by Eric Asher
“What is it?”
“It’s much what you thought it was,” Zola said. “A soul that had been trapped on the battlefield, torn away, and brought to some place that isn’t its own. It may have tried to take on the form of another ghost, or a form that was forced upon it by whatever dark mage enslaved it. It’s hard to say.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let you know what we decide.”
Zola ended the call. I was fairly certain she already knew what my decision was.
“You’re going to Falias?”
I smiled at Alexandra. “Yes.”
* * *
After checking my weapons and securing my backpack, I laced my fingers into the dead flesh of Gaia’s hand and stepped into the Abyss. The cold gray fingers warmed and curled around my own, small motes of golden light floating down and congealing into Gaia’s form. I could better see the things in the darkness as Gaia’s light grew, and I recoiled.
A cluster of peaks large enough to crush a house loomed overhead, flanked by tree-trunk-like tentacles as thick as a redwood.
Slimy gray flesh shifted at a near-frozen pace, and I watched in awful fascination as one giant black eye began its slow rotation toward us.
“Croatoan?”
“It is indeed the one known as Croatoan. I have seen many of his kind lately, and stranger things have made their way into the Abyss.” Gaia offered me a small smile before turning her head up and gazing at the massive beast beside us.
“Where are they coming from?”
“I suspect there is a fracture in one of the Seals,” Gaia said. Her ethereal voice whispered through the darkness. “It is not the time Seal, though I feared it might be after what occurred in the Burning Lands.”
I didn’t have to ask her if she meant what had happened when we destroyed Prosperine. In the events leading up to that, I had become a Timewalker, as had Vicky and my sister. “Where do we travel to today?” Gaia asked.
“I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “Can you tell me where Alexandra has been outside of Falias? To the south? They have an armory there.”
“I am afraid I cannot. I will need more detail than what you have offered.”
I’d been curious if Gaia would be able to tell me more, without giving her the exact destination Alexandra had shown me. Gaia was a Titan of the earth, and she had displayed an uncanny intuition in the past. But I supposed it did have its limits. “It’s near Antietam,” I said. “Where the Irish Brigade gathers, the werewolves led by Caroline.”
Gaia shifted her head as if she was looking into the distance, able to see something halfway across the world. Although distance as I understood it in the Abyss likely meant we had already walked nearly that far.
“Yes,” Gaia said. “I believe I see our destination.” She frowned slightly. “You are walking into a trap, Damian.”
“The Utukku,” I said. “They are the guardians of the armory. I know them well.” Or well enough, I thought.
“You go to a place with ghosts,” Gaia said. “It may be unwise to venture there alone.”
“I don’t have a choice,” I said. “But thank you for the warning.”
“The Abyss will open on a hard corner. It may not be a soft landing, but I believe you will be alone for a brief time.” She turned her golden gaze to me. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, and Gaia released my hand.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Exiting the Abyss was far gentler than exiting the Warded Ways, but sometimes it was still a hard landing. I didn’t have any of the awful vertigo I’d grown accustomed to when dropping out of the Warded Ways, but the sudden stop in forward momentum was enough to put my stomach in my throat. The immediate impact that followed didn’t help matters. Gaia hadn’t exaggerated about it being a hard corner.
Even though I’d been expecting something, the room was still black as night. The stony surface beneath my cheek was a wall, or possibly a floor. It took me a moment to realize I was still standing. So it was a wall. Gaia had left me flush against what felt like stone and water and dirt. I blinked my eyes, but still no light came.
Something whispered in the distance as if it had just grown aware of my presence. I tried to listen, and the sound grew louder. What I thought had been a whisper became a hiss. What I thought had been a hiss became the slow scratch of a claw on stone. I was still blind, and I hoped the sound was the Utukku and not something else.
I had a matter of seconds to decide whether I would raise a light, or shout a greeting, or simply wait for them to discover me.
I decided instead on a combination of all three. The incantation came first. “Minas Illuminadda.” The greeting came second, though I didn’t know how effective it would be. “It’s Vesik! Uttuku’s friend from the Royal Court of Faerie. I fought alongside Hess in the ruins of Falias.” The incantation had finished forming a small ball of light by the time I finished speaking. It looked like swirling flame in the darkness, but the pale white of a sliver of moon. The rhythm of the slithers and scratches on the stone didn’t change. Nor did it grow louder. I understood why as my eyes adjusted to the light of the incantation.
A battlefield ghost, with more sentience than it had any right to have, dragged a shattered rifle in his right hand, the bayonet scraping the stones. It shouldn’t have made a sound. Something was wrong. For that matter, it shouldn’t have been underground, and by that point, I was fairly confident we were underground. The ghost swayed back and forth, closing on me. Its eyes never left mine. The crown of its head passed through ghostly roots that had forced their way between the minuscule cracks of the stones overhead.
I could reach out with my necromancy, but if this ghost was a trap, that might well be the end of me. Someone with either more power or more knowledge than I had had sent a ghost not so unlike this one into the shop. My other option was to flee, wrap my fingers into Gaia’s once more, and run screaming into the Abyss. But I knew that wasn’t an option, no matter how much I was tempted to reach into my backpack once more and grab that cold dead flesh. I gritted my teeth and sent my aura rocketing toward the old ghost.
Before my aura touched it, I already knew it wasn’t natural. Its bayonet shouldn’t have been able to spark across the stones. Something else was at play, and as soon as I made contact, it all became clear.
A knowing began, not the life and love and regrets of a soldier fighting for something he believed in, fighting for people he cared for, or even an unlucky bystander from that bloody age; instead, I found the tangled remnants of a werewolf, masked and bound against his will to be what amounted to little more than a diversion.
I didn’t see much into his past, but I felt the sword blade, felt the attacker physically change the clothes he wore and place the old Springfield rifle in his hand. If I hadn’t been nauseated, I would’ve laughed when I realized it had been a modern bayonet duct-taped to the barrel.
Once I knew it was there, the threads of his binding were easy to see; a malignant, red and black miasma, just a tiny darkness behind the golden glow of his soul. I reached out with my aura and burned it away. I didn’t much care which side had bound this werewolf or for what reason. He was in pain, and he needed to move on.
I wasn’t sure exactly how long the process took, as sometimes when my aura was intertwined with something else’s, time vanished. A moment could become an hour or an hour a moment. I heard the ghost’s whispered “Thank you” as the dark magic faded from his soul, and his entire being began to fade in turn. The vision of auras, and incantations, and utter darkness, gave way to the creatures now standing at the other end of the corridor.
* * *
Only when the mutilated ghost had gone did I feel the horrifying weight of the dead above me. The halberds of the Utukku gleamed in the light of the illuminada incantation. One of them raised a blade with her right arm, pointed at me, and spoke sharply. But I couldn’t hear it.
All I could hear were the stuttering screams of the dying above us, the likes of which I had
n’t felt since Gettysburg. I summoned a shield as the first Utukku charged at me, but the electric blue power short-circuited in an instant, failing me as if it had been struck by a great power.
I frowned as I fell to one knee, the impact jarring my bones as the nearest Utukku threw her halberd to the side. It clanged against the wall. That seemed like a remarkably sloppy attack. My vision dimmed, turning into a tunnel. I wasn’t sure if it was the dying light of my incantation or the rapid onset of a loss of consciousness. Either way, the room went black. The rapid thunderclaps of cannons firing back to back shattered the stillness around me. My mind felt as if it were drifting from my body, lost in the Abyss, while my physical self was gently pulled through a stony corridor. A whisper wound its way through the screams, too real to be my imagination, but too distant to be real.
“What’s wrong with him, Hess?” the voice whispered. “Something’s wrong. That barrier wasn’t supposed to attack our allies.”
“I don’t think it was attacking him,” a familiar voice hissed. “That thing that was in here with him, I don’t know what it was. Take him to Utukku. Get him to the Fae.”
The thunder of gunfire and screams of the dying silenced the whispers once more.
It felt as if I’d been dragged across the rocks for a day. I wasn’t sure if I still had my shoes or my backpack, and panic cut through the pain inside my head as I realized I wasn’t even sure if I had the hand of Gaia.
“He’s waking up,” the first voice said.
I wanted to tell them that I had always been awake. But had I?
“Get him into the light,” that familiar voice said. Hess’s voice. But she was supposed to be in the Obsidian Inn. What would she be doing in Antietam? I tried to ask that very question, but my mouth wouldn’t move.
“By the gods,” a new voice said. “What’s wrong with his hand?”
“It’s the flesh of a gravemaker,” Hess said. “We need to wake him, for this could be bad for everyone here.”
The gentle dragging grew into something more frenetic. My heels bounced off the uneven stone, and it felt as though my shirt had been torn as it was pulled across jagged rocks. The solid darkness around me slowly, painfully, brightened.
“Over the threshold,” Hess shouted. “Clear the way!”
I heard someone bark a protest, but the sharp crack of flesh on skull silenced whoever had spoken. Glorious light stabbed into my eyes. The thunder of cannons and screams and gunfire slowly faded. Not as overwhelming, but still a constant cacophony that felt not so far away.
“Hess?” I managed to cough out in a shaky voice.
“Damian,” Hess said, and I felt a gentle pressure on my left shoulder. “Can you understand me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can you tell me how to get to the armory?” I squinted into the light, just barely making out the outline of her reptilian face. “The tour guide said there was an armory around here.”
Hess patted my shoulder. “Yes, yes. Rest now.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and I wasn’t sure how long I had been out, but I startled awake when the sound of claws on stone echoed right beside my head. The Utukku waited patiently for me to stop having a heart attack.
“Damian Vesik,” Utukku said. “Why have you come to this armory?”
“Utukku?” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”
She gave me what amounted to a smile on her lizardlike face: a small curl of a thinly lipped mouth, and the flash of dagger-like teeth inside.
“It is good to see you, too, but you must tell me, why have you come here?”
I sat up and rubbed my forehead. “Alexandra said you had the shards of the stone daggers here, or at least the shards of a weapon with powers like those of a stone dagger?”
“We do,” Hess said, stepping up beside Utukku. “But without one of the fairy blacksmiths, they are quite useless.”
Utukku nodded in agreement. “Hess is correct, but why has Alexandra revealed the location of this armory?”
“We lost contact with the Obsidian Inn,” I said. “Foster and Aideen can’t reach them through the Warded Ways. We weren’t warned about any kind of radio silence, and were worried there was an imminent threat.”
Utukku gave a slow nod. “They are maintaining silence. I am afraid some of the queen’s water witches are laying siege to the Obsidian Inn. Or at least they believe they are,” Utukku said, a knowing smile on her lips. “In truth, they are laying siege to an unguarded outpost.”
“Any communication through the Warded Ways could be intercepted,” Hess said. “And that could reveal our ruse.”
“We were all a bit worried,” I said.
“As were we,” Hess said. “Especially when you began summoning the flesh of a gravemaker in the catacombs.”
“They are not catacombs,” Utukku said.
“The term is still apt,” Hess said, annoyance plain in her voice.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Beneath Antietam,” Utukku said. “I’m afraid the ghosts that we thought would conceal our activities had ill effects on your well-being.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess you could say that.”
“Come with me,” Hess said, helping me to my feet. “I’m quite certain that some of your allies will be anxious to see you.”
I followed Hess after Utukku dismissed herself for an audience with some of her people. We left the light of the larger chamber behind, diving into the darkness of the corridors once more. These were formed of carefully cut, inlaid stone like the catacombs beneath Falias. They reminded me more of the burrow of some great creature, the edges rounded except where they became doorways. Several times, Hess paused before a branch, listening intently at the darkness, before tugging on my sleeve to continue.
It felt like we continued in that pattern for a good fifteen minutes before I once more saw light ahead. Hess had guided me well enough that I’d only landed on my face once, and I was quite grateful for that. The closer we came to the light, the more I realized it was in the shape of a doorway. Just a thin line of luminescence pierced the darkness.
“The armory is hidden here,” Hess said. “We’ll be above the ground again, and I hope the ghosts will not be too much for you.”
“It’s better now.” My subconscious had been hard at work, focusing on the structure of the catacombs, muffling the thunder of gunfire and screams and cannon shots. This place was still alive in a way, like so many of the old battlefields I’d set foot on.
Hess raised the amulet around her neck, placing it at the edge of the door. Something clicked and cycled, followed by another and then another, before our dimly lit corridor echoed with the smack of dozens of opening deadbolts.
The door opened slowly, revealing a broad swath of an old painting. An old battle. As the door opened wider, I realized I’d seen photos of the painting before. It was one of several enormous works done not long after the Civil War, depicting the battle of Antietam. I frowned, not understanding why it was inside the water witches’ armory. It dawned on me a moment later. They’d hidden the armory in plain sight.
Hess stepped through the doorway, and I followed. We were in a relatively small square, surrounded by the very paintings that I knew were on display at Antietam’s museum. Glass cases sat in front of each, holding old swords, guns, and memorabilia from the battle that had happened here so long ago.
At the edge of my hearing, someone whispered, “It’s Hess.”
I turned my head to the left to see who had spoken, and blinked in surprise when I saw a familiar face at the top of the stairs. “Caroline?”
“I told you we were being too loud,” the alpha werewolf said, almost hissing at the man standing beside her.
I couldn’t stop a broad smile when he stepped into the light.
“Hey, Damian.”
“Dell?” I laughed. “You’re about the last person I expected to see here.”
“Me?” Dell said. “So, you only
expected Hess and Caroline to be sitting on a pile of fairy weapons in the middle of the Civil War battlefield?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” I muttered.
“Why are you here?” Caroline asked. “I trust you, necromancer, as did the Ghost Pack before me. What has brought you here?”
“We couldn’t reach anyone at the Obsidian Inn. Everyone’s in a communications blackout.”
“And with good reason,” Caroline said. She was far more serious than Dell. She gave me a critical eye as if the person standing before her might be an illusion. And at that moment, I realized that probably wasn’t a bad state of mind to be in.
Caroline gave me the rundown of what had been happening with the Obsidian Inn, and why the werewolves were helping to guard one of the armories. To her, it was all strategy, taking small advantages where she could to keep her pack safe. Safe was maybe not the right word, but to keep as many of them alive as possible. And they’d completely locked down communications, fearing what was being intercepted by unfriendly ears.
“Hess told me much the same about the Obsidian Inn,” I said. “Nixie’s queen has been striking out against the commoners’ military in Saint Charles. They lost nine men, Caroline. A squad of soldiers, killed by undines.”
She was taken aback.
“They would’ve gotten all ten, as the survivor was poisoned by one of the water witches’ blades. Aideen and Alexandra were able to heal her. Shortly after, a fairy calling himself Drake destroyed the hospital ICU where the soldier was being cared for. They barely got her out.”
“Drake?” Hess said. “No Fae has taken that name in millennia.”
Hess’s words made my suspicions about Drake’s identity settle like a lead ball in my gut. “He’s a fire user. Nearly as powerful as the Demon Sword, from what Foster says.”
“So this is why you’ve come?” Caroline asked. “But what do you need from the armory?”
