The ship cut through the sky. The walls rattled, and they heard ice and stone pummel the hull. The wind outside turned to a low moan. They were close to the Reach.
Everyone sat or crouched low, their faces grim.
“ Lucan is dead, right?” Kane asked.
“ Yes,” Cross answered. “So far as I can tell. But some fragment of his spirit is still here. It was scattered, but its pieces found shelter in the three closest mages.”
“ Ekko's not a mage,” Ramsey pointed out.
“ No,” Black answered, “but she sees spirits, and she communicates with them. That seemed to be enough for Lucan to make a connection.”
“ That's why the Sleeper came after us in Krul,” Cross added.
“ Yeah,” Cole said. “What happened there, exactly?”
“ You’re welcome,” Ramsey said with a smile. “Sorry I couldn't do it sooner. Had I known how important your mission had become, I'd have made efforts to get you out of there before then.”
“ What?” Kane asked, exasperated. “My head is going to explode from all of this bullshit…who the hell are YOU, now? A spy?”
“ Well…yes,” Ramsey said in an off-handed manner.
“ Well…” Kane seemed at a loss. “Fine!”
“ I've been feeding information to the Southern Claw from inside of Krul for about two years,” Ramsey said. “On occasion, when the opportunity presented itself, I arranged for prisoners to be ‘lost’ so that they could find their way home.”
Cross wondered if Ramsey had been the one who'd helped Graves and Morg escape. His old teammates had both been incarcerated in and had later escaped from Krul. Morg's imprisonment might have been before Ramsey's time there, but Graves’ wouldn't have been. He'd have to ask the Gol about it later.
“ Those runes of yours…” Kane said approvingly.
“ They helped. Being a natural born liar comes in handy, too.”
“ So what do you know about all of this?” Cole asked.
“ I didn't know anything at first. But Cross was pretty delirious in his sleep, and he started to drop tidbits of information. I think it must have been while you were figuring out that you were bonded to Ekko and Black, and so also to this Lucan. It's hard to get messages out to the Alliance — I only do it every few weeks — but when I figured out that you were onto something important, I gathered some information myself and figured out who you were.”
“ How did you get us out?” Black asked.
“ Cross guessed that this shadow thing was trying to find the three of you,” Ramsey said, “since you're carrying around what's left of Lucan’s super-spirit. But no matter how powerful it is, I knew it would never find you with the arcane safeguards around the city, so when I knew you'd all be out in the open and in the same place, I…turned the safeguards off. Or I arranged to have it happen, at any rate.”
“ And then it found us,” Cross nodded.
“ Well, a distraction did seem to be in order,” Ramsey smiled.
“ Destroying a city is a good distraction,” Kane said. “Though I wish you wouldn’t have waited so God-damned long to spring us…”
“ I can only save so many,” Ramsey interrupted. “Let’s just leave it at that. If I could have saved every prisoner who came into Krul, I would have. But that’s not how it worked. I had to let some die, so that I could save many more. The Southern Claw felt that having a spy inside of Krul was worth more than saving every prisoner who wound up in the city. It’s an awful risk, smuggling prisoners out…every time I did it, I ran the risk of being exposed. And let’s just say that it…wasn’t easy, getting me in as deep as we did. A lot of sacrifices were made.” He swallowed, pained by some memory. Kane looked about to apologize, but Ramsey held up a hand. “Like I said…let’s just leave it at that.”
For a minute or so, no one spoke.
“ Wait,” Cross said at last. “Did you say you’ve just been in touch with the Alliance…”
“ I have. We can call them up on the radio I brought from the safe house. Commander King has put part of Claw Company on standby to help us out in Karamanganji.”
“ Woo-hoo!” Kane shouted. “So they can handle this now!”
“ No,” Cross said. “The three of us,” he indicated himself, Black and Ekko, “need to get to the Woman in the Ice. For all we know, we’re the key to unlocking her power and stopping this damned thing.”
Kane looked dejected, but he nodded.
“ I knew you were going to say that,” he smiled. “Shit.” He stood up and walked over to Ekko. Her blank vampire's eyes were impossible to read. They might as well have been pools of oil. Kane stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“ How long till we reach Karamanganji?” Black asked, breaking the silence.
About five hours, Ekko answered in Cross' mind. He passed the information along.
“ I'm going to get some sleep.”
They all followed the advice, all except the pilot. Ekko needed no sleep. She'd already dreamed her last dream.
I’ve hated you all of my life, Cross thought. He didn’t direct the sentiment at Ekko, but to all of the vampires in the world, every bloodsucker in the darkness, every undead who waited and plotted from the other side of the black walls of their dead cities. I’ve never had any reason to do anything else. I’ve always been afraid of you. All that you do is take. You’ve never done anything but destroy everything I ever loved.
Ekko turned, and looked at him. Her eyes might have been cold and glassy voids, but her expression was one of sadness.
God damn it.
When Cross slept, he dreamed that he was back on the mountain. Snow was there with him, along with Dillon and Graves. They all smiled. He heard the waters and felt his feet in the stream, even as he watched the cold fire race up the mountainside and consume them.
Later, he sat in the dark. They flew through the night. Ekko expected them to arrive at Karamanganji just after dawn. Cross rubbed his eyes and sat uncomfortably against the wall. His spirit swirled near his hands and kept them warm as she slid in and out of his fingers like a warming gel.
“ Cross?”
It was Cole. She looked exhausted.
“ Yeah?”
“ You got a second?”
“ No, I’m real busy.” He smiled. “Sorry. I’m not as funny when I’m this tired.”
Surprisingly, Cole smiled, too, and she sat down next to him. It was so cold in the ship they’d all taken to huddling close to one another. Everyone else but Ekko was asleep, bundled beneath old blankets and coats.
Cole’s dark hair hung lank around her face — it had grown considerably in the weeks they’d spent incarcerated in Krul — and in spite of what she’d been through she still carried a sort of radiance about her, a natural beauty that owed as much to her demeanor and her stalwart resolve as it did to any physical blessings. He could see why Black had very plainly stated that she would die for this woman.
“ Well, I need to interrupt you,” she said with a small smile.
“ What’s up?”
“ Cradden Black and his men attacked my expedition party and took me hostage…”
“ Yeah…God, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that…”
“ You forgot. I did, too. Hey, we’re exhausted,” she said. “But I just remembered something that I wanted to tell you. Most of the people in the group that hired me on as a guide were archeologists out of Dorn. They wanted to see Karamanganji and look at the famous glyphs, to see if they could make sense of what others couldn’t.”
The glyphs of Karamanganji were one of the features that had made the site famous. It was hypothesized that they might have been the base for several languages encountered After the Black, which was odd when one considered that most of those languages originated from completely different worlds. There were theories that when realities converged during The Black, temporal and spatial relationships were created between races and locations that, prior to the catastrophe, had never been linked in any way whatsoever. History itself had been re-written.