by Ed McDonald
‘Sounds to me like you’re fighting your own demons, not his,’ I said. I thought of Ezabeth, scarred and burned, and how it hadn’t mattered a shit to me. I could have said as much to Nenn, but Ezabeth had kept her true face from the world and only revealed it to me. It would have been a betrayal to speak of it, even if she was dead and gone. Even if it would help Nenn. ‘Love’s not an easy thing to bear. Makes us doubt ourselves in ways that don’t make sense. Don’t fuck things up for yourself because you’re afraid to be happy.’
‘I’m not happy,’ she said. ‘I have a horrible fucking hole in my face.’ She shook her head, annoyed at herself. ‘So yeah. Sometimes I think maybe I should find a decent Fixer, get him to stick some poor dead girl’s nose on my face.’
There wasn’t much that I could say to that. I never was very good at comforting people. I signalled for another bottle of wine instead. That was about the best that I could manage.
‘How are you holding up, Ryhalt?’ Nenn asked. Shifting focus to me. ‘All these Bright Order people coming into the city. It can’t be easy on you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess it isn’t.’
‘Still dreaming of Ezabeth?’
‘If I sleep,’ I said. ‘The worst part, though? I want to believe the Bright Order. I want to believe she’s going to appear in a flash of light and thunder. Governor Thierro believes it. Sometimes, I wonder if he’s right. And then I remember that she funnelled an Engine’s worth of phos through her body and wrote herself out of existence. She’s gone.’
‘I know,’ Nenn said. ‘But you’re not.’
‘Not yet.’
12
Day slipped to dusk, dusk turned to night.
A beautiful song rose over the city. It began at the far edges of hearing and grew, drawing closer. Louder and louder, high and nasal, rising and falling with wordless melody until it demanded all attention. It ended abruptly, with an explosion louder than any cannon that I’d ever heard fired.
I fell from the chair I’d been dozing in, landing in a flurry of reports and spilled ink as I knocked the bottle from the desk.
‘Shitting fuck!’ I exploded, half because I’d been woken by an immense boom and half because I was covered in ink.
As my brain reengaged, for one terrible moment I thought someone had activated the Engine. I panted in my ink puddle, listening for the new apocalypse, but nothing followed the detonation save the frightened barking of a hundred dogs. The last lamp had burned down. I must have drifted off, but that ephemeral song had cut into my dreams, if it had been real at all. I went to the window, rubbing at the stiffness in my neck and shoulders. Sleep must have crept up on me, and I felt worse for it.
The night was deep as Eala sat fat and golden over the city. Valengrad never truly went dark, but a mile distant, over rooftops and chimney stacks, I saw a trail of strange light, green and purple and yellow, rising alongside smoke and the red glow of flame. Over in Mews, a civilian district.
People had died.
The city was awake now, babies, children, dogs, a chorus of voices joining a discordant orchestra of fear and panic. The door flew open and Amaira burst in, wide-eyed and red-faced from running up the stairs. It was touching that she’d looked for me before the doorman.
‘What the fuckin’ hell was that, Captain-Sir?’ she shouted.
‘Language,’ I snapped, taking out my anxiety on her. Were we under attack? The noise, the lights, neither boded well. My head began to take up a slow throb as my body remembered how I’d driven it over the last week, protesting at the interruption of its much-needed rest.
‘Was it the drudge?’ Amaira asked. I put an arm over her shoulders, which felt strange to do because I don’t do hugging, but she was trembling and scared and that’s what you do with kids when they’re afraid. Her fear drove me to nonchalance.
‘I don’t know what it was. Maybe just an accident. Not the drudge.’
She looked at me with big, terrified eyes. It had only been four years since the drudge shattered the wall and orphaned her. I gave her a smile and that unfamiliar expression seemed to help somehow. We looked out at the swirls of bright colour that spiralled up into the sky. ‘I should probably go find out what’s happened,’ I said. Amaira didn’t need instructing – she went and found my sword belt, glad to be useful. I put on my long black uniform coat and belted it over the top.
‘You know what I did with my boots?’ I asked.
‘Took ’em down to be polished,’ she said.
‘When did you do that?’
‘After you fell asleep.’
I almost said she should have been sleeping too, but coming from me I doubted it would carry much weight, and besides, she’d been doing me a favour. Never mind how she knew I was still at the office or how she knew when I’d fallen asleep. Fight the battles you can win, run from the ones you can’t. Best lesson I ever learned.
I found cold coffee in a pan in the kitchen and forced it down, as though it might help with the throbbing that was growing behind my eyes. My doorman looked shaken. He’d placed a broadsword on the counter, as if expecting an attack at any moment and eyed the longsword that I was carrying in addition to my standard-issue cutlass. I didn’t expect to find action out there, but it never hurts to go prepared.
I called at my own house to pick up my pretend son. My housekeeper seemed glad to see me, even more glad that I was taking Maldon out of the house.
‘There’s a demon in that boy,’ she told me. ‘He’s too clever by half and too nasty by far.’
‘You’ll not hear me disagree,’ I said, and she didn’t know the half of it. Technically, the demon had been removed, but he was doing a good job of being just as unpleasant. I asked her to wake him, and loitered in the hallway.
The house was more than I’d ever expected to possess again. Carpets, a broad staircase, enough rooms to house a small battalion. In the dining room there was a table that could have seated sixteen, but I’d never used it. In the hallway, a ceremonial suit of parade armour stood on a stand, where it had been since I was given it as a thank-you for the part I’d played during the Siege. It would have been ideal for the battlefield two hundred years ago, but like all things of beauty, its time had passed. There was a lesson there, I suppose. One drunken evening Tnota and I had taken it out into the courtyard and shot pistols at it, but despite its lavish ornamentation, the smith who’d made it had taken pride in his work. The engraving was elaborate, but the steel was the best in the states and our shots had pinged off it. There was a lesson there, as well.
Maldon was not in the room that I had allocated for him, and the housekeeper found him sleeping down in the cellar, in the clutter of what was going to be his workshop. He wasn’t happy to be woken, and of all the people in Valengrad, he’d managed to sleep through the strange song that even now was calling in my ears. He had a sour-vomit smell about him and a smear of some kind of oil across his brow. I began to wonder whether allowing him to work on his potentially dangerous project whilst keeping up his drinking had been the best of ideas, but then, I’d always combined alcohol and fighting and I was still around.
‘I was having a lovely dream,’ Maldon said, evidently wishing he was still having it. ‘Remember those girls we met over Enhaust’s shop?’
‘Not now,’ I said. My housekeeper looked very disapproving.
We rode double across to Mews. Falcon was a belligerent animal, but he wasn’t spooked by the people who had ambled out to make a lot of noise in the street in their nightclothes and overcoats, muttering fearfully about the song. It seemed of more interest to most of them than the following explosion and more than one was trying to replicate it.
The damage site was busy with people and fire and a number of buildings in a row of tenement houses had been demolished. I’d seen buildings hit by heavy ordnance before, the cannon balls chewing holes in the walls, but that was n
othing compared to this. The buildings were not just damaged; they were gone. Reduced to piles of rubble and broken timber, debris spread liberally across the road. Even the windows of the houses opposite had been blown in and the guts of an adjoining building were laid bare, displaying the former occupant’s bad taste in armoires and decor. The rubble seemed to glitter slightly, twinkling as if the stars had descended to take residence amidst the destruction.
Somewhere, a woman was wailing her grief.
Anybody who had been in the levelled houses would have been killed instantly. A fine dust permeated the air and fire had spread to the surrounding buildings. Teams of aldermen, soldiers and locals battled the flames, forming bucket chains that ran down the street to the water pumps. They worked efficiently: the fires were small and would be brought under control quickly, so I rode past them to get a better look at what had happened.
‘What a bleeding mess,’ Maldon said. For once, his usual coldness had thawed.
Now that we were up close, I could see no sign of the swirls of colour that had been visible at a distance and began to wonder if it had been some kind of colossal accident. If I hadn’t heard that singing sound, I’d have guessed that a store of blasting powder had gone up, destroying four homes in the blast. The bodies of their residents were still buried beneath the rubble. It would have taken a lot of powder to cause that kind of damage, though, and this was a residential street not a military store. But stranger things had happened. Maldon was sniffing the air like a hound.
‘Something familiar about the smell,’ he said.
‘I don’t smell any explosives,’ I said. Blasting powder has its own special flavour, a scent I’ve always enjoyed, partly because the drudge don’t use powder weapons. Their technology is a way behind ours. But it wasn’t present here. Maldon was picking up something else. I’d brought him because I needed his unique understanding of things dark and unexplained.
‘It wasn’t a powder weapon,’ he said. ‘Sorcery did this.’
‘A Spinner?’
‘No. Even a well-trained Battle Spinner couldn’t do this – certainly not easily.’
I felt the pressure behind my eyes intensify, tried to squint it away.
‘Ezabeth could have done it,’ I said. Maldon snorted.
‘I suppose. But she was rarer than wings on a pig. At my strongest, with ten canisters, I’d have struggled to do this.’
I tried to smell whatever he was getting, but all I could get was stone, and night, and grief.
‘These were just civilian homes,’ I said. ‘Nothing special or important. I don’t know who lived here, but a glance up and down the street tells me that all of them together were poorer than this was worth. One thing’s for sure, doing this didn’t come cheap, whether it was done with powder, phos or some other power.’
We stood and watched the scurrying firefighters. They went about their work efficiently. Some were weeping for neighbours as they passed buckets down the line, or maybe their tears were despair at the pointlessness. I saw black-uniformed citadel soldiers, the troops of private units in mismatched livery and yellow-hooded Bright Order militia all working side by side. Valengrad knew how to pull together in a crisis, at least when it meant stopping houses from going up in flame.
I dismounted and crossed to the rubble, coughing in the dust-laden air. It sparkled, glittering like a sequined party gown and though someone shouted that I should keep away from it, I didn’t sense any danger from a pile of broken house. The light caught on a small fragment of something, winking at me in the dark. I knelt and picked it out, turned it over. It was hot to the touch, not hot enough to burn but warm enough that I didn’t want to hold it for long. A piece of dull, cloudy rock crystal with a vaguely yellow hue. I looked for the light to catch on something else within the debris of roof tiles, shattered beams and broken bricks. Sure enough, I quickly picked out another chunk of crystal, jagged and as long as my finger.
‘What the fuck are these?’ I grumbled aloud. Maldon had joined me and I passed him one.
‘Looks like common rock crystal to me,’ he said. He held it up in front of his face, as if he could see through his scarf to examine it. A reflex, or something else? It was definitely rock crystal. Had to wonder what the hell it was doing here, in among the rubble. The blast site was littered with it. It wasn’t worth much, the kind of thing kids find entertaining. Certainly nothing explosive about it.
The crystal confirmed Maldon’s conclusion. This was not some powder-store accident. Somebody bore the responsibility for what had happened here today. Someone had to pay for it.
I lingered at the site as the fires were put out and grim-faced labourers began digging. Some of the beams were heavy and had to be dragged clear by horses, but most had been splintered to the point that a few workmen could heave them aside. The first body they found was a boy in his teenage years. The blanket he’d died under was black and red. He was unrecognisable, his skull flattened, and though a nearby grandmother wailed and tore at her hair, there was some kind of mercy in that. He wasn’t recognisable as a person and at least it had been quick. I forced myself to watch as the workmen placed the bloody blanket back over him.
They didn’t understand, nobody did. Valiya got it, the need to observe, to fuel the anger that stokes the need to fight. I watched, and I saw the dreadful grief on that grandmother’s face. I made myself listen to it. Fuck sleeping. Fuck people’s fearful stares, fuck the lack of respect from the squawks and the cream. This was what we fought: this cruel and indiscriminate waste of life. How the hell could I sleep when there was this much darkness in the world? Ezabeth had fought it. She’d stood against it, shown the way. But she was gone, destroyed, nothing of her left but a whisper in the light. It fell to me, now. I didn’t trust anyone else enough to pass on the responsibility.
Three hours after that first blast, a second song rose over the city.
I heard it sooner this time. Faint at first, but growing rapidly in strength. I looked up to see the source of the unearthly song, somewhere above and away, out across the Misery. There was a raw, alien beauty to it, and this time I detected more than one voice amidst the soar and the lull before I saw it in the sky. It began as a faint, distant light. Those same pastel hues, purple and green and yellow, shimmered together in a sphere of light, tiny as a star at first but growing larger. It shot past the cracks in the sky, seeming to gain speed as it did. And then the descent. No longer a phenomenon of the sky, it arched down, down, down toward the city. For one terrible moment I thought, this is for me, this one comes for me, but then it slammed down somewhere else. The thunder came, a roar of detonation as it met the ground, and sparks and coloured lights leaped up into the sky.
‘Spirit of fucking mercy,’ I said. Maldon had his hands over his ears to block out the echo of that song as it passed through the streets.
‘Agh! My head!’ Maldon exclaimed. ‘My fucking ears! That sound, it burns.’
He staggered and went down to his knees. I placed a hand on his shoulder but he shrugged it off. Whatever mess Shavada had made of his body and brain, he was overly sensitive to magic. Whatever we’d just seen, it was fucking magic all right, and it was being thrown clear across the damn Misery.
A terrible chill ran through me. I had to grit my teeth against the sudden swell of uncertainty and fear that rose within me. No lone sorcerer had that kind of power. But a Deep King might. The possibility did not bear thinking about.
The great red letters on the citadel’s walls flared bright and red in the night. COURAGE disappeared, and instead they read: COMMAND COUNCIL SUMMONS. I hadn’t seen those words displayed so brazenly since Shavada had laid siege to the walls, and I remembered how poorly that had turned out for the council.
But then the song came again. And again. And before the night was over, there was panic in the streets.
The morning’s death toll was 178 souls. The drudge’s m
issiles killed indiscriminately. A granary suffered a direct hit, the flour inside igniting and magnifying the power of the blast fivefold, reducing Tenth Street to rubble. Homes, shops, animal pens, the blazing missiles came down in and around the city seemingly at random. The terror struck home like a knife.
The drudge sent twenty-seven missiles in all, each preceded by that voiceless song. Sixteen either fell short or soared past the city altogether, exploding out in the recently ploughed fields or churning up great clouds of stinking Misery dust. But eleven hit, and each one of them caused chaos. Soldiers tried to keep order, but there was nothing they could do to protect anyone from those descending orbs of death.
A single orb arced down toward the citadel. Before it could come down upon the projectors of Nall’s Engine, the light-sphere detonated in midair as if it had slammed up against a wall of hard air. Most of the Engine was belowground but Nall had also left his device some protection. I watched the fires from a balcony on the fourth floor of the citadel, wondering if the whole building was protected, or just the Engine itself.
‘Monstrous,’ Nenn said, looking out at a dozen blazes across the city. It took a lot to throw her off her stride. ‘It’s barbaric,’ she said through her teeth. ‘This isn’t war. It shouldn’t be war.’
‘It’s not as though the Deep Kings spared a thought for civilians during the Siege,’ I said. ‘They’re not going to now. They’ve been quiet for four years, but we knew that it wouldn’t last. They’ll never be satisfied until they’ve destroyed us all. Our respite is over.’
I thought of Crowfoot and his Heart of the Void, and what he’d done to the people of Clear, Adrogorsk and all the towns and villages that lay around them. What he’d done to the world, even to the sky.
‘There’s no defence against this,’ Nenn said. ‘What can we do?’
It was a good question.