The Witch's Eye (39 page)

Rourke
’s men moved closer.  Danica’s spirit coiled around her body like an oiled snake.  She heard his bloodthirsty whispers.   

“We paid for a trip you never finished,” Danica said.

“Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes,” Rourke said.  He drew a double-barreled shotgun and pointed it at them.  “Our trip stops here.  I’m not getting any closer to that mess of a battle than I have to.  I’m not risking me or my men.” 

On cue,
those same men drew longknives and pistols.

“So what now?” Danica asked.  Ronan
stood still as a statue beside her.

“Now, either you negotiate
payment for a return trip,” Rourke smiled, “or you get off here.”

She didn
’t need to ask what he wanted as payment.  He and his men had been eyeing her body like she was a piece of meat ever since they’d left the shore. 

“You know we could kill every single one of you,” Danica said.  “Right?”

Rourke laughed. 

“Then why haven
’t you?” Rourke asked.  “Oh, that’s right…the boat.  You don’t know how to operate it.”

“We haven
’t killed you for the same reason you won’t kill us now,” Ronan said.  His voice was almost a growl.  “Because we’re not stupid.  Even with the fighting going on, too much noise might attract an Ebon Cities patrol.  Or a Southern Claw recon ship.  And you morons don’t want to see either.”

Rourke clenched his fingers around his gun.  He licked his teeth, and clacked his ringed fingers
together. 

“Fuck this,” he said.
  “We’re done here.” He aimed the shotgun at Ronan and pulled the trigger.

Danica
’s spirit fused into a crimson shield around Ronan.  Buck-shot bounced away like broken pebbles.  Ronan spun around and cast a dagger into the throat of the closest man, then ducked and dove forward with his katana in hand.

Rourke shouted.  Guns turned on
Danica.  She released her spirit in a fan of icy flames and immolated two of Rourke’s men, then raised her G36C and gunned them down while they writhed and burned.  Ronan sliced through the last man’s face.  Blood sprayed onto the deck, and the swordsman calmly kicked the corpse into the water. 

As quickly as th
e fight had started, it was over.

Danica walked up to Rourke.  He
’d taken bullets in his side, and lay crumpled and bleeding on the deck.  He snarled as Danica drew close, and at the last moment leapt at her with a curved dagger he’d kept hidden in his shirt.  Danica easily moved aside and used a backhanded strike from her metal arm to shatter the bones in his hand.  Rourke screamed and fell to his knees.

“You were wrong about one thing, Rourke,” she said.  “I know perfectly well how to drive your shitty little boat.”  His eyes went wide
as she whipped her metal hand forward and crushed his face.  The bones in his skull cracked and blood spurted out, and even though he wasn’t quite dead she used her boot to push him overboard and into the water.

Ronan
walked up next to her, his blades sheathed.  Danica let her spirit wrap around her.  The air was cold and crisp, and the clouds grew thick overhead.  She tasted hex energies in the atmosphere, the charnel scent of rot. 

“I think there are Ebon Cities patrol boats
nearby,” she said.  “We’d better get moving.”

“Do you still know where we
’re going?” he asked.

Danica focused.  She cleared her mind.

She sees carnivore fog and vampire shores.  Claws
like cracked razors under the full moon.  The vampires stand shoulder to shoulder and face the sea. 

They are naked and
dark, scarred and mindless.  Their link to the vampire collective consciousness has been severed.  They share a new master, a dark intelligence which drives them to destroy.

She drifts closer. 
Her consciousness stretches and bleeds like a beam of light.  The world compresses, squeezes in, falls away.  She is a leaf on the black wind. 

She floats between ranks of dead faces
and navigates passages of smelted rock, where the torn earth smokes with coal fumes and fire.  She weaves through the splintered remains of once proud forests.  Serpentine twists of smoke curl into the darkening sky. 

Even in that ethereal
body she smells the age of that place, the burning.  She tastes destruction in the wind.  Something ancient has been unearthed, some dread relic upturned from the corroded island’s skin. 

She
moves closer.  She is afraid.

She descends into a
smelted crater.  Mounds of ash cover the charred bones of forest beasts.

The Witch
’s Eye is there, along with its smaller sibling.  They float and orbit each other, spinning faster and faster. 

The gate hums with the sound of an engine.  Burning runes on the archway slice through the fog
and reveal a surface made of black ice.  The doorway is ready to break.  Some barely contained terror of the night lands pushes from the other side. 

There is a
towering woman in command, a six-armed creature with sleek muscles and bloody eyes.  Her skin glitters with the sheen of black diamonds.  Runes and piercings cover her body.  Her garbled arcane speech echoes into the storm of shadows above. 

She turns, and looks at Danica. 

I’m waiting for you
, she says.

Danica fell back from the vision.  The details of the gate and its location had never been so visceral.  She gasped for breath, and nearly fell to her knees.  Her head was spinning. 

“Dani?”  Ronan
’s voice was distant, an echo that seemed to come from the far side of a vast field.  She looked at him.  His face wavered and shook.  Hurt flared through her mind. 

“I saw,” she said.  She coughed, and shook herself.  Ronan helped her
up.  “I think I was seeing through the eyes of some captives.”

“Captives?”

“Vampire captives,” she said.  “Prisoners of the Eye, and the six-armed witch.”

“Dani,” Ronan said.  “You
’re going to have to repeat that…”

“I can, but it
’s not like I know what I’m talking about,” she said with a bitter laugh.  “There’s a six-armed woman…a witch.  I’m not sure who or what she is, exactly, but I think she’s somehow taken control of the Witch’s Eye.  I think the Witchborn report to
her
, and I think she’s creating them and taking vampire captives so she can open some sort of…gate.  I don’t know where it goes, and I don’t know who she is.”  She swallowed.  “I don’t know much of anything.”

“You know a hell of a lot more than I do,” Ronan said.  “Wherever this gate goes…”

“It’s nowhere good,” she said.  She took a deep breath.  “Ronan…we may be going about this all wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“I…I’m still not completely sure what was done to me.  The Revengers…” She looked at her steel arm.  “They gave me this fucking thing after a vampire bit me.  And then the vampires of Lorn molded my mind.”  She looked at him.  “Maybe you
should
have killed me.”

Ronan stared at her. 
He was probably wondering the same thing.

“No,” he said.  “Absolutely not.”

She had the image of their destination in her mind, and realized they’d spotted the island they needed to get to just a few minutes before Rourke had brought them into the cove. 

The sky was full with dark clouds
, and the wind was colder than before.  Danica cranked the engine into gear.  The boat roared across the waters. 

Her
instincts guided her.  She hoped they wouldn’t lead her astray.

They sped through freezing mist and fog.  Beams of failing sunlight pushed through the veil of clouds, and dark birds flew close to the Loch’s surface.  Danica steered them through narrow channels of jagged granite and glacial flow.  The remains of ships and broken pillars littered the dark waters. 

The
waterways were tight.  Soon the ship could barely squeeze between the derelict isles, and Danica knew it wouldn’t be long before she and Ronan would have to abandon the boat altogether.  She didn’t relish the notion of swimming in those waters. 

Her spirit was restless
, and it grew more and more difficult to keep the vampire’s voices out of her head.  Even with her spirit shielding her she still felt the undead slither through her mind like a poison song.

Ronan
stayed close, but didn’t say anything.  He sharpened his knives and swords and polished a pair of bladed brass knuckles he’d found in one of the ship’s cupboards next to more whiskey and a lot of coin.

Good to know we
’ll have some compensation if we come out of this alive
, Danica thought. 

They sailed on.
The dull hum of the motor was lost beneath the sound of the churning waves.  They navigated clusters of tall rock that obscured view of the wider sea.  Smoke rolled at them in waves. 

They were
close to the eye of the storm.  They’d almost reached the center of Rimefang Loch.  The air was noticeably crisp, and colder.  The icy waters turned clear enough for them to see the twisted volcanic stone at the bottom of the sea. 

The whispers in Danica
’s head suddenly turned to screams.  She heard the roar of engines.

“Ronan!”

They only had moments to react.  Two flying warships appeared out of nowhere, their red-black hulls decorated with chains and blades.  Bone cannons bore down on the pirate vessel, and the hum of pulse engines growled through the darkening sky.

Danica
pushed the boat faster.  Her spirit shielded her and Ronan’s bodies in a carapace of red light.  Incendiaries tore through the hull and blazed across the deck.  Even with the shield Danica felt the roiling heat. 

The
ship exploded beneath them.  She grabbed Ronan around his waist and threw them both forward and into the water.  There were faces beneath the surface, leering pale visages wrapped in rusted chains and barnacles.  Flayed skins floated like moss. 

Her spirit stayed wrapped around them
so they could breathe.  They swam with their hands linked and kicked their way through the murk, past columns of corpses and towers of bone.

Cold canisters
sank into the depths.  The first explosion ripped through the water in a wave of frozen light.  She heard a bull doom, a ripple of cold white force.  Danica’s spirit absorbed the brunt of the destructive energies, but the blast still tore into them.  Water flooded her lungs.  She turned end over end and fell up towards the light.

They
floated to the surface.  Air rushed into her lungs. 

C
hained nets wrapped around them.  Edged weights cut into her flesh, and hooks latched onto her armor.  She grabbed at the netting with her metal arm and ripped it away.  Ronan sliced through the bindings with his katana as he struggled to stay afloat. 

Bone d
arts struck her in the stomach and back.  Her spirit screamed, and faded.  More nets wrapped around them.  She and Ronan slammed into each other. 

Her limbs twisted and locked.  She couldn
’t see past her own hands as they were lifted into the air.  Blinding floodlights blazed down from the ships.

They
were dropped onto a slick deck.  Metal rammed hard against her spine.  Her breath was gone, and she floated in pain.

Danica
tried to move, but the net held firm.  She felt herself fading, and when she called for her spirit he didn’t respond.

Narcosm
, she realized. 

A scarred
man stepped into view, a man cloaked in black.  His eyes were hungry, and he wore the slash and claw insignia of the Ebon Cities on his chest.  A pale figure stood beside him, tall and regal with death-pale skin, her red-clad bodyguards at her sides.

“You see, Lady Riven,” Lynch said with a satisfied smile.  “I told you we
’d find her.”

The vampire dame
smiled coldly.  That undead face was the last thing Danica saw before she lost consciousness.

TWENTY-THREE

MARAUDER

The air
pulsed with the sound of arcane engines.  Two Southern Claw Bloodhawks and the airship
Marauder
flew through the chill sky, trailed by their own dark shadows on the choppy waves below.

S
ilver and black mist partially obscured the broken isles and floating debris on the water’s surface.  The wind smelled of gunpowder and hex currents.  Even without a spirit Cross heard the voices of the lost, the tortured cries of souls marooned in the aftermath of battles.  The dark waters faded to ice-blue, and eventually turned crystal clear.  They saw rocks beneath the sea, as well the ruins of ancient cities and the twisted metal remains of downed airships and Southern Claw war fleets.  Uncounted lives had been lost in the constant maritime battles between the Ebon Cities and the Southern Claw.  Evidence of the fighting could be seen in the distance: bomb blasts, clouds of gunsmoke, drifts of burning fog filled with red-white explosions.  Now and again the vapors would shift and Cross caught sight of distant fliers – reptilians, sleek vampire warships, and twisted sacks of floating meat carried on the foul breeze.