Stone rode the point, and the others filed in behind him. The camel, who’d shown surprising endurance through the entire ordeal (or perhaps not that surprising…Cross realized he didn’t know a great deal about camels), brought up the rear, tethered to Graves’ horse.
“ So…what?!” Graves asked. “You have a habit of starting a conversation and then falling asleep.”
“ I was talking to Cristena, you moron.”
“ Bite me.”
“ Yes, children?” Cristena said with a sigh.
“ What did you do?” Cross asked her.
“ What do you mean?” she hesitated.
“ I mean, what did you do?” Cross asked again. “Back there, at the gates.”
“ I heard you. That doesn’t mean I know what you’re talking about.”
“ Your magic,” Cross said. “Something about the way you channeled your spirit, maybe, or…”
“ You’re not making any sense,” Cristena said, and she cut Cross off when he tried to respond. “Listen, Cross, no offense…but I don’t want to talk to you about my spirit. I don’t want to talk about much of anything with you. All that should matter to you is that I’m going to help you get through the Bone March. That’s it. I don’t want to get to know you. I don’t need you. You need me.” The anger in her voice was hard to miss.
“ Yeah,” Cross said.
I felt you touch your spirit, he thought. I felt your magic, back at the city, even though my spirit is gone. And I don’t know why. I shouldn’t be able to do that. How did that happen?
Was it you that somehow made that possible? Or was it me?
“ Is there a problem?” Stone asked from up ahead.
“ No,” Cross said. He met Cristena’s gaze until she finally looked away and cast her cold eyes to the north horizon. “No problem at all.”
PART FOUR
He stands alone in a wasteland of black sand, a realm of charcoal graveyards. The black mountain stands in the distance, impossibly tall, a rip in the sky. The forest lies at its feet, subjugated by the peak’s brutal size. The stink of crumbled empires and the breath of ghosts drift on the ice wind breeze.
There is nothing beyond the glade and the mountain. They are adrift, an island in a sea of nothing. Black sands run to infinity. He feels the icy cold of the open desert, and he gazes up to a bloody red sky filled with swirling steel clouds. Dead air whips along the ground, and it draws sand up into a black storm that takes to the sky like a predatory flock.
He hears the pain of the prisoners in the trees, bound there for eternity. He feels he should not free them, but he doesn’t know why.
Night stretches slowly across the sky and spreads like a stain. He senses the women in the glade, trapped in a prison of trees. He feels their heartbeats across the dust, vibrating through the sands. He hears tears that fall like raindrops.
The lonely dirge of a train cries out. A plume of churning smoke appears in the distance, spat into the sky by a steel goliath that tears across the ground, a train with no tracks, an iron juggernaut that brings a cloud of black souls in its wake. He is afraid of this ghost train. He knows he will see it closer, and soon, but he doesn’t want to.
He calls out to her, to any of the prisoners, but all he is rewarded with is the sound of his own meaningless voice, a fading echo carried away by the wind as easily as the black sand. The train draws nearer, inevitable, unstoppable.
He has lost her. He is alone.
FIFTEEN
They rode through a land of dust and ash.
The Bone March was a region of midnight sand. When the sun was eventually sucked into the horizon they knew it would be difficult to discern where the world began and where it stopped. Red dust had been blown into drifts as tall as a man, but the ground beneath the sand was all black: black soil, black water, black stone. It was as if everything had been burned and had yet to heal.
That’s not far from the truth, Cross thought.
Once beyond the dangers of Dirge, they rested and made sure that all of their supplies were in order and that they had their bearings. Cross compared his translated map with Cristena’s knowledge of the area, and they used the compasses and water-globes to align the sun’s position with their location to make sure they were in the right place. Once they charted a course, they set off.
After an hour of riding into the Bone March, it felt as if they’d traveled to another planet. The world was a black desert, an endless sea of onyx soil and crimson dust and gnarled, lifeless white trees that protruded from the ground like dug-up old bones. The air was as dry as paper, but the soil underfoot seemed unstable and almost fluid at times, and they rode with an eye out for sinkholes.
The utter stillness of the March was unnerving. There were no insects, no coyote or wolf calls, and no wind. Even the footfalls of the horse’s hooves were nearly silent. The loudest sounds to be heard were the creak of the saddles and the shift of guns and equipment as they rode.
It was midday, though it was difficult to tell, since the sky had been the same pale shade of red for hours. The color reminded Cross of a bloody steak. He dismounted and led the nameless camel for a while so that he could stretch his legs. The air was cold, and it smelled like something sick. Cross had been constantly thirsty since they’d entered the March, as were the horses. Luckily they’d had the foresight to stock up on water, but at the rate at which they had to consume it in order to stay even relatively hydrated, and thanks to the apparent scarcity of potable water there in the March, they knew that their supply wouldn’t last very long.
I guess it’s a good thing we aren’t going far.
“ This is where it all started,” Cross said.
“ What?” Graves asked.
“ The Black broke through into our world here. Well…” Cross turned about in a circle, taking in the breadth of the Bone March. “ Somewhere out here. They think.”
“ They think,” Cristena repeated. She rode at the rear of the group. Her palomino looked downright exhausted, and Cristena looked listless and sleepy, herself. Cross suspected that raising that shield back in Dirge had taken more out of her than she’d let on. “It’s a guess. There’s no way to ever prove it.”
“ Well, they did find arcane residue from The Black out here in the wastes a few years ago,” Cross answered. “Not to mention the remains of old Soth. We shouldn’t even be too far from some of Soth’s ruins, if my map is right.”
“ Old Soth is just a myth,” she said. “El Paso used to be here, not some faerie vampire capital.”
“ I am so lost,” Graves said.
There was no way anyone could prove or even understand the truth about The Black. All that could really be agreed on was that there was a time before The Black, and a time after, and that no two worlds could be further removed.
The destructive phenomenon called The Black had arrived completely unheralded, and it ravaged the world with a single-minded fury the likes of which humankind could still barely conceive. Millions died in the days and months following The Black. The initial colliding of worlds had caused tidal waves and earthquakes. Entire cities had
