“ He also has a good crew with him,” Vos said. “A half-dozen mercs, at least.”
“ Well, that’s great,” Dillon said quietly. “Do you have a layout for the ruins?”
Black produced a map. The ruins in question were those of a city, depicted in carefully cast lines of charcoal and ink on a faded piece of yellowed parchment. If the map was accurate, there were plenty of buildings in the ruins, at least ten square city blocks worth.
“ All right,” Black said. “So what’s the plan?”
“ Wait,” Cross said. “There’s one more thing.” The air stiffened as a cold and dead wind came at them. Cross rocked in place to try and stay warm. The sky was clear and vast. “What made the ship crash?”
Vos looked at Black, as if for permission to answer. Black swallowed, and she took a deep and shuddering breath.
“ We’re not sure,” she said. “Something…dark.”
“ Dark skinned?” Dillon asked.
“ Maybe,” Black said. “It wasn’t human. Royce…the pilot…whatever it was, it tore Royce and the entire cockpit in half. But right before it happened, he said he saw something, and whatever it was sent him into a panic.”
“ Well…what was it?” Dillon asked when Black looked away. “What is it the man said?”
“ He said it was a shadow,” Vos answered. “A ghost. A cold, dark ghost.”
He looked terrified.
“ Ebon Cities?” Cross asked after an uncomfortable silence.
“ I don’t know,” Vos answered. “I don’t think so.”
“ No,” Black said with certainty. Her eyes were lost out in the dark. The tiny campsite was a speck of light in the dark sea of the plains. “This was something…old. You could feel it through the walls of the ship. You could feel its presence, so cold and vast and…dead. Like a heartbeat that came from the bottom of a pit.” She looked back at them. “That’s the best I can describe it. It was like a hole. Like a void.”
Black’s eyes stared back into the memory, stuck inside the vision of whatever they’d seen when the ship crashed, and of what Black’s spirit had felt.
Vos watched Black as she sat there, quiet. Cross saw that the male Revenger looked at his superior officer with concern.
“ Whatever it is,” Vos said, “it tore the control room right out of the damned ship. We were mid-air when it happened. The whole crate just spiraled right out of the sky.” He spat on the ground, and rubbed it into the hard dirt with his boot. “We lost five men. Five.”
Again, there was silence.
Cross thought that he recognized what Black was talking about. It had been described as a dream, a nightmare of an absence, a dark void. An evil older than the new world, and it roamed free. It was a hunter, which meant that it might have been the same entity that he and Dillon had been sent to stop.
No, not to stop. To find out how to stop. No one can take that thing on alone.
It was out there. Waiting.
I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I hope that’s not what it is. Either way, we’re in it deep now.
After a while, they went over Black’s intelligence about the ruins where her lover was being held, and laid their plans.
FIVE
The ruins where the Blacks were to conduct the exchange were of a place called Shul Ganneth, once a temple-city of the lupine race called the Maloj. Not much was known about the Maloj, save that they’d been bestial creatures with foul appetites and a talent for tribal magic. They were also thought to have been extinct for several years, possibly even before the remnants of their civilization had been fused with earth during The Black. Only bits and pieces of their culture remained in the form of ruins, artifacts and fossils found in the wilderness.
The mixed group of Revengers, Southern Claw soldiers and Black Scar inmates traveled at a good pace all through the next day. The air was moist, filled with a thick and freezing fog that blocked sight past half-a-mile and that left them constantly clammy and cold. The ground they traveled over was mostly flat plains covered in snow and beds of smooth ice-covered stone, stony ridges and partially frozen streams.
They traveled on foot and spared the horses and the camel the extra weight, save for those times when Dillon rode ahead to scout. The terrain they passed through was mostly wide open country, so they moved in a spread out formation, with the prisoners at the center, shackled and bound to each other by their wrists.
Cross’ legs ached. The effort of walking on slick ice and brittle ground was exhausting. The air was the color of milk, and thick with frost. Patches of ice covered Cross’ armored coat, and the blankets on the animals turned white with brittle snow powder.
“ Are we there yet?” Kane groaned after a while. No one answered.
“ What’s their story?” Cross asked Black. The two of them walked behind and a good distance away from the rest of the group, though not out of any intent. Cross was stuck leading the slower camel, while Black was busy checking maps of the area, which slowed her pace. Cross’ horse also clunked along beside them.
“ Kane and Ekko?” she said. “They’re stowaways.”
“ How’s that?”
“ They were trying to escape from Black Scar. I’m still not sure how they did it, but they managed to sneak out of general population and smuggle themselves onboard the Dreadnaught. I guess they thought they’d sneak away the next time it left.”
“ Which is when you ‘borrowed’ it,” Cross said.
“ There,” she said. She ignored his comment. “It’s just past that ridge, another mile or two.”
They reached the ridge, which was composed of a number of tightly clustered and jagged rock formations. Sizable clefts in the razor-sharp stones formed questionable paths that led to the other side. Those paths looked like they’d been sheared clean through the rock with some enormous blade.
Rather than pass through right away, the group rested. Dillon went on ahead to check out the ruins, which were barely visible about a mile or so off, at the edge of a thinning field of silver-blue mist.
He wasn’t gone long.
“ There’s no way to get into that place without being seen.” He drew a rough map of Shul Ganneth in the snow. He explained that the exterior wall was a massive dome that bore a single continuous crack down its western side. From what Dillon had seen, it was the only easy way to get in.
“ There are some doors on the far end near some separate ruins, but there’s no way to open them. There isn’t even a handle.” He scratched some squares inside of the circle he’d made to represent the dome. “These are buildings. They’re all over the inside of the dome. If I can get close enough to that crack without being seen, I can slip off and hide in the ruins. I might need a distraction so that I can pull it off, though.”
“ Can you scale the dome?” Black asked. “Maybe come in at the top, where the crack starts?”
“ Only if you and Vos have stashed away some pretty incredible climbing gear that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t wish that climb on anyone. That stone is smooth, old and unstable. I barely even trust walking in there…that place looks ready to collapse.”
“ Fine,” Vos said. “We’ll head straight in then. The way I like it.”
“ Good to know,” Cross said sarcastically. “So are we ready?”
They moved through mist made orange by the dusk sun. A hard wind drove across the plain and carried snow dust and white grit that made it suddenly difficult to see past a few hundred yards. They kept to a path clear of ground snow, a stretch of pale hard stone broken with age. The path twisted and curved through ripped ice. Cross felt a cold that gnawed down to his bones.
And then, Shul Ganneth.