Soulrazor (34 page)

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Authors: Steven Montano

BOOK: Soulrazor
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“
I know. Cross told me. But if Laros sees what I’m about to show you, he’ll shit himself.”
Danica slid the heavy iron bolt across the door. Pike hesitated, looked at Black, and unlocked one of the massive desk drawers and removed a hand-sized object. Whatever it was, it had been wrapped in old and soiled cloth and appeared to be made of metal.
Pike looked at her.
“
What do you know,” he asked, “about Shadowmere Keep?”

 

At 1200 hours, 4
th
, 5
th
and 9
th
Platoons, Tiger Company, deployed along the northwestern end of Thornn. A number of spirit reconnaissance teams had been sent out between 0800 and 1000 hours to search for something very specific.
Normally, undead left void spaces in the air, holes where they’d passed. This was unlike living creatures, which filled the air with a tangible and readable presence. Undead were more difficult to track, but the void signatures left in their wake were just as telling as the energies emanated by humans or other living things, provided one knew how to look for them.
The platoons were specifically selected based on the proficiency of their witch trackers, who were renowned for their ability to hunt down convicts, assassins and spies with an efficacy matched by few others. Those witches had been assembled and trained to fill the void left in the Southern Claw’s ranks after so many Hunter squads had been lost during the search for the traitor Margrave Azazeth, aka “Red”.
The witches were sent not to look for void signatures, or even living signatures, but for undisturbed areas, places where no disturbances existed at all.
Places that looked abnormally “normal”.
Because while the undead of the Ebon Cities had devised a means to camouflage their presence, the downside of their deception was that it worked almost
too
well.
Any given area should have always shown some signs of disturbance caused either by small signs of life – insects, plains animals, or even large patches of fungus or plants – or else by the voids created by enumerate trace spirits and fragment ghosts, derelict entities too minor and scattered to present any true threat but whose presence still marked the area with an absence, a space where
un
-life existed, where the patterns shifted just enough they could be noticed.
The Ebon Cities’ new cloaking device, powered by the same temporal-displacing mud that had infected Eric Cross and his spirit, worked too perfectly. They made an area appear
entirely
undisturbed, untouched by both living and unliving presences. At a glance, a space where they’d passed appeared perfect, but under scrutiny – and once it became clear the scouts needed to look for a lack of disturbance, not a disturbance itself – the artificiality of those areas was easy to spot.
Black, Kane, Ronan, Ash, Maur and Grissom watched from the observation deck of the mansion, a room fitted with a conglomeration of nautoscopes they’d salvaged from wrecked Bloodhawks and Skyhawks. They could almost see the entire outer perimeter of the city.
The screen itself left something to be desired. It was a bulbous piece of glass mounted on the wall of the large room. It looked like a half-melted television set, and its crystal faced bore several cracks. It needed to be refitted to the wall every few months to prevent it from falling down again.
They watched as the battle approached.
A pair of Shermans rolled towards the northwest corner of the city, just west of the northern Moon Gates, a small outpost primarily used by scout patrols, survey teams and the occasional hunter or farmer sent out under armed escort to gather special materials for food production in the thaumaturgic fields west of Thornn.
There was a surprising amount of open space between the interior city walls and its northernmost buildings, even in spite of the abutting presence of both the Grange residential district and the laborer's makeshift housing commons called Graytown. Both the city watch and the bulk of ground troops from the chosen Platoons had plenty of room to operate. Citizens were encouraged to mass near Centertown – which was located well away from the northwestern walls – or else to secure themselves safely in bomb shelters and stay there until given the All-Clear.
Black had no idea how she knew the exact time the attack would come, or the direction it would come from. She had only vague recollections of a dream she felt sure she'd had more than once. She must have seen a clock in the dream, or else recalled the position of the sun, something to indicate the direction of the attack…
But it wasn't just a dream
, she reminded herself.
You've actually
seen
this. You were there when it happened, somehow. Or else another version of you saw it, and some connection was made across time, some mental transmission or a shared memory or a leak between realities.
Danica had no way to explain it. She wasn't sure if she ever would.
Whatever it was, she proved to be right.
Once spirit reconnaissance verified that two separate areas outside the city walls were entirely “too devoid” of anomalies or disturbances, scouts conducted general surveys. They didn’t target the zones the spirits had observed, but they searched for signs of passage in the general area to see if the cloaked Ebon Cities units left any other markers they
couldn’t
concealed.
The scouts were only gone for a short time. Reports made their rounds along the chain of command, and eventually Danica and the team caught wind of what was happening.
Traces of necrotic dust were found on foliage several miles away, and it was the same variety found in the exhaust generated by Ebon Cities’ warships. There was just enough residue found to serve as proof that vampires had been in the area, and recently.
At 1300 hours, shortly before Danica’s dream visions told her the Ebon Cities would launch a devastating offensive against Thornn, Elias Pike led the 4
th
, 5
th
and 9
th
Platoons, Tiger Company, in a pre-emptive strike against what appeared to be little more than some empty plains outside the city.
Black had offered to get the team involved, not only to prove that she stood behind her words, but because it really
was
their city, regardless of what she might have said. It had become their home, and it was a
human
city, one way or the other. Mercenaries or no, Cross had assembled the group to do good, to help in the war effort, and it would have been a dishonor to him to do anything different.
But Pike, surprisingly, trusted her, and so Black and the others made their final preparations to leave while they watched the battle transpire on the cracked and blurry screen. They were able to appreciate the tactics of the situation from their distant vantage.
Had the vampires launched their attack, the outer city defenses wouldn’t have had time to respond. Even the automated cannons and flame launcher sentry posts would at best have put up token resistance. Undead and gargoyle soldiers could have penetrated the walls, and then the real damage would come.
The fact that the Ebon Cities sent two full Wings meant they had a tactical advantage. While one Wing drew the city’s defenses towards them, the second cloaked Wing could move in.
It was a brilliant plan, so long as they avoided detection before they began the attack.
Mortar blasts tore the earth in two stretches of open ground north and west of the city. Explosions tore up and down the plains. Plumes of smoke exploded into the sky. Raw flesh and bone matter came down in clumps, visible only after the bodies were destroyed. Detonation fumes rose from the frosted ground.
The rhythmic bursts could be heard from well within the city, and it was eerie to watch the events unfold on screen.
Bloodhawks strafed the pre-sighted area with motorguns and chain cannons. Mages assembled on the walls with their spirits cast around them like capes of cold fire. Flame cannons were powered up, and M2 Brownings were re-positioned to more efficiently fire into the sky near Moon Gate.
Only the soldiers of Tiger Company deployed. The entire sizable and well-armed contingent of the city guard that manned the area was pulled all of the way back to Centertown and held in reserve.
Ebon Cities crafts appeared after the strafing began. There was no way to tell if the cloaking devices had been disrupted, or if the vampires simply determined they were no longer needed. Either way, the subterfuge had come to an end, and Danica watched with apprehension as crawling war machines with bone carapaces and bladed cannons phased out of thin air. Their treads cut into the earth like claws.
Vampire warships floated close to the ground. Their turbines blasted the earth black with vile energies while thick chains dragged skeletal remains through the dirt.
Razorwings mounted by groups of vampires armed with bone rifles and razor swords soared overhead.
A single Coffin – an aerial troop transport shaped like a massive iron box and decorated with sharp guns and rotating beds of spikes – appeared near the back-end of the vampire forces. The large vessel was doubtlessly filled with zombies, war wights, kaithoren and murderwraiths.
Clawed reptile beasts with short crenellated horns and translucent green eyes pounced to the front of the assault. They ripped into the stone and literally ran up Thornn’s walls.
Gargoyle shock troops swathed in black-and-green armor and equipped with razor nets and caustic bolas roved in aerial gangs.
Undulating flesh wings and dripping tentacle beasts that spun and lashed at the air filled the ranks of the undead forces.
Even with the scores of bodies and destroyed ships left in the wake of Thornn’s preliminary strike, there was still a small army of undead outside the walls.
The shooting started, and the air ripped apart.
Very little of what transpired after that was visible on the screen in the mansion. Dust and haze and drifts of arcane steam obscured clear vision of the battle. Explosive blasts of lightning and flame shook the city. Hex energies turned the air thick. Black bursts of smoke fell over Thornn.
Machinegun fire and charged corrosive blasts echoed in the distance. Vehicles rammed into one another, and armored reptiles howled. Gargoyles from separate sides of the battle cackled and cursed at one another in their garbled and ancient tongue.
Gol-piloted dirigibles floated by, surrounded by small clouds of messenger homunculi. The sky was crowded with war spirits and angry ghosts.
Black walked to the window of the observation room. She could see most of Centertown from the mansion, but the walls where the fighting took place were distant, just a dark line against the afternoon sun. The sky was pale where it wasn’t dominated by iron clouds. The wind was cold and smelled of gunsmoke and blood.
The team was restless.
Black knew that Kane and Ronan wished themselves at the battle: they wanted,
needed
to be a part of that fight, to be there with the regular soldiers as they defended their home.
Surprisingly, it was a feeling she struggled with herself. Danica Black had been alone for most of her life. Even when she was in a relationship, her mind always focused on what she needed to do to keep herself safe, to protect herself when, inevitably, it would all fall apart. It was what kept her distant, and alone.
I’ve never believed in a cause. All that ever made any sense to me was protecting myself. Leave it to a damn stubborn warlock to change all of that.
Kane and Ronan walked over to her.
“
Dani,” Kane said, but she put a hand up and stopped him.
“
I know,” she said.
“
Do you?” Ronan said, but Black gave him a silencing look.
“
Yes,” she nodded. “I
do
. But right now, this isn’t our fight.”
“
Like hell it isn’t….” Kane started, but she cut him off.
“
We’re a part of the Southern Claw,” she said. “And being part of a team is knowing your place, and your role.”
She pointed at the bomb-blast horizon, at the drill-heads of raw spectral power and the smoke that billowed up from earth-shattering explosions that went off just on the other side of the outer walls. The battle came into clearer view as the assault advanced to the upper walls.
A reptilian crawler ripped through the sandstone and was gunned down by a dozen heavily armed soldiers. A vampire warship soared overhead with two Razorwings at its back, and all three of them were torn down by M2s and arcane blasts of fire and stone. Draconians fell with wretched cries and splattered on the ground. Airships crashed in the northern section of the city and sent up clouds of poison flame.

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