down, grinned at the three of them from the other side of the ice. Many of those bones clearly weren't human.
The corridor came to an abrupt end at the side of a steep underground canyon that ran for as far as they could see in either direction. The walls in the area were dark and jagged rock covered with twisted white roots that protruded from the stone like broken finger bones.
There was no apparent bottom to the trench: it was a deep cleft of impenetrable shadow. The tunnel continued on into a crack of darkness on the far side of the thirty-foot wide gorge.
Dank and surprisingly warm wind wound its way up from the subterranean canyon. It smelled of campfires and soot.
The floor around the canyon was littered with bodies. They were soldiers, from the look of it, well armed with automatic weapons and blades, and they were armored in hybridized versions of Southern Claw and Ebon Cities leather and chain armor. Two Gorgoloth and a Doj giant had been torn apart by what had appeared to have been a storm of razors. Their faces and torsos had been shredded. Smoke rose from their corpses as if they'd been burned. Two more bodies — a human and a Vuul — had been frozen half-in and half-out of the ice walls. The Vuul’s torso and face were bloody and cracked where he’d been trapped in the glasslike surface. The human had fallen into the wall backwards before it froze, and while his torso was entombed on the other side, his twitching legs still jutted out into open air.
The tang of power hung in the area like a powder burn. Cross sensed something primal and angry, very much like Lucan’s energies. He stepped forward carefully, his body tense.
Something didn’t feel right. Another power was held ready nearby, and it was poised to strike. Cross looked back at Black and Ekko, and saw that they felt it, too, whatever it was.
Cross looked at the bodies again, more carefully this time, and he ran through the catalog in his mind of the Black Circle members he’d seen pictures of back in Thornn. His mind collated data like a machine: his arcane studies had always come easy to him, and once he committed something to memory it never left.
The Gorgoloth were probably just compelled or hired muscle. The Doj he recognized as Ravus, and the Vuul was Synder. The human was a weapons dealer named Marus.
None of them was Jennar.
Just as he made that realization, Ekko sprang up and launched herself at a shadow. Her target was a fold in the air, an empty space that Cross had looked straight at and disregarded.
That was the spot where Jennar used the magic of his Crujian nightlance to mask his presence.
Jennar came into view the moment before Ekko reached him. Her claws extended like razor fans. Jennar was tall and thin, lean but muscled. He was dressed in black leather armor. His blonde hair was pushed back and his face was wrapped in black cloth, which left the scarred skin above his nose exposed. His brown eyes narrowed in hate.
He held the nightlance ready. It was an imposing two-handed weapon. A layer of cold blue flames rippled up and down a razor-sharp ebon blade forged from meteor stone. A second, shorter blade made from red diamond extended down from the base of the hilt. The entire weapon radiated pulsing black power, shadow energies that made the air around Jennar tainted and thick.
Ekko sailed beneath Jennar's wide swing and swept up at him with her sizable claws, but he was nimble, and he jumped backwards and out of the way.
Cross raised his gun and fired, but Jennar moved with inhuman quickness, and he spun and rolled the nightlance with the speed of a propeller. Bullets cracked and flew to the ground.
Black fired at him with the HK94. Dark fire leapt out of the arcane blade and incinerated the bullets, almost in slow motion.
Cross cast his spirit into a wide arc of burning white light that circled around the small canyon and then rushed back in like a frost comet. Black's spirit roared straight forward in a spear of ice. Ekko gathered herself, and leapt at Jennar.
He was everywhere, impossibly. Years of training and unnatural thaumaturgic bio-engineering, coupled with that dread Cruj weapon, made Jennar a demon in human skin. Twenty-nine Southern Claw officer's deaths were credited to his name. He'd never been defeated or captured.
Jennar moved in a blur. He spun round and sliced Cross' pale comet in two. White sparks fell to the ground as he finished the turn and met Black's spear, which he shattered into glittering onyx shards.
Ekko's claws sank into Jennar’s shoulders. He yelled in pain and rage as he sank his blade deep into Ekko's stomach. The flaming sword extinguished as it pierced her flesh, and Jennar kept pushing until he’d buried the sword up to the hilt. Purplish dark blood fountained from the wound and ran over his gloved hands.
Cross froze, and Black screamed. Ekko hung limp for a moment, but then she threw her weight forward and into her claws. Seven-inch steel fingers tore through the meat of Jennar's chest.
The momentum of Ekko's attack carried both she and Jennar over the edge and into the canyon. Ice and rubble trailed behind them as they tumbled down the slope, and out of view.
Mere seconds had passed. Before Cross or Black had even reached the edge, Ekko and Jennar were gone.
“ NO!!!”
He sees Cristena.
He sees Graves and Dillon and Stone and Ramsey.
He sees Snow, burning.
“ She's alive,” Black said. Cross turned round to object, but she was right. He sensed her there, a shard of the light that the three of them shared. She was faint, weak, and even less alive than she’d been before the battle had begun, but she was undeniably there.
And there was something else. Something that hadn't been there before…or if it had, it had chosen to keep itself concealed until that very moment.
It was a thousand void souls trapped in a mountain of shadowy flesh, a darkness so utter and deep that the entire world seemed drawn towards its dismal core.
The Sleeper approached.
“ Cross…” Black said. Her eyes were huge with fright. Cross imagined he must have looked the same.
“ I know.”
It had not yet reached Karamanganji, but it was close. Crylos and his men would have sight of it at any moment.
“ I'll find her,” Black said. “You go. Go while we’re all still alive.”
“ But it has to be all three of us…”
“ It will be,” Black said. “What we share is more than physical. We proved that back in Krul.”
Cross thought about it for a moment, and nodded.
She was right. She had to be.
He looked at the dark tunnel on the far side of the subterranean canyon. A presence pulled at his mind. Black looked at the tunnel as well, and nodded.
Black took Cross into her arms. They pushed out, using Danica’s spirit to hold them aloft as they went. Cross held on tight. Their flushed faces touched as they drifted from one end of the void to the other, free-floating over the shadowy deeps. They moved weightless through a sea of frigid wind.
Cross grabbed the icy stone on the far side, and pulled himself away from Black. His spirit wrapped round him, glazed him with heat. Danica floated back over the rift and started her descent to go and find Ekko.
Cross’ heart hammered. Black looked at him as she sank, and for the first time since they’d met, her smile seemed genuine.
“ I’ll see you soon,” she said.
“ You’d better.”
Black held her arms aloft. She glowed hot and bright with the fires of her spirit, and she continued to glow as she drifted down into darkness.
Cross turned and looked at the cleft in the canyon wall. The space was narrow. Ebon steam leaked from the crack in slow and rhythmic bursts. The cold that issued out of that cleft was absolute, but Cross knew that his spirit’s heat and the protection afforded him by Lucan’s ancient soul would keep him safe. Any normal human would die the moment they stepped through.
His thoughts went back to the arena.
