Steven Montano - Black Scars

And yet no one had ever lost their spirit and gained a new one, until I did. Nothing is impossible, especially when we don’t fully understand the rules of the game.

The vampire had a hood over its head. It stood rigid as a board and hovered inches above the ground, held aloft by the same invisible force that generated the flaming cage that constrained it. The vampire made no sound.

Lucan, Kane and Ekko all sat nearby while they ate. Kane and Ekko shared a blanket to hold off the night’s chill. Lucan sat alone, absent-mindedly eating while he stared off into the eastern wastes. Vos and Dillon stood guard, suspiciously watching each other as much as they did the prisoners and the plains for any sign of trouble.

“ Lucan is special,” Black began. She and Cross sat a few meters away from the prisoners, on opposite ends of a low cook fire just beyond a jumble of stones that might have once been a wall. Coffee boiled inside of an old black pot that dangled over the campfire. “His spirit isn’t like yours and mine. It’s…older. Larger. More primal, I suppose.”

“ He looks like he’s in his forties,” Cross noted. Cross was twenty-seven. He would be lucky if he lived to see thirty-two or thirty-three. Short life expectancy was a fact of life with warlocks and witches, who spent most of their lives tied to their arcane spirits, bonded with spectral undead forces that literally fused with their souls. When you held hands with the dead, eventually they pulled you down into the grave. “How has he survived this long?”

“ His spirit has been controlled and repressed for most of his life,” Black said. “Lucan Keth was born in the wild, bought from his parents by slavers, and raised to be used as a weapon. He has never known control of his spirit, because no one who ever controlled him has wanted him to. Without thaumaturgic constraints, his spirit would run wild. It would go on a destructive rampage.”

“ Are there any others like him?”

“ If there are, I’ve never heard of them. I doubt they’d survive past puberty without strict supervision by an experienced mage.”

“ How did Lucan’s spirit know to target the Gorgoloth, and not us?” Even though Cross and his spirit had been forced to protect themselves from Lucan’s power, it had become clear that the only reason they’d survived at all was because Lucan wasn’t trying to harm them. Cross didn’t want to believe there was anyone with that much power, especially not someone who had so little control. He remembered the feel of Lucan’s spirit when it had blazed over him, and he went cold from the memory. Cross had been to the necropolis of Koth and had stood in the presence of the Old One: the touch of Lucan’s spirit was colder by far.

“ We’ve had Lucan at Black Scar long enough that we’ve learned how to focus his spirit’s rage based on how we measure its release from the thaumaturgic bonds. It’s a combination of timing and degree.” Black poured them each a cup of coffee. The steam felt soothing in the brittle air. “No one really controls Lucan’s spirit. The best we can do is manipulate it.”

Cross chewed on that.

I’ve never seen such pure destructive force contained in a human being.

“ Where are you taking him?” he asked. “And, more importantly, why are you taking him there?”

Black bit her lip, and looked away. Cross got the feeling that she wasn’t used to being in a situation she had no control over.

“ They have my lover,” she said at last. “And if I don’t give them Lucan, Cole is dead.”

“ Who is ‘they’?”

“ A gang of mercenaries and thieves led by my brother, Cradden Black.”

“ Wait a second,” Cross said. “Your brother kidnapped your boyfriend…”

“ Girlfriend.”

“ I’m sorry?”

“ Girlfriend, you misogynist prick. Lara Cole is my girlfriend.”

“ OK,” Cross said. “Your brother kidnapped your girlfriend, and the only way for you to get her back is to give him Lucan…the most powerful warlock I’ve ever encountered, and I’d bet I’m not the only person who would say that. Do I have all of that right so far?”

“ That about sums it up,” Black said sardonically.

“ You’re willing to go through all of this, for her?” he asked. Black nodded. “She must be pretty special.”

“ She’s worth dying for,” Black said matter-of-factly.

Cross nodded. Of all of the things he’d ever known a Revenger to do, stealing a prisoner out of Black Scar to free a loved one hardly ranked among the worst. Still, Black clearly wasn’t too concerned with the ramifications of releasing Lucan’s spirit into potentially deadly hands.

“ What does Cradden want with Keth?” he asked.

“ No,” she said, avoiding the question. “Your turn. I know you’re offering to help…and I also know that you aren’t doing it out of the kindness of your heart. What do you want from me.”

“ You know what,” he said. “The Woman in the Ice.”

Black watched him like he was something poisonous.

“ I don’t know…”

“ No,” Cross interrupted, sternly. “You know something.”

You have to.

Follow and you will find.

“ Why do you need to find her?” Black asked him.

“ Why do you follow up every question I ask with another question?”

Black laughed.

“ The art of negotiation, my friend.”

“ We’re on a mission,” Cross said after a moment. “For Mother.”

He could tell that his answer caught her off guard.

“ As in…the White Mother?”

“ No, your mother,” Cross said. “Yes, the White Mother.”

“ And what does the White Mother want with the Woman in the Ice?”

“ You know I can’t tell you that,” Cross said after a pause. He considered telling her, but he still wasn’t quite sure if Danica Black was the sort of person who would care or not.

Because something so evil you can’t even imagine it is going to slaughter thousands of people, and we have to stop it. Not that I have the faintest idea how finding the Woman in the Ice is supposed to help.

“ I don’t know where the Woman is,” Black said. “But I’ve heard of her.”

“ Yes,” Cross said with a nod. “And not many have.”

“ Cole could find her.” Every time Black said her lover’s name, Cross heard her voice crack a little. “Lara hires herself out as a gun and a guide for treasure hunters and archaeologists. The last time that I spoke to her was just before my brother took her, and she said she was leading an expedition that was looking for the Woman in the Ice. And that they were getting close.”

The fact that someone else was looking for the Woman presented problems all its own. Cross decided to file that particular problem away in his head until he dealt with the other eighty-six already on his list.

“ Did she say where they were going?”

“ No,” Black said. “Just that she was somewhere here in the Reach.”

Cross nodded.

Damn it. I hate prophecies. Layers and layers of them now, stacking up, burying us deep. It had been a prophecy that had led to the mission in the first place. Another had led him from the Lith camp to the Dreadnaught. And now this.

“ Well?” Black asked.

“ I’m thinking.”

“ Does it usually take this long?”

“ Yes. Shut up, please.”

The air turned dark. Ebon claws of shadow crept over the horizon, and pale fog thickened close to the ground. There were strange calls in the distance — carrion birds, wolves, inhuman echoes that seemed to crawl into the width of the sky. The wind died down, but that didn’t help with the incessant chill. Not far away, Kane and Ekko talked quietly, while Dillon and Vos struck up a conversation. Lucan stared out into the night, his eyes glazed.