He watches the cities burn. People die by the thousands, cast into great pits or onto drill-shaped obelisks, and those who aren’t hacked to pieces and cast into reservoirs for the vampires to feed on are instead summarily executed by the toxins which flood the landscape.
The Ebon Kingdoms swallow everything, and soon occupy most of the north and the entire western continent. Lights from the Claw Stations flicker like diamonds and blood, and the harvesting field are filled with screams. Dirty towers glow like dim candles, and the cities are razor juggernauts, obscene jags of twisted steel and bone. Vast fogs of pollutant stretch across the land like a sea of poison. Iron railways trace veins along the cracked and blood-stained earth. Red brick and dark walls, dismal sepulchers and cobbled mazes of flesh.
Though everything is different, much is familiar. Black Scar has fallen; New Koth still stands, ruled by a lich council after Cross saw to the death of the Old One, Knight. His friends are still there, and they’ve suffered the same fates as they had before.
He never could have imagined a world worse than the one he knew, but here it stands.
A landscape of waste, crushed stones, forgotten forests filled with blood-hungry beasts and forlorn necropolises. Vampires roam the land in bladed warships and iron crafts, hunting down survivors. Humans live in fear, either of the Ebon Kingdoms or of the Coalition. It is a new hell.
He sees Danica. She’s survived, moving through the forest. Walls of flame and fire smoke surround her.
There’s no sign of Ronan, or Shiv. Cross’s heart twists like a knife in his chest. The atmosphere is thick with grit and thaumaturgic backwash, hideous fluid rained down by a cadre of Raza assassins. Danica has no choice but to flee, and she retreats back to the headlands where they first spied the white plume of smoke. She’ll wait for him, he knows it. She loves him, and she won’t give up.
“Do you understand, Cross?” Hasker said.
Cross heard the voice distantly. The details inside the vision were hazy, and when he forced his eyes open the small iron room was still full with white fog smelling of something freshly skinned. His skin was flushed with heat. He no longer stood but sat on the floor, his back against the wall.
“They changed everything...” he said.
“What is he talking about?” Hasker demanded. Cross didn’t hear a response. “Do you see your woman?” Hasker said, closer now. Cross could just make out his bald pate in the darkness as the man looked down on him like some pale tower.
“Yes,” he said. “She got away.”
“I let her. Get. Away.” Hasker backed up, his hands clasped behind his back. “You’re going to do what we want, Cross. To keep her safe.”
“She’d...” Cross blinked against the unnaturally bright light. Silver glints sparked off the corner of his vision. He felt thickheaded, and his thoughts were starting to float away. “She’d kick your scrawny ass...”
Laughter. Then pain, a spike of hurt which spread up his arm. It was difficult to focus on the wound in the smoky haze of the hut, increasingly harder to even discern what was happening.
“We let her live,” Hasker said. “We can change that.”
Cross laughed to himself. He knew how powerful she was.
“I have the schematics to that arm of hers,” Hasker said. Cross’s heart went cold. Something in Hasker’s voice told him it wasn’t a bluff. “It’s based on Cruj tech. Black Scar was desperate for money before we finally destroyed that shithole a few months ago. They had all sorts of interesting things in there.” Cross heard him walking, and barely made him out on the other side of the room. “If I give the command, she dies. Wherever she is, whoever she’s with. It won’t matter.” He sipped from a cup of something. Cross tried to imagine himself crossing the room and snapping the little bastard’s head open, but without the sword he was useless. Just a broken old man.
“What do you...what do you want?” he asked. He heard the fear in his voice, which meant Hasker heard it, too.
“The swords,” Hasker said again. “It all comes down to the swords.”
“You have them.”
“And we have you.”
“So what am I supposed to do with them?”
Now the Raza appeared. Her face was stark and pale, frightening in its proximity. Eyes like pools of frozen milk, teeth filed to points. Her breath smelled of frozen spices and things recently dead.
“We want to know what they can do,” she said. “There is one Maloj on this world, and it’s still out there. We know it fears the blades, but we don’t know why. You’re going to help us.”
Cross swallowed hard. It felt like ice had lodged in his throat. All he kept thinking about were Ronan and Shiv, probably dead out there in the fire. Danica would help them – if she could save them, she would. Just like she’d save him.
“If you refuse, she dies,” Hasker said slowly. “If I think you’re going to refuse, she dies.” Hasker nodded at the Raza. “Show him.”
The vision returned, not as overwhelming this time, just Danica, at the top of the rise, hiding in the thin trees, gathering herself, nursing her wounds, her thick red hair washed with sweat, her golem arm faintly glowing with power, the blades across her back, Claw and Scar, the siblings to his fused weapon.
Terror washed through his body. From what he’d glimpsed in those visions the Coalition was as bad as the Ebon Kingdoms, if not worse. He couldn’t give these monsters access to that kind of power. Without him the blades were useless – he didn’t understand why, and likely never would, but it was the only advantage he had. They wouldn’t torture him, because he’d known torture. They wouldn’t torture her, because then he’d never do what they wanted.
But they’ve got me. They know they do.
The right thing to do – what Danica would have done – would be to let her go. To let her die. The needs of the many. By protecting her he might have been dooming everyone’s future.
But I can’t do that.
The only solace he could take was that she was still alive, and that she had the other two swords. Maybe they didn’t know about them. Maybe they just didn’t care.
They have me. But so long as she’s alive, there has to be hope.
“She won’t just give up, you know,” he said. “She’ll come after me.”
“So you’re the damsel in distress, eh?” the chain-wielder asked.
“Quiet,” the Raza said.
“She saw an explosion,” Hasker said. “All she’ll find is bodies ruined beyond repair. One of them will look remarkably like you.”
He remembered the illusion, the trap that got him captured, and his blood boiled. The room snapped into clarity, and suddenly Cross sensed the blades, knew their exact location there in the soiled chamber. He reached out, and his fingers brushed the edge of the meteor steel before a wave of force threw him back against the wall. He felt something crack, and blood ran down the side of his face.
“I should kill her now, just out of principal!” Hasker yelled, but Cross threw up his hands in surrender.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. “I’ll...I’ll do what you want.”
Silence. He couldn’t see through the blurriness in his vision, the throbbing pain that made the room unclear.
“If you defy us,” the Raza whispered, her voice so close he felt her rancid and frosted breath on his ear, “then the next time you see her she’ll be dead. You belong to us. Don’t test our patience. We let her live and leave her free to prove to you our power. We can find her anywhere, and will. If she seeks solace in a band of tribesmen or with the White Children we’ll have warships ready to fly out and destroy their camp. If she takes asylum in Meldoar, rest assured we have many spies and assassins there, and she’ll never see them coming.”
Silence again. Cross’s vision bled back into view. They were clearing the room, preparing to move out. He heard the groan of an airship up above.
“Do we have an understanding, Cross?” Hasker asked quietly. “Your obedience, in exchange for he
r life.”
Cross wished he had the strength to fight it. Or, better yet, the strength to do what needed to be done.
“Yes,” he said. “I swear it.”
And he looks, and there she is, hours later. They must have moved him when he lost consciousness, but he’s back in the vision now, and he sees her kneeling over a mound of ash at the blackened edge of the forest. Ronan and Shiv are vanished and gone, and Danica weeps over a body that isn’t his. Her tears are quiet but steady, and she’s shaking with fear, rage and loss. He feels her pain, wracking through his body like a physical force. Tears shake loose from his incorporeal form.
He wants so badly to reach out to her. She seems so close, like he’s standing right there, a phantom at the edge of the clearing.
Predatory shadows prowl the sky, and the air is loud with wolves. She can’t stay long.
I love you, he says, but all that comes out is a whisper of cold wind, lost among the trees. Danica hangs her head and cries, but not for long, because she’s strong, has always been strong. She’ll carry on, because that’s how they deal with fear and weariness, how they live with loss.
They carry on.
No, he says, but his voice is nothing but a distant echo in the sky. He can’t lose her. He wants to reach out, to take hold and pull her close, to be back with her again, the two of them, carrying their friends across the wastelands, the closest thing they’ll ever have to paradise.
But he can’t. He’s just a shadow, and she’s beyond his reach.
After a while she turns and walks away, and then she’s gone.
PART TWO
SIGNALS
The crowd of human resistance fighters are lined up near black pits filled with smoking green gas and curled bones the color of rusted blades. Flames fill the sky, and orange and black clouds circle into shifting vapors overhead. Iron and steel structures fume with heat. The moon is pale, as dead as the earth it stares down on.
Reaver watches from behind his iron mask as the humans are executed. Rows of vampires stand at attention. The looming citadel at their backs is the color of blood, while the dark streets are clean and silent. Smoke from burning flesh fills the air like a fog.
Dissonant vampire dirges echo into the sky. To Reaver they sound of broken glass and grating metal, just shattered and warbling crashes of random noise. Rasps, dead breaths, air escaping punctured lungs. He wonders if they sound beautiful to the vampires.
Faded memories of music play through his necrotized mind, a vague recollection of time he’d spent with others. Smiles, drinks. Feeling like he was home. The memory fades.
He breathes deep. He doesn’t need to, but that doesn’t stop the reflex, the memory of something he used to do. He still blinks even though his eyes have long since crusted over and serve little purpose, for it’s the power of the soul-infused fluids in his rotting veins that grants him strength and consciousness, just as his link to the dismal core of vampire intelligence lends him direction and purpose.
All he needs are his hands and his skills. They’re why he was reanimated: that core, that human aspect they need. Otherwise he’d be just another meat sack, a zombie or a war wight.
He shouldn’t be thinking that. He wonders why they don’t know, seeing as how he’s linked into their collective.
Thinking again. Stop.
If he has to think, it needs to be about what lies ahead, for the hunt is underway.
That’s why he was brought to Basilisk Claw, one of the new outposts on the frontier of the Northern Fang Territories, replacements for the outdated Bonespires. Red metal poles wave skin flags in the icy breeze as fliers pass far overhead, Razorwings and Bloodshadows, edged vampire warships leaking smoke which smells of brine and blood.
Sometimes he sees her face, but he doesn’t know who she is. She haunts him, and he desperately wants for her to stop.
This shouldn’t be happening to him, these random flashes of memory. He wonders why he doesn’t go to the theurges, why he’s hiding this away, harboring this secret, this betrayal. He doesn’t know the answer.
Basilisk Claw stands at the edge of vampire territory. The Southern Claw is gone save for the so-called White Children and their young leader. The East Claw Coaltion is a bigger threat – Wulf and his forces won’t be content to rest with their holdings for long, and though no major offensive has been mounted yet it’s only a matter of time before the war starts all over again, this time with a more ruthless human enemy.
But even the threat of the Coalition pales in comparison to the danger of Bloodhollow.
An order is issued – soundless, wordless, a summons, like something has latched into his chest and pulls at him. Reaver leaves the rank and file of the undead as they watch the slaughter and walks down a wide and jagged lane, dark stone and iron streets, thaumaturgic metal steaming with acid fog and blood smoke. Rivers of industrial sludge run through grooves in the road. Alleys are filled with broken bodies and discarded limbs. Twisted buildings stand hedged in by sword-like minarets and sawtooth pillars. Massive guns, razor launchers, bone cannons and gore sprayers are mounted on low turrets manned by vampires and war wights who watch Reaver pass with cold and calculating stares. The air smells of muck and hemlock; gouts of steam shoot from between the buildings at irregular intervals.
Reaver walks, drawn by the summons of the lich called Harpy. He’s never met her in the flesh, but her tactics are lauded even by the vampire aristocracy. Like Reaver she’s among the elite non-vampires, the type of creature which a decade ago would have been driven out by the dead aristocracy on account of their inferior status, for only vampires can hold positions of rank or power. Thinking like that led to the formation of Koth and all of the problems with the Old One; that mistake is hurting the Ebon Kingdoms still, since New Koth is at least ostensibly an ally of the Coalition.
Rows of corpses have been propped up as a wall, the bodies drained of fluids, the skin as pale and reflective as the surface of the moon. Eyes sewn shut and hands nailed to their sides, they have been pressed shoulder to shoulder, a fence of cadavers held in place with hexed wires tied around black iron poles. Reaver wonders how many of those victims he’d sent here himself.
Who was I?
Again, that doubting his role, his place. It isn’t right. His instincts tell him to report himself, to handle this before it becomes too much, before something happens. But he doesn’t.
Maybe that’s why Harpy is summoning me, he realizes, and in a way it’s a liberating thought, for it means this conflict within him will soon be resolved, and he won’t have to think anymore.
Reaver approaches Basilisk Claw’s central square, where a blood sacrifice is taking place. The square if dominated by a wide central altar standing twenty feet high, an elevated dais of rounded iron and stone mounted on pillars of stained nickel. Vampires stand silent and watch the event, their armor black and spotless, their eyes like cold mirrors colored with flickering lights cast by gas-burning torches at the perimeter of the yard. Iron catwalks overhead block out sight of the blood and lightning clouds.
A dozen humans are held face-down over a pool at the center of the dais, a wide cup filled with gore. Their hands and feet are mangled as they struggle against their bonds, but they’re held in place by brutish zombie theurgeons and skeletal doctors who gather the blood as it falls into smoking iron jars. No one screams – their vocal chords have already been severed, and their naked and writhing bodies are so starved and sucked of life they can barely put up any resistance. Reaver looks away and wonders if he knew any of those people in his old life, or if his death had been better than theirs.
He approaches a grim citadel of gold and iron and onyx lead. Doors fashioned in the semblance of teeth part before him.
Reaver enters a chamber so dismally cold that what’s left of his organic flesh curls tight in reaction and clenches against his metal components. Ice crusts under his boots. A parade of Ebon Kingdom soldiers marches by outside holding standards of flayed skins and c
adavers. Reaver turns and watches them from just inside the doorway, and for a moment he has a grand view of Basilisk Claw, its striated layers of bladed streets and claustrophobic channels, angled roads and twisted alleys, oddly leaning structures like iron shavings and broken bones, all of it riddled with channels of blood and filth and partially concealed within roiling clouds of burning mist and pockets of flaming cloud. Industrial gears and grinding metal sound through the sky, and an occasional human cry rings out as prisoners are slowly and painfully executed, their remains carefully preserved by the theurges to better fuel the Claw’s war machines.
“You’re late,” a voice says. Reaver is surprised by how human it sounds.
He turns and beholds the lich. She is lovely in her own way, delicate and small. Short hair is all that remains of what looked to have once been long and luxurious locks, and one of her rotting eyes has been replaced with a dark red gem which swirls and turns in place, greasing itself with old blood as the arcane powers within echo and explode like a cluster of stars. Her robe is grey and silver, simple and unadorned, and much of it floats low beneath her as she hovers in mid-air, legs crossed and emaciated arms exposed to the flickering ochre light. Fingernails the color of night squeeze down around her knees. The flesh on her arms and face is blackened and slick with puss, but even then Reaver sees that she must have been young when she’d died, not even a woman grown.
“I came when I was called,” Reaver answers, his voice a growl of metal and bone. The citadel is hollow and vast, a dark strip of metal grating hedged in by containers and sarcophagi. Open crates of weapons – iron guns, spear throwers, bone ballistae, claw rifles – stand next to an open locker filled with discarded clothing, and a workbench is covered with vials, tubes and small mounds of silver and black powder. Reaver smells fear in the air.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 6
