Steven Montano: Blood Skies

He went through the city in a quiet panic, and it was a struggle every step of the way for him to maintain his resolve. There was always something undead within arm's reach, and at any moment he expected one to turn and pounce on him.

Nothing happened. He was left alone.

Cross searched for some sign of the Old One’s residence. It would be plain, Cross reasoned, for the Old One was not an ostentatious ruler. He’d been a soldier in life, a man who’d earned his reputation by doing the impossible and asking for little in return. His lair now would be fortified, but it would by no means draw attention to itself. Quite randomly, Cross took down a steep lane, and he entered a lower section of the city.

He walked down a road paved with faces: flayed skins pulled taut and stretched out in a mockery of caricature screams, a collage of human masks beneath his boots. He saw pillars made of black stone, and he passed a temple made of saw blades.

Cross came to the edge of a dock that led over turgid grey waters. Iron mists clung to the surface of the sea, low enough that he could still see the outline of a land mass out in the smoky bay, an isle dotted with buildings. Massive ice floes drifted in the water, black glaciers cut through with frozen veins of crimson quartz and bits of stony debris that still cleaved to the ice, the refugees from some long forgotten structure.

Cross compiled what he knew of the Old One. In life he’d led an expedition north some months after The Black, before the first warlock or witch sightings. That expedition, evidently, had been to try and rescue some special child, a child that a prophet or a fortune teller had determined would give humans the means to survive in their suddenly devastated world.

The Old One — Knight, that’s what his name was, Dane Knight — had died there along with all of his men, trapped and ambushed in a church by vampire shock troopers. The child had died, Knight had been turned into a vampire even though the rest of his men had been slaughtered, and in time he became a separatist and a defector known as the Old One.

I wonder why he left, Cross wondered. Why did he defect from the Ebon Cities?

The void where Cross’ spirit should have been gnawed at him, and it left him weak. He felt hollow. He wasn’t sure why, but he was certain the Old One was on that isle. The misty waters were laggard and sluggish. They’d once been frozen and solid, just like the lands that had surrounded the church where Knight and his Company had fallen, at least according to the tales.

You’re still there, Cross thought. The church where you died is on that isle, and that’s where you are. Trapped in the past.

Cross walked to the docks. Ancient and rotted wood creaked beneath his weight. The smell of sea salt was muted by the odor of undead fish, which Cross spied swimming just beneath the smoke-colored surface of the water. Tall smokestacks on iron dreadnaughts moored in the bay belched acrid black smoke that twisted into the sky. The air was brighter there by the water, pale and empty like a frozen winter. Dead waves splashed against the heavy pylons beneath his feet.

Behind him, the city carried on, unconcerned by his presence.

Cross descended a wooden staircase and stepped onto the floating walkways that led to the ships. Most of the vessels were large sailing crafts made of iron, bone and black wood, and they bore sails woven from tanned skins. There were also a number of submersibles, one- or two-man submarines equipped with massive viewing portholes and sharp propellers.

He spied a small sailing craft big enough for perhaps a dozen people. A hooded wight stood at the bow, its undead face partially concealed beneath a grey hood. If the wight found Cross out of place or suspicious then it made no sign of it. Instead it gestured with a skeletal hand for him to board the boat. Its wide and frozen human eyes seemed to regard Cross carefully as he approached.

I am expected.

He chilled at the thought, but accepted it, and boarded. The vessel shifted and lurched as he stepped onto the slick deck. Cross walked to the iron railings that secured the passenger pit, and looked out at the island.

Somehow, Cross wasn’t surprised by this turn of events. Maybe he’d even known this was how it would happen.

The wight stepped aboard in silence. It regarded him with its molded skeletal smile.

“ You’re expecting me,” Cross said. He was surprised when the figure nodded. “Where are you to take me?” he asked.

The wight pointed with a bony claw to the misty isle. Cross nodded.

A few minutes later the thaumaturgic turbines sputtered to life, and the vessel lurched forward into dark waters, slowly propelled by its noisy motors. Cross held on to the railing as the craft sliced its way through the oily sea. Black smoke from the city and the docks spread across the sky like an ink spill that painted a path to the black island.

Cross was certain, even before the vessel had launched, that he would not be coming back.

Buildings took shape in the mist as the boat drew closer to the isle. The shore was rocky and jagged, like a fan of blades. White waters heavy with green slime and putrid sludge crashed against the stones. The structures on the shore stood like gravestones in the white fog. Ghostly calls sounded through the chill of the afternoon. The air was icy and thick, and it pressed against Cross’ skin like a razor’s kiss.

The boat came ashore at one of the few points in the labyrinth of deadly stones where the beach was accessible. Cross disembarked and waded through polluted waters to a beach of pure white sand. He noted something odd about the sand, so he knelt down and took up a handful. Tiny bits of broken bone and tooth, so fine they were almost invisible, drifted between his fingers. The beach was ground bone: he stood on a shore of the dead.

Behind him, the ship silently cast off, as Cross knew it would.

Cross marched toward the structures. The dark chain of buildings was arranged in a semi-circle near the edge of some craggy foothills, similar in their appearance to the dagger-like rocks of the shore. The white fog blocked his vision beyond the buildings, which loomed wraithlike in the mist.

The air was shockingly cold. Cross walked through a floating curtain of ice that coated him in a brittle shell of frost. His lips and eyes felt numb. He breathed warmth into his hands and quickened his pace. Unnaturally dark cobblestone streets ran right up to the bone sand. Cross stepped up carefully, so as to avoid slipping.

The buildings were mostly wood, and they, too, were utterly black — the siding, the porches, even the windows were pitch, as if they’d been dipped in tar. The rickety wooden shacks were in a general state of disrepair.

The buildings encircled a solid ebon obelisk apparently made of black ice. The monolith stood twice as tall as Cross, and it was covered with silver runes and glyphs that Cross recognized as High Jlantrian script. Similar markings had been set on a disc of dark stone which served as a sunken, inverted platform that supported the obelisk. The disc and the ice pillar looked like a dial, or a clock. A short set of steps descended from the platform to the ground.

Even without his spirit, Cross felt drawn to the pillar. The obelisk emanated cold so absolute it made the air raw. Bitter steam curled off the stone.

Cross stared, and he moved closer without at first even realizing it. There was something intimately familiar about the obelisk, like the feeling of coming home, just as there was something terrifying about it, a danger that he couldn’t put a name or a face to. He saw voices in the obelisk, and he felt something claw at the stone from inside of it. As Cross drew closer he realized the obelisk wasn’t black at all — it was transparent, and it was filled with a desolate midnight smoke.