The Witch's Eye (2 page)

But this
wasn’t
the Ebon Cities, and Creasy knew it.  This was human magic.  And that’s what made it all the more frightening.

“Ready the men,” Creasy said.  “We have to leave Wolftown immediately.” 
Harris stammered, and Sayer looked at him like he’d grown a second head.  “God damn it, somebody get Roth!”

His spirit
came back to him with such speed and force he almost fell from the wall.  She was flushed with fear and revulsion. 

Th
ings took shape in the distant night, visible only to his spirit-enhanced vision – engine fires, unholy lights, burning blood fumes spewed from monstrous vehicles.  Low-flying aircraft released exhaust made caustic with the power of lost souls.  War machines roared across the open plains and left dark steam in their wake.  Soldiers rode thaumaturgically altered mounts and wore body-armor fused and hardened by the power of the dead. 

Creasy breathed deep, but couldn
’t calm himself.  A human legion armed with undead technology crossed the plains.  They marched with grim purpose for the city-states of the Southern Claw.

Creasy
hoped Wolftown could be evacuated in time.  They had to get a message to the other settlements in the area.

They had to warn them
that the armies of Fane were on the move.

ONE

REMAINS

Ronan climbed.
  His fingers bled.  His skin was raw with cold.  He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to carry on after he’d lost so much blood, but that was what he always did: he survived, and kept on fighting long after he should have died.

That
’s a nice motto.  I should put that on a business card.

Ronan took a deep breath
, and the air scraped down his lungs.  He was trapped in a bottomless shaft he’d inadvertently tumbled down during an insane melee involving Cross’s team, the Revengers, some undead forces out of Koth, a full Wing out of the Ebon Cities, and fuck-knew who else.  He’d have needed a scorecard to keep track of who was who. 

In his attempt to kill
the Revenger’s leader, Rake, Ronan had dove through an obelisk made of razor-sharp crystal, fallen an indeterminate height, and landed hard on an outcropping of jagged stone.

I have
a habit for jumping into sharp things.  Interesting. 

Blood ran down his arms and face.  He
’d bandaged himself as best he could by tearing up his shirt and wrapping the cloth around his wounds.  Ronan had no idea how long he’d been climbing.  His existence had become a monotony of crumbling green stone and aching limbs.  His gear was gone – he was down to the katana strapped to his back and what was left of his clothing. 

Stinging wind
blew up from the depths of the pit.  He felt the emptiness of the open space beneath him.

He saw Danica, Rake and the dead Razorwing
fall in his memory, and his teeth clenched.

God damn it. 
Almost all of us are gone.

For all he knew, Maur was dead, too
, as he and Jade hadn’t exactly been racking up a kill count when Ronan had fallen down the hole. 

And a lot of good my heroics did. 
I always seem to come up with the short end of the stick. 
He hesitated at that, and his grip faltered.
  You’re better off than Kane.  Poor bastard.  Rest easy, man.  You had guts.  That counts for a lot these days.

Ronan
grimaced.  It took tremendous effort just to keep his body supported against the wall, and he couldn’t afford to stop moving.  His footing was poor, and he expected the rock face to fall apart beneath him.  His shoulders and arms burned. 

The pain
in his upper back triggered memories of his childhood.  He remembered being tied to a post and lashed for failing to stand at attention or cut his sparring opponent deep enough.  Years of rigid training at the hands of the Crimson Triangle had left him hollow and hard, and by the age of twelve he’d already learned to tolerate levels of pain that would have broken most grown men.  But he
did
have a threshold, and ever since he’d joined Cross’s team he’d found himself testing his limits more often than he cared to admit.

Ambient green light shone
through the thick and unnatural fog.  The entire shaft reeked of sorcery.  Ronan knew they didn’t call it sorcery, but he’d decided a long time ago he didn’t give a shit – he’d call it what he wanted.  He’d been taught and raised to distrust magic.  It didn’t matter it was the only thing keeping humans alive in the war against the vampires.  The Crimson Triangle had glossed over that part: it was easier to hunt and kill mages if you didn’t believe they were doing the world any good.  The people who’d raised him were twisted scholars and wise men whose idea of rearing a child was to push them to their physical and psychological breaking points.  Ironically, his masters were all mages themselves, older men who’d been well past their primes when they’d gained their spirits in the early days After the Black.  Normally only the young and strong could survive the burden of magic.  Most of the older ones had died quickly.

Except for bastards
like the Crimson Triangle, who learned how to sacrifice others to keep themselves alive.

Ronan
’s memory flooded with images from his time in the Order. He saw red-cloaked men with hidden faces kneel beneath a desert sun; blood-washed stones and rune-cast altars; a stone courtyard filled with young men and women burning in the midday heat, their skin scarred by arcane chains and forced to stand rigid as they learned to fight, to kill, to forget everything they’d once been.  He saw fields of torture, and remembered marches across endless white deserts.  Some of the children had been too weak, and couldn’t take it anymore: they’d cried for their parents, as any child would, and at that point they’d been dealt with, most often at the hands of other youths in the Order.

Only the heartless survived. 

He shook himself back to the present.  He had no desire to re-live even a moment of that old life. 

He climbed
hand over hand, ascending into darkness.  Bitter smoke swept over him.  His mind was adrift in a black sea.  Ronan honed in on that cold hard place beyond conscious thought.  Every student who’d survived that bloody courtyard had learned to do it, to eclipse the pain, to push their bodies to the limit, no matter the cost. 

The physical world grew distant
and dark.  His consciousness passed through an ashen drift.  He fell away from his body, away from the hurt and the caustic air, away from the fear of never getting out alive.   

H
is mind entered a different place.  The Deadlands. 

Voices echoed in the darkness.  He ignored the
m, and climbed.  Everything grew less stable.  He passed through a shifting boundary, a border between realities.  He recalled having passed through it before, when he’d fallen.  Bits of rock broke away in his grip like crusts of old bread. 

A sound came
from above.  He looked up, took a breath, and waited.  It came again, a cry of pain.  It sounded real, like an actual human voice. 

O
r maybe I’ve finally cracked.  Kane always said I was crazy.  I think he was right.

Ronan steeled himself, and
kept climbing.

The shaft opened into the floor of the large room where their battle against the Revengers had taken place.  Ronan pulled himself up to level ground. 

For a long time
he couldn’t do anything but lay next to the hole and struggle for breath.  His body was covered in cold sweat, and his chest felt like someone had stomped on it with iron-soled boots.  Ronan had trouble keeping his eyes open.  He hung at the edge of consciousness. 

T
he room slowly bled into view.  Grey shards of broken glass, the remains of the shattered obelisk, littered the ground like hailstones.  Ronan slowly stood, and walked up the slope.  He smelled vehicle fuel and blood, and the ozone taste in the air signaled the presence of magic.  Thick silver and iron smoke filled the area.  Ronan stepped over a low wall of jagged crystal, the broken foundation of the obelisk. 

The
place was an abattoir.  Bodies, many of them undead to begin with, had been crushed, torn, perforated or burned to a crisp.  Shell casings, shattered steel and snapped bones were everywhere.  Gutted remains smoldered on the floor amidst piles of twisted vehicular wreckage.

The open hole
in the ceiling where the Razorwing had crashed through was clouded with mist and steam.  Ronan could just make out the dying light of cold stars through the haze. 

Nothing moved.  The battle was long done. 
Ronan’s boots crunched on debris as he walked through the carnage.  Rot carried on the musk wind, a stench so hard it felt like grit in his teeth.

He heard a moan
from somewhere nearby.  Ronan drew his blade.  He quietly moved past wrecked vehicles and the burning dead.  The moan sounded again, louder than before, as Ronan approached a pile of bodies. 

The Reve
nger lay half–buried in the mound of corpses.  His left leg was trapped beneath a fallen Troj, a nine-foot tall monstrosity that must have weighed half-a-ton.  The man’s other leg was free but bled from a gunshot wound, and one of his hands had been partially crushed.  Mottled hair and wild eyes regarded Ronan stupidly. 

Ronan knelt down. 
The man seemed to come to his senses, and started crying.

“Please…” he whispered.  “Please…”

“What happened?” Ronan asked quietly.  “Who won?”

“What?  Who
won
?! I’m fucking dying beneath this giant…”

“And you
’ll probably stay there,” Ronan interrupted.  He kept his voice even, his tone soft.  “Unless
I
do something about it.  So don’t be an asshole.  Tell me what I want to know.”

“Bastard,”
the man said.

“True.”  Ronan looked around as if he
’d get in trouble for what he was about to do.  Still kneeling, he put the edge of his blade against the man’s free leg and slowly cut open his calf.  The Revenger howled as blood gushed from the open wound.  Ronan stopped.  “You were saying?”

“
They pulled back, all right?!” the Revenger screamed.  “Everyone pulled back!”

“Why?”

The man looked frightened, like he shouldn’t say.  Ronan held his blade up again.

“Fane!
” he said.  “It was Fane!  Fane showed up and started attacking everyone!”

“Fane?” 
What the Hell? 
“What are you talking about?”

“
They were armed to the teeth,” the Revenger explained.  “They would’ve given that Wing a good fight even if the vamps had been at full-strength, but they weren’t, because the Suckheads had been fighting
us
.  Everyone scattered when Fane showed up.  After Rake vanished down the hole and Burke was killed, the others…just took off.”

Fane had been a part of the Southern Claw,
but the growing influence of the merchant’s organization the Hammer and Fist had brought the city-state’s loyalties into question, which was especially troublesome since Fane provided much of the Southern Claw’s armaments.  Cross’s team had learned that Fane planned to defect from the Southern Claw, and that the Hammer and Fist had hired and outfitted an elite mercenary army. 

Defecting is one thing
, Ronan thought. 
But this sounds like they’re on the march.  Are they gobbling up more territory? And if so, why in the hell would they start way up here, so far from their own city?

Voth Ra
’morg was still a good distance from any Southern Claw settlements, but Ronan didn’t think that even a rich city-state like Fane was equipped to start conquering the wastelands. 

No, this force was up here
for a purpose.  The question is…what?

“Thanks,” Ronan said.  He stood
up and turned to leave.  He didn’t think he was likely to find any useful items there; at a glance, everything of value seemed to have already been stripped from the corpses. 

“You…you can
’t just leave me here!” the Revenger shouted as Ronan walked away.  “Christ, man, I’ve got a wife…”

“She
’ll miss you,” Ronan said.  “I know your work.  You and the other Wardens are all pieces of shit.  If you’re asking me for
pity
, you might as well just save your breath.”

Ronan
left him alone.  After a minute the Revenger’s screams turned to sobs, but Ronan kept moving, and soon he couldn’t hear the dying man at all.

Ronan made his way back to the surface.  The battle had spilled into the cold warehouse over the subterranean tunnels.  Broken machinery and corpses were everywhere.  One Revenger’s face had been smashed in, but his leather armor was still intact, so Ronan peeled it away from the body and donned it himself.  The corpse smell was strong, but Ronan had worn a dead man’s clothing before.