A woman stands just out of sight, shrouded in darkness. Her cold eyes are filled with hate.
He draws a deep breath. Something inside him goes as still as crystal. A sound like exploding earth rumbles in his soul. The heartbeats have grown distant to each other. Everything freezes.
The avatars have all been destroyed. Nothing but a circle of pale dust remains. The blades smolder his fingers and burn his hands. Carbon smoke leaks into the sky.
He stops. Everything is still. He is held in stasis in the battered moment.
He looks to the sky, and sees the rip. It is not an actual hole, but a fold in the clouds, a wound through which he glimpses other worlds. Watery images bleed like blood rain.
He sees Thornn, and the keep. He sees the crater and the dark edge of reality.
Another beat. His body trembles. The sky buckles and folds. For a moment, he fears it will tear, but it holds firm.
It is time.
He steps away and uses the blade to cut a swath in the ground, a cold rip through which his body falls.
He plummets into a dark void of formlessness. He no longer stands at the border of worlds where his home can be harmed.
I did it. I will die alone.
He finds himself over a vast sea.
He falls towards the Keep.
It looks different now. Perhaps it is years since he has last seen it. It is still unmanned and abandoned, a place forgotten in the pages of time. The sea is turgid and thick. He sees the horizon, impossibly far away. The shadow mist recedes. He sees the ground, not as distant as he’d thought, cold grey earth covered with green grass. Stones mark the beach. A small cottage waits in the distance.
He falls through the sky. Cold wind ripples through his hands and freezes his skin. His breaths come in short bursts as he plummets toward the ocean. There is no sound.
He is just above the waters when the darkness inside him finds its purpose. He feels a moment of peace – a memory of Snow as they stand at the edge of Thornn and look at the white apple on the tree – before the energies soundlessly consume him. He feels a burst of pain, like he is cut from within by a cold blade, but then it is over.
The blast tears him apart. He sees it at a distance, a spectator to his own doom.
Black dust strikes the surface of the waters and scatters on the waves. Rolling clouds of smoke silently race to the horizon and turn the sea black with heat.
The sound comes then, a virulent explosive wave, a thundering detonation. The water boils and erupts. The air turns brittle, cracks, and falls like dark rain.
Blazing pillars of ghost flame blast open the sky.
In moments, everything is gone. Somehow he still sees it, this distended destruction, this remote view of an end.
He is content with the knowledge that it didn’t happen the way Jennar had wanted it to…that nothing more than this remote and forgotten place is destroyed.
Thornn is safe.
The thought keeps his soul warm as it is swept away.
SEVENTEEN
WAKING
Falling. Out of a blood sky, and into a black sea. Traces of lightning cut through the air like varicose veins. Drifts of salt and kelp float on the surface of the water, derelict drifts on the greasy film.
She doesn’t remember landing, but suddenly she is there on the shore. She sinks to her knees in the blood red sand. The black keep looms over her.
It is not the same bastion on which she so recently did battle: this keep is in ruins, an ancient and hollow shell of what had stood here before. The mists have mostly cleared, but a few grey tendrils still cling to the crumbling walls like lost children.
The sea is sluggish and thick. The waves melt against the sharp bones that stand like jagged monuments at the edge of the beach, a perimeter of ancient teeth. Despite the proximity to the sea the air is strangely dry.
A dark ship drifts in the distance. The world sinks into the darkening sky. The water rises around her feet.
Bodies emerge from the water, bloated and dead, fixed to the sea by chains.
She is not afraid of them anymore. She already knows what she has to do.
Danica Black woke from a horrible dream. She was disoriented and weak, and for several minutes all she could do was hold her legs close to her chest and sit in bed while she shivered beneath the thin blankets. The air was still dark, as it was not yet dawn.
She woke with the sensation that something terrible was about to happen. She shook from head to toe. Her skin felt like it had been rubbed raw with ice.
The longer she sat there, the more she remembered, and realized what had happened.
A short time later, Black stood in the hospital headquarters of the Southern Claw. She’d always hated that place with a passion. Not only did it conjure memories of her time spent in the military prior to joining the ranks of The Revengers – a time of her life she’d have preferred to forget entirely – but the arcane wards set in and around the structure always set her spirit on edge, and she knew he’d be impossible to deal with for the rest of the day. Each spirit bore its own specific thaumaturgic frequency, and certain arcane defense measures disturbed a spirit’s equilibrium. It just so happened that the hospital’s defense grid resonated a thaumaturgic resonance that didn’t mesh well with her spirit: it disrupted him and made it difficult for him to retain any sort of stable form for more than a few minutes at a time. If she didn’t think it would have been dangerous to do so she’d have just cut him loose and let him roam the area, but she was afraid an unattached arcane spirit found so close to the Southern Claw headquarters would be mistaken for an undead threat, and be treated accordingly.
None of this would be a problem if Pike would get off his ass and just talk to me, she thought bitterly. I mean, I love to be kept waiting as much as the next girl, but come on…
In all fairness, she’d come to his office without an appointment, and she hadn’t bothered to inform his aides as to the nature of her business. Going there at all with the source of her information was relatively insane, she’d decided, and she’d already almost left the hospital more than once. It was going to be difficult to convince Pike that he should raise the city defenses on account of a feeling she’d had, a fear based on a half-remembered dream.
If she’d been in his shoes, she’d have dismissed the idea without a second thought, especially considering how Pike felt about her. He rarely took any pains to mask his contempt for both her and Kane.
And if Laros shows up, they might just throw me in the brig out of pure spite. Yay.
The wide hallway was supported by thick sandstone columns wreathed in shadow. Tall Christian crosses had been bolted into the walls, and the windows were so darkly tinted it looked like dusk inside rather than dawn.
The entrance to the medical wing stood just across the hall. Black heard occasional moans or conversations between the doctors and nurses, and every now and again a distant cry of pain rang out.
A series of offices and meeting chambers sat at the other end of the chilly corridors. Each office was sealed off by a thick wooden door reinforced with iron.
Danica stood against the wall and marveled at how much dust there was. A pair of staff officers walked by and gave her a look, one of them unquestionably lustful. She smiled and looked away. She thought of Cole, and of Cross.
This is a waste of time. Pike will throw me out the second he hears what I have to say.
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t shake the feeling she’d woken with, that dread sensation.
If you don’t think they’ll believe you, then what are you doing here?
Because she knew she was right. She knew something was coming, and it was in her power to stop it.
If only she could convince Pike of that.
“Sorry, Danica, but you’re going to have to repeat that.” Pike’s bemused expression and sarcastic tone were almost exactly the reaction she’d expected.
The grizzled officer lit a cigarillo, and offered one to Black. She�
��d technically quit smoking a few years ago, but whenever she went drinking she usually indulged herself, and since she knew Pike preferred smokers to non-smokers she accepted. The smoke burned her throat and scraped her lungs. Her gums ached from the acrid fumes.
“Cross is gone,” she repeated. “He departed last night, but he left a warning: the Ebon Cities are going to attack.”
“And you decided to present this to me…casually?” Pike asked. “Obviously it wasn’t so urgent you had to come and see me before breakfast, eh?” Pike thought for a moment. “And just where is Cross getting this information?”
“It’s…complicated,” Black said. She hadn’t intended to lie to Pike like this, but using Cross as an excuse made a lot more sense that trying to convince the commander he should listen to her because she had a bad dream. “It has to do with the substance he fell into. It’s made him…temporally unstable.”
“Don’t you mean ‘temporarily unavailable’?”
“I said what I meant.”
Pike hesitated. She hoped Pike and Laros knew as much about the black blood as she thought they did, and that the recollection she had of an event that hadn’t even happened yet meant something…aside from the fact she was probably going insane. Either way, she’d find out soon.
Danica Black had become something of an expert at gauging the truthfulness in others. You had to be able to read people’s abilities to lie, to determine when someone let something slip, even if they themselves weren’t entirely sure of what that was.
Pike did that, just then. That moment’s hesitation, the half-second of recognition and surprise that crossed his face, told Danica she was right.
He isn’t surprised to hear about the temporal displacement properties. He’s surprised that I know about them.
“Enough beating around the bush,” Pike said. “What are you saying…exactly?”
Danica took a drag off of the cigarillo, exhaled, and took a deep breath.
“This afternoon, at approximately 1600 hours, the Ebon Cities will launch a major offensive against Thornn. The attack will come unbidden, and before any defenses are raised the vampires will penetrate the city walls.”
“Now how in the hell…?”
Danica ignored him, and continued.
“I…we…are not sure how they’ll manage to get into Thornn undetected, especially with as many soldiers and Razorwings as they plan to bring, so the first thing we need to do – besides shore up our defenses and prepare for inner-city combat – is to see if we can’t determine if any cloaked vehicles are approaching.”
Pike stared at her. She couldn’t tell if he was angry or just confused.
“How do you know this?” he asked.
“Cross,” she lied, but only partially. Because he was the reason she knew: if not for his leaving she wouldn’t have figured things out.
I don’t understand how this is possible, either, she wanted to tell him. I’m having memories of something that hasn’t happened yet, that couldn’t have happened yet.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “How can Cross know this?”
“There’s also a bomb,” she explained. “But…that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. I think Cross will take care of that. Or…” she hesitated. “He already has. That’s how I’m here to tell you about this.”
Pike laughed. Though he’d been taken aback, there was nothing in his eyes that told Black he didn’t believe her.
You know the black blood has temporal distortion qualities, she thought. So you can’t dismiss this. You can’t, because the only way that I could know about this is if I had some firsthand evidence. Like information about the future.
“Suppose I believe you,” Pike said quietly. “What’s your proof?”
Danica shook her head.
“You’ve got me there,” she said. “All I can tell you is that if we’re not ready by 1600 hours, Thornn is going to be in a shitload of pain.” She stood up. “But that’s on you. This isn’t my city.” She turned to leave.
“Where the hell are you going?” he barked.
“I have to go and save Cross,” she said. “I may only have a vague sense of what sort of trouble he’s in, but I do know he needs my help…maybe now more than ever.”
“Wait,” Pike said. He pushed past her and closed the door. “Listen…I have no idea how you know what you know, but if you’re implying what I think you are…then I have something you need to see.”
Pike went back behind his desk, an extraordinarily large metal table that looked like it had been dropped from the top of a tall building at least twice.
“Lock the door,” he said.
“I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, half laughing. To her relief, Pike laughed too.
“I know. Cross told me. But if Laros sees what I’m about to show you, he’ll shit himself.”
Danica slid the heavy iron bolt across the door. Pike hesitated, looked at Black, and unlocked one of the massive desk drawers and removed a hand-sized object. Whatever it was, it had been wrapped in old and soiled cloth and appeared to be made of metal.
Pike looked at her.
“What do you know,” he asked, “about Shadowmere Keep?”
At 1200 hours, 4th, 5th and 9th Platoons, Tiger Company, deployed along the northwestern end of Thornn. A number of spirit reconnaissance teams had been sent out between 0800 and 1000 hours to search for something very specific.
Normally, undead left void spaces in the air, holes where they’d passed. This was unlike living creatures, which filled the air with a tangible and readable presence. Undead were more difficult to track, but the void signatures left in their wake were just as telling as the energies emanated by humans or other living things, provided one knew how to look for them.
The platoons were specifically selected based on the proficiency of their witch trackers, who were renowned for their ability to hunt down convicts, assassins and spies with an efficacy matched by few others. Those witches had been assembled and trained to fill the void left in the Southern Claw’s ranks after so many Hunter squads had been lost during the search for the traitor Margrave Azazeth, aka “Red”.
The witches were sent not to look for void signatures, or even living signatures, but for undisturbed areas, places where no disturbances existed at all.
Places that looked abnormally “normal”.
Because while the undead of the Ebon Cities had devised a means to camouflage their presence, the downside of their deception was that it worked almost too well.
Any given area should have always shown some signs of disturbance caused either by small signs of life – insects, plains animals, or even large patches of fungus or plants – or else by the voids created by enumerate trace spirits and fragment ghosts, derelict entities too minor and scattered to present any true threat but whose presence still marked the area with an absence, a space where un-life existed, where the patterns shifted just enough they could be noticed.
The Ebon Cities’ new cloaking device, powered by the same temporal-displacing mud that had infected Eric Cross and his spirit, worked too perfectly. They made an area appear entirely undisturbed, untouched by both living and unliving presences. At a glance, a space where they’d passed appeared perfect, but under scrutiny – and once it became clear the scouts needed to look for a lack of disturbance, not a disturbance itself – the artificiality of those areas was easy to spot.
Black, Kane, Ronan, Ash, Maur and Grissom watched from the observation deck of the mansion, a room fitted with a conglomeration of nautoscopes they’d salvaged from wrecked Bloodhawks and Skyhawks. They could almost see the entire outer perimeter of the city.
The screen itself left something to be desired. It was a bulbous piece of glass mounted on the wall of the large room. It looked like a half-melted television set, and its crystal faced bore several cracks. It needed to be refitted to the wall every few months to prevent it from falling down again.
They watched as the battle approached.
A pair of Shermans rolled towards the northwest corner of the city, just west of the northern Moon Gates, a small outpost primarily used by scout patrols, survey teams and the occasional hunter or farmer sent out under armed escort to gather special materials for food production in the thaumaturgic fields west of Thornn.
There was a surprising amount of open space between the interior city walls and its northernmost buildings, even in spite of the abutting presence of both the Grange residential district and the laborer's makeshift housing commons called Graytown. Both the city watch and the bulk of ground troops from the chosen Platoons had plenty of room to operate. Citizens were encouraged to mass near Centertown – which was located well away from the northwestern walls – or else to secure themselves safely in bomb shelters and stay there until given the All-Clear.
Black had no idea how she knew the exact time the attack would come, or the direction it would come from. She had only vague recollections of a dream she felt sure she'd had more than once. She must have seen a clock in the dream, or else recalled the position of the sun, something to indicate the direction of the attack…
But it wasn't just a dream, she reminded herself. You've actually seen this. You were there when it happened, somehow. Or else another version of you saw it, and some connection was made across time, some mental transmission or a shared memory or a leak between realities.
Danica had no way to explain it. She wasn't sure if she ever would.
Whatever it was, she proved to be right.
Once spirit reconnaissance verified that two separate areas outside the city walls were entirely “too devoid” of anomalies or disturbances, scouts conducted general surveys. They didn’t target the zones the spirits had observed, but they searched for signs of passage in the general area to see if the cloaked Ebon Cities units left any other markers they couldn’t concealed.
The scouts were only gone for a short time. Reports made their rounds along the chain of command, and eventually Danica and the team caught wind of what was happening.
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