He could barely move. His muscles shook with effort as he clenched the altar with gloved hands and hauled himself to his feet.
The church doors shook. Motes of frost fell from the ceiling. Thick gusts of soiled snow blew through the windows and turned the air the color of ash. The cracked doors held steady, secured by bodies that had fallen against it in a grisly barricade, but Knight knew they wouldn’t hold for long.
Knight’s left arm dangled uselessly at his side. His shirt and armor had been torn to shreds, and he was covered in thick cuts that ran all of the way to the muscle.
It’s a wonder I haven’t died from blood loss yet.
He had to move. There was too much at stake, and too little time.
His teeth clenched with effort, Knight stumbled forward. He pulled his 9mm from the holster with his good hand. He wasn’t sure if the pistol was loaded, and even less sure if it would make any bit of difference towards what was coming for him.
Lucky for me, that’s not what it’s for.
He stumbled, one foot in front of another, to the back of the church. The doors buckled again behind him. He heard a frenzied shout, a bodiless animal call over a chorus of humanoid screams. They’d use explosives soon. Knight pushed through the doors that led to the center of the church, not wanting to wait around and see what was inevitably about to burst through the main door.
He entered a small chamber that was dark, wide and cold. It was a near empty room decorated with wooden columns and a single torch set in a wall sconce to provide light. Fumes of what Knight had been told was magic lingered in the air, a tangy ozone haze that watered his eyes and made the world blur. It was just barely past dawn.
Time to do the deed, he thought. They’d almost been ready to complete the ritual when the attack had come. The scholars had to make sure that everything was ready, that most of the ritual had actually been completed, and that all that remained was the final stroke, the part of their task that had to wait until the sun came up. The vampires knew what they were up to: they’d attacked just before first light.
I hope this works. I hope it was worth it.
Knight tripped, and he grimaced in pain from the hard impact on his knees as he fell to the ground. He set the pistol down and slammed the door shut behind him. Seconds later he heard the outer doors of the church buckle and shatter. His pursuers hadn’t come through the windows because of the tripwires and holy oils, but that hadn’t delayed them nearly as much as he’d hoped. Knight fumbled for the gun, nearly dropped it, fell forward, and somehow managed to turn the fall into a running lurch that brought him to his feet again.
Inside the space in the center of the wooden pillars, at the bottom of a short set of stairs, was a sort of sunken pit. Knight had to step slowly, a difficult task given the fact that there was blood in his face and his head was spinning with fatigue. His feet felt like they’d been separated from his body. Knight managed to make it to the bottom of the steps, where he dodged a ring of candles that had been set around the bundle of cloth at the exact center of the room.
The perfect center, Knight thought, recalling the priest’s words. This is the middle of the middle. There’s something special about this place, some geo-religious significance: its fey lines, its orientation to the magnetic poles, a lot of faerie dust in the area, some damned thing. This is the only place it can be done. The only place we can save humanity.
They were coming. Knight stumbled to the cloth bedding that had been laid down for the child. Huge black eyes stared up at him. He looked into her face, and was reminded of his daughter.
Knight’s heart froze.
I can’t do this.
Yes you can, he told himself. You have to. Now focus.
Knight did his best to ignore the growing chaos of sounds beyond the door — whirring blades, mechanized weapons, hybrids of blood and bone that shouted obscenities in an arcane tongue he couldn’t understand. His arms shook, and even with as much pain as he was in, what came next was far more painful.
He took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.
PART ONE
The fields of snow and rivers of ice are reflective white and blue, like steel and bone, a mirror a thousand miles long. A ghost train screams by in the distance, and it belches a stream of dark smoke into the air. In the middle of this nowhere stands a massive mountain as black as coal. It pierces the sky and penetrates the heavens.
He sees the forest glade at the base of the mountain. He knows that she is there.
Something approaches. He senses it rather than feels it, a tremor, like electricity along his imaginary skin, a taste of unrest on his ethereal tongue. He hears dead whispers hidden in the frozen wind.
He is at once both vast and miniscule, an omniscient being squeezed into a bottle. The world plays out in his vision like a painting beneath him, as if he were some tireless airborne being.
His vision sweeps across the apocalypse landscape. He sees black waters and blood skies, skeleton trees in burning bogs, pale dancers on a distant vampire shore. He sees cities made from stone and iron and guarded by impossible weapons, threatened by living shadows that take the shape of wolves or ravens or emaciated men. He sees the dead who lie in waiting, ready to assault what is left of humankind from their scattered black towers of steel webs and ossified bone.
All of it, he sees, but cannot touch.
Soon, she says. You are closer than you think.
Closer to what?
To a part of the world that you should not be able to touch. A place that is in danger. A place you are closer to than most.
He knows her, and he trusts her. She is a part of him.
He floats through aimless skies. The vapor of ages folds around him. He arrives back in his own dream, at the edge of unseen realities. He is adrift within the folds of overlapping worlds.
ONE
Year 20 A.B. (After the Black)
Cross saw blood in the sky.
It was a trick of the dusk light. Thick rays of dying crimson sunshine cut through the dark vapors that hung over the battlefield and the drifts of white smoke spewed by crawling war machines. The air was a den of rumbling motors, heavy treads and great iron wheels that crushed rock and shattered bones. Cross smelled oil and exhaust.
I hate this place.
His entire body ached. Cross had slept perhaps five hours in as many days, and that sleep had been more like scattered instances of half-slumber snatched off in heaps of dirty blankets and piles of bandages that had been left discarded outside the medical bivouacs. All of his sleep had been half-filled with nightmarish images of torn bodies and children drowning in burning fuel.
Grime and filth covered his skin. Cross’ stomach ached. He was long tired of magically preserved rations and stale wine. When he ate anything beyond a slice of bread his gut twisted and his urine burned. Cross didn’t normally
