Cross tried to sit up. His back was as stiff as a plank, and he was still disoriented and dizzy.
There was nothing left of the boy but ash.
“ What the hell?!” Kane said as he pointed at the smoldering pile. “WHAT the hell?!!”
The airship moved deeper into the sky. Cross felt its ascent. The metal shuttered. He pictured them over the barren landscape, headed east.
“ Where are we going?” he asked Cole.
She looked at him for a moment, ascertaining if he was injured, or at least in his right mind.
“ The Reach,” she said. “Near Karamanganji. The Bone Towers.”
“ We have to move fast,” Cross said. His head was pounding. “It’s testing us. That was a sliver of the Sleeper, just a fraction. It possessed the boy to see how dangerous we were.” He looked up at the rest of them. The gravity in the room was almost crushing. “It won’t delay any longer. We have to get to the Woman in the Ice, before it’s too late.”
SEVENTEEN
“ Cross,” Kane said. “You said you’d tell us what the hell is going on.”
The airship headed due east. No one aside from the nameless boy had been killed or seriously injured, but the attack had left everyone demoralized.
Ekko put the ship on autopilot. They knew where they were going now. The Bone Towers were a series of cylindrical rock formations near the ancient city of Karamanganji, a lonely and desolate burg filled with hollow buildings of pale ice. So far as anyone knew, the city had always been abandoned. The frigid location had been discovered a few years back, just a few hundred miles north of the ruins of Shul Ganneth, beyond what was called the White Border, a northerly latitude point where the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees.
They flew through the night. The muted groan of the engines and the howl of the frozen wind outside filled their heads. The burgeoning dawn sky was a pink stain when viewed through the smeared and broken glass. The air inside of the cabin was cold as the night’s chill crept through the twisted metal paneling.
The vessel shook as it carried through the sky. Everyone was still shaken by the Vath’s charge and by the death of a boy they’d known nothing about, except that he’d been weak and close enough to death that the Dra’aalthakmar had possessed him with ease.
“ A few months ago, something evil woke up,” Cross began. Everyone sat against the walls, watching as he spoke. He felt like he needed a storybook. “The Southern Claw knew about it before it woke, but we didn’t know much about what it really was.”
“ How did you know about it?” Kane asked.
“ The Lith. They aid the Southern Claw war effort with their prophecies.”
“ The Claw puts too much confidence in them, if you ask me,” Cole interjected. Cross thought she’d developed something of a maternal kinship for the boy, and his death had left her rattled and sullen. He noticed that she and Black still sat at an arm’s distance. Something had happened between them, or was about to happen.
“ What kind of ‘something evil’ are we talking about?” Black asked.
“ Like I said, we’re not sure exactly what it is, but we know its name: the Dra’aalthakmar. We just refer to it as the Sleeper. So far as the Lithian prophecies could tell us, it’s some sort of…demon, I guess. A living shadow. Anyway, it was imprisoned back on its home world, where it was buried deep underground in some kind of magical prison.
“ During The Black, that prison shifted here — to Earth. The magic that held the Sleeper in stasis weakened, and the physical location of the prison shifted much closer to the surface than it had ever been on its home world. So it was just a matter of time before the prison was compromised.”
The notion wasn’t that preposterous. Much had been destabilized during The Black, and many of the structures and ruins that populated the landscape looked half-made, but they weren’t: usually that appearance was because those structures or cities or (in some of the more horrific cases) creatures had been ripped asunder from their world and only partially recreated on Earth.
“ So that…thing we saw back at the city,” Cole asked, “ that was the Sleeper?”
“ It took its vitamins,” Kane said.
“ It’ll keep getting bigger, I think,” Cross said, “if we don’t stop it.”
“ And how, precisely, do we do that?” Ramsey asked.
“ The Lith said that the key to stopping the Sleeper is the Woman in the Ice. I think the Sleeper knows this, and it wants to find the Woman and destroy her before she destroys it. I also think that Lucan Keth was somehow connected to the Woman, and that his primordial soul is born of the same power as she is. It’s possible, even, that the Woman is what imprisoned the Sleeper in the first place…that they’re from the same world, and they were both ripped to Earth during The Black.”
“ Am I the only one who’s stupid around here?” Kane asked. When no one said anything, he took a breath and nodded. “Let me rephrase that: am I the only one here who doesn’t know who the Woman in the Ice is?”
“ Not a who, a what,” Cole answered. “It’s some sort of ancient monument, buried deep underground. Some say it’s an obelisk, covered in images of a forgotten goddess. Some say it’s that goddess’ bones, frozen in the ice, or the frozen corpse of a lady giant. There’s supposed to be some magical power connected to the Woman, and that’s why people search for it. I was guiding an expedition of scientists and explorers to the city, and one of them thought they’d find the Woman there.”
“ Yeah,” Cross nodded. “About that…”
The ship lurched and shuddered.
“ Wait,” Black said. Ekko did a quick diagnostics check, and gave a thumbs up sign. “That scared the shit out of me,” Black laughed. “Okay…I want to make sure that I have one thing straight. You think Lucan is somehow tied to the Woman…how, exactly?”
“ I don’t know what the connection is,” Cross answered. “But I do know this: the Sleeper wants to destroy the Woman, whoever or whatever she is. And now it wants to destroy us, because what’s left of Lucan Keth’s soul is fused to you, me, and Ekko.”
“ Wait a minute,” Kane said. He had that sort of sarcastic and nervous yet still macho smirk on his face that so reminded Cross of his old friend, Sam Graves. “Back up a sec. This thing can apparently nuke cities just by showing up…so the strategic masterminds who run the Southern Claw sent TWO GUYS to stop it?”
Cross couldn't help but laugh.
“ Two things, pal. One, no one had any idea of exactly when this thing was going to wake up. We knew that lives would be at stake if we didn’t figure out a way to stop it, but I think the prophecies led the High Command to believe that we’d have more time. Second, Dillon and I were sent on a reconnaissance mission: information gathering, and that's all. We were supposed to spend time with a tribe of Lith and see if we could find the Woman in the Ice. Once we did that, the High Command would put together a research team to take over the mission.”
“ Only that's not what happened,” Black added.
“ We didn't expect the damn thing to show up in person. It woke earlier than we thought it would, and I’m guessing it followed Lucan. Like I said, he had some connection to the Woman, to the power that I think imprisoned the Sleeper in the first place. That's why it crashed your prison ship, and once it knew where you were going, that's why it waited for us in Shul Ganneth.”
“ So what did my brother have to do with any of this?” Black asked.
“ He was working for the Ebon Cities,” Cross answered. “We weren't sure how much they knew, but it stands to reason they'd want to take measures to protect themselves if they thought some ancient power was about to wake up. That, or else they thought they could find a way to direct that power against the Southern Claw. It just makes sense they'd want to get their hands on Lucan.”