The Witch's Eye

THE WITCH’S EYE

STEVEN MONTANO

BLOOD SKIES

Blood Skies

Black Scars

Soulrazor

Crown of Ash

The Witch
’s Eye

Chain of Shadows
*

THE SKULLBORN

City of Scars*

Path of Bones

The Black Tower

HORROR NOVELS

Something black…

Blood Angel Rising*

* Coming in
2013

This is a work of fiction.  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author
’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2013 Steven Montano

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Barry Currey

Released by Darker Sunset Press

DEDICATION

To
Jim, Lucia, Ron and Steve.

For teaching me how to do this, even though you thought genre writing was dumb.

THE WITCH
’S EYE

Salt waves crash
against the icy shore.  Drowning moments held frozen.  Everything smothered by a tapestry of dreams. 

Th
e gate hums with the sound of an engine.  Burning runes on the archway slice through the fog and reveal a surface made of black ice.  The doorway is ready to break.  Some barely contained terror of the night lands pushes from the other side. 

T
he moment stretches out.  She has to act now, because soon it will be too late.  She descends into a smelted crater.  Mounds of ash cover the charred bones of forest beasts.

The
six-armed woman is there.  Her garbled arcane speech echoes into the storm of shadows above.  Bloody light spills from her eyes.  The Witch’s Eye is with her, leaking smoke and power. 

C
old light bleeds from the gate.  Dark-skinned vampires stand rigid, entranced. Their flesh crusts and peels away.  Necrotic energies drip from their fingers and stain the ground. 

Faces
appear in the portal, the visages of long-dead horrors with bared fangs and dark eyes filled with centuries of hate.  She senses the vastness beyond the barrier, the emptiness.  Scintilla from a world filled with pain.

T
he dream is long wiped from her memory by the time she wakes, but still she’s left with a sense of desperation, a need to prevent something terrible from happening. 

She doesn
’t even know who she is.  But she knows a storm is coming.

PROLOGUE

MARCH

Year 25 A.B. (After the Black)

He smelled blood in the night.

Creasy woke from a familiar dream of an eyeless woman crossing the ice.  She wandered through a bitter storm in the company of wolves. 

It was the same dream he
’d had ever since he was a child, ever since he’d been old enough to know he was a warlock.  He imagined the eyeless woman in his dreams was his spirit.  Even though her visage was horrifying, it was a comfort to put a face to the presence.  Many mages regarded their spirits as kin, or sometimes as lovers, but his had always been something of a mother figure.

J
ust a very frightening mother figure.

Creasy was worried. 
He only had the dream when something was wrong.  Seeing her, sadly, was never a good omen.

He
rolled over and looked at Tanya’s naked and tattoo-covered back.  Her dark hair spilled across the small pillow on Creasy’s bed, and her skin was warm against his thick and callused hand.  They’d been in a relationship for over a year and had grown comfortable together, which both worried and warmed him.  It was dangerous to get too close to people.  No one seemed to last long in Wolftown.

He looked around
his room.  As the most powerful warlock in the community, Creasy was given a private quarters in one of the small buildings near the center of town.  Most of the settlement was made up of tents and bivouacs, but a few people – the leaders, the best hunters, the sick and infirm and pregnant – were granted better shelter from the harsh valley winds.  Even then, the housed quarters weren’t heated, and most nights Creasy and Tanya could only stay warm either with the aid of his spirit or by staying tightly wrapped in the wolf-hide blankets. 

Creasy
’s room contained little more than his bed and a small table where he kept a scant collection of books.  Most of them were journals containing information about the landscape and the creatures of the world After the Black, as well as a few treatises on magic.  Creasy had never received proper training in the arcane arts – he’d grown up in the wild and learned the craft from drifters and shamans, and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

He
sensed his spirit.  She drifted across the floor like a pale white mist.  Her presence was cold, always cold.  Creasy sat up cautiously, as he didn’t want to wake Tanya, not until he knew what was going on.  He’d smelled something, some presence that shouldn’t have been there. 

Creasy rose from the bed, and his
feet chilled against the floor.  He slid into his heavy wolf-skin cloak and quietly stumbled around the room searching for his boots.  Creasy caught sight of himself in the mirror; as was often the case, he was taken aback.  His dark skin was lined with scars from the unnatural age that came to all warlocks.  He was thirty-one, but in warlock years he might as well have been fifty, and his body showed it. 

He
smelled that presence again, a sharp tang of metal and blood.  The odor drove up his nostrils with such pungent force he nearly gagged. 

Creasy dressed
quickly.  Tanya woke while he did, and pushed herself up onto her elbows.  Her pale face shone in the dim candlelight, and her dark hair hung over her shoulder like a black tapestry.  Tattoos of serpents and moons covered her upper chest and arms, and though she must have seen the concern on Creasy’s face she just smiled.

“Is e
verything all right?” she asked.  Her voice was dark.

“I
’m not sure,” he said.  “I just have to check something.”

“Has an alarm been raised?”
She sat all of the way up and pulled the blankets tighter around her body.

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. 

“Is this a warlock thing?” she asked with a wry grin.  He loved that smile, a trace of sarcasm, a dash of spice.

You love her
, he told himself. 
You know you do.  Stop acting like you don’t.

“It is,” he smiled back.  He adjusted his cloak
and made sure his blades and boots were secure.  “I’ll be right back.”

It was not yet dawn, and the frost moon still hung low in the blue-black sky. 
Dead forests stood to the east, and the jagged Bone Hills were just visible over the shanty walls to the north. 

Blazing cook fires twisted in the
icy wind.  Creasy was greeted with the familiar smells of roasting meat and smoking hides as he made his way to the eastern walls.  Shaila and Hassan busily prepped and cured jerky for the coming day’s hunting expeditions.  If Creasy’s memory served, Task’s hunting party, which had set out for the Pale Drifts two days before, would return in just a few hours, hopefully weighed down with ice beaver pelts and moose hides.  Wolves weren’t the only thing they hunted in Wolftown. Roth encouraged them to seek out different game, as it allowed them to build up a variety of barter goods.

“
Besides,” he’d laughed, “it might be nice if not everything we hunted had a chance of killing
us
first.”

Creasy was surprised
Roth wasn’t about – the man never slept, quite a feat considering how often he enjoyed women and drink. 

He
nodded at Joran and Hass, the sentries who stood watch with rifles and spears up on the central tower.  They both wore extra-thick wolf hides to shield them against the bitter wind. 

Shaila brought him a cup of warm milk, and he nodded his thanks.
  He sipped and stood, letting his body build its resistance to the cold. He listened to the wind ripple the cloth tents of Wolftown.

This is a good life
, he thought.  He’d almost forgotten what had woken him in the first place.  Then he sensed it again, and this time the presence was almost overwhelming. 

Blood in the night. 

He smelled it,
tasted
it, a tang of salt and steel and fresh wounds.  It came sudden and unbidden, a harbinger of something beyond the walls, something approaching fast.  It stank with the taint of dark magic.

Creasy moved swiftly.  Fear gripped his heart.

“Get Roth,” he told Hassan, and the big man moved without question.  Everyone knew to listen to Creasy when he spoke, for he did so only seldom, and he made his words count.

Creasy ran
for the front gates.  Jannick, Haggen, Bell, Greene and Korthos manned the flame cannons and machine gun nests.  They looked sleepy and cold, but they snapped to attention as Creasy approached.

His spirit raced ahead of him
and tore across the plains.  Creasy climbed one of the iron ladders that led to the top of the outer wall.  The guards stationed there, Harris and Sayer, were barely boys, but they’d proven themselves against the wolves, and Creasy knew they were fierce fighters.

But still…
they’re so young.

“Everything okay, Creasy?”
Harris asked.  He was a sharp boy with hawk-like features and blonde hair, and he gripped his assault rifle tight as Creasy leaned over the wall.

The smell was intense now, but
Creasy wasn’t surprised that no one else was alarmed: only a mage could have smelled this, this stain.  This was magic,
bad
magic, tainted and twisted through the unnatural manipulation of souls, the kind of chattel sorcery used by the Ebon Cities.