Blood Skies (blood skies)

  Blood Skies

  ( Blood Skies )

  Steven Montano

  Steven Montano

  Blood Skies

  He sees the city. It stands beyond fields of broken sand and salt estuaries, at the edge of a frozen sea, opposite a forlorn tower of black metal and razor protrusions. It is a city of the living.

  It looks unnatural, like it doesn’t belong. The city teeters at the edge of a frozen marsh. Transparent frost limes the outer city walls, and strange insects like cursive figures lie petrified in ice that has been colored dark with dirt and rust. A frozen sun illuminates the white-gray fields.

  He feels as if he has never seen it before. Cold and bitter wind curls off the surface of the frozen sea, and it carries the smells of corrosive salt, alien fish, undine fog and arcane steam. The sky is striated in alternating layers of dark and light, a cross-section like aerial soil, and the horizon is simultaneously too far away and too close. The debris-filled sky is two dimensional, like a flat screen.

  Nothing seems to belong. The world has been cleaved, and then fused back together by a blind hand. There is a sense of wrongness, a heavy and catastrophic air, a feel of the temporary. He feels and sees it, can almost taste it, even though he isn’t really there.

  Is this a dream? A vision? Does it matter?

  He sees into the heart of Thornn and gazes at its angled towers and iron catwalks, at its crenellated domes and flying bunkers. There are fields of half-built ships that will someday sail through the air. He sees the farm fields, bound in by razor wire and protected by automaton gun turrets made of ancient steel; they swivel on grinding gears fueled by sorcery. Low in the sky are dirigibles piloted by lightweight Gol aeronauts — they are un-people, dwarf and misshapen, bound by the shared knowledge that they have been changed but forever unaware of what was done to them. In a way, the Gol are representatives of the entire world.

  Things were different before The Black, and everyone knows it. But no one knows how.

  He soars over the rooftops, cognizant of the fact that he is flying, but unable to feel the experience. He is an intangible: he sees and feels and smells the world as if through a ghostly lens. He is a spiritual camera, a robot essence with no form; a medium.

  He feels her with him. He is never alone, and he is glad for it. She presses against him, her ethereal skin laced to his like a warm and sticky sheet. Her thoughts penetrate him, and her breath holds him like warm vapor. He wears her like armor, like skin. Her form corrodes, reforms, comes together once more in a shimmering rain that trails him like a spectral wake.

  He passes through twisted streets, over narrow lanes and between crooked houses. It is architecture fused together by need. The city is ancient and medieval, but it has been laced with things he knows are modern: streetlights powered by batteries, falafel vendors, percussive music created by programmable machines. Thick clouds of industrial smoke from tall brick chimneys fill the sky. Tall windows spill yellow light as the pale sun descends, and the glare of reflection that spills across the land slowly begins to ebb. He hears voices and wagon wheels, horses and steam whistles. He feels currents of powerful magic, the crackle of arcane energies that provide the city with warmth. He smells warm bread and hot cider, alcohol and smoked meat. He hears laughter, a baby crying, and the clang of steel as it is hammered into armor or stakes.

  There are crosses everywhere, all over the city. They hang over doorways, are imprinted on buildings, and have been drawn on the road in hexed chalk and blessed inks. The crosses are made of iron and bronze, hammered and hand-painted, tall and thin or fat and squat. Some more resemble ankhs, while some look like blades. None of them do any good, and everyone knows it, but the crosses aren’t there for practical purpose. They are symbols of the ongoing conflict.

  The nearest Bonespire stands at the far end of a vast network of fields made of ice and salt, past broken channels of sluggish dirt-filled water and shattered stone. From the walls of Thornn, the Bonespire is little more than a black sliver, a malevolent needle surrounded by a nimbus of roaming shadow. It is only one of many, but it is from there that most of the attacks against the city of Thornn are launched.

  He wants to dream of a world where none of this has happened, of a place without The Black. He wants to dream of a place where his shattered memories of a peaceful childhood are untarnished, of a sky than doesn’t darken, of a world that doesn’t smell of rot. He wants to dream of a place where he can lay down and go to sleep without the fear of never waking up.

  He doesn’t know why, instead, he dreams of this place, this world that he already knows, the world that he wants to escape but wakes up to, inevitably, every day.

  All he wants is to dream of something different. He wants to dream of a place where he is not afraid.

  PROLOGUE

  APOTHEOSIS

  Year 3 A.B. (After the Black)

  Black noise hung in the air like a fog. Whispers slithered along the walls in a dismal chant, a dirge that saturated the church.

  The halls seemed miles long, like dark tunnels of charcoal shadow. Dim beams of murky light cut through cracks in the mortar and the splintered wooden planks over the windows. The rooms were filled with frost and dust. The church was one of the last of its kind, a holdover from the world before The Black.

  Knight tried desperately to take the sight of it all in before he died.

  He stared into one of the angel’s faces. Blood ran down her cheek, split along her nose and fell in twin rivulets of red rain to the floor. The statue’s wings had been shattered in the battle.

  The altar was at Knight’s back, where it propped him up as he sat on the floor. He was barely able to feel anything below his waist.

  The world outside the church was white. Harsh wind howled through the shattered windows, carrying the smell of death and the moans of undead. The air was cold and dry. Motes of dust dangled in the air like drunken moths. Thick pools of blood covered the floor. Shell casings, broken blades and chunks of flesh were everywhere.

  Knight tried to move. He had only slightly more feeling in his arms than in his legs. There was a stabbing pain between his shoulder blades, like a massive splinter had been embedded into the meat of his back. Blood trickled down the holes in his arms and chest.

  No, he thought. Not yet. Not yet.

  Knight lifted his head far enough to see the far doors. The pews in the church had been shattered and were covered by black vampire corpses that still oozed blood. There were human bodies as well, smothered beneath the smoking ebon husks of the undead. Screams still echoed in his ears, which also still rang from the thunderous rapport of the Gatling gun that sat smoking and empty on top of the altar.

  The vampires had rained down nail shot and chemical bombs before they’d charged the doors. Smoke still swirled and clung to the cracked walls. Dead winter wastes waited beyond the smoke, a vast plain of ice and glacial drifts and graveyard cities interred in tombs of snow.

  The stench of smoking meat filled Knight’s nostrils and clogged his throat. He gagged and struggled to pull himself upright, slipped in his own blood and fell forward onto the Gatling gun. Knight sensed the looming twisted angels on the wall behind him, a fresco of black figures entwined in a vaguely profane dance of limbs and wings and shadow.

  There were voices outside. Knight saw the air blacken from their breath.

  “ You have to move!” he shouted at himself, and he did, though clumsily. His legs were weak, and his boots slipped on shells and blood, forcing him to his knees. Blood trickled down Knight’s mottled hair and ran over his face before it cut around his nose and fell to the floor. He was a reflection of the crying angel.

  He could barely move. His muscles shook with effort as
he clenched the altar with gloved hands and hauled himself to his feet.

  The church doors shook. Motes of frost fell from the ceiling. Thick gusts of soiled snow blew through the windows and turned the air the color of ash. The cracked doors held steady, secured by bodies that had fallen against it in a grisly barricade, but Knight knew they wouldn’t hold for long.

  Knight’s left arm dangled uselessly at his side. His shirt and armor had been torn to shreds, and he was covered in thick cuts that ran all of the way to the muscle.

  It’s a wonder I haven’t died from blood loss yet.

  He had to move. There was too much at stake, and too little time.

  His teeth clenched with effort, Knight stumbled forward. He pulled his 9mm from the holster with his good hand. He wasn’t sure if the pistol was loaded, and even less sure if it would make any bit of difference towards what was coming for him.

  Lucky for me, that’s not what it’s for.

  He stumbled, one foot in front of another, to the back of the church. The doors buckled again behind him. He heard a frenzied shout, a bodiless animal call over a chorus of humanoid screams. They’d use explosives soon. Knight pushed through the doors that led to the center of the church, not wanting to wait around and see what was inevitably about to burst through the main door.

  He entered a small chamber that was dark, wide and cold. It was a near empty room decorated with wooden columns and a single torch set in a wall sconce to provide light. Fumes of what Knight had been told was magic lingered in the air, a tangy ozone haze that watered his eyes and made the world blur. It was just barely past dawn.

  Time to do the deed, he thought. They’d almost been ready to complete the ritual when the attack had come. The scholars had to make sure that everything was ready, that most of the ritual had actually been completed, and that all that remained was the final stroke, the part of their task that had to wait until the sun came up. The vampires knew what they were up to: they’d attacked just before first light.

  I hope this works. I hope it was worth it.

  Knight tripped, and he grimaced in pain from the hard impact on his knees as he fell to the ground. He set the pistol down and slammed the door shut behind him. Seconds later he heard the outer doors of the church buckle and shatter. His pursuers hadn’t come through the windows because of the tripwires and holy oils, but that hadn’t delayed them nearly as much as he’d hoped. Knight fumbled for the gun, nearly dropped it, fell forward, and somehow managed to turn the fall into a running lurch that brought him to his feet again.

  Inside the space in the center of the wooden pillars, at the bottom of a short set of stairs, was a sort of sunken pit. Knight had to step slowly, a difficult task given the fact that there was blood in his face and his head was spinning with fatigue. His feet felt like they’d been separated from his body. Knight managed to make it to the bottom of the steps, where he dodged a ring of candles that had been set around the bundle of cloth at the exact center of the room.

  The perfect center, Knight thought, recalling the priest’s words. This is the middle of the middle. There’s something special about this place, some geo-religious significance: its fey lines, its orientation to the magnetic poles, a lot of faerie dust in the area, some damned thing. This is the only place it can be done. The only place we can save humanity.

  They were coming. Knight stumbled to the cloth bedding that had been laid down for the child. Huge black eyes stared up at him. He looked into her face, and was reminded of his daughter.

  Knight’s heart froze.

  I can’t do this.

  Yes you can, he told himself. You have to. Now focus.

  Knight did his best to ignore the growing chaos of sounds beyond the door — whirring blades, mechanized weapons, hybrids of blood and bone that shouted obscenities in an arcane tongue he couldn’t understand. His arms shook, and even with as much pain as he was in, what came next was far more painful.

  He took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

  PART ONE

  THORNS

  The fields of snow and rivers of ice are reflective white and blue, like steel and bone, a mirror a thousand miles long. A ghost train screams by in the distance, and it belches a stream of dark smoke into the air. In the middle of this nowhere stands a massive mountain as black as coal. It pierces the sky and penetrates the heavens.

  He sees the forest glade at the base of the mountain. He knows that she is there.

  Something approaches. He senses it rather than feels it, a tremor, like electricity along his imaginary skin, a taste of unrest on his ethereal tongue. He hears dead whispers hidden in the frozen wind.

  He is at once both vast and miniscule, an omniscient being squeezed into a bottle. The world plays out in his vision like a painting beneath him, as if he were some tireless airborne being.

  His vision sweeps across the apocalypse landscape. He sees black waters and blood skies, skeleton trees in burning bogs, pale dancers on a distant vampire shore. He sees cities made from stone and iron and guarded by impossible weapons, threatened by living shadows that take the shape of wolves or ravens or emaciated men. He sees the dead who lie in waiting, ready to assault what is left of humankind from their scattered black towers of steel webs and ossified bone.

  All of it, he sees, but cannot touch.

  Soon, she says. You are closer than you think.

  Closer to what?

  To a part of the world that you should not be able to touch. A place that is in danger. A place you are closer to than most.

  He knows her, and he trusts her. She is a part of him.

  He floats through aimless skies. The vapor of ages folds around him. He arrives back in his own dream, at the edge of unseen realities. He is adrift within the folds of overlapping worlds.

  ONE

  WAR

  Year 20 A.B. (After the Black)

  Cross saw blood in the sky.

  It was a trick of the dusk light. Thick rays of dying crimson sunshine cut through the dark vapors that hung over the battlefield and the drifts of white smoke spewed by crawling war machines. The air was a den of rumbling motors, heavy treads and great iron wheels that crushed rock and shattered bones. Cross smelled oil and exhaust.

  I hate this place.

  His entire body ached. Cross had slept perhaps five hours in as many days, and that sleep had been more like scattered instances of half-slumber snatched off in heaps of dirty blankets and piles of bandages that had been left discarded outside the medical bivouacs. All of his sleep had been half-filled with nightmarish images of torn bodies and children drowning in burning fuel.

  Grime and filth covered his skin. Cross’ stomach ached. He was long tired of magically preserved rations and stale wine. When he ate anything beyond a slice of bread his gut twisted and his urine burned. Cross didn’t normally get sick thanks to his spirit, and that told him the problem wasn’t an infection but his own inability to adjust to a military diet there in the field.

  He’d only been on the front lines of the war for two weeks.

  He felt his spirit with him. She was like a slippery electric skin that hovered centimeters away from the next world, a wraith-like unguent that caressed him. He breathed her in, and while the vapor of her spectral form turned his lungs cold he felt comfortable knowing that she was there, surrounding him, a weapon and a friend. She was part of his own soul, intelligent but lost, cleaved to him and yet worlds distant. He knew her better than he knew his own sister, better than he knew himself.

  Dark clouds twisted in a rot tainted wind that blew in from the east, out of the sodden wastes of Blackmarsh. Dismal fields of black mud stretched to the murky horizon, which was difficult to see beneath a sky pregnant with shadows.

  Dozens of dark tents lay like the wounded across the torn landscape. Black smoke trailed in varicose lines up to a darkening sky that was the color of uncooked meat. Cross tasted salt and soot in the cold and dry air. He sat with a host of Southern Claw soldiers that he didn’t
know, save for Graves, whom he’d known since boyhood. Graves fit in better than Cross did amongst the regulars of Wolf Company. Of course, Graves was a soldier, not a warlock like Cross.

  Warlock. A weapon and a freak. We’re the Claw’s most valuable assets, and the closest humankind comes to matching powers with the enemy. All we have to do is burn our own souls for fuel and probably be crippled before we hit thirty.

  The tent shifted in the dank wind. A host of makeshift chairs wobbled in unstable mud around a wide wooden stump they used as a game table. Cross sat with his cards clenched upside down in his hand, and he knew full and well he didn’t stand a chance.

  The soldiers of Wolf Company were a sullen and dirty bunch, and they were nearly impossible to tell apart due to the black mud that was caked to their uniforms. Shotguns, assault rifles, blades and bows hung from harnesses and stood propped against iron tent poles. Dozens of packs as caked in filth as their owners sat nearby in case an alarm went up.

  “ Why so grim?” Graves asked.

  Graves’ scars were barely visible beneath the camouflage paint, the charcoal runes, the mud and the hex soot that covered his face. Most of it had been intentionally cast across the exposed skin of every soldier to prevent catching vampiric infections or arcane diseases, but all of the paint and fluid had sluiced together over the course of days, making even the fairer skinned men look black.

  “ Are you serious?” Cross asked in return.

  “ Wow. Is your hand that bad?” As ever, it was difficult for Cross to tell whether or not Graves was being serious. He was something of a redneck bumpkin at heart, but he had plenty of field experience, having joined the front lines almost a year before Cross had. “You might as well just fold,” Graves added after he stared at the back of Cross’ cards, as if he possessed x-ray vision.