by Ed McDonald
‘You don’t have to convince me that you wanted to serve. You were given that bastion to hold because you had the guts to do it,’ I said. ‘So now you’ve built the Grandspire. Paying your debt of service another way?’
‘If only life were so simple,’ Thierro said. ‘A significant astrological event approaches. A solar flare. Two years ago, I learned that the Grandspire must be completed before it passes.’
I could have become a businessman like Thierro. My life would have been very different, if I had. I’d probably still have my old name, a family, and no damn raven tattoo on my arm. But I had always hated the wheedling money-play, the spinning of coins and promises. I’d always rather have enemies who’d come at me with a spear in hand rather than the kind who’d buy my boots out from under me.
‘If you need Ezabeth Tanza to finish it for you, you’re long out of luck.’
‘You know of the Bright Order and the teachings of the High Witness. Do you believe?’
‘I’m yet to be persuaded.’
Thierro seemed to think that over. Then he leaned forward.
‘A cigar, if I may?’ I frowned. Didn’t think that was a good idea, but it would have been rude to refuse. He took a pair from the tin, lit both and then offered me one.
‘I saw her,’ he said. ‘The Bright Lady. Not just a glimpse, either. A true vision.’
‘Lots of people make that claim. It’s not going to end the war.’
Thierro considered the cigar carefully. He placed it between his lips, drew, then blew smoothly.
‘I didn’t believe it would either. But then I saw her. She cured me, with her fire.’
I said nothing. Hearing people talking about Ezabeth here, in my sanctuary, was like having a long needle driven into my spine. A feeling of terror for her, lost, alone and trapped. Pain for me, for what I’d lost. And envy. Deepest, deepest envy that these true visions had never been for me. I dreamed that I saw her sometimes, in my half-awake state, reaching for me with one hand, imploring. But Tnota was right. I saw what I wanted to see. And then she appeared to the likes of Thierro. The lucky few. Witnesses.
It hurt.
Smoke curled between us, only my cigar tasted flat, dead.
When the ghost in the light first appeared, Dantry had gone searching for her. People around Valengrad were experiencing visions, glimpses of a woman in the phos network. The visions had seemed random: a woman appearing to startle a baker; glimpsed by a guard on the wall; appearing to a clerk in the citadel. She was an aftershock, an echo. Then we’d heard more. Stories from other, farther-away places, and not just the cities but anywhere they had a phos network. Down a mine, even aboard a ship. All across the Dortmark city-states, people saw her: the Bright Lady. The spirit in the light.
‘I understand your reluctance to accept it,’ Thierro said. ‘But when she came to me, she healed me. She burned the dark poison out of me, and I feel her still, deep in my heart.’ He placed a hand over his chest. ‘And she told me the Grandspire must be ready for her coming. She needs it, if she is to be reborn.’
I’d wanted to believe, too. In something that went beyond just a simple flicker in the night. That Ezabeth still lived on, somehow. I had chased the visions, and chased down those that experienced them. But she was nothing. Just an echo. A shadow lingering in the phos network, frozen in time at the moment of her death. Because if she’d been anything else, she would have appeared to me. And not just in my dreams.
Thierro looked so earnest that I didn’t know what to say. It was one thing to believe that Ezabeth had appeared to him. Reports of the Bright Lady were plentiful enough that one more made no difference, and the preachers were proclaiming their visions in the streets, day after day. But nobody had claimed to have heard her before. I was a born cynic, and years of tracking down spies, deserters and seditionists had only toughened me to lies.
‘If we weren’t old friends, I might be hustling you over to the Maud about now,’ I said. ‘You got better, and I’m glad of that. But if you’re hearing voices, then maybe you should be laying off the leaf-pipe.’
Thierro sucked on his cigar, released a cloud of smoke into the still air. It hung there, blue and white, glazing the distance between us.
‘Scepticism is understandable,’ he said. ‘But she didn’t just heal me. She gave me a gift.’
He held out his free hand, palm up. After a moment, a small ball of light grew there, cold and blue-white, mirroring the colour of the smoke. It crackled a little, but gently. Perfectly controlled.
‘You can spin,’ I breathed. The light rotated slowly over his hand as I stared.
It was impossible. Spinners’ ability always came through in adolescence. Thierro had been twenty-one when I fought beside him at Adrogorsk, and he’d never had the power. I stared at the impossible ball of light. It twisted, took on a faint golden hue, and for a moment it bobbed a little circle. He was still calm, still presenting that pleasant, businesslike pressure.
‘Ezabeth Tanza was the greatest Spinner in generations. A mind like few others. Stories of her prowess during the Siege still linger. And she disappeared the night that Nall’s Engine activated. The night the drudge inside the city were annihilated by a light-storm that nobody has ever been able to explain.’ He looked me dead in the eye. ‘Tell me the truth, Ryhalt. It’s her, isn’t it? She’s the spirit in the light. Ezabeth Tanza is the Bright Lady.’
My jaw had locked rigid and I couldn’t speak. Thierro’s businesslike visage shifted. He smiled. My silence had told him all that he wanted to know.
‘Don’t fear,’ he said gently. ‘The secret is safe with me. I just needed – ’
The door banged open and Valiya staggered in the doorway, sweat slicking her face, hand clutched to her collarbone. Blood stained the front of her dress.
‘Nacomo got loose,’ she said.
8
Marollo Nacomo’s escape had not been a masterstroke of planning. Valiya and two jackdaws had been escorting him through the city when he’d grabbed a dagger from a belt and gone slash-wild. None of them were badly injured, but he’d shed enough blood to stop them from getting their hands on him. One of the jackdaws looked likely to lose a couple of fingers and the other wasn’t going to be winning any beauty contests in the near future, but in fairness, he probably wouldn’t have won them anyway.
I had Amaira show Thierro out.
‘Thank you, Ryhalt,’ he said. ‘Things will get better. Trust me.’ We shook hands.
We got Valiya patched up. Amaira brought bandages while we waited for a surgeon to come and suture the wound. It wasn’t deep, just messy.
‘I should have been more careful,’ she said. Her anger at her own mistake hurt her more than the shallow wound. She was right, so I didn’t patronise her with contradiction. I’d become so used to her competence with papers and numbers that I’d tasked her with thug work. The failure was more mine than hers.
‘If you live through your mistakes, there’s always something to take from them,’ I said. ‘We’ll get him back.’
‘I’m sorry. I fucked up, Ryhalt. It won’t happen again.’
‘Just take it easy,’ I said. ‘I need you fixed up. Rest. We’ve got the gate sergeants on the lookout for him. He won’t escape the city.’
I pulled in all my manpower and set them to searching. We questioned Marollo’s acquaintances and colleagues from the theatre, but they’d not seen him in weeks. He’d become a recluse after he fell from the spotlight. Nenn’s Ducks were enjoying their Misery leave but they were more than happy to kick a few doors in and scare a few snooty actors if they were getting paid for it. I had a pair of eyes watching Nacomo’s house too.
I’d had him by the throat and my carelessness had let him slip from my fist. My employees could sense the violence of my mood and kept a safe distance.
I received a request from the marshal to attend her
in the late afternoon. Davandein liked to send her orders like they were invites to a summer garden party, elaborate calligraphy sealed in scented envelopes, but there was a sense of urgency about it, and it read more like an order than a polite invitation. She knew I hated being bossed around, which meant either she was angry, or she was in a lather about something. I was already sporting half a brandy buzz and I wasn’t in the mood to talk to her, but her tone set me on edge. Nenn had been summoned as well, and we waited together in a sitting room whilst Davandein entertained whoever had gone in before us. Nenn wasn’t her usual foul-mouthed self.
‘Gut’s playing up,’ she admitted. ‘Has been for a while.’
‘Probably all those chillies you get through. Can’t be doing your insides any good,’ I said. Nenn’s urge to eat raw red chillies had not diminished in the years since I got her fixed. She frowned, massaging her belly where the drudge blade had pierced her, years ago.
‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘The flesh remembers what it wants. Can’t say no.’
‘What does Davandein want?’
‘Damned if I know,’ Nenn said with a shrug. Something was eating at her. I asked annoying questions until she broke.
‘I worry about it. When it hurts,’ Nenn said grudgingly.
‘About what?’
‘About what’s inside me,’ she said. ‘About what Saravor took out and about what he put back in. Sometimes I wonder if I’m all messed up in there.’ She tried to make her voice light, careless, but she had no skill at acting. ‘Like, if I could get pregnant. Shit like that.’
We rarely spoke of the deal I’d had to strike with the Fixer after Nenn took a drudge blade to the gut at Station Twelve. Saravor had been the only sorcerer with the skills to save her. I’d never regretted making that deal – monstrous though he was, Saravor had saved my best friend’s life. But he wasn’t a healer, and he hadn’t repaired the parts of her that had been damaged. He’d replaced them.
I was no good at talking to people about the things that matter to them. Never had been. Nenn’s comment hung between us, dirtying the air until I couldn’t bear the awkwardness anymore.
‘That what you want? Little shits under your feet?’
‘I don’t know. I’m getting old for it anyway.’
‘You never seemed like the maternal type before,’ I said. It was hard to think of a woman less well suited to motherhood than Nenn, but then, being a parent wasn’t achieved through merit. I asked her, ‘This your idea, or someone else’s?’ And by someone else, I meant Betch.
‘Just something I was thinking on. Sometimes I feel that there’s a window and it’s slowly closing on me, shutting off the light.’
Misery soldiers weren’t overly given to worrying over family and future. You get used to the danger. Gain an expectation that you probably aren’t going to see thirty. Then you hit thirty and forty seems an impossible goal. Those few who made it to fifty were known all through Valengrad. But Nenn had hit thirty running, and I guess everyone mellows with time. Even someone as full of kill as Nenn. I’d had my chance at fatherhood, and I’d failed. Some men aren’t made to be fathers, and some don’t deserve to be.
We were led out onto the citadel’s roof by a servant. I was glad to be saved from having to discuss it any further. I didn’t have anything useful to say.
The wind blew high and hard, the salt-and-chemical stink of the Misery sweeping into the city where the factory runoff couldn’t disguise it. It helped to wake me up, the usual layer of fug pushed back from my thoughts and eyes. The jester’s-hat projectors of Nall’s Engine loomed vast and black above us. Silent, inert. For now.
‘The thing that was stolen,’ Davandein said sharply. ‘Talk to me.’
The marshal looked immaculate in a high-necked white blouse, braces and black, three-quarter-length trousers that were probably a fashion that had yet to reach the Range. The wind whipped away the smoke of a cigarillo that she inhaled through a long-stemmed holder and lips painted strawberry red. She stood alone, but her cabal of Battle Spinners weren’t far away. They were young, peacocks and daffodils every one. A group from the Order of Aetherial Engineers conversed separately.
‘There’s not much to report,’ I said. ‘And it pains me to admit that. I’ve had my men dropping bribes in every quarter, but the property that got taken isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to get fenced in some back-alley pawnshop. Whoever took it wanted it for something specific.’
‘How much danger are we in from it?’
‘We’re on the Range,’ Nenn said. ‘How much does a shit stink?’
It wasn’t the answer that Davandein wanted but she glowered at the broken sky rather than at Nenn.
‘Do you need more resources?’ she asked. ‘Would my Spinners help?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll get it back.’
I wasn’t making the promise just because I felt responsible. I was responsible, and the frozen raven that had torn itself free from my arm had been sent to alert me. It had not arrived in time, though, and its half-ruined message had not been coherent. I expected to get another message from Crowfoot at any time, but why his bird had failed to get through worried at me. It wasn’t like his power to be misspent, or like his workings to go awry. That in itself was troubling.
‘Didn’t need to come all this way just to tell you that,’ Nenn said. She’d been winning at tiles and hadn’t enjoyed being interrupted.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to keep an eye on the Bright Order. Both of you. If they step out of line, or overstep their mark, I need to put them beneath my heel. Their presence here troubles me.’
Davandein flicked the cigarillo from the end of the holder, loaded up another. I glanced at Nenn. She didn’t like the marshal much.
‘They’re just crazies,’ Nenn said. I hated to admit it, but talking with Thierro had bothered me. He was a smart man. Brilliant in commerce, even. As a student he’d been fond of drinking, fond of shooting, and fond of taking a girl around a dance floor and the dance that followed. We hadn’t been close, but I’d have called him a friend. I’d been a shit to him once, at one of those very dance halls. He’d beaten me at cards earlier that night, so when a girl to whom he’d written a hundred love sonnets had gone with me and I’d seen him scowling at me, I’d tipped him a mocking little salute as I led her out the door. But even when I’d made him angry, Thierro hadn’t done the rash thing and challenged me to a duel – as Torolo Mancono would do two years later. It would have been a foregone conclusion; even then I’d been big, and I’d been much better than him with a blade. Instead of throwing his dignity onto the fire, Thierro had been calm, composed. He’d taken the loss, ignored the barb and moved on to the next girl. He’d got her too, as I remembered.
For a man who exhibited that level of self-control even when drunk to be convinced of the Bright Lady’s coming worried me much more than the preachers on the street. An uneducated man can be led to believe anything that suits his mood, but the Thierros of the world were a rarer breed. Only he knew something that the other believers didn’t. Maybe that counted for something.
‘I need to know if the Bright Order are telling the truth,’ Davandein said. She ejected the words as though they’d rotted beneath her tongue. ‘The High Witness is coming here, to Valengrad. He claims that a new world order will begin here. That justice will be restored. I need to know what he plans.’
She was worried about her own power, I thought. Her position.
‘Valiya has a dossier on them,’ I said. ‘There are four Witnesses in total. They’ve travelled the states, preaching the message. Hard to pin them down. Hard to get any information on any of them. We know two names: Valentia, and Glaun. But they travel secretly. I know next to nothing about them, other than that they’re expected to arrive in Valengrad in the next two weeks.’
‘The Bright Order edge perilously close to outrig
ht dissent,’ Davandein said. ‘The High Witness has garnered considerable support, even here. They take wild, crowd-pleasing steps to win the mob and trumpet revolutionary diatribe alongside their dogma. I want them squashed.’
‘But you don’t want to question their religion, because if they’re telling the truth, then you’ll be wrong and look stupid,’ Nenn said. Davandein’s glower turned on her this time. I let them clash antlers as unwelcome memories resurfaced, bubbles of gas rising through the fetid swamp.
‘Fuck.’ No amount of cream and powder would keep that much anger from Davandein’s face. ‘Fuck it all. The High Witness will make trouble for us. I need to counter them. Somehow.’
‘I’ve ignored the Bright Order for too long,’ I said. ‘I should have got a leash around them before they got this big. There are thousands of them now.’ I’d let my personal feelings about their beliefs dissuade me from looking into their activities, and that had been foolish. Maybe Thierro believed the preaching of the Witnesses, but he was wrong. I was sure he was wrong. Wasn’t I?