Cross pulled his spirit back to shield them as they passed through the drift of black dust. She withdrew from the edge of the massive chamber, which for some reason was difficult for her to penetrate, and she arched her form over Cross and Ronan’s heads as they walked into the new series of corridors.
Vampires waited for them. Cross cursed his spirit, and for a moment he wondered why she hadn’t detected the undead presence, but a glimpse at their attackers revealed why.
Five vampires in Ghoststeel armor, which made them all but invisible to arcane detection, seemed to step straight out of the pale walls. The passage ahead led into the massive chamber that Cross had sensed before, while the other halls led off to obscurity.
Cross swept his spirit ahead and used her to block a barrage of gunfire, which she scattered into a shower of sparks.
Ronan dove and ducked beneath a bone scimitar, then came up and severed a vampire’s arm at the elbow. Cross fired both pistols into the Creed as his spirit fell on the undead as a shower of acid rain.
“
Go!” Ronan shouted.
More vampires emerged from around the corner. Ronan drew his MP5 and fired into the mob while he used the katana in his off-hand and ran another vampire through.
“
Are you nuts?”
“
I’ll hold them!” Ronan shouted.
Dark steel panels with razor-edged points, like a set of massive steel jaws, converged to meet at the center of the open doorway that led to the large chamber. The two ends would close and seal the way in another few seconds.
Cross’ heart pounded. He wrapped his spirit around his body and flung himself up and through the rapidly closing gap between the panels. He lost direction, clenched his teeth and sealed his eyes as he flew forward, expecting to be maimed.
Instead, he landed hard on the other side of the door just moments before it sealed with only a minor cut in his leg and a pain in his ribs where his body had struck the ground.
Cross was out of breath. He took a moment to gather himself, stood up, and looked around.
“
Oh….crap.”
THREE
AVATARS
Cross found himself in a chamber of dead girls.
Deep pits filled with dark fluid filled the breadth of the enormous room in a grid-like pattern. The body of a young woman hung suspended over each vat. Each corpse dangled from a network of dark chains that ran like a massive web across the cathedral-like ceiling.
Each body was pale-haired and pale-skinned, nude and not entirely human. The flesh was moldered and grey, and each corpse was latched to at least a dozen hooks in her shoulders, torso and outstretched arms. Black fluid, like grisly oil, dripped off the bodies and into the vats.
The room smelled of formaldehyde and disinfectant. Dark vapor curled in the freezing air.
“
What the hell…?”
Cross stepped closer. A narrow series of walkways ran through the system of open pools. The sound of clanking chains drowned out the distant wail of klaxons and the roar of groaning machines.
He heard dread whispers in the air, not spirits, but something less alive, a subtle dirge that made his flesh tingle. He felt moisture on his skin, the result of a gritty black mist born of the substance in the vats.
Cross wiped away a slick ebon sheen from his face, and he silently thanked Ash again for the inhalant protection. He doubted he’d be alive without it.
A tall obelisk made of gold and black steel stood at the center of the room. It was like an idol, lost in the mass of suspended bodies. The slashed eye symbol of the Ebon City of Rath had been chiseled onto its face. The obelisk was roughly twenty-feet high and segmented, as if meant to break apart. A short control panel was on the floor in front of the structure.
I must be hanging out with Kane too much
, Cross thought as he stepped onto the walkway and made his way towards the panel.
I usually rely on
him
to do something this stupid.
He had one gun drawn, and his spirit wound tightly around his open hand like a whirlwind gauntlet. The air felt sharp, and tasted like melting wax. Cross moved carefully between the vats. The floor was slick with dark grease and necrotic oil, and he had to move his feet with great care to make sure that he didn't fall into one of the ebon pools.
The female corpses all stared forward with glassy eyes. Up close, Cross saw that each of the dangling bodies bore an identical set of trace scars on the lower right abdomen and in twin spots on their backs, wounds that were separate from where the thick chains hooked into their white-blue flesh. The corpses’ sickly hair hung in wet clumps, but the oil was somehow clear while it was still on their bodies: it turned dark and slick as it dripped from their rigid toes and rained into the pools, as if leaving the bodies allowed the liquid to return to its natural ebon state.
All that Cross could hear was the fall of blood oil and the echoing clank of chains. The bodies surrounded him. His heart hammered in his chest. His skin was electric with tension, and he imagined dead fingers dancing up and down his spine. At any moment he expected the bodies to shift, for their eyes to snap open and for a room full of the chained and dangling dead to snap to life and tear him apart.
But they didn't, and Cross had nearly made it to the central obelisk when it dawned on him why the army of identical dead girls looked so familiar to him. It was only a vague sense of recognition, like something glimpsed in a half-remembered dream.
Each of them looked just like the Woman in the Ice.
Cross had only met the enigmatic woman once, in a cavern deep beneath the icy ruins of Karamanganji. To the best of his admittedly limited understanding, she was an avatar of some sort of other-worldly goddess, as was the White Mother, the unseen but highly revered leader of the Southern Claw.
What did it mean that the Ebon Cities were constructing a host of bodies, presumably set for reanimation, that looked identical to the White Mother?
Nothing good.
Cross made it to the control panel without incident. His criminal witch contact, Warfield, had provided him with a
codestone
, a device that contained a host of purloined Ebon Cities’ access codes and bypass algorithms, and it had proved invaluable in getting them as far as they had without tripping every alarm in the Bonespire. Cross set the scarab-shaped device against the panel and depressed the metal buttons at its edges. The dark screen on the device lit with blood-colored vampire script, High Jlantrian text that looked like collapsing insects and flaming hieroglyphs. The letters cycled and rotated while the lock-pick hummed like a diminutive outboard motor. Cross fingered his HK, and kept his spirit close by.
He sensed nothing from the bodies: no life, no energy signature, and certainly nothing near the level of arcane power he'd once been granted by the Woman in the Ice to use against her enemy, the dark shadow entity called The Sleeper. These bodies were just bodies, at least for the moment.
Cross waited. His worried about Ronan, and the rest of the team.
Focus
.
The
codestone
beeped quietly, and the obelisk rumbled. Heavy iron gears groaned with an echoing resonance. Diagonal lines across the face of the obelisk pulled apart, and the bronze and gold-plated iron opened and revealed a largely hollow space that billowed grey vapors. When the smoke cleared, all that occupied the interior of the short tower was a three-foot tall cylinder of bone that hovered a few inches above the ground. The cylinder radiated sick heat, and it bore the stamp of Rath.
Cross moved forward carefully. His spirit swirled around him and probed the defensive vapors, only to recoil at the dead voices. The dangerous and uncontrolled energies leaked toxic whispers that made the air violently unstable.
He sees a black keep at the edge of a black sea. Vampires frozen in walls of clear ice. Women without eyes. A sword of black steel cut through with red veins. An archway of rune-cast iron in a mountain clearing. A city that falls into a false sun. A maelstrom of screaming skin. A battle at the edge of a crater.
Cross reached for the cylinder. The air around it was so cold and heavy it was like reaching through slush.
"I wouldn't do that."
Cross turned around. The speaker had not been there even a moment before. Cross’ spirit had noted no approach or presence. It was if the tall and lean man who spoke to him had literally appeared out of nothingness.
The man was olive-skinned and draped in a crimson leather trench coat. He was incredibly gaunt, and had thin and spidery finders. One eye was covered by a small metal plate that appeared to have been bolted to his skull; the other was not an eye at all, but a black gem that ebbed and throbbed with subtle power. He wore fingerless gloves the same color as his coat and a slavery bracelet on each wrist, and the thin silver chains from the bracelets were hooked to a number of bladed rings on his fingers. A dark iron ring pierced his nose, and his cheeks were covered with twisted Jlantrian runes. The man’s thin goatee parted to reveal a grim and fanged smile.
Cross recognized the man from the military’s MOST WANTED files: Cranos Thane, a Southern Claw defector who performed grisly experiments and operations on behalf of the Ebon Cities, and a converted vampire.
Cross didn’t hesitate. The second HK leapt into his hand, and Cross used his spirit to shield himself as he blasted away at point-blank range with both enchanted pistols. The air exploded with arcane gunfire. Shell casings clattered to the ground and bounced into the bubbling pools of black liquid. Cross smelled brimstone and gunsmoke.
Not a single shot hit home. Thane lifted a hand and somehow evaporated every magic-infused bullet that came at him. They melted against an invisible shield.
He’s a mage?
Cross sensed nothing, and his spirit noted no other presences anywhere nearby. Something wasn’t right.
“
Surprised?”
A second voice came from behind him. Just like Thane, this woman – she was tall and athletic, with dark leather armor crafted in the fashion worn by The Revengers, and she had pale skin and blonde hair that fell in curly waves behind her back – emanated nothing that his spirit could register. As far as Cross could tell, she not only had no magic, but she wasn’t even
there
.
Cross turned and fired, but the woman was faster. She scissor-kicked his right elbow and sent his gun splattering into a pool. His spirit moved in to protect him, but she was thrown back. The woman wasn’t a witch, but something had intervened to protect her, some arcane force he couldn’t detect...
Stop trying to figure things out, you moron. Do something, before you die.
Cross’ spirit tore against the woman, but a shield was raised that deflected the attack. Shards of magical force collided in sparks of corrosive rainbow matter. Cross’ spirit recoiled and pulled back, and she curled and twisted like a writhing tidal wave.
Arcane power hammered forward. Cross focused his spirit into a keen edge around the tip of his bone blade as he threw it.
He sensed Thane’s power manifest around his body, and for the first time got a clear read of what he was up against. Thane wasn’t a warlock: he manipulated the power of the Bonespire itself, somehow acted as a conduit, a channel for energies that flowed through his undead body like it was a conductor.
Cross’ weapon slammed into the woman’s shield with audible force. A lightning crack sounded in the room. The woman was thrown back into the air but then flew back at him. Power covered her body in a corona of white flame. Cross raised his spirit and formed a shield just in time.
Thane cast smoking black tendrils of freezing force. They wrapped around Cross’ legs and held him. He sliced backwards and severed the tentacles with his blade, but that effort pulled his focus away from the woman just long enough that his shield buckled, and he was thrown off balance and knocked to his knees.
She stood over him. Her right arm was bound in a silver and iron gauntlet that crackled with arcane power. The flames spun round her body in a ghastly whirlwind of pale fumes. The power of the Bonespire covered her with an energy signature that masked everything about her and kept her presence hidden from arcane detection.
That shield wavered. For just a split second, Cross saw the woman’s features change.
She looked just like the bodies – the dead avatars.
What the hell is going on?!
Cross lashed out, but Thane struck him with a bubble of necrotic energy. The woman’s gauntleted arm came down on the back of Cross’ head. Pain flashed through his skull, and his vision swam. He fell prone. A boot heel slammed against his back and pressed him hard against the floor.
The black fluid bubbled inches away from his face. The smell of tar and rot filled his mouth, and the air raced from his lungs. The world seemed to shift and turn beneath him.