Cross walked on. His eyes were cast forward, and his pace quickened. He was ready to finish it. Even naked as he was without the shield of his spirit, he marched towards his end, and he was not afraid.
TWENTY-TWO
The prison of fog came to an end at the edge of a dead city.
The walls of the necropolis were made of thick stone blocks, so dark they seemed to suck the light out of the air. Sheets of black iron, pitted and dented by a history of unnamed calamities, had been riveted over the spaces between the blocks. The fog ended a few hundred feet short of the onyx city walls, far enough away for Cross to take in the impressive breadth of the utterly silent necropolis, which sat atop a field of ice cold mud. He saw a coastal shore at the far end of the city, and even though the waters were some distance away he detected the faint odor of salt. Skeletal and jagged towers stood at the corner intersections of the city walls. Each tower supported a belfry of preposterous size and crooked angles. Red flags hung limp in the dead air, and barbed iron spikes lined the tops of the walls like an animal’s spines.
A wide grey path led to the open portcullis that granted access to the city. There were crowded houses packed into the same unseemly angles as the towers, and stone streets that bore not a trace of refuse. Silver mist and dark green chimney smoke rolled over everything. The streets snaked deep and out of sight, winding into shadows.
Cross stood frozen. This city bore a citizenry, who even as he stood in awe moved silently along dank and lifeless streets. They went about their business, their eyes gone or their limbs missing or their mouths sewn shut.
This was a city populated by corpses.
They moved in near silence, so stiflingly quiet that Cross’ breaths sounded to him like hurricanes, his footfalls like thunder. The air tensed, as if ready to pounce.
The dead carried on as living people did. They were occupied by any number of mundane tasks.
Cross wasn’t even aware of the zombies behind him until they passed him by and entered the city, oblivious or unconcerned by his presence. He watched them pass. Their flesh was rotten and leathery, and they bore gaping holes in their bodies through which he saw black worms that swam in their veins in place of blood. None of the undead so much as turned their heads in his direction.
Maybe they don’t know that I’m here, Cross thought. How?
Maybe I’m expected. Maybe they’re supposed to let me pass.
Cross swallowed. The act of breathing seemed to drag rocks up and down the inside of his chest, and his stomach boiled over with worry.
Do it now, or you never will.
He stepped into the necropolis.
The silence was unnerving. Bound in by walls and towers, walking along clean streets beneath the shade of tall buildings, passing storefronts and sewer grates, Cross could almost believe he was somewhere else, in some normal city. But where another city would have bustled with activity, and the air would have been filled with shouts and whinnies and steam engines and noise, there in the necropolis there was only the quiet shuffle of corpse feet on the stone roads, the low and nearly inaudible moans of the undead, and the distant toll of some mad church bell that sounded utterly alien in that dread landscape.
He read a word on the face of a large building with stone columns: Koth. The Old One’s city. The vampires that defected from the Ebon Cities came to Koth. It was a city of undead outcasts, rebels, traitors in the eyes of the vampire elite. Those undead that were not tolerated by vampires — lich, ghouls, zombies, utterghasts, kai’thoren, mummies, necrofilch, others — were welcome in the Old One’s city. There they hid, hated by both the living and the dead.
But just like Red, the Old One is willing to compromise, Cross thought bitterly. The Old One is willing to give the Ebon Cities the means to defeat us, just so he can rejoin their good graces.
Cross brushed against dead bodies, and realized he couldn’t look much better than they did. He felt numb. The air in Koth was chill and damp and it froze his clothes to his skin. The mud and gore that had caked to his body itched. He wore a suit of gritty armor.
He wandered the streets, wondering where he would find Red.
Twisted and narrow lanes led down curved hills and snaked like rivers between the crooked buildings. Piles of bones stood at street intersections, illuminated by fire pits filled with cold blue flames. Tapestries of flayed skin dangled from the rooftops. Cross saw vehicles made of bone and turbines fueled by blood. He saw factory-bred zombies with false skin expertly sewn to their bodies with industrial seams. He saw feeding vats filled with entrails and bloody slime, and tanks filled with black necrotic fluid used to embalm and preserve rotting corpses, a privilege of the vain upper echelon of the damned.
Every building in the necropolis was dark and had been carved with rampantly elliptical angles, lending Koth a shadowy and organic feel. Black smoke silently churned from distant processing plants that cast industrial shadows over the city. Cross tasted exhaust and rotten nectar in the air, and he smelled turpentine and embalming fluid, sumac and hemlock. Beneath it all was an inescapable fog of decay.
Cross rubbed shoulders with shambling corpses and gaunt wights. Flame spirits floated through the air, casting blazing trails behind them. He gazed into eyeless sockets and mummified heads with their mouths frozen in permanent grins. The black sidewalks were coated with white corpse dust.
He went through the city in a quiet panic, and it was a struggle every step of the way for him to maintain his resolve. There was always something undead within arm's reach, and at any moment he expected one to turn and pounce on him.
Nothing happened. He was left alone.
Cross searched for some sign of the Old One’s residence. It would be plain, Cross reasoned, for the Old One was not an ostentatious ruler. He’d been a soldier in life, a man who’d earned his reputation by doing the impossible and asking for little in return. His lair now would be fortified, but it would by no means draw attention to itself. Quite randomly, Cross took down a steep lane, and he entered a lower section of the city.
He walked down a road paved with faces: flayed skins pulled taut and stretched out in a mockery of caricature screams, a collage of human masks beneath his boots. He saw pillars made of black stone, and he passed a temple made of saw blades.
Cross came to the edge of a dock that led over turgid grey waters. Iron mists clung to the surface of the sea, low enough that he could still see the outline of a land mass out in the smoky bay, an isle dotted with buildings. Massive ice floes drifted in the water, black glaciers cut through with frozen veins of crimson quartz and bits of stony debris that still cleaved to the ice, the refugees from some long forgotten structure.
Cross compiled what he knew of the Old One. In life he’d led an expedition north some months after The Black, before the first warlock or witch sightings. That expedition, evidently, had been to try and rescue some special child, a child that a prophet or a fortune teller had determined would give humans the means to survive in their suddenly devastated world.
The Old One — Knight, that’s what his name was, Dane Knight — had died there along with all of his men, trapped and ambushed in a church by vampire shock troopers. The child had died, Knight had been turned into a vampire even though the rest of his men had been slaughtered, and in time he became a separatist and a defector known as the Old One.