Black Scars (15 page)

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Authors: Steven Alan Montano

BOOK: Black Scars
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Hours passed, or maybe days. There was no way to know.
Dark waters churned and chains rattled in ghostly echo. Cross stumbled in and out of awareness. He soon had no sense of where he was. He focused his mind and forced himself to remember things. Sometimes, he couldn’t do it.

 

He is trapped in an eternal midnight. Dry twigs are in his hair. He stands, shaking, and feels the bitter mountain air as it courses through the dead trees. Churning fires and distant howls fill the night with grim noise. His muscles are stiff. His feet crush twigs frozen in muddy ground as thick as tar.
He looks between the trees, and he sees a sliver of dead sky. Drifts of molten copper clouds lay smeared over the horizon like metallic stains.
The forest burns in the valley below. Cold smoke drifts up through iridescent rain and forms an ocean of cobalt cinders. Blades of dark ash, like smelted leaves, float dead in the air.
Behind him, the air twists into a funnel of translucent ice. Dirt and debris form a solid wall of choking haze. He sees a portal through the drifting fog, a pale passage that hangs there like a white scar.
I'm not here,
he realizes
.
There is a cold-throated scream. He doesn’t realize the absolute and utter silence until the cry rings out. He sees that silhouette, a vague female shape, a shadow that comes undone. The form dissolves like a shard of black ice in pure white water. Limbs fall away from the core. The doorway is too bright to look at
.
Wait.
He feels a presence there, weak and distant. Fragile. It is known to him, familia
r.
Help me,
says the voice from the doorway. A voice he knows, or should know
.
The mountain growls beneath his feet. He looks into the trees, and he sees eyes and teeth that fill the black void of shadows between the leaves. Black flames leap up the mountainside behind him. Cold fire rushes like waves, a blazing inverted avalanche.
Help me,
the voice says again.
He turns to run, and is engulfed.

 

At some point, Cross was shackled. He didn’t remember it happening. Heavy gauntlets made his fingers feel as thick as sausages and dampened any hope of channeling his spirit. Barbed chains ran from his wrists to his ankles, and they scraped against his knees and cut him as he walked. His wounded leg blazed and throbbed with pain.
Everything was a haze. His senses were dull. The world was shades of dark and light, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. He felt separated from his own body, distant.
Cross was led down a hall by a pair of black-clad vampire guards. They wore moon-curve blades and blank white masks. It had been so long since he’d been out of water that he almost forgot how to walk, and he stumbled as he moved down the dry steel corridor. The chains didn’t help: the shackles gave him sharp cuts that sent thin rivers of blood down the insides of his already-soaked pants.
He was pulled into desert sunlight, and his eyes burned. Everything went white. He tasted sand and felt unbearable heat that cooked his skin. The sounds of the chained city filled his head in a catastrophe of metal noise.
Cross fell painfully to his knees. He couldn’t rise. His left leg was so wracked with pain he couldn’t summon the will to try.
He slowly and painfully regained his vision. Images bled into view. The world was uneven and unstable, like he saw it through a crooked lens. He was pulled to his feet. Cross rocked and swayed in place.
They’d brought him to some sort of prisoner’s commons. His shackles were removed, and he was left standing on a floored metal area surrounded by spike-topped walls the color of rusty nails. The commons was the size of a baseball diamond, wide and open, and the walls curved where they met the ground at sharp angles. There were no doors. Grey-skinned gargoyles with thick and stony wings hovered overhead.
The sky was vast and bright. The iron clouds seemed translucent, and they receded away from the blood red sun. Sticky air coursed up and over the wall, and Cross felt the slightest shudder in the ground when the wind blasted with its gale force. They were on top of a tall structure, he guessed, some open courtyard at the apex of one of the city’s tallest buildings, which explained why nothing but the sky was visible from within that bowl.
The commons was filled with prisoners. Each one of them was dingier than the last. Greasy inmates, most of them human, shuffled across the yard in packs. A few half-Doj towered over the others, their broad and chiseled jaws painted with desert soot. Cross saw some Lith, a handful of Gorgoloth, and even a Regost, the so-called Hollow Men, whose smoking spectral breath could be smelled across the commons. Cross spied a pale-skinned Vuul, whose translucent flesh had been rendered opaque with grime and dried blood. He briefly saw a Gol, who quickly vanished behind the taller prisoners.
The prisoners moved like zombies. They shuffled along as they walked, seeming to lack the strength or the will to do anything more. Their eyes looked forward, listless and dead. Their clothing was torn and shredded and soaked, but it dried fast beneath the blistering heat of the sun. Everyone looked like they’d lived through a bomb blast, or worse. Fingernails had turned black. The gray film they wore made them all siblings.
Cross smelled heat and sewage and sweat and piss and fear. The air was a miasma of body stink and hot metal. It burned just to stand in it.
There were a few women, Cross noted, and they were as caked in cuts and filth as the rest. Cross didn’t want to imagine how life was for them here, with so few females compared to the number of men.
Panels in the floors slid back to reveal shallow recesses filled with thick brown gruel that was vaguely the color of beans. The prisoners ate the stuff voraciously with their hands, the only option available.
Cross felt as if it had been days since he’d eaten. The sludge was thick and oily, and it felt like cold clay in his trembling hands. Worse, it tasted like some sort of congealed lard, and he fought to get it down his throat and keep it in his stomach. He was so ravenously hungry it was difficult not to shovel more of the stuff down, but he knew that if he ate too fast he’d choke and be sick.
No water was provided. That worried him.
They were watched by gargoyles, mindless and violent brutes who could sit still for days on end without having to move, obedient lackeys from the shores of Rimefang Loch who would serve either vampires or humans without discretion, so long as they were paid. Cross saw no vampires, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by…he heard their guttural calls just on the other side of the walls, low growls and throat songs that sliced open the air like knives. He heard the slurp and smack of vampire feedings even over the sounds of the prisoners gorging themselves, and the roar of the city’s vast chains.
Several of the prisoners couldn’t handle their food, and Cross guessed they were as new to the prison city as he was. They vomited noisily onto the ground, sometimes right back into the feeding troughs.
A new series of sounds assaulted them. He heard babies being hurt, children screaming, sounds of torture and pain that came from just out of sight.
None of it is real
, he told himself.
They’re just screwing with our heads.
Some of the prisoners looked around, afraid. Others didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Cross needed something to drink. Again, he didn’t seem to be the only one. The gruel dried painfully in his mouth. He smelled and tasted basalt and corn.
“
Just take it slow,” the Gol said. He was short, which was normal for that race, barely four-feet-tall, with diseased looking skin that was riddled with scars and pores. He kept most of his face concealed beneath a heavy cloth wrap and a thick red cloak that looked as tattered as a battle flag, but the diseased flesh was difficult to completely hide away. His hands look withered, and old. “Small bites. Let is dissolve in your mouth. Eat too much, and you’ll choke.” The Gol’s yellow eyes had no pupils. His voice was gravel and stone. “There will be no water. You drink your piss, or the water in your cell.”
They were the first words Cross had heard spoken in what must have been days. It took Cross some moments to assemble meaning from them, and by the time he did the Gol had vanished. He saw no trace of him in the crowds.
The sun beat down. The walls shielded them from the hot wind, but not from the molten heat or the cloying stench.
Cross sat for a while. There was not a shred of cover anywhere to be found in the open commons. The ochre clouds melted away, and the sun bathed the world in heat. Before long the light was so bright it was almost impossible for him to keep his eyes open.
He wandered around after he ate. A fight broke out between the Vuul and a pair of humans. The gargoyle sentries seemed to have little interest in the melee, so the Vuul was left alone to tear the humans apart with its considerable fists.
Cross turned away. He had no doubt that the humans would be eaten, and he wanted to know nothing of it.
His spirit moved around him in a sort of protective embrace, but all that Cross could sense was how weak and feeble she was, how helpless. He was going to have to keep her safe, not the other way around.
Maybe I can do it this time. Maybe I can actually protect someone important to me.
He sees Snow, burning. This time she is on that mountain. She stands below him, and the flames roar up from the valley and engulf her. He watches her flesh melt from her bones. She disintegrates in a furnace blast of cold fire
.
Cross shook his head. He was going insane.
The pitted iron walls of the prison were covered in dust and sand that clung to old congealed blood stains that had sealed to the metal. Images had been scrawled there: claws, handprints, mouths. Beneath the gritty outer coating of desert grime were more elaborate shapes drawn or cut directly into the metal, pyramids and elliptical gods, eyes and teeth and bladed crescent moons.
Cross closed his eyes.
“
Cross?”
It was so strange to hear words spoken again so soon. Most of the voices he heard in the commons were guttural chants, or the whispered silver sounds of foreign tongues, and after a while they all faded into background noise, white static that filled his head as he wandered, not really words at all.
Dillon put a heavy hand on Cross’ shoulder. Cross stared up at him. It took him a few seconds to register who it was. The tall ranger looked gaunt. His eyes were sunken, like he hadn’t slept for days.
Cross regarded him stupidly, not understanding. When it became clear that he wasn’t dreaming, Cross slowly lifted an aching, gauntleted hand and put it on Dillon’s arm, and he held it there for a moment to make sure he was really awake.
He stood, and then he promptly collapsed in Dillon’s arms.

 

 

 

 

 

TEN
TOWERS

 

 

They were introduced to a new routine. After they were left to roast in the sun for a few hours every day, with only the foul-smelling brown gruel to sustain them, the prisoners were unceremoniously hauled out of the commons by gargoyles and returned to the darkness of their cells. Vampires with bone launchers and large-bored handguns watched from high up on the walls as the bestial winged creatures moved the prisoners. Considering how lethargic the inmates were, Cross thought the vampires needn’t worry too much.
Back in his cell, he drank foul water and tried not to fall unconscious and drown. He slept standing up. He dreamed of the cold inferno as it clawed its way up the mountain, and of a female figure as she died in the pale doorway. Sometimes Snow was there, as well, burning next to him.
Every day, he was removed from his cell and taken to the commons, where he met with Dillon. They saw no sign of the others.
The gruel and dirty water never changed. They were being kept alive, but not healthy. Cross’ insides burned like he’d swallowed an acid pill.
“
They’re going to Turn us,” Dillon said at one point.
There was no telling how many days had passed since they’d been first been brought to Krul. On those rare occasions when his head felt clear, Cross remembered being led through the labyrinth of dark halls by black-clad vampires in masks, then flown up a massive cylinder shaft by blank-eyed gargoyle warriors with bodies as solid as stone before he was brought into open air and dropped into the commons.
The gauntlets they fit him with every day ached and cut into his wrists, leaving them raw. His leg wound still throbbed, but it ached less than it had before. It may have even started to heal, though he couldn’t imagine how that was possible without some sort of medical aid.
It was never night, or at least it seemed that way. They were only brought outside in the blazing sun of midday. The rest of their time was spent buried deep in the tower.

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