Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Find me information that will bring them down,’ Davandein said. ‘And find whatever was stolen from that vault.’

  We left the roof. I was glad to get out of the biting wind.

  9

  We rode quickly through the streets, pallid rain fizzing against the phos tubes. My armour was going to need oiling as soon as I got it back home. It’s all very impressive to look at, but if you have to take care of your own gear, it rapidly becomes a pain in the arse.

  ‘There’s a public commotion,’ Tnota told me. ‘Condition Blue.’

  ‘You’re the only one who uses those categories,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what “Condition Blue” means.’

  ‘It means that there’s a public commotion,’ Tnota said. He gave me his most infuriating grin.

  We clattered through the Spills, toward the Grandspire. It thrust high toward the sky as if seeking to pry open the white-bronze cracks. Nine hundred feet tall, taller than any tower had a right to be. Thierro’s engineers had done something with phos-welded pillars of twisted steel and despite its vast size it had survived all of the recent tremors. The ground had been shaking only that morning, a mild quake, but it put everyone on edge.

  Thierro had been right. The Grandspire was an astonishing monument to man’s ability to create. It wasn’t beautiful, too blocky, too practical, but it was easy to imagine the Bright Order pilgrims’ awe as they approached the city and saw it towering into the broken heavens. When the Witnesses arrived they were probably going to do a jig.

  The tower was nearly two hundred feet wide at the base. They’d had to demolish a good bit of the Spills to make room for it and nobody missed the slums that had been levelled, nobody whose complaints mattered, anyway. When it was finished, it would be the greatest phos mill the republic had ever seen, the moonlight filtering down through a hundred lenses, floor after floor, to the Spinners at the base of the tower. The Westland Frontier Traders were doing their part to see that Nall’s Engine was adequately supplied. Or at least, they believed that they were. I knew better, of course.

  A crowd had gathered in the spacious plaza that led to the big double doors leading into the Grandspire. Gawkers tended to get in the way or get hurt when things got out of hand, today fear steamed the air between the scattered masons, carpenters and engineers. They held tight to their hammers and saws, stood in disordered clusters. The workers came in every colour and shape imaginable, brought in from across the breadth of the known world to raise the Grandspire in just a handful of years. The next shift would be arriving soon, and the plaza would become even more crowded.

  A troop of men with shouldered firearms were marching in poor step toward the Grandspire’s open doors. At their head, I was surprised to see Governor Thierro. I shouldn’t have been. It was his Grandspire after all. I gave Falcon my heels and intercepted them.

  ‘What’s the deal here, Governor?’ I said.

  ‘Something from the Misery entered the Grandspire nearly an hour ago,’ he said. His face was serious, his eyes as intense as always. ‘I’m going to bring it out.’ He wore polished, heavily engraved armour as befitted his status, and this time he was armed. Not with anything so clumsy or mundane as weapons: a Battle Spinner’s harness formed an X across his shoulders, two phos canisters strapped to his belt.

  I’d been shaking down whisper-men for any signs of Nacomo when I’d received a message saying something similar. In all my time on the Range I’d never known a Misery creature to get into the city.

  ‘Wait for the citadel soldiers,’ I said. ‘If it is from the Misery, then they’ve the experience to deal with it. Whatever it is.’ I looked over the men that Thierro was leading. They were company men employed by the Westland Frontier Traders as security, but some of them wore the yellow hoods of the Bright Order: religious zealots. Not the best men to have at your back.

  ‘Should bring up Davandein’s Battle Spinners as well,’ Tnota said. I’d filled in everyone who mattered about Thierro’s spinning abilities.

  Thierro didn’t like to be told what to do by a man of no rank. His eyes said everything about his disdain for Tnota, who admittedly was dressed like he’d fallen out of bed and into a random assortment of clothes.

  ‘We’re going in now,’ Thierro said firmly. ‘Every minute that the workmen are stood idle, Westland loses thousands of marks.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long while since you’ve had to deal with the things that crawl around in the Misery.’

  ‘Trust me, Ryhalt, I’ve met my share of monsters. Those that saw it describe it as a man without a face,’ Thierro said. ‘The workmen all got out and I’m burning money just standing here talking to you. If we used to handle bottles of that forty-nine back in the day, I’m pretty sure that you and I can handle someone else who’s off their face. Besides, these are good men. Solid.’

  I gave them another look. Mostly in their twenties or thirties, their gear middle-of-the-range, some of it old, some new. Nobody looked incapable, but they lacked the toughness you see with professionals. About half of them were packing firepower, and that’s when I saw the gleaming silver barrels of flarelocks among them. Tnota had spotted them as well. There were six of them, tubes and wires connecting the phos tanks that provided the weapons with ignition. As I glanced across them I saw that of those carrying them, every one was wearing a yellow hood. I said nothing about it, tried to give nothing away, but Tnota glanced my way. He’d seen it too.

  ‘They look sound,’ I said. ‘Good enough.’

  The security force bristled with pride, shifted the piece-of-shit flarelocks on their shoulders. Thierro was calm; we could have been discussing the price of wheat. Men like him don’t fear the night; when you’re lord of the dance, you think yourself indestructible.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ I said. Thierro tipped his head toward me in acknowledgment. To Tnota I said, ‘I take it you don’t want to come?’

  ‘Someone should stay down here and deal with the Condition Blue,’ he said.

  ‘What’s a Condition Blue?’ Thierro asked.

  ‘A public commotion,’ I grunted.

  I checked my pistols over, tested the action and loaded. They had barrels the length of my forearm, and my forearm was longer than most. Flintlock mechanisms, expensive, heavy things with walnut stocks and engraved metalwork. For a man who didn’t like fancy things I seemed to own more than my share of them.

  The Grandspire was surrounded by a broad plaza, mostly choked up with stacks of stone and timber needed for the frantic construction. Crowds of men in heavy leather aprons, oil stained, hair lifted by static charge, watched us approach the doors. I was at the fore, clicking metallically in my half armour, black-steel lobster plates covering most of my squishy bits and my poleaxe on my shoulder, a blade at my side and pistols holstered across a bandolier. Standard kit for gracking monsters. As we neared the Grandspire we ascended the broad tiers of steps leading toward the doors.

  ‘I don’t suppose it’s on the ground floor?’ I said. I didn’t have much hope.

  ‘It was heading upward when the labourers fled,’ Thierro said. He twisted a dial on one of his phos canisters and a light began winking. Primed. ‘Ready weapons, lads,’ he said. He’d been out of the military for a long time, but he’d retained his sense of command well enough. Given his success overseas, he probably could have made Range Marshal if not for Adrogorsk.

  ‘Keep those things away from me,’ I said. ‘If I’m going to get gracked today, I’d rather it was by the faceless monster than by one of your weapons exploding.’

  ‘The Bright Lady’s faithful have no fear of the light, Captain,’ one of the soldiers said to approving murmurs from the militia. ‘These weapons are holy. They draw their power from her.’

  Guns driven by light. It made sense, to them at least. Levan Ost’s killers came into mind. I didn’t thi
nk that any of these security men had any relationship to those men just because they carried the same kind of hardware, but perhaps Develen Maille had been Bright Order. He’d been desperate, and desperate men are bent to religion all too easily.

  Worth thinking about when there weren’t monsters to hand.

  ‘Just don’t throw them around,’ I said. I kept a cautious distance.

  The doors were open. I let the militia go in first. Never know what might be waiting beyond a door.

  The Grandspire was not finished or running yet. The brickwork was raw, no panelling, no plaster, the skeleton of a behemoth only. Gaps in the ceiling sat ready for vast lenses, some as broad as fifteen feet across. It was an old design, the dream of a great scholar two hundred years dead, finally coming to fruition now that the princes had opened their purses. I wondered whether this new mill would be better for the Talents, the poor bastards who worked the light. Ezabeth had pitied them, and I had never forgotten her tale about her friend, worked to death in a mill.

  What was most incredible about the Grandspire was that it hadn’t simply collapsed during the recent earthquakes. There was a rigid solidity to it that told me that it would take more than a few tremors to shake the dust out of this tower.

  The ground floor was broad, high-ceilinged and empty of near everything except building supplies.

  ‘Scour the place floor by floor,’ Thierro said. ‘Quick now. Time’s wasting.’

  The bones of the Grandspire were in place, but it was still very much a work in progress. So much bare, undressed stone made every footstep echo. A winding stairway led up and up. There was supposed to be a phos-powered platform within an enclosed shaft to transport people and machinery up to the higher floors, but Thierro said that it wasn’t connected yet, which meant that I was going to have to climb all the way in armour. If the creature had gone all the way to the top, my bad leg was going to be screaming agony by nightfall.

  ‘This is going to take all day,’ I said, as we reached the fifth floor. I was sweat-drenched inside my steel already, wished that I hadn’t worn it. I wasn’t as young as I used to be. Thierro seemed to be holding up just fine.

  ‘Good show. We’ll split up. If we’re in groups of four, we can take three floors at a time.’

  I didn’t think Thierro’s troopers were as keen on the idea as he was. The safest option was to go back down and let a thousand grenadiers in here with Battle Spinners, but it was too late now. Whatever the faceless creature was, it didn’t seem to have killed any of the workers. Not that we knew of yet. Thierro sensed the apprehension too, and addressed his men. ‘Every minute we spend here is a minute that work has ceased,’ he said. He raised his voice. ‘The Bright Lady needs the Grandspire to be completed.’

  ‘For the Bright Lady!’ the hooded militia chorused, which was the stupidest thing I’d heard all day. Those without yellow hoods either looked away or joined in anyway, if without much enthusiasm.

  ‘Bastian, Elta, Hemley. Go with the Blackwing captain. You three with me on the seventh floor. The rest of you on the eighth. We’ll meet on the stairwell after each sweep. The Lady comes.’

  ‘The Lady comes,’ the soldiers intoned, bowing their heads. I huffed with irritation and headed off up the stairs. Two men and a woman followed me. Two of them were packing flarelocks, carried reverently, which may have been religious sentiment on their part, but I was glad to see the weapons weren’t being banged against the floor or jogged about. Falling through one of the lens holes in the floor was a better way to go than getting melted into your own weapon.

  ‘Got any experience with monsters?’ I asked, as we began to move through the corridors of the sixth floor. Fine stone dust lingered in the air, and we were soon speckled with white powder.

  ‘No, sir.’ Bastian was in his twenties, but his face hadn’t quite left his teens. ‘I was a clockmaker’s apprentice before my vision.’

  Elta could have been a musician, and Hemley should have been off tending cows somewhere the wheat grew long and thick. Maybe they carried their weapons so reverently because they were unused to holding them, rather than from a sense of spirituality. They were greener than cut summer grass and probably less use. The only thing I could have said in their favour was that they knew which end the shot came out.

  ‘You aren’t soldiers,’ I said. Not a good time to knock their confidence, but heading into action with untried troops at your back is a recipe for getting a blade through it.

  ‘We’re the people’s militia,’ Elta said.

  ‘You could be acrobats or goose tamers for all I care,’ I said, ‘you aren’t soldiers. You got any idea how to use those swords you’re wearing?’

  ‘I do,’ Bastian said eagerly. He had a short, scratchy beard and an energy that said he always thought himself right.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what we were facing up here, but I hoped that Thierro had taken his best with him. He’d not given me anything worth spit.

  I went first down the hall with my poleaxe on my shoulder and a pistol in my left hand. I hissed at my spring buds to be quiet as I went ahead, glancing through empty doorways into empty, unfinished rooms. First time I’d been in the Grandspire. I had to say, I was impressed.

  The floor was empty of anything other than cigar butts, piecrusts and piss stains left by the labourers. Most of the chambers housed spaces for giant lenses in both the floor and ceiling. I jumped half out of my skin when I looked up to see one of Thierro’s men peering down from the floor above.

  ‘So how’d you wind up carrying arms for Westland?’ I asked. ‘You got a Whitelande accent. You aren’t local.’

  ‘I carry arms for the Bright Lady, and the Witnesses,’ Bastian said.

  ‘Sure. Imagine that’s what I asked.’

  ‘I saw her. In my own home,’ Bastian said, sombrely. ‘She looked so sad. I knew at once that she was the Bright Lady I’d heard about, and she chose me over my brothers, all six of them.’

  ‘I saw her too,’ Elta agreed. ‘Clear as day, she was.’

  We picked around a clutter of tools and workbenches, abandoned by the labourers. This place should have been ringing with the sounds of chisels, trowels and buzzing, phos-powered saws. The emptiness made it feel curiously lonely. I turned a corner and scanned for signs of inhuman things. Clear.

  ‘What about you? You see the Lady too?’ I asked Hemley. He was the most reserved, the only one I thought might actually be worth something in a scrap. He also had a smoking matchlock rather than a flarelock, which made me like him more.

  ‘No,’ he said, but his voice was no less assured. ‘Not yet, anyway. The Witnesses say that in time, we all will.’

  His accent placed him as from some country village, someplace where milking a cow was the highlight of the day and a tree falling would be talked about for years in fable.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ I said. I nosed around a corner, pistol leading the way. Clear.

  ‘The Order came recruiting,’ he said. ‘And they spoke a lot of sense. About how the wealth’s all the wrong way around. One man in a thousand has more wealth than all the rest put together, and even if some fellow tries to raise himself, he can’t earn a title. All this on the Range – the Grandspire, the wall, the soldiers – it’s all important, I suppose, but out in the states the people are taxed to their limit, while the princes sip sparkling wine from diamond cups. It can’t go on.’

  ‘You think there’s revolution on the table? That’s why you came?’

  ‘I think the Bright Lady is a sign that something better is coming,’ Hemley said, and as much as I didn’t want to, I felt a treacherous twinge of hope that he was right.

  ‘But you don’t believe?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Bastian said fiercely.

  ‘Sure, of course,’ Hemley said, though I didn’t find him terribly convincing. ‘People have seen her in visi
ons, haven’t they? Enough people that I don’t doubt their sincerity.’ He shrugged. It didn’t seem terribly important to him.

  As we neared the end of our sweep there came a deep, earthy boom from far above us. A fine drift of dust sifted down.

  We backed up and regrouped with Thierro and the others on the stairs. His men, who had previously worn expressions of pious solemnity, looked like they’d woken up to the situation. Sweat on their brows. Fingers getting twitchy near firing levers.

  ‘Higher,’ Thierro said.

  ‘Higher,’ I agreed.

  Seventy-five fucking floors. I ditched my axe. Wished that I wasn’t wearing armour. My leg protested, the old wound stabbing at the bone. This was a young man’s game. By the time I saw daylight ahead of me I was wet through with sweat and blowing steam.

  I was the last to reach the roof.

  The top of the Grandspire was a vast, flat platform of perfectly clear, phos-hardened glass with a low curtain wall. Through the three feet of glass I could see the floor below, and the lens holes leading down. I felt nervous about stepping onto it, like I stepped onto the perfectly still surface of a pool of water. The glass platform’s only feature sat in the centre, the Iron Sun, a twenty-foot-wide globe of black metal on a pedestal, its outer surface armoured in a series of overlapping metal shells. Smoke rose around it and the glass floor was cracked and splintered into chips of fused glass, the smell of blasting powder lingering despite the fierce wind. The soldiers were mostly clustered on the other side of the Iron Sun, some upright and some kneeling, but all of their weapons trained on a lone figure beside the curtain wall.

  A familiar figure stood beside a hole that had been blown in the wall, looking out across Valengrad. He wore a long white nightshirt, which fluttered around his legs in the high wind. The same nightshirt we’d arrested him in. His shoulders worked up and down in time with laboured breaths. Even only able to see his back I recognised him well enough. Marollo Nacomo, star of the stage and traitor to the Range.