The Tower that they needed lay straight ahead. Its doorway looked like a cut in the side of the structure, and it seemed to stretch open wider as they approached.
Cross motioned for Tasker and Daye to wait outside. Kane took the point, and he led the way with the sawed-off Remington held ready. Danica illuminated the icy dark interior of the tower with a ball of heatless white flame. Flickering light reflected off of white walls and floor. Discarded digging implements — drills, chisels, hammers, picks — lay strewn like casualties. Electric lamps had been plugged into a portable generator, and they sat in a perimeter around both the tools and several chunks of ice that had been scattered in front of a sealed circular door. That door was also wrought of ice, but this ice was of a lighter shade than the rest, and it was thin and semi-translucent.
Footsteps in the frost led straight up to the ice door, and vanished into it.
“ Okaaaay,” Kane said.
“ I don't get it,” Cole said as she walked past the tools.
“ It looks like they broke through,” Black said. “But then…why is there still a sealed door here?” She stepped up to the ice and placed a hand on it, and immediately she pulled away as if she'd been burned. “It's twice as cold as anything else in here,” she said. Her words turned to icy steam.
Cross watched the frozen barrier as if would provide him with the answer.
After a moment, it did.
Cross' spirit hovered at the door. She probed, and then slipped her vaporous form into the tiny cracks in its face. She felt its thickness and its weight, tested its strength, tasted its age, felt magic in the thousands of crystal constituents that made up the whole.
“ They did break through,” Cross said. “And they entered the tunnel. And then this…” he indicated the ice door, “formed up behind them, and sealed them in.”
Kane looked at Cross, then back at the door, and then back at Cross again.
“ Okaaaay,” he said.
Can you feel that? Ekko thought to him. She's here.
Cross did feel it: power. It was pure, primal and ancient, difficult to even acknowledge without being crushed by the sheer force of its presence. That power had gender, unlike Lucan's spirit, which had seemed androgynous to Cross, a mass of lost souls in a sort of spectral mass, a mongrel construct of ghostly matter. This power that emanated up at them now, however, was unquestionably female. Cross could almost taste her sex in the arcane currents, the geometric emanations, earth and ice.
Black felt it, too. She didn't have to say anything — it was clear by the strange mix of fear and awe in her eyes.
“ So what do we do?” Cole asked.
“ You head back,” Cross said to her. “You too, Kane.”
“ Um…no.”
Ekko put a hand on his arm, and nodded. Black and Cole exchanged looks.
Cross pulled his spirit tight around his body. He fueled her anger by thinking about Dillon, about Snow, and about Graves. His mind raced, and filled with pain. He thought about the children who’d been rounded up and butchered at Crucifix Point, and about Gage and Cala, about Zender the gentle Doj who'd been captured and tortured to death by Gorgoloth raiders, about the dead soldiers in Karamanganji who would never speak to their friends again, who would never look a lover in the eyes. He thought of every victim of the vampires, every ruined life, and every unanswered slaughter. Cross thought of every injustice and wrong he had ever witnessed over the course of his young life, and he poured them into his spirit. He twisted her, and focused all of the rage until she was as sharp as a raw blade.
“ Like hell I'm going…” Cole argued with Black.
“ I'm not leaving Ekko,” Kane said.
Cross rose his head. He was infused with the raw destructive power of a spirit who, in the space of a few moments, had experienced a lifetime of Cross' most vivid and painful memories. Volatile magic radiated out of his eyes. He was like a sick and explosive star.
“ The three of us have been touched by the power in this place,” he said. “You two haven't. If you go down there, you'll die, just like the Black Circle who went down there died.” He moved and stood directly in front of the ice door. The power of his raging spirit swelled inside of him, ready to burst. “The two of you need to leave. Now.”
Kane and Cole clearly didn't want to go, but Cross hoped they saw the truth in his words. He hoped they understood.
After a moment's hesitation, they each hugged their respective lovers, and took their leave.
“ We'll be right outside,” Cole called.
“ Cross,” Kane called out. The warlock turned. He held the rage of his spirit much more efficiently than he ever had before. Lucan's energy was the cause of that. It coursed through all three of the mages. It filled them with power. It knew that its moment was near.
“ Thank you,” Cross said.
“ Good luck,” Kane said with a nod.
The two left.
Black and Ekko stepped up to either side of Cross. The three of them joined hands and stood in a line. Black's spirit was as angry as Cross’. Had it not been for Lucan's influence, they would have destroyed one another through their sheer proximity. Instead, their energies flowed through the space between them, and it electrified the air. Ekko focused the energies stored inside of her, as well, and added them to the fold, vampiric hunger and a desperate will to survive.
For a brief instance, they are back at the ship. They see Lucan, and he kneels before them. All of his strength is gone. His life is ending. He raises his head and looks at them as they walk towards him in the still and silent air. He smiles.
I knew you'd come, he says.
Their spirits released their anger in a charnel blast. The air ignited into a roar of arctic fire, and it rent the crystal door apart. Chunks of ice melted into clouds of steam.
A tunnel of black ice waited beyond the smoldering remains of the door. The air smelled glacial. The smoke of ages past curled off the floor of the ink-dark passage.
Without a word, the three of them stepped inside.
TWENTY-ONE
They entered a world of glass. The tunnel was sloped and uneven, like it had melted. Black's arcane torch reflected semi-translucent walls filled with stony debris. The air was cold but dry, and exceedingly dark. It was as if something slowly sucked away at the light.
They moved as quickly as they could across difficult ground. Cross drew his HK45 and held his spirit coiled around his gauntleted left hand. Sweat ran into his eyes in spite of the cold. Every shuffle of their boots in that frozen tunnel sent violent echoes through the air. Ekko moved in the middle with no weapons except for her claws, and Black brought up the rear with an HK94 she'd received from Daye.
The three of them looked like they were close to death, all covered in ash and blood and soot.
The place was a labyrinth. After a steep descent, the tunnel came to a multiple junction that looked like the center of a galaxy. Icy corridors trailed off in multiple directions. Black's torch only illuminated to a radius of a few feet, so both she and Cross cast out their spirits and surveyed the area. The spirit’s wraith-like forms raced down smooth frozen passages, and they pushed back and forth against the walls like fish darting down a river as they searched for any presences.
They found something. The three hunters quickly caught up.
Bones were entombed in the clear ice walls, frozen in grisly dance. Skulls, some of them sideways or upside
