Vampire Down (Blood Skies, Book 7) (2 page)

They push deeper into the complex.  The incendiaries have done considerable damage to the entrance chamber and the surrounding halls.  Necrotic gases fill the icy tunnels, caustic green smoke which dissolves the frost-colored lead corridors and ice-rimed ceilings. 

His Shadowclaws are right on him, fangs hidden beneath iron cowls, black and red armor emanating poison vapors and frost smoke.  Rifles and sabers are out, pulsing with thaumaturgic light.

He hears motion, something stirring in the twisted dark.  Reaver holds his fist up, signaling the stop.  The motion isn’t necessary, something he does out of habit – they’re all mentally attenuated to one another, their thoughts and commands linked by the vampire whispers which constantly slice through their undead brains.  Even when Reaver doesn’t hear them they’re there, a cold presence clawing at the edge of his thoughts. 

The air is frozen.  They move down cold and jagged passages lit only by the dull pulse of jade lamps sputtering with electric chemicals.  The air is rancid due to the toxins released by the vampire volleys; if anything has escaped the actual blasts they’re unlikely to have survived the fallout. 

The place is a maze.  Networks of passages connect barracks and weapons storage rooms lined with maps and ancient drawings, arcane schematics scrawled on the walls in dark ink.  Everything lies beneath a layer of frost.  The men they killed upstairs were the only humans who’ve occupied this hideout for some time, as the other living quarters were evacuated at least seventy-two hours earlier. 

Their intel is old.  Lord Drake had hoped for a more successful strike, for a number of freshly poisoned bodies to be shipped back to the processing plants for reanimation and information extraction.  The incinerated corpses upstairs wouldn’t do.

How had they known?

It might have been a matter of inconvenient timing: the humans could have moved people out of this bunker not because of any advanced warning but because they shift survivors often and always keep people on the move to avoid detection.  Refugees who aren’t dug in with the Coalition or Meldoar have been forced to adopt a refugee existence, living in scattered underground camps or in hills and forests far removed from the ruins of their fallen cities, which are now garrisoned with undead sentries.  In spite of their reduced power base the human resistance – the White Children – have proved quite capable of disrupting supply lines and staging small-scale strikes against isolated vampire patrols searching for humans, or the last of the dreaded Maloj. 

Lord Drake desperately hopes to capture one of the resistance leaders.  The informant told them that the most important one – the White Mother’s heir apparent – had been in that bunker, and recently.  Lady Morganna has charged Drake to find her, and Drake has in turn landed that task squarely on Reaver’s shoulders.  He intends to succeed.

Halo echoes reconstructed by the passage of spirits play out in his mind as his squad navigates the labyrinth of halls.  The sensations are weaker so deep in the glacial complex.

The poison vapors thin and slowly dissipate.  Intel in no way indicated the complex would run so deep.  Reaver slows his pace, moves deliberate though the dripping dark.  The air is thick with vehicular fumes and frost smoke.  There’s no sound save for the creak of ice under their feet and the slithering whispers of the vampire collective. 

They come upon a crossroads of corridors which lead to stout iron doors secured with bands of rimed metal.  Hex diagrams scrawled on the wall indicate defensive patterns, thaumaturgic security measures set to dissuade intrusion. 

Reaver reaches to his belt for a small disc-shaped stone riddled with sharp protrusions.  Two clicks on the organic shell and the body comes to life with glittering blood light, shifting numeric patterns which click and whir like tiny saw blades.  Arcane pressure builds up inside the device, a rising hum of energies. 

He releases, and the weapon lands on the ground and shoots forward like it’s spring-wound.  Scuttling claws scrape cold against the floor as the undead lockpick scurries forth, a beetle carapace surrounding a mass of smoking organic matter.  Lights and key-codes pulse green and orange.  Reaver moves back, and his Shadowclaws follow suit. 

The lockpick reaches the first door and explodes in a rain of blinding sparks.  Soul-infused energies collide with spirit-laced wards, hex traps which lance across the hall in a razor-web of spectral netting.  The energies twist around each other, sizzling like meat put to the flame. 

Reaver holds himself ready for the blast.  A wave of ice-blue light flows out from the detonated lockpick, a spectral pulse of power that washes over him like a tide of rancid water. 

For just a moment his necrotic systems shut down.  He remains as he was, a revenant controlled by the Ebon Kingdoms, but his highly augmented body is powered by theurgic metals and black iron cybernetics, arcane materials tempered by soul magic and an internal lichflame engine fueled with wight’s-blood.  His iron eyes seal shut, his muscles go rigid, his joints lock.  For long and agonizing seconds he’s just a corpse. 

His mind keeps working.  He sees the woman again, blonde and pale, dying in his arms. 

Reaver comes back.  Gears shift and black blood pumps through his necrotized veins.  His eyes snap open just in time to see the warded doors come unsealed, and the guardians emerge.  A trio of iron-laced warriors, thaumaturgic constructs left to defend this nexus of frozen chambers.  They’re mongrels of arcane engineering, patchwork automatons of clay and metal and stone, crude homunculi rendered enormous through desperate experimentation.  Their faces are metal plates, their eyes glowing gemstones and rock.  Armor covers innards of wire and steel.  The golems emerge from doors leading off from the crossroads.  Two are bronzed, one is made of dark iron; two have fists laced with spikes, the third has a multitude of arms retrofitted with whirring blades. 

The Shadowclaws move fast, but not before the many-armed golem is on top of them.  Metal saws through undead flesh, and pale blood splashes on the wall.  Gunfire rings out.  Reaver’s auditory senses protect themselves as metal seals over his ears to prevent damage to his vulnerable central brain cortex.  He raises a jagged shield just in time to deflect a fist-strike from one of the golems.  He and his vampires close back-to-back-to-back in defensive position.  The roar of bone rifles echoes through the narrow hall and the air fills with smoke.  Incendiary bullets and explosive needles lance into iron shells. 

Reaver moves with supernatural speed and grace.  Instinct drives him, training from some former life, maybe many former lives.  He ducks and jabs, blade piercing a gap in the automaton’s armor and severing filtration cords and metal cables.  Waves of plasma heat pulse into the golem’s innards and fuse the metal joints shut, rendering the arm useless. 

Ice-white pyramid targeting matrices slide over his shadow-infused vision.  Reaver reaches down and blasts the ground with incendiary needles which ricochet up and into the golem’s unprotected undercarriage.  Riveting explosions shift its insides, dull collisions of malfunctioning gears which send smoke up through the widening cracks in the armor.  By the time Reaver turns to assist his team his opponent is failing, the gears shutting down.

They make short work of the others.  The air is thick with smoke and the stench of grease, and the halls are strewn with gory paste and machinery parts.  He steps over automaton guts to investigate the newly opened chamber.  Two are merely sentry stations, glorified closets housing networks of tubes and fuel pump hook-ups for the golems to recharge and rest until their safe-guards are triggered.  The third chamber is larger, the remnants of some sort of warehouse or storage locker.  A central pit in the mist-shrouded chamber leads to a deep network of grilled cages housing old engines and bilge pumps.  Part of the room provides the life-support capabilities for the hideaway, a network of filters and arcane-powered drivers which supply air, heat and water, but not all of the machines are for sustenance – Reaver’s vampire tech sensors scroll messages noting resonant hex fields and thermal generators, heat signatures from spectral explosives.

The White Children had been building weapons, not hand-held armaments or personal thaumaturgic supplies but items with massive destructive potential: hex bombs, plasma spikes, arcane bangalores, ripper shells.  It’s Fane technology, but primitive, stolen, for the White Children haven’t worked with the East Claw Coaltion since the early days after the fall of the Southern Claw.

Reaver walks through the room, skirting dangling chains and shelves packed with broken down weapons, assault rifles, grenades, arcane gauntlets stripped of their casings, components harvested to be used in other, more powerful tools.

Spectral images fold across his vision.  One of the people killed above had been there in those deep and secret chambers, and information ripped from the fleeing spirit confirms what Lord Drake had guessed: she’d been there, the leader of the resistance.  Reaver briefly sees her, pale blue skin and coal black hair, rune-addled arms and ice-solid eyes.  Even in the reconstructed vision her body is wreathed with power and presence.  She appears only for a moment, a fleeting vision who walks across the chamber accompanied by men-at-arms wearing patchwork armor and mismatched weapons.  They mention a place, somewhere of import they’ve finally found. 

A city.  Bloodhollow.

He knows of it, a human outpost, one desperately sought by all sides of the war: the White Children, the Ebon Kingdoms, New Koth, the East Claw Coalition.  It is a bastion of hope for the living and the key to power for the dead, some mythical destination of future or past significance.  Weylines intersect there, temporal channels.  Something did or will occur there. 

He knows the vampires must reach it before the White Children. 

The range of the ghost vision fades, but Reaver obtains coordinates.  It is deep underground, at the edge of contested territory east of the Loch.

Reaver runs his gauntleted hand across layers of dust and frost barely a day old.  She was there recently, which means she isn’t far ahead of him. 

Memories nag at the edge of his mind.  He sees her again – the woman, dying in the dark.  He weeps over her.  He ignores it: remnant memories from his human life will only distract him. 

A schematic flashes across his vision, commands accompanied by the harsh whispers of the vampire nations.

NEW DIRECTIVE, they say.  PROCEED TO BLOODHOLLOW.

“And what of the woman?” Reaver says, his voice hoarse, burdened by damaged and rotting vocal cords that have never been properly reconstructed, even if reanimation all but halted the process of deterioration. 

APPREHEND, the voices command.  Reaver glimpses the source of the whispers, a mist-wreathed chamber of blood and blades, silver darkness and iron moonlight.  Eyes in the dark peer into him, look through him.  He feels his lost soul twisted in a clawed and iron-tight grip.  RENDEZVOUS WITH HARPY AT STATION ONE-ONE SIX, BASILISK CLAW, the voices command.  OBTAIN REINFORCEMENTS.  PROCEED TO BLOODHOLLOW.

And then the voices are gone, and Reaver and his team take their leave. 

He can’t get the image of the dying girl out of his mind. 

ONE

AFTER

Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

Cross woke with a start.  He bolted upright, and it took him a moment to find his bearings, for the familiarity of his surroundings to sink in.  His heart pounded hard in his chest and his throat was raw. 

The tent flapped in the dry cold wind, and a chill ran up his skin.  He could feel the desolate emptiness of their surroundings, the barren and lifeless wastelands beyond their camp there at the edge of The Reach.

Danica stirred next to him.  Her hair was tussled across her face, pasted there with sleep sweat.  It was still strange to Cross that he couldn’t sense her spirit, wound as it was within the bloodsteel arm which clicked and whirred as she shifted beneath the green army blanket they shared.  His hand was on her bare stomach, feeling her warmth.  Exhaustion swept through him, but it was a good exhaustion, not the endless weariness that came from running, fighting, never finding rest.

Their first time making love a few nights ago had been like that – desperate, driven, both of them possessed of a furious lust.  They might not have said it, but for all either of them knew they’d be dead soon, and they’d been pushing each other away for far too long.  Cross had been shaking the entire time, but he’d never felt so alive.  He’d lasted much longer than he’d had any right to, and later they lay there on the bedroll, with the scratchy and uncomfortable fabric clinging to them and their hair tangled together and the smell of sex all around them.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her, didn’t dare, in case she wasn’t there when he woke up.

And yet he dreamed of those he’d failed.

Cross shook his head, trying to drive away thoughts of those he’d lost.  Nothing could be gained by going there.  Madness waited all around them, in every square yard of the bleak wastes they found themselves trapped in, and to worry about his past failings would be a sure way to drive himself completely insane.  The dead were gone, and they weren’t coming back, and that was all there was to it.  He had to let them go.

Easier said than done.

Cross snuck away from the blankets and pulled on his trousers and shirt, then found an armored jacket while he quickly put on his boots.  Creasy’s shotgun was there on the ground, so Cross checked to make sure it was loaded, strapped the scabbard holding Soulrazor/Avenger to his back, and slipped outside.