Cross entered a labyrinth of shadow and stone. Everything was unstable, like he floated in a cold void sea. The d arkness twisted and bent. The details of the ceiling were obscured in a haze of swirling golden shadows and patches of inky darkness. The air pulsed like pools of rippling oil.
He passed crystal domes cracked open by some unnatural calamity. Twisted passages snaked like veins through the heart of the canyon wall. Bones and sediment had frozen in the milk rock. Murky blue-black light emanated from within the walls.
He stepped through an archway of whalebone, a massive jaw ridged with blunted teeth. Pale oil s dripped down and splashed onto the floor.
Cross came to a cavern of batholitic rock. The air was smelted and white. Curved stone spiraled away in cyclone s of ebony and silver. Cavernous echoes sounded through the Netherwere — the world below, a vast network of catacombs and tunnels that ran like a maddening maze into an infinity of twisted underground canyons and natural chambers, abandoned Cruj dwellings and Maloj temples, Vuul slave mines, subterranean Gol settlements and the hidden lairs of the secretive Regost.
Low rolling fumes buried the floor, so thick they seemed almost liquid. The mist rolled at hi m from out of a series of tunnels he thought led to the Carrion Rift. He followed them. Soulrazor/Avenger was heavy in his grip. His boots echoed loud in the darkness.
C oncentric rock formations twisted like black grain down a funnel. Sounds came at him, distant growls and shouts. He was getting closer to the breach, he could feel it. Geothermic pressure squeezed the air and made it sweat. Vents of bitter steam pushed out of scar fissures and blocked sight of what lie ahead.
He wandered for what felt like days. The blade tugged him this way and that, as if it knew the way. It took him to the source of the echoes. He heard wind, and something like rain.
The Obelisk of Dreams lay on its side at the end of the tunnel, literally pushed through the in side of the canyon wall, fused between two realities. Everything shifted around it, folded in to unnatural p atterns. Drifts of rock dust fell from the ceiling.
The artifact was just as h e remembered it, utterly black and icy cold. To even be near it chilled the blood. Faint whispers of pain bled from the cracks in the Obelisk’s surface. Silver runes like scars littered its utterly dark face. It was still whole, in spite of the violence it had lived through.
Drifts of rubble fell from the walls. E verything wavered like heat images. He saw his breath, and then saw it again. He stood at a place conjoined, where the boundaries threatened to come unglued. The floor stretched and compacted.
He moved close r to the Obelisk. It was safe. He’d beaten Azradayne and the Shadow Lords to it.
Now what?
Cross studied the monument. It was so innocuous, so still. It barely seemed possible that it could bear such import. The Obelisk had rested in the hands of the renegade necropolis of Koth for decades, but the undead had lacked the knowledge of how to destroy it until Red had offered them that information.
To destroy it required a sacrifice. A particular sacrifice.
That sacrifice was supposed to have been me, he thought. I wonder if the Shadow Lords have already prepared another.
Another sacrifice.
Cross looked past the Obelisk and through the shattered rock wall, into the wreckage and madness of the Carrion Rift. A shifting barrier like black smoke separated the two realities. He look ed through the ebon fumes, into the world he once knew. The top half of the twelve-foot Obelisk hovered over the void of the canyon. A sea of s creaming vapors melted down the vast trench. Black t entacles writhed and twisted in the bladed shadows below. The Rift was a place buried in darkness and mist.
Why would anyone want to rule this world? h e wondered. The Southern Claw fight to stay alive, to protect our own. What do the Shadow Lords want? Power? Dominion? They’d rule from atop a throne of dust, and wear a crown of ash.
Another sacrifice.
Cross stood at the boundary. He could reach through if he wanted and enter the Carrion Rift. He could step back in to his own world, onto ledges of crumbling roc k and jutting bits of stone on his side of the canyon. He could be free of the Whisperlands.
Not yet. Not yet.
Blood trickled down the Rift walls. Things lurked in the darkness below. H e felt their eyes on him, sensed their ravenous hunger.
Another sacrifice.
Because I lived, there will be another sacrifice.
There was another wide shelf of rock on the opposite canyon wall. It was littered with s hards of black iron wreckage. He saw broken engines and shattered railway cars, sunken turrets and cracked metal wheels.
It occurred to him that Snow’s remains might have been there in the ruined remains of the train. He’d almost forgotten what she looked like. He pictured her charred body folded in to the metal.
Cross tried to put sight of her from his mind, but he couldn’t. He saw her, burning on the train. It was one of the only memor ies he had of her whe re he could still picture her clearly.
Stop it, he told himself. This doesn’t help.
But he was already crying, and he couldn’t stop.
He waited. It was hard to know how much time passed.
Cross stood in the cold dark. The necronaught wreckage was in sight, and the Obelisk was just a few feet away. The caves shifted unnaturally all around him. He looked back down the twisted rock corridor and saw steam clouds and molten shadows.
Cross held Soul razor/Avenger ready. He wasn’t sure what good it would do, what good he could do against a cadre of powerful warlocks. He tried to remind himself he’d survived battle s with the necrotic angel minions of the Revenger Korva, and that this would be no different.
But the truth was he felt less sure of himself than he had for a long time. H e had no idea what he should or sh ouldn’ t expect from the arcane blade. It served its own whim, held its own agenda.
He shivered. His grip on the gelid hilt slipped, so he righted himself and held it tighter. He considered propping himself against a wall to rest, but the shifting atmosphere told him that would be unwise.
Another sacrifice.
He wondered who the Shadow Lords had found.
It had to be someone particular. The conditions for the sacrifice required to destroy the Obelisk of Dreams were exact: a mage who’d forcibly been separated from their spirit, and then had had that connection restored. So far as he or anyone in the White Council knew, Cross was the only mage that had ever happen ed to. Now he wasn’t even a mage anymore, something he tried not to think about.
They’d have to create their own sacrifice somehow. They’d have to force those conditions, find a way to do it intentionally. He was sure they could: Margrave had told him that Koth had found a way, and if circumstances hadn’t made it so Cross had wound up fitting their criteria, that sacrifice would have been Snow.
But do the Shadow Lords really want to destroy the Obelisk? he wondered. What else would they do with it?
What if the Obelisk isn’t even what they’re looking for?
He wasn’t sure why that last thought occurred to him. I t came like a bolt of lightning out of a clear and quiet sky. And like some festering wound or a horrible itch, once the notion was there, it wouldn’t go away.
Are they looking for something else?
Cross watched the tunnels. He glanced behind him, into the Carrion Rift. He waited for the Shadow Lords, or for their minions.
He wondered what else they could be searching for.
If the Shadow Lords truly had the means to come and g o from the Whisperlands at will, it made little sense for them to seek anything else. If they didn’t really have the means to leave the Whisperlands, if that had all been a lie, then maybe they sought escape, just like he did…but that meant Kyver and the Grey Clan had lied to him, and he had trouble believing that. He hoped his instinct about them had been correct.
Cross decided the Obelisk of Dreams really was the object of the Shadow Lord’s search.
But what about the spider? What about Azradayne?
He waited. Something sounded in the distance overhead, some shattering of rock. Probably Sorn tech, he thought, used to blast through the stone. He kept his eyes up. D eep shadows roamed the ceiling. S talactites dripped milky water and iron sediment.
What are you looking for, Azradayne? he wondered. He’d convinced himself it wa sn’ t the Obelisk, even if that wa s what the Shadow Lords wanted. They were her lackeys, powerful though they surely were.
What do you want, spider? What have you altered my life to accomplish? What hurricane did you trigger by directing my path?
What do you want?
Another sacrifice.
His mind raced. What else had he done by following the path laid out for him by the spider? He tried to think beyond the obvio us, beyond rescuing the Obelisk and defeating the Sleeper, beyond slaying Jennar and keeping Soulrazor out of Korva’s hands.
Someone he knew. Someone he’d met. His heart pounded hard against his chest.
Someone I’ve met, someone I wouldn’t have met without Azradayne’s interference. Again, was it someone obvious, some creature of import that, had he ignored the spider’s guidance, he would never have encountered? The Lith. The Soulweavers. The Eidolos. The Grey Clan. Or was it someone else?
Kane? Ronan?
Black?
What if one of them was what the spider truly wanted? Its web was vast, and the eyes in which he’d glimpsed so many versions of himself could have easily seen where the threads might conjoin, where the strands led, where tangential possibilities could take him. He tried to dissect his own path in his mind, tried to look backwards, but it was impossible to take it all apart, impossible to know the truth of where his choices might have led him. The possibilities were limitless, but all of it came down to what the spider’s purpose was.
What do you want?
Not the Obelisk. He was sure of that. Was giving the Obelisk of Dreams to the Shadow Lords just a matter of convenience, a means to an end? Had the spider so deftly manipulated Cross to arrange for one of his friends to wind up where it needed them to be? Did Black or Kane have something it wanted, or did they serve some greater purpose it needed them to fulfill?
Cross’s heart chilled. He could only dare guess at the spider’s goal s, at how great its vision extended through the network of space and time.
But he felt with dread certainty that his friends were in danger.
Cross gripped his blade with hands gone numb from the cold. He wiped rancid steam from his eyes, shook himself, breathed deep.
He’d make his stand th ere. With any luck, it wouldn’ t be his last.
It can’t be. I have to find them. I have to save them.
Shadow s moved in the distance. He heard the industrial grind of heavy machines and the ring of metal on stone. The air crackled and hummed with thaumaturgy, and he smelled iron and smoke.
They were coming. He pushed thoughts of Danica and Mike and the others from his mind.
They come for him. He’s waited, watched the inky darkness in anticipation of this assault. He believes he has no chance, but he knows, in th e s e last moment s of his life, at this final crossroads, that he can’t allow himself to fail.
H and-cannons lined with blades push through the darkness. He sees gi ant silhouettes and central single eyes. He sees grey armor fused with iron plate as Sorn enter the chamber.
Cross moves in a blur, not sure where his sudden speed come s from, not even cognizant of what ’ s happening until he cut s the first giant down, slices it from groin to neck and feels hot purple blood splash onto his face.
The blade is in control.
He swipes, ducks and weaves like a bladed dancer. He moves in and out of shadows like he’ s a shadow himself. He sees other versions of himself, alternate possibilities. He steps and steps again, cuts and cuts again. He strikes the same creature only once, but from m any angles. His stutter- strikes punch out from different dimensional possibilities. He is as the spider sees him: himself at a crossroads, the many paths conjoined into one. He is himself, striking from different futures, different pasts.
Blasts deafen his ears. Iron shot and nail spikes rip into the stone walls. The Sorn pour through, grim and silent, their enormous bodies blocking the way out. Monsters from the Carrion Rift scream as ballistics punch through the walls and rip into them.
He steps, strikes, steps away, strikes again. He hamstrings grey giants and severs fuel couplings, yanks grenades away from belts and tosses them at other Sorn. He sends hails of exploding flesh and fuel sailing through the air in molten waves.
He ha s become a walking nightmare, a shade. He sees them in blurs, barely aware of his own motions. The blade cuts up and through and across. Fingers and shells fall to the ground.
The Sorn are confused. He’ s everywhere and nowhere at once. They accidentally fire into one another, send flames back into their own ranks. Six are dead in the space of a minute.
One grabs him. It guesses correctly, or else the probability of his slipping past becomes too miniscule, even in this c onfused and chaotic place. He’ s thrown against the wall, and feels his back break.
Another Cross steps up and kills the offending Sorn, tears through its chest with his arcane sword. He sees a third Cross cut down by rotating gun barrels and stamped into gristle.
He is all of the versions of himself. The spider has joined more than one Cross to this battle: it has sent them all.
Condemned me to die. Every one of me.
He ducks back, hides in the dark. Sorn draw bludgeoning melee weapons and pursue him. He dodges around massive stalagmites. The giants spray the area with chain guns and nail launchers. Shards of stone and steel rain down around him.
He howls a nd leaps back into their midst. Soulr azor/Avenger hacks through flesh and tears through armor. He hears low grunts and watches bodies ooze purple waste on to the ground.
H e stands alone. He has defeated all of them. Over a dozen Sorn bodies lie in ruins. They sag and fade and bleed out without a sound.
H e regards the other versions of himself. They stand as if in council, half-concealed by shadows, wavering in and out of existence. They are barely recognizable. Some wear full beards, some are clean-shaven; one is missing an eye, while another is dressed as a Revenger; one still possesses his spirit, and he can even taste her in the air, her scent, her power. None of them is whole: they are half-illuminated shades, flickering ghost images. None of them is really there, and yet they all are.
They vanish. He is alone with the corpses.
Impressive, a voice says, and he turns around.
They’ re there. T he mages.
There are six Shadow Lords, each identical to the last, tall men in charcoal robes and high leather boots. Iron belts and bracers adorn their shadow-drenched skin. E ach wear s a simple and featureless mask, a bisected segment of skin-tight steel with dark eye slits. They are doppelgangers of one an other, and the air is alive with the force of their arcane might.
He readies his blade. He knows he can’t ho pe to defeat them all, but he has to try.
The first mage sends a blast of fire. He slices it in half, and t he pale flames sear out and strike another warlock, who dies screaming. Cross doesn’t give his attacker a second chance: he charges and removes the man’s head with a clean swipe.
Another warlock attacks him with gauntlets covered in crackling green waste. A fourth forges an ice sword and meets him in battle.
He shatters the ice sword and sends the mage back, then turns and severs the gauntlet-yielder’s hands. He spins and finishes the sword bearer, and both mages fall to the ground and die at the same moment.
But the last two mages have him. The first warlock slices his arm open with a blade made of black steel and diamond edges. He cackles like a child as he watches Cross stagger a nd bleed. The other mage hammers Cross with a cone of gravitational force that sends him to his knees and blasts the wind from his lungs.
Well done, Tregoran.
And you, Marklahain.
He falls on to his back. The uncertain world shifts even further. His sword is on the ground, well out of his reach.
What did the Eidolos tell me? He struggles to remember its words, to bring to mind the secret that had been imparted to him by the dread psychic. He feels certain the knowledge will save him.
The last two mages stand over him. One of them eyes their prize: t he frozen obelisk. They both laugh coldly.
He looks for the other version s of himself, but their connection to this place is g one. He’ s all alone, left with the burden of his failure, with the knowledge that he’d nearly stopped these mad warlocks.
But that doesn’t matter, he realizes. Because even if I’d beaten the Shadow Lords, Azradayne will still get what she wants.
He struggles for breath and grope s for his weapon, but it ’ s buried deep in the folds of shadow that creep a cross the floor.
Only the living are lost. H e re members t he words the Eidolos had given him. Only the living are lost.
Arcane energies fuse around him. His skin goes rigid, and his lungs free ze. He knows that i t’ s too late.