Steven Montano: Crown of Ash

The second tank left trails of black smoke in its wake as necrotic engines propelled it straight towards them. Thick blasts of sand flowed around the vehicle in a dust tide. The tank grew larger by the second. It was so close it shook the airship’s ruined walls.

Kane looked in the sky above the tank and saw d ark shapes in the dust. T he tank had air support.

Terrific.

“ F liers!” he shouted. He ripped his boot knife free and sliced open Maur ’s harness. T he Gol jumped down, ripped a mini-Uzi away from a holster in the paneling, and raced towards the port-side hatch. “You’re welcome!” Kane shouted after him.

T he top-mounted 20mm cannons suddenly hammered to life, and the sound pounded at Kane’s skull. Ronan was still in the gunner’s se at.

Sol pulled Jade and Maur behind him as he kicked open the port hatch. They’d landed at a steep angle on top of a tall sand dune. Sol leap t out and roll ed down the slope. Jade and Maur followed, and Kane moved next to the open door.

“ Are y ou coming?!” he shouted, but Ronan couldn’ t hear him over the guns. “Hey dumbass!” Kane screamed as loud as he could. “LET’S GO!”

Ronan leapt down from t he gunner’s seat, grabbed his MP5A5, and followed.

Kane fell onto the sand and rolled down the dune. He felt his knee buckle again, and he tasted cold sand.

They were in the middle of a pale wasteland. T he Rakzeri ship had crash-landed onto a sharp stone half-buried under the sand.

It’s just our shit luck we’d hit the one random rock in the whole friggin’ desert, Kane thought bitterly. It’s like a collective skill.

The ruined barrier was less than a klick behind them to the east, and the frozen desert sloped sharply downwards to the west, towards a cluster of fallen trees and dry riverbeds.

The shrill call o f a tank shot cut the air apart like a banshee’s wail.

“ M ove! ” Kane screamed. They ran and fell down the dunes.

The shell exploded in a blast of sand, fire and sm oke. Dust roared across Kane’s vision and stung his eyes. Shrapnel hailed down. P ain lanced through his arm and b lood flew onto his face.

Everything went silent. All Kane heard was the beating of his own hammering heart. His hands found one of his blades there on the ground, and that was when he realized a ten-inch needle of steel had bore straight through his forearm. Surprisingly, h e felt no pain.

That’s probably a bad thing.

Sol was yelling at him. H e couldn’t hear a word th e big man said.

Everyone lay scattered on the ground, alive but dazed, contorted in awkward positions where they’d landed at the bottom of the dune. Smoke drifted over the m.

The flaming wreckage of the Rakzeri ship slid down the sand and straight towards them. It would crush them all in moments.

Sound crashed back into his ears like a tidal wave.

“ Kane, mo ve your ass!” Sol shouted. The criminal hel d Jade ’s arm in one hand and had Maur over his shoulder.

Ronan ran at Kane and tackled him, knocking the wind from his lungs. T hey both roll ed out of the path of the flaming wreckage. He saw an inverted image of the burning ship as it slid and tumbl ed down the dune. Black fire plumed into the air. Drifts of ash came down like snowflakes.

The f liers approached, and t he tank drew within a few hundred yards. C hains dangled from the cannons and tore the sand. S hadowy Razorwings soared in low and nearly touched the ground with their oily black bodies. Kane saw dark armored vampire riders with bladed hand-cannons and serrated swords.

Jade’s spirit was the first to strike. Undulating saws of purple light cut a swath across the sand. The Razorwings avoided the attack with ease, but she bought the team enough time to split and run in different directions.

Her arcane blades kicked up a dust storm that twisted violently into the air. The storm expanded until it enveloped the entire crash site. Kane couldn’t see more than a few yards out, but he knew that meant he couldn’t be seen, either. The sand somehow stayed out of his eyes and throat, which meant Jade shielded them from the storm’s effects.

Kane and Ronan lost sight of the others, but he knew Jade would be able to find them — he felt her telepathic presence at the edge of his mind.

The sound of the tank fa ded as it struggled through the desert storm, and the fliers’ reptilian cries echoed in the distance as they desperately search ed for the ir prey.

Kane and Ronan kept low and used the dunes for cover. They saw the silhouettes of the fliers in the grit — filled sky and heard the metal roar of massive wheels, but the sand mist concealed them, and soon they moved a safe distance away from the crash.

The dunes were steep and difficult to cross. Kane and Ronan ran up and down sand drifts, muscles aching and out of breath, until they found themselves in a shallow stone valley made of blasted stone, either an ancient riverbed or a fault line that cut straight down into the sand like a crack.

They only had to wait a few minutes before the others caught up with them. Miraculously, they hadn’t been followed.

Whirling patterns of blue — and- white rock poked through the sand. Deep shadows flowed like water through the breaks in the milky stone. The ground in the small valley was hard and cold, and they actually discovered traces of black ice.

They hid there in the crevice, concealed in side fissures in the rock. They heard the growl of some great aerial beast — not a Razorwing, and no thing that any of them recognized, but they decided they’ d rather not find out what it was — and huddled together as icy wind scraped past them.

After a while, everything was quiet. Jade’s storm faded to a drift of angry wind. Kane saw how pale and out of breath she was. No doubt she was fatigued from using her magic so much.

They waited another hour before they finally emerged. The afternoon had drawn long, and t he liquid sun hung frozen in the silver sky. Kane felt the chill of the ocean wind as surely as if they stood at the shore, but he guessed they were still a few miles out…and that was when he realized he didn’t actually have a clue where they were.

“Do you know our location, Jade?” he asked. “I completely lost my bearings when we ran away from the crash.”

“With no supplies,” Sol nodded glumly.

“Shit,” Ronan said.

“Damn it,” Kane echoed.

“Maur is not pleased.”

“I’m with Maur,” Ronan said. “Do we even know where the ship is now? We’ve been running around the dunes for a couple of hour s.”

“Jade?” Kane asked quietly. She looked exhausted, and more than a bit panicked. “Can you get us back to the ship?”

“ I think so,” she said hesitantly. “ But whatever we saw in those ruins back there is making it hard for my spirit to search the area.”

“Your storm work ed,” Ronan said sternly.

“ Using my spirit for violence and using it to search an area are two entirely different things,” Jade said. “Whatever that phenomenon was, it’s been well hidden, and whatever magic was used to conceal it i s ma king this entire region unstable.”

They walked beneath the pale and open sky. Kane heard howls in the distance. The wind was cold and sharp. His body was sore, and his knee ached like someone had jabbed a needle into it. Still, the fact that ever y step didn’t make him double over in agony was a good sign. He’d bandaged his arm — he didn’t remember removing the sliver of steel, but it was long gone — and Jade’s spirit had staunched the bleeding. Even then, it still throbbed and burned like crazy.

They came to the top of a steep rise and found a good vantage of the desert. Thick drifts of cobalt dust shifted in the distance like corroding walls. Storm clouds brewed far to the east. T here were few discernible landmarks they could use to get their bearings: just the ubiquitous sand, rising and falling with no pattern or rhyme, cold and glassy, striated in bands of black and white. There was no sign of the ship, and it wa s impossible to even pick up the smoke trail with so much dust and sand in the air.