The squad tore towards the badlands, passing through drifts of fire smoke and dust stirred up by harsh dead winds. Cross heard nothing behind them to indicate that any sort of pursuit was still underway, and for a moment he thought they’d gotten away clean.
That was when the mortar shells began to fall.
The blasts started slowly, a distant chorus of soft booms. It was difficult to make out the origin points of the mortars, but they heard the bombs tear down through the air with sonic force, a cavalcade of building momentum.
The first blast hit about 300 yards behind them, well off the mark but close enough that it rattled the ground and spooked their horses. Graves had to fight their mount to keep it from throwing them both to the ground. Chunks of earth scattered and fell around them like dice. The second blast hit a few yards closer.
“Ride!” Stone shouted. “If this smoke clears and they get a clean shot, we’re dead!”
They raced, nearly out of control, down the steep hill. The mortar blasts got closer and closer, and they fell one after another in quick succession. Cross expected every blast to hit. His spine tingled, and the hairs on the nape of his neck froze in spite of the sweat and flight. His back tensed, ready for the blast, ready for the shrapnel.
Somehow, they made it. Within a few minutes they’d left the crash of mortar shells behind them, and the city of Dirge faded until it was just a dark stain.
The land continued to slope to the north. The path widened between the growing hills, which turned rocky and jagged. Up ahead, past the last line of dying vegetation, was a realm of red dirt, black soil and white trees. The Bone March.
They rode in silence for a time, listening for the sound of pursuit. Surprisingly, none came, but they kept their pace for another hour.
The air took on a metallic and stale quality. There was no breeze. The land ahead of them was already an eyesore, a dread panorama.
“So,” Cross said at last. His voice was surprisingly loud in the prevailing quiet. There weren’t even insects or bird calls in the air.
Stone rode the point, and the others filed in behind him. The camel, who’d shown surprising endurance through the entire ordeal (or perhaps not that surprising…Cross realized he didn’t know a great deal about camels), brought up the rear, tethered to Graves’ horse.
“So…what?!” Graves asked. “You have a habit of starting a conversation and then falling asleep.”
“I was talking to Cristena, you moron.”
“Bite me.”
“Yes, children?” Cristena said with a sigh.
“What did you do?” Cross asked her.
“What do you mean?” she hesitated.
“I mean, what did you do?” Cross asked again. “Back there, at the gates.”
“I heard you. That doesn’t mean I know what you’re talking about.”
“Your magic,” Cross said. “Something about the way you channeled your spirit, maybe, or…”
“You’re not making any sense,” Cristena said, and she cut Cross off when he tried to respond. “Listen, Cross, no offense…but I don’t want to talk to you about my spirit. I don’t want to talk about much of anything with you. All that should matter to you is that I’m going to help you get through the Bone March. That’s it. I don’t want to get to know you. I don’t need you. You need me.” The anger in her voice was hard to miss.
“Yeah,” Cross said.
I felt you touch your spirit, he thought. I felt your magic, back at the city, even though my spirit is gone. And I don’t know why. I shouldn’t be able to do that. How did that happen?
Was it you that somehow made that possible? Or was it me?
“Is there a problem?” Stone asked from up ahead.
“No,” Cross said. He met Cristena’s gaze until she finally looked away and cast her cold eyes to the north horizon. “No problem at all.”
PART FOUR
SCARS
He stands alone in a wasteland of black sand, a realm of charcoal graveyards. The black mountain stands in the distance, impossibly tall, a rip in the sky. The forest lies at its feet, subjugated by the peak’s brutal size. The stink of crumbled empires and the breath of ghosts drift on the ice wind breeze.
There is nothing beyond the glade and the mountain. They are adrift, an island in a sea of nothing. Black sands run to infinity. He feels the icy cold of the open desert, and he gazes up to a bloody red sky filled with swirling steel clouds. Dead air whips along the ground, and it draws sand up into a black storm that takes to the sky like a predatory flock.
He hears the pain of the prisoners in the trees, bound there for eternity. He feels he should not free them, but he doesn’t know why.
Night stretches slowly across the sky and spreads like a stain. He senses the women in the glade, trapped in a prison of trees. He feels their heartbeats across the dust, vibrating through the sands. He hears tears that fall like raindrops.
The lonely dirge of a train cries out. A plume of churning smoke appears in the distance, spat into the sky by a steel goliath that tears across the ground, a train with no tracks, an iron juggernaut that brings a cloud of black souls in its wake. He is afraid of this ghost train. He knows he will see it closer, and soon, but he doesn’t want to.
He calls out to her, to any of the prisoners, but all he is rewarded with is the sound of his own meaningless voice, a fading echo carried away by the wind as easily as the black sand. The train draws nearer, inevitable, unstoppable.
He has lost her. He is alone.
FIFTEEN
BONES
They rode through a land of dust and ash.
The Bone March was a region of midnight sand. When the sun was eventually sucked into the horizon they knew it would be difficult to discern where the world began and where it stopped. Red dust had been blown into drifts as tall as a man, but the ground beneath the sand was all black: black soil, black water, black stone. It was as if everything had been burned and had yet to heal.
That’s not far from the truth, Cross thought.
Once beyond the dangers of Dirge, they rested and made sure that all of their supplies were in order and that they had their bearings. Cross compared his translated map with Cristena’s knowledge of the area, and they used the compasses and water-globes to align the sun’s position with their location to make sure they were in the right place. Once they charted a course, they set off.
After an hour of riding into the Bone March, it felt as if they’d traveled to another planet. The world was a black desert, an endless sea of onyx soil and crimson dust and gnarled, lifeless white trees that protruded from the ground like dug-up old bones. The air was as dry as paper, but the soil underfoot seemed unstable and almost fluid at times, and they rode with an eye out for sinkholes.
The utter stillness of the March was unnerving. There were no insects, no coyote or wolf calls, and no wind. Even the footfalls of the horse’s hooves were nearly silent. The loudest sounds to be heard were the creak of the saddles and the shift of guns and equipment as they rode.
It was midday, though it was difficult to tell, since the sky had been the same pale shade of red for hours. The color reminded Cross of a bloody steak. He dismounted and led the nameless camel for a while so that he could stretch his legs. The air was cold, and it smelled like something sick. Cross had been constantly thirsty since they’d entered the March, as were the horses. Luckily they’d had the foresight to stock up on water, but at the rate at which they had to consume it in order to stay even relatively hydrated, and thanks to the apparent scarcity of potable water there in the March, they knew that their supply wouldn’t last very long.
I guess it’s a good thing we aren’t going far.
“This is where it all started,” Cross said.
“What?” Graves asked.
“The Black broke through into our world here. Well…” Cross turned about in a circle, taking in the breadth of the Bone March. “Somewhere out here. They think.”
“They think,
” Cristena repeated. She rode at the rear of the group. Her palomino looked downright exhausted, and Cristena looked listless and sleepy, herself. Cross suspected that raising that shield back in Dirge had taken more out of her than she’d let on. “It’s a guess. There’s no way to ever prove it.”
“Well, they did find arcane residue from The Black out here in the wastes a few years ago,” Cross answered. “Not to mention the remains of old Soth. We shouldn’t even be too far from some of Soth’s ruins, if my map is right.”
“Old Soth is just a myth,” she said. “El Paso used to be here, not some faerie vampire capital.”
“I am so lost,” Graves said.
There was no way anyone could prove or even understand the truth about The Black. All that could really be agreed on was that there was a time before The Black, and a time after, and that no two worlds could be further removed.
The destructive phenomenon called The Black had arrived completely unheralded, and it ravaged the world with a single-minded fury the likes of which humankind could still barely conceive. Millions died in the days and months following The Black. The initial colliding of worlds had caused tidal waves and earthquakes. Entire cities had been swallowed into the earth and lost forever as the land resealed itself. Fires covered entire coastlines. Seas drained, and deserts sank.
But that was only the beginning. After the initial devastation that had ripped the boundaries between worlds, humankind had to contend with what had slipped through the cracks.
People were hunted through the night by living shadows, and haunted by the ghosts of apocalypse cities that had stood for centuries but that no one could remember ever being there in the first place. Worst of all, earth was besieged by hordes of vampires led by the enigmatic Grim Father, who established a military regime over most of what was left of the northern continent.
Monsters were real. Myths and legends and horror stories were all real, and it was as if they had always been real. Even magic became real shortly after The Black. The ruins and histories of cities that had never before existed melted into reality and the collective consciousness as if they had always been.
At the same time, while many cities had been ruined and violently torn apart in the apocalypse, it was commonly agreed that other cities had simply faded, as if they’d never existed at all.
The Black had merged realities, and destroyed them. Worlds had bled together like spilled fluids.
No one even knew what The Black really was, where it had come from, or if it was really gone. All anyone knew for certain was that it had destroyed the known world, and that it had rewritten all that had come before as indelibly as it had forever altered what would ever come after.
“Where else would it have started?” Cross asked. “Can you tell me one other place, besides the Bone March, that fits all of the criteria?”
“The Skull Plains,” Cristena answered.
“It’s lifeless enough,” Cross conceded, “but it bears little to no arcane residue, and least none that’s ever been found.”
“Rimefang Loch.”
“No. Even taking into account the residents of Ghostborne Island, the Loch is relatively unaltered by magic.”
“‘Relatively’,” Cristena laughed. “Listen to you. All right, then…the Bleeding Straits.”
“Now who’s talking about myths?” Cross laughed.
“I’ve been there, Cross,” Cristena said. “Have you? Look, the point is, there are plenty of areas where The Black might have come through. It’s foolish to assume it’s here in the March just because it’s the most popular choice. I’ve been in and out of the Bone March and all of those other places, and I’ve never once seen anything that convinced me The Black started in any of them, let alone here.”
“There’s a reason that the popular theory is the Bone March…” Cross started, but Graves cut him off.
“Oh, who cares?!” Graves said. “What does it matter where it started?”
“It doesn’t,” Cristena said.
“Then why argue about it?” Cross asked with a bit of sneer.
“I wasn’t arguing,” Cristena said. “I just don’t like to listen others spout off theories like they’re facts.”
“Well, it must be nice to be right all of the time,” Cross smiled.
“It is,” Cristena smiled back, and she spurred her horse around them and rode ahead to take the point.
“Cross, you are so smooth,” Graves laughed. Cross didn’t answer.
Time crawled by. They hoped to only be stuck in the Bone March for two or three days at the most, but that first day had already felt like ten. The March smelled like bad eggs. They crossed sluggish streams of greasy gray water and shallow fields filled with black lichen and swollen fungus-covered patches of ice. The temperature grew noticeably colder, and after a time the air was filled with a semi-translucent freezing fog.
They crossed fields of aged bones, yellowed by time and the excess of sulfur in the air and the iron in the water. The bones lay in piles, protruded from the ground like stakes, or they hung from the branches of dead white trees.
Those trees were numerate. They were skeletal white, so unnaturally devoid of color they were like an absence, a missed spot on a painting or a tear in a photograph. The snaky roots jutted from the ground like frozen serpents. Black husks of prune-like fruit that seeped sickly purple juices dangled from gnarled limbs. The ground around the bases of the trees was pitted, as if eaten by acid.
Navigating the Bone March took its toll on them. There was no shade or cover, and the absence of any notable landmarks had a disheartening effect on Cross’ psyche. The ground remained soft and uneven, and consequently was difficult for the horses’ already weary legs to tread. The squad rested their mounts often, noting the thick and foamy sweat that developed near the animal’s necks and chests in spite of the incessant chill. The air tasted like salt.
This is taking too long, Cross thought. We have to hurry, or we’ll never stop her in time. We’ll never be there in time to save Snow. But they couldn’t go any faster, he knew that, they all knew that. They wouldn’t be able to stop Red at all if they pushed themselves too hard.
They finally passed some ruins, and they saw the hollow remains of a large stone building, whose stone pillars and crumbling walls were all that still stood. There was a lonely well, its bucket still on the ground, whose shaft led down into a lightless pit of briny black fluid. There was a long-abandoned motorcade, the skeletons of cars left to rust and fade in the frozen heat. These landmarks were fleeting, momentary distractions from the great black and red graveyard that surrounded them.
This, they knew, was what had become of the old human civilization, and if the vampires won the war, places like the Bone March would be all that was left. The vampires would lay everything to waste, and they’d rule over the blasted lands from the confines of their graveyard cities.
They made camp just before nightfall at the edge of a bluff next to a steep path that led to a rickety wooden bridge. The bridge, which looked less than stable with its splintered posts and rotting rope bindings, stretched over a thin but deep gorge. They decided it would be better to try and cross in full light, or what passed for full light there in the Bone March.
Cross sat warming his hands by the fire, nursing a flask of water and an open can of beans, when they heard the howls of wolves off in the distance.
“Hooray,” Graves said, and he tossed the remainder of his coffee into the flames. The fluid was strangely combustible, which about summed up the quality of their coffee.
“They’re still a good distance away,” Cristena said. She huddled inside of a thick green blanket, shivering and holding a steaming cup of the same dangerous coffee. “But we’d better keep our eyes out for them. There isn’t much for them to eat out here, except each other.”
“And us,” Stone pointed out.
“How can they even survive out here at all?” Graves asked. The crackling flames cast them all in flickering shadows.
“Not much lives here,” Cristena explained. “The March can trap you. It’s unnatural, and it’s easy for an animal to get lost here. Some things wander in from the borderlands, and they just never find their way out.”
Their camp swam in a sea of darkness. They might have been in outer space. Cross looked up at the sky. It was frighteningly vast and deep, so much that he felt like he could fall into it. Between the fathoms of space and the darkness of the March, Cross imagined his body plummeting, on and on without end.
He dreams of falling. He sees the woman again, the refugee from the mountain glade, but while he falls through a black sky, hers is white. He falls down, and she falls up.
Wolves woke him. Cross came to with a start. His head ached and his heart pounded.
“It’s all right,” Stone said from nearby. He was on watch, and he had the M16A2 in hand. “They’re far away. Try to get some sleep.”
The next morning, as they drifted along the bleak landscape, spurred on by the fact that with any luck they’d be away from the Bone March by day’s end, they realized they were being followed.
A group of riders trailed them in the distance. The terrain had turned flat over the course of their morning travel, so there was no way for their pursuers to avoid being seen. It was impossible to glean any details about them at that distance, save the number. There were six.
“Could they be nomads?” Cross asked. He already knew the answer. He wasn’t even sure why he’d even bothered to ask.
“They’ve been tailing us for a while,” Stone noted. “They probably just stayed out of sight until we crossed that gorge. The terrain has been pretty flat since then, nowhere for them to hide.”
The squad carried on with an eye behind them. The riders didn’t quicken or slow their pace, but they kept a perfect distance, dangling right there at the edge of sight.
“Should we just take care of this?” Graves asked after a while.
Blood Skies Page 16
