She woke in darkness.
She was thirsty, and she drank. She couldn’t see what. It tasted salty and thick.
She had memories of standing in a dead city.
Whispers claw ed at her mind. For a moment she thought it was her spirit, but what she heard was a myriad of desperate calls, a choir of ghastly voices. They spoke in unison, and yet the sound was chaos. They intensified, and came faster. They scratched at her ears and tore at her nerves. There was nothing she could make of it, no true words, just hisses and curses, virulent chants, dirty foreign cackles and animal sounds. She willed them away and sat up.
Danica was in a cold room. She felt odd…out of place. The pale walls were strewn with blood. She was naked and cold and she felt the bite on her neck.
Oh, God.
She lifted her left hand — there was something wrong with her right arm, because she couldn’t feel it — and felt the wound. The scar was ragged and tender to the touch, but she felt very little pain.
They bit me. I’m a vampire.
Panic surged through her until she heard another voi ce in the distance, a desperate and plaintive cry.
It was the voice of her spirit.
Vampires don’t have spirits. The dead can’t call magic.
There was no mistaking the voice. She knew who it was. She’d grown up with him always within reach. She’d know hi m anywhere.
She stood, and felt cold metal against her skin. Danica looked down in horror.
Her right arm was gone. She vaguely recalled the axe, the blood. She remembered Geist severing it, pulling it away just moments before the Koth ian vampire, the defector, had bit ten her.
In its place was an arcane appendage: a piece of smooth and animated red steel nearly the same hue as her hair. It moved with sinuous motion. Thin curls of crimson steam emanated from her fingers when she moved them.
She fe l t nothing. The metal moved clums il y, and when she clenched her fist she could only see the motion, not sense it. She touched the appendage with her opposite hand, and was amazed at how cold it was.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
A presence was ther e in the arcane animated steel. H er spirit.
He’d been trapped, somehow. Contained. A prisoner of her false limb.
God, no. This isn’t happening.
The joint was bloody and raw. She saw where the metal had fused with her skin, where it had joined and melted with her flesh. It was seamless.
No no no no wake up, Dani, wake up, wake up.
Pain flooded her head, sudden and quick. Her gums and teeth flared to life.
She was thirsty. She wanted blood.
She fell to the floor screaming.
What have they done to me?
EIGHTEEN
Cross entered a labyrinth of shadow and stone. Everything was unstable, like he floated in a cold void sea. The d arkness twisted and bent. The details of the ceiling were obscured in a haze of swirling golden shadows and patches of inky darkness. The air pulsed like pools of rippling oil.
He passed crystal domes cracked open by some unnatural calamity. Twisted passages snaked like veins through the heart of the canyon wall. Bones and sediment had frozen in the milk rock. Murky blue-black light emanated from within the walls.
He stepped through an archway of whalebone, a massive jaw ridged with blunted teeth. Pale oil s dripped down and splashed onto the floor.
Cross came to a cavern of batholitic rock. The air was smelted and white. Curved stone spiraled away in cyclone s of ebony and silver. Cavernous echoes sounded through the Netherwere — the world below, a vast network of catacombs and tunnels that ran like a maddening maze into an infinity of twisted underground canyons and natural chambers, abandoned Cruj dwellings and Maloj temples, Vuul slave mines, subterranean Gol settlements and the hidden lairs of the secretive Regost.
Low rolling fumes buried the floor, so thick they seemed almost liquid. The mist rolled at hi m from out of a series of tunnels he thought led to the Carrion Rift. He followed them. Soulrazor/Avenger was heavy in his grip. His boots echoed loud in the darkness.
C oncentric rock formations twisted like black grain down a funnel. Sounds came at him, distant growls and shouts. He was getting closer to the breach, he could feel it. Geothermic pressure squeezed the air and made it sweat. Vents of bitter steam pushed out of scar fissures and blocked sight of what lie ahead.
He wandered for what felt like days. The blade tugged him this way and that, as if it knew the way. It took him to the source of the echoes. He heard wind, and something like rain.
The Obelisk of Dreams lay on its side at the end of the tunnel, literally pushed through the in side of the canyon wall, fused between two realities. Everything shifted around it, folded in to unnatural p atterns. Drifts of rock dust fell from the ceiling.
The artifact was just as h e remembered it, utterly black and icy cold. To even be near it chilled the blood. Faint whispers of pain bled from the cracks in the Obelisk’s surface. Silver runes like scars littered its utterly dark face. It was still whole, in spite of the violence it had lived through.
Drifts of rubble fell from the walls. E verything wavered like heat images. He saw his breath, and then saw it again. He stood at a place conjoined, where the boundaries threatened to come unglued. The floor stretched and compacted.
He moved close r to the Obelisk. It was safe. He’d beaten Azradayne and the Shadow Lords to it.
Now what?
Cross studied the monument. It was so innocuous, so still. It barely seemed possible that it could bear such import. The Obelisk had rested in the hands of the renegade necropolis of Koth for decades, but the undead had lacked the knowledge of how to destroy it until Red had offered them that information.
To destroy it required a sacrifice. A particular sacrifice.
That sacrifice was supposed to have been me, he thought. I wonder if the Shadow Lords have already prepared another.
Another sacrifice.
Cross looked past the Obelisk and through the shattered rock wall, into the wreckage and madness of the Carrion Rift. A shifting barrier like black smoke separated the two realities. He look ed through the ebon fumes, into the world he once knew. The top half of the twelve-foot Obelisk hovered over the void of the canyon. A sea of s creaming vapors melted down the vast trench. Black t entacles writhed and twisted in the bladed shadows below. The Rift was a place buried in darkness and mist.
Why would anyone want to rule this world? h e wondered. The Southern Claw fight to stay alive, to protect our own. What do the Shadow Lords want? Power? Dominion? They’d rule from atop a throne of dust, and wear a crown of ash.
Another sacrifice.
Cross stood at the boundary. He could reach through if he wanted and enter the Carrion Rift. He could step back in to his own world, onto ledges of crumbling roc k and jutting bits of stone on his side of the canyon. He could be free of the Whisperlands.
Not yet. Not yet.
Blood trickled down the Rift walls. Things lurked in the darkness below. H e felt their eyes on him, sensed their ravenous hunger.
