his hands on her shoulders.
“ How long till we reach Karamanganji?” Black asked, breaking the silence.
About five hours, Ekko answered in Cross' mind. He passed the information along.
“ I'm going to get some sleep.”
They all followed the advice, all except the pilot. Ekko needed no sleep. She'd already dreamed her last dream.
I’ve hated you all of my life, Cross thought. He didn’t direct the sentiment at Ekko, but to all of the vampires in the world, every bloodsucker in the darkness, every undead who waited and plotted from the other side of the black walls of their dead cities. I’ve never had any reason to do anything else. I’ve always been afraid of you. All that you do is take. You’ve never done anything but destroy everything I ever loved.
Ekko turned, and looked at him. Her eyes might have been cold and glassy voids, but her expression was one of sadness.
God damn it.
When Cross slept, he dreamed that he was back on the mountain. Snow was there with him, along with Dillon and Graves. They all smiled. He heard the waters and felt his feet in the stream, even as he watched the cold fire race up the mountainside and consume them.
Later, he sat in the dark. They flew through the night. Ekko expected them to arrive at Karamanganji just after dawn. Cross rubbed his eyes and sat uncomfortably against the wall. His spirit swirled near his hands and kept them warm as she slid in and out of his fingers like a warming gel.
“ Cross?”
It was Cole. She looked exhausted.
“ Yeah?”
“ You got a second?”
“ No, I’m real busy.” He smiled. “Sorry. I’m not as funny when I’m this tired.”
Surprisingly, Cole smiled, too, and she sat down next to him. It was so cold in the ship they’d all taken to huddling close to one another. Everyone else but Ekko was asleep, bundled beneath old blankets and coats.
Cole’s dark hair hung lank around her face — it had grown considerably in the weeks they’d spent incarcerated in Krul — and in spite of what she’d been through she still carried a sort of radiance about her, a natural beauty that owed as much to her demeanor and her stalwart resolve as it did to any physical blessings. He could see why Black had very plainly stated that she would die for this woman.
“ Well, I need to interrupt you,” she said with a small smile.
“ What’s up?”
“ Cradden Black and his men attacked my expedition party and took me hostage…”
“ Yeah…God, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that…”
“ You forgot. I did, too. Hey, we’re exhausted,” she said. “But I just remembered something that I wanted to tell you. Most of the people in the group that hired me on as a guide were archeologists out of Dorn. They wanted to see Karamanganji and look at the famous glyphs, to see if they could make sense of what others couldn’t.”
The glyphs of Karamanganji were one of the features that had made the site famous. It was hypothesized that they might have been the base for several languages encountered After the Black, which was odd when one considered that most of those languages originated from completely different worlds. There were theories that when realities converged during The Black, temporal and spatial relationships were created between races and locations that, prior to the catastrophe, had never been linked in any way whatsoever. History itself had been re- written.
The theory was dismissed by most as ludicrous. The idea that reverse tangential lines of chronological connection existed brought up some terribly frightening notions regarding the nature of reality. Cross had heard the theories, and they made his head hurt.
“ Black said you’d mentioned to her that someone in your party was actively searching for the Woman in the Ice,” Cross said. He was suddenly worried, but he wasn’t entirely sure why.
“ Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “The expedition as a whole wasn’t looking for the Woman, but one of its members was. He asked me about it a couple of times: if I’d heard of it, if I thought the rumors about it were true, and so on. He was so insistent that I finally asked the head archaeologist, a guy named Kyver. Kyver told me there was some rumor that one of the Bone Towers might house the Woman in the Ice, but it was pure conjecture, and it had nothing to do with why they were going. He was frankly surprised that anyone besides himself even knew about the rumor, or why they would bring it up.”
Cross nodded. His worry grew.
“ The guy who asked you about it…”
“ That was the weird thing. He was one of the armed escorts — a mercenary hired out of Ath when one of the group’s regular men came down with the flu.”
“ So the guy asking about the Woman in the Ice…”
“ Wasn’t even part of the original party.”
“ What did he look like?” Cross asked.
Cole paused. It was obvious that she needed to concentrate in order to remember, which worried Cross even more.
“ He was tall, with short blonde hair. He wasn’t really handsome, but not really…well, not really remarkable at all…he was just sort of plain. I’m not even sure if I could point him out again if I had to. But he wore all black.”
“ What sort of weapon did he carry?” Cross asked.
“ Funny, I never actually saw it,” Cole said, thinking back.
The airship bounced through some turbulence. The interior was only dimly lit by red stones set high in the walls, rubies that cast everything in a bloody haze.
“ I think it was a rifle,” she said at last. “I remember now. It must have been, because it was very long, and he kept it wrapped up and stashed away with his other gear.”
“ He escaped, didn’t he?” Cross asked. “When Cradden and his gang attacked you?”
“ Yes. He didn’t even put up a fight…he just fled. He was gone in an instant, while the expedition team was being…shot down.” She swallowed, pained by the memory. Cross gave her some time.
“ Did he give you his name?” he asked eventually.
Cross loaded his HK magazines. He hadn’t even realized he was doing so.
“ Markos.”
Cross laughed.
“ Jennar. His name is Jennar. Markos is one of his aliases. It’s an old alias, and he hardly ever uses it…but he has used it before.”
“ Who is he?”
“ Trouble. And the fact that he was with your party, looking for the Woman in the Ice…that’s even more trouble.”
Everyone else woke up a couple of hours later. The night outside was still pitch black, so dark there might have been nothing outside of the vessel except for an unending and starless void. It was as if they floated through ink. The rumbling airship — with its bloody lights and the ear-shattering monotony of its engines — existed all by itself, a blip in an endless ebon sea. It seemed they’d flown forever, and whatever reality existed beyond those walls was part of some other world. As long as they stayed in the ship, they were safe, safe from the reality of all they’d been through, and everything that they still had to do.
But they couldn’t stay in the ship forever.
“ We have trouble,” Cross explained when everyone was awake. They ate MREs and drank water. Everyone was tired, miserable and exhausted. Even washed and somewhat rested they looked and moved like people who’d been to hell and back.
And we still have one last stop on our trip.
“ Trouble?” Black asked. “What, more?”
“ Just for something different, right?” Kane laughed.
Cross had Cole recall her story. Black nodded with the parts that she was already familiar with.
“ The reason that Cole can’t remember exactly what he looks like,” Cross explained, “is because this man,
