Kane’s face was covered in gray blood. His eyes were vacant and haunted.
Danica Black battled a hellishly fast Lith warrior. The female Lith was light and thin and armed with a double-bladed spear adorned with human hair and chain grips. Black moved like a serpent, agile and strong. She wore dark leather armor and yielded twin swords. Her spirit whirled around her in a protective barrier of spinning blades. Dead wind circled the arena floor as the women darted in and out of the maze of bodies left from the earlier battles. Blades sparked and spun off of one another. Cross wasn’t sure if the Lith used magic, or if she was just incredibly agile. In the end it didn’t matter: Danica skewered the woman on both of her blades and held her bleeding body upright as she died.
Like Kane, something seemed dead inside of her.
They’re killing us slowly. Each of us dies a little with every life we take.
They could keep going, keep fighting, and they would. Presumably they would be freed at some point. That was the deal she had made, wasn’t it? Cross couldn’t even remember anymore.
All he knew was that if he didn’t fight and win, Dillon suffered.
They showcased the prisoners before every series of matches. Most of the prisoners were new. The cast changed as the gladiators did. Old prisoners were discarded or killed when their accompanying fighters failed, and new prisoners replaced them as new gladiators arrived. Every victim was tied to a fighter. Every gladiator had someone to win for besides themselves.
Dillon looked sick, and wracked with pain. He still gave that same knowing and brotherly nod every time Cross looked at him. In a way, it would have been better if Dillon had looked at him with hate or despair, but he didn’t.
He still believes that we have a chance. That, or he just wants
me
to believe it.
Cole was wasting away. Cross still had not seen Ekko, not once, and yet Kane battled like a man possessed.
He couldn’t think about it too much. It was his turn to fight.
Cross was matched with a pair of Gorgoloth armed with heavy stones bound to lengths of black chain. Their stark manes and sharp fangs made them stand out against the midnight chamber that surrounded them. Cross tried to keep them both in sight. They looped the flat stones in the air and growled, spaced themselves apart to try and flank him. His spirit laced herself tight to his skin, stuck to him as if with needles. The pain she caused kept him alert and angry. He felt her bloodlust course through his blood. His normally shaking nerves steadied, cooled like smelted iron dipped in water. He kept her close, and her cold radiated through his hands and across his chest.
The first Gorgoloth shouted out and charged, which signaled the other to attack from the flanking position. Cross released his spirit on the Gorgoloth behind him. She fell on the brute like a hail of explosive nails, while Cross met the other one head on.
Cold explosions detonated behind him. He heard screams and felt bits of fleshy matter as they rained down.
The other Gorgoloth swung its stone too wide, as it hadn’t expected Cross to step in to its attack. Cross severed the chain with a clean blow and raked the bone blade across the creature’s face. It howled in pain and grasped at its ruined eye. Cross called his spirit back from the cold and steaming remains of her victim. She swam to his blade and sheathed it in razor shadows, a humming ebon layer of dripping volcanic metal.
He cut the Gorgoloth in half with a single blow.
Cross returned to his place in the circle of gladiators. Time had lost meaning. He didn’t know how many fights he’d already won. When the match was over, after every battle had been fought, the gladiators were led back to their cold and featureless cells, stripped of their weapons along the way.
Cross saw the normally placid crowd descend upon the bodies as the gladiators left. The prisoners whose respective fighters had failed were added to the mix, dropped screaming from the hanging stone, and they crashed down hard on the ground to be consumed by a horde of aristocratic vampires turned suddenly ravenous.
Cross started to hear that noise wherever he went: smacking lips, tearing flesh, slurping blood. It turned his stomach sour.
Whenever he isn’t fighting, he is here with her, in the Reach.
The land is a ruin. Plumes of smoke dance into the sky and gather in an inverted ocean that cancels the sun.
They hunt. He is armed with his bone blade, its edge sharp and black. His hunting partner is armed with small knives that are always bloody, even when they find nothing.
What do we hunt?
You’ll know.
The area is caustic due to mounds of Gorgoloth cadavers and the hexed fuel that leaks from the wrecked airship. The air tastes of dirt and metal.
They traverse streams of black water. The air is unnaturally still. The sky beyond the dead trees is pale red and eye-numbing. Loose stones and broken logs glisten with foul moisture.
They run. He feels the shadow in the trees and in the sky. The presence is oppressive, overwhelming.
He hears Dillon scream somewhere beyond the trees. He wants to kill something, to hurt it. It is the only way he can think of to make that pain stop.
No.
Part of him, something deep inside, knows that this is not right, that he shouldn’t be here. Something about this new bond he shares with this woman is wrong. But he runs with her nevertheless, taken by need. They jump over festering streams and run through dead woods. They move separately, and yet they are joined.
Bound together by blood spilled, and yet to spill.
They brought him women. At first Cross didn't want them. He hadn't asked for them, and he was distrustful of anything offered by the Ebon Cities. And it felt wrong, for some reason, like there was someone he'd betray by taking terrified slave girls who’d been snatched from their homes, and who were likely as malnourished and exhausted as he was.
But his lust built. It had been some time since he'd been with a woman, and before long the lure of having one was too much for Cross to resist. He felt he'd hate himself for it later, even if he didn't know why.
Cross wasn't sure of how many women they brought him, always after fights. Like the battles themselves, the memories quickly blurred, and faded. He remembered faces and warm tongues, tangles of red and black and blonde hair and the feel of soft breasts in his hands and on his tongue.
He lost time. He might have been fighting and whoring and sleeping for years.
At one point Tega Ramsey was in his cell again. Cross felt like he'd just woken, that he'd just walked into a conversation that had been going on for some time.
Ramsey looked at him with his usual cruel eyes, filled with amusement at another's expense.
“
Why?” Cross asked, not entirely sure what he asked. Ramsey seemed unfazed.
“
Because you've done well,” he answered. “You've become quite popular among the vampire crowd who fly in from Rath and Sethia to watch the matches. The way you channel your spirit through that blade…they call you Razor.”
Later still. It might have been the same conversation, Cross couldn't tell. He knew that Ramsey had told him things about himself, like the fact that he'd been a servant of the Ebon Cities ever since the surrender of Dirge, where he'd apparently been someone of import. He hated the job, hated sharing information with Talos Drake and Morganna, but he had little choice.
“
We do whatever we have to do to survive.” Cross didn't know he'd said it aloud until he saw Ramsey's confused expression. “How long?” he asked the Gol.
Ramsey didn't seem to want to answer. Yellow sunlight filtered through the bars in the door. Cross didn't need to see the undead sentries who waited outside to know that they were there. He smelled them.
“
Your next battle is a rematch with Tower,” Ramsey answered. He in no way hinted that Cross and the others would be released after that. Cross considered killing Ramsey, but decided it would serve no purpose. He felt sure he could destroy the sentries outside, too, but after that it would be difficult to escape. He had others beyond himself to think about.
Dillon. Dillon is in pain
.
Ramsey left. The golden light faded fast. Soon it would be night full, and again he would have to fight. The thought filled him with dread, and suddenly the pain and welts and wounds he'd suffered over the course of those days or weeks came surging back to him. Somehow, even without his spirit there to aid him at any time except during the fights in the arena, his body had healed.
Cross slept. It was the easiest way to avoid thinking about the coming night.
She waits for him. Whatever they hunt is fast, and it melts into the shadows of the deep woods.
A storm rises behind them, frosted air and sharp winds. Dank blue clouds hang petrified in the chiseled sky. The shadow is there, too, looming larger than before. It pursues them.
They hunt something, or someone, and the shadow, in turn, hunts them.
His spirit is afraid, but she is also exhilarated. She is taken by the heat and lust of the hunt. Her form is wrapped around his arms and his weapons in a cloak of black steam. She circles him like a charcoal cloud and trails his movement like exhaust. He moves immolated across the dreamscape.
His cohort moves at his side. Her clothing is pale and ragged, but her dark blades are drawn. She still bleeds
–
she always bleeds
–
but the blood flows slower the faster she moves.
They cut a swath through the tress. Hoarfrost and brittle branches break away before them. White honey drips onto the path. There are signs of passage. They hunt some large and wounded animal that bleeds light. Traces of phosphorescent steam lick the dirt and stone.
Something growls in the sky. The earth rattles. He senses a presence behind them. There are more hunters. Not the shadow in the sky
–
these new beings are from the other world, the mountain.
No. The other world is the city. The real world.
Worlds upon worlds, all of them in his or someone else’s mind. He is lost. The sky splits, cuts open like a seam. He smells the blood of ages seep through the cracks. Everything is less stable. He feels as if they could fall off of the surface of the dream world and into the mud-colored sky.
Branches claw and snag at their clothing. They stop. She is weak, and she turns to him, takes him in her arms, and embraces him. They kiss passionately. He feels energy flow into her through her nectar-sweet tongue. He feels wounds on his neck re-open and pour blood down his arms.
This is wrong. I can’t stop her.
They hunt again. Their pursuers are close, as is the shadow in the sky. Trees uproot and float into the air. Everything is breaking, coming undone. Soon it will all collapse.
They follow blood that is light, drops of liquid sun that burn the ground. They step through puddles of oil and bone sand.
Their prey is there. He stands alone at the center of a black lake with a surface like cracked steel. Dark smoke flows endlessly from a deep wound in the frozen surface, and it forms a pillar that twists like a serpent into the sky. The lake’s glacial smell turns his lungs raw and makes his skin burn.
He looks at the man they have hunted. He is exhausted and half-alive. He slumps down to his knees at the middle of the lake. His wounds bleed light.
Lucan.
He looks at the woman he has hunted with, the one who bit him, and at last he knows her, even though her eyes are sunken and her skin has taken on the pallor of death.
Ekko.
We have to save him,
she says, but her words are mist
. I’m sorry. It was the only way I could show you. It’s the only way I’ve been able to survive.
The shadow behind them grows larger, a black moon that swallows the sky. Silhouettes of armed vampires appear in the distance as they cut their way through the disintegrating forest. The ground pulls apart into jagged stones. The ice cracks and the shadow falls like a monstrous wave of black water. It envelops them.
“
He’s alive,” Cross whispered.
He sat up. Tension that had coiled up in his back threatened to snap him in two. Sharp pain gripped his stomach. Dusk approached, and the light faded fast. Cross couldn’t remember when he’d fallen asleep, or how long he’d slept.
The air was cold and tasted of sweat. The shadows were long on the pale walls. He heard someone scream in the distance, and close by he heard the rattle of chains. Cross threw his legs off the side of his lumpy cot, cracked the muscles in his neck, pissed in a pot in the corner, and drank from the water skin that had been left on a hook on the wall. He stretched his body, placed himself in plank position and held until his muscles were sore and sweat flowed onto the stone. The ground was cool and soothing to the touch, so he stayed there for a time, lying like a corpse.