pits and dodging psychotic Bl ack Scar inmates forever alter ed his sense of reality when he fight s. His body becomes an engine. Weapons are an extension of his arms. Killing is as easy as breathing.
The vampire leader is skilled. Kane uses the saber to deflect it ’s swift attack s. He dodge s ghouls armed with short knives and zombies with rotating saws attached to their limbs.
The Citadel protects itself. Kane feels its alien intelligence, some vast and controlling entity that lurks with in the walls.
A sword slashes into his side. He bites through the pain. The wound is the price he pays so the vampire leader come s too close to dodge Kane’s gunfire. H e blasts its pale skull into paste.
Ronan and Sol battle the other vampires and shoot their way through ranks of ghouls. The air is blood meat mist, shrapnel and gun smoke. The air outside has whipped into a fury of black powder and razor rain.
He finds a dark iron ladder bol ted to the bleeding walls, and ascends. His hands grip pitted metal soaked with oil and blood. Gouts of dark steam leak from the iron tower. He climbs up a tube of jagged rust edges and leering bone faces. Phantoms melt through the walls.
A vampire appears out of a hatch, and Kane shoots it until its body turns to pulp. Another comes at him from behind. It flies through the air as if on wings, and he wrestles with it for a moment before he cracks its fanged mouth against the wall and sends it plummeting to the floor a hundred feet below, where Ronan and Sol tear through the undead ranks.
He sees munitions and glass spheres as he climbs; rooms filled with corpses await ing animation; strange whirring devices of thaumaturgic potential; bio-organic machines, skin pulled taut over control panels; strange workbenches covered with beakers and vials of bubbling fluid.
He and the others have been sent to destroy a research station. The Ebon Cities has come to this black wasteland with a purpose. T hey mean to find something.
The apex of the Citadel lies hidden beyond a steel hatch at the top of the ladder. The rotary-style door swings up into a cold and utterly black chamber. His wrist cannon glows blue-green and illuminat es the darkness.
The room is filled with sarcophagi. Flat black coffins crafted from iron have been bolted into the walls so the vampire inhabitants can step in side and sleep vertically. C orpse dust form s a runic circle i n the middle of the floor. Cold iron candelabra s dangle from the ceiling and paint the room with flickering silver light. A black mirror stands at the far end of the chamber.
He readies his weapon and carefully enters the vampire barracks, his heart in his throat. The hairs on his neck freeze. He walks slowly, careful to a void the circle at the center.
The coffins remain sealed.
He walks up to the black mirror. It’ s somehow darker than the rest of the lightless room, an utterly blank void that seems to suck away the ambient glow of his armaments. Deep iron mists float within the mirror’s face. The frame is made of bone and steel.
He shoots the mirror.
The glass explodes and throw s him back. Shards cut his face and arms.
The coffins fly open. Half of them are filled with undead that move with chilling speed. He stands in a chamber filled with warrior corpses.
Kane roars as he sweeps the room with gunfire. He can only see by the flash of bullets and exploding blood. F anged mouths his s. E bon claws reach for him. A sea of pale bodies swarms in.
He blasts his way back to the hatch door. Claws tear skin from his arms. He shoves the wrist — cannon into a vampire ’s mouth and bl ows open its skull. Another one tries to take him down but he shoots through it s torso. He slashes behind and ahead with his blade.
Teeth sink into his neck. He screams and shoots the top of the vampire’s head off before h e falls back wards through the hatch. The fangs break off and remain lodged in his wounded skin.
Everything turns end over end. He loses direction. Som ething hard smashes against his back, and knows it isn’t the floor. Blood swims in his vision. B lack air engulfs him.
He hears shouts. He’s no longer sure where anything is com ing from.
He hangs suspended from the iron ladder. T he harness that connects him to his weapon i s caught on steel rivets in the wall, and his boots are tangled in the ladder’s rungs. He can’t feel any pain.
The world is upside-do wn. Dark steel drip s with gore through an air filled with black shadows. He gazes up at the floor and down at the ceiling. H e dangles halfway between the two ends of the tower. Blood flows down his arms and neck.
He reaches up (down) and pulls the fangs from his neck. A jet of blood shoots out and soaks his face before it rains to the ground.
Ronan climbs up (down) to get him. Sol fires up (down) into the horde of vampires. They are nightmares that scale the walls, nude and unarmored creatures with black hair and pale flesh covered with blood runes and shadow tattoos. They crawl down the steel, fast and relentless even as Sol ’s gunfire cuts them apart and they plummet up and then down, past Kane’s swimming vision, to splash into mounds of blood flesh at the top (bottom) of the tower.
He screams. His vision goes dark, a pulsing beat of black visions, pale dancers on a distant vampire shore, undead matrons around statues of shadow flesh, undead cities that move like great beasts across the landscape.
His heart pound s, and then it slows. Impure blood flows through his veins and turns them black.
Ronan reaches him on the ladder and fires into the vampires. H e somehow untangles Kane with one hand and hoists him over his shoulder.
Gravity is gone. He feels like he ’ s floating. His strength has left him. Everything fades in and out.
He hopes they’ ve succeeded. He has the sense they ’ re supposed to destroy this place, to stop the vampires from finding something, and they aren’t doing it for the Grey Clan, and certainly not for Burke, but for the people he cares about. The people he fears he will never see again.
H e falls into a nightmare-plagued slumber.
Kane woke. He was back in th e steel room. This time he wasn’ t alone.
He sat up and vomited blood. He felt something in his mind, some dank presence that saturat ed his skin. He looked down and saw that his veins were still black. His body was wracked with hurt. B lood flow ed down his neck.
“What…?” His voice hurt. Tubes had been inserted into his sk in. A brown-haired woman in black Revenger’s armor knelt down beside him and dr e w his stained blood into a syringe. He saw crawling black insects in the glass.
He wanted to throw up again, but Ronan grabbed his shoulders.
“Hang on, ” he said. “Just…hang on.”
Kane looked around. The door was open, and just outside the room were industrial steel chambers filled with tables and chairs and medical equipment. He saw Grey Clan mov ing boxes of supplies, and he heard a clamor of activity.
He saw Jade, Ronan, Maur, Sol and Burke, the bastard Burke, a Black Scar warden and a cold-hearted murderer. He was accompanied by more Revengers, as well as a contingent of Grey Clan.
“ All of you… ” Kane started to say, but he coughed up another mouthful of blood. “ All of you…can go to hell… ”
He fell back, and passed out again.
TWELVE
The sky bleeds red and black. Clouds loom and twist like screaming faces. He presses ahead through the black wind.
The City of Thorns is far behind him. He walks across a dust sea. A forest of brambles, thorns and rock waits in the distance, but first he has to traverse field s of clay and black water. Cracks in the ground remind him of scars.
