Darksiders: The Abomination Vault (10 page)

He tried to listen to the creatures moving above, but the gusting winds, the deafening cries of a thousand avian throats, and the thickness of the stone itself made a mockery of his efforts. That the enemy was watching, he had no doubt—but precisely where, or in what number, he just couldn’t say.

So be it. Death had a very simple doctrine for just such a circumstance: When in doubt, strike first and kill
everyone
.

Scuttling sideways until he reached the edge of the protruding stone, the Horseman reached his left arm upward. He felt about until his questing fingers found a crevice on the spur’s side that would hold his weight, sank his fingers as deep as they would go, and let go with his other hand and both feet.
For an instant he dangled, his fingertip grip all that kept him from a dreadful plummet. Then, with a single flex, he hauled himself up until he could reach the fingers of his
right
hand up and over the stone. With one last exertion, he brought his left hand up again, so that he hung from the top of the outcropping, and lifted until he could just see over the edge.

He found himself staring at a veritable
thicket
of brass spindles.

One of the automatons was almost directly before him, and it was a stroke of fortune that its attentions were currently directed elsewhere. Numerous others, well over half a dozen, stood at intervals in both directions. Even if Death could hold them off, with their sheer numbers and the limited breadth of the ledge, they could easily bottle him up for a good while.

All the more reason to deal with them swiftly, then.

Again Death let go with his right hand, hanging solely by the left. Harvester tugged itself from his back, the strap vanishing, and flew to his waiting fist. At the whim of its wielder, the potent weapon altered itself once more—not any dramatic change of shape, this time, but simply a dulling of the blade, transforming itself into more of a heavy hook than a scythe. The Horseman hauled himself up to the edge on his left arm, swung Harvester in a high arc, and yanked with all his strength.

The blade sank into the torso of the nearest construct, screeching like the newly damned as metal grated on metal. Rather than slicing through, Harvester instead jerked the brass-coated soldier over backward. For a split second it only wobbled—that spinning base provided an unnatural degree of balance—and then it toppled. The headless shoulders struck with a deafening clang, bouncing once or twice off the unyielding stone.

In that same sharp tug, Death sent himself sailing up and over the edge of the outcropping. He didn’t fly high, propelled
as he was with only the strength of one arm, but he didn’t
need
much height. He tucked his legs under him as he rose, and then thrust down hard in a full-bodied leap.

His boots struck the torso of the construct he’d just brought down, hard enough to dent the carapace. The Horseman shot overhead, well beyond the reach of the enemy’s longest weapons, somersaulting forward as he soared. Harvester’s edge sharpened instantly, and the weapon sprouted a
second
blade on the opposite end of the haft—becoming, in effect, an elongated
S
with a perfectly straight centerline.

The force of the impact was also more than sufficient to send the fallen construct flipping end over end off the edge and down, down, until it was lost from sight, but Death had already forgotten about it.

He was spinning as he landed, knees bent to absorb the shock, Harvester whirling around him, blades circling in a deadly orbit. Again metal shrieked and shredded, and the five nearest constructs, only just turning to the attack, collapsed to the stone in a scattered collection of parts.

Only two of the squad remained; two that should hardly have been a problem, where the prior six were not. But for all his acumen, Death had never seen these things in battle, had only their clumsier six-limbed compatriots by which to judge.

And he badly underestimated just how quickly they could move.

By the time Death had come out of his spin, Harvester raised, the remaining pair were already upon him. The bits and scraps of their fallen allies proved no impediment at all. The whirring spindles dodged past the bulk of them without the slightest hesitation, and even launched the constructs in surprising leaps
over
the worst of the detritus. It was a peculiar hopping motion, almost silly looking, but startlingly effective.

They advanced together, synchronized as though guided
by a single mind, each swinging all four of its hand-blades in one violent flurry. They rushed in,
leaned
in to the attack.

Death was more than swift enough to parry the array of blades with the haft of Harvester, but there was nothing he could do to mitigate the sheer
momentum
of the attack. The impact lifted him off his feet and drove him up and out …

Clear of the ledge, suspended for an eternal instant over the shattering drop—and then gravity began hauling at him with avaricious hands.

Before his knees had fallen below the level of the rocky surface, the extra head on Harvester flipped itself around, so that both blades now pointed in the same direction.

As the topmost blade passed the pitted sides of the thick spur, Death sank it deep into the stone, far deeper than any natural blade could have pierced.

He loosened his grip, allowing his own fall to continue even as Harvester stuck fast, until his hands had almost reached the second blade. Then he clamped down and simultaneously kicked his legs out in front of him. The blade slid through its niche in the stone, serving as a pivot, and Death was swinging forward
beneath
the jutting finger of rock.

A fearsome yank both dislodged the first blade and sank the second one into the
opposite
side of the overhang. Kicking out once more and curling his arms, he knifed his body upward at an angle that none but the most agile of angels could have duplicated. He released his grip on Harvester, which remained dangling from the rock, tucked into a backward roll, and landed in a crouch back on the outcropping,
behind
his attackers.

Again they rotated to face him with blinding speed, but this time he was ready for them. Rather than try to block the brass swords that swung his way—he couldn’t even if he’d wanted to, as his weapon was still lodged tight and dangling from the pitted rock—he fell backward, bending at the waist.

The blades hissed over his head in less than the blink of an eye—two of them, four, six …

Death reached up, balanced at a backward angle that even he could not hold for long, and snagged the fourth wrist on each of the two constructs as they passed. He gave each a solid tug, crossing his arms over his chest …

And sank each blade into the torso of the opposite construct.

They both froze, the animating magics trying to cope with the sudden damage. While those wounds alone might not, perhaps, have proved sufficient to destroy the creatures, the crossed arms provided enough leverage for Death to haul himself upright once more. Then, using only two fingers on each hand, he shoved both the metal soldiers at the shoulder and sent them plummeting over the edge as they had done to him. They twisted and spun as they fell, still locked in each other’s death wounds, until he could see no further trace of them.

“Hmm,” he grunted, watching for a long moment after they were gone. Then, as the cliff was clear at least in the immediate vicinity, he called Harvester up from where it hung and continued on his way.

T
HE FARTHER HE PENETRATED
into the Crowfather’s realm, the more numerous the enemy became—but so, too, did the domain’s defenses grow more potent. The crows seemed more plentiful than the stars in the night sky, and while most were of a normal build, an occasional deafening cry or the flap of a wall-thick wing suggested avian defenders of truly prodigious size. Winds froze everything in their wake; lightning spiked and stabbed, a veritable forest of blinding bolts; and the mountains themselves had begun to shake with the crash of falling avalanches and slamming gorges.

So yes, the constructs were many, but Death himself was
forced to deal with few indeed, and most of those were sufficiently distracted that he had little difficulty in taking them unawares. The Horseman ran, crept, climbed; Harvester rose and fell, sometimes a single great scythe, sometimes two, occasionally some other weapon entirely; and enemy after enemy dropped.

Now, not too terribly long after the clash on the protruding spur, Death neared the heart of the matter.

Just ahead, almost undetectable against the natural jagged lines and projections of the canyon walls, a great tower of worked stone jutted from the depths. It rose overhead, impossibly, unreasonably straight and sheer, so that any glance up into the blackened sky felt like a vertiginous drop into infinite depths. Seemingly natural bulges and niches served, to all purposes, as supporting arches, flying buttresses, embedded columns. Patches of ice glistened in what little remained of the light, adding the only sparks of color to what was otherwise a stew of shadowed blacks and rocky grays.

Death scrambled down the cliffs, allowing himself to drop a great deal of the way, then bolted for the tower’s entrance—a gaping maw of a cave in the rock face—at a dead sprint. The few constructs that stood in his way were clustered together within the hollow, drifting slowly forward, focused on guarding against attacks from before, not behind. Death swept through them without slowing, Harvester cutting them down or hurling them from the edges, and not one managed a single stroke in return.

Just inside the cave mouth, a great sculpture of a crow stared impassively at them all from its perch half embedded in the stone. Beyond
that
lay only shadow and frost.

And still no small trek. Death briefly cursed the Crowfather’s paranoia and egotism both, and continued.

Through frigid corridors so high that he could scarcely see
the ceiling, through barren chambers in which the shapes of things long dead were only just visible within the ancient ice, and finally through a cavern so vast it generated its own currents and winds, the Horseman traveled. In that last, he picked his way between jutting rocks and fierce stalagmites, sliding across great sheets of slick frost. Feathers formed a sporadic carpeting, and the entire cavern smelled of guano and—despite the eternal cold—growing things from deep within the earth that no sentient beings of any world had ever seen.

He ignored them all, walking until the great pillar at the cavern’s center—a column of calcification and ice as thick as a hill—had come and gone. Until finally,
finally
, Death came to an open cave mouth at the grotto’s end, passed through to the stairs beyond, and began once more to climb.

I
T WOULD HAVE PROVED SIMPLEST AND MOST EFFICIENT, OF
course, if War could simply cross over into the White City directly beside his objective. Unfortunately, the angels—like the Charred Council, and several of the other great powers of Creation—were paranoid of their many enemies infiltrating through precisely such methods. They couldn’t
prevent
him from doing so, not as the Charred Council did, but the White City boasted sufficient wards and safeguards that the entire population would be alerted to his presence if he were to so materialize. And not only aware; they’d almost certainly assume, due to his means of arrival, that his intentions were unfriendly.

Whereas, if he arrived formally, they’d only
suspect
that his intentions were unfriendly.

So he appeared from the void between realms atop the great bridge and moved openly toward the gates of the White City. Nor, this time, was he alone.

The Rider sat atop a horse of phenomenal size, bulging with an almost overdeveloped musculature beneath hair of such rough gray it appeared to be granite. Indeed, perhaps it
was
granite, in places—for the horse’s lower legs and hooves
were cracked like the plains of the Charred Council’s abode, showing the glow of a molten core within. Gouges in the flesh along the neck and flank, shaped into runes of ancient mien, shared that fiery radiance, as did the beast’s eyes and nostrils. The saddle on which War sat was as much steel as leather; the bridle, like Death’s, was a chain, though this one was thick and free of blemish or rust.

Patches of bridge blackened beneath the beast’s hooves. It gave a guttural snort, as though in satisfaction.

“Easy, Ruin.” For his mount, War’s voice turned as gentle as it ever got—which wasn’t very. “No enemies here.”

Ruin’s low whinny sounded disappointed. War almost chuckled.

“Have no fear. There should be plenty of chaos and blood for the both of us soon enough.”

The span on which they trod was a gleaming gold, near enough to blind anyone who spent too long gazing down. Sweeping arches provided the bridge its support, while spouts with no natural source provided scintillating waterfalls between each arch. They flowed from the bridge itself, plummeting into depths unseen. It was musical, in its way, that constant rush.

Rocky outcroppings stood beside the bridge, boasting an array of knotted trees and thriving brush. Great statues of warrior angels, the stone worn and pitted by the flow of centuries, towered three or four times War’s own height from a few of those crags. They made, so far as the Horseman was concerned, unimpressive guardians. Grand in design, perhaps, but he would have expected a martial community to have
live
sentinels upon the bridge.

His first sight of the city itself was not the wall, but the highest of the flying isles. These small parcels of earth floated freely overhead, not merely ignoring but actively mocking a
great many natural laws. They were jagged at the base, rather like mountains flipped upside down, and housed various fortresses and towers atop them. From this distance, War could make out few details, either of those structures or anything else. The faint shape of wings, flapping around the islands, might have been either angels or great birds for all he could tell.