Black Scars Read online

  BLACK SCARS

  STEVEN MONTANO

  Also by Steven Montano

  BLOOD SKIES SERIES

  Blood Skies

  Black Scars

  Something Black…*

  Soulrazor**

  Crown of Ash**

  The Witch’s Eye***

  Storm of Skulls***

  *Coming 2011

  ** Coming 2012

  *** Coming 2013

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011 Steven Montano

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by Syd Gill.

  Released by Darker Sunset Press

  DEDICATION

  To Mom & Dad.

  For everything that I am.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to everyone who supported me and Blood Skies. Without your help and encouragement, there wouldn’t be a Black Scars.

  Thanks to Lib, my gorgeous wife (who defines and redefines “awesome”), for her endless love, support and patience. As much fun as “Emo Wednesday” was, it’s probably a good thing that it ended.

  Thanks to my beta-reading posse of Jen Kirchner (proofreader and beta-reader extraordinaire) and Alan Edwards (funniest zombie hunter there is); to Syd Gill for continuing to be an incredibly resourceful and capable artist who can actually produce images out of my nonsensical ramblings; and to all of the amazing writers and readers I’ve met over the past several months for your advice, your observations, and your help.

  BLACK SCARS

  It swims in a sea of night.

  Oceans of dark ooze seal the Sleeper in a liquid grave. Frozen white stones like arctic stars drift in the dark ichors, light by which the Sleeper’s glazed eyes regard its midnight prison. It smells bile and decay and the oily musk of the earth’s innards. Its lungs long ago filled with caustic sludge.

  Distant sounds play in the green and black world, muffled explosions and music. The Sleeper tries to shift its body in the gelatinous prison, but the dank and primordial jelly holds firm. Slime has congealed in its mouth and throat.

  It has been forgotten and abandoned in this organic oubliette.

  The creature is made of darkness. Its skin is black and smooth. It has pronounced bones that seem ready to break free where they press against its manta-ray flesh. Its face is vaguely human-like, with shallow cheekbones that grant it a near skeletal visage. A ring of jagged horns protrudes from its forehead, and its eyes are angular and cat-like. A tiny mouth is filled with razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s lean frame is broad-shouldered and tall, but as gaunt as a wraith.

  The Sleeper drifts through the murk. Days pass before it moves an inch. It has been encased in arcane mucus since before The Black. It was entombed elsewhere, in another world, now forgotten. It was powerful once, and feared. Some even called it a God. Its gelled prison, buried deep underground, shifted during a conflagration that killed millions and permanently scarred worlds.

  In the years since The Black, the caustic prison has moved. It has melted its way closer to the surface, a cliff wall that hangs over a deep cleft of ice and ash.

  No one knows of the prison’s existence. If they did, measures would doubtlessly have been taken to secure it.

  A drop of vile green liquid burns out through the cliff wall. The hole that it creates is tiny, a pinprick, but it is enough. Somehow, the ebon Sleeper notes its proximity to the surface. It senses that a breach has been made. Even stuck in that numbing quagmire, the Sleeper’s mind remains active, and alert.

  It reaches out with painful effort. Shifting against the dark jelly is like swimming through concrete. Long black talons curl through green skin and break it apart. Calcified liquid snaps as the Sleeper bites down slowly and painfully.

  Its muscles are stiff from decades of motionlessness. Its eyes blink and bleed – they have been frozen open in a sea of dreaming murk.

  Deep in the bowels of the earth, an inhuman scream carries into the green darkness.

  Rocks and debris loosen from the cliff wall and tumble into the white abyss. Overhead, the bruise-blue sky is utterly still. The icy air is heavy with frost.

  The cliff face is jagged and uneven. It is littered with stones, petrified moss and deep roots that have frozen like pipes.

  A black fist pushes through the hole. It is the size of a melon, and its claws are as long as knives. Thick jade sludge hisses as it meets the open air, and it drips into the depths of the frozen canyon, where it burns a hole through the fog. The clawed hand reaches down and rips into the stone. More rock comes loose, crushed beneath a grip that is strong enough to crack bones.

  The liquid prison explodes outward like a geyser. Gray and green filth stream into the open air in a vitriolic rush. Hot steam dissolves the rock beneath the hole and widens the gap. A waterfall of effluvia flows into the frozen sky.

  The Sleeper moves in a rush of shadow. Its dark skin turns nearly insubstantial when it touches the open air. Iron-hard claws turn to smoke. The creature transforms into a dark dream that ascends skyward in a laggard wave of ebon breath. It leaves a scarred hole in the cliff face beneath it as it floats to the zenith of the cold rift.

  When it reaches the land at the top of the canyon, the Sleeper collapses.

  Something must have gone wrong – there was no reason it should have escaped. This place…this place is not where it was buried. The air is different here. It isn’t just the cold.

  Something feels…wrong, and out of step. Different, like the way a dream feels different from being awake.

  This is not the same world it went to sleep in.

  Confused and frightened, the Sleeper shifts rapidly to the Shadowmere. It slips between worlds, to dark shadows that abut the physical reality humans call home, and immediately it is taken aback.

  The shadows are filled with spirits. The Sleeper has never seen so many outside of its native realm. Have they followed it? Have they come to claim it, to take it back, to bind it once again?

  It recalls centuries of agony. It remembers cages of flame and ropes of iron.

  It turns back to its humanoid form. Spiny ridges protrude from the shadow flesh of its back, and saber-like claws extend and melt into one another until its appendages resemble black swords. Its skin becomes the color of a glittering razorblade eve.

  It lashes out. It slices its way out through the realm of shadows, that place where the spirits hide.

  It takes them by surprise. They are weak, lost and adrift from their mortal anchors. They have not come for the Sleeper at all. They are nothing compared to the undead that had long ago imprisoned it.

  The jailor had been powerful, an avatar of a greater power; these pathetic beings are more like lost children. Their living anchors have been crushed in some military action, and now these spirits are like lost pups, drifting, aimless, angry and afraid.

  It rips through that host of lost souls with the efficiency of an assassin. It skewers them with smoking blades and eyes of liquid fire. It tears them apart, and their remains fall to the depths of the dank void that surrounds the shattered melding of worlds.

  It casts dead spirits into an oblivion from which even they cannot escape. Their shapeless forms plummet like gossamer strands of spider silk as the Sleeper wanders through the briny dark. Its meteoric blade is merciless as it slaughters the dead.

  All around it, souls fall like dark rain. The Sleeper grows drunk on fear and slaughter. It went to sleep in one world and woke in another: a place confused, an amalgam of shattered realities.

  Finally, it stops. Fine ebon dust and tendrils of melting shadow cover its body. It melts away, out of the Shadowmere, b
ack into the physical world where it fades into a shimmering haze of ebon smoke.

  To a human eye, the Sleeper would appear as a dark blotch, a grisly stain like day-old blood. Sunlight cuts right through its form. It is a walking shadow, a dark cloud of diamond dust.

  It must rest again, but only for a short time. Now that it is free, it must re-gather its strength.

  For reasons it doesn’t understand, its eyes wander east, past the pale badlands and to a place filled with ice and bitter cold. It sees a structure hidden in the wastes, filled with ancient secrets.

  It doesn’t know why it has awakened, but it has a profound sense of purpose. A dream is caught in its undead mind like a whisper, a faintly forgotten echo.

  The Sleeper bears a notion, a sense of a direction.

  It needs to destroy something, some important presence. It needs to slay an enemy. And that enemy is to the east.

  PART ONE

  REACH

  ONE

  FOLLOW

  Year 23 A.B. (After the Black)

  The sky was the color of bones.

  Cross was on his back. The tent flap was wide open, and his head and shoulders lay exposed to the cold air of the tundra. His eyes locked on the dead white sky. Frozen grass cracked beneath him as he rose from the uneven ground. His ears and nose felt frozen, and the light from the white sun seemed to pierce straight through to his brain, giving him the sort of headache he usually only got after a long night of drinking…not that he drank all that often anymore. His muscles were stiff, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to actually hear himself creak as he sat up.

  Maybe if I didn’t always sleep in my flak jacket, I wouldn’t wake up feeling like a piece of wood.

  The Lithian campsite comprised of about twenty tents in all. Most of those tents had been stitched together from Tuskar skins, though a few shaman’s tents had been made from the hides of white lions or snow snakes.

  The snowy expanse of the Reach stretched on for as far as the eye could see. The shadow of Thornn was barely a blot on the western horizon.

  Cross stood up, slowly. He smelled campfire smoke and tasted cold air that cut to the back of his throat and burned his lungs.

  “Morning, sunshine,” Dillon said from behind him. The lean scout was in a pair of camouflage pants and a loose tee-shirt.

  “Aren’t you cold?” Cross asked. He reached down and found his green wool blanket, which was nearly as stiff as his back. The interior of the tent was littered with more blankets and the rest of Cross’ gear, which was actually quite little: his backpack and his weapons, two pairs of gauntlets and their insulated battery packs, a cast iron skillet, some clothes, and a map case. The tent was barely big enough to fit Cross, let alone his gear. He wasn’t sure how the Lith managed to sleep two or sometimes three deep in those tents, even with as light and as thin as they were.

  “Nah, man,” Dillon said as he folded out a second shirt. He set his backpack down, which was loaded with weapons and filled canteens. “You get used to it.”

  “Yeah…how long have we been out here?” Cross asked. He rubbed his hands together over and over again, desperate to work some warmth into them.

  “Most people get used to it,” Dillon smiled.

  The air was the same hue as the drifts of ice and snow that covered so much of the Reach. The sky seemed unusually bright, especially compared to the smog and smoke that Cross was used to back in Thornn.

  His home city was actually close enough that it could be seen, but the smoke of its industry and the arcane fog generated by its perimeter defenses crowded the air around it and contributed to the red haze that constantly suffused the western sky. Sometimes that haze was more subtle, a ring that clung to the pale air like a faint sore or a bruise, but the air held some trace of red no matter where you went. People of the Southern Claw called the effect Blood Skies: a perpetual crimson gloom that clung to the atmosphere, an unwholesome miasma of unstable arcane energies and unholy toxins released over twenty-odd years ago, when Earth had been fused with uncounted other worlds during The Black. No one really knew exactly how or why it had all happened. They likely never would.

  Standing in the snowy wastelands of the Reach, while exceedingly dangerous, was worth the risk for the brighter air, made that way since they were away from the cities and because the pale sun reflected so easily off of the snow. It was pleasant. It reminded Cross of his youth, and that was difficult to remember, sometimes.

  The condition of the atmosphere was worse the closer one drew to the Ebon Cities. The vampires were hundreds of miles away, but their influence extended all across the north and western rim of the continent, which was thick with the presence of malign blood spirits, hunter wraiths and winged necrotic patrols. Poisonous gases and aerial toxins gushed out of the Ebon Cities’ industrial vents day and night so as to dissuade Southern Claw approach; naturally, those poisons had no effect at all on the city’s undead inhabitants.

  I never want to see the Ebon Cities. Not in person, anyways.

  But seeing them was always a possibility, of course. Cross was a warlock of the Southern Claw Alliance, a coalition of humans and their allies who controlled the southern half of what was commonly believed to be the only continent of the new world. Before he and Viper Squad had been dispatched to hunt down the traitor Margrave Azazeth, it had been their job to carry out special missions against the vampires of the Ebon Cities. Now, Cross was the only member of Viper Squad left alive, and his role had changed.

  “So is today the big day?” Dillon asked. He sat down on a smooth and dark stone and fastened his combat boots. Jamal Dillon was a frighteningly tall man, easily a head higher than Cross’ not inconsiderable six-foot-two, and when he wasn’t burdened down with eighty pounds of Southern Claw standard issue armor his carefully honed muscles were intimidating to behold. Not that his physical appearance was in any way indicative of his personality: Dillon was about as laid-back of a soldier as Cross had ever met, and after having served in Wolf Company and Viper Squad, Cross felt had met his fair share. Dillon reminded him a bit of Samuel Graves, Cross’ best friend, killed in action while fighting Sorn in the ruins of Rhaine. Graves had saved Cross’ life and paid for it with his own. Not a day went by that Cross didn’t remember that, or him.

  “I think so,” Cross nodded. He ripped open a packet of jerky, and looked around as if a fresh cup of coffee would magically appear for him. When it didn’t, he settled for some water from his canteen, instead. “I need to find Sajai and see if she’s ready.”

  “No you don’t,” Dillon said with a shake of his head. He didn’t bother looking up from his boots. Dillon was a man of few words. Living in the wilderness for weeks on end would make one reticent to speak, Cross supposed, so Dillon made sure that the few words he did use were efficient.

  “Right,” Cross nodded after he thought about it for a moment. “She’ll find me.”

  “There you go.”

  “I’ll figure this out eventually,” Cross said as he pulled on his sunglasses.

  “Yes, you will,” Dillon answered. “Just in time for us to leave.”

  “Better late than never.”

  Dillon reached into his pack and pulled out a piece of jerky and a sealed plastic cup. Dillon shook the cup, which rattled the handful of beat-up dice that were inside. They made quite a racket in the still morning air, but none of the Lith ever seemed to mind. He cast the dice onto the ground, and then he wrote the sequence of numbers down in a little notepad with a charcoal pencil.

  “You know how strange that is, right?” Cross asked with a grin on his face.

  “Can’t say that I do,” Dillon laughed.

  “Really?” Cross pulled his jerky apart with his teeth. It was surprisingly juicy and hot. “Are you ever going to tell me what that’s all about?”

  “Maybe,” Dillon nodded. He finished the sequence, and put everything away. He’d gone through the same routine every morning that Cross had spent with him out there in the Reach. “Y
ou want to talk about strange…when are you going to name that camel?”

  “I’m not,” Cross said with a smile.

  “Do you even know its gender?”

  “No. And the thought of checking is kind of repulsive.”

  Dillon laughed, and gathered the rest of his gear. He was something of an irregular soldier. Like Cross, he’d served with Hunter squads and large Companies, and, also like Cross, Dillon had gained distinction by living through some impossible situations, and he’d earned himself something of a non-traditional role in the Southern Claw military. In Dillon’s case, that role involved serving as a guide for special missions that ventured deep into the wilderness. Dillon had been doing it for almost eight years now (which meant that he was older than Cross had originally thought, and certainly older than he looked), and he was on friendly terms with various mountain tribes and non-humans, including the mysterious Lith.

  Cross saw a few of the Lith now, breaking camp as they prepared to move on. There were over two dozen of the silent nomads in the camp. They were almost invisible in the dull white dawn thanks to their incredibly pale flesh and hair. A full-grown Lith male was barely six feet tall but only, Cross estimated, about 150 pounds, and yet somehow the Lith managed to actually thrive in the harsh winter wastelands called the Reach. The females were smaller than the males, but Cross thought they all looked as thin as skeletons. He watched them move across the camp, bound in white and deep blue furs and boiled leather armor, ghost-like as they expertly broke down their tents. They left no trace of their presence.

  Dillon and Cross grabbed their packs. Any business Cross had with the Lith had to wait until they broke camp. The humans were guests there, and not terribly well trusted ones in spite of their best efforts to abide by Lithian customs and obey the ghostly people’s loose laws. The Lith were one of the few races that humans got along with, after all, and while their presence was much quieter than the Gol or the Doj, the Lith were a valuable source of information and trade. They were tied to the land in a way that humans hadn’t been since The Black, and they had ways of culling resources from the inhospitable terrain that people of the Southern Claw couldn’t, even with the aid of magic.