Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (7 page)

H
e
i
s forced to do battle with bizarre beasts
,
multi-limbed and black-bodied brutes like monstrous gorillas, lamprey-mouthed foxes, drooling two-dimensional humanoids with prehensile tongues
. 

H
e
proves more than capable of
defend
ing
himself
.  He draws strength
from
the
black-and-white blade
in his possession
.  It
make
s
his body
stable
and keeps him from being
fully assimilated into the landscape.

H
e
tries to
avoid contact with others,
but
sometimes it’
s inevitable.  He stumbles upon
people
lost in the wastelands
, people like
himself.  They are
abandoned and adrift,
afraid
of the arcane natives, marooned from
another
time
or
reality.  The
se people
are almost always mad.  One
refugee
accuse
s
him of being a
frog
disguised as a
man
so
he can lull people to their deaths
.
  Another ru
n
s away
from him
so
fast
he kills
himself tumbling
down
a dark gorge.

Once he comes across twins, blonde women
not
yet
fully saturated
by the taint of shadows
.  They take turns drinking from a vial of briny fluid
that
they found at the base of a dying tree,
and they wager on
which one of them
will
be the first to perish from the obviously poison substance.  They wail and beg
for
him to jo
in him, and their calls still ring in his ears long after he leaves
them to their mad suicide.

The Whisperlands.  That
is the name of th
e
ebon-
wracked
lands,
that
bleak domain of shadow mud and endless
dusk
.  He
isn’t sure
how he knows its name, but he
does.  Someone
gave
this grim reality
that
title long ago
. 

The Whisperlands. 
He has been there for
so very long
.

A
cadre of
warlocks
rule
s
the Whisperlands. 
They, in turn, owe their allegiance to a powerful witch.  They
are just like him in that
t
hey
have
n’
t
been
fully corrupted by the soul-saturating substance
of the
realm
, that
black ash
that drifts like
debris
from
some
perpetual explosion. 

He
’
s never seen th
e mages
in person
, but he
sees evidence of their existence everywhere: t
races of hex power left in the air
,
b
lack fields blasted white
,
a
reas of
dark
rock or red tide chiseled or cut with vorpal proficiency
,
t
ainted soil, s
moking ripples in the lands
cape,
c
old iron shards and crystal and
other
effluvia of the arcane.

But the most telling sign
of the mage’s existence
are the whispers
.
 
He hears
th
ose
voices in the wind, faint
echo
es
like a distant memory.  Sometimes they raise the hackles on
the back
of his soiled neck. 
I
t’s difficult to tell how close they are
.  T
hey scour the
earth
and
poison
the atmosphere with the force of their
presence. 
They are legion, a
horde of derelict ghosts fused together in a mongrel presence.

The warlocks hold a small army of
these
spirits at their command
,
mindless
apparitions
held captive
,
forced to shape and bend against their will. 
They are u
nliving slaves tethered by ectoplasmic chains and cold iron
bonds
.  He hears
the pain behind their
voices. 
The whispers sound together in
an anthem of surrender, a dirge of loss.  They sing to warn the black world of their fate.

He comes to understand the Whisperland
’
s
geography
, and
by
so doing
he
learns
which
areas
are
controlled by
the
mage warlords.
 
The shadow world
is not
as
random and
as chaotic
as he'd originally
thought
.  There are
patterns
to the
rippling dar
k landscape. 
He
learns where
t
he jagged hills melt into
dark waters
and where they
turn back to
solid
gr
ound
again
.  He learns to anticipate
the spread pattern of
erratic
fissures
created by sporadic earthquakes
. 

The s
ky is
blood slate
, petrified cloud and frozen
dust
.  Everything
appears
burned
or bleeding.
  The Whisperlands are so
deeply and
utterly black
that
treading the ground
is like walking
across
a night sky.

He feels, sometimes,
like
the Whisperlands
are sealed in
a
glass case
, and
that
he is part of
the
gritty
diorama held within.

H
e stumbles across a
black
field
littered
with pale rocks
and
comes across
something
he doesn
’
t exp
ect: a
child, ungainly
and hideous
,
with an enlarge
d
h
ead and skin
that is
slowly being eaten away by va
ricose veins of shadow.  The child
points at a distant mountain. 

He can't be sure
if
either
the child or the mountain
is
real.

That mountain, he suspects, belongs to
the mages. 
He has
n’t
made
any
physical maps, but
he doesn’t need to.  He has committed
the
geography
of the black lands
to
m
emory
, and he knows there is a region
on the other side of the mountain that
is empty on his mental
diagram
of the Whisperlands
. 
That blank spot is a
place
he has
not
yet
explore
d
.

That, he
deduces
, it is the mage’s home.

He’
s tempted to
go to
it,
but
he can’
t explain or understand why.  They have
n’t
done
any
thing to him.  He doubts they
’
re in any way responsible for his being
trapped
there.  Likely they are trapped
,
as well,
and
th
ey have chosen to band together
rather than remain
isolated
.

He
avoids
the region. 
The mountain reminds him of something from his old life.  Whatever it is, it’s painful
, and he’
s glad
the memory never really forms
. 

He walks on.

Time passes.  He drifts
through
the ruins of cities.  Some of them contain shadow people,
while
some are
populated
only
by refuse
. 
T
he whispers are
always
there, a mournful sound like
a
forlorn wind.  His boots crush
stones
into black dust.  He smells
burn
ing
fumes and
c
old
smoke
.  His body grows weary, but it
’
s
only
a memory of fatigue.

With every step
he becomes more of a
shade
.  His skin has lost much of its natural
color.  His mind isn’t
as focused as it once was
:
like the landscape,
it
become
s
darker
and
less distinct.

He travels through an ink stain. 
S
ilhouettes
follow him
, the
arcane tribals.  Or maybe he
follow
s
them.

The child. 

It
’
s there,
watching him.  This time it isn’
t alone.  A second child, a girl, is
there with the boy.  H
er head
is
just as freakishly large, her eyes
are
bulging orbs.  Filigrees of wet dust fall from their bodies.  Their eyes and hands are barely traceable outlines of grey, vague underwater impressions. 
The bitter wind pulls away bits of t
heir flesh and clothes.

Is
that
what I look like?  Am I only a shade now?

He
’
s almost afraid to hold
up his hand, but he does.  It’
s hard for
him to find it, to focus in the
dust tempest.  He watches bits fall away, pulled like sand into the funnel of sky. 

The wind
intensifies
.  His
body is discorporating.  He feels himself drift
apart, but the sensation is surreal. 
H
e feels so very, very old.

The shadow children motion.  They want him to follow.
  H
e does. 

They
walk
to
the remains of a city. 
Buildings lean in towards one another as if huddled against the cold.  A low black wall surrounds thin black
structures
that have
toppled
like
fallen
matchsticks. 

Dust flies across their path, and for a moment he
worries the children
have come apart and drift
ed
into
the sky, but
then
he sees them again
in the black windstorm
.  They
move deliberately
so as to keep
him in sight
.  He follows them at a distance, his fingers near his blade.