Black went to Cole and embraced her. Cole held her in return, but Cross noticed that she was the one to break away, and she quickly moved to help the others.
Kane was covered in Gorgoloth blood. His visage was grim. He’d been watching the doorway when they appeared, his eyes set and sad. He seemed to know what he would see even before they’d emerged.
Regardless, when he saw Ekko, the strength seemed to drain out of him. He fell to his knees and bent over her body, and he hovered there as if held by puppeteer’s strings. Tears welled up in his eyes. He pressed his head against hers, and spoke to her quietly.
Kane stroked her hair in his hands, and softly kissed her forehead.
They left the lovers alone.
Outside, the world was held in the grip of a frozen wasteland. The air was bitter, cold and raw. Cross shivered the moment he stepped into the street.
He looked west, and saw no shadow there. They’d won.
Then why doesn’t it
feel
like it?
he wondered.
Where’s that sense of victory you’re supposed to get when you win a major battle? Where’s the sense that’s it over, that everything is going to be all right?
Cross felt none of that. He felt like he’d been thrust into the middle of something he hadn’t understood, and that he’d taken part in a battle that wasn’t really his.
He thought about his childhood. He thought about his sister and his mother, of a life when everything made sense. He’d never really had a period of his life like that, and he knew it. But he felt better believing that he had.
“
What’s that?” Black asked. He jumped at the sound of her voice. She stood just behind him, staring with him out at the frozen city. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying.
“
What’s what?”
“
That sword.”
Cross had forgotten it was even in his hand. It felt light, like a shard of plastic, and the magnetic draw it had held before was gone. It was just a blade now, incredibly thin, something like a piece of frosted sea glass carved into the shape of a predator’s tooth. It was made of magic, but it bore no magic of its own.
“
Just something I’ll carry with me,” he said.
They stood quietly in the cold wind.
“
Lucan’s power,” Black said after a time. “It’s gone.” Cross just nodded. “So it’s over.”
“
I guess so,” he said. He looked at her. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.
Black smiled. And then, unbidden, her tears flowed.
“
Cole is leaving me,” she said quietly. “We’d just split up before…before Cradden took her. I was ready to let her go, but…I didn’t want anything to happen to her.” She wiped away her tears. “After all I’ve done for her…she’s still going to leave.” She straightened herself. “I’m…sorry, about Dillon…”
Cross didn’t know what to say. He remembered the rage and the fury he’d harbored towards her. He remembered wanting to kill her –
vowing
to kill her – once it was all over. He remembered why.
He’d
always
remember why.
But he looked into her face, and he saw the truth of her pain. So he just nodded.
“
I’m sorry, too,” he said.
They both stood there for a while, waiting for something else to happen. When nothing did, they gathered themselves and went back inside to find Kane.
Ekko was dead and gone. She did not Turn, as they’d feared she might. Lucan’s power had somehow prevented that as she’d passed: it granted her a peaceful death.
Kane sat quietly for a long time, even after Cross and Black came and found him. He was hunched in the corner, watching Ekko’s body like he expected it to rise.
“
So,” he eventually said in a cracked voice. “Did we win?”
Cross and Black exchanged a look.
“
Yeah,” Cross said.
Kane looked at Black.
“
Are you going to take me back to Black Scar?” he asked quietly.
Danica looked at the floor. The air was still, and cold. Every motion echoed.
“
No,” she said. “Even if I was going back, I wouldn’t take you.” She looked at him, and then at Cross. “I’m sorry,” she said. Cross was starting to get used to seeing her vulnerable. He didn’t like it.
They waited quietly. The approach of the Bloodhawk outside rattled the air and shook the icy walls. Kane stood, and threw a blanket over Ekko’s body.
“
So what now?” he asked.
Cross looked at the wall. He swore that he’d seen a spider there, crawling across the ice.
He’d already been entertaining the notion since he and Black had talked outside. Now, he knew he had to go through with it.
“
Well,” he said. “I take it you two don’t have any plans?”
“
Does learning to live with a price on your head count?” Black said grimly. She’d be marked for death for leaving the Revengers: they all knew that. Even if she hadn’t hijacked a prison airship, commandeered men without authorization and stolen prisoners, the Revengers didn’t take lightly to its former members running around outside of Black Scar when they knew so many of the prison’s secrets. They also weren’t bound to appreciate the strains that Black’s capture and the subsequent destruction of Krul would place on Revenger-Ebon Cities relations.
“
I’m booked,” Kane said with a straight face. He’d been a laborer, a prisoner, or a gladiator all of his life. Being an escaped inmate from both Krul and Black Scar wasn’t bound to help him make many easy friends. Like Black, he had nothing left, and nowhere else to go.
Cross looked at each of them in turn, and took a breath.
“
Come with me.”
TWENTY-THREE
DAWN
Somehow, the camel made it.
They found it on their way out of the Reach, when they flew back towards Thornn in the repaired Bloodhawk. Cross hated to pull rank on Crylos, especially with as many men as 1
st
and 2
nd
Platoon has lost, but he needed to get back and speak with Elias Pike right away, and since Crylos had already indicated that he and his troops had been given over to Cross’ authority for the duration of the mission, the warlock decided to bring them out of harm’s way while he got to where he needed to go.
And there was the damn camel, wandering across the wastelands. It looked none the worse for wear. It had somehow been shed of its pack – likely tundra nomads or scavengers had helped relieve it of its burden – and it didn’t look terribly happy when Cross ordered the Bloodhawk to set down, but for some reason it didn’t run, and it waited, chewing and snarling and standing there with its dual humps and its horrid teeth. It bore no markings, so there was no way that Cross could actually identify it, and yet he knew it was his. If nothing else, there couldn’t have been that many solitary Bactrian camels wandering around the Reach who’d stand still and nuzz at Cross while he landed, approached, and coaxed the creature into the ship’s hold.
“
Really?” the deck officer asked as Cross brought it aboard.
“
Absolutely,” Cross said with a smile. “He’s part of my team.”
Thornn was as he remembered it, which was good considering it had been some months since he'd been there. It was difficult for Cross, sometimes, to go back. So many memories attached him to the city, memories of people he'd lost.
Cross stared out of the Bloodhawk’s window as they approached Thornn. He saw the city's arcane wires and sandstone and its iced outer walls as the ship circled and made its descent. Pillars of blue-white flame burst forth from industrial chimneys and lit the dawn like funeral pyres. Thick concertina wire electrified with pale crimson energies surrounded the city like steel brambles. Obelisk towers made from black iron bore automated chain guns that rotated back and forth and ensured clear skies. Gargoyle sentries floated through the blood red air like enormous birds.
Cross remembered the gargoyles of Krul, and before they'd even touched down he was shaking.
The Bloodhawk landed on the platform atop the massive hospital headquarters of the Southern Claw military that were stationed in Thornn. The sky was filled with islands of menacing red clouds, and the air tasted of industrial smoke and the particular ice-dry odor of the Reach.
Rotating lights caught Cross, Black and Kane in flashes of yellow and white as they stepped off of the ship. It was still dark enough that shadows wreathed their faces.
Cross stepped to the edge of the building and looked out over the city. He peered into canyons of tall and dark buildings, a network connected with wires. He saw homunculi fly through the air with missives or messages, trying not to crash into birds or each other. He saw telescopes and antennas, clotheslines and stargazers on balconies, all protected by armed gargoyle sentries who perched on strategically placed towers, motionless in their classic statue stances. He saw small armored dirigibles float over the space between the buildings, lightweight vessels manned by Gol aeronauts and equipped with silvered harpoons and bags of holy water. He saw the farms positioned along the northwestern section of the city, fields of green and orange and red shielded by reinforced arcane glass and patrolled by Doj sentries. He saw squat guard posts armed with mounted flame cannons and packed with sandbags filled with blessed soil. He looked down into the narrow city streets and saw the silhouettes of vendors and merchants and homeless as they stirred with the morning light.
Once, that place had felt like home. He wasn’t sure what it felt like now.
“
Hey!” Kane said from behind him. The cargo door stood open, and the deck sergeant stood there with their fourth team member. “What do we do with the camel?”
“
So let me get this straight,” Pike said from the other side of the meeting room table. His voice was so gravely it sounded like he chewed on glass.
He was a tall and lean man with a stony jaw and pale stubble that matched his stark white hair. Elias Pike, a Southern Claw officer in charge of special assignments and the closest thing that Cross had to a direct report, lit a cigarillo and stood up. He offered one to Cross, who refused. Pike knew well and good that Cross had quit a few years ago, but he always offered anyways, because he was of the opinion that
all
soldiers should smoke. He argued life was too short to worry about dying early. Pike's hair had gone white not because of age – he was thirty-four – but because he'd been mostly drained of blood and infected with vampirism in a field skirmish with Ebon Cities regulars a few years back, and it had only been the timely intervention of resident Thornn surgeon Phil Rikeman that had saved him. Rikeman, in turn, wore a metal brace on one leg that kept an unidentified magical disease that had permanently latched to his knee-bone from eating him alive.
Cross had lived through something similar, but the disease he'd carried had ultimately detonated a pyroclast bomb that killed his sister, and if not for the unexplained sacrifice made by his old spirit, it would have left
him
dead, as well.
Everyone has scars. And yet here I sit, scarred and beaten…and coming back for more.
“
You want me to revoke your status as a Southern Claw officer,” Pike said slowly, visibly clenching his teeth at the words, “but to retain your services as an operative for the Alliance.” He took a drag from his cigarillo. “So, in essence, you want to become a mercenary, working for us.”
“
Working
only
for the Southern Claw,” Cross added quietly.
Pike laughed, and blew out a stream of smoke. Dank afternoon light fell through the tall windows of the sandstone chamber. Cross heard the moans of patients in the medical wing, a massive network of bed-filled chambers located beyond the reinforced wooden door across the hall. The air was dry and cold and filled with dust and cobwebs, and unnaturally thick shadows clung to every corner of the hospital, lending the entire structure an exceedingly ominous atmosphere. Graves used to joke that the hospital looked more like a place to party with vampires, not fight them.
“
If that's the case, why not just stay?” Pike said. There was a hint of anger to his tone, but that was more or less a given when you talked to Pike. He was an excellent field commander, but not much of a people person.
“
I’d consider it, if you’ll take on Danica Black and Mike Kane.”
Pike laughed quietly again.
It’s better than him chewing me out, I guess.
“
I read their files,” Pike nodded as he smoked and paced around the table. Cross kept his eyes forward. “Kane is a criminal and thief, and he was a gladiator at Krul. Black is a long-standing member of the Revengers, an organization that we have tenuous relations with, at best.” He paused. “You know we can’t do that.”
“
The Southern Claw allowed my
sister
to join my squad,” Cross said, trying to contain the bitterness in his voice. “So they can allow a couple of seasoned fighters – who, by the way, helped destroy a major threat – to join the Southern Claw as special operatives.”