Crown of Ash bs-4

by Steven Montano

  They’re letting my spirit heal me, she realized, so that they can hurt me again.

  It was foolish to dream of Lara, so she didn’t. Because she knew no matter how hard she cried or how badly she wanted Cole to be with her, it was never going to happen.

  She’s gone. And she’s not coming back.

  She woke looking up at the inside of a black dome.

  She was no longer on the ship, but down on the ground, in the ruined city. F rozen shadow vapors weigh t ed the air. Her skin was wreathed in wet frost. Her breaths were ragged and heavy.

  Danica lay on her back. She’ d been secured to a slab of icecovered granite. The dome above her was made of ice and dark stone.

  Her skin was frozen. The bonds held her wrists tight. She felt her spirit, just out of reach, screaming like he was in pai n. He struggled to be free. She sensed that he wanted so desperately to help her.

  She looked around, desperate. She saw Rake and Raven and Geist and two more me n she didn’t know. It took her some moments to realize they weren’t men at all, but undead.

  The first was a lich. Most of t he skin had fallen from his bones, and his skeletal visage bore burning black eyes. His l ong claws gripped some sort of medallion, an ancient trinket that looked familiar.

  “Mor ning, Dani,” Rake said. “Are y ou ready?”

  “What the hell is going on?” she asked. Her heart hammered with fear. She couldn’t move, couldn’t call her spirit. Her mind raced to find a way out, but there wasn’t any. She felt tears on her face. “Rake…please…”

  “Sorry, Dani,” he smiled, and he nodded to the second undead creature. The vampire.

  It s dark hood fell back to reveal a pale face with a wide mouth. His unnaturally dark eyes were voids in his skull. S harp fangs dripp ed dark venom. He was lean and muscular and bore a vicious and toothy smile. His nearness chilled her heart.

  Geist stepped up onto the slab and stood over her. The Revenger held a wide-bladed axe. The tip was so sharp Danica could almost taste its razor edge. A distorted view of her face reflected back at her in the metal.

  I won’t scream, she told herself, her last defiant act. I won’t give you the satisfaction, you bastard.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked grimly.

  “Prepare you,” Rake said. She was surprised he ’d graced her with an answer. “ Like I told you before, we need a sacrifice to des troy the obelisk and end humanity’s reign of magic. A few years ago, the leaders of Koth planned to use Cross, because he fit the conditions perfectly. He’d lost his spirit, and then regained it. But Cross no longer has a spirit. So now we need someone else.” H e nodded for Geist to proceed.

  Black knew he hadn’t really answered her question. He in no way had explained what they were about to do to her, how they would make her useful to them. She didn’t bother pointing out that without magic he and T he Revengers would be just as much at the mercy of Koth and the Ebon Cities as the Southern Claw, but she had no doubts he’d already thought of that, that he’d already planned ahead. Rake always planned ahead.

  She looked up at Geist’s twisted and ugly face. The axe was massive, and his expressionless gaze was chilling.

  The vampire moved closer. It smiled. Its pale and twisted face was hideous to behold. T he forehead was long and smooth and the jaw was pugnacious and wide to accommodate the rows of razor teeth.

  Geist raised the axe. When she looked up again, she wasn’ t afraid. Her last thoughts weren’t of Cole, but of Cross.

  I’m sorry, Eric. I’m so sorry.

  The blade fla shed down quick. The pain was so intense she black ed out the instant her blood splash ed onto the vampire’s face.

  Darkness.

  She swims in a black sea. It’ s calm now, rigid. Lonely.

  There ’s no one there with her. She’ s adrift on ebon waves in the middle of a vast nowhere, a world made of water.

  S he’d loved to swim as a child. She would get in and out of the water as often as she could. She did it to escape. She couldn’t bear her family. She was nothing but meat to them, and they were just trash to her. Her mother did nothing to help. Her father was a demon. Her brother was the same, only younger.

  So she swam, just as she swims now. She drifts alone. It disturb s her that there are no voices. There ’ s no one there to tell her that she ’ s safe.

  It doesn’t matter. She knows she won’t be there long.

  She woke in darkness.

  She sees razor claws and blood, teeth filled with meat.

  She sees dead cities on a frozen shore next to a black and oily sea. Blood vapors fill the sky. There are b lack ships in the bay with engines that grind bones and scour the air with pale flames.

  Rows of still-standing dead bodies line up at the edge of the icy sea. The anemic corpses step one-by-one into the waters, where the howling waves consume them.

  That world is dying. It has always been dead, but now it falls apart. There’ s little left.

  She sees the war labs and the factories. Sees the council halls and hears the endless arguing, the grinding alien tongue that for some reason makes sense to her now. She stands there, a cold body, naked but unafraid.

  She is judged by a pale council. They regard her, inspect her. Cold tongues and clammy hands run over her skin. She stands stalwart, uncaring.

  What more can they do to me?

  She ’ s fed. Thick and vi s cous fluid pours down her throat. She takes it. Her instinct is to cough it up, to gag on it, but she knows it sustains her, and she wants to be sustained.

  She isn’t done yet.

  The scars on her neck won’t heal. They ’ re ugly and jagged and they ooze thick and congealed blood that runs down her skin. The arcane tattoos on her right arm faintly glow, resistant to this dread change in her physiognomy, but after a while they fade.

  They bring her b lack blood in bone goblets. She drinks it. She can’ t get her fill.

  She woke in darkness.

  She was thirsty. Her breath caught in her chest.

  Bone needles probed her. She saw nothing but pale light.

  She felt no pain, and yet knew she wasn’t whole. Something cold pressed against her shoulder, metal and frigid.

  Then the pain came, and she screamed.

  Ravenous claws flesh blood drink blood falling in waves collapsing fields of flesh raw explosions this world ends your world erase us not them find you found you find him we will always find you find him this world erase

  She woke in darkness.

  She was thirsty, and she drank. She couldn’t see what. It tasted salty and thick.

  She had memories of standing in a dead city.

  Whispers claw ed at her mind. For a moment she thought it was her spirit, but what she heard was a myriad of desperate calls, a choir of ghastly voices. They spoke in unison, and yet the sound was chaos. They intensified, and came faster. They scratched at her ears and tore at her nerves. There was nothing she could make of it, no true words, just hisses and curses, virulent chants, dirty foreign cackles and animal sounds. She willed them away and sat up.

  Danica was in a cold room. She felt odd…out of place. The pale walls were strewn with blood. She was naked and cold and she felt the bite on her neck.

  Oh, God.

  She lifted her left hand — there was something wrong with her right arm, because she couldn’t feel it — and felt the wound. The scar was ragged and tender to the touch, but she felt very little pain.

  They bit me. I’m a vampire.

  Panic surged through her until she heard another voi ce in the distance, a desperate and plaintive cry.

  It was the voice of her spirit.

  Vampires don’t have spirits. The dead can’t call magic.

  There was no mistaking the voice. She knew who it was. She’d grown up with him always within reach. She’d know hi m anywhere.

  She stood, and felt cold metal against her skin. Danica looked down in horror.

  Her right arm was gone. She va
guely recalled the axe, the blood. She remembered Geist severing it, pulling it away just moments before the Koth ian vampire, the defector, had bit ten her.

  In its place was an arcane appendage: a piece of smooth and animated red steel nearly the same hue as her hair. It moved with sinuous motion. Thin curls of crimson steam emanated from her fingers when she moved them.

  She fe l t nothing. The metal moved clums il y, and when she clenched her fist she could only see the motion, not sense it. She touched the appendage with her opposite hand, and was amazed at how cold it was.

  Oh my God. Oh my God.

  A presence was ther e in the arcane animated steel. H er spirit.

  He’d been trapped, somehow. Contained. A prisoner of her false limb.

  God, no. This isn’t happening.

  The joint was bloody and raw. She saw where the metal had fused with her skin, where it had joined and melted with her flesh. It was seamless.

  No no no no wake up, Dani, wake up, wake up.

  Pain flooded her head, sudden and quick. Her gums and teeth flared to life.

  She was thirsty. She wanted blood.

  She fell to the floor screaming.

  What have they done to me?

  EIGHTEEN

  Web

  Cross entered a labyrinth of shadow and stone. Everything was unstable, like he floated in a cold void sea. The d arkness twisted and bent. The details of the ceiling were obscured in a haze of swirling golden shadows and patches of inky darkness. The air pulsed like pools of rippling oil.

  He passed crystal domes cracked open by some unnatural calamity. Twisted passages snaked like veins through the heart of the canyon wall. Bones and sediment had frozen in the milk rock. Murky blue-black light emanated from within the walls.

  He stepped through an archway of whalebone, a massive jaw ridged with blunted teeth. Pale oil s dripped down and splashed onto the floor.

  Cross came to a cavern of batholitic rock. The air was smelted and white. Curved stone spiraled away in cyclone s of ebony and silver. Cavernous echoes sounded through the Netherwere — the world below, a vast network of catacombs and tunnels that ran like a maddening maze into an infinity of twisted underground canyons and natural chambers, abandoned Cruj dwellings and Maloj temples, Vuul slave mines, subterranean Gol settlements and the hidden lairs of the secretive Regost.

  Low rolling fumes buried the floor, so thick they seemed almost liquid. The mist rolled at hi m from out of a series of tunnels he thought led to the Carrion Rift. He followed them. Soulrazor/Avenger was heavy in his grip. His boots echoed loud in the darkness.

  C oncentric rock formations twisted like black grain down a funnel. Sounds came at him, distant growls and shouts. He was getting closer to the breach, he could feel it. Geothermic pressure squeezed the air and made it sweat. Vents of bitter steam pushed out of scar fissures and blocked sight of what lie ahead.

  He wandered for what felt like days. The blade tugged him this way and that, as if it knew the way. It took him to the source of the echoes. He heard wind, and something like rain.

  The Obelisk of Dreams lay on its side at the end of the tunnel, literally pushed through the in side of the canyon wall, fused between two realities. Everything shifted around it, folded in to unnatural p atterns. Drifts of rock dust fell from the ceiling.

  The artifact was just as h e remembered it, utterly black and icy cold. To even be near it chilled the blood. Faint whispers of pain bled from the cracks in the Obelisk’s surface. Silver runes like scars littered its utterly dark face. It was still whole, in spite of the violence it had lived through.

  Drifts of rubble fell from the walls. E verything wavered like heat images. He saw his breath, and then saw it again. He stood at a place conjoined, where the boundaries threatened to come unglued. The floor stretched and compacted.

  He moved close r to the Obelisk. It was safe. He’d beaten Azradayne and the Shadow Lords to it.

  Now what?

  Cross studied the monument. It was so innocuous, so still. It barely seemed possible that it could bear such import. The Obelisk had rested in the hands of the renegade necropolis of Koth for decades, but the undead had lacked the knowledge of how to destroy it until Red had offered them that information.

  To destroy it required a sacrifice. A particular sacrifice.

  That sacrifice was supposed to have been me, he thought. I wonder if the Shadow Lords have already prepared another.

  Another sacrifice.

  Cross looked past the Obelisk and through the shattered rock wall, into the wreckage and madness of the Carrion Rift. A shifting barrier like black smoke separated the two realities. He look ed through the ebon fumes, into the world he once knew. The top half of the twelve-foot Obelisk hovered over the void of the canyon. A sea of s creaming vapors melted down the vast trench. Black t entacles writhed and twisted in the bladed shadows below. The Rift was a place buried in darkness and mist.

  Why would anyone want to rule this world? h e wondered. The Southern Claw fight to stay alive, to protect our own. What do the Shadow Lords want? Power? Dominion? They’d rule from atop a throne of dust, and wear a crown of ash.

  Another sacrifice.

  Cross stood at the boundary. He could reach through if he wanted and enter the Carrion Rift. He could step back in to his own world, onto ledges of crumbling roc k and jutting bits of stone on his side of the canyon. He could be free of the Whisperlands.

  Not yet. Not yet.

  Blood trickled down the Rift walls. Things lurked in the darkness below. H e felt their eyes on him, sensed their ravenous hunger.

  Another sacrifice.

  Because I lived, there will be another sacrifice.

  There was another wide shelf of rock on the opposite canyon wall. It was littered with s hards of black iron wreckage. He saw broken engines and shattered railway cars, sunken turrets and cracked metal wheels.

  It occurred to him that Snow’s remains might have been there in the ruined remains of the train. He’d almost forgotten what she looked like. He pictured her charred body folded in to the metal.

  Cross tried to put sight of her from his mind, but he couldn’t. He saw her, burning on the train. It was one of the only memor ies he had of her whe re he could still picture her clearly.

  Stop it, he told himself. This doesn’t help.

  But he was already crying, and he couldn’t stop.

  He waited. It was hard to know how much time passed.

  Cross stood in the cold dark. The necronaught wreckage was in sight, and the Obelisk was just a few feet away. The caves shifted unnaturally all around him. He looked back down the twisted rock corridor and saw steam clouds and molten shadows.

  Cross held Soul razor/Avenger ready. He wasn’t sure what good it would do, what good he could do against a cadre of powerful warlocks. He tried to remind himself he’d survived battle s with the necrotic angel minions of the Revenger Korva, and that this would be no different.

  But the truth was he felt less sure of himself than he had for a long time. H e had no idea what he should or sh ouldn’ t expect from the arcane blade. It served its own whim, held its own agenda.

  He shivered. His grip on the gelid hilt slipped, so he righted himself and held it tighter. He considered propping himself against a wall to rest, but the shifting atmosphere told him that would be unwise.

  Another sacrifice.

  He wondered who the Shadow Lords had found.

  It had to be someone particular. The conditions for the sacrifice required to destroy the Obelisk of Dreams were exact: a mage who’d forcibly been separated from their spirit, and then had had that connection restored. So far as he or anyone in the White Council knew, Cross was the only mage that had ever happen ed to. Now he wasn’t even a mage anymore, something he tried not to think about.

  They’d have to create their own sacrifice somehow. They’d have to force those conditions, find a way to do it intentionally. He was sure they could: Margrave had told him that Koth had fou
nd a way, and if circumstances hadn’t made it so Cross had wound up fitting their criteria, that sacrifice would have been Snow.

  But do the Shadow Lords really want to destroy the Obelisk? he wondered. What else would they do with it?

  What if the Obelisk isn’t even what they’re looking for?

  He wasn’t sure why that last thought occurred to him. I t came like a bolt of lightning out of a clear and quiet sky. And like some festering wound or a horrible itch, once the notion was there, it wouldn’t go away.

  Are they looking for something else?

  Cross watched the tunnels. He glanced behind him, into the Carrion Rift. He waited for the Shadow Lords, or for their minions.

  He wondered what else they could be searching for.

  If the Shadow Lords truly had the means to come and g o from the Whisperlands at will, it made little sense for them to seek anything else. If they didn’t really have the means to leave the Whisperlands, if that had all been a lie, then maybe they sought escape, just like he did…but that meant Kyver and the Grey Clan had lied to him, and he had trouble believing that. He hoped his instinct about them had been correct.

  Cross decided the Obelisk of Dreams really was the object of the Shadow Lord’s search.

  But what about the spider? What about Azradayne?

  He waited. Something sounded in the distance overhead, some shattering of rock. Probably Sorn tech, he thought, used to blast through the stone. He kept his eyes up. D eep shadows roamed the ceiling. S talactites dripped milky water and iron sediment.

  What are you looking for, Azradayne? he wondered. He’d convinced himself it wa sn’ t the Obelisk, even if that wa s what the Shadow Lords wanted. They were her lackeys, powerful though they surely were.

  What do you want, spider? What have you altered my life to accomplish? What hurricane did you trigger by directing my path?