Steven Montano: Crown of Ash

Cross moves in a blur, not sure where his sudden speed come s from, not even cognizant of what ’ s happening until he cut s the first giant down, slices it from groin to neck and feels hot purple blood splash onto his face.

The blade is in control.

He swipes, ducks and weaves like a bladed dancer. He moves in and out of shadows like he’ s a shadow himself. He sees other versions of himself, alternate possibilities. He steps and steps again, cuts and cuts again. He strikes the same creature only once, but from m any angles. His stutter- strikes punch out from different dimensional possibilities. He is as the spider sees him: himself at a crossroads, the many paths conjoined into one. He is himself, striking from different futures, different pasts.

Blasts deafen his ears. Iron shot and nail spikes rip into the stone walls. The Sorn pour through, grim and silent, their enormous bodies blocking the way out. Monsters from the Carrion Rift scream as ballistics punch through the walls and rip into them.

He steps, strikes, steps away, strikes again. He hamstrings grey giants and severs fuel couplings, yanks grenades away from belts and tosses them at other Sorn. He sends hails of exploding flesh and fuel sailing through the air in molten waves.

He ha s become a walking nightmare, a shade. He sees them in blurs, barely aware of his own motions. The blade cuts up and through and across. Fingers and shells fall to the ground.

The Sorn are confused. He’ s everywhere and nowhere at once. They accidentally fire into one another, send flames back into their own ranks. Six are dead in the space of a minute.

One grabs him. It guesses correctly, or else the probability of his slipping past becomes too miniscule, even in this c onfused and chaotic place. He’ s thrown against the wall, and feels his back break.

Another Cross steps up and kills the offending Sorn, tears through its chest with his arcane sword. He sees a third Cross cut down by rotating gun barrels and stamped into gristle.

He is all of the versions of himself. The spider has joined more than one Cross to this battle: it has sent them all.

Condemned me to die. Every one of me.

He ducks back, hides in the dark. Sorn draw bludgeoning melee weapons and pursue him. He dodges around massive stalagmites. The giants spray the area with chain guns and nail launchers. Shards of stone and steel rain down around him.

He howls a nd leaps back into their midst. Soulr azor/Avenger hacks through flesh and tears through armor. He hears low grunts and watches bodies ooze purple waste on to the ground.

H e stands alone. He has defeated all of them. Over a dozen Sorn bodies lie in ruins. They sag and fade and bleed out without a sound.

H e regards the other versions of himself. They stand as if in council, half-concealed by shadows, wavering in and out of existence. They are barely recognizable. Some wear full beards, some are clean-shaven; one is missing an eye, while another is dressed as a Revenger; one still possesses his spirit, and he can even taste her in the air, her scent, her power. None of them is whole: they are half-illuminated shades, flickering ghost images. None of them is really there, and yet they all are.

They vanish. He is alone with the corpses.

Impressive, a voice says, and he turns around.

They’ re there. T he mages.

There are six Shadow Lords, each identical to the last, tall men in charcoal robes and high leather boots. Iron belts and bracers adorn their shadow-drenched skin. E ach wear s a simple and featureless mask, a bisected segment of skin-tight steel with dark eye slits. They are doppelgangers of one an other, and the air is alive with the force of their arcane might.

He readies his blade. He knows he can’t ho pe to defeat them all, but he has to try.

The first mage sends a blast of fire. He slices it in half, and t he pale flames sear out and strike another warlock, who dies screaming. Cross doesn’t give his attacker a second chance: he charges and removes the man’s head with a clean swipe.

Another warlock attacks him with gauntlets covered in crackling green waste. A fourth forges an ice sword and meets him in battle.

He shatters the ice sword and sends the mage back, then turns and severs the gauntlet-yielder’s hands. He spins and finishes the sword bearer, and both mages fall to the ground and die at the same moment.

But the last two mages have him. The first warlock slices his arm open with a blade made of black steel and diamond edges. He cackles like a child as he watches Cross stagger a nd bleed. The other mage hammers Cross with a cone of gravitational force that sends him to his knees and blasts the wind from his lungs.

Well done, Tregoran.

And you, Marklahain.

He falls on to his back. The uncertain world shifts even further. His sword is on the ground, well out of his reach.

What did the Eidolos tell me? He struggles to remember its words, to bring to mind the secret that had been imparted to him by the dread psychic. He feels certain the knowledge will save him.

The last two mages stand over him. One of them eyes their prize: t he frozen obelisk. They both laugh coldly.

He looks for the other version s of himself, but their connection to this place is g one. He’ s all alone, left with the burden of his failure, with the knowledge that he’d nearly stopped these mad warlocks.

But that doesn’t matter, he realizes. Because even if I’d beaten the Shadow Lords, Azradayne will still get what she wants.

He struggles for breath and grope s for his weapon, but it ’ s buried deep in the folds of shadow that creep a cross the floor.

Only the living are lost. H e re members t he words the Eidolos had given him. Only the living are lost.

Arcane energies fuse around him. His skin goes rigid, and his lungs free ze. He knows that i t’ s too late.

Kane took a deep breath.

“Relax,” Turner told him.

“ Are you my therapist?” he asked her sharply.

“No.”

“Then stop telling me to relax.”

Kane smelled ice, oil and gunpowder as the ship skimmed over the brittle surface of the Dark Sea, a largely frozen marshland between the Bone Hills and the vast tund ra called T he Reach. A ccording to Burke, that was where they ’ d find the ruins of Voth Ra’morg, where T he Revengers and the Kothians planned to enter the Whisperlands.

It was also where Rake and his cronies would likely kill Cross and Black in the ir attempt to get…something. No one seemed clear as to what it was Rake was actually looking for, but everyone seemed to agree that if he was going through this much trouble, it had to be something bad.

The cold ship rattled as it sped along. Kane saw the black and marshy landscape through the wide windows. The land was littered with icy reeds and mounds of frozen lichen, islands of damp earth and giant petrified mushrooms. The setting sun shone red and gold as it sank be hind grey-black clouds. Dark mountain peaks loomed in the distance.

Grey Clan skiffs, bulky grey vessels with indu strial turbines and heavy guns, trailed Burke’s squat and ugly warship.

Turner finished giving Kane his injection, an arcane healing solution made from a blend of salt water, holy oils and Type A Blood. S upposed ly it would help purge whatever was left of the vampiric infection from his system. Turner shot the fluid into his arm with a needle he thought w as roughly the size of a broadsword.

Under normal circumstances, a single injection should have been sufficient. Unfortunately, time progressed differently in the Whisperlands than it did in the sane wo rld, and so far as Turner knew — and the book — smart Revenger seemed to know quite a bit — no one had ever been bitten by a vampire while they were in the shadow realm and then transferred back to the physical world before the infection had set in. Supposedly, coming back had actually saved his life, since the slower flow of time delayed the infection process.