Fountains were cracked and dry, entire houses had been leveled, statues had been toppled and the fronts of buildings had been torn away. The streets were soon so littered with wreckage and rubble the ground was barely visible.
They saw only a few bodies, and there were no lost spirits to accompany them. If Rhaine’s citizens were dead, their spirits were no longer in the city. Both Cross and Cristena should have been deaf from the cries generated by that many lost souls.
Maybe that mass grave was filled with the people from Rhaine, Cross thought. It would explain why it’s so quiet here now.
But that wasn’t it. There should have been something more, some whispers of a lingering soul, some background spiritual static, a general unquiet in the nether region between worlds. There was nothing. Everything was empty, and utterly abandoned.
The squad passed through the open shell of a building, and for the first time the four of them were able to look into Rhaine’s central city square. Roaring fires burned in the shells of destroyed vehicles. Bright smoke billowed into the sky, and showers of sparks fell onto the bloodied pavement.
A large crater rested at the exact center of Rhaine, at the spot that had likely once been occupied by the city hall. An imperfect orb made of black iron hovered over the hole. The lopsided sphere hummed and turned in place above the ovoid depths of the crater. Subtle lines of black lightning raced up and down the surface of the metal ball, and tendrils of energy danced between the orb and the ground in a ghastly web. The area that surrounded the crater was occupied by smoking and crumbling buildings, their ruins illuminated by red flames. The ground was torn granite that had been rent asunder by explosive blasts.
The wrecked plaza was also paved with the dead.
Scores of bodies lay heaped in orderly piles ten or fifteen feet high. They were neatly arranged columns of dead husks. The smell in the air was ghastly. The bodies had been left to decay for some time, and their proximity to so much heat and flame had sped the rate of deterioration. Cross gagged on the taste of overcooked meat that soiled the air.
“ Holy shit,” Graves whispered.
“ That’s an Egg, isn’t it?” Stone asked with a nod towards the floating black ball.
“ Yeah,” Cross coughed. “That’s why we couldn’t sense any roaming spirits,” he said. “Because there aren’t any. There are no souls left to detect.”
“ What do you mean?” Graves asked quietly. They all crouched down and did their best to stay out of sight.
“ Sometimes the Sorn feed the souls of people they kill to the Black Eggs. No one has seen an Egg in over a decade. We thought they were all gone.”
The squad kept quiet, and clung to the shadow of the building shell. From their vantage they spied a half dozen Sorn who carefully navigated the urban graveyard with silent stoicism. The nearest was just a few blocks away.
The Sorn were essentially humanoid, save that their skin had the hue and texture of worked stone, and they stood nearly twelve feet tall. Their hairless heads were decorated with runic markings and ritualistic scars, and each bore a short row of onyx horns on his forehead. Each Sorn had but a single large eye in the center of its face, so large there was barely any room left for its tiny mouth. The Sorn’s armor was coal black steel set with iron plates and jagged spikes, and their weapons looked like industrial machines, heavy, functional, covered in gears and knobs, ugly but efficient.
Cross didn’t feel a single spirit aside from his and Cristena’s. There wasn’t a human soul left in Rhaine that didn’t belong to the squad. He didn’t know exactly how the Sorn fed souls to the living artifacts they worshipped, but he tasted the vile stench of black magic in the air. All of the Black Eggs were thought to have been destroyed during the Southern Claw’s last major engagement with the Sorn, back during the Battle at Horn’s Peak in A.B. 13. The spheres were malignant and intelligent orbs made of arcane iron reputedly taken from the core of an ancient meteorite. They possessed their own magic, and they demanded unquestioned loyalty from their Sorn followers. This one had been well fed.
“ We can go around it…” Cristena began.
“ No,” Stone said. “We can’t.” His tone made clear he would broker no argument.
“ You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“ I’m sorry, Cristena,” Stone said, “but we do. There is no getting around this.” He quietly removed his extra equipment, and just kept his weapons and armor. Graves did the same.
And so did Cross, without even realizing it until he was almost done.
Am I insane?
“ You can’t help these people,” Cristena said. “Do you hear me, you stupid, macho assholes? They’re dead, and their souls are dead. You should be worrying about the people you can help. I don’t believe this…why am I the only thinking about your mission? Eric, what about Snow? If you get yourself killed…”
“ He won’t,” Stone said.
“ God damn it, what will this prove?” Cristena said, loud enough that Cross was sure the Sorn overheard them. If they did, they made no indication of it, and the giants just tended to their business, organizing the bodies and patrolling the field of dead.
Nothing, Cross thought. This will prove nothing. And yet, we have to do it.
He stands in the glade. She is there, lovely and snow white pale, her hair blown back by the gentle breeze that circles down from the black mountain.
He thought of Snow. He hoped she’d understand.
Cristena conceded without further argument: after a minute or two of silence she, too, readied herself for battle.
Cross wasn’t surprised. He knew that she still wanted to die, even if she seemed to have forgotten for a while.
He didn’t think they were going to die. He wondered if she’d be disappointed.
It took a few minutes to set up the mini-gun, which they mounted on a low wall near a hollow building that overlooked the crater. Stone, still slowed from his cracked rib in spite of plenty of arcane first aid provided by the mages, decided to man the mini-gun, while Graves took the M16A2 with the M203. Cross and Cristena loaded up with most of the handguns. For some reason, Cross wondered about the camel, and hoped the creature had the good sense to stay out of danger.
They fanned out across the nearby section of town. There was debris everywhere — shattered stone, broken pieces of furniture, collapsed ceilings and cracked walls — so there was plenty of cover available. Cross found himself alone in the blasted remains of an old house.
This is insane. But it’s too late now.
A stream of white light burst out of the rotating barrels of the mini-gun a few houses away. Stone had waited until a pair of Sorn walked directly into his field of fire before he’d opened up on them.
Deafening blasts filled the air. Heavy chunks of Sorn armor collapsed beneath the thunderous barrage of the mini-gun, and while the creatures managed to draw their massive blades Stone eventually sent them both to the ground.
More Sorn suddenly appeared all over the square. The eye-numbing light made it so that many of them were difficult to see in spite of their size. Weapon blasts tore through the night. The Black Egg shifted and turned in place.
The mini-gun strafed the area. Small explosions boomed. Black dust drifted across Cross’ field of vision. He let his spirit swim out and over his body and through his fingers like water. Cross molded her form, squeezed his fingers together, and shaped her essence into a chain of eldritch blades that he cast out into the dark. The blades punched through concrete and embedded themselves into Sorn targets with audible force.