The Crow

by Alison Croggon

  At first, all he saw were blobs of red flame swimming in darkness. He shook his head, blinking, and tried to look again. Where was he? He could recognize nothing around him. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he made out the jagged mass of the Dagra mountains against the lighter clouds, and then the spike of the Iron Tower; but he couldn't recognize anything else. The Iron Tower seemed to be on fire. Other points of flame moved about crazily in patterns that made no sense: he blinked again and realized they were people carrying torches.

  Still nothing made any sound.

  I lost Nisrah, he thought emptily. He ran away. It was all for nothing...

  And then: Why is it all so quiet? Why can't I hear the rain?

  He struggled out of the pit and found himself on top of a mound of rubble. His hands were torn and bleeding, and it hurt to touch the stone: but when he began to retch, he realized the stones were scorching him with sorcery. He began to scramble awkwardly off the pile of rubble, down the side farthest from the Iron Tower. At once his head began to clear a little, freed of the fog of sorcery. He looked ahead: the ground before him stretched out level and wide, and moving columns of flame were streaming toward him. Soldiers, he thought. The armies camped on the plateau.

  He realized that the pile of rubble must have been the Dagra walls. He was outside Dagra. He had escaped. But where was Ire?

  His mouth felt as if it were made of dust. His pack was still on his back, so he fumbled for his water bag, and took a long gulp.

  It made him feel slightly, very slightly, better, and he began to wonder what he should do. His ears were no longer stuffed with silence: they were ringing with a high, irritating noise, and underneath that, he could hear a faint patter of rain falling on stone. He was wet through with the rain. He shook his head again, trying to get rid of the ringing in his skull; he must have been deafened by the noise.

  His first thought was to find Ire, if he was still alive. If he was still alive. How could anything have survived those crea­tures he had seen in the sky? Or had he imagined them in his terror? There was no sign of them now. If Ire was dead, Hem was on his own.

  Screwing up what little energy he had, he sent out a feeble summoning.

  Nothing.

  If he didn't move, someone would trip over him and he would be captured and put to death. But where could he go?

  Doggedly he began to crawl away from Dagra, out of the path of the marching soldiers. His only thought was of Ire. He must be dead. Ire was dead, and he was alone on a plain of nightmare, already a haunt, some spider thing that was no longer human at all. But still, he didn't want to die. He kept on crawling.

  You're going the wrong way, pebblehead.

  The voice lilted into his head as clearly as the bar of a song. He looked up in a daze, squinting through the darkness.

  Not ten paces away, Ire stood on a spike of rock. Something dangled from his beak.

  Hem froze in shock. Then he staggered to his feet and ran toward Ire, who launched himself off his perch and glided toward Hem. He caught him, gathering the big, clumsy bird in his arms, pressing his cheek against Ire's feathers, which were filthy and smelled of scorching. There were no words for what he felt.

  Crooning, Ire pressed against him, rubbing his head against Hem's temple. But then the bird flapped his wings, demanding to be let go. Hem opened his arms, and Ire perched on his shoulder and spoke into his ear.

  We must move, my friend. Or we will die.

  Where? asked Hem despairingly.

  Away from here. Then we will think what to do. And take this, I am tired of carrying it.

  Ire dropped the thing he had been carrying into Hem's palm. It was a trinket that the crow must have picked up, a small brass object that was strung on a fine steel chain. Hem felt a sudden hysterical desire to laugh: even here, in the midst of utter devastation and ruin, Ire never forgot his thieving ways. He slipped the chain over his head, feeling the trinket strangely hot and heavy against his skin, and stroked Ire's neck.

  Oh, my friend, I'm so glad to see you. I thought you were dead, he said.

  It was a close thing, said Ire. I will tell you later. But now we must go. The soldiers come.

  The rain was beginning to peter out, and as the clouds lifted, an uneasy moon let fall a meager light. Hem glanced back at what was left of the city: it looked as if someone had taken a bite out of the center. The Iron Tower was outlined by a dim glow; it stood intact, but everything in front of it seemed to have been flattened. He wondered vaguely what had happened there, but was simply too tired to care. Ire pushed him on, guiding him away from soldiers he might otherwise, in his weariness, have walked straight into. Somehow Hem renewed his glimveil, somehow he kept walking, although his legs no longer felt as if they belonged to him. If Ire had not continually nagged him, he might have slept where he stood.

  Ire did not let him rest until a washed-out dawn began to lighten the gray landscape. Hem looked up and realized they had come a surprisingly long way. He had been heading down­hill for at least an hour, stumbling through slopes of scree that bruised his ankles and tripped him. They had left the plateau on which Dagra stood, and were now on lower ground, near the shores of the black lake that lapped gloomily on dark sands. Hem was too weary to scavenge through his backpack for food: he simply crawled under a bush and went to sleep. He was wet through and cold, and the ground was stony, but he was beyond thinking about creature comforts. Merely to stop walk­ing was all he asked. Ire crept in beside him, and snuggled into his neck.

  He was woken some hours later by savage pangs of hunger. Ire was nowhere nearby. Hem was so stiff and sore he could barely move, and his arms and legs were covered in grazes and bruises. He looked at his meager supplies – a strip of dried meat and a couple of moldy dates – and considered how to ration them. It was impossible: he would have to steal some food from somewhere. Then he ate the lot, staring glumly over the reeds that rustled in the thin winds by the shoreline, checked his glimveil, and went back to sleep.

  Ire returned at nightfall. He had scouted all around their area, and it was deserted. The countryside was in turmoil: all the roads were blocked by soldiers, some allied to Imank, others to the Nameless One, and he had seen several skirmishes. He had eavesdropped on a couple of conversations between Hulls, and it seemed that no one knew what was happening.

  But I know, said Ire, looking smug. I know more than anyone else.

  Hem, feeling stronger after his long sleep, was amused. You are just talking big, he said.

  Ire ruffled his feathers with irritation. I am a crow, not a lying human being, he said huffily. I don't make things up. I was there. I saw things that others did not.

  But, but what?

  I saw things. But I won't tell if you're not nice.

  Hem smiled wanly. I'll be nice, he said. I promise.

  Ire was silent long enough to judge that he had punished Hem for his impertinence, and then began to tell him what he had seen.

  He had got past the wards and vigilances of Dagra's walls by the simple expedient of flying over them. This was not, he told Hem, as easy as it sounded: he had had to fly around the city and into the mountains, where the walls ran into the solid rock of the Osidh Dagra. Even so, to get over the wards he had to fly so high that it was hard to breathe, and ice crystals formed on his feathers. But at last, late in the afternoon, he had found his way in.

  From above, he could see the heightening tension in the citadel: all the major thoroughfares were beginning to fill with armed soldiers; and artisans and slaves out in the streets hurried to shelter. The increasing winds began to buffet him, and besides the dangers of lightning, there were invisible pres­ences gathering in the upper air that made his feathers stand on end. So he flew low over the roofs of Dagra and began to search for Hem.

  Their months of intimate mindtouching meant that Ire could always find him, no matter where he was. It was, he explained to Hem, like the way he always knew where north was: Hem was a star in the guiding constellations
in his brain. But this time, muffled by the warring sorceries that twisted around the city buildings, the star had gone out. He began to worry that Hem had been killed, and flew from one end of Dagra to another, becoming increasingly agitated.

  Ire had been both repelled and fascinated by the Iron Tower. It drew him with a dreadful magnetism. Each time he swept the city roofline he ventured a little nearer, and, at last, driven by an insatiable curiosity, he flew up its dire height, a gray mote of dust against its massive blackness. The higher he flew, the more uneasy he became; he could feel the prickle of massive protec­tions, vigilances, and wards woven inside the very substance of the tower; but in the gathering darkness and wind, he went unnoticed.

  In a watchtower near the top he glimpsed a lighted window, and something moving inside; but at that moment, he felt Hem's summoning – Hem had now left the barracks of the snouts and was wandering lost through the streets of Dagra with Nisrah at swordpoint. Ire glided away from the tower to speak to him, fearing to trigger a vigilance, and arranged to meet Hem at the gate, before the sorceries broke their mind­touch.

  He had intended at that time to fly straight to the gate to wait for him, but his curiosity got the better of him: he just wanted a closer look at the Iron Tower. A quick reconnoiter could do no harm... The power that he sensed in the walls of the tower was enough to scorch his feathers, and he knew it would have sensed him at once, if it had not been preoccupied: but it was not looking outward. It was intently focused on something inside.

  Ire weighed the danger exactly as he would calculate the risks of stealing a desirable spoon from a crowded kitchen. As was usually the case, his inquisitiveness won over the threat of being caught. Slowly and cautiously, he flew back to the lighted window, perched on a parapet nearby and craned his neck for­ward, trying to see inside. In the shadows of the gathering storm, he did not see the small figure that fixed its eyes on him and began to stalk him.

  The next thing Ire knew, he had been caught by a leather thong weighted at each end with stones, which whipped itself around his legs and made him fall off the parapet onto the inner walk. It happened so quickly he didn't even have time to caw in alarm. Rough hands picked him up, unwound the thong from his legs, and shoved him, protesting furiously, into a sack (which stank, he said indignantly, of dung).

  Ire was very unclear about what had happened next. He had been carried somewhere, and he had heard voices talking and coarse laughter. He suspected that he had been caught for some guard's dinner. He lay very still inside the sack, thinking it might be best to pretend that he were dead. He wondered if his legs were broken and expected any moment that someone would wring his neck. Then he heard new footsteps, another voice giving what sounded like orders. He thought then that his captor was somewhere he shouldn't be, because he seemed to panic. When the other footsteps retreated, his assailant moved with great stealth, still holding onto the sack, and then started running. But he was seen: Ire heard the other voice speaking in anger, and suddenly Ire was flung through the air and landed with a bump on a stone floor. He heard raised voices and a scream and something that felt like a blast of sorcery. He heard footsteps retreating, as if they went down a staircase, and then everything went quiet.

  Ire seemed to have been forgotten. He lay half-stunned by his fall, until he realized that the end of the sack was now open. Cautiously he began to struggle and poked his head out. He could see very little: he was in a room of polished black stone, lit by flickering iron braziers attached to the walls. Nearby, obscuring his view, he could see a large round table, also of black stone, on which were engraved strange patterns and runes that glowed with a faint greenish light. Then, to his joy, he saw a window – really an embrasure, an unglazed slit – not more than ten paces away. But before he could do anything about escaping, he heard rapid footsteps approaching the room, and the door was flung open.

  A single, appalled glance made him withdraw at once into the fragile shelter of his sack, grateful that chance had thrown him into a pool of shadow.

  Here Ire's powers of description began to falter; he did not know how to put what he had seen into the Speech. Hem could visualize, through their mindtouch, a shadowy image of what Ire remembered; but Ire found it so distressing that it was immediately twitched away. What Hem managed to glean from Ire's attempts to describe what he saw was pieced together from several conversations over the next few days.

  Two presences had entered the room. The closest, with its back to Ire, was definitely a Hull, but it emanated a power that even Ire could tell was many times greater than any he had pre­viously encountered. It was tall and heavily built, dressed in black plate armor that bore no device, and its helm also was plain and unadorned. Across its back was a scabbard that drew Ire's eye: like all else about the Hull, it was unadorned, a sheath of bright steel that threw off an evil gleam. From the scabbard jutted the pommel of a sword that Ire said hurt his eyes; it was inscribed with many intricate runes that seemed to writhe as he looked at them.

  The other being was hidden behind the stone table. Ire could only hear its voice, and this terrified him more than anything he had encountered in his short life. It was worse, he said, than any marred beast he had seen in the Hills of Glandugir. This voice was melodious and beautiful, and it always spoke softly, but somehow the beauty made it more frightening, rather than less so. Ire said that what made it most terrifying was that it seemed to be in pain. A sense of immeasurable physical agony ran underneath everything it said and honed each word to a bitter point of impotent malice. It seemed to be utterly without pity, for itself or anything else: it radiated an implacability that Ire thought was like madness. Not the kind of madness that leaves a soul in fragments, but an irrationality tempered by a malignant, intelligent, immensely strong will.

  The entirety of that will was focused on the Hull that stood before it, and the Hull was unshaken and unafraid.

  The Hull could only be Imank, the Captain of the Black Army. And, as for the other, Ire guessed that he must be in the presence of the Nameless One, an experience that very few liv­ing creatures had endured and survived. Ire withdrew slightly, shivering into his sack, wishing he were anywhere else.

  The Nameless One and Imank were arguing, and Ire found to his surprise that he could understand some of it, as they used the Speech. Despite himself, he became intrigued and, as he had not been noticed, his terror lessened slightly. He began to eaves­drop.

  The conversation went on for a long time. Ire found it con­fusing – he couldn't understand most of it. But nevertheless, he worked out that Imank wanted the dominion of the Suderain, as reward for loyal captaincy over the centuries; but the Hull was far from begging. And it seemed that the Nameless One was very reluctant to grant such power. Underneath nearly everything that was said was an implied threat; Ire noticed that Imank used no title for the Nameless One, and simply called him by his usename, Sharma.

  "If I do not have the suzerainty, Sharma," said Imank, "I cannot lead my forces into Annar. I cannot with a proper authority exert your full will on the rebels in Car Amdridh. And my forces demand a proper recognition of their loyalty to you."

  "When the campaign is completed," said Sharma softly, "then you will gain your true reward."

  Ire wondered what this "true reward" might be.

  The argument continued for some time, becoming more and more heated. Ire could feel their hatred and mutual fear, and as their anger rose, so the winds and lightning around the tower increased, and the earth tremors that had been shaking Dagra for hours grew in intensity. Imank began to shout, threatening open rebellion if the Nameless One did not accede to his demands. Then there fell a dreadful silence.

  "I see no loyal captain before me," said the Nameless One coldly. "I see a creature of greed and treachery."

  Quicker than the eye could see, Imank swept out the sword and attacked Sharma. There began a titanic, nightmarish struggle. Ire cowered in his sack, unable to move with fear.

  Then something golden ar
ced through the air, hit the wall by the window and landed not far from Ire. It startled the crow out of his dazed terror and he stared at it with a sudden fierce desire. It was clearly a precious thing; a very precious thing. He hesi­tated for a moment and then hopped out of the sack. His neck thrust forward between his shoulders, he scuttled across the floor to the trinket, grabbed the chain in his beak, and leaped with all his strength for the embrasure. He shot out like an arrow, fleeing for his life, and he didn't look back, not even when the tower itself began to scream and a green fire exploded around him, scorching his feathers and tumbling him down toward the col­lapsing towers of the city of Dagra, where a terrible battle raged in the streets beneath.

  Ire wouldn't talk about what had happened between his flight from the Iron Tower and his meeting with Hem, although Hem asked him if he had seen the terrifying winged beings that had come out of the air at the gate. Part of Hem still wondered if he had dreamed these things. The only thing Ire would say was that he thought he would die. But I did not, he added, fluff­ing out his feathers. Because I am a clever crow.

  When Ire had finished his tale, Hem drew out the chain from under his tunic and looked at the trinket thoughtfully. It was fashioned out of brass, a strange forked thing that didn't seem to have any obvious use. Did it belong to Sharma? But why would the Nameless One carry such a humble object around his neck? Perhaps it was a memento, something he kept to remind himself of his vanished humanity? It seemed most unlikely.

  He looked at the trinket more closely, and realized it was inscribed all over with tiny runes that he couldn't read. A prickle of wariness made him hide it back underneath his clothes. It looked ordinary, but deeper senses told him that he could not treat it lightly. He would think about it later, when they had escaped.

  XXV

  RETURN

  Alone, Hem and Ire could move much more swiftly than a thousand snouts, but both of them were very weary. And Hem had to steal all his supplies. Mostly he raided any cultivated fields they passed on the way, but once he managed to break into a storehouse, from which he took some hard, round breads and smoked meats. He filled up his pack, and after that was not so hungry.