Blood Skies (blood skies)

by Steven Montano

They’d come across its smoking remains just outside of the Wormwood. The pilot’s bodies had been flayed and their bones burned. Nothing was left now but timber. The vampires had hit it hard and fast. Eventually, someone would ask questions back in Thornn when the ship didn’t return, but that would take some time…several days, at the very least, and it wasn’t like the remnants of Viper Squad could expect any backup. Squads had been deployed far and wide in search of Red, and many of the Southern Claw’s most elite hunters and soldiers had perished during searches in the vampire-controlled wilds of the Wolfland, the harsh tundra of the Bone March, the trap-filled Razortooth Hills, and the barbaric winter lands called the Reach. Cross had known members from many of the doomed Squads. Others, like Renaad, he learned of later.

  There was, quite literally, no one left to be deployed without leaving the major cities of the Southern Claw almost entirely unguarded, a potentially lethal option to all of the cities, but particularly to Thornn, given the hordes of Gorgoloth that waited perched to strike at it from the Reach. And the Gorgoloth weren’t even the biggest threat — the Rath battalion staged at the Bonespire west of Thornn constantly waited for the city’s defenses to suffer, and the dark tower housed a formidable array of Shadowclaws, blood wings, razor golems and bone-blade shock troops, a force that could do horrendous damage if they were to gain an advantage against one of the most populated human city-states left in the world. The Southern Claw Alliance would live on, but the loss of Thornn would be difficult to recover from.

  “ Are you up for this?” Graves asked him. Cross got the impression Graves had already asked him that question at least once, and he just hadn’t heard him. He drifted in and out of awareness. When he was alert, he felt pain. He wasn’t sure how much more he could handle.

  “ Yes,” Cross said after a considerable pause. “I just…I feel…”

  “ You look like Hell,” Graves said when Cross didn’t finish his sentence. “I can only imagine how you feel.”

  “ No,” Cross said, aware of how weak his voice sounded. “No. You can’t.”

  “ Let’s pick up the pace,” Stone said from ahead of them. “I want to make Dirge before nightfall. The last thing we need is to spend another night outdoors. Pick up your feet and move, Cross.”

  “ You’re all heart, Stone,” Graves said. Stone gave him a look. Morg would have laid Graves out for that. Cross was glad Stone wasn’t quite so aggressive. In fact, Stone was actually pretty quiet, though when he did say something it was usually something unfriendly.

  There were dead trees in the distance, and the low and jagged hills seemed to circle the three of them like predators. The deep red sun fell fast behind a thick flotilla of iron clouds. The temperature continued to drop, but they kept walking. Cross wasn’t sure how he managed to maintain the pace.

  “ She’s gone,” he said after a time.

  “ What?”

  “ She’s gone, Sam. Snow…my spirit. Both of them. I didn’t think it could happen.”

  They walked in silence again. A wolf howled in the distance, and the sound echoed with bloodcurdling resonance through the menstrual sky.

  “ How…” Graves didn’t seem to know what to ask.

  “ Is it…is it always like this, for you?” Cross asked. “This…quiet?”

  “ I don’t understand.”

  “ I’m used to hearing her. My spirit, I mean. I’m used to hearing her voice, her whispers. The spirits, they…they don’t really say anything, but they’re there. Always. And I feel her…felt her, I mean…wrapped around me, like a shroud. I’m cold now. And it’s so quiet.”

  Graves didn’t say anything.

  Cross had no way of knowing if he would ever have her back. He’d never heard of a warlock or witch who’d lost their spirit in the first place. The two were supposed to be inextricably linked, a joining of souls, tied together by an invisible and unbreakable bond. Killing one meant killing the other, or so Cross had always believed.

  I was wrong. That, or I actually am dead. I feel dead.

  It bothered him that he was focused more on the loss of his spirit than that of Snow. Maybe it was easier that way…after all, losing his spirit seemed like his pain. Snow, for all he knew, could have been suffering horribly at that very moment.

  Stop thinking that. It doesn’t help.

  He knew that Graves was keeping an eye on him, probably to make sure he didn’t pass out. Cross walked in a zombie state. His mind didn’t process the act of moving, nor was he really aware of what was around him. He was used to being able to send his spirit out, to feel his surroundings, to search for what was there and what wasn’t, and that act was as natural to him as breathing. He felt blind now. Empty and alone.

  Near sunset they stopped at the top of a hill with a cave filled with heaps of animal bones. Mounds of dry red dust stood to either side of a crudely dug path that led away from the hill and into some dead plains. The path ran like a crooked river to the edge of the small city of Dirge.

  Dirge was a squat and ugly town, a shell of haphazard buildings made of brick, clay, steel and timber. It was surrounded by a fifty-foot-tall wall of corrugated black iron held together with rivets cast from hexed steel. The parapets of the city were manned by masked sentries armed with crossbows and assault rifles. Thick streams of black smoke churned from Dirge’s smithies and factories, and near the center of the city stood a black stone tower eighty-foot high whose apex was set with a circle of black barbs that formed the semblance of a crown. The sounds of industry churned from within the unforgiving city walls. The gates were made of black steel and surrounded by a defensive perimeter of sandbags and caltrops.

  “ God, I hate this place,” Graves muttered.

  “ I haven’t had the pleasure,” Cross said. Even looking at Dirge filled him with a sick sense of foreboding. Normally he would have interpreted such a feeling as a warning sent by his spirit.

  “ OK, let’s lay some ground rules,” Stone said quietly. “This is an armistice town, so vampires are as welcome here as humans. Humans are only allowed if they aren’t associated with the Southern Claw.”

  “ Okay,” Cross said. “So how do we explain where our equipment came from?”

  “ Mercs and hunters use Southern Claw equipment all the time,” Graves shrugged. “It’s the best stuff on the black market.”

  “ So we bought it, we stole it, or we traded for it,” Stone added. “But we need to keep the specialty items hidden. Hex grenades, arcane salts, those gauntlets of yours…anything on us fancier than a gun is going to raise eyebrows.”

  Luckily, their dark fatigues and armor didn’t bear any insignias of the Southern Claw, and the design was standard enough issue that it would be easy to pass the three of them off as mercenaries. They stowed Cross’ more unusual gear: the grenades and the salts, the alchemy tubes, the entropy stones, all of his gauntlets, the wires and battery packs, the arcane fuses. They hid this contraband inside of thick blankets, coats and other bulky items they carried with them. They decided to keep Winter’s oversized battery pack on hand, which they would claim they scavenged in the wilderness. With even a decent trade for the battery they’d be able to restock their ammunition and acquire extra supplies for the arduous trek north. To pursue Red, they had to drive straight through the heart of the Bone March.

  “ It feels wrong to get rid of this,” Cross said as he looked over the rest of Winter’s gear.

  “ We don’t have much choice,” Stone said. They marched side-by-side down the steep hill. Graves was at the point, and he carefully approached the city with his shotgun in plain sight. Cross didn’t need his lost supernatural senses to sense the Dirgian flame-cannon mounted high on the wall above the gate. The massive weapon turned in their direction as they drew close. “Don’t go soft on us now, Crossie.”

  “ Don’t call me ‘Crossie’. ‘Stonie’.”

  Stone laughed.

  “ How you holding’ up?”

  “ I’m fine,” Cross said. “I’m worri
ed as hell about Snow, but if we can get to Red and stop her, I’ll feel even better.”

  “ We will,” Stone said. “Thanks for going down into that mud hole. I thought we were done.”

  “ We may still be done,” Cross said quietly.

  It had taken hours to translate the map, and he was far from certain he’d done it correctly. The calculations, codes and references had been difficult to translate, and he’d been forced to do it all from memory since he hadn’t been able to use magic to aid him. But he’d grown up learning everything that could be learned about the arcane. Once Cross had discovered the truth about himself when he was young, he’d obsessively dedicated his life to understanding magic, especially when it became clear that Snow was similarly cursed. He had decided long ago that he’d never be at a loss because he didn’t understand something…which was yet another reason why the loss of his spirit had been so hard for him to adjust to.

  This is what I am. All I am.

  “ We should get a tracker,” Cross said, almost to himself.

  “ A tracker?” Stone asked. “Are you serious? We don’t need some mercenary tagging along.” He stopped and turned to Cross. Graves also stopped. Up ahead, the flame-cannon had aimed right at them. “This is serious, Cross. We don’t need a loose cannon on board.”

  “ We need all of the help we can get,” Cross said. “We need someone with magic, someone who can track, and someone who knows more than we do about traveling through the Bone March. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what we know about that place isn’t a whole hell of a lot.”

  Stone looked at him for a moment, and then smiled.

  “ Man, we are screwed,” Stone said with a grin. “I’m taking the advice of a warlock without magic.” He looked back at the city, and the stoicism returned to his chiseled face. “I’ll do the talking.”

  “ Guys…” Graves asked from the front. He stared right at the flame-cannon, and it stared back. Naturally, he sounded more than a little nervous. “Any time you want to move your asses and get up here that would be great.”

  “ Talk away,” Cross said to Stone. “I’m liable to throw up any second now.”

  “ Tough guy,” Stone said with a sad shake of his head. “Great.”

  The gates were directly ahead. The border of the dark door was made from thick bands of iron surrounded by a bass relief of a fanged skull, positioned so that when one walked through the gates it was like they’d stepped into a leering mouth.

  “ Cheery,” Cross said quietly.

  The gate guard’s masks were clear silver plates set with eye-holes. The rest of the masks were featureless ovals, dented and marred to the extent where they reflected nothing. Their armor was mismatched — they wore steel shoulder plates, face wraps and tunics, leather pants and steel-toed boots. Kevlar and flak vests were just barely visible under their billowing cloaks, their hard steel gauntlets gripped sharp iron poles, and they wore aged pistols and wickedly curved knives strapped to their belts.

  Surprisingly, the Dirgian guards didn’t detain the three of them much at all. They gave the trio a brief interrogation as to the nature of their visit, verified that they bore neither alchemy or void bombs and didn’t suffer from any arcane diseases, made a quick but fruitless search of their belongings, and ushered them into the city.

  TWELVE

  DIRGE

  Inside the walls, Dirge was much as Cross expected — a dirty, dingy, noise-filled mess.

  The streets were filled with grimy citizens with faces spotted with sickness and fatigue, charcoal dust that stuck in the air, iron wheels that ground against the broken street, furnace flames that burned high into the sky, and walls of arcane steam. People moved in crowded packs, and they toted sacks of dried goods and pulled carts of potatoes, grain, coal dust, raw steel and machinery parts. The air tasted like industry and sweat.

  Dirge’s structures were pushed together like crowded bystanders. Buildings had been built with crooked angles, and every window and door looked too tall and too narrow, as if every block had been compressed in a giant hand. Dirge was not a tall city except for the outer walls, but it was thoroughly congested. All of its structures, even the clay and dirt roads, were gray or black. Walking through Dirge felt like passing into an ink stain.

  “ Do we want to get some rooms?” Graves asked.

  “ We might as well,” Stone replied. “No sense sleeping outside the city when we can stay at an inn. But let’s get moving — we don’t want to be out after sundown.”

  Cross thrilled at the notion of spending the night in a bed. His back felt as stiff as steel from sleeping in a thin bedroll on uneven ground for the past several days.

  Dirge’s sparse population dressed in a variety of clothing as haphazard and diverse as the people themselves. Humans of all races and associations were there: refugees from the rapidly dwindling frontier, miners from the Razortooth logging camps, former citizens of nearby Southern Claw cities like Thornn or Ath. Many of the people looked to be working class, and they dressed in dingy grey and brown work clothes and heavy boots. Others wore a hodgepodge of fashions, from the retro-Medieval attire of Thornn to the heavily cloaked garb worn by the Gol of Meldoar. There were too many people in too much of a rush to pay the three Southern Claw Hunters any mind.

  Cross saw very few of the city’s black-garbed sentries down on the street, but they were easy to spot higher up on the parapets, where they watched both the roads of Dirge and the surrounding countryside. Flame-cannons propped on swiveling mounts allowed the sentries to aim the deadly weapons at targets on either side of the outer wall. Cross figured that in addition to the obvious show of force represented in the cannons there were likely more subtle means that Dirge’s rulers used to keep the streets clean of undesirables, from incognito warlocks and witches to arcane scopes in the towers.

  The black tower at the center of Dirge loomed over the rest of the city. It was a dagger, a black spike that protruded up from the nexus of town like a dirty blade. Cross couldn’t help but feel watched by the tower, as the thorny obelisk seemed to follow and hover over them as they walked, poised like a frozen black snake. It wasn’t as if the rest of the city wasn’t oppressive — the dark material of the buildings set them in stark contrast to the pale red sky, and Dirge was so dark in some areas that its people became walking silhouettes.

  Stone directed them to the tavern district, just a few short blocks from the main city gates so that visiting merchants and emissaries from Rath wouldn’t have to travel far before they came to the hospitality of an inn. Most of the signs in the district were written in High Jlantrian, an archaic tongue used by the vampires. Many Southern Claw officers could read High Jlantrian, but to Cross it looked like a random series of slashes and cuts. He recognized it for what it was, but he couldn’t read it. High Jlantrian had no arcane value at all. Cross had spent his time learning Inverted Malzarian, the text of magic.

  It was still daylight when they approached an inn, so there were very few vampires about. Those that Cross did see kept their pale faces carefully wrapped and their bodies concealed beneath bulky crimson cloaks, clothing that symbolized their status. Dirge was an armistice town: its rulers had quietly surrendered to the mercy of the Ebon Cities. The city was allowed to retain its human population, but the local authorities reported to a vampire Viscount, who along with a small contingent of undead honor guards had indirect control of the city.

  An unmistakable aura of fear existed in Dirge, so palpable Cross could almost taste it. From what he understood there were only very few vampires to actually be found in the city at any given time, but more could always arrive, as they had the freedom and authority to do whatever they pleased.

  This is no way to live, Cross thought bitterly. We’ll run you out of here, and out of everywhere else, you bastards.

  The establishment they entered, The Blackfang Inn, was a spacious and smoke-filled place that was deathly quiet, dark and cold. Immaculately clean wood-polished floors and a long and sleek
bar showed no signs of ever having been even touched, in spite of the dozen or so patrons seated at both the bar and at the few small tables. Those tavern patrons were stoic and silent, deeply focused on their purple liqueurs and thin black cigarillos. Gray and silver air shone from the skylight above the bar and illuminated the bartender in silhouette. Cross smelled whisky and hashish.

  Stone nonchalantly walked up to the bar while Graves and Cross took a seat. The other patrons looked much as the three Hunters did — dirty, unkempt, sleep-deprived and in need of a drink — but for some reason Cross felt ridiculous putting down their dirty packs on a floor that looked like it could have doubled as a trauma room. A large metallic fan set high in the ceiling sliced the pale light from outside into swirling ribbons. A square balcony bound by black iron rails and set with dozens of blank steel doors stood a dozen feet above the main floor. Those doors, Cross could only assume, led to the coveted bedrooms.

  Stone bought a round of Dirgian brandy. It was one of the weaker drinks available, he assured them, since they needed to keep their wits about them even though they all agreed a drink was much needed. He also set a room token down on the table.

  “ One room?” Graves said with a groan.

  “ Don’t even start,” Stone said. “We’re safer if we stay together. I don’t trust this place one bit.”

  They all were all on edge. If someone figured out they were from Thornn, the militia would come gunning for them without a moment’s hesitation…especially that portion of the militia that bore fangs.

  “ I may have found a place where we can find a tracker,” Stone said after he took drink.

  “ Really?” Cross asked.

  “ You were only at the bar for two minutes…” Graves said quietly.

  “ I have a way with people.”

  “ What way?” Graves laughed quietly. Their conversation was undoubtedly the loudest in the tavern, even though they spoke barely above a whisper. “Your idea of a conversation is usually an insult followed by a rabbit punch.”