Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)

by Steven Montano

  The wind intensifies. His body is discorporating. He feels himself drift apart, but the sensation is surreal. He feels so very, very old.

  The shadow children motion. They want him to follow. He does.

  They walk to the remains of a city. Buildings lean in towards one another as if huddled against the cold. A low black wall surrounds thin black structures that have toppled like fallen matchsticks.

  Dust flies across their path, and for a moment he worries the children have come apart and drifted into the sky, but then he sees them again in the black windstorm. They move deliberately so as to keep him in sight. He follows them at a distance, his fingers near his blade.

  He wonders if they’re associated with the mages, or if they are the mages.

  The mages. I was trying to remember something about the mages.

  They lead him through the remains of the crumbling city. Most of the buildings have collapsed. The earth underfoot is old clay. Wreckage lies everywhere, and he sees the lonely skeletons of the city’s long-lost inhabitants.

  Up above, the clouds roil like a dark sea.

  The children enter one of the few standing structures. They pass through a crooked archway beneath what might have once been the leering face of a demonic lion, but now the stone is too dark for him to tell.

  He hesitates. He feels fear like a lead weight.

  The mages. I can’t remember. There’s something about them that I need to remember…something important.

  Without another thought, he follows.

  The inside of the tower was cold and dry. Cross knew who he was the moment he set foot inside, even if he couldn’t remember much of anything else. The soot immediately started to flake off his skin. He felt his senses return, like he’d been stuck in a mental haze. His body shook from the cold, and he was able to move quickly again, unhindered by the debris of the Whisperlands.Cross had entered other structures in that strange world before, but this sense of clarity, this cleansing, had never before occurred. He’d never found himself shielded from the roar of the black wind and the touch of the tainted world.

  The inside of the tower looked like an abandoned outpost. Tattered grey flags dangled in air that reeked of age and tasted like soot. The floor was littered with drifts of cold ash and the charred remains of broken furniture.

  Aside from the open doorway, which led to air so suffused with darkness it was like black gelatin, the only other way out of the stark room was a rickety wooden staircase leading up. He took it.

  Each step rattled and creaked beneath his weight. Motes of dust floated down from the ceiling. The only light came from ambient worms clinging to the walls. For all Cross could tell they were long dead, but their bodies still shone with a phosphorescent shine that turned everything a shade of sick green.

  He passed alcoves filled with the bones of unknown animals. Small slits in the outer walls granted view of the black landscape.

  His muscles tensed as he ascended the final few steps.

  The upper floor of the tower was a single large room. The ceiling was drastically too high for the circumference of the chamber. The lightning worms were absent there, so only the barest details were visible in the light that spilled in from the doorway behind him: shattered porcelain dolls, piles of shredded clothing, smoking ice strewn like shattered glass. The room was quiet, and all he heard was the tell-tale call of the stygian winds.

  The children waited for him. A boy and a girl, both dressed in rags. They weren’t as large as they’d been outside, where their appearance had been almost troglodytic, preposterous skulls on ridiculously small bodies. There in the tower they were much smaller, and while their flesh held an unnatural pallor they at least were the size of normal children, only with slightly enlarged eyes. They stood stone-still and stared at Cross as he stepped into the chamber.

  They weren’t alone.

  A monstrous presence waited behind them, something tall and massive but entirely encased in pillars of roving darkness. He squinted to try and get a better look at the creature, but whatever it was it remained just out of sight.

  “Hello,” the boy said. His voice was flat and emotionless. He moved robotically.

  “Um…hello,” Cross said quietly. He took another step into the room, but he refused to wade too far in. The light behind him couldn’t penetrate the gloom. He heard something wet in the shadows, something slithering. It coiled and tensed, and he smelled the musk of organic waste, vaguely sexual but putrid. “What is this place?”

  “Shelter from the storm,” the girl said. Her voice was equally dead and distant. Neither of them moved an inch. Cross didn’t think they even breathed.

  “Why am I here?” he asked.

  “Only you can know that,” the boy said.

  “We are not concerned with why you are here,” the girl said.

  Cross stepped sideways, careful to walk slow and quiet.

  “What are you concerned with?” he asked.

  “How to leave,” they both said in tandem, their voices so effortlessly cued to the same frequency it sent shivers up his spine.

  “Leave…this tower?”

  “The Whisperlands,” they said, and then the boy continued to talk on his own. “I am a prisoner here, just like you. I have been here for a very long time.”

  “What are you?” he asked. His fingers slid towards Soulrazor/Avenger’s grip. It had been some time since he’d remember the black-and-white sword’s names. “Why are you talking to me through these…” He looked at the girl. It was difficult to see just how lifeless she was in the dark. “Through these things …they sure as hell aren’t children.”

  “Your mind could not bear the sight of me,” she said.

  “That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?” he said with a nervous laugh.

  I have no magic, he realized. He’d wandered across the Whisperlands for what felt like decades, but in the mental mire caused by the black windscape the memory of his loss either hadn’t occurred to him, or else it simply hadn’t mattered. The blades might not have any of their arcane properties here, and I don’t have any other weapons. If these things want to kill me, I’m done.

  “It is not a matter of judgment, or inclination,” the boy said.

  “It is matter of what you can fathom,” the girl added. “And you cannot fathom me.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Cross said grimly. “So what do you want from me?”

  “You wish to escape,” the boy said. “That is plain.”

  “I wish to help you,” the girl added. “But I cannot leave this place.”

  “Of course,” Cross said with a nod.

  “Do not doubt me,” the boy said. The voice was less human than before. It scratched like steel and glass. The children’s eyes were black. Shadow veins bulged from their faces and made their false flesh paler. Their feet lifted slightly off the ground.

  Tendrils attached them to the darkness at the back of the room. Flesh lines hooked into their backs, greasy appendages dripping slime in the rigid air. He couldn’t tell if the bodies were those of actual children or if they were just extensions, constructs. Flesh puppets.

  “How can I not doubt you?” Cross asked quietly. He took a step back towards to the stairs. “You won’t show me what you are.”

  There was no answer. He felt the air breathe and tense.

  And then it showed him.

  Darkness peeled back. Tendrils of shadow ripped away like frightened snakes. The children’s eyes vanished into puddles of slime, and the bodies flattened like empty sacks and fell to the floor with sickening slumps.

  The creature was made of soiled skin and shadow orifices. Its mountainous husk was the height of the room, a pulsating membrane of fish-like flesh and tinted veins. It had no visible limbs or appendages save the tentacle strands, which melted so seamlessly into its bulk they almost looked like shadows themselves. The entire body had the semblance of a dark tree trunk, a living pillar of glistening black skin fused to the floor.

&n
bsp; Cross’s head throbbed as he looked at the creature, not so much from the grotesquerie of its appearance as from the sheer force of its psychic presence.

  Eidolos. Cross had heard of the dread race before, but only in rumor. They were one of the few creatures described in the Tome of Scars he’d never encountered firsthand. Once-allies (or slaves, or masters, depending on which story one believed) of the subterranean giants called the Cruj, the Eidolos were a bizarre earthen-organic race of rocks that had assumed flesh form and bonded with the arcane energies of the earth. The younger versions took on the form of humanoids, but the older they got, the more they evolved, and the less human they appeared. Possessed of vastly superior and alien intelligences, the Eidolos were known for their incredible cruelty and dominant psychic powers, which, if the reports were correct, could literally crush a human’s mind if they spent too long in the creature’s proximity. Warlocks and witches were supposedly afforded some measure of resistance due to their arcane spirits. Which means I might be screwed.

  His mind felt weighted down. His limbs grew heavy. He wanted to sleep so he could erase the intense pain in his skull. His muscles ached and seemed to melt into the floor.

  No. I’m stronger than this.

  He didn’t remember drawing Avenger/Soulrazor, but it shook in his hand. Its stark power lifted him to his feet. It was a hybrid sword, a fusion of black and white shards of once larger weapons born of opposing powers, the extractions or physical manifestations of the White Mother and The Black. Every time Cross had thought the weapon’s power spent, it reminded him that it was never wise to doubt the might of divine forces.

  Unlight shone from the blade. Throbbing pulses of white and echoes of black shadow pulled away from the meteor steel. The tower shook.

  The shadows warped, twisted and raced back to the far corners of the room. The darkness moved with such force Cross was nearly thrown back, but the subtle shield issued by the pulsing blade kept him safe.

  You wanted me to show you my form, the Eidolos’ mountain of voices called. The words were less shaped than before, more erratic, like it had to learn how to form speech all over again.

  The room returned to the same pit of darkness it had been when he’d entered. The child puppets remained on the floor, no longer needed. Cross could only barely make out the vaguest outline of the Eidolos’s behemoth presence.

  “Yes,” he said, not wishing to come to blows with the creature, even though his blade did seem to afford him a measure of protection. Even with the artifact held firmly in hand, his head still throbbed with pain. “Yes I did. Of course, you could have just told me what you were…”

  And you could have accepted my word. I am a prisoner here, the same as you. But we can escape…provided you lend me your aid.

  “You mean lend you my body,” Cross said. “Because you can’t leave this tower.”

  Yes.

  “The mages,” he said. “Tell me about them.”

  What would you have me tell?

  “Are they in control here?”

  Yes and no. The Shadow Lords are the most powerful beings in the Whisperlands, at least at the moment. But they are no more in control of this place than you or I.

  “Are they the key to escaping?” Cross asked. He edged back towards the doorway and the light. He still felt like he hung at the edge of consciousness. Only the chill touch of the arcane blade kept him focused and awake.

  They are. They have a way out.

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  Warlocks, led by a witch. They subjugate the denizens of this realm and craft them into armies. They take what they want.

  “What is this place?” Cross asked. “The Whisperlands…what is it, really?”

  There is no knowing that, the Eidolos replies. You might call it hell. It is a place between worlds. Nothing is meant to exist here. It is refuse from The Black. We are shadows. It is all we can ever be. But some of us remember what we were before…where we were before. We can escape our bonds, you and I. We can be more.

  Cross’s hands were numb with cold. He had no reason to trust this thing, this monstrous telepath. The Eidolos’ motives, their sense of reason, the very makeup of their utterly alien minds were well beyond his understanding.

  But it still wanted to survive. That was a basic enough drive that almost any creature possessed…which meant, Cross realized, that it was probably on the level.

  He hoped his weapon shielded his mind from its powers. He didn’t like the notion of not even being able to mull things over without his thoughts being scanned.

  The Eidolos waited patiently. The tower rattled from the force of the ebon wind. Cross wondered about the Shadow Lords, about how long they’d been stranded there…or how long the Eidolos had been stranded there. No one knew much of anything about the Whisperlands, but he’d learned that time passed differently there, that a year on earth might have been ten in that shadow oubliette.

  He wondered how long he’d been there.

  And then something else occurred to him.

  The mages had a way out, the Eidolos said. That meant that maybe, just maybe, they could leave whenever they wanted to…and yet they were still there.

  What are they doing here?

  He’d always assumed the mages were like he was: unwilling refugees stranded in the Whisperlands. He’d guessed that maybe they’d banded together to make the most of their new home, a place they quickly found they could subjugate and control. But years, maybe decades of madness had changed their minds, and now they longed for an escape. It all made sense.

  And yet now he wondered if he was wrong.

  What if they aren’t trapped here? What if they came here intentionally? What if they want something the Whisperlands has?

  If the Eidolos read his thoughts, it paid them no mind, nor did it make answer to his query. It just waited, and the tower pulsed to the beat of the creature’s hollow heart.

  “All right,” he said to the flesh pillar. “I’ll help you, because by doing so I’ll be helping myself.”

  That is all that is asked, it responded in his mind.

  He took a breath.

  “What do I have to do?”

  FOUR

  BATTLEFIELD

  The sky folded in on itself. Kane saw smoke, and smelled fire. There was blood in his eyes.

  He was alive.

  The crash.

  Shit.

  He sat up and grimaced. Grinding hurt rang through his knee. A steel plate had fallen on top of his right leg. He choked on the stench of burning fuel.

  We always crash. I’m sick of this crap.

  Kane slowly pulled himself out from under the metal. He was relieved to see that his wounds were superficial, and he imagined he had Jade to thank for that, since she’d likely shielded them with her magic – there was really no other way any of them could have survived the impact.

  That’s something else for Vago to hold over us. Damn it.

  He looked around. Fire rapidly spread through the inside of the ship. Kane winced as he pulled himself to his feet – the damage to his knee was worse than he’d thought.

  The starboard wall and much of the roof were bent in and twisted. Crackling thaumaturgic wires burned grey-black smoke. Thick fluids sprayed from the torn walls. Chunks of metal dangled from what was left of the ceiling, and sharp debris protruded from the floor where the ship had landed on something buried in the sand.

  Kane grabbed Jade’s hand and pulled her up. Blood covered one side of her face, and she coughed violently in the thick smoke.

  He looked around for the others.

  That second tank is still out there, unless Ronan got extremely lucky with that last barrage. And one thing we haven’t been lately is lucky.

  Sol pulled himself out from under some collapsed roofing. He was bruised and covered in cuts and engine oil, and a piece of metal the size of a boomerang stuck out of his left arm. Kane winced when Sol nonchalantly pull the shrapnel out, shook away the blood, and picke
d up his M78. The big man lumbered to his feet and looked through the holes in the hull.

  “Sol!” Kane shouted. The ringing in his ears was intense, and his own words seemed to echo from miles away. “Help your girl!”

  He found his MP14A and turned off the safety.

  “The other tank is still out there, guys!” Kane shouted. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  He made his way to the cockpit. The fuselage had pushed up from the ground.

  Maur was alive but badly bruised. Blood ran into the Gol’s eyes where his forehead had smacked hard against the dash. Still, he was conscious enough to complain as Kane tried to pull him loose from the heavy straps that kept him bound to the pilot’s seat.

  Pain flooded through Kane’s body. He felt a numbing sensation at the edge of his mind, a field of darkness that threatened to block out his vision. He fought it, shook himself, turned and followed Maur’s frightened gaze as he looked out the cracked viewport.

  The second tank left trails of black smoke in its wake as necrotic engines propelled it straight towards them. Thick blasts of sand flowed around the vehicle in a dust tide. The tank grew larger by the second. It was so close it shook the airship’s ruined walls.

  Kane looked in the sky above the tank and saw dark shapes in the dust. The tank had air support.

  Terrific.

  “Fliers!” he shouted. He ripped his boot knife free and sliced open Maur’s harness. The Gol jumped down, ripped a mini-Uzi away from a holster in the paneling, and raced towards the port-side hatch. “You’re welcome!” Kane shouted after him.

  The top-mounted 20mm cannons suddenly hammered to life, and the sound pounded at Kane’s skull. Ronan was still in the gunner’s seat.

  Sol pulled Jade and Maur behind him as he kicked open the port hatch. They’d landed at a steep angle on top of a tall sand dune. Sol leapt out and rolled down the slope. Jade and Maur followed, and Kane moved next to the open door.

  “Are you coming?!” he shouted, but Ronan couldn’t hear him over the guns. “Hey dumbass!” Kane screamed as loud as he could. “LET’S GO!”

  Ronan leapt down from the gunner’s seat, grabbed his MP5A5, and followed.