Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘We’ll persevere,’ Betch said. The handsome captain put a consoling arm around Nenn’s shoulders, but she shrugged it away. She didn’t want comfort. She was too raw, too angry, and when you get the kill inside you, comfort’s like vinegar to a wound. She leaned against the railing and smoked, glowering at the sky. It was quiet now, and a red dawn was making her way across the Misery’s distant horizon. The cracks in the sky had been quiet all night, as they listened to this new symphony of terror.

  ‘Lot of questions need answering,’ I said. But, in my heart, I knew that whatever this was, it was out of my hands. This was for the citadel to deal with, not Blackwing.

  ‘The marshal will devise a plan,’ Betch said.

  ‘Maybe. For now, we’re lucky to have survived it. Not everyone can say that.’

  One hundred and seventy-eight people. Wasted lives, wasted ambitions, wasted dreams. The poor bastards probably never even knew it was coming. The orbs came down with a little warning, but nobody could say where they would fall until it was too late.

  Davandein worked with her commanders all night, but finally saw me as the sky turned from blush to blue. At least, as blue as it ever gets by the Misery. She looked none the worse for having been up all night dealing with an attack that we’d never seen coming. She wore a long, pleated skirt that fell to her heeled ankle boots, beneath a military coat with gold and silver skulls and cogs around the epaulets. Black opals glittered at her ears. High fashion and military pragmatism combined.

  ‘Keep it brief, Commander,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to tell you how much I have to do, and this isn’t one of your monster hunts.’

  ‘It isn’t, but it might become one,’ I said. She’d redecorated Venzer’s old office in a sparse, elegant fashion, but when I looked at the beam from which he’d taken his last jump I could still almost see his crumpled old body hanging there. I looked away.

  ‘How so?’ Davandein asked.

  ‘There are two things that spread the seeds of cultism among the population,’ I said. ‘The first is hope. The dream that there’s something better, that the Deep Kings are actually beautiful gods. The second is fear. When they don’t think that they can win, they’ll side with the worst devils from the darkest hells if they think it will give them a chance. That’s what this bombardment is designed to do.’

  ‘It’s doing a lot more damage than that,’ Davandein said.

  ‘The damage is negligible,’ I said. ‘Two hundred dead, maybe? And that’s when we weren’t prepared. Maybe they’ll try this again, but if they do, we’ll have precautions. If two hundred is the best they can manage, then they’re trying to bring down an oak by sending a mouse to nibble at it.’

  ‘Two hundred a night will fell us sure as a chisel will take down an oak, given enough time,’ Davandein said curtly. She was a passionate woman at heart. She took the losses personally.

  ‘They took us by surprise,’ I said. ‘It’s bad. I understand that. But if they try this again tonight? We’ll have your cabal of Battle Spinners up on the citadel, where they’re protected, trying to bring the orbs down before they reach the city. We can warn people to hide in their basements.’

  ‘If this wasn’t just a test,’ Davandein said. Her face was grim. ‘This might just be the beginning. Tomorrow perhaps we face a hundred of these attacks. Perhaps we’ll see a thousand. Maybe this was just them drawing range on us, have you considered that?’

  ‘It’s not my job to consider that, Marshal,’ I said. ‘It’s my job to ensure that this doesn’t stir people toward the Cult of the Deep. If people fear that you can’t protect them, they’ll turn to those that can, even if their promises are founded on sand. I put down one traitor today. Either we give the people hope, or before long it won’t take a Bride to turn them.’

  Davandein mulled it over.

  ‘I need the people to hear the right message. I need all of the major news sheets on our side, putting out a good-news offensive.’ She nodded to herself. ‘Yes. We tell the people that our Spinners have stopped more than half of the orbs. Lift them with stories of children saved from the rubble by brave volunteers. Make them grateful. Show them that they need us.’

  She was a strong woman, but proud, and the deaths had wounded her. That could be dangerous, but I had to admire her pragmatism.

  ‘I’ll see to it,’ I said. ‘Give me a citadel seal and I’ll see to it that the news sheets are telling the stories that we want told.’

  ‘A citadel seal? You want a licence to do whatever you want?’

  Suddenly I didn’t like her tone.

  ‘Don’t I have that already?’ I said. She met my eyes and I didn’t look away. Davandein knew what Blackwing really was, and my connection to Crowfoot, a secret entrusted to each Range Marshal when they took the office. She knew better than to suggest asking my master for help. It didn’t work that way, and she knew it.

  ‘Do it,’ she said. She opened a drawer in Venzer’s vast old desk and threw me a brass lump with the citadel’s insignia on one side. ‘But once the printers are singing our song, I want that back.’

  ‘We need to know where those sky-fires are coming from, and how,’ I said.

  ‘Every squad I can muster is heading out into the Misery,’ Davandein snapped. ‘But it’s like looking for a lost hair in a herd of sheep.’

  ‘You have Gurling Stracht here?’ I asked. Stracht was our best scout. He was seldom in the city, but I’d run into him in a bar not long ago. Davandein nodded. ‘Tell him to go the crystal forest. Some of the fragments that came down looked like rock crystal. Not many places to find it in the Misery. It’s a fixed point, but it’s deep. It’s where I’d look first.’

  ‘I’ll get it done, thank you, Galharrow,’ Davandein said shortly. But she’d noted it, however little she wanted my help. She saw accepting assistance as showing weakness, even when it was a long shot like the crystal forest. But it was the best I had, and the only help she was being offered.

  ‘Have you had any reply from the Lady of Waves?’ I asked, changing the subject. The Lady was the only one of the Nameless to have a permanent residence, and so the only one we could try to contact when we needed help. I had to assume that Davandein had sent her a message.

  ‘It was the usual response,’ she said. ‘Her priests say that she’s currently dormant, whatever the hells that means. The prince of Pyre wouldn’t attempt to rouse her from her slumber just for a couple of hundred dead citizens.’ She shook her head. ‘We’re on our own, as usual.’

  ‘Of course we are,’ I said. ‘We always are. Even when they’re here.’

  13

  The day was cold, but the rain held off. It was the smallest of mercies for those digging bodies from the rubble.

  Somehow I’d known that safety would come with the dawn. The night brought forth the terrors and the coming of the sun showed that our ordinary lives were still there, no different than they had been before. At least, not for those whose homes were still intact. Bread needed baking, drains needed unblocking, cutpurses cut purses and bankers counted other people’s money.

  The parasites emerged, traders and con men feeding on people’s fears. I gave Casso and the jackdaws a clear directive: tolerate no sedition. Accept no arguments. I made a morning call around the four major print-works and checked over what they were planning to put out. I changed the headline ‘TERROR FROM THE SKY’ to ‘DRUDGE SCORE FIFTY-TWO MISSES.’ It wasn’t true, but it was the news sheets so it didn’t have to be. The editor complained when I told him to burn the first thousand copies he’d printed, the ink still wet, but when I explained the term ‘seditious profiteer’ in terms of the white cells and confiscation of assets, he found himself persuaded.

  My investigation had stalled. Nobody had anything to talk about other than the death that had borne down on us from the sky, but I still had a Deep King’s missing Eye to locate. Knowing who’d taken it h
adn’t made my task any easier and though Casso was out trying to catch any scent of Saravor, so far he’d found fewer leads than it takes to walk a dog.

  By the time night fell again, a blood-pounding headache had set in. The headache was nothing unusual, but I must have let it show, which was.

  ‘You look like you’ve been dragged through hells,’ Valiya said. ‘Can I get you something to help you sleep?’

  ‘No potions, no tonics,’ I said. I looked at the purpling around my fingernails, which had not faded as I’d hoped. Not good.

  ‘How about something stronger?’ Valiya put down a bottle of vodka and two glasses. ‘They make this in my hometown and I don’t expect many more bottles will come this way with the sky-fires falling. I thought you’d appreciate it.’

  She sat opposite me, poured and drank. The vodka was smooth, mildly lemony, and we drank and talked through a number of dead-end leads on the Eye, discarding each in turn, and I realised partway through that I considered her an equal.

  ‘You know, Ryhalt,’ Valiya said after a while, ‘this bombardment we’re under makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Makes me not want to think, in some ways,’ I said. ‘Anything particular on your mind?’

  ‘Some things.’

  She hesitated then. Her resolve faltered, maybe, or she was gearing herself up to say something important. I was too blind to understand what it was.

  She reached out and placed her hand over the back of mine.

  Her hands weren’t small by a woman’s standards, but they were half the size of mine. Her skin was much paler and the tattoos that snaked across it were artful while the skulls grinning up from the back of my hand were faded and crude. Her hand was warm.

  I hadn’t been touched so deliberately by a woman since the day we burned the world. Not since Ezabeth and I lay together in the deep cold of the Engine’s heart. I thought of her then, remembered her face. Not the pretty, seventeen-year-old face that had melted me. I saw her scarred, the skin tight and raw on one side of her face, crow’s-feet around the other eye. She was the only thing that I’d ever really loved, besides the bottle. I found that my tongue had fallen immobile and my throat had clenched up tight.

  ‘It will be dark soon,’ she said.

  ‘It will.’

  ‘Do you think that the song will come again? The sky-fires? That’s what people are calling them.’

  ‘I don’t know. I hope not,’ I said, my mind still elsewhere. Had it been only one, or three, maybe even a handful then I would guess not – but they’d hurled twenty-seven, and struck with an alarming regularity, over and over, which spoke of method and process.

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘How we could die, at any moment. Gone, in a heartbeat, in a flash. Puts things into perspective, don’t you think?’

  She looked up at me, and her eyes were bright, and alive, and nothing about them was burning or dead. I turned my hand over so that I could take her fingers in mine. Her hand felt like it fit there.

  ‘None of us can get out of this life alive,’ I said. It was lame. It was all I could think of to say.

  ‘It makes me think about choices we make. How we choose to spend time. How we waste the time we have.’

  I didn’t say anything. I knew that I should, but I didn’t. Four years had done nothing to wear away the pain I’d felt when Ezabeth died. Four years of knowing she was still out there, still entombed in the light. I’d failed her and let her destroy herself, and there was nothing I could do to save her. I’d tried to keep that door closed, tried to smother the memory with work, and drink. Tnota always told me to let go. But I couldn’t let go.

  I flinched away from her.

  ‘You should go.’

  A moment of silence, then Valiya rose and left. She looked back from the door as if she wanted to say something more, but I turned my back on her and after a moment the door closed. Maybe forever.

  14

  I feared the coming of the night.

  ‘I want you to go down into the basement and stay there,’ I told Amaira.

  She looked cross. It is a foolish man that angers an adolescent girl. We are not made to withstand their fury.

  ‘I don’t like it down there. It smells funny, and it’s cold.’

  I could have suggested that she go and sleep at my unloved house, but I might at least pick a battle that I had a chance of winning.

  ‘I’ll get you some blankets,’ I said. ‘It’s safer down there. I can’t protect you from things that come out of the sky, but the building can.’

  ‘What if the building falls down on me?’ she asked.

  ‘Then I’ll dig you out.’

  ‘Do you promise?’ Amaira said.

  It is a bad idea to promise things to children. Adults, having seen dozens of them shattered, understand that circumstances change and that a promise is, at best, confirmation of what you intend in the moment. A child remembers a promise through all seven hells and will hold you to it, strong as chains.

  ‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep you safe. I promise.’

  I believed it, too, as I took Amaira down into the cellars. She normally slept alone in the servants’ quarters at the back of the offices, but while a direct impact from one of the sky-fires might well collapse the building into the cellars and kill everyone anyway, being down there was safer in the event of flying debris or a partial impact.

  I’d got hold of a few things for her on a table. A plate of raisin biscuits and a jug of small beer, a phos lantern in case she was afraid in the night. A book with pictures of wild animals and exotic creatures from beyond the sea.

  ‘Stay down here until morning, no matter what you hear,’ I said. ‘And if you hear the song, get underneath the table. Meara is at the front desk and she knows you’re here. She’ll come and get you if necessary.’

  Amaira didn’t say anything, and I left her there in the dimness. Don’t make them promises, don’t get attached to them either. They either die or grow up into people that you wish you’d not met in the first place.

  ‘Captain-Sir,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’

  I hesitated for a moment. I almost turned back to her.

  ‘Stay down here,’ I said. Then I left her alone, with only a lamp for company.

  There were only thirteen projectiles that night. Two went down in the Misery, three overshot and two detonated harmlessly against whatever shields protected the Engine, but enough of them caused damage. The Spinners that Davandein had placed on the citadel’s roof tried a number of volleys, but the sky-fires were moving too fast and if they hit any of them, they didn’t have any effect.

  The morning death toll was somewhere between fifty and seventy. Not so bad as the first night, but still a lot of dead people. A lot of fear.

  The tension was thicker than smog as I rode back through the city the following day. Businesses were closed and people stood out in the street, gazing upward as though they had to be sure that it was over. Doomsayers had appeared on street corners proclaiming that the final battle was upon us. I would have them rounded up later, but I was too run-down even to make a note of their faces.

  A single voice of positivity stood out among the pessimism and defeat. A middle-aged man in a bright lemon coat stood atop a crate, a pair of attractive young farmer’s daughters standing beneath him with armfuls of pamphlets.

  ‘My friends, do not fear the night,’ he called out to the crowd who were gathering to hear him speak. He had a Whitelande accent, a city man. ‘The dark of the past will be burned away. Yes, we have suffered this night, but what good was ever achieved without suffering? The Bright Lady is coming, reaching out to us, and when she appears she will defy the Deep Kings and send them back to the darkest of the hells, whence they came. Her faithful will know victory, and she will r
eward her followers. Who here has seen her?’

  He looked out at the people expectantly. Nobody said anything. For one insane moment I thought about raising my hand. Someone else did.

  ‘I’ve seen Her,’ he said. ‘She appeared to me from the light. A beautiful woman, young but powerful. Her hand was outstretched, reaching: for justice! She told me that Her Witnesses were coming.’ Well rehearsed, clearly orated. He was a plant in the crowd, working his lines. They’d probably go district to district doing this show throughout the day.

  ‘Praise be, a true vision!’ the orator proclaimed. ‘No sooner did these troubles begin than the Witnesses sought to come to the Range, to protect you all from the terrors of the broken sky. The broken sky spits thunder down upon us, but the Witnesses shall be your shield. The High Witness has sworn to protect you.’

  ‘What are they going to do? Wall off the sky?’ a less cooperative observer shouted back.

  ‘The Witnesses command the power of the Bright Lady,’ the speaker declared. He thrust a finger skywards as if that made his point. ‘Not the weak, barely trained incompetents employed by the citadel. Each of the Witnesses is blessed, chosen, powerful in their art. What do the princes do to protect you? To guard you? Do they offer you shelter in their fine marble halls? What good do your taxes serve now? Taxes that have burned your hands, wearied your legs, crooked your back?’

  An interesting shift in tone, one that struck a chord with a number of the onlookers. I saw a lot of nodding.

  ‘All right, that’s enough of this crap,’ I said finally, pushing through the crowd. People didn’t like being bumped, but there wasn’t much that they could do about it.

  ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘Captain Galharrow of Blackwing.’ He hadn’t recognised the uniform, but he understood what that meant. My reputation had travelled over the last few years. The orator straightened up, but he didn’t cower.

  ‘A pleasure to meet you, sir, a fine and noble ally in our struggle against the enemy.’ He extended his hand to me. As he did so, the ground shifted ever so slightly beneath my feet and the low rumbling sound that announced another earth tremor began. People grabbed onto anything nearby for stability. I hunkered down low and waited for it to pass. It wasn’t a big one, but the smashing of falling crockery sounded from nearby houses. The Bright Order preacher lost his balance and his attendants had to catch him.