The Witch's Eye (10 page)

FIVE

dragon

They called her Dragon. 

It wasn’t her real name.  She no longer
knew
her real name. It had been stripped from her along with everything else. 

She was just
Dragon now.  The weapon.

Sun
light spilled through clouds of ink and lime.  The curtains peeled back before the dry breeze.  The city-state of Lorn was a fringe settlement populated with travelers and merchants, a borderlands town that bustled with activity and yet somehow remained eerily quiet.  White silk flags rippled in the stale wind.  The air was warm in spite of the grey sky, and Dragon’s skin felt sticky beneath her dress.

She
crossed the room.  Bowls filled with figs and dried cherries sat on small ivory tables.  The ochre floor was smooth, almost reflective. 

Dragon walked onto the balcony and
looked out over the city.  Elephants moved through the streets, driven by hard-faced merchants in pale funerary garb.  The men wore long and wicked scimitars on their backs and carried rifles in hand.  They carefully watched the crowd, wary of those who might hold interest in the massive boxes tied to the backs of the great armored beasts. 

Dragon
was surprised at the lengths people went to in order to protect their material belongings.  She felt like personal possessions had once meant something to her, but it was hard to remember.  She wanted for nothing now.  The man who’d been waiting for her when she’d first arrived at the city, Lynch, gave her everything she needed.  He and his servants provided her with lavish quarters, exotic baths, and clothing that cost more than most people could make in a year. 

And
he’d given her the weapons.  Necroblades.  They could sever a mage’s spirit and cast it adrift, make so it could never return.  The weapons were incredibly rare, and when Dragon looked at them she was transfixed by their midnight beauty, by the frozen fog that seemed to swirl within the layers of hammered steel.  They were the perfect tools for carrying out her duties in Lorn.

W
ind swept through the apartment.  The sleeves of her dress lifted in the breeze and exposed an arm made of animated steel.  Her flesh was raw where the metal joined with her scapula, but the union was seamless.  She felt nothing in the arm, and yet had full control over it. 

She
felt the stirrings of power within the bloodsteel.  A captive spirit thrashed uselessly against the walls of its prison.  Dragon felt no pity for the spirit.  She didn’t feel anything.

Down on the street below, some passerby
ventured too close to the train of elephants and angered the merchant-soldiers.  Blades were drawn, and blood was spilled.  In Lorn, it never took long for the knives to come out.

The first thing she remembered was coming to the city. 

She
was alone and on foot.  Her vision came into focus outside Lorn’s crenellated white walls.  The settlement stood at the edge of the pale wastes called the Grim Lands.  The milk-drop sun was cold and white in the cloudless sky, and a low bank of dead fog crawled across the shattered ground. 

She turned around in a circle.  She was dressed in
sandy leather armor and carried a rifle.  Her face was covered with a cowl, and her tall boots had the comfort of something she’d worn for a very long time.  She was tired from the walk, but she was neither hungry nor thirsty.  The canteen at her side was full. 

Cold wind stung her
eyes.  The air smelled stale and cold, like sour ice.  Her fingerless gloves showed nails that had seen their share of work. 

Who
am I?

Lorn stood quiet. 
She wasn’t sure how she knew the city’s name. Flags whipped in the breeze.  The dark stone gates stood closed.  A long road led off behind her to the obscurity of the fog-wreathed wilderness. 

A
heavy bell tolled somewhere within the city walls. 

She
’d never been to Lorn, had never even walked in the region before.  Few entered the Grim Lands: it was an inhospitable and lifeless waste filled with shallow bogs and twisted trees.  Roving undead walked those pale lands, and if they didn’t kill you, the Ebon Cities patrols would. 

She tasted salt on the wind. 
There was singing inside the city, some holy chant or dirge.  Everything felt unreal, like she’d just woken up. 

Lacking any other options
, she carefully approached the city.  She wore a piece of bizarre armor on her right arm, a carapace shell through which she felt nothing.  It rendered her numb, and she was confused until she realized – until she
remembered
– that the metal
was
her arm, that it had recently been set there to replace her flesh and bone. 

S
he felt the presence of an arcane spirit in the limb.  She was a mage, and clearly a dangerous one, for she felt the anger and power of that spirit, his pure and visceral desperation to be free.  He struggled to escape, but she knew she couldn’t let him.  He could only be released in controlled bursts of carefully shaped energies, and he couldn’t be allowed out on his own.  Instinct told her that would be dangerous, that he would try to fight against her.

Was I exiled here?
she wondered.  She must have been a dangerous outcast, banished from wherever she’d lived before and sent to this dreary outpost at the edge of nowhere to serve out a sentence in anonymity.  Perhaps they’d wiped her memory clean so she could never find her way back.

She stood
and shivered in the wind. She knew she was trapped.  If the situation weren’t so preposterous she’d have laughed…but it
wasn’t
preposterous, it was happening. 

Her memories were gon, but basic knowledge and her instincts remained.  S
he knew how to fight.  She knew she could carve most opponents apart with a sword, and that if she properly focused and channeled the spirit trapped in her steel arm the effects were devastating. 

She knew she had a questionable past
.  She had little doubt that her current situation was a result of some malfeasance she’d been involved with.

Of course, if someone used magic to wipe
my memory, they could have
planted
thoughts there. 

P
art of her was tempted not to play along – to just turn around and wander back into the wilderness – but she had no supplies aside from her clothing, her armor and her weapon.  The jagged hills and twisted bogs of the Grim Lands stretched to the horizon.  She was in vampire territory, and wouldn’t last long on her own.

Reluctantly, the woman without a name walked up to the
city gates.  The walls were bone white, scarred and pitted by burns, claw-marks and projectiles.  A corbelled watchtower stood over the frosted and rune-covered gates.  They swung wide as she approached.

Vampires waited
inside.  Her heart froze.

There were two of them
, and they stared at her from within the folds of their heavy black cloaks.  Their malevolent pale faces seemed frozen, and their taloned hands hovered near the hilts of serrated blades.  A cluster of unarmed humans stood behind them, and she understood she’d been brought to an armistice city, a human settlement that had surrendered itself to vampire authority.  She saw tightly packed buildings on pale lanes.  Deep shadows loomed from every doorway and window.  People moved cautiously, afraid to disturb the near silence.

She stepped forward. 
Neither of the vampires made any move to intercept her.  They stood back and watched her with large eyes like ebon mirrors that reflected the image of her frightened face and grimy hair. 

Her fingers tensed, and the spirit
in her arm screamed and pounded against its arcane prison like an animal in a cage, but she kept her pace steady and her breaths slow.  Tension shot up her back as she passed between the undead and entered the city.

A human man
stepped out of the shadows and approached her.  He was tall and lean, and his face was marred by slash marks and burns.  He, too, wore a heavy black cloak. 

Her spirit
writhed and wailed in the metal arm.  She ignored him.

The man
stopped, and smiled.  She stared back at him.

“My name is Lynch,” he said.  “Welcome to Lorn.”

She st
ood at the edge of her chambers and looked out over the balcony.  She smelled fruit and tobacco in the dry wind. Her eyes went beyond the walls to the wasteland of salt marshes, ice waters and frost boils.  The apartment sat over a market, and she saw fish vendors and dried goods merchants, knife sellers and weapons dealers, slave traders and mercenaries.  Everything was for sale in Lorn.  Razorwings sat on the city walls with their tails curled around the watchtowers.  Vampire warships left grey fumes in their wake as they flew low over the city.  The air grew darker as the morning wore long. 

She needed to prepare herself.  Lynch had told her she
’d be needed. 

Tailor-
made armor hung in the tall wardrobe behind the silks dresses and other clothes she didn’t need.  The armor was purple and black, tight-cut and form-fitting, something a man wanted to see her in. 

The notion of being found attractive by a man
did nothing for her, nothing at all.  She knew she didn’t like men and instead preferred women, and she also knew that hadn’t always been the case, that something had happened to make her that way, some event from her childhood, but she couldn’t remember what.

The more sh
e tried to recall who she was and where she’d come from the more distant it all became.  Her mind was foggy and distant.  She felt like she’d just woken up, only the feeling never went away.

Her skin was cold as she
donned the armor and laced the straps tight.  Once the shoulder-plates were in place she slipped on her tall boots and positioned the black katars in the sheaths on her back. 

Her metal arm wasn
’t covered, and it shone in the failing light.  She tensed her fist, trying to push feeling into it, but there was none.  The spirit contained in the bloodsteel struggled, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him.  He knew she wouldn’t release him until she was ready, and even then it would only be briefly.  The arcane device granted her absolute control over him, more control than any other mage had
ever
had over their spirit
.

She wondered how that had happened
, wondered who’d made her that way, and why.  Sometimes she had vivid flashes, memories of pain and fear.  An underground prison.  A loved one dying in her arms. 

She looked at herself in the mirror.  She had to admit she was beautiful, and though the armor was cut
too tight to ever be practical she still appreciated the effect.  Her short blonde hair looked strange on her, she thought…somehow
wrong. 
She sensed that many aspects of her appearance had been changed.  Her left cheek bore a trace scar, something like a teardrop made of blood.  Her eyes were cold and vacant. 

I don
’t know you
, she thought to her reflection
.  And I’m not sure I want to.

She was ready.

Lynch was her handler.  He kept her safe
and made sure she had every amenity, and he passed down the orders given by his vampire superiors.  The notion of not doing what he said seemed preposterous.  She never questioned him, even though some instinct told her she should.

Lynch had set her up in what used to be a hotel
.  She was the building’s only occupant apart from the slaves and guards who tended to her.  With the exception of her own lavish quarters, the rest of the hotel was filled with rubble-strewn halls, cracked plaster, broken doors and shattered chandeliers.  The place looked ancient and smelled of rotting wood and mold.  Only dim illumination filtered in through the boarded-up windows.

Lynch waited for her at the bottom of the stairs.  Lean and dressed all in black, he looked more a shadow than a man. 

“Good morning,” Lynch smiled.

“Good morning.”

“Are you ready?”

She didn
’t reply, but walked towards the door.  She felt Lynch’s eyes on her as he followed her out into the street. 

The air
in Lorn was bitter, stale and grey.  A steel fog hovered over the city.  Hawkers shouted out, promising the best knives, cloaks and cuts of boar meat.  Tobacco smoke filled the air.  Throngs of people pushed past one another, many of them leading monkeys, camels and goats. 

The c
rowds parted before her.  They knew who she was, and what she did.  No one was going to stand in her way.

Vampire sentries
stood along the parapets near the barbican.  Blades pointed upwards from the top of the dark structure.  The undead watched impassively, their lips pulled back to reveal wide fangs, their smoking hand-cannons held ready.  Dark hair and dark armor glistened with blood dew and thaumaturgic sparks.  Cold steam curled off the walls and revealed the wolf visage of the Ebon Cities on the stone.