Cross saw blood in the sky.
It was a trick of the dusk light: thick rays of dying crimson sunshine cut through dark shifting vapors over the battlefield and the drifts of caustic white smoke left in the wake of crawling war machines. The air was a den of rumbling motors, heavy treads and great iron wheels that crushed rocks and shattered bones. Cross smelled oil, and tasted exhaust.
I hate this place.
His entire body ached. Cross had slept perhaps five hours in as many days, scattered instances of half-slumber he’d caught amidst heaps of dirty blankets and piles of faulty bandages left discarded outside the medical bivouacs. All of his sleep had been half-filled with nightmarish images of hex-torn bodies and children drowning in burning arcane fuel.
Grime and filth covered his skin in a film. Cross’ stomach ached, long tired of thaumaturgically preserved rations and stale wine; whenever he ate much of anything beyond a slice of bread, his gut twisted and his urine burned. With his spirit always at hand, Cross normally didn’t get sick, which told him it wasn’t so much any actual infection as it was his inability to adjust to a military diet while he was there in the field.
He’d only been on the front lines of the war for two weeks.
He felt his spirit there with him, a slippery electric skin that hovered centimeters away from the next world. She was a wraith-like unguent that caressed and tickled against him. He breathed her in, and though the vapor of her spectral form turned his lungs cold he felt comfortable knowing she was there, surrounding him, a weapon and a friend, his own soul, intelligent, lost, cleaved to him and yet worlds distant. He knew her better than he knew his own sister, better than he knew himself.
Dark clouds twisted in the bitter, rot tainted wind that blew in from the east, out of the sodden wastes of Blackmarsh. Dismal fields of black mud stretched to the murky horizon, which was difficult to make out beneath a sky pregnant with shadows.
Dozens of dark tents lay like the wounded across the torn landscape. Thick trails of coal black smoke trailed in varicose lines into a darkening sky the color of uncooked meat. Cross tasted something like salt and soot there in the cold, dry air.
He sat with a host of soldiers that he didn’t know, save Graves, whom he’d known since boyhood. Graves fit in better than Cross did amongst the soldiers of Wolf Company; he was, after all, one of them, not a warlock like Cross: a weapon, a freak, and the closest thing the city of Thornn had to matching weapons with the enemy.
The tent shifted in the dank wind. The makeshift chairs stood unstable in the mud around the wide wooden stump they used as a game table. Cross sat idly, his cards clenched upside down in his hand, knowing full and well that he didn’t stand a chance. They were a sullen, dirty bunch, nearly impossible to tell apart with the black mud caked to their makeshift uniforms. Blunderbusses, rifles, blades and hammers hung from harnesses and stood against the iron tent poles; dozens of packs, as caked in filth as their owners, sat nearby in case an alarm went up.
“Why so grim?” Graves asked from Cross’ left. Graves’ scars were barely visible beneath his camouflage paint, charcoal runes, mud and hex soot, most of which had been set intentionally across the exposed skin of every soldier to prevent catching any vampiric infections or arcane diseases. Now all of that paint and fluid had sluiced together through the course of days, making even the fairer skinned men look black.
“Are you serious?” Cross asked in return.
“Wow. Is your hand that bad?” As ever, it was difficult for Cross to tell whether or not Graves was being serious. He was something of a redneck bumpkin at heart, but compared to his field experience Cross felt like a child most of the time. “You might as well just fold,” Graves added after he stared at the back of Cross’ cards, as if he possessed arcane vision.
“You should listen to him,” Malone smiled. “In fact, you should both probably just give up now.” Malone’s was tall and broad in the shoulder, and he was thin and muscular at once, with a chiseled face and crust of short dark hair. Graves had once joked that he looked like the lovechild of Superman and Frankenstein’s monster. “Full house.”
“That’s not possible,” Cala said after a moment. It was well known that she was the only card shark in the squad. “You can’t even spell, Malone. How do you expect us to believe you were able to put together a Full House?”
“He thinks we’re playing Go Fish,” Graves laughed.
Cross felt a stiff, dead wind carry through the camp. There were just under thirty individuals altogether – mostly soldiers, with a half-dozen mages and a single, lonely Doj engineer named Zender – cramped into the scattered tents, which seemed as occupied with equipment as they were with personnel. There were sacks of blessed soil stacked high like sandbags around each of the open tents, bundles of black iron poles bundled by hex wire, barrels of ash, boxes of pellet, shot and gun ammunition, raw moon rock and sacks of hexed salt. Little of that equipment was for the soldiers – most of it was for use by the mages. There was work to be done in the Blackmarsh…too important, he thought, to be handed to a bunch of young warlocks such as he.
What the hell am I doing here?
As if in answer, his spirit pushed against him. The breath of her form floated across his skin and filled him like living smoke. His fingers tingled, and he licked his lips to taste her electric hex. He unfolded his cards onto the table. Graves, Malone, Cala, Locke and Gage all nodded their appreciation that he’d folded, since he was just holding up the game with his indecision, but he saw that Gage and Cala were on edge, as well. A mage’s spirit was attenuated to subtle fluctuations and ebbs in the ethereal nodes of the living world: existing in the liminal space between living and dead, it was a witch’s or warlock’s spirit that granted them a sight that pierced illusion, that could seek out known individuals over a score of miles, that could detect hidden or unseen threats both mundane and magical. Being anchored to his spirit allowed Cross to cull bits of her shadowy form and transform it into potent energy, to create effects that humans had come to know as magic. It also meant that he was constantly exposed to the world of the dead, that he walked with a foot perpetually in the grave. Cross had lived with her since adolescence, after he’d nearly died at the hands of a sickness, but discovering her only meant he’d die young, later. No one could live long tied to an arcane spirit – by their very nature spirits were emotionally volatile and dangerous, lest they’d be unable to produce the energies they did.
Cross sat back and looked towards the low, dark trees, the border of the Blackmarsh. It was difficult to tell where the trees began or how far they ran, but luckily Wolf Company wouldn’t be pressing in any deeper than the outer perimeter, if and when their air support ever actually arrived. Unfortunately, in order to get close enough to set the hex rods and initiate the detonation sequence to clear out the vampire garrison located there in the marsh, they had to figure out a way to contend with the shadow-wings and hellwyrms, and that was where the airships came in.
Too bad they’re about three hours late. It would have been nice to have done this before dark.
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