Steven Montano: Crown of Ash

“This is a crap idea, Dani,” Kane said.

“Don’t be scared, Blondie,” Sol said.

“I wasn’t talking to you, Beefsteak,” he said.

Ronan looked at Danica.

“It’s your call.”

Danica looked at her friends, and then at Jade. This was worse than she ’d thought.

Why are you looking for me now? she wondered. Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone, Rake?

She tapped her foot. They had to get home. For all they knew, Cross’ s life depended on it.

“Give us an hour,” she said. “We’ll meet you back here?”

“Of course,” Jade nodded.

“Dani…” Kane said as they left, but she put a reassuring hand on his arm.

“ We don’t have much of a choice, Mike. You guys go, help them out. I’ll make sure Cross is secure and try to keep us both out of sight.”

They moved a short distance away from Vago’s men before she stopped and looked at them both.

“We need to play this bastard’s game, at least for now,” she said. “You guys take Maur and go with them, do the job, and I’ll try to keep any more of my old friends from finding me. Right now it’s just important that we get home.”

Something had broken through the boundary. Something big.

The turbines on the Rakzeri airship Wicked roared loud as they blasted away waves of cold desert sand. The sky was pale and vast, and a dank red glow pressed up from the western horizon. Kane smelled sea salt and coal dust on the icy wind. They were just a dozen miles from the Ebonsand Sea, a dark and impressive expanse o f churning waters and dangerous, unnatural storms.

Kane knelt down in the sand and fac ed the barrier, a series of tall arcane pillars made of limestone and granite. The line of stones stretched in either direction for as far as the eye could see. Each pillar was covered in dark runes that supposedly cast an invisible shield between them, which acted as a twenty-mile long fence between Blacksand and the wild territories to the north and west.

A pair of the pillars had been broken, however, and up close it appeared they’d been rammed by some sort of vehicle or a large creature. Unfortunately, the salt winds off the Ebonsand coast had blown away any tracks, so all he could tell for certain was that either an armored land mammal or a small tank had smashed through the stones.

Awesome, he thought. Is it too much to ask for things to just be easy every once in a while?

“Well?” Jade asked. The witch stood just inside Wicked’s open bay door. T he ship hovered a few yards behind Kane and less than a foot off the ground. It was appropriately named: every Rakzeri ship Kane had ever seen looked like a handful of broken knives shoved around a conch-shell. The ships were efficient and fast but, in his humble opinion, ugly as hell.

Jade’s long dark hair caught in the wind. She was very short — five feet, if even that — and as thin as a rail. I t was a wonder she didn’t lift up in the breeze and sail into the sky.

“ ‘Well’ what? ” Kane said. “ You’re the expert. Y ou tell me.”

Kane had to shield his eyes from the dust kicked up by the Wicked, but there really wasn’t much to see other than the boundary, an unnamed arcane perimeter built by the mages of Blacksand to keep hostile wilderness mutations and primitive humanoids at bay.

It occurred to Kane that they weren’t far from Crucifix Point, the site of a terrible massacre at the hands of a vampire kick murder squad several years back. Ever since the Southern Claw had pulled most of their resources out of the area to concentrate on fighting the vampires in and around Rimefang Loch, the more the southerly territories had fall en into disorder. Now they were just a lawless haven for criminals, pirates and outcasts.

“It doesn’t look good,” Jade said. Kane hadn’t even seen her disembark from the vessel, but suddenly she stood on the ground right next to him. Ronan was behind her.

Jade walked across the cold sand with sandaled feet. Kane’s skin went cold at the presence of her spirit.

“Well?” Ronan asked. Only his eyes were visible beneath his shemagh.

“Give her a second,” Kane said. “You got a hot date, or something?”

“Blow me,” Ronan growled.

“That’s between you and your date,” Kane nodded.

“ Grow up, ” Jade groaned.

She walked past Kane and up to the nearest obelisk, which stood some eight-feet-tall and three-feet across even after it had been broken. The obelisks were partially submerged in the sand. There was roughly fifty feet between the individual stones, and they’d been linked together with a thin iron chain that had snapped and fallen on to the ground.

“There are trace s of foreign magic here, ” Jade said. “ Something used it to shatter the barrier.” She concentrated a moment. “ Ebon Cities magic. Chattel sorcery. ”

“ Shocker, ” Kane said.

“That’s terrific,” Ronan said with a shake of his head. “What now…‘Chief’?”

Kane tried to ignore the comment. Ronan was upset that Black had put Kane in charge while she stayed behind in Blacksand, but Kane liked it even less.

I shouldn’t be in charge, he thought. The only reason it’s me is because Black knows Ronan is two steps shy of being a complete nutcase, but she does n’t just want us to take orders from Vago’s flunkies. God, this sucks!

“This is the third breach we’ve found,” Kane said, mostly to himself, and then he turned to Jade, “but this is the first time you’re been able to get a read for what might have caused the damage, right?”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Then we should go through here, and check it out.”

She gave him an annoyed look.

“So you’re an expert on magic now?” she asked sardonically.

“Don’t get your panties wrinkled,” Kane said. “Do you disagree?”

“No,” Jade said after a moment. “But maybe you should let the mage ma k e the call on things related to magic.” Her smile went cold. “ Got it?”

Kane glowered, but he clenched his teeth and bit back about fifty insulting comments that came to mind. He heard Ronan laugh behind him.

We wouldn’t be in this mess if not for the f riggin’ Revengers. He and Cross had always kno w n it wouldn’t be easy for Danica to walk away from Black Scar, especially with as much a s she seemed to know about T he Revengers. But we didn’t expect them to track her down here, in the middle of N owhere S quared. They were basically out of money and short on all of their other supplies, and they really had no easy way to escape. Working with Vago was the only way they’d managed to stay out of Black Scar’s clutches, and every day they had to hide and rely on his protection they just fell deeper into his pocket.

Jade looked at the barrier again. Her attention was lost in the shifting sands.

“What is it?” Kane asked.

“I don’t know…” she said. “Something’s here…s omething is tied to this land.”

Her voice was dreamy and distant, and she stared straight ahead. Kane cautiously stepped around to look at her face. Her eyes glowed. They were locked in some arcane realm, trapped in a vision of magical trace lines or spectral pulses or some other damn thing Kane only barely understood. Even with as much as he’d learned about magic in the two years he’d spent with Cross and Danica, very little of it actually made sense to him.

“ ‘Something’ is…kind of vague, ” he said.

“Something old,” she said. “ S omething powerful.” Her eyes blinked, and when she opened them again their normal cold green color had returned. She looked dazed for a moment, and then regained her composure and looked at Kane. Whatever she saw on his face made her smile. “ What, did I creep you out? ”