Steven Montano

Black Scars

It swims in a sea of night.

Oceans of dark ooze seal the Sleeper in a liquid grave. Frozen white stones like arctic stars drift in the dark ichors, light by which the Sleeper’s glazed eyes regard its midnight prison. It smells bile and decay and the oily musk of the earth’s innards. Its lungs long ago filled with caustic sludge.

Distant sounds play in the green and black world, muffled explosions and music. The Sleeper tries to shift its body in the gelatinous prison, but the dank and primordial jelly holds firm. Slime has congealed in its mouth and throat.

It has been forgotten and abandoned in this organic oubliette.

The creature is made of darkness. Its skin is black and smooth. It has pronounced bones that seem ready to break free where they press against its manta-ray flesh. Its face is vaguely human-like, with shallow cheekbones that grant it a near skeletal visage. A ring of jagged horns protrudes from its forehead, and its eyes are angular and cat-like. A tiny mouth is filled with razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s lean frame is broad-shouldered and tall, but as gaunt as a wraith.

The Sleeper drifts through the murk. Days pass before it moves an inch. It has been encased in arcane mucus since before The Black. It was entombed elsewhere, in another world, now forgotten. It was powerful once, and feared. Some even called it a God. Its gelled prison, buried deep underground, shifted during a conflagration that killed millions and permanently scarred worlds.

In the years since The Black, the caustic prison has moved. It has melted its way closer to the surface, a cliff wall that hangs over a deep cleft of ice and ash.

No one knows of the prison’s existence. If they did, measures would doubtlessly have been taken to secure it.

A drop of vile green liquid burns out through the cliff wall. The hole that it creates is tiny, a pinprick, but it is enough. Somehow, the ebon Sleeper notes its proximity to the surface. It senses that a breach has been made. Even stuck in that numbing quagmire, the Sleeper’s mind remains active, and alert.

It reaches out with painful effort. Shifting against the dark jelly is like swimming through concrete. Long black talons curl through green skin and break it apart. Calcified liquid snaps as the Sleeper bites down slowly and painfully.

Its muscles are stiff from decades of motionlessness. Its eyes blink and bleed — they have been frozen open in a sea of dreaming murk.

Deep in the bowels of the earth, an inhuman scream carries into the green darkness.

Rocks and debris loosen from the cliff wall and tumble into the white abyss. Overhead, the bruise-blue sky is utterly still. The icy air is heavy with frost.

The cliff face is jagged and uneven. It is littered with stones, petrified moss and deep roots that have frozen like pipes.

A black fist pushes through the hole. It is the size of a melon, and its claws are as long as knives. Thick jade sludge hisses as it meets the open air, and it drips into the depths of the frozen canyon, where it burns a hole through the fog. The clawed hand reaches down and rips into the stone. More rock comes loose, crushed beneath a grip that is strong enough to crack bones.

The liquid prison explodes outward like a geyser. Gray and green filth stream into the open air in a vitriolic rush. Hot steam dissolves the rock beneath the hole and widens the gap. A waterfall of effluvia flows into the frozen sky.

The Sleeper moves in a rush of shadow. Its dark skin turns nearly insubstantial when it touches the open air. Iron-hard claws turn to smoke. The creature transforms into a dark dream that ascends skyward in a laggard wave of ebon breath. It leaves a scarred hole in the cliff face beneath it as it floats to the zenith of the cold rift.

When it reaches the land at the top of the canyon, the Sleeper collapses.

Something must have gone wrong — there was no reason it should have escaped. This place…this place is not where it was buried. The air is different here. It isn’t just the cold.

Something feels…wrong, and out of step. Different, like the way a dream feels different from being awake.

This is not the same world it went to sleep in.

Confused and frightened, the Sleeper shifts rapidly to the Shadowmere. It slips between worlds, to dark shadows that abut the physical reality humans call home, and immediately it is taken aback.

The shadows are filled with spirits. The Sleeper has never seen so many outside of its native realm. Have they followed it? Have they come to claim it, to take it back, to bind it once again?

It recalls centuries of agony. It remembers cages of flame and ropes of iron.

It turns back to its humanoid form. Spiny ridges protrude from the shadow flesh of its back, and saber-like claws extend and melt into one another until its appendages resemble black swords. Its skin becomes the color of a glittering razorblade eve.

It lashes out. It slices its way out through the realm of shadows, that place where the spirits hide.

It takes them by surprise. They are weak, lost and adrift from their mortal anchors. They have not come for the Sleeper at all. They are nothing compared to the undead that had long ago imprisoned it.

The jailor had been powerful, an avatar of a greater power; these pathetic beings are more like lost children. Their living anchors have been crushed in some military action, and now these spirits are like lost pups, drifting, aimless, angry and afraid.

It rips through that host of lost souls with the efficiency of an assassin. It skewers them with smoking blades and eyes of liquid fire. It tears them apart, and their remains fall to the depths of the dank void that surrounds the shattered melding of worlds.

It casts dead spirits into an oblivion from which even they cannot escape. Their shapeless forms plummet like gossamer strands of spider silk as the Sleeper wanders through the briny dark. Its meteoric blade is merciless as it slaughters the dead.

All around it, souls fall like dark rain. The Sleeper grows drunk on fear and slaughter. It went to sleep in one world and woke in another: a place confused, an amalgam of shattered realities.

Finally, it stops. Fine ebon dust and tendrils of melting shadow cover its body. It melts away, out of the Shadowmere, back into the physical world where it fades into a shimmering haze of ebon smoke.

To a human eye, the Sleeper would appear as a dark blotch, a grisly stain like day-old blood. Sunlight cuts right through its form. It is a walking shadow, a dark cloud of diamond dust.

It must rest again, but only for a short time. Now that it is free, it must re-gather its strength.

For reasons it doesn’t understand, its eyes wander east, past the pale badlands and to a place filled with ice and bitter cold. It sees a structure hidden in the wastes, filled with ancient secrets.

It doesn’t know why it has awakened, but it has a profound sense of purpose. A dream is caught in its undead mind like a whisper, a faintly forgotten echo.

The Sleeper bears a notion, a sense of a direction.

It needs to destroy something, some important presence. It needs to slay an enemy. And that enemy is to the east.

PART ONE

REACH

ONE

FOLLOW

Year 23 A.B. (After the Black)

The sky was the color of bones.

Cross was on his back. The tent flap was wide open, and his head and shoulders lay exposed to the cold air of the tundra. His eyes locked on the dead white sky. Frozen grass cracked beneath him as he rose from the uneven ground. His ears and nose felt frozen, and the light from the white sun seemed to pierce straight through to his brain, giving him the sort of headache he usually only got after a long night of drinking…not that he drank all that often anymore. His muscles were stiff, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to actually hear himself creak as he sat up.

Maybe if I didn’t always sleep in my flak jacket, I wouldn’t wake up feeling like a piece of wood.

The Lithian campsite comprised of about twenty tents in all. Most of those tents had been stitched together from Tuskar skins, though a few shaman’s tents had been made from the hides of white lions or snow snakes.

The snowy expanse of the Reach stretched on for as far as the eye could see. The shadow of Thornn was barely a blot on the western horizon.

Cross stood up, slowly. He smelled campfire smoke and tasted cold air that cut to the back of his throat and burned his lungs.

“ Morning, sunshine,” Dillon said from behind him. The lean scout was in a pair of camouflage pants and a loose tee-shirt.

“ Aren’t you cold?” Cross asked. He reached down and found his green wool blanket, which was nearly as stiff as his back. The interior of the tent was littered with more blankets and the rest of Cross’ gear, which was actually quite little: his backpack and his weapons, two pairs of gauntlets and their insulated battery packs, a cast iron skillet, some clothes, and a map case. The tent was barely big enough to fit Cross, let alone his gear. He wasn’t sure how the Lith managed to sleep two or sometimes three deep in those tents, even with as light and as thin as they were.

“ Nah, man,” Dillon said as he folded out a second shirt. He set his backpack down, which was loaded with weapons and filled canteens. “You get used to it.”

“ Yeah… how long have we been out here?” Cross asked. He rubbed his hands together over and over again, desperate to work some warmth into them.

“ Most people get used to it,” Dillon smiled.

The air was the same hue as the drifts of ice and snow that covered so much of the Reach. The sky seemed unusually bright, especially compared to the smog and smoke that Cross was used to back in Thornn.

His home city was actually close enough that it could be seen, but the smoke of its industry and the arcane fog generated by its perimeter defenses crowded the air around it and contributed to the red haze that constantly suffused the western sky. Sometimes that haze was more subtle, a ring that clung to the pale air like a faint sore or a bruise, but the air held some trace of red no matter where you went. People of the Southern Claw called the effect Blood Skies: a perpetual crimson gloom that clung to the atmosphere, an unwholesome miasma of unstable arcane energies and unholy toxins released over twenty-odd years ago, when Earth had been fused with uncounted other worlds during The Black. No one really knew exactly how or why it had all happened. They likely never would.

Standing in the snowy wastelands of the Reach, while exceedingly dangerous, was worth the risk for the brighter air, made that way since they were away from the cities and because the pale sun reflected so easily off of the snow. It was pleasant. It reminded Cross of his youth, and that was difficult to remember, sometimes.

The condition of the atmosphere was worse the closer one drew to the Ebon Cities. The vampires were hundreds of miles away, but their influence extended all across the north and western rim of the continent, which was thick with the presence of malign blood spirits, hunter wraiths and winged necrotic patrols. Poisonous gases and aerial toxins gushed out of the Ebon Cities’ industrial vents day and night so as to dissuade Southern Claw approach; naturally, those poisons had no effect at all on the city’s undead inhabitants.

I never want to see the Ebon Cities. Not in person, anyways.

But seeing them was always a possibility, of course. Cross was a warlock of the Southern Claw Alliance, a coalition of humans and their allies who controlled the southern half of what was commonly believed to be the only continent of the new world. Before he and Viper Squad had been dispatched to hunt down the traitor Margrave Azazeth, it had been their job to carry out special missions against the vampires of the Ebon Cities. Now, Cross was the only member of Viper Squad left alive, and his role had changed.

“ So is today the big day?” Dillon asked. He sat down on a smooth and dark stone and fastened his combat boots. Jamal Dillon was a frighteningly tall man, easily a head higher than Cross’ not inconsiderable six-foot-two, and when he wasn’t burdened down with eighty pounds of Southern Claw standard issue armor his carefully honed muscles were intimidating to behold. Not that his physical appearance was in any way indicative of his personality: Dillon was about as laid-back of a soldier as Cross had ever met, and after having served in Wolf Company and Viper Squad, Cross felt had met his fair share. Dillon reminded him a bit of Samuel Graves, Cross’ best friend, killed in action while fighting Sorn in the ruins of Rhaine. Graves had saved Cross’ life and paid for it with his own. Not a day went by that Cross didn’t remember that, or him.

“ I think so,” Cross nodded. He ripped open a packet of jerky, and looked around as if a fresh cup of coffee would magically appear for him. When it didn’t, he settled for some water from his canteen, instead. “I need to find Sajai and see if she’s ready.”

“ No you don’t,” Dillon said with a shake of his head. He didn’t bother looking up from his boots. Dillon was a man of few words. Living in the wilderness for weeks on end would make one reticent to speak, Cross supposed, so Dillon made sure that the few words he did use were efficient.

“ Right,” Cross nodded after he thought about it for a moment. “She’ll find me.”

“ There you go.”

“ I’ll figure this out eventually,” Cross said as he pulled on his sunglasses.

“ Yes, you will,” Dillon answered. “Just in time for us to leave.”

“ Better late than never.”

Dillon reached into his pack and pulled out a piece of jerky and a sealed plastic cup. Dillon shook the cup, which rattled the handful of beat-up dice that were inside. They made quite a racket in the still morning air, but none of the Lith ever seemed to mind. He cast the dice onto the ground, and then he wrote the sequence of numbers down in a little notepad with a charcoal pencil.

“ You know how strange that is, right?” Cross asked with a grin on his face.

“ Can’t say that I do,” Dillon laughed.

“ Really?” Cross pulled his jerky apart with his teeth. It was surprisingly juicy and hot. “Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?”

“ Maybe,” Dillon nodded. He finished the sequence, and put everything away. He’d gone through the same routine every morning that Cross had spent with him out there in the Reach. “You want to talk about strange…when are you going to name that camel?”

“ I’m not,” Cross said with a smile.

“ Do you even know its gender?”

“ No. And the thought of checking is kind of repulsive.”

Dillon laughed, and gathered the rest of his gear. He was something of an irregular soldier. Like Cross, he’d served with Hunter squads and large Companies, and, also like Cross, Dillon had gained distinction by living through some impossible situations, and he’d earned himself something of a non-traditional role in the Southern Claw military. In Dillon’s case, that role involved serving as a guide for special missions that ventured deep into the wilderness. Dillon had been doing it for almost eight years now (which meant that he was older than Cross had originally thought, and certainly older than he looked), and he was on friendly terms with various mountain tribes and non-humans, including the mysterious Lith.

Cross saw a few of the Lith now, breaking camp as they prepared to move on. There were over two dozen of the silent nomads in the camp. They were almost invisible in the dull white dawn thanks to their incredibly pale flesh and hair. A full-grown Lith male was barely six feet tall but only, Cross estimated, about 150 pounds, and yet somehow the Lith managed to actually thrive in the harsh winter wastelands called the Reach. The females were smaller than the males, but Cross thought they all looked as thin as skeletons. He watched them move across the camp, bound in white and deep blue furs and boiled leather armor, ghost-like as they expertly broke down their tents. They left no trace of their presence.

Dillon and Cross grabbed their packs. Any business Cross had with the Lith had to wait until they broke camp. The humans were guests there, and not terribly well trusted ones in spite of their best efforts to abide by Lithian customs and obey the ghostly people’s loose laws. The Lith were one of the few races that humans got along with, after all, and while their presence was much quieter than the Gol or the Doj, the Lith were a valuable source of information and trade. They were tied to the land in a way that humans hadn’t been since The Black, and they had ways of culling resources from the inhospitable terrain that people of the Southern Claw couldn’t, even with the aid of magic.

Perhaps most importantly, the Lith were a race of prophets. Their witches sensed future events and determined when and where something of significance might occur. Cross wasn’t sure how they did it — if it was through the use of spirits, it was in a manner that was unknown to humans.

No surprise there, Cross thought. For as much as we know about magic, we still don’t know a damn thing. It’s a wonder we’ve survived as long as we have.

Once Cross had all of his gear stowed away, he cleaned his weapons and tended to the camel. He’d first worked with such a beast during Viper Squad’s last ill-fated mission, when they’d purchased one from a merchant in the armistice city-state of Dirge. That camel had noisily but faithfully served at Cross’ side for the rest of the mission, and while he never found out what had happened to it (he was fairly certain it had either wandered off into the dead lands north of the Carrion Rift or else had been eaten by ghouls), he decided he’d always bring one along whenever duty required him to trek into the wilderness. This camel — which he didn’t name out of pure superstitious habit — had been with him for the better part of a year. Cross still didn’t know how to ride the beast, and he didn’t think that either of them was up for trying.

The rock shelf that the Lith camped on overlooked the Reach from the side of a squat mountain. Navigating up and down the sliding mountain face to get to and from the camp was treacherous, but the elevated position meant that only the most dedicated predators would dare try to harm them. The air was thin and cold atop the rocks, and the wind snapped against Cross’ cloth-wrapped face and cut straight through his grey armor like a blade. At times the gusts were so strong Cross felt sure they could have forced him off of the rock and into open air. The campsite was large enough, Cross guessed, to land a pair of the Southern Claw’s new Bloodhawk airships.

Dillon stood next to him. His scraggly black beard had finally shed some of the frost it had accumulated overnight. Cross’s own face bore only slight traces of stubble. Growing a beard wasn’t in the cards for him, and never had been.

Cross’ spirit pushed against him. Before the Viper Squad’s last mission, such an act would have brought him comfort. His spirit was tied to his soul, after all, an ethereal feminine counterpart, an extension of his own life force that he called on to craft magical effects and to gather information. She had, in many ways, been his deepest friend and companion, and his one true love aside from his sister.

They’re both gone now. Gone, and they’re not coming back.

The touch and feel of his spirit had changed, just as Cross had changed. The spirit he was bonded to was an entirely different entity than that he’d spent most of his life with.

A year before, in the secret obelisk prison that housed humankind’s arcane souls, Cross had destroyed Margrave, and his original spirit had, in turn, sacrificed herself to save him. His new spirit was a reward, of sorts, granted to Cross by whatever entity it was who ruled that obelisk.

It had been an uneasy marriage thus far. Sensing this spirit was like reaching through ice-water, or staring into a smoky mirror.

His spirit was a shadow of the one he’d once known, a bitter and resentful echo. The emotions that she emanated usually felt like an indictment of Cross, a resistance to whatever he attempted.

He felt more alone that ever.

There’s still so much we don’t understand about magic…so much that still doesn’t make sense. Maybe that’s why I’m still here. Maybe that’s why they sent me back.

He sees his old spirit, falling into the sky.

“ Hello?”

Cross snapped to. Dillon was looking at him.

“ Sorry,” he said.

“ Are you all right?” Dillon’s voice was thick and loud. Rangers had to be silent. Cross was fairly sure that was why Dillon actually didn’t talk all that much — even his whispers were easy to hear. He had to make an effort at being quiet, which was probably why he was so good at it.

“ Yes,” Cross said after a moment. A thick crust of iron clouds crept over the stale sun. Heavy shadows floated like vessels on the face of the pale valley. A silver-red river wound its way across the land below like an open wound. “What’s up?”

“ Sajai,” Dillon said with a nod.

The Lith witch worked her way up the stone hill and towards the two Southern Claw men. Like all Lith, Sajai was thin and short. Her golden hair flowed in the freezing mountain breeze, and her milk white skin was as flawless as snow. Sajai was dressed in a pale blue cloak laced with gold and platinum cuffs, but the garment was tied tight at the waist like a corset. A series of tall knife scabbards surrounded her washboard frame, while her gloves and boots were made of some sort of animal skin, probably ice wolf.

Sajai came and stood before them. Cross found the Lith unnerving because of their physical appearance. He hated that he felt that way, but it was what it was. Their eyes were blue, so bright they sparkled in even the barest hint of light. They held themselves with perfect posture and poise, and the Lith made no sound, not even by mistake. They were like living wraiths.

Strangest of all, the race had no mouths: their faces beneath their small nostrils were like surgical masks made of flesh. Cross had no idea how they ate, and had never seen them do so, even though they always took meat from the animals they killed. So far as communication was concerned, all Lith seemed to have some telepathic or empathic connection with one another. The Lith also had a system of hand signals that they used to communicate with outsiders, but Cross had never seen them use it with each other.

Sajai, the witch mother of this band of Lith, used those signals now. They were subtle, and didn’t involve a great deal of overt motion, which seemed to suit their quiet race. The hand language still looked complicated, and Cross wished he’d been able to pick up more of it, which should have been possible given how many weeks he and Dillon had spent in their company. The Lith were nomads. They lived off of the harsh environs of the Reach, and though they never looked for trouble they always seemed capable of dealing with it when it came. They had also forgotten more about magic than the collective warlocks and witches of the Southern Claw would ever even possess, which was why Cross was there now.

Cross looked at Dillon.

“ She wants to know if you’re ready,” Dillon said.

Cross nodded.

Sajai stood a full head shorter than Cross, but those blue eyes pierced straight through to his core. He felt his spirit twitch, as if afraid. Sajai’s arcane sight cast her face in a near invisible corona that surrounded her like gossamer dust. Cross could feel as her gaze took in everything about him, from his thoughts to his fears, from his past to his soul. She’d done it before, when he and Dillon had first arrived.

She wants to make sure I’m still driven by the same motives. She has to know that I’m not letting something slip, some hidden agenda.

When she seemed satisfied, Cross felt the tension in his body let up. He hadn’t even realized it was there in the first place. Sajai turned and started down the slope. Cross had the impression he was supposed to follow her, confirmed when Dillon nodded expectantly.

Sajai moved quickly down the hill, and Cross had to watch his footing on the unstable rock as he scrambled after her. Most of his gear was in his pack; all that he carried with him were his arcane gauntlets, bunched together in his fist.

“ I’m surprised you didn’t pick up more of their language,” Dillon said from behind him as they carefully stepped down the hill. Dark protrusions of rock jutted out of the stone and formed the semblance of steps, but the pace at which Sajai moved and the height of those steps still made keeping their balance tricky.

“ Me, too,” Cross said. “I’m better at reading languages than speaking them.” He looked back over his shoulder. “Do they think I’m idiot for not having learned more of it?”

“ I doubt they care,” Dillon said quietly. “They’re not like us. They don’t really judge.”

They came into the company of more Lith when they arrived at the bottom of the hill. The trek down the breadth of the mountain to the Reach itself would take hours, but the Lith had completely broken down their camp, and everything that had once been spread across the hillside had been rolled and neatly packed away and bound to the backs of stark white horses with reptilian skin and tufts of heavy hair on their feet and joints. The horse’s manes were like melted crystal.

The other Lith parted before them. Their weapons were sinuous and sleek, bows carved from stark white wood and swords and axes with blades made of translucent crystal. Cross saw no firearms anywhere in their midst. His spirit bristled as if threatened, and Cross had to exert some mental force to rein her in.

It’s like owning a pet wolf, sometimes.

Sajai passed through her fellows and walked towards the cliff, where they had a clearer view of the Reach. It looked like a sea of ice. Thick canyons of gray and green rock covered the landscape like wounds.

Sajai stepped up to the edge, propped one foot on a short stone that dangled precariously over open air, and looked out.

Cross had been sent by the Southern Claw High Command to learn something from this Lith woman, the leader of a tribe that in the past had given the White Mother valuable information about the Ebon Cities. He’d been sent to find something hidden out there in the wastes.

But the Lith had their own way of handing out information. They would not be rushed. They lived so much longer than humans, and much of what humankind found frightening was entirely familiar to the Lith.

She had to make sure that my need was genuine. She had to know I could be trusted.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Cross had done his best to earn that trust, with Dillon’s knowledge of the Lith guiding his actions. He felt bad for Dillon, really — the ranger was used to running reconnoiter missions for Hunter squads or charting out unexplored territory for Company deployments, not baby-sitting a warlock of dubious qualifications while he tried to get information from a race that he didn’t even share a common language with. Even though Dillon didn’t complain, Cross noted restlessness in his gait and in his thick voice. He was a ranger, after all — he wasn’t used to sitting still.

But you never complained when the mission came straight from the High Command. If they were giving the order, it meant that it was something the White Mother herself wanted done.

Without turning to regard them, Sajai pointed out to the Reach. At first Cross didn’t see anything: it looked like the same arctic wasteland it had always been. The air was dirty and cold and Cross tasted glacial smoke on his tongue. His scarred left hand burned in the frigid temperatures. Hard wind pushed against them.

“ Crap,” Dillon said after a moment.

“ Tell me about it…”

“ No, look!”

Cross followed Dillon’s gaze. A few miles away, just past a ridge of low and dark hills, amidst a drift of early morning haze and ash, was a stream of smoke that curled up into the sky.

“ Is that from a wreck?” Cross asked.

“ Looks like it to me.”

An airship, he thought. It could’ve been any sort of mechanized or thaumaturgically driven vehicle, of course — a tank, a Rathian war wagon, a Bonewalker, an Ebon skiff — but somehow Cross knew what it was.

Sajai looked at Cross. She made a simple hand motion: a sweep and cut, drawing her hand away from Cross and above her own throat, then back out towards the trail of smoke.

“ Follow,” Dillon said, reading the signal. His eyes went back to the smoke. “Follow and you will find.”

She’s been waiting for this, Cross thought. That’s why they’ve let us stay for so long. She was waiting for this day, this place, to show us where we needed to go. That ship had to be there. In order to find what we need, our next step is to go to that wreck.

Cross considered asking her what the smoke was, but he knew that she wouldn’t tell them.

Follow and you will find.

Cross looked at the smoke, and he felt something cold inside of him. It was as if eyes buried deep in the distance stared back.

“ Thank you,” Cross told Sajai. “Dillon. I think it’s time for us to go.”

TWO

DREADNAUGHT

Dillon estimated that the trip would take just over half a day. They’d spend only a portion of that time crossing the flat wastelands of the Reach — most of it would be spent descending the small mountain, which had to be done carefully lest they fall to their deaths.

Luckily for Cross, Dillon was an expert at getting around in harsh environments. The ranger might as well have been born in the wild. He was fairly quiet and reserved, opinionated when it came to which route to take or what areas to avoid, but soft spoken on most everything else.

Cross did know that Dillon had a temper. They’d been accosted by brigands on their way to the Lithian camp, a band of wasteland outlaws who made a living feeding off of small caravans and launching attacks on Southern Claw border towns. Dillon hadn’t taken kindly to their intrusion, and Cross knew that if he hadn’t used magic to scatter the bandits Dillon likely would have killed each and every one of them.

Dillon had mentioned having a sister, and a nephew. Other than that, the ranger seemed content to keep to himself, and Cross respected that, even if he did find himself occasionally starting conversations that faded to nothingness due to a lack of response on the ranger’s part.

Small stones scattered down the side of the mountain as they made their descent. Cross’ camel slowed their travel with its deliberate and even pace. Dillon led the way on a horse as black as coal. His horse was adept at sliding down the smooth slope, but Cross’ dun moved a bit more awkwardly, due largely to her rider’s inexperience. Cross was slowly becoming a better rider, but he’d spent most of his military career being flown to his missions, and he’d only been riding horseback regularly for about a year.

Still…I should be better at this by now.

The small mountain where the Lith made camp stood at the northern end of a low and craggy range that cleanly cut the Reach off from the southern plains. If they turned south, they could have followed the range straight to the city of Fane. The landscape was dark and jagged, and the hills looked like enormous shards of black glass. The sun was dull and low as they rode into the Reach. Cross had to draw his armored coat tight and turn up his collar, and even gloved his hands felt frozen as he clung to the reins.

The ground in the Reach was hard and brittle, more ice than snow, with a thin layer of uneven and dark stone that ran underneath. Frozen streams and the fallen husks of stark white trees littered the landscape. Cross’ breath steamed in the air. His ears, mouth and nose were held under a cloth wrap, and even then they felt numb after they’d ridden for about an hour.

Dillon rode straight in the saddle. He wore a tan armored coat and had a long MK-14 carbine slung over his shoulder. An M4A2 was slung across the back of his saddle bag, and he had a 9mm Beretta strapped to a holster on his leg. Cross felt the weight of the sawed-off Remington shotgun in the holster on his back, which hung next to his black-bladed machete, the sheath turned so that he could draw it underhanded. His HK45 was slung in a holster on his left side, and his most potent weapon hovered in and around him, an ethereal shadow that tasted like charcoal and that whispered unintelligible mutterings into his head.

She hadn’t stopped whispering at him since he’d woken. It was like having a madman’s stereo. Sometimes, Cross just wished he understood what his spirit was telling him. Usually, he wished he could ask her to just be quiet.

They rode quietly across the ghostly ice plains. They stepped carefully to avoid sharp stones, patches of ice, and areas too brittle to support their weight.

Hours passed in near silence. Cross would have liked to sleep in the saddle, but it wasn’t going to happen. His nerves were alight, thanks in no small part to the nagging paranoia of his spirit. But that wasn’t entirely it: Cross disliked the notion of being directed by a prophecy. The fact that Sajai seemed to have known there was going to be something there in the Reach that Cross needed to follow unnerved him. It was like a trap had been laid by the universe, and he was walking straight into it.

The plains sloped down near a cluster of bone white trees rimed with dark frost. The skeletal remains of a tall humanoid creature sat near the trees; one of its hands was frozen so that it looked like it pointed back the way Cross and Dillon had ridden from.

Cross tried not to take it as a sign.

At the bottom of the slope was a thin canyon that was maybe twenty feet across. The only apparent means to cross to the other side was to use a thin log that traversed the distance like a crude bridge. Frozen pools of blood waited at the bottom of the slope, next to the log.

A cluster of thick trees and rocks waited at the far end of the gap, and beyond the tress waited the unseen source of the streaming smoke.

“ You smell that?” Cross asked. He smelled fire and fuel. “It’s an airship.” They couldn’t see any wreckage from where they were, but the smell made him certain.

“ Could it be one of ours?” Dillon asked.

“ I can’t think of a reason why a Southern Claw airship would be this far north,” Cross said. The Ebon Cities’ vessels used hexed organic fuel that smelled entirely different than that used by Southern Claw airships, so it was unlikely that the vessel was of vampiric origins. Cross deduced that it was probably a stolen or reconstructed vessel, like those used by smugglers and raiders.

Cross’ spirit moved ahead on her own. Thin lines of spectral essence connected them, which gave Cross an awareness of the area ahead. He felt the heat of fires and he smelled burning skin. He heard voices, and saw auras of pain. Lost and dead spirits roamed the air like predators in blood waters, but Cross’ spirit had become expert at protecting herself, and she eluded those wailing souls before they could do her harm.

Cross felt multiple living presences ahead, moving on the other side of the trees and stones. There were voids there, as well, unspaces where beings should have stood, but didn’t.

“ We’ve got vampires ahead,” Cross said, and he and Dillon dismounted.

They readied their weapons.

“ How many?” Dillon asked.

“ I’m not sure. Two, maybe three.”

“ That could be rough for just the two of us.”

His spirit bristled at that. She didn’t like Dillon not counting her as part of the group. She’d developed quite the temper.

I need to be careful of that. If she flares out of control and catches me off guard, we’ll all be in trouble.

“ There’s more,” Cross said. He had his HK45 in one hand; he molded his spirit in the other, his gauntleted hand. He didn’t latch onto her form too tightly, but held her ethereal tendrils like a rein, firm enough to let her know she’d be needed back soon. She extended her form to the other side of the open canyon, but at his command she moved, smoke-like, back to him, and she surrounded his body and filled his lungs with a burning sensation. Warmth filled him, vaguely erotic and invigorating, but at the same time painful and poisonous. She was like some dread hashish.

“ There are a half-dozen other life forms over there, too. Maybe more…it’s hard to say.”

Dillon chewed on that for a moment. His dark beard was cut close to his angular face, which always looked grim.

“ Human?” he asked.

“ Can’t say.”

“ Damn.” Dillon spat. “Is there anything you are sure about?”

“ I’m sure I don’t want to go over there,” Cross nodded.

They left the horses and the camel tethered to a lone tree at the west end of the ridge. Dillon led the way. He carefully stepped out onto the log, which shifted suspiciously beneath the ranger’s weight and looked ready to twist or collapse. Cross watched nervously as Dillon slowly but surely worked his way across. Wind flew up from the canyon depths, but Dillon didn’t slow or falter in the least. Cross did his best not to look into the canyon — he just watched Dillon advance and tried not to think about how deep it probably was.

Once Dillon crossed, he drew his rifle and took up position, and Cross realized he hadn’t thought of a good reason not to follow.

The log was two-feet-thick, but it creaked unnervingly when Cross set foot on it. He heard dirt and stone loosen from the cliff wall as he shuffled across. The wood felt slick beneath his boots, and the wind gusted just enough that it felt like malevolent hands pushed against his body, waiting for the right moment to shove.

Cross didn’t look down. He didn’t have to: he could sense the depth of the rift below, and his legs almost turned to jelly.

Stay with me.

She did. In spite of her reckless tendencies, Cross’ spirit stayed close as he crossed the unstable log, and her swirling form supported just enough of his weight that he almost floated across the last stretch of the cold run.

Dark growls peeled up from the depths of the canyon. Dillon chanced a glance down, but Cross didn’t. When he reached the far side he galloped onto stable ground and didn’t look back.

“ Will your camel be okay?” Dillon asked. Cross did look back then, and he saw the silhouette of the two mounts and the camel against a backdrop of dead clouds.

“ Yeah. I think it's smarter than both of us combined.”

“ Then why doesn’t it have a name?”

“ Names aren’t its style. Lay off about the camel, will you?” he laughed.

Dillon smiled.

They quickly cleared the open ground between the canyon and the line of dead trees. Cross and Dillon moved one ahead of the other in alternating runs, so that one man always kept an eye on what lay ahead while the other advanced.

The smell of fuel grew heavier as they came to the trees. Smoke poured into the air from the other side in an unrelenting stream.

Cross sent his spirit forward again. She found burning fuel tanks and bits of thaumaturgic cold steel, broken hex fields and snapped chains forged from arcane iron. She discovered a handful of living things, as well as the void space of vampire souls.

Cross and Dillon kept low and moved quietly through the trees. Soft stones shattered into pale dust beneath their boots, and their feet cracked apart dry twigs and brush. The floor was littered with pine needles and bits of wood and steel. Torn clothing dangled from dead branches.

They came upon the first body about twenty paces into the woods, a crumpled human in dark armor. His flesh was scalded and his head had snapped back against a dead pine. He’d fallen from the ship as it had exploded and crashed. A. 44 Magnum revolver was held in a hip holster, but he bore neither badge nor insignia.

Dillon nodded at Cross. They moved on without a word.

Cross’ spirit coiled around him like a hungry snake. Her touch burned against his skin, and she slithered over his mind like warm oil.

The trees were just thick enough to block easy sight of what lie ahead. Cross hadn’t thought the trees ran that deep when they’d viewed them from afar, but after several minutes he and Dillon still worked their way through a veritable forest.

They found more wreckage, and two more bodies. Cross stopped, and Dillon followed suit.

His spirit found an area up ahead that she refused to enter on her own. Cross considered coaxing her on, but he decided against it. He signaled to Dillon that there was danger ahead. They crept forward.

The hull of a wrecked airship lay smoldering on the ground. The crash had formed a clearing. The ship had barreled over a stretch of trees and flattened them, creating an open area that was several hundred yards across. Broken trees, still aflame, lay like sticks all over the dark forest floor, and the earth was torn and black. Smoke and ash hung in the air, and gusts of cold wind enveloped everything in diesel smoke. The air was a fog of vehicular fumes.

Cross and Dillon emerged a few yards away from what looked like the tail end of the crash, where they found the aft end of the ship. The shattered remains of the foredeck, Cross guessed, were what accounted for the wreckage they’d already found. He saw blood and broken limbs amidst the burning refuse. Everything smelled like factory fires in a slaughterhouse.

“ Cross,” Dillon said quietly.

There was a body on the ground in front of them, and it was still moving. Greasy innards dangled from its waist where the legs had been torn away from the torso. Thick chains, still attached to a bulkhead, held the severed limbs just a few yards away.

The vampire clawed its way across the ground. Its black nails ripped into the soil, it’s clothes were tattered and ragged, and a deep cut in its forehead oozed a copious volume of pale blood that pasted its dark hair to its scalp. Dark, undead eyes regarded Cross and Dillon coldly, and the creature’s ashen face contorted in hunger, rage and pain.

This was a prison ship.

Cross looked at the smoking aft and saw the word DREADNAUGHT chiseled in letters across the dark wood. Most of the bodies they saw must have been those of prisoners, as they were dressed in the same crumbling rags as the vampire, but Cross saw another body that had been impaled on a broken shard of wood. That body, Cross reasoned, must have been one of the jailers, as he wore leather armor and had a. 44 Magnum in a side-holster, just like the body in the trees.

“ Black Scar?” Cross asked aloud.

“ That’s my guess,” Dillon nodded.

The vampire snarled and hissed. Its black tongue slathered hungrily out of its massive jaws. Cross smelled the creature’s carrion stench and grave-soil musk.

Dillon unsheathed his machete and sliced off the vampire’s head with a quick strike.

They heard movement. It was difficult to see the interior of the Dreadnaught’s aft-end wreckage, but they had a clear view of the shattered deck, much of which was still ablaze.

Cross stepped closer to the ship with his HK ready. His spirit wound about his free arm. Her anxious state almost rendered him numb, and her whispers clawed at his ear. Dillon moved into a covering position.

After a few steps, Cross stopped. The air was suddenly colder. He saw his breath and felt his skin go cold, and the ground crystallized beneath his feet.

“ Cross!” Dillon shouted.

Dillon’s rifle shot cracked open the air like a hammer.

Cross saw the vampire. It leapt at him from out of nowhere, its claws outstretched, its jaws wide, its pale skin covered in scars and runic tattoos. Cross had no time to react, but he didn’t have to. Dillon’s bullet shattered the vampire’s jawbone and it fell to the ground, where it writhed and clawed with violent force, as if taken by a seizure. Cross shot it, this time in the heart, and it stilled.

Two more vampires came at them. Their tattered clothing looked like it had been worn for centuries. Their ebon fangs and claws stood in stark contrast to the pale light. They were emaciated and fearless, clearly starved for blood.

Cross released his spirit. She flew into the first vampire as a drill head of pure force, an invisible and tightly wound cyclone that threw the creature into the air and onto its back. Cross raised his pistol and shot it as it fell.

The second vampire came from the other direction, and in a heartbeat it was nearly on top of Dillon. The ranger had no space to get a shot off with his rifle, but his machete was at his belt, and he pulled it free just in time to deflect claws aimed for his throat.

Cross’ senses overloaded. He heard a throbbing hum and noted a powerful male scent, like that of a wild wolf. His skin tingled with the unclean touch of someone else’s magic.

Red chains of fire swirled through the air and wrapped around the vampire’s body. The undead howled in fury as the chains touched its rotting flesh, which blistered and smoked with a gut-wrenching odor. The chains only burned the vampire when it moved against them; otherwise they hovered just inches away, where they circled the creature like flaming predatory eels. They kept it contained. So long as it stayed within their orbit, they wouldn’t burn it.

A burst of automatic gunfire shredded the ground between Dillon and Cross.

“ Don’t move, you morons!”

A tall and dark-haired man in black combat armor stepped out of the smoke. His hair was spiky and wild, and he wore a bandolier filled with knives and extra ammunition magazines over his armored coat. A broadsword was sheathed across his back, and he held an MP5.

Cross glanced at Dillon, who didn’t take his eyes off of the gunner.

Where are you? Cross wondered. His spirit returned, and he had her probe the area for the master of the other spirit, the male spirit. A witch was nearby, hidden somewhere out of sight.

That spirit and his master probed right back. Cross had wondered if the act of confining the vampire in such a flamboyant manner would prove too taxing on the witch and thereby prevent her from masking her presence, but he realized that those arcane flames were far too potent for even a high witch to maintain. That meant she used an implement to do it, an arcane focus that would reduce the stress placed on her own magic.

A damned powerful implement, he guessed. That means that she’s perfectly capable of matching anything I can do right now.

“ Dillon,” he said. “Wait.”

“ For what?” he asked. The shooter had the drop on them both, but Cross knew for a fact that Dillon could take him if he had to. Those throwing knives on the back of his belt weren’t just for show.

“ For the witch,” Cross said. “She’s around here somewhere.”

“ Really?” the shooter laughed. He had a coarse and gravelly voice. He bore a scar on one side of his face. “You’re a bright one, aren’t you? Both of you: drop your weapons.”

“ I don’t want to,” Dillon smiled.

“ Good,” the gunner replied, and he raised his gun and aimed it at Dillon’s face.

“ Knock it off, Vos,” a woman’s voice called out.

Four figures emerged from the burning fog and haze. Two men and one woman were bound and chained together at the wrist. Both of the men were blonde; one was an older man with thinning hair and a number of scars, while the other was younger and athletic, bearded and tattooed. The third prisoner, the woman, was lithe and the color of a ghost, with long blonde hair and a number of tattoos — dragons and blades, pyramids and skulls — that matched those of the bearded prisoner.

The prisoners were shepherded by a woman that Cross momentarily mistook for Ilfesa Warfield, a seductive black marketer and witch in Thornn whom he’d lusted after for the past several years. This woman was taller than Warfield, more toned, and impossibly more voluptuous, clearly displayed by the tightness of her form-fitting armor. Her waist was waif-thin, and her legs seemed to go on forever. She was clearly in excellent physical condition. Her deep red hair was perfectly straight and fell just past her shoulders, and her cheeks were sharp, angular and angry. Her eyes shone sapphire blue.

The witch wore black leather armor that matched that of her partner, Vos. In one hand she held a Colt Python revolver. Her other hand was encased in an arcane gauntlet, and she gripped a small ball of smoldering flame.

“ You’re Revengers,” Dillon said. He didn’t bother to hide the contempt in his voice.

“ Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re a dumbass. Now drop your weapons.”

“ Wait…is there suddenly bad blood between the Revengers and the Southern Claw?” Cross asked. He holstered his HK. His spirit hovered in the space between them, an invisible wall of fire. He felt the witch’s spirit, along with all of its harsh male destructive potential and raw primal energy. They were evenly matched.

“ You’re not dressed as Claw,” the witch said. She was right — Cross and Dillon both wore earth-colored fatigues and armored coats with no insignias.

“ Who in the hell else would we be with, lady?” Dillon groaned.

“ There are lots of questionable characters roaming the wilderness these days,” Vos smiled.

“ Tell me about it,” Dillon said.

Vos motioned for the prisoners to drop down to their knees, which they did, though the bearded man did so reluctantly. He shook his head sadly at Cross, and smiled wryly, as if he was the only one in on some great joke.

Cross knew all too well that the Revengers were to be taken seriously. They were a mercenary outfit, not a part of the Southern Claw. They maintained autonomy because they controlled the massive facility called Black Scar, a vast and secure prison complex located in the wilderness far to the east of the Reach. The Revengers charged inordinate fees to the Southern Claw for use of this facility, but the Claw did so, as there was no better place to hide away dangerous citizens or captured creatures that for whatever reason needed to be kept alive. Relations between the Claw and the Revengers had always been tenuous, in no small part because of the rumors that inmates at Black Scar were subjected to brutal treatment and horrific living environments. Then there was the Revenger’s excessively mercenary nature: anyone could be incarcerated into Black Scar if the price was right. Worse, anyone — or anything — could also be set free, so long as there was ample cash involved.

“ I don’t care if you’re Southern Claw or Wile E. Coyote,” the Revenger woman said. “You just destroyed two of my prisoners. Destroyed prisoners are no good to me.”

“ Yeah, that’s a bitch,” the bearded prisoner laughed. “Of course, you don’t mind them roughed up a little bit, do you Hot Pants?”

Vos cracked the prisoner in the back of the head with the butt of the MP5. The bearded man fell forward, and he nearly dragged the others prisoners down with him.

“ Nice move, kid,” the other blonde man smiled. He seemed distant, and woozy.

The female prisoner didn’t speak, but she cast Vos a baleful look. Cross noticed the scar that ran lengthwise across her throat.

“ Kane,” Vos said to the prisoner. “Do that again. Please. I’d love to break your kneecaps.”

“ I like it when you talk dirty,” Kane groaned.

“ All of you, shut up,” the woman growled. She turned back to Dillon and Cross.

“ So you’re Southern Claw?”

“ Yeah,” Dillon nodded.

“ What are you doing all of the way out here?” she asked.

“ Recon,” Dillon lied.

Either the woman bought it, or she didn’t really care. She looked at Cross.

“ I’m going to call my spirit back. I’d appreciate if you’d do the same.”

“ I’d rather you didn’t call your spirit back,” Cross said, “at least not until you have that vampire safely contained.”

She smiled. He pulled back his spirit. She was reluctant and angry, and he could feel how desperately she wanted to confront the witch’s spirit. Cross had to exert more will than usual in order to force her to behave. He sensed as the witch called hers back, as well, seemingly with the same amount of required pressure.

The fiery chains around the vampire didn’t move, which meant that the woman’s gauntlet was wholly responsible for keeping the undead contained.

I’ve never seen an implement with that much power. Of course, no one really knew the full extent of the Revenger’s resources, but they were unquestionably extensive. Black Scar itself was supposedly buried deep within the earth, a multi-layered stronghold of chiseled iron protected with incredible levels of magic and artillery.

“ Your weapon?” Dillon said to Vos.

Vos watched Dillon for a moment, smiled, and lowered his gun.

“ You want to give me a hand?” he asked the ranger.

Dillon complied, even though he didn’t seem overly enthused by the idea. He and Vos secured the prisoners and moved them away from the wreckage. None of the prisoners spoke while they were moved; they just kept their eyes to the ground.

The witch’s name was Danica Black. She was a Warden of Black Scar and a Revenger, two facts that counted as marks against her in Cross’ mind.

That’s right, make excuses, he chided himself. She’s even further out of your league than Warfield is. And that’s saying something.

Cross stood at the ready while Black carefully adjusted the dials and switches on her arcane gauntlet, modifying the flaming chains that constrained the vampire and making them more stable. The chains never actually touched the creature: they just hovered less than an inch away from its pale flesh, ensuring that if the vampire tried to break free it would turn itself to ash.

“ Is this everyone?” Cross asked as they moved away from the wreckage and into the trees. The dead forest was thin and open, and after a short distance they finally found ground that was devoid of debris. Sharp stones covered the frozen soil of the forest floor. There was only a small amount of snow on the ground in the forest itself, but Cross looked through the tree line to the east and saw fields of white. The air was bitter and cold, and even though they put some distance between themselves and the Dreadnaught’s wreckage the smell of burnt wood and fuel still hung thick all around them.

“ This is all,” she said with a shake of her head. Soot and ash covered parts of her smooth face and hair. “All of the survivors of the Dreadnaught’s trip across the Reach. All six of us.” She smiled bitterly. “Shit.”

Black paced about, kicking stones with her tall boots. Cross tried not to think about how much she looked like Warfield.

Okay, stop it.

Her spirit was there, tense and watchful. Cross’ own lapped at it, teased it with challenge.

Dillon and Vos erected a crude camp, where they gave the prisoners — Lucan, Kane and Ekko — some water.

“ This has been a really nice trip, Vos,” Kane nodded as he was handed the canteen. “Can we go to the beach, too?”

“ Only if we get to see your girlfriend in a bikini,” Vos smiled.

“ I thought you were my girlfriend,” Kane replied.

“ Where are you bound for?” Cross asked Black, ignoring the sparring contest as best he could.

The vampire hovered just a few feet away. It watched them malevolently, unmoving, utterly silent save for the crackle of arcane flames that surrounded it. Cross saw the reflection of pale fire in its glassy eyes.

“ None of your business. Now let me ask you something, Cross,” Black said. She was a full head shorter than he, but her presence lent to her height. She had a slight accent, something inner-city. Her people had probably descended from New Yorkers, from the time Before The Black. “What are you doing out here?”

“ None of your business,” Cross said after a moment. He leaned against a tree and folded his arms. “Well, that was productive.”

“ At least we know where we stand,” Black smiled.

“ True,” Cross said. “But it’s going to be difficult to help each other if we don’t share some information.”

“ Help?” Black laughed. “Who said anything about needing your help?”

Before Cross could answer, a howl echoed from somewhere in the distance. It was followed in short order by another, and then a third, and then there was a choir of howls, a dirge that rattled the trees. That sound cut like cold blades through the air.

“ Oh, God, what the hell is that?” Kane moaned.

“ Wolves!” Vos said, but Dillon shook his head.

The voices behind the howls were deep and broken. The creatures that made them were inhuman, and a legion.

Not wolves, Cross realized. Gorgoloth.

THREE

BURN

They quickly made their way back to the Dreadnaught. Though the air was caustic, the smoke from the burning fuel provided them with some cover. The dead forest was mostly barren, and while there were plenty of trees to be found, they were all naked and needle thin.

The Dreadnaught’s wreckage had spread over a quarter-mile area. The aft end was the only piece of the ship that was still even relatively intact. Everything else had pulled apart into splinters. Wood, metal and machinery parts lay like industrial snowdrops on the soiled forest floor.

Dillon and Vos took position in opposite ends of the aft wreckage. Each man stood just inside of the now-sideways staircases that led below-deck. Black, in the meantime, took Cross and the prisoners behind what looked like part of a wrecked turbine engine that had fallen about a hundred feet away from the aft section. Between the four of them, they covered most of the clearing.

Wreckage and felled trees littered the ground. The skeletal forest was all that stood between them and the advancing Gorgoloth. Mist froze in the air near the tree line and blocked any clear line of sight. Ethereal light lit the air like soft fire. The air was gray and cold. White mist and dark smoke obscured the pale sky.

By the time they’d taken up position, the Gorgoloth’s battle cries had drawn noticeably closer, as the volume of those cries had tripled in their intensity. The brutes possessed a talent for placing their calls from distances and directions that made it all but impossible for an enemy to determine their numbers.

Black pushed Kane to his knees, then waited for the other prisoners to follow suit. Ekko hesitated before she knelt down. Lucan didn’t move, but it didn’t seem to be out of protest. The glazed look in his eyes and the manner in which he rocked on his heels told Cross that Lucan wasn’t entirely aware of what was happening.

“ Lucan,” Kane said from his knees. “Come on, buddy, snap to.”

“ Now,” Black said, insistent, but she didn’t shout. “On your knees.”

“ Yes,” Lucan said with a tired nod. “Of course.”

The vampire growled quietly. It hovered in the air a few feet behind them. The dark flames of its prison crackled and hummed with magical force.

“ Is that thing secure?” Cross asked.

“ Yes,” Black said impatiently. “Feel free to not ask again.”

“ Careful, big guy,” Kane said to Cross from his kneeling position. “You don’t want to get on Warden Danica’s bad side…not that she has a good side…”

Perhaps to prove Kane’s point, Black used her boot and pushed him forward and onto his face. Ekko shot Black a baleful look. Cross wondered if the deep scar on Ekko’s neck was the reason he’d not heard her speak.

Black produced an old-fashioned lever-action Winchester rifle; it was made of black metal and decorated with an elaborate grip carved into the likeness of a dragon’s tail. Apart from the stock design, it was like a weapon straight out of the Old West.

The broken turbine machinery was about four feet tall and twice that in width, so it provided good cover for the six of them. The device still smoked and crackled now and again, and the low hum and stink of broken magic made the area around it dank and thick.

“ Is this thing going to blow up?” Kane asked.

“ Yes,” Cross answered. He was relieved when Black smiled at that.

The air tasted raw with cold. Cross watched his breath steam in front of his face. He only barely saw Dillon or Vos in the nearby ship.

They waited. The sky turned the color of salt. Cross held his spirit ready and alert, but he didn’t want to send her out, at least not yet. He sensed Black’s spirit close by, and he didn’t want to leave himself exposed in case she tried something underhanded.

The ground rumbled slightly, as if from thunder.

It won’t be long.

His spirit slid down his arms and onto his gauntleted fingers, which promptly went numb from the cold. Needles of pain tingled up and down his skin. His spirit was so excited it literally hurt him.

Black’s male spirit was ambient and powerful and aggressive, made of tumultuous energy that was packed up tight like a bag of gunpowder.

Cross drew his HK45, which he checked and rechecked far too many times. The prisoners waited. Lucan and Ekko did so quietly, while Kane whistled loudly until Black finally threatened to shoot him if he didn’t stop.

“ Black,” Cross said. It was hard to sound casual when he knew that a horde of ebon-skinned cannibals were coming right at them. “Where did you say you were headed?”

“ I didn’t,” Black answered through gritted teeth. She didn’t look at him.

“ That’s right,” Cross said. “Is that because you don’t want me to know that you’re not supposed to be here?”

At that, Black shot him a sideways glance. It was all the confirmation he needed to know that he’d guessed correctly.

“ You’d be better off minding your own business,” she said. She had her rifle ready and aimed at the tree line to the east.

“ It’s a little late for that,” he said.

“ It’s too late for anything,” Lucan said. His voice took them by surprise. Cross looked at him. Lucan’s eyes were closed and his head was bent forward, as if in prayer. “An end is near.”

“ Thanks, man,” Kane said next to him. “ Now I feel better.”

“ What do you care, anyway?” Black asked Cross, ignoring the prisoners.

“ Maybe I’m just curious,” Cross shrugged. “We may be dead in a minute.”

“ What, do you want a kiss, too?” Black said dryly.

“ I do,” Kane said.

“ Shut up,” Black answered. “So why do you really want to know?” she asked Cross. “If you have something to say, then I’d prefer that you just say it.”

“ Yeah, you seem like the forward type,” Cross smiled.

He looked at the clearing. There were a few hundred yards of open space between them and the trees. Drawing a horde of charging Gorgoloth into the clearing was the only chance they had to funnel the brutes and control their movement to trap them in a cross-fire. In retrospect, staying deeper in the trees would have made it easier to avoid getting surrounded, but it would have been more difficult to set up any sort of defensible position.

I don’t want to die here, Cross thought. Somewhere else. Not in the Reach.

The mist thinned. Dark shapes took form in the distance, a mass of bobbing shadows.

Cross didn’t need to see the white spider. It was a guide, somehow, the world’s way of telling him where to go, only he’d seen it less and less those past months. He knew it was there, somewhere, out on a tree or crossing the path. They were supposed to be there, finding that crash.

Follow and you will find.

“ Dillon and I are on a mission,” he said. “We’re looking for something.”

“ Pray tell.”

“ The Woman in the Ice,” he said.

Cross noted Lucan’s reaction: he stiffened like a board, and his eyes fluttered open for a moment, as if waking from a dream, and then closed again.

Black flinched at mention of the Woman.

“ You’re heard of her,” Cross said.

“ Maybe,” Black said with a nod.

Thunder approached the tree line. The Gorgoloth would break into the clearing in a few moments. Cross’ spirit coiled up so hard she weighed down his limbs. He breathed in deep, pulled her into his lungs, and held her there.

“ I know you’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “You have a skeleton crew and only a handful of prisoners. Whatever you’re doing here, it’s not as a Revenger.” He had to raise his voice to be heard. “If we live through this…you and I have things to talk about.”

The sound of the approaching force grew louder by the second. Inky silhouettes bled into view through the dying fog. A second later, and the Gorgoloth were there.

A raucous battle howl rose at the edge of the trees, so powerful that the forest shook. Ebon-skinned nightmares charged out of the fog. They had stark white manes and ravenous blades, black flesh and white armor. They were harlequin marauders.

The Gorgoloth had oversized mouths that bore simian teeth. Clawed hands held weapons made from obsidian and shaved stone. Their armor was made of snow serpent scales, white bear skins and blood wolf hides. There were over a hundred of them, easily. Each stood almost seven feet tall, and they had knotted dark muscles and lupine feet.

The Gorgoloth horde charged forth, heedless of any danger.

A hundred Gorgoloth, Cross mused, is not all that many. At least it wasn’t when compared to the droves they usually traveled in, but that didn’t matter. Against rifles and two mages, they might as well have been a thousand. The Gorgoloth found ways to prevail through their overwhelming numbers, their fearlessness, and their sheer brutality.

The air grew thin as Black sent her spirit forward into the mob. A rain of hot razors fell onto the clearing. They seared through ebon flesh and burned the dead trees to the sound of howls and the stomach-churning stench of burnt skin.

The charge faltered perhaps for a moment. They roared ahead, undeterred.

A cyclone of dark fire leapt from Cross’ hands. It was small enough at first that he hurled it like a projectile, and as it flew through the air it exploded into a violent pyrotechnic twister the size of a truck. The black funnel was a whirlwind of ebon flames and blades that slashed through every Gorgoloth in its path. Blood and scorched flesh sprayed like steaming clumps of mud.

Automatic gunfire erupted from inside of the ship’s wreckage. The first line of Gorgoloth were struck down by bullets and tumbled to the ground. White blood splattered like greasy milk. Cross sensed Black’s spirit pull back as she fired into the Gorgoloth with her Winchester; the rattle and rapport of the rifle was much louder than Cross expected, and Black fired with expert precision, pumping the lever so quickly after each shot that her arm became a blur.

Gorgoloth fell in piles, tripped on one another, and crushed into the bodies of their brothers as they charged forward. Flesh and blood exploded. The air was a roar of battle cries and guttural yells.

The Gorgoloth cleared half the distance from the tree line, and they showed little sign of slowing. More shadows threatened from the surrounding fog.

Cross brought his spirit back. She billowed into the form of an edged shadow and sliced her way through barbaric ranks like a murder of ravenous crows. Ribbons of black flesh splashed onto earth made wet with blood. She returned as a cloud of vapor that soared into his lungs and burned them. She was exhausted, and Cross felt like he’d been running for hours.

Still the Gorgoloth came.

Cross fired his HK into the onrushing mob. They were closing fast. Sharp and heavy throwing stones as large as baseballs soared at the humans, only to crack and scatter in the air as Black’s spirit barely formed a shield around them in time.

He sensed the fatigue in both of their spirits. They needed time to recover. Just precious moments would help. He hoped that by releasing them one and then the other the spirits would each have chance enough to rest, but it wasn’t enough.

The Gorgoloth pulled to within thirty yards. Cross saw fury in their blank eyes and fanged visages. Dillon and Vos fired furiously into the small horde. Cross watched with horror as the ebon brutes reached the hull of the ship and swung stone axes and dark blades and broke into the vessel. Wood splintered and collapsed, and the two gunmen backed deeper into the wreckage and disappeared from sight.

“ Cover me!” Black shouted.

“ What?!”

Cross didn’t have time to argue. Black ducked away and moved behind the prisoners. She started undoing Lucan’s bonds.

What, is she going to offer the poor guy up as a snack?

He had only heartbeats before Gorgoloth were upon them. A rushing waves of bodies and weapons. The air thundered and the ground rattled, and Cross’ heart dropped to his feet. He didn’t feel himself move, but suddenly he was right there in front of them. His HK flashed four shots, and two Gorgoloth fell as the chamber clicked empty. His spirit turned into a fan of liquid fire that shot out in a gushing stream. Gorgoloth collapsed with their faces and hands melting. Cross crouched down and ripped the shotgun from the holster on his back.

He felt how weak his spirit was. She wouldn’t be able to keep it up.

He fired a blast from the shotgun. The force threw him back since he was off balance, but the shot tore off a Gorgoloth’s arm and sent the brute sideways.

Still they came, a wall of black warriors. They trampled their own dead. They had no fear.

Cross did. His body was cold with it. There was no way out, and no way to deal with so many.

He felt a presence behind him. It was massive and powerful, a looming force of immense and primal magic. The monstrous spirit erupted out of nowhere.

Arcane power pushed at Cross from behind and nearly froze him in place. Its touch was so chilled he felt his movements slowed. Pinpricks of shadow pierced his skin and crept into his muscles. Everything darkened. The sky turned midnight, and the mist became as thick as iron.

Cross fired his shotgun again. The blast seemed distant. A Gorgoloth’s face tore away in slow motion. Time froze. They trudged through air like dark ice.

He looked at the prisoners.

Lucan floated a full foot above the ground. Black stood behind him. Her hands were wreathed in arcane power, and all of her attention was focused on the floating prisoner. The energy she held paled compared to Lucan’s.

Everything paled compared to Lucan.

He was a catastrophe of light, a storm of cold electricity that twisted and danced across the surface of the hard ground like drops of arctic rain. His eyes and his heart glowed hot white. The air sucked toward him, as if he were some sort of void, an inescapable hole. Space bubbled. Cross felt something inside of him weaken, and his energy drained away like water from a punctured sack.

Lucan’s spirit was an enormous and screaming entity, a collective force of hundreds bound into an unstable mass. It was a clay thing, an idiot specter. It filled the space between the living and the dead like a churning miasma. Pain and rage and hatred and fear leaked from that collective like wisps of deadly steam.

Bolts of lightning leapt past Cross. He tasted an ionic chill. The bolts flashed into the horde of rushing Gorgoloth. The brute's bodies polarized: their black skin turned white as ash, while their hair and eyes burned black.

The air growled. Cross smelled burning blood. He pulled his spirit back and buried her as deep inside of himself as he possibly could. She resisted. She was caught up in the violent rush, the thrill of power. Cross bent her will. Even when her resistance caused a backlash of pain that rippled through his gut, he held firm.

Lucan held his hands up to his face. They drew close together, as if magnetic. The electricity danced and found the Gorgoloth, pierced through their chests, held each monster impaled on slivers of violent energy.

Then, Lucan dropped his hands, and the Gorgoloth exploded.

Their bodies tore apart almost silently. All that Cross heard was a series of soft thuds, like underwater explosions. The Gorgoloth’s ashen skin became clouds of white dust. Each of them froze for a moment, petrified, before they were blown apart.

A few seconds later, time caught up with them, and the sound of the explosions rang through the forest. The crack of electric fire roared out in every direction. Cold air blasted against Cross’ skin. He crouched into a ball and held his spirit tight to his soul, fearful she would somehow be torn away.

No. I’m not losing another.

He screamed as a storm of undead energy swept over him. Cross breathed in frozen fumes.

He sees a city of ice. He stands beneath it, in ancient rock chambers. The walls are dark stone, a glacial labyrinth filled with poison fumes that crystallize into bitter fog. Black stalactites dangle from the ceiling like predators.

This place is old. His life energy evaporates like steam.

Tunnels lead away from the chamber. They snake their way into hidden corners and ancient tombs. They wind their way down to a central hub, a frozen core. The air is so cold there it burns.

He sees a woman in the ice, frozen, a pale silhouette embedded in ebon glass. He has seen her before, and before this is all over he will see her again.

Cross barely rose his shield in time. He felt his spirit cry out as raw undead matter collided against her. Tendrils of dark magic flayed them both.

Lucan’s screams sounded through the air, a rising crescendo of pain. It might have been a thousand voices.

Cross held on. Cold wracked his body as he bowed into blasting waves of dark power, like standing in a flash flood of burning oil.

Those few moments felt like an eternity. Finally, the blast stopped.

Cross released his spirit the moment that Lucan’s lightning faded. She collapsed into a scattering cloud. He had to give her a chance to heal. His own body shook with pain. He was soaked with cold sweat and the frozen drool of ghosts.

One more second spent being pummeled by those energies and he’d have lost his spirit for good, he was sure of it. She wracked his side with a sharp snap of pain. She was angry, and she wanted him to know it.

Lucan fell to his knees. His head lowered and his eyes closed. He looked barely alive, let alone conscious. His skin was damp with sweat, and he breathed rapidly, almost hyperventilating.

Black had somehow shielded Kane and Ekko. While visibly shaken, they appeared relatively unharmed, and they gripped each other tightly, like they were lost at sea. Cross saw Dillon and Vos out of the corner of his eye, alive and well and on their way to join them.

The Gorgoloth, all hundred or more of them, were dead and gone. Where they’d stood was a field of smoking black meat and ash. Grisly steam melted snow from the trees. The scene smelled like a burning slaughterhouse.

Kane laughed.

“ Lucan…that was COOL!”

Black bound Lucan’s wrists behind his back.

Cross seized the opportunity. He reloaded, walked up to Black, and pressed the barrel of his HK against her temple.

“ What,” he said. “The hell. Was that?”

“ Hey!”

Vos trained his gun on Cross, but only for a moment. Dillon forced Vos’ MP5 to the ground and wrapped his arm around the other man’s throat. Before Vos could adjust, Dillon had a knife-point to his face.

“ Uh-uh,” Dillon said calmly. “You clearly don’t know who you’re screwing with.”

“ Neither do you,” Black barked.

“ Tell me what’s going on,” Cross said to her. “I know that you’re not here on Revenger business. There is no way that a warlock as powerful as Lucan and a troupe of vampires would be shipped anywhere without a full contingent of Black Scar guards. There were bodies from the wreck, but not that many bodies…and that means you only had a small team with you. That’s not like the Revengers.” Her expression was furious. Cross nodded. “You’re doing something off the record,” he said. “Tell me I’m right.”

“ You’re right,” Lucan said. His voice took both Cross and Black by surprise. “I am far too dangerous to be out here in the wilderness.”

“ Yeaaaah!” Kane shouted.

“ Shut up, Kane!” Black snapped.

“ I want answers,” Cross insisted. “Now…please.” He lowered the gun. “No more games. It isn’t coincidence that we found you out here.”

“ What does that mean?” she asked.

“ The Lith guided us here,” Cross said. “We were meant to find you.”

“ Why?”

“ I think it’s because you can help us. With our mission. And maybe…maybe we can help you, too.”

Black laughed quietly.

“ So you think our meeting is…what, destiny?” she asked with a dour grin. “You believe in that shit? In prophecy?”

Cross hesitated.

“ Yes. I do.”

Black’s smile vanished. Her piercing eyes locked with his. Her gaze was firm and commanding, but it betrayed traces of fear, and sadness. She considered him.

Cross could tell that she was usually made of stone, that she redefined the notion of No Nonsense. She likely garnered equal amounts of resentment and respect from those who knew her. On any other day, he was sure she’d have just told him to go to hell.

But not today.

“ All right,” she said at last. Her voice was quiet and controlled. “All right.” She swallowed. “Maybe you were meant to find us, Cross, because the truth is…I do need your help.”

FOUR

DEEP

They camped as far from the scene of the battle as possible, since the entire area reeked of burning flesh and smelted metal, and the ground looked like scorched meat pie and had the consistency of hot tar. Even the carrion birds dared not come close.

The camp was east of the dead forest, near some fallen dark stones that had probably once been part of a shrine or a remote monastery. The ground was cold and hard, the air the same, while the sky was vast and dark. Whenever he camped out under the open sky, Cross got the sensation that he was floating in a black sea. It wasn’t a feeling he particularly enjoyed.

Kane and Ekko were allowed use of their hands so that they could eat. Vos passed out MREs — Cross got Cheddar Mac, not that any of the flavors could really be distinguished from one another — and they collected cool water from a small stream that ran into an ice field.

Cross’ spirit hovered at the edge of the white wastes. He felt Black’s spirit circle the camp like a hungry dog.

Of Lucan’s spirit, there was no trace.

Cross had never heard of such a thing. No spirit as powerful as that could go undetected.

And yet no one had ever lost their spirit and gained a new one, until I did. Nothing is impossible, especially when we don’t fully understand the rules of the game.

The vampire had a hood over its head. It stood rigid as a board and hovered inches above the ground, held aloft by the same invisible force that generated the flaming cage that constrained it. The vampire made no sound.

Lucan, Kane and Ekko all sat nearby while they ate. Kane and Ekko shared a blanket to hold off the night’s chill. Lucan sat alone, absent-mindedly eating while he stared off into the eastern wastes. Vos and Dillon stood guard, suspiciously watching each other as much as they did the prisoners and the plains for any sign of trouble.

“ Lucan is special,” Black began. She and Cross sat a few meters away from the prisoners, on opposite ends of a low cook fire just beyond a jumble of stones that might have once been a wall. Coffee boiled inside of an old black pot that dangled over the campfire. “His spirit isn’t like yours and mine. It’s…older. Larger. More primal, I suppose.”

“ He looks like he’s in his forties,” Cross noted. Cross was twenty-seven. He would be lucky if he lived to see thirty-two or thirty-three. Short life expectancy was a fact of life with warlocks and witches, who spent most of their lives tied to their arcane spirits, bonded with spectral undead forces that literally fused with their souls. When you held hands with the dead, eventually they pulled you down into the grave. “How has he survived this long?”

“ His spirit has been controlled and repressed for most of his life,” Black said. “Lucan Keth was born in the wild, bought from his parents by slavers, and raised to be used as a weapon. He has never known control of his spirit, because no one who ever controlled him has wanted him to. Without thaumaturgic constraints, his spirit would run wild. It would go on a destructive rampage.”

“ Are there any others like him?”

“ If there are, I’ve never heard of them. I doubt they’d survive past puberty without strict supervision by an experienced mage.”

“ How did Lucan’s spirit know to target the Gorgoloth, and not us?” Even though Cross and his spirit had been forced to protect themselves from Lucan’s power, it had become clear that the only reason they’d survived at all was because Lucan wasn’t trying to harm them. Cross didn’t want to believe there was anyone with that much power, especially not someone who had so little control. He remembered the feel of Lucan’s spirit when it had blazed over him, and he went cold from the memory. Cross had been to the necropolis of Koth and had stood in the presence of the Old One: the touch of Lucan’s spirit was colder by far.

“ We’ve had Lucan at Black Scar long enough that we’ve learned how to focus his spirit’s rage based on how we measure its release from the thaumaturgic bonds. It’s a combination of timing and degree.” Black poured them each a cup of coffee. The steam felt soothing in the brittle air. “No one really controls Lucan’s spirit. The best we can do is manipulate it.”

Cross chewed on that.

I’ve never seen such pure destructive force contained in a human being.

“ Where are you taking him?” he asked. “And, more importantly, why are you taking him there?”

Black bit her lip, and looked away. Cross got the feeling that she wasn’t used to being in a situation she had no control over.

“ They have my lover,” she said at last. “And if I don’t give them Lucan, Cole is dead.”

“ Who is ‘they’?”

“ A gang of mercenaries and thieves led by my brother, Cradden Black.”

“ Wait a second,” Cross said. “Your brother kidnapped your boyfriend…”

“ Girlfriend.”

“ I’m sorry?”

“ Girlfriend, you misogynist prick. Lara Cole is my girlfriend.”

“ OK,” Cross said. “Your brother kidnapped your girlfriend, and the only way for you to get her back is to give him Lucan…the most powerful warlock I’ve ever encountered, and I’d bet I’m not the only person who would say that. Do I have all of that right so far?”

“ That about sums it up,” Black said sardonically.

“ You’re willing to go through all of this, for her?” he asked. Black nodded. “She must be pretty special.”

“ She’s worth dying for,” Black said matter-of-factly.

Cross nodded. Of all of the things he’d ever known a Revenger to do, stealing a prisoner out of Black Scar to free a loved one hardly ranked among the worst. Still, Black clearly wasn’t too concerned with the ramifications of releasing Lucan’s spirit into potentially deadly hands.

“ What does Cradden want with Keth?” he asked.

“ No,” she said, avoiding the question. “Your turn. I know you’re offering to help…and I also know that you aren’t doing it out of the kindness of your heart. What do you want from me.”

“ You know what,” he said. “The Woman in the Ice.”

Black watched him like he was something poisonous.

“ I don’t know…”

“ No,” Cross interrupted, sternly. “You know something.”

You have to.

Follow and you will find.

“ Why do you need to find her?” Black asked him.

“ Why do you follow up every question I ask with another question?”

Black laughed.

“ The art of negotiation, my friend.”

“ We’re on a mission,” Cross said after a moment. “For Mother.”

He could tell that his answer caught her off guard.

“ As in…the White Mother?”

“ No, your mother,” Cross said. “Yes, the White Mother.”

“ And what does the White Mother want with the Woman in the Ice?”

“ You know I can’t tell you that,” Cross said after a pause. He considered telling her, but he still wasn’t quite sure if Danica Black was the sort of person who would care or not.

Because something so evil you can’t even imagine it is going to slaughter thousands of people, and we have to stop it. Not that I have the faintest idea how finding the Woman in the Ice is supposed to help.

“ I don’t know where the Woman is,” Black said. “But I’ve heard of her.”

“ Yes,” Cross said with a nod. “And not many have.”

“ Cole could find her.” Every time Black said her lover’s name, Cross heard her voice crack a little. “Lara hires herself out as a gun and a guide for treasure hunters and archaeologists. The last time that I spoke to her was just before my brother took her, and she said she was leading an expedition that was looking for the Woman in the Ice. And that they were getting close.”

The fact that someone else was looking for the Woman presented problems all its own. Cross decided to file that particular problem away in his head until he dealt with the other eighty-six already on his list.

“ Did she say where they were going?”

“ No,” Black said. “Just that she was somewhere here in the Reach.”

Cross nodded.

Damn it. I hate prophecies. Layers and layers of them now, stacking up, burying us deep. It had been a prophecy that had led to the mission in the first place. Another had led him from the Lith camp to the Dreadnaught. And now this.

“ Well?” Black asked.

“ I’m thinking.”

“ Does it usually take this long?”

“ Yes. Shut up, please.”

The air turned dark. Ebon claws of shadow crept over the horizon, and pale fog thickened close to the ground. There were strange calls in the distance — carrion birds, wolves, inhuman echoes that seemed to crawl into the width of the sky. The wind died down, but that didn’t help with the incessant chill. Not far away, Kane and Ekko talked quietly, while Dillon and Vos struck up a conversation. Lucan stared out into the night, his eyes glazed.

“ Cross…”

“ What does your brother want with Lucan?” he interrupted.

“ I told you, I don’t know.”

“ That’s not what you said. You didn’t say anything. You just dodged the question,” Cross said.

“ You’re a pushy bastard, you know that?” she snapped. Danica Black had her limits, too, it seemed. The fact that she had something of a temper wouldn’t make much of a difference in Black Scar, he supposed; if a prisoner was lucky there they’d get beaten to within an inch of their life.

“ Is Cradden a Revenger?” he asked.

“ No,” Black said dismissively. “Not all of Ma and Pa Black’s children turned out well.”

Great, Cross thought.

Silence again fell between them, longer than the last time.

“ I’ll make sure,” Black finally said, after the lack of conversation had almost lulled Cross to sleep, “that Lara helps you find what you’re looking for. All you have to do is help me deliver Lucan to my brother.” She shrugged, and smiled darkly. “Without a ship, I can’t exactly do this with just Vos to help me. And Cradden has men. Lots of men. If I waltz in there with just two guns he’ll screw us.”

“ Why not use Lucan?” Cross asked, afraid to hear the answer. “You obviously have no qualms about doing that.”

“ Screw you,” Black said quietly. “Cradden’s my brother. I’m not sure I’d be able to protect both he and Cole if I turned Lucan lose like that.”

Cross thought about that for a minute. He let Black wait while he pondered his options.

“ We’ll help you, and you’ll get Cole to help us. But there’s a caveat,” he said. “I can’t let you give Lucan to your brother. Especially if you’re not going to tell me what Cradden has in store for him.”

Black smiled, almost sadly.

“ Is that right?”

“ Yes,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to give him up.”

“ Then go to hell,” Black said, and she stood up.

“ Can I finish?” Cross said, as calmly as he could manage. Cross considered his own people skills less than stellar, especially when he had to deal with women. Women who looked like Danica were particularly tough for him to handle. “I’ll help you get Cole back, if you’ll convince her to help us.” He stood up, and looked Black in the eye. “But I can’t let you give Lucan to anyone but me. He’s too dangerous. He has to go back to Thornn.”

Black watched him carefully. She reminded him of an angry cat. Her nostrils flared with barely contained anger. A sudden cold breeze caught her dark red hair and pulled it across her face. Cross couldn’t have pulled his eyes from her even if he’d wanted to.

Stare away, stud. She has a girlfriend. Even if she wasn’t a lesbian, you’d be about as interesting to her as a pile of corkwood.

“ I don’t want Cradden hurt,” she said at last.

“ I don’t want him hurt, either,” Cross said. “But I also can’t let him have Lucan. And I need to find the Woman in the Ice. A lot of lives may depend it.”

She shrugged.

“ Saving lives doesn’t mean much to me,” she said matter-of-factly. “You have to protect what’s yours. That’s all that matters.”

Black left Cross alone, and walked back over to the rest of the group.

Cross ran his hands over his face. He felt like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were raw and tired, and his skin was so dry he could’ve used his face to take the edge off of a piece of wood.

Why the hell can’t anything ever be easy?

After he meditated on his conversation with Black for a few minutes, Cross went and found Dillon. His hands itched beneath his leather gauntlets, but with how quickly his new spirit rose to anger he found that he needed to wear them almost constantly.

The Reach was cold, pale and vast. The dead forest where they’d battled the Gorgoloth was only half a mile away, but it looked much further.

Night fell. The sky was deep and bloody purple, like a discolored bruise. Ice-hard snow padded the ground.

The main campfire had been dug deep and entrenched in a low ring of packed snow to protect it from the wind. Its flames cast the figures around it in ghostly shadow.

Dillon had already ventured back across the bridge after the battle. He’d fetched both of their mounts and the camel. Cross had no idea how Dillon had coaxed them across the log, and he decided it was better if he didn’t.

Cross and Dillon sat together, away from the others, and spoke quietly. Kane and Ekko were both fast asleep, wrapped in each other’s arms beneath a thick wool blanket. Lucan kneeled, as if in prayer, also wrapped in a blanket and also, as far as Cross and Dillon could tell, unconscious. Black read a small book at her seat on the opposite side of the big fire, while Vos was just out of sight behind her, walking the perimeter.

The two men ate warm beans heated in tin cans. Cross thought they tasted like asphalt. The ground was hard beneath them, and it was so cold it more or less nullified the blankets they hid under.

Cross brought Dillon up to speed regarding his conversation with Danica Black. He left out what Black had said to him there at the end about saving lives not meaning much to her. He still wasn’t exactly sure what to make of that.

“ Shit,” Dillon said when Cross finished. “Man…this is turning out to be a real pain in the ass, Cross.”

“ Sorry,” Cross said. “What did you expect when they handed you the job of babysitting me?”

“ Trouble,” Dillon laughed. “Not like this, though.” He paused, and cast a furtive glance at Black. “You, uh…you buy her story?”

Cross took a sip of cowboy coffee. It tasted like they’d made it with dirt instead of coffee grounds.

“ I think so,” he said after a moment. “But we need to be careful.”

“ You think she’s setting us up?”

“ No,” Cross said. He stretched his arms out. He could have used a healing salve, but he wanted to hold on to what small supply they had in case they needed it later. Black and Vos had salvaged everything they possibly could from the Dreadnaught’s wreckage, but even with what they’d recovered there was still barely enough supplies for the five people from the ship. Cross and Dillon had enough of their own supplies, but there was very little they could spare. “No,” Cross said again. “I truly believe she wants her girlfriend back.”

“ I dig the fact that she has a girlfriend,” Dillon said with a wry smile.

I don’t, Cross thought.

“ Just because she wants to get her girl back,” Dillon continued, “doesn’t mean she won’t turn on us when the deal is done. You know, so she doesn’t have to keep up her end of the bargain.”

“ Yeah…in the end, she may not want to give up Lucan,” Cross said. His beans were gone, but his stomach still growled with hunger. “So like I said…we’ll be careful.”

Dillon threw the rest of his coffee into the fire, and pulled a licorice root out of his pocket, which he chewed on thoughtfully.

“ You got any family, Cross?” he asked. They’d been on the mission for weeks, but Cross realized he knew little about the ranger.

“ No,” he said with some hesitation.

He sees Snow, burning on the train.

“ You have a sister, right?” Cross asked him. “And a nephew?”

“ Yeah,” Dillon said. “Jeraline’s husband died a few years back. She’s been taking care of Dwayne on her own. He’s a good kid. Cute. Loud, though.” Dillon laughed. “I don’t see them too much,” he said. “But I would like to see them again.” He looked at Cross. “I’ll follow your lead. Just try not to get us killed, all right?”

Cross nodded.

“ Fair enough,” he said. “Shall we?”

They rose and went to speak with Black. There were some things that needed to be sorted out.

They took their seats by the fire and accepted more coffee, this time from a fresh kettle that Black had just made. It tasted slightly less gritty than what Cross and Dillon had been drinking.

Black sat bundled up in a blanket. Her face looked ashen in the firelight. Vos came over and stood with his weapon folded in his arms.

“ We’ll help you get Cole back,” Cross continued. “In return, you convince her to help us find what we’re looking for. In either case, when this is all over, Lucan Keth comes with us.”

“ Back to Thornn,” Vos said with an angry smile on his face.

“ Yes,” Cross answered. “Back to Thornn.”

“ Do you want us to bend over, too?” Vos asked.

Dillon blew Vos a mocking kiss.

“ I don’t like being bullied, Cross,” Black said. “But you have to protect what’s yours. Vos and I can’t do this on our own. If you help us get Cole out of there alive, and you help us get to safety…sure, I’ll let you have Lucan. And I’ll ask Cole to tell you what you want to know.”

“ So we have a deal?” Cross asked.

“ We have a deal,” Black said.

Vos bristled, but he didn’t say anything.

“ Where’s the exchange supposed to take place?” Dillon asked.

“ At some ruins to the east,” she said. “They should be about a day’s march, I think. If we still had the airship, we’d have been there by now.”

“ Wait,” Cross said. “When were you supposed to be there?”

“ Today,” Vos said. His words were cold.

Cross looked at Black, and she met his gaze. Her expression was controlled, but he noted the worry.

“ She’s fine,” Cross said.

“ Yeah,” Dillon said, sounding less convinced.

“ Of course she’s fine,” Black said firmly. “I don’t need you to tell me that. If Cradden went through this much trouble to get Lucan from me, he wouldn’t kill his hostage and wreck his chances. Besides, he knows damn well he’ll never get anything out of me if he hurts her. But…” She paused. That worry returned to her face. It was subtle, almost too subtle to notice, but her eyes creased ever so slightly, and the inflection of her voice cracked, just a hair. “If he thinks we’re cheating him, or if he thinks we’re not going to deliver…then there’s no telling what he’ll do. He can be a real spiteful bastard when he’s cornered. But he’s not stupid.”

“ He also has a good crew with him,” Vos said. “A half-dozen mercs, at least.”

“ Well, that’s great,” Dillon said quietly. “Do you have a layout for the ruins?”

Black produced a map. The ruins in question were those of a city, depicted in carefully cast lines of charcoal and ink on a faded piece of yellowed parchment. If the map was accurate, there were plenty of buildings in the ruins, at least ten square city blocks worth.

“ All right,” Black said. “So what’s the plan?”

“ Wait,” Cross said. “There’s one more thing.” The air stiffened as a cold and dead wind came at them. Cross rocked in place to try and stay warm. The sky was clear and vast. “What made the ship crash?”

Vos looked at Black, as if for permission to answer. Black swallowed, and she took a deep and shuddering breath.

“ We’re not sure,” she said. “Something…dark.”

“ Dark skinned?” Dillon asked.

“ Maybe,” Black said. “It wasn’t human. Royce…the pilot…whatever it was, it tore Royce and the entire cockpit in half. But right before it happened, he said he saw something, and whatever it was sent him into a panic.”

“ Well…what was it?” Dillon asked when Black looked away. “What is it the man said?”

“ He said it was a shadow,” Vos answered. “A ghost. A cold, dark ghost.”

He looked terrified.

“ Ebon Cities?” Cross asked after an uncomfortable silence.

“ I don’t know,” Vos answered. “I don’t think so.”

“ No,” Black said with certainty. Her eyes were lost out in the dark. The tiny campsite was a speck of light in the dark sea of the plains. “This was something…old. You could feel it through the walls of the ship. You could feel its presence, so cold and vast and…dead. Like a heartbeat that came from the bottom of a pit.” She looked back at them. “That’s the best I can describe it. It was like a hole. Like a void.”

Black’s eyes stared back into the memory, stuck inside the vision of whatever they’d seen when the ship crashed, and of what Black’s spirit had felt.

Vos watched Black as she sat there, quiet. Cross saw that the male Revenger looked at his superior officer with concern.

“ Whatever it is,” Vos said, “it tore the control room right out of the damned ship. We were mid-air when it happened. The whole crate just spiraled right out of the sky.” He spat on the ground, and rubbed it into the hard dirt with his boot. “We lost five men. Five.”

Again, there was silence.

Cross thought that he recognized what Black was talking about. It had been described as a dream, a nightmare of an absence, a dark void. An evil older than the new world, and it roamed free. It was a hunter, which meant that it might have been the same entity that he and Dillon had been sent to stop.

No, not to stop. To find out how to stop. No one can take that thing on alone.

It was out there. Waiting.

I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I hope that’s not what it is. Either way, we’re in it deep now.

After a while, they went over Black’s intelligence about the ruins where her lover was being held, and laid their plans.

FIVE

RUINS

The ruins where the Blacks were to conduct the exchange were of a place called Shul Ganneth, once a temple-city of the lupine race called the Maloj. Not much was known about the Maloj, save that they’d been bestial creatures with foul appetites and a talent for tribal magic. They were also thought to have been extinct for several years, possibly even before the remnants of their civilization had been fused with earth during The Black. Only bits and pieces of their culture remained in the form of ruins, artifacts and fossils found in the wilderness.

The mixed group of Revengers, Southern Claw soldiers and Black Scar inmates traveled at a good pace all through the next day. The air was moist, filled with a thick and freezing fog that blocked sight past half-a-mile and that left them constantly clammy and cold. The ground they traveled over was mostly flat plains covered in snow and beds of smooth ice-covered stone, stony ridges and partially frozen streams.

They traveled on foot and spared the horses and the camel the extra weight, save for those times when Dillon rode ahead to scout. The terrain they passed through was mostly wide open country, so they moved in a spread out formation, with the prisoners at the center, shackled and bound to each other by their wrists.

Cross’ legs ached. The effort of walking on slick ice and brittle ground was exhausting. The air was the color of milk, and thick with frost. Patches of ice covered Cross’ armored coat, and the blankets on the animals turned white with brittle snow powder.

“ Are we there yet?” Kane groaned after a while. No one answered.

“ What’s their story?” Cross asked Black. The two of them walked behind and a good distance away from the rest of the group, though not out of any intent. Cross was stuck leading the slower camel, while Black was busy checking maps of the area, which slowed her pace. Cross’ horse also clunked along beside them.

“ Kane and Ekko?” she said. “They’re stowaways.”

“ How’s that?”

“ They were trying to escape from Black Scar. I’m still not sure how they did it, but they managed to sneak out of general population and smuggle themselves onboard the Dreadnaught. I guess they thought they’d sneak away the next time it left.”

“ Which is when you ‘borrowed’ it,” Cross said.

“ There,” she said. She ignored his comment. “It’s just past that ridge, another mile or two.”

They reached the ridge, which was composed of a number of tightly clustered and jagged rock formations. Sizable clefts in the razor-sharp stones formed questionable paths that led to the other side. Those paths looked like they’d been sheared clean through the rock with some enormous blade.

Rather than pass through right away, the group rested. Dillon went on ahead to check out the ruins, which were barely visible about a mile or so off, at the edge of a thinning field of silver-blue mist.

He wasn’t gone long.

“ There’s no way to get into that place without being seen.” He drew a rough map of Shul Ganneth in the snow. He explained that the exterior wall was a massive dome that bore a single continuous crack down its western side. From what Dillon had seen, it was the only easy way to get in.

“ There are some doors on the far end near some separate ruins, but there’s no way to open them. There isn’t even a handle.” He scratched some squares inside of the circle he’d made to represent the dome. “These are buildings. They’re all over the inside of the dome. If I can get close enough to that crack without being seen, I can slip off and hide in the ruins. I might need a distraction so that I can pull it off, though.”

“ Can you scale the dome?” Black asked. “Maybe come in at the top, where the crack starts?”

“ Only if you and Vos have stashed away some pretty incredible climbing gear that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t wish that climb on anyone. That stone is smooth, old and unstable. I barely even trust walking in there…that place looks ready to collapse.”

“ Fine,” Vos said. “We’ll head straight in then. The way I like it.”

“ Good to know,” Cross said sarcastically. “So are we ready?”

They moved through mist made orange by the dusk sun. A hard wind drove across the plain and carried snow dust and white grit that made it suddenly difficult to see past a few hundred yards. They kept to a path clear of ground snow, a stretch of pale hard stone broken with age. The path twisted and curved through ripped ice. Cross felt a cold that gnawed down to his bones.

And then, Shul Ganneth.

It seemed to sneak up on them from out of the icy fog. It was squat and troglodytic, a broken shell like a preposterously gargantuan egg. Its outer walls were smooth dark stone coated in a layer of pale ice. The structure was much larger than Cross had expected.

The fog receded from the dark round walls as the group drew close. Its crumbling carapace looked like a vast stone crab.

Fields of eight-foot-high wooden stakes bordered the stone path that led to the city. The pale wooden poles were sharp and old, covered in dirty ice and dark stains. Cross tasted torment in the air, the whispered rants of long faded spirits whose physical bodies had died in great pain. Those spirits were long gone, but their suffering had been such that their voices left a spectral imprint on the area.

The group marched slowly through the path of stakes. They saw no bones or bodies. The dome of Shul Ganneth towered before them. It protruded from the bitter and frozen earth like a scab.

Vos led Lucan on the back of Cross’ horse. Kane and Ekko were tethered to the camel’s saddle, which Cross held at the rear of the party. Black rode on Dillon’s bay, and while it was clear that neither she nor the animal were terribly comfortable with the arrangement, they made a good show of it.

The vampire prisoner floated behind them, drawn by the power of Danica’s implement. It was a floating flare that snarled into the darkness, a moving undead torch.

Cross didn’t send his spirit out until they neared the entrance to the ruins, in part because he feared lost souls in the area, but also because doing so would alert Cradden Black earlier than they’d have liked. Cradden was a warlock, and even though Cradden’s gang was almost undoubtedly already watching them it would be difficult for him to read the strength of Cross’ spirit if she was reined in, at least until they got closer.

No need to make this more difficult for ourselves than it already is.

They passed into the crack in the ruined dome wall. It was a welcome relief to be in out of the wind, but the air inside of Shul Ganneth was so utterly still and cold it was almost paralyzing. Cross watched his breath crystallize, and felt his lungs burn.

The vampire’s bonds gave them a fleeting view of the ruins inside of the dome, which was good, because the light from outside seemed incapable of penetrating the unnaturally dense shadows. They walked in darkness as thick as oil. White firelight bounced off of jagged and broken structures made of crumbling limestone rimed with frost. The buildings were uneven and covered in sharp crenellations and dangerous edges. Doorways had tilted sideways and steps looked like blades. The ground was dry and covered with rubble and bones that were so soft they collapsed underfoot. The air smelled cold and dirty. Streets led off to nowhere. Structures seemed to float out of the darkness, which was so deep it could have stretched for miles. They walked through a sea of night, an ink stain addled with debris.

Less than a minute after they entered the city, Dillon slipped from his hidden position next to the camel and vanished into the shadows.

Cross’ chest was tight. There were eyes on them, and something more: a presence, vast and ugly and overwhelming. It was foreign, not borne of that place, but at the same time deeply rooted to it. It was an intruder that had melded with the ruins themselves — something vast, and dark, and very old.

Cross drew his HK45, and made his spirit ready. Her spectral skin smoothed over him like a warm tide. She spat at the presence that Cross had sensed. She was so miniscule compared to it, a firefly in a dark sky.

Shadows fell over them like black dust. Decayed facades and crumbling steps and massive doorways leered at them from the edge of the black air like bitter faces.

“ Daaaamn,” Kane muttered. His words echoed like a clap of thunder. “Sorry.” His second word carried even louder than the first, an avalanche in the dark.

Cross looked at him, and raised a finger to his lips.

A lantern appeared in the murk. Danica Black spurred the horse forward. They rode past rows of broken stone fence and between statues of half-eaten lupine warriors. Clumps of petrified clay littered the ground. The frost had gone gray with age. Cross smelled sage and animal musk.

The lantern bearer waited up ahead. He was a stocky and unshaved warrior with leather armor and a chain coat, and he wore a double-barreled shotgun on his hip.

He nodded towards an alcove behind him. It took Cross’ eyes a moment to make out the structure in the muted light — a temple that seemed to melt out of the shadows. The building was cylindrical and very tall, with crumbling columns and spiky protrusions that covered its shell like quills.

“ Danica,” said a voice from the dark. It wasn’t the shotgun bearer, but a second man, a small and wiry individual with a goatee and a black pilot’s coat straight out of World War I. Cross thought the man looked like he should have behind the controls of a Fokker…he even wore aviation goggles. Cross couldn’t begin to fathom how the man could see anything in the impenetrable murk, unless those goggles were some sort of arcane implement. “You made it,” the aviator said with a broad smile. “Cradden was starting to worry.”

“ Hello, Gregor,” Black said icily. “Killed any women or children lately?”

“ Darling, you tease,” he laughed.

“ Can we get on with it?” Vos growled.

“ Lighten up, Vos,” Gregor said with the same salesman’s smile. “We’re all friends here.”

“ Be that as it may,” Black said, “I’d rather take an acid bath than stand this close to you any longer than I have to, Gregor. So like Vos said…let’s get on with it.”

Gregor’s eyes moved to Lucan. The captive warlock sat stoically in the saddle, his eyes on something that wasn’t really there. Whatever the Revengers did to keep Lucan’s immense power contained seemed to reduce the warlock to a zombie-like state.

“ Who are your friends?” Gregor asked Black.

“ Prisoners, and my aides.”

“ But only one vampire,” Gregor said with a sad shake of his head.

“ I’ll discuss that with my brother,” she said. “And no one else.”

Gregor laughed again.

“ You’re a bitch, Danica.”

“ So are you, Gregor.”

“ You go in alone,” Gregor answered.

Cross stretched out his senses through his spirit. The looming shadow that clung to the walls of Shul Ganneth didn’t feel as oppressive as it had before; it had receded to more of a background murmur of spectral white noise rather than a roar of black sound. All Cross heard now were distant whispers through the sonic fog.

Besides Danica’s spirit and his own was one more: a hostile female spirit with an incredible level of aggressive power. Cross could only surmise she belonged to Cradden Black.

If he’s the only one of his gang that’s a mage, at least that’s one advantage that we have. Cross wasn’t sure if that fact made up for how badly Cradden’s gang outgunned them, but it was a start.

“ I can’t take all of the prisoners in on my own,” Danica said.

“ That’s a sad story,” Gregor smiled.

“ Just let one of us help her get the prisoners inside,” Cross interrupted.

“ Yeah!” Kane added. “Don’t be such an ass-hat.”

Vos cracked Kane on the back of the head with a gloved fist.

“ I was trying to help, you hemorrhoid!”

“ My God, you’re stupid,” Vos snarled at Kane. “Do you want to die?”

Kane looked up at him.

“ No? Wait…could you repeat the question…?”

“ Shut up!” Black snapped.

For as often as they hit him, Cross thought, I’m starting to wonder if he doesn’t actually enjoy it.

Gregor looked at Cross.

“ Who the hell are you?”

“ Cross.”

“ You work for Black Scar? You don’t look like a Revenger.”

“ I’m not.”

Gregor and the shotgun carrier exchanged looks.

“ Fine,” Gregor said after a moment. He pointed at Cross. “You can help her take Lucan and the vampire inside. Follow Keegan.” The lantern bearer took a step forward. “The rest of you will wait here with me.” He looked at Black. “I’d behave if I were you. If anything goes wrong, your dyke girlfriend is dead. Mercer is a hell of a good shot.”

“ Who’s Mercer?” she asked.

“ The sniper who gets to blow your lesbian bitch’s skull off if you screw this up. I’m only sad that I won’t get to do it myself.”

“ Gregor,” Vos said. “I’d advise you to shut up.”

“ Still got a crush on your boss, there, Vos?” Gregor laughed.

“ Keep laughing,” Vos smiled. “I’ll be the one who kills you.”

“ The dyke will go first,” Gregor laughed.

The look that Black gave Gregor would have killed a small animal. Gregor just smiled. He wore a number of knives in a harness slung over his aviator’s vest, and he had a pair of six-shooters secured in a hip-strap around his waist.

Black turned and nodded at Cross, and he took the reins of Lucan’s horse. Vos moved to secure Kane and Ekko.

“ Take care of yourself, Chief,” Vos told Danica.

“ You, too.”

Black rode ahead first. The vampire floated silently in her wake, a blazing beacon, and they followed the wordless Keegan into the temple structure.

Cross and Vos exchanged nods, and Cross led Lucan into the building. The lamp faded into the shadows behind them as he and Lucan followed Danica Black into a deeper dark.

SIX

TRADES

Cross’ and Danica’s spirits swirled and twisted around one another as the mages rode down the tunnel. Cross kept his as contained and as close as he could, but she was anxious and almost out of control again, and reining her in made his head throb and his eyes sore. She pushed with skin-chilling force as strong as a hard wind. Her incessant whispers drowned his senses. He could almost make out her words, and they were less than friendly.

The horses’ hooves clattered on the cracked stone as they rode the length of the rubble-strewn corridor. The walls were ancient crumbling sandstone decorated with hieroglyphs, which as far as Cross could tell were random and nonsensical: whorls and spirals and collapsing eyes, discs and curved fangs, moons that fell from idiot skies. The ceiling was just out of sight, a yawning strip of eye-numbing black, and the way ahead was a perpetual hole. The tunnel walls seemed to press in on them. Every sound was a deep and hollow echo.

Glassy frost reflected the light of the vampire’s chains, which lit their way with a flickering orange glow. Keegan walked a good distance ahead of them. Cross tried to remember the names and number of Cradden’s gang, which Black and Vos had given to he and Dillon when they’d put together their strategy outside of Shul Ganneth.

That prick we just met, Gregor. Syn, a swordswoman. Maddox, a Doj. Keegan the silent lantern bearer. A gunman named Taske. Cradden himself. And now this Mercer, who sounds like he’s a sniper. Hopefully Cradden Black doesn’t have any more surprise allies.

They came to a wide and open chamber, a massive courtyard surrounded by collapsing columns and dark alcoves. Felled statues of wolf gods and bits of broken rock littered the ground. Above them hung darkness so rich it could have been mistaken for a night sky, but it was just the underbelly of the cracked dome. The air smelled and tasted of mold.

Two men waited near the center of the enormous room. They rested against a massive stone wolf’s head that must have once belonged to a much larger statue; the stone bust lay cracked and on its side, half of its face smashed away. One of the men was a Doj, a mountainous and broad-shouldered humanoid nearly eight feet tall. The Doj’ muscles bulged beneath a brown flak jacket, and his tanned flesh was covered with tattoos and runes. The blade strapped to his back was nearly as long as Cross was tall.

The second man was unquestionably Cradden Black. His resemblance to Danica was impossible to miss: red hair, sharp eyes, angular cheekbones, and a sour grin. Even with his tightly trimmed beard he was almost a reflection of her. He even wore black leather armor.

“ Hey, Sis.”

Danica didn’t say anything. She stopped her horse a good twenty paces away from her brother and the Doj, who Cross surmised was the infamous Maddox.

“ So…” Cradden said with a smile. “I get the silent treatment tonight?”

“ What the hell do you expect me to say?” Danica snapped. “It’s taking all of my willpower to not shoot you in the face.”

Cradden nodded, and kept smiling.

“ Who’s your friend?” he asked.

“ Hired help,” she answered.

“ Your hired help is a warlock,” Cradden said coolly. “Aren’t you, friend?”

“ Cross,” he said. “I’m not your friend. But I am a warlock.”

Cross sensed Cradden’s spirit, which was hostile and close. It was fast and surprisingly stealthy for a female spirit, and it circled the room like a darting lizard. Cross held his own spirit in check, which he’d been forced to do a lot more than normal over the past few days. If he allowed her to manifest into a combat-ready form Cradden would sense it, and Cross didn’t want to start any trouble until they at least knew where Cole was. Cross sensed Danica exercise the same restraint with her own spirit, but, like Cross’, Danica’s was angry and on edge, and she only barely had him contained.

All three spirits in the chamber bristled at one another’s presence. They pulsed and prodded, tensed their ethereal skin and pricked each other with sharp tendrils of arcane power. The air was volatile. Cross felt like he stood near a pool of gasoline with an open flame in his hand.

“ Hello, Lucan,” Cradden said to the captive warlock. “Do you remember me?”

Lucan Keth’s eyes opened, but only just. If he recognized Cradden Black, he made no sign of it.

“ Why is there only one vampire?” Cradden asked.

“ We had trouble. We crashed.”

“ Yeah, I saw that…”

“ Any idea how that might have happened?” Danica pressed.

“ Nope.”

“ You know, you could’ve helped us out. Bro.”

“ It wasn’t my problem,” Cradden said with a shrug. “You were told to get all of the merchandise to us on time. That was your job. Sis.”

Cross lost track of Keegan. The shotgun-toting mercenary vanished after he’d led them into the courtyard. Cross scanned the area. He couldn’t remember if the man had moved on through the massive room, or if he’d turned and gone back the way they came. There were plenty of felled columns and statues and bits of shattered stone debris that he could hide behind in the chamber, but he just as easily could have slipped away into one of the alcoves, as well.

Cross manifested his spirit. Rather than gather her into a wad of volatile energy, Cross tried to slip her stealthily along the walls. If he could, he’d use her to locate Keegan, as well as any of Cradden’s other men who might be hiding nearby.

“ Where’s Cole?” Danica asked.

“ Where are my vampires?”

“ I have replacements,” Danica said calmly.

“ I don’t want…”

“ Gladiators,” she said. “From Krul.”

Cross thought about that in the ensuing silence.

Wait…she must mean Kane and Ekko, Cross thought. Gladiators? Really?

Krul’s gladiators were the cream of the chattel crop. They were often engineered by morphorganic technology borrowed from the Cruj. If Danica was on the level, that meant Kane and Ekko were incredibly dangerous.

It also means she lied to me when she told me they were stowaways.

Cradden nodded his head in approval. He ran a hand over his beard, and then he laughed.

“ God damn, Sis, it’s good to see you. You always know just what I want. Just like Christmas. Mom never had a clue…remember when you got me…”

“ Where’s Cole?!” Danica demanded. Her voice was so icy it might have frozen the air. Cross felt her spirit coil like a snake. His spirit did the same, but he held her back. The air was alight with hostile energies that electrified the flesh and made the air as brittle as glass. It was as if three starving wolves had been released into a room with just a single piece of meat.

“ All right, Sis,” Cradden said with a smile. “All right…Syn!” he shouted.

Cross couldn’t find Keegan. It was difficult to keep his spirit focused in that whorl of aggressive arcane energies. She was difficult to keep in check even on a good day, and Cross felt his control slowly slipping as the spectral tension mounted.

Two horses ambled out of a dark alcove behind Cradden and into the chamber. Both of the horses were black and difficult to make out. For a moment Cross thought the riders floated in the darkness.

Both of those riders were female. One, the captor, had long dark hair tied into a top knot, and a pale and anemic face. She wore leather armor beneath a long Hussar’s jacket that she let hang open, and she had a number of blades arranged on shoulder and belt straps. The most significant blade, a katana made from black metal, she held to the captive’s throat.

The captive was a short, pale woman dressed in dark clothing that was covered in grime and soot. Her feline eyes were frightened, and her dark hair was pasted to her skin by the gag wrapped around her mouth. Her hands were bound behind her back, and a number of discolored bruises on her face made clear how she’d been treated. She bit down on her gag and said something unintelligible.

“ It’s okay, Lara,” Danica said. Something in her voice was almost ready to break.

“ Let’s have them,” Cradden said.

Danica glanced at Cross. He stood just a few feet behind and to her right. The look in her eyes was almost desperate. Cross knew then and there that she would do anything to get Cole.

And that means trouble for the rest of us.

“ You know if you do anything stupid,” Cradden said, “Syn is going to cut Cole’s head off. It’ll be quick, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be painless. And if Syn somehow misses — and she’s won’t — I’m sure Gregor told you about our shooter, Mercer. He’s out there somewhere…only you don’t know where.” Cradden smiled. “And he doesn’t miss.”

Maddox, the Doj, took a few steps forward. He was trying to gain position on Cross. He stood maybe ten giant’s paces away.

Cross casually moved his fingers behind his back. His spirit rolled against his hands like waves of crystal heat.

The horse whinnied, disturbed by something. Cross looked behind them just in time to see Keegan move out of the shadows with a machete in his hand. He had high ground as he crept along the edge of a fallen statue of what appeared to be a lupine mage.

Cross held his spirit ready. He knew he wouldn’t be able to channel her before Keegan’s machete split his skull, so instead he swung his shotgun like a club. The stock caught Keegan in his wide jaw and knocked him off of the statue.

Everything happened at once.

Danica’s spirit exploded in a torrent of cold wind, a flow of force that launched itself like a giant snake. It wrapped around Cole and shielded her from Syn’s blade, which bounced away from Cole’s neck instead of slicing straight through it.

Cross leveled his shotgun and fired. Syn and her katana exploded in a bloody spray, and the corpse fell from the rearing horse before the beast ran off into the darkness. Maddox and the other horse tripped each other up for a moment before the angry Doj hacked the interfering animal’s head off with his preposterously huge blade.

Cole was on the ground, held and cushioned by Danica’s spirit. A shot rang out in the dark, followed by another. Cross didn’t see where the first landed, but the second bounced away from Cole as it struck Danica’s invisible shield.

Mercer. The damn sniper.

Cradden howled with rage. His spirit lashed out at Cole as a phalanx of razor blades. Cross channeled his spirit into a storm of wind, grabbed Cole and telekinetically pulled her away. Not seconds later a thousand sizzling blades sank into the earth where she’d been.

Dead voices pressed against Cross like cold steam. His lungs turned to ice and filled with frozen vapor. His spirit and Cradden’s spirit collided in a burst of obsidian shards.

Cross pumped the Remington and shot Maddox in the stomach. The giant doubled over and fell to the ground. Cross pumped another shell into the chamber and fired at Cradden. The pellets caught Cradden in the shoulder, throwing off his aim as he fired his own shotgun, but not by enough. Danica fell with an arm clenched around her ribcage.

The spirits tore at one another like spectral wolves. Keeping his spirit under control tore at Cross’ mind. The gnashing wraith-like teeth of arcane ghosts made the air brittle and explosive. Stones in the walls shifted in place and threatened to tear away, and the shadows bent unnaturally, melted into caustic darkness. The air throbbed and grew thick. The spirits’ power was too much: they pulled at the very fabric of reality.

We have to get them under control. They’ll kill us all if we don’t.

The world seemed to tilt. The walls bubbled and expanded. Shadows swam over Cross’ eyes. He heard a chorus of dead whispers, an incessant song filled with dry-throated voices. He felt sharp dust, like he’d breathed in a cloud of glass.

The spirits were tearing each other apart.

Cross stepped up to Cole, who still lay on the ground. She was conscious, but she had a deep cut over one eye, and blood poured down her face. He took Cole by the arm and tried to her on her feet.

A bullet took Cross in the back of his left thigh. Pain blazed through him like a wildfire, and he nearly fell. The bullet had been meant for Cole’s head, only he’d inadvertently stepped in the way.

God damn Mercer again, he cursed. The sniper fired on them from somewhere out there in the darkness, maybe from one of the many elevated alcoves that peppered the walls like dark honey combs.

“ Run!” Cross yelled.

Even with her hands bound behind her back, Cole leapt to her feet and raced towards where Danica had fallen.

Maddox charged at him. Cross had forgotten the Doj. The shotgun blast had torn apart the giant’s armor, and blood and white bits of stomach meat covered his chest, but the wound seemed to have done little to quell the giant’s stamina. The spirit’s melee had caught Maddox at its center: scars from steaming claws, ethereal teeth and cold fire covered the giant’s flesh and made him a steaming and bloody mess. Even then, the giant held his great blade high, and his square jaw clenched as he charged the mage who’d shot him.

Cross ducked beneath the sword blade, only to collide with the giant’s knee as it crashed into his chest like a cinder block. Cross didn’t even know he’d fallen. His leg was already going numb. Maddox’ shadow loomed over him.

A sharp crack sounded through the air, and a bullet from out of nowhere took off the giant’s ear. Maddox staggered back and howled in pain.

Thanks, Dillon.

Cross rose, stumbled, and pulled his spirit close to his chest. He couldn’t use her to levitate like a witch could, but he fell into her for a moment like a pair of welcoming arms, and he let her ethereal form take some of the weight off of his wounded leg.

More shots rang out, this time from outside of the coliseum. Cross limped to a low stone wall and tumbled over it, almost dropping his shotgun in the process. The pain in his leg was fierce.

Cross sat on the ground and put his back against the stone. His spirit hovered over him like a protective shield. He felt her anger and impatience, but somehow she realized that he needed her close, likely because she sensed his pain.

Thanks, he thought bitterly. Too bad it only took my getting shot for you to stay put for a minute.

Cross readied the shotgun. Everything went quiet.

He carefully looked back over his shoulder to where the fighting had taken place. He saw his dead horse, torn apart by bullets and arcane energies. Lucan was nowhere to be seen. The vampire hovered all alone, untouched by the battle, bound and gagged and surrounded by the same flaming chains that provided the only light in the thick gloom. Cross actually felt sorry for the vampire for a moment, trapped there in the midst of all of the chaos. He wasn’t sure how the undead had thus far escaped the battle unscathed.

He saw a flicker of movement near the vampire. Cross aimed his shotgun in that direction when Keegan came out of the shadows behind him, machete in hand. Cross couldn’t turn in time.

A bullet took Keegan in the back of the head, and he stumbled and fell.

Danica and Cole appeared from behind a nearby chunk of stone. Danica held a smoking Colt Python in her hand. She still bled from her side, and if not for Cole supporting her weight she wouldn’t have been standing at all. They both looked exhausted beyond measure.

“ Cradden,” Danica said. “He took Keth.”

“ Which way did they go?” Cross asked.

“ Through the far alcove, straight across.”

Cross ripped a piece of cloth out of his pack and quickly tied it around his leg. The bullet had gone clean through, and he’d already lost a fair amount of blood. The wound stung, and even just shifting his weight made him wince with hurt. His spirit swam beneath his arms like ghostly crutches. She poured energy into him, melted into his blood like warm vapor. He felt her mend the torn flesh and stitch his skin back together. It would take time to properly heal, but with her stabilizing him Cross knew that he wouldn’t have to worry about further blood loss or infection.

If only she could make the damn pain stop.

He looked at the women. Though she looked like she’d had a brush with death, Lara Cole forced Danica Black to sit down. Cole dutifully opened Black’s armor jacket, lifted her shirt up to clean her belly, and pulled a strip of cloth from her own undershirt to help stem the bleeding. She smiled at Black. Her expression was sturdy and stern, yet tender.

Cross was suddenly very jealous.

“ Do we still have a deal?” he asked Black. She gave him a venomous look. “Look, Dillon and I just saved your girlfriend’s life. Twice. And for the record…it hurt.”

“ What deal?” Cole demanded of Black. She had a husky voice, hard-edged, and her tone was just as poisonous as Danica’s.

Oh, yeah, you two make a lovely couple. I bet you’re tons of fun to hang out with.

“ Yes,” Black said. “We still have a deal. And Cross…thank you.”

Cross reloaded the Remington, returned it to its shoulder strap, and pulled out his pistol.

“ What are you doing?” Black asked him.

“ I can’t let your brother take Lucan. It’s too dangerous.”

Black’s contemptuous look turned to something like fear.

Good, Cross thought. That means you might finally understand how serious I am about this.

“ Don’t hurt him,” she said coldly. “Don’t hurt my brother.”

“ Screw that,” Cole said angrily. Black winced as Cole less than delicately cleaned the buckshot wound in her side.

“ What are the odds that Cradden can undo Lucan’s safeguards?” Cross asked. “Can he release Lucan’s spirit?”

Black looked at him uneasily. Understanding seemed to dawn on her.

“ Cross,” Black said. “There’s something you should know…Cradden owes a lot of money to a man named Talos Drake.”

“ I figured he was in debt, or something…” Cross stopped as realization dawned on him. I know that name. “Wait…Drake. Is he a smuggler?”

“ Yes,” Black said with a nod.

“ And a slave trader,” he added.

Black looked at him guiltily.

Love makes you do crazy things, I guess. Like putting everyone else in danger to save the one you care about the most.

Cole glared at Black. She clearly knew the name as well as Cross did.

“ You stupid bitch,” she told Danica. Black didn’t argue; she just kept her eyes down.

Warfield had mentioned the name Talos Drake to him in the past. The man was a black marketer she claimed she’d never do business with again, not after what had happened to him.

Because now Talos Drake is a vampire, and hardly anyone knows it, but he’s also second-in-command of the Ebon City of Krul. Shit.

Lucan Keth was dangerously unstable and vulnerable, a warlock with the highest level of raw power that Cross had ever seen held by a human being. For all Cross knew, Lucan was somehow tied up in the same damn prophecy that had landed he and Dillon hip-deep in trouble, searching for the means to destroy an evil that no one understood.

But Lucan’s role in the prophecy didn’t matter, not right then. The fact remained that Lucan Keth was incredibly volatile and dangerous…and he was about to be delivered right into the claws of the Ebon Cities.

The vampires? Cross wanted to scream at Black. How could you agree to give him to the vampires?

But he didn’t say another word — he just set off after Lucan.

SEVEN

FALLEN

The tunnel beyond the alcove was pitch black and filled with broken stones. Cross limped through inky darkness. His spirit held the bullet hole in his leg shut and regenerated the damaged tissue with her spectral form; if she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to move at all. She reminded him of that fact by letting him feel most of the pain.

The passage emptied into the Reach. Stone walls and ruined buildings that resembled crumbled sand castles refracted the jade moonlight. Everything seemed to glow, as if immolated.

The sky was vast and deep. Most of the ground was covered in smoke-colored ice. Mounds of frozen ash marked which areas were safe to walk. Steam curled off of a glassy and frozen black lake whose surface was visibly cracked.

Cross inched forward. The night’s chill was bitterer than before. He heard something in the air, a distant dirge like birdsong.

Gunshots rang out and echoed into the sky. They came from the far side of the structure. He saw no trace of Cradden, Lucan or Maddox, so Cross shuffled down the hillside and carefully toed the edge of the ice-covered black lake.

He listened.

There was something there with him, and it was neither human nor spirit. Cross had sensed it before, that same overwhelming and ancient presence he’d felt when they’d first arrived at Shul Ganneth. Whatever it was, it was very old, and it made the air seem brittle. Cross had wondered if what he sensed was an effect of Shul Ganneth, as that would have made some sense. That place had been a temple refuge for the Maloj, after all, primal arcane natives who in their time had commanded vast and terrible powers. According to tales, their home had been as devastated as Earth had by The Black, and significant portions of their twisted arcane geography and spatial biomechanical tools had been left half-lodged between worlds. Earth had only been exposed to a fraction of what that mad race of lupine theurgists had created. Cross had only seen some of their locales and relics, but what he had seen was powerful, and defied most of what he’d learned about magic.

But what he felt there outside wasn’t born of Shul Ganneth, he was sure of it. It was a presence. Something else was there in the ruins, something Cross hadn’t seen yet. It froze his spirit in her place, and cowed her. He felt her wither in its shadow.

Cross traced his way along the edge of the frozen shore, which broke into salt crust beneath the toes of his boots. Cracks littered the edge of the black lake and shot out several feet into the ice, like caricatures of dark lightning.

He saw where dust piles had been broken apart or flattened. Cross pulled his spirit close, and her slippery electric form pushed against him. He set her to the task of keeping his weight light as he moved. She took pressure off of his wounded leg, and she gave him just enough of a telekinetic lift to glide him along the ice.

Cross felt himself fading; he was on the brink of passing out. His spirit’s anxiousness kept him conscious.

Stay alert. There’s something out there in the dark.

Cross knew that Dillon was en route, but he didn’t have time to wait.

He made his way towards the crumbling cluster of broken monuments at the far side of the onyx lake. So much sediment and debris had frozen into the ice it looked like a slab of marble. Lupine faces and serpentine limbs from shattered statues lay scattered everywhere. The far bank was a barrier of frozen charcoal dust. Stone faces from shattered statues peered out through an ice cold mist that smelled of lye.

Cross moved carefully. His eyes had trouble adjusting to the gloomy green light. Everything seemed distorted and distant, as if he moved underwater. His boots pushed through crusts of petrified basalt and frozen ash. The air tasted sick.

Slowly he made his way off of the ice and onto the far shore, near the small set of ruins that stood outside of Shul Ganneth, the ruins that Dillon had spied on his earlier reconnoiter.

A truck sat at the far side of the felled monuments. It was an old-fashioned M2 Army transport that had been painted black. Such artifacts were rare outside of the Southern Claw, and those that still existed were used sparingly in favor of the arcane airships, which didn’t require traditional gasoline, but instead were powered by thaumaturgic fuel. The truck growled with a low grinding sound, like a metal animal gasping for breath.

“ Damn it!”

The voice was Cradden’s. He sat behind the wheel in the truck cab. Blood ran down one side of his face. Maddox and Lucan, both lucid and unsteady, sat in the truck bed.

Cross didn’t hesitate. He sent his spirit forward in a rain of fiery nails. Smoke trailed the spiky projectiles as they seared through metal and glass. The air was alight with hundreds of incendiary ribbons.

Spirits tangled. Cradden raised a shield that deflected many of the missiles so that they exploded in a rain of sparks and steel shards.

A shadow flickered at the edge of Cross’ vision. He turned just in time to see Gregor emerge from behind a shattered stone monument. Gregor’s goggles reflected the fire of the arcane battle, and he aimed his shotgun squarely at Cross’ head.

Machine gun fire tore through the night. Vos and Dillon ran out of the darkness behind Cross, kicking up clouds of black dust and ice silt.

Vos gunned down Gregor with his MP5. Gregor’s body fell onto the ice lake, which cracked but didn’t break beneath his dead weight.

Something stirred. Cross sensed it more than felt it: a waking. The air shook. Something snaked out of the folds of night shadow and gripped the core of his being. Its touch was as icy as death. His spirit felt it, too, and she pulled away as if she’d been touched by something poisonous.

Cross ducked back behind a wall and looked at the ice. Dark steam escaped from the cracks beneath Gregor’s corpse. The air grew darker, soiled by a thick unguent like ghastly coal dust.

It’s hiding under the ice, he realized. That presence, whatever it was, that same dismal and overwhelming entity that Cross had sensed the moment they’d drawn close to Shul Ganneth, was itself an alien there, an intruder. Its power was immense. It’s at least as powerful as Lucan, and maybe more so. And it’s waking up.

With horror, Cross realized what it was.

If anyone else sensed the Sleeper’s rise from the black lake, they made no sign of it. Bullets flew everywhere. Vos charged forward and sprayed the side of the truck with gunfire. Dillon, Black and Cole brought Kane and Ekko the long away around the ice, and they ducked behind the stone ruins for cover. The vampire floated behind them, still chained by fire.

Cradden’s spirit howled at them in a tidal wave of acid and frost. Cross shifted his own spirit up and formed a whirling shield, a blade of air that cleaved Cradden’s spirit in two.

Black’s spirit leapt forward and shattered her brother’s attack. Dark fire and steaming cold washed over them. The air exploded with noise. The backlash of arcane energy made Cross reel as force hammered into him. Black was stunned, and Cradden fell to the ground.

Maddox, the Doj giant, crashed into them with his sword. Cross’s spirit was weak, dazed from the battle, but he drew her up with both fists. Thaumaturgy crackled in his gauntlets. She formed another shield, a sheet of invisible steel that only barely deflected the massive blade as it came at Cross’ skull.

The world spun. Cross fell. He had only the vaguest sense that he’d been knocked off of the shore, or that he’d collapsed onto the smoking lake no not there the shadows are leaking out and next to Gregor’s body. He blinked, and he looked back towards the battle.

Vos screamed as Maddox cut him in half. Shots fired and bones snapped.

A fiery body flew over his head.

Danica Black used her control over the vampire’s chains to hurl the undead at Maddox like a feral missile. The burning chains exploded as the vampire and the Doj entangled. The vampire clawed and sank its fangs into Maddox even as they both burst into flames. The Doj tried to pry it off, but the vampire’s talons sank deep into his chest. Undead and giant wrestled in a flaming mass of blood, flesh and flame, a writhing tower of limbs and burning skin. They were a flailing skin torch.

Cross rose unsteadily to his feet.

Cradden Black turned and ran. He only made it three steps before the front of his face exploded as a bullet crashed through the back of his head. Dillon coldly chambered a round in his MK-14 and fired another bullet into Cradden’s body before he’d even hit the ground.

“ Nooooo!” Danica stopped, and pointed her pistol at Dillon.

Cross stood up, weakened from the pain in his leg. He stumbled onto the shore.

The ice smoked behind him. The steam flowed faster.

“ Danica…”

“ I said I didn’t want him hurt!” she shouted.

“ Dillon, Black, both of you!” Cross shouted. “We don’t have time for this…”

The Sleeper exploded out of the ice.

Great chunks of steaming hot crystal flew into the sky. Cross saw molten night burst skyward like a dark geyser.

“ RUN!” he shouted.

They clambered up the slope and took cover behind the felled stone monuments. Kane and Ekko ran straight away as fast as they could, still bound in chains. No one tried to stop them, and they vanished into the night.

A howl like a steam train pierced the air. It shook Cross’ bones and froze his blood. The sound rattled the very framework of the sky.

The shadows took form. Glimmering scales like steaming black gems shone in the light of the dismal moon. A semblance of limbs moved in a column of grey and black fog. Its eyes were white pits. Its breaths crystallized the air and turned it to gray snow.

The vast form was without true dimension or limit. It bled from the darkness of the night, and the night, in turn, bled from it. Its smoking husk oozed shadows like dust.

It was Dra’aalthakmar: the Sleeper. Cross and Dillon had been sent to find Woman in the Ice, the only known means of stopping the shadow beast, but neither of them had expected to face it.

It’s already awake, Cross realized in horror. It rested here.

Follow and you will find.

They’d been sent to find the means to stop this ancient creature, not to stop it themselves.

The air swirled with dark grit. The darkness in the area turned solid. Proximity to the shadow meant death.

They couldn’t speak. Drawing breath felt like swallowing sand. The night collapsed around them.

Cross looked around. The faces of his companions bled like watercolors. His spirit melted over his body, pulled him down as if into a tidal pool. He took hold of someone’s hand, but it was difficult to tell whose.

The Dra’aalthakmar’s form expanded. In moments, it would engulf them.

Ahead, near the truck, something that still held a solid form walked toward them. It was like a torch in the darkness, bright and clear, unaffected by the molten shadows.

Lucan.

Cross sensed the primal spirit. It was like standing at the head of a tidal wave. Most spirits whispered: Lucan’s screamed. It was a choir of desperate voices. The air was crowded with the souls of the lost.

Cross collapsed. Dillon and Cole had already fallen; Black was only barely conscious, just like Cross.

Lucan’s eyes were open and clear. Hot white lightning danced on his open palms.

Cross smelled ionized wind, and he tasted ozone. Everything shifted around Lucan, like he was a bubble of pure air that moved through polluted waters. The darkness split around him and recoiled. Lucan walked without hesitation straight onto the black lake and towards the massive humanoid that had formed out of the steel hard shadows.

Lucan is the weapon we were meant to find, Cross realized. His ancient and primal spirit is what we need, not the Woman in the Ice.

Why were we sent to find the Woman, then?

Cross hauled Black to her feet. Cole and Dillon were slower to rise, but they seemed to be all right. Everyone was dazed and weak. They looked pale, and their clothing and hair were covered with dust.

The darkness receded, and left them. It focused on its new enemy.

Lucan and the Dra’aalthakmar battled on the lake. It was a constrained melee, a bottled maelstrom. Cross felt the lick of hex energies and the ripple of arctic flames. He smelled acetone and heard dull explosions issue from the inside of a fog made of alternating light and dark.

They saw little of the actual battle from their vantage. Everything was a storm of white shadows and black dust.

No one spoke. Even Cross didn’t fully understand what it was they saw.

They were so distracted by the fighting that none of them noticed the vampires until it was too late.

Shadowclaws — Ebon Cities elite soldiers — flew at the group on Razorwings, large flying reptiles with bone spurs that jutted from their leathery skin. The beasts had huge hinged jaws, like those of a piranha, and their oily flesh smelled of turpentine and smoke.

A dark net weighted with black spheres caught Dillon and Cole and brought them to the ground. Danica fired her pistol and readied her spirit, but whatever she planned to do was interrupted as a bone spear pierced through her shoulder. She fell, screaming.

Cross watched the riders approach. He hadn’t realized it was dawn. The wine-dark sky bled orange with the rising sun.

His spirit exploded out of his hands in an arc of blue fire. She incinerated two Shadowclaws and their Razorwing mounts, and they dropped from the sky like meteors.

A whirling black chain flew at him. Cross saw only a blurry line and heard the clank of metal as the weapon coiled around him. He collapsed with his arms painfully pinned against his body. Bladed hooks pierced his flesh.

A dread ship made of bone floated into view. Its turbines blasted necrotic exhaust that smelled of brimstone and that burned the ground white. Black sails curled in the wind, and bloody chains dangled down from the deck. The pale hull was covered in spikes and bladed cannons.

Cross tried to move, but he couldn’t. His strength was gone. He felt his spirit, weak and torn and as sundered as he was by the dismal energies storied in the black chains.

The Ebon Cities warship descended to claim its prisoners, while a battle between primordial forces raged on at the center of an ancient and frozen lake.

Steven Alan Montano

Black Scars

Blades of light and dark crash into each other and send polarized sparks through an air turned brittle and raw. Tendrils of steam twist away from an icy ground made black by the touch of cold fire. Ice melts beneath them and shatters like dark glass.

It had not known that its old enemy had survived this long, or in this new world. It should have sensed it upon awakening.

It has lived for this chance to destroy the servant of its jailor.

Obsidian skin folds into a diamond hard edge that cuts through soul matter like smoking hot meat. The air is filled with a haze of flaming dust. Bone vapor engulfs the battle, a necrotic unguent that catches in the wind and makes storms from razor-sharp fragments.

The souls of lost ages entangle on the lake. They pierce and twist against one another. They strip away shadow flesh and carve through arcane limbs.

The battle rages on. The combatants reform themselves. They become liquid and uncertain. Their multifarious bodies collapse into one another in a hail of broken darkness and white crystal. Their bodies lose dimension as they struggle on, ignorant of the damage caused to their surroundings.

The land folds and ripples away from the epicenter of their destructive struggle. The sky browns and cracks. The ice ripples and sinks and collapses in on itself.

Blades of white and ebon steel pierce each other’s forms. Oil and lightning explode as they grapple. They have fought this war for eons, and will fight if for eons yet to come. Their conflict is their prison, and their demesne.

They weaken. The sky is bleached white from the touch of their soiled power, sucked clean of its life by impure energies. The ground smolders. It is a scar of pale ash.

The primal warriors weaken, until at last the Sleeper lands a devastating blow. The enemy is no longer distinct: it dissipates and spreads into shards. The fragments of its being sink and fuse into the living mages nearby.

White energy bleeds into them, an ethereal transfusion. The Sleeper’s enemy becomes a refugee hidden in human souls.

Weakened and suddenly alone, the Sleeper withdraws. Its enemy has gone.

The battle has fused the land into karsts. The devastation is frozen in a shattered epitaph of melted ice and fused black rock. They have destroyed the lands around them in their war of dust.

Victorious, the Sleeper disregards the mere human shell left behind by its enemy. Its jailor has escaped, scattered like ice crystals in the wind.

The Sleeper sinks into the earth, and rests.

Soon, it will hunt again.

PART TWO

CHAINS

EIGHT

KRUL

Cross woke. He sensed that he’d woken before, but that might have been a dream. He had only vague memory of what had happened after he’d witnessed the battle between Lucan Keth and the Dra’aalthakmar.

He remembered razor claws and barbed chains; leering vampire faces and black laughter; a grey room with dark scratches on the walls; cages made of bone; falling through skies filled with blood clouds.

Cross had seen the frozen city in his dreams. Something waited for him there.

That memory faded, and he was left alone in suffocating darkness. His body ached down to the bone. His wrists were bound behind his back. The air was hot and moist. Cross was on his knees, on top of something cracked and sharp. Dank wind washed over his body, and for a moment Cross felt weightless.

He felt his spirit. She was weak and hovered just out of reach, like a firefly held in a glass jar.

Something tore away his hood. Hot air stung his face and his eyes, and the bright sky temporarily blinded him. For a few seconds Cross thought that the blazing crimson sun would crush him.

He knelt on top of a steel city wall. A bitter rot taste clung to the air and turned Cross’ stomach sour. The roar of arcane turbines filled his ears, and waves of heat pushed against him as low flying warships passed overhead.

Cross gazed into a metropolis of chains: tall and crooked buildings made of metal and bone, bound together in a massive web of iron links. Everything was the color of blood and rust. Every surface in that steel jungle of towers and parapets and jagged bridges was dented and browned from the touch of desert storms.

Endless drifts of ochre sand surrounded the city. There were hills and mounds and ridges of crimson rock and dust. It was as if the world had been trapped in a stain. The hot and dry desert wind carried grit that clung to the eyes and teeth.

“ Rise,” a voice commanded. It was not a human voice. The mouth that spoke the words was concealed behind a strip of red cloth that covered the lower half of a pale and ashen face. The vampire wore the red combat armor of a Shadowclaw. It held a large-bored rifle in its hands, and six black-clad vampires stood behind it, one for each prisoner, each of them with its considerable claws on display. Their eyes were solid coals, their skin was waxy and pale, their jaws were too large for their heads, and their hair was unnaturally black.

Black, Cole, Dillon, Kane and Ekko were there with Cross. Each of them was battered and bloodied and covered in dark desert grime. The prisoners were unceremoniously hauled to their feet. Cross felt vampire claws on his back, and his wounded leg nearly gave out as he rose. Sharp pain shot from his thigh into his abdomen, and he almost cried out.

There was no sign of Lucan.

The prisoners were brought to a pitted steel platform covered in scorch marks. Cross looked down. It was difficult to gauge the breadth of the city, but he suddenly respected its depth. Layers of rooftops and platforms and cross-sections of thick barbed chains lowered into dizzying metal canyons filled with black smog. Cross could barely make out the image of a dirt street far below. The height at which they stood was dizzying, and for a moment he felt his center of gravity shift and threaten to pull him from the precarious ledge.

The city moved. The groan of machinery sang through the air in a choir of metal. Something shifted deep in the city’s iron bowels, and other areas groaned back in response. The vampire metropolis shifted. The wall shuddered beneath their boots. Chains dragged across pathways and guide beams, pulled and lifted and squeezed sections of moveable city, which rotated like the interior of some vast clock. Gears slid in with one another, great joints snapped together, and locking mechanisms loudly shifted into place. Drifts of red dust exploded off of the buildings and fell like dry rain.

Dark fliers circled the skies: Razorwings with black and leathery skin, mighty claws and saber-like teeth. Stout aerial warships covered with spikes and guns floated above the city walls. Cross saw vats of hot blood and buildings covered in razors, temples made of bone and obelisks made of blackened skulls. Everything leaked shadow. Great brutish work beasts with silvered horns and thick ebon flesh roamed the oversized walls, hauling carts of goods and slaves and platforms packed with vampire soldiers.

They were in Krul. The City of Scars.

The six prisoners were lined up and held tight. The platform lurched beneath their feet. Steel ground against steel. Buildings seemed to grow taller all around them as they gradually descended into the shadows below. They sank into a metal sea.

Cross tasted acetone and tar. Industrial vents spat yellow gases into the air. Spectral visages like golden skulls swam in the poison fog.

The prisoners looked into the depths of a city of towers as the platform descended. Chains hung like cobwebs from every surface. Massive stone wheels and spokes of black bone turned with grating audible force. The network of chains pulled buildings together like jaws. Reverberating booms shook the city with bone-rattling resonance.

Cross grit his teeth against the pain in his leg; he had no choice but to place weight on it, since the vampire who held him did so at an awkward angle that left him unbalanced. He chanced glances at the others, but their eyes were cast down or sealed shut. They might as well have been miles away.

The dank yellow sunlight shrank to a box over their heads, and the darkness swelled as they descended. They sank into an atmosphere that was thick and dark. He saw cold steam and tight spaces between buildings carved from black iron. Dark fluids leaked and trickled down the walls. The air smelled like death.

The platform sputtered and stopped, and it struck the nadir of Krul with a hollow boom. They were half-a-mile beneath the top of the city walls.

They wanted us to see how deep we are, Cross realized. They’re making a point: escape is not an option.

Cross looked at the others. They reminded him of scared animals. No one spoke. Each vampire escort held its prisoner with just one cold claw around an arm.

Something inside of him went sour and sick. Every breath was ragged, and something painful churned in the depths of his stomach. He shook all over, partly from fatigue and hunger, but partly because he was so terrified he could barely hold himself together.

We’re going to die here. If we’re lucky. His thoughts went back to Lucan, and the Dra’aalthakmar. And if Lucan didn’t destroy that thing, we won’t be the only ones who’ll suffer. If only they’d been able to send some sort of warning to the Southern Claw.

The platform rested at the end of a long street that ran between caged walls. Dark steam flowed through the air. Cross heard something on the other sides of the walls, but it was difficult to tell what. The air was cold, and dripped shadow.

The vampires marched the prisoners down the lane single file. Cross went first. Pools of brackish water filled pits in the cracked street. The decayed remains of small animals lay in gray clumps in the path, issuing a horrid smell.

The caged walls loomed to either side. Iron fog crept through razor bars like gray blood. The air was cold and heavy and crystallized in their lungs. Things waited on the other side. Cross’ spirit, weak though she was, sensed many living creatures, not all of them human.

The distant window of the sky was barely perceptible at that depth, a bright slit in the dark city above.

They brought Cross and the others to a sturdy iron door at the end of the caged gauntlet. The door led into the side of a plain stone building so preposterously tall it might as well have led up to the sun. The wall was covered in runes, claw marks and scorch stains. A wheel-shaped handle made of obsidian and bone turned in place, and gears moved deep in the wall.

The prisoners were ushered through the door and down a dank staircase that led to a hall filled ankle-deep with water and muck. The walls were covered in blood stains, nicks and arcane graffiti set there with black chalk. The air shifted, and the walls groaned. It was as if they’d stepped onto a ship.

The march was relentlessly paced. Kane complained and was pushed to his knees and struck in his lower back with the butt of a bone rifle. He didn’t complain again.

The vampires brought them to a wide vaulted hall with a half-dozen side corridors that led into the obscurity of shadows. Pale blue lights that looked like radioactive ice clung to the iron ceiling. Cross made out vampire script cast in blood paint. His High Jlantrian was shoddy, at best, but he thought it read CELL BLOCK 13.

“ No!” Black called out as she and Cole were separated. All of the prisoners were taken away, one by one. “Cole!” she screamed.

“ It’s ok, Danni,” Cole said with a nervous smile. A vampire hauled her down a corridor. She put all of her weight against the creature as it led her away and forced it to drag her through the murky water, but since Cole only weighed maybe a buck-ten, Cross didn’t think she really gave the undead too much trouble. “I’ll see you soon!”

“ God damn it, you bastards!” Black screamed. She struggled, but not enough.

None of us has the strength.

His spirit, as if in reply, stirred and pressed against him like a frightened pet. He could barely feel her, she was so weak.

What the hell did they do to you?

Kane stole a kiss from Ekko before they dragged him away. He knew exactly how to throw his weight and drag his feet and generally make things as difficult for their vampire jailors as he possibly could without actually getting himself disciplined again.

He’s been here before. Cross couldn’t imagine that Kane and Ekko’s history with this place boded well for them. As brutal as Ebon Cities jailors would be with captured Southern Claw soldiers, they’d be even less gentle with prisoners who’d escaped their grasp once already.

Dillon was taken down another hall. He and Cross exchanged glances as he was dragged away. Cross shook his head, and he wanted to explain that he was sorry, that he hadn’t wanted things to end up as they had, that he wished they weren’t hundreds of miles away from home and behind enemy lines and far from where they were supposed to be, about to die or worse.

For his part, Dillon just nodded back, stoic, quiet and reserved, just like always.

This isn’t your fault, that nod seemed to say. This is what happens sometimes.

Cross’ stomach clinched. He thought of Dillon’s sister and nephew. He thought of Snow, burning alive on a train as it plummeted to the bottom of a nightmare rift.

The lead vampire and a black-clad jailor hauled Cross down a long hallway. Dank water that reeked of feces and charcoal leaked through Cross’ damaged combat boots, and he felt greasy matter mash between his toes. The sound of their feet splashing down the hall filled Cross’ head like a song, but it was drowned out by the groan of the metal walls.

There was less light the deeper they went. Soon Cross’ eyes strained to see the filth-covered hallway. Something brushed against his leg just below the surface of the water; whatever it was, it was so cold that its touch nearly froze him in his tracks.

He was pushed around a corner. Water flowed down a short set of steps and into a dark, vast room. The vampires pushed Cross down the steps. He stumbled and fell head-long into the freezing water screams teeth gnashing claws at his throat rain of acid blood nails fire tearing through the sky is a giant mouth parting to tear the flesh ground into holes like eyes like pits fire burn hold you down falling forever into screams teeth gnashing

Cross gasped, and jumped back up to get his head out of the water. He was soaked through to the bone. His clothes clung to his skin. A smell like the inside of an old drain clung to his nostrils. Dank water dripped off of him like he’d spent an hour in the middle of a rainstorm.

The water level in the room had risen up to his knees. Even though he’d only been submerged for a few moments, he had the feeling that hours had passed. He felt out of synch, like he’d just woken up. The door had been sealed shut, and the air was still.

Cross stumbled around in near darkness. A dim glowing orb — some arcane vampire trinket the size of a softball — dangled from one of the enumerate chains that hung overhead. The orb leaked steam and smelled like gasoline.

He inspected the chains. Dozens of them hung down from the high ceiling, but the lower ends of the chains were still several feet over his head. Bits of molded meat, ragged cloth and bone dangled from the hooks.

He sloshed his way back to the steps and the sealed iron door. The steps had been swallowed up by the water, and even when he ascended he was still submerged up to his ankles.

Cross reached for his spirit. She was there, but she was incredibly weak. They’d done something to her, something to the bond that the two of them shared, some damage he couldn’t quite identify. He felt it inside of him, a wound so deep it ate at him and blackened his soul, like he’d been filled with oily smoke. That wound wouldn’t let them heal or truly touch one another.

Not again.

“ God damn it!”

His voice echoed into the darkness and faded away. He was answered only by the slosh of deep water and the jangle of rusted chains.

Cross limped the perimeter of the room. His spirit managed to keep his body warm — he worried about Dillon, who had no such ability — but there was little to be done about the water. He thought about trench foot. He’d be able to sleep on the top step next to the door so long as he propped himself upright, but he’d only be able to doze, at best, and he knew that if he was too exhausted he’d quietly slip under the surface and drown.

He tapped on the walls, and tried the door. The steel was lined with thick patches of grey-red rust, but it was free of handholds, and impossible to climb.

Time passed. Cross tried to reach the chains, but he couldn’t. He paced and limped through the grimy waters. He tried the walls again.

They’d taken his gauntlets. Even if his spirit hadn’t been so weak and their bond hadn’t been as damaged as it was, it was incredibly dangerous for him to call on her. At best, he’d scar them both forever.

I know better than to have even tried. His mind felt numb and slow. What the hell is wrong with me?

He walked, back and forth, and memorized the particular smudges on the wall, the spots where the steel had been damaged in peculiar ways. One pattern of scratches looked like some ancient language. He thought that another looked like a lizard wearing a hat, and that was when he understood that he was losing his mind.

His skin was cold and clammy. He was afraid to look at his feet under the boots. His stomach growled.

Cross closed his eyes, and hours seemed to pass in the space of that hands with claws reach out of the water grab pull you down slide the skin off your bones suck lick chew our way up your body blink. He slept standing up. Horrid images assaulted him in his dreams, so he did his best to stay awake.

They’re trying to break you, he told himself. This is what they do.

This is what they did to Snow.

He thought about his sister. He tried not to, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. He missed her. Her death was his fault, because in the end he hadn’t been able to save her. His chest tightened at the memory. His hands shook. He saw her face, younger than when she’d died, when she was maybe ten years old. He heard her voice.

Cross wept.

He sees her on the train, burning.

The light grew dimmer. He saw things move in the shadows, things he hoped weren’t really there. The chains rattled now and again, blown by some phantom wind. There was no breeze in that dank pit, of course, no clean air at all. Cross tasted poison on his tongue and bile in the back of his throat.

He pissed in the corner, not caring that it would blend with the other water in his cage.

Cross lost time. It might have been only hours since they’d deposited him there, or it might have been days. It soon became very difficult to tell if he was awake or asleep.

He guessed awake, because there were no hands or voices that came out of the water to claim his mind or his flesh.

Cross started to cough unceasingly. He used his spirit to fend off sickness. Doing so without a thaumaturgic implement burned his fingers, and they sizzled with pain, but Cross was thankful for the reminder that he could still use them. He was happy to be awake.

“ Hello?” he said. His voice echoed and faded. Only the chains answered.

He tried to count the hours, and realized that he had no way to even start. There was nothing he could use to mark the passage of days aside from his own blood, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.

Cross stared at the wall. He was exhausted.

I’m never leaving, he thought. This is my grave.

NINE

FADE

He walks on a mountain, but it isn’t really him. Whatever body he inhabits now is light and lithe and moves with feline grace.

He slithers through the shadows of a falling forest. The sky is bright and cold. Azure light shines down and melts thick patches of dark ice at the base of petrified trees.

He smells sap and winter flowers. There is snow beneath his bare feet, and he tastes nectar and honey in the air.

Leaves rattle as a hard wind pushes its way up the steep mountainside.

Below and behind him is a valley filled with burning trees.

The blaze rages silently. The smoldering fire gives off no heat: it is a cold blaze. Wind carries bitter frost and charcoal mist that lands on his tongue. The flames are black and blue, the color of hurt.

Everything around the mountain is on fire. The world below is lit with dark flames.

Where am I?

He fears that he is back at the glade, looking into the soul prison within the obelisk. But this is something else, a landscape that is unknown to him, an undiscovered land. This place serves as a refuge for some lost and lonely mind.

Deep clouds cling to the air like grease on glass.

Something deep inside the mountain stirs. The stone under his feet groans and shifts. He hears a distant crack, like an enormous stone has fallen.

He runs.

It is not his body. She is tiny, whoever she is, short and light, and she is used to running, used to pushing herself beyond her limits. It is what she has always done.

The air is sluggish and thick. He moves as if through deep snow.

The light fades. Shadows spill across his vision like dark wine. Leaves crash and shatter on the ground like glass and stone.

Whoever’s mind he has intruded on is tearing itself apart.

Help.

He doesn’t know the voice. He feels that he should. He feels her words, and they cut across his ethereal skin like dull razors.

Help me. Please.

He stumbles up the mountain, moves deeper into a forest as it collapses into drifts of dry ash. The air swallows itself, becomes a cyclone that shines through the eye of an oily storm.

Everything turns hot. Mercurial wind scrapes through the bone trees. White dust falls from the sky.

A dissolving silhouette melts in the cold white eye of the liquid storm. It is a dark human outline that pulls apart like snow in water.

He reaches for the figure with a hand that isn’t his. The mountain shifts, and everything spins. Dismal breath washes over him. He silently plummets back down the mountain, into the heart of a raging cold inferno.

Cross wasn’t sure how he’d slept, or even if he’d slept. He stood against the wall, hurting everywhere. His knees felt like they’d been pelted with hammers. His back and shoulders ached with knots of tension, and his eyes were raw. His body was soaking wet. He shivered miserably, and sneezed.

He had no idea how long he’d been awake. He didn’t actually remember waking, just as he didn’t remember falling asleep.

Cross wandered through the ankle-deep waters of his oversized cell. His feet were sodden within his boots. His sinuses burned. The air felt toxic.

The oubliette was a nightmare of cobalt blue steel littered with dark detritus that floated in the air like clouds of heavy soot. The chains above his head rattled and clanged, forced by some breeze that wasn’t there.

Sometimes Cross imagined bodies up there in the darkness of the ceiling, lost in the jungle of chains. If there were corpses, they had to be as bored as he was.

He only barely felt his spirit, and her presence faded with each passing breath. They were killing her slowly. Her whispers were barely audible above the water and the chains.

What have they done to us?

Cross drifted. He felt like a shadow. Every time his consciousness started to fade he sloshed through the waters and tried to stay focused. He felt like he’d just woken up. H e had the dazed sensation of having just stepped into an unfamiliar room, over and over again. He had to remember what had just happened, had to re-establish some sense of place, of self. He felt like he was dreaming.

Maybe I am.

It was a nightmare of isolation, a dismal end to a dismal tale that would finish with him alone and in the dark, trapped in a metal coffin filled with water, shadows and chains.

His body was weary to the bone. He’d barely sat since he’d been brought to the prison. His legs had gone dull with pain. His muscles were so stiff it was a wonder he could move at all.

Cross couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He had moments when he couldn’t recall much of anything, and that frightened him, but fear, he decided, was good. It meant they hadn’t broken him yet.

He tried desperately to hold on to whatever thoughts he could, but it was difficult with his brain shifting in and out of focus. The world was a dark and noisy blur.

He thought of Snow and her dolls and her faceless boyfriend Geoff who he never actually got to meet; of Mom and Dad and his childhood, swings and plastic basketball hoops and bikes with training wheels; of the world turning black, The Black, shifting out of focus, the sky tearing open like a bloody and festering wound and raining blood and ash and spewing forth things that roamed the streets and ate people; he thought of days of sickness, floating in and out of consciousness, feverish and at the edge of death while nightmares lurked outside of his window; staring off into a hot darkness, a nightmare of eyes and teeth and the shadow of a cold and vast mountain; Drogan, an old mystic, a man from the mountains, who’d healed him, who’d explained to his wailing mother how her son was a warlock, a freak like the things that were destroying the world.

Cross remembered Razorwings and their vampire riders as they flew low through a red sky and searched for survivors, for refugees and lost children that they stole away and took back to the Ebon Cities’ feeding vats and skin factories.

He remembered the red-haired beauty he lost his virginity to, a whore whose name he couldn’t even remember but whose face and body he would never forget.

He remembered Samuel Graves, his best friend, so full of trouble and life and piss and grit, covered in mud and grime at his side in Blackmarsh, a prisoner of the very city Cross was lost in now, but Graves was dead, killed back in Rhaine in what felt like another lifetime now.

He recalled the study halls of Glaive and the cracked and listing monument on Ghostborne Island and the cold fields west of Thornn.

Cross recorded and catalogued his mind. He tried desperately to remember it all, to shelve away every ridiculous detail and fact about himself, to hold onto them, to place them somewhere and keep them there without having to even try. The memories blasted through his brain with staccato rhythm. It was difficult to keep up with them.

Soon, he lost track of everything but his mind.

He felt his spirit as she struggled. She stayed close, tied to him like a drowning swimmer in a pitch black sea. Cross couldn’t call on her for much more than fending off his pain, and even that strained her. He felt her whispers, so quiet they were like rustling leaves in a soft wind, completely out of place in the grime and stink and eye-numbing darkness.

Easy. Easy, I won’t let them hurt you.

It struck Cross as mildly insane that this was the first time since he’d acquired his new spirit that she wasn’t driving him crazy.

The light faded to a blur. It was hard to see even his own hand in front of his face.

Hours passed, or maybe days. There was no way to know.

Dark waters churned and chains rattled in ghostly echo. Cross stumbled in and out of awareness. He soon had no sense of where he was. He focused his mind and forced himself to remember things. Sometimes, he couldn’t do it.

He is trapped in an eternal midnight. Dry twigs are in his hair. He stands, shaking, and feels the bitter mountain air as it courses through the dead trees. Churning fires and distant howls fill the night with grim noise. His muscles are stiff. His feet crush twigs frozen in muddy ground as thick as tar.

He looks between the trees, and he sees a sliver of dead sky. Drifts of molten copper clouds lay smeared over the horizon like metallic stains.

The forest burns in the valley below. Cold smoke drifts up through iridescent rain and forms an ocean of cobalt cinders. Blades of dark ash, like smelted leaves, float dead in the air.

Behind him, the air twists into a funnel of translucent ice. Dirt and debris form a solid wall of choking haze. He sees a portal through the drifting fog, a pale passage that hangs there like a white scar.

I'm not here, he realizes.

There is a cold-throated scream. He doesn’t realize the absolute and utter silence until the cry rings out. He sees that silhouette, a vague female shape, a shadow that comes undone. The form dissolves like a shard of black ice in pure white water. Limbs fall away from the core. The doorway is too bright to look at.

Wait.

He feels a presence there, weak and distant. Fragile. It is known to him, familia r.

Help me, says the voice from the doorway. A voice he knows, or should know.

The mountain growls beneath his feet. He looks into the trees, and he sees eyes and teeth that fill the black void of shadows between the leaves. Black flames leap up the mountainside behind him. Cold fire rushes like waves, a blazing inverted avalanche.

Help me, the voice says again.

He turns to run, and is engulfed.

At some point, Cross was shackled. He didn’t remember it happening. Heavy gauntlets made his fingers feel as thick as sausages and dampened any hope of channeling his spirit. Barbed chains ran from his wrists to his ankles, and they scraped against his knees and cut him as he walked. His wounded leg blazed and throbbed with pain.

Everything was a haze. His senses were dull. The world was shades of dark and light, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. He felt separated from his own body, distant.

Cross was led down a hall by a pair of black-clad vampire guards. They wore moon-curve blades and blank white masks. It had been so long since he’d been out of water that he almost forgot how to walk, and he stumbled as he moved down the dry steel corridor. The chains didn’t help: the shackles gave him sharp cuts that sent thin rivers of blood down the insides of his already-soaked pants.

He was pulled into desert sunlight, and his eyes burned. Everything went white. He tasted sand and felt unbearable heat that cooked his skin. The sounds of the chained city filled his head in a catastrophe of metal noise.

Cross fell painfully to his knees. He couldn’t rise. His left leg was so wracked with pain he couldn’t summon the will to try.

He slowly and painfully regained his vision. Images bled into view. The world was uneven and unstable, like he saw it through a crooked lens. He was pulled to his feet. Cross rocked and swayed in place.

They’d brought him to some sort of prisoner’s commons. His shackles were removed, and he was left standing on a floored metal area surrounded by spike-topped walls the color of rusty nails. The commons was the size of a baseball diamond, wide and open, and the walls curved where they met the ground at sharp angles. There were no doors. Grey-skinned gargoyles with thick and stony wings hovered overhead.

The sky was vast and bright. The iron clouds seemed translucent, and they receded away from the blood red sun. Sticky air coursed up and over the wall, and Cross felt the slightest shudder in the ground when the wind blasted with its gale force. They were on top of a tall structure, he guessed, some open courtyard at the apex of one of the city’s tallest buildings, which explained why nothing but the sky was visible from within that bowl.

The commons was filled with prisoners. Each one of them was dingier than the last. Greasy inmates, most of them human, shuffled across the yard in packs. A few half-Doj towered over the others, their broad and chiseled jaws painted with desert soot. Cross saw some Lith, a handful of Gorgoloth, and even a Regost, the so-called Hollow Men, whose smoking spectral breath could be smelled across the commons. Cross spied a pale-skinned Vuul, whose translucent flesh had been rendered opaque with grime and dried blood. He briefly saw a Gol, who quickly vanished behind the taller prisoners.

The prisoners moved like zombies. They shuffled along as they walked, seeming to lack the strength or the will to do anything more. Their eyes looked forward, listless and dead. Their clothing was torn and shredded and soaked, but it dried fast beneath the blistering heat of the sun. Everyone looked like they’d lived through a bomb blast, or worse. Fingernails had turned black. The gray film they wore made them all siblings.

Cross smelled heat and sewage and sweat and piss and fear. The air was a miasma of body stink and hot metal. It burned just to stand in it.

There were a few women, Cross noted, and they were as caked in cuts and filth as the rest. Cross didn’t want to imagine how life was for them here, with so few females compared to the number of men.

Panels in the floors slid back to reveal shallow recesses filled with thick brown gruel that was vaguely the color of beans. The prisoners ate the stuff voraciously with their hands, the only option available.

Cross felt as if it had been days since he’d eaten. The sludge was thick and oily, and it felt like cold clay in his trembling hands. Worse, it tasted like some sort of congealed lard, and he fought to get it down his throat and keep it in his stomach. He was so ravenously hungry it was difficult not to shovel more of the stuff down, but he knew that if he ate too fast he’d choke and be sick.

No water was provided. That worried him.

They were watched by gargoyles, mindless and violent brutes who could sit still for days on end without having to move, obedient lackeys from the shores of Rimefang Loch who would serve either vampires or humans without discretion, so long as they were paid. Cross saw no vampires, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by…he heard their guttural calls just on the other side of the walls, low growls and throat songs that sliced open the air like knives. He heard the slurp and smack of vampire feedings even over the sounds of the prisoners gorging themselves, and the roar of the city’s vast chains.

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 engineer 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.

You got more than you bargained for, Dillon. I want to promise you that you’ll get to eat your sister’s crappy cooking again. I want to tell you that you’ll get to see your nephew. But I can’t. I can’t promise you those things, but I can damn well do everything in my power to get us out of here. That I can do.

“ Cross…” Dillon began, his mind obviously hinged on the same overwhelming scenario. “Listen…”

“ I’m not giving up,” Cross interrupted. Dillon’s eyes were glassy, and his lip trembled. He suddenly looked very old, and yet the fear in his eyes was that of a boy. It’s amazing what they can do to you. “Don’t give up,” he repeated. “Not yet.”

“ You might as well,” said a third voice. “Whatever you think you’re going to do, it’s never going to happen.”

The gravelly voice that interrupted them was somehow familiar, but it took Cross a moment to recognize it.

The Gol stood over them with a handful of brown lard. His short shadow blocked out the dull orange fire of the desert sun. His hood was drawn, but his face-wrap was down, revealing a grayed face lined with scars, cuts and pores. He looked like a leper, but such was the case with all of the Gol. They were a race of hostages. Once, they believed, they’d held another form, a larger form closer to that of humans. But that larger race’s collective consciousness was ripped away during The Black and deposited into new bodies, those of vile dwarves.

The worst part was that the Gol seemed to have no memory of who they truly were, what they’d been, or where it was they came from. Just like Earth itself, they had been re-written by The Black, forever cast into an unfamiliar shape with no means of escape, doomed with the knowledge that they had once been something different, something greater, but cursed to have that memory suppressed from their ever destabilizing minds.

“ Say what?” Dillon said.

“ You’re not escaping,” the Gol said. His teeth were black, as were his jagged fingernails. “No one does. To think otherwise is…pretty stupid.”

“ We have to get out,” Cross said. Even seated on the ground, he only barely had to incline his head to look right at the little man’s ugly face.

“ Oh, well, that’s different!” the Gol croaked with what passed for a smile. “Just tell the vampires that! I’m sure they’ll let you go.”

“ Do you want something?” Dillon said angrily. “Or are you just lonely?”

“ Of course I’m lonely!” the Gol barked with another laugh. “Most of the other humans here are farmers or criminals…not my class of people at all. We don’t get many Southern Claw Hunters.”

Cross stilled at that.

“ How do you know that we’re Hunters?” he asked.

“ Because I’m a genius,” the Gol smiled. “But only you are a Hunter. He’s a ranger,” he said with a thumb at Dillon.

Cross and Dillon exchanged glances.

“ They already know,” the Gol said, addressing the unasked question. “That’s probably why you’re still alive.”

“ Who in the hell are you?” Dillon asked him.

“ Tega Ramsey,” the Gol answered with a short bow. “Smuggler. Negotiator. Acquisitions expert. Obtainer of rare and difficult things. And just as fucked as you, at least at the moment.”

“ And what brings you to this little paradise?” Dillon laughed.

Cross gave him a look. He didn’t share the ranger’s amusement at the odious little troll.

“ Vampires don’t like when their weapons technology is sold to other races without their knowledge or permission,” Ramsey smiled. “I suppose in this case, ‘without their permission’ is the more accurate statement on its own, since they obviously had some knowledge, lest I wouldn’t be here…”

“ We’ve got it,” Cross interrupted. “What can you tell us about this place?”

“ What would I know that you don’t?” Ramsey asked in return.

“ How long have you been here?” Cross asked.

“ How long have you been here?” Ramsey asked in return. Cross almost answered him, but realized he couldn’t. Reading his confused look, Ramsey smiled. “Exactly.”

“ Look, you know something,” Dillon said impatiently. “Or else you wouldn’t still be alive.”

“ That’s why you’re talking to us, isn’t it?” Cross said. “You have something to offer us. In return…” Tega Ramsey was obviously fishing for friends, and for protection from other inmates. He’d likely survived in Krul by goading or coercing others into protecting him; he had to have done so, based on his size alone. One could only go unnoticed in an environment like Krul for so long, especially when the Gol made such easy prey. Most of the other inmates would have eaten him alive without someone watching out for him.

“ You’re smarter than you look, mage,” Ramsey told Cross.

“ Obviously not,” Cross said bitterly. “Or else we wouldn’t be here.”

“ Sometimes, you can’t control where you end up,” Ramsey smiled. “Sometimes the fates just have it in for us.”

Dillon nodded, but Cross shook his head.

No. For some damn reason, I think I’m supposed to be here.

Follow and you will find.

“ So tell us,” he said aloud.

“ Tell you what?”

“ Anything useful.”

Tega, it turned out, knew quite a bit, though little of it would prove terribly beneficial in terms of securing their freedom. Cross and Dillon also learned very quickly that it was best not to ask exactly how Ramsey came by his information. Cross believed every word of what he told them. If Ramsey was lying, he was a fantastically dramatic liar, but his words still rang true.

Besides, what the hell else are we doing to do aside from listen to what he has to say? And if he is completely full of shit, he deserves a medal for his storytelling.

Ramsey told them that Krul was five-hundred vampires strong — which was actually a much smaller number than what Cross and Dillon had guessed — and that there were twice that many prisoners. At least half of those prisoners were human commoners, farmers, laborers and criminals purchased from the corrupt wardens of Black Scar. He knew that the city was controlled by a vampire named Morganna, who among other luminaries had under her command the infamous Talos Drake, the same vampire smuggler to whom Cradden Black had planned to sell Lucan Keth. Ramsey knew that the tower they were housed in was one of the three tallest in all of Krul, part of a triad of towers called The Talons: Scar, Blight, and Fist. Scar was the prison tower, Fist was the command tower, and Blight was where prisoners were taken to be broken, experimented on, Turned, tortured, or transformed into some useful substance for the vampire legions. He knew that arcane dampeners made it so that nothing inside of the walls could be tracked from the outside, just as no arcane messages or missives could pass in or out of Krul.

But most importantly, Ramsey knew that there were other prisoners brought in with Cross and Dillon, and that they were still alive.

“ Two of the women,” he told them as they sat baking in the sun, nibbling on dried bits of brown food that looked and tasted like horse dung, “are in Fist. I don’t know why, and that bothers me. I like to know things.” Ramsey had covered up his face. His eyes were dull yellow, the pupils so faint they were almost impossible to see in the glaring sunlight. “The other two are in Blight. I wouldn’t count on seeing them again.”

“ Which two women are in Fist?” Cross asked.

“ The brunette and the redhead.”

Black and Cole. Which means Kane and Ekko are in Blight, and likely dead by now, or worse.

“ What the hell are they doing in Fist?” he asked Dillon, but it was Ramsey who answered.

“ They’re from Black Scar,” he said with a shrug. “Black Scar deals with Krul often. The trafficking of live flesh between the two cities is quite lucrative, I understand.”

“ Son of a bitch,” Dillon laughed.

Cross tried to think about what that would mean for Dillon and himself. Probably nothing, he decided. Likely any chance he and Dillon had that Danica Black would exercise her influence with the vampires to buy their freedom were dashed the moment Dillon shot and killed her brother. Cross looked at Dillon, and the ranger’s sullen nod told Cross he was thinking the same thing.

There was no reason to ask Dillon why he’d shot Cradden Black. It didn’t really matter anymore.

“ Even knowing all of this,” Ramsey said after he let them ruminate on the information, “the truth is still quite simple: there’s no getting out of here.” His gray and milky eyes were unblinking. “Others have tried, and failed. And so will you.”

Bone-white trees protrude from the earth like enormous stakes. He is deeper in the forest this time, on the shore of a dark lake with a surface like fused glass. The air smells like cold smoke and ancient mold. Lichen dangles from the pale trees and lifts and sways like silk in the hot wind. He sinks ankle-deep into a blood marsh.

Muted yellow light rains down from above in clouds of ash colored amber and jade. The shadows of avian raptors cut across the ground as the distant fliers pass overhead through the pulsing orange sky.

Behind him, the valley of the lost is on fire. Cold flames race up the face of the steep black mountain. The air turns to frost before the advance of the roaring blue-white flames, and it cracks and shatters like crystal. Clouds like skulls reflect the fires back in a haze of blue shadow.

They move as if frozen. He feels his spirit with him, he can even almost see her, and she clings to him like a layer of clothing pasted against his panicked skin.

Ahead, the pale doorway shrinks. The female silhouette that is trapped there melts like a black snowflake.

The manic breathing of angry and ravenous mouths fills the air. Something bleeds across the sky and turns the world black. They try to run, but they are utterly consumed and crushed by a vast and hungry shadow.

Cross woke as he was pulled from his cell.

His muscles were stiff. His bones felt weak, like wood left too long in the rain.

The dreams, or the visions, or whatever they were, had grown more and more vivid and more difficult to shake off. They were different than before. A year ago, he’d started experiencing visions of women dying in a mountain glade, slain by black unicorns. That vision, it turned out, had been his glimpse into the obelisk prison of arcane spirits, the place where they were held until called upon by their witch or warlock masters.

This was something else, something far more dangerous, and entirely alien to him. He felt like an intruder on that dark mountain, and the presences that chased him — the fires, the shadow, the eyes and the teeth in the trees — didn’t want him to reach the woman in the doorway. There was something familiar about her, something he felt he should have known, and he was so close to understanding it threatened to drive him mad. It was like a song whose music he could hear, but he couldn’t remember the words.

The gauntlets were locked in place over his hands, as ever. By now his wrists had been rubbed raw from the constant treatment. He’d taken to drying out his feet in the sun during his “exercise” time. His clothes were a ragged mess, barely held together by filth and their last few rotting threads. His skin was so covered in grime he looked like a burlap sack. His skin itched all over.

I’ve been worried about trench foot or an infection, and here instead I’ll get some skin disease.

Gray-skinned gargoyle minions, hulking brutes with leathery wings and faces like bladed bricks, lifted Cross into the hollow tower shaft with ungentle claws. They did not take him as far as usual. Cross noted the change in the mind-numbing routine immediately, and while he tried his best to maintain his composure, he panicked inside.

What had happened? Was it because he and Dillon had spoken to Tega Ramsey? Cross had been suspicious of the Gol from the start, but it had taken him a while to realize it. The little bastard knew too much to be just a common prisoner. But to what purpose had they decided to haul Cross away now? Or had this been their plan all along? Did this even have anything to do with Ramsey?

Rather than lift him all of the way to Scar’s apex, the gargoyles set Cross down on a platform next to a dark metal hall roughly halfway up the tower. The hall led into darkness.

Cross wasn’t afforded a chance to hesitate. Vampires in pale white armor emerged and took hold of his arms with iron-clad hands. He smelled foul musk and charnel breath. Their claws had been honed to a razor’s edge, and they wore featureless masks. They seized him with stone-hard grips and plunged him forward into shadow. Cross steeled himself, as he expected to be shoved into some hard surface at any moment.

A door opened into a pale and featureless room. The vampires tossed Cross inside. His leg stung with sharp pain, and he almost blacked out as he collapsed on bruised knees and sore hands. The door slammed shut behind him with an echoing boom.

A cold white flame dangled in a smoking iron pot. The eye-numbing light shone on the other occupant of the room, Danica Black, who stood near the opposite door.

Any notions Cross might have had that Black was getting special treatment were dispelled by Danica’s appearance. She looked pale, thinner than before, and while he was sure Black looked a far cry better than he did, Cross still thought the Revenger’s eyes were sunken and distant, and that she held the restless and nervous demeanor of someone who hadn’t slept for days. And while her dark leather armor — the uniform of the Revengers — looked relatively clean and well kept, its wearer was unquestionably worse for wear.

Black also bore a trace scar near her right eye, just on the outer edge of her face. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her. It still looked raw, and it resembled some sort of collapsing star of blood. Her deep red hair hung loose around her shoulders, a bit longer than it had been before.

“ Hello, Cross,” she said quietly.

Cross hesitated. She was unarmed. He felt no trace of her spirit, which he guessed had been suppressed, just like his own had.

“ Are you okay?” he asked after a moment. The room seemed unnaturally still.

She regarded him quietly. He could already tell she had unpleasant things to tell him.

“ Yes,” she nodded. “I suppose I am.”

“ Cole?” he asked.

Black hesitated before she nodded.

“ She’s been better,” she answered. She watched him carefully. “I saw that Dillon was doing all right.”

“‘ All right’?” Cross said bitterly. He nodded. “If being locked up in a half-submerged fish tank, isolated in darkness, half-starved and left to bake out in the sun for a few hours a day is ‘all right’, then…yeah, Dillon is doing all right. So am I.” His icy stare was reciprocated in kind. “So what’s going on, Danica?”

Black smiled a sad and knowing smile.

“ Being a Revenger, I carry some…clout, I guess you could say, with the Ebon Cities. They don’t think of me as an equal, by any means, but they recognize the relationship they have with the Revengers, the group that I belong to.”

“ Which you weren’t representing when you were taken,” Cross said quietly. “And that’s why you’re here, hip-deep in shit with the rest of us.”

“ I’m the only reason we’re still alive,” Black said. Her look and voice made clear she didn’t care if Cross believed that or not.

Black leaned back against the wall. The air was sweaty and rank, like the underside of a dock. The stillness Cross had sensed before was abruptly broken as something groaned far away, and the walls shook. Likely Krul was changing again, its buildings re-aligning to form another new paradigm.

“ Danica,” Cross said, not caring that he could hear the desperation in his own voice. “We have to get out of here. That thing that Lucan was fighting, that shadow…that’s what Dillon and I were sent to gather information about, why we were sent to find the Woman in the Ice. It’s called the Dra’aalthakmar. The Sleeper. And it will kill a lot of people if we don’t figure out a way to stop it before it reaches Southern Claw territory.”

“ I know,” Black interrupted. “But right now you have to worry more about how we’re getting out.”

Getting out. We’re getting out.

Cross’s heart skipped a beat. He almost went to tears. Emotions that had welled up and been lost in the time spent in that dank and burning hell suddenly threatened to tear him apart. He felt his own irrational response, and he didn’t care.

“ How?” he blurted. “How will we get out?”

Black hesitated.

“ They’re going to…give us a chance,” she said. Cross swore she was near tears, which seemed very unlike her. “A fighting chance. The same chance they’ve given Kane, and Ekko.”

Cross nodded, relieved, but only for a moment. Pain seized his shoulders and his gut.

He remembered where Kane and Ekko were being held. He remembered what they had done in Krul before they’d escaped the first time.

He looked into Black’s eyes, and the fear that he saw in them matched his own.

“ Did you say ‘a fighting chance’?” he asked quietly.

Black nodded. Her scar caused the tear that ran down her cheek to take on the color of blood.

“ We have to fight in their arena games,” she said. “You, and me, and Kane, each fighting on our own. If we don’t…the ones we care about are going to suffer.”

Cross felt like he was spinning. He thought he was going to be sick. His insides rattled and his arms and legs almost went numb.

“ Fight?” he asked, hearing the fear and exhaustion in his voice. “How am I supposed to fight? Christ, Danica, I can barely walk!”

“ You have to,” she said. Her composure was gone. She was all anger and fear and distress, just like he was. “You have to, or else Dillon is going to die…slowly. They’ll do the same to Cole. They’ve already started in on Ekko.” She looked him dead in the eyes. Cross saw the truth there, the belief that there was no other way. “You’re going to fight, Cross. If you don’t, then Dillon is going to suffer, and then Dillon is going to die.”

ELEVEN

ARENA

The cold skies are filled with ice ash and frozen flames. Trees felled by a gnashing horde of dagger-like teeth surround him. Eyes like black stars squeeze out of the shadows.

The blue-white blaze races up the mountain. It covers the dark stone and frost-tipped sagebrush with a firestorm that turns the air to a sea of choking white smoke. He hears it coming, and he feels the mountain growl beneath him. Something shifts deep down in the clefts of primal and molten rock.

He runs. His spirit is with him, cleaved to his core. Waves of glacial air sweep over them at the fore of the tide of arc fire. The cold turns the ground to ice, and it breaks stones that have suddenly turned brittle.

He runs for the doorway.

She is there, the melting silhouette. Her body is like a butterfly held in stasis before a blazing white sun. Whispers of things long dead surround them and slice the air open like a storm of blades.

Something looms over the trees, vast and dark and more ancient than the world itself. Its presence is overwhelming, an avalanche of shadow.

The doorway collapses in on itself like burning paper. Its light falls away in drops of pale rain.

Black fire explodes from the ground in whirling ebon pillars that scorch the sky. He chokes on the stench of funeral pyres.

He leaps through the door as the mountain explodes into flames behind him, and he falls into a place of dead trees, red water and black sky. It is familiar.

The forest in the Reach. This is where we rested after we found the Dreadnaught.

She lies on the ground, and waits for him. She lifts her head and watches his approach. Her body is bathed in blood and soot and covered with terrible scars. It is almost too late for her…but not quite. He trembles as he kneels down and picks up her fragile body. He holds her tight as the blood that slicks down her neck and arms makes his grip on her body tenuous.

I knew you’d come, she says.

He doesn’t know her. But he feels her pain, and knows that he has to save her, for she, in turn, will save him.

Cross drifted in and out of consciousness, and in and out of pain. He saw milk-colored chambers of icy steel and iron machines that churned steam and cemetery smoke.

They strapped him to a cold table. His skin was treated with pungent oils and powders that looked and smelled of grave dust. He was forced into a vat of crimson brine and black nutrients that soaked into his skin, and he was left to float weightless, somehow not drowning, like a fly trapped in honey.

Cross felt little of it. He could tell what was happening, but none of it seemed real.

He dreamed of the burning mountain, of escaping that dark shadow in the sky. He dreamed of the woman beyond the pale doorway, of her falling bloody into his arms.

Cross had become more cognizant in his dreams than when he was awake. The world was a vast and unstable haze of blurry colors and liquid noise. He felt detached, somehow, floating above himself as he was tended and healed by necrotic surgeons. He saw his own body revitalized with noxious chemical fluids the color of swamp water, liquids that were piped into his skin through metal tubes they inserted into his flesh.

He was drugged regularly. Cracked pills were forced down his throat by zombie surgeons, drugs were pumped into his bloodstream through hollow bone needles, and gases were released into the air around him to soak into his skin while he breathed through a tube. The undead that attended his body were unaffected by the fumes. Quiet and pale corpses with grim rotting faces tended to him, sometimes gently, often not. Cross was turned and poked and flipped like a piece of meat, a flesh doll. His existence had been rendered to a series of flashes: light and dark, color and sound, foul smells and pain. They leeched poisons from his diseased leg, only to replace them with different poisons, substances that would make him what they wanted him to be.

Cross had only a vague understanding of what was happening, but he knew that he was being healed. The vampires apparently understood that he was injured and malnourished, and even though they ultimately wanted him to fail in the arena, they also, for whatever reason, wanted to give him a fair chance. That part was Black’s doing, he was sure of it.

Maybe. Who can understand what a vampire thinks? Had it been us with vampire prisoners, we’d have destroyed the bastards, period. No chance to escape. Never.

Cross hovered between worlds. He saw cold fires in the operating room, and he heard the mountain as it growled from somewhere beneath Scar Tower. He felt the colossal breath of a ghost sky. The operating room was on the mountain. He was the fire.

Everything is bleeding. Melting together.

He grew stronger. So did his spirit.

Their bond was diamond-hard, but it was different than it had been before. That bothered Cross, but his head was already awash in senseless flashes. He couldn’t focus. She was different, their bond was different, and that was reason to be afraid, but in his confused and fatigued state Cross couldn’t determine why.

His spirit licked ethereal lips and violently swirled around him in a razorblade caress. She was a metal angel, and when she hovered close it tickled his flesh with a dangerous electric current, a pulsing and breathless aura that dripped with heat and tension. It was as if they were lovers: deadly, violent, uncaring lovers, bound by flame and lust, tantalizing one another with aggressive sexual promise, unheeding of the harm they could do.

Cross tried to pull away from her, but it was a half-hearted effort, and he knew it. He found this new form of contact with her intoxicating. He’d never been so close to anyone, even his old spirit.

Focus.

Snow. Lucan. Dillon.

He tried to keep important names at the front of his mind. He tried to remember why he was there, and why he needed to escape. He tried to remember who he was fighting for, and what he had to do. Sometimes he couldn’t recall what the names meant, or who they belonged to. Their faces had grown distant and hazy. But he fought to remember them, regardless.

Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Others. Black. Cole. Kane. Ekko. Graves.

He wasn’t sure if he spoke the names, or if he just remembered them. It was hard to even tell where he was.

Focus.

Follow and you will find.

He was ready.

Cross stood before a set of polished steel doors twice as tall as he was. Their edges were scorched, and the reflective face had been bent, hammered and scratched. They looked familiar. He had the vague notion he’d stood there before.

The walls around him were sandy steel awash with oil, dirt and blood stains. The corridor vanished into darkness behind him, a caustic web of shadows filled with cries and steam. The ceiling overhead was a cracked glass dome stained with pollutants and desert debris.

Engines roared over and around him. He felt the city change outside the walls, heard it fold and twist. He smelled blood in the air, and he heard a low dirge on the other side of the door, a throaty vampire song.

Cross saw his reflection in the dirty steel doors. He was lightly armored in black and crimson chain. A tight leather-and-steel gauntlet covered his left hand; the gauntlet was bound to a battery on his back through a thin network of sharp gold wiring. Traces of arcane oil sluiced out of the wires and sizzled when they struck the ground.

He looked paler than before. His eyes seemed darker. Something inside of them teemed with madness.

What have they done to me?

His spirit held onto him like armor. Her touch burned even as it soothed, and her ethereal claws tugged at his back. She mounted him like a steed.

Cross felt numb. He knew this wasn't right, that he shouldn't have been there, but it was hard to think straight. Tension coiled through his muscles and his tendons. A sharp and serpentine sense of pain wound its way up the ridge of his spine. He shook with anger anger at what? and his stomach knotted up as tight as his chest. The armor he wore felt unnatural and wrong. It smelled burnt and charnel, like it had been taken off of a dead man and placed on Cross’ body, which he reasoned was probably what had happened. Runic markings had been cast onto the backs of his hands and his forearms: serpents, eyes, ankhs, blades. He felt the weight of a weapon in a sheath on his back.

Strangest of all, his leg had healed. He felt healthy and strong.

The doors groaned open, out and away from where he stood. His heart skipped a beat. His spirit swirled and tore at him in her excitement. He felt her pull and plead, and it took effort to rein her in.

Focus.

Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Black and Cole. Kane and Ekko. Graves.

An arena waited on the other side of the metal doors. It was not what Cross expected. Everything he had seen in Krul up to that point had been desert pale or earthen, dust and sand and blood and grit. Only the industrial blue steel of the submerged lower levels had been different, and those chambers were staggering in their monotony.

The arena varied from all of that: it was cast in cool whites and soft greys, harlequin banners and a floor that looked as soft as a pale sea. Frescoes of jagged cities and serpent angels covered circular walls wrought from smoothed granite. The arena floor was spotless, cool marble covered with a massive painting of a half-closed eye impaled on a crescent moon. The air was filled with sweet incense, which only barely contained the palatable odor of rot. The entire space was enclosed by a dome as dark as a midnight sky. Glittering silver flames held suspended in floating sconces bathed the arena in uncertain light.

The stadium walls were perhaps twenty feet tall. Spikes made from black bone lined the tops of the walls, and thick fluid sluiced down the spikes like black milk. Beyond the spikes was a seating area, made from dark wood and black leather, which circled the arena.

There were hundreds of seats, each of them occupied by a vampire. The depths of their ranks was impossible for him to make out — beyond those pale and withered faces was a wall of midnight, a black curtain of dismal specter bodyguards and angry war ghosts left free to roam the air in a ghastly cyclonic barrier.

Cross breathed in raw eldritch air. His spirit bathed in it, basked in it. Her form expanded and shuddered, and Cross shuddered, as well. The depths of magic in that chamber were staggering. It bespoke of the status and power held by the dozens of vampires in the audience.

He had been brought before the vampire elite. Cross would fight for his friend's life before the noble undead caste, the aristocracy of the night. Dark eyes and monstrous pale faces regarded him pitilessly. Despite their number, the arena was utterly and deathly quiet. Cross heard his own breaths echo back from the two-hundred foot high interior of the dome. His skin felt brittle, and his blood ran cold.

Unbidden, he entered the arena.

He moved slowly, as if in a dream. He felt as if he had done this before. Bone fragments exploded into white dust beneath his boots. Nothing else moved.

A gaunt skeletal figure stood at the exact center of the arena floor. Black swathed and preposterously tall, the undead creature used a bone hand covered with razor blades to direct Cross to stand at the edge of the circle. Its elongated grin seemed mocking.

Cross did as he was commanded. He saw little to be gained from doing otherwise.

One by one, the other fighters came into the arena. They were all clothed in mismatched armor, patchwork steel plates and leather padding, chain mesh and bladed epaulets, faceless helmets and barbed weapons. Cross saw a pale-fleshed Vuul and an ebon-fleshed Gorgoloth; the smoking humanoid husk of a Regost, and a towering and muscle-bound Doj. There were more humans, puny when compared to the other monsters.

He saw Danica Black, her red hair pulled up into a severe top-knot. She wore a sleeveless armored vest and fingerless gloves, black pants and combat boots. Curved twin blades were sheathed across her back, and a draconic tattoo covered the entirety of her right arm, which pulsed with smoking purple light. Her eyes were dead and cold.

He saw Kane, entirely transformed from the joking moron Cross had met before. Kane was a blonde giant, his beard neatly trimmed and braided, his bare oiled muscles tensed and scarred. He held a crescent moon axe in his hands. Like Black, his eyes were unnaturally still. He gritted his teeth like an animal ready to hunt down its dinner.

Cross looked at the vampires in the crowd, and they were as stoic and as still as wax statues. They bore deep eyes like pits and moon-pale faces. Lips drew back to reveal gray fangs that dripped dark venoms. The vampires’ clothing was ruined finery, elegant hussars and gothic gowns all in dark shades — ebon and blood red, midnight and emerald — but the clothing was covered in aged flaws, dust and ancient stains and open tears. The undead wore silver bracelets and iron rings, bladed necklaces and bracelets of bone. They smoked black cigarillos and drank dark blood from silver goblets.

A creature presided over the arena from atop a throne of knives and bones. He was tall and dark, with his long hair pulled back half-up-half-down. His ashen skin was remarkably human, and his green and black armor was of the finest make. A dark-bladed katana rested in his spidery hands.

Talos Drake. Cross wasn’t sure how he knew who the vampire was, but he did. Drake had once been a notorious black market trader. Now he was the Viscount of Krul, and the acting leader when the military commander of the city, Morganna, was otherwise engaged.

Dead black lions with eyes like white fire and fangs capped with rusted steel stood to either side of Drake. Their rotted bodies were perfectly still, curled and poised. At the foot of the throne stood a Gol attendant, an emissary or speaker of some sort.

It was Tega Ramsey.

That son of a bitch.

Cross’ senses slowly returned to him. Rage welled in his soul. The Gol looked on calmly, not a vampire, but a traitor, a willing servant of an odious race.

Talos Drake stood up. His height was impressive. His long coat was decorated with gold trim and bone fetishes. Braids of hair that were obviously not his own dangled from chains wrapped around his wrists.

The other vampires all looked at their leader. Hundreds of pairs of vampire eyes trained on Drake, and waited. Talos smiled a toothy smile, and nodded.

A platform descended from above. It had been entirely concealed in the false night of the aerial dome. Eyes turned to the circular slab of rock as it slowly sank down. The loud clang of chains and industrial gears rattled as the stone made its grinding descent. Over a dozen gladiators cast their gazes skyward, worried, bitter, angry and confused.

Cross looked with them. He was afraid that he knew exactly what it was they would see.

It was an inverted altar, a chunk of layered granite. A statue protruded from the bottom of the slab, dead center, a manmade stalactite. The statue was of vague and dark sexual creatures with bat wings and fangs. The statue-creatures twisted together in an orgy of black stone, many made one, a molten amalgam of succubus angels.

Suspended around the statue were the hostages. They hung cruciform, and they dangled like meat on hooks. Each prisoner was fastened to an inverted wooden pole that jutted down from the stone slab, and they were held in place by ropes and chains that kept their arms pinned behind their backs. Their bare feet dangled helplessly over the arena floor. The stone came to a drastic and ear-shattering stop, and it hung suspended a good thirty feet above the arena.

The prisoners had all been beaten and cut. Fluids dripped down, a slow tide of blood and urine and drool. Even the stench of decay from the presence of hundreds of vampires could not mask the scent of the prisoner’s suffering and fear.

Not every prisoner was human. Cross saw a half-Doj with one eye sealed shut beneath a wound; a Lith, with crushed toes; a Gol, whose bonds looked so loose he might fall at any moment.

He saw Cole, her face bruised, her cheeks cut, and her neck bloody. There was no sign of Ekko.

But he saw Dillon. The ranger’s feet were bare, and blood sluiced down his legs and ran off of his toes in a thin stream that pooled on the ground far below. His face was a mess of cuts, and some sort of crude pattern had been carved across his chest, an idiot artist’s attempt made into his dark flesh.

Dillon met Cross’ gaze. Somehow, he managed a weak smile, and he nodded.

Cross, again, felt that he had seen this before.

Fight, said the gaunt skeletal being without making a true noise. The sound echoed inside of Cross’ mind like a sonic bruise. Fight, and win, or they will suffer even more.

The stone groaned upwards. Cross looked at the skeletal creature. His hands tensed, and his spirit crackled. Without thinking, he breathed her in. Her heat filled his lungs with fire. Blood trickled from his eyes and turned his vision red. His skin smoked as he fused his spirit into a lance of black ice that he cast into the skeletal being.

The spear pierced the abomination’s folds with a sound like metal scratching glass. White sparks erupted from its dark heart. A rush of dead air escaped the figure as it collapsed in on itself in a shrinking black cloud. Cross smelled foul meat.

For a moment, no one moved, even as the slab of prisoners slowly groaned its way back towards the vast darkness of the ceiling. Black liquid oozed out of the tattered cloak.

Sharp pain filled Cross’ head. He heard the sound of screaming metal. Explosions rang inside of his soul. His skin went damp as invisible claws raked across his nerves. He fell to the ground screaming.

Above him, suspended and immobile, Dillon screamed, too.

“ No, no, no,” Talos Drake spoke. He was suddenly on the ground, looming tall over Cross’ hunched form. Cross felt as if he’d been beaten with stone clubs. He could barely lift his head to look at the vampire who stood like a pillar of shadow before him. “There are rules, warlock. You just broke one. Now your friend suffers, as well.”

Cross struggled. Every motion was wracked with pain. His muscles were on fire. He craned his neck and looked up at Dillon, whose desperate eyes looked back.

It’s okay, he mouthed. The raw meat of his legs was exposed. They’d carved into his thighs like he was a flank steak. Cross could barely breathe. He wasn’t even aware of the tears in his eyes until they ran down his face and neck.

You barely even know him, a voice told him. His voice. But that didn’t matter. He knew him enough. Dillon was in pain because of him. Any chance the ranger ever had of eating his sister’s crappy cooking or seeing his nephew (what was his name did he ever even tell me?) rested squarely on Cross’ shoulders.

The Sleeper. Lucan. There’s still so much that I have to do.

Cross felt the weight of another man’s life push down on him. Slowly, he rose. He met Talos Drake’s gaze, a difficult task since the Viscount stood a full head taller than Cross did. No more words were spoken. The vampire smiled, and the stone of prisoners continued its ascent into darkness. Dillon’s eyes never left Cross until he and the others vanished into a sky of shadows.

Focus.

Dillon. Lucan. Snow. Graves.

Kane was one of the first to fight. He and the Gorgoloth matched up while the rest of the gladiators were compelled to form a perimeter around the circular battlefield. Massive white serpents swam through the darkness around them as if it were water. The air tasted cool, and Cross smelled the white worm’s oceanic breath.

Kane made quick work of his ebon-fleshed opponent and proved himself the more barbarous combatant by far. Axe blades swung and connected with diamond sparks. The fighters danced around the dark and steaming husk of the tall skeleton. Kane moved with expert grace and sinuous side-steps that defied his size and that sent his opponent into frustrated moves that proved to be its undoing. When their axes became entangled and clattered noisily to the ground, Kane snapped the Gorgoloth's kneecap sideways with a well-placed punch. He calmly drew a bone scimitar while the Gorgoloth desperately tried to re-set its knee bone with a series of sickening snaps. Kane waited until the Gorgoloth realized the futility of its actions before he finally took off its head with a cold and efficient swing.

In the darkness above, whatever prisoner the Gorgoloth had been attached to howled in pain.

The vampire crowd remained silent. No bodies were cleared and no cheers erupted. The fighters moved when it was their time to fight, directed by some psychic missive.

Cross watched as humans slew humans and the Doj slaughtered the Lith. Blood and broken corpses collected on the once pristine floor. The smell of open bodies grew strong. The pale serpents writhed with excitement, and they hissed and bared enormous fangs. The ground turned red.

He realized that no mages had battled until it was his turn to fight. He wasn’t sure how he knew when it was time: he suddenly stood on the circle, as if he’d woken there. He held a thin but wickedly sharp bone blade in one hand, while his gauntlet crackled with dark fire and gripped his spirit in the other. She closed around his body like a suit of shadow armor. His flesh ran cold at her touch, and his lungs cooled when he breathed her in.

Up above, he felt Dillon wince in pain. Talos Drake and Tega Ramsey looked on, unmoving.

Win, he told himself. Focus. Dillon. Snow.

He sees Snow, burning in the train.

You failed to save her. Don’t fail again.

His opponent was the Regost, which didn't surprise him. Only it or the Vuul would provide an adequate challenge to a mage, due to their innate resistance to magic. The Regost — the Hollow Men — were husks of humanoid bodies possessed by angry spectral beings that existed only as vapor, and who were forced to possess flesh automatons constructed in the strange factories they controlled at the bottom of the Ebonsand Sea. This figure was seven feet tall and sheathed in dark leather armor covered with metal plates positioned to protect the weaker joint areas. The Regost bodies would lose audio input from a strike to the head, but the hosts were more concerned with guarding the mobility of their flesh vessels, as well as the precious organic heart-engines that kept the host alive. The Regost’s face was little more than a fleshy mask fused to a rough piece of steel. Dark blue and black armor covered the thin body, which yielded a sharp steel blade set with an exceptionally long handle.

Cross knew he had to plan every step carefully. No magic would directly affect the Regost or its vessel, and while Cross had spent the better part of the last year learning to better use a blade, the bone hand-and-a-half sword they'd given him felt awkward and heavy at the tip. Cross feared he was too unfamiliar with the weapon, which he felt didn’t have a large enough hilt to counter the weight of the blade.

They circled one another. Their booted feet shuffled noisily on the stone as they turned. Each matched the other’s movements. The air bristled.

The Regost came at him with a furious series of blows. Cross met each in time with his blade. The force behind the Regost's attacks was staggering. Cross' arms stung from the effort.

He countered as best he could, stepped into the Regost’s strikes and deflected them away and countered with a well-balanced two-handed swing, but the Regost was faster than it looked, and its height afforded it a significant reach advantage.

Cross let his spirit swim around him. She cast the air in a fog made from bone dust and she whipped debris into a noisy shield. Cross knew the Regost didn’t rely on sight — maybe by disrupting what it could hear he’d gain the advantage.

Everything Cross did, his opponent countered. Its blade parried his attacks and forced him to move quickly to avoid being struck back in kind.

Some of the attacks got through. Blood ran down the dark runes on Cross’ skin, which pulsating in time to the beat of his heart, while his own blade dripped with dark Regost blood that steamed and sizzled on the ground.

The Regost came at him again, and he threw its blow aside. His spirit churned and howled. She desperately wanted to lash out, and before he could stop her she became a fan of dark flame that flew from his gauntleted hand.

Fire recoiled from the thaumaturgic shield that was permanently fused to the Regost’s spectral form, and the attack flew back at Cross. He fell to the ground, dazed. Dark fire licked at his body and spread all over his arms. His spirit screamed as she imploded in a burning ebon whirlpool.

Cross sensed the Regost as it stood over him. Pain crowded his head and fire lanced up his body, but he thrust his blade up and into his opponent’s stomach with a last valiant strike before he doubled over, screaming. The black fire swallowed him whole.

The mountain explodes behind him. He barely escapes into the pale doorway. His body smokes and churns. His spirit clings to him, angry and afraid. Her claws tear him open, and his blood leaves him soaked as he falls to the ground.

Anger swells. Pain sears his body. Something inside of him feels hollow and distant. It is as if a part of him has died.

He is in the Reach. The air is cold and hard. The sky is a white slate as brittle as glass.

The wreckage of the Dreadnaught is there, splintered wood and burning fuel that fills the sky with greasy fumes. He feels the presence of the Sleeper, a dread soul that is thousands of years old, a prisoner and refugee from another world. It is the harbinger of a darker sunset.

The woman is there, as well. Her face is pale, and her eyes are bloodshot and dark. Blood covers the tattered rags she’s been forced to wear.

The cold sky falls apart. Birds freeze in the melting twilight sun. Ashes float like snowflakes.

Help me.

Who are you?

You know who I am. And you know what you have to do. If you don't, they'll both die.

I don’t, he says. I don’t know what to do. The memory returns to him, painful and fast. I lost. I died.

No. Almost…but not quite.

What do I do?

I reached out for you. I knew the woman wouldn’t help me. I was a psychic in life. I heard the whispers of the dead, but I was not a witch. I heard their stories, and their secrets.

You understand them? he asks.

Sometimes. And they have taught me how to survive. But you must help me.

Her bleeding body collapses. She falls forward, and if not for him she would hit the ground. He holds her in his arms, and lifts her up. She is thin and frail. Her blonde hair is pasted to her face and neck. She smells sweet, like nectar.

I love him, she says. I want him to live. Help me. Open yourself to me.

Why should I trust you?

Because I promise you nothing, she says, but a fighting chance.

He carries her over dead water. His spirit trails, unhappy, untrusting, but somehow cowed.

Soon he is covered in the woman’s blood. They leave a thin crimson trail behind them on the pale and cracked earth.

Just before he is about to stop and rest, she leans in and bites him in the throat.

Cross woke, and screamed.

He wasn’t in his cell, but in a gray room with a single door. Sand and heat surrounded him. Dank sunlight cut through the bars and illuminated the dust motes in the air.

Cross’ body burned. He sat up slowly, as he felt nauseous and dizzy. His arms throbbed with pain, and his head felt as if it had been split open. His back and neck were stiff, almost jagged, like they were made of broken glass.

The runes cast onto his arms pulsed with dark light. They throbbed in time to his heartbeat. He felt his spirit there with him. She hovered a good distance away, as if afraid to initiate contact.

It took him a long time to pull himself off of the cot, which hung from the wall in the corner of the room. His stomach growled with hunger, and his gums ached. Memories of the fight flashed back to him.

Dillon.

A sharp clank sounded on the other side of the door as a bolt was withdrawn. The portal opened with a loud creak, and golden sunlight flooded the small chamber. Tega Ramsey stepped inside with tall vampire guards at his back.

“ Good to see you’re recovering, Cross,” he said.

“ What happened?”

Ramsey hesitated, and cautiously walked into the room. The Gol was right to fear him — Cross badly wanted to tear the dwarf’s head clean off of his shoulders — but there were more important things to worry about.

“ You don’t recall?” Ramsey said quietly.

“ No. Not all of it, anyways…”

“ You lost,” Ramsey said bluntly. “Or rather, you had a draw. A stalemate.”

“ Is that possible?”

Ramsey narrowed his eyes, as if suspicious.

“ You tell me.”

Cross readied an insult, but stopped. He realized there was a great deal that he couldn’t remember about the fight. Images flashed through his mind.

Blades. Fire. A Regost. Dillon.

Dillon.

“ You tried to use your magic,” Ramsey said. He stood fully in the room now, while the vampire sentries remained stationed at the door. Cross didn’t remember sitting back down, but he was hunched and cross-legged on the cot, which strained under his weight and made the steel brackets creak where they held it against the wall.

“ I was on the mountain…” Cross said. “There was a woman…”

No. That was before. Or after.

It was becoming harder for him to determine what was real, or if any of it was real. Dream and pain and visions of blades all bled into a collage of images and sensations.

“ You tried to use your magic,” Ramsey said, slowly, “on a Regost. Just like some idiot first-year novice warlock. Your own flames were all over you, burning you.”

Ramsey’s milky eyes went to Cross’ arms. Cross looked down.

He was unscathed. It was as if he’d never been touched.

“ My spirit?” he asked.

“ Oh, no,” Ramsey said with a shake of his head. “Something else, but they’re damned if they know what it is. They’re very interested in you, Cross. They know who you are, but they’re not sure what you are. They know about how you lost your spirit, got her back, and lost her again. About how you found another. About how you somehow survived a necroclast explosion at point blank range.” His voice dropped. “About how you’ve seen the world where the spirits roam, and yet you came back. They know you’re…unique. Special, even. And that makes you valuable.”

Hatred snapped Cross back to clarity for a moment.

“‘ They’?” he said sharply.

Ramsey smiled a hideous, black-toothed grin.

“ You count me as one of them?” He nodded. “If you wish.”

“ You are one of them.”

“ You don’t know what I am,” Ramsey said coldly. “You don’t have a first-born clue.” He paused, and drew an angry breath. They waited in silence. Cross heard engine turbines somewhere beyond the walls. “I do what I have to in order to stay alive,” Ramsey continued after a time. “The same as you.”

Ramsey turned to leave. The vampires let him out, and they waited when he paused at the doorway.

“ You’ll fight the Regost again,” he said. “Its name is Tower, by the way. But first the vampires will test you. They’ll pit you against lesser foes. See how much you’re capable of. And I suggest you do well.” He cast his eyes down. “For your friend’s sake.”

He left. The door was slammed and locked behind him.

Cross breathed in, slowly. His body shook all over.

After a while he rose. He ignored the pain that blazed through his body and he worked through every block and parry and thrust and swipe he’d ever learned. Images of his dead sister burned in his mind.

TWELVE

RAZOR

Cross stepped into the arena.

Just as before, death and silence waited for him. Floating silver flames and dead white snakes slithered through the air around the pale and rune-marked stone. Vampire eyes watched him from the dark stadium seats, calm and hungry. They never moved when the gladiators were present, but Cross could tell that they were anxious, and that they hungered for blood. He knew that the vampires fed on the fallen when the fighting was done, and that was why the arena floor was never cleaned between battles. That floor was immaculate when the gladiators arrived, but soon it would be covered in thick pools of blood and steaming flesh.

The bone blade that he wore on his back had been honed to a razor’s keen edge. The hilt was wrapped in black cord that had been stained and fused with oil and lacquer. The blade itself was yellowed bone taken from the fangs of some massive and primordial beast. The sword was lightweight but long, and it could cut through flesh and light steel.

Cross had used it many times. How many, he couldn’t be sure. He had been a fighter in that arena of the dead for what felt like weeks.

Cross was always the first gladiator to arrive, but never the last to fight, not anymore. He, Kane, Black, the Regost called Tower, and Gorge the Vuul were all that remained of the group that Cross had first been brought to the arena with. With the exception of the match between Tower and Cross, none of those fighters had fought against one other.

Until now.

Gorge was no match for Kane. Despite its ferocity, size and weapon — it carried a heavy flail made from bone and metal — the Vuul was nowhere near as skilled of a fighter as Kane was. The blonde gladiator’s face still looked boyish no matter how many scars he acquired or how thick and shaggy his beard became. He was too fast, too agile, and filled with too much raw fury for his opponent. Kane’s crescent axe sliced the flail’s chain, and when the gray-skinned Vuul tried to hammer Kane with its formidable fists, Kane switched to a thin scimitar made of bone, a faster and lighter weapon that was far more accurate than an axe. He hamstringed the Vuul and let it writhe and crawl along on the ground before he finished it.

Kane’s face was covered in gray blood. His eyes were vacant and haunted.

Danica Black battled a hellishly fast Lith warrior. The female Lith was light and thin and armed with a double-bladed spear adorned with human hair and chain grips. Black moved like a serpent, agile and strong. She wore dark leather armor and yielded twin swords. Her spirit whirled around her in a protective barrier of spinning blades. Dead wind circled the arena floor as the women darted in and out of the maze of bodies left from the earlier battles. Blades sparked and spun off of one another. Cross wasn’t sure if the Lith used magic, or if she was just incredibly agile. In the end it didn’t matter: Danica skewered the woman on both of her blades and held her bleeding body upright as she died.

Like Kane, something seemed dead inside of her.

They’re killing us slowly. Each of us dies a little with every life we take.

They could keep going, keep fighting, and they would. Presumably they would be freed at some point. That was the deal she had made, wasn’t it? Cross couldn’t even remember anymore.

All he knew was that if he didn’t fight and win, Dillon suffered.

They showcased the prisoners before every series of matches. Most of the prisoners were new. The cast changed as the gladiators did. Old prisoners were discarded or killed when their accompanying fighters failed, and new prisoners replaced them as new gladiators arrived. Every victim was tied to a fighter. Every gladiator had someone to win for besides themselves.

Dillon looked sick, and wracked with pain. He still gave that same knowing and brotherly nod every time Cross looked at him. In a way, it would have been better if Dillon had looked at him with hate or despair, but he didn’t.

He still believes that we have a chance. That, or he just wants me to believe it.

Cole was wasting away. Cross still had not seen Ekko, not once, and yet Kane battled like a man possessed.

He couldn’t think about it too much. It was his turn to fight.

Cross was matched with a pair of Gorgoloth armed with heavy stones bound to lengths of black chain. Their stark manes and sharp fangs made them stand out against the midnight chamber that surrounded them. Cross tried to keep them both in sight. They looped the flat stones in the air and growled, spaced themselves apart to try and flank him. His spirit laced herself tight to his skin, stuck to him as if with needles. The pain she caused kept him alert and angry. He felt her bloodlust course through his blood. His normally shaking nerves steadied, cooled like smelted iron dipped in water. He kept her close, and her cold radiated through his hands and across his chest.

The first Gorgoloth shouted out and charged, which signaled the other to attack from the flanking position. Cross released his spirit on the Gorgoloth behind him. She fell on the brute like a hail of explosive nails, while Cross met the other one head on.

Cold explosions detonated behind him. He heard screams and felt bits of fleshy matter as they rained down.

The other Gorgoloth swung its stone too wide, as it hadn’t expected Cross to step in to its attack. Cross severed the chain with a clean blow and raked the bone blade across the creature’s face. It howled in pain and grasped at its ruined eye. Cross called his spirit back from the cold and steaming remains of her victim. She swam to his blade and sheathed it in razor shadows, a humming ebon layer of dripping volcanic metal.

He cut the Gorgoloth in half with a single blow.

Cross returned to his place in the circle of gladiators. Time had lost meaning. He didn’t know how many fights he’d already won. When the match was over, after every battle had been fought, the gladiators were led back to their cold and featureless cells, stripped of their weapons along the way.

Cross saw the normally placid crowd descend upon the bodies as the gladiators left. The prisoners whose respective fighters had failed were added to the mix, dropped screaming from the hanging stone, and they crashed down hard on the ground to be consumed by a horde of aristocratic vampires turned suddenly ravenous.

Cross started to hear that noise wherever he went: smacking lips, tearing flesh, slurping blood. It turned his stomach sour.

Whenever he isn’t fighting, he is here with her, in the Reach.

The land is a ruin. Plumes of smoke dance into the sky and gather in an inverted ocean that cancels the sun.

They hunt. He is armed with his bone blade, its edge sharp and black. His hunting partner is armed with small knives that are always bloody, even when they find nothing.

What do we hunt?

You’ll know.

The area is caustic due to mounds of Gorgoloth cadavers and the hexed fuel that leaks from the wrecked airship. The air tastes of dirt and metal.

They traverse streams of black water. The air is unnaturally still. The sky beyond the dead trees is pale red and eye-numbing. Loose stones and broken logs glisten with foul moisture.

They run. He feels the shadow in the trees and in the sky. The presence is oppressive, overwhelming.

He hears Dillon scream somewhere beyond the trees. He wants to kill something, to hurt it. It is the only way he can think of to make that pain stop.

No. Part of him, something deep inside, knows that this is not right, that he shouldn’t be here. Something about this new bond he shares with this woman is wrong. But he runs with her nevertheless, taken by need. They jump over festering streams and run through dead woods. They move separately, and yet they are joined.

Bound together by blood spilled, and yet to spill.

They brought him women. At first Cross didn't want them. He hadn't asked for them, and he was distrustful of anything offered by the Ebon Cities. And it felt wrong, for some reason, like there was someone he'd betray by taking terrified slave girls who’d been snatched from their homes, and who were likely as malnourished and exhausted as he was.

But his lust built. It had been some time since he'd been with a woman, and before long the lure of having one was too much for Cross to resist. He felt he'd hate himself for it later, even if he didn't know why.

Cross wasn't sure of how many women they brought him, always after fights. Like the battles themselves, the memories quickly blurred, and faded. He remembered faces and warm tongues, tangles of red and black and blonde hair and the feel of soft breasts in his hands and on his tongue.

He lost time. He might have been fighting and whoring and sleeping for years.

At one point Tega Ramsey was in his cell again. Cross felt like he'd just woken, that he'd just walked into a conversation that had been going on for some time.

Ramsey looked at him with his usual cruel eyes, filled with amusement at another's expense.

“ Why?” Cross asked, not entirely sure what he asked. Ramsey seemed unfazed.

“ Because you've done well,” he answered. “You've become quite popular among the vampire crowd who fly in from Rath and Sethia to watch the matches. The way you channel your spirit through that blade…they call you Razor.”

Later still. It might have been the same conversation, Cross couldn't tell. He knew that Ramsey had told him things about himself, like the fact that he'd been a servant of the Ebon Cities ever since the surrender of Dirge, where he'd apparently been someone of import. He hated the job, hated sharing information with Talos Drake and Morganna, but he had little choice.

“ We do whatever we have to do to survive.” Cross didn't know he'd said it aloud until he saw Ramsey's confused expression. “How long?” he asked the Gol.

Ramsey didn't seem to want to answer. Yellow sunlight filtered through the bars in the door. Cross didn't need to see the undead sentries who waited outside to know that they were there. He smelled them.

“ Your next battle is a rematch with Tower,” Ramsey answered. He in no way hinted that Cross and the others would be released after that. Cross considered killing Ramsey, but decided it would serve no purpose. He felt sure he could destroy the sentries outside, too, but after that it would be difficult to escape. He had others beyond himself to think about.

Dillon. Dillon is in pain.

Ramsey left. The golden light faded fast. Soon it would be night full, and again he would have to fight. The thought filled him with dread, and suddenly the pain and welts and wounds he'd suffered over the course of those days or weeks came surging back to him. Somehow, even without his spirit there to aid him at any time except during the fights in the arena, his body had healed.

Cross slept. It was the easiest way to avoid thinking about the coming night.

She waits for him. Whatever they hunt is fast, and it melts into the shadows of the deep woods.

A storm rises behind them, frosted air and sharp winds. Dank blue clouds hang petrified in the chiseled sky. The shadow is there, too, looming larger than before. It pursues them.

They hunt something, or someone, and the shadow, in turn, hunts them.

His spirit is afraid, but she is also exhilarated. She is taken by the heat and lust of the hunt. Her form is wrapped around his arms and his weapons in a cloak of black steam. She circles him like a charcoal cloud and trails his movement like exhaust. He moves immolated across the dreamscape.

His cohort moves at his side. Her clothing is pale and ragged, but her dark blades are drawn. She still bleeds — she always bleeds — but the blood flows slower the faster she moves.

They cut a swath through the tress. Hoarfrost and brittle branches break away before them. White honey drips onto the path. There are signs of passage. They hunt some large and wounded animal that bleeds light. Traces of phosphorescent steam lick the dirt and stone.

Something growls in the sky. The earth rattles. He senses a presence behind them. There are more hunters. Not the shadow in the sky — these new beings are from the other world, the mountain.

No. The other world is the city. The real world.

Worlds upon worlds, all of them in his or someone else’s mind. He is lost. The sky splits, cuts open like a seam. He smells the blood of ages seep through the cracks. Everything is less stable. He feels as if they could fall off of the surface of the dream world and into the mud-colored sky.

Branches claw and snag at their clothing. They stop. She is weak, and she turns to him, takes him in her arms, and embraces him. They kiss passionately. He feels energy flow into her through her nectar-sweet tongue. He feels wounds on his neck re-open and pour blood down his arms.

This is wrong. I can’t stop her.

They hunt again. Their pursuers are close, as is the shadow in the sky. Trees uproot and float into the air. Everything is breaking, coming undone. Soon it will all collapse.

They follow blood that is light, drops of liquid sun that burn the ground. They step through puddles of oil and bone sand.

Their prey is there. He stands alone at the center of a black lake with a surface like cracked steel. Dark smoke flows endlessly from a deep wound in the frozen surface, and it forms a pillar that twists like a serpent into the sky. The lake’s glacial smell turns his lungs raw and makes his skin burn.

He looks at the man they have hunted. He is exhausted and half-alive. He slumps down to his knees at the middle of the lake. His wounds bleed light.

Lucan.

He looks at the woman he has hunted with, the one who bit him, and at last he knows her, even though her eyes are sunken and her skin has taken on the pallor of death.

Ekko.

We have to save him, she says, but her words are mist. I’m sorry. It was the only way I could show you. It’s the only way I’ve been able to survive.

The shadow behind them grows larger, a black moon that swallows the sky. Silhouettes of armed vampires appear in the distance as they cut their way through the disintegrating forest. The ground pulls apart into jagged stones. The ice cracks and the shadow falls like a monstrous wave of black water. It envelops them.

“ He’s alive,” Cross whispered.

He sat up. Tension that had coiled up in his back threatened to snap him in two. Sharp pain gripped his stomach. Dusk approached, and the light faded fast. Cross couldn’t remember when he’d fallen asleep, or how long he’d slept.

The air was cold and tasted of sweat. The shadows were long on the pale walls. He heard someone scream in the distance, and close by he heard the rattle of chains. Cross threw his legs off the side of his lumpy cot, cracked the muscles in his neck, pissed in a pot in the corner, and drank from the water skin that had been left on a hook on the wall. He stretched his body, placed himself in plank position and held until his muscles were sore and sweat flowed onto the stone. The ground was cool and soothing to the touch, so he stayed there for a time, lying like a corpse.

He worked through a physical routine that he somehow remembered even when everything else had grown hazy and disconnected. He lunged and parried with a phantom blade, leapt and kicked away from the walls, positioned his legs to do sit-ups and lunges.

Snow. Dillon. Graves.

Lucan.

Slowly the details of the dream returned to him. His fingers shook as he moved them to his neck. There was, as expected, no wound there, but he had been wounded, and though he didn’t understand how he at last knew what was happening to him, why he continued to heal even when she shouldn’t have been able to.

His spirit bristled at the realization. The air around him turned cold and bitter, the taste of her anger. Cross ignored her. She’d have the opportunity to vent her rage soon enough. He felt her frustration build and fester like a boil. It would be ugly when it erupted, but that was what he needed this time. He kept imagining a way to beat the Regost, and containing his spirit’s anger was the key.

If Lucan was still alive, that meant the Sleeper could still be stopped, and that was all that mattered. He tried not to think about Dillon or his pain, dangling from that stone, watching Cross fail, praying to see a family he had no chance of ever seeing again. He thought about Danica Black, and Kane. He would have to fight them at some point, he knew it.

Win. That’s all that matters. Win, at any cost.

By the time the bolt on the door slid back, he was ready. They would give him his weapons later, but Cross’ mind was focused and alert. He knew what he had to do.

Tega Ramsey was there with the sentries. He often came into the cell with the salt-encrusted zombie whose sole purpose was to prepare Cross for battle. It helped him don his leather and chain armor, fastened the arcane gauntlet to his hand and gave him his bone blade. Its rotting eyes were perfect mirrors that showed Cross his weather-beaten face.

He tried not to look too long. He barely recognized himself.

“ So tell me,” he said to Ramsey as the zombie slid the black gauntlet onto his hand. The Gol stood leaning against the doorway with his arms folded. “Does Kane know that you’ve Turned Ekko into a vampire?”

Cross took some satisfaction in the surprise that showed in Ramsey’s milky eyes.

“ He knows that she is being Turned,” he said carefully. “He knows that she will not be fully of The Blood unless he falls.” Ramsey turned his head. “And there is no way you could know that, Cross,” he said. The crease in his face wrap betrayed his wry smile. He understood what was happening, maybe even better than Cross himself did. “You are so very full of surprises.”

“ Yeah,” Cross said. His rage was growing. “And you are so very full of shit. I’m getting out of here, Tega. You and I will settle accounts after I do.”

The zombie handed Cross his sword.

Ramsey stood there in his tattered crimson robes, his scarred and ugly face defiant, a full two feet shorter than Cross. Cross badly wanted to put his blade through the little man’s head, but he knew it would accomplish nothing. Ramsey smirked.

“ The chances of you ever leaving this city are slim, my friend,” Ramsey said. “And the chances of you being rescued are even less, not without someone on the inside to help you be found. But you already knew that.” He paused, and his eyes narrowed. “Tell me…did you ever wonder why you were the one fighting, and not Dillon?”

Had I? Cross felt sure he had. It was a logical question. Between the two of them, Dillon was unquestionably the better physical specimen: he was tall and muscular, athletic and graceful, strong.

“ Cross,” Ramsey smiled again. “Think. Both you and Dillon are only alive because of the deal that Danica Black arranged for you. The deal was that one of you would fight, and the other would suffer as a hostage.” Ramsey stepped close. It would have been so easy for Cross to kill him then and there.

No. Dillon. Dillon needs you. You have to find Lucan. Snow. Dillon. Graves. Lucan.

“ And?” he growled.

“ It was Danica Black that chose you to do the fighting, and not Dillon. Any idea why?”

Ramsey didn’t wait for a response, but turned and marched down the long hallway. The vampires shoved Cross into the corridor. He felt he could destroy them before the spirit dampeners sent lances of fire into his brain, like they had when he’d struck down the skeleton on the arena floor.

But that meant Dillon would die. That meant Lucan would die. He had no way of knowing what the Southern Claw knew. Cross had no choice but to assume that there was no one who would act against the Sleeper but himself.

Why did Danica choose me?

He lost time. He always fell into a sort of trance when he moved towards the arena, but he couldn’t tell if it was some effect of Krul or if it was the mind-altering drugs they fed through his water and food to make him less dangerous until it was time to fight. The world faded to a blur. His steps grew distant. Everything slowed.

He thought about Snow. The memories came unbidden, but he didn't fight them. He saw her at her apartment that first night after he'd learned she was to be a member of Viper Squad. He should have felt rage and pain at her betrayal, but all of that had been left behind. They sat in her cramped apartment, surrounded by thin shelves of books, and they ate warm bread and cheese and drank red wine. They tried to make up for years spent distant from one another in a single night. In the end it had just felt awkward, like they'd only brought to light how far apart they’d grown.

“ I'm sorry, Snow.”

He wasn't sure if he spoke aloud or not. He didn't really care.

The arena doors opened ahead of him. Cross immediately noted that something was different. The air wasn’t as still as it had been on past trips to the arena. Something had come alive. He could all but taste it in the air, a sense of predatory anticipation, an animal musk.

Pale lights floated in the air and cast the world in ghastly shadows. Hundreds of vampire eyes watched as he entered the arena. For once he was not the first gladiator there, but the last. The semi-circle of other combatants watched stoically as he approached. He saw several humans, a new Vuul, and a Sorn. He saw Tower, Kane and Black. Every fighter, Cross included, wore darker armor than they normally did, pitch black leather and chain and hard plates that made the fighters almost invisible in the false indoor night. Floating silver flames and flying serpents passed like fish through a shadow sea.

The platform started to descend. Heavy chains rattled in the darkness.

A new figure in the stands caught Cross’ eye. She had never been there before, but he knew who she was: Morganna, the true leader of Krul, Talos Drake’s lover, and an assassin and enforcer for the Grim Father. She was moon-pale and severe, with a jutting jaw and thick hair held in place with a silver-capped stick made from black bone. Her dark dress and talons matched Drake’s hussar, and she wore a katana identical to his in every way. Morganna’s eyes were on Cross as he walked across the floor. He held her gaze.

His spirit knew what was coming. He felt her lustful and bloody desire to release her pent-up rage.

The stone platform from above came to a halt just as Cross reached the circle and took his place. He didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to find his friend. If he didn’t see him, maybe he could imagine that he was stuck in some terrible dream, a nightmare he might still be able to wake up from. Maybe if he didn’t see Dillon, the soul-breaking pressure of how badly he needed to win wouldn’t weigh him down.

Kane stood directly across from him. His eyes were closed, and his arms were at his side. He had no one to look for on the stone.

Cross also saw Black out of the corner of his eye. Her face was a mask, hard and unafraid. The space behind her eyes was dead and cold.

In spite of himself, Cross looked up. He found Dillon after just a few seconds, and his heart cracked. The ranger was emaciated and thin to the point of being skeletal. One eye was gone, replaced by a dark and dripping hole. His legs were swollen, covered in cuts that had caused his flesh to go gray. Dried blood encrusted his arms and wrists where they’d worn beneath the chains that held him suspended. His one eye looked dead and void, but after a moment Cross realized that Dillon stared right at him. The ranger trembled as he dangled there beneath the stone. His jaw set, Dillon slowly nodded the same confidant nod that Cross had grown used to seeing, and then he smiled.

Something inside of Cross died at that moment.

He stepped onto the arena floor unbidden. The tall skeletal form that was the master of ceremonies recoiled, and it hovered higher off the ground.

Cross’ breathing came in fast and violent bursts. He felt like he’d grown jaws. His spirit concentrated her form into a nimbus of crackling black energy that filled the air with the tang of ozone and burning matter. She covered his left arm like a gauntlet of shifting shadows.

Tower stepped onto the arena. Its great blade was honed from a single shard of obsidian steel. Its armored faceplate concealed dead and false skin. Salt-and-pepper hair had been pulled back to reveal entirely blank and useless eyes. The Regost’s boots stamped the stone as it marched. It kicked up dust and made pale clouds of bone debris.

Tower charged without a moment’s hesitation, the attack silent but for the shift of its armor. Cross’ bone blade was in his hands in time to deflect the first heavy blow and spin Tower away, but the Regost’s timing had improved, and it turned and hammered two, three more blows against Cross’ blade. He fought one-handed, held the bastard blade at an angle that made it an extension of his arm. He moved with the attacks, and even though the blows rattled his bones his feet were fluid and kept moving.

Cross counterattacked. His strikes were fast, aimed to deliver quick jabs into Tower’s husk of a body, testing his defenses rather than seeking to do damage. Tower’s armor was thicker than Cross’, made of dark plate held in place with leather straps. Soul smoke churned beneath the faceplate and out of artificial eyes as the Regost furiously blocked Cross’ blows with such strength it was a wonder the blades didn’t snap.

His spirit retained her composure. Something about their bond with Ekko calmed her. She was able to wait rather than explode in anger, which would have surely killed them both.

Cross continued to dance around his opponent, and while the Regost’s host body wouldn’t tire, the vaporous being within grew impatient. Dark and spectral steam wrapped around the flesh automaton and turned the air into haze. Steel rang against steel and sent sparks to the ground.

Unmoving faces watched the two warriors shift and dance. Cross’ heart pumped with power and anxiety. His spirit froze his arm till it was nearly ice.

He anticipated Tower’s moves. Every sword swing was a powerful strike, but he moved quicker than Cross recalled, so both the force and speed of the attacks made the Regost difficult to guard against. Regardless, Cross could dictate the direction from which Tower launched its strikes simply by changing his own stance.

He saw Dillon’s nod in his mind’s eye.

Cross grit his teeth, stepped in close, and forced Tower to set its feet and make a downward swing that would take Cross’ head and arm off at the shoulder. His spirit exploded around his skin, scalded him with bitter cold that froze into a solid barrier around his left arm.

His veins froze. His bones felt brittle and weak.

Cross’ arm was coated in dark frost, and he held it out before him like a shield. The ice armor ruptured as Tower’s sword crashed down, and both sword and ice shattered like glass. Black crystal light and fused steel exploded into crystal shards.

Pain echoed down Cross’ body in waves. Every bone in his arm broke, and he screamed in pain.

But with Tower committed and its weapon destroyed — Cross’ magic had never touched the Regost, only its sword — Cross threw himself into his opponent and pushed his bone blade into Tower’s abdomen. The Regost panicked, put all of its life force into holding its host body upright, but Cross kicked forward and threw off its weight, forced his enemy deeper onto his sword. Cross sank his blade in to its hilt.

Blinded with pain, Cross held the blade firm. Dark artificial blood pooled around his unwounded hand. His spirit held on in the air behind him, extended, exhausted. He watched the gray liquid vapor of the Regost drain away. The creature’s life force sizzled as it fell to the ground like dripping fat.

Cross collapsed onto his knees. Already he felt Ekko’s vampiric power fuse his shattered bones back together. His spirit did what she could to numb the intense pain. Tears welled in his eyes. He heard his bones crack as they mended and realigned like puzzle pieces inside of his flesh. The world spun, and then it seemed to fall away beneath him, as if he floated. He dropped his sword.

He felt the disapproving eyes of Morganna and the vampire elite. Cross looked up at them defiantly. Hatred for the vampires of Krul burned in his soul.

Cross teetered at the edge of consciousness. He arched his body backwards and looked up at the prisoner’s slab, that grisly chandelier that hung over the battlefield. Dillon had passed out. Cole, her eyes deep and sallow and her arms riddled with so many cuts that she looked like a grisly road map, gave him a faint smile.

Down on the circle, Kane watched him with grim and knowing eyes. He also smiled, ever so slightly.

Danica Black did not. Her eyes bore straight through to his soul. For a moment, Cross didn’t understand why she regarded him with such hatred, but as the tide of pain washed over him and he slipped towards unconsciousness he realized the truth.

You want Dillon to suffer, because he killed your brother. You chose me…because you thought that I would fail. All this time, even with your deal, you meant for Dillon to die.

His last thoughts, before he passed out, were of killing Danica Black.

THIRTEEN

DUEL

They run. They have turned from hunters into prey.

Dark silhouettes of fangs and blades pursue them through the trees. The vampires will have them soon — there is no doubt of that, nor any way to avoid it. It is the shadow in the sky that he fears, the shadow that will bring death.

What is this place? he asks as they run. He should be out of breath, unable to speak from exhaustion, but he isn’t.

It is a place from before the world, Lucan says. A slice of a time from before there was time. A refuge of the soul, and of the mind.

Cross wonders if that makes sense to him. It doesn't.

They run over sharp stones and up the sides of barren brown hills. The pink and gray sky melts beneath shadows and black clouds that smother everything in an ebon wave.

It destroyed me, Lucan says. It destroyed my body, but what is left of my primal spirit still lives, scattered. It was thrown like shards of glass through the night. Some of those shards stuck to other creatures, like you, and Ekko, and Danica Black.

Mages, Cross realizes. Two mages, and another who touches spirits. All of them had been in close proximity to Lucan and the Sleeper during the battle over the lake.

The Sleeper…

Lives, Lucan explains. It comes for you now, to finish you off. It is afraid. We can hurt it…we can imprison it again. Not many souls such as mine exist. It wants you destroyed. All of you.

The shadow leaks into the furthest reaches of the sky.

But most of all, it searches for my master. She is the one who presents the most present danger to the Sleeper’s freedom. She is the woman that you were sent to find.

The Woman in the Ice…

Cross growled as he woke. Despair crushed him.

I didn't ask for this. Any of this.

But neither had Dillon.

His bones had re-knit themselves. His muscles burned like they'd been cut and dipped in salt, but he could function, and he could move. He could fight.

Ekko had reached out to him psychically, and infected him. The vampire’s telepathic bond with Cross made him feral and bloodthirsty, but it also gave him incredible regenerative capabilities. He didn't want to test its limits, but he knew that before long he would have to. He only hoped that Ekko's captors didn't find a way to block the connection. It had been foolish to speak with Ramsey about Ekko's being Turned, but it had been the only way for Cross to be sure of what was happening to him.

He rose. There was a sharp, almost tearing pain buried deep in his stomach. He wondered if there wasn’t some internal damage, something that couldn’t be fixed by either his spirit or Ekko’s vampiric power.

Not long ago he would have worried that the pain was an effect of the food and drink they’d given him. He knew that it was tainted: there had never been any question regarding that. They wouldn’t want him at full strength except during the duels in the arena.

But now that’s out of their hands, he thought with grim satisfaction. Now Ekko heals me, and she purges those poisons out of my system, just like a spirit would.

Cross tried not to think too much about the fact that he benefitted from a vampire’s power, that it was the strength of creatures he hated to the core of his being that now allowed him to carry on when he should have already failed.

His heart burned with anger, and he pushed himself until his muscles burned with pain. He ran back and forth, pushed off of the walls with his booted feet. He stayed twice as long in the plank position, and pushed his body to its limits. He didn’t tire. He punched the air until his arms were so sore from motion that he couldn’t move. It didn’t matter. His body would heal before his next battle.

He wasn’t sure how it worked, exactly. He felt no thirst for blood, no ravenous hunger like a vampire’s victims were supposed to feel when they were Turned, or when they were in the process of being Turned. But hatred fueled him: hatred for vampires, for the leaders of Krul…and hatred for Danica Black. The rational part of his brain knew that he couldn’t kill her, if for no other reason than the fact that he needed her. If what was left of Lucan, those bits of his ancient soul, had indeed bonded with Cross and Ekko and Black, she had to live.

But not for one second longer than is necessary, he promised himself.

He went through his motions, through thrusts and parries and dodges. Cross battled imaginary foes. He worked himself to a sweat. He drank water, and at some point was given food, real food, a metal bowl filled with strips of cured pork and beef and a crust of bread along with a jug of purple wine. He devoured it all, and licked the juices from his aching fingers.

It was difficult to slow his mind down. He had to determine how they would escape. They had to save the Woman in the Ice. If she fell, the Dra’aalthakmar, the Sleeper, would raze the cities of the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities alike, and while Cross didn’t give two shits about the vampires he didn’t want to be the man who’d failed humankind. There had to be a way out, and one that didn’t rely on Danica Black. He knew now that they would never be released, no matter how well or how many times they fought.

Cross fell onto the cot, exhausted. Bright sunlight seeped through the high bars of the door, and the air was sticky and hot. It would be some time still before nightfall. He allowed his body to rest, even though his mind continued to race and rage.

He stands on an ashen peak. The night sky is vast and starless. The wind is bitter with the taste of glacial salt, and so cold it makes the air brittle. Cracks in the ground threaten to widen and swallow him up.

The mountaintop is surrounded by a void. It is an island of ruined stone in a sea of endless night. The ground shifts beneath his feet like a raft lost in an inky sea.

The Sleeper is there. It is a thick and charnel presence, a smoking husk of primordial rage and defiled power.

His feet kick mounds of dust like fine black snow as he circles, trying to gain advantage against a foe that can likely destroy him with ease. The Sleeper manifests a physical presence. It is a tall and thin shadow of bladed edges and serpentine limbs, with eyes like dead stars. Cross tries to lock his eyes onto its form, but his mind burns from the effort. The Sleeper is an inconstant, an eye-numbing haze in the vague semblance of a giant.

He realizes he does not face the shadow alone. His spirit hugs painfully against his skin, like armor made from shards of broken steel. There are two others there with them atop the thin spire of crumbling rock, standing next to him at the foot of a Stygian titan.

One of them is Ekko, pale and bloody, her eyes dead crimson, her hands replaced with thick claws encased in iron gauntlets.

The other is Danica Black. Her katars are as ebon as her armor, and the fresh scar around her right eye is bloody and raw. She looks at Cross, and he looks back, their eyes direct doorways into their tainted souls.

Even with that brief connection, that understanding, they both know there will be more blood spilled between them. And that only one of them will survive.

He was shaken awake by vampire sentries. His vision swam, and his head throbbed with pain. The runes on his forearms pulsated with bloody purple light, and for the first time Cross realized it wasn't the food or drink that kept him in a dreamlike state, but the arcane runes that had been cast onto his skin. They made him more susceptible to the vampire’s control and suggestion. It occurred to him that those runes might have been how Ekko had managed to maintain their empathic vampire bond — the shards of Lucan’s soul that had embedded themselves in Cross, Black and Ekko in the wake of his apparent destruction had established a link between the three living mages, but these mind-weakening runes had in their own way perpetuated it. If not for them, Cross doubted Ekko ever would have been able to reach out and telepathically infect him at all.

Telepathic vampirism. I’ve officially heard it all.

Cross was fit into his armor by withered zombie hands. His gauntlet was clamped onto his hand and his blade was strapped to his back. His spirit cooled against his skin like a soothing vapor.

He cleared his mind. He was brought again to the arena. The trip was clearer this time. The controlling runes were losing their efficacy. He saw the stone halls wrought in blood-spattered stone. They were lined with the cells of other condemned prisoners, their eyes vacant and hollow, their faces grim, sucked of all life. Each of those condemned inmates looked as dead on the outside as he felt on the inside.

Cross passed bladed reliquaries and filthy operating rooms with stained floors. There was a chamber where the pieces of a dead giant were being grafted together to form a titan zombie, a tower of shambling armored flesh held up by scaffolding and dark iron ladders. Cross walked on bridges that spanned pools of bubbling acid fuel. He walked through open courtyards populated by bone trees that grew in blood soil. He smelled decay and human fear in exercise yards, where prisoners were forced to leap over swinging blades and duck beneath oversized claws. Chambers grew long with shadows as the sun descended. The air turned as dark as wine, and the sound of chains rang like song through the approaching night.

The air turned pale as they approached the arena, and it was heavy with the tang of sweat. Cross wondered if the cold feeling inside of him was still fear. He should have felt more apprehension as he approached those doors. His limbs should have shaken, and thoughts of doubt should have plagued his mind. But all he felt was the cold, a gnawing chill that encased his heart, as if in armor.

The doors groaned open, and the arena waited for him. He was once again the last fighter to arrive. The prisoner slab had already started its descent, and it filled the air with stone and metal noise. The fading desert light from outside was overwhelmed by the burn of floating silver torches. The predatory bone serpents passed nearby as he entered the room, and he smelled their dead breath. He ignored the undead eyes that glared down at him. His own eyes were cast ahead, locked on his opponent.

Danica Black waited for him. Her armor had been discarded in favor of mobility and speed. Her dark-bladed katars shone with a wicked crimson light, and her dark clothing made her fade into the shadows. Pale and tattooed skin was exposed at her neck and midriff, and her bare and serpent-inked arms ended in dark fingerless gloves. Her hair was the color of blood, and her black lips were sealed in a determined scowl.

Cross had never beheld a woman as beautiful as she.

He drew his blade as he approached the arena floor, and with his other hand he removed his armor coat and dropped it to the ground. His eyes never left Black's, but at the corner of his vision he saw movement near the commander's chairs in the stadium seats, likely a gesture made by Drake or Morganna to indicate that they approved of the match.

Only when he'd reached the pale killing floor did Cross allow his eyes to go up, to look upon the dying. Cross knew he would carry what he saw there with him for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.

Dillon looked withered. His skin hung loose from his bones. His one eye was sunken and dark, and his mouth hung slack. He looked feverish, but he was so devoid of strength he couldn't even shake in pain. His legs had been stripped of much of their meat, but they’d been expertly bandaged and tended so he that would not die quickly of his wounds. The skin where his wrists and ankles were bound was raw and dried with blood. One of his feet was gone.

He looked nothing like Dillon. He was some dying old man.

Cross caught his gaze. It was a bead of glass. There was no recognition. Whatever part of Dillon had been holding on to hope and life for all of that time was now gone. The ranger was still alive, but only on the outside.

Cross took a cold, deep breath. He felt like a tear should have come, but nothing did, and that itself made his despair even more.

I'm sorry, Dillon.

Cross tried to remember his childhood, some piece of innocence he may have once felt. He wanted to remember a simpler time, when he wasn’t surrounded by all of this madness. He hoped there was some piece of him, something locked and buried away deep in his soul, that remembered those better days, because his conscious mind could no longer find them, and he doubted it ever would again.

Danica started the fight. Cross expected the attack. Her spirit roared towards him in a tidal wave of black fire, an ocean of pure necrotic force and raw male power. Cross split the attack with his own spirit, who shone with diamond light. Black’s defenses cracked wide open, and for a second Cross saw his chance: a hole in her spirit’s power through which he could strike.

He didn’t.

Cross charged forward and aimed his bone blade at Danica’s exposed stomach. Her katars swept in, crackling with her spirit’s power. Cross’ arm snapped back in pain as the twin blades converged and shattered his bone sword into pieces. He fell onto his back, his arm alight with dark fire. Cross made a backhanded motion that swept Danica up and off the ground. She landed with a hard crack on the stone.

The air fled from his lungs. Cross felt the bones in his broken arm shift and re-knit. The pain sent daggers of hurt through his body. He was on the edge of passing out. Cross clawed at the ground, desperate to rise.

Black soared at him, her face bloody. Her katars smoked with dark frost. Cross grit his teeth and pulled his spirit around him so that she could cover him with armor made from glittering black crystal. Ice cleaved to his skin.

Cross threw out a hand and took Danica Black by the throat.

Hatred chewed through his soul. His eyes narrowed as he looked into Danica Black’s panicked face, and he saw inside of her. Her spirit clawed at him in desperation and panic, but his shield was fused by his hatred. Memories of weeks spent at Dillon’s side wouldn’t leave his mind. His friend had never wanted much, had been as unassuming a man as any Cross had ever met. He just wanted to see his sister and nephew again.

Memories of Snow cracked through the sinews of Cross’ mind, unbidden. He felt his grip tighten. Every torment he’d felt those past two years were suddenly embodied in Danica’s pale and beautiful face. He saw Red in her eyes, and he saw Morganna, and the Sorn. He saw every evil that had ever been visited upon him, and it would have been so easy to breathe out, to release all of that anger, and with that breath his shadow-wreathed fist would crush her neck.

Tears ran down his face. Cross hesitated. He wanted to kill her so badly he knew it couldn’t be right. Some part of him, something locked and buried deep inside, told him that it was wrong.

He loosened his grip, just for a moment. It was enough.

Black's spirit pulled away from her body. It was a risky maneuver: in the split second it needed to reform itself he could have killed her.

Danica sent her spirit spiraling down as a midnight lance that punched through the meat of Cross’ shoulder like a massive and bloody nail. Pain eclipsed his consciousness, and his vision went white.

Even as the darkness took him, he felt Dillon's life slip away.

They sit at the edge of a wide river. He hears the echo of cold and dark water as it crashes against the low wall. Their feet dangle over the side.

Wires cross the air over the river to the south, a music sheet without notes. There are rocks just below them, littered with sticks and stony debris. A feather floats by, not far away. A bridge is to the north, squat and ugly steel made serene by its surroundings. Wind-tossed waves lap against the stone and send up splashes of water that tickle their legs.

He is there with and Snow, Graves and Dillon. They smile with him, and they sit beneath the warm sun with their feet dipped in the sun-dappled waves. Cross feels at peace.

Cross woke to the moon. It hung low and huge in the sky, an immense isle of platinum in a midnight sea. He was in a different cell than before.

He'd been hog-tied to iron loops bolted into the stone floor. His broken bones had mended, but pain still gripped him in a vise. There was no ceiling, just a hole overhead that was closed with thick metal beams. Clouds that were rust red and as thick as stones cut across the massive lunar face. The air was thick and meaty. The night bled like an open vein.

His spirit clung to him, weak and restrained. Cross felt darkness at the edge of his soul. It held her away and clawed at his mind like a boat that had run aground in narrow waters.

He’d been stripped down to his trousers. His chest was covered in scars despite his newfound regenerative properties. He couldn’t feel Ekko, but then he never had: the vampiric power was still there, and it coursed through his veins. But he knew that it would only do so much.

“ You’re awake,” Ramsey said. It wasn’t a question. “Dillon is dead.”

Even though Cross already knew that, the words still twisted inside of him like a knife. He was grateful that Ramsey decided not to give him more details.

“ So what now?” Cross asked. His voice was hoarse, and dark. It hadn’t always sounded like that.

“‘ What now’?” Ramsey laughed. He walked into Cross’ field of vision. His face wrap was off. Ramsey leaned closer. “You idiot. What the hell were you thinking? You threw that fight on purpose, and every vampire in attendance knew it.”

“ I had my reasons,” Cross said.

“ Well, I hope they're worth getting both you and your friend killed over.” Ramsey hesitated. “You're being executed tomorrow night.”

Cross might have been mistaken, but he swore he detected a hint of sadness in Ramsey's eyes.

“ Executed?”

“ Yes. It means ‘killed’.”

“ Thanks,” Cross said with a grim laugh. “I know what it means. I guess I'm just surprised they're not going to Turn me.”

“ They would if they could,” Ramsey said after a moment. He paused. “Cross…what are you doing here? I mean really?”

Cross looked up at the Gol, and smiled. It would have been so nice to have someone to trust, to share that burden with.

You had that someone. He's dead now. And you're about to follow him.

“ I could ask you the same question,” he replied. Ramsey smiled back.

“ Is there…anyone you’d like me to send a message to?” he asked. “Any family?”

“ You can do that?”

Ramsey quietly fixed Cross with a piercing look.

“ You’d be surprised what I can do,” he said, and he nodded, ever so slightly, as if afraid someone would see the gesture. His eyes moved down, almost unnoticeably. Cross followed the Gol’s glassy-eyed gaze quickly, so as not to look like he stared at whatever it was he was being shown.

For a second — maybe not even that long — Ramsey’s left hand curled and twisted. It formed a shape…a shape that Cross recognized.

Cross’s heart skipped a beat. He wasn’t sure what was happening.

“ Black,” Cross said. “Take a message to Danica Black.” Ramsey nodded. “Tell her…I hope Cole lives. Deal or no deal, I hope Cole lives, because now I just want the shadow to find me.”

Ramsey watched Cross intently. Their eyes were unblinking.

“ Is that it?” he asked. Cross nodded. “All right, then. Cross…it’s been a pleasure. Good luck tomorrow. But I guess luck doesn’t have anything to do with it, eh?”

Ramsey took his leave.

Cross couldn’t sleep. The image Ramsey had formed burned in his mind.

It was Southern Claw hand code. One simple message, conveyed just barely long enough for Cross to even see it.

BE READY, it said.

FOURTEEN

DARKNESS

Cross woke to the sound of grim drums. They filled the night like a shattered heartbeat. Dread build in his chest. His arms lay still.

When he was unchained and led from the cell a few minutes later, he realized he wasn’t shaking at all, at least on the outside.

Be ready, Ramsey had said. It might have been another trick, something meant to lull him into a false sense of calm before he was executed. It might have been a beautiful lie, a gesture from a friend that ultimately had the same result, leading Cross to believe he would live, when ultimately he would die. But at that point, there was little else he could do but wait.

Something had changed while he'd slept. Cross couldn't say what it was, what had caused the shift that he felt, but its presence was unmistakable. The air held a gravity it had lacked before, a sense of presence. It was a familiar feeling. He'd felt it before, in a dream he could only half remember. Whatever it was, it filled him with a sense of foreboding as solid as lead.

Something was coming. He tasted its charnel odor.

Cross' arms were tightly bound behind his back and secured with metal wire that sliced painfully into his wrists. Black-clad vampires in blank masks pushed him through the door and marched him down a steep set of stairs that circled the sandstone tower he'd been held in.

The night was hot and stale and deep. The moon loomed like a swollen silver eye, so massive he felt he could have reached out and touched it. Blight Tower stood at a dizzying height over the City of Chains. There was no railing for the stairs, and it would have been easy for Cross to fall off the side and into the valley of steel that waited below. Krul was a labyrinthine network of iron webs and canyons of steam and shadow. The sound of grinding metal tore through the night like an animal cry. Blasts of industrial smoke trailed into the air, which reeked of body ash and burning blood. Razorwings soared through the sky, reptilian beasts with scaled wings and tails like bladed whips and serpentine mouths that exhaled clouds of poison dust.

Deathly whispers filled Cross’ head as they led him down the stairs and onto a steel bridge that was barely two feet wide. The bridge was held in place by pale chains and bone girders, and it led over a platform that floated in the air all on its own: a massive disc of black metal, a juggernaut of dark iron that was hundreds of feet across and that hovered and turned like the head of a massive screw.

Black obelisks stood upon the face of the bobbing platform, as did a massive and complicated contraption that stood at the nexus of a cluster of pillars. This central edifice was like some ossified steel tree constructed from mirror shards and shattered saws. Its limbs were as spindly as a spider's legs, and its central trunk dripped dark fluids that ran into gutters filled with slime. Fluid as thick as oil leaked from the massive platform and fell like grisly rain into the smog and shadow-filled obscurity of the city below.

The narrow plank was a dozen feet higher than the surface of the revolving platform. Cross was flown down by a spike-backed gargoyle whose black eyes reflected Cross' exhausted and haggard face back at him. He only barely recognized what he saw. He didn't recall being so pale, so worn, so bearded and scarred. He looked like a corpse.

The massive rotating platform felt unsteady beneath his feet. Dozens of vampires stood in attendance. Most of them looked like prison sentries, but Cross saw Talos Drake with his dark undead lions, and a pair of vampires clad in blood red cloaks and armor and equipped with weapons made of Crujian steel — Shadowclaws, elite Ebon Cities commandos out of Rath.

He also saw Tega Ramsey, who attended Drake. He saw Danica Black, Kane, and several of the other gladiators, all bound and on their knees, brought to bear witness to the fate of one of their own who'd chosen not to die with honor in the arena.

A second, smaller disc floated above the platform, well above the tree of razors and the whirling bones. This smaller vehicle was only about the size of a truck, curved in a bowl shape, and lined with massive downward-pointing saws like the inverted dorsal fins of some razorine shark. A stout turbine engine at one end of the vessel pushed it through the air, and the vehicle left a stream of black and green smoke in its wake. Inside of the wide-mouthed interior of the bowl-shaped vessel were a trio of bone-launching motor guns operated by female vampires with black masks, tight green armor and tall scimitars they carried slung across their backs. A massive male vampire at least seven feet tall piloted the vessel. He was all undead muscle and thick armor, and Cross guessed he’d likely been a Doj before he’d been Turned.

Chained to the bottom of the small vehicle were a dozen prisoners who looked as though they'd been dipped in blood and dragged through the desert. Their arms and legs were tied over their heads and to the bottom of vessel, while their bodies faced out, like they were figureheads on the underbelly of the dark ship. The vessel was designed to aerial dock, where it would float perpendicular to a loading platform; if it were actually forced to land, every prisoner would be crushed.

Cross spied Cole among the other prisoners as the vehicle floated close to the surface of the execution platform. He could barely recognize her, since her bloody hair was pasted to her face and she’d gone bone thin.

You bastards.

Cross was seized by the arms and marched across the platform. Kane nodded at him as he walked by. Black looked at him with…fear? Remorse? Either way, she didn't seem happy about his execution.

Well, at least there's that.

He glanced at Ramsey again, who nodded at one of Drake's other attendants as she whispered something to him. She was a young-looking female vampire with short blonde hair.

Cross turned away. That vampire was Ekko.

Something growled in the air, guttural and deep. It was distant, but the sound was strong enough that he actually felt it. No one seemed to notice but Cross.

The drums pounded slower than before. They'd become a heartbeat for the bestial city. Cross heard chains and smoke and cries, and he smelled metal and oil and rotting flesh. He moved stiffly, exhausted beyond measure.

They led him towards the tree. Drops of grisly matter rained down from the clockwork branches and their whirring blades. The pale moonlight cast the shadows of limp bodies held in the tree at awkward angles, crumpled and missing appendages. A dank and stale air wafted over Cross.

Dillon's body was on the platform at the base of the tree, so ruined that Cross only recognized it because it made no sense for any other body to have been placed there. Knowing his friend's fate before seeing his corpse had prepared him somewhat, but Cross still felt sick.

No one deserves to die like that. He'd been a simple man, and he hadn't wanted for much. He’d wanted to protect his home; he’d wanted to see to it that the sister and nephew he likely felt awkward around were safe and taken care of; he’d wanted an occasional companion of his own. I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry.

A pair of cloaked vampires stood at the base of the tree, their white robes and skin like pale torches in the claustrophobic shadows. Murderous mechanical branches moved overhead. The vampires smiled. Something deep in Cross' soul sealed away the rage and hatred he felt at that moment, so that he could reach back in and use it later, when he'd need it the most.

He’d have the opportunity: Cross knew that he wasn't going to die.

Not yet.

They untied his hands and pushed him into a vertical metal coffin. The inside of the box was filled with wires and blades. The vampires seized his wrists and secured him to sharpened straps that dangled from the edged walls of the box. The coffin would lift him into the air, where the tree would slowly flay him into chunks of meat.

The shadow again howled from the desert. This time, everyone heard it.

The sound shook the city of Krul, and it echoed long after it should have faded. The temperature dipped from the chill of a desert night to almost frigid. Small shards of tiny razors fell from the killing tree and clanked noisily to the platform.

The city froze. Vampire eyes cast themselves westward, towards the source of the dark roar. Arcane chants and silent rites had already begun deep inside the residencies and on the streets of Dirge, vampire spells meant to ward off enemies and raise the city defenses.

They'll do little good.

A general alarm was raised. The sight of the vampire city-state was something to behold when the city was under attack. Vampires quietly moved in military precision to gather weapons and armor. Deep horns like something from the bottom of the sea cast dull booms into the sky. Buildings folded together as Krul's massive chains began the lengthy process of sealing the city off from attackers. Cross heard guns in the outer walls shift and extend. The columnar metropolis squeezed tight as the buildings pulled and folded together. Winged fliers and airships took to the air. Sharp musk carried on the dead breeze, as did the whispers of incorporeal servants and homunculi messengers.

For a moment it seemed as if Cross had been forgotten. He looked through the crowd of vampires and searched for Black and Kane. The deep night turned even blacker.

It found us. It came for the shards of Lucan’s soul.

Ramsey.

Cross struggled against the straps that held him in the bladed cage. They’d not been fully secured.

Tega Ramsey did this. He shut down the city dampeners, or manipulated them. He made it so that the Sleeper could detect us, so that it would find us.

Cross shoved his foot against the cage door and pulled. Leather and metal scraped against his hand. Blood and skin tore away as the straps snapped. He fell out of the cage and onto his back on the cold stone, where he stared up into the heights of the razor tree. Slivers of dark steel and thick drops of blood rained down around him.

Claws punched through Cross’ shoulder and pinned him to the platform. He screamed, and threw his arms around the vampire who’d attacked him. The undead's blank mask was all that looked back. Pain flooded through Cross’ body.

The distant shadow howled again. Its call rattled the city and shook the massive platform, which started to tilt. Chaos spread like fire. Vampire soldiers and spectators spread everywhere. Cross expected shouts and cries and sounds of panic, but then he remembered where he was. The guards and the bureaucracy and the minor nobility of Krul were silent in spite of the dire situation.

The world turned black. Cross’ vision and his senses dulled.

The vampire held him down and looked around at the chaos, unsure of what it was supposed to do. Chain bridges and iron catwalks swiveled as the out-of-control execution platform drifted too close to one of Krul's buildings. The Sleeper's approach either distracted the platform's pilot or it had disrupted Krul's arcane mechanisms. Klaxons and sirens blared through the sky. Armed serpent riders and their mounts soared by in the night. Vampires on the platform raced for the edges, seeking escape or weapons.

As the platform tilted, Cross clearly saw the Sleeper through Krul's columns of smoke and industrial fires.

Its size, even its form, defied comprehension. It was a roiling mountain of darkness. Seas of ghostly matter swam within its form, storms of cold lightning, molten pools of stale moonlight. Its eyes were like blazing scars, and its smoking ebon claws were the size of warships. It towered and blocked out the sky. The great lumbering mass loomed over Krul's un-breakable cylindrical walls. The air was heavy with shadowy grit and a spectral vapor of charcoal fog.

Cross looked at the Sleeper, and his insides froze. Even just seeing it was like falling into the sky.

The execution platform was being evacuated. Already most of the vampires had leapt onto Razorwings or small airships that had swept by on their way to engage the beast.

The vampire above him brought its knee into his sternum, and Cross cried out in pain. The vampire leaned forward and pushed down with all of its weight. Cross tried to move, but the eight-inch claw embedded in his shoulder kept him flat on his back. The blade twisted and tore at the meat in his arm. Cross screamed, reached up and pulled off the creature's mask. The wide-jawed creature smiled. Dark eyes watched the warlock with hate, and pale drool ran from its stark-white fangs and dripped onto Cross' face. It smelled of dead animal.

“ Too quick for you,” the vampire growled as it raised its other claw. Cross brought his free hand up and smashed the ball of his fist into the vampire's face. He got his legs up underneath his attacker and threw it off of him and onto its side. The claw tore painfully out of his shoulder.

A horde of fliers and bone airships flew toward the Sleeper, which stood so massive it might as well have been the sky. Its inhuman howl was so loud its ripples could literally be seen as they shook the air. The entire city lurched.

The platform collided into a building with a deafening ring of steel. Gravity fled as Cross was lifted into the air to hang weightless for a moment before he came down painfully on his chest. The air was knocked from his lungs. He felt like he'd been pitted. His entire body was a bruise, and his left arm had gone numb because of his shoulder wound.

The platform tilted. It must have lodged into the building it struck, but it was still propelled by its arcane turbine engines, which, unable to propel the device forward, instead pushed one end of the disc higher into the sky.

With nothing to grasp onto, Cross slid down the platform. His stomach lurched.

Cross collided with a low set of steel poles that jutted out of the deck like quills. The impact sent sharp pain through his ribs and his back. He turned his body and propped his feet onto the poles. The ship hung at an angle that grew steeper by the moment as one end continued to climb. Vampires and consorts fell from the platform.

Above him, the vampire sentry howled in rage. It slid down the deck with controlled speed and held its claws out like a raptor's talons.

Ekko came out of nowhere and tackled the vampire. Her claws took it in the throat, and as it turned to lash back at her she tore its head from its body.

She looked at Cross. Her skin was deathly pale, and her claws were easily seven inches long in hands too large for her slender frame. Her eyes were black orbs without pupils. Her mouth was large, and lined with razor-sharp fangs.

Cross almost felt the connection between them. His vision flashed, and for a moment he saw himself in something like a bloody heat signature through her eyes. He tasted blood in the air. For the briefest of moments, Cross gazed into the minds of the vampire collective. He recoiled at the hundreds of vampires across Krul who worked in tandem as the shadow called Dra'aalthakmar approached. The twisted and alien hive-mind of the undead nearly tore his consciousness apart.

Not now, a voice came. Ekko's voice. She spoke inside of him. Now we have to go.

The platform pushed against tall Krul structures and continued to tilt: it was nearly vertical. Cross pushed his back against the floor of the platform and kept his feet on the metal bars. He felt like his body could fly into the air at any second. Ekko hung at an odd angle, with her claws stuck into the steel so that she hung like a sinuous ape.

Krul was in chaos. Buildings shifted and folded into defensive stances. Metal shells erected like insect carapaces and lent Krul the appearance of a metropolis of iron beams. Razorwings with steel-tipped claws moved in flotillas toward the attacking shadow, and their armored vampire riders assaulted the Sleeper with nail guns and handheld bone cannons. Airships made of ossified bone and dark iron launched explosive harpoons and razor-wire nets, necrotic torpedoes and pyroclast phalanx missiles.

Everything that was launched simply vanished into the Sleeper's form, swallowed into its dismal midnight heart. The mass of vaguely humanoid shadow didn't make a counterattack. It didn't need to, when it’s very presence was destroying Krul. Arcane engines sputtered, and stopped. Razorwings were overwhelmed by the maelstrom of psychic effluvia let loose in the city, and the shock of it caused them to fall out of the sky. Chains buckled and snapped their links, which shattered into steel shards that fell like rain into the darkness of the city below.

The air tasted like smelted iron. Cross stared into that mass of murderous shadow, and he saw oblivion.

There, Ekko commanded. He tore his eyes away. His feet slipped, and he desperately clutched onto the pitted steel at his back. Vampire bodies dropped hundreds of feet and faded to writhing slivers before they vanished into the obscurity of the distant poison fog. Cross shook so badly it was a wonder he hadn't fallen himself.

Cross! Ekko yelled into his mind. Go!

“ Go?!” he shouted. His voice was hardly audible in the groaning dirge of the Sleeper. “Where?!”

Ekko pointed. Directly below them, maybe thirty feet down, was the smaller sentry vessel with the prisoners tied to the bottom of the hull. Kane was already in the open bowl of the vehicle, locked in hand-to-hand combat with the Doj vampire. One of the females lay headless over the lip of the giant metal raft, one piloted the vehicle using some sort of console at the center of the vessel, and the third female, in spite of having lost an arm, pulled herself up from the floor of the open cockpit. She moved towards Kane’s back with her one set of claws bared.

Ekko took hold of Cross' arm and pulled him away from the platform, and into empty air. Cross would have protested, but all that came out was a panicked yelp.

He and Ekko plummeted through open space. Ekko held him as they went, twisted her body under his and took the brunt of the impact when they collided loudly with the vessel below. Ekko's mostly undead body was as hard as iron. Cross’ head hammered, and his arm felt like it was about to pull clean away from his body.

The smaller ship listed to the side, and he heard panicked screams from the prisoners secured beneath it.

They'd landed right next to one of the motor guns. The vampire pilot screamed and hissed at them. The other female saw them, stopped, and turned.

Go! Ekko barked. She pushed Cross out of her way, and he barely managed to shoot out his hand and grab hold of the motor gun instead of falling over the side.

Ekko and the one-armed vampire attacked each other with vicious claws. The pilot pulled a large-bored pistol from her holster and, with one claw still on the control panel, aimed it at Ekko.

Cross spun the motorgun around so that its massive rotating barrels aimed inwards, at the pilot. It wouldn't work, and he knew it. Vampire weapons were specifically encoded so that the living couldn’t use them, so that they wouldn't activate if touched by living hands.

But Cross was bonded to Ekko, and that seemed to be good enough.

The gun creaked and swiveled and seemed to start firing before Cross even pulled the trigger. The rapport was ear-shattering. Thick metal bolts hammered back and forth and rocked the craft. Cross had to hold on for dear life so that he wasn't thrown over the side. Heavy bone-and-iron nails shot out with staccato force and turned the vampire pilot's torso into a cloud of meat. Ekko dove down as Cross swiveled the gun up and stopped firing. His hands ached from the force of the motorgun’s motion.

The ship lurched for a moment before Ekko pulled herself away from the one-armed vampire and gained control of the vessel.

Kane and the vampire giant fell against the lip of the open cockpit. Cross brought the weapon to bear on the other female and fired. The roar and grind of the motor gun was overwhelming. When the smoke cleared the other vampire was gone, cast over the side by nail fire.

The male vampire snarled. It elbowed Kane in the face and reached for Ekko. It stood just behind Ekko’s body, preventing Cross' shot. He felt his spirit course and surge against his skin like saltwater, and he almost took hold and channeled her before he remembered that he wore no implement. He'd burn them both to cinders if he used magic now.

Kane pulled a saber from the vampire's belt, and in a fluid motion he hacked its arm off at the elbow. The brute turned to face Kane, and while it was distracted Ekko lobbed off its head with a swipe of her ample claws. Kane threw what was left of the vampire over the side.

In spite of the terror in his eyes when he gazed at Ekko, Kane wrapped her tightly in his arms. Cross couldn't hear what was said — the grind of collapsing metal and the sky-shattering call of the Sleeper drowned everything out — but she moved as if ashamed, as if she didn't want him to see her.

She's not a vampire yet, he thought. Not fully.

The air was awash with ash, smoke and gunfire. The execution platform was aflame, as was a significant portion of Krul. Failing machinery collapsed from the Sleeper's presence, and fuel tanks exploded all across the city.

Cross grabbed the controls. There was no visible wheel or stick, just a number of metal plates scribed with runes in High Jlantrian, the vampire language.

Instinctively, he put his hands on the panels. The vessel immediately started to sink.

No, Ekko told him. She seized back the controls.

“ We have to get these people off of the bottom of this damned thing!” Cross shouted.

“ There're dead!” Kane shouted back. “What we need to do is get the hell out of here before The Nothing back there decides to eat us!”

“ We’re not leaving without Black!” Cross shouted.

“ What?” Kane shouted back. “How stupid are you? Who gives a shit about Black?!”

“ We need her,” Cross insisted. Ekko steered the vessel towards the execution barge, which had finally snapped free of the buildings and had started to level out as it sank. It lay directly in the Sleeper's path as the shadow slowly made its way through Krul.

They pulled weapons from the felled vampires. Kane could only use blades (of which he acquired several), which left the bone pistols, a rotating triple-barreled vampire shotgun, and some sort of necrotic whip device.

The Sleeper was half a mile away. It loomed and poisoned the night clouds. Its eyes were utterly dead vortexes of pale fire that devoured and fell in on themselves.

“ There!”

Cross saw Danica Black. She tried to stay low on the surface of the execution platform. She held a curved sword, but she was pinned down by a pair of vampires with rifles, who fired at her from the cover of the killing tree.

Cross cut them apart with the motor gun. A Razorwing turned and flew toward them in a long and looping circle. Cross fired at it and drove it off. He had no doubt there would be more.

The wind that bellowed out of the Sleeper was cold and furious and tasted like sparks. It had risen to a gale force. The small ship rocked unsteadily as Ekko lowered it towards the platform’s deck.

“ No!” Black hollered at them from below. She ran out in the open and waved her arms. “Don’t land…she's alive! Cole is alive!”

The skiff floated unsteady about a dozen feet over the smoking platform. The wind was so strong they felt like they'd be tossed into a building at any second. Ships moved fast all around them. They weren't moving towards the Sleeper anymore: they fled from it.

“ Don't land!” Black screamed. “I'll just jump onboard!”

She was maybe fifteen or twenty feet away, just ahead and below them. Cross moved to the edge of the vessel and aimed the vampire triple-barrel directly at her. It was incredibly heavy for such a short weapon. Vampire runes on the stock and trigger glowed softly against his skin.

“ What the shit?!” Black called out.

“ Don't!” Cross shouted back. “No! You don't get to act like you don't know why I want to kill you!”

Black took a breath, and raised her hands in surrender. Cross felt both his spirit and Ekko shudder against him, uncertain.

The city continued to collapse around them.

“ Christ, will you just SHOOT THE BITCH?!” Kane shouted.

“ Shut up!” Cross yelled back, and he shouted to Black. “We had a deal. Assuming Cole really is alive, so far as I'm concerned…” He breathed. It was so hard to hold his fingers still. “As far as I’m concerned, we still do.” He aimed the gun at her face. He wouldn't miss at that range, Sleeper or no Sleeper, and they both knew it. “Will you still honor that deal?”

Black looked at him with grim and tearful eyes. He saw pain flash across her face.

“ Yes,” she shouted, desperate. “Yes!”

Cross' finger tensed against the trigger. He thought about Dillon, about his stupid dice and his notebook, about his sister and nephew. About that look in his eyes when he’d dangled from that stone, when he already knew that he wasn't going to make it.

This isn't about him. Not right now.

Follow and you will find.

He eased his finger off the trigger, and lowered the gun.

FIFTEEN

EXODUS

Lara Cole was alive, but only barely. The same couldn't be said for most of the other prisoners secured to the underbelly of the hovercraft. Only two others had survived its flight: one was maimed, while the other was a frightened child.

The vessel hovered over an open docking platform on the south end of Krul, as far from the Sleeper as they could get and still safely land. Two larger airships, both under repair, were parked on the massive roof. The sky was bruise-black, cut at the horizon by the stark and bloody red of a fresh dawn. The city around and below them was largely quiet, but occasional vessels, Razorwings and vampire sentries passed by every minute or so, forcing the small band of escapees to keep their heads down. No vampires had appeared on that roof to challenge them yet, but Kane stood near the access hatch in the floor of the rusted metal roof with a rune-covered bone sword at the ready, just in case.

Black tended to Cole and the boy, who was no older than ten and whose name they couldn't get out of him since he wouldn’t speak. Cross tended the maimed man, who'd lost most of his left leg at the knee, probably when the hovercraft had collided with the execution platform. His half-leg was bandaged but still bleeding, his injured face was covered with cloth, and his skin was clammy and feverish. Cross didn’t think he had long to live.

The rest of the prisoners on the vessel had been smashed, burned or shot in the chaos. Most of their remains couldn't even be removed from the bottom of the ship.

Cross looked back into central Krul. The formidable vampire city, home of so much pain and fear, was in ruins. The city's chains dangled loose into steel valleys of smog and caustic darkness. Numerous buildings had collapsed altogether, crushed beneath the weight of taller structures or brought down by the damage caused from crashed airships or dying Razorwings. The execution barge had brought down a half-dozen buildings when it fell, and Cross still thought he heard the echoes of that crash in the sticky wind.

He held his spirit close so as to protect her from the wild spirits of the dead. There were so many of them now they were like schools of ravenous spectral fish.

Fragments of steel and bone shards floated through the dark air like ash. The sky above Krul was filled with a churning circle of bleak cobalt clouds that were as thick as steel.

“ Are we waiting for something?” Kane said. They'd only been on the platform for a few minutes, but Cross understood Kane's anxiety. Every second counted. The Sleeper seemed to have vanished, at least for the moment. Traces of its twisted form still lingered, a scattered black rain that drifted like a curtain.

You're not gone, Cross thought to it. You're full. You ate quite a few souls today.

His stomach tightened at the thought. Vampires didn’t have souls, which meant it was the prisoners that the Sleeper had fed on. Many had died in the chaos when the city had come undone, and many more had surely died from the mere proximity of the Sleeper's life-draining presence.

“ We're okay for the moment,” Cross said. “At least from the Dra’aalthakmar.”

“ So all we need to worry about is the vampires,” Kane said with an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. “Hey, no sweat! What are we worried about?”

Kane looked at Ekko, nervously. The almost-vampire had removed herself from the others on the roof. She kept vigil on the sky with her large ebon eyes.

“ Nobody asked you, Kane,” Black said as she finished wrapping a bandage around Cole's arm. Cole had been only barely lucid since being revived. Her jaw and one side of her head had been badly bruised, and she was emaciated to the point of being skeletal. Her lips were cracked and dry, and every time she moved her hands they shook.

The same went for the boy, who seemed locked inside of himself with a delirious fear that made him weep. Cole, weak though she was, held the boy close.

“ What did you say?” Kane said to Black. He took a few steps closer to her. “Sorry, I didn't catch that. I thought maybe I heard you being rude again, you bitch.”

Black stood up. Cole put a hand out to stop her, but Black brushed it away.

“ You heard me just fine, you dumb shit,” Black said.

“ Maybe you didn't say it with enough feeling…”

“ Stop!” Cross said, loudly. “We don't have time for this crap. As soon as we’re ready, we have to get the hell out of here!”

Kane and Black both stopped, but they still looked ready to pounce.

“ We?” Kane said. “No, no, no…I think you left something back there, Cross. Like maybe your brain. There is no 'we'. Ekko and I are getting out of here. I don't give a shit what you do. I mean…look at her! Just LOOK at Ekko!!” It was the closest thing to panic Cross had seen or heard in Kane.

“ Ekko is going to Turn, you moron,” Black barked at him. “What are you going to do then?”

“ Oh, so if we come with you she’ll be all right?” Kane barked. “Are you going to cure her, Doctor Black? Oh, and if you call me a moron again you're going to be Black and blue.”

“ Try it…”

“ Stop!” Cross shouted, and he ran between and pushed them both back as they moved to grab one another. “Seriously? We DO NOT have time for this!” Cross turned to Kane. “Ekko has to come with us, Kane,” he said as calmly as he could manage. His spirit burned against his skin. She was caught up in the anger and aggression of the moment, and the effort he had to expend to hold her back sapped at his strength. “She's a part of this, whether she likes it or not. And I…I know how she feels about you, which makes you a part of this, too.”

Kane was clearly furious, and his fists balled up so tight it was a wonder they didn’t crack. But even though he fumed and gnashed his teeth, Kane kept his eyes focused, and he visibly fought to maintain control. All things considered, Cross thought that the big man did an admirable job of keeping his rage in check.

Kane turned and looked at Ekko. Pale and monstrous though she was, her expression was clearly one of sadness as she nodded assent to what Cross had suggested.

“ Fine,” Kane said, exasperated and angry. “Fine. We're with you.” He pointed and looked at Danica. “But you stay the hell away from us.”

“ Bite me,” Black laughed. “Can we go, please?”

“ Yes,” said a voice from the other end of the loading platform. “You have no idea how long overdue our exodus is.”

It was Ramsey.

Kane turned as if ready to cut the Gol down, and Cross felt the air crackle with the coursing energy of Black's spirit, who tasted of ozone and iron, fire and blood. Without an implement, there was little that Cross could do to stop Black from using her magic.

“ He's coming with us,” Cross said, as loud and as authoritative as he could. He felt cold inside. There was a hollow space where something important used to be, something that would keep him from killing Black in spite of how important he knew she was.

No. Focus.

“ Give me one reason,” Kane said, “why I shouldn't hollow out his skull and use it for a piss pot.”

Ramsey laughed.

“ Well, you're creative, at least,” he said.

Black scowled, and closed her fist. An incandescent blade of shimmering dark glass took shape in her hand, so sharp it made the air bleed.

“ No,” Cross said. He didn't recall picking up the triple-barrel shotgun, but he felt its weight in his hand, felt his finger longingly stroke the trigger. “He's coming with us.”

Black kept her eyes on Ramsey. The Gol hadn't moved — he just stood there with his face covered, his tattered cloak blowing in the bladed wind, his milky eyes regarding them without a hint of emotion.

“ And who put you in charge?” she asked Cross.

“ I did,” he said. “And for one simple reason: unlike you and Kane, I’ve left the arena behind.”

Both Black and Kane looked at him. He saw the confusion in their eyes, the rage. He saw them desperately try to reconstruct the past few weeks, to try to discern truth from nightmare, to try and remember all of the lives they'd taken and the terrible and violent things they'd done just to stay alive. Just as quickly as they seemed to remember, he saw them want to forget.

“ Tega Ramsey is the only reason we're getting out of here at all,” Cross said. Ramsey nodded. “What about the other prisoners?” Cross asked him. “The inmates held in the city?”

Ramsey shook his head.

“ Dead,” he answered.

“ All of them?”

“ Krul protocol,” Ramsey said after a moment, as if weighing whether or not he wanted to share it. “In the event of any sort of incursion or disaster, all cells are summarily filled with neurotoxin. It happens automatically, and without question. Chances are that most of them were dead before you even made it off of that platform.”

“ Wait,” Black said. “That…thing was disrupting everything mechanical. Maybe not all of the gas was released.”

“ In which case those prisoners were let loose into the lowest bowels of the city, where the sentries and golems would destroy them.” He shook his head. “And that’s not even taking into consideration the poison gases floating around in the alleys and lower streets. There may be a few scattered survivors here and there, but you have to ask yourself if they’re worth looking for.”

“ Look,” Cross said. “Maybe…”

A sharp blast of wind cut through the air behind them as a bladed warship rose up out of nowhere. Its turbine engines screamed as their exhaust distorted the air and turned it molten. Bone cannons mounted on the blood-colored forward deck sprayed the air with explosive white needles.

Sparks and bone exploded across the face of the platform. The sound of steel filled Cross' head. Debris flew into his face as he dove through a cloud of choking exhaust and heat.

The maimed man was torn to pieces by the vampire ship’s weapons.

Cross screamed. He tasted hex and glacial salt seconds before Black hurled her sword through the air. Bone needles shattered the blade and turned it to glass, but the resultant explosion sent fragments of onyx dust that flew like a swarm of razor bees. The cloud flew into the vampire vessel and buried it in sharp black sand. The turbine engines sputtered.

Cross took hold of the motor gun on the hovercraft, swiveled the weapon around, and opened fire. The blasts nearly shattered his eardrums, but Cross narrowed his eyes and held the wildly bucking weapon steady. Shots as large as railroad spikes ripped through metal and undead flesh. The weapon shredded the vampire ship into pieces. The vessel listed to its side and spun out of control before it fell into the clouds and shadows below.

Not far away, more ships and fliers took notice.

“ Can we leave now?!” Kane shouted.

Ramsey left no question as to which of the two vessels under repair they should take when he darted past everyone and into the closer airship, a squat vehicle the color of sand. The ship had large turbines at its aft, and large motor cannons at the fore and in a top-mounted turret. The craft’s size identified it as some sort of cargo vessel, but its sleek design seemed more inclined for speed.

Either way, Cross and the others got aboard.

The interior of the vessel was made from twisted and sinuous metal cast in a variety of desert hues. Dark and vaguely organic panels housed wiring that looked like massive tube-worms filled with crackling fluid. The vessel smelled of arsenic and sumac.

Cross instinctively threw a hand against a dark panel on the wall that looked like a black vomit stain. Sharp pain lanced into his hand, but the rear doors slid shut.

The ship was a single open area. There were small alcoves on the starboard and port walls, while the fore and aft sections respectively housed the cockpit and the rear doors. Each alcove looked barely big enough to squeeze a child into.

The ship rumbled. Ekko was already in the pilot's seat, a massive and bizarrely curved chair that bore an incredibly low back, preposterously high arm-rests and a number of frightening-looking spiked protrusions that hooked to a network of translucent tubes. Those tubes, in turn, ran all throughout the claustrophobic cockpit. The rest of the interior of the ship was long and low, with only a single yellow window covered in what looked to be a century's worth of oil, dirt and slime.

“ Can you fly this thing?” he asked.

Yes, she answered wordlessly. I was raised by a pilot.

“ Of course she can!” Kane yelled. “She was…”

“ Raised by a pilot. I got it.”

Kane gave him a confused look. Black had Ekko and the child pushed against the port wall. There were no visible seatbelts, or even actual seats, just areas where the metal curved slightly. Cole had the boy in a protective grip, and they clung to the wall as best they could. Ramsey ran to the front and pointed out what controls and readings Ekko would need.

They heard an impact blast hit somewhere outside of the ship's thick metal walls. The vessel lurched sideways at least six inches as part of the platform exploded.

“ Let's go!” Cross shouted. A second blast rattled the ship and knocked Cross to the ground. The turbine engines roared to life. The walls groaned.

Cross could tell when the vessel took to the air by the sudden sense of weightlessness. It had been a while since he'd been in an airship, to the point where he’d actually forgotten how much he despised flying. He felt like he was stuck in the act of falling even with steel all around him.

The scream of incendiary weapons passed behind and beneath them. He felt heat through the walls.

“ Shit!” Kane yelled. He stood right behind Ekko and Ramsey in the smell cockpit area. “Watch out for the Razorwing, babe!”

“ Will you sit down?!” Black shouted.

The vessel lurched and turned. There was a dull thud and the sound of cracked glass. The window was covered with a radial crack that spread like a spider's web.

“ Cross…man the damned guns!” Ramsey shouted.

The vessel had guns at the fore — massive twin motorguns operated by the pilot — and a rotating turret on top, which required a gunner. Cross climbed into the portside alcove that, so far as he knew, was where he needed to be. The space was claustrophobic and uncomfortable, and he was sure he'd pulled at least one muscle before he finally managed to get inside.

The console, just like the pilot's cockpit, lacked any discernible handle or trigger — there was just a short pillar, about eight inches high, which glowed with Jlantrian runes. Those runes hummed when Cross brought his hands close to them. The alcove had no window, no monitor, and no way to see the outside of the vessel.

What the hell?

Cross took a breath. His spirit curled around him and filled his lungs with frozen vapor. He focused on the stone. The confined space of the alcove squeezed in on him. His eyes locked on the runes.

He felt another whisper, a deep-throated growl somewhere between a wolf and a saw mill. His vision bled. He stared into the heart of a tornado.

Cross touched the pillar, and was ripped out of his body.

He sees the ship fly through a maelstrom of clouds. Arcs of black lightning lick against the hull as it moves over Krul's outer walls. Flying obsidian mines turn the air to fire, and lances of sound launch from Krul’s outer defenses. He feels his shoulders ram against the alcove compartment as the ship rocks from the force of explosions and dodges streams of arcane fire. Explosive nails soar up at them from guns mounted on the rooftops.

He sees the ship dive, rise and turn. The forward motor guns strafe the air ahead of them and destroy a small spiked vessel which spins away into the dirty clouds; a fiery trail marks its descent. He sees Razorwings and other vessels, sleek and fast-moving gunships that lead a larger command vessel, a stout juggernaut that resembles a flying armored shark. Its guns are massive blasphemies of steel, bladed cannons that leak black smoke and liquid fire.

Cross fixes his ethereal vision, this newfound omnipresent spectral sight, on the nearest Razorwing. He wills the guns to fire.

Twin black cannons, little more than tubes about four-feet long and just a few inches wide, make the air explode with noise.

Each boom is like the fall of an enormous hammer. The guns rock back and forth on their swivel turret. Each shot causes the twin guns to slide and recoil at blinding speed, a jackhammer weapon.

Large shot tears the Razorwings and their riders into husks of smoking meat. They plummet into the sea of ochre clouds below.

Cross wills the weapons to fire again, this time on the other gunships. Blasts exchange, steel and bone and flame.

The red and cloudy sky is made black with fumes. Harpoons the size of horses barely miss the renegade vessel. The ship lurches and dives.

Cross lands a lucky shot on a gunship, and its foredeck catches aflame in an explosion of dark and billowing smoke.

They seize the opportunity, and flee.

The ship flies into thick clouds and dives down into valleys of stone. They will be over the Bone March before long, but until then the rocks and hills and valleys west of the Wormwood will provide them with cover. The sound of vampire vessels fades into the background, and soon they fly through quiet skies, and hide beneath blood clouds.

Cross fell away from the grip of the turret vision. He tasted metal and smelled burning oil. He promptly bumped his head hard against the low metal ceiling of the alcove compartment, and he was still cursing and nursing the back of his skull when he emerged to find the others.

“ Well,” he said. He wasn't sure of what there was else to say.

Black and Cole sat quietly against the wall. Cole had the boy in her arms. He'd fallen asleep, and Cole didn't look far from being unconscious herself. Her eyes were dark, and her face looked ashen and pale. She looked off into nothing and held the boy, with her back against the wall and the two of them wrapped in a blanket.

Black sat next to her, watching her with concern. She looked up at Cross. Her expression bore a mixture of loathing, fear and resignation.

Awesome, he thought. Well, at least that's the look I'm used to getting from attractive women. He met her gaze for a moment. Understanding passed between them: whatever their differences, they’d have to wait for now.

His body was bruised and sore, and despite how much of the past few days he’d spent unconscious, Cross felt like he hadn't slept in a month. His shoulder wound was already healing up — there were unquestionable benefits to being tied to a vampire, he had to admit — but every muscle felt like he'd been pounded with meat tenderizers.

Rest, Ekko told him. He felt her vigil, the waking nightmare that was her growing hunger. She held it at bay.

But for how long? he wondered, not concerned if she heard the thought or not. How long before you Turn?

Ekko made no indication that she heard him. She just sat silently and piloted the vessel, her fingers barely touching the runes on the control panel.

Kane stood with his hands on her shoulders. He was clearly uncomfortable. Her skin had to be freezing to the touch, and seeing Ekko like that was like looking at her corpse. The blonde man's eyes were filled with worry.

“ Congratulations,” Ramsey said. He sat down heavy on the floor. The vessel hummed and rattled. All there was to see beyond the cracked pilot’s window was a red and grey haze of clouds and dust. “You’ve escaped Krul. Now the real fun begins.”

“ Speaking of which,” Kane said. “Would someone kindly explain to me what the hell is going on?”

Cross sat down against the wall.

“ Rest first. We’ll talk later.”

It swims through clouds of corroding soul matter, drifts of spectral unguent that block its senses. Much of its existence has been spent sleeping, so its senses have long been dulled. It spent centuries lying drunk and drowning in the debris of dreams.

Its ebon bulk grows fat from the souls it absorbs. It reels from sucking the marrow from living bones. Soulless shades of the dead — the so-called vampire elite — pummel and bombard it with their technology, with their beasts and ships.

It disregards them. It stands at the nadir of their city, where it grows. Its once small frame has swelled. Merely existing on this world lends it fuel.

Life can be found everywhere here. It permeates the air and saturates the water. It multiplies and folds and breaks apart in waves. It expands and collapses and rebuilds. Its energy is chaotic and destructive, but in the midst of that chaos are living constituents, shining spheres of unfiltered life that burn like glittering stars.

Its ancient enemy still lives. That core of light, though greatly weakened, survives in the pinprick souls of the three humans. Now it sleeps: the jailor. Now it is the one imprisoned. It is trapped in the trio of flesh vessels.

But that is not what worries the Sleeper.

Because she is here. The avatar.

It feels her. Her presence hangs heavy, and the weight of her age makes the air sluggish. The light of her blazing heart is like a beacon. After so much time, so many eons spent sleeping in The Black, it wants to take revenge on her. Only its fear keeps it in check.

There can be no fear, a voice tells it, an ancient and decrepit voice from the time before The Black, from a world where it was once powerful. The Sleeper knows that voice. It fears it more than it does the avatar.

Our enemy is here, the voice says. Destroy it. Destroy it, and you will be free.

But it is free. It can go anywhere, do anything. Nothing on this fused bastard world can stop it.

Wrong. It can. She can.

Which means that the Sleeper has failed. It had the chance to destroy the humans, but it allowed them to escape. They’d remained hidden, and when suddenly the light of their cores was revealed the shadow was too burdened by its own power, too drunk off of the energies that the world continually poured into it, to stop them.

This has happened before — this is how it was imprisoned. Its power builds. Its form expands. Too much life. It grew tired before The Black, fat and lethargic off of its own might. It gave her the opportunity to imprison it.

But now she is the one who sleeps. Now it can destroy her, and it will never fear imprisonment again.

The shadow rises. The steel towers and batholitic lights and necrotic chains of the city crumble in the corruptive cloud that leaks from the Sleeper’s ethereal skin. Dark funnels of vapor lash out and collapse metal buildings and stone barracks.

It swells with power. It howls and cuts the land apart. Earth shakes and shatters and sinks in its path. The sky crumbles. It stretches mammoth arms and closes its smoking claws.

It is the Destroyer. It is Dra’aalthakmar. All it needs to do is exist, and by so doing it brings death.

It is the bane of the living. It is the pit into which the world will fall.

All it needs to do is kill its jailor and destroy the scattered remains of her servant.

It will feed for all eternity after it destroys the humans, and the Woman in the Ice.

PART THREE

AVENGER

SIXTEEN

SAFE

The first thing they did was locate one of Tega Ramsey's safe houses — Cross wasn't surprised to learn that he had several — so that they could get food and supplies.

As it turned out, Ramsey had been afforded a surprising degree of autonomy for a vampire slave, though he attributed much of that success to his innate ability to sow confusion. The bureaucracy of the Ebon Cities was no less dense than that of the Southern Claw. All that you needed to do, he explained, was understand the system well enough to use it your own advantage, which in Ramsey’s case meant using magical artifacts that he possessed to disguise the fact that he’d sworn fealty to more than one vampire, even though a slave was only supposed to be able to pledge loyalty to one. Evidently, Ramsey had found a way to forge the sigil of allegiance inscribed on a living servant when they pledged themselves to a vampire; the sigil acted as some sort of clearance, or pass. If Ramsey was ever challenged by a vampire or their servants, he would reveal the sigil of another master, which apparently meant that he was to be left alone. This, it seemed, allowed him a great deal of flexibility in terms of moving through different vampire-controlled territories and gaining access to various embassies and outposts.

Cross didn’t completely understand how it all worked, but Ramsey was still alive, so it was safe to assume that he knew what he was doing.

Ramsey's safe house was an abandoned gas station in what had once been northern Nevada. It was a forlorn and desolate old structure in the middle of its own personal desert, a dark-soiled wasteland populated with shattered stone walls and sand-filled ravines and dark-bodied scorpions the size of cats. The air was hot and moist and tasted of lime. Grim clouds circled the station like predators.

Inside of a grimy and refuse-filled interior, the group ransacked lockers, cupboards and sealed compartments in search of supplies. More than a few rats and squatters had made their home there in the recent weeks. Thankfully, most of Tega's goods were well hidden behind locked doors and in sealed containers, so they found the essentials that they needed: food (mostly jerky, rations, and MREs), vacuum-sealed bags and steel canteens filled with fresh water, some clean clothes and armor, boots, and even some weapons, mostly small arms but also some knives, a pair of Remington 870 pump-action shotguns, and an M16A2 that was in good working order.

“ This place is filthy,” Cole complained as they sifted through the goods in search of what they needed. She looked and sounded better than she had before, though it was clear that it would be some time before she was anywhere near full strength. They’d washed with Ramsey's spare water and now hauled what was needed back to the airship. The ship, it turned out, had some sort of problem with the power routing system, which meant that the vessel couldn't fly for very long without needing to be shut down to prevent a power overload. It was the vampire equivalent of the engine overheating.

“ If I'd have known I was going to have such lovely company over, I wouldn't have given the maid the day off,” Ramsey said. He rifled through bags of mixed ammunition, and he pulled out rounds they could actually use and consolidated them into boxes.

“ This place reminds me of my old apartment,” Kane said with a laugh as he hefted a roll of blankets onto his shoulder.

“ Me, too,” Cross snickered. It felt like it had been years since he'd called the apartment in Thornn his home; it had become a storage room for stuff he never seemed to need.

“ When were you in my apartment?” Kane asked with a smile.

It took Cross a moment before he got the joke. He laughed.

“ Oh, you guys are a riot,” Cole snickered.

Everyone gathered supplies in the safe house except for the unconscious boy, who remained sleeping in the back of the ship, just like he’d been doing ever since they’d escaped from Krul; Black, who stood guard outside of the building with one of the shotguns; and Ekko, who was back on the ship making repairs.

Cross never would have guessed it, but not only was Ekko a qualified pilot, she was also a capable engineer. Prior to being a gladiator in Krul, she'd actually been a criminal who smuggled contraband and drugs back and forth between some less luminary Southern Claw cities, places like Kalakkaii and Glaive. Kane, on the other hand, had been a laborer, at times a dockworker, at other times a smithy or a construction strong-back. He'd even been a miner before he'd been taken hostage by a band off less-than-brilliant smuggling associates of Ekko's during an ill-fated job that wound up landing both of them in Krul.

“ Are you done yet?” Black yelled at them from outside.

“ Do we sound done?” Kane hollered back.

“ You sound like an idiot,” Black responded.

“ Thanks, Dani,” Cole muttered. “That helps.”

Cross suppressed a laugh as he hauled a bag of first aid supplies out to the ship. They’d landed and parked it near the pumps, as if they'd pulled up for some Premium gas.

That's how it used to work, right? Everyone had a vehicle, a truck or something, and they could drive wherever they wanted, and when they ran out of fuel they just stopped at one of these places and bought some more for a few coins? They didn't have to position people on watch or scour for food. They didn't have to wonder what was coming over the ridge and whether or not it was going to try and eat them.

Cross could barely conceive of such a place.

Black gave him a wicked look as he ran by. The land was dead and dark in every direction, all rough gravel and soil interrupted only by the silhouettes of low and distant hills or rock formations. The sticky wind blew clouds that were the color of fresh wounds across the sky.

“ You guys need to hurry the hell up in there,” Black said. She cast her eyes out to the distance, watching, waiting for something to appear.

Cross chose not to say anything. He stepped into the vampire vessel and stacked the medical supplies with the other goods they'd already brought on board.

The child lay fast asleep beneath some wool blankets. The lad was far too thin, and unquestionably malnourished. His cheeks were shallow and his eyes were dark with fatigue. He still hadn’t spoken a word to anyone; in fact, he’d only been conscious for all of ten minutes ever since they’d rescued him.

Ekko was at the console, where she knelt down and looked into an opened panel of circuits and wiring. She had a grim and determined look on her face. Cross sensed and felt her frustration, just as he felt her struggle against her own instincts. She was Turning, slowly, and if she did so completely her mind would join the vampire collective consciousness. There would be no thoughts she'd be able to keep to herself, even if she wanted to.

Of course, if she Turns, she likely won’t want to. She’ll be too busy trying to eat us.

Under different circumstances, it would have made no sense to keep her alive. No matter who she was, or who she had been, once she Turned she belonged to the Ebon Cities. But this, without question, was an unusual circumstance. Something kept her from changing, at least at the moment…Cross was fairly certain the Turning should have already happened by now. Maybe, he reasoned, it was the shard of Lucan Keth's ancient and primal spirit that lay embedded in her soul. Maybe it was the bond she'd formed with Cross and his spirit, even though he’d felt that connection weaken ever since he’d lost the battle against Danica Black.

Whatever the reason, Cross felt reasonably certain they had nothing to fear from her just yet.

But what about later, if Keth's spirit leaves us? What then?

Sensing his presence, Ekko sat up and looked at him. Her coal black eyes seemed to suck the light out of the room. Her short blonde hair was now darker than her skin, which had gone the color of milk. Strangely, she smiled, and she nodded at Cross. He nodded back, and left her to her work.

What a fucked up world, he thought.

The sky grew darker, and yet the temperature rose. Cross started to sweat beneath the old black shirt he'd found in the safe house, a dirty and old piece of fabric that looked like it had been used to clean the grease out of an old engine, and yet it was still nowhere near as filthy as the soiled rags he'd worn in Krul.

Black shot another angry look at him as he passed her by. He felt their spirits tangle in an air suddenly turned electric, sharp and bloody. Hate welled in him, and he felt his spirit feed off of it, just as she lent it fuel.

“ You killed him, you know,” Black said.

Cross stopped.

Ramsey had given him an arcane gauntlet, one of several he'd stashed away there. Cross smelled its circuits, and he felt the portable battery buzz where it was strapped to his upper arm beneath his shirt. His spirit swirled around him like a ghostly snake. He also had an HK45 at his side, but that wasn't what he'd use if anything happened.

He slowly turned around. Black's face was set with anger.

“ You picked me to fight,” Cross said coldly. “You wanted him dead for shooting down your waste of a brother.”

Black smiled incredulously.

“ Is that what you think?” she snapped. “You think it's really as simple as all that?”

“ You want to tell me different?”

“ You want to do me a favor or go stick your head in the engine when we take off?” she said. “Screw you, Cross. You had me in that fight. You could've taken me…but you didn't.”

Cross bit back his anger.

“ Understand something,” he said quietly. “I needed you and Cole alive so that you could fulfill your end of the bargain and show me where to find the Woman in the Ice. And that's it. There's a lot more at stake here than you or me getting revenge.” He saw Dillon, saw him hanging there, but he pushed the memory away. “I weighed his life against thousands. It’s as simple as that. There was never really a choice.” He took a breath. It felt cold, and it slid down his chest like a piece of ice. “Faced with the same decision, he'd have done the same thing in my place.”

Cross turned away. He only then was aware of the tears in his eyes.

“ Is that what you're going to tell yourself?” Black asked him. Her words were suddenly quiet, barely audible over the rising musk wind. “Is that thought going to help you sleep at night?”

“ Nothing is going to help me sleep at night,” he said quietly. “Not ever.” He turned back around. “What helps you sleep at night, Black? What drowns out the screams of all of those inmates that you used to watch die every day?”

Black looked past him, into the darkness of the cold stone hills. It would be full dark soon, and they still had a long way to go.

“ I got her out,” she said. There was an unmistakably bitter note to her voice. “I saved her. I saved Cole.” She looked at Cross. Her smile was bleak as a warm blast of wind lifted her blood red hair. “And for the record…she would not have done the same for me.”

She turned away. Cross watched her for a moment, and then he went back into the station.

“ So, what, you just concentrate and…it changes?” Kane asked.

“ Let me show you,” Ramsey said.

Ramsey, Kane and Cross carried the last of the needed supplies out of the safe house and towards the airship. All in all, they had several days’ worth of food and water, enough weapons to tackle a small army, and enough fuel to get the airship to the Reach and back, provided Ekko had made any headway with the power issue.

Kane had a box of water bottles hoisted on his shoulders, but he set them down long enough to watch Tega pull back the sleeve of his red cloak and show a pale and fleshy arm with a dark rune inscribed on the skin. The rune bore the likeness of a bladed letter “C”.

“ That’s the sign of House Rane…Drake’s house.” Ramsey stared at it, muttered a couple of obscure and unintelligible words, and touched it. The sigil ran like ink down his arm, and then quickly reformed into a twisted serpent that gripped a sword. “House Karn.” Again. This time the mark expanded, then shrank into the shape of a skull with horns at its jaw. “House Mora.”

“ That,” Kane nodded, “is SWEET!”

Cross laughed. It felt good to be out of Krul. Good to be out in open air, not in the confines of the dark, not ankle deep in murk and muck, not confused if what he saw was really happening, or if days had passed since the last time he’d known what was going on. The feel of the air on his face, the roll of the breeze through his hands, the feeling of turning around and being able to see for miles in every direction…

You need to get it together, he told himself. You still have a job to do. And time is short.

They’d only spent a couple of hours gathering supplies and making repairs. It was time to get going.

Cross was about to say as much when Black called up the alarm.

“ Incoming!”

Everyone stopped, petrified. Their reverie snapped. Dark riders appeared in the distance, a cluster of forms that spread out like a bloody ink stain across the dark ground to the west. The rider’s massive mounts tore the ground open with mandibles and claws. Enormous bodies writhed and burrowed through the dark soil. They were half-a-mile away, and closing fast.

“ Vath!” Black shouted.

Ravenous zombies, intelligent enough that they banded into flocks and hunted together, rode out of the dark hills. This far west, the Vath acted as servants of the vampires, who used them to patrol the lowlands between the Ebon Cities and root out intruders.

Dull thuds sounded in the murky air as the Vath launched organic projectiles. There had to be twenty or more Vath, plus their mounts, and they’d be at the safe house inside of a couple of minutes. Even at their current distance Cross heard their gargling voices and lunatic, bloodthirsty calls. The air darkened around them as they rode, stained by the shadows that leaked from their corrupted souls.

Cross, Kane and Ramsey hauled the last of the gear into the open rear door of the airship as fast as they could. His heart was already pounding, and soon Cross’ limbs ached from running while weighed down with bags of ammunition and dried goods. The air seemed to suck the wind out of his lungs as he ran.

Black covered them from the rear, while Cross ran inside. Ramsey yelled for Ekko to start the engines. She furiously locked down the fuselage and activated the complicated network of runes that started the launch sequence. The turbines slowly lurched to life with a sound like hammers on metal.

Cross dropped the bags, snatched up the M16A2 and the vampire triple-barrel from the wall, and ran back out. He didn’t see Cole or the boy.

That can’t be good.

The airship stood on flat ground right outside of the gas station, next to a long strip of open land that gave them plenty of room to take off.

Black fired the Remington at the approaching crowd of creatures, but she was too far away to do any real damage. The Vath drew to within a quarter of a mile, near enough that Cross could make out details he’d have preferred not to.

The Vath were taller than humans. They were eyeless and ebon-colored creatures with oversized mouths filled with knife-like teeth. Their bony carapaces leaked black dust and soot that poisoned the air around them, and glowing runes covered their emaciated bodies like tattoos. Spindly fingers worked bladed weapons wrought of bone and iron. They rode enormous scarab beetles and giant wriggling black worms the size of warhorses, which they anchored themselves to with razor-wire reins and bone spurs. Their collective call sounded like the dying breath of some enormous creature, a lunatic dirge filled with warbles and gasps. Cross smelled their foul auras even from a quarter mile away — charcoal fumes and burnt skin, dry rot and animal stink.

The two lead Vathian riders held their bone staffs high. Churning dark matter formed between the rods like a banner of black dust.

Cross’ spirit folded around him and jarred his skin with raw cold. Black’s spirit waited in the air as well, ready, smoldering, powerful. The ground smoked at their touch.

Kane and Cole were right behind them with weapons drawn. Cross heard the airship shudder and lurch to life. Exhaust kicked dark dust into the air, which turned molten and hazy with heat. Arcane energies sputtered as the ship lifted a few inches off of the ground.

“ Go!” Black shouted.

Kane and Cole stepped up and slowly backed into the ship, their eyes on the approaching riders. Cross waited. The black haze of the Vath coalesced, built, doubled and redoubled its size. They were working magic, but some primal elemental force that didn’t require spirits, pure shadow energies.

Dark missiles raced towards the ship: dripping shadow projectiles, meteors of melting oil. Cross’ spirit burned his fingers as he sent her forward in a wave of corrosive daggers. The bolts of magic were blasted into liquid shards that smoked the ground where they fell.

Black released her spirit into a folding wave of sharp stones, a strip of razor rocks that twisted and turned like a flock of birds before they spun through the air in the shape of a murderous propeller. The energies hacked dark bodies apart, and they fell forward into piles of broken shell and oozing worm flesh. The earth steamed.

Inside of the airship behind them, someone screamed. Cross raced inside.

The air burned dark behind him. Looming shadows formed faces and stretched across the sky. Danica sliced through them with whips of red fire. The air was gritty, and tasted of brimstone.

Inside, Ramsey flew against the wall with a thud. It was the boy who’d thrown him.

By the time Cross reached the melee, Kane had grappled the child with one hand and held a machete in the other. The boy clawed and spat at him, growled from a mouth of shadows and desperately reached for Kane’s face with a prehensile tongue covered in barbed and dripping quills.

Cole was face-down on the floor. Ekko desperately tried to lower the floating ship so that she could help, since her gun lay just out of reach.

“ No, fly!” Cross shouted. He hefted the triple-barrel shotgun, and hesitated. There was no way he’d only hit the child if he fired, so he dropped the weapon and raced at them with his spirit wrapped around his hands.

The boy kicked Kane in the groin, doubled him over, put long fingers into the big man’s hair and rammed his head against the floor. He turned Kane over, hissed, and pressed his talons against the man’s eyes.

Cross grabbed the boy by the back of the head and immolated him. Black fire coursed out of his hands and set the child’s hair alight. He screamed, not a monstrous cry, but that of a little boy in pain. Burning flesh and blood gagged Cross. His eyes bled from the force of the magic he released. Something pushed him back. The world spun.

The boy stood over him, howling and on fire. It cursed him in some ancient and alien tongue. It looked at him with burning eyes as black as pits, and even through the dark flames Cross saw the shadow, the heart of the void that had nearly consumed him twice. Something inside of Cross turned like a blade. He felt it, surrendered to it. He let it escape.

White light shot out of his hand and consumed the shadow child, the false human husk. The Sleeper’s agent. Time slowed as the white flames tore the shadow apart, inch by inch. Even its scream moved slow, sluggish, like a dream.

He lost time.

It sees him. He feels himself shrink at the foot of the mountain. Cold flames roar around him. The flesh slides from his bones. He screams as he is eclipsed in a cloak of black fire.

“ Cross!”

The ship lurched into the air. Black was at the cargo door, which still hung open. She and Kane fired at something just outside of the vessel. The sky was black and thick. Gunfire and engine noise roared through his head.

“ Are you okay?”

Cole leaned over him. He touched her face to be sure that she was real. His head felt like it had been filled with lead. He glanced around.

Ramsey sat against the wall and nursed a bruised forehead. Ekko piloted. Black and Kane fired rifles at what he could only assume were the Vath, even as the ship ascended. The rear doors slowly sealed shut. The rush of hot wind faded, and they were left in a still and sticky air.

Cross tried to sit up. His back was as stiff as a plank, and he was still disoriented and dizzy.

There was nothing left of the boy but ash.

“ What the hell?!” Kane said as he pointed at the smoldering pile. “WHAT the hell?!!”

The airship moved deeper into the sky. Cross felt its ascent. The metal shuttered. He pictured them over the barren landscape, headed east.

“ Where are we going?” he asked Cole.

She looked at him for a moment, ascertaining if he was injured, or at least in his right mind.

“ The Reach,” she said. “Near Karamanganji. The Bone Towers.”

“ We have to move fast,” Cross said. His head was pounding. “It’s testing us. That was a sliver of the Sleeper, just a fraction. It possessed the boy to see how dangerous we were.” He looked up at the rest of them. The gravity in the room was almost crushing. “It won’t delay any longer. We have to get to the Woman in the Ice, before it’s too late.”

SEVENTEEN

CONNECTIONS

“ Cross,” Kane said. “You said you’d tell us what the hell is going on.”

The airship headed due east. No one aside from the nameless boy had been killed or seriously injured, but the attack had left everyone demoralized.

Ekko put the ship on autopilot. They knew where they were going now. The Bone Towers were a series of cylindrical rock formations near the ancient city of Karamanganji, a lonely and desolate burg filled with hollow buildings of pale ice. So far as anyone knew, the city had always been abandoned. The frigid location had been discovered a few years back, just a few hundred miles north of the ruins of Shul Ganneth, beyond what was called the White Border, a northerly latitude point where the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees.

They flew through the night. The muted groan of the engines and the howl of the frozen wind outside filled their heads. The burgeoning dawn sky was a pink stain when viewed through the smeared and broken glass. The air inside of the cabin was cold as the night’s chill crept through the twisted metal paneling.

The vessel shook as it carried through the sky. Everyone was still shaken by the Vath’s charge and by the death of a boy they’d known nothing about, except that he’d been weak and close enough to death that the Dra’aalthakmar had possessed him with ease.

“ A few months ago, something evil woke up,” Cross began. Everyone sat against the walls, watching as he spoke. He felt like he needed a storybook. “The Southern Claw knew about it before it woke, but we didn’t know much about what it really was.”

“ How did you know about it?” Kane asked.

“ The Lith. They aid the Southern Claw war effort with their prophecies.”

“ The Claw puts too much confidence in them, if you ask me,” Cole interjected. Cross thought she’d developed something of a maternal kinship for the boy, and his death had left her rattled and sullen. He noticed that she and Black still sat at an arm’s distance. Something had happened between them, or was about to happen.

“ What kind of ‘something evil’ are we talking about?” Black asked.

“ Like I said, we’re not sure exactly what it is, but we know its name: the Dra’aalthakmar. We just refer to it as the Sleeper. So far as the Lithian prophecies could tell us, it’s some sort of…demon, I guess. A living shadow. Anyway, it was imprisoned back on its home world, where it was buried deep underground in some kind of magical prison.

“ During The Black, that prison shifted here — to Earth. The magic that held the Sleeper in stasis weakened, and the physical location of the prison shifted much closer to the surface than it had ever been on its home world. So it was just a matter of time before the prison was compromised.”

The notion wasn’t that preposterous. Much had been destabilized during The Black, and many of the structures and ruins that populated the landscape looked half-made, but they weren’t: usually that appearance was because those structures or cities or (in some of the more horrific cases) creatures had been ripped asunder from their world and only partially recreated on Earth.

“ So that…thing we saw back at the city,” Cole asked, “ that was the Sleeper?”

“ It took its vitamins,” Kane said.

“ It’ll keep getting bigger, I think,” Cross said, “if we don’t stop it.”

“ And how, precisely, do we do that?” Ramsey asked.

“ The Lith said that the key to stopping the Sleeper is the Woman in the Ice. I think the Sleeper knows this, and it wants to find the Woman and destroy her before she destroys it. I also think that Lucan Keth was somehow connected to the Woman, and that his primordial soul is born of the same power as she is. It’s possible, even, that the Woman is what imprisoned the Sleeper in the first place…that they’re from the same world, and they were both ripped to Earth during The Black.”

“ Am I the only one who’s stupid around here?” Kane asked. When no one said anything, he took a breath and nodded. “Let me rephrase that: am I the only one here who doesn’t know who the Woman in the Ice is?”

“ Not a who, a what,” Cole answered. “It’s some sort of ancient monument, buried deep underground. Some say it’s an obelisk, covered in images of a forgotten goddess. Some say it’s that goddess’ bones, frozen in the ice, or the frozen corpse of a lady giant. There’s supposed to be some magical power connected to the Woman, and that’s why people search for it. I was guiding an expedition of scientists and explorers to the city, and one of them thought they’d find the Woman there.”

“ Yeah,” Cross nodded. “About that…”

The ship lurched and shuddered.

“ Wait,” Black said. Ekko did a quick diagnostics check, and gave a thumbs up sign. “That scared the shit out of me,” Black laughed. “Okay…I want to make sure that I have one thing straight. You think Lucan is somehow tied to the Woman…how, exactly?”

“ I don’t know what the connection is,” Cross answered. “But I do know this: the Sleeper wants to destroy the Woman, whoever or whatever she is. And now it wants to destroy us, because what’s left of Lucan Keth’s soul is fused to you, me, and Ekko.”

“ Wait a minute,” Kane said. He had that sort of sarcastic and nervous yet still macho smirk on his face that so reminded Cross of his old friend, Sam Graves. “Back up a sec. This thing can apparently nuke cities just by showing up…so the strategic masterminds who run the Southern Claw sent TWO GUYS to stop it?”

Cross couldn't help but laugh.

“ Two things, pal. One, no one had any idea of exactly when this thing was going to wake up. We knew that lives would be at stake if we didn’t figure out a way to stop it, but I think the prophecies led the High Command to believe that we’d have more time. Second, Dillon and I were sent on a reconnaissance mission: information gathering, and that's all. We were supposed to spend time with a tribe of Lith and see if we could find the Woman in the Ice. Once we did that, the High Command would put together a research team to take over the mission.”

“ Only that's not what happened,” Black added.

“ We didn't expect the damn thing to show up in person. It woke earlier than we thought it would, and I’m guessing it followed Lucan. Like I said, he had some connection to the Woman, to the power that I think imprisoned the Sleeper in the first place. That's why it crashed your prison ship, and once it knew where you were going, that's why it waited for us in Shul Ganneth.”

“ So what did my brother have to do with any of this?” Black asked.

“ He was working for the Ebon Cities,” Cross answered. “We weren't sure how much they knew, but it stands to reason they'd want to take measures to protect themselves if they thought some ancient power was about to wake up. That, or else they thought they could find a way to direct that power against the Southern Claw. It just makes sense they'd want to get their hands on Lucan.”

The ship cut through the sky. The walls rattled, and they heard ice and stone pummel the hull. The wind outside turned to a low moan. They were close to the Reach.

Everyone sat or crouched low, their faces grim.

“ Lucan is dead, right?” Kane asked.

“ Yes,” Cross answered. “So far as I can tell. But some fragment of his spirit is still here. It was scattered, but its pieces found shelter in the three closest mages.”

“ Ekko's not a mage,” Ramsey pointed out.

“ No,” Black answered, “but she sees spirits, and she communicates with them. That seemed to be enough for Lucan to make a connection.”

“ That's why the Sleeper came after us in Krul,” Cross added.

“ Yeah,” Cole said. “What happened there, exactly?”

“ You’re welcome,” Ramsey said with a smile. “Sorry I couldn't do it sooner. Had I known how important your mission had become, I'd have made efforts to get you out of there before then.”

“ What?” Kane asked, exasperated. “My head is going to explode from all of this bullshit…who the hell are YOU, now? A spy?”

“ Well…yes,” Ramsey said in an off-handed manner.

“ Well…” Kane seemed at a loss. “Fine!”

“ I've been feeding information to the Southern Claw from inside of Krul for about two years,” Ramsey said. “On occasion, when the opportunity presented itself, I arranged for prisoners to be ‘lost’ so that they could find their way home.”

Cross wondered if Ramsey had been the one who'd helped Graves and Morg escape. His old teammates had both been incarcerated in and had later escaped from Krul. Morg's imprisonment might have been before Ramsey's time there, but Graves’ wouldn't have been. He'd have to ask the Gol about it later.

“ Those runes of yours…” Kane said approvingly.

“ They helped. Being a natural born liar comes in handy, too.”

“ So what do you know about all of this?” Cole asked.

“ I didn't know anything at first. But Cross was pretty delirious in his sleep, and he started to drop tidbits of information. I think it must have been while you were figuring out that you were bonded to Ekko and Black, and so also to this Lucan. It's hard to get messages out to the Alliance — I only do it every few weeks — but when I figured out that you were onto something important, I gathered some information myself and figured out who you were.”

“ How did you get us out?” Black asked.

“ Cross guessed that this shadow thing was trying to find the three of you,” Ramsey said, “since you're carrying around what's left of Lucan’s super-spirit. But no matter how powerful it is, I knew it would never find you with the arcane safeguards around the city, so when I knew you'd all be out in the open and in the same place, I…turned the safeguards off. Or I arranged to have it happen, at any rate.”

“ And then it found us,” Cross nodded.

“ Well, a distraction did seem to be in order,” Ramsey smiled.

“ Destroying a city is a good distraction,” Kane said. “Though I wish you wouldn’t have waited so God-damned long to spring us…”

“ I can only save so many,” Ramsey interrupted. “Let’s just leave it at that. If I could have saved every prisoner who came into Krul, I would have. But that’s not how it worked. I had to let some die, so that I could save many more. The Southern Claw felt that having a spy inside of Krul was worth more than saving every prisoner who wound up in the city. It’s an awful risk, smuggling prisoners out…every time I did it, I ran the risk of being exposed. And let’s just say that it…wasn’t easy, getting me in as deep as we did. A lot of sacrifices were made.” He swallowed, pained by some memory. Kane looked about to apologize, but Ramsey held up a hand. “Like I said…let’s just leave it at that.”

For a minute or so, no one spoke.

“ Wait,” Cross said at last. “Did you say you’ve just been in touch with the Alliance…”

“ I have. We can call them up on the radio I brought from the safe house. Commander King has put part of Claw Company on standby to help us out in Karamanganji.”

“ Woo-hoo!” Kane shouted. “So they can handle this now!”

“ No,” Cross said. “The three of us,” he indicated himself, Black and Ekko, “need to get to the Woman in the Ice. For all we know, we’re the key to unlocking her power and stopping this damned thing.”

Kane looked dejected, but he nodded.

“ I knew you were going to say that,” he smiled. “Shit.” He stood up and walked over to Ekko. Her blank vampire's eyes were impossible to read. They might as well have been pools of oil. Kane stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“ How long till we reach Karamanganji?” Black asked, breaking the silence.

About five hours, Ekko answered in Cross' mind. He passed the information along.

“ I'm going to get some sleep.”

They all followed the advice, all except the pilot. Ekko needed no sleep. She'd already dreamed her last dream.

I’ve hated you all of my life, Cross thought. He didn’t direct the sentiment at Ekko, but to all of the vampires in the world, every bloodsucker in the darkness, every undead who waited and plotted from the other side of the black walls of their dead cities. I’ve never had any reason to do anything else. I’ve always been afraid of you. All that you do is take. You’ve never done anything but destroy everything I ever loved.

Ekko turned, and looked at him. Her eyes might have been cold and glassy voids, but her expression was one of sadness.

God damn it.

When Cross slept, he dreamed that he was back on the mountain. Snow was there with him, along with Dillon and Graves. They all smiled. He heard the waters and felt his feet in the stream, even as he watched the cold fire race up the mountainside and consume them.

Later, he sat in the dark. They flew through the night. Ekko expected them to arrive at Karamanganji just after dawn. Cross rubbed his eyes and sat uncomfortably against the wall. His spirit swirled near his hands and kept them warm as she slid in and out of his fingers like a warming gel.

“ Cross?”

It was Cole. She looked exhausted.

“ Yeah?”

“ You got a second?”

“ No, I’m real busy.” He smiled. “Sorry. I’m not as funny when I’m this tired.”

Surprisingly, Cole smiled, too, and she sat down next to him. It was so cold in the ship they’d all taken to huddling close to one another. Everyone else but Ekko was asleep, bundled beneath old blankets and coats.

Cole’s dark hair hung lank around her face — it had grown considerably in the weeks they’d spent incarcerated in Krul — and in spite of what she’d been through she still carried a sort of radiance about her, a natural beauty that owed as much to her demeanor and her stalwart resolve as it did to any physical blessings. He could see why Black had very plainly stated that she would die for this woman.

“ Well, I need to interrupt you,” she said with a small smile.

“ What’s up?”

“ Cradden Black and his men attacked my expedition party and took me hostage…”

“ Yeah…God, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that…”

“ You forgot. I did, too. Hey, we’re exhausted,” she said. “But I just remembered something that I wanted to tell you. Most of the people in the group that hired me on as a guide were archeologists out of Dorn. They wanted to see Karamanganji and look at the famous glyphs, to see if they could make sense of what others couldn’t.”

The glyphs of Karamanganji were one of the features that had made the site famous. It was hypothesized that they might have been the base for several languages encountered After the Black, which was odd when one considered that most of those languages originated from completely different worlds. There were theories that when realities converged during The Black, temporal and spatial relationships were created between races and locations that, prior to the catastrophe, had never been linked in any way whatsoever. History itself had been re-written.

The theory was dismissed by most as ludicrous. The idea that reverse tangential lines of chronological connection existed brought up some terribly frightening notions regarding the nature of reality. Cross had heard the theories, and they made his head hurt.

“ Black said you’d mentioned to her that someone in your party was actively searching for the Woman in the Ice,” Cross said. He was suddenly worried, but he wasn’t entirely sure why.

“ Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “The expedition as a whole wasn’t looking for the Woman, but one of its members was. He asked me about it a couple of times: if I’d heard of it, if I thought the rumors about it were true, and so on. He was so insistent that I finally asked the head archaeologist, a guy named Kyver. Kyver told me there was some rumor that one of the Bone Towers might house the Woman in the Ice, but it was pure conjecture, and it had nothing to do with why they were going. He was frankly surprised that anyone besides himself even knew about the rumor, or why they would bring it up.”

Cross nodded. His worry grew.

“ The guy who asked you about it…”

“ That was the weird thing. He was one of the armed escorts — a mercenary hired out of Ath when one of the group’s regular men came down with the flu.”

“ So the guy asking about the Woman in the Ice…”

“ Wasn’t even part of the original party.”

“ What did he look like?” Cross asked.

Cole paused. It was obvious that she needed to concentrate in order to remember, which worried Cross even more.

“ He was tall, with short blonde hair. He wasn’t really handsome, but not really…well, not really remarkable at all…he was just sort of plain. I’m not even sure if I could point him out again if I had to. But he wore all black.”

“ What sort of weapon did he carry?” Cross asked.

“ Funny, I never actually saw it,” Cole said, thinking back.

The airship bounced through some turbulence. The interior was only dimly lit by red stones set high in the walls, rubies that cast everything in a bloody haze.

“ I think it was a rifle,” she said at last. “I remember now. It must have been, because it was very long, and he kept it wrapped up and stashed away with his other gear.”

“ He escaped, didn’t he?” Cross asked. “When Cradden and his gang attacked you?”

“ Yes. He didn’t even put up a fight…he just fled. He was gone in an instant, while the expedition team was being…shot down.” She swallowed, pained by the memory. Cross gave her some time.

“ Did he give you his name?” he asked eventually.

Cross loaded his HK magazines. He hadn’t even realized he was doing so.

“ Markos.”

Cross laughed.

“ Jennar. His name is Jennar. Markos is one of his aliases. It’s an old alias, and he hardly ever uses it…but he has used it before.”

“ Who is he?”

“ Trouble. And the fact that he was with your party, looking for the Woman in the Ice…that’s even more trouble.”

Everyone else woke up a couple of hours later. The night outside was still pitch black, so dark there might have been nothing outside of the vessel except for an unending and starless void. It was as if they floated through ink. The rumbling airship — with its bloody lights and the ear-shattering monotony of its engines — existed all by itself, a blip in an endless ebon sea. It seemed they’d flown forever, and whatever reality existed beyond those walls was part of some other world. As long as they stayed in the ship, they were safe, safe from the reality of all they’d been through, and everything that they still had to do.

But they couldn’t stay in the ship forever.

“ We have trouble,” Cross explained when everyone was awake. They ate MREs and drank water. Everyone was tired, miserable and exhausted. Even washed and somewhat rested they looked and moved like people who’d been to hell and back.

And we still have one last stop on our trip.

“ Trouble?” Black asked. “What, more?”

“ Just for something different, right?” Kane laughed.

Cross had Cole recall her story. Black nodded with the parts that she was already familiar with.

“ The reason that Cole can’t remember exactly what he looks like,” Cross explained, “is because this man, Jennar, is a warlock who uses his spirit to disguise his appearance. That’s a very rare and very difficult talent that only a few mages have. Also, that long weapon he had wasn’t a rifle, but it’s a sort of sword called a nightlance.”

“ I’ve heard of those,” Kane said. “It’s a Crujian weapon, right?”

“ Right.”

“ Who is this clown?” Black asked.

It was Ramsey who answered.

“ Black Circle,” he said. The way he mouthed those words, it was as if they left a bad taste in his mouth.

Nothing else needed to be said. The Black Circle was well known, even if many chose to believe they didn’t exist. Nihilists and fanatics who lived in the shadows, the Circle’s efforts revolved around a drive to bring about the downfall of all life. They were well-supplied, well trained, and very powerful. Luckily, their numbers were few, but they were capable of doing incredible damage given the right opportunity. Some said the Circle believed they were God’s angels, sent to punish those who’d somehow survived Judgment Day; others thought they served some other-worldly evil, a demonic or undead agent, or even The Black itself.

Whatever their motives, one thing was clear: they were friends to no one, for they sought the destruction of all. They wanted to watch everything — the world, its people, all of it — burn. They sought oblivion, and they were willing to give their own lives to achieve that end, if necessary.

A member of the Black Circle had been there with Cole, searching for the Woman in the Ice. Weeks had passed since Cole had been abducted. For all they knew, the Black Circle had already found what they were looking for. And if they had, there was no telling how much damage they’d already done.

EIGHTEEN

KARAMANGANJI

They came upon the frozen city at first light. Soldiers from Claw Company, out of Ath, waited for them, just as Ramsey had promised.

Even through the frosted and thick-paned window of the airship, they saw how much brighter the world became that far north. They were deep in the Reach, in Gorgoloth territory and well beyond the White Line. They felt the biting chill even through the walls of the craft.

They had no real plan aside from finding the Bone Tower that Cole thought housed the Woman in the Ice. They hoped they'd beat the Black Circle agents to the site, but Cross thought that was highly unlikely. The best they could hope for was that the Woman was buried deep, or else shielded behind a great deal of arcane safeguards, and that the Black Circle hadn't actually reached her yet. Still, it had been weeks since Cole’s party had been ambushed, and even though it would have taken Jennar some time to gather his allies and guide them back to Karamanganji, the Circle still had a significant head start.

Cross’ nerves were on edge, and his pulse raced with worry.

They touched down to the west of the frozen city. Everyone threw on as many layers of winter clothing as they could: heavy coats, hats, thick gloves, extra pants, double layers of socks, anything that Ramsey had on hand. Unfortunately, the Gol had never really anticipated making an arctic trek, so their clothing supplies were a bit thinner than they would have liked.

Bitter winter wind greeted them as the rear doors slid open. Blasts of bone-chilling air cast everything in white drifts and icy fog. Cross shivered the moment the doors opened. The faces of the refugees from Thornn were wrapped with shreds of torn blankets. They all looked like stuffed scarecrows, and they moved with about as much grace.

The sky was dull white, and the earth was pale and sheen. Most of the ground was layered with sheets of snow so cold it had fused into layers of ice. Sharp stones protruded from the ground like shards of broken glass, and a trail of rock led up the face of Mount Karamanganji, a desolate peak that stuck like a black and jagged tooth into the frozen sky. The ruins of the city stood at the base of the mountain, easily visible from atop the rise.

It was a city of ice. Glacial buildings were fused into the frozen rock. Wide streets covered in uneven layers of petrified snow ran between spires of glittering dark crystal. Gray fog curled off of the featureless buildings and filled the air between the stark white towers with vapors of rolling shadow. Needle-thin bridges connected the delicate structures like misplaced horizontal icicles.

The breadth of the city was impressive. When the wind turned in the ship's direction, Cross tasted cold so raw it burned his tongue. He sensed powerful and ancient spirits, their origins and numbers so vast and scattered they would not be pinpointed. They swam through the currents of the air, heavy, formless and pure, like uncut diamond matter.

The group met Claw Company atop the ridge that overlooked the city. Cross saw a ground transport and a tank. Both were made out of magically-treated steel, and they were lightweight vehicles that could be carried by the cargo transport airship grounded on a ridge that overlooked the city.

Only a few Southern Claw soldiers were visible out there in the snow, their brown and deep red armor hardly camouflaged but probably the best choice for keeping track of soldiers so that no one became lost in the arctic wastes.

Airships ran reconnaissance over the frozen city streets. Cross counted at least six Bloodhawk warships in the air. They were sleek and lightweight vessels shaped like aerial speedboats.

With the troop transport and the two land vehicles, that meant that the Southern Claw had sent a least two platoons. Cross was relieved: he didn’t want the entire Company. He had a bad feeling about what was coming.

A cluster of soldiers made their way towards the vampire airship. It pained Cross' eyes to even watch them in the stinging snow. He felt his sinuses freeze.

“ Lieutenant Crylos?” Ramsey called out, his voice drowned in the wind.

“ You must be Ramsey!” a man called out. “This way!”

The soldiers led them into a makeshift white tent that was nearly invisible in the eye-numbing wind. Inside were a number of tables with maps pinned to them, plenty of supplies, sandbags, and a hex field generator that provided power and acted as an early warning system against intruders. Cold iron rods and sacks of blessed earth rested near the center of the tent. The generator made the air inside surprisingly warm.

A witch waited in the tent. Her dark hair was pulled back to reveal intricate tattoos cast on her neck and angular cheeks. She held a dark crystal attached to a string over one of the maps.

The man who’d spoken with Ramsey pulled back his hood. He was young and unshaven, with dirty blonde hair and large blue eyes.

“ I’m Lieutenant Crylos,” he said, and he shook everyone’s hand in turn. “Sergeant Ankharra is busy divining for any obvious signs of recent disturbances in this area. Thus far we haven’t turned anything up, but give us time. We’re good at finding trouble.”

“ This should be a match made in heaven, then,” Cross laughed. “You served with Sergeant Stone in Scorpion Company, right?”

“ I did,” Crylos nodded. “Good man. Sorry to hear about what happened to him. I’ve heard a lot about you, Cross.”

Cross couldn’t decide if the fact that he had a reputation was a good thing or a bad thing.

“ Where’s the rest of your Company?” Ramsey asked.

“ Patrolling near Saarn. That’s actually where the entire Company was bound for when we received orders to come and help you.” Crylos looked at Cross, clearly assuming the warlock was in charge. “What are we expecting, exactly? All we were told was that there was something of import in these ruins, and that agents of the Black Circle were looking for it, as well.”

“ We hope that the Black Circle is all we have to deal with,” Cross said grimly. “We may have vampires on our tail. Or worse.”

“ Excellent,” Crylos nodded. His face was almost expressionless. Cross couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic, or if he really was excited about the notion of facing vampires. He decided Crylos would make a terrific poker player.

Black, Cole and Kane all kept surprisingly quiet. Ekko kept her hood drawn, as they'd agreed she would. Cross and Black had both used basic thaumaturgic currents to help mask her presence from top-down vampire detection measures. Since Ekko wasn't a full vampire, she’d remain undetected unless someone specifically searched the exact spot where she stood. The implications of what might happen if Ekko's nature was discovered was more than Cross wanted to think about, as was the notion of having to convince Crylos that it was okay that they had a vampire on their side. There were some things that were all but unheard of to the average Southern Claw soldier, and the notion of working with the undead was one of them.

Funny how much I've changed, Cross thought. I used to think like that, too. Maybe everything would be easier if I still did.

“ That's kind of rare, isn't it?” Cross asked Crylos. “For a witch to be an officer?”

“ Ankharra is one of the few,” Crylos nodded.

“ I think I've found something,” Ankharra said, right on cue. Crylos nodded for everyone to convene at the map. Harsh winter wind cut through the tent as the flap opened and a handful of other officers joined them.

Ankharra briefly surveyed the new arrivals. She was a lean and handsome woman with dark and exotic eyes and full black lips. Cross felt her spirit, raw and male and filled with primal hunter power. His spirit felt largely insignificant next to Ankharra’s. Worse, he felt Black's spirit test Ankharra's. Two male spirits in the same area was always dangerous. The level of anger and aggression was so thick that Cross nearly choked on it.

“ Danica Black?” Ankharra said with a mean-spirited smile. “It’s been a long time. I'm surprised they let you out of your dungeon.”

“ I'm surprised you can even survive in this climate,” Black smiled back. “Don't reptiles need to bathe in sunlight to stay warm?”

Kane laughed, and he clawed the air and made a sound like a hissing cat.

“ Anyways…” Crylos interrupted.

“ There are arcane trace elements near this Tower,” Ankharra said. She pointed with a dark fingernail to a spot on the map.

“ Is that it?” Cross asked. Cole stepped up. She had to study the entire map for a moment to gather her bearings.

“ Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

“ Most of the energy is residual,” Ankharra continued. “It’s maybe a week or two old. But something has occurred near that tower, as recently as yesterday morning.”

“ Like what?” Cross asked.

“ And you are?” Ankharra asked him pointedly. Cross saw Crylos give her a look, but he shook his head, and smiled.

“ Asking you a question,” Cross answered. “What sort of activity?”

Ankharra regarded him a moment, and then smiled back.

“ It’s focused destructive power, for the most part. Channeled fire, large scale explosions squeezed into tight spaces…things like that.”

Cross and Black exchanged glances. The Revenger nodded.

“ The Black Circle,” he said. “They’re blasting. They think they’ve found her, and now they’re trying to get to her.”

“ Well?” Crylos asked.

Cross ran his hand over his face. Even with the small amount of rest he’d gotten on the airship, he felt as though he hadn’t slept for days. His stomach was tight with worry, his nerves were on edge, and he had trouble focusing his eyes on anything for more than a few seconds without getting dizzy.

We are so close, he thought. So close to ending this…but now, more than ever, we have to stay alert, and we have to be ready.

“ We’d better get rolling,” he said.

“ What do you need from us?” Crylos asked.

“ More than anything, I need you to keep Karamanganji secure, if that’s possible.”

Besides the threat of vampires coming after them — not to mention the Sleeper, which Claw Company could do little against — there was no telling what else might stalk the ruins of the ice city. They were deep in Gorgoloth territory, and depending on which rumor one heard there could be anything from Regost wanderers to Cruj scavengers traipsing through the icicle necropolis.

“ We could use one squad with a vehicle as backup, in case these Black Circle fruit loops are waiting for us,” Ramsey said. “Our intelligence on them is shaky, at best.”

“ What do we know about them?” Crylos asked.

“ They’re bad guys,” Kane said.

“ That’s it?” Crylos laughed.

“ Um…they’re really bad guys,” Kane said.

“ That about sums it up,” Cross said with a smile, and he looked at Crylos. “Good enough?”

“ Good enough,” the Lieutenant nodded.

Even though Crylos offered Cross and his “specialist team” a Southern Claw Bloodhawk warship to use in place of what Kane referred to as their “beat-up vampire jalopy”, Cross refused. Their purloined ship worked just fine, and Cross didn't want to dip into Claw Company resources any more than he had to. He was already wracked with worry over how many losses Crylos might suffer before it was all over, and he would do his best to minimize those losses any way that he could.

Cross was also surprised when absolutely every member of his new and makeshift team insisted on going right into the heart of danger, though he knew he shouldn't have been. He, Black and Ekko had no choice, and Cole and Kane would do what they could to keep their lovers safe.

Who surprised him was Ramsey. Even though the Gol had made his status as a non-combatant crystal clear, he also insisted that he tag along.

“ Are you sure?” Cross asked once more. It had stopped snowing, and the wind was gone. The white landscape was cold and still. Deep blue mist slid down the face of Mount Karamanganji, while the city itself stood silent and stoic, a dingy glacial metropolis, frozen like a photograph.

They stood just inside of the ship. Their escort, a Bloodhawk, waited close by, it's half-dozen soldiers armed and waiting.

“ Of course I'm sure,” Ramsey said. “Trust me, Cross…I don't make decisions lightly.”

“ You've already done plenty…”

“ And yet the most important bits are the ones we're just now getting to.” Ramsey crossed his arms. “I just destroyed years of work I’d spent infiltrating the Ebon Cities bureaucracy to get you and your people out. And I condemned hundreds of prisoners to die the moment that I let that damned shadow know where you were.”

Cross swallowed. He hadn't thought much about that, or about what Ramsey had been through. He couldn't begin to imagine what the Gol had endured in order to prove his loyalty to the vampires, or what evils he'd witnessed and turned a blind eye towards so that he could go on doing good later. And the end to that luminous career had been to let a city full of prisoners die, many of which must have been Southern Claw. Those deaths were on Ramsey’s conscience.

And mine, he thought.

“ If anyone deserves to see this through to its end, it's you,” he said. He held out a hand to Ramsey. The Gol regarded it for a moment with his glazed eyes, but just nodded.

“ Let's shake when this is over,” he said, and he stepped up the ramp and onto the stolen vampire ship.

Cross watched the Bloodhawk as its turbines warmed up. It was a smaller vessel, built for speed and maneuverability, with heavy chain guns mounted on top in an old-fashioned ball turret. The man in charge of the ship, Harker, gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up. Cross returned the favor, adjusted the straps on his borrowed Southern Claw uniform, and turned to step inside the vampire vessel.

Just around the edge of the ship, hidden from view, were Kane and Ekko. They held each other close. Cross walked on, not wanting to intrude, but the bond between he and Ekko was still there, and though that connection had faded, it was impossible to ignore just then.

He felt their words.

I Love You. I’ll always be with you, no matter what happens.

They were Kane’s. They were sincere, and warm, and yet leaden with sadness and regret. Kane choked on them.

He felt Ekko’s emotions, muted though they were now due to her newfound cursed state. He felt regret cut across her still beating heart like a hot blade, felt it sear and score her insides. He saw memories, flashing images of she and Kane together, little moments, most of them desperate, most of them on the run or fighting for their lives, imprisoned, separated, waiting to be together.

They were apart again. And even as close as they stood now, the chances of their ever bridging the gulf that separated them were next to impossible, and they both knew it.

For a moment, Cross had to stop, nearly crushed with grief. Ekko was no longer capable of shedding tears, so Cross, whether he wanted to or not, did it for her.

He gathered himself, and boarded the ship.

NINETEEN

ASH

The vampire airship flew in low over the frozen city. Shards of ice flaked off in the arctic wind. The air was littered with those blue-white crystals, and a frozen fog drifted up from the city like columns of wintery chimney smoke. Karamanganji's structures were tall and thin and widely spaced apart, so the city streets appeared open and stark. Fountains of frozen water stood near every major intersection.

The Krul warship trailed the better-armed Southern Claw Bloodhawk. Cold radiated up from the frozen streets. The breath of those inside the vessel frosted in the air. They sat huddled together, and their bodies slid or bounced into one another every time that Ekko had to take a steep turn or change altitude.

No one spoke.

The Bone Towers, as they were known, had been so named because of the blanched quality of the stone and ice that encased them. There were only three such towers, spaced in a triangular pattern near the center of Karamanganji. The Tower’s bladed belfries faced the center of the city and one another, like a tribunal of petrified hawks, and each had a stout stone keep at its base.

No one had any idea what lay within the Towers, because no one had ever gained access. It was considered unsafe to use explosives to aid in the exploration of Karamanganji, as the damage caused would be impossible to repair, and besides would prove incredibly dangerous to explorers, as well. It was widely agreed that bringing the city quite literally crashing down was hardly conducive to effective exploration.

“ It should be the northernmost tower,” Cole said. It was the first words spoken by anyone in the vampire ship since it had taken off.

They saw just enough through the cracked window to marvel at the height of the frozen towers as the vessel wove its way through an urban forest of ice and pale stone. Nearly invisible runes had been cast on many of the structures.

“ It's amazing,” Black said, “that all of this has stood here for so long, and yet we still know next to nothing about it.”

Karamanganji's durability was indeed a marvel. The site radiated power, which was why, even though it was often explored, it was also respected, and never harmed. Even the savage Gorgoloth, the most enumerate and destructive race in the region, seemed reluctant to do damage to the frozen city.

That reluctance, it seemed, was not shared by the Black Circle.

They found the Circle’s base camp at the foot of the northern Bone Tower. The Circle had left a modified ice cannon out in plain sight; its white casing was difficult to make out in the snow. A focal converter lens had been mounted over the barrel, and tanks of cryogenic fuel were hooked to the ammunition feed instead of the hardened spheres of liquefied shot normally loaded into ice cannons.

“ What the hell…?” Cross wondered aloud.

“ Impressive,” Ramsey said. “I could be wrong, but I believe the Circle has modified their cannon to cut instead of blast. That lens and that fuel would let it fire a sustained beam.”

“ And that way they can dig,” Cross said with a nod, “without bringing the entire city down. They couldn't do that with a flame cannon.”

The Bloodhawk sent a ground team to do a quick sweep of the Bone Tower’s lower level, while Cross and his team remained on board their ship. The Southern Claw soldiers found evidence of a recent dig, including tools and signs of forced entry, and a blasted hole that seemed to lead down to some sort of catacombs beneath the tower. Harker’s team reported that it didn’t appear the tunnels themselves had been breached, as the only means of entering was covered with a thick sheet of transparent ice.

Hopefully that means the Black Circle hasn’t actually found the Woman, even if they have made progress with their dig.

Signs of a recent struggle — dead human mercenaries and Gorgoloth — indicated that the Circle had run afoul of trouble, which must have been the reason they'd been forced to halt their efforts.

There was no sign of Jennar, however, nor of any of the more dangerous Black Circle members known to the Southern Claw, criminals like Molochai, Lllandrix, Malath or Klos Vago. Those few bodies that Harker’s men found appeared to be the remains of hirelings and minions.

Before Cross or any of his companions could inspect the excavation site firsthand, distant and hollow booms sounded in the air. Explosions.

A second sounded, and then a third. The radio blared with static. The reception was terrible — the radio was almost eighty years old — but the sending stone in Cross' hand went white hot as a priority message was sent to every ship, vehicle and foot soldier in and around the frozen city.

Incoming, the message said. Vampires, approaching from the west.

Cross’ team and Harker’s squad regrouped. They flew the airships away from the Tower and set down on an elevated hill near the north end of the city, where they surveyed the horizon with the Bloodhawk's scopes.

A single armored Wing approached. There were seven vampire warships outfitted with heavy armor and long-range weapons and a dozen mounted Razorwings — brutish flying reptiles with enormous hinged jaws, reptilian wings, and razor-sharp bone protrusions that could slice through body armor. The Wing was led by a large airship the size of yacht, a vessel covered with large-bored cannons and preposterous blades as big as sawhorses. The Southern Claw called those command vessels “Coffins” due to their box-like shape and the fact that they were usually packed wall-to-wall with undead infantry: armored zombies, war wights, kaithoren, ghoul runners, and things much worse.

Between pilots and crew, over 200 undead approached the icy city. The First and Second platoons of Claw Company, conversely, had six Bloodhawk airships, plus the stolen vampire vessel, a Panzer II that had been reinforced with arcane-treated cold steel plates, and an M2 half-track that towed a Flak 38 20mm cannon. There were maybe seventy-five men between the two platoons. While the Southern Claw had ground fire superiority, they were badly outnumbered, and severely outclassed in the air.

God damn it.

“ We’ve faced worse, Sir,” Harker told him. Cross was twenty-seven years old, but he felt like an old man next to Staff Sergeant Harker, who was twenty if he was a day.

“ Please don’t call me ‘Sir’,” Cross said. “I’m not an officer.”

Harker nodded. Cross had voluntarily exited the chain of command in the Southern Claw as part of his deal to continue work as a special operative. The fact that he was no longer an officer with no true command authority hadn’t diminished his value in the eyes of most Southern Claw soldiers that he met. Because in spite of Cross’ attempts to keep a low profile, almost every soldier he ran into knew that he’d prevented the loss of human magic, and that he’d never wanted to be re-assigned to another team out of respect to the fallen members of Viper Squad.

“ In any case, we’ve faced worse,” Harker said. “Wait…orders are coming through now.”

The vampires were maybe ten minutes away.

It was important to try and reduce the risk of collateral damage as much as possible, so the decision was made to engage the vampires from the western edge of the city, using the sloped ice walls of the ruins to hide the Panzer and the 20mm. The vampires would almost certainly strafe the area with their warships, run interference with the Razorwings, and try to land the Coffin close to either the Panzer or the Bone Towers, where their undead infantry's sheer numbers would overwhelm the humans. It was imperative, then, to destroy the Coffin as quickly as possible.

Crylos, via radio, asked Cross to take command of Harker’s squad. Cross could have refused, based on the fact that he wasn’t a true officer. He also could have decided to stick with his mission, and penetrate the sealed catacombs immediately while Crylos’ men engaged the enemy.

But he didn't refuse the command.

Careful, he warned himself. You've been here before. Don’t lose sight of your mission.

Yes, he answered, I’ve been here before. And the last time, my friends died because we couldn't stay together. The Black Circle is nowhere to be found, and we need to secure this area before we can figure out what needs to be done next.

To do that, Crylos needs every available man.

He would've told that to the others if he’d needed to, but no one questioned his decision. He almost wished they had.

The Panzer moved just inside of the outer city walls, where the wide streets gave it enough room to maneuver, which was necessary with how slick the terrain was. They detached the Flak 38 from the M2 and left it with a four-man crew, who could roll the artillery around the outer edge of the city and pick and choose their targets.

From what Cross learned, Crylos would stay on the M2 and direct the ground troops, while Ankharra would lend aerial support from one of the Bloodhawks. Cross didn't have quite as much flexibility with his limited personnel — both he and Ekko had to be on board the vampire warship in order to make its weapons function, and since there would be no separating Kane and Ekko, they decided to send Black and Cole onto Harkness' Bloodhawk in order to make it three Southern Claw ships with magic capabilities instead of just two. Not only would that grant them more strategic options in the open air, but keeping the mages separated made it so no single ship would become the sole tempting target to the vampires. Ramsey decided to stay in the vampire ship with Cross, Kane and Ekko.

The Bloodhawks and the older, rickety vampire vessel circled low in the pale sky, trailing dark exhaust that swam through the air like smoke serpents.

Cross saw the Ebon Cities vessels through the arcane scopes. They were thickly bladed ships surrounded by clouds of black steam. Their motor guns were massive, and each vessel was equipped with several iron-tipped short-range missiles along their hulls. Their black and red armor was curved and angled like a creature's bones, and the collective approach of the Wing was like that of some polluted storm, slow and roiling, deliberate, an advance that darkened the entire sky.

The Razorwings flew amidst the warships. They were black and leather-skinned beasts whose serpentine necks and chitinous bodies leaked shadows like dust. The riders and the vampire raiding crews that rode on the creature’s backs were almost invisible against their mount’s sinuous bodies, but the silhouettes of long spears and large-bored hand cannons were easy enough to make out. The black banner of the Ebon Cities swung in the hands of a rider on the rear Razorwing. Bat-like wings bound with hardened razor steel flapped slowly through the air, their methodical motion almost dreamlike.

The Coffin cruised along at the rear of it all, its 6-inch guns aimed straight ahead. It was a monstrosity of devilish iron and arcane plate, a floating armored juggernaut that spewed black fire and that bore barbed protrusions the size of lances. Even from a distance, Cross felt foul magical energies radiate from its core. The vessel used twisted perversions of tormented souls that were held captive and burned as fuel.

Cross pulled himself away from the scopes. Using them wasn’t as physically taxing as manning the vampire weapons systems, but it still required considerable effort from both he and his spirit.

Cross’ spirit felt at ease for the first time in months. She was calm around his body, ready to expend herself in whatever way he asked of her but not, for once, impetuous or impatient. Something inside of her, and between the two of them, had matured.

Better late than never, I guess.

He steeled himself. It would he mere minutes before the vampires were close enough to engage. He checked his weapons — the HK, a new machete, and a slightly-used sawed-off Remington shotgun with a pistol grip, the so-called “Witness Protection” model — and his armor, took a deep breath, and waited. Waiting was always the hard part.

The airship shuddered and turned slightly to port. He heard the hard arctic wind just outside the cold steel walls. His stomach twisted into a knot, and his hands shook.

He thought of the dream where he sat with his feet in the water. He couldn't remember if it was Snow and Dillon who’d been with him there, or if it had been Snow and Graves. He wished them all there, somewhere peaceful.

A hand on his shoulder broke his reverie and nearly brought his gun out of its holster. Kane held up his hands in mock surrender.

“ Careful, Killer,” he said.

“ Sorry,” Cross said with a relieved laugh. “What's up?”

Kane hesitated, and then offered his hand.

“ For what it's worth…”

Cross smiled. The weight pressing down on him seemed to lift, just a little. He shook Kane's hand.

“ You, too. It's been a pleasure, Kane.”

“ Mike,” Kane said. “My name is Mike. I prefer Kane, though. It reminds me of Batman.”

Cross laughed. He glanced down and caught sight of Kane’s forearms, which were exposed between the end of his armored coat and his thick gloves. Cross saw tattoos shaped like crescent blades and violent letters. They glowed red, but the illumination was so faint and feeble he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been staring directly at them from just a few inches away. He took hold of Kane’s forearms.

“ They gave these to you, didn’t they?” he asked. Cross let go and rolled up his own sleeves. “In Krul?”

“ Yeah…they didn’t even charge me!”

“ Shit!” He saw the same glow on his own arms, incredibly subtle. He realized that a non-mage might not have even noticed. Even as a warlock, he was lucky to see the glow at all, since he guessed it had been intentionally hidden. “We need to figure out a way to get rid of these,” he said after he thought about it for a moment. He raced to the front of the ship.

“ Get rid of what?” Kane asked from behind him. “Our arms?”

“ Tega, can you raise a channel to Harker’s ship?”

“ Sure thing,” Ramsey said. He grabbed the SCR-300 and turned it on. A high-pitched blast of static sound came over the telephone-like transceiver. Luckily, the squelch circuit prevented the Gol’s eardrums from exploding, no matter how loud the feedback.

“ Uh…crap.”

“ What?” Cross asked.

“ There’s no signal,” Ramsey said. “I think it’s being jammed.”

Cross pushed his way around Ramsey and moved behind Ekko. It was amazing how frozen the air felt next to her, almost like she sat in a freezer. Cross looked past her and through the cracked window, so that he could see the white city.

The dark clouds that signaled the vampire’s approach had doubled in size. They hung just over the edge of Karamanganji, a mass of pure black smoke that oozed through the pale air like octopus ink. Cross heard the clang of metal as vampire warships altered their wing configuration: steel dropped into slots that shortened the wings but extended the vessel’s length, making them leaner and faster, like black steel predators wreathed in cold ebon steam.

The battle began, unceremonious and quick. Cross blinked, and suddenly they were in the middle of an aerial war.

There were distant bomb blasts, and flashes of light against the nightmare of clouds to the west. It seemed that miles still separated the two aerial forces, and yet suddenly there they were, both sides in plain sight of one another, close enough to gaze into enemy cockpits.

The warships were not fast. Dark and soiled smoke trailed from thaumaturgic engines like streams of paint, or blood. Vessels swam in the thick air as though stuck in turgid waters. The scream of engines sounded like metal banshees.

Motorguns rattled off hundreds of rounds; they fired black explosive shells or cold iron stakes or ballistic spheres capped with razor shrapnel. Shards of bone laced with necrotic energies sought out living targets, while short-range missiles filled with blessed napalm powders blossomed into mushroom pattern throughout the sky.

Explosions and bullets collided against outer hull armor. Motorgun rounds bounced away from spirit-charged shields infused to the Bloodhawks. Southern Claw incendiaries detonated against hardened shadow carapaces.

For a few moments that stuck in Cross' mind like an eternity, it seemed as if neither side could do the other harm.

That illusion was shattered just moments later.

His spirit swam hot around him, and she scalded his skin with her bristling destructive excitement. Kane and Ramsey braced for close-range fighting. Ekko carefully twisted in her seat as she piloted the warship. Cross clenched his fists till his hands were white, and he ground his teeth until they sounded ready to crack. He put one hand out and grabbed the guide pole located behind the cockpit. He took a breath, and held it. He was ready to fall into the white void.

Vessels crashed into one another like Brahma bulls. Metal on metal, and metal on flesh. Fire exploded in an avalanche of engines and speed. Ships bounced and curled away from one another. Sparks turned the air into a rain of flames. Motorguns blasted armor to shreds. Spiked hulls tore into each other, ripped sheets of metal away so that the crews within the vessels flew out into the open sky.

By the time Cross released his held breath, four ships had been reduced to ruins of metal and exploding skin. There was no way to tell them apart once they exploded. They dissipated like paper, barely visible through the vampire vessel’s dirty window. Vicious noise followed seconds after the destruction occurred, as if delayed. Clouds of dismal blood vapor filled the air where the airships had been.

Bodies, living and dead and undead, fell through the sky like rag dolls. Some fell into turbine engines, which summarily exploded as the bodies ejected out of the other end like flaming husks of jerky. Other bodies smashed into hulls and came apart like sacks of meat, or else they fell headlong into viewports, stuck there as the vessels careened wildly out of control.

Some fired side arms as they fell. The living cried out; the undead fell silent, their eyes cast into the void of sky above them. Caustic black clouds trailed the vampire vessels and cloaked everything in a choking haze.

Cross was only vaguely aware of his own screams as he sent his spirit through the walls. His muscles burned and his eyes watered.

His spirit drove through a warship's bulkhead like a spear made of hardened midnight. He felt the power core tear apart beneath her meteor sharp edge and balloon out in a dire necrotic explosion. Fire filled the vessel and incinerated undead flesh before it blasted through the viewport and out of the rents in the hull. The ship fell from the sky in a hail of scorched metal and bone.

Ferocious booms shook the air and filled it with clouds of explosive smoke.

The Panzer.

Its mobility allowed it to avoid becoming an easy target, but the airships were just fast enough that it was almost impossible to get a quality shot.

The rapid barrage of 20mm shells fired from the Flak 38 carried into the clouds. They hammered low-flying warships as they swooped down and dropped incendiary missiles onto the ice city.

Great frozen structures cracked with a sound like breaking bones. Clouds of icy shrapnel flew into the still air. Undead napalm spread through frigid streets, leaving trails of fire and steam.

Cross’ heart hammered. The ship lurched and twisted as Ekko flew in behind a vampire warship and rammed its aft side with the bladed plates on the front of their stolen vessel. The enemy ship spun away, careening like a lost top through the air.

“ Our guys won’t shoot us, right?” Kane shouted. The noise in the ship had grown to a din.

“ Probably not!” Ramsey yelled back. “We’re in an older ship! They look a little different!”

“‘ A little’?” Kane repeated. Ramsey just nodded. “Thanks…I don’t feel any better!” Kane said.

The explosions and the roar of the engines and the hammering staccato rhythm of massive shells made it so that at first none of them noticed the hole in their starboard side. Smoke and wind blasted across their faces and made it impossible to hear. Cross looked out and saw a shred of pale blue sky through the ripped wall.

“ Incoming!” Merrick shouted. His M16 was ready before Cross even made it to the gunner's alcove.

The vampire's second wave, the Razorwings, suddenly filled the sky. Their jagged wings unfolded and arced forward, presenting barbed tips laced with venom and fire. Bloodhawks that had already been torn open presented the easiest targets, as their hulls left soldiers exposed to the armored reptile’s flesh-tearing wings.

The Razorwings swooped with grace and agility that defied their size, and they moved with a sense of utter fearlessness shared with their masters. They ripped men out of open hulls and threw them into the sky. Soldiers flailed and bled as they fell, and some were snatched up mid-air and torn apart by hooked beaks and claws.

Purple and black blood spattered in the air as chain guns and cannons cut through the Razorwing flotilla. Great squeals sounded, and wings shred like paper. A Bloodhawk plowed straight into a Razorwing with its ram-plate blades and pierced its chest like a host of lances, but then the pilot was unable to dislodge the ship from the beast, and they both went down.

Arcane fire coalesced and took the shape of a great winged humanoid, an impressive juggernaut of dark flame. The signature of Black's magic was almost impossible to miss.

Cross smelled charcoal and flames and blood as he slipped into the gunner's console. He heard Merrick rattle off a count, three Bloodhawks down, four vampire warships, four Razorwings, ground troops taking heavy fire from the Coffin. He felt the ship buckle and turn, slammed his shoulder hard into the steel alcove as Ekko made a sharp dive, felt his stomach lurch, felt sweat run down his brow and beneath his shirt, felt his boots clamp hard against the back of the bent recess that reminded him of a twisted doorway made for some caricature of a human, some creepy vampire thing with hunched shoulders and an oversized head, a Gory or a Burton character, and he remembered his childhood, his dad, the beach, the waves

Snow burning on fire and as his hand fell to the panel he breathed in his spirit as something noisy shrapnel metal blast rips through the ship and he is torn from his body

His vision is an arcane stream that floats through the air like a jet of fire. He is over the battle and inside of it at once, a detached carrion bird, a wisp of thought. The dark steel cannons on the warship’s turret turn and rotate at his command, an extension of his senses.

Warships dive in and out of dark clouds of smoke, steam and blood. Gouts of corrosive red flame eddy like pyroclastic balloons in the still winter sky. Bullets and blades soar through the air in thick and deadly streams. Razorwings dive and twist around deathtraps of falling steel. Artillery shells puncture armor plate and create pockets of exploding smoke.

The Coffin floats in low beneath the cover of warships and Razorwings and launches short-range ballistics loaded with electrified nails and spheres filled with explosive gas. Fire and steel splatter and spread through the icy city; the blasts crash into glacier structures and create unearthly waves of steam.

The Panzer shoots down one of the Razorwings, turns it into a splatter of reptilian innards and skin that collapses violently to the ground. Three other Razorwings overtake the Panzer, pick its crew away from the damaged shell and latch onto the gun and twist and pull until it fires misfires the shell goes off inside the turret and kills everything in and around it in a mass of shrapnel and blood.

Cross trains the guns on the Coffin and fires. The roar of the jackhammer cannons is deafening as they launch explosive dark shells. The shots batter the Coffin’s outer armor, but the guns can't do enough damage to reach the hordes that are hidden inside. Ekko brings their ship back into the sky.

Everywhere he looks there is fire and bodies and blood. Ships fly and burn. A missile rips through a Bloodhawk and turns it into a ball of flame. An injured Razorwing flies into a vampire warship and sends them both spinning out of control in a trail of smoke and blood mist, and they crash into an ice dome that explodes into crystal shards.

The once pale city turns black and red.

Danica Black's spirit holds her vessel aloft. She and Cole stand at the door, where they and a pair of soldiers fire small-arms at a dying Razorwing whose claws have latched into the rim of the engines. Cross trains his guns on the beast’s hindquarters, which dangle down well below the craft, and he fires until the body finally falls. Black and Harker's Bloodhawk is badly damaged. It trails smoke and lists to its port side.

Cross blasts through another Razorwing and splatters its reptilian body apart. Its vampire rider drifts away and hovers in the air for a moment before it calmly falls to the distant ground.

There are only three Southern Claw ships left, including Harker’s vessel and his own. He sees no sign of the M2 or the Flak 38. There are still three Razorwings, the Coffin and a vampire warship that need to be dealt with.

He sends his thoughts to Ekko, and without a word she brings the vessel around. Their warship is also damaged, and it leaks blood-red fluid. It moves slower than before, and the roar of its engines has been reduced to a wheeze.

The Coffin flies close to the ground. It bears down on the M2, which races across the ice as the soldiers in the truck fire assault rifles and B.A.R. s at the command ship’s heavily armored hull.

Cross aims the guns and fires. Static booms perforate the air and rip away chunks of steel plate. Fragments of flaming metal fall to the ground. Blasts erupt out of the Coffin's bladed aft and port cannons and paint the sky black.

Explosions rock the warship. Cross tastes metal and rotting fumes. The air outside scalds and scars.

A Razorwing collides with the back of their ship. Arcane blades tear through the beast’s skin as Black’s spirit attacks.

The men on the M2 have rocket launchers. The Coffin moves straight towards them. It flies just above the ground, as its vertical lift has been impaired by the damage that Cross has dealt to it. Ekko flies them in low, as well, and they and the M2 flank the command ship.

The Coffin’s razor cannons fire living shrapnel, necrotic and intelligent blades that fly and seek targets like flocks of malevolent ravens. Cross feels cold wind and black breath. He hears Kane roar as he blasts the aggressive shrapnel with a shotgun in one hand and the M16 in the other just moments before it reaches their ship.

Cross fires at the Coffin's damaged port side, as do Crylos' missile men. Explosive shells claw and burst just as the vessel’s guns blast back at them.

The Coffin is on fire. It descends and lands hard on the icy ground just inside the city. It smashes apart ancient ice structures. The earth shakes as the heavy vessel screams to a halt.

Kane has dealt with the shrapnel, but their ship is losing power. The engines moan and spew forth thick plumes of grim smoke. The wind stings as they bear down on the now grounded command ship.

Flames leap all across its surface. Cross senses the presence of narcotic gasses and fuel tanks that are on the brink of detonation. The Coffin's smaller guns drive the M2 back as they smash open the windshield and perforate its tires. The undead vehicle’s bay doors open.

Cross sees undead — black clad vampire shock troops, red clad Shadowclaws, war wights with enormous talons and pale smooth bodies, zombies with shields and swords and hammers, child-sized ghouls in feral packs, a floating kaithoren with dangling tentacles and six mouths made of circular razors, bone constructs of many limbs and saw blades and pyroclastic eyes, hordes of creatures, a legion, and Cross takes a breath, turns the guns, and fires at the opening in the ship, hoping to mow them down before they can do any damage.

But a Razorwing flies out of nowhere and intercepts the blast. Its body explodes into a greasy missile that collides with their ship.

Spinning flaming out of control weightless dizzy falling Cross fires and pulls in his spirit uses her to shield the others as air and metal falls and crashes into cold hard ground

Cross fell back into the physical world with a painful jolt. Metal pressed against his back, and his body had twisted and contorted into a painful position there in the narrow entrance to the gunner’s alcove.

The bitter odor of smelted metal, gunpowder and burning fuel filled the interior of the ship. Despite the cold in the air, a glaze of sweat covered his face and soaked his shirt, which clung to both his armor and his skin. Pale light spilled through jagged holes in the starboard side of the vessel, where blasted metal had torn into the cabin like curved claws.

Cross pulled himself up, winced at his bruised arm and neck, and looked around.

The front panel was smashed. Arcane circuitry sparked and burned. Ekko pulled herself away from the console; a jagged piece of steel stuck out of her left arm. Kane, bruised and bloodied, pulled her away from the cockpit. Ekko yanked the metal out of her arm without a second thought. Cross watched the wound seal up, like sand falling into a hole.

“ Ramsey?” Cross called out, but there was no answer, because Ramsey was dead.

His small body had been crushed between two plates of steel that had folded in and collapsed where the warship impacted the ground. One hand protruded out of the ruined metal. Cross saw bits of crimson cloth and dark stains of blood.

“ Shit!” he shouted.

They heard gunfire seconds later, the scream of warship engines overhead, and the deep-throated screech of Razorwings. Cross sensed bodies moving outside, guns and claws and saw-blades. They smelled the charnel stench of a mass grave.

They snatched up weapons. Cross pressed a panel to open the rear hatch, which slowly groaned upwards. They heard growls just outside of the smashed viewport at the fore end of the ship, as well as whirring blades and sickening wet slurps.

The rear door took an eternity to open. Cross gauged their weapons. He had his HK, a machete, and the vampire triple-barrel. The M16 was dry, but Kane had the Remington, two short swords, and an axe. Ekko had an MP4A and her claws.

It would have to do.

They heard growls. The moment that the door opened high enough for them to squeeze through, they ran.

A small horde of undead came at them from around the front of the warship. The ground looked clear around the aft end and to the port side, but Cross knew that they had only moments before they’d be overrun.

The dead pushed at them from the starboard side. There were armored vampires and razor-fanged gray zombies encrusted in salt and ice, taloned war wights with pale blank eyes and horrible mouths of saber-like teeth. Cross saw undead monstrosities that oozed phosphorescent slime and dripped dark waste from the pores in their decaying hides. Expanding clouds of flesh and tentacles filled the air, pulsating beaks and hungry innards. Dozens of lifeless eyes looked at the three humans, hungry, angry. The dead soldiers filed forward with shocking speed.

Cross, Kane and Ekko ran. The undead were right on their heels.

They fired back behind them as they fled. Bullets flew into the lifeless mob. Shotgun blasts and automatic fire tore through the wall of the dead. The vampire weapon strained Cross’ forearms and fingers with its rapidly spinning shotgun barrels.

Their feet moved sluggishly, as if stuck. The air felt frigid and slow.

Ahead stood more of the ice city, cold and pale and empty. Undead ran through and over the warship behind them. They fell from the top of the vessel like flesh rain and landed clumsily on the blasted ice.

The ground was slippery and uneven. Centuries of rock hard rime covered mounds of gravel and cobblestone, so even in those areas where the ice had melted the ground was still difficult to cross.

Cross fired into the undead mob. Bullets lanced around him on the ground. Black blades soared through the air in high arcs and buried themselves in the ice just inches away from Kane's feet. A whirling sphere of flesh leapt at Ekko as she reloaded, but she tore it to shreds with her razorine claws. Her face was bestial and inhuman.

They ran.

Adrenaline pumped through Cross' body. The Ebon Cities ground forces were right behind them.

The wreckage of the Coffin was just a few hundred yards off the bow of their downed ship. The M2 sat just north of the Coffin, near a ruined building made of ice and stone. Crylos’ vehicle was also under attack by the same horde of undead foot soldiers that continued to pour out of the Coffin.

Flares fired into the smoking sky. They saw Black's Bloodhawk engage the last vampire warship, and more Razorwings.

Ravenous undead flew at them as they ran. Whirling saws locked to maimed zombie appendages rang with the song of grinding steel. Bone needles hammered the ground. Cross sent his spirit out in a wave of dark wind that threw the needles aside before he brought her back around. He twisted and honed her form until she was a pencil-thin blade, a vorpal lance that rent the zombie front-runners in half.

The mass of undead was less than fifty yards behind them. Kane and Ekko made for the ruined building, the same as Crylos and his surviving men. Cross saw Southern Claw soldiers cut down by whirling bone blades and enveloped in folds of living skin the size of bloody carpets.

He couldn't hear anything beyond the catastrophe of bullets and explosions and screams. Burning meat scent filled his nostrils and throat.

The undead were right on top of them. Cross fired the triple barrel with mad determination. Kane dropped the empty shotgun and hacked through necrotic bodies with his swords. Ekko's oversized and utterly inhuman claws sparkled like diamond ice as she hacked and slashed through ranks of bladed zombies, wights and whip-bearing phantoms.

Blood flew onto their faces and chests. Cross didn't remember dropping the triple-barrel, but it was gone, and he hacked away at the enemy with his machete instead. Heads and arms cracked beneath the destructive energies that his spirit encased him in.

Still they came.

Thunderous blasts tore through the air to the north. The Flak 38 rolled into view. Three bloodied soldiers found a spot just past the ruins, positioned the cannon, and blasted into the undead ranks. Metal thunder broke the air. Shells the size of carrots pummeled dead flesh and tore Ebon Cities’ soldiers to pieces. The Flak 38 bought just enough time for Kane to pull Ekko back. Cross cleared enough space for them to run by firing a phalanx of flaming coals into the undead, which set their flesh alight.

Still they came.

Relentless, and without end.

The M2 was overrun. Half of Crylos' men were brought down with bone and blade. Most of the rest engaged in close combat with an overwhelming horde.

The Razorwing dropped a vampire swordsman out of the sky like it was a white flesh missile. The vampire slashed through the Flak 38 crew in seconds, and the lone soldier who got away was snatched up by the Razorwing’s claws and torn in half.

Cross called his spirit, pulled her to within centimeters of his skin. He felt her, tasted her, sticky and burning, like sweet acid on his tongue. Rage filled him, power fueled by the same controlled and murderous force that made him win fight after fight back in Krul, power that boiled his blood and made his eyes smoke when he thought of Dillon, who would never again see his sister or her son.

That power curled inside of him and froze, an icy core, a glacial shield around his heart, growing, building, freezing. And there, nestled right beside it, in some far removed and distant aspect of his mind, was a shard of light and life, a powerful and ancient slice of arcane matter, a derelict fragment of an older creature from an older time. Cross saw it, felt it.

Used it.

He is on the mountain, looking on as the blaze of cold fire races toward him. The frost is so powerful it freezes his skin.

He watches Snow and Graves and Dillon and everyone else he ever cared about crystallize and shatter like glass figurines.

Behind him, beyond the pale doorway, are Ekko and Black. Their bodies are alight in coronas of white fire, and their eyes burn like vacant suns.

They are the inheritors of Lucan's primal spirit. They are the keepers of the light that burned inside him, a light that has burned for centuries, and that will go on burning for centuries to come, regardless of what happens now.

But right now that light has a purpose to fulfill, and while it will not allow itself to be used for just any reason, it will grant them, those three, its new avatars, some small measure of its strength so that they can defeat their enemies.

It does this not out of compassion, but as a token of good faith: one service, for another.

Cross roared, and the sky flew apart.

Shards of light exploded out of his body. He didn't need to see Black and Ekko to know they’d had been taken by the same nova glare, that their bodies were held in sunbeam prisons. Their consciousness melted together, fused into a common purpose.

There will be a price. It was no voice, but an understanding held between them. An acknowledgement.

There will be a price.

There always is.

Raw soul matter exploded out of Cross like he was the heart of a star. It expanded and curled along the ground, reached into every crack and crevice, into every fold of dead skin and raw socket, into every hollow bone and dangling bit of sinew. Necrotic energy recoiled before the agonized cry of primordial spirits, a collective of the damned that screamed out of Cross’ bleeding eyes and hands like they were rolling liquid flame.

The undead exploded. Pale animated bodies and jagged skeletal weapons, razor vapors and icy claws, maggot hearts and grave dust, soiled black fire and cursed souls: all of it immolated within the onslaught of primal spirit matter like paper put to the flame.

White detonations rang up and down the field as dead bodies erupted in blasts of cold fire. The explosions carried on through the small horde in a chain reaction. Angry white light leapt from one body to the next.

In the sky above, the vampires in the final warship and those mounted on the last Razorwing were also affected by the light. The dead flesh tore from their rotted bones and evaporated like melting snow.

The light caught the burning fuel in the Coffin and ignited it. The resulting explosion peeled into the sky with a deafening blast. The ground shook. Everything sucked in towards Cross like a vortex.

When it was done, every last Ebon Cities fighter was gone. Nothing was left of them but ash.

Cross stood in a daze. His eyes burned and his skin peeled from the cold. His arms and legs trembled, and after a moment his strength left him completely, and Kane caught him as he fell to his knees. His throat felt like a chimney.

The last vampire warship crashed to the ground just a few hundred yards away. Shrapnel and gouts of caustic flame filled the frozen wind with the smell of burnt metal.

And as abruptly as the battle had began, it was over. The icy world settled into near silence.

The last Bloodhawk landed a few minutes later, having lost three men. The Bloodhawk that carried Ankharra had been shot down, but her magic helped most of those onboard survive the crash.

All told, over forty of Crylos' seventy-five men were dead.

They all stood in silence for a time. They watched bloody patches of fog fall and melt the icy ground beneath them. Smoke of different colors competed for control of the sky. Torn and exploded remains were everywhere, and soon they were covered in drifts of smoking ash. The air smelled like long-burned meat.

Ekko stumbled over to Cross and Kane. Black and Cole joined them. The side of Black's face was bloody from where, Cross later learned, Harker’s head had exploded when a bone grenade went off inside the ship.

Cross stared off into the pale and frozen sky. The ghosts of centuries passed through him. He felt soiled, and very old. He had become a conduit for Death.

And I'll have to do it again, before this night is done. That was what they really taught me in Krul, whether they knew it or not. How to kill…and kill again.

Quietly, the survivors of First and Second Platoon, Claw Company, gathered what resources and men they had left. Their task was not get finished.

They still had to find the Woman in the Ice.

Steven Alan Montano

Black Scars

TWENTY

ICE

The Southern Claw base camp became a makeshift medical bivouac. Thankfully, only a few of those who’d been injured were in serious condition. The death toll, however, was high, and already there were mutterings that it was all too much for them to take on, that they barely had enough men left to secure the area, let alone dedicate more to a thorough search of what promised to be a sizable underground complex.

Cross quelled their concerns as best he could.

“ I don't need many of your men.”

He, Black, Cole, Crylos and Ankharra stood away from the camp, at the top of a low rise that offered a good view of the frozen city. Thirty square blocks — nearly a quarter of the city — had been reduced to icy ruin in the battle. Dark steam and churning drifts of yellow-orange fog still clung to the area. Even at a distance, it was easy to smell the smolder of artillery and scorched bodies. Drifts of ash covered the ground like grey snow.

“ How many?” Crylos asked.

“ We have to consider the very real possibility that we're still going to have to deal with the Black Circle, in one capacity or another,” Cross said.

“ Well, correct me if I'm wrong,” Ankharra said, “but we have zero intel regarding the Circle's numbers or capabilities.”

“ That’s correct,” Cross said. “And we also have a 600-foot-tall walking shadow on our tail. We'll need as much warning as possible when it gets here so that we can clear the area.”

“ Is there any way to engage that thing?” Crylos asked.

“ Not if you want to win,” Black answered.

Everyone paused at that.

“ So what do you need?” Crylos asked.

Cross looked at the bivouac, and at the remaining soldiers of 1st and 2nd Platoon. The image of men falling out of the sky was still stuck in his mind.

“ Spare me two men,” he said at last, “to escort us back to the Bone Tower. They can standby and back us up if we run into trouble.”

Crylos nodded. The last Bloodhawk had a damaged fuel pump and needed repairs, and it wouldn't be ready for any sort of heavy activity for several hours, at least. They'd need it to get the remaining men out in a hurry. Claw Company could send reinforcements, but Cross made clear that he didn't want that. It would only provide more fuel for the Sleeper.

It's coming, he thought. It wants to destroy us, and the Woman in the Ice. It knows what we can do to it.

Kane and Ekko were just outside of the main camp. They sat in a small and private tent carefully watched by a pair of soldiers who politely kept their weapons stowed.

There had been no way to conceal the fact that Ekko was Turning once the battle had finished, and Crylos had been understandably less-than-thrilled to discover that a near-vampire was now in his camp. The fact that she’d helped defeat the Ebon Cities undead helped her case, but Crylos’ biggest reservation was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same that Cross had himself: what happened when she did Turn?

As far as Cross could guess, all three of them — he, Ekko and Black — were tied to Lucan's power and the Woman in the Ice. What would have happened if one of them had died during the battle? What if Ekko became a vampire before their task was finished? Cross didn't think that her transformation was likely, at least not yet…he still felt that the primordial energies they'd inherited from Lucan somehow prevented her Turning completely, at least for the moment.

But what happens when all of this is done? What happens when Lucan's power is no longer needed? Will it fade away? Will she Turn then?

Cross walked into their small tent. Kane and Ekko sat quietly. He meditated in lotus position — his flexibility was impressive for a large man — with his eyes closed and his palms out. Ekko sat in the same pose, utterly still, her blank eyes like black pools. The air was cold from her presence. Her blonde hair looked stiff, as if from frost, and her lips had gone dark blue, a sharp contrast to the excess of her pale skin.

I'm scared, Cross. She spoke to him with telepathy so seldom it was easy for Cross to forget that she was even capable of doing so.

I know, he answered with his own thoughts. Me, too.

Will you do something for me?

She didn't have to say what — he already knew. She didn’t want to Turn, and if it came down to it, she wanted to make sure that someone would do what was needed. He wasn't sure that he could, but he knew he’d do his best if she made him promise.

She did.

Kane's eyes opened.

“ Is it time?” he asked.

Cross wanted to take him aside, to talk to him about Ekko.

What the hell would you say? he asked himself.

“ Yeah. It's time.”

On his way back to the bivouac, Cross saw Black and Cole. They stood just behind the M2, which needed some repairs. The two women stayed largely out of sight. He couldn't hear anything they said, but it was clear they were having a disagreement, since Cole held up her hands in frustration and shook her head, but Black kept talking, perhaps imploring her lover to listen.

Cross wanted to step away before he was noticed, but Black looked up and saw him. He pointed at the city, nodded, and in the blink of an eye she regained her composure and nodded back.

He walked to the frozen city gates, a frosted archway lined with runes. Even with as cold as the air was, the gates were colder. Cross wondered who could have constructed something as wondrous as this city, and why. It was born of another world, clearly, but was every structure in that world like this, icy and beautiful, fragile and yet capable of withstanding the test of time? Or had it been something different once, and had it only been given this icy form after The Black? Was it like so many other things that Cross had seen: had it been re-invented after the cataclysm, made into something that bore only a passing resemblance to what it had once been?

Everything is wounded, he thought. Every place that I go, every person or creature that I meet. We're all injuries that have been stitched back together, and now we’re nothing like what we'd once been.

The Black made everything a scar: healed, but imperfect. And as we heal, we change…and not always for the better.

They walked through the city of ice. Ash filled the air like charred snowflakes. The streets were uneven and covered with frost, and everything lay in utter silence. Frozen shadows and icy wind pressed against the seven of them as they crept along. The structures were crudely detailed, caricature renditions of normal buildings. At a glance, Karamanganji could have been an artist's rendition of Thornn, or Ath. The frost glittered like a diamond glaze in the failing arctic light. It would be night soon; the temperature was already dropping.

Cross pulled his armored coat tight against his body, and his spirit folded around him and warmed him with her burning proximity. He knew that she had been cowed and maybe even hurt by Lucan's primordial power. Cross held her close. He was ready to be done with this mission.

They walked on streets of glacial white, and they crossed avenues that had frozen like glittering waves. They walked through shadows made solid with cold.

The two soldiers, Tasker and Daye, were quiet lads who did as they were asked. Cross thought they looked far too young to be soldiers, but he also recalled seeing them there on the ground when the undead horde had made the charge. They’d had their baptism of fire, and they’d stared into the flame. There was no un-seeing what had been seen. Even soldiers who survived something like that died in other ways: even survivors were casualties.

Black, Cole, Kane and Ekko kept their eyes alert and keen. Cross watched behind them, expecting the Sleeper's massive shadow to appear at any moment.

The Bone Towers loomed in the distance. They were pale slivers, stark even in that environ. Thin arrow-slits and frosted windows dotted the strangely angled structures. Dark portals rested at their bases.

The Tower that they needed lay straight ahead. Its doorway looked like a cut in the side of the structure, and it seemed to stretch open wider as they approached.

Cross motioned for Tasker and Daye to wait outside. Kane took the point, and he led the way with the sawed-off Remington held ready. Danica illuminated the icy dark interior of the tower with a ball of heatless white flame. Flickering light reflected off of white walls and floor. Discarded digging implements — drills, chisels, hammers, picks — lay strewn like casualties. Electric lamps had been plugged into a portable generator, and they sat in a perimeter around both the tools and several chunks of ice that had been scattered in front of a sealed circular door. That door was also wrought of ice, but this ice was of a lighter shade than the rest, and it was thin and semi-translucent.

Footsteps in the frost led straight up to the ice door, and vanished into it.

“ Okaaaay,” Kane said.

“ I don't get it,” Cole said as she walked past the tools.

“ It looks like they broke through,” Black said. “But then…why is there still a sealed door here?” She stepped up to the ice and placed a hand on it, and immediately she pulled away as if she'd been burned. “It's twice as cold as anything else in here,” she said. Her words turned to icy steam.

Cross watched the frozen barrier as if would provide him with the answer.

After a moment, it did.

Cross' spirit hovered at the door. She probed, and then slipped her vaporous form into the tiny cracks in its face. She felt its thickness and its weight, tested its strength, tasted its age, felt magic in the thousands of crystal constituents that made up the whole.

“ They did break through,” Cross said. “And they entered the tunnel. And then this…” he indicated the ice door, “formed up behind them, and sealed them in.”

Kane looked at Cross, then back at the door, and then back at Cross again.

“ Okaaaay,” he said.

Can you feel that? Ekko thought to him. She's here.

Cross did feel it: power. It was pure, primal and ancient, difficult to even acknowledge without being crushed by the sheer force of its presence. That power had gender, unlike Lucan's spirit, which had seemed androgynous to Cross, a mass of lost souls in a sort of spectral mass, a mongrel construct of ghostly matter. This power that emanated up at them now, however, was unquestionably female. Cross could almost taste her sex in the arcane currents, the geometric emanations, earth and ice.

Black felt it, too. She didn't have to say anything — it was clear by the strange mix of fear and awe in her eyes.

“ So what do we do?” Cole asked.

“ You head back,” Cross said to her. “You too, Kane.”

“ Um…no.”

Ekko put a hand on his arm, and nodded. Black and Cole exchanged looks.

Cross pulled his spirit tight around his body. He fueled her anger by thinking about Dillon, about Snow, and about Graves. His mind raced, and filled with pain. He thought about the children who’d been rounded up and butchered at Crucifix Point, and about Gage and Cala, about Zender the gentle Doj who'd been captured and tortured to death by Gorgoloth raiders, about the dead soldiers in Karamanganji who would never speak to their friends again, who would never look a lover in the eyes. He thought of every victim of the vampires, every ruined life, and every unanswered slaughter. Cross thought of every injustice and wrong he had ever witnessed over the course of his young life, and he poured them into his spirit. He twisted her, and focused all of the rage until she was as sharp as a raw blade.

“ Like hell I'm going…” Cole argued with Black.

“ I'm not leaving Ekko,” Kane said.

Cross rose his head. He was infused with the raw destructive power of a spirit who, in the space of a few moments, had experienced a lifetime of Cross' most vivid and painful memories. Volatile magic radiated out of his eyes. He was like a sick and explosive star.

“ The three of us have been touched by the power in this place,” he said. “You two haven't. If you go down there, you'll die, just like the Black Circle who went down there died.” He moved and stood directly in front of the ice door. The power of his raging spirit swelled inside of him, ready to burst. “The two of you need to leave. Now.”

Kane and Cole clearly didn't want to go, but Cross hoped they saw the truth in his words. He hoped they understood.

After a moment's hesitation, they each hugged their respective lovers, and took their leave.

“ We'll be right outside,” Cole called.

“ Cross,” Kane called out. The warlock turned. He held the rage of his spirit much more efficiently than he ever had before. Lucan's energy was the cause of that. It coursed through all three of the mages. It filled them with power. It knew that its moment was near.

“ Thank you,” Cross said.

“ Good luck,” Kane said with a nod.

The two left.

Black and Ekko stepped up to either side of Cross. The three of them joined hands and stood in a line. Black's spirit was as angry as Cross’. Had it not been for Lucan's influence, they would have destroyed one another through their sheer proximity. Instead, their energies flowed through the space between them, and it electrified the air. Ekko focused the energies stored inside of her, as well, and added them to the fold, vampiric hunger and a desperate will to survive.

For a brief instance, they are back at the ship. They see Lucan, and he kneels before them. All of his strength is gone. His life is ending. He raises his head and looks at them as they walk towards him in the still and silent air. He smiles.

I knew you'd come, he says.

Their spirits released their anger in a charnel blast. The air ignited into a roar of arctic fire, and it rent the crystal door apart. Chunks of ice melted into clouds of steam.

A tunnel of black ice waited beyond the smoldering remains of the door. The air smelled glacial. The smoke of ages past curled off the floor of the ink-dark passage.

Without a word, the three of them stepped inside.

TWENTY-ONE

CIRCLE

They entered a world of glass. The tunnel was sloped and uneven, like it had melted. Black's arcane torch reflected semi-translucent walls filled with stony debris. The air was cold but dry, and exceedingly dark. It was as if something slowly sucked away at the light.

They moved as quickly as they could across difficult ground. Cross drew his HK45 and held his spirit coiled around his gauntleted left hand. Sweat ran into his eyes in spite of the cold. Every shuffle of their boots in that frozen tunnel sent violent echoes through the air. Ekko moved in the middle with no weapons except for her claws, and Black brought up the rear with an HK94 she'd received from Daye.

The three of them looked like they were close to death, all covered in ash and blood and soot.

The place was a labyrinth. After a steep descent, the tunnel came to a multiple junction that looked like the center of a galaxy. Icy corridors trailed off in multiple directions. Black's torch only illuminated to a radius of a few feet, so both she and Cross cast out their spirits and surveyed the area. The spirit’s wraith-like forms raced down smooth frozen passages, and they pushed back and forth against the walls like fish darting down a river as they searched for any presences.

They found something. The three hunters quickly caught up.

Bones were entombed in the clear ice walls, frozen in grisly dance. Skulls, some of them sideways or upside down, grinned at the three of them from the other side of the ice. Many of those bones clearly weren't human.

The corridor came to an abrupt end at the side of a steep underground canyon that ran for as far as they could see in either direction. The walls in the area were dark and jagged rock covered with twisted white roots that protruded from the stone like broken finger bones.

There was no apparent bottom to the trench: it was a deep cleft of impenetrable shadow. The tunnel continued on into a crack of darkness on the far side of the thirty-foot wide gorge.

Dank and surprisingly warm wind wound its way up from the subterranean canyon. It smelled of campfires and soot.

The floor around the canyon was littered with bodies. They were soldiers, from the look of it, well armed with automatic weapons and blades, and they were armored in hybridized versions of Southern Claw and Ebon Cities leather and chain armor. Two Gorgoloth and a Doj giant had been torn apart by what had appeared to have been a storm of razors. Their faces and torsos had been shredded. Smoke rose from their corpses as if they'd been burned. Two more bodies — a human and a Vuul — had been frozen half-in and half-out of the ice walls. The Vuul’s torso and face were bloody and cracked where he’d been trapped in the glasslike surface. The human had fallen into the wall backwards before it froze, and while his torso was entombed on the other side, his twitching legs still jutted out into open air.

The tang of power hung in the area like a powder burn. Cross sensed something primal and angry, very much like Lucan’s energies. He stepped forward carefully, his body tense.

Something didn’t feel right. Another power was held ready nearby, and it was poised to strike. Cross looked back at Black and Ekko, and saw that they felt it, too, whatever it was.

Cross looked at the bodies again, more carefully this time, and he ran through the catalog in his mind of the Black Circle members he’d seen pictures of back in Thornn. His mind collated data like a machine: his arcane studies had always come easy to him, and once he committed something to memory it never left.

The Gorgoloth were probably just compelled or hired muscle. The Doj he recognized as Ravus, and the Vuul was Synder. The human was a weapons dealer named Marus.

None of them was Jennar.

Just as he made that realization, Ekko sprang up and launched herself at a shadow. Her target was a fold in the air, an empty space that Cross had looked straight at and disregarded.

That was the spot where Jennar used the magic of his Crujian nightlance to mask his presence.

Jennar came into view the moment before Ekko reached him. Her claws extended like razor fans. Jennar was tall and thin, lean but muscled. He was dressed in black leather armor. His blonde hair was pushed back and his face was wrapped in black cloth, which left the scarred skin above his nose exposed. His brown eyes narrowed in hate.

He held the nightlance ready. It was an imposing two-handed weapon. A layer of cold blue flames rippled up and down a razor-sharp ebon blade forged from meteor stone. A second, shorter blade made from red diamond extended down from the base of the hilt. The entire weapon radiated pulsing black power, shadow energies that made the air around Jennar tainted and thick.

Ekko sailed beneath Jennar's wide swing and swept up at him with her sizable claws, but he was nimble, and he jumped backwards and out of the way.

Cross raised his gun and fired, but Jennar moved with inhuman quickness, and he spun and rolled the nightlance with the speed of a propeller. Bullets cracked and flew to the ground.

Black fired at him with the HK94. Dark fire leapt out of the arcane blade and incinerated the bullets, almost in slow motion.

Cross cast his spirit into a wide arc of burning white light that circled around the small canyon and then rushed back in like a frost comet. Black's spirit roared straight forward in a spear of ice. Ekko gathered herself, and leapt at Jennar.

He was everywhere, impossibly. Years of training and unnatural thaumaturgic bio-engineering, coupled with that dread Cruj weapon, made Jennar a demon in human skin. Twenty-nine Southern Claw officer's deaths were credited to his name. He'd never been defeated or captured.

Jennar moved in a blur. He spun round and sliced Cross' pale comet in two. White sparks fell to the ground as he finished the turn and met Black's spear, which he shattered into glittering onyx shards.

Ekko's claws sank into Jennar’s shoulders. He yelled in pain and rage as he sank his blade deep into Ekko's stomach. The flaming sword extinguished as it pierced her flesh, and Jennar kept pushing until he’d buried the sword up to the hilt. Purplish dark blood fountained from the wound and ran over his gloved hands.

Cross froze, and Black screamed. Ekko hung limp for a moment, but then she threw her weight forward and into her claws. Seven-inch steel fingers tore through the meat of Jennar's chest.

The momentum of Ekko's attack carried both she and Jennar over the edge and into the canyon. Ice and rubble trailed behind them as they tumbled down the slope, and out of view.

Mere seconds had passed. Before Cross or Black had even reached the edge, Ekko and Jennar were gone.

“ NO!!!”

He sees Cristena.

He sees Graves and Dillon and Stone and Ramsey.

He sees Snow, burning.

“ She's alive,” Black said. Cross turned round to object, but she was right. He sensed her there, a shard of the light that the three of them shared. She was faint, weak, and even less alive than she’d been before the battle had begun, but she was undeniably there.

And there was something else. Something that hadn't been there before…or if it had, it had chosen to keep itself concealed until that very moment.

It was a thousand void souls trapped in a mountain of shadowy flesh, a darkness so utter and deep that the entire world seemed drawn towards its dismal core.

The Sleeper approached.

“ Cross…” Black said. Her eyes were huge with fright. Cross imagined he must have looked the same.

“ I know.”

It had not yet reached Karamanganji, but it was close. Crylos and his men would have sight of it at any moment.

“ I'll find her,” Black said. “You go. Go while we’re all still alive.”

“ But it has to be all three of us…”

“ It will be,” Black said. “What we share is more than physical. We proved that back in Krul.”

Cross thought about it for a moment, and nodded.

She was right. She had to be.

He looked at the dark tunnel on the far side of the subterranean canyon. A presence pulled at his mind. Black looked at the tunnel as well, and nodded.

Black took Cross into her arms. They pushed out, using Danica’s spirit to hold them aloft as they went. Cross held on tight. Their flushed faces touched as they drifted from one end of the void to the other, free-floating over the shadowy deeps. They moved weightless through a sea of frigid wind.

Cross grabbed the icy stone on the far side, and pulled himself away from Black. His spirit wrapped round him, glazed him with heat. Danica floated back over the rift and started her descent to go and find Ekko.

Cross’ heart hammered. Black looked at him as she sank, and for the first time since they’d met, her smile seemed genuine.

“ I’ll see you soon,” she said.

“ You’d better.”

Black held her arms aloft. She glowed hot and bright with the fires of her spirit, and she continued to glow as she drifted down into darkness.

Cross turned and looked at the cleft in the canyon wall. The space was narrow. Ebon steam leaked from the crack in slow and rhythmic bursts. The cold that issued out of that cleft was absolute, but Cross knew that his spirit’s heat and the protection afforded him by Lucan’s ancient soul would keep him safe. Any normal human would die the moment they stepped through.

His thoughts went back to the arena.

He sees himself step through the doors and into a room full of vampires who wait to watch him kill. He finds the coldness inside of himself, the dark and hardened shell around his heart that has carried him through uncounted nights of slaughter.

Kill or be killed.

Just like now.

There was no turning back. There never had been.

Without another thought, Cross stepped into the fissure, where he passed into the heart of night.

TWENTY-TWO

PILOT

Cross passed through curtains of dust and ash. He felt his consciousness as it was squeezed and compressed. Geothermic pressure closed in on him from all sides. His soul expanded like air, and pushed out through a crack in a dome of stars.

He saw riders in a dark vessel on a dark sea, and they sailed beneath a vast night sky. Fumes from a distant age turned to wraith-like unguent. He saw black moons and red tides. Cities of crumbling shale waited on the shore.

Cross stepped onto an ashen plain. Thick iron clouds pregnant with dark rain clung to the sky. The earth was dry and cracked.

Every step that he took kicked up gouts of bone dust. Dead white trees hung weeping in the distance like lost children.

There was no mark of his passage, no doorway by which he came, or through which he could return. He had appeared at the middle, in the heart of a pale nowhere. Ebon mists, the precursor to an approaching black storm, surrounded the plains, which Cross realized were finite. The ground ended at those mists. He stood on a wide island of floating stone.

The air was chill and dead. There was no wind or life in that place, whatever and wherever that place was. A deep peel of thunder shook the sky to its very edge.

Cross checked himself. Nothing had changed, save for the fact that he now carried a weapon that he hadn't before: a shimmering white sword. Its thin blade was almost invisible when he turned it, and when held flat it was semi-translucent and transformative. He held his hand on the other side of the blade and looked at it through the metal, and his hand wasn't just gauntleted when viewed that way, it was armored in heavy white plate, like he was a knight from a story. Everything came to life when viewed through the blade: the plains were vibrant with life instead of dead and ruined, and the sky was cerulean instead of black.

The sword was light and easy to yield. It was nothing like a machete or the lighter bone blade he'd been armed with in Krul, and yet Cross instinctively felt that he knew how to use the sword, as if he'd spent a lifetime training with it. The weapon was long and unusually balanced, and the grip was much longer than what he was used to, carved from bone and wrapped in linen so that the entire weapon took on a ghostly hue.

Something was intimately familiar about the sword. It was not a sword, not truly, but he couldn't determine what it really was.

He saw glimpses of another life. He saw an encampment in the mountains; banners and victory parades in an unknown country; pain and loss that belonged to someone else, but that stung like they were his own. He felt pain from past wounds that weren’t his.

What is this place?

“ It is called The Fade,” a woman said.

Until that point, Cross had thought he was alone.

She stood at the center of the plain, at once right next to him and yet miles distant. Her armor and the dress she wore over it were as white as the blade was. Her pale flesh was almost unnaturally so, and her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, with two braids bound in black metal clasps. Her penetrating eyes were snow white and almost blank, and she radiated an immense level of power, power that Cross was sure he would have sensed even without his spirit.

It was the same massive and primordial magic that Lucan had possessed, that he had gifted to the three mages.

The same power as that in the sword.

“ Avenger,” she said. She smiled and nodded at the blade. “It's called 'Avenger'.”

“ Who are you?”

“ I am the Woman in the Ice,” she replied.

“ That's not an answer,” Cross said. “I've seen your likeness before.”

“ True,” she nodded. “You serve my sister. The White Mother and I are siblings, after a fashion. We are avatars of the same power. As is that blade that you hold in your hands.”

Something growled through the sky.

“ The power that Lucan infused us with,” he said. Cross was suddenly aware of a wind that hadn’t been there before. It stank of fear, hopelessness and death. “ That power is in this sword now, isn't it?”

“ It IS the sword,” she corrected. “Here, in this place between the worlds, all power takes on a physical manifestation.”

The ground rumbled, and the sky darkened. Thick onyx clouds spread like spilled black milk.

“ What is that thing? The Dra'aalthakmar?”

“ You know its name.”

“ But that doesn't mean that I know what it is.”

Cross felt something loom over him. That presence hovered like a dark star.

“ It was her prisoner. She held it captive for eons. It is a great evil. You call that evil The Black.” As if in response to hearing its name, the sky trembled again. Bits of flaming rock fell like charnel rain. “It cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered, and weakened. That is what you must do.”

“ Wait a second,” Cross said. The rising wind intensified. He had to shout to be heard. “Why me?! I came here to find you…YOU'RE the one who's supposed to do this.”

“ All I can do,” she said sadly, “is grant you the tools to accomplish your task. Your female companions are the power. I am the vessel.” Her features faded, sucked into shadow. Charred sky swarmed over the plain like a horde of penumbral spiders. Everything crumbled. “You are the pilot.”

He falls through maelstroms of screaming smoke. His eyes cast out to churning charcoal seas filled with glaciers of black ice. He falls like a teardrop through a deep and empty sky. The world divides behind him and refolds. A scar is left in his wake.

He falls without a body. He falls outside of time.

In the distance, beyond the boundary of what is and the fathomless realm of what isn’t, forms press against the outer shell of the void. Their visages are impossible to comprehend. Each one of them is as vast as a midnight sky. Their eyes are black pits.

He is a sailor on the ebon sea. Churning smoky waters lap and bite at him. He reaches for the edge of the void, and finds it.

On the other side are the ashen plains of the Reach. Ice smokes into the air and bitter frost crunches beneath his feet. He steps onto snow that recoils, blackened, away from him. He sinks with every step.

He is not in his own body, nor is he in any body. This is a new vessel, as the Woman in the Ice had promised. Just as she is the trapped avatar of a greater power, he pilots the avatar of the Woman. He holds control of a spirit machination: a construct of ghosts.

Avenger weighs the air around him. It's every motion cleaves the skin of reality. Its blade is so keen even time bleeds at its touch.

He moves through the sky. He is an avatar made of blades. The world moves beneath and around him. He is out of synch, neither faster nor slower. He moves according to different rules, stands in the folds between moments. His footsteps leave smoking shadows on the land.

Ahead of him, on the opposite horizon, is the Sleeper. He has never seen it clearly before now. It is not all that different from him. It is cloaked in dripping darkness. Vast drifts of its ebon form fall away and melt the transitional realm. In the physical world, possibilities are melted by its passage. It carries with it inevitability, a finality.

They approach one another from opposite ends of the spectral sky. The Sleeper yields a blade every bit as black as Cross' is gleaming white.

Pure flames dance in the air between them. Every step they take is a thunderous echo. The world shakes and rattles at their passage. Time blisters and peels away.

The Sleeper is night condensed into humanoid form. Its skin is a rich ebon field. The blade in its hands cuts the air, and darkness bleeds out.

All around them, everything stops. The universe holds its breath.

Cross steps forward in his unbody, in his armor and weapons of light.

He knows this blade. Avenger extends and shifts. It is fire and light and an edge that can cut through worlds.

Their swords come together in battle.

The weapons clash at the center of the sky. Metal and light explode. The ring of ancient steel cracks the heavens like a hundred storms.

Very quickly, the battle turns to the Sleeper's favor. It is the stronger of the two. Its attacks come at him like an avalanche of dark blades. It is all he can do to deflect them.

He can't launch an attack back of his own; he is too busy defending himself.

Its eyes smoke with histories of destruction. He hears plaintive calls in every strike of its weapon: lost souls made to suffer their own end, again and again and again, with every blow landed by that blade.

He falls. His phantom form feels pain. Terror seizes his bodiless heart.

No.

He springs to his feet. He sends a hail of strikes at the Sleeper, and one of his thrusts lands a cut that gushes forth a rain of shadows instead of blood, a black waterfall of soil and soot.

His rapidly deteriorating mind goes back to the arena in Krul. He is taken back to the battles, to the merciless drive to win. He had a cause worth winning for: to keep his friend alive.

But his friend is dead. He failed.

Dillon is lost, just a body now. All of his simple hopes, his love for his sister and nephew, his sense of duty, his strange dice and his notebook, all gone. Dead and lost, because Cross couldn’t save him.

Graves, and Ramsey, and Stone and Cristena. And Snow. Snow, burning, screaming on the train.

He sees their faces in the clouds as he presses the attack. Their accusing looks give him strength. Steel resolve pumps through the avatar’s veins.

With every motion his comfort in the unbody grows. Rage courses through him like fire. He recalls the taste of victory in the arena, the animalistic drive to destroy his enemies.

He does so now. He smells weakness, sees an opening, and he takes advantage.

Sparks fall onto the Reach like lighting rain. Steel grinds steel into smoldering splinters. Slowly, inch by inch, the light drowns out the shadow.

The Sleeper is desperate. It lashes out with an off-balance strike that catches him off guard. Avenger is deflected aside, and the dark sword pushes forward, finds home.

He screams as the shadow blade pierces his flesh. Something inside of the lunar armor screams out in pain. Everything begins to unravel. He is down on the ground. The Sleeper towers over him. Its midnight blade rises as it prepares to deliver the killing strike.

He reaches deep inside, and finds that part of the avatar that is dying. It fades like a star. It must be released, and even as he ponders the notion he feels it surge forward, feels it call out with a martyr’s fury, a grim resolve. It leaps out of the avatar, and into Avenger.

The white blade rises just as the black blade falls. Dark metal shatters like broken glass. Shadows curl off into shards of lost midnight. Umbra energies part and steam as Avenger continues up, straightens, hones in on its target. He can practically smell the Sleeper’s void heart, buried deep in folds of night armor.

Avenger punches through shadow flesh and dark possibilities, slices away ebon mail and drills to the Sleeper's core. White metal pierces the black and ancient heart, and the Sleeper explodes. Shadow rains down. Dark geysers of energy scream into the heavens like bolts of hot grease.

The Sleeper melts like ice in the sun. It's unmouth rounds into a bodiless scream. Its pale moon eyes shrink, dim, and fade. The clarion roar of a thousand cursed souls escapes into the vast sky. He sees worlds unfold in the shadows of their passing: places that once were, places that might have been.

For a moment, he feels that he can reach out and grab those places, hold onto them, maybe keep them from fading.

But before he even realizes it, the moment is lost, and he is left alone as the dust of time drifts over his body and washes him away.

Cross woke back in the cave, on the safe side of the canyon. His body felt like he’d been trampled by horses. His chest was raw, and he belched up acrid smoke. Cross slowly sat up. Dull pain pushed against the inside of his skull.

After a time, Cross stood up. Both of his arms trembled. Avenger lay at his feet, smoking and broken. Most of the upper edge of the blade had cracked off, and those shards melted like ice right before his eyes. The hilt had also snapped off at the bottom, leaving an overall shorter weapon, jagged, and steaming with frost. Cross gently picked it up.

Dazed and dizzy, he looked around. He felt like he had just woken from a dream. The bodies of the Black Circle agents were still there, lifeless on the rock shelf next to the underground canyon.

He looked across the rift. The cleft in the rock had sealed.

He saw Black struggle to climb up the inside of the canyon wall by the light of her own arcane torch. Ekko was draped across her back, unmoving.

Cross lost breath for a moment.

“ Danica!”

She looked up, exhaustion on her face. Her eyes looked red and weary. By her expression, he knew that Ekko was in trouble.

He found a coil of rope on one of the fallen Black Circle agents and tossed an end down. Black secured it around Ekko's waist, and between her spirit's levitation abilities and Cross pulling the rope they managed to get both women back to the surface. They collapsed on the ground from exhaustion.

Black had a cut on her arm that bled through a rip in both her armored coat and the shirt underneath.

Ekko was listless, and quiet. Cross couldn't tell if she was about to Turn, or die. Her eyes wouldn’t stay open, and dark blood dribbled out of her nose and mouth.

“ We have to get her topside,” Black said. “Quickly.”

“ Where's Jennar?”

Black let something slip out of her pack and onto the ground. Cross saw with some surprise that it was a gloved human hand. “The rest of him got away. He slipped out in the confusion. This entire place almost tore itself apart. I thought we were all going to die.” Black paused, and she looked at Cross. “It's gone, isn't it?”

Cross nodded.

“ It’s gone. For now, at least.”

They carried Ekko back through the ice tunnels and up to the shattered portal as fast as they could. The way was treacherous thanks to the ice, and despite Ekko’s waif-like form, Cross and Black were so exhausted that even their spirits proved little help in getting their fallen companion topside.

It didn’t matter. She was dead well before they made it.

The icy chamber at the base of the Bone Tower was filled with gunsmoke and bodies. Kane, Cole and the soldiers had been attacked by more Black Circle grunts — a band of Gorgoloth armed with automatic weapons and rock hammers. Daye had been shot in the arm, but looked like he'd pull through.

Black went to Cole and embraced her. Cole held her in return, but Cross noticed that she was the one to break away, and she quickly moved to help the others.

Kane was covered in Gorgoloth blood. His visage was grim. He’d been watching the doorway when they appeared, his eyes set and sad. He seemed to know what he would see even before they’d emerged.

Regardless, when he saw Ekko, the strength seemed to drain out of him. He fell to his knees and bent over her body, and he hovered there as if held by puppeteer’s strings. Tears welled up in his eyes. He pressed his head against hers, and spoke to her quietly.

Kane stroked her hair in his hands, and softly kissed her forehead.

They left the lovers alone.

Outside, the world was held in the grip of a frozen wasteland. The air was bitter, cold and raw. Cross shivered the moment he stepped into the street.

He looked west, and saw no shadow there. They’d won.

Then why doesn’t it feel like it? he wondered. Where’s that sense of victory you’re supposed to get when you win a major battle? Where’s the sense that’s it over, that everything is going to be all right?

Cross felt none of that. He felt like he’d been thrust into the middle of something he hadn’t understood, and that he’d taken part in a battle that wasn’t really his.

He thought about his childhood. He thought about his sister and his mother, of a life when everything made sense. He’d never really had a period of his life like that, and he knew it. But he felt better believing that he had.

“ What’s that?” Black asked. He jumped at the sound of her voice. She stood just behind him, staring with him out at the frozen city. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying.

“ What’s what?”

“ That sword.”

Cross had forgotten it was even in his hand. It felt light, like a shard of plastic, and the magnetic draw it had held before was gone. It was just a blade now, incredibly thin, something like a piece of frosted sea glass carved into the shape of a predator’s tooth. It was made of magic, but it bore no magic of its own.

“ Just something I’ll carry with me,” he said.

They stood quietly in the cold wind.

“ Lucan’s power,” Black said after a time. “It’s gone.” Cross just nodded. “So it’s over.”

“ I guess so,” he said. He looked at her. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.

Black smiled. And then, unbidden, her tears flowed.

“ Cole is leaving me,” she said quietly. “We’d just split up before…before Cradden took her. I was ready to let her go, but…I didn’t want anything to happen to her.” She wiped away her tears. “After all I’ve done for her…she’s still going to leave.” She straightened herself. “I’m…sorry, about Dillon…”

Cross didn’t know what to say. He remembered the rage and the fury he’d harbored towards her. He remembered wanting to kill her — vowing to kill her — once it was all over. He remembered why.

He’d always remember why.

But he looked into her face, and he saw the truth of her pain. So he just nodded.

“ I’m sorry, too,” he said.

They both stood there for a while, waiting for something else to happen. When nothing did, they gathered themselves and went back inside to find Kane.

Ekko was dead and gone. She did not Turn, as they’d feared she might. Lucan’s power had somehow prevented that as she’d passed: it granted her a peaceful death.

Kane sat quietly for a long time, even after Cross and Black came and found him. He was hunched in the corner, watching Ekko’s body like he expected it to rise.

“ So,” he eventually said in a cracked voice. “Did we win?”

Cross and Black exchanged a look.

“ Yeah,” Cross said.

Kane looked at Black.

“ Are you going to take me back to Black Scar?” he asked quietly.

Danica looked at the floor. The air was still, and cold. Every motion echoed.

“ No,” she said. “Even if I was going back, I wouldn’t take you.” She looked at him, and then at Cross. “I’m sorry,” she said. Cross was starting to get used to seeing her vulnerable. He didn’t like it.

They waited quietly. The approach of the Bloodhawk outside rattled the air and shook the icy walls. Kane stood, and threw a blanket over Ekko’s body.

“ So what now?” he asked.

Cross looked at the wall. He swore that he’d seen a spider there, crawling across the ice.

He’d already been entertaining the notion since he and Black had talked outside. Now, he knew he had to go through with it.

“ Well,” he said. “I take it you two don’t have any plans?”

“ Does learning to live with a price on your head count?” Black said grimly. She’d be marked for death for leaving the Revengers: they all knew that. Even if she hadn’t hijacked a prison airship, commandeered men without authorization and stolen prisoners, the Revengers didn’t take lightly to its former members running around outside of Black Scar when they knew so many of the prison’s secrets. They also weren’t bound to appreciate the strains that Black’s capture and the subsequent destruction of Krul would place on Revenger-Ebon Cities relations.

“ I’m booked,” Kane said with a straight face. He’d been a laborer, a prisoner, or a gladiator all of his life. Being an escaped inmate from both Krul and Black Scar wasn’t bound to help him make many easy friends. Like Black, he had nothing left, and nowhere else to go.

Cross looked at each of them in turn, and took a breath.

“ Come with me.”

TWENTY-THREE

DAWN

Somehow, the camel made it.

They found it on their way out of the Reach, when they flew back towards Thornn in the repaired Bloodhawk. Cross hated to pull rank on Crylos, especially with as many men as 1 ^st and 2 ^nd Platoon has lost, but he needed to get back and speak with Elias Pike right away, and since Crylos had already indicated that he and his troops had been given over to Cross’ authority for the duration of the mission, the warlock decided to bring them out of harm’s way while he got to where he needed to go.

And there was the damn camel, wandering across the wastelands. It looked none the worse for wear. It had somehow been shed of its pack — likely tundra nomads or scavengers had helped relieve it of its burden — and it didn’t look terribly happy when Cross ordered the Bloodhawk to set down, but for some reason it didn’t run, and it waited, chewing and snarling and standing there with its dual humps and its horrid teeth. It bore no markings, so there was no way that Cross could actually identify it, and yet he knew it was his. If nothing else, there couldn’t have been that many solitary Bactrian camels wandering around the Reach who’d stand still and nuzz at Cross while he landed, approached, and coaxed the creature into the ship’s hold.

“ Really?” the deck officer asked as Cross brought it aboard.

“ Absolutely,” Cross said with a smile. “He’s part of my team.”

Thornn was as he remembered it, which was good considering it had been some months since he'd been there. It was difficult for Cross, sometimes, to go back. So many memories attached him to the city, memories of people he'd lost.

Cross stared out of the Bloodhawk’s window as they approached Thornn. He saw the city's arcane wires and sandstone and its iced outer walls as the ship circled and made its descent. Pillars of blue-white flame burst forth from industrial chimneys and lit the dawn like funeral pyres. Thick concertina wire electrified with pale crimson energies surrounded the city like steel brambles. Obelisk towers made from black iron bore automated chain guns that rotated back and forth and ensured clear skies. Gargoyle sentries floated through the blood red air like enormous birds.

Cross remembered the gargoyles of Krul, and before they'd even touched down he was shaking.

The Bloodhawk landed on the platform atop the massive hospital headquarters of the Southern Claw military that were stationed in Thornn. The sky was filled with islands of menacing red clouds, and the air tasted of industrial smoke and the particular ice-dry odor of the Reach.

Rotating lights caught Cross, Black and Kane in flashes of yellow and white as they stepped off of the ship. It was still dark enough that shadows wreathed their faces.

Cross stepped to the edge of the building and looked out over the city. He peered into canyons of tall and dark buildings, a network connected with wires. He saw homunculi fly through the air with missives or messages, trying not to crash into birds or each other. He saw telescopes and antennas, clotheslines and stargazers on balconies, all protected by armed gargoyle sentries who perched on strategically placed towers, motionless in their classic statue stances. He saw small armored dirigibles float over the space between the buildings, lightweight vessels manned by Gol aeronauts and equipped with silvered harpoons and bags of holy water. He saw the farms positioned along the northwestern section of the city, fields of green and orange and red shielded by reinforced arcane glass and patrolled by Doj sentries. He saw squat guard posts armed with mounted flame cannons and packed with sandbags filled with blessed soil. He looked down into the narrow city streets and saw the silhouettes of vendors and merchants and homeless as they stirred with the morning light.

Once, that place had felt like home. He wasn’t sure what it felt like now.

“ Hey!” Kane said from behind him. The cargo door stood open, and the deck sergeant stood there with their fourth team member. “What do we do with the camel?”

“ So let me get this straight,” Pike said from the other side of the meeting room table. His voice was so gravely it sounded like he chewed on glass.

He was a tall and lean man with a stony jaw and pale stubble that matched his stark white hair. Elias Pike, a Southern Claw officer in charge of special assignments and the closest thing that Cross had to a direct report, lit a cigarillo and stood up. He offered one to Cross, who refused. Pike knew well and good that Cross had quit a few years ago, but he always offered anyways, because he was of the opinion that all soldiers should smoke. He argued life was too short to worry about dying early. Pike's hair had gone white not because of age — he was thirty-four — but because he'd been mostly drained of blood and infected with vampirism in a field skirmish with Ebon Cities regulars a few years back, and it had only been the timely intervention of resident Thornn surgeon Phil Rikeman that had saved him. Rikeman, in turn, wore a metal brace on one leg that kept an unidentified magical disease that had permanently latched to his knee-bone from eating him alive.

Cross had lived through something similar, but the disease he'd carried had ultimately detonated a pyroclast bomb that killed his sister, and if not for the unexplained sacrifice made by his old spirit, it would have left him dead, as well.

Everyone has scars. And yet here I sit, scarred and beaten…and coming back for more.

“ You want me to revoke your status as a Southern Claw officer,” Pike said slowly, visibly clenching his teeth at the words, “but to retain your services as an operative for the Alliance.” He took a drag from his cigarillo. “So, in essence, you want to become a mercenary, working for us.”

“ Working only for the Southern Claw,” Cross added quietly.

Pike laughed, and blew out a stream of smoke. Dank afternoon light fell through the tall windows of the sandstone chamber. Cross heard the moans of patients in the medical wing, a massive network of bed-filled chambers located beyond the reinforced wooden door across the hall. The air was dry and cold and filled with dust and cobwebs, and unnaturally thick shadows clung to every corner of the hospital, lending the entire structure an exceedingly ominous atmosphere. Graves used to joke that the hospital looked more like a place to party with vampires, not fight them.

“ If that's the case, why not just stay?” Pike said. There was a hint of anger to his tone, but that was more or less a given when you talked to Pike. He was an excellent field commander, but not much of a people person.

“ I’d consider it, if you’ll take on Danica Black and Mike Kane.”

Pike laughed quietly again.

It’s better than him chewing me out, I guess.

“ I read their files,” Pike nodded as he smoked and paced around the table. Cross kept his eyes forward. “Kane is a criminal and thief, and he was a gladiator at Krul. Black is a long-standing member of the Revengers, an organization that we have tenuous relations with, at best.” He paused. “You know we can’t do that.”

“ The Southern Claw allowed my sister to join my squad,” Cross said, trying to contain the bitterness in his voice. “So they can allow a couple of seasoned fighters — who, by the way, helped destroy a major threat — to join the Southern Claw as special operatives.”

Pike finished his circle of the table, and stopped.

“ It’s unlikely to happen, Cross.”

Cross nodded.

“ Then you know my decision. You gave me the option whether or not to stay on when I returned from Viper Squad’s last mission.”

“ And you never really gave me an answer,” Pike said.

“ I am now. Sir…the Southern Claw uses mercenaries all the time. Give my team the shit jobs — we’re used to it. You know we’re capable. We’ll be a much bigger help as freelancers than we will as part of the regular army, anyways.” He saw Pike raise his eyebrows as he pondered the possibilities. Everything Cross said was true: while the Alliance didn’t like to talk to about it openly, they made use of quite a few mercenary bands to act as backup for undermanned Companies, or else to do routine investigating or carry out patrols in understaffed areas. It had been a mercenary outfit — the so-called Storm Riders — who’d helped bail Wolf Company out of the fire when they were ambushed by Ebon Cities regulars at Blackmarsh. “Most of the mercenaries that the Alliance uses aren’t reputable,” Cross continued. “I’m offering you the services of some that are.”

Pike sat back down, and lit another cigarillo.

“ I don’t get it, Cross. What’s so important about these two? I know you’ve been through a lot together, but…”

“ More than can ever be told,” Cross said. “Sir, I…” Cross paused. It was going to be difficult to explain. He wasn’t sure if anyone would really understand. “A lot of soldiers died up there.”

“ Are you going to feed me some shit about how that’s your fault?” Pike said. “Come on, Cross…every single one of them knew what they signed up for.”

“ That doesn’t matter,” Cross said. He shifted in his chair. “Not to me.” He leaned forward over the table. “Sir…me, and Black, and Kane…we might pick up some other mercs, people we know we can trust…but we work well together. I didn’t think we would, but we do. I’d trust my life to either one of them. And they…none of us have any family, any ties, or any friends apart from one another.” He stood up. “If we die, no one will care.” Pike gave him an irritated and dubious look. “Look, we can do some good. We can clear out vampire barracks or track down missing criminals. We can explore lost temples or back up Hunter Squads. Pay us by assignment. We’ll report to you or to whoever you tell us to report to.” Cross shrugged. “I guess…that’s my pitch.”

Pike sat there, quiet. After a minute or so spent appraising Cross, Pike nodded, approving.

“ You know you don’t have to leave the service,” he said.

“ I think I do. I think I’ll do more good like this.” Cross made to leave.

He’d just reached the door when Pike spoke again.

“ Good job out there, Cross. You saved a hell of a lot of people. Maybe all of us.” He took a drag. “Again. You’re a real hero, even if you’re the only one who doesn’t see it.”

Cross put his head against the door.

“ I don’t know what I am,” he said quietly. His spirit, who’d kept to the background and had remained a tangential presence throughout the conversation, decided to come close then. She pressed against Cross, and flushed his cold skin with her heat. His gauntlet crackled at her proximity as gauges set into motion, ready to channel her. But she couldn’t stop him from shaking.

Not all that long ago, I was almost at peace. But I was just deluding myself. Look at me. Something died inside of me a long time ago. I have to find it. I think Black and Kane might be able to help me. If not…I guess at least I’ll die in decent company.

He opened the door.

“ Cross?”

“ Yes, Sir?”

“ Assuming I agree to this…what should I call your team?”

Cross looked out of the window. The skies had turned dark red, the color of a wound. A white spider crawled across the window, so quick Cross might have imagined it.

“ I don’t know,” Cross said. “Don’t call us anything.”

Dear Jeraline,

My name is Eric Cross. I knew your brother.

I’m sorry that I won’t be able to make the trip to see you in person. As it happens, while I thought I was going to have a bit of freedom to travel, the fighting between Thornn and the Bonespire across the plains recently started again, and my team is going to be needed.

I spent a few months in Dillon’s company. I can’t say that I got to know him terribly well — he was not the most loquacious man, and neither, as it happens, am I — but at the same time I very much considered him a friend.

I’ve been told that word of his death has reached you. I wrote to tell you that he died well. I know that doesn’t mean much — my own sister died as part of a mission just over a year ago, and the fact that she died serving the Southern Claw and fighting for our survival does little to quell my guilt and pain at knowing that she is gone.

Regardless, I wanted you to know that your brother was a good man. One of the best men I have ever known, in fact. It was my honor and my pleasure to serve with him. In the end, his death ultimately saved the lives of thousands of people…maybe the lives of everyone in the Alliance.

I hope to meet you in person someday, but I don’t know if we’ll ever really have the chance. If that is the case, I hope this letter finds you well. I miss your brother dearly. I know that he loved you and your son very much.

Take care.

Eric Cross

“ What’s that?” Jonas asked.

Cross folded up the letter. The Black Hag was particularly loud that evening. Thick smoke and dank lighting made it all but impossible to see anything that was more than a few feet away.

Cross was still working on his first drink. In spite of Jonas’ prodding, that was all he planned on having.

“ Something I need to send off.”

“ Love letter?” Jonas asked. The warrior priest had long hair, and a deep scar ran down one side of his face. For a priest, he could put away liquor like no one else that Cross had ever seen. Even Graves hadn’t been able to keep pace with him.

Jonas and Graves had been good friends for a long time. Jonas had taken news of Sam’s death particularly hard, and he’d smashed up the Black Hag and spent a few nights in jail because of it.

“ An apology,” Cross said. He had to all but shout to be heard through the din of the Hag's tinny industrial drums set to Middle-Eastern chants, the roar of gamblers, the laughter and song of drinkers and dancers. Muted lights cast the smoke-filled tavern in shadow.

“ You apologize too much,” Jonas laughed. “Drink!”

“ Maybe later,” Cross said, and he patted the priest's shoulder and pushed his way past dancers and waitresses.

Black and Kane sat at their table, quietly sharing a drink in an unquiet place. Both wore dark shirts and armored coats. In Thornn, it was unwise to ever go unarmored, or unarmed.

“ How are we doing?” Cross asked them. The corner they'd tucked themselves away in was a bit quieter than the rest of the Hag; you could actually hold a conversation, provided you got close enough.

Cross set down his black guava. He felt a bit dizzy, and he knew he'd need to eat soon.

“ You know,” Kane said. “I may actually need to have another drink.”

“ You've had four,” Black laughed. “I have no qualms about leaving your drunken ass here…just so we're clear on that.”

“ I can't feel a thing,” Kane shrugged.

“ That’s evidence that you've had too many!” Black laughed. She'd had a few too many, herself.

Cross watched them, and smiled. In reality, he still only barely knew them, and he wasn't sure how well he'd ever really know them…or how well he really needed to.

I know you both need this, he thought. Kane needs to kill vampires, and find Jennar. Black needs a cause, something to do that doesn't involve taking bribes and mistreating prisoners…something good.

They both needed something good.

How about you? Cross asked himself, and he was surprised at the question. Everything seemed to fade, the sound in the bar, the smoke, the choking tobacco air. Even the table fell away, along with Black and Kane and his slithering and anxious spirit. It was as if Cross sat alone.

What do you need?

I don't know. I don't know what I need. But I hope that I find it soon.

He came back, and took a drink.

Black told Kane about how all of his various escape plans from Black Scar would have failed. Kane, in turn, explained to her how he'd have easily beaten her had they been matched up in Krul. Both of them laughed, and drank, and smiled. Cross had never imagined seeing either of them like this: so present, and so full of life.

I need to feel like that. I need this, and I need them.

“ Was that a spider?” Black said as she leapt up from her stool.

“ You're afraid of spiders?” Kane laughed.

Black splashed her drink onto Kane’s face. Kane laughed, Black laughed, and Cross laughed, too, and they kept laughing together deep into the night.

Steven Alan Montano

Black Scars

It stirs. It breathes.

It slips through oceans of pain. Eyes like sharp white blades blink and struggle against the tide of blood that washes its body down the river. The flow is turgid and thick. Unknown fish, eyeless and pale, slither against its legs. Its body thuds against rough stones in the river.

It is underground again, confined to black fluid.

Another prison.

No. This is different. Not a prison. An escape.

It fell. The Pale Goddess has bested it again. Her servant found a way to reform, to pass its powers on so that they could be yielded by the warlock.

The Sleeper will do the same. Even now, a fragment of its greater whole lives on. It rests in the consciousness of this man, this barely living creature who floats in oil-black waters in an underground river. The body is not whole. It has been engineered, modified by unnatural means. Some of those means are familiar to the Sleeper, as the science is based on its own physiognomy.

Curious, the Sleeper looks closer, into the heart of this man. He has been re-imagined, organs and limbs replaced. His blade, an unholy thing made of fused realities and twisted thaumaturgic science, is still in his hand, and its power sustains him, keeps him alive.

He will do. Even that fragment of the Sleeper's form is enough to animate this dying husk, this hybridized being. He will live as a host.

His muscles darken as the Sleeper takes full control of his faculties. It slides into his pulsing muscles and forces itself into the space behind his eyes. It activates necrotic engines in the man's circulatory system so that they pump blood into his darkened heart. It grips the blade, and dark power that even the brilliant architects of the weapon couldn't fathom pour through its body and lend it strength.

When the waters exit the ruins beneath the ice city and spill into the arctic wastes, the man called Jennar rises, infused with the power of The Black.

Content

Steven Montano
Black Scars

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

PART TWO

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

PART THREE

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE