Steven Montano - Black Scars

“ Jeraline,” Dillon said. His words came slow, like he had difficulty remembering them. He seemed only half awake.

They heard the roar of turbine engines as vessels passed outside the city walls, and the roar and groan of Krul’s chains as the city realigned itself. Cross felt the metal rattle beneath them whenever Krul folded and shifted, a gargantuan puzzle piece being rearranged.

His spirit held on to him. He felt her warmth, different than that of the desert air. She was distant and faint. He wondered if he could channel her if not for the gauntlets, or if doing so would burn her out like a candle. It didn’t matter — there was no way the vampires would leave that option open to its prisoners. Doubtless there were a ridiculous number of safeguards and spirit dampeners all over the prison city.

The groups of prisoners shifted around every now and again, and some individuals roamed on their own. They wandered and talked quietly, held handfuls of food that looked like fecal waste. There was nowhere for them to go, and nothing to do. The upwardly sloped walls bore no cracks, handholds or protrusions aside from the spikes, which jutted straight out at the top of the walls a good fifty feet over their heads. Without shade, prisoners were left with nothing to do but bake beneath the sun on the sand-covered metal floors.

Cross’s mind felt lost, adrift, and asleep. He remembered that Dillon had spoken, and that suddenly seemed like it had happened hours ago.

“ Who’s Jeraline?” he asked.

“ My…my sister.”

“ Yeah,” Cross answered.

I’m so weak. I can’t think straight. Have they drugged us, or is this just the fatigue, the malnourishment? Am I sick? He felt his leg. He didn’t think the wound had festered, but he couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually checked it. He hoped he wasn’t feverish.

“ I miss her cooking,” Dillon said. He laughed.

“ Was…was she a good cook?”

“ Nah, man, she was terrible!”

Dillon laughed, a booming, half-mad and infectious laugh, and Cross found himself laughing, as well. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know why they were laughing. It didn’t matter that nothing was funny.

A memory came to him. Black and white shadows, colliding in a storm. A maelstrom over a frozen lake. Obsidian glass and cold smoke. A Woman in the Ice.

Focus.

He felt his spirit there at the edge of his thoughts. He felt her pain, a distant and lingering ache like an old wound that was almost healed, like some fading scar.

Focus.

“ Dillon,” he said. He blinked his eyes, shook his head. “We have to get out of here.”

Lucan. The Dra’aalthakmar. The Sleeper. A shadow over the ice. A battle.

“ I know,” Dillon said.

They sat for a time. Another day might have passed and they wouldn’t have known, since their routine had become so ingrained in his mind Cross didn’t even notice it any more. Time melted and blurred.

His clothes were disintegrating. He was so covered in grime he felt like he wore someone else’s skin.

At some point, he and Dillon talked about Krul, and assessed what little they knew about the prison city. The longer they talked, the clearer their minds became, even though it was still difficult for Cross to track the passage of time. But he knew one thing clearly: they had to escape. If Lucan and his primal spirit had lost the battle with the Sleeper, it might have already been too late. But, if Lucan had weakened it, or even just fought it off for a time, there was still a chance. There was even the chance that Lucan had somehow defeated the Sleeper, and that the mission was done…but Cross sensed that wasn’t true, even if he wanted to believe it. Either way, they still had to escape. He did not intend to sit in Krul and rot.

But before they could escape, they had to plan, and in order to do that they had to catalog everything they knew of their surroundings. That was true of any tactical situation. Going back to that routine — their training from years back, when Cross had been a green recruit afraid of his own shadow, and Dillon was a foot soldier — helped them both focus, and it kept them sharp when fatigue or drugs or heat or malnourishment or sickness or all of those things threatened to drag them down into mental oblivion.

Cross had been there for what felt like an eternity, a black prison of the mind with tighter bonds than the gauntlets or the shackles he was forced to wear every time they brought him to and from the surface. He’d floated in that mire, a semi-conscious soup. Now, there with Dillon, recalling his days in Viper Squad and Dillon’s days in the infantry, talking and planning, laying out strategy, carefully weighing options and making crude maps in the sand, made Cross realize that he wasn’t dead yet. That prison in his brain was still there, a deep and dismal shaft, but Cross finally felt he had a chance to claw his way out.

Focus.

Krul. The City of Scars. It was the prison metropolis of the Ebon Cities, a place where the vampires sent exiled captives that they wanted kept alive. It was a monstrosity of steel and chains, a gargantuan complex nestled in the center of an arid wasteland several days travel from a blighted sea.

Most of the prisoners in Krul were tortured for information, or else they were used as slave labor in the vampire’s production facilities. Even more were used as fodder in spectator gladiator games, events of blood and mayhem staged for the pleasure of the undead aristocracy.

The rest of the prisoners were Turned into vampires.

The Southern Claw had learned quite a few things about how vampires corrupted and Turned creatures. Arcane venom was injected into the bloodstream via a bite, and it spread quickly. Tiny necrotic insects in the venom festered and multiplied and turned the victim’s entire metabolic system into an undead engine, until the victim became an automaton of flesh. These new vampires were vicious, strong, powerful, and utterly loyal to the vampire collective, possessed of some vast and dark consciousness that all of the vampires of the Ebon Cities shared. But these vampires were also brutes, possessed of only modest intellects. They were grunts; foot soldiers.

On occasion, the Ebon Cities desired a human convert to retain the skills they’d possessed in life. This required a separate and slower process, one that preserved the intelligence and abilities of the living being. That process belonged to the wardens of Krul.

The prisoners in the open commons were never molested by the guards. There seemed to be no agenda aside from letting the inmates bake in the sun. The fact that food was provided indicated that they weren’t meant to die, so Cross could only surmise this routine was all a part of the breaking process, some psychological means by which their resistance would be eroded.

Cross’ leg still throbbed with pain, but even though he still clenched his teeth every time that he shifted his weight the wound itself felt much less tender. Whatever infection it was that had furthered Cross’ disorientation was finally starting to pass.

“ How many?” Cross asked Dillon.

“ Judging by the size of the city…there are a thousand vampires, at least.” They couldn’t be sure of how many prisoners there were, since they didn’t understand the function of most of the buildings they’d seen during their initial “tour” of Krul. Every once in a while they heard the throaty whispers of the undead float at them through the walls, a hissing rhythm that grated the senses. Krul wasn’t exclusively a prison, they knew that much: it also housed a good number of vampire aristocrats, as well as a half-dozen or so refining facilities that processed metal, obsidian, and other raw materials used in manufacturing plants located elsewhere. The prisoners of Krul were put to good use, and it was only a matter of time before Cross and Dillon joined those ranks.