Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)

by Steven Montano

  The Rakzeri vessel tilted back and forth as freezing ocean wind battered the underbelly of the ship. Everyone held onto support bars or the backs of the seats. Weapons and armor lined both walls of the vessel, and various gauges, valves and scopes littered the ceiling like plumbing pipes. The unstable floor made Kane’s stomach turn, but he held on with muscular arms lined with tattoos – eyes, blades, suns, pyramids, crescent moons – and tried to balance the weight of the blades and the HK45s on his shoulder harness.

  “Fly much, Maur?” he laughed. “I’m about to lose my lunch if you keep up your Red Baron shtick…”

  “Maur will ignore that comment,” the Gol replied. “That is lucky for you, because if he hadn’t you would get out and walk.”

  “That might be safer,” Ronan laughed.

  “You girls are funny,” Sol smiled. “Now shut up and keep your minds on business.”

  “Maur should warn,” he shouted back, “that he can easily open the bay doors and dump all of you out.”

  Kane walked up next to the cockpit, a small metal recess surrounded by tubes filled with hydraulic fluids and heating pumps that kept the vessel’s interior atmosphere bearable even in adverse weather conditions. The pilot’s seat was pressed tight against the forward plating, and there were so many panels, monitors and dials it was actually difficult to look through the forward window and see what was in front of them. Jade stood directly behind Maur, and as Kane came close she pointed again.

  “Look,” she said, and her voice was frightened.

  The terrain ahead looked like any beach along that stretch of the coast. Metallic white fog rolled along the bleach white sands and half-buried rock formations.

  But about a klick ahead of them was a wide expanse of dark ground surrounded by a crumbling circle of black pillars. An unmistakable air of power gripped the area, a faint and shimmering black ice glow.

  “There’s something in there,” Jade said. “Something that’s hidden from plain sight.”

  “Can you…you know…scout it?” Kane asked. “With your spirit?”

  “I’m sort of hesitant to do that,” she said quietly. “Something isn’t right here.” She took a breath and nodded. “But you’re right…that’s what needs to be done.”

  The air twisted and stiffened as her spirit shifted away from her body and exited the craft. Jade’s feet lifted off the ship’s floor. White light shone from her eyes. Kane heard cold whispers, a winter’s breath.

  Up ahead, the space within the pillars shifted. Pale sands burned to black and twisted into the sky in a tangle of ink-dark coils. Pulsating pockets of light appeared in the darkness, a shine of frozen stars.

  “Whoa,” he said.

  The darkness rose. Tendrils of shadow joined together in a wide arc. A shifting archway of dust rose up, and in just a matter of seconds it stood a hundred feet high. The space within the arch was like a cold dark mirror filled with choking vapors.

  Kane looked through the massive lens and saw more of the desert and the sky, but everything was saturated in an air turned charcoal: the sand was black, the sky was an onyx slate, and the birds were twisted, like scars. Soiled wind howled from within the arch and blasted shards of razored darkness onto the pale sand.

  Kane’s eyes were lost in that vision. He knew he stared into another world.

  Moments after the gateway appeared it exploded, and fell back to the desert floor. Only a wide circle of charred ash remained.

  “Jesus…” Kane breathed. “PLEASE tell me I wasn’t the only one who saw that!”

  “What the hell?” Ronan breathed. Sol looked like he’d seen a ghost, and Maur was visibly shaken.

  “Jade?” he asked.

  Jade shook all over. She held herself as still as she could. Kane took her shoulder in his hand, and he almost jumped at how cold she was.

  “Jade?” he repeated. “You okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” she breathed. She sounded exhausted and terrified. Kane tried to steady her. “I’m not sure how that happened…”

  “How what happened?” Kane asked.

  “I was just scouting the area, but I…I triggered something…I accidentally found the way to open some portal…”

  “Ok…it’s okay,” Kane said. For a moment he forgot the fact that she technically wasn’t on his side. “It’s okay. We know it’s bad, and that’s enough to get us started.” He looked at the rest of them. “Maybe we should…”

  A deafening explosion rang throughout the cabin. Flames blasted across the window. The ship nearly flipped over in mid-air. Maur cursed, and Kane wasn’t able to grab hold before the ship violently lurched sideways and threw him against the wall.

  Alarms blared through the airship. Freezing wind blasted through a rent in the hull. Noise and violent motion eclipsed Kane’s senses.

  He managed a glance at the nautoscope, and he saw war machines approach across the sand. He wasn’t sure how they’d managed to get so close without being noticed.

  Jade went to the torn hull, and her spirit tried to weave it back together. Steam erupted from the ship’s pipe-work as the auto-flush system purged the flames from the aircraft’s interior. Sol grabbed his weapons and Ronan climbed into the gunner’s seat, a swivel-mounted chair near the aft end that controlled the top-mounted 20mm cannons.

  Bladed missiles raced by them outside. Kane readied his M14A, moved behind Maur, and looked through the viewport. A pair of vampire tanks with oversized stone wheels and steel-plated hulls raced towards them, bladed sharks that dragged chains across the ground. The vehicles bore rotating iron guns and bone harpoons. Dark sails atop the sleek vessels propelled them along using the desert wind, and churning pillars of smoke billowed from their exhaust ports.

  More missiles launched, screaming black shards of serrated cold metal that left trails of spectral steam in their wake. Kane saw ghastly faces race ahead of the weapons as they drew close.

  “Maur, I hope you know what the hell you’re doing!”

  Wicked’s cannons roared. Kane covered his ears – the grind of the motorguns was deafening. The ship rocked with explosive blasts. Shells tore one tank apart as Maur twisted Wicked and dodged the first missile.

  But the second missile struck home. The blast tore open the starboard hull and threw the ship sideways. The roar of exploding steel enveloped them. A wave of hot wind threw Kane hard against the port wall. Glass shattered and flew through the cockpit like rain.

  Kane felt nothingness below and around him as Wicked careened out of control. The cannons kept roaring.

  Jade fell against the shattered starboard hull and nearly slid out of the ship and into open air. Kane threw himself forward and slid across broken glass, grimacing as he reached out and snagged her hand. Sol grabbed his legs and kept them both from falling out. They all three held onto the floor plating as Maur did his best to wrestle the ship back under control.

  “Hang on!” Kane shouted. He held tight onto Jade’s arms for those final few seconds before the airship crashed to the ground in a blaze of metal and fire.

  THREE

  WHISPERLANDS

  He is fugitive to a shadow world.

  Nothing is constant. The sky bleeds red to dark to pale and back again. Clouds like teeth grin down at him.

  Day and night are indistinguishable. The sky is the same stain, the land the same matte darkness. Jagged hills and half-ruined structures protrude from the ground like scabs. The world looks dipped in tar.

  He roams like a carrion bird, picking up discarded items, but little of what he finds is useful. He has no need for food or water in that place. He is a living ghost.

  The dank red sun is the only constant. The air reeks of caustic gases and decay. Iron clouds scar the sky. The dull light has pained his eyes for years.

  Trees bend and twist into one another like drunken serpents. Great valleys rest in the middle of dry riverbeds. Dark water flows uphill, turgid and thick, like muddy oil. Massive skeletons litter the land, great tusked horns and s
hattered simian skulls, the remains of beasts from some lost age.

  He’s covered in black and red dust, a thin layer of soot that won’t come off his skin no matter how hard he tries. Every puddle and flow of water is tainted, filled with iron sediment and crumbling stone.

  The world is covered in a film of grease and soot. Shadows cling to his flesh and the trees and the air he breathes. Flakes of it clog in his throat and nostrils.

  He walks. Sometimes his curiosity is piqued by the landscape or its inhabitants, but he rarely stays in one place for very long.

  He avoids contact with others. The creatures of the shadow world are dangerous.

  He has covered hundreds of miles in his exile, and yet he has gotten nowhere. If there are boundaries to that dank reality he has yet to find them. Black deserts crumble into dead forests that give way to dry lakes. He hears the roar of a distant ocean, but he can never find it.

  Every now and again he comes back to the crater, and to Shadowmere Keep. He always finds them in different areas than the last time.

  He no longer knows his name. He forgot it long ago.

  For a time he thought the wastelands were just a prison of his mind. He feared he was still trapped with the woman from the keep (he can’t remember who she was, only that she’d betrayed him, and that she’d caused him pain). But the longer he roams the melting fields of rot and trudges his way across the broken earth the more he realizes he isn’t the only prisoner there.

  Most of the other creatures are just mockeries of natural life. He sees bulls made of iron and birds that bleed acid, giant reptiles wreathed in shadow vapor and lumbering hulks with oversized arms that drag their knuckles across the onyx soil. None of these creatures have discernible features: they are carved from shadow, ebon-skinned and pale-eyed forms that bleed off into the darkness.

  There are humans, or at least things that are similar to humans. They travel in groups. They acknowledge each other, he and these natives, by keeping their distance. He has not deigned to approach them, and for their part they have left him alone. They seem to survive by staying together and keeping on the move. They hunt, out of some memory or instinct rather than an actual need for sustenance.

  Or maybe they do it out of cruelty, he thinks. This is a cruel land.

  Sometimes he follows the natives from afar. Their groups vary from a few dozen to a thousand, mass migrations that ride shadow horses towards the blood horizon. He isn’t sure why he follows them – there is no escape from that place. If there was, those people wouldn’t be there. He realizes this and breaks away, sets off in a different direction, or so he thinks. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.

  He moves across plains of dusk, through petrified black forests and up shattered hills. The taste of metal sticks to the inside of his mouth. He breathes air that smells of coal and brimstone. He is so covered in dirt he can no longer recall the feel of his own skin.

  He crosses bone bridges and walks through hollow and abandoned cities. He sees the skeletons of sailing ships. Toppled statues of strange human-reptile hybrids litter the landscape.

  Black clouds converge like stains. Trees, bone thin and sharp, prod the sky like knives.

  He walks through fields of blood and oil. Dark nectar drips from skeletal branches. The spines of heavy brambles twist like daggers from the ground.

  He walks until his legs are numb and his throat is raw. Shadows seep down to his pores. He drifts like a lost leaf, carried by a wind that smells of age and death.

  Sometimes he feels the need to hunt.

  He hides in deep forests filled with soot-drenched leaves, where black ash falls like charcoal rain. He skewers mangy shadow hounds and forest cats, skins them and cooks them, but he rarely eats their soiled flesh.

  Sometimes instead of hunting, he is hunted.

  Great beasts with canine skulls, pugnacious jaws and moon-slit eyes prowl the black lands. There are Bloodshadows: avian and tentacled masses with beaks and teeth and flailing limbs that rip open the landscape in their ravenous hunger. Snakes melt out of trees like burned trails of cinder. Pools of briny water camouflage the open maws of subterranean marauders.

  He is forced to do battle with bizarre beasts, multi-limbed and black-bodied brutes like monstrous gorillas, lamprey-mouthed foxes, drooling two-dimensional humanoids with prehensile tongues.

  He proves more than capable of defending himself. He draws strength from the black-and-white blade in his possession. It makes his body stable and keeps him from being fully assimilated into the landscape.

  He tries to avoid contact with others, but sometimes it’s inevitable. He stumbles upon people lost in the wastelands, people like himself. They are abandoned and adrift, afraid of the arcane natives, marooned from another time or reality. These people are almost always mad. One refugee accuses him of being a frog disguised as a man so he can lull people to their deaths. Another runs away from him so fast he kills himself tumbling down a dark gorge.

  Once he comes across twins, blonde women not yet fully saturated by the taint of shadows. They take turns drinking from a vial of briny fluid that they found at the base of a dying tree, and they wager on which one of them will be the first to perish from the obviously poison substance. They wail and beg for him to join him, and their calls still ring in his ears long after he leaves them to their mad suicide.

  The Whisperlands. That is the name of the ebon-wracked lands, that bleak domain of shadow mud and endless dusk. He isn’t sure how he knows its name, but he does. Someone gave this grim reality that title long ago.

  The Whisperlands. He has been there for so very long.

  A cadre of warlocks rules the Whisperlands. They, in turn, owe their allegiance to a powerful witch. They are just like him in that they haven’t been fully corrupted by the soul-saturating substance of the realm, that black ash that drifts like debris from some perpetual explosion.

  He’s never seen the mages in person, but he sees evidence of their existence everywhere: traces of hex power left in the air, black fields blasted white, areas of dark rock or red tide chiseled or cut with vorpal proficiency, tainted soil, smoking ripples in the landscape, cold iron shards and crystal and other effluvia of the arcane.

  But the most telling sign of the mage’s existence are the whispers. He hears those voices in the wind, faint echoes like a distant memory. Sometimes they raise the hackles on the back of his soiled neck. It’s difficult to tell how close they are. They scour the earth and poison the atmosphere with the force of their presence. They are legion, a horde of derelict ghosts fused together in a mongrel presence.

  The warlocks hold a small army of these spirits at their command, mindless apparitions held captive, forced to shape and bend against their will. They are unliving slaves tethered by ectoplasmic chains and cold iron bonds. He hears the pain behind their voices. The whispers sound together in an anthem of surrender, a dirge of loss. They sing to warn the black world of their fate.

  He comes to understand the Whisperland’s geography, and by so doing he learns which areas are controlled by the mage warlords. The shadow world is not as random and as chaotic as he’d originally thought. There are patterns to the rippling dark landscape. He learns where the jagged hills melt into dark waters and where they turn back to solid ground again. He learns to anticipate the spread pattern of erratic fissures created by sporadic earthquakes.

  The sky is blood slate, petrified cloud and frozen dust. Everything appears burned or bleeding. The Whisperlands are so deeply and utterly black that treading the ground is like walking across a night sky.

  He feels, sometimes, like the Whisperlands are sealed in a glass case, and that he is part of the gritty diorama held within.

  He stumbles across a black field littered with pale rocks and comes across something he doesn’t expect: a child, ungainly and hideous, with an enlarged head and skin that is slowly being eaten away by varicose veins of shadow. The child points at a distant mountain.

  He can’t be sure if eithe
r the child or the mountain is real.

  That mountain, he suspects, belongs to the mages. He hasn’t made any physical maps, but he doesn’t need to. He has committed the geography of the black lands to memory, and he knows there is a region on the other side of the mountain that is empty on his mental diagram of the Whisperlands. That blank spot is a place he has not yet explored.

  That, he deduces, it is the mage’s home.

  He’s tempted to go to it, but he can’t explain or understand why. They haven’t done anything to him. He doubts they’re in any way responsible for his being trapped there. Likely they are trapped, as well, and they have chosen to band together rather than remain isolated.

  He avoids the region. The mountain reminds him of something from his old life. Whatever it is, it’s painful, and he’s glad the memory never really forms.

  He walks on.

  Time passes. He drifts through the ruins of cities. Some of them contain shadow people, while some are populated only by refuse. The whispers are always there, a mournful sound like a forlorn wind. His boots crush stones into black dust. He smells burning fumes and cold smoke. His body grows weary, but it’s only a memory of fatigue.

  With every step he becomes more of a shade. His skin has lost much of its natural color. His mind isn’t as focused as it once was: like the landscape, it becomes darker and less distinct.

  He travels through an ink stain. Silhouettes follow him, the arcane tribals. Or maybe he follows them.

  The child.

  It’s there, watching him. This time it isn’t alone. A second child, a girl, is there with the boy. Her head is just as freakishly large, her eyes are bulging orbs. Filigrees of wet dust fall from their bodies. Their eyes and hands are barely traceable outlines of grey, vague underwater impressions. The bitter wind pulls away bits of their flesh and clothes.

  Is that what I look like? Am I only a shade now?

  He’s almost afraid to hold up his hand, but he does. It’s hard for him to find it, to focus in the dust tempest. He watches bits fall away, pulled like sand into the funnel of sky.