City of Steel (Chaos Awakens Book 3) Read online

  Chaos Awakens: Book 3

  By

  Heath Pfaff

  Index

  Prologue - Whoa

  Chapter 1 - Waking the Dead

  Chapter 2 - There and Back Again

  Chapter 3 - Wagons North

  Chapter 4 - The Many Imprisonings of Xan

  Chapter 5 - Lofty Heights, Lofty Goals

  Chapter 6 - Treacherous Paths

  Chapter 7 - Where is My Mind

  Chapter 8 - Beyond the Wall

  Chapter 9 - That Was Heavy

  Chapter 10 - The Place of Endings

  Chapter 11 - The Fall of Shadows

  Shadows Epilogue

  Prologue

  Whoa

  Haley woke covered in blood with a heavy pressure on top of her. It took her only a moment to figure out that she was under somebody. She bit back her panic as she pushed the dead weight off of her chest. Normally a girl of fourteen might have had trouble moving such a mass, but Haley was incredibly strong for her age and the cursed weapon she carried at her hip enhanced her natural strength even further. She gave a single strong push, and the body rolled off of her and to the ground at her side. She scrambled to her feet, trying to figure out where she was and what was going on. Her memories were shattered, tiny fragments of events that didn’t fit together clearly. She looked down at the body that had been pinning her to the ground and her heart jumped in her chest.

  “Crow!” She called out, realizing she knew the person who’d been unconscious atop her a moment before. The young swordsman was a mess. He was unconscious on his back, covered in sweat and blood, more blood seeping from three different stab wounds in his chest. Haley knelt down at his side. “Crow!” She called again, placing a hand on his head. His face was like ice. Haley leaned in close to the boy’s mouth, listening for his breath. He wasn’t dead. He was still breathing, though it was shallow and ragged. She reached for her knife, intending to cut some of his cloak off to use it to stop his bleeding, but her knife was gone. A momentary panic swept through her as she realized she’d lost the knife Xandrith had bought her as a gift when she’d first become his apprentice. That moment passed quickly, however. Crow needed her to keep her head. She reached to the scabbard on her back and pulled forth a spare blade. It wasn’t her favorite weapon, but it would do in a bind. The blade was keen, even if the weapon itself wasn’t well weighted for combat and throwing. She would have preferred something better. Now, however, it would serve her well. She quickly cut several long scraps from the swordsman’s cloak and went to work using them to plug the holes in his body. He’d already lost so much blood.

  The blood that was covering her was his as well. She’d feared that she was injured, but all of the blood was Crow’s. She was just exhausted, not hurt. How much of that vital fluid had Crow lost? How had he lost it in the first place? She tried to grasp a hold of the memories that swirling through her mind, but they were all out of order and none of them made sense. Would Crow known any better?

  “Merrick?” She called quietly, using Crow’s real name. “Please wake up, Merrick.” She pleaded, placing a hand against his cheek. He was so very cold.

  Crow groaned quietly, his eyes fluttering.

  Haley’s heart began to beat quickly in her chest once more. “Merrick?!”

  “Haley?” His voice was weak, barely above a whisper.

  “Merrick, what happened? Where are we and how did we get here? Who attacked you?” Haley’s questions poured forth beyond her ability to control them.

  Merrick took a few steadying breaths, lightly licking his dry and chapped lips. “Kassa attacked us.” He said quietly. “Attacked you. I don’t know why. We started running … blacked out.”

  “Why would she attack us?” Haley asked incredulously. A few of the fragments of her broken memory slid into place. She remembered sitting and anxiously waiting for Xandrith to return from the gray corridors, that damned place he’d taken them through to get inside the walls of Yillan Reach. He hadn’t emerged with the rest of them. They’d waited for well over an hour, hope dwindling with each passing minute. That’s when things became difficult to recall. She’d been talking to Crow about something related to her magic, and then she’d heard Crow yell out a warning. She’d sprung to her feet and turned, drawing her weapon, but Crow had jumped in front of her. There was a struggle and Haley had been struck despite Crow’s attempt to help. Kassa had swept in like a wraith, her attacks fast and powerful. In a moment she’d beaten back both Crow and Haley, and that is when things turned red. Haley was knocked roughly aside. There was blood pouring out on the ground. Kassa and Crow were struggling with each other. Crow was bleeding.

  “I think I’m dying.” Crow’s voice was even softer than it had been before. It pulled Haley from her memories and back into the immediate moment. She leaned down over him, applying more pressure to his wounds. Was the bleeding even slowing? The fragments of cloak were already looking soaked.

  “No, no. I’m not going to let you die. We’re going to get help. We’ll rest here for a few minutes until your bleedings stops, and then we’ll go get help.”

  Crow was shaking his head weakly. “I can’t make it. I just want to sleep. The damned blade won’t be quiet.” Crows hand weakly touched his sword hilt. “It wants to … it thinks I should …”His eyes floated back into his head and Crow was unconscious again.

  “Crow!” Haley leaned close to his chest again. She was still wearing the magic wood carved fox mask that she’d been given when she left Shawl’s cabin nearly a month before. She placed the ear of the mask against Merrick’s ribs and listened. His heartbeat was slow, dwindling.

  “Damn it!” She cursed. “I don’t know what to do.” She looked inward for the voice of her own cursed weapon, but it was strangely silent. “Help me.” She pleaded inwardly, but the blade wouldn’t speak to her. Crow was dying. Even with the extra healing prowess all cursed blade wielders possessed, he was going to die if he didn’t get some help. He was losing too much blood, and his wounds were too numerous and deep to heal on their own. Even if she had possessed a source of magic, she didn’t know how to enact the healing spells.

  Her hands were soaked with fresh blood. “Please don’t die, Merrick. I need you.” She did the only thing she could think of. She kept pressure on his wounds and watched him grow weaker and weaker.

  Chapter 1

  Waking the Dead

  “Xan.” A familiar voice encroached upon the absolute darkness that had enveloped the assassin. It drifted through the emptiness as something more than just a sound. That word, that name, it was a thing of substance in a place that denied substance of any form. At first Xan didn’t want to hear it. Nothingness had been comfortable in a way. This word, his name, was a reminder of a physicality that he’d already broken from. He didn’t want to go back. His memories of life, his last moments, they weren’t the sort of thing that would make a person wish to live again.

  “Xandrith!” There was that word again. This time it was spoken with an angry, unsympathetic edge.

  “Damn it, go away!” Xan snapped back. The sound of his own voice, produced by his own vocal chords, startled him out of the darkness. He opened an eye to a dull gray sky. A cold breeze swept over him, and as it passed over his body it seemed to bring with it a surprising amount of pain. Xandrith groaned.

  “There you are. I knew you weren’t dead.” The familiar voice spoke again. Xan turned his head to see who was talking. He was more than a little shocked to see that it was him.

  “Well, this is a surprise.” The assassin said as he tried to push himself to a sitting position. A pain in his chest stopped him from doing so.

  “You may want
to relax for a bit. You’re not quite ready to be up and around.” The other him told him. “I’m afraid you were stabbed in the heart.”

  “I remember.” Xan tried to keep the emotional pain from his voice. His last memory before the emptiness had been of Kassa’s black eyes staring into his own.

  “Don’t take it too hard, Xan. She tried to resist as long as she could. There is no one to blame except you.” The other Xan said, sitting down on a bench a few feet away. Xandrith noted that this other Xan looked like a younger version of himself. He appeared entirely human, as Xan had before he’d become corrupted by the sanguine magic and the troll blade.

  “I thought I’d healed her.” He told himself. “I don’t understand how that darkness could have been in her all this time.”

  Younger Xan was shaking his head. “It wasn’t. She was fine until you took her through the gray ways. The gray ways belong to the old one, the very ancient thing you’ve been striving to destroy. You handed her back to the enemy.”

  Xan lifted his head a few inches and let it fall to the ground with a thud. The pain in his flesh was refreshing. He could pretend that the tears in his eyes were caused by the physical discomfort, but then who was he pretending for? Himself? He lifted his head and let it fall again. The added pain didn't really help at all. His entire body was awash with a terrible burning sensation, as though he'd recently taken a dip in a river of boiling water.

  “There is no point in agonizing over it. You can’t change the past by dwelling on it. No, it’s time that we start looking ahead.” The younger Xan stood up and walked over to his counterpart. “We need to decide what we’re going to do next.”

  “Alright.” Older Xandrith replied after taking a moment to collect himself. “But first, what exactly are you?”

  “I’m the troll blade, or what is left of it anyway. I think I’m mostly you.” The other said, looking at his arms and torso as though asking himself the very same question.

  “Hmmm.” Xan wasn’t convinced. “How did you get outside of me?”

  “Oh, I’m not outside of you. I’m not really here at all.” Younger Xan answered with surprising assurance.

  “Great, so I’m insane and talking to myself now?”

  “Probably.” The other replied with a half grin.

  “Okay, but how am I not dead? I felt that knife go through my heart.” Xandrith decided he’d need some more answers before he started making decisions.

  “You felt that knife go through one of your hearts. Fortunately you’re part troll now, and that comes with a very handy second heart!” Young Xan answered, sounding a bit like a commentator at some form of jousting event. “Of course, you know all of this already. I’m you, so I don’t really know anything that you don’t already know. I just have a different perspective on it all. Maybe.”

  Xandrith frowned and put his hand on his chest, feeling around for the beating of his alleged second heart. It took him a few minutes to discover it, beating faintly just below his lung on the right side of his chest. He could barely feel it through his ribs. “Well, great. I’m a troll now.”

  “Not entirely, no, but your last burst of magic did change a lot of you physically. You’ve been feeling it. The extra energy, the surge of strength and exhilaration. That’s the good parts of the troll anatomy kicking in. Opening the Great Vault has actually managed to save your life.” Young Xan smiled.

  “Wait, you said ‘That’s the good parts,’ what does that mean?”

  “Well, your looks have suffered a bit, and I think you’re starting to grow horns. You don’t look quite as human as you once did.” He seemed genuinely sorry that he had to divulge this information.

  “I don’t have horns!” Xandrith began to protest as he reached up to his heads, but the words fell dead on his tongue as he felt the two, jagged bumps along the crown of his head. The right one was longer than the left. “Shit.” He commented. “I have horns.” He sighed and closed his eyes.

  “They don’t look terrible.” Young Xan offered some consolation. “At least your skin is still mostly human, and you haven’t grown any extra arms, or started to get fangs. You could probably still pass as a human in some places.”

  “I use to pass as a human in all sorts of places.” Old Xan replied grumpily.

  "Well, whether you can pass for human or not, you're definitely not going to pass for a troll. That's going to become a problem soon if we don't get out of here."

  Xandrith opened his eyes again and looked at his doppelganger. "What does that mean?"

  "The trolls are coming, and I'd guess there are going to be a lot of them. Now that the Drayid have gone the Reach has become an uninhabited fortress just waiting to be taken. I don't know when they'll get here, but I can't imagine it will take them long. The Kassa-thing will have told them about the fall of the Drayid, and they'll be here to take over."

  The sound of Kassa's name sent a wave of despair through the assassin. He briefly considered just closing his eyes again and going to sleep. The trolls could take him. What did he have to live for anymore? She’d talked with him about starting a family just before he’d taken her into those gray passages. Just before he’d ruined her again. How was he supposed to accept a future without her? He swallowed that gravely shard of self-pity with no little effort before speaking again. "I guess I should get up then. I don't like trolls, and I'm fairly certain they don't like me either."

  "Yes, it's about time for that. You'll need to be careful, though. Your body is weak and your second heart is not fully formed. If you push yourself too hard it could just stop. We wouldn't want that, would we?" The Young Xan seemed completely serious.

  "Maybe not." Xan answered as he attempted to push himself back to his feet for the second time since waking from death. He had to keep going. He’d promised Leahn, and he couldn’t quit after all that this journey had cost Kassa. Some foolish part of him refused to ever give in while his legs would still carry him forward. His hand brushed something cold and metallic at his side, and he stopped for a moment as he realized exactly what it was. The knife blade was coated in a drying layer of his blood, yet another layer to the already intricate pattern of the metal. It was Haley's knife. He'd bought this blade for her as a gift, and it had somehow ended up in Kassa's hands. Xan shook his head, trying to shake away the notion of what that might mean. Haley wouldn't have parted with that knife willingly. He picked the knife up, wiped away his own blood, and put it in an empty scabbard at his side. He'd have to deal with those bleak considerations later. He needed to get up.

  His body hurt. The muscles ached and that burning sensation still made his veins feel like molten metal.

  "Blood stopped pumping through your system for a time. The burning is normal blood flow returning. It will pass soon enough." Young Xan addressed his concerns, and as soon as he spoke the words older Xan realized the truth to them. The sensation was similar to having slept on an arm funny, if not accompanied by a bit more pain.

  The pain in his chest was annoyingly acute as he scrambled the last bit to his feet. He could feel his second heart hammering away in his chest, beating with obvious strain to maintain his blood circulation. It was on the right side of his chest, somewhere below his lung. The sensation was a strange one. Xan placed a hand over the place on his chest where he could feel the excited beating originating from. His hand was different than he remembered it. His fingers were longer, the bones heavier. His human fingernails had been replaced by black claws that edged beyond the tips of his fingers when he curled his hand and tensed his knuckles.

  "Hmmph." He let out a slight puff of exasperated air.

  "There is no point in dwelling on the details just yet. We should get going." The younger him attempted to distract him from the discovery of his new physical traits by repeating the same insistent desire to leave.

  "Where are we going?" Xan asked, taking his first uncertain step in the direction of the talking image of his manifested insanity.

  "Out of here, for
now. After that, well, that's something you'll have to decide."

  Xan chuckled dryly. "My last plan didn't work out so well."

  "Well, that makes us about due for some good luck, no?"

  "You're never going to pass for me if you keep being so optimistic." Xandrith noted with a frown. His next footfall was accompanied by a flare of pain through his chest. He winced and bit down on his lip for a few seconds before speaking again. "How long am I going to be weak like this?"

  "That's difficult to say. If you were a troll you'd be fine already. Your humanity isn't doing you any good. The wound is definitely healing faster than it would for a normal man, but it's far slower than a troll's injury would patch itself. You're just going to need to be careful until the damage to your primary heart is repaired. There is no helping it." That wasn't exactly encouraging.

  "Which way do we go to get out of here?" Xan asked, pausing a moment before a thought occurred to him. "No, on second thought, which way did Kassa go? I need to find her."

  Fake Xan shook his head. "You're not thinking clearly. Kassa left here in a hurry. You're not going to catch up with her in your current state, and you don't want to. If she knew you were alive, she'd kill you again, and this time she'd be certain to make it stick. Do you really want to throw away the only advantage that you have right now? They all think you're dead."

  Xandrith opened his mouth to reply indignantly, but the words faltered on his tongue. The other him was right. What would he do even if he did manage to catch up to Kassa? Did he really believe that she would see reason if he could just talk to her? What did he hope to learn by speaking to her? The aching in Xan's chest was only partially due to his perforated heart. No, Kassa was beyond him. He couldn't do anything to help her this time. Not now anyway, maybe not ever.

  "You know what we need to do." Young Xan spoke, breaking his silent misery.

  "I don't." Xan replied quietly.