ONE
Year 23 A.B. (After the Black)
The sky was the color of bones.
Cross was on his back. The tent flap was wide open, and his head and shoulders lay exposed to the cold air of the tundra. His eyes locked on the dead white sky. Frozen grass cracked beneath him as he rose from the uneven ground. His ears and nose felt frozen, and the light from the white sun seemed to pierce straight through to his brain, giving him the sort of headache he usually only got after a long night of drinking…not that he drank all that often anymore. His muscles were stiff, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to actually hear himself creak as he sat up.
Maybe if I didn’t always sleep in my flak jacket, I wouldn’t wake up feeling like a piece of wood.
The Lithian campsite comprised of about twenty tents in all. Most of those tents had been stitched together from Tuskar skins, though a few shaman’s tents had been made from the hides of white lions or snow snakes.
The snowy expanse of the Reach stretched on for as far as the eye could see. The shadow of Thornn was barely a blot on the western horizon.
Cross stood up, slowly. He smelled campfire smoke and tasted cold air that cut to the back of his throat and burned his lungs.
“ Morning, sunshine,” Dillon said from behind him. The lean scout was in a pair of camouflage pants and a loose tee-shirt.
“ Aren’t you cold?” Cross asked. He reached down and found his green wool blanket, which was nearly as stiff as his back. The interior of the tent was littered with more blankets and the rest of Cross’ gear, which was actually quite little: his backpack and his weapons, two pairs of gauntlets and their insulated battery packs, a cast iron skillet, some clothes, and a map case. The tent was barely big enough to fit Cross, let alone his gear. He wasn’t sure how the Lith managed to sleep two or sometimes three deep in those tents, even with as light and as thin as they were.
“ Nah, man,” Dillon said as he folded out a second shirt. He set his backpack down, which was loaded with weapons and filled canteens. “You get used to it.”
“ Yeah… how long have we been out here?” Cross asked. He rubbed his hands together over and over again, desperate to work some warmth into them.
“ Most people get used to it,” Dillon smiled.
The air was the same hue as the drifts of ice and snow that covered so much of the Reach. The sky seemed unusually bright, especially compared to the smog and smoke that Cross was used to back in Thornn.
His home city was actually close enough that it could be seen, but the smoke of its industry and the arcane fog generated by its perimeter defenses crowded the air around it and contributed to the red haze that constantly suffused the western sky. Sometimes that haze was more subtle, a ring that clung to the pale air like a faint sore or a bruise, but the air held some trace of red no matter where you went. People of the Southern Claw called the effect Blood Skies: a perpetual crimson gloom that clung to the atmosphere, an unwholesome miasma of unstable arcane energies and unholy toxins released over twenty-odd years ago, when Earth had been fused with uncounted other worlds during The Black. No one really knew exactly how or why it had all happened. They likely never would.
Standing in the snowy wastelands of the Reach, while exceedingly dangerous, was worth the risk for the brighter air, made that way since they were away from the cities and because the pale sun reflected so easily off of the snow. It was pleasant. It reminded Cross of his youth, and that was difficult to remember, sometimes.
The condition of the atmosphere was worse the closer one drew to the Ebon Cities. The vampires were hundreds of miles away, but their influence extended all across the north and western rim of the continent, which was thick with the presence of malign blood spirits, hunter wraiths and winged necrotic patrols. Poisonous gases and aerial toxins gushed out of the Ebon Cities’ industrial vents day and night so as to dissuade Southern Claw approach; naturally, those poisons had no effect at all on the city’s undead inhabitants.
I never want to see the Ebon Cities. Not in person, anyways.
But seeing them was always a possibility, of course. Cross was a warlock of the Southern Claw Alliance, a coalition of humans and their allies who controlled the southern half of what was commonly believed to be the only continent of the new world. Before he and Viper Squad had been dispatched to hunt down the traitor Margrave Azazeth, it had been their job to carry out special missions against the vampires of the Ebon Cities. Now, Cross was the only member of Viper Squad left alive, and his role had changed.
“ So is today the big day?” Dillon asked. He sat down on a smooth and dark stone and fastened his combat boots. Jamal Dillon was a frighteningly tall man, easily a head higher than Cross’ not inconsiderable six-foot-two, and when he wasn’t burdened down with eighty pounds of Southern Claw standard issue armor his carefully honed muscles were intimidating to behold. Not that his physical appearance was in any way indicative of his personality: Dillon was about as laid-back of a soldier as Cross had ever met, and after having served in Wolf Company and Viper Squad, Cross felt had met his fair share. Dillon reminded him a bit of Samuel Graves, Cross’ best friend, killed in action while fighting Sorn in the ruins of Rhaine. Graves had saved Cross’ life and paid for it with his own. Not a day went by that Cross didn’t remember that, or him.
“ I think so,” Cross nodded. He ripped open a packet of jerky, and looked around as if a fresh cup of coffee would magically appear for him. When it didn’t, he settled for some water from his canteen, instead. “I need to find Sajai and see if she’s ready.”
“ No you don’t,” Dillon said with a shake of his head. He didn’t bother looking up from his boots. Dillon was a man of few words. Living in the wilderness for weeks on end would make one reticent to speak, Cross supposed, so Dillon made sure that the few words he did use were efficient.
“ Right,” Cross nodded after he thought about it for a moment. “She’ll find me.”
“ There you go.”
“ I’ll figure this out eventually,” Cross said as he pulled on his sunglasses.
“ Yes, you will,” Dillon answered. “Just in time for us to leave.”
“ Better late than never.”
Dillon reached into his pack and pulled out a piece of jerky and a sealed plastic cup. Dillon shook the cup, which rattled the handful of beat-up dice that were inside. They made quite a racket in the still morning air, but none of the Lith ever seemed to mind. He cast the dice onto the ground, and then he wrote the sequence of numbers down in a little notepad with a charcoal pencil.
“ You know how strange that is, right?” Cross asked with a grin on his face.
“ Can’t say that I do,” Dillon laughed.
“ Really?” Cross pulled his jerky apart with his teeth. It was surprisingly juicy and hot. “Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?”
“ Maybe,” Dillon nodded. He finished the sequence, and put everything away. He’d gone through the same routine every morning that Cross had spent with him out there in the Reach. “You want to talk about strange…when are you going to name that camel?”
“ I’m not,” Cross said with a smile.
“ Do you even know its gender?”
“ No. And the thought of checking is kind of repulsive.”
Dillon laughed, and gathered the rest of his gear. He was something of an irregular soldier. Like Cross, he’d served with Hunter squads and large Companies, and, also like Cross, Dillon had gained distinction by living through some impossible situations, and he’d earned himself something of a non-traditional role in the Southern Claw military. In Dillon’s case, that role involved serving as a guide for special missions that ventured deep into the wilderness. Dillon had been doing it for almost eight years now (which meant that he was older than Cross had originally thought, and certainly older than he looked), and he was on friendly terms with various mountain tribes and non-humans, including the mysterious Lith.
Cross saw a few of the Lith now, breaking camp as they prepared to move on. There were over two dozen of the silent nomads in the camp. They were almost invisible in the dull white dawn thanks to their incredibly pale
