers with streams of ghost fire and acid ice. She dodged through clouds of crackling flames and blue-white explosions.
A massive and armored Razorwing twisted its way through the gap in the ceiling. Its barbed wings and hooked claws scraped against stone. It opened its mouth and released a horrendous howl. A vampire armed with a double-bladed axe rode in a massive saddle on its back.
Danica looked at Rake. He stared right back at her. His eyes burned white and gold.
Rake shaped his spirit into a tendril of slithering light that he lashed around Danica’s ankle. It burned through her boot and into her flesh. She threw a lash of razor ice at Rake, but his spirit deflected the attack, and the frozen shrapnel flew straight into the Razorwing’s chest. The beast howled as obsidian magic pierced its dull heart and killed it instantly. It fell towards the tower of skulls.
“I’m gonna eat your fucking heart!” Ronan howled. He leapt forward and tackled Rake. They flew over the pit and into the pillar of glass. The Razorwing landed on it from above.
The world filled with the sound of a glacier breaking. The pillar shattered as if in slow motion. The flying beast fell through it one layer at a time. Green and white glass shattered around the draconic corpse in a hail of crystal shards. Its body writhed and twisted, and the brittle explosions eviscerated its rider.
The Razorwing plummeted into solid darkness. Thick fumes of green smoke billowed up around the dead beast and pulled it down to oblivion.
Rake and Ronan fell with the glass shards. They plummeted behind the Razorwing’s corpse, followed it into the void below.
The line around Danica’s ankle tightened and pulled her body backwards. Rake still held the other end of the arcane whip.
Her head struck the ground. She felt blood in her hair. She slid across a field of sharp rock and shattered glass bones, out of the madness of the melee and into the open pit.
She falls. Blackness rushes past her. She’s pulled into a shaft of midnight.
A hole fades in the distance above her. Soon it’s gone, obscured by yellow gases and frozen steam. She smells the age of worlds. Hollow screams and carbon wails surround her. She sees cracks in the jagged stone, holes to a bitter and smoke-filled landscape, a wasteland of bubbling iron pools and twisted flesh mountains, smoking blood geysers and pits of iron teeth.
She knows what she sees is the Carrion Rift: a twisted zone of unfinished transformations, a place of becoming, of things undone and never to be.
She sees herself fall, a pale angel made of flesh and blood and steel. She plummets through crumbling barriers and breathing skies. Her body sinks closer to the darkness, then ascends, pulled back up towards a pocket of sanity, a place still bound by reason and solid walls.
Something hard slammed into her back. Danica’s breath shot out of her. She twisted her body and looked around.
They were in the wide stone shaft, the Shadow Lord’s vertical portal to the Whisperlands. They’d landed in some pocket of safety, a space unaffected by the shifting bonds and temporal winds.
She reached out and grabbed something. At first she thought it was a jutting stone, and she panicked when she realized it was actually a massive talon. The surface shifted beneath her and scraped against the broken walls of the shaft. Greasy smoke hung overhead, and the hole emptied into a frosted void below.
Danica stood on the underbelly of the Razorwing. Its leather leash line and the
chains that dangled from its platform saddle were wrapped around a protrusion in the rock above, which had snared the plummeting corpse. Now the beast hung belly up like a massive and dead puppet, its four feet held straight up in the air. The tethered corpse banged against the side of the shaft.
The hardened skin on the Razorwing’s underbelly was slick with dark blood. The dragon was the size of a bus. The chains tensed, and bits of rocks snapped loose from the outcropping overhead. Rocks bounced off the walls and fell out of sight.
The reptilian body shifted beneath her. She grasped one of its upturned hind claws and pulled herself closer to the middle of its long abdomen. Its dead tail dangled down below, and she heard it smack against the stone.
“Danica!” Ronan shouted. His head poked out from the outcropping overhead. “Look out!”
Something slammed against her back. Danica flew forward and her face hit the stone wall. Her feet slipped, but she reached up and gripped the rock with her steel hand.
Rake came at her from behind. His fists were covered with corrosive energy. Sparks of green light licked the air. Blood ran down his broken nose and into his teeth. He snarled with rage.
He punched at her again. Danica raised a shield, but not in time. Rake smashed through her spirit’s defenses and knocked her back. She slid and nearly fell from the dragon’s belly.
“God damn it, Danica, you ruined everything!” he yelled, and he kicked her in the stomach. Pain doubled her over. The air raced out of her lungs. “We had a nice thing going. We were going to be on top of the food chain…” He reached down and grabbed her hair. She screamed as arcane flames leapt from his hands and burned her flesh. Her spirit kept her from catching on fire, but searing pain flared across her face. “You’re going to be sacrificed, bitch,” he hissed.
He pushed his face close to hers. Darkness pulsed behind Rake’s eyes. Dank and oily smoke leaked from his gaze.
Rake’s mask started to slide. His skin seemed to crumble like plaster. What lay beneath the peeling flakes of skin wasn’t bone or skull, but darkness, the cold of the void, so utterly black it pained her eyes to look at him.
Underneath the skin, he was just a shadow.
Just like Jennar. Just like The Sleeper.
She went cold inside. The darkness of The Black had hidden itself inside Rake. Maybe it had been guiding his actions all along, had used his magic and his resources and forged alliances and manipulated events to get what it wanted.
It had put itself in a position to destroy the Obelisk.
This was not The Sleeper. The Sleeper had been an entity of pure cruelty and destruction, an avatar of chaos and madness. This new agent of darkness was possessed of cunning and manipulation. It had laid its plans carefully and had worked in secret, only now revealing its true nature when all else had failed.
She looked into his icy eyes. Charcoal smoke leaked from his broken skull.
The thing that wasn’t Rake forced its hands around her throat.
Her strength was gone. She tried to fuse her spirit into a blade, but her vision faded. Rake, or what had once been Rake, would win.
A shadow fell over them, cast by the smoky light trapped in the green mist above.
Ronan yelled as he came down in a controlled fall. He grabbed Rake as he landed and pulled him away from Danica. Ronan fell back against the wall with a crack.
Danica blasted Rake with a cone of black fire that melted off his skin and knocked him from the Razorwing’s belly. He smoldered and burned as he fell, a black torch dropped in darkness.
The chains snapped. Links flew apart like shattered ice. The serpent’s corpse dropped into darkness. Metal and stone fell like rain.
Ronan grabbed hold of the jagged wall. He reached out for Danica, but it was too late. The dead beast fell, and she fell with it. The sight of Ronan faded from view, and she
falls through liquid darkness. Dark stone passes by. There are gaps in the walls. She sees the bleeding skin of a festering land and smells an air corroded with fear.
She is weightless. She falls without fear of landing, like she’s suspended in an inky pool. She almost imagines herself sleeping on a bed of black down.
Her memory goes back. She remembers Cole and Kane, and her heart shatters. She can’t believe they’re gone.
She has the dream again, the dream of the soft room, the golden light and the feel of a lover’s skin. She dissolves into that world, a place of silken sheets and soft pillows, of an olive dawn and the smell of plums and berries by the bedside. The desert is warm and inviting, and she wants to spend the rest of her life there, wiling away the hours, resting at Cole’s side.
Another dream. This time she’s with Kane. He’s like a brother to her, a brother she wants, not the shit of a brother she wound up with. He smiles, and in this dream he’s forgiven her, truly forgiven her.
She sees Cross, and she wants to hold him. She wants to fall into his arms. She’s dreamed about him before, but she hasn’t told him about it, can never tell him about it. She knows he’ll never want her, and never could. No one could, and after Lara she will never want another.
These dreams aren’t real, she tells herself. You don’t get to do this…to hide. There can be no happiness. Not for you. Not after the things you’ve done.
Because she remembers the prisoners, the torturous mines with their flesh-scalding steam and razor whips, the screaming children pushed into the Gauntlet to be hunted down by Ebonbacks and mutant tigers, the hollow eyes and soulless gaze of people marched to their deaths. Human life reduced to filth and chattel, and she was one of the architects of that suffering and madness.
How much blood is on your hands? Why did you think you would ever be given a chance for happiness?
She falls, and hopes she’ll never stop falling. She knows she deserves no end from the nightmare of her life.
Do you?
I wait for you. You are here by my doing, and I will take you.
She lands in a field of black stone and shattered ice. The impact is somehow less severe than she’d feared. She feels no pain, and her body barely even registers the impact. It’s like falling into a bed of shadow, a landscape of black clouds.The world is so dark it’s hard to tell if she’s underground or not. Stones like red stars glitter overhead. The air is filled with heated smoke, and everything is covered in dust. She tastes soot.
She moves differently there, steps to a strange pulse and rhythm. Everything feels slowed.
Obsidian walls riddled with fissures and cracks stand in the distance. Wine-dark waters drip down from the distant ceiling and scald the floor. The air sweats.
Columns of bone and salt support the endless cavern. She senses something familiar about the area. A thought nags at her, a sense that she’s seen it before, that she’s meant to be there. She smells the age of that place.
There’s no clear path for her to follow. She stands at the center of a cavern filled with columns and mounds of bone. Echoes and howls echo through the darkness.
The Razorwing’s body floats by as if it’s carried by a laggard tide. Dark blood splotches the air like drops of oil. Its tongue lolls out of its mouth, and its razor teeth are cracked.
She moves, unclear as to where she needs to go. Something drives her towards a particular corner of the cavern. Blood stones and dripping red waters glow like a dusk sun. Her feet crush salt-dust stones. Blades and gun parts litter the floor, and she sees evidence of a ruined vehicle, metal machine parts and pistons, loose gears and plates of black iron. She sees a metal wheel and twisted ventilation ducts.
They are the remains of a train. She knows where she is, and knows where she must go.
Instinct makes her hesitate. If the shadow Rake has come this way, he will still need her for the sacrifice.
But what else can I do? I can’t go back.
Cross. She knows Cross is there, and without another thought she follows the metal innards of the ravaged Necronaught. Dust grates through her lungs. Her steps echo in the d
arkness.
She runs, determined not to let another friend die.
TWENTY-TWO
MORROW
Something hammers the air. It’s far off at first, like thunder. Black dust shakes loose from the ceiling. The clang of metal rings in the distance. The dreadful sound approaches like a vast automaton of shadow and stone. What little light there is bleeds away.
The two remaining Shadow Lords – Tregoran and Marklahain — turn their masked faces to regard the approach. Cross senses their fear. Their pinprick eyes narrow beneath their featureless masks and their hands crackle with the glow of pale frost.
He tries to rise, but they push him back down. He can’t find his sword. Blood and puss ooze out of his wounded arms. His eyes are crusted over with scabs.
He isn’t sure how long they’ve beaten him. Shadows seep into his pores. Only their proximity to the gap in the worlds, the hole that leads to the Carrion Rift, keeps his body stable.
Only the living are lost. He still can’t determine what that means, what significance the message is supposed to hold. His mind races for an answer. It’s something to focus on as he battles his way through the pain.
Blood pounds in his ears. He feels himself grow more corporeal by the moment. He turns and looks at the Obelisk. The gap in the wall is widening. Solid matter spreads like water. The shadow dust and spectral smoke that’s closest to the artifact slowly transforms into crumbling granite.
Inch by inch, the cavern grows more solid, more real. He realizes this is the Shadow Lord’s doing, their way of transporting the Obelisk home.
Dark crafts float in the canyon on the other side, black iron vessels like half-moon platforms, iron dreadnaughts covered with spines and guns. They are Sorn vehicles. He sees the giants on the decks, grey silhouettes with crackling harpoons and massive guns. Their lone eyes shine like diamonds into the bleeding dark of the Whisperlands.
The Shadow Lords have communicated with them somehow, told them the Obelisk’s location in the physical world so they can come to haul it away. He can’t fathom how the giants have survived the horrors of the Carrion Rift when no Southern Claw or Ebon Cities expedition ever has. He imagines the backing of a cadre of powerful mages and vastly superior alien technology plays some part, as does finally knowing the Obelisk’s resting place, which the Shadow Lords had sought for so long. They had found the caverns, but they could have searched that labyrinth for years and never found anything.
Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) Page 27