Crown of Ash bs-4

by Steven Montano

  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 thank ful the Sorn had poor night vision.

  His m ind 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.

  The blast shook the air. Heat washed against him. Cross leapt over a low wall and threw himself back against the stone to use it as cover while he brought his arms up to shield his neck and head. His eyes stung from explosive fumes. His skin felt like it was melting, and when he breathed in it was like swallowing jet fuel.

  He waited. After a few moments the series of explo sions stopped. He heard flames and smelled toxins and burning skin.

  He carefully stood up and checked himself. He hacked up bloody phlegm, took a deep breath. He was okay.

  The dig site was in ruins. The engine was split open and spewed ghastly spirit unguent that looked like slime milk. Thick bursts of oil bubbled and sank into the ground. A handful of the rock walls had shattered and fallen to pieces in the blast. Drifts of yellow smoke from the plains billowed across his path as he quietly walked back towards the hole with his blade in hand.

  Two of the Sorn were dead. T heir grey flesh had been blown open by the blast, and their innards were exposed to the salty air. Their central eyes were still.

  A third giant still lived, and it struggled a nd dragged itself across the ground. Its back and head were covered with burn marks, and the skin had torn away from its abdomen, where meat gristle and dark blood spilled out.

  It looked at Cross as he stepped up and sliced open its throat. It died silently.

  Cross scanned the perimeter. There was no sign of the fourth Sorn, and that worried him. Strange alarms blared in the distance, booming drum pattern beats mixed with arcane klaxons.

  Maybe the spider he’d seen hadn’ t been associated with the Shadow Lords after all. Maybe it truly was his spider, there to ensure him he was on the right path.

  He tried not to think about the murals…about the images of the spider as it destroyed cities.

  Dark cries sounded through the sky. There was nothing beyond the mists and smoke around him except for pitch black plains. He felt like he stood in the middle of nowhere.

  We search.

  Only the living are lost.

  Cross checked the iron beams. As he’d expected, most of the device had been damaged in the blast, and two of the beams had fallen down into the hole. The third, however, was still bolted into the ground, and it hung over the opening at a forty-five degree angle. The pulley mechanism was gone, but there was still plenty of cable, and he thought that if he secured a line tight enough he could lower himself down.

  The fourth Sorn was down in the hole, where it clu n g desperately to the wall. The rock in the shaft was blasted obsidian that shone like dark stars. The one-eyed giant’s face and body were riddled with cuts, and it looked to have lost some of its fingers. It blinked up at Cross and grimaced.

  He found a crate filled with machinery and slowly pushed it into the hole. He heard the Sorn fall as the box of equipment tumbled and struck the creature, and they both crashed down the sides of the shaft.

  Cross couldn’t get the image of friends long dead out of his mind. He was shaking, and had to take a moment to right himself. He saw them, remembered them, and vowed to waste no more time.

  It took him a handful of minutes to locate enough cable. He tore cloth from the Sorn’s clothing and wrapped it around his hands so he wouldn’t slice himself apart with the frayed metal line on the way down. He wound one end of the cable around a low column of quartz, then looped the other end twice around the beam and dropped the rest into the darkness of the shaft. He searched the Sorn’s bodies and used the smallest carabineer — like clamps he could find to secure himself to the line. He lowered himself into the hole with a handful of flares in his pockets.

  The air was bitterly cold. It was like sinking into a pool of ice. Subterranean wind kicked up from below and sent shivers up his spine. His lungs itched from rock dust. Shards of crystal protruded from the walls. He lit a flare as he descended, but it would be tricky to hold it and repel at the same time, so he dropped it down the length of the shaft. To his great relief he saw it hit the bottom, which was several hundred feet below.

  He repelled slowly, and his arms soon ached from the effort. He carefully kicked off from t he walls. The grey blood stains left on the jagged stone indicated how sharp it was.

  Another blast of ice wind came up at him. Dread whispers filled the air, lost voices that hissed at him to leave. The black quartz was threaded with gold and radiated a primeval chill.

  He thought about the spider as he made his descent.

  Something wasn’t right. Something had happened when he’d looked into its many eyes, something he’d been unable to piece together. In the past, a white spider had always appeared when he was on the right path, when he was moving to where he was supposed to be. It had helped him prevent the Obelisk of Dreams from being destroyed, and it had helped him stop the Sleeper. It had been strangely absent from his life ever since the team had been formed, just a memory. He’d taken that to mean he hadn’t needed it — that he’d been making the correct choices, and that the path he’d walked had been the right one.

  He felt cold inside. His breaths crystallized. The pull of gravity seemed to intensify the deeper he went down the shaft, an inescapable draw that led to the fused core of the mountain. He smelled iron and sulfur as he dropped closer to hell.

  He remembered looking up at the spider in that cold chamber. He’d seen his own reflection s in its many eyes, and those reflections had a ll been different.

  Different angles? Or something else?

  The walls seemed to move as he made the descent. Everything rolled around him like he was stuck on a ship in a violent sea.

  The light of the flare below him went out, leavi ng him in darkness. He stopped and dropped a second. The new light flickered as it fell, turned at odd angles. It seemed to phase in and out of existence, and when it landed he swore it was somehow different than when it had left his hand.

  A different flare. A different possibility.

  Reflections. Many eyes.

  He realized the truth.

  It wasn’t just different angles of myself I saw in the spider’s eyes. I was seeing different versions of myself. It was me, moving along different courses of action. Possible selves.

  Cross ’s mind had always been overly analytical. He had a naturally photographic memory, a keen sense of calculation and data analysis. He could read a text once and commit it to memory, compare it to a similar text and see the differences and similarities line-by-line. He had a natural knack for solving arcane algorithms and hex theories, for unlocking codified texts and discordant formulae. He could see patterns and variations where many others couldn’t.

  He analyzed the events of his own life, from the first moment he’d seen that white spider with Snow in the cemetery outside of Thornn up to where he was now, lowering himself down a frozen shaft, trying once again to save human magic from annihilation. He broke down every choice, every crossroads he’d ever stood at. He tried to determine what might have happened differently, how events might have changed if he’d made different choices.

  The spider saw them all. She (he wasn’t sure, still, why he thought it was female, but he did) had known all along, had guided
him.

  Guided…or manipulated?

  He stopped.

  I’d always assumed she was some sort of…guide. Fate, maybe, showing me where to go, what to do.

  But to what ends?

  He saw the Sorn’s mangled corpse below his feet, so he kicked off and twisted himself around to avoid landing on the body. H e touched down on the rock at the nadir of the massive shaft. The black stone cracked under his feet: it was brittle as ice. A single wide corridor led off from the shaft towards a distant chamber filled with golden light.

  His vision shifted, halted, and started again. The air felt uncertain, out of synch. It was like when he’d been dipped in the black fluid in the Bonespire and had stepped outside the normal flow of time. This entire place was disconnected, and it shifted away from the possible realms.

  Cross paused, gripped by a cloying chill inside and out.

  He knew in his gut that the spider in the Citadel was Azradayne.

  Something not of our world, or any world we know, was what Vala had said about her. The Grey Clan hadn’t said what she was.

  The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.

  She’s moved me where she wants me to be. If she can see different possibilities, different versions of what would happen, then she could have seen how my being in certain places could alter the course of history.

  It didn’t mean that he was all important. Chaos theory, the notion of a hurricane caused by butterfly wings, held to the principal that minor events led to greater events, distant chain reactions, small occurrences potentially initiating world-changing sequences. It could have been anyone. All that mattered was seeing the pattern, knowing what threads led to what.

  Maybe s he wanted the Obelisk here, so she moved me, made it so my actions would cause it to happen when I destroyed that train.

  He drew his blade. The cold caused the hilt to cleave to his skin.

  But then why would she send me after it again? And why now?

  His mind raced as he stepped down the corridor. The air warmed, but it also grew less stable. His shadow folded and doubled, fell away and danced along the wall like he was more than one self, a group of possibilities. His vision blurred, cleared, blurred again. The sound of his footsteps echoed down the uncertain hall.

  Why send me here? he wondered again. Or does it even matter? Now that my part has been played, is she even concerned with me at all?

  Was she ever?

  He felt he should have resisted somehow, should have made some different choice, tried to act in an unpredictable manner. He also knew it was too late. If he was right, if Azradayne was indeed the spider and she’d manipulated him for the sake of altering the pattern of fates, if she’d spun her webs out as far out as he suspected, then she’d have planned for every contingency. He was nothing more than a fly now, caught in her strands.

  Cross continued down the tunnel. Whatever she’d determined his fate to be, he’d meet it head on.

  SEVENTEEN

  Preparations

  Do you?

  Do you what?

  Do you love me?

  Danica woke in darkness. She’d dreamed of Cole. For a moment she couldn’t remember what had happened, and she panicked when she couldn’t find Lara next to her.

  And then she remembered Lara was dead, and she was wracked with sorrow. She tried to keep herself quiet, but her sobs echoed into the dark. Memories of Cole flashed through her mind, moments they’d shared. W alking near Rimefang Loch beneath a blood sun. D oing shots of green liquor on an airship passing over Kalakkaii. S moking naked in Cole’s little apartment in Ath while they read cheesy lines to each other from paranormal romance novels. L ooking at one an other, staring at one an other, kissing and caressing and listening to music from the grammaphone.

  Danica lay in the dark. She imagined Cole next to her, just like in her memor ies, with her dark hair spilled o nto the floor, her pale skin, her luminous eyes large and expressive and filled with something Danica could only hope was love, Black’s own helpless devotion reciprocated.

  She smiled at the memories, even though they brought tears to her eyes.

  Do you love me?

  I don’t know.

  She was on an airship. She heard the hum of machinery and smelled fuel. T he large steel vessel vibrated as it barreled its way across the frozen sky.

  It was a large ship, she guessed, an Ironnaught, which meant t hey were on a long voyage. A vessel that big meant Rake had brought plenty of res ources along. Men, Scarecrows, vehicles.

  What the hell are you up to? Why are you in bed with Koth?

  No one came for her. She was left alone in the dark. H er spirit was distant and blocked off. Shielded by the Fade, Raven.

  What do you want with me, Rake?

  I guess we’ll use you after all, he’d said.

  Use me for what?

  She couldn’t come up with an answer. From what she could tell, he just wanted to make her suffer.

  She slept.

  S he and Lara and Cross and Kane are all in the Black Hag back in Thornn. The room bustle s with people. The air is bright in spite of the tobacco smoke. People laugh and smile and dance. The dark air swirl s with dissonant chords of tribal music and heavy beats. The smell of bacon and bread is strong.

  She sits at the table, and all three of them look at her gravely. Their bodies fad e before her eyes. The y begin to crumble like they ’re made of sand.

  She panics. She reaches across for Lara, but her hands pass right through her, and Cole’s body comes apart and collapses into dust.

  She reaches for Cross, and Kane. She takes hold of them both, but her grip is tenuous. They ’ re slipping through her grip, slowly coming apart.

  They ’ ll both be gone soon. She doesn’t have much time.

  Danica woke in darkness. A gain. Voices from dreams and memories plagued her thoughts.

  The air was colder than before. G usts of cold wind push ed through the gaps in the steel-plated hull. T he floor dipped at a steep angle. The ship must have been flying through some treacherous territory, navigating high peaks or sharp winds. Everything lurched.

  Danica slowly rose to her hands and knees. Her body was rigid with pain. Her spirit had never had the opportunity to fully heal the wounds she’d suffered in t he Gauntlet, so her arm and leg were both tender, and they pulsed with hurt. A t least they were no longer bleeding.

  Her back was sore, and her arms ached so badly she could barely lift them. She felt how swollen her face was from the battle with Creyzak.

  Lara.

  Do you?

  She stood up and stumbled through the darkness. S he found a wall, and slowly explored the perimeter of the room. It seemed to be empty, which meant they’d likely stuck her in a spare cargo hold. Ironnaughts were massive ships designed to haul hundreds of prisoners at a time, and they were armed to the teeth in case they ran into any trouble. Even if Rake brought a massive force along there’d still be rooms to spare for the likes of her.

  I’m not done yet, you bastards. You know me, Rake. You know I won’t die easily.

  She found a recess in the wall, and after she probed around for a minute she realized it was the hatch door with a rotating wheel handle that was undoubtedly locked from the outside.

  It occurred to her they must have placed her in some sort of shielded chamber. She doubted very much that Raven was just standing around outside so Black couldn’t channel her spirit.

  She rested her face against the cold metal. The Ironnaughts weren’t terribl y well insulated. The heat she’ d felt when she’d first woken hadn’t been from the engines but from whatever lay outside. That meant they’d started off near the Scorpion Desert, not far from Black Scar, and now that it wa s colder they were likely entering the north. They were probably somewhere in t he Reach.

  And what the hell do you want there, Rake? The Reach was barren tundra, a no man’s land populated by tribes of uncivilized creatures. Aside from some scattered settlements
, there was very little to be found in the area.

  But there are lost cities there, she reminded herself. Places like Karamanganjii. The last place she’d seen Lara until they’d both been taken in Blacksand.

  God damn you, she thought. You knew they’d kill her anyway s. Why did you give them Cross?

  You have to fix this. I don’t how, but you have to.

  She st oo d at the door. She listened.

  S he heard beastly roars that she thought came from below. Th at meant th ey were carrying Ebonbacks, and maybe Razorwings. Of course, if the Kothians had tagged along then there was no telling what sorts of undead monstrosities might have be en on the ship.

  The fact that Rake had chosen to all y T he Revengers with the undead of Koth turned her stomach. If there was any modicum of kinship or familiarity left for her former allies, it had been dispelled by that arrangement. It didn’t matter that some of T he Revengers might not agree with the alliance: none of them would oppose Rake. Even his co-founders hadn’t been strong enough to stop him from taking over the prison. T he Revengers would follow him no matter what, and that made each and every one of them her enemy.

  Black searched around the door, desperate for a way out, even though she knew there wasn’t one.

  Save your strength. Prepare your mind. When an opportunity comes, you ’ll have to seize it.

  T he door opened. It might have been hours later.

  Danica was sitting on the floor. She rested and meditat ed as best she could. Kane had taught her some yoga on the ir lengthy train trip along the Dubrakki Railway, and she found it helped calm her mind sometimes.

  She snapped to and stood up as the door opened. Danica looked for a n opportunity, but she quickly realized this wouldn’t be it. Two Scarecrows stood in the doorway with jury-rigged 20mm rifles aimed straight at her chest. T heir leering and near ly skeletal f aces seemed to grin. The corridor was filled with dim red light, like they stood in a darkroom. Danica had to squint to see.