What do you want?
Another sacrifice.
His mind raced. What else had he done by following the path laid out for him by the spider? He tried to think beyond the obvio us, beyond rescuing the Obelisk and defeating the Sleeper, beyond slaying Jennar and keeping Soulrazor out of Korva’s hands.
Someone he knew. Someone he’d met. His heart pounded hard against his chest.
Someone I’ve met, someone I wouldn’t have met without Azradayne’s interference. Again, was it someone obvious, some creature of import that, had he ignored the spider’s guidance, he would never have encountered? The Lith. The Soulweavers. The Eidolos. The Grey Clan. Or was it someone else?
Kane? Ronan?
Black?
What if one of them was what the spider truly wanted? Its web was vast, and the eyes in which he’d glimpsed so many versions of himself could have easily seen where the threads might conjoin, where the strands led, where tangential possibilities could take him. He tried to dissect his own path in his mind, tried to look backwards, but it was impossible to take it all apart, impossible to know the truth of where his choices might have led him. The possibilities were limitless, but all of it came down to what the spider’s purpose was.
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 goal s, 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 th ere. With any luck, it wouldn’ t be his last.
It can’t be. I have to find them. I have to save them.
Shadow s 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 th e s e last moment s of his life, at this final crossroads, that he can’t allow himself to fail.
H and-cannons lined with blades push through the darkness. He sees gi ant 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 come s from, not even cognizant of what ’ s happening until he cut s 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 m any 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 ha s 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 c onfused 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 a nd leaps back into their midst. Soulr azor/Avenger hacks through flesh and tears through armor. He hears low grunts and watches bodies ooze purple waste on to the ground.
H e 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.
H e 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. T he 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. E ach wear s a simple and featureless mask, a bisected segment of skin-tight steel with dark eye slits. They are doppelgangers of one an other, and the air is alive with the force of their arcane might.
He readies his blade. He knows he can’t ho pe to defeat them all, but he has to try.
The first mage sends a blast of fire. He slices it in half, and t he 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 a nd 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 on to 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: t he frozen obelisk. They both laugh coldly.
He looks for the other version s of himself, but their connection to this place is g one. 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 grope s for his weapon, but it ’ s buried deep in the folds of shadow that creep a cross the floor.
Only the living are lost. H e re members t he words the Eidolos had given him. Only the living are lost.
Arcane energies fuse around him. His skin goes rigid, and his lungs free ze. He knows that i t’ 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 tund ra called T he Reach. A ccording to Burke, that was where they ’ d find the ruins of Voth Ra’morg, where T he Revengers and the Kothians planned to enter the Whisperlands.
It was also where Rake and his cronies would likely kill Cross and Black in the ir attempt to get…something. No one seemed clear 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 be hind grey-black clouds. Dark mountain peaks loomed in the distance.
Grey Clan skiffs, bulky grey vessels with indu strial 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. S upposed ly 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 w as 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 wo rld, 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.”
G reat, 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. H e 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, b ut 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 death s, hu h? ” 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 bette r, 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 s tay 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. B lack and icy marshlands surrounded the ruins. A thin and crumbling network of earth and wood en walkways provided safe passage across the dark bog. Tendrils of green m ist 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: T he Revengers had beat en them there.
A large airship hovered just over the island, tethered by a mooring chain. Two s
maller ships flew in a perimeter pattern around the structure. Both vessels were heavily armed with repeating cannons and arcane ballistae.
D ark war machines moved on the ground. The b lack juggernauts had massive iron wheels and swinging turrets, blade-rams and flame-cannons, and they cra shed through the laggard waters and flatten ed the mounds of earth and old wooden walkways in their path.
The vehicles moved quickly. D ark 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 creatu res in the area, or squatters who’d claimed the ruins. B ut he doubted the airship would have moored there if anything in Voth Ra’morg hadn’t already been dealt with. At worst, T he Revengers might have had to contend with tundra barbarians or Gorgoloth who roamed the area in search of plunder.
Instead, t he creatures who attack ed 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. T hunderously loud rifles pelted the dark iron tanks. The Troj moved fearlessly, well aware of their own near invulnerability, for t heir thaumaturgically modified metabolism healed most wounds with ease and they were bred to know n either 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.
C reatures of equal size from Black Scar met t he Troj in battle. They were t all and gan gly 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.
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