Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7)

by Steven Montano

  Deeper in the city his boots crushed salt-encrusted ash and snow that had petrified so it resembled bone marrow. The cold was deep and biting, like passing through a curtain of blades, and every breath he released sent sharp and dissonant sounds through the deeper dark. He knew there was nothing there, sensed he was alone even though he felt eyes on him.

  He found the center of the city, an open yard filled with collapsed towers. Cracks in the rock dome overhead offered view of the blood-milk sky. The busts of great statues, tumbled columns and piles of rubble lay scattered on the ground.

  He came across the remains of bodies, a Doj and a few humans, the corpses still clinging to long frozen weapons, their flesh and wounds petrified by the cold. Predators were too afraid to enter this place due to how unnatural it felt.

  That’s the effect they have, he thought. The Maloj poison everything.

  They reminded him of himself, and that sickened him.

  Ronan avoided the bodies and decided to camp in the central ruins, a field of broken rock and decimated buildings drowning in shadow. He built a small fire next to a stone that looked like some sort of enormous building block. The heat from the campfire was pathetic and small, easily eclipsed by the intense cold and darkness. The light it gave off was like holding a match up to the void in the hopes of peering into its depths.

  He was alone.

  As it should be.

  Then why did it feel so wrong? He’d come to enjoy the company of the team – Maur, Danica, Grissom, Ash, Cross, even Kane. Over time he’d come to think of them as more than fellow warriors. He’d felt a kinship to them, but not like he had to the blonde boy, the child from the Order Ronan had been ordered to kill, but who in the end took his own life rather than return to their masters in defeat.

  He breathed into his hands. The cold was turning his fingers numb. His skin flushed cool even beneath his layers, and his breaths fogged around him.

  After Cross and Danica perished in a battle with the East Claw Coalition, Ronan had taken it upon himself to protect the girl Shiv. He watched over her, gave her what little he had to offer. He hadn’t really known her before that, but something formed between them, a connection that was as comfortable as it was terrifying. She saw goodness in him, and kindness, and though he wanted so badly to believe that what she saw was really there, hidden beneath all of the blood and evil, he couldn’t.

  Over time he felt closer to her than he ever had to anyone else, but the team was gone. The man he’d become – the good man, the one who’d sacrifice himself for his friends – was gone. He was living a lie, pretending to be something he wasn’t.

  Eventually Ronan left Shiv in the care of her new family, the White Children. They looked to Shiv for guidance and leadership, revered her for what the White Mother had passed on. It was too much a burden for any one person to bear, but she was strong, and he knew he’d just be in the way. There was no place for him there.

  Now he was alone. He had no weaknesses, no one to protect but himself.

  It was better that way. He wasn’t fit for human company, and never would be.

  You can’t go back to being something you never were.

  Ronan allowed himself only the barest amount of sleep. He kept one eye on his surroundings, his mind alert and focused on the moment, aware that at any second he’d have to defend himself. His hand lay on the hilt of his katana, and his body was wrapped in a thick wool blanket that was soon as frozen as everything else. He had his back against the crease in the stone, in a small clear space surrounded by tumbled columns.

  The shuffling came out of nowhere, but when Ronan silently shook himself awake there was nothing there. He sat in the darkness. The fire had died down to embers. Ronan listened, tightened his grip on the blade while he willed the blood to return to his arms and legs. He crouched low, focused his mind. He sensed the Deadlands there, that place where he could push himself no matter what, and prepared himself to step into it.

  The sound came again, off in the dark, buried in that black sea. The seam of sky visible through the crack of the dome above was blood-hued, signaling that it was almost dawn. The light in no way made his surroundings easier to make out, so after a moment he rose, leaving his cloak and other equipment behind, and stepped away from the stone and into the shadowed clearing.

  What at first he’d thought was shuffling was actually a dull and rhythmic tapping near the southern entrance to the city, opposite the way he’d entered. It was difficult to tell if it was stone on stone or metal on metal, but either way it was a good ways off, not as close as he’d feared. Ronan gathered himself, collected his belongings, and set off to find the source.

  The southern half of Shul Ganneth was is in a sadder state than what he’d already seen, and there were fewer indications aside from the exterior walls that what he walked through had ever been anything more than ruins. Only the barest remains of building foundations stood there, and rubble was piled high on the crooked streets like concrete snow. Even with dawn spilling through the crack overhead the air was thick with darkness and smelled of frozen rot. Ronan kept his vision focused and used the trace light to guide his way, stepping carefully so as not to fall and injure himself. The roads were narrow and the architecture was twisted and warped – structures sheared off for no apparent reason, doorways were lined with spikes and barbs, floors were sloped at preposterous angles. It was as if the entire place had been rendered in oil and left out in the rain.

  The tapping grew louder. Ronan could make out the southern gates at the far end of the crooked lane. The space around the entrance was utterly dark, bordered by half-collapsed statues and tumbled columns.

  Ronan breathed slow as he approached the remnants of some sort of shattered temple, a citadel whose exterior walls had the smoky color of burnished steel. Tall slivers of stone had fallen away and blanketed the floor of the cavernous path; some of them smoked with cold. He smelled acid in the breeze, a salty aroma like something freshly embalmed. The darkness blanketed him, hedged him in. He drew his cowl up around his face, as he always did when he knew violence was at hand.

  The sound came from just inside the structure, the offices of some minor public official, maybe a seneschal. He heard the sound again and again, dull and rhythmic, a repetitive beating from the other side of a crude barricade. Ronan could clear it easily enough by just leaping over, but instead he made his way along the outside wall, keeping close to the ridged stone. Dust and ice leaked from cracks in the foundation. The blades of light from above grew brighter, and more of Shul Ganneth’s interior was revealed. Great portions of the city were in utter ruin, and even with the illumination the shadows still dominated the space inside the dome.

  Ronan came to a window that was smeared over with oil and frost, but the glass had broken enough for him to peer through. A dead man stood on the other side of the barricade, his rotted remains preserved by the cold. Tattered clothes dangled from his black and crusted skin, and reams of ice had formed on his fingernails and decayed teeth. Eyes stuck in a glazed expression stared straight ahead and his lips were locked in a grimace, peeled back from his blood red gums. Ronan guessed the man had died a long time ago, but some aspect of the Maloj’s foul magic had reanimated the corpse, which was why the zombie kept pushing against the barrier with his raw fists, his carcass impervious to the damage he caused himself as he slowly pounded, searching for a means of escape, no longer understanding why he even needed or wanted to leave.

  The assassin watched the creature as it endlessly tried to push its way free. He thought about all of the people he’d killed and wondered if he hadn’t been doing them a favor.

  Ronan turned away, and left the creature to its fate. He exited the city.

  Plains of ice, fields of stunted scrub and shallow clefts of shadow and blasted rock. The land was pale and dead, rolling fields of blanched earth covered with thin layers of greased snow and patches of frozen marsh. Wind sliced in from the north like a host of blades, whipping razor ice acros
s his path and blanketing the world with dust.

  Remains of creatures slain by both Gorgoloth and the cold sat like monuments beneath the harsh winter sun, mounds of heaped-up carcasses, an iced mass of snouted and tusked creatures. There were more bodies, trenches of slain Lith and human travelers, their cross-hatched tattoos and tribal markings preserved by the ice even though their innards had been torn away to be used as trophies or food.

  Ronan traveled fast, not pausing for rest. He crossed ridges of turned-over earth and into a copse of long dead trees. He trod over the spread claws of petrified roots, mounds of leaves frozen like gravestones, craters of carbon grime. He saw the remains of warships from both sides of the conflict, torn apart by howitzers and cannons and burned down to skeletons.

  The air was frozen, lacking oxygen. The world was becoming less habitable by the day.

  The day wore long. He moved with purpose, shielding himself from the cold, not stopping to examine his surroundings but keeping his mind alert for danger. He passed through the remains of some tribal village that had been razed, mounds of black rubble and wood still smoking like slag. The rank scent of meat emanated from beneath the ice, frozen carnage hidden in the ashen waste.

  He ran across bandits, scraggly and desperate men who did their best to prey on other survivors, only they’d been driven out of their territory by the vampires and didn’t have the resources to reach the East Claw Coalition lands, leaving them stranded there in the Reach where the only humans to hunt were each other, and exiles like Ronan. He made short work of them, and later only barely recalled encountering them at all, just flashes of memory, blood and screams, gunfire and a barely working chainsaw. It wasn’t until later, as the sun started to set and he finally saw his destination in the distance, that he remembered he hadn’t killed them but had left them cut and bleeding and without their supplies, stranded in a glacial nowhere.

  His thoughts were on Shiv. He couldn’t stop worrying. For years he’d pushed her out of his mind, but now he knew he never should have left her.

  She’s the last family you have. You need to protect her, to die for her if necessary.

  He’d happily give his life for hers. Now he just had to hope he could reach her in time, before she reached Bloodhollow.

  Ronan traveled on into the night. He crossed swells of ruined land, pushed through groves ground to nothing, passed frozen cadavers of beasts and humans and ruined vehicles. The soft whistle of icy wind and the knock of dead wood surrounded him as the vegetation grew thick. He was almost to the headlands.

  He found a dying warthog that had fallen into a stone basin; the beast shook with hunger and frostbite. It limped in circles and pawed at the ground, moved sluggishly, the blood frozen in its veins. The beast’s skin was ridged with frozen scabs, and its breaths came out as wheezes. Ronan watched it for a moment, tensed his grip on his weapon, but in the end he left it there alone.

  He was cold inside and out, hollow and alone. He’d find Shiv because it felt right.

  Ronan walked beneath a cloak of dusk through rugged transverse rises, a maze of forests and broken hills. By the time the dead yellow moon rose and he saw his immediate destination to the south he’d made it to the Bone Hills. He was almost to East Claw territory, and with any luck he’d reach Pyramid Station by dawn. After he gathered supplies and information he’d carry on southwest, into the Ebon Kingdoms and to Bloodhollow.

  He was going to save Shiv. It had become his purpose, even if he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because it had been so long since he’d had one; maybe because he had to prove to himself there was still something inside him that wasn’t dead. He wasn’t sure if he truly believed that, but he owed it to himself – to his old self, the one that felt something, the one that used to belong somewhere – to try.

  TEN

  WEAPONS

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  Night fell, and Cross looked out over the pyres.

  The aftermath of a battle was always the worst. Wulf had no qualms about collateral damage or civilian casualties, and he’d made clear his position that he would much rather sacrifice a few hundred lives than risk giving up any ground or advantage to the vampires, the White Children or Meldoar. After the battles, when the air calmed and the smoke cleared and the body count known, the hypocrisy bubbled to the surface, and Wulf’s ambassadors did the talking. Their rhetoric was persuasive and direct: they spoke of the great Coalition, humankind’s last hope, about protecting your own and defending against the darkness, about how the horrors of war made them all victims.

  It’s all a distraction, Cross thought. Wulf can kill any of us, all of us, at his whim, so the best way to keep everyone in line is to make sure they’re more afraid of the vampires than they are of him.

  Rather than a memorial service, Wulf’s red-clad ambassadors arranged thaumaturgically powered displays onto the walls of the rubble-strewn city-squares, projecting images of devastation and loss, of cities felled by the Ebon Kingdoms, of settlements and villages utterly ruined by vampire assaults. That way, they insisted, whatever had happened there that night would be kept in perspective – that while a few terrible sacrifices might have been necessary to quell the assault it was better than the alternative, which would have meant thousands of deaths when another bastion of human civilization fell to the undead.

  Cross sat back. He’d found a hollow in a ruined building, an open corner room with most of its brick wall blasted away. The ground and sky were barely illuminated by the pyres. Curling red smoke wound up to the burning atmosphere like a host of serpents. There was no moon, no stars, just a night as black as the landscape. The once-criminal controlled city-state of Night was made of dark stone and blood-red brick, and the ground had been scorched black when the city was built in order to clear the area of some bacterial fungus. Cross sat huddled near a small fire he’d started in the middle of the floor and stared up at the sky. He’d gotten better at allowing himself to sit out in the open air and gaze up, to try and ignore the old fear of floating off the world.

  I’m not sure that would be such a bad thing right now.

  There were only a few people huddled in crowds in the city below, watching the scenes of devastation as they were displayed on the long blank walls of what used to be some sort of sports arena. They saw burning buildings, bodies strewn onto the road before reanimation, vampire processing stations being filled with the remains from the ruined cities. Many had bought into Wulf’s “defender of mankind” role and actively tried to sway other citizens to embrace what a good man he was, a benefactor and savior.

  Funny how no one talks about how his rise to power including slaughtering villagers and settlements that had stood in his way when Fane marched on Seraph, or the fact that he ousted the very organization that had hired him because they weren’t giving him enough power, Cross thought bitterly. Wouldn’t want to taint his sparkling image.

  Even with as close as he’d been to Wulf those past few weeks Cross didn’t feel any closer to understanding the son of a bitch. He was clearly a man of ambition, and despite his brutish nature and naturally sadistic tendencies he did have incredibly charismatic authority and deft political awareness, undoubtedly aided by his ambassadors, Fanian politicians he’d swayed to his side back when he’d first started negotiating with and slowly siphoning power away from the Hammer and Fist. Originally contracted to help defend Fane from its perceived enemies when the powerful weapons-producing city-state decided to secede, Wulf deftly maneuvered himself into a position of considerable authority. Soon he was the one calling all of the shots in regards to building up Fane’s military forces, and before long he’d contracted a great deal of Troj, Raza and former Southern Claw commandos, all of who were utterly loyal to him.

  By the time the Hammer and Fist recognized what sort of monster they’d created it was too late. No one really understood why Wulf insisted the city launch a preemptive strike on Seraph, but before anyone even knew what was really happening Fane’s armies were o
n the march, razing villages in their path as they tore across the eastern plains. Southern Claw forces met them near Ath and fought a bloody campaign along the banks of the Bloodnight River, and that had been where things had stood when Cross and every other passenger on a military airship bound for Ath had mysteriously been sucked away to the distant continent of Nezzek’duul, where they’d struggled against dark forces and lost all but a handful of their own before the warlock Creasy had finally been able to send them back.

  And by the time we returned, everything had already gone to hell.

  Cross shuddered against the cold. He pulled his armor coat tight and considered dragging out his wool blanket to wrap himself in while he made some coffee, but the notion of moving that much was just disheartening.

  None of it seemed real. Danica was held up in Meldoar, believing him dead, and Ronan and Shiv were gone. He’d failed them, failed them all.

  I have to make this right.

  But how? Wulf had him on a tight leash. Soulrazor/Avenger kept his thoughts shielded from the Raza and any warlocks or witches in Wulf’s employ, but that hardly mattered when they had no intention of letting him out of their sight. The only reason he was even still alive was because only he seemed capable of using the blades. Wulf had assassins watching Danica – according to Hasker, the killer-to-be was on the mercenary team she’d recently joined – and at his command she’d be eliminated, and that was that.

  “If you don’t cooperate,” Hasker had said, “your red-headed bitch will wind up floating in the Ebonsand Sea.”

  Cross hadn’t dared to try and make contact with her. That would have been like signing her death warrant. He looked out to the western sky; Meldoar was several hundred miles away.