Blood Skies (blood skies) Page 11

  Cross tried to focus, tried to pull himself away from the sight of his dying spirit, but pain and blackness overcame him.

  TEN

  LOST

  Cross woke some time later.

  Morg was dead. His body was so covered with wounds it was almost impossible to identify him. He was a bloody road map.

  Kray was dead, too, impaled on a vampire’s spiked spear.

  Cross felt little. He should have. They’d been like brothers without being friends, but he’d known both of them long enough that the notion of their being dead seemed unreal. He tried to call up memories of them, specific events or conversations, but he couldn’t. They were dead and gone, and part of him had already excised them from his mind.

  Stone and Graves, on the other hand, were alive. Graves was injured, but thankfully his wounds were superficial. He was battered and bruised from being thrown across the room by the giant vampire, but aside from some sore bones and numerous cuts and scrapes he’d gotten off lucky. Graves took Morg’s armored elbow brace and wore it on his right arm to secure where he felt he’d bruised the bone, but all that he really needed was rest and medical attention. Rest would have to wait, but once they got back to the airship they’d have access to some better medical supplies.

  Cross wasn’t much better off himself. He was fairly certain his ribs had been bruised — one or two might have been cracked — and his head felt like glass had been shoved into his brain. He was dizzy and weak, but only part of that was from his wounds.

  Where are you? Why can’t I feel you?

  He tried to focus on something else.

  The vampires, thankfully, had been vanquished, but Red was gone.

  And so was Snow.

  It was bad enough that Morg and Kray were dead, but Cross didn’t want to imagine what Red was doing to his sister. He tried to shut it out, to dispel any thought of it, but he couldn’t. He shook with rage and fear.

  They pulled Morg’s and Kray’s bodies aside. Stone decapitated the bodies to prevent reanimation, and the corpses would be left there in the catacombs. Graves, Stone and Cross huddled together near the entrance around a makeshift campfire they built from shattered wood and old rags that they lit with holy oils. The fact that they rested at the charnel scene of a battle, with the gory remains of butchered vampires all around them, didn’t seem to bother them, and Cross tried to figure out when he’d become like that.

  “ So what happens now?” Graves asked.

  We lost two brothers today, but Snow is alive. You haven’t lost her yet.

  He wouldn’t consider the possibility that his sister might be dead. He tried not to think about it all, just as he tried not to call up memories of her, or to dwell on what a horrible brother he’d been to her the past few years. If he thought about anything aside from just getting her back, he knew he’d fall apart.

  Tears welled in his eyes. Cross did everything he could to focus them into intent.

  Just go and get her.

  “ We continue the mission,” Cross said.

  “ Say what?” Stone said. “Our tracker is gone. Can you track them?”

  Cross hesitated.

  “ No. I’m…not even sure I can use magic.” He looked up at them. “I think my spirit might be gone.”

  Graves and Stone looked at each other. Cross knew neither of them really understood what that meant. It was difficult for anyone who wasn’t a witch or a warlock to fully comprehend it. A spirit was tied to the soul — it was an inexorable part of a mage, intangible and distant, difficult to comprehend or explain, but at the same time it was as close to a mage as their own skin, as intimate as their own thoughts. Only warlocks, witches and some of the stranger races like the Eidolos and the Lith could willingly contact and bond with their spirits. When they did, the result was magic.

  “ How…how is that possible?” Graves asked.

  “ I’m not sure if she’s really gone,” Cross said, his head low. “I can’t feel her. She’s been at the edge of my thoughts for most of my life, and for the first time for as long as I can remember she’s just…not there.” He shuddered. “I think it happened when she saved me from that head wound.”

  “ Morg saved you from that vampire,” Stone said, and he stood up. “And now he’s dead, and not only can you not track that bitch, but you’re useless to us.”

  “ Hey, back off,” Graves said to Stone. He stood a full head shorter than the other man, but it was clear he didn’t care. “Cross knows more about magic than you and me combined. He’s far from useless.” Graves looked down. “Besides, his sister…”

  “ Is just fine,” Cross said quietly. His chest ached, and his breathing was ragged and dry. “And we’re going to go and get her.” He looked at Graves, and then at Stone. Both of them watched him carefully, like he might explode. “Let me rephrase that. I’m going after her. It would be nice to have some help.”

  Stone hesitated, but after a moment he just shrugged.

  “ Fine,” he said. “But if we can’t track them, then what the hell are we supposed to do? We were sent to find and kill Red before she makes it to the Old One. If we can’t do that, we’re all screwed.”

  Graves looked down. The longer they sat there, the worse the stink in the room became.

  Cross stared at the floor and recalled the grave soil stench, the measureless sense of age, the sheer, dismal draw when Red had first emerged from the pit.

  What were you doing down there?

  “ The hole,” he said aloud. He stumbled to his feet.

  The room with the hole was silent and still. Cross felt nothing, further proof that his spirit was gone, maybe permanently. The realization made him shake where he stood…but it also meant he could approach the hole now that he didn’t have a spirit that was vulnerable to its attacks.

  He heard nothing, felt nothing. Whatever horror protected the pit, it had little interest in him now.

  Graves and Stone were right behind him.

  “ I’m not sure how Red managed it,” Cross said. “Maybe some of those algorithms that we found on the map back in Thornn, the stuff I couldn’t piece together, were part of some arcane shield she used to protect her spirit, or something.”

  “ Are you nuts?” Graves asked. “You told us not to go in there.”

  “ Cross,” Stone added. “This is not a good idea.”

  Cross calmly came to the lip of the hole. It looked like the heart of midnight. The perimeter was smooth black mud that crawled with worms. Ancient and knotted roots twisted out from the rim of the pit like gnarled arms. He smelled decay and cold heat. Even without his spirit to guide him, Cross sensed there was something wrong down there, something ancient and deep. Something hidden.

  “ You can’t be serious…” Graves said, but Cross removed his pack and put it down, pulled off his gauntlets and unhooked the wiring and set all of his gear aside. Then he removed his coat — his ribcage winced from the effort — so that he was down to just his shirt, his pants and his boots.

  “ Cross,” Stone said sternly. He was in command now. It was easy to forget that Morg was gone. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “ Going down there,” he said, and having said it, he’d realized he’d decided, that he’d passed the point of being unsure or uncertain or capable of being talked out of it. “We don’t know who or what was buried here. We don’t know what this place is…not really. Red came here for a reason. Maybe there’s some clue as to what she’s up to.” He looked back at the pit. “Down there.”

  “ We know what she’s up to,” Stone said. He moved into the room as if to stop Cross. “She’s going to give the Old One vital information and royally screw the human race.”

  “ Which is exactly why I need to go down there,” Cross said. Stone watched him. He knew as well as Cross that no one knew how to find Koth, the Old One’s city. That necropolis of outcasts had managed to stay hidden from both the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities for over a decade.

 
“ We don’t have much else we can do,” Cross said. “My sister is gone. We have no way of tracking Red without her, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going after her. We have to find out where she’s going. I don’t know if the answer is down there or not, but I have to try something.” He heard his own voice crack with desperation.

  “ Stone,” Graves said. “He’s right. We have to carry on. If you have any better ideas…I sure don’t. Maybe we need to let Eric do this.”

  “ Damn it,” Stone said after a long pause. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “ No,” Cross said matter-of-factly. “Not really.”

  They secured a rope about his waist and made sure it was tight. Cross rubbed hexed salt and blood milk ointments on his face, hands and arms in order to protect himself from any poisonous maladies or arcane diseases in the blood-stained soil.

  Finally, reluctantly, they lowered him down.

  Descending into the hole felt like passing through a fleshy membrane. Rank and moist earth swallowed Cross and collapsed in on him the moment he sank beneath the level of the floor. Grime spilled all over his face, into his nostrils, through his hair and into his eyes. He breathed in rot and effluvia, and felt his blood run cold. Just like before, when he’d first glimpsed at the hole, he was drawn down. He felt himself wanting to sink deeper, to melt into the folds of the earth, never to pull back, down, safe, forever in that grave…

  But without his spirit, the pull was weaker than it had been before. It wasn’t meant for him, or for humans at all, but for their spirits, and whatever malign intelligence had created the hole had intended to trap those arcane intelligences, not their human companions. Again he wondered how Red had managed it.

  Cross held his breath, and let his body sink into the rotting fold.

  He sees the maidens beneath the shadow of the mountain. Four women wait in the silver shadows of a vast black precipice. Thick rain and leaves blow through the glade.

  The unicorns stalk them through the smoldering trees. Their horns glisten with acid and oil. Their eyes are dark pits of malicious intent.

  He sees the city beyond the hills, a metropolis of black steel and vast furnaces, arcane towers and reflective metal rivers. Soldiers march from it, bound for a dismal end on a dismal field. Dark rain falls as the men leave a city caught in the tall shadows of grim monuments.

  He sees the battle, the war against pale things from the dark. He sees a prison without walls. He sees the church. He sees the sacrifice.

  Cross fell. He descended into a perfectly round and smooth sphere of a room carved from black rock. It was barely large enough for him to kneel in. The air was warm, and smelled surprisingly sweet. Cross was covered in filth, and he had to wipe grime and bits of bone and silt away from his eyes. Faint glistening smoke filled the air, which smelled vaguely of hashish.

  He looked around and realized he’d found some sort of meditation chamber, a sage’s retreat. The tiny space had been filled with hundreds upon hundreds of runes written on the dark walls of the egg-shaped space with white chalk. The runic graffiti took a myriad of forms: lines and spirals, ellipses and arcane calculations, inverted algorithms’ and cross-cut runic geometries, all of it both nonsensical and yet undeniably possessed by a pattern. It was a madman’s code.

  It was similar to the map they’d found in Thornn, but not identical. That map had been made using the language and code set here. This was older. Ancient.

  Cross sat and stared at it all, took it all in, stored bits in his mind and compared them to one another. His brain arranged, stored, rearranged.

  He remembered his studies. His mind went back to the grim academy in Seraph, through the hovels of ancient books and age-yellowed parchments, where hunched scholars turned leathery with age and angry and trapped spirits drifted through the texts. When it came to the arcane, Cross was a machine: he had a natural gift for magic, for recalling vagaries and geometries and diagrams, for storing them in his mind, organizing them, recalling details with much greater clarity and precision than he could with anything else in his life. It was work, sometimes, for Cross to remember even his sister’s birthday, but he could recall the dynamics of variant hex fields or the schematics for a pyramid vortex bomb with ease.

  Cross looked, read, stored, and recalled. He had no idea how much time passed, as it blurred while diagrams and lines and encrypted layers of meaning spun through his mind.

  Finally, he saw an answer.

  It was a map.

  This isn’t a crypt at all, he thought. It’s a message. She came here to learn something. That map in Thornn had told her how to get here, to find the second map. She came to gather information that the Old One had left behind for when he wanted someone to find him.

  Red had come to find her way to Koth, the Necropolis. A place of legend and whispered terror. A city that even the mighty vampires of the Ebon Cities feared and despised. It was bane to humans and vampires alike, a black city of outcasts and evil forces controlled by the Old One, who plotted and schemed in order to further his own nefarious agenda.

  That was where Red was going, and now Cross knew how to find it.

  PART THREE

  SHADOWS

  He walks in the cold shadow of the mountain.

  He wears the same clothes as he had back in the physical world, but instead of being filthy with blood they are filthy with brine. He sinks ankle deep into thick pools of salty bog made grey with sediment.

  He makes his way to an island of dry ground. The boundary between the land and the water is marked by a thin vein of silver mist. The air is cold and still, and every splash of his boots echoes like thunder. The water is bordered by thick trees so tall and dark they seem like walls. Thick leaves heavy with moisture drift down from indeterminate heights and fall lazily to the ground.

  The mountain looms above him. It is so large it is nearly impossible to see anything else. It looms overhead like a giant, replacing the sky.

  Ice shards float past his feet. The riverbed is uneven, for it alternates between deep pools and shallow runs of silt and sediment. His feet find dry ground and he steps out of the cold flow, through mist that feels electric as it runs over his legs. He hears something faint in the distance, a mournful song. There are eyes on him, watching from somewhere in the darkness of the trees.

  A white spider scuttles across the back of his hand.

  He knows she is there, trapped in a prison of smoke and rain. The demonic whinnies of black steeds echo through the trees, and the brimstone stench of their tainted sweat carries on the hard wind. Voices come and fade. He walks through thick clouds of forest steam and arcane frost.

  Black leaves fly through the air and gang together in flight like flocks of ravens. He hears her screams in the wind. He feels her pain press against him like a shower of glass shards.

  I’ll find you, he promises, even as the world bleeds away. I’ll find you.

  ELEVEN

  WOUNDS

  They walked beneath a blue-black sky that looked like a vast and seeping bruise. It felt like it might rain, but they all knew that wouldn’t happen. It hadn’t rained much After The Black.

  They walked across drifts of hard red clay and fine white dust. The air was cold and bone dry, and it tasted of salt even though they were far from any sea.

  They rested only sparingly. They made cold camps and feasted exclusively on MREs, which tasted like wet paper.

  Cross slept as he walked, or at least he came close. His entire body was sore, but thankfully, even with the continued march, his ribs had healed considerably, and the dizziness that had earlier plagued his every step had faded. He had a minor concussion, he concluded, at worst.

  But the pain of his loss was greater, and it hurt deeper than any physical wound he could ever sustain. Cross’ nerves were on edge, and he was anxious to the point of nausea. On top of that, his temperature was high and he suffered bouts of extreme chill, so he’d probably contracted a fever.

  He tried not to think abo
ut which loss was worse. Thinking about Snow sent chills through his stomach and down his spine. He tried to push the images of her young face from his mind, his memories of her as a young girl, which was who she was to him, and who she’d always be. Every time he thought of her face, he saw Red standing beside her, drowning her with dark magic and pain.

  The loss of his spirit was more physically painful, and in its own right just as bad. He suffered withdrawal at her loss, plain and simple. His spirit was gone, and he’d never before been without her. It was like losing a part of his self. He felt incomplete, and hollow. A void grew at his core.

  He, Graves and Stone marched towards Dirge, a borderland outpost and armistice town controlled by the Ebon Cities that stood west of Thornn and north of the Wormwood. It was directly en route to Red’s destination, at least so far as Cross’ crudely translated map indicated. Cross had determined that she was bound for the Carrion Rift, a vast canyon filled with the remains of the tens of thousands slaughtered by the Grim Father’s vampire legions in the early days after The Black. It was Cross’ guess that Koth, the necropolis ruled by the vampire outcast called the Old One, was there. It was the Old One that Red intended to give her information to; he was the one she planned to hand the key to destroying what was left of humankind.

  It was midmorning, but they’d only been walking for a couple of hours. The three of them had originally been air-dropped northeast of the Wormwood, and they’d entered the haunted forest on foot, since the Wormwood was far too hazardous for them use mounts in it. Even pack animals were out of the question.

  The airship, unfortunately, was not an option for getting to Dirge.