The Witch's Eye (26 page)

“My spirit notes a trace of Ebon Cities soul magic,” Creasy said quietly.  “It wasn
’t used to create that arm, but it
was
used it to control her mind…”

“Then we
undo it,” Ronan said coldly.  “Like I said.”

“You listen to me,” Reza said.  “You
are acting under military orders.  That woman is a liability.”

Ronan st
ood up, as did Reza.

“Ronan…” Maur started, but he cut the Gol off.

“What are you implying?” he said.  He and Reza stood face to face. 

“She
’s dangerous,” Reza said.  “She needs to be taken into custody.”

Ronan smiled.

“Good luck with that,” he said.  He looked at Maur, and then at Danica.  She watched him calmly.  “You go ahead and get back to your Company,” he told Reza.  “Tell Crylos what happened, and tell him I’ll be in touch about the money owed to me and Maur.”

Reza seemed at a loss.

“You’re not coming back?” she asked.

“No.  I have a new job.”  He looked at Danica.  “I
’m taking her home.”  He looked at Maur.  “You with me?”

“Maur is with you,” the Gol said without hesitation.

“You can’t do that…” Reza said, but Ronan turned away.  “She might have valuable information…you can’t just take her with you!”

“You want to try and stop me?” he said. 

“This is pointless,” Danica said.  “I’m not going into custody, and I’m not going ‘home’.  I’m going to Rimefang Loch.  I have to destroy the Witch’s Eye.”

Ronan, Reza and Creasy all looked at her. 

“What do you know about it?” Creasy said as he stood up.  The fire crackled loudly and spilled flames into the darkness.

“It
’s a self-animated construct possessed of vast arcane power,” she explained.  “A failed Ebon Cities’ experiment meant to grant the vampires true magic.  The effects were nothing like they envisioned.  Instead of granting vampires magic, the Eye corrupts their bodies from the inside out.  Its power eats away at them and makes them hunger for the flesh of their own.  Every vampire bitten by an infected is corrupted in turn.  It spreads like a disease. 

“
I need to root out the source of the Witchborn virus – the main fragment of the construct, the Witch’s Eye – and destroy it.”

“Wait,” Reza said.  “I
f it’s killing the vampires and turning them against one another…”

“They still hunger for human flesh as well,”
Danica said.  “You saw what happened to Wolftown.”

“Fane
did that,” Creasy said.  “They’re on the march.”  He looked at Ronan.  “They want the Eye.  They want to use it against the vampires.”

“And so do we,” Reza
said.  “Jesus, this is perfect. If she knows where it is…”

“
She
is right here,” Danica said.  Her voice turned cold.  Ronan felt her spirit chill the air.  “And
she
is going to destroy it.”  She looked at Ronan.  “I saw the ruins of Wolftown.  The Bloodwolves came to feast on its remains, and they were feasted on in turn.  The Witchborn destroyed them.  They destroy
everything
.  Their thirst for vampire flesh is not driven by hunger, but by a desire to increase their own numbers.”  She took a breath.  “It’s reproduction.  The Witch’s Eye drives them to propagate.”

“What does it want?” Ronan asked.
  “The Eye?”

“
To destroy,” she said.  “The Ebon Cities created it to infuse vampires with arcane might.  They strove to craft vampire warlocks and witches, to use our own most powerful weapon against us.  It didn’t work, and the experiment took on a life of its own.  It must release its energies, and spread them.  I believe it’s building to a detonation of some sort.  Its power swells.  If it doesn’t release this power, it will die,” she said.  “So it spreads.  It grows.  One becomes legion.”

“How do you know all of this?” Creasy asked.

She hesitated.

“
I know this because I destroyed one of its lesser fragments, and when it shattered I saw into its consciousness.  Whatever the vampires did to me also enabled me to absorb the bulk of the information stored in the construct.”  She looked at Ronan.  “I’m sorry.  The notion of  ‘home’ sounds nice.  And I
want
to remember you.  I do.”  She stood up.  “But I can’t.  I have to fulfill my purpose.”

“Which sounds like
our
purpose,” he said.  He looked at Reza.  “Unless you somehow think an army of maniacal and magic-yielding vampire savages sounds like a good thing for the Southern Claw?”

Reza tightened her mouth.
  The campfire thinned, and the howls of distant wolves stirred in the night. 

“We have to get word to Crylos,”
Reza said.

“The Eye is on an island in
the middle of Rimefang Loch,” Danica said.  She looked at Ronan.  “That’s where it is
now
, but I don’t know how long it’ll stay there.”  She broke her gaze and stared into the flames.  Danica looked lost, and when her eyes moved back up and met Ronan’s again she was at the edge of tears.  “I have to do this,” she said. “I don’t know if you can understand.   But I
have
to go.”

Ronan nodded.

“It’s not an easy thing…being broken,” he said.  “You have to hold what’s left of you together.  You find a purpose.  Pretty soon it’s all you have left.”  He looked at the others.  “I’m going with her.  Creasy, I think you and your ladies should go with Reza.”  He looked at Reza.  “Get back to Crylos.  Tell him what’s going on, and where we’re going.”

“Maur is coming
with you,” the Gol said.  “You need someone with a level head at your side.”

“And that means
you
?” Ronan said.  “We’re fucked.”  Gol threw a stick at him.

“You
’ll need a warlock, too,” Creasy said.  Tanya looked at him.  Her eyes were sad, but she nodded.  Ronan could tell the news wasn’t unexpected.  “I had a feeling I’d be traveling with you again,” Creasy said to Ronan.

Ronan smiled. 

“Sorry about that.”

Creasy shrugged
.  Tanya pulled him down to sit next to her.

Danica walked away from the fire and
to the edge of the trees.  She looked out at the dark.

Ronan
looked at Reza. 

“Are w
e good?”

She clearly wasn
’t happy, but she nodded.

“Yeah.  We
’re good.  I’ll take those two with me at first light and head for Ath.  You’ll be going northwest, I take it?”             

“Seems like it,” he said.  He looked at Danica. 
“I hope you understand,” he said to Reza. 

Reza watched him for a moment.

“No,” she said.  “Not really.  But I
do
understand she’s your friend, and that you want to help her.”  She hugged herself to fight off the chill.  “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”             

“
Well, I don’t,” he said.  “But that’s never stopped me before.”

He sat back down next to Maur, who offered him a drink of water.

“You make a fine leader,” Maur said.

“No I don
’t,” Ronan said.  “Danica is a good leader.”  He took a drink.  “She’ll come back to us.  Things will be like they were before.”

Maur hesitated.

“Kane is dead,” he said.  “And Cross is gone.”

“I know.”

“Things
can’t
be the same, Ronan.  They just can’t.”

Ronan thought
about the stairs.  His own reflection, bone pale and haggard.  The face of death.

“No,” he said. “
I guess they can’t.”

They set out the next morning.

Ronan and Maur
divided the food and ammunition between the two groups.  There wasn’t much.

D
awn light bled through the trees.  Ronan’s breath frosted. 

He
saw everyone’s wounds stark in the morning light.  He watched each of them, probing them for vulnerabilities.

Tanya
’s ankle was weak.  Katya’s heart beat too slowly, and her breaths came shallow.  Reza was very careful with her left arm.  Maur was more difficult to read, as his alien physiognomy didn’t obey the same rules as a human’s, but Ronan saw how he stepped slower than usual, likely due to fatigue. 

Creasy and Black
’s weaknesses were more challenging to determine since their spirits maintained their bodies...but the two mages were still human, and it only took Ronan a few minutes to realize Creasy had an old wolf-bite wound that made him favor his right leg, and Danica would never fully recover from when they’d ripped her arm away, as the cauterized injury still smoked trace amounts of cold magic.

Ronan realized
he was gauging his allies’ weaknesses like he was going to hunt them down.  He pondered whether or not that bothered him, and decided it did.

Shadows clung to the ground
as they worked their way to the edge of the forest.  Pine needles crunched beneath their boots like bones, and ice-laden branches fell apart around them.  The air was numbingly cold and smelled of sap and animal droppings.

They passed near a roaming pack of
normal wolves that was too afraid of the humans and their unnatural spirits to dare approach.  The creatures followed the party from just out of view, their star-white eyes locked on a group of prey they knew was too powerful for them to take on.  After a time the wolves broke off.

The
groups parted ways where the forest curved in at the banks of the Nightblood River.  Tributaries ran northeast to a series of low hills and patches of green forest that would take Reza, Tanya and Katya on to Ath.  On a clear morning they would have been able to make out the city-state’s industrial fumes beyond the distant hills.  Though Ath was still some distance away, with any luck the three women would be found by Southern Claw patrols or the soldiers from Talon Company. 

The rest of them
would follow the Nightblood northwest for another three klicks before it emptied into Rimefang Loch.  Once they reached those shores they’d try to find the island, and the Witch’s Eye.

“
Are you sure you won’t come to Ath?” Reza asked him.

“
You know as well as I do they’ll take her into custody,” Ronan said.  Black stood a ways off from the others, waiting with barely concealed anxiousness.  It might have been her spirit driving her forward or the vampire whispers in her mind, a voice that bade her to obey.  “And you
want
them to,” he added.

Reza
looked at him coldly.

“
You can honestly tell me you don’t think she’s dangerous?” Reza asked.  “There’s no telling what they did to her.”

Ronan
’s mind went to the shrine.  He looked up the long steps, and saw leaves blow by in the ice-hard wind.  The grey morning sky had been filled with frost particles and dark clouds that looked like faces.  His blade had felt cold in his hand, a sickle of frozen steel.  He’d known what was waiting for him.  Part of him would always be stuck at the bottom of those steps.

“You
’d be amazed at what you can recover from.”

“Good luck,”
Reza said after a moment’s hesitation, and she extended her hand.  “I’m sorry you and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on things.”

They shook
hands.

“Me,
too.” He nodded at Tanya and Katya.  “Take care of them.”

“
We’ll see you soon,” Reza said.

Creasy and Tanya shared a quiet embrace.  Ronan admire
d the strength of the Wolftown people.  There was no place for tears in the wastelands. 

Katya walked up and placed a single hand on Creasy
’s rough and bearded cheek.  The dark-skinned man nodded at her, and gave her a sad smile.  Tanya handed him something, some small trinket, a necklace or a locket that he took in his hands and held for a moment before he buried it away in the folds of his heavy green coat.  They quietly kissed one last time, and he turned away.

They didn
’t look back.

Ronan, Black, Maur and Creasy
descended hills covered with grey snow.  They trudged through ankle-deep drifts and slowly made their way down to the clear banks of the Nightblood.  The waters ran cold and fast, and they felt the river’s icy chill even from the shore. 

Pale shards of light
cut through the charcoal clouds.  Thick trees stood vigil to the north, and to the northwest the waters crashed through a broken estuary that stymied the fast-flowing Nightblood where it emptied into Rimefang Loch. 

No one spoke.  Danica led the way, followed by Ronan; Creasy brought up the rear, while Maur struggled in the middle.  He insisted on not being carried, but Ronan lifted him up after a time just so they could keep their pace.