Chain of Shadows (Blood Skies, Book 6) Read online

  CHAIN OF

  SHADOWS

  STEVEN MONTANO

  Also by Steven Montano

  BLOOD SKIES

  Blood Skies

  Black Scars

  Soulrazor

  Crown of Ash

  The Witch’s Eye

  Chain of Shadows*

  Vampire Down

  The Ending Dream

  Darker Sunset

  THE SKULLBORN TRILOGY

  City of Scars

  Path of Bones*

  The Black Tower

  HORROR NOVELS

  Something Black…

  Blood Angel Rising*

  SHORT STORIES

  Tales of a Blood Earth

  Tales of a Blood Earth 2

  * Coming Soon

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 Steven Montano

  All rights reserved. Released by Darker Sunset Press

  Cover art by Barry Currey

  DEDICATION

  To the Posse.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d never even make it past the planning stages of these damn books without the tireless aid of some of the best people on the web.

  Thanks to Lib for continuing to inspire, assist, love and push me to greatness each and every day.

  Thanks to Takenya and Sam for filling my head with their own great ideas.

  Thanks to Barry for continuing to produce covers that make me wish I could take credit for them.

  And thanks to Jen, Candice, Alan, Tiffany, Amber, Bruce, Joe, Danielle, Mihir, Angela, Clare, James, Daniel and Rob for always being there to provide such great support.

  You are all awesome, and I’m forever in your debt.

  CHAIN OF SHADOWS

  Darkness in the water, blood on the wind. Roiling night smoke pours through the ravine, a cloud of ash and poison. The air is cold with fear.

  His clothing is torn, his body riddled with cuts. Everything is a blur of shifting silhouettes and bleeding shadows. He falls to his knees in the mud.

  There’s something wrong with him. His limbs are heavy, weighted to the ground. His motions are sluggish and dreamlike. He seems to move as someone other than himself.

  He’s become another.

  The change ripples through his body and burns under the skin. Images flash before him, storms of cinder and mountains with claws, gore in the sky and fields of bone.

  He stumbles through soiled waters. This isn’t who he is. He’s been trapped somehow, sealed in someone else’s flesh. His form shifts and wavers as he walks. His presence is uncertain, in flux.

  He tries to recall the moments leading to this one. Nothing comes easy. His mind floats in a haze of silver echoes and steel rain.

  The pools reflect a monstrous shadow. He fears something is following him until he realizes he is the shadow, a vacillating hulk of black edges and mottled fur.

  What am I?

  He isn’t alone. There are others, drifting shapes with vaguely lupine forms. Slathering jaws and dripping teeth and eyes like cutting moons. They bear smoking fangs and ebon talons, and their wolf hides are wet with meat juices.

  He can’t see any of them clearly. They’re only shadows, holes in the light, rips to some darker place.

  Something speaks to him, speaks through him, the voice of a vast and ancient presence. It compels him. Its language is some sanguine tongue, a dirty arcane dialect stinking of rot and burning metal. He can’t make any sense of it and yet he moves, carried by its commands.

  He has no memory of anything before this. He tries, but whatever else has happened is gone.

  His vision bleeds like chalk in the rain. Hollow roars echo through the night. Everything is distant and flat.

  Clawed feet tear into the rock. There’s nothing beneath the island of torn earth. He senses the emptiness of the surrounding void.

  His consciousness is a prisoner, trapped at a dizzying height. He looks down and sees himself, a pinprick figure. A bleeding man swathed in oily rags.

  That’s who I once was, he thinks, and he longs to remember more, but the moment is ripped away.

  He marches with the others. Their presence blisters the air and boils the ground. Nailed fingers scrape against stone. He ascends to a watery light, where he hears howling and darkness.

  They don’t make it far when the hole is sealed. He panics. The voice hisses in anger. His body shifts and fades.

  Not yet, he realizes. Whatever dread purpose drove him here will be forced to wait, but not for long. For even though the gate has closed a part of him is still there, despoiling the landscape, a behemoth entity squeezed into a flesh shell.

  Soon. He isn’t sure if the voice is his, or another’s. Soon…

  PART ONE

  GATE

  ONE

  RISING

  Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

  The roar echoed into the dawn sky.

  Cross, Danica, Flint, Shiv and the Lith ranger Grail ran up the slope as fast as they could. They’d just been through a battle, and they looked it – their armor and clothing was scorched, stained and torn, and most of them bore wounds. Cross wasn’t sure how he’d even managed to keep moving, except that the arcane blade in his possession seemed to have a knack for keeping him alive long after he should have fallen.

  Soulrazor/Avenger had saved his life a dozen times, maybe more. It made him an expert swordsman. It healed him, but only when it wanted to. It was possessed of some alien intelligence he could neither understand nor communicate with. It served its own agenda, and while he wasn’t sure exactly how intelligent it was he knew he couldn’t trust it…but without any magic, he didn’t have much of a choice.

  This damn thing is the only reason I’m still breathing. He knew the blade had bonded to him, but he wasn’t sure why, or what it wanted. And now certainly wasn’t the time to worry about it, not with the darkness spilling out behind them.

  They ascended a sloped hill covered with cold dust and shattered obsidian obelisks. Crumbling bones and scorch stains littered the ground. The slope was the interior of a ring of jagged hills on an island in the middle of Rimefang Loch, a cold freshwater sea which in many ways acted as the unofficial center of the struggle between the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities. Icy wind lashed their bodies as they climbed, and Cross tasted hex and necrotic energies, a vile tang of churning power that made everything smell like it had burned. Inhuman voices boiled up from the darkness at their backs, garbled and insane chatter leaking through the skin that separated worlds.

  “Run!” Cross yelled. They clamored up the hill. He glimpsed down at the shadows.

  It had been a long and arduous road to get to the island in the Loch, and they’d lost many on the way. Danica had been controlled by the Ebon Cities and forced to fight a new breed of vampire called the Witchborn, while Cross had escaped the Carrion Rift after what felt to him like decades of exile, first as a prisoner to his own hostile spirit and later as a refugee in the shadow-plagued Whisperlands. Most of his team was dead or missing, including Kane, one of his only friends.

  It had been so long since he’d seen them. Years had passed, literally, and he recalled little of it. He still felt like he was stuck half in a dream, frozen in moments that had long since passed. The more he tried to remember his life before he’d fallen into that vat in the Bonespire the more difficult it was for him to grab onto who he’d been. His life had become a series of flashing images, one painful instance after the next, and every time he turned around it seemed someone else he cared about had died. He fel
t so old, and covered with so many scars there was little of the original man left.

  I don’t even know who I am anymore. I’ve lived through my team for so long. Kane, Grissom, Ash. Their faces were burned in his memory. They’d all died trying to save him, and with every death he felt he’d lost another piece of his soul.

  He wasn’t sure how he managed to keep moving. His body was wracked with hurt and covered with burns from his brief battle with Azradayne, the spider who’d been manipulating his path for the past several years, and maybe even longer. There was no telling how far her vision extended, or how far back she’d spun her webs.

  “Cross,” Flint said as they ran. “What the hell is it?”

  Cross felt bad for the man. An ex-soldier turned settler, he did all he could to care for his daughter. And now he’d been sucked into the heart of fear, because Shiv had powers no one could really understand.

  I’m so sorry you got sucked into all of this.

  “I’m not sure,” Cross said. “And I don’t want to stick around to find out.”

  “I thought we’d stopped it,” Shiv said. The girl’s eyes were wide with terror. “I’m sorry, Eric…I thought we’d stopped it…”

  He took her by the shoulders. They’d made some good distance – they’d already passed the downed escape pod, and weren’t far from the gap leading to the outer beach.

  “We did everything we could,” he said. “You saved us.”

  Shiv smiled nervously. The girl was barely eleven, yet had an alacrity and keen sense of will he seldom saw even in adults. Shiv’s power was unique, and if word of it got out she’d become a target…not just for the vampires, but for forces in the Southern Claw.

  I’ll keep you safe, Cross silently promised. He tried not to think about how much she reminded him of Snow. He saw his sister, burning on the train. No good will come of that. Keep your head in the here and now before you get somebody else killed.

  The howl came again, and the sound rammed against Cross’s skull and sent pain crashing through his body. His ears felt like they’d filled with burning liquid, and his vision went white. He clutched his head and fell to his knees.

  Everything went silent. Cross looked up in horror. The momentary dawn had fled and the sky turned dark, stained by an inky pillar which rose from the center of the island, where Azradayne had attempted to open the black gate.

  Everyone was on their knees, holding their ears and grimacing in pain. Their mouths were twisted in screams but he heard nothing, just the pulse of blood through his ears.

  He looked down the hill, where the darkness was thickest. Where the gate had once stood was now an explosion of shadows, churning like waves of greasy water. Shapes moved there, humanoid yet wolf, slithering and inconstant and monstrous, with sickly amber eyes and claws of smoke. Limbs like breaking glass sliced through the greying air.

  The world tilted. Cross felt himself drawn down, sucked towards the nadir of the slope. Shapes writhed like melting shards of mirror glass. He tried to look away, but his mind was held in a vise. Flakes of ash fell off his body and drifted towards the epicenter of the island. He was coming apart. Panic flooded through his chest. He saw himself back in that darkness, lost in the void.

  I’m a shadow again.

  A blast of white light shot past them from the top of the hill and screamed into the darkness. The heat was so intense it nearly threw him to the ground.

  In the blaze he caught sight of the shapes below, hulking wolves with razored black fur and dripping icy fangs. Even in the stark light it was difficult to gauge their numbers, for their bodies seemed to somehow bleed into one another and cluster like a mass organism, oil and shadows in writhing carnivorous pools. Only their eyes seemed stable, pits of cold light.

  Something grabbed him from behind and pulled him away. He was brought to his feet by powerful hands and brought up the hillside.

  The darkness shifted back, and the sound of howls rushed at them. His insides felt twisted, and the scars on his face burned with pain.

  Screaming whispers echoed in his head, howling tongues which lapped at his consciousness with knife-sharp promises of hurt.

  A voice called out to him, but he barely heard it. His mind swam, and he felt himself falling.

  “Cross!”

  He was on his back. Shapes moved over him. Sound drifted in and out. Agony pulsed at the edge of his thoughts. He felt himself drifting, as if lost on a black sea. Alone, cut off from everything. He heard the rasping ghost winds of the Whisperlands, felt himself caked in charcoal darkness, adrift for decades in an ebon waste. He gulped in panic.

  No. I don’t want to be back there. I don’t want to be lost again.

  “Cross!”

  A woman’s face leaned over his. Not Danica. Darker skin, black hair. Her upper chest and hands were covered in tattoos.

  “Ankharra?”

  The Southern Claw witch had been in command of a small unit who’d given he and his traveling companions some much-needed transport to the island in the Loch. When the cargo ship carrying them all had gone down he’d assumed the worse.

  He sat up in a daze and realized they were back on the beach. A handful of Southern Claw soldiers in red and black armor scrambled down the shore. The jagged peaks loomed to the north, and Cross heard the crash of ocean waves behind him. Freezing water sprayed onto his face. He was shaking, but he was grateful to still be solid.

  Wara was there, the Doj mercenary who led the group called the Grey Watch, her face badly scarred. She and the Lith called Witch helped Shiv and Flint get on their feet; it seemed everyone had collapsed the same as Cross.

  “What the hell…?” he started, but Ankharra put her arm under his and helped him to stand.

  “No time for that,” she said. “We need to go.”

  The howl came again, and the sky seemed to rip. A pillar of darkness exploded from within the broken ring of mountains. Cold wind swept in and down, stinging to the touch and smelling of rot.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Ankharra said. “But I’ve got one Bloodhawk left and barely any men. The Ebon Cities forces withdrew, and I think it’s time we did the same.”

  Cross looked around the beach. Corpses littered the pale sand, most of them the half-dissolved black corpses of what they’d called the Witchborn – vampires crafted by the Witch’s Eye, bastardized and magic-yielding creatures who’d become a potential threat to all life on the planet. There were other bodies, Ebon Cities vampires in black and silver combat armor and Southern Claw soldiers out of Talon Company.

  “They all dropped,” Ankharra said as he steadied himself. He glanced up and saw Danica talking to a medic and holding her head in her hands.

  “Who?” Cross asked.

  “The Witchborn,” Ankharra said. “They all fell at once.”

  “That must have been when Dani destroyed the Eye,” he said with a grim nod. “But that’s when the other trouble started.”

  “What happened to them?” Ankharra said.

  “They were sacrificed,” he said.

  They looked back at the gap in the rocks, the path to the inner island, bordered by sharp stones like spear-tips.

  “Sacrificed?” Ankharra asked.

  “To open that gate,” he said. “Something came through.” He looked at Ankharra. He felt lead in his chest. “We failed. We couldn’t stop her.”

  “Couldn’t stop Danica?”

  “She didn’t know what she was doing,” Cross said quickly. He looked up at the sky and watched the billowing tower of shadow. “It was Azradayne.”

  “Ankharra!” Wara shouted from further down the beach. “Let’s move!”

  The howl came again, peeling back the air like torn skin. Cross felt drops of gore on the wind.

  He pulled away from Ankharra and raced over to Flint and Shiv. There were less than a dozen Southern Claw soldiers left, scanning the area and watching for trouble as they quickly made their way towards a
breakwater standing a few yards out from the rocky and moss-covered shore. Aside from Grail and Witch none of the other Lith from the group they’d met outside Dirge had survived. All of the soldiers and Doj had been burned, bloodied and bruised.

  “Are you okay?” he asked the father and daughter.

  Flint nodded. There were traces of blood in his ears and on his cheeks. He held Shiv tight. Cross looked at her, and she nodded. She was clearly terrified, but tried her best not to show it.

  “We’re okay,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. Every time those two were in danger he went rigid with fear. The notion of something happening to them sent ice through his veins. “You’d best get over to that rock, then,” he told them. “They’re going to take us out of here.”

  He turned back and moved towards Danica.

  “We need to go,” she said. She stumbled a bit as she walked, and just like Cross she looked battered and exhausted. Danica’s black hair looked so strange and out of place, and with her armor jacket torn he had a clear view of the metal appendage, the automaton arcane arm the Revengers had placed there. Danica might have still been at least partially under the influence of the vampires, and the eldritch steel was doubtlessly capable of more than simply serving as a repository and focus for her spirit. But none of that mattered. In spite of his fatigue and fear a jolt of strength rushed through his body at the sight of her. Her skin looked smooth and soft, radiant in the budding dawn light. Her eyes were deep green and seemed to glow, and her hair lifted in the wind.

  I thought I’d never see you again.

  She walked up to him, and he threw his arms around her.

  Another howl came, closer this time, nearly at the edge of the sharp stones. The sound clawed at the barrier and brought the touch of ice to their skin.

  They started towards the shore.

  We just can’t catch a break, he thought bitterly.

  The battered Bloodhawk came into view from out of the clouds, circling the perimeter of the island. It looked to have taken its share of hits, and smoke trailed from its aft end.