He looks on this, and knows that he is not supposed to see it, this forbidden place, this secret. It is the shape of things past and buried, and things still yet to come.
Cross woke to chaos. Gunfire erupted all around him. Blood and mud covered his eyes as a greasy film. His sense of direction was gone. His shaking limbs slipped in the mud as he struggled to rise. He smelled sorcery in the air, a burning cloud of caustic fumes that swept across the camp. Cross climbed up to his knees. He pulled slime and effluvia away from his eyes, and looked at the Blackmarsh.
The Ebon Cities regulars — the vampires — were coming.
The lead war machine was a shrieking monstrosity, a steamrolling juggernaut covered in chitin plates and bladed chains that dangled from its deck. The vehicle plowed through the bloody black earth. Massive red wolves and their masked vampire riders fell in line behind the machine. The riders held serrated swords and axes at the ready, and the wolves’ howls echoed into the darkening skies.
The camp was in disarray. The air support still had not come, and its delay in arrival had given the Ebon Cities regulars in the Blackmarsh plenty of time to mount an offensive. Bodies lay in bloody heaps, and thick black and red smoke billowed across Cross’ field of vision as if from a blazing hearth. Soldiers and mages shouted as they desperately tried to rally. Cross’ spirit swam around him, dizzy and angry, and through her he felt the onslaught of dire energies launched at the Company, and he sensed the presence of rebuilt Crujian war machines and dismal undead weapons fueled with stolen blood. Company cannons fired from behind him, and the cold iron shells detonated with thunderous force into the dreadnaught and the wolf riders in great explosions of fur, metal and undead flesh. Adrenaline coursed through the air, so thick it almost fell like rain.
Cross picked up his pistol. He found Graves in the crowd and made sure he was all right.
They both joined the rank of Wolf Company soldiers. They charged ahead.
Cross wasn’t ready to die. He was even less ready to die alone.
TWO
Year 22 A.B. (After the Black)
There was a white apple on the tree. It was like an orb of frozen snow. A tiny spider, also as white as ice, crawled across the apple’s face. The small and withered apple tree, which bore only that single and pale fruit, sat in a shallow river bank filled with muddy water and foul runoff from the Reach. Wind blew in from the vast eastern tundra and whispered through the reeds like a sad and quiet song.
The sky was low and oppressive, and the air was raw with cold. Cross stared out past the tree and the dense skeletal foliage that stood behind it and into the Reach, an endless and colorless plain of ice floes, snow-covered hills, arctic waters and drifts of snow deep enough to drown in. The horizon was a thin line of shadow that lay compressed beneath the dead white sky. The harsh white color of the Reach marked the end of civilization, for it was where Thornn’s sphere of influence ended, and where the deadly hostility of the wilderness began. There were no other cities of the Southern Claw Alliance this far north — the closest, Ath, was several days travel — so in many ways Thornn truly did stand alone.
“ Eric? Are you okay?”
His sister, Snow, stood behind him near the gravestones. The cold ground was nearly blue. The cemetery was a long and thin field that stretched all of the way back to the lower defensive tiers of Thornn, a funnel of reinforced red stone walls embalmed in arcane ice and surrounded by enchanted concertina wire. The city was squat and ugly, a troglodyte atop a twisted snowbound hill. Thick plumes of dark smoke slithered like serpents into the stale sky. Cross heard the distant wail of klaxons and machinery.
His sister wore a pale cloak. The cemetery, in contrast, was dirty and grey, and the grave markers were just low plates of steel etched with the names of the departed. Thornn’s citizens couldn’t actually be buried, as the danger of the dead coming back as vampires could not be dismissed, so they were instead cremated. Cross understood that reanimation had been a real problem about fifteen years ago, back in the early days of the war. Now the melting down of the deceased was so standard a practice no one even thought twice about it.
“ I’m fine,” he said. “Come and look at this.”
Cross’ eyes roamed up to the sentry gargoyles that hovered over Thornn like a murder of stone crows. Arcane storms invisible to the naked eye formed a quiet cyclone of protective magical energies over the city. Those energies emitted a constantly collapsing field of destructive power specially attuned to necrotic flesh.
Cross’ spirit drifted out and away, and she floated near the edge of the grave field before she moved back close to him. There was no danger in the cemetery, so his spirit was at peace, and her calm filled him. She fell around him like warm vapor that enveloped his body. She’d been with him since he was eight, when it had been discovered he was a warlock. He could barely remember being without her.
“ What is that?” Snow asked. She was shorter than Cross by several inches. There was little mistaking their relation, as she had the same coal black hair and large green eyes as he, and they were both exceptionally pale of skin. Her hair was cut short along the sides and on the back but was long on top, and there was a single streak of white that ran down from the center of her temple. Her choker was black leather set with a black cross. “Is that an apple? God, it must be rotten to the core.”
“ I don’t think so,” Cross said. “Look at it. I think it’s fresh. It’s just…white. Maybe it was drained of its color by this place.” It was possible. Entire crops had been leeched of color near inhospitable regions. Cross had heard of whole forests in the Bone March that had been rendered bone white by the unnatural landscape, and the Wormwood was so corrupt that even vampires feared the vegetation there. There was the Reach, that vast tundra that had been sucked of its life, and the Ebonsand, with its intelligent crabs that muttered arcane curses and Vuul pirates who’d claimed control over waters infused with occult blood. The world was a diseased and broken place. Cross knew that a better one had once existed, back during his youth, but it was becoming harder and harder to remember what that place had been like.
“ It’s beautiful,” Snow said.
“ Yeah,” Cross said. “I guess it is.”
She and Cross stood shoulder to shoulder. Their long cloaks were blown back by the baleful winter breeze. The arctic sun was rapidly setting. Behind them, past Thornn and on towards the lowlands, lay a brittle landscape filled with loose stones and shallow riverbeds, salt marshes and estuaries, cliffs of dark clay and low-rolling mists. If you took too long to pass through the plains it became difficult to remove the smell of decay and rotting vegetation from the clothing or skin. It was a few days travel from Thornn to the northeastern tip of Rimefang Loch, where armored boats sailed south to other Southern Claw cities on the coast. The outposts scattered along the western coast of the Loch formed the Thirteen, a defensive barrier against the dark stain of the Ebon Cities Bonespire fortresses.
The chill grew worse. Cross estimated they had less than an hour left before sundown, by which point they had to be inside the city walls. His spirit drifted close, then passed between Snow and himself (she pressed tight against him, as if jealous of his flesh and blood sister) before she circled out and away, cognizant of their surroundings, always on watch for anything that might do them harm.
“ Do you think Mom is doing well?” Snow asked.
They stared at the apple, and into the Reach. Snow didn’t like to look west, towards the Bonespire, even though it was hard to see from there in the grave field. The western plains were level with Thornn, while the graves were lower by a good hundred feet. A winding path led up the hillside and back to the eastern city gates, through the barbican and into the eastern guardhouse. It had been some time since Thornn had actually seen a Gorgoloth attack from out of the eastern Reach, but the ebon-skinned barbarians had historically wrought so much devastation that hostility from the Reach was considered inevitable, just as a similar, eventual attack from the Bonespire to the west was expected. Thornn was prepared for the next assault, regardless of which direction it came from.