“I don’t think so,” she said. She closed her eyes and focused for a moment. “I think it would be dangerous.”
“Figures,” Kane said.
“Not because of them,” she said with an eye towards the roving crewmen. They’d more or less left the team alone since they’d brought back Sol, who’d been left as dazed and weak as Kane and Ronan. “This entire area feels unstable.” Jade looked around and shook her head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Who are these freaks?” Ronan growled. He looked at Jade. “You still think they’re Grey Clan?”
“It would make sense,” Jade said. Ronan seemed unconvinced, and Kane had to agree with him: last he’d checked, the missing people of the fallen city-state of Desh weren’t exactly reptiles.
Once a significant port city, Desh had been an early membe r of the Southern Claw Alliance. Besides having to deal with vampire hostilities, Desh had been also plagued by creatures out of the dangero us and unexplored Ebonsand Seas. M utated sea horrors, Vuul pirates, and wave after wave of violent weather churning with dark sorcery had battered the city-state.
Then, one early morning in the year A.B. 9, the city-state of Desh vanished without a trace. No one could explain how it could have been there one day and suddenly be gone the next. All intelligence gathered indicated that the Ebon Cities vampires weren’t responsible for Desh’s disappearance, and that they were just as confounded as the Southern Claw as to what had actually happened. There was nothing where the city had once stood: it had quite literally vanished without a trace. Everything from its citizens and curtain walls had evaporated into thin air. It was like Desh had never been built at all.
Then, around 16 A.B., humanoid wanderers started to pop up along the Ebonsand Coast. They were surprisingly well-armed and piratical nomads who traveled on arcane-driven vehicles and eked out an existence along the rocky shores and sandy wastes. No one in the Southern Claw ever got close enough to learn any more about the creatures who’d come to be known as the Grey Clan, but it was widely accepted they were human, albeit somewhat more primitive and bestial in spite of their apparently sophisticated technology…technology that seemed to be based on that of the Southern Claw. Heightened activity on the front lines of the war prevented any further investigation of the Grey Clan, who deftly became even more difficult to find from that point on. They’d kept to the shadows, never posing any threat, but they were always on the Southern Claw’s watch list due to their mysterious origins.
But nothing I ever heard said they were frickin’ snake men.
Whatever they were, now that Kane, Ronan and Sol had been “treated”, the prisoners had been left alone. They’d even been given canteens of water and loaves of dark bread, which they vanquished hungrily. Kane felt like he hadn’t eaten in days, and since he’d actually been in that exact situation before he cautioned everyone to eat slowly for fear of making themselves ill.
Of course, it hadn’t been days, but whatever they’d done to him below deck had robbed him of most of his strength.
“Jade…what did they do to us?”
She’d been watching all three of the m en carefully ever since they’d been brought back on deck. The fact that the reptilians had left her and Maur alone was confusing. Had the humans been prepared for some sort of sacrifice? Or did they need some measure of protection that mages and Gol had no need for? None of it made any sense.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “How do you feel?”
Kane had to think about that for a moment.
“Like I’ve been drugged, only without the groovy buzz.” He looked up at the sky, then down to the sand. “My head feels weird. Clearer, I think.”
“Like you’ve been enhanced?” she asked.
“No, it’s just like…I can see more,” Kane said. “Things I don’t think I’d notice normally.” He looked at Jade, and he saw every curve of her pale smooth skin, the richness of her silky black hair, the etched details of the tribal tattoos on her neck, the subtle motions and sweat on her chest as she breathed in.
Everything was clearer and brighter. He was overwhelmed by the sight of things that he would have missed before.
They gave me HD vision. Terrific.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“ My breathing is strange,” he said. “I feel like I have asthma or something. And I told you about the…vision. Hallucination. Whatever.” Jade nodded. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Jade looked out at the desert. Kane had the sense she knew something she wouldn’t say.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
A behemoth city of pale rock and sea stone appeared in the wasteland of grey sand. Rickety bridges made from petrified sinew connected iron towers that looked shoved into the ground like wayward spears. Rings of blasted sandstone surrounded deep pits, and flags stitched from whale flesh flapped in the breeze. There were no streets, just sandy walkways that wound between rugged towers and houses thatched together with rope and metallic netting. Drifts of sand covered the buildings like metal snow. The Ebonsand Sea was just beyond the city, and it reflected the radiant light of the melting sun.
Large walrus-like beasts shuffled outside the city perimeter and left lines of acidic glue in their wake. More of the grey-skinned humanoids rode the slug-tailed creatures. Skiffs docked on rusting metal planks next to crashing ocean waves. A number of ATVs and dune-buggies drove in and out of a network of tunnels beneath the city.
Cold ocean air blew in from the dark sea. Kane tasted salt and engine oil.
The vehicle flew close to the ground. Something appeared over a dune just south of the city.
It was a nother skiff. It fl ew in low over the dune bank, and was also bound for the city. The vehicle was equipped with fewer guns and a wider deck than the vehicle Kane and the others rode, which meant there was more room for the dead and wounded on board.
There were at least two dozen of the grey-skinned humanoids. They bled green or were missing limbs, and had been flayed open or turned inside out. Their grisly wounds were crudely bandaged with wraps of linen. Some of the wounded thrashed about violently as they clawed at some imaginary threat. Others couldn’t stop screaming, or bled constantly from both eyes. Several others had decaying appendages turned to stumps of clay or ash.
The two crafts drew to within a hundred yards of each other. Kane heard dissonant whispers in the wind, a gritty chant made by gargling and guttural voices. It took him a moment to realize that what he heard was a chorus of the wounded. They all spoke jointly in a vagrant and sibilant tongue. Their eyes were blank as their mouths moved without their knowledge.
“What the hell…” Kane whispered.
“Anarchotech,” Jade said.
“Bless you,” Kane said as he looked at her. Her face was pale and her eyes were wide.
“And what the hell is ‘anarchotech’?” Ronan asked.
“It’s Ebon Cities experimental magic,” she explained. “They fuse chaotic energies with captured soul power to create a new type of energy. It’s unstable. And it’s incredibly debilitating towards living creatures.”
“Why don’t they use it all of the time, then?” Ronan said with a grim laugh. “And why haven’t we heard of it before?”
“They just started experimenting with it recently,” Jade explained as the ir skiff drew closer to the city. “It’s still in the early stages, I think. Most Southern Claw mages know about it, but they haven’t spread the word.” She shrugged. “I guess your military doesn’t want a panic on its hands. I understand it’s dangerous for the vampires, too…it’s just a lot more dangerous for living creatures.”
“So what does it do?” Kane asked.
“It destabilizes you,” Jade said. “Melds you with other possibilities, or something to that effect. No one knows just how powerful it is.” She looked back at the ship of the wounded. “Hopefully we won’t find out.”
“It looks like someone already has,” Kane said. “So it would seem these people are enemies of the vampires, too.”
“ Big deal,” Ronan said.
The skiff came to a stop over a n enormous landing platform hedged in by jagged towers. A seven-foot tall grey man with a lizard-like tail waited on the platform with a s mall contingent of guards armed with bolt-action rifles and wearing heavy cloaks to shield them from the icy wind.
