“How in the hell could the Southern Claw not have caught wind of this?” Black asked. “I mean…Fane’s loyalties are in question, but…”
“But nothing,” Roth laughed. His accent still made it difficult to understand him completely, but Black was getting used to it. She actually found his voice kind of cute. “Fane sends the weapons without question. They’re the biggest producer of firearms used by the Alliance.”
“Exactly,” Black said. “There’s no way the White Mother would let them just…leave.”
“If they keep producing weapons, though…” Kane pointed out. “Why would she care?”
“If the Southern Claw tries to stop them from seceding,” Roth explained, “they will cease weapon production. And then there would be real trouble.”
“Interesting,” Ash said. “So they’re going to go neutral. Truly neutral.”
“They’re going mercantile,” Ronan said. “There’s a difference.”
“Smart,” said Maur. They all looked at him. “What? Maur thinks it’s smart.”
“He’s right,” Black said. “They’ll be like The Revengers. Charging fees for their services.”
“And The Revengers,” Roth said, obviously growing angry, “also do work for the Suckheads!” He tossed his drink in the fire, and it blazed up. “This is why many of us are out here – we’ll have nothing to do with Fane’s treason, but we like living separate from the Southern Claw. So we choose freedom. It’s dangerous out here, but it’s the life we want.” He looked at Black. “Is this what you’re here about? To find out what’s happening in Fane?”
“Not exactly,” Black said. “We’re more interested in what’s happening near Fane.”
“The dig,” Creasy said. “You’re here about the dig.”
“What can you tell us?” Black asked him.
“I won’t tell you,” Creasy said. “But if you like, I can show you. Come first light.”
She looks upon black seas beneath burning skies. Flames fall through rips in the cobalt clouds and boil the waters. The fire is the only light for miles.
She sees the city, and it burns. It has been torn inside out by an exploding mirror between the worlds. She sees ancient ruins of dark stone used as a resting point for soldiers from an unknown army. The molten false sun wavers, inconstant. The city streets are paused, a held breath.
She has seen this all before.
She drifts, walking, a ghost through black ruins that stand at the edge of an oily sea. This keep, this fortress on the edge of dark waters, is what lies on the other side of the sun mirror. This is the place where he sails on the ship.
She knows him. She is looking for him.
A woman stands on the shore, and she waits for the ship. Her features are cloaked in shadows so thick they cover her like armor. Her dress billows in the bone cold wind.
The waters chop and churn with violent motion. They are like an organism. They claw at the small boat as it approaches, as if angered by its transgression.
It won’t be long now. He will arrive, and the woman who waits for him will take him in her arms, and in her arms he will stay.
She is sucked back towards the city, the other city, the city that burns. She sees the mirror twist and expand. She hears a heartbeat, fading. A countdown to the final moments of her forgotten life.
Black woke, startled and exhausted. She wasn’t used to remembering her dreams. She especially wasn’t used to seeing the same thing in her dreams over and over again.
Something’s so familiar about these, she thought. The man in the boat, the woman…the city. God, something about the city, and that sunlight…
“Danica!” Kane shouted into the room.
Black had been given a sparse but private quarters in one of the few permanent structures in Wolftown, a one-story residential building with a dozen rooms but very little furniture. The insulation also left a bit to be desired.
“What, Mike?!” she shouted back. Her eyes were still closed, and her face was pressed against the cot. She pushed herself up and looked around. The room was like some infested workshop. Bits of broken pottery and wood littered the floor, and light shone through the windows. “Christ, don’t you know how to knock?!”
“I did knock. Now get up, you grumpy shit. Creasy is ready to go!”
“Mike!” she called out. She was groggy, and her eyes had trouble adjusting to the light. She’d never been much of a morning person. Her skin was cold to the point of aching, and her neck and jaw were stiff from using her coat as a pillow.
Kane came into the room. He was suited up, and he chewed on a strip of wolf meat.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Danica pushed herself to the edge of her cot, but found she had to sit still. Her head throbbed with the pain of a terrible hangover. It shouldn’t have been the alcohol…her spirit always remedied that. She called him up, listened to him whisper into her mind as he wrapped himself around her body and poured warmth into her skin.
“Look,” she said. She’d hesitated about sharing the dreams, but something was definitely wrong. “This is going to sound weird…”
“WOOOOOOLVES!!!!” a voice shouted from outside. A bell rang, again and again. Booted feet stomped across the settlement.
“Shit, that can’t be good,” Kane said, and he raced out the door. Black cursed under her breath, pulled on her boots and coat, grabbed her knife harness and the H&K, and chased after him.
Wolftown was alive with noise. The frozen sun shone white on pale and dusty ground. People ran in every direction, but most of the men and fighters moved to the east wall.
Flame cannons were pumped and rotated so they pointed outside Wolftown. Ladders rose for men to climb up and look over the walls, and additional bags of blessed earth were thrown against the base of the perimeter for reinforcement. Weapons were handed out at small open huts filled with rifles, bows and shotguns.
Black and Kane found the others, who still hastily pulled on armor and readied themselves. It seemed that Ronan had enjoyed the company of a local girl during the night, while Maur and Grissom stayed up late gambling and drinking ale.
Terrific, guys. Lot of use you’ll be.
Growls sounded on the other sides of the walls. They were difficult to hear at first over the frenzied shouts, but as the moments ticked by they grew louder, a frenzied chorus of lupine anger that filled the air with an almost physical force. Danica heard heavy paws pound the earth. The ground shook.
Roth was up on the catwalk that ran the length of the tall eastern wall.
“Ready, lads!” he shouted. “It’s a hunter pack!”
“What does that mean?” Kane yelled up to him.
“It means brace yourself,” Creasy said. The tattooed mage appeared out of nowhere. “This is going to get ugly.”
Black felt her spirit coil with anticipation. He lashed out, feral, and she had to keep him in check for fear of his rage spilling with vitriolic force. The earth burned around her feet, and the dust blistered and peeled back like paint. Through him, she sensed the sheer physical mass of the approaching wolves.
Bloodwolves weren’t like normal wolves: they saw humans as meat, and they never hesitated to launch an attack, since their physical bulk allowed them to overpower most other creatures, and their bony hides were strong enough to repel even small arms fire. They were difficult to kill.
“Where’s Ash?” She suddenly realized the witch was nowhere in sight.
“Ah, shit!” Grissom shouted. “Sis???!!!! Ash, where are you??!!”
Grissom went to go and find his sister, and that was when the wolves attacked.
The outer walls buckled. Metal met bone with such force it seemed the entire town moved across the ground. Shards of rock and dust flew into the air. Men rocketed and crashed down from the twenty-foot high walls.
Black saw claws scrape over the edge of the perimeter, not quite far enough to gain footing so they could climb over. There was little more she and the team could see from
the ground inside the complex.
“On me!” she shouted to the others, and she made her way to the front gates. If there was any part of Wolftown that was vulnerable, that was it. Ronan, Kane and Maur fell in behind her. “Did Grissom go to find Ash?” she shouted.
“I think so,” Kane said.
Shit!
They weaved through crowds of people rushing for safety. Wolftown’s citizens dove into huts or ran as far from the sounds of danger as they could. Faces wide with terror flashed before Danica’s eyes.
Black briefly recalled the village of Sandosa, a remote mountain settlement The Revengers had raided because they’d heard rumors it housed fugitives. Sometimes she still had nightmares about what they’d done there.
The front gates of Wolftown were iron grills reinforced with thamuaturgic wiring and barbwire coils. Flamecannons, set behind sandbags to either side of the gates, pointed at the entrance to the city, and a small tower about twenty feet in had a .30 caliber machinegun mounted on the railing.
A half-dozen hunters waited near the opening. They were the first ones who died when the giant wolf ripped through the city gates. Red and black fur flashed through steel and flesh. The massive lupine was inside the city so quickly Black thought she’d dreamed it.
She heard snarls and shouts, saw blood and cracked bones. The pale earth turned grisly and red. Flames roared into the air, and Danica smelled roasted skin and fur. Meat innards spilled onto the ground.
The team fired into the beast. Bullets took the creature’s flank and cracked through its armored bones. The blast of gunfire rang through her ears. The creature stumbled while chunks of its body flew against the walls. Its last stumbling step sent it forward onto its face, but two more wolves leapt over it.
The first was fast, and it barreled past Danica and knocked Ronan aside. Kane sprayed the creature with bullets from his M4 as it ran past, and he chased after it when it vanished around the bend and moved deeper into Wolftown.
Danica was too fast for the second wolf. Her skin scalded and her throat went cold as she whirled her spirit forward in a wide disc of flaming shrapnel, a whirling saw-blade of dripping arcane matter that seared through the beast’s massive skull and ripped out most of its spine. What was left of the wolf collapsed to the ground in a burning heap, and it slid several yards before it came to a halt at Black’s feet.
“We need a wall!” she shouted, and more men came running, their weapons ready. They formed a perimeter at the shattered front gates. A wagon filled with sand rolled in front of the open hole, and men cleared away the gory remains of the former sentries and took up position at the flamecannons.
Black was drawn away by the sound of screams at the center of Wolftown. She ran, and her spirit trailed her like a flame cloak.
By the time they got there, it was too late.
The wolf that had penetrated into the city left five mauled people in its wake. It had harbored no specific destination: the Bloodwolves were bloodthirsty and murderous, more monster than animal, and it had simply wanted to kill.
Black found its remains near the cook fires. Its head had been removed by Ronan’s blade, and Kane’s arms were soaked up to his elbows with the creature’s blood. He bore a large and nasty claw wound on his chest where the wolf had cut straight through his armor coat.
Grissom lay on the ground, his throat ripped out. Ash was bent over him, crying. Black walked up and put her hand on the witch’s shoulder. Their spirits bristled at one another’s touch, but they forced themselves to fade to the background.
“I was trying to get some kids to safety…” she said softly. Tears stained her eyes. “He shouldn’t have come looking for me.” She looked up at Black, and took her hand. “He shouldn’t have.”
Black nodded. There was nothing she could say.
THIRTEEN
CRATER
Fifteen had died, and ten more had been injured. According to Creasy, it was far from the worst attack the Bloodwolves had ever launched on Wolftown.
They burned Grissom’s body. It was a standard practice in Wolftown, just as it was all over the Southern Claw, but in Wolftown cremation wasn’t driven so much by the fear of reanimation as it was by not wanting to give the Bloodwolves any free meals. They had a special place where they did it – a rock pit just east of town, south of the thick forests that marked the officially recognized boundaries of Wolfland – and they took Grissom and the other fourteen casualties there shortly after they repaired the main gate. Surprisingly, aside from the gate, the town had taken very little structural damage, but the psychological scars, as ever, ran deep.
How do we do it? Black wondered. She’d thought the people in Wolftown had to be just a little bit insane to live out there, so exposed to deadly predators like the Bloodwolves…but then wasn’t that the case wherever she went? The entire world was a giant deathtrap. And we can go at any time. Any of us.
She watched the flames ripple into the bright mid-morning sky. The air was crisp and cold. Her mind kept tricking her into thinking the pale dust was actually snow.
A dozen people from Wolftown stood near the blaze. The stack of burning bodies looked like scorched driftwood as the harsh wind kicked the flames high. Dark smoke churned and sailed across the open plains and into the depths of the frozen forest.
“I’m sorry, Ash,” Black said quietly. She didn’t want to say she knew what it felt like to lose a brother, even though she did.
Besides, her relationship with her own brother hadn’t been quite the same as that between Ash and Grissom. She and Cradden had never been able to even stand one another, and in the end Cradden had kidnapped Lara, one of the only people in the world Danica cared about. He’d threatened her life in order to pay off some debts he owed to the Ebon Cities. Cradden had been killed in the ensuing conflict, and while Danica had indirectly taken revenge on the ranger who’d executed him she’d done so out of a matter of principal, not because she actually cared about her brother.
There was no question that Ash loved Grissom. So far as Black knew, she and her brother had taken care of each other for a good long time. Black didn’t actually know how old either of them was – Ash was older than she looked, and even half-Doj tended to live a good deal longer than a full-blooded human.
“He died trying to save me,” Ash said quietly.
Black turned and looked at Ash. Her dark skin was stained with soot, dust and tears. She was so short, a foot shorter than Danica, but she had strength: that was plain in her eyes, ruddy and tear-stained though they were.
“Don’t do that,” she said. “Not for a second. I’m sorry he’s gone, but it’s not your fault.”
A priest – or at least a man who seemed to have some knowledge of the words of the Old God – said a prayer for the dying.
Black could tell Ash wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She just turned back and looked at the fire.
They watched as what was left of Grissom floated away in the smoke, carried into the empty sky by the cold wind. Black gripped Ash’s hand and held it tight. Ash didn’t look away from the smoke, not for a moment.
Despite Black’s insistence Ash remain behind if she felt she needed to, the witch made clear she planned to continue on. No one questioned her.
Black was secretly relieved. They couldn’t afford to be any more short-handed than they already were, especially with the big man gone.
She hadn’t really known Grissom all that well. He’d been an amiable enough soul, dependable and good natured, and he’d been surprisingly quiet for such a large man. He’d loved his sister dearly, and it was clear Ash had trouble dealing with his sudden loss, no matter how quiet she kept or how calm she seemed.
Creasy led the five of them across the plains and into a network of broken hills that looked like a landscape of shattered teeth. They climbed steep bone-colored ridges and crossed land made pale beneath a glaring winter sun. The air smelled of salt, and tasted like bitter meat.
The ground was rough terra
in, but in exchange for their aid in defending Wolftown Roth had been willing to part with a small team of shaggy horses and a single camel to carry their gear. Only Ronan and Ash were accomplished riders, but Black had just enough experience that she was able to fake it, and Kane was naturally dexterous and athletic, even if he did have a fairly pathetic level of animal empathy. (“Is it asking too much for you to stop jerking around like that, you dumb shit!?” became his regular dialog with his dun steed.) Creasy rode a dark draft horse of considerable size – an Andalusia, Black thought, a breed her mother used to like – while Maur rode with Ronan, who complained about the Gol’s tendency to hold on just a little too tight.
“Better you than me,” Ash smiled at the swordsman. She was still shaken, but she did her best to maintain her composure.
She just lost her brother. I’m amazed she can even stand.
“It’s another few miles,” Creasy said. “Keep your eyes open. Marauders frequent these parts.”
“Oh, good,” Kane said dryly. “Someone who’ll want to kill us. That’s new.”
They rode through fields of frozen grass that cracked and fell apart beneath the horse’s hooves. Pale pools of briny ice held petrified reeds and yellowed animal bones. Decayed husks of wild beasts and plains deer littered the ground, the gristle of their rotting innards exposed to the still air. The hills were largely silent save for the clatter of horse’s hooves and the occasional call of a distant wolf.
“How many wolves are in Wolfland?” Ash asked Creasy.
“Unknown,” he said. “Lots.”
“Is it good money?” Ronan asked. “Bringing their hides to market?”
“No,” Creasy said. “Mostly we use and eat what we kill, and we only trade with others when we must. We do what we have to do to survive.”
They rode on. Black remembered other plains like these, dry wastelands east of Mourne she’d swept in the aftermath of a Gorgoloth raid. The Revengers flew in on airships and rode in on Ebonbacks, great tusked reptiles like dinosaurs with serrated horns and bony tails, and gathered survivors to be taken to Black Scar as prisoners.
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