The Witch's Eye (29 page)

She couldn
’t imagine what he’d been through.  There were plenty of rumors about what the warlocks of the Crimson Triangle did to their young initiates.  If even half of those stories were true, Ronan had been raised to be a monster.  She and Cross and Kane had always suspected his origins – it explained why he rarely left the mansion, why he didn’t care to go out drinking with them and obsessively kept to himself.  He’d always regarded the rest of the team as if they were so strange to him, so foreign.

And I guess we were.

“What happened?” she asked.

Silence.  He stared at the waves.  She didn
’t dare move.  Something inside told her it would be dangerous if she did.

“
He and I were supposed to fight,” he said at last.  His voice was so quiet it was almost lost in the sound of the waves.  “It was the last test.  The winner would become part of the Order.”  He laughed bitterly.  “I would have won,” he said with a small amount of pride.  “I would have beaten him.”  Tears again.  He ignored them.  “But I couldn’t do it.  I didn’t
want
to fight him.  It felt wrong.  He was the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had.  I didn’t want…”  He looked down at the ground.  “I just couldn’t.  Even when they sent him to kill me a few years later, I couldn’t do it.  I beat him then, too.  And I let him go.”  He laughed again.  “Maybe a part of me thought if I killed him…”

“That you wouldn
’t be human anymore,” she said. 

“
Pretty stupid, really, considering I’m…barely human now.”

Danica looked straight in
to Ronan’s eyes.

“You
’re more human than you think,” she said.  She looked up at the sky, then back the way they came.  “And so am I.”

She turned back
.

“Danica…”

“No, Ronan.”  She looked at him.  “We have to save Creasy and Maur.  You need to do it as much as I do.  We’re not going to leave them back there.  We
can’t
.”  She turned to go.  “We just can’t.”

She waited for an argument, waited for him to tell her how doing that would endanger
everyone…how they couldn’t let themselves be delayed from destroying the Witch’s Eye. 

B
ut he didn’t.  He fell in time beside her, blades sheathed, eyes ahead.

S
omething at Ronan’s core had always remained untouched by the brutality of the Crimson Triangle, a hidden part of his soul that had kept him from killing that boy, that had made him hold the two of them back after they’d already made the decision to abandon Maur and Creasy, a decision that would have doomed he and Danica forever, even if neither of them had really been aware of it at the time.

They moved
fast.  The Rimefang was at their backs.  They traversed the hill and entered the field of sword grass, which Ronan pushed from their path with his katana held sideways as they ran.  Inky clouds moved in from the north. 

More blasts sounded behind them.  Whatever battle
was going on out at sea was getting bloody.  They moved into the tree line and did their best to follow the river from there, so they could stay out of sight.

Dan
ica thought about Cole, and Kane.  Her heart pounded with loss.  She’d never see them again, and for a moment she seized up and had to stop as something inside of her locked, like a deep breath held frozen.  Tears ran down her face.  She tasted the salt of loss.

Ronan waited
patiently.  After a time, he asked if she was okay.  She couldn’t answer.  But she thought of Maur and Creasy.  She thought of Cross.  She couldn’t know if they were okay, if any of them were okay.  For all she knew, it was already too late.

But maybe it
’s not.

And that
was enough.

SEVENTEEN

WATCHERS

The
Lith party took a winding route to the Loch.  Once they exited the Bone March they came to the badlands northeast of Wormwood.  It was a desolate region devoid of resources or tactical value, which thankfully meant the vampires weren’t likely to keep a watchful eye on the area. 

Dry plains,
scrub oak and fetid lakes dotted the wastes. The soil was black and red and covered with fire moss, and everything lay heavy with the stench of a bog.  Blood flies and mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds plagued them as they traveled.  Cross wasn’t sure what would drive him crazy first, the bugs or Flint’s ceaseless gripes.

The
silent Lith moved with grim resolve, always grouped in twos and threes, never stopping for longer than they had to and never venturing into an unknown area without scouting it out first.  Of course, since they couldn’t speak, Cross, Flint and Shiv had no idea what was going on half of the time, but the dark-haired Lith leader was usually able to get them to understand when she wanted them to stay put. 

Cross was impressed
by the Lith’s stealth.  Even their strange crystalline horses moved with fluid grace and effortless momentum, like they glided rather than walked.  The small band proved capable of moving in and out of the shadows with ease.  It was as if they and their mounts were ghosts. 

He was also impressed by Flint and Shiv.  The two of them trudged on with determination
, even if Flint did make it a point to communicate his general level of discomfort at every available opportunity.  Cross had hoped against hope he’d be able to find some safe place to take them, a settlement or a caravan, but they were too deep in vampire territory.

But is where I
’m going any safer?

They
lost one of the horses a day out of Dirge.  The creature cut its leg coming down a slope as they made their way around the Wormwood.  Without magic there was little Cross could do, so Flint put it down.

Flint and Shiv rode
the remaining horse, a dark-haired Shire with a steely coat and enormous hooves.  It was so broad they could have mounted a tent on its back.  The beast trod noisily and tore up clumps of mud and soil as it walked, but it was surprisingly docile for its size, and it didn’t give Flint any trouble in spite of his insisting he’d never been much of a horseman. 

“I much prefer walking,” he said. 

“How did you get to Rifttown?” Cross asked him. 

“Airship.  We booked passage on a cheap vessel and hitched a ride.”

The Lith distanced themselves from the humans.  If they had any objections to Flint and Shiv coming along they made no indication of it.  The pale-skinned warriors rode with their eyes alert and weapons ready. 

The da
rkness of the Wormwood faded into the distance as the pale wastes west of Rimefang Loch came into view.  Cross saw salt dunes and grey spires, twisted brambles and obsidian ruins.  The barrens were stained the color of dripping meat, and the air was cold and rancid.  Hard wind sliced across the bitter landscape.  Cross shivered beneath his dirty shirt and armor coat, and Shiv wrapped her arms around her father’s waist while they rode.

“Shiv,” Cross said.  She looked at him.  “What
’s your horse’s name?”

“Hisan,” she said.

“Is that Arabic?” he asked.  She nodded.

Flint smiled. 

“She likes to study old languages.  A friend of ours found an Arabic-English dictionary and gave it to her for Giving Day.” 

“Your camel,” she said.  “His name is Musad.”

Cross couldn’t help but smile, but he felt a small twinge of regret.  The camel brought back memories of Viper Squad.  It seemed so long ago he’d been in Dirge with Graves, Stone and Cristena. 

“Musad,” he
whispered.  He rode on the back of the brute, only barely confident it wouldn’t throw him.  It had a slow and lumbering gait, an easy stroll that pushed him much higher up in the air than anyone else.  He had a good vantage of the countryside, not that there was much to see.

At least I
’ll know if there’s any trouble coming
, he thought. 
So I guess there’s that
.

Cross
kept thinking about old friends.

“You miss them?” Shiv asked.

Cross smiled, and nodded.

“Yeah,” he said.  “I do.”

“We’ll find them,” she said.  She looked out to the horizon.

“Not all of them,” he said.  “Some people are too far gone for me to find.”

“You’ll find them, too,” she said after a moment.  “In your own way.”

They rode in silence after that.

They came within sight of Rimefang
Loch.  Cross had never before laid eyes on it from the western shore.

Several miles wide and tens of miles long,
the Rimefang was a massive body of water that had become the unofficial boundary between the Southern Claw and the Ebon Cities.  A good deal of fish and shellfish could be found along the far eastern shores, and numerous islands lined with minerals and oil wells occupied the violent sea.  Unnatural winds carried across the waters.  There were creatures out there – aquatic marauders and arcane sealife, Vuul pirates and primitive Dracaj offshoots who made dark sacrifices in submerged coral castles. 

Cross
used to visit another part of the Loch, the far off shore near the city-state of Ath.  The waters were calmer there, and not so deep.  The fish were just fish, not roaming sea monsters, and the area was heavily patrolled by Southern Claw warships.  An obelisk monument had the names of those killed during The Black inscribed on its face.  For the longest time Cross had made an annual trip to the obelisk to pay respects to his father.  He hadn’t been there in a very long time.

The point where
the Lith and human band approached the western shore was mercifully free of Ebon Cities outposts or the strange bone pillars used to sniff out arcane activity.  It was also a far cry from the waters Cross knew.  Black iron barricades stood off the shore, barbed deterrents laced with hex and razor wire.  The black waves were fouled with red sludge, and dry storms hovered in the atmosphere.  The sand was dark and reeked of animal waste and dried blood.  A shallow slope led down to the Rimefang’s bloody edge, and patches of thick trees lent cover and shade from the icy sun.

“What are they waiting for?”
Flint asked through gritted teeth.  He, Cross, Shiv and the two larger Lith, muscular brutes Shiv had affectionately nicknamed Bull and Dozer, waited in a stand of low and leafless trees next to an abandoned boat house.  The rest of the Lith stood scattered about the shore, so deftly concealed behind rocks and bushes that if Cross hadn’t watched them hide he never would have even guessed they were there.

“I
’m not sure,” Cross said.  “For something to come out of the water, maybe?”

“Like a shark,”
Shiv said.

“
I don’t think a band of Lith warriors came all this way to ambush a shark,” her father said.

“You never know,”
she retorted.

Bull gave them a severe look.  They quieted.

They heard the throaty calls of unknown animals.  Blood flies skimmed across the water’s surface. 

Bull and Dozer were armed with hea
vy crescent blades, exceedingly sharp silver axes covered with runic etchings and script from some forgotten language.  Cross held Soulrazor/Avenger close, and Flint had the shotgun. 

The air was so tense it threatened to snap
.  They waited for what felt like an eternity until they finally saw them.  The Watchers.

Half-wraith dir
igibles, bulging ghost sacs of unguent and black smoke.  Their pale eyes shone like beacons.  The ground cracked and peeled and the waters churned and boiled beneath their gaze.  Slithering tentacles dangled around beaked maws and tore at the ground with razored ganglia.

There
was a host of the undead patrol.  Synthetic dead brain cortexes within the rotting meat husks channeled information back to vampire commanders at some nearby outpost.

Cross
’s blood froze.  Flint grabbed Shiv and pulled her deeper into the bushes.  Cross gripped the hilt of his blade tight.  The Watchers wouldn’t go down easy, but they were nothing compared to facing a full vampire patrol.

He held his breath.  The world seemed to do the same.

The Watchers creaked with gristle as they floated by.  The sound of something being chewed stirred within their corpse-sack bodies.  Meat juices stained the ground.  Cross smelled burning skin and heard a choir of cracking bones, and it took him a moment to realize that sound was the Watcher’s voices.

Shiv
looked out from the shadows, her eyes wide with terror.  Her father wasn’t faring much better.  Cross motioned them to stay low. 

A Watcher
floated close.  The bushes bent and creased beneath the floating body.  Leaves and twigs fell into his hair.  Tentacles slithered and flopped overhead like epileptic snakes.