Several of the prisoners couldn’t handle their food, and Cross guessed they were as new to the prison city as he was. They vomited noisily onto the ground, sometimes right back into the feeding troughs.
A new series of sounds assaulted them. He heard babies being hurt, children screaming, sounds of torture and pain that came from just out of sight.
None of it is real, he told himself. They’re just screwing with our heads.
Some of the prisoners looked around, afraid. Others didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Cross needed something to drink. Again, he didn’t seem to be the only one. The gruel dried painfully in his mouth. He smelled and tasted basalt and corn.
“Just take it slow,” the Gol said. He was short, which was normal for that race, barely four-feet-tall, with diseased looking skin that was riddled with scars and pores. He kept most of his face concealed beneath a heavy cloth wrap and a thick red cloak that looked as tattered as a battle flag, but the diseased flesh was difficult to completely hide away. His hands look withered, and old. “Small bites. Let is dissolve in your mouth. Eat too much, and you’ll choke.” The Gol’s yellow eyes had no pupils. His voice was gravel and stone. “There will be no water. You drink your piss, or the water in your cell.”
They were the first words Cross had heard spoken in what must have been days. It took Cross some moments to assemble meaning from them, and by the time he did the Gol had vanished. He saw no trace of him in the crowds.
The sun beat down. The walls shielded them from the hot wind, but not from the molten heat or the cloying stench.
Cross sat for a while. There was not a shred of cover anywhere to be found in the open commons. The ochre clouds melted away, and the sun bathed the world in heat. Before long the light was so bright it was almost impossible for him to keep his eyes open.
He wandered around after he ate. A fight broke out between the Vuul and a pair of humans. The gargoyle sentries seemed to have little interest in the melee, so the Vuul was left alone to tear the humans apart with its considerable fists.
Cross turned away. He had no doubt that the humans would be eaten, and he wanted to know nothing of it.
His spirit moved around him in a sort of protective embrace, but all that Cross could sense was how weak and feeble she was, how helpless. He was going to have to keep her safe, not the other way around.
Maybe I can do it this time. Maybe I can actually protect someone important to me.
He sees Snow, burning. This time she is on that mountain. She stands below him, and the flames roar up from the valley and engulf her. He watches her flesh melt from her bones. She disintegrates in a furnace blast of cold fire.
Cross shook his head. He was going insane.
The pitted iron walls of the prison were covered in dust and sand that clung to old congealed blood stains that had sealed to the metal. Images had been scrawled there: claws, handprints, mouths. Beneath the gritty outer coating of desert grime were more elaborate shapes drawn or cut directly into the metal, pyramids and elliptical gods, eyes and teeth and bladed crescent moons.
Cross closed his eyes.
“Cross?”
It was so strange to hear words spoken again so soon. Most of the voices he heard in the commons were guttural chants, or the whispered silver sounds of foreign tongues, and after a while they all faded into background noise, white static that filled his head as he wandered, not really words at all.
Dillon put a heavy hand on Cross’ shoulder. Cross stared up at him. It took him a few seconds to register who it was. The tall ranger looked gaunt. His eyes were sunken, like he hadn’t slept for days.
Cross regarded him stupidly, not understanding. When it became clear that he wasn’t dreaming, Cross slowly lifted an aching, gauntleted hand and put it on Dillon’s arm, and he held it there for a moment to make sure he was really awake.
He stood, and then he promptly collapsed in Dillon’s arms.
TEN
TOWERS
They were introduced to a new routine. After they were left to roast in the sun for a few hours every day, with only the foul-smelling brown gruel to sustain them, the prisoners were unceremoniously hauled out of the commons by gargoyles and returned to the darkness of their cells. Vampires with bone launchers and large-bored handguns watched from high up on the walls as the bestial winged creatures moved the prisoners. Considering how lethargic the inmates were, Cross thought the vampires needn’t worry too much.
Back in his cell, he drank foul water and tried not to fall unconscious and drown. He slept standing up. He dreamed of the cold inferno as it clawed its way up the mountain, and of a female figure as she died in the pale doorway. Sometimes Snow was there, as well, burning next to him.
Every day, he was removed from his cell and taken to the commons, where he met with Dillon. They saw no sign of the others.
The gruel and dirty water never changed. They were being kept alive, but not healthy. Cross’ insides burned like he’d swallowed an acid pill.
“They’re going to Turn us,” Dillon said at one point.
There was no telling how many days had passed since they’d been first been brought to Krul. On those rare occasions when his head felt clear, Cross remembered being led through the labyrinth of dark halls by black-clad vampires in masks, then flown up a massive cylinder shaft by blank-eyed gargoyle warriors with bodies as solid as stone before he was brought into open air and dropped into the commons.
The gauntlets they fit him with every day ached and cut into his wrists, leaving them raw. His leg wound still throbbed, but it ached less than it had before. It may have even started to heal, though he couldn’t imagine how that was possible without some sort of medical aid.
It was never night, or at least it seemed that way. They were only brought outside in the blazing sun of midday. The rest of their time was spent buried deep in the tower.
He and Dillon sat with their backs against a wall and talked. They couldn’t actually see the sun, as it hid behind layers of dull clouds that looked like sand. The clouds in no way impacted the heat, so their senses remained dull and their limbs were heavy.
“They’ll take their time doing it,” Dillon continued. His voice was slurred and his eyes were half-shut, like he was drunk. There were tears in his voice. “They’ll do it slow.”
“We have to hold on,” Cross said. The commons seemed less crowded than it had before. The other prisoners huddled in groups, largely segregated by race, but a few inmates remained isolated. One man with wild hair and greasy stains on his face muttered to himself constantly. One Gorgoloth had lost an eye, but the brute sat hunched and played with the crusty orb like it was a marble. A pale-skinned Vuul stood quiet and stoic and stared up into the sky as if it waited for something to descend.
Everything smelled like an outhouse in summer. The air tasted fetid.
Cross thought about Snow. She hadn’t been taken to Krul – it had been the undead of Koth who’d broken her, not the vampires of the Ebon Cities, and she’d been broken in spirit rather than actually Turned, but in the end it was much the same as where Cross found himself now. He wondered if she’d been subjected to the same treatment as he, isolated and malnourished. He wondered if they’d also found a way to keep her awake for days on end.
“Jeraline,” Dillon said. His words came slow, like he had difficulty remembering them. He seemed only half awake.
They heard the roar of turbine engines as vessels passed outside the city walls, and the roar and groan of Krul’s chains as the city realigned itself. Cross felt the metal rattle beneath them whenever Krul folded and shifted, a gargantuan puzzle piece being rearranged.
His spirit held on to him. He felt her warmth, different than that of the desert air. She was distant and faint. He wondered if he could channel her if not for the gauntlets, or if doing so would burn her out like a candle. It didn’t matter – there was no way the vampires would leave that option open to its prisoners. Doubtless there were a ridiculous
number of safeguards and spirit dampeners all over the prison city.
The groups of prisoners shifted around every now and again, and some individuals roamed on their own. They wandered and talked quietly, held handfuls of food that looked like fecal waste. There was nowhere for them to go, and nothing to do. The upwardly sloped walls bore no cracks, handholds or protrusions aside from the spikes, which jutted straight out at the top of the walls a good fifty feet over their heads. Without shade, prisoners were left with nothing to do but bake beneath the sun on the sand-covered metal floors.
Cross’s mind felt lost, adrift, and asleep. He remembered that Dillon had spoken, and that suddenly seemed like it had happened hours ago.
“Who’s Jeraline?” he asked.
“My…my sister.”
“Yeah,” Cross answered.
I’m so weak. I can’t think straight. Have they drugged us, or is this just the fatigue, the malnourishment? Am I sick? He felt his leg. He didn’t think the wound had festered, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually checked it. He hoped he wasn’t feverish.
“I miss her cooking,” Dillon said. He laughed.
“Was…was she a good cook?”
“Nah, man, she was terrible!”
Dillon laughed, a booming, half-mad and infectious laugh, and Cross found himself laughing, as well. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know why they were laughing. It didn’t matter that nothing was funny.
A memory came to him. Black and white shadows, colliding in a storm. A maelstrom over a frozen lake. Obsidian glass and cold smoke. A Woman in the Ice.
Focus.
He felt his spirit there at the edge of his thoughts. He felt her pain, a distant and lingering ache like an old wound that was almost healed, like some fading scar.
Focus.
“Dillon,” he said. He blinked his eyes, shook his head. “We have to get out of here.”
Lucan. The Dra’aalthakmar. The Sleeper. A shadow over the ice. A battle.
“I know,” Dillon said.
They sat for a time. Another day might have passed and they wouldn’t have known, since their routine had become so ingrained in his mind Cross didn’t even notice it any more. Time melted and blurred.
His clothes were disintegrating. He was so covered in grime he felt like he wore someone else’s skin.
At some point, he and Dillon talked about Krul, and assessed what little they knew about the prison city. The longer they talked, the clearer their minds became, even though it was still difficult for Cross to track the passage of time. But he knew one thing clearly: they had to escape. If Lucan and his primal spirit had lost the battle with the Sleeper, it might have already been too late. But, if Lucan had weakened it, or even just fought it off for a time, there was still a chance. There was even the chance that Lucan had somehow defeated the Sleeper, and that the mission was done…but Cross sensed that wasn’t true, even if he wanted to believe it. Either way, they still had to escape. He did not intend to sit in Krul and rot.
But before they could escape, they had to plan, and in order to do that they had to catalog everything they knew of their surroundings. That was true of any tactical situation. Going back to that routine – their training from years back, when Cross had been a green recruit afraid of his own shadow, and Dillon was a foot soldier – helped them both focus, and it kept them sharp when fatigue or drugs or heat or malnourishment or sickness or all of those things threatened to drag them down into mental oblivion.
Cross had been there for what felt like an eternity, a black prison of the mind with tighter bonds than the gauntlets or the shackles he was forced to wear every time they brought him to and from the surface. He’d floated in that mire, a semi-conscious soup. Now, there with Dillon, recalling his days in Viper Squad and Dillon’s days in the infantry, talking and planning, laying out strategy, carefully weighing options and making crude maps in the sand, made Cross realize that he wasn’t dead yet. That prison in his brain was still there, a deep and dismal shaft, but Cross finally felt he had a chance to claw his way out.
Focus.
Krul. The City of Scars. It was the prison metropolis of the Ebon Cities, a place where the vampires sent exiled captives that they wanted kept alive. It was a monstrosity of steel and chains, a gargantuan complex nestled in the center of an arid wasteland several days travel from a blighted sea.
Most of the prisoners in Krul were tortured for information, or else they were used as slave labor in the vampire’s production facilities. Even more were used as fodder in spectator gladiator games, events of blood and mayhem staged for the pleasure of the undead aristocracy.
The rest of the prisoners were Turned into vampires.
The Southern Claw had learned quite a few things about how vampires corrupted and Turned creatures. Arcane venom was injected into the bloodstream via a bite, and it spread quickly. Tiny necrotic insects in the venom festered and multiplied and turned the victim’s entire metabolic system into an undead engine, until the victim became an automaton of flesh. These new vampires were vicious, strong, powerful, and utterly loyal to the vampire collective, possessed of some vast and dark consciousness that all of the vampires of the Ebon Cities shared. But these vampires were also brutes, possessed of only modest intellects. They were grunts; foot soldiers.
On occasion, the Ebon Cities desired a human convert to retain the skills they’d possessed in life. This required a separate and slower process, one that preserved the intelligence and abilities of the living being. That process belonged to the wardens of Krul.
The prisoners in the open commons were never molested by the guards. There seemed to be no agenda aside from letting the inmates bake in the sun. The fact that food was provided indicated that they weren’t meant to die, so Cross could only surmise this routine was all a part of the breaking process, some psychological means by which their resistance would be eroded.
Cross’ leg still throbbed with pain, but even though he still clenched his teeth every time that he shifted his weight the wound itself felt much less tender. Whatever infection it was that had furthered Cross’ disorientation was finally starting to pass.
“How many?” Cross asked Dillon.
“Judging by the size of the city…there are a thousand vampires, at least.” They couldn’t be sure of how many prisoners there were, since they didn’t understand the function of most of the buildings they’d seen during their initial “tour” of Krul. Every once in a while they heard the throaty whispers of the undead float at them through the walls, a hissing rhythm that grated the senses. Krul wasn’t exclusively a prison, they knew that much: it also housed a good number of vampire aristocrats, as well as a half-dozen or so refining facilities that processed metal, obsidian, and other raw materials used in manufacturing plants located elsewhere. The prisoners of Krul were put to good use, and it was only a matter of time before Cross and Dillon joined those ranks.
“Could we get out over the wall?” Cross asked. He knew that it was a stupid question, but it was the way they’d agreed to do it. Neither of them was fully cognizant, even after what felt like weeks of getting used to the routine of being shuffled back and forth from their cells and meeting up on the rooftop of the tower prison, so asking even the dumbest questions would hopefully allow them to avoid making dumber mistakes.
If you can still ask the stupid questions and know that they’re stupid questions, you’re ok, Cross decided.
“Even if we make it past the spikes and the gargoyles,” Dillon whispered, “…which we won’t, by the way…we’re still on a damn skyscraper…probably one of the tallest buildings in Krul.”
Crap. Hadn’t thought about it that way.
“And we have no weapons…” Cross said.
“And we have no weapons,” Dillon echoed with a nod.
They couldn’t take weapons from the prison guards even if they tried, as all vampire armaments were unusable by humans. Vampires used a method, created by the cruel race of arcane enginee
r giants called the Cruj, which enabled them to craft a protective resonance hex field around their weapons, a sort of permeated magical barrier that hovered less than an inch away from blades, guns or cannons. That field prevented any non-vampire from being able to use the item in question. Depending on the hex settings, the consequences of attempting to do so varied from simply not being able to grip the device, receiving an electric shock, or setting off a low-grade hex field detonation that could cost the would-be thief a limb.
Cross doubted vampires truly needed weapons there in the prison, in any case. A vampire could physically overpower almost any other humanoid creature in a one-on-one matchup, with the exception, maybe, of a Vuul, a full-blooded Doj, or a Sorn. Even then, a second or third vampire was all that was really needed to bring those tougher creatures down.
But worrying about the lack of arms was rudimentary. The cold, hard fact that neither of them wanted to speak aloud was quite simple: there was no escape.
Even if they somehow managed to get their hands on working weapons, they had an entire garrison of vampire prison guards to battle their way past. If they managed to somehow escape through use of stealth, they had to navigate through an unfamiliar city populated with undead, a city doubtlessly filled with toxins and gases and poisonous fluids that had no effect on vampires but that would make the terrain all but impossible for living beings to survive in. And even if they managed that, Krul was still over a hundred miles behind enemy lines, in largely uncharted lands controlled by the Ebon Cities.
Cross had to believe that someone else would be sent to complete his mission: that the Sleeper, the long-buried fear called the Dra’aalthakmar, could still be stopped, if it hadn’t already.
There’s no way that the battle between Lucan and the Sleeper will have gone unnoticed. It’ll be handled.
And yet…that didn’t help his situation. He looked at Dillon, a quiet and stalwart man, a lonely soldier doing his duty no matter what was asked of him.
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