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

  Calm down. It’s probably nothing. The heat playing tricks on you. Or maybe she’s just crazy.

  Danica remembered the blood pool in Lorn. Lynch groping her body and filling her head with lies. Dissonant echoes of the vampire nations searing through her skull. Nightmare flashes of dead cities and flesh streets, pale vampire feasting ceremonies and the shores of a necrotic sea.

  She walked in a daze, found the cliff wall and leaned against it, ignoring how hot it was to the touch. Sweat beaded down her face and her skin flushed, and yet she felt cold inside, like she’d swallowed a ball of ice. The shadows seemed to thicken overhead.

  They’re coming for you.

  You’re in danger.

  Was something wrong with Shiv? Or with her? She’d spent weeks under vampire control, and before that she’d been Azradayne’s captive, that otherworldly six-armed witch who controlled the Black Circle. The memories of what had happened during her time in Lorn were only beginning to come back to her, but her time spent with Azradayne was a black hole in her mind. All of it, remembered or not, felt like another lifetime ago. It had been months since the shadow Rake had transformed her into a living conduit for her own spirit, but it might as well have been years. She still felt disconnected and unfocused, and concentrating on anything took supreme effort. She was quicker to anger now, and she felt herself growing distant from everyone without even meaning to.

  What if it isn’t Shiv? she wondered. What if it’s me? I was tapped into the vampire collective consciousness for weeks….what if I’m still there?

  You’re in danger.

  She heard the voice. It wasn’t Shiv’s, but it was hauntingly familiar.

  They’re coming for you.

  Danica put her hand over her face and begged the voices to stop.

  EIGHT

  PROPHECY

  They returned to camp just before sundown. As Creasy had predicted the temperature dropped rapidly, and the smothering and intense heat quickly turned to a dry and baneful chill. The climate might have been different, but staying alive in this desert was going to be no less daunting than surviving in the Reach. Creasy had spent his life in the wilderness, living outside the comfortable realms preferred by people of the Southern Claw. He’d witnessed limbs taken by frostbite and madness brought on by dehydration, had seen people die of exposure and waste away because they couldn’t find food.

  In a way he was almost more comfortable with the notion of the coming night: cold was his element, what he’d grown up with and survived in all his life.

  They can have this heat. This shit is something I can do without.

  Part of him kept hoping he’d wake up, and that the string of ill portents brought by the vision of his spirit had never come to pass.

  That was when it all started, he realized. That night in Wolftown when I last saw her. The night when Fane attacked us.

  He’d lost his world that night, but it had been bound to happen sooner or later. He should have been ready. He’d taught himself not to grow attached, not to fall into any sense of comfort or complacency. He and Roth and Tanya and all of the people who lived in Wolftown or Fangtown or Heartbane or any of the other hunter-trapper settlements of the eastern wilds knew they’d chosen a difficult path. They lost people every week, sometimes every day.

  There’s no time for tears in the wastelands. It sounded like romanticized nonsense, but it was the truth of things. Everyone was hurt; everyone had scars. If you were lucky you had a lot of scars. In Gorgoloth culture scars were considered a badge of honor, a proof of prowess in battle. In Wolfland it was much the same, but the scars were evidence of durability. They proved you could take what the world threw at you and come back for more.

  We survive and suffer, or we die. Those are the choices we face.

  For Creasy it had never really been a choice at all. He’d lost too many people, suffered too much to just give in now. Tanya had called him stubborn, but she didn’t know the half of it. He’d go on surviving because he wasn’t going to give the Bloodwolves or the Gorgoloth or the wastelands raiders or even the world itself the satisfaction of watching him die. When his time inevitably came, it would be on his terms.

  He, Ronan, Grail and Reza made a wide perimeter sweep of the area around the crash.

  The hills to the north formed a twisted labyrinth of sharp rocks and deep crevices. The air smelled of wood and tar smoke, and the jagged walls in some of the deeper clefts and dry ravines resembled animal spines. They decided against venturing too deep into that maze of asperous rock. The shadows in the network of slopes were thick, and Creasy’s spirit detected presences there, hidden hunters confined to the shadows.

  Based on their findings, they decided they wouldn’t be traveling north.

  It was going to be difficult to reach the ground west of the crash, since there seemed to be no easy means of scaling the cliffs. The top of the canyon wall the ship leaned against was several hundred feet up. After a bit of searching they eventually found the means to get to the top by way of a steep slope located a half-mile southwest of the crash, buried behind a cluster of sandy hills.

  The going was arduous in the heat, but Creasy used his spirit to scout ahead when they rested just inside a shallow cave about halfway up the slope. His spirit told him that the ground up top was flat, barren and devoid of any life or cover, and nothing but another stretch of plains leading west into the blank and burning desert.

  They decided to avoid that higher ground. The effort required to make the ascent would be devastating to the band of survivors unless they could find some reason to make the trip, and until they could be sure that going south or east wasn’t a better option both Creasy and Reza determined their limited time would be better spent scouting in those directions. Ronan offered to go to the top on his own, convinced he could use his ability to “enter the Deadlands” to give him enough stamina and drive to make a successful reconnoiter, but Creasy convinced him to hold off, at least for the time being.

  Ronan was a strange man, calm and level-headed, which likely came from his being raised as an assassin. Most everyone treated him with a great deal of fear and apprehension, and after a time Creasy started to see why. In the wake of the slaughter at Wolftown Ronan had shown bravery and determination in helping Danica Black fulfill her mission, but now as they scouted he kept insisting on going further, not heeding the fact that prolonged exposure could be deadly or worrying about concealing their presence from potential enemies or predators. He’d become more brazen than before, angrier.

  I can’t imagine it’s the stress of the situation, Creasy thought. He’s not the sort who’d crack under pressure. It was something else, then, but Creasy couldn’t tell what, and so he decided he’d keep his eye on Ronan. From a distance.

  More signs of civilization lay just a few miles to the south. The cracked remains of the old road crossed what appeared to be a failed railway. Sand covered the iron beams, and twisted shreds of metal protruded from the ground like rusted fingers.

  The train tracks came to a stop a few miles southwest of the crash-site, abruptly ending at the edge of a jagged ravine nearly a hundred feet deep. Old bones and cold shadows waited in the depths, and from the age of the claw marks it appeared they’d found the lair of the Simar.

  The ravine didn’t seem a logical reason to completely halt construction of either the tracks or the road, which ran south as far as the eye could see. The Southern Claw ranger Reza deduced that whoever constructed them might have used the rift as a suitable excuse to end construction. “There must have been a reason it ran out here,” she said. “I wonder if there is something north of us that we haven’t seen yet.”

  “Maybe,” Ronan said. “But I guarantee there’s something south of us. This road came from somewhere.” It wasn’t flawless logic, but they decided it was their best option. Patches of the dark road were visible beneath the sand, and the construction ran like a broken ribbon into heat haze and what appeared to be more hills and possibly even th
e semblance of human-made structures in the distance, those shadowy towers they’d spied earlier.

  Creasy sent his spirit out. It was risky – he’d already noted the presence of hostile arcane energies in the area, and he was worried if he sent her too far it would be difficult to maintain control – but with few options he decided it was worth the risk.

  Shirt pasted against his skin and mouth filled with the bitter taste of desert sand, Creasy knelt in the cracked dirt and held his hands to his sides. The dry earth burned his knees through his pants, and even wearing sunglasses his eyes ached beneath the glare of the blasting sun.

  Creasy’s mind drifted out, a bird over a dune sea. The sensation of heat and wind and sweat running down his back and through his beard all faded, like he was falling into a dream. His body was left on the desert floor, kneeling in front of the others, and he saw himself, ever so briefly, as he was lifted out and away.

  His eyes were in his spirit. He flew through her, with her, his consciousness clutched tight like a fish in a hawk’s talons. The sky turned two-dimensional, a hazy mirror of sand and smoke. Everything twisted and melted together. He floated over a shimmering island of stone in the dry sea, a blasted array of structures, once-great buildings ruined by time and the elements, now just dilapidated versions of themselves, roofs cracked, pillars leaning like drunks.

  She found the train platform, and while it appeared it hadn’t been used for its intended purpose in quite some time there was still a skeleton crew there, surveying and digging for mineral deposits in a nearby network of caves. They were dark-skinned men, their faces weathered and cracked from growing up under the blistering desert sun, their clothing loose and functional. Those outside covered their heads with shemaghs, while those inside drank cool tea and ate rice cakes and cold lentils.

  The station had lines of communication, radio wires and thaumaturgic transmitters mounted high on iron poles, bulbous gem-like eyes buzzing with arcane potential. They must have had some access to the larger city Creasy’s spirit glimpsed in the distance, a cluster of sharp spires held within oddly curved walls. A small locomotive with just a handful of cars waited at the station, its only possible destination back the way they’d came, as the functional part of the line ended there. It was a place on the far edge of civilization.

  Creasy’s spirit cut low to the ground and stayed out of sight. He had no reason to believe these men were hostile, but he didn’t want to take that risk, at least not yet. He’d leave that to Ankharra and the others to decide.

  Rather than draw her back just then he decided to inspect what lay to the east. His spirit blinked through standing stones and narrow crevices, dark and shadow-drenched cuts in the earth filled with vague and unsettling creatures, razor whispers and smoking breath. He guided her clear of those spaces, kept her away from the things in the dark.

  He pushed her back over the landscape, his consciousness reeling from the effort. There was something about this foreign land that unsettled him, even if he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. The atmosphere was different, more charged, weighted with magical potential.

  Something caught his spirit’s eye. At first he thought it was creatures crawling across the dark sands, but as she slowed, disturbed by a presence clinging to the ground like a polluted wall of smoke, he realized they were bodies. Recently dead spirits clung to the remains like desperate children, violent and enraged at their host’s passing.

  They were Southern Claw, dead soldiers from the crash.

  The trail of corpses led east, towards a dead forest at the edge of a shallow valley. The sand in that crevice was grey and old, and through his spirit he smelled ash and blood smoke. Twisted antlers and charred bones marked a twisted topiary of brambles and thorns.

  Something waited within, hidden in the trees. Something dark, and very old.

  The sun was setting fast when they returned, and the temperature kept dropping. Long shadows loomed across the canyon wall in the flickering firelight. The Southern Claw soldiers had started a handful of campfires, which twisted in the freezing night wind. Though the blazes would attract predators from a dozen miles out the survivors needed the warmth, and there was still too much carnage inside the Skyhawk to risk using it for shelter. The damn thing could collapse at any moment; camping near it probably wasn’t the best idea, but if they ventured too far they’d be exposed out in the open…unless they went north, into the jagged canyons, but they all shared the same feelings towards those shadow-drenched crevices and the unnatural things they knew stirred within.

  Creasy, Ronan, Cross, Black and Ankharra sat huddled under brown wool blankets around a campfire and discussed their options. Creasy was used to the cold, but the winds in Wolfland were seldom this hard and stinging, and even with his spirit warming him he felt the lash of the frigid cross-winds like the sting of a whip. The cold there in Nezzek’duul was different than that in the north. With no cloud cover or humidity the heat just pushed out into the open air, so even rocks and sand that just a few hours ago had been scorching hot to the touch were now ice cold.

  “So what are you saying?” Cross asked. “Is this where they took our people?”

  “I believe so,” Creasy said. He was exhausted, but tried not to let it show. It was getting harder and harder to keep his strength up these days. He was almost ancient in warlock years, and he doubted he had much time left.

  Time enough, he thought. I have things to do before I sleep. He thought of the children in the forest, of all the friends he’d buried. There’s time enough to make things right.

  “So if we go south,” Ankharra said, “we’ll get to this station?” Her accent seemed to be growing thicker by the day. Creasy wondered if she hadn’t been hiding it all this time, or if perhaps she was trying to make it more pronounced since with any luck they’d be dealing with locals soon.

  “Yes,” Creasy said.

  “How far?” Ankharra asked. A howl of the dry wind carried across the open desert like the voice of the lost.

  “It’s about thirty miles to the station,” Creasy said. “Not quite that far to the dead forest to the east.”

  “Any idea what’s in the forest?” Black asked.

  “Nothing good,” he said. “Old power. Something evil. That’s about all I can say without getting closer.”

  “Fun shit,” Ronan said.

  Murmuring voices filled the air, conversations from the other fires. Creasy’s spirit sensed the fear in the camp. Twenty-seven people huddled together against the encroaching sea of night. Walls of darkness pressed in on them. The bloody sky still showed the outlines of the ship and the distant hills, but without the light of the fires the darkness from the desert would have been absolute, as there were no stars. The moon was full and bright, yet seemed incapable of penetrating the inky shadows.

  “So what now?” Cross asked. He looked at Ankharra. “I mean…it’s

  your show.”

  “And as you all know, I’m not used to being in command,” she said. She looked around the fire. “Suggestions are welcome.”

  “It’s dangerous to stay in one place for too long,” Creasy said. “Especially here, where none of us really knows what to expect.”

  “He’s right,” Cross said. “There could be more of those ape creatures, or something worse.”

  “The railway, then?” Danica asked.

  “The main group should go that way,” Creasy said. “And a few of us should go to the dead forest.” He pulled his dirty green coat tight around his body. “We can catch up after we rescue whatever survivors we can.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Cross asked.

  “Me and three others. The same group as before.”

  “You’ll need another mage,” Danica said.

  “Are you volunteering?” Ronan asked her.

  “Damn right. I’ll take Reza’s place.”

  “Wait a second…” Cross said.

  “Ronan and I have worked with Creasy before,” Danica said. “We’ll be fi
ne. Reza knows the way to the rail station, so she can lead the larger group. Grail can come with us.”

  The Lith nodded.

  Creasy saw Cross shake his head in frustration. It was fairly obvious he and Danica were having some sort of argument, but Creasy wasn’t about to get in the middle of it. He knew better than that. Whenever Tanya started going on the warpath he always found it best to just get the hell out of her way.

  “Fine,” Cross said. “Assuming Ankharra is okay with that.”

  Ankharra looked hesitant. “Are you sure you don’t want some more soldiers?”

  “A small group moves faster,” Ronan said.

  “We’re not sure there’ll even be anyone to rescue,” Creasy said, his eyes on the flames. He felt several heads turn towards him, and he shrugged. “We may get there just to find out that your friends are dead.”

  “Laros is no friend,” Ronan grunted.

  “He needs to be kept safe,” Ankharra said sternly. “Listen, we’re all exhausted. We should try and get some rest. We’ll leave at first light, before it gets too hot. Thirty miles…it should take us about a day-and-a-half to get to the railway station. We have enough water for a trip that long. Your scouting group can take whatever you need.”

  “We’ll find whoever there is to find and catch up with you,” Creasy said.

  Ankharra nodded and stood up, wrapped in her black cloak. She looked miserable in the cold. “If I don’t see you in the morning, good luck,” she said, and she went off to get some sleep.

  Ronan spat into the fire. “See you kids at sun-up,” he said, and he turned and went to find a place to sleep, as well.

  One-by-one the group either left the fire or huddled in closer to sleep. There were about eight fires in all, enough for three or four people to gather close, and at least one person from each group remained up and on watch with guns held high. A handful of soldiers had been assigned to walk the perimeter, and they were careful to stay within clear sight of the flames. The primitive campsite could be spied from miles away, a blazing raft in the black shadow sea.