The Witch's Eye (34 page)

Shiv licked her lips
nervously.  Her gaze was penetrating.  He felt something familiar, not quite the touch of a spirit but something close, a smoking presence that filled the air between them like a freezing fog.  Cold blue light swirled in her irises.  Something dark was there…it was as if something gazed out through her eyes, some far-off presence from a place of shadows.   

“Shiv?” Flint asked.

She blinked, and looked at her father.

“What?”

“Are you okay?”

“
I changed my mind,” Cross said to Flint.  “You’d better come with me.  Please.”

“What?”

“I don’t want her out of my sight,” Cross said.  “There’s no two ways about it.”  He looked at Shiv.  “I don’t know what’s happening to you, but I think it has something to do with this thing they’re hunting, this eye.  My sword saved you and your father for a reason…and I think the best way to keep both of you safe is for you to stay with me.”

He looked at Witch.  She stood on the shore a dozen yards away,
still as a stone. 

Cross had the impression they’d be returning to the boat, but he still made sure they had plenty of food and water with them when he put Shiv on the camel.  Flint, despite his protests, climbed up with her.

“I can
’t ride this damned thing…” he grumbled.

“Learn,” Cross said.

The Lith led the way.  Grail and Rogue took one of the remaining crystal horses and moved through the network of standing stones.  The foliage at the edge of the beach was thick and dark, and once inside the trees the group found themselves climbing a steep slope.  Broken stone pushed up through the sand.  Musad grunted quietly as he walked.  Cross was sure not to walk directly behind the brute, just in case it lost its footing.

Shapes loom
ed at them from out of the darkness.  Leaves rustled, and branches snapped beneath their feet.  The waters of the Rimefang battered the beach behind them.

The path thro
ugh the forest narrowed and grew more arduous.  Cross’s legs quickly grew tired as he traversed the hill, and in spite of the cold he was soon covered with sweat.  Wet sand fell into his boots.

A dark wind came at them, and Cross felt a greasy taint on his skin. 
Voices slithered through the trees like oil – the whispers of the recently dead.  His blood ran cold, and the hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end.

“What’
s that?” Shiv said.  Her voice rang loud in the darkness.  Cross stepped up next to the camel to make sure she was alright.

“It
’s okay,” Flint said.  “It’s okay.” 

Cross
looked up.  The night sky was barely visible through the canopy of trees.  He wouldn’t be able to see the phantoms of the recently killed, but he could search for signs of their passage: scorched leaves, bloody discoloration in the air, wisps of spectral drool.   

Everyone waited
.  After a few moments the whispers faded, and the air returned to normal.  The cold that had clawed at them was suddenly gone, and everything was silent once again.

Witch stepped past Cross and
moved up the hill.  She guided them up a different route, one that wasn’t as steep as their original path, but narrower. 

“Cross, what the hell is g
oing on?” Flint asked.  “Where’s she going?”

“She heard the voices too,” Shiv said.  She sounded small, and afraid.  “She heard what they said.”

“Did
you
?” Cross asked her.

“I did…but I didn
’t understand them.”

Cross looked at Flint, then at Dozer.  He pointed at Flint and Shiv. 
Dozer nodded.

“Stay with Dozer,”
Cross said.  “I’ll go see what’s happening.”

Witch, Grail, Rogue and Bull
moved up the hill at a relentless pace.  Sand fell around their feet in drifts.  Cross clambered up behind them.  Moonlight cut through the rough branches, and dirt caked under his fingernails and filled his beard and hair, which kept getting tangled in the tree limbs.

God
, I need a haircut.

At last t
hey reached the apex of the small island.  Yellow-orange smoke blasted up at them from the other side.  The center of the isle was a shallow valley, about a mile across and thick with lifeless trees.  The ground was slick with oil and blood.  Cross heard shouts and the rapport of gunfire. 

A small village
sat down in the valley.  It looked to have been constructed from whalebone, giant shells, granite and wood.  The buildings were curved like tusks and teeth, and the people who lived there weren’t people at all but Doj, giants who by the looks of their home eked out a simple existence.  Their community bore few visible machines aside from a generator.  Some half-built boats, thaumaturgic lamps and boxes of old tools littered the ground between the buildings. 

T
he village was under siege.  Strange creatures assaulted them: lupine and dark, wolf-men cloaked in steaming shadows.  Oily black fur made the assailants largely invisible in the night, but their bloodstone eyes shone like fiery coals, and their weapons were shards of blackened bone set with razored points. 

The creatures moved too fast to track.
  Cross couldn’t tell if there were two, ten or fifty.  The sibilant chants and bizarre arcane whispers they’d heard back on the hill weren’t the voices of the dead, as Cross had originally thought, but the speech of the dread wolf creatures.  He tasted hex in the air, ancient and foul power he’d only ever encountered once before, back in the ruins of Shul Ganneth.

“It
’s the Maloj,” he said out loud.  “That’s impossible.”

L
ittle was known about the vile lupine sorcerers called the Maloj save that they’d been masters of dark tribal magic and had possessed terrible appetites.  The Maloj were also supposedly extinct, and while vestiges of their twisted magic lay scattered across the eastern wastelands no one had ever actually seen the creatures.  But Cross knew with certainty they were there now. 

He
saw a score of wounded Doj, and a few dead.  The giants had sealed themselves in as tight as they could in their shattered and isolated village.  They fired large-bored rifles, launched massive spears and tried their best to meet the Maloj head-on with blades and warhammers, but the wolf’s sorcery made them all but impossible to stop.

He
and the Lith knelt at the top of the slope.  They were a few hundred yards away from the battered village.  The Lith readied their blades and bows.  Cross looked at Witch. 

“What are we doing here?” he asked. 

She made the motion of a slash and cut with one hand.  Cross knew that sign.  It was one of the few he recognized from what felt like a lifetime ago.

Follow.  And you will find.

He almost wanted to look for the spider, but he’d given up searching for portents or omens. 

Enough of
this
.  Maybe the Lith could see the future, but he couldn’t.  And he was tired of being led around.

“Where
’s Danica?” he asked Witch.  “Is she down there?”  Witch shook her head.  “Where
is
she?”

She made the slash and cut sign again.

Helping the Doj will lead me to her
, he thought. 
That, or you already know, but you won’t tell me until I help you.

“Fine,” he said. 

Gunfire rattled the air.  The Doj shred through a section of woods with a nail-launcher, a reconfigured Sorn weapon they’d mounted on a tripod.  Wolf shapes moved in at them, three-dimensional shadows armed with black blades.  Three giants died choking on their own blood, and their lupine killers vanished back into the darkness before the Doj could fire back.

Witch nodded, and they
started down the hill. 

R
ipples of shadow pulsed around them.  Displaced air scraped against Cross’s skin like broken branches.  He smelled burning cold. 

Doj
shouted in panic and pain.  Cross and the Lith reached the bottom of the hill.  They moved through the network of gnarled trees.  Shreds of wood and rock jutted from the ground. 

Grail and Rogue took the lead and
moved through the dead forest without a sound.  Bull had a huge warhammer slung around his forearm, and Witch held two knives at the ready.  The Lith’s cold iron masks were decorated with eye-slits and twisted runes. 

Cross tied a piece of cloth around his face to shield his mouth and nose from the cold
there at the nadir of the valley.  The unnaturally black air chilled his blood and gnawed at his bones.  Dark wind trilled the pines.  The Doj village was just a few hundred feet away, but Cross and the others kept to the shadows. 

A
Maloj poured into the forest path right in front of him.  It was broad and tall, but the bulk of its lupine shape was crouched low so it could move more effectively through the trees.  Voided steel hissed in its grip. 

Grail came
out of nowhere and slashed the beast across its flank.  The Maloj’s howl was like a thousand creatures dying.  Blood pounded through Cross’s skull, but he kept his vision focused.  He jumped forward and thrust his blade into the creature’s heart, and his arms sank deep into leathery flesh and sharp fur.  Blood sprayed on his face, cold and thick.

The first Maloj fell, but
more came. 

Cross lost himself in the darkness of battle.  Shapes danced in his vision. 
He heard the growls of hollow wolves and tasted smelted blood.  Moon pale blades sparked against hex-wrought swords. 

He
swung, ducked, swung again.  Something crashed into him from behind, and a bone sword cut through his armor and shirt.  If skin opened he didn’t feel it, but he was suddenly aware of blood trailing down his leg and pooling on the ground.

There came f
lashes of light and teeth.  He smelled piss and blood, heard the collision of steel and bone.  His blade moved with him, moved
for
him. 

Doj crashed into the clearing, plain-dressed giants with hammers
, saw-blades and spears.  Many fell, their blood splashing the air like ink as they ran into a line of spectral guillotine wire the Maloj had stretched across the forest path. 

Cross
hacked at monsters.  He followed the scent of blood and the crimson glow of lupine eyes.  Claws of bleeding shadow came at him from out of the darkness.  Iron black nails shredded the trees.  Dirty snow flew into his mouth as he dove to the ground. 

He felt hex power
, the deep growling energies of a spirit unleashed.  It was clumsy and slow and familiar, but after a moment Cross recognized it as Witch’s spirit, that false spectral companion granted by Shiv’s power.  Its iron jaws snapped around Maloj bodies and broke them in two.  Silver blood splashed on the forest canopy.

The Maloj
fired violent waves of black sorcery.  Funnels of dark fire and crackling whips of razor ice sliced through the trees.  Cross heard screams and burning.

His
sword pulled at him.  It wanted him to follow.  Head down, Cross let the twin blades drag him through the darkness.  His feet tangled on undergrowth and bloody vines, and he nearly pitched forward through tunnels of shadows and smoke.

Cross
came around a forest bend and faced the Maloj, hulking wolf shapes that stood like men.  They yielded barbed staves covered with fetishes of bone and smoking blood.  Their eyes were deep and red like the heart of a furnace, and their claws were so black the rest of the night seemed pale.  He couldn’t tell how many there were, and he wasn’t going to wait to count them.

He
flew forward and howled.  Soulrazor/Avenger slashed at mottled fur.  Black blood stained him. 

Black blood. 
His mind went back to the Spire.  He remembered falling into the vat of necrotic fluid, and the nightmare of a half-temporal existence that had followed.  Images flashed through his mind, disconnected years spent wandering the shadow-drenched wastes.  Trapped, a man made of ash.

He hacked down
another Maloj before smoking claws tore through his shoulder.  This time he felt the cut, and screamed.

A clarion call sounded overhead
, an alien bird cry so distant it might have issued from the moon.  A dark and bulbous sack of pulsing flesh raced across the pre-dawn sky. 

And just as sud
denly as the Maloj had appeared they were gone, vanished like wisps of wind-blown smoke.  The air tasted of burned metal.  Traces of bloody mist clung to the trees and sand. 

A hand came around his arm, and Cross leapt up and nearly put his blade through it. 

“Whoa!” Flint shouted.  “It’s okay!”

Cross stepped away, and fell down.

“Eric!” Shiv shouted.  “Dad, he’s hurt!”

Pain flooded his body.  His side and shoulder burned with cold.  Tears of pain fell into his beard.  His insides felt like they
’d come spilling up through his mouth at any moment.