Steven Montano: Blood Skies

Cross walked. He ignored his aching knees. His own exhaustion pulled him along. He stumbled through mud and mist, almost devoid of thought.

He looked at the grave mounds and wondered how many of them still contained children’s corpses, and what suffering and fear they’d experienced at the hands of black-fanged vampires and their maggot-addled wight servants.

He thought of Snow, alone and afraid, subjugated to unimaginable cruelties at the hands of Red and her soulless patron.

He thought of Graves, his best friend, annoying and taxing at times but like a brother to him, and Graves was just a body now, a blood-spattered corpse that no one would even recognize. He thought of Stone and Cristena and Morg and Kray and Winter, of Snow and his mother and father, of the streets and shops and the frightened people he’d left behind in Thornn. He saw random images, meaningless in and of themselves a candle in his sister’s window frame; an open door that leads to a pub where he and Graves like to drink; a boxing match where he loses forty coins; a fortune teller who tells him he’ll live to a ripe old age; an elephant ride that he and his sister take, and they wonder all the while where such a beast came from; a brothel where he loses his virginity, the only place he will ever really enjoy the company of women; an apple stand where he works; a steam engine and a railroad that will never be finished, one of the only memories he has of his father, who takes him there when he is very small, before The Black; a sunset he watches with Snow; an eclipse; a waterfall and a lake and a bucket of cold white fish; a summer day, when Snow is inside, mother is in the kitchen, and he looks up at the sky and wonders, he sees possibilities, he knows he is trapped in one of those small eternal moments when his life is not yet decided, when there are choices still to make, when nothing is yet certain and all of those moments, taken together, were the chaotic collage of his life, a snapshot of his memory, his soul. There was no one thing, no ill-defined feeling or heart-moving song, but it was a sea of memories, a soup of emotions. It was life, his life, and his home, which was a place he wouldn’t let be destroyed by a woman who’d tried to be a savior but in the end had decided to become a God.

Cross walked on. His eyes were cast forward, and his pace quickened. He was ready to finish it. Even naked as he was without the shield of his spirit, he marched towards his end, and he was not afraid.

The prison of fog came to an end at the edge of a dead city.

The walls of the necropolis were made of thick stone blocks, so dark they seemed to suck the light out of the air. Sheets of black iron, pitted and dented by a history of unnamed calamities, had been riveted over the spaces between the blocks. The fog ended a few hundred feet short of the onyx city walls, far enough away for Cross to take in the impressive breadth of the utterly silent necropolis, which sat atop a field of ice cold mud. He saw a coastal shore at the far end of the city, and even though the waters were some distance away he detected the faint odor of salt. Skeletal and jagged towers stood at the corner intersections of the city walls. Each tower supported a belfry of preposterous size and crooked angles. Red flags hung limp in the dead air, and barbed iron spikes lined the tops of the walls like an animal’s spines.

A wide grey path led to the open portcullis that granted access to the city. There were crowded houses packed into the same unseemly angles as the towers, and stone streets that bore not a trace of refuse. Silver mist and dark green chimney smoke rolled over everything. The streets snaked deep and out of sight, winding into shadows.

Cross stood frozen. This city bore a citizenry, who even as he stood in awe moved silently along dank and lifeless streets. They went about their business, their eyes gone or their limbs missing or their mouths sewn shut.

This was a city populated by corpses.

They moved in near silence, so stiflingly quiet that Cross’ breaths sounded to him like hurricanes, his footfalls like thunder. The air tensed, as if ready to pounce.

The dead carried on as living people did. They were occupied by any number of mundane tasks.

Cross wasn’t even aware of the zombies behind him until they passed him by and entered the city, oblivious or unconcerned by his presence. He watched them pass. Their flesh was rotten and leathery, and they bore gaping holes in their bodies through which he saw black worms that swam in their veins in place of blood. None of the undead so much as turned their heads in his direction.

Maybe they don’t know that I’m here, Cross thought. How?

Maybe I’m expected. Maybe they’re supposed to let me pass.

Cross swallowed. The act of breathing seemed to drag rocks up and down the inside of his chest, and his stomach boiled over with worry.

Do it now, or you never will.

He stepped into the necropolis.

The silence was unnerving. Bound in by walls and towers, walking along clean streets beneath the shade of tall buildings, passing storefronts and sewer grates, Cross could almost believe he was somewhere else, in some normal city. But where another city would have bustled with activity, and the air would have been filled with shouts and whinnies and steam engines and noise, there in the necropolis there was only the quiet shuffle of corpse feet on the stone roads, the low and nearly inaudible moans of the undead, and the distant toll of some mad church bell that sounded utterly alien in that dread landscape.

He read a word on the face of a large building with stone columns: Koth. The Old One’s city. The vampires that defected from the Ebon Cities came to Koth. It was a city of undead outcasts, rebels, traitors in the eyes of the vampire elite. Those undead that were not tolerated by vampires — lich, ghouls, zombies, utterghasts, kai’thoren, mummies, necrofilch, others — were welcome in the Old One’s city. There they hid, hated by both the living and the dead.

But just like Red, the Old One is willing to compromise, Cross thought bitterly. The Old One is willing to give the Ebon Cities the means to defeat us, just so he can rejoin their good graces.

Cross brushed against dead bodies, and realized he couldn’t look much better than they did. He felt numb. The air in Koth was chill and damp and it froze his clothes to his skin. The mud and gore that had caked to his body itched. He wore a suit of gritty armor.

He wandered the streets, wondering where he would find Red.

Twisted and narrow lanes led down curved hills and snaked like rivers between the crooked buildings. Piles of bones stood at street intersections, illuminated by fire pits filled with cold blue flames. Tapestries of flayed skin dangled from the rooftops. Cross saw vehicles made of bone and turbines fueled by blood. He saw factory-bred zombies with false skin expertly sewn to their bodies with industrial seams. He saw feeding vats filled with entrails and bloody slime, and tanks filled with black necrotic fluid used to embalm and preserve rotting corpses, a privilege of the vain upper echelon of the damned.

Every building in the necropolis was dark and had been carved with rampantly elliptical angles, lending Koth a shadowy and organic feel. Black smoke silently churned from distant processing plants that cast industrial shadows over the city. Cross tasted exhaust and rotten nectar in the air, and he smelled turpentine and embalming fluid, sumac and hemlock. Beneath it all was an inescapable fog of decay.

Cross rubbed shoulders with shambling corpses and gaunt wights. Flame spirits floated through the air, casting blazing trails behind them. He gazed into eyeless sockets and mummified heads with their mouths frozen in permanent grins. The black sidewalks were coated with white corpse dust.