Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (6 page)

A
deafening
explosion rang through
out
the cabin.  Flam
es blasted across
the window
.  T
he ship nearly
flipped
over in mid-air
.  Maur cursed, and Kane wasn’t able to
grab
hold before the ship violently lurched sideways and threw him against the wall. 

Alarms blared through the
airship
.  Freezing wind blasted through a
rent
in the hull.  Noise and violent motion eclipsed Kane’s senses. 

He
managed a
glance at the nautoscope
, and he saw
war machines
approach across the sand
.  He wasn’t sure how they
’d
managed to get so close without being noticed
. 

Jade
went
to
the torn hull, and her spirit
tried
to
weave it back together. 
S
team erupted
from
the ship
’
s pipe-work
as
the auto-flush system
purge
d
the
flames
from
the aircraft’s interior. 
Sol
grabbed his weapons
and Ronan climbed into the gunner’s seat, a swivel-mounted chair near the aft end that controlled the top-mounted 20mm cannons. 

Bladed missiles
raced by
them
outside
.  Kane readied his M
14A
,
moved behind Maur
,
and looked
through
the viewport. 
A
pair of vampire
tanks
with oversized stone wheels and steel-plated hulls
raced
towards them,
bladed sharks that dragged
chains across the ground.  The vehicles bore
rotating iron guns
and bone harpoons
.  Dark sails atop the sleek vessels propelled them along
using
the desert wind, and churning pillars of smoke
billowed
from
their
exhaust ports.

More missiles
launched
, screaming black shards of serrated cold metal that left trails of spectral steam
in their wake
.  Kane saw ghastly faces
race ahead of
the
weapons
as they
drew close.

“Maur, I hope you know what the hell you’re doing!”

Wicked
’s cannons roared.  Kane covered his ears –
the grind of the motorguns was deafening
.  The ship rocked with explosive blasts.  Shells tore
one
tank
apart
as Maur twisted
Wicked
and dodged the first missile. 

But the second missile
struck
home
.  The blast tore open the starboard hull and threw the
ship
sideways.  The roar of exploding steel
enveloped them.  A
wave
of h
o
t wind threw
Kane
hard against
the
port
wall
.  Glass shattered and flew through the cockpit like rain. 

Kane
felt nothingness below and around
him
as
Wicked
careened out of control.  The cannons
kept roaring
.

Jade fell against the shattered starboard hull and
nearly slid out of the ship and into open air.  Kane threw himself forward and slid across broken glass, grimacing as he reached out and snagged her hand
.
Sol
grabbed his legs
and kept them both from falling out.  They all three
held
on
to the floor plating as Maur did his best to wrestle the ship back under control.

“Hang on!” Kane shouted
.  H
e held
tight
onto Jade’s arms for those final few seconds before the airship crashed to the ground in a blaze of metal
and fire
.

THREE

WHISPERLANDS

He is fugitive
to
a shadow world.

Nothing is constant.  The sky bleeds red to dark to pale and back again.  Clo
uds like teeth grin down at him
.

Day and night are
indistinguishable
.  The sky is the same stain, the land the same
matte
darkness. 
Jagged hills and half-ruined structures
protrude from
the ground
like scabs. 
T
he world
looks
dipped in tar. 

He roams like a carrion bird, p
icking up discarded items
,
but
little of
what he finds
is useful
.  He has n
o need for food or water in that
place.  He is a living ghost.

The dank red sun is the only constant.  The air reeks of caustic gases and decay.  Iron clouds scar the sky.  The dull light
has
pained his eyes
for years
.

Trees bend and twist into one another like drunken serpents.  Great valleys
rest
in the middle of dry riverbeds.  Dark water flows uphill, turgid
and thick
,
like
muddy oil.  Massive skeletons litter the land,
great tusked horns and shattered simian skulls,
the remains of
beasts
from
some lost age
. 

He’
s covered in black and red dust
,
a thin layer of soot that
won’t come
off his skin no matter how hard he tries.  Every puddle and flow of water is tainted, filled with iron sediment and crumbling stone. 

The world is covered
in
a film of grease and soot.  Shadows cling to
his
flesh and the trees and the air he breathes.  Flakes of it clog in his throat and nostrils. 

He walks.  Sometimes his curiosity
is
piqued by the landscape or its inhabitants
, but
he rarely stays in one place for very long. 

He avoids contact with others.  The creatures of the
shadow world
are dangerous.

He has covered hundreds of miles in his exile, and yet
he has
gotten nowhere.  If there are
boundaries to
that
dank reality
he has
yet to find
them.  Black deserts crumble into dead forests that
give way
to dry lakes.  He hears the roar of a distant ocean, but
he
can never find it. 

Every now and again
he comes back to the crater, and
to
Shadowmere K
eep. 
He always finds them
in different areas than the last time. 

He no longer knows his name. 
He forgot it long ago.

F
or a time
he thought
the wastelands were
just
a prison of his mind.  He
feared he was still trapped
with
the woman from the keep (he can’t
remember
who she was, only that she’d betrayed him, and
that she’d
caused him pain).  But the longer he roams the melting fields of rot and trudges his way
across
the
broken
earth
the more he realizes he isn’
t the only prisoner
t
here.

Most of the other
creatures
are
just
mockeries of natural life.  He
sees
bulls made of iron and birds that bleed acid
, g
iant reptiles wreathed in shadow vapor and lumbering
hulks
with
oversized arms
that drag
their
knuckles
across
the
onyx
soil
.  None of these creatures
have
discernible features: they are carved from
shadow
, ebon-skinned and pale-
eyed
form
s that bleed
off
in
to
the darkness
. 

T
here are humans,
or at least things that are
similar to humans
.  They travel
in groups.  They acknowledge each other, he and these natives, by keeping their distance.  He has not deigned to approach them, and for their part they have left him alone.  They seem to
survive
by staying together and keeping on the move.
  They
hunt
,
out of some memory
or
instinct
rather than
a
n actual
need for sustenance.

Or
maybe they do it
out of cruelty
, he thinks. 
This is a cruel land. 

Sometimes he follows the natives
from afar
.  Their
groups
vary from a few
dozen
to a thousand, mass migrations that ride shadow horses
towards
the blood horizon.
 
He isn’t sure why he
follows
them
– there is no esc
ape from
that
place
.  If there was,
those
people
wouldn’t
be
there. 
H
e realizes this
and breaks
away
,
sets off in a different direction
, or so he thinks. 
Sometimes it’s difficult to tell
.

He moves a
cross plains of dusk
, t
hrough petrified black forests and up shattered hills.  The taste of metal sticks to the
inside
of his mouth.  He breathes air that smells of coal and brimstone.  He is so covered in dirt he can no longer recall the feel of his own skin.

He crosses bone bridges and
walks through
hollow and abandoned cities.  He sees the skeletons of sailing ships. 
T
oppled
statue
s
of strange human-reptile hybrids
litter the landscape
. 

Black clouds
converge
like stains.  Trees
,
bone thin and sharp
,
prod the sky like
knives
.

He
walks
through fields of blood and oil. 
Dark
nectar drips from skeletal
branches
.  The spines of heavy brambles
twist like daggers from the ground.

He walks until his legs are numb and his throat is raw.  Shadows seep down to his pores.  He drifts like a lost leaf, carried by a wind that smells of age and death.

S
ometimes
he
feels
the
need to hunt. 

He
hides
in deep forests
filled with
soot-drenched leaves, where black ash falls like charcoal rain.  He skewers mangy shadow hounds and forest cats, skins them and cooks them, but he rarely eats their
soiled
flesh. 

Sometimes instead of hunting, he is hunted.

Great beasts
with
canine skulls
, pugnacious jaws and moon-slit eyes prowl th
e black
lands.  There are Blood
s
h
adows:
avian
and tentacled
masses
with
bea
ks and teeth and flailing limbs
that
rip open
the landscape
in
their ravenous hunger.  Snakes melt out of trees like burned trails of cinder.  Pools of briny water
camouflage
the open maws of subterranean marauders.