Black felt it, too. She didn't have to say anything — it was clear by the strange mix of fear and awe in her eyes.
“ So what do we do?” Cole asked.
“ You head back,” Cross said to her. “You too, Kane.”
“ Um…no.”
Ekko put a hand on his arm, and nodded. Black and Cole exchanged looks.
Cross pulled his spirit tight around his body. He fueled her anger by thinking about Dillon, about Snow, and about Graves. His mind raced, and filled with pain. He thought about the children who’d been rounded up and butchered at Crucifix Point, and about Gage and Cala, about Zender the gentle Doj who'd been captured and tortured to death by Gorgoloth raiders, about the dead soldiers in Karamanganji who would never speak to their friends again, who would never look a lover in the eyes. He thought of every victim of the vampires, every ruined life, and every unanswered slaughter. Cross thought of every injustice and wrong he had ever witnessed over the course of his young life, and he poured them into his spirit. He twisted her, and focused all of the rage until she was as sharp as a raw blade.
“ Like hell I'm going…” Cole argued with Black.
“ I'm not leaving Ekko,” Kane said.
Cross rose his head. He was infused with the raw destructive power of a spirit who, in the space of a few moments, had experienced a lifetime of Cross' most vivid and painful memories. Volatile magic radiated out of his eyes. He was like a sick and explosive star.
“ The three of us have been touched by the power in this place,” he said. “You two haven't. If you go down there, you'll die, just like the Black Circle who went down there died.” He moved and stood directly in front of the ice door. The power of his raging spirit swelled inside of him, ready to burst. “The two of you need to leave. Now.”
Kane and Cole clearly didn't want to go, but Cross hoped they saw the truth in his words. He hoped they understood.
After a moment's hesitation, they each hugged their respective lovers, and took their leave.
“ We'll be right outside,” Cole called.
“ Cross,” Kane called out. The warlock turned. He held the rage of his spirit much more efficiently than he ever had before. Lucan's energy was the cause of that. It coursed through all three of the mages. It filled them with power. It knew that its moment was near.
“ Thank you,” Cross said.
“ Good luck,” Kane said with a nod.
The two left.
Black and Ekko stepped up to either side of Cross. The three of them joined hands and stood in a line. Black's spirit was as angry as Cross’. Had it not been for Lucan's influence, they would have destroyed one another through their sheer proximity. Instead, their energies flowed through the space between them, and it electrified the air. Ekko focused the energies stored inside of her, as well, and added them to the fold, vampiric hunger and a desperate will to survive.
For a brief instance, they are back at the ship. They see Lucan, and he kneels before them. All of his strength is gone. His life is ending. He raises his head and looks at them as they walk towards him in the still and silent air. He smiles.
I knew you'd come, he says.
Their spirits released their anger in a charnel blast. The air ignited into a roar of arctic fire, and it rent the crystal door apart. Chunks of ice melted into clouds of steam.
A tunnel of black ice waited beyond the smoldering remains of the door. The air smelled glacial. The smoke of ages past curled off the floor of the ink-dark passage.
Without a word, the three of them stepped inside.
TWENTY-ONE
They entered a world of glass. The tunnel was sloped and uneven, like it had melted. Black's arcane torch reflected semi-translucent walls filled with stony debris. The air was cold but dry, and exceedingly dark. It was as if something slowly sucked away at the light.
They moved as quickly as they could across difficult ground. Cross drew his HK45 and held his spirit coiled around his gauntleted left hand. Sweat ran into his eyes in spite of the cold. Every shuffle of their boots in that frozen tunnel sent violent echoes through the air. Ekko moved in the middle with no weapons except for her claws, and Black brought up the rear with an HK94 she'd received from Daye.
The three of them looked like they were close to death, all covered in ash and blood and soot.
The place was a labyrinth. After a steep descent, the tunnel came to a multiple junction that looked like the center of a galaxy. Icy corridors trailed off in multiple directions. Black's torch only illuminated to a radius of a few feet, so both she and Cross cast out their spirits and surveyed the area. The spirit’s wraith-like forms raced down smooth frozen passages, and they pushed back and forth against the walls like fish darting down a river as they searched for any presences.
They found something. The three hunters quickly caught up.
Bones were entombed in the clear ice walls, frozen in grisly dance. Skulls, some of them sideways or upside down, grinned at the three of them from the other side of the ice. Many of those bones clearly weren't human.
The corridor came to an abrupt end at the side of a steep underground canyon that ran for as far as they could see in either direction. The walls in the area were dark and jagged rock covered with twisted white roots that protruded from the stone like broken finger bones.
There was no apparent bottom to the trench: it was a deep cleft of impenetrable shadow. The tunnel continued on into a crack of darkness on the far side of the thirty-foot wide gorge.
Dank and surprisingly warm wind wound its way up from the subterranean canyon. It smelled of campfires and soot.
The floor around the canyon was littered with bodies. They were soldiers, from the look of it, well armed with automatic weapons and blades, and they were armored in hybridized versions of Southern Claw and Ebon Cities leather and chain armor. Two Gorgoloth and a Doj giant had been torn apart by what had appeared to have been a storm of razors. Their faces and torsos had been shredded. Smoke rose from their corpses as if they'd been burned. Two more bodies — a human and a Vuul — had been frozen half-in and half-out of the ice walls. The Vuul’s torso and face were bloody and cracked where he’d been trapped in the glasslike surface. The human had fallen into the wall backwards before it froze, and while his torso was entombed on the other side, his twitching legs still jutted out into open air.
The tang of power hung in the area like a powder burn. Cross sensed something primal and angry, very much like Lucan’s energies. He stepped forward carefully, his body tense.
Something didn’t feel right. Another power was held ready nearby, and it was poised to strike. Cross looked back at Black and Ekko, and saw that they felt it, too, whatever it was.
Cross looked at the bodies again, more carefully this time, and he ran through the catalog in his mind of the Black Circle members he’d seen pictures of back in Thornn. His mind collated data like a machine: his arcane studies had always come easy to him, and once he committed something to memory it never left.
The Gorgoloth were probably just compelled or hired muscle. The Doj he recognized as Ravus, and the Vuul was Synder. The human was a weapons dealer named Marus.
None of them was Jennar.
Just as he made that realization, Ekko sprang up and launched herself at a shadow. Her target was a fold in the air, an empty space that Cross had looked straight at and disregarded.