Ghouls, Cross thought, and he started to panic. Ghouls were pack hunters. And those packs were big.
Gnashing sounds converged on him. Leering grey faces loomed at Cross from out of the darkness. Black teeth flashed darker than the surrounding night. Cross shouted as razor-sharp claws slashed his face, his chest, and his arms. He felt fingers in his hair. Blood splashed onto his cheek.
Cross lashed out and whipped bodies aside. He smashed melon-sized skulls with his pistol, and pried away hands and teeth. The ghouls came at him from all sides in a tide of hungry mouths. Cross found an open maw, shoved the pistol inside and fired. Chunks of bone and flesh splattered everywhere.
He pushed and kicked and kept firing. They held his legs, his torso and his arms, even as they beat and tore at him. They grabbed his coat and tried to pin his limbs and drag him to the ground, where they’d easily be able to finish him off. He was drowning in a tide of angry little bodies.
Cross managed to pull the machete free from the sheath on his back, and somehow he shoved and kicked his way to his feet. He chopped through child-sized bodies with ease, cut off limbs and cleaved skulls in two. His ears filled with hideous screams.
They’re not children, his mind shouted. Not anymore.
His muscles were on fire. He felt like he was covered in nothing but wounds. Cross chopped and hacked in every direction. He swam in a field of meat. Claws raked his body, tore at his stomach and legs. Finally, after a savage blow that sent a wide stream of blood across his chest, Cross found an opening in the wall of ghouls. He pushed his way free and fled.
He ran through the dark without direction. He couldn’t tell if he ran away from the danger or toward it. The darkness was near absolute, deepened by the steel-hard mist. Black mud made every step uncertain. The chattering and gnashing of tiny teeth was right on him, closing around him like a cage.
Something took hold of his legs. Cross painfully tripped and landed face first into the mud. The machete flew from his hands.
Small and spindly hands tipped with wickedly sharp talons reached up from beneath the ground. They tore at him, grasped at him, and pulled him down. Needles of pain tore at his body. Cross breathed wet earth. He would drown in the mud.
The ghouls in pursuit were nearly on top of him. Cross lashed out and pried the hands off of him long enough to reach into the pocket of his armored coat. An earth-bound claw slashed at his ear and took off a chunk of skin, and pain flared down the side of his face.
The crowd of ghouls in pursuit had closed to within a few yards. They were ready to pounce. Cross threw the grenade, turned and lay prone in the mud while he shielded his head and neck.
The explosion rocked the ground. Cross saw white fire through his clenched fingers. The flash briefly illuminated the surrounding area, and he saw a muddy plain populated by dark pits and covered with over two dozen more ghouls. They screamed as the blast took them. Chunks of body and drifts of gore crashed to earth.
Cross waited for some time after the explosion. No more ghouls attacked him – he’d either killed them all or forced them back into hiding. His chest heaved, and every breath was like swallowing chunks of ice.
He recovered his discarded weapons from the ground. The SIG was broken. Cross sheathed the machete, reloaded the HK and the shotgun, and gathered himself. There was still no sign of the camel. Likely the ghouls had gotten their claws on it.
Dawn spread like a milky stain. The sky bled from black to grey, and the fog lifted enough for Cross to realize he was in a mass graveyard. Unmarked mounds were in every direction, and the holes he’d seen before were in fact half-dug graves. A few shovels and picks lay discarded in piles.
These were no ordinary graves, but ghoul graves. Living children had been cast into specially prepared necromantic soil and buried alive, and over the course of their slow and terrifying deaths they’d been gradually transformed into undead.
I’m close, he thought. I’m almost to Koth.
A whimpering from behind him drew Cross’ attention. Some of the ghouls had survived the worst of the grenade blast by using their fellows as shields, but that hadn’t saved their limbs from being destroyed. These ghouls mewled pathetically, their limbs smothered like ground meat. They stared up at Cross, as if begging for mercy. He left them there.
The sunrise would be in the direction where the light burned brightest through the fog. Using that to gauge his direction, Cross headed north. He was caked in blood and dried mud. Scars and aching cuts covered his face, his arms and his chest, but the bleeding had stopped. Layers of filth had stemmed the flow of his wounds.
Cross walked. He ignored his aching knees. His own exhaustion pulled him along. He stumbled through mud and mist, almost devoid of thought.
He looked at the grave mounds and wondered how many of them still contained children’s corpses, and what suffering and fear they’d experienced at the hands of black-fanged vampires and their maggot-addled wight servants.
He thought of Snow, alone and afraid, subjugated to unimaginable cruelties at the hands of Red and her soulless patron.
He thought of Graves, his best friend, annoying and taxing at times but like a brother to him, and Graves was just a body now, a blood-spattered corpse that no one would even recognize. He thought of Stone and Cristena and Morg and Kray and Winter, of Snow and his mother and father, of the streets and shops and the frightened people he’d left behind in Thornn. He saw random images, meaningless in and of themselves
a candle in his sister’s window frame; an open door that leads to a pub where he and Graves like to drink; a boxing match where he loses forty coins; a fortune teller who tells him he’ll live to a ripe old age; an elephant ride that he and his sister take, and they wonder all the while where such a beast came from; a brothel where he loses his virginity, the only place he will ever really enjoy the company of women; an apple stand where he works; a steam engine and a railroad that will never be finished, one of the only memories he has of his father, who takes him there when he is very small, before The Black; a sunset he watches with Snow; an eclipse; a waterfall and a lake and a bucket of cold white fish; a summer day, when Snow is inside, mother is in the kitchen, and he looks up at the sky and wonders, he sees possibilities, he knows he is trapped in one of those small eternal moments when his life is not yet decided, when there are choices still to make, when nothing is yet certain
and all of those moments, taken together, were the chaotic collage of his life, a snapshot of his memory, his soul. There was no one thing, no ill-defined feeling or heart-moving song, but it was a sea of memories, a soup of emotions. It was life, his life, and his home, which was a place he wouldn’t let be destroyed by a woman who’d tried to be a savior but in the end had decided to become a God.
Cross walked on. His eyes were cast forward, and his pace quickened. He was ready to finish it. Even naked as he was without the shield of his spirit, he marched towards his end, and he was not afraid.
TWENTY-TWO
NECROPOLIS
The prison of fog came to an end at the edge of a dead city.
The walls of the necropolis were made of thick stone blocks, so dark they seemed to suck the light out of the air. Sheets of black iron, pitted and dented by a history of unnamed calamities, had been riveted over the spaces between the blocks. The fog ended a few hundred feet short of the onyx city walls, far enough away for Cross to take in the impressive breadth of the utterly silent necropolis, which sat atop a field of ice cold mud. He saw a coastal shore at the far end of the city, and even though the waters were some distance away he detected the faint odor of salt. Skeletal and jagged towers stood at the corner intersections of the city walls. Each tower supported a belfry of preposterous size and crooked angles. Red flags hung limp in the dead air, and barbed iron spikes lined the tops of the walls like an animal’s spines.
A wide grey path led to the open portcullis that granted access to the city. There were crowded houses packed into the same unseemly angles as the tow
ers, and stone streets that bore not a trace of refuse. Silver mist and dark green chimney smoke rolled over everything. The streets snaked deep and out of sight, winding into shadows.
Cross stood frozen. This city bore a citizenry, who even as he stood in awe moved silently along dank and lifeless streets. They went about their business, their eyes gone or their limbs missing or their mouths sewn shut.
This was a city populated by corpses.
They moved in near silence, so stiflingly quiet that Cross’ breaths sounded to him like hurricanes, his footfalls like thunder. The air tensed, as if ready to pounce.
The dead carried on as living people did. They were occupied by any number of mundane tasks.
Cross wasn’t even aware of the zombies behind him until they passed him by and entered the city, oblivious or unconcerned by his presence. He watched them pass. Their flesh was rotten and leathery, and they bore gaping holes in their bodies through which he saw black worms that swam in their veins in place of blood. None of the undead so much as turned their heads in his direction.
Maybe they don’t know that I’m here, Cross thought. How?
Maybe I’m expected. Maybe they’re supposed to let me pass.
Cross swallowed. The act of breathing seemed to drag rocks up and down the inside of his chest, and his stomach boiled over with worry.
Do it now, or you never will.
He stepped into the necropolis.
The silence was unnerving. Bound in by walls and towers, walking along clean streets beneath the shade of tall buildings, passing storefronts and sewer grates, Cross could almost believe he was somewhere else, in some normal city. But where another city would have bustled with activity, and the air would have been filled with shouts and whinnies and steam engines and noise, there in the necropolis there was only the quiet shuffle of corpse feet on the stone roads, the low and nearly inaudible moans of the undead, and the distant toll of some mad church bell that sounded utterly alien in that dread landscape.
He read a word on the face of a large building with stone columns: Koth. The Old One’s city. The vampires that defected from the Ebon Cities came to Koth. It was a city of undead outcasts, rebels, traitors in the eyes of the vampire elite. Those undead that were not tolerated by vampires – lich, ghouls, zombies, utterghasts, kai’thoren, mummies, necrofilch, others – were welcome in the Old One’s city. There they hid, hated by both the living and the dead.
But just like Red, the Old One is willing to compromise, Cross thought bitterly. The Old One is willing to give the Ebon Cities the means to defeat us, just so he can rejoin their good graces.
Cross brushed against dead bodies, and realized he couldn’t look much better than they did. He felt numb. The air in Koth was chill and damp and it froze his clothes to his skin. The mud and gore that had caked to his body itched. He wore a suit of gritty armor.
He wandered the streets, wondering where he would find Red.
Twisted and narrow lanes led down curved hills and snaked like rivers between the crooked buildings. Piles of bones stood at street intersections, illuminated by fire pits filled with cold blue flames. Tapestries of flayed skin dangled from the rooftops. Cross saw vehicles made of bone and turbines fueled by blood. He saw factory-bred zombies with false skin expertly sewn to their bodies with industrial seams. He saw feeding vats filled with entrails and bloody slime, and tanks filled with black necrotic fluid used to embalm and preserve rotting corpses, a privilege of the vain upper echelon of the damned.
Every building in the necropolis was dark and had been carved with rampantly elliptical angles, lending Koth a shadowy and organic feel. Black smoke silently churned from distant processing plants that cast industrial shadows over the city. Cross tasted exhaust and rotten nectar in the air, and he smelled turpentine and embalming fluid, sumac and hemlock. Beneath it all was an inescapable fog of decay.
Cross rubbed shoulders with shambling corpses and gaunt wights. Flame spirits floated through the air, casting blazing trails behind them. He gazed into eyeless sockets and mummified heads with their mouths frozen in permanent grins. The black sidewalks were coated with white corpse dust.
He went through the city in a quiet panic, and it was a struggle every step of the way for him to maintain his resolve. There was always something undead within arm’s reach, and at any moment he expected one to turn and pounce on him.
Nothing happened. He was left alone.
Cross searched for some sign of the Old One’s residence. It would be plain, Cross reasoned, for the Old One was not an ostentatious ruler. He’d been a soldier in life, a man who’d earned his reputation by doing the impossible and asking for little in return. His lair now would be fortified, but it would by no means draw attention to itself. Quite randomly, Cross took down a steep lane, and he entered a lower section of the city.
He walked down a road paved with faces: flayed skins pulled taut and stretched out in a mockery of caricature screams, a collage of human masks beneath his boots. He saw pillars made of black stone, and he passed a temple made of saw blades.
Cross came to the edge of a dock that led over turgid grey waters. Iron mists clung to the surface of the sea, low enough that he could still see the outline of a land mass out in the smoky bay, an isle dotted with buildings. Massive ice floes drifted in the water, black glaciers cut through with frozen veins of crimson quartz and bits of stony debris that still cleaved to the ice, the refugees from some long forgotten structure.
Cross compiled what he knew of the Old One. In life he’d led an expedition north some months after The Black, before the first warlock or witch sightings. That expedition, evidently, had been to try and rescue some special child, a child that a prophet or a fortune teller had determined would give humans the means to survive in their suddenly devastated world.
The Old One – Knight, that’s what his name was, Dane Knight – had died there along with all of his men, trapped and ambushed in a church by vampire shock troopers. The child had died, Knight had been turned into a vampire even though the rest of his men had been slaughtered, and in time he became a separatist and a defector known as the Old One.
I wonder why he left, Cross wondered. Why did he defect from the Ebon Cities?
The void where Cross’ spirit should have been gnawed at him, and it left him weak. He felt hollow. He wasn’t sure why, but he was certain the Old One was on that isle. The misty waters were laggard and sluggish. They’d once been frozen and solid, just like the lands that had surrounded the church where Knight and his Company had fallen, at least according to the tales.
You’re still there, Cross thought. The church where you died is on that isle, and that’s where you are. Trapped in the past.
Cross walked to the docks. Ancient and rotted wood creaked beneath his weight. The smell of sea salt was muted by the odor of undead fish, which Cross spied swimming just beneath the smoke-colored surface of the water. Tall smokestacks on iron dreadnaughts moored in the bay belched acrid black smoke that twisted into the sky. The air was brighter there by the water, pale and empty like a frozen winter. Dead waves splashed against the heavy pylons beneath his feet.
Behind him, the city carried on, unconcerned by his presence.
Cross descended a wooden staircase and stepped onto the floating walkways that led to the ships. Most of the vessels were large sailing crafts made of iron, bone and black wood, and they bore sails woven from tanned skins. There were also a number of submersibles, one-or two-man submarines equipped with massive viewing portholes and sharp propellers.
He spied a small sailing craft big enough for perhaps a dozen people. A hooded wight stood at the bow, its undead face partially concealed beneath a grey hood. If the wight found Cross out of place or suspicious then it made no sign of it. Instead it gestured with a skeletal hand for him to board the boat. Its wide and frozen human eyes seemed to regard Cross carefully as he approached.
I am expected.
He chilled at the thought, but accepted it
, and boarded. The vessel shifted and lurched as he stepped onto the slick deck. Cross walked to the iron railings that secured the passenger pit, and looked out at the island.
Somehow, Cross wasn’t surprised by this turn of events. Maybe he’d even known this was how it would happen.
The wight stepped aboard in silence. It regarded him with its molded skeletal smile.
“You’re expecting me,” Cross said. He was surprised when the figure nodded. “Where are you to take me?” he asked.
The wight pointed with a bony claw to the misty isle. Cross nodded.
A few minutes later the thaumaturgic turbines sputtered to life, and the vessel lurched forward into dark waters, slowly propelled by its noisy motors. Cross held on to the railing as the craft sliced its way through the oily sea. Black smoke from the city and the docks spread across the sky like an ink spill that painted a path to the black island.
Cross was certain, even before the vessel had launched, that he would not be coming back.
TWENTY-THREE
OBELISK
Buildings took shape in the mist as the boat drew closer to the isle. The shore was rocky and jagged, like a fan of blades. White waters heavy with green slime and putrid sludge crashed against the stones. The structures on the shore stood like gravestones in the white fog. Ghostly calls sounded through the chill of the afternoon. The air was icy and thick, and it pressed against Cross’ skin like a razor’s kiss.
The boat came ashore at one of the few points in the labyrinth of deadly stones where the beach was accessible. Cross disembarked and waded through polluted waters to a beach of pure white sand. He noted something odd about the sand, so he knelt down and took up a handful. Tiny bits of broken bone and tooth, so fine they were almost invisible, drifted between his fingers. The beach was ground bone: he stood on a shore of the dead.
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