She pulls herself free of the grimy beach and steps onto a stony shore. The dark stone wall looms above her, and seems to bear some malevolent intent. She hears something through the walls, a distant song like the voice of the forlorn sea.
She sees a black ship. It sails in the distance, frozen against a pale sun that sinks like ice into the horizon. A lone figure stands at the bow, and he desperately holds onto the deck railing as the waves grow violent and the sky bleeds dark.
The others are there with her. They are incorporeal at first, just shades, and she only knows them by their outlines, by the arcane signatures of their heartbeats. Her spirit wraps tightly around her, and the heat of his presence makes her solid. Shadows fall from her skin like ebon scales and float away on the dead breeze.
She looks at the ship, at the crumbling black sky, and she knows she has seen this before, that she has been here before…and that she will be here again.
The sky cracks and falls like brittle waves of melting crystal. Piece by piece, the ruined keep rebuilds itself. Chunks of mortar slide back into place. Rebar and iron crenellations twist together like metal serpents. Lost stones and shards of wood emerge from the water and fall into perfect position as the structure rebuilds itself.
A scene of destruction rewinds. The darkness builds and then lessens. The sky turns from black to red. Everything twists. The team takes shape out of the darkness and step onto the shore of this reconstructed reality, this past version of a place that stands outside of time.
Danica felt like she’d been adrift in the sky for days. The notion of solid ground seemed a distant memory, and she nearly fell over.
Everyone was there. Kane and Ronan helped Ash to her feet, and Maur grumbled and complained in the third person as he dusted himself off. They were all covered in flecks of black dust and soot. Iron mists surrounded them.
They walked on thick blocks of mortar embalmed in grease ice. The curtain wall before them was easily wide enough to land a pair of Bloodhawks side-by-side. The parapets were covered in dark blades made of steel and stone. Siege weapons from a lost age, catapults and ballistae and trebuchets, stood unmanned. The devices looked like they’d gone unused for centuries.
Danica shivered. Her breath crystallized and fell, and even with her spirit wrapped around her body her skin felt brittle from the cold.
“Ok, I give up,” Kane said. “Where the hell are we?”
“Not only where,” Ash said as she turned in a circle. “But when?”
“What?!” Kane said, disbelieving.
“Shadowmere Keep,” Ronan said. “We’re in the past, before it was ruined.”
Shadowmere. One of the first vampire bastions from early in the war, Shadowmere fell to the human armies of Ath, and it was believed its destruction was one of the reasons the vampires turned to the more advanced Bonespire structures.
Danica looked closely at the black mortar and stone spikes. Dust between the blocks of stone was frozen. This place hadn’t been used in decades, or longer.
“No,” she said. “This is similar to Shadowmere, but it’s a replica.” She turned around and sent her spirit to scout the surrounding area. The arcane fog was filled with spectral detritus, the discarded firmament of lost souls congealed in roiling night smoke. That atmosphere grew thin beyond the veil of shadow mist, and there were boundaries to the reality. “We’re not even on Earth. We’re somewhere else, some quasi-dimension.”
“Are you going to explain all of this in plain English?” Kane griped.
The team used the wrecked siege weapons for cover as they advanced along the wall.
“During The Black, we know that Earth was fused with other worlds,” Ash explained. Her spirit had taken the form of a shimmering scimitar that fixed itself to her forearm and dripped caustic jade heat. “We also know that lots of pieces of those worlds were…lost.”
“Ok,” Kane said. He aimed his M4 forward and covered Ronan while the swordsman ran up and ducked behind a chunk of broken stones. The two men stayed at point, while Black, Maur and Ash brought up the rear.
“Well, just because they were lost doesn’t mean they ceased to exist,” Ash said plainly. When Kane gave her a puzzled look, she opened her hands and indicated their surroundings. “Here we are.”
“Great. We’re in the Twilight Zone.”
“Something like that,” Ash smiled. “The Tome of Scars refers to them as The Fold. They’re like lost mini-realities, places only tangentially connected to our world.”
“Sure,” Kane nodded.
They moved another hundred meters. There was no enemy contact, nor any indication of where they needed to go. It occurred to Black they also had no idea how they’d leave, if leaving even became an option.
Where are you, Eric?
She chanced a glance over the side of the wall. The air was so thick with blue-grey smoke and mist the keep might as well have floated in the sky. Vapors twisted and clung unnaturally to the stone. Deep and monstrous calls sounded in the distance, the cries of alien birds stranded in the void of smoke. The air was stiff and quiet.
Kane kicked a chunk of rock into the open air and leaned over to watch it fall. It vanished in the mist like without a sound. He frowned, and they carried on.
Black was nagged by a sense this had happened already. She felt that same mental fog that had bothered her ever since they’d left Thornn. Something about all of this seemed too familiar, a sense of déjà vu far too uncanny and unnerving to be dismissed.
“Kane,” she said quietly. A disturbing thought had occurred to her.
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember how we got here?”
“Are you on drugs, too?” he said sardonically. “We walked through a fucking magic gate, Danica.”
“Not that,” she said, shaking her head. Something buzzed in her mind, some notion, and she couldn’t shake it no matter how hard she tried. “The voyage…our trip down here…”
“The big flying thing…Wolftown…losing Grissom…yeah, it’s been buckets of fun…”
“God damn it, Mike, listen to me!” she almost shouted. Ronan and Ash and Maur all stopped. “Leaving Thornn. Do you remember…leaving Thornn?”
“Danica, I…” Kane looked ready to answer, but he hesitated. He licked his lips, frustrated, confused. “I…well, shit…”
Ronan motioned that something lie ahead, but they couldn’t discern any more from their current location. They had to move in.
They ducked and ran between two catapults. Kane took the point and moved forward in a low run, and he’d gone maybe thirty yards and nearly reached the second catapult when he suddenly threw himself prone. Ronan was next in line, and he turned and raised a closed fist in the air, the signal for everyone to stop and go silent. There were voices up ahead, muffled by the distance.
Black listened. At least one of those voices spoke in an arcane tongue, and after a moment she recognized the speaker.
Korva.
Black nodded at Ronan. She, Maur and Ash were behind a large stone block that looked like it had once been part of the shattered tower to their left. Maur kept his mini-uzi aimed forward. Black sensed Ash’s spirit turn volatile. Danica’s spirit weaved in and out of the cold and endless mist. If Korva had any mages with her, they wouldn’t need to spend much time searching for the witch’s spirits.
Shit. I wonder how we got this far without being noticed.
The team didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver: the stone block and the catapults took up most of the space on the curtain wall, and what remained was littered with chunks of rock and smoking ice.
Kane had fallen prone about ten yards shy of the second catapult, and a tall tower made of barbed stone and metal stood just beyond the siege weapon. There was no door at the tower’s ground level, but a large oval hole about twenty yards up from the tower’s base led inside. Grappling hooks and nylon ropes dangled from a stone protrusion that jutted out over the opening like a massive avian perch. Danica heard the shuffl
e of feet and the clatter of weapons and armor.
Kane looked back at her from his prone position. She signaled her plan to him: his role mainly involved keeping his head down. His eyes went wide, and she could only imagine the pleasant things he’d say to her the next time they spoke.
She saw the glimmer of steel wings and pale bodies. Hexed vapors hung thick in the air. She could just make out the group up ahead, which included human mercenaries, some of the avatar soldiers, and a pair of mages, one witch and one warlock.
Black took a deep breath. It used to be so easy to give orders that led to other people’s deaths. All it took was actually caring about those people to screw that up, she supposed.
She was about to give the word when something happened. A new presence stirred.
It came out of nowhere and shot into the air with the force of a bomb blast, and its arrival tore their eyes to the opposite end of the curtain wall, past the tower. Shards of smoking glass hailed down like a sizzling meteor swarm. Trails of dark steam followed the projectiles as they burned through the fog.
Dead breath washed against her face. Spirits scrambled to erect shields of battered chrome and shards of rock, derelict defenses culled up from the surroundings to repel that barrage of primitive missiles. Ebon flames exploded and engulfed the ground. Steel wings groaned as undead angels took flight.
Danica tasted hex currents in the air. She recognized the arcane signature of the intruder.
Cross.
She nodded at Kane and Ronan. The latter rose and fired at the tower. Black and Ash both sent their spirits forward with violent force.
Danica scorched the area with a solid line of razor energies. Maur ran up next to Ronan and tossed a grenade that landed at the base of the tower.
A series of explosions rang out beyond the catapult and tore through the tower wall. Roiling clouds of debris-filled vapor swept at them like a dust storm.
Black and Ronan fired at the angel silhouettes. Their ears rang with gunfire.
“Where is he?” she asked Ash. She’d already sensed that the witch had sent her spirit ahead to search for Cross. “Ronan,” she shouted. “Help Kane!”
The men rushed towards the base of the tower. Maur shifted to cover them.
“He’s…in the sky,” Ash said. “I think he’s flying.”
“What?” Black said with a nervous laugh. “How the hell did he learn to do that?”
“Contact!” Ronan yelled from up ahead. Black heard gunfire in the smoke, followed by blades and shouts. She rushed forward past Maur. The smog seared her eyes, and choking vapors filled her lungs. Drifts of dark fog cleared ahead of her as she ran, and Black leapt over chunks of stone and blasted limbs that had scattered on the ground.
One of the avatars was dead. Its once majestic frame and visage had been reduced to chunks of pale skin and shards of metal wing.
The enemy witch was down. Her legs had been blown away in the explosions, and her body was black and blistered but she still clung to life, doubtlessly through the aid of her spirit.
The warlock was in the tower. He hid behind chunks of shattered mortar and stone and sent blades of smoking red energy that hounded Ronan like animate knives. The swordsman was barely able to hack them aside with his katana.
Kane was on the ground. One of the blades had jammed into the meat of his shoulder, and he tried not to scream even though the red-hot metal sizzled in his skin.
Maur sprayed the hole with his uzi, and the warlock ducked back, surprised.
That gave Black enough time to send her spirit through the opening. The warlock threw the attack aside with his own spirit, and the air sparked where the ghosts met, but while he was distracted the conjured blades left Kane and Ronan alone long enough for Ronan to run up and kill the maimed witch where she lay twisted on the ground.
Maur and Black pressed the attack, and the warlock fell back.
They took cover behind the catapult. Black looked at where the tower had been blasted open.
“We weren’t that careless,” she said. “Ash and I were careful not to hit the tower, and one grenade wouldn’t have made a hole that size.”
“I think the mages redirected the attack,” Ash said as she caught up with them. The five mercenaries were all back together. “They’re skilled…”
“Oh, who cares??!!” Kane shouted. “Will one of you heal my friggin’ arm??!!”
Black wrapped her spirit around Kane’s skin and sealed the wound. Steam hissed out of the injured flesh, and Kane bit down and grit his teeth.
“Now what?” Ronan asked. He put his katana to the side and reloaded his MP5.
Booms detonated in the sky. Somehow, Cross was up there, flying. They couldn’t see him through the smoke and unnatural bruise-blue fog, but she sensed the signature of his spirit as it rained ice shrapnel against the two flying avatars. The clang of steel echoed up above.
Maybe it has something to do with this place, Black thought, but her spirit felt seemed to be the same as it always had, as did Ash’s. Or maybe it’s the black blood. It must have done something to him, made him stronger.
She feels a heartbeat, slowing down. Each beat concentric, closing in. A countdown.
Oh, God.
“We have to hurry,” she said. “Kane, Maur, covering fire on my command! Ronan, get ready! Ash, back me up!”
No one questioned her. They moved efficiently into flanking positions on either side of the catapult and situated themselves so every shooter had a clear line of fire to the blasted opening on the ground level.
Black gave the order. Kane and Maur sprayed the hole with automatic fire. As expected, the warlock inside erected a shield, a translucent wall of force that deflected bullets and sent them caroming into the air.
That was why Black sent her spirit up. He shaped himself into a pulsating wave of edged force that slithered up the walls and into the higher aperture of the structure. Danica sensed exactly where the warlock hid in the tower and sent her spirit straight at him, and the warlock was forced to shift his shield up at the last moment to try and throw back Danica’s spectral assault.
He was seconds too late. Heat seared his face and cleaved the flesh from his bones. Exposed skull meat sizzled, and the warlock screamed. With the shield gone, Kane leapt out and fired, took the man’s kneecaps out and sent him sprawling to the ground. Bullets ripped into the warlock’s body, and Black and Ronan jumped through the hole.
Smoke and steam concealed all details of the interior. Danica smelled hex fumes and brimstone, and the air was so hot it scorched her eyes. Her spirit poised himself on her shoulders like an arcane hawk.
Korva stood at the edge of a series of vast, cold pits. Black sensed the void within, the impossible deeps that waited below.
A black blade, a sliver of meteoric rock that bellowed steam and darkness, jutted out of the stone next to one of the pits. The lower section of the blade was shaved silver where Korva had begun to pull it from the floor, but the end was still stuck, wedged in the blood rock.
Black sent her spirit forward at the same moment Korva gripped the handle and howled in a viral arcane tongue, a virulent and ancient language which made the air crackle and spark.
Cold so true it turned the blood to ice flowed out of the black sword in waves, and Danica barely kept her heart from stopping as it hit her. Ronan fell to his knees, struggling for breath.
Danica held on. She focused her grip and turned her spirit into a wedge of translucent crystal force that punched through Korva’s stomach. The blonde woman screamed, and with a quick motion she released her grip on the black sword and tore the missile out of her abdomen before crushing it to dust with one hand.
Pain rippled up and down Danica’s arms. Jets of fire ran through her bones, and cold spiders crawled in her gut.
She unloaded with the G36. Bullets sparked on the ground and ricocheted off the dark blade. Korva somehow avoided the bullets; she moved with supernatural speed. Though she bore no wings like the soldier av
atars, she was obviously augmented. No human could have survived that blow through the torso, and though the former Revenger bled copiously from the wound she returned to the sword and tried her best to pull it free.
A shadow loomed overhead. Black glanced up and saw the gargoyles.
She had no way of knowing if they defended Shadowmere or aided Korva. Either way, they descended with open claws and bared fangs. The gargoyles wore iron and stone shoulder spikes and gauntlets. Their eyes were cobalt slits. Razor spurs and arm shields had been strapped tightly to their bodies. They bore down with terrifying speed, stone hawks the size of lions.
Black fired at one and slowed it long enough for Ronan to recover and take off its thick head with his blade. Two more of the brutes landed on top of him and drove him hard to the ground. Black sent a tide of arcane energy blasting through the gargoyles: she cut one in half and threw the other against the wall.
Ash, Kane and Maur ran into the tower.
Time slowed. Their motions were stilted. Everything seemed to move through a filter of sand.
Kane went to help Ronan, who was still down on the ground, when a gargoyle came at him. He pulled a curved blade from his back and twisted at the last possible moment. The gargoyle’s claws just missed the blonde man’s throat as he curled into its chest, brought his sword up, and cut the beast open from groin to neck. Stone-colored intestines spilled to the floor.
Maur sprayed the air with gunfire, and tried his best to keep the other gargoyles at bay.
Even bleeding and dying as she was, Korva still gripped the dark blade. She had almost yanked it free.
Black’s spirit still reeled from Korva’s attack. Her gun clicked empty as she downed another gargoyle. The brute landed hard on the ground and tore up chunks of stone, bounced and fell headlong into one of the fathomless holes and vanished with a bellowing howl.
Danica drew a kukri and ran towards Korva. She ducked beneath another gargoyle claw, and she heard Kane yell as he grappled the beast behind her and threw it against the wall.
Soulrazor Page 20
