The burst of the Browning cut through the silence. The roar was so loud that even at that distance Danica heard little else. A blaze of white machinegun fire perforated the dark earth and ripped up chunks of loose soil.
Kane looked like he held on for dear life as he fired the weapon. Spent shells soared into the air, and Black saw steam rise from his position.
Danica had no idea the Browning would be so accurate at that range. Kane cut two of the mercenaries down: one had both of his legs blown off, and the other was thrown back with little left of his head. Rounds pounded into the walking tower, but most of them bounced away with the clatter of metal-on-metal.
As expected, Kane drew enemy fire right away, and he and Ash ducked down behind the nest. The tower had some sort of motorgun mounted on its crenellated face, and the rotating barrels ejected large bursts that tore into the hillside.
The remaining four mercenaries returned fire with automatic weapons, but they were too far away to be accurate. Rather, the suppressing fire was meant to keep Kane’s and Ash’s heads down while the tower advanced on their position.
The warlock captain stood back and assessed the situation, just as Black had hoped he would. She sensed his spirit as it probed the area. He’d find Black and the others soon, but not soon enough.
Black motioned to Maur, and the Gol set the detonator on the dual blocks of C4, which he’d bound together into an explosive the size of a lunchbox. Black took hold of the block and had her spirit lift it up and away. The chunk of explosive clay carried like a leaf in the wind.
Bullets sprayed. The tower shambled along on the ground. Its motorgun blared with staccato force. A smoke grenade flew up and out of the machine-gun nest and popped on the ground, where it produced a stream of grey fog.
Kane would now move back around the hill and reposition himself close to the southern end of the crater, while Ash would stay low, exactly in the spot where she and Kane had been, the last place the mercs would expect her to be.
As soon as the smoke popped, Black sent her spirit forward with the C4 in its grip. The mage’s spirit detected hers and attacked, and the two wraith forms grappled in a tangle of ethereal tendrils and smoking limbs. Danica reeled in pain as a spike of arcane force punched through her spirit’s ashen body, but she helped him retaliate as a blast of charnel heat.
Black’s spirit held the C4 in its grip just outside of the melee even as it fought. The explosive skirted the chaos like a bird trapped at the outskirts of a storm.
The mage knew where the team was hidden. He screamed and directed the mercenaries. The tower shambled, its crab-legs dug into the mud, and its motorgun turned. Danica saw men in the corbelled apex of the tower, helmeted gunners who were nearly invisible against the body of black steel.
The team moved. Ronan led the way as they scrambled down the hill. The motorgun shots were thankfully inaccurate at that distance. Chunks of earth flew into the air behind them. If they paused for more than a second they’d be perforated by ball-ammo the size of oranges. The groan of winding chain metal buzzed like a factory sound.
Ash’s spirit soared up and over the ridge and came down on the tower in sparks of dark rain. Fire sizzled and perforated the walking device. Men screamed as bolts of heated metal scoured their flesh. The tower shifted and blasted the hillside.
Black, Ronan and Maur raced across open ground, desperate to cover the distance between themselves and the tower while both the mercs and the mage were distracted by Ash’s attack. Loamy earth blasted up around their feet.
Black’s and the mage’s spirit battled with arcane tendrils and drill-like claws made of smoke and flame.
The mage saw them when they were a hundred yards out. His eyes bled black and his flesh smoked from the effort it took to pull his spirit away from Danica’s.
Kane arrived at his position near the south ridge. More rounds from the Browning pounded the earth and rattled the tower, and the air rang with metal noise. The mercenaries hesitated, confused, and they were promptly cut down by Ronan as he charged forward with his MP5.
Danica barely managed to fuse her spirit into a shield before the warlock’s angry war ghost hammered them with limbs like bladed hammers. Spectral white energies rained down. Danica’s skin burned with the effort of keeping the team safe from the assault.
But the plan worked. Ash’s spirit, now ignored, soared through the air like a ghostly serpent and wound himself around the block of C4, which Danica’s spirit still held with a spectral limb extended to the periphery of the battle. Ash’s spirit clamped the explosive to the side of the walking tower. Black sensed when Maur hit the detonator, and she yelled to everyone to get down.
The blast ripped off the top of the tower and split open the metal face of the moving iron juggernaut. Fire roared up and out of the wounded vehicle as the men in the gunner’s nest fell, flaming, to the earth. The mechanical legs buckled, and the tower tipped.
The mage rose from where he’d fallen. Half of his face had burned away, but his hands still crackled with arcane energy, dismal electric fire that dripped from his fingers like caustic sludge.
Black promptly skewered him with a spear of dark fire, and his eyes glazed over as he stood there, impaled and immobile, until Ronan grew tired of his moans and sliced off his head.
“Move!” Black yelled. She signaled Kane and Ash to come join them from their separate positions on the ridge.
The air was brittle and thick. Smoke poured into the sky, and blood soaked the already dank soil.
For a moment, Black thought she glimpsed another silhouette, a shadow of a man there on the field, but quickly it was gone, and when she searched for the presence there was nothing to be found. They pressed on.
Black, Ronan and Maur moved towards the guarded tunnel entrance stood directly beneath the machinegun nest. The area ahead of the hole bore tracks from both the iron tower and the men who’d accompanied it. The tunnel mouth was wide and dark and was partially blocked with stacks of equipment and crates of ammo.
The cave sucked the light from the air. They were only a few feet into the tunnel and yet couldn’t see anything without the use of the flares they’d gathered from some open crates. The temperature was twenty degrees cooler just inside the cave than it was outside. Danica’s breath and she shivered in place, but as tempting as it was to use her spirit to keep them warm she sent him ahead, past a small camp and into the labyrinth of supplies to determine what lay ahead.
The cave was actually smaller than they’d thought, and it was unusually shaped. The walls looked smelted, like whatever had crafted the crater had split off into a second, smaller piece of debris that had barreled into the wall and formed this second aperture. The far end of the rough tunnel was dark, and the dark ice that covered the serrated edges of the rock smoked with cold.
The team cautiously moved forward. Black felt certain she’d seen this before, but details of the memory continued to elude her. The walls stretched unnaturally the deeper they went. Whatever life forms Ash had noted before were gone.
An archway of dark iron stood at the end of the tunnel, almost hidden within folds of frost smoke and shadows. The metal arch was covered in chiseled runes and arcane monograms, but the interior of the archway – which by all rights should have led directly into the stone – was an utterly dark void, a hole that seemingly led to nothingness.
Staring into that hole was like looking into oblivion. The darkness there was absolute, and chilling. Black’s spirit didn’t want to approach it. He was cowed, but more than that he felt…blocked. Like something held within that fathomless aperture pushed him away.
“What is it?” Ronan growled.
“Maur thinks it is Cruj technology,” the Gol said. “Transubstantive locationism.”
“Say what?” Ronan groaned.
“A teleporter,” Black explained. “They used to be everywhere, back when the Cruj were active allies of the vampires. Most of them were destroyed.” She stepped back, and looked around
. “This is why they were here. They were trying to break in, and go where this leads.”
The air was deathly quiet and still.
“Where’s Cross?” Ronan asked. “I thought Ash said she sensed him down here.”
“She did,” Black said. “Which means he’s on the other side.”
Ronan lowered his weapon, spit, and laughed.
“So we have to…”
“Yeah,” Black nodded. “We do.”
“Does it even work?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
They waited for Kane and Ash, who arrived shortly. Kane had disabled the Browning, as he’d not wished to leave it functional when he wasn’t the one using it. He quickly discovered there were two more there in the cave, and that didn’t improve his mood.
Black quickly brought them up to speed.
“That makes sense,” Ash nodded. “The distortion fields created by Cruj tech, especially their spacewarping mechanics, would explain the interference we encountered outside. I don’t know about you, Dani, but my spirit is scared to death of that thing.”
“This is nuts,” Kane said. “Do we have any clue where this thing leads? I mean, it could burrow straight into some god-damn vampire necropolis!”
“Well, as far as we know, these men are mercenaries funded by the Ebon Cities,” Black said. “So I doubt it leads to one of their cities. More likely it goes somewhere that gives them a tactical advantage over the Southern Claw, or to something they need.”
She sees the black keep at the edge of the black shore. She sees the woman in the fog, with eyes like cuts that peer into a diamond winter.
Danica took a breath. She didn’t want to look at the gate. The very sight of it chilled her.
“Either way,” she continued, “we can’t afford to stand here debating it. Cross went through, and so did more of these mercs. This is dark and ancient magic…whatever they want that’s on the other side, they’ve gone through a lot of trouble to find it.”
“All the more reason,” Ash said, “to make sure they don’t get it.”
Black looked at each of them in turn. Only Ash looked unafraid.
Girl power, she thought with a smile, knowing damn well this was no time to be laughing.
“Are we ready?” She didn’t want to give anyone the chance to back down, not that she imagined they would. She was right.
“Ready when you are, Chief,” Kane smiled.
“Let’s do it,” Ronan nodded.
“Maur wants to know what we’re waiting for,” the Gol said.
Ash took Black by the hand. Together, they reined their spirits in and forced them to move through that dank vertical hole.
The dark barrier pressed against them with cold pressure. The whispers of long destroyed souls raced through their minds and cursed at them in forgotten tongues.
Images flashed before Danica’s eyes, the dark keep, the shadow woman. She saw fields burn with icy flames, and a sword carved from black shadows.
She sees the city burning, and the wavering doorway melts like wax in the uncertain sky. She sees a black keep on the other side of the hole, and she hears frenzied death throes as the void crushes them.
The last thing she thinks, before she is twisted and sucked into the unstable realm on the other side, is that it is too late, that what will come to pass has already happened.
That their deaths are certain, and nothing can change that now.
Black closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and passed through a membrane of icy darkness. She fell into another world.
interlude
frozen
Crystal nails of ice surround him in a cage of frozen light. He can’t see, and he can’t hear. For moments he is lost, a shard of rain. He doesn’t remember how he got here. He can’t recall anything before passing through, before he was trapped in the membrane between worlds.
Memories stretch across his path like a trail of steam. He sees the chamber of dead girls, and he feels dark oil swallow him up. Black smoke envelops his eyes. He drowns in an effluvia of souls.
Where am I? he wonders. There is no answer.
He drifts like a kite from unexplained heights. Slowly, he regains some sense of the shattered landscape around him.
He is back at the crater again. Always back at the crater. There is no escaping the inevitability of that return.
It happens over and over again, a shard of time that replays like a broken machine. He hears hundreds of voices eclipsed by the sheer and dismal force of that descent. The sky turns black, scorched by flames that fall from the shattered sky.
He sees a crack in the dome of night, sees the riders on their black ships. He will join them soon. He is no longer a tangible presence, here, or anywhere.
He moves through night’s filigree and down chutes of liquid time. He soars on wings made dark by the grit of ages past. There is no constant where he falls, no point of reference. He is not in the past, or in the future, because neither is fixed. Nothing is.
He remembers, briefly, his overland voyage. The memory is real, and now. There is no notion of a time before.
He leaves Thornn after he speaks with Warfield, when he decides once and for all that she is not what he wants, that she never has been. To cling to the notion of being with her is not only foolish, but self-destructive. He knows who he is, at last, and he knows what he has to do.
All he doesn’t know is what’s happening to him.
So he leaves. Better to learn on his own than to endanger his team with his unstable spirit. He knows even at this point (before there is the notion of now, or the memory of now, before there is a notion of before) that he has been cast out of the normal flow of the world. He walks beside it, left to peer in like a spectator. He no longer treads the same ground as anyone else.
Something follows him. He can sense it, almost smell it, the burning odor of a fresh wound, a rent made in the dark fabric that surrounds him. He sees nothing when he looks back, so he carries on.
He knows his team will come after him, and he hopes they won’t run into too much trouble. He has to set things right on his own without endangering his friends. He feels, somewhere deep inside, that he is the key to stopping events that have already been set in motion. That his falling into this shadow realm has not happened by chance.
The voyage is difficult. He purchases passage on an airship owned by a pair of cutthroat merchants, and they happily deposit him at a trading post near Ath in exchange for a hundred coins.
There, in that transitional city of desperation, where anything can be bought or sold with enough patience, he hires passage again, this time on a criminal vessel whose ruddy-faced captain agrees to take him directly to the excavation site.
He never passes near Fane, or Wolftown, the one place near the mission site where his team is bound to rest when they get there. At best, he knows he is half-a-day ahead of them, but that concept seems so medieval.
Time is nothing but water. It is easily shifted but never stopped.
The longer he travels, the further he moves away from the reality he knows. He moves in dimensions unfamiliar to him. He travels away from himself, and not in some metaphoric sense, even if he does appreciate the irony. He is no longer a part of the world he knew, but he is in a place suffused by visions, a cold and desolate realm filled with shadow drifts that suffocate his soul.
Every motion grows more sluggish, like he trudges through oil. He feels trapped at the bottom of a vast well, or in the cold and black darkness of a terrible dream. He is frightened, alone, and afraid, in a way he has not felt in a long
Stop it, there’s no such thing as
time.
Day passes into night, then back again. The criminal vessel deposits him on a calcified field of salt and bone, a wasted expanse of rotted vegetation and grass made hard by pollution and cold. The chiseled land smokes with frost, and mounds of dark earth disguise the ossified remains of ancient corpses, the petrified flesh of dead giants. He walk
s through a graveyard of mold. Stones like bony hands protrude from the earth and claw at the sky.
Again, something follows him, but it is a different presence than before. What he sensed last time was a phantom, a spectral force that masked itself well, even though he is not convinced it was actually a singular entity.
What follows him now is something different, something rooted to the living world.
He draws close to his destination. He has been here before, or to someplace like it. He recalls the fields outside of Koth, the renegade necropolis, and he sees the ghouls who hunt him in the dark. He is back there again, chasing Red. He fears he has lost his grip on what is real, or what is when. Time repeats itself
does this mean I have to lose Snow all over again?
but he is wrong, the child-like things that stalk him through the iron mist of the cold dawn are not ghouls.
They are exiled Gol, outcasts from the city of Meldoar, criminals and scavengers left to scour the wastelands in packs. They come over the rise in a silent mass of ruddy cloaks and diseased faces, black fingernails and teeth, bone picks and yellowed eyes. How he couldn’t see them before is unfathomable. He runs.
They are without fear. His spirit assaults them with concussive blasts, a symphony of sonic blades that perforate the ground and turn it red with ruined flesh. The derelict Gol are relentless, and they push through a blood mist and greasy rain that just moments ago had been their comrades. They stagger on in pursuit, and all he can do is flee.
He puts distance between himself and the rabid mob. His spirit is displeased at his decision, for his unwillingness to satisfy her bloodlust. She makes him weak by expelling raging energies against the world around them.
She burns trees to cinder and rocks to molten pools. He is glad to be alone, for he has no way of knowing what damage she would do to his friends.
Night and day blur together. He knows he has not been there long, but he can no longer sense time. He is above it, around it. It no longer applies to him.
Soulrazor (Blood Skies, Book 3) Page 16
