The y look into the dread sky and see a vampire fortress.
An island of jagged rock stands atop a narrow stone tower just a hundred yards away. This n ew edifice is adjacent to the tower of stone they woke on, and it’s practically a reflection save for one impo rtant difference: instead of being to pped by a small steel building, the second island is dominated by a citadel made of black rock and red iron.
It’ s a Bonespire. It’s a small Bonespire, roughly the size of a manor, but a Bonespire nevertheless.
That’s terrific, Kane says.
Look, Ronan says, and he points between the islands of stone.
The only way to get to the other mountain is to cross a narrow bridge made of crumbling earth. The bridge is only four or five feet wide but almost fifty feet long. B its of stone crumble and fa ll into the air. Both of t he thin towers are at least a mile high. They stand over a land of red water, black earth and roiling dark smoke.
A pile of equipment lies on the far side of the bridge: swords, axes, armor vests, and strange gauntlets attached to short muzzle d guns and long ammunition belts.
Great, Kane says. We’re in a fucking video game.
Do they expect us to attack the Bonespire? Sol asks. Why not send our mage with us?
The idea might not be for us to actually survive, Ronan says. They’re probably watching us. This is all probably for their God damn ed amusement.
Then piss on them, Kane says. T he best thing we can do is stay right here.
As if in response, the ground shifts. The ir mountain cracks ope n like melting ice. C hunks of rock fly into the air as the bridge between the towers starts to fall apart. The rail-thin mountain crumble s beneath them. The island shakes and tilts under their feet. A ll three of them fall to their knees. Kane glances up, and notices that the other island remains stable.
Of freakin’ course, he says.
Do you guys ever shut up? Sol growls.
K laxons sound in the Bonespire. Dark fliers take to the air. Kane smells brimstone engines and arcane fuel. The small keep is five — stor ies of smooth black rock dotted with crimson battlements, and it stands just a short distance from the stone bridge. A single door slid es open and releases hulking Doj zombies with putrid grey flesh and hammers in place of hands. An undulating kaithoren — a mass of billowing tentacle flesh and uncertain mouths fill ed with grinding canine teeth — follows the zombies.
The three men run onto the rock bridge, and it falls to pieces behind them as they race for the other side. Kane waits for his feet to fall on open air. Vertigo hazes through his skull, and he expects to be ripped into the void sky at any moment. Everything spins.
T he zombies approach the bridge from the other end. Their monstrous dead forms grow larger by the second.
The mountain falls behind them with the dissonant roar of crashing stone. The y barely make it across. Kane jumps off the crumbling bridge and lands hard on his chest on the opposite ledge. Ronan falls next to him. Sol is the last one to make it, and he jumps f orward and lands on top of both Kane and Ronan, flatte n ing them b eneath his weight.
Get. O ff, Kane coughs.
The Doj zombies draw close. Red sweat pours down Kane’s face as he picks up one of the gauntlets. Hard wind claws at his back. P anic grips his chest as he glances over the edge and sees the blood sky below. Red clouds and shards of derelict rock float like ice in glacial waters.
He looks up. The nearest zombie is practica lly on top of the m. Its putrid skin drips vile grey fluid and worms. M assive neck muscles strain as the zombie raises its rusted hammer fists and clenches its rotted teeth.
He takes a breath. For a moment, Kane is back in the arena. He finds his focus.
H e calmly fixes the gauntlet to the back of his hand and forearm. The device is made of bone and pale metal and easily weighs five pounds. T he short-muzzled firearm consists of three short barrels, and t he ammo belt coils up around his elbow and extends to the mid-point of his upper arm.
Metal clamps snap shut and pierce his skin. T hin needles in the gauntlets send electric jolt s through his body. His flesh tingles, and he feels something shift in his synapses, an understanding of which muscles he has to use in order to activate the weapon.
He tightens the muscles in his arm and fires.
Explosive rounds fly from the weapon with such force he’ s nearly throw n from his feet. The rounds rip into dead flesh and explode. Skin shreds and bursts open in chunks.
The first zombie falls off the top of the mountain. The grotesque corpse tumbles like a flank of flayed meat through the open sky.
Kane growls and shoots again. His arm and side ache from the force of the weapon, but he uses his legs and lower back to keep his body stable as he advances towards the citadel.
He shoots th e next zombie giant in the head. It falls backwards, and its hammer arms flail wildly before the brute rolls down the slop e and plummet s into open air.
The kaithoren is further back, a bulk of flailing shadow limbs and dripping razor beaks. Roiling tentacles launch bone shard projectiles. Kane fills the air between them with gunfire and shatters the organic missiles before they can reach him.
A tentacle reaches for him, but he blasts it apart. The kaithoren roars through the air l ike a wall of kamikaze slime. Kane throws himself prone.
Machine-gun fire sounds over his head. S hells clank to the earth behind him. Ronan and Sol wear gun-gauntlets and flak vests. Their bullets tear into the kaithoren and drive it back. P utrid emerald slime sizzl es on the dark ground.
Kane lif ts himself up. Ronan hands him a saber. He runs forward with the weapon and slice s open the kaithoren’s suddenly exposed undead heart, a mass of fibrous tissue the color of old meat. It’ s the only solid thing about the c reature, an unholy core that holds the rest of the abomination together. Kane strikes at the stillborn mass and cleaves it in two. R ed ichor s explode outwards as the kaithoren squeals and melts to the ground.
Streams of red-brown ooze stain his face and stick to his skin like clumps of putrid mud. His nose is filled with the stench of animal rot.
This sucks.
Ronan hands him a flak vest, which he hastily puts on. It’ s too big at first, but a fter he buckles the vest in place it automatically resizes itself.
The sky grow s darker. T he fliers h ang back in the air, a host of gargoyles armed with nets and axes.
He checks his ammo, and realizes the weapon has reloaded itself.
Well that’s handy. I guess t his hasn’t been too difficult, Kane says.
The gates to the citadel open again, and a Creed of vampires emerges. They wear blue-black armor with bladed epaulets and yield smoking hand-cannons and pikes. Their greasy pale skin shines dull y in the autumnal light. D ark hair is pulled back in severe top-knots. Fangs glisten and drool with anticipation.
The hollow tower behind them is a shaft of red fog and black steel filled with equipment and machinery parts. More undead wait inside.
The gargoyle s descend and move to flank the three men, while the Creed advances on their position.
Ronan gives Kane an angry look.
Don’t say it, Kane says.
They battle their way through the citadel.
His arms grow weak from shooting the wrist-cannon and swinging the saber. Ronan and Sol fight beside him. They t ear thr ough red armor and black fliers and scorch the air with metal, fire and blood.
The vampires never stop coming.
Even after the first Creed falls, another emerges from deep er with in the Citadel. Not all of the undead in the Bonespire are soldiers — they fight wight technicians and zombie surgeons, skeletal laborers and ghoul messengers, hulking mountains of zombie flesh meant to carry large loads. Only the vampires are meant for combat, but they still j oin in the attempt to throw back the three-man assault.
The gargoyles, also, come at them in seemingly unending waves. The me n tear the air apart with thaumaturgic ammo. T hey shoot and cut down silhou ette fliers and send bloody bodies crashing to the ground.
They battle half- automaton flesh walkers, monstrosities of ebon iron fused to patchwork assemblies of smoking skin. Dozens of eyes leer at Kane as he ducks beneath steam-driven hammers and blasts through limb joints to topple the golem s.
P oisonous air fills the inside of the citadel, making t heir lungs burn and their eyes sting.
A vampire armed with twin blades descends upon them from the height of the tower, an unseen void of shadow over their heads. This undead is some sort of champion, a leader accompanied by two more red-armored vampire fiends with dark hair and iron fangs. Their e yes are hidden behind thick goggles, and they wear twisted tattoos on their dead flesh.
Z ombies pour out of vents in the floor and emerge from hidden storehouse s of mutated skin.
Kane feels superhuman. He is more in th at shadow world, better, stronger. He senses an arcane presence in him and around him, some subtle augmentation that not only allows him to breathe and exist in an environment that by all rights should be caustic to humans, but to excel in it.
It occurs to him this is what the Grey Clan did to them on the ship: prepared them for battle on this dread world of shadows.
The melee is a blur of motion and noise. E verything becomes instinct and reaction. Years spent in gladiator pits and dodging psychotic Bl ack Scar inmates forever alter ed his sense of reality when he fight s. His body becomes an engine. Weapons are an extension of his arms. Killing is as easy as breathing.
The vampire leader is skilled. Kane uses the saber to deflect it ’s swift attack s. He dodge s ghouls armed with short knives and zombies with rotating saws attached to their limbs.
The Citadel protects itself. Kane feels its alien intelligence, some vast and controlling entity that lurks with in the walls.
A sword slashes into his side. He bites through the pain. The wound is the price he pays so the vampire leader come s too close to dodge Kane’s gunfire. H e blasts its pale skull into paste.
Ronan and Sol battle the other vampires and shoot their way through ranks of ghouls. The air is blood meat mist, shrapnel and gun smoke. The air outside has whipped into a fury of black powder and razor rain.
He finds a dark iron ladder bol ted to the bleeding walls, and ascends. His hands grip pitted metal soaked with oil and blood. Gouts of dark steam leak from the iron tower. He climbs up a tube of jagged rust edges and leering bone faces. Phantoms melt through the walls.
A vampire appears out of a hatch, and Kane shoots it until its body turns to pulp. Another comes at him from behind. It flies through the air as if on wings, and he wrestles with it for a moment before he cracks its fanged mouth against the wall and sends it plummeting to the floor a hundred feet below, where Ronan and Sol tear through the undead ranks.
He sees munitions and glass spheres as he climbs; rooms filled with corpses await ing animation; strange whirring devices of thaumaturgic potential; bio-organic machines, skin pulled taut over control panels; strange workbenches covered with beakers and vials of bubbling fluid.
He and the others have been sent to destroy a research station. The Ebon Cities has come to this black wasteland with a purpose. T hey mean to find something.
The apex of the Citadel lies hidden beyond a steel hatch at the top of the ladder. The rotary-style door swings up into a cold and utterly black chamber. His wrist cannon glows blue-green and illuminat es the darkness.
The room is filled with sarcophagi. Flat black coffins crafted from iron have been bolted into the walls so the vampire inhabitants can step in side and sleep vertically. C orpse dust form s a runic circle i n the middle of the floor. Cold iron candelabra s dangle from the ceiling and paint the room with flickering silver light. A black mirror stands at the far end of the chamber.
He readies his weapon and carefully enters the vampire barracks, his heart in his throat. The hairs on his neck freeze. He walks slowly, careful to a void the circle at the center.
The coffins remain sealed.
He walks up to the black mirror. It’ s somehow darker than the rest of the lightless room, an utterly blank void that seems to suck away the ambient glow of his armaments. Deep iron mists float within the mirror’s face. The frame is made of bone and steel.
He shoots the mirror.
The glass explodes and throw s him back. Shards cut his face and arms.
The coffins fly open. Half of them are filled with undead that move with chilling speed. He stands in a chamber filled with warrior corpses.
Kane roars as he sweeps the room with gunfire. He can only see by the flash of bullets and exploding blood. F anged mouths his s. E bon claws reach for him. A sea of pale bodies swarms in.
He blasts his way back to the hatch door. Claws tear skin from his arms. He shoves the wrist — cannon into a vampire ’s mouth and bl ows open its skull. Another one tries to take him down but he shoots through it s torso. He slashes behind and ahead with his blade.
Teeth sink into his neck. He screams and shoots the top of the vampire’s head off before h e falls back wards through the hatch. The fangs break off and remain lodged in his wounded skin.
Everything turns end over end. He loses direction. Som ething hard smashes against his back, and knows it isn’t the floor. Blood swims in his vision. B lack air engulfs him.
He hears shouts. He’s no longer sure where anything is com ing from.
He hangs suspended from the iron ladder. T he harness that connects him to his weapon i s caught on steel rivets in the wall, and his boots are tangled in the ladder’s rungs. He can’t feel any pain.
The world is upside-do wn. Dark steel drip s with gore through an air filled with black shadows. He gazes up at the floor and down at the ceiling. H e dangles halfway between the two ends of the tower. Blood flows down his arms and neck.
He reaches up (down) and pulls the fangs from his neck. A jet of blood shoots out and soaks his face before it rains to the ground.
Ronan climbs up (down) to get him. Sol fires up (down) into the horde of vampires. They are nightmares that scale the walls, nude and unarmored creatures with black hair and pale flesh covered with blood runes and shadow tattoos. They crawl down the steel, fast and relentless even as Sol ’s gunfire cuts them apart and they plummet up and then down, past Kane’s swimming vision, to splash into mounds of blood flesh at the top (bottom) of the tower.
He screams. His vision goes dark, a pulsing beat of black visions, pale dancers on a distant vampire shore, undead matrons around statues of shadow flesh, undead cities that move like great beasts across the landscape.
His heart pound s, and then it slows. Impure blood flows through his veins and turns them black.
Ronan reaches him on the ladder and fires into the vampires. H e somehow untangles Kane with one hand and hoists him over his shoulder.
Gravity is gone. He feels like he ’ s floating. His strength has left him. Everything fades in and out.
He hopes they’ ve succeeded. He has the sense they ’ re supposed to destroy this place, to stop the vampires from finding something, and they aren’t doing it for the Grey Clan, and certainly not for Burke, but for the people he cares about. The people he fears he will never see again.
H e falls into a nightmare-plagued slumber.
Kane woke. He was back in th e steel room. This time he wasn’ t alone.
He sat up and vomited blood. He felt something in his mind, some dank presence that saturat ed his skin. He looked down and saw that his veins were still black. His body was wracked with hurt. B lood flow ed down his neck.
“What…?” His voice hurt. Tubes had been inserted into his sk in. A brown-haired woman in black Revenger’s armor knelt down beside him and dr e w his stained blood into a syringe. He saw crawling black insects in the glass.
He wanted to throw up again, but Ronan grabbed his shoulders.
“Hang on, ” he said. “Just…hang on.”
Kane looked around. The door was open, and just outside the room were industrial steel chambers filled with tables and chairs and medical equipment. He saw Grey Clan mov ing boxes of supplies, and he heard a clamor of activity.
He saw Jade, Ronan, Maur, Sol and Burke, the bastard Burke, a Black Scar warden and a cold-hearted murderer. He was accompanied by more Revengers, as well as a contingent of Grey Clan.
“ All of you… ” Kane started to say, but he coughed up another mouthful of blood. “ All of you…can go to hell… ”
He fell back, and passed out again.