There was no reason to ask Dillon why he’d shot Cradden Black. It didn’t really matter anymore.
“ Even knowing all of this,” Ramsey said after he let them ruminate on the information, “the truth is still quite simple: there’s no getting out of here.” His gray and milky eyes were unblinking. “Others have tried, and failed. And so will you.”
Bone-white trees protrude from the earth like enormous stakes. He is deeper in the forest this time, on the shore of a dark lake with a surface like fused glass. The air smells like cold smoke and ancient mold. Lichen dangles from the pale trees and lifts and sways like silk in the hot wind. He sinks ankle-deep into a blood marsh.
Muted yellow light rains down from above in clouds of ash colored amber and jade. The shadows of avian raptors cut across the ground as the distant fliers pass overhead through the pulsing orange sky.
Behind him, the valley of the lost is on fire. Cold flames race up the face of the steep black mountain. The air turns to frost before the advance of the roaring blue-white flames, and it cracks and shatters like crystal. Clouds like skulls reflect the fires back in a haze of blue shadow.
They move as if frozen. He feels his spirit with him, he can even almost see her, and she clings to him like a layer of clothing pasted against his panicked skin.
Ahead, the pale doorway shrinks. The female silhouette that is trapped there melts like a black snowflake.
The manic breathing of angry and ravenous mouths fills the air. Something bleeds across the sky and turns the world black. They try to run, but they are utterly consumed and crushed by a vast and hungry shadow.
Cross woke as he was pulled from his cell.
His muscles were stiff. His bones felt weak, like wood left too long in the rain.
The dreams, or the visions, or whatever they were, had grown more and more vivid and more difficult to shake off. They were different than before. A year ago, he’d started experiencing visions of women dying in a mountain glade, slain by black unicorns. That vision, it turned out, had been his glimpse into the obelisk prison of arcane spirits, the place where they were held until called upon by their witch or warlock masters.
This was something else, something far more dangerous, and entirely alien to him. He felt like an intruder on that dark mountain, and the presences that chased him — the fires, the shadow, the eyes and the teeth in the trees — didn’t want him to reach the woman in the doorway. There was something familiar about her, something he felt he should have known, and he was so close to understanding it threatened to drive him mad. It was like a song whose music he could hear, but he couldn’t remember the words.
The gauntlets were locked in place over his hands, as ever. By now his wrists had been rubbed raw from the constant treatment. He’d taken to drying out his feet in the sun during his “exercise” time. His clothes were a ragged mess, barely held together by filth and their last few rotting threads. His skin was so covered in grime he looked like a burlap sack. His skin itched all over.
I’ve been worried about trench foot or an infection, and here instead I’ll get some skin disease.
Gray-skinned gargoyle minions, hulking brutes with leathery wings and faces like bladed bricks, lifted Cross into the hollow tower shaft with ungentle claws. They did not take him as far as usual. Cross noted the change in the mind-numbing routine immediately, and while he tried his best to maintain his composure, he panicked inside.
What had happened? Was it because he and Dillon had spoken to Tega Ramsey? Cross had been suspicious of the Gol from the start, but it had taken him a while to realize it. The little bastard knew too much to be just a common prisoner. But to what purpose had they decided to haul Cross away now? Or had this been their plan all along? Did this even have anything to do with Ramsey?
Rather than lift him all of the way to Scar’s apex, the gargoyles set Cross down on a platform next to a dark metal hall roughly halfway up the tower. The hall led into darkness.
Cross wasn’t afforded a chance to hesitate. Vampires in pale white armor emerged and took hold of his arms with iron-clad hands. He smelled foul musk and charnel breath. Their claws had been honed to a razor’s edge, and they wore featureless masks. They seized him with stone-hard grips and plunged him forward into shadow. Cross steeled himself, as he expected to be shoved into some hard surface at any moment.
A door opened into a pale and featureless room. The vampires tossed Cross inside. His leg stung with sharp pain, and he almost blacked out as he collapsed on bruised knees and sore hands. The door slammed shut behind him with an echoing boom.
A cold white flame dangled in a smoking iron pot. The eye-numbing light shone on the other occupant of the room, Danica Black, who stood near the opposite door.
Any notions Cross might have had that Black was getting special treatment were dispelled by Danica’s appearance. She looked pale, thinner than before, and while he was sure Black looked a far cry better than he did, Cross still thought the Revenger’s eyes were sunken and distant, and that she held the restless and nervous demeanor of someone who hadn’t slept for days. And while her dark leather armor — the uniform of the Revengers — looked relatively clean and well kept, its wearer was unquestionably worse for wear.
Black also bore a trace scar near her right eye, just on the outer edge of her face. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her. It still looked raw, and it resembled some sort of collapsing star of blood. Her deep red hair hung loose around her shoulders, a bit longer than it had been before.
“ Hello, Cross,” she said quietly.
Cross hesitated. She was unarmed. He felt no trace of her spirit, which he guessed had been suppressed, just like his own had.
“ Are you okay?” he asked after a moment. The room seemed unnaturally still.
She regarded him quietly. He could already tell she had unpleasant things to tell him.
“ Yes,” she nodded. “I suppose I am.”
“ Cole?” he asked.
Black hesitated before she nodded.
“ She’s been better,” she answered. She watched him carefully. “I saw that Dillon was doing all right.”
“‘ All right’?” Cross said bitterly. He nodded. “If being locked up in a half-submerged fish tank, isolated in darkness, half-starved and left to bake out in the sun for a few hours a day is ‘all right’, then…yeah, Dillon is doing all right. So am I.” His icy stare was reciprocated in kind. “So what’s going on, Danica?”
Black smiled a sad and knowing smile.
“ Being a Revenger, I carry some…clout, I guess you could say, with the Ebon Cities. They don’t think of me as an equal, by any means, but they recognize the relationship they have with the Revengers, the group that I belong to.”
“ Which you weren’t representing when you were taken,” Cross said quietly. “And that’s why you’re here, hip-deep in shit with the rest of us.”
“ I’m the only reason we’re still alive,” Black said. Her look and voice made clear she didn’t care if Cross believed that or not.
Black leaned back against the wall. The air was sweaty and rank, like the underside of a dock. The stillness Cross had sensed before was abruptly broken as something groaned far away, and the walls shook. Likely Krul was changing again, its buildings re-aligning to form another new paradigm.
“ Danica,” Cross said, not caring that he could hear the desperation in his own voice. “We have to get out of here. That thing that Lucan was fighting, that shadow…that’s what Dillon and I were sent to gather information about, why we were sent to find the Woman in the Ice. It’s called the Dra’aalthakmar. The Sleeper. And it will kill a lot of people if we don’t figure out a way to stop it before it reaches Southern Claw territory.”