Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (30 page)

The stillness in the air was solid, a wall of silence.  Lights cast on dust-covered door frames.  Debris created a snarled maze in the dark, but Warfield moved steady, directing the others to carry on deeper into the complex.  They came to a set of twisted stairs leading up to what was left of the upper floor.  Ronan brought up the rear, his gun aimed into the cobwebbed shadows. 

“
We’re close,” Warfield said from above.  “Ronan, get up here.”

He took a breath, wondering if he was being played.  He’d never had a thing for Warfield, but in her days peddling black market weapons and tech back in Thornn she had a reputation for being a deft manipulator of men, and he had no reason to believe she’d turned over a new leaf just because she now sold protective hex technology to the White Children.  Still, finding Bloodhollow meant finding Shiv, and that was all that mattered.

Hang in there, kid.  I’m coming for you.

Ronan moved up the stairs quickly, nearly falling when one of the metal steps threatened to give way beneath his weight.  He slung the Norinco over his shoulder and came to a narrow landing about five feet wide and twice that long, which ran ahead of several open doorways and terminated at a pair of hallways leading deeper into the structure.  The air was filled with dust and smelled of rot and engine grease.  Even with Warfield’s spectral orb hanging high in the ceiling the shadows were unnaturally thick, signaling that some sort of thaumaturgic disturbance occupied the area, low-level energies which likely accounted for the structure’s terrible condition.

“The portal should be up here somewhere,” she said. 

“
Terrific,” he said. 

The Southern Claw had experimented with translocative portals without much success early in the war, but that hadn’t stopped scientists from continuing to try and make them work, searching for the proper combination of hexes and stolen bits of vampire or Gol tech that might allow them to finally reach a breakthrough and create stable gates, ones that would both open and close on command without scrambling people’s physiology in the process.   Ronan knew it could be done – he’d stepped through a few of those portals himself, and not always willingly – but no one in the Southern Claw had ever figured it out, and those few gates that did exist were permanent and tied to specific destinations.  Supposedly this one would lead to a network of secret caverns beneath Bloodhollow, but there was no guarantee the gate would even function. 

Still, it’s better than nothing.

Ronan tried not to think about what seeing Shiv again would do to him.  He never should have left, and he wasn’t sure if she’d want him back.

Suck it up
, he told himself. 
Get this done.

Ronan moved ahead to where Felix indicated, the others right behind him. 

In his mind’s eye he saw Shiv, alone and afraid.  He wanted so bad for her to be ok it pained him. 

I can do this one thing right.  Just one thing.

The hall resisted the light, and even with Warfield’s magic at his back Ronan couldn’t see more than a few feet down the corridor.  The darkness turned claustrophobic and tight and he felt pressure from all sides, like he’d been squeezed into a black box.  Ronan breathed deep, checked to make sure the rest of them were still there, and pushed forward, drawn down the hall.  He narrowly avoided a gaping hole edged with snapped stone and shards of metal and backed up just in time to prevent Abraham from tumbling into it.

“
You owe me,” he snarled, and he didn’t give Abraham a chance to answer before carrying on.

Something waited on the other side of the third door, some hexed potential he could practically taste, a haze of brimstone and power, dark and sweet like old wine, and Ronan felt his brain buzzing just from the proximity of magic.  Warfield, Abraham, Torbin, Felix and the two others whose names Ronan hadn’t bothered learning all trained their weapons on the door.  He took a breath, and he’d no sooner kicked the door open when something launched out of the darkness.

It was a bulk of skin moving with arachnid gait.  Knife-like limbs scissored out at them, and it wasn’t until one of the nameless soldiers was decapitated and Torbin was speared through the gut that Ronan saw it clearly – a bent over humanoid with preposterously long arms edged with curled bone as sharp as razors.  His thick legs were knotted with bone and muscle and his grinning face was a mask of sliding flesh, disproportionate and mostly featureless, some mutation that had left this once-Lith turned grotesque.  Living in proximity to the unstable magic of the gate had doubtlessly played its part in twisting the scavenger’s body and making him malleable, his bones and skin a shifting amalgam, a puzzle monstrosity. 

Gunfire erupted in the dark, peppering the creature’s torso and bouncing back, captured in its rubbery flesh and ejected to the floor in a shower of metal.  Another bone limb snapped out of the dark and cleaved Abraham’s skull in two.  Ronan ducked beneath a blow, threw Felix aside and sliced down with his katana, severing the appendage.  He moved through a sludge of shadow, his heartbeat slow, his motions exaggerated.  Passing into the Deadlands, painful as it was, allowed him to guide his blade true and snap through the few stable tendons left in the creature’s body while ignoring its morphing arcane flesh.  Dull screams called out, and the creature raised both arms to hack through Ronan when Warfield’s hostile male spirit shot through its skull with glowing hot blades.  Brains and blood spattered on the walls as the caricature marauder collapsed to the ground. 

“Jesus...” Felix managed.  The thin man’s glasses were stained with someone else’s blood.  Only he, Ronan and Warfield were left of those who’d entered the building.  “What the...”

“
There,” Warfield said.  “Look.”

Ronan wiped off his katana, stood and looked into the room; the door still swung back and forth on its hinges.  The barracks was small, barely enough for a pair of bunks and a single desk, all of which had somehow been melted into cold slag, collapsed by the presence of the throbbing blue-white portal hanging there on the wall.  It was ovular, and in spite of being made of pure light it pulsated with a sickly slurping sound every time the orifice opened and closed, opened and closed, a black heartbeat.  The air in the room was leaden and thick, and when Ronan stepped inside he passed into a terrible heat.  Sweat instantly glazed his skin, and his eyes grew heavy.

Ronan looked at Felix, who was already adjusting the dials on a small hand-held device roughly the shape and size of a palm pilot.  Thaumaturgic nodes sparked in the half-light, and every time he adjusted a switch the module clicked and whirred. 

“
You should be fine,” he said.  “So long as you move fast.”

“
You’re coming too, Felix,” Warfield said. 

“
Do I have to?”

Warfield looked at him sternly. 

“The White Children died trying to reach Bloodhollow,” she said.  “I could have saved them, but I swore I’d keep Shiv away until she was ready.  Now Shiv may be dead, and we may all be fucked.”  Warfield’s cold eyes seemed to bore straight into Felix’s chest.  After a moment’s hesitation he nodded.

“
All right,” he said.  “If we have to...”

“
For fuck’s sake...” Ronan muttered.  “So now what?”

“
Just step through,” Warfield said.  “We’ll be right behind you.”

“
Great.”

This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

Ronan steeled himself.  The darkness swirled as he moved towards the gate, gelid energies slipping around him like blasts of ice water.

The moment he stepped into the portal a heart-stopping cold lanced into his heart.  Something shrieked in the back of his mind, a pained call that sliced through the darkness.  Ronan sensed motion at the edge of his thoughts, coiled shadows twisting against his skin from out of the aether.  Shadows latched onto him, threatened to pull him down.  He heard teeth in the night, gnashing and grinding, and after another step the ground vanished from under his feet.

Forks of blood lightning over black seas, dark waters and churning liquid.  Dim glass cracks as lurching shapes pound against the shell.  The sound of snapping bones rings through the endless dark.

There are eyes in that sea, pale cuts like icy wounds.  Thousands of them, all from the same face, a collective given multifarious form.  A legion of one.

They push against the crystalline borders of reality, a vast creep of shadow and night.  Black blood fills the void in a never-ending tide.  The howls of the damned echo into the sky.

He falls alone, but isn’t alone.  He sees Cross and Danica and Shiv on an island of black ice, a cracked drift melting into the boiling waves.  Seams race across the surface. 

They reach for each other, but the chunks of glacier drift apart, pulled towards a vortex at the edge of the black sea. 

Ronan falls.  Cold scalds his flesh as he’s sucked into the waters.  He sees his friends pulled under, swallowed into the iron dark ocean.  Oily liquid sears down his lungs and burns his eyes, and as frosted hands drag him below the last thing he sees is the pale and burning sun, corroding like paper in a flame. 

Ronan woke on his back, which was knotted with pain and pressed against some uneven surface.  His head throbbed, and the first thing he smelled as he breathed in was burning leaves.  Hand gripped around the hilt of his katana, Ronan rose to his knees.

The chamber he found himself in was wrought of cracked stone; seams in the walls leaked dust and vines which snaked into the eyes and mouths of frescoes of wolf-headed creatures.  The air was damp and warm, and every breath echoed. 

Warfield and Felix both lay on the ground, unconscious.  Black smoke curled away from their bodies.  Ronan tried to stand, but weakness shot through his legs, and a wave of nausea rolled deep in his stomach and nearly doubled him over. 

Did we make it?

A stone door slid open with an ear-shattering groan.  Ronan lifted his blade as silhouettes appeared against a backdrop of jade light.  Human voices drifted through.  The light blurred his vision, but Ronan’s ears picked up the sounds of people entering the room, and even squinting he was able to make out guns and drawn bows.

A presence approached, powerful and familiar. 

“Ronan,” Cross said from the doorway.  “Jesus...”

“
Cross.”  He lowered the sword.  “You…you died.” 

It was the last thing he said before he passed out. 

interlude

the black

Dark seas boil.  The barrier cracks, ripples like the forks of a jagged sea.  The darkness building, roiling, one world to the next.

Unseen eyes of the horde gaze inward, blood and ice, burrowing white fire and acid cold.  Monstrous presences, but truly they are a single presence.  One made many, many made one.  A bulk of darkness pressed against the dome of worlds, black mirror walls stretching from impossible horizon to impossible horizon. 

Whispers cut like razors through substance so thick it could never be air.  Agony.  Their pain has carried on since the inception of time.  Shadow vapors and cold storms.

They wait at the border, tasting the promise of life on the other side, and it is intoxicating.  They want it, need it.  The very smell of an untainted reality makes their maws slaver with anticipation and need.

They are mass, a churning sea of black skin, a molten aggregate.  The flowing tide of onyx souls rises and falls against the boundary.  Liquid consciousness, histories of torment.  The barrier stretches, pulses, expands as the cracks grow and rain shards of iron dust.

It will never break, not from this side.  Their jailors made sure of that. 

They writhe in the dark sea, the liquid remains of the dead they’ve made.  Trapped in a bubbling void of the lost, an ocean of dead souls.

They writhe, twist, push, no longer possessed of a notion of identity.  If they were once individuals they have all since melted into one.  A dark singularity.

They are the Maloj.  The world destroyers.  Reduced to ash, burned and boiled down to a form from which they can never escape, constrained in this dismal prison, this oubliette for the damned.

Centuries pass.  The mindless sea shouts and slams against the translucent bonds of its world.  There’s no longer any semblance of multiplicity – they have corroded into a single mass, a murderous ooze of power and hate.

It has become The Black. 

Its rage and loathing know no bounds.  It pushes and howls, desperate to escape, to feed.  It knows it was once free, that it was many, the Maloj, destroyers of worlds.  Death’s messengers.  The solution to a universe that had grown fat and weak.

It will escape.  It is only a matter of time.  The Black has weakened the barrier as far as it can.  There’s nothing left to do now but wait.

Centuries pass.

The Black has watched worlds.  It has seen empires rise and topple, watches species and realities come and fade.  It witnesses the passage of history, the destruction of futures and pasts.  It sees the evolution of those who imprisoned it. 

It no longer has a identity outside of its collective and monstrous form, but it recalls what it was, the Maloj, wolf-headed arcanists who designed magic and weapons capable of bringing whole civilizations to their knees.  Their power was as legendary as their cruelty. 

Now, there is just The Black: a sea of worlds, a bubbling black void of darkness.  Planets drown in the morass.  Its waters span galaxies.  It submerges planes of existence and shards of time.

But still it is trapped.

It cannot consume, cannot conquer.  Once the Maloj had purpose, and reason behind their madness.  They had motive and drive, some call or destiny behind their need to destroy others. 

Those reasons are lost, but the drive is not.  The Black seeks to envelop all.  It was defeated and left in this horrifying state, but that won’t stop it.  Losing its identity has only given new life to its intent. 

It will escape.  And it will have revenge.

Centuries pass.

The Black watches, and waits.  It sees societies come and go, hungers for them, needs them.  Its desire to devour

We were something, once

is all it has.  There is nothing else. 

At last, it has its chance.

A crack.  Hairline at first, just a tiny flaw.  A nick in the face of the vast, dark prison.

The flaw grows, and The Black pushes against it.  A turgid flow of slimy liquid crashes against the barrier.  The crack jets out, a bolt of white against the unending wall of darkness. 

Sound.  There’s been nothing but the screams of the wounded for centuries, but now this crack, a glacier breaking, a rip. 

Wind howls through the void, cold and sharp.  It pulls open the sky like a cut. 

The darkness explodes with light.

The flaw widens and sunders the barrier, inch by inch.  To those on the other side it would seem like decades had passed, but The Black senses the damage instantaneously.  It’s waited so long for this moment.

The world wall shatters.

The explosion ripples out.  Diamond shards lance through the sky.  Much of the substance of The Black is destroyed by the tide of detonations as the barrier falls away.  But not all.

It leaks through like drips of caustic oil.  Over the course of further decades bits of the substance from one reality drip into the other. 

The Black finds itself in a grey landscape littered with bones, clouds of dark vapor and churning blood seas.  Flaming ships fall from a dark sky, and the pale and twisted trees are full with legions of armored warriors.  Distant fortress-cities bombard each other with bladed missiles and vortex cannons.  Creatures with armor and knives collide in valleys of black vapor and rot. 

Everything on this world is dead, yet the fighting rages.

The Black pushes through the hole between worlds, and comes into Malefia.  The realm of the vampires.

Centuries pass.

War rages. 

The vampires have battled amongst themselves for millennia.  Thousands have been slaughtered. 

Fields run thick with black blood and the iron seas boil with industrial grease.  War machines darken the sky.  Corpse flesh litters the landscape. 

The Black infiltrates this realm of devastation.  The consciousness attains individual forms, remembers what it was once like to be whole.  It remembers wars it fought before it became this collective entity of doom and retribution. 

Tendrils of liquid metal drive deep into the crust of the moldered earth.  Eyes melt into onyx sludge and gaze up at undead citadels and black domes.  It scrapes through necropolises and perches unseen on the towers of the damned.  Streets made of stitched flesh and flags of dripping skin flutter in the poison wind.

This world was not always such.  It was once a place of life and vitality, but years of meddling with dark forces has turned it to a cold, dank moor of pitiless battle and unceasing conflict.  Isolated fortress-cities trapped in mist-wreathed swamps pay homage to the vampire houses, petty fiefdoms ruled by decaying corpses from their thrones of gold and salt. 

The houses have fought for so long they can no longer recall what started their conflict, or why they still battle.  They know only that their enemies must be destroyed.

The unceasing conflict between the vampires is just what The Black needs.  It uses the undead houses against one another. 

The city-state of Karn is first.  The once-Maloj infiltrate the corpse-body of the ruling warlord and slay his advisers, then deploys the city’s considerable arsenal on the troops of Night Fortress.  The viscount Drakkal can’t deduce why Karn has attacked, but his viscount, Lady Chane, declares war on Karn. 

The vampires are cruel and barbaric creatures.  Their anger and rage is cold, but their lust to spill blood is never sated.  They need little reason to escalate their aggression.

The Black watches.  It’s not in any hurry.  It hungers for more, for other worlds populated with life, rather than death.  There are realms of beating hearts and lush trees, flowing water and rolling grass; places with sunshine and rain and vitality and life so thick The Black can almost taste the blood pumping and the hearts beating and breaths being drawn through that oily skin between worlds.

It wants those places.  It will use Malefia to get them.

Centuries pass.

The land is in ruin.  Fields of bodies smoke in the grey morning light.  Rivers run thick with industrial sludge left behind by broken war machines and burst fuel drums.  Once proud shrines and stone monuments now lie twisted and reduced to rubble.  Skin farms have been turned to craters, and spattered vampire remains grease the landscape.

A swath of devastation runs from Kel Doran to Blackmount, from the Talon River to the Sea of Blood.  Quiet vampire settlements, small adobe structures built into deep pits to help shield the inhabitants from the bright rays of the cold sun, fume with the smoke left behind by artillery blasts.  Broken blades are everywhere, and the tattered banners of long proud vampire bloodlines flutter in the frozen wind. 

Morag, Krune and Rath are the last three vampire nations left standing.  Everything else – the city-states, the country manors, the free-standing settlements and brothels and slave dens and borderlands outposts – have been destroyed by the war.  The ruin spreads further and wider than ever in Malefia’s history. 

The sky is black with smoke and blood.  Piers have collapsed and fallen into the sea.  Great barricades of bone and iron are gone.  Bodies and machines smother the icy grey landscape.  The air is a plague of industrial fumes and venemous vapor, and the roar of cannons sounds deep into the night. 

Once towering structures of stone and steel have fallen into chunks of smelted blood-soaked rock.  The cities were always quiet, for the dead make no noise, but now the air is rigid with disuse.  Dark clouds stain the sky, permanent rents in the fabric of Malefia’s reality.

Thousands of vampires have been destroyed, and millions of their slaves have been slaughtered. 

The Black watches.  There are a few who suspect its role in escalating the war to this level.  It hasn’t been difficult: the vampires were made for conflict.  They’d spent thousands of years destroying each other before The Black came.  The once-Maloj have merely helped things along, inhabiting the bodies of particularly war hungry leaders and initiating a few battles to drive the ongoing war. 

Once pushed, the dominoes fall easily. 

Black stars burn in the night when the final battle begins.  The necrotheurges of Krune have developed a bone-rimmed cannon that will launch catastrophic energies at Morag and burn it out of existence. 

A thousand vampire slaves are sacrificed in unison to lend the Zero Engine its fuel.  The bladed howitzer stands as tall as a tower, and its black core hums with necrotic oils which seep down from a bowl of metal at its zenith, where the slaves are crushed with great mandibles of steel and bone. 

Their screams ring through the night.  The sound of thousands of bones breaking at once echoes like a clap of thunder.

The Black waits.  Everything has built to this moment.

The blast of glacial flame rips apart the sky.  Blood rains down in virulent waves.  The dome cracks.

Darkness shifts.  The sky falls up, and the ground splits.  Liquid matter melts through the tapestry between worlds.  Acid fills the atmosphere with smoke.

The Zero Engine explodes.  The blast rips Krune apart in a volley of smoking metal and dead flesh that turns the countryside to white ash. 

Malefia shakes.  A chain of explosions erupts across the dead landscape, towering blasts of molten fume and burning oil.

The world crumbles.  The Black has won.

There is only one city-state left.

The leaders of Rath watch the devastation.  Their theurge-king has studied Krune’s weapon when it was still unclear who they’d fire on.  The more populated cities have been evacuated and moved into subterranean shelters, and Rath’s armies have been moved away from the more densely populated areas so they can strike into Krune territory.

The theurge-king stands amidst a network of bleeding skeletons, a web of sinew and calcified drapery that hums dissonant chords.  He listens to the song of the bones, feels the whispers pulse through his mind.  He’s manipulated the anatomy of the destroyed, culled the collected consciousness of the vampires under his command.  Their joined sibilant minds are linked to his own, and to the rest of the vampires of Rath.  It is an ancient art he’s resurrected, one forbidden by the rest of the vampire nations, but with so much at stake he knows he can’t afford to heed the wisdom of millennia past.

He is Daezarkian.  And it is by his will that his vampires survive.

He is a cruel and unforgiving lord.  He brokers no discordance within his dominion, and has little patience for his enemies.  Daezarkian is among the few who suspects other forces are at work in the war, that another entity has manipulated the vampire nations, though he can’t determine what that entity is.  No rebel force or band of vampire slaves has the strength or drive to organize such a sinister rebellion, and the utter annihilation of every vampire on Malefia serves no one, not even those they rule. 

He turns to his wife, Jadira.  She is his by arrangement, and was once part of the city-state of Thornn, a place known and in some circles ridiculed for allowing its human slaves to be educated and given opportunity, to be raised and trained so they could attain some semblance of station within the hierarchy.  There were certain jobs performed better by the living slaves, some duties they could better fulfill.