some primal elemental force that didn’t require spirits, pure shadow energies.
Dark missiles raced towards the ship: dripping shadow projectiles, meteors of melting oil. Cross’ spirit burned his fingers as he sent her forward in a wave of corrosive daggers. The bolts of magic were blasted into liquid shards that smoked the ground where they fell.
Black released her spirit into a folding wave of sharp stones, a strip of razor rocks that twisted and turned like a flock of birds before they spun through the air in the shape of a murderous propeller. The energies hacked dark bodies apart, and they fell forward into piles of broken shell and oozing worm flesh. The earth steamed.
Inside of the airship behind them, someone screamed. Cross raced inside.
The air burned dark behind him. Looming shadows formed faces and stretched across the sky. Danica sliced through them with whips of red fire. The air was gritty, and tasted of brimstone.
Inside, Ramsey flew against the wall with a thud. It was the boy who’d thrown him.
By the time Cross reached the melee, Kane had grappled the child with one hand and held a machete in the other. The boy clawed and spat at him, growled from a mouth of shadows and desperately reached for Kane’s face with a prehensile tongue covered in barbed and dripping quills.
Cole was face-down on the floor. Ekko desperately tried to lower the floating ship so that she could help, since her gun lay just out of reach.
“ No, fly!” Cross shouted. He hefted the triple-barrel shotgun, and hesitated. There was no way he’d only hit the child if he fired, so he dropped the weapon and raced at them with his spirit wrapped around his hands.
The boy kicked Kane in the groin, doubled him over, put long fingers into the big man’s hair and rammed his head against the floor. He turned Kane over, hissed, and pressed his talons against the man’s eyes.
Cross grabbed the boy by the back of the head and immolated him. Black fire coursed out of his hands and set the child’s hair alight. He screamed, not a monstrous cry, but that of a little boy in pain. Burning flesh and blood gagged Cross. His eyes bled from the force of the magic he released. Something pushed him back. The world spun.
The boy stood over him, howling and on fire. It cursed him in some ancient and alien tongue. It looked at him with burning eyes as black as pits, and even through the dark flames Cross saw the shadow, the heart of the void that had nearly consumed him twice. Something inside of Cross turned like a blade. He felt it, surrendered to it. He let it escape.
White light shot out of his hand and consumed the shadow child, the false human husk. The Sleeper’s agent. Time slowed as the white flames tore the shadow apart, inch by inch. Even its scream moved slow, sluggish, like a dream.
He lost time.
It sees him. He feels himself shrink at the foot of the mountain. Cold flames roar around him. The flesh slides from his bones. He screams as he is eclipsed in a cloak of black fire.
“ Cross!”
The ship lurched into the air. Black was at the cargo door, which still hung open. She and Kane fired at something just outside of the vessel. The sky was black and thick. Gunfire and engine noise roared through his head.
“ Are you okay?”
Cole leaned over him. He touched her face to be sure that she was real. His head felt like it had been filled with lead. He glanced around.
Ramsey sat against the wall and nursed a bruised forehead. Ekko piloted. Black and Kane fired rifles at what he could only assume were the Vath, even as the ship ascended. The rear doors slowly sealed shut. The rush of hot wind faded, and they were left in a still and sticky air.
Cross tried to sit up. His back was as stiff as a plank, and he was still disoriented and dizzy.
There was nothing left of the boy but ash.
“ What the hell?!” Kane said as he pointed at the smoldering pile. “WHAT the hell?!!”
The airship moved deeper into the sky. Cross felt its ascent. The metal shuttered. He pictured them over the barren landscape, headed east.
“ Where are we going?” he asked Cole.
She looked at him for a moment, ascertaining if he was injured, or at least in his right mind.
“ The Reach,” she said. “Near Karamanganji. The Bone Towers.”
“ We have to move fast,” Cross said. His head was pounding. “It’s testing us. That was a sliver of the Sleeper, just a fraction. It possessed the boy to see how dangerous we were.” He looked up at the rest of them. The gravity in the room was almost crushing. “It won’t delay any longer. We have to get to the Woman in the Ice, before it’s too late.”
SEVENTEEN
“ Cross,” Kane said. “You said you’d tell us what the hell is going on.”
The airship headed due east. No one aside from the nameless boy had been killed or seriously injured, but the attack had left everyone demoralized.
Ekko put the ship on autopilot. They knew where they were going now. The Bone Towers were a series of cylindrical rock formations near the ancient city of Karamanganji, a lonely and desolate burg filled with hollow buildings of pale ice. So far as anyone knew, the city had always been abandoned. The frigid location had been discovered a few years back, just a few hundred miles north of the ruins of Shul Ganneth, beyond what was called the White Border, a northerly latitude point where the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees.
They flew through the night. The muted groan of the engines and the howl of the frozen wind outside filled their heads. The burgeoning dawn sky was a pink stain when viewed through the smeared and broken glass. The air inside of the cabin was cold as the night’s chill crept through the twisted metal paneling.
The vessel shook as it carried through the sky. Everyone was still shaken by the Vath’s charge and by the death of a boy they’d known nothing about, except that he’d been weak and close enough to death that the Dra’aalthakmar had possessed him with ease.
“ A few months ago, something evil woke up,” Cross began. Everyone sat against the walls, watching as he spoke. He felt like he needed a storybook. “The Southern Claw knew about it before it woke, but we didn’t know much about what it really was.”
“ How did you know about it?” Kane asked.
“ The Lith. They aid the Southern Claw war effort with their prophecies.”
“ The Claw puts too much confidence in them, if you ask me,” Cole interjected. Cross thought she’d developed something of a maternal kinship for the boy, and his death had left her rattled and sullen. He noticed that she and Black still sat at an arm’s distance. Something had happened between them, or was about to happen.
“ What kind of ‘something evil’ are we talking about?” Black asked.
“ Like I said, we’re not sure exactly what it is, but we know its name: the Dra’aalthakmar. We just refer to it as the Sleeper. So far as the Lithian prophecies could tell us, it’s some sort of…demon, I guess. A living shadow. Anyway, it was imprisoned back on its home world, where it was buried deep underground in some kind of magical prison.
“ During The Black, that prison shifted here — to Earth. The magic that held the Sleeper in stasis weakened, and the physical location of the prison shifted much closer to the surface than it had ever been on its home world. So it was just a matter of time before the prison was compromised.”
The notion wasn’t that preposterous. Much had been destabilized during The Black, and many of the structures and ruins that populated the landscape looked half-made, but they weren’t: usually that appearance was because those structures or cities or (in some of the more horrific cases) creatures had been ripped asunder from their world and only partially recreated on Earth.
“ So that…thing we saw back at the city,” Cole asked, “ that was the Sleeper?”
“ It took its vitamins,” Kane said.
