You don’t live too long if you’re a trusting soul. That was a lesson Cross had learned early. Never trust a beautiful woman was another.
The pyrojack gauntlet was inside, as promised. It was an older and less attractive design than the gauntlets he used now, which were black leather and iron devices bound with wires that hooked to a belt-mounted battery pack; they provided assurance that he could both properly channel his spirit and that doing so wouldn’t consume his mind or his body. The pyrojack was different — it was an independent arcane item rather than an implement, and the lone remaining red gem set between the knuckles of the first and second fingers of the gauntlet was a self-contained weapon. Only a mage could activate the missile which, so far as Cross knew and so far as Warfield had promised, would launch out to a range of nearly 500 yards and explode with the force of three grenades. Best of all, using the missile wouldn’t exert any actual pressure on his spirit. The pyrojack would come in handy, he thought, for times when his spirit had been expended too much and was fatigued, or if he needed to use her for defensive purposes and a pistol just wouldn’t be enough firepower. Cross’ spirit helped him sense the power and potential in the device.
“ What are you going to use it for? A little stress relief while you’re on leave?” Warfield smiled. Blowing something up for kicks was pretty much what he expected Warfield would do with the pyrojack if it stayed in her possession…destroying things, period, seemed to be something Warfield liked, along with sleeping with men thrice her age and getting as stone dead drunk as she could on a regular basis.
“ I’m saving it for a rainy day,” he said with a shake of his head. As he put the case into his pack, he found his eyes drawn again to the ebon blades. Their silver slashes looked like scars. “What’s up with the black knives?”
“ They’re Necroblades,” Warfield said with a strangely proud smile. “Undead use them. Rathian assassins. They’re harmful to spirits.”
“ They target the spirit?” Cross asked with a nervous laugh.
Warfield shook her head.
“ They sever the bond,” she said. “Cut the spirit loose.”
It was every mage’s worse nightmare. While there were theories about such scenarios, no mage had ever been known to lose their spirit and survive the experience. The pain and shock of the separation was too much, like having your skin removed, but instead of a lengthy period of suffering the experience would be shaved into just a moment or two of intense agony. The spirit, if indeed it survived the separation even when its host did not, would in all likelihood be devoured by malevolent incorporeal predators of the world of the dead.
“ Where the hell did you get those?” Cross asked. And should I report them?
“ Come on, Eric,” Warfield smiled. “You can’t expect me to tell you where I shop for my toys. You might not come back.”
It was hard not to focus on her perfect skin, her pursed lips and her large, expressive green eyes.
“ You’re right. I might not.”
With purchase in hand Cross took his leave, and he returned to the soiled night. It wasn’t the image of the knives that burned in his memory as much as the notion of losing his spirit.
Cross had some time to kill before he was supposed to meet Graves at The Black Hag, so he briefly stopped by his home, an apartment at the edge of The Grange. The Grange was a secluded neighborhood known for its briars, antiquated wooden houses and incredibly steep roads made of dirt and stone. Thick iron fences sealed the Grange off from the surrounding neighborhoods, but the prevalence of twisted trees and shadow-drenched corridors of brick and foliage gave the area a vaguely threatening air. Even with armed patrols in the area and magically reinforced locks set on most of the quaint looking cottage-style houses, Cross usually sensed something malevolent in the shadows, just out of sight.
Cross’ apartment was located on the upper level of a small brown building. The lower floor was an abandoned book shop that had been boarded up some months ago when the owner had been found drained of blood outside of the city walls. With no heir apparent, Hobb’s Books was claimed by the city. The inventory was sold off and the funds were used to help rebuild some of the outlying homes destroyed in the Gorgoloth assault that had occurred the previous winter. Cross’ door stood at the top of a short set of cracked cobblestone steps. He purposefully avoided the thirteenth step, as he was highly suspicious that it was waiting to one day crack loose and send him into a neck-breaking fall down the previous twelve.
The inside of Cross’ apartment was dark and hazy. It was a single room layered in thick brown and black rugs and decorated with maps of the known world, illustrations of the Ebon Cities, and lists of arcane maladies, inhuman creatures and known vampire champions. Cross’ room looked less like a habituated living space than it did a poorly organized ready room. A single table and chair bore stacks of books, unwashed cups and mugs; the bed, which had no legs and lay flat against the far wall, hadn’t been made in months. Snow avoided his apartment as if it was infested, and Cross didn’t blame her. The air smelled musky, and the lone window let in only a feeble amount of light, largely because the glass was dirty beyond the capacity of even flame cannons to clean.
Cross lay down, and slept.
He dreams of knives, surrounding him, holding him in like a bladed cage. He stands on the deck of a black ship in a black sea, floating softly through dark laggard waters. Behind him is a dead city in the cold mist, and ahead of him, on the far shore, stands a black mountain and a forest filled with women as terrified and alone as he is. He knows who one of them is, and he knows he has to save her.
Cross woke just after dark, and he felt even more lost and uneasy than before he’d slept. He spent just a few minutes getting ready before he went to join Graves at The Black Hag. He couldn’t get the image of those black knives out of his mind.
The Black Hag was one of the only establishments in Thornn that Cross enjoyed spending time in outside of his own home. The subterranean tavern doubled as a gaming pit and a meeting spot for mercenaries, soldiers, criminals, and other luminaries of the seedier side of Thornn’s populace.
The most remote city of the Southern Claw Alliance, Thornn was a city in progress, a haven for repopulation after creatures released by The Black had wiped out so much of the human race. At first they had only been attacked by the vampires, pale-skinned fiends who’d first come in waves, like barbarians, unorganized and hungry, seemingly as shocked by this new apocalypse world as the humans were. After a time, the vampires slowed down, grew organized, and built the Ebon Cities, and they settled in to control much of what was left of the world. There were other creatures out there in the wastelands, as well, some of them worse than the “suck heads”: the monstrous Gorgoloth, the giant and enigmatic Cruj, the black-hearted Sorn, the Vuul, the Eidolos, and the undead, scores of zombies and wights and lich and ghouls and other things that should have existed only in nightmares. But nightmares had become real, or else they’d always been real and humankind had been ignorant of the fact until The Black came along and woke them up.
Cross wondered about that, sometimes — if the world had always been this way, Earth convergent with other realities, and if humans had just been cut off somehow, ignorant, adrift in the sea of their own isolation. The world was different after The Black, and very few could remember what it had been like before it had all happened, before the catastrophes and the vampire invasion, before magic and caustic seas, before liquid nightmares, before cities fell into earthen maws and the sky had turned to a corrosive red haze. It was hard to remember the world that had been before half of the people had died, before giant wolves and killer trees roamed the poisonous wilderness, and before abandoned and ancient cities appeared out of nowhere, in some cases shattering other cities in the process. Multiple worlds, squeezed into one.