Black tackled Korva, and they both fell to the floor. Korva drew a diamond-cold katana and swiped at Black. Danica barely managed to pull back in time. Their blades crashed together.
They hesitated for a moment, one on either side of the dark sword. Danica smelled glacial frost and rotting meat curl off meteor steel.
“I never liked you, bitch,” she hissed, and she lunged at Korva.
Her spirit surrounded her katar with a glowing nimbus of light. Drips of grease energy fell from her blade.
Korva moved fast, faster than Black expected, and somehow deflected Danica’s blow with her gauntleted hand. Energies danced and exploded between their bodies, and Danica flew backwards and into the wall.
Pain flashed up and down her torso, and she felt something wet on the back of her skull. Her vision went blurry. Blood-soaked hair fell over her face.
Korva hovered at the edge of the pit, one hand again on the hilt of the black sword. An explosion rang outside. Waves of dead smoke flowed into the tower.
A corpse flew into the room like a missile. Wisps of arcane energy trailed the avatar’s body as it landed with an audible crack against the wall and fell in a heap. The man who’d killed the avatar stepped into the tower.
“Cross!” Danica yelled.
He was bruised and beaten, and blood ran down one side of his face. He held Avenger in his hand, and the blade smoked arctic steam and pulsed with pale fire.
His eyes glowed dark with the shine of his spirit. Black sensed its raw power, stronger than it had ever been before. Something dark swam in the air around Cross, like he’d fused with a cloak of liquid shadow. It leaked into his pores, clung to him, tethered him to his blade and to his spirit.
“Danica…” he gasped. He looked at her with cold determination. “You shouldn’t be here…”
The rest of the team battled the gargoyles, who continued to swarm down, an unending tide of gray flesh and clawed wings.
A maelstrom of shadow energies filled the air like poison fumes, and darkness pushed into the tower like tidal waters. Danica felt multiple presences squeezed into one, a compressed coven of ghosts fused into a tall blonde man’s body armed with a glistening black ice blade.
“Jennar!” Kane howled. He leapt at the Black Circle agent, the man who was no longer a man, a vessel for what was left of the shadow that had destroyed the vampire city of Krul.
He had become The Sleeper: a vestige of The Black.
“Mike, no!” Danica yelled.
Korva wrenched the sword free, and as the blonde woman drew the dark blade from its rusty base the salt-encrusted stone blocks that made up the floor began to fall straight down into a black void beneath the tower. Blasts of dust turned the air to a choking haze of ash smoke.
In spite of the chaos, Kane sliced at Jennar. Black remembered her first encounter with the assassin, how his enchanted Crujian nightlance and bio-thaumaturgic augmentations had made it so even she, Cross and Ekko combined had only barely driven him off. Black had then pursued him into the depths of the ice caverns beneath Karamanganjii on her own, and it had taken every last vestige of her skills to hunt him down and defeat him. He’d already been mortally wounded by the half-vampire Ekko, and even then Black still hadn’t been able to capture him.
So it was of no surprise to her when this new, power-infused Jennar deflected Kane’s blow, seemingly without effort, and sent Mike sprawling into a pit with a back-handed strike. Jennar’s eyes narrowed and burned with hot white light like the hearts of dying stars.
Those eyes widened with shock when Korva and the blade fell into the same pit moments after Kane did.
The tower imploded. Stones cracked and exploded out of the walls with such force that Black’s spirit was only barely able to shield her. Everything collapsed in a cacophony of stone rain and exploding shadows.
Cold scalded her flesh as she pitched forward, and her body spilled into the void. Bodies fell amidst a hail of black rock and shattered steel. Her sense of direction was gone, and Black screamed as she tumbled, end over end, into the wasteland of darkness that waited below.
SIXTEEN
WASTELANDS
Her vision stretches across skies of blood and fire. Drifts of airborne ash collide with the wreckage of unmanned dirigibles, floating coffins that litter the skyscape. Crumbling towers are cast headlong into the river at the valley floor, and blocks of sandstone tumble in slow motion. Shattered wires spark electricity against the snow banks.
Most of the city is flattened from within by a cold explosion of arctic flames that scorch the buildings white and blast windows away like sheets of brittle frost. Thick plumes of sick smoke twist into the air. The snow that falls is soiled and dark and smolders on the ground like cinder tears.
She drifts, a prisoner of the scene. She is a shadow, and she fades like the smoke. She melts and descends, is torn again from one reality to another. She cannot believe this is real, even as memories of the battle race through her ethereal mind, even as she sees the moments that lead to the blast, the winding heartbeat. The countdown.
Cross.
It was Cross, stuck in that shimmering mirror, that memory she’s forgotten, or else dismissed as a dream. A memory of a time that hasn’t happened, or is yet to happen.
She falls, desperate, to the ruins below. The shadows melt and rain to the ground.
Black fell to her knees. The ground was hard and jagged, and she sliced open her hand as she used it to stop her face from hitting the broken sidewalk.
She felt like she’d just stepped off of a fast-moving boat. Her stomach lurched, and for a moment she was so dizzy she didn’t dare try to stand up.
Danica grabbed her kukris from the ground. The muscles in her back ached as she stood and gazed into the wasteland city.
She had no doubts the ruins she looked upon were those of Thornn. She recognized the cobble streets, the rust-red lanes, the sandstone residences. But everything had been blasted apart, and the ruins were covered in dark scorch marks and drops of caustic liquid.
An absence hung in the air. A mage could always note the presence of other living beings, especially in an area as densely populated as Thornn. Even if no specifics could be felt, there was always a sense of life, an overabundant presence of energies.
Now, there was nothing.
Black slowly turned and looked around. She saw Ronan and Kane, both battered and bruised. Like her, they’d fallen hard, and their bodies were covered in scrapes and cuts where sharp stones had penetrated their clothing and armor. Ash and Maur had landed a little further away.
There was no sign of Jennar, or Cross.
But she saw Korva, off in the distance.
They’d landed in the center of what used to be Thornn’s city square, the junction between the residential Grange District and the Centertown business area, where everything from weapons and grammaphones to beer and bread could once be bought at almost any hour of the day or night. The statue of the White Mother had been blasted away – all that was left were her bare feet – and most of the shops Danica used to frequent had been turned to piles of stone, metal and rebar. Clouds of dust and smoke still clung to the ground, as if the devastation had just happened. The air smelled toxic.
Danica stumbled forward a step, and almost tripped on the severed limb of a gargoyle.
The smoking remains of an Ebon Cities warship lay in the middle of the square, and it had apparently landed on the howitzer that had shot it down. Fires still raged in streets she’d once walked. Cables and wires that had once connected the upper floors of buildings dangled and cast showers of smoking sparks.
“What the hell?” Kane coughed. “Danica, what’s going on?”
“Jesus,” Ash muttered. “Is this Thornn?”
“Bitch!” Ronan shouted, and he took up his MP5 and fired at Korva. She was several hundred meters away, bloodied and bruised but still alive. Danica saw no sign of the black blade as the former Revenger returned fire with an auto-pistol before she ducked out of sight ar
ound a fallen building. Ronan kept firing.
“Ronan, save your ammo, God damn it!” Black yelled. “Does anyone see Cross?!”
Kane shook his head. He looked like he was on the edge of panic. Ronan just looked like he was on the edge of sanity.
Maur moved close to them as he reloaded. Ash quietly stood nearby, as shell-shocked as the rest of them.
“What the hell…?” Black said.
“C’mon, we’ve done this,” Kane said, out of breath. “Danica, we were…we were here, weren’t we…?”
“Of course we were here,” Maur muttered. “It’s Thornn.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Kane said. “We…fought this battle. There were Razorwings and war wights…and something in the sky, some…”
“Portal,” Black finished, and she looked up and saw it in her mind’s eye.
A watery hole. A undoor. A slipstream to another world, and through it I saw Shadowmere Keep.
“We’re in the future,” she said. “But it’s a possible future. We can change this.”
“How do you know that?” Ronan barked. He dropped his MP5 and pulled out his katana.
“Dani?” Ash asked. She looked weary, and beaten. “How do you know that?”
“Think about it,” Black said. Her head buzzed with questions. Saying it all out loud was the only way to work through it. “This battle took place before we left Thornn to follow Cross,” she continued. “Remember?” She received half-hearted nods in reply. She knew how they felt – everything in her mind was inconstant, like she’d had too much to drink, but there was clarity hidden there, a certainty that her instincts were correct. “In order for us to have even left Thornn in the first place…we had to have survived. Which means that we came from some alternate timeline where this didn’t happen.”
She loaded her Colt Python and holstered it, then drew her blades. Her spirit soared out of the sky like an angry hawk, and her lungs cooled when she breathed in his essence.
“You lost me,” Kane said.
“We’re from a timeline, a sequence of events, where the destruction of Thornn never occurred,” she explained. “It couldn’t have, or else we wouldn’t have lived long enough to make it to Wolftown, or to that crater.”
“But we remember it,” Ronan said. “My memory of this battle is only vague, but…I do remember it. I remember…dying here…”
“That gate,” Ash said with sudden realization. “The Shadowmere. All of this…we’re living in fragments. We’re seeing other times, other worlds. We’re traveling through places where we don’t belong.”
“And I think that damn sword is the key,” Black nodded. “Korva had those avatar soldiers constructed so they could protect her from Jennar, because whatever that sword is, he wants it, too.”
“You didn’t tell me he was a friggin’ supernatural monster,” Kane said angrily.
“He wasn’t,” Danica said sharply. “His sword makes him dangerous…but not like this. I think he has traces of The Sleeper inside him.”
The look on Kane’s face was that of utter despair.
“Are you fucking KIDDING ME?!”
“Why are we standing around here?” Ronan barked. “If there’s even a chance we can save Cross, get back to a time where this bullshit didn’t happen, and kill that bitch, then let’s move our asses.”
“Yeah,” Kane said with a nod. “For once I’m in total agreement with Psychos R’ Us here. Let’s move.”
“Carefully,” Black said. “Ash, you’re with me. Maur, watch our backs.” She nodded at Kane and Ronan. “Go ahead, boys.”
“Jennar is mine,” Kane said plainly.
“You think you can take him?” Ronan chided. They spread out and started down the hill that led to the blasted and smoking remains of Centertown.
Danica expected Kane to reply to Ronan with some macho and smartass response, but he didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But he killed the only person I’m ever going to love. So I’m sure as hell going to try.”
They descended to a place of blood and wreckage. Stone and metal refuse covered the ground in an almost scale-like pattern. Smoldering bones and the burned husks of undead meat filled the air with vile fumes.
Several of the streets had actually collapsed into the shallow sewage system, and moving through the air near those crashed lanes was like walking through a film of melting fat. The half-shattered remains of buildings loomed overhead, and thin beams of light seeped through the cracked ruins and illuminated the dust and smoke. The air was hot and stale, and every step sent up clouds of debris. Their passage was anything but silent – everything they stepped on or touched shattered into dust.
“God,” Ash choked. “I…I can’t believe this…”
“Don’t,” Black said sharply. “It never happened. And it never will.”
Still, it was difficult to navigate the city without being reminded of nights spent drinking and carousing with Cross and Kane, or nights with Cole, even though the two of them had never spent that much time in Thornn together, as they preferred the rough-and-tumble criminal port city of Kalakkaii.
They saw shreds of clothing and broken dolls, shattered walking sticks and carts of scorched produce, collapsed storefronts and broken wheels, fragments of newspaper and torn shoes.
The ghostly silence unnerved Danica, the utter lack of whispers or voices or heartbeats, where before there had been so many.
Ash was crying. Danica wanted to round on her, tell her to stop, but she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter if she cried for the city or for her brother. It wasn’t Black’s place to tell the older witch what she should be feeling.
“Are you okay?” Maur asked from behind them.
Ash cleared her tears, and took a breath.
“Yes.”
The witches coordinated their spirits and conducted an arcane reconnoiter of the remains of Thornn. The spirits floated in and out of structures, drifted through collapsed buildings and into shattered bomb-shelters, moved through homes whose inhabitants had all been turned to dust, and then drifted up into the dark clouds gathered over the city.
“This way!” Black shouted, and she ran up what used to be Clock Street, towards its intersection with Halo Lane. The road was cracked down the center, like a seam had been split. Piles of shattered slate and broken bricks formed narrow paths.
“We have to hurry!” Ash said.
They were ambushed when they reached the intersection. Black’s spirit noted the presence of the war wights just seconds before they sprang out of the shadows, and she barely had time to lift her spirit and form a shield before the first claws came at her.
These were not normal war wights. Their flesh was blistered black and covered in thick white veins that oozed phosphorescent bile. Dark dust billowed out of their wide eyes and the pores in their cracked skin. It was as if they wore cloaks made of greasy soot.
Gunfire blazed hot and turned the air yellow and white. The wights threw themselves at the team with abandon. Kane gunned two of them down with his M4, while Ronan sliced one wight’s head clean away just moments before its claws would have found his throat. Maur blasted through another wight’s mid-section at point-blank range with the mini-uzi – his battle-cry was almost louder than the gunfire, and it took Danica by surprise – and Ash’s spirit pulled down another undead and sliced it in half.
Black’s spirit coiled around her katars and encased them in black ice. A wight leapt into the air and jumped against a shattered stone wall as it tried to disorient her and come at her from behind. Black turned and severed its claw at the wrist, then drove her second blade through its undead skull.
Once the wights were dispatched, the team moved on to the intersection at the top of the hill.
Those undead were summoned by the blade, Danica realized. They weren’t animated, but constructed, fabricated by the same energy that Jennar yields.
At the top of the street, in a ruined courtyard in front of the smashed and ruined re
mains of the hospital fortress of Thornn, they found who they were looking for.
Cross was on his knees. He coughed up blood that splattered all over the ground.
Strangely, Jennar was on the ground, as well, and he clutched a stomach wound that gushed black blood.
Korva stood over them both with the black blade in her hands. Drops of cold matter fell from the tip of the sword. Its meteoric face glimmered in the fading light.
The former Revenger turned and looked at the team as they came over the rise. Her eyes shone darkly, and an aura of malice surrounded her. Her smile was wicked, and her curly blonde hair lifted in the black breeze.
“You’re too late,” she laughed. “Not only will I end the war, but I will claim dominion over this world, and all worlds like it. I will no longer be an avatar, but the Goddess, reborn.”
“What’s this crazy bitch talking about?” Kane muttered. He stepped up and shot at Korva without hesitation. Black followed his lead and released her spirit in a phalanx of white spears laced with tendrils of dripping fire.
Korva raised the blade, and shards of darkness tore away from the crystalline face like an undulating wave of vaporous spiders. Bullets melted like butter put to a flame, and Black rocked back on her heels as her spirit collided with something that felt like an iron wall. The shield was nearly translucent, a film of petrified blood.
“Kill her!” Kane yelled, and he fired at Korva again and raced forward.
The sword hissed. Night’s veins bled at its touch, and darkness oozed in its wake.
Ghastly forms took shape in the darkness. Creeping vines of shadow leaked out of Korva’s body and covered the ground. Her veins turned dark, like she’d been filled with oil. A column of shadow formed around her body like a brittle cyclone. Licks of dark lightning danced away and stretched out like the tentacles of some oblique sub-aquatic marauder.
Shadows melted into the semblance of leering spectral faces, long-limbed visages with grim melting mouths that dripped ectoplasmic drool.
Within moments, a dozen half-ghosts surrounded the team. They were vaguely humanoid shapes with elongated limbs and pugnacious canine jaws hobbled together with bits of detritus and wreckage used as makeshift weaponry, glass and stone and steel fused into hammers, wedges and knives.
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