“Looks like it’s bound for the shore,” Alvarez said over her shoulder.
“And that means Meldoar,” Raine said, sounding irritated, which seemed to be the dark-haired woman’s normal tone of voice. The city was a few miles inland, just a vague outline in the haze and fog. There was no way to know if this crab-whale had land movement capabilities, but Danica figured it was probably best if they didn’t find out.
“Swing us around, Maur,” Danica said, and she signaled Delgado to man the chain guns. The gunnery seat swung into motion, a wide armored chair at the back of the ship that pitched the gunner into a nearly upside-down position. Maur had based the modifications he’d made to the ship on vampire tech, rigging the weapons systems so they took the shooter into a sort of virtual three-dimensional interface which allowed them to close the gap between themselves and their targets and ignore their real-world surroundings.
The ship buckled into high gear. Danica breathed deep, and the cold plasma of her spirit filled her blood like lead. Vapors swelled in her chest, and his ethereal touch lanced across her skin like she’d jumped in ice water.
Alvarez and Raine readied their AR15s and held themselves ready by the door while Danica prepared her MP5 and the swords.
The waves parted in a storm of sand and water as Maur lowered the draconic airship closer to the surface. Danica heard the click and whir of guns over the roar of the modified turbine engines. The ship tilted, and she saw small hordes of crab and armor-plated fish scurry across the sand.
“Maur says 'Good luck',” Maur said through the comm. Danica never understood why he referred to himself in the third person, and doubted she ever would. Some things were just best left as mysteries.
“Thanks,” Danica said. “Hopefully we won’t need it.”
She, Alvarez and Raine dropped down the few feet to the beach, landing on the mixture of soft stones and buried rock. For as cold as the air was up in the ship it was colder on the ground, and in moments her skin was soaked through with mist and sea spray. Danica stowed the MP5 behind her back and stayed low as they moved further down a long and winding sand belt which ran like a crumbling bridge out to deeper waters.
The sea beast was ahead, a dark splotch under the rising blood sun, growing larger by the moment, if no more distinct. Like the creatures they’d battled in Nezzek’duul it was a shadowy mass, ill-defined but clearly enormous, a clawed assembly of armor and flailing limbs.
Hard wind pushed in at them form the north. Danica’s spirit wound around her, coiled and ready to spring. Claw and Scar both pulsed and ebbed against her skin, their necrotic heartbeats timed to her own. She’d bonded with the blades and grown adept at blocking out their phantasmal voices.
Danica took point, while Alvarez and Raine hung back and spread out to a ten meter spread. The sound of the waves grew louder, a dull roar which surrounded them as they jogged up the narrow bank.
Incendiaries rolled out across the water, a dull staccato beat of cannon fire as Delgado started the guns. Peeling booms, echoing blasts. Waves exploded beneath a barrage of hot shells. The roar of the warship echoed and doubled back as Maur swung around and came into position over the water. Smoke followed the vessel like a tail.
Heavy rounds tore into the aquatic horror. Tentacles splashed and smacked into the waves. Danica, Alvarez and Raine kept moving. They saw the mass a hundred yards out, just beyond the end of the pale sand bar. The black shape slithered and ebbed just below the surface, an island of fangs and teeth.
Danica was about to motion the others to set up the mortar when the sand bar rippled. Enormous spiked arachnid limbs shot out of the water and launched high in the air, throwing seawater and masses of kelp and jellyfish into the purple sky before slamming back down. Spines dug into the sand. The waves were suddenly bloody and thick.
“Go!” Danica shouted. Her spirit oozed away from her hands in a molten wave of gold and white, churning flames filled with static and smoke. Licks of energy wrapped around the two nearest appendages, bent upwards like jagged girders of dark steel. A deep groan issued from the depths of the Loch.
More shots hammered down, and Alvarez and Raine pelted the limbs with their assault rifles. The air rang with gunfire and noise. Squelching sounds like suction came from the beast.
Danica ripped two grenades loose and threw them into the water; Alvarez and Raine followed suit, and just as they tossed them the warship swung around and pumped rounds from the chain guns into the black mass. White noise and cold explosions. Danica sent her spirit into the water as a lance of black ice.
The monstrous limbs stuttered in place and groaned like metal beams before they slowly collapsed. Danica pulled her spirit back and formed a soiled cold shield to protect the team from two of the enormous insect’s legs as they came crashing down.
“Maur says you have incoming!” The Gol’s voice rang through her ears in the comm-mike.
“What?” Danica turned.
Shapes emerged from the sea, sinuous and serpentine, fast-moving and much smaller than the black beast. The creatures bore undulating fan wings and long sweeping tails like those of predatory eels. They were about a hundred yards out, not so much floating in the water as moving over it, curled snake-like beings with humanoid torsos. Dark eyes as cold as death glittered in the dawn light, and their thick heads were filled with rows of dagger-sized blades locked in carnivore grins. Their arms were ridged with spines and hooks and their skin was sickly grey-green, dripping with putrescence and ooze. Bones and flaps of human flesh covered their thin torsos like tattered clothes, and their hands were triads of large claws hooked together like bird’s talons. There were three of the creatures, their deep-throated growls mockeries of human laughter.
“Christ, that black thing was a vehicle…” Danica said.
These Dracaj were the pilots.
They motioned with their gangly claws and suddenly their bodies were surrounded in coronas of cold blue light. Danica smelled glazed corrosion, fecal stench and acid smoke. They pointed at the human mercenaries with their twisted fingers and bent the air into funnels of dank green light. Static built, electrical energies curling into the atmosphere.
“Get down!” Alvarez shouted, and he raised his rifle and fired. Bullets evaporated off the shields of cyclonic light. Danica tasted hex, the tidal wash of some bestial and primitive magic. Raine was about to fire but she hesitated when she saw that Alvarez’s weapon was having no effect.
“Move!” Danica shouted.
Exhausted though her spirit was his power built against her skin. Gears and pistons slid into place in her bloodsteel arm. Thaumaturgic elements moved into position, portals set with focal lenses and arcane conduits which allowed her spirit to intensify like water building pressure in a pipe. Her skin went cold, her eyes white. The Dracaj’s bastard magic churned and tightened the air, making it difficult to breathe.
Danica focused. Gelid wind scraped against her. Her spirit coiled inside her golem limb, that monstrosity that had been forced upon her. Anger welled in her heart.
The trio of green humanoids glided through the air, their tail fins flapping and undulating like they were still underwater. Black and cold eyes glared at her as they unleashed their gathered energies, caustic wads of dripping power that sizzled and cooked the beach. Trails of green smoke made everything rancid and sick. Danica breathed, held, waited until the moment when they chose to sever themselves from the magic and release it, that split-second of vulnerability when they released the ties between the energies they’d crafted and their own bodies, like an umbilici waiting to be cut.
When that instant came she launched her spirit. He lanced forward and buried himself in the cleft between the Dracaj and their power, that miniscule gap in moments that occurred after they released their magic but before they shielded themselves again. The gap widened with red fire, an incendiary blaze of napalm and nails. Razor darkness shelled inside their protective barriers like a grenade thrown into a tightly sealed room.
The Dracaj’s attack fizzled, cut off at the source. Drips of green light fell into the sick waters as the reptilian masters screamed. Danica’s spirit growled in her mind, his rage and ecstasy overwhelming. Ethereal flames licked against monstrous hides, boiling their skin and throwing them into paroxysms of agony. Their mockeries of laughs turned to mockeries of screams.
The warship hovered low, drowning out all sound, and the roar of the chain guns hammered the air. Slugs the size of baseballs ripped at the reptiles. When the last vestige of their arcane shields fell away the Dracaj had no defense against the guns except for their speed. Two of the creatures were too slow, and their brittle and scaly flesh flew apart and sprayed out on the foamy waves, but one of them moved so fast it became a blur.
Alvarez and Ruiz fired their weapons, trying to get close enough that the Dracaj couldn’t elude them, but the monster sailed through the air like a murderous rainbow, shifting directions and speed and moving around the humans like they were stuck in jelly.
Danica breathed deep. Her spirit was still depleted from the battle, so she drew the dark blades Claw and Scar and surged forward. The cold whispers of the necrotic swords filled her mind, grim voices promising agony and pain. Her eyes shone with grisly light as she lifted up, propelled by the magic in the artifact blades so she moved nearly as fast as the Dracaj, even faster. Its blank reptile eyes shone like horrid black moons, and gnarled fangs peeled back in rage as she brought the weapons home. The sickly grey-green head flew away in a spray of muck and slime. Danica had to roll under the body and press herself to the sand to avoid the thrashing tail and wildly grasping claws. Steam and smoke sizzled from the corpse.
The waves crashed against the shore, and water filled with brine and blood soaked through her boots.
“Well done,” Maur said in the comm-link. “Maur thanks you.”
“No problem,” Danica said. “We’ll consider it a test run.”
Alvarez and Ruiz exchanged glances and watched her nervously for a moment, then nodded. None of them had spoken about the mission they’d been given, but it weighed heavy on all of their minds. The number of hostiles encroaching Meldoar’s waters had increased dramatically over the past few weeks, but nothing they’d had to deal with would come close to the importance of finding Bloodhollow.
Danica had only learned of the rumors recently, something they’d never caught word of in her own timeline: a lost city, buried somewhere deep underground and containing some last vestige of human magic that could end the war forever. No one really believed the tales, but that didn’t explain why the East Claw Coalition and the vampires were suddenly so hell-bent on finding it, and by all accounts they had. Meldoar had to get to it first, but not until a powerful but secretive contact was ready to give them the information they sought. Until then, they waited, and hoped they’d be able to move before it was too late.
The cleanup took some time. Danica and Alvarez harvested the Dracaj for trophies, skulls and skins that would be useful to the Gol engineers. Meldoar’s magical research facilities always needed more raw materials to work with.
Danica stored the bloody trophies in a steel case next to the hangar door. Gold-green sunlight glittered off the churning waters, and within a few minutes Meldoar’s sloped walls came into view, wreathed with artificial mists and guarded by spiked battlements covered with howitzers and thaumaturgic bolt-throwers.
She thought about Cross. That sense of loss returned like a blade in her chest.
This is what we fought for, she thought, hoping he’d somehow hear her. A chance to end the war.
She just wished he could be there with her. The sun was less bright without him to share it with.
EIGHT
WALLS
Year 35 A.B. (After the Black)
10 A.S.C. (After Southern Claw)
Day broke, stunning the horizon with gold-white light. The airship stayed close to the craggy mountain face before punching through the drifts of soiled black mist. Jags of bone and coiled rock jutted from the slopes of the valley like broken fingers, and the churning clouds glowed with bursts of lightning. The sun seemed frozen, hazy and frosted like molten metal.
Shiv stared out as she huddled against the cold. The viewport was covered with grit and dust, but even through the smudged glass she clearly made out the shadows of the old tower on the north ridge. The needle of black rock and corroding metal had been hollowed and abandoned years ago, but even with its vampire inhabitants long since removed the citadel still oozed shadows, and a nimbus of soiled fog curled away from the forgotten stronghold, the remnants of the corrupted machines and chattel sorcery once used to power the structure’s defenses.
Eventually they’ll figure out that we’re hiding in an abandoned Bonespire, she thought. Until then we have to enjoy our luxury accommodations for as long as we can. If only we had a hot tub.
Gyver brought the ship in while Ruiz manned the guns. Rorn, Tam, Cask and Jahl gathered the equipment; they didn’t want to be out in the open for more than a few moments, not only to avoid overexposure to the caustic atmosphere but to get inside Warfield’s protective resonance field as quickly as possible. Ilfesa Warfield, a black market dealer and smuggler, had somehow devised the only reliable means anyone had found to keep from being detected by the Ebon Kingdom’s powerful reconnaissance, and she sold that technology to the White Children at a hefty price.
They passed the outer marker and heard the familiar beep echo over the scanners as they came within range of the Bonespire’s concealed guns. Humans were incapable of using vampire tech, but Carver and his crew had managed to retrofit the bone cannon’s swivel mounts and guidance systems to accept more mundane howitzers and Flak 38s, and using old-fashioned camouflage the Resistance had managed to keep the weapons concealed, at least for the time being.
Shiv shuddered, but tried to steady herself. Her nerves were electrified with worry and her heart rattled in her chest.
They lived on the verge of annihilation. Every day could be their last, and everyone knew it. Every time they went to sleep there was no way to be sure they’d ever wake up again; every time they left on a mission there was no way of knowing if they’d ever come back. Fear clung to her, threatened to crush her. Sometimes she felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Your father didn’t bring you up to be weak, she told herself. There were too many people relying on her, looking up to her, for her to let her fears take control, but sometimes it all seemed too much, and all she wanted to do was lie down and never rise again. She hated herself for that.
Voices of the lost echoed at the edge of her thoughts. She heard them constantly, saw them whenever she closed her eyes: the unquiet dead, the forlorn spirits of those thousands killed during the Ebon Kingdom’s purge of the Southern Claw. There was never a moment when they weren’t with her, when they weren’t singeing the back of her mind. Images played at her from the depths of the frozen dark, and every morning when she woke she had to fight her way through the crusted silhouettes of the dead, looming and hopeless presences that smothered her with their needs and begged her to help them.
Those tattered souls clung to her like a shroud. She wasn’t alone, and never would be again.
They left the confines of the ship and crossed through Warfield’s barrier. The air was grey and tasted stale, and the flash of lightning played off the rib bones of ancient beasts, which protruded from the ground like curled spears.
Guns were trained on them as they entered the narrow alcove which granted access to the Bonespire, hex-charged weapons that disrupted incorporeal patterns and ruptured the coiled dark organs of creatures like war wights, revenants and battlewraiths. Shiv nodded to Jorv and Kreen, two young men who’d been recruited into the White Children after they’d witnessed their parents being brutally murdered when the vampires stormed Seraph; until a few weeks ago they’d grown up in the care of Priest, a mysterious drifter who made it his business to seek out lost youths and take them under his wing, caring for them and
training them until they were old enough to make their own way. Lucky for the resistance Priest was a friend, and many of his charges wound up joining their ranks.
The inside of the spire was grim and dark, and the Resistance had done little to alter the structure except making it safe to inhabit. Everything with any military or scientific value had been stripped from the Bonespire when the vampires evacuated; Shiv always wondered why they hadn’t just destroyed the citadel to ensure it never fell into enemy hands, but she wasn’t about to complain. The Bonespire had proved to be an incredibly safe place to hide, and though there was little within they could make use of the tower itself was highly defensible.
Shiv moved down the corridor, intent on meeting with Terrell before he left on his next mission. He and Mace were for all intents and purposes her lieutenants, and while they deferred to her judgment she was the first to acknowledge they had infinitely more experience than she did; while she’d learned quite a bit from her father, Cross and Danica, she still considered herself a novice when it came to tactics and strategy, and she didn’t like making decisions without having more adept minds point out the flaws in her plans. Terrell had grown restless as of late, ever since Mara had vanished, and she knew he’d continue to volunteer for missions as an excuse to get out and search for her, even though the hard reality was his wife was likely dead and gone.
He won’t accept that, as well he shouldn’t. We have so few left.
She thought of her father, thought of Cross and Danica. She thought of Ronan. A pang of loss like a seized breath lodged in her chest, but she couldn’t afford to pay it any heed. She missed them dearly, but they were all gone. She had to remember all they’d given her, all she’d learned from them.
Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) Page 12
