The Witch's Eye (32 page)

Ronan and Black had followed the trail from
the point where they’d been ambushed by the Ebon Cities recon force.  The path took them on a different route than they’d gone before, away from the thin forests and straight into the badlands to the south, a region covered with ruined hills and twisted foliage.  Ronan saw blood flies and mosquitoes in spite of the gnawing cold. 

They approached the
settlement slowly.  The air was dark, but there was no real cover.  They drew to within a few hundred yards, and Ronan was surprised they hadn’t been spotted.

Maybe we have.  Those fuckers could just be luring us in.

“You want to use your spirit to scout ahead, or something?” he asked.  They kept low and moved through knee-high grass that had been drained of its color.  Small stones and snails crunched under their boots.

Danica
’s spirit hovered around her metal arm like a toxic cloud.  Ronan heard its whispers, felt its slithering presence. 

They paused.  Danica looked ahead.  Her eyes shone with dull crimson light.  Hex fumes issued from her golem
appendage. 

Ronan tensed his hands and checked his blades. 
He watched Danica.

He wasn
’t exactly sure what had happened back there at the river.  If something in Wolftown had freed Danica from the Ebon Cities’ control, then falling into the Nightblood had snapped her out of her amnesia.  She seemed to remember everything now, even if she did still seem a bit disconnected.

But why the hell did you spill your guts
to her like that?
he asked himself. 
What do you think is going to come of that? 
Ronan wasn’t used to having weaknesses.  He especially wasn’t fond of telling others about them.
But this feels right
, he told himself. 
Coming back for Creasy and Maur.  This is where you belong.

L
ike when he’d walked away from the Triangle.  Like the day he’d let the blonde boy live.

“There are three
Suckheads,” she said.  “Maur and Creasy are inside.”  Danica looked at him.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said.  He pulled up his
cowl and readied his katana.  “What about the Razorwing?”

Danica
’s eyes shone in the darkness.  Her spirit’s spectral whispers dragged against their skin. 

“
It’s on the far side of the compound,” she said.  “Alone and untended.”

“Let
’s take care of
it
first,” Ronan said.

He
’d first killed a Razorwing when he was twelve.  They were one of the most difficult creatures to sneak up on, worse than Icelizards or Hornclaws, but not as difficult as Ebonbacks or Hulkers.  The memory of crawling along the Skull Plains was still fresh, and he remembered the feel of slick freezing mud on his skin as he’d tried his best to stay low and quiet in spite of his cold terror.  The Razorwing he’d been sent to kill had been a youngling, but even then it was still five times his size, and he’d always remember the sight of its scales glittering dark in the gelid sunlight.  It had died quickly.

T
hey kept low and ran a wide perimeter around the cluster of buildings.  Ronan kept expecting an alarm to go up, or for one of the vampires to appear.  He heard a cry of pain in the distance.  It sounded like Maur. 

Hang on
.

The earth was black and moist,
making the footing uncertain.  They stayed to the east side of the ravine and moved past low mounds of earth.  Ronan motioned for Danica to wait and watch the settlement.  She knelt low and obliged, even if she didn’t look too happy about it.

Ronan raced forward. 
He focused, and his mind sliced to the cold place inside him.  He returned to the blood yard, to the scores of young men and women wearing bloody bandages on their blistered feet.  Blade-carved runes ruined their once clear flesh and their eyes were blank and glassy as they stared into the coastal winds.  He was ten years old.  He’d killed man and beast, women and children.  And he would kill many more.

He was in the Deadlands. 
He saw the shadow of the Razorwing against the violet sky.  It shifted where it stood, its wings unfolded as it clawed and buried its face in something on the ground.  It was feeding.

Ronan
seized his chance.  He slowly came forward, ten yards, then twenty.  He didn’t even remember removing his boots, but he’d cast them aside along with his cloak and armor jacket.  His bare feet sank into cold mud. 

The Razorwing
feasted on a young Ebonback whose outer shell hadn’t fully formed, which allowed the draconian beast to tear into the center and bite into sinew and gristle.  Ronan crept closer.  The sound of cracking bones filled the air.  The world was still, the dark plains frozen beneath a stain of clouds.  He smelled blood.  He was just a few feet away when the Razorwing looked up at him.  Ronan saw his reflection in the yellow-gold eyes.  He sprang. 

The beast reared and roared.  Its tail lashed forward, but Ronan was too
fast.  The katana sliced into the Razorwing’s throat.  Ronan had killed a thousand creatures over the course of his life.  He knew where to cut, and how to strike.  He knew how to kill things quickly or kill them slowly. 

The Razorwing thrashed. 
Ronan narrowly dodged a slicing wing.  Dank water filled his mouth as he crashed to the ground.  The reptile writhed, and hot purple blood sprayed everywhere.

The buildings came to life.  The Creed
had been alerted.

Ronan rose and ran
away from the flopping Razorwing as it bled out.  He kept low, using the grass as cover. 

Pale vampires
appeared in the darkness.  Ronan saw bladed guns and shifting cloaks.  He ducked as gunfire tore into the night.  Bone needles exploded into the Razorwing’s dead hide. 

Two of the vampires moved
into the field.  Their armor jackets were the color of blood, and their large and fanged mouths hung open with thirsty anticipation.  The third vampire stayed at the door of one of the buildings, its steaming hand-cannon held ready.

Danica
’s spirit tore into one of the vampires as it moved towards Ronan.  Its body twisted beneath a shower of red sparks, and there was little left of it by the time Ronan sprang forward and sliced off its face.

The
other vampires shot at Danica.  Her spirit shred the bone needles and bullets into powder. 

Ronan moved
fast.  His feet were drenched in swamp water and his skin was frozen, but he was back on the blood yard again, racing for pig-heart targets and dodging swinging pendulum blades, his skin raw where he’d been whipped or cut open.  He’d been taught to block out the pain, to block out e
verything
, because nothing mattered but the kill.  That was his purpose, his only purpose.  Nothing else mattered.

It had occurred to him
that other children had normal memories, memories that weren’t filled with torture and killing and trials of pain.  He envied them.

One of the vampires
turned and fired, but Ronan was faster.  He severed its hand and cleaved through its skull with a pair of quick strikes.  Its body fell quivering to the ground. 

The last vampire retreated inside.  The
space beyond the open doorway was suffused with shadow.  Black smoke rolled across the ground.  Ronan sensed presences within, but it was so dark he might as well have been staring into a night sky.

“Maur?” he called out.  “Creasy?” 

Nothing.  Ronan carefully stepped forward. 

“Ronan!” Black yelled.  She came around the corner in a blaze of crimson magic.  Her spirit poured into the shack
and lit the unnatural darkness within.

The vampire waited just
on the other side of the doorway with a dark-bladed hatchet aimed squarely at Ronan’s head.  Maur and Creasy were inside, bloodied and bound.

Ronan ducked, and the blade struck stone.
His katana took the vampire in the face and split its skull.  The undead fell without a sound, and Ronan kicked its torso out of the way.

“Jesus!” Danica yelled.

The two captives were bloody messes.  Creasy’s bare chest was covered with cuts.  The warlock’s face was bruised and blistered, a purple and black mass that oozed puss and blood.  His eyes were scabbed over, and he babbled deliriously.  The only thing that kept him upright was the rope securing him to the pillars in the middle of the room.

Maur
looked even worse.  The Gol had been stripped naked and flogged with a bladed whip.  His bald grey pate was covered in bleeding wounds, and his fingers and toes had all been crushed to a pulp. 

“Oh, God,”
Danica said. 

Ronan
drew his knife and cut Creasy free while Danica wrapped a blanket around Maur.  The Gol shook in place and muttered to himself.  Danica’s spirit filled the room with burning vapors.  Ronan’s eyes stung as the air turned hard and sharp, like he was breathing in gas fumes.  He laid Creasy down on his back.  Blood was all over Ronan’s hands and chest by the time he’d finished.

“Where the hell is Creasy
’s spirit?” he asked.

Danica looked around,
and then nodded at a low table.  “Those empty bottles.  Narcosm.  They must have knocked him out and poured it down his throat before he could do anything.”

“Fuck.”

“Maur,” Danica said.  “Hang on, Maur.”

Ronan knew Danica was trying to use her spirit to heal the Gol
, but because of his alien anatomy – the Gol were skin automatons, a race of refugees expelled from their true forms and trapped in derelict organic vessels – Danica had no idea where to start.  Gol healed themselves, and they didn’t share the secrets of their bodies with outsiders. 

She
doesn’t know how to help him
.

He looked at Creasy.  Blood
dripped from the warlock’s mouth.  His lips were split, and his jaw had been broken.  Fluid ran from his ear.  Ronan cleared blood away from the other man’s neck, and was relieved to see they hadn’t bitten him.  But he wouldn’t live long.

“Dani,”
Ronan said.  She looked at him with desperation in her eyes.  “Creasy needs help.”

And you can fix
him,
but you can’t fix Maur.
  He didn’t have to say it out loud, because she knew, he saw it in her eyes.  He nodded at Maur, and changed places with her. 

Maur
’s milky white eyes were glazed over.  Pale blood seeped from his raw and sticky skin.  Being conscribed to a flesh prison didn’t dull the sensation of pain, and Ronan knew the Gol must have been in considerable agony.  Maur had never been seriously injured before, and the few wounds Ronan had ever seen him sustain always seemed to heal by themselves.

Ronan took off his outer shirt and bunched it up so Maur could use it as
a pillow.  Maur cried and mumbled but didn’t wake.

“God damn it, Maur, I didn
’t save you from those Gorgoloth just to have you end up like this,” Ronan said quietly.

Magic swam through the air.  Blue-grey smoke curled around Creasy
’s body.  He gasped and coughed.  The warlock blinked, and his mouth opened into a scream.  His hands grabbed at nothing.

“Ronan!”
Danica shouted.  “Hold him!”

Ronan left Maur and clutched Creasy
’s hands.  The warlock’s legs kicked out, but Danica held his feet still while her spirit did his work.  Ronan watched the warlock’s wounds heal.  Skin sealed together.  Puss and tainted blood pushed out of his body before the lacerations fused shut like they’d been soldered.  The man thrashed and kicked, and it took every bit of Ronan’s strength to hold him still.  Blood-curdling howls issued from Creasy’s lips as his ruined body was painfully reassembled by another’s magic.  Bones shifted and vertebrae snapped back into place.  The air smelled like burning skin and body fluids.   

After what felt like hours, Creasy finally stopped screaming.  Ronan tasted hex in the air, the conjoined arcane powe
r of opposing magics.  Somehow Danica’s magic had freed Creasy’s spirit, and they both worked to heal the warlock’s wounds. Danica eased off after a time to let Creasy’s spirit do the work on her own. 

She and Ronan
carefully backed away and went to tend Maur.  There was nothing they could do for the Gol, at least not there, so Ronan sat with Maur while he slept and watched over him.  Maur was one of the only people he’d ever known who thought of him as a friend.

And I almost left you behind
, he thought. 
Danica and I both nearly walked away.  What the hell is wrong with us?

Creasy’s spirit finished healing him within the hour.  The warlock lay exhausted and shaking when it was all done.  Danica gave him a spare blanket from her pack, and Ronan shared what meager rations they had. 

The warlock
sat against the wall. Danica was cross-legged on the ground across from him, while Ronan stayed close to Maur.