by Ed McDonald
‘Now stay off that box and piss off,’ I said when the earth’s rumbling subsided. I raised my voice. ‘Everyone needs to go back to work, not to have their heads filled with this Bright Lady nonsense. Go on, all of you, go do something productive. If you don’t have anything better to do than stand around listening to promises spun on the wind, then I know some canals that need dredging.’
The small crowd had started dissipating as soon as they heard the word ‘Blackwing’ but now they scuttled faster.
‘We’re doing no harm here, Commander,’ the city man said unhappily. He shrugged up the collar of his lemony jacket. ‘I’m giving the people hope. You should be applauding me.’
‘Yeah, well, the only clapping I do is with irons. Get out of here before I decide I don’t like the way you’re looking at me.’
The attacks continued for another two nights. The war with the Deep Kings was usually fought out in the Misery, minor skirmishes between long-range patrols, a hundred miles from civilization. The Deep Kings hadn’t managed to strike a blow against the Range since Shavada assaulted Valengrad directly. The theatre where we’d watched the absurd play lost its roof. The Grandspire took a hit, but its phos-welded core had deep foundations and of all the structures in Valengrad, it took the blast on the chin. A bar was blown to pieces, and a grocer’s shop, and houses. Endless houses.
We didn’t know how they were doing it. Didn’t know which of the Deep Kings had dreamed this nightmare up to torment us with. Didn’t know what they hoped to achieve by it. But the missiles fell, and things burned, and people died. Our ignorance was no shield.
On the fifth night, I went to the wall to meet Nenn and watch the fireworks, but nothing came. The siren never sounded and no death came hurtling out of the Misery. The next night was the same and we began to believe that whatever it was, it was over.
The seventh night saw that same piercing song rise again, its return accompanied by the grinding wail of the siren. Casualties for that night reached 212. The death toll rose above a thousand. Another earthquake shook the city, collapsing a tavern where people had been sheltering from the missiles. Some of them got out, but not all.
People began to flee the city.
It started with boarded up windows on shops, and then the better streets fell quiet. Employees failed to appear for work, ovens went unlit. Some of the greener recruits deserted in the night and those that had the means to pack all their belongings onto a cart began to leave. Better to sit out the nightmare with their families in some quiet rural neighbourhood.
Marshal Davandein took steps to ensure that the city did not falter. An official dictate was passed: nobody employed by the military was free to leave, which was half the population, and neither were public servants or anybody who supplied the military, which was basically everybody else. The only people allowed to leave the city were those too poor to do so.
Her child tax, and the protests against it, had laid the kindling, and now the containment orders tipped the perception of the Range Marshal from an antagonistic overlord to a dictatorial enemy. Angry protests swelled, and then bloomed into full-blown riots.
A mob is like a living beast, an animal that moves in accordance with its base desire. When they reached the citadel, chanting ‘Save us from the skies,’ and ‘Give us back our taxes,’ the mob had grown from its humble origins of a few hundred to thousands. I watched from a high window in the citadel as Davandein sent her cavalry out. They rode big black horses, curved sabres held to the shoulder, but Davandein hesitated to order them to attack. Slashing heavy cavalry through Valengrad’s population would be a disaster for her political standing. After a tense standoff, the mob was dissuaded, but by that time it had grown even larger and lost all sense of why it had begun or what it wanted. As it dispersed it swept back into the commercial districts, destroyed the barge market on the canals and struck through the tailor’s quarter. A fire started. Bodies were left in the seething wake of man’s communal stupidity, where they lay untouched in gutters. Who they were, why they were killed, was lost in the press.
Riots, in Valengrad. It defied belief.
When the first song rose that night, I went to check that Amaira was where I’d told her to be. The barrel cellar was cold, but she’d turned one corner into a den, hanging sheets over a big table, forming drapes around her bed to keep the warmth in.
‘Amaira?’
‘I’m here, Captain-Sir,’ she said, but her usual vivacity was diminished. It hurt a little to see her flagging. She pulled back one of the sheet-drapes. She had a good pile of blankets beneath the table, some for lying on, some to pull over her. I thought that, dismal as the cellar was, it wasn’t so very bad. I’d slept in worse places, both in the Misery and out, and at least it was dry.
‘How are you holding up?’ I asked.
‘I’m doing my job just fine, Captain-Sir,’ she said. She gave me a little salute, and I didn’t stop her. It didn’t seem very important. I knelt beside the table-bed.
‘Are you scared?’
She paused for a moment, then put her arms around her knees.
‘I try not to be.’
‘It’s all right to be scared,’ I said. ‘We’re all scared. It’s normal to be frightened when things are bad.’
She nodded, but her eyes were downcast, her energy sapped. Fear will do that to you. It takes a bright and vibrant person and reduces them to a shadow of what they were. I crawled in under the table, where Amaira had a candle burning inside a glass jar. Not a lot of room for me under there.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ I said, though I was probably wrong. ‘We’re safe down here. You’re safe.’
‘That’s what my parents told me,’ she said. ‘They said we were safe. That we had the Engine. Then they were gone.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. You can’t spin a few words and suture wounds that have scored so deep through a person’s core. So I lay down beside her, because sometimes being nearby is the best you can do. She’d pinned a number of sheets of paper to the underside of the table. I recognised some of them from books that had been in my office. Books that would have a substantially lower value now their pages had been torn out.
‘I’m only borrowing them,’ Amaira said.
‘It’s fine,’ I said, glancing at them.
Poems. Valiya had been teaching Amaira to read. She’d struggled with it, having started too late in life, but she was managing and Valiya was insistent. She was determined that Amaira was going to have every skill a girl needed.
‘Do they help?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ Amaira said quietly. ‘I thought that if I keep reading them in the night, then even if I died, I’d be looking at something beautiful. And then maybe I wouldn’t be scared.’
Several moments of silence followed, and then she put her head on my shoulder. I put my arms around her, and I don’t know whether I clung to her to give her comfort, or whether she was giving it to me. I shouldn’t have. She was a servant and I was her employer. I was not her father, not her uncle, or brother. But she was a frightened child, and I was supposed to have the answers. I was supposed to be able to make it all safe, and calm, and all right. I wished that I had the power to end the terror, to stop the destruction. But I didn’t. Nothing makes you feel more powerless than failing a child.
‘It will be fine,’ I lied. ‘Now, try to sleep. It’s hard, I know.’
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked.
‘I have to work,’ I said. I always did.
As the missiles faded with the night, the mob rose with the dawn, unleashed like some pent-up beast. It emerged somewhere different each day, then grew and spread, casting waves of chaos through the streets. The rioters kept their distance from the citadel and its soldiers, but shops were looted, homes invaded, old grudges settled in the anonymity of the herd. Only the fourth day of madness brought a reprieve, as t
he skies opened and a colossal downpour kept all but the most die-hard looters from venturing out onto the streets. The mob realised that whilst it was very, very angry about a lot of things, it wasn’t so angry that it wanted to get wet.
Valiya brought me paperwork, as subdued as Amaira. She didn’t meet my eye as she stood there, spine straight. I’d hurt her. She’d loosened her armour and I’d given her a bruise to show for it. ‘I found something,’ she said. ‘If you aren’t busy.’
Formal. Distant. I guess I was bruised too. I nodded, unsure what to say or how to act around her. Nothing had passed between us. Nothing, but something as well.
She rolled out a map of the city. The cartographer had done a good job, some of the distances might even have been relatively accurate. The citadel, the wall, Mews, Spills, Gathers, Wicks, Willows and all the other districts were clearly labelled. It had probably been worth a fair bit before someone had drawn all over it.
‘You bought this?’
‘No. It was yours,’ she said. I grunted. She’d ruined my map. I should probably have been annoyed that she’d done that without my permission, but I wasn’t.
It was simple enough to see, laid out on the desk. Valiya had marked all of the impact sites, then numbered them according to the night they had struck. The first night was the most widely distributed, the second slightly more clustered. As the nights passed, the clusters drew together with fewer and fewer outliers.
‘They’re targeting the Spills,’ I said. ‘Or at least, more of their projectiles are coming down there.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why? It’s the poorest, shittiest district in the city. There’s some argument to be made that destroying it might be a blessing in disguise.’
‘It not the Spills that’s being targeted,’ Valiya said, tapping the map. ‘It’s the Grandspire.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. There was more to the Spills than the Grandspire, although nothing else quite as valuable. ‘But the Grandspire is just a big phos mill. Even if the drudge managed to destroy it, there are other mills.’
‘But it’s not just a phos mill, is it?’ Valiya said. She could snap her voice like a whip when she wanted to. ‘It’s a symbol, isn’t that what Governor Thierro told you? It’s drawing all these Bright Order fanatics to the city. And if he’s to be believed, it can generate enough power through that Iron Sun at the top to bring their beliefs to life.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘But maybe the drudge do,’ Valiya said, harshly. ‘And maybe you should consider it.’
I wanted to. What I wouldn’t have given to believe it. Every time I closed my eyes and saw her reaching out to me my chest lurched and my breath grew still. Every time I heard another preacher telling me that she was coming back, I tried to block it from my mind while gnawing hope scratched away at the edges. But now, if the drudge were trying to bring down the Bright Order’s symbol of her return, couldn’t I allow myself to at least acknowledge that I could be wrong?
‘No.’ I said it firmly.
‘I know all about her, Ryhalt,’ Valiya said tiredly. ‘I know about Ezabeth Tanza. It’s not exactly a secret among your friends. So stop ignoring what everyone is saying. Maybe the Bright Lady will appear. Maybe they’re right.’
‘I listened to what the Bright Order said about the Bright Lady. I listened to what Dantry Tanza had to say about the Bright Lady. And I listened to what Governor Thierro said about the Bright Lady. You know what they all had in common?’
‘No.’
‘It’s wishes and dreams, and nothing more solid than that. I’ve seen what that obsession can do to someone. The people? They listen to preachers whose aims are as political as they are religious. Thierro? He blossomed late as a Spinner, and suddenly he thinks he’s a prophet. He’s about as rich as a man can be, and still he’s looking for more. People will believe what they want to believe. That doesn’t make it real.’
Valiya chewed it over. She wanted me to be wrong, but she knew no more on the subject than any of the rest of them.
‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not,’ Valiya said eventually. ‘The drudge think that it is. That has to be why they’re focusing their attacks on the Grandspire.’
I looked over the map, the coloured inks. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there might be a pattern. If people could be evacuated from the Spills by night, we might save a lot of lives. A lot of people to move, though, and Davandein’s orders hadn’t been popular lately.
‘I’m lucky to have you,’ I said. Didn’t mean to. Beneath the fog of sleeplessness and unhappiness it just got out.
‘Blackwing is lucky to have me,’ she said. Her face was empty, the spark that had lit it in these past weeks extinguished and buried beneath rubble. ‘You don’t have me. You’re the commander, but you’re not Blackwing. One day, you’ll be gone, and I’ll still be here.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ I said.
‘That’s what my first husband said,’ Valiya said. She looked me dead in the eye for the first time. ‘So did the second. And they were liars both.’
15
‘Spirits damn us to the hells, Ryhalt, the city’s going to shit,’ Nenn said. She was angry and she was sober, and whilst one was more common that the other, neither was improving her mood. Another week of sky-fires and bloody unrest had us all rubbed raw. Captain Betch rode alongside her, passing no comment on her outbursts. He seemed unfazed. Solid.
One of Davandein’s men had tipped Nenn off that Davandein was planning to move against the leaders of the Bright Order, probably in the next few days. I felt a certain sense of obligation to tell Thierro because we’d been friends, but mostly because the city was too highly strung for that kind of conflict. People were already rioting. Acting now was like tossing embers into a powder store. The Witnesses had proved hard to track down, until tonight: now they’d called a public rally at the foot of the Grandspire, which had already inflamed the situation. I saw my city trembling on the fire, ready to overboil and spew scalding water over those unfortunate enough to be caught.
The road leading into the Spills was packed with people, a slow, shuffling herd of yellow scarves and hoods. Night had fallen and while they waited for the song to rise again, the Bright Order faithful gathered to hear their High Witness speak. The first public appearance. Nenn and I were mounted and people struggled out of our way to avoid getting stepped on.
‘Davandein won’t listen to me,’ I said. ‘You need to make her see reason.’
‘She isn’t listening to anyone, damn her,’ Nenn said. She spat a wad at a man who stubbornly held his ground in front of her horse. He turned with eyes blazing but couldn’t match her stare.
Rioque and Clada were high and looked close enough to touch, only Eala was absent from the sky tonight. Purple and blue daubed the world in shades of bruise. The cracks in the sky glowed fierce and bright, pulsing slowly.
‘All these people gathered together make a nasty target,’ Nenn said. Davandein’s attempts to get people out of the Spills had only caused them to dig their heels in, and Thierro had refused to stop his building operation even for a day. The Bright Order’s obstinacy had forced her to move her plans forward. She could be proud and headstrong, but ultimately, she felt responsible for the citizens in her care. Nenn shook her head. ‘If one of the sky-fires comes down in the crowd, we’ll be sweeping up body parts for days.’
Weeks was more likely, if anyone was left alive to pick up a broom. We ought to have been seeking shelter, but if Davandein moved against the Witnesses, the city could go up in flames. I hadn’t expected this call-to-service to go out, clogging the roads.
We reached the plaza that surrounded the Grandspire, which was already packed with people, tradesmen, soldiers, children, even a smattering of the cream with their entourages. Yellow hats, yellow hoods, yellow everywhere. On the broad flights of steps that l
ed up toward the Grandspire’s double doors, four figures, robed in gold, stood before the crowd. Our horses forced passage through the people until we had a good view.
The four Witnesses faced each other. No doubting who they were, eyes down, hands linked. A heavily scarred, hairless Spinner had his back to me. To his right was a woman whose face was astonishingly beautiful. She flowed with vitality, and was strangely familiar, as if I’d dreamed of her once and then forgotten her. Her small hand was enveloped in the paw of a huge old woman, not just wide but tall, almost scaled up. Her back was hunched, oversized hands jagged with bone and mottled with spots of age, a stark reminder to the vision by her side that youth never lasts. One was a grown man’s fantasy, soft coils of golden hair and the promise of soft curves, the other, a child’s nightmare.
The fourth was Governor Thierro.
I was only surprised for a moment. He was a full-on believer in the Bright Lady, and if his story could be believed, then she was the one directing the show, through him. It made sense for a man with such a desire for control to have taken it. But he hadn’t told me he was a Witness, and that made my eyes narrow and my fingers twitch.
Each of the Spinners’s wrists were wrapped in copper wires that ran away into the Grandspire. The atmosphere was charged, and not just from the expectation hovering over the nervous crowd. I could feel the energy in the air, could smell the hot, metallic odour of the phos. The Witnesses were loaded with it.
‘Do not be afraid,’ Thierro said, his voice enhanced to roll out over the crowd, over the rooftops, over the city. ‘The Bright Lady sees the purity in your hearts. She sees that you desire justice above all things. She will guard you in the dark night when those who should have failed you.’