Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  The others had drifted away to huddle with their families in their cellars, not ready to place all their trust in the Witnesses’ protection even though they’d saved most of the city the night before. But not all of it – three of the sky-fires had made it through. Valiya, Tnota and I took a look at the vast weaving in the sky, thousands of glittering points of light, then retired beside the fire. Why didn’t we seek shelter? Sheer bloody-mindedness, maybe. Then Tnota fell asleep in his chair, snoring and it was just Valiya and I.

  ‘What’s the order of business tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘Where do we even begin?’

  ‘Maybe we should take a holiday,’ I said. I allowed myself a smile. It felt the first in a long time. ‘Get away from the city whilst all this boils itself dry. Where should we go?’

  ‘I heard that the sky gardens on Pyre are worth a look,’ Valiya said. It was still awkward between us. She reached up and pulled free two of the pins that stacked her hair up on her head and shook it loose, fingers combing out the snarls and flattened patches. I didn’t mean to get caught up watching her, but she noticed. ‘What?’

  It wasn’t just the shape of her face or lazy sweep of her hair, it was the set of her shoulders, the way she controlled the space around her. Her intelligence, her determination. Her dignity.

  ‘Not worth the journey,’ I said, bringing myself back. ‘The crossing to Pyre will leave you sick for a week. Something in the gardens runs off into the water, makes the whole place stink. They’re beautiful, but only if you put a peg over your nose.’

  ‘I didn’t take you for a traveller,’ Valiya said.

  ‘My parents wanted me to see the world. Visited all of the city-states at one time or another. Crossed over to Hyspia, the Iscalian cities. Even stopped in Angol once.’

  ‘I liked Angol. Once you get past all the cannibalism, anyway,’ Valiya said. She smiled, and I thought to myself, yes. In a different life, a life where the damage had never been done to us, I could have loved her. I’d met Valiya after I gave up sleeping and it felt as though she’d always been slightly out of focus, hidden behind a wash of winter grey. In the dim candlelight, I saw her clearly now.

  ‘Why did you really come all this way?’ I said. ‘Ostermark’s a long way off. You must have left family behind. Friends. Why come here, to the broken sky and the never-ending war?’

  Valiya swirled the wine in her glass, her legs tucked beneath her on the divan. She’d removed her shoes and the tips of stockinged toes protruded from the hem of her dress. It felt like something intimate, to see them. An element of trust. A sign that the bruise I’d given her might be fading.

  ‘You ask as if there was a choice,’ she said, not meeting my eye, her voice tinged with pain. ‘There’s a war. It needs winning and I don’t trust anyone else to fight it better than I do. I’m smarter than most people. A lot smarter. How could I entrust the fate of the world to people less capable?’

  The fire cracked and popped in sympathy. She wasn’t saying this to impress me. She knew that it wouldn’t. But maybe she guessed it was the same feeling that kept me awake all the long night.

  ‘My first husband didn’t like how hard I worked,’ Valiya said. ‘He didn’t understand. He made a lot of money on fishing fleets, while I was organizing an intelligence network to monitor the counts around Ostermark. Do you know what he said, when I told him that I’d outearned his fishing boats?’

  I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t my place.

  ‘He said that I’d made us abnormal. That if word got out, his social circle would snicker at him. He told me to give it up. Sell the business. That I should run the shop he’d given me and forget about spies and whisper-men.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Valiya’s smile barely reached her face.

  ‘I did. I wanted it to work. I wanted it to work so much, I’d have done anything for him. But, if you want to know the truth? When his ship went down, I wasn’t heartbroken. I was relieved.’

  I had lost a spouse as well, and felt no relief. I’d not loved her, not as I was supposed to. Not as I’d intended to, even. But her passing had still hollowed me out. I looked down at the flowers on my arm, the ones tattooed there to remind me of those that she’d taken with her that day. The ones for whom I’d sold myself to the crow.

  ‘And your second man?’ I asked. Just words to fill the silence.

  ‘A good man,’ Valiya said. ‘The best man. Killed by the drudge.’

  She didn’t offer anything more, and though I knew it had been six years, clearly that wound was still bleeding. We were both walking casualties, the sutures never quite holding us together.

  ‘And what of you? Your Ezabeth.’

  There are wounds that won’t heal, and then there are wounds that are still being inflicted. I had loved Ezabeth with a ferocity that could have driven the drudge back to their side of the Misery on its own. In a way, it had. I couldn’t speak of her. Even thinking of her made me feel that I was betraying her with Valiya. She’d given her life for me, for us, for everyone, for the world. And now, while whatever remained of her was imprisoned within the light, I was getting shy around someone else.

  ‘We should sleep,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot to be doing tomorrow.’

  My words were harder, flatter than I had intended. They settled down between us, alien. Vinegar. No way back from them.

  ‘Yes, Captain. Of course. A lot to do.’

  Valiya put her shoes on, and then she was gone and I sat in the dim light of the lamps and rubbed my tired eyes, only then realizing that Tnota’s snoring had stopped sometime ago.

  ‘Big Dog says you could do a lot worse than that very good woman,’ he said without opening his eyes.

  ‘She’s an employee,’ I said. As though that mattered.

  ‘Ain’t nothing to do with it,’ he said. He nestled deeper into the side of the chair. A single eye opened to look at me. ‘You want my advice, you go find her, apologise and let nature take its course.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for your advice,’ I said. ‘What do you know about women anyway?’

  ‘Men. Women,’ he said, ‘we’re all the same where it matters. Can’t live your life alone, Ryhalt. Shouldn’t, anyway, not when there’s good people that want to hold us. Here we are sitting getting shit-faced in a city that’s being pelted with heaven-fire and we might die at any moment, and you’re going to turn down a good thing because you’re still hurting over a woman that’s been dead four years.’

  His words punched arrow holes into my chest. It’s one thing to know it yourself, it’s another to hear someone else say it. I should have snapped something back but my jaw had decided to wire itself shut.

  ‘We both know that that shield’s not Ezabeth’s doing,’ Tnota said. ‘She’s gone and there’s some kind of impression left in the light. We both know that ain’t her either.’

  ‘It is her,’ I said. ‘The ghost in the light. It’s her.’

  ‘It ain’t,’ Tnota said. ‘She was flesh and blood, and that thing in the light don’t have neither. But there’s a woman you just drove away got both, and each of them hot for you. You want to be lonely forever?’

  ‘I want Ezabeth back,’ I said, like I was tearing the arrow free. It must have been barbed because it hurt even worse coming out the other way.

  ‘Let me be honest with you, Ryhalt,’ Tnota said. ‘When you imagine that somehow she makes it back, imagine her getting out of the light, what do you think that would be like? I mean, when we ran into her all that time ago back at Station Twelve she was rich. Cream. Used to the fine things. And us? We were practically in the gutter. You got yourselves thrown together when things got all hot and chaotic, but if she’d survived, what then? You think she’d be here, watching you drink yourself sick? Nah. She was better than that. She was fine as you like cream, and clever with it. You really think she’d stay here on the Range?’

&
nbsp; ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We’ll never know, will we?’

  ‘We won’t,’ Tnota said. ‘That’s all the more reason to find some kind of happiness with a good woman who brings you pastries and tries to look after you, even though you don’t really deserve it.’

  Somewhere else in the city one of the singing projectiles came crashing down through the Witnesses’ shield. It could have been here, could have fallen on us. But it didn’t, and our survival had been assured once more by luck. As it ever is.

  17

  I woke Maldon from his usual drunken stupor with a kick.

  ‘Get up. I have work for you.’

  ‘But I’m dreamin’,’ Maldon said. He tried to fend the toe of my boot off with a softly flailed arm. It was unsuccessful and earned him another kick. ‘Fine,’ he grumbled. ‘But it delays your new toys.’

  ‘They don’t look to be getting made right now anyway,’ I said. ‘How much did you have? It’s past ten and you’re still wrecked.’

  Maldon was a state. His hands and forearms were shiny with gun oil and he smelled of phos residue and ground iron. I didn’t want to ask.

  We rode double through the dark city over toward the Spills. The faithful had left a lot of litter in their wake, discarded, indestructible piecrusts, empty bottles, horse and human manure, scraps of greased paper, and all the other detritus that people on the move leave behind. Amazing to say it, but the Spills seemed even dirtier than usual.

  ‘Ugh,’ Maldon said. ‘The smell of the phos residue is incredible. It’s like the Engine just fired.’

  The previous night’s activity didn’t mean that the workmen had stopped. They were going hard, shifting vast timbers that would form runners for the looms. Some poor bastards would end up more or less chained to those beams, spinning light through dozens of focusing lenses. The nasal drone of phos-powered saws came from high overhead.

  ‘That will be the shield, I guess,’ I said. I could taste it too, a metallic flatness to the air. Maldon was far more attuned to it though, and I needed that attunement to invisible things today.

  We rode in a wide circle around the Grandspire, then closed in and rode a tighter one. Workmen didn’t even glance up at our passing, but they weren’t the only ones there now. Men with silver-barrelled flarelocks had taken up position on the stairs, at the entrance, in pairs walking a perimeter. They eyed us, but a man with a child doesn’t inspire a great deal of interest. The Grandspire was our defence against the drudge and it was only right that it be guarded, but if they were citadel men, they were wearing Bright Order colours and carrying the Bright Order’s holy weapon. Back when the man who wasn’t Devlen Maille’s flarelock had exploded, they’d been rare. Now they were everywhere.

  ‘Getting anything?’ I asked.

  ‘The phos residue is powerful,’ he said. ‘What am I meant to be getting?’

  I reined Falcon in and he was happy to stop. He might have been built like a charger but he was a lazy old cob at heart. We dismounted, stretched our legs out. The saddle had been thumping me in the balls something awful.

  ‘I was hoping for traces of the Eye,’ I said. ‘Nothing?’

  ‘You think that I’d keep it quiet if I picked that up?’ Maldon said. He was tense as a violin string and just the mention of something connected to Shavada caused him to flinch. Poor bastard. ‘Why do you think it was here?’

  I looked at the vastness of the Grandspire, a tower that nearly reached the clouds.

  ‘It seems too strong,’ I said. ‘The shield. The Witnesses are clearly powerful Spinners, and they wire up and make the shield together. But even so I wondered if Saravor was involved. The Eye is a fragment of a Deep King. I don’t know what kind of magic can be wrought with it, but he wanted it, for something. Wondered if it was this.’

  ‘If it was here, then I can’t smell it,’ Maldon said. ‘So it wasn’t here for long, if it was at all.’

  ‘It was a long shot,’ I said.

  ‘You dragged me out here just for this?’

  ‘No,’ I said. This part was harder to ask. ‘The phos you can smell. Tell me about it. Is it … normal?’

  Maldon thought about it, then said, ‘It smells old. Like it’s been stored for a long time in a battery coil. Years, maybe. Why? What else were you thinking?’

  Maldon’s assessment confirmed what I’d suspected. The shield was the work of four talented Spinners running their power through the Iron Sun at the top of the Grandspire, and whatever that Iron Sun was, it was more than just a vent for excess power, as I’d been told. But whatever it was, however clever the technology behind it – the light-shield had required astonishing power. Thierro had told me to believe. Valiya had struck at my doubts. Even my own people were wearing yellow. Since I saw the Witnesses raise the shield, a doubting little voice had been hammering away at the back of my mind. Insistent. Relentless. I had to know.

  ‘I have to be sure. Does the Bright Lady make the shield?’ I asked.

  Maldon’s face lit up in a leering grin, and he almost spoke, but the words faded away, the leer dying as quietly as it had come. He didn’t have eyes, so I was spared seeing pity in them. I hated to be pitied. But it was written there on his unnaturally childish face all the same.

  ‘No, Ryhalt,’ he said after a while. ‘It’s not her. It’s a phos working, channelled through some kind of system inside the Grandspire. If you’re asking if there’s something more at work than that? No. It’s colossal, and it’s impressive as the hells, but it’s just phos spinning. Whatever they say, it’s not her.’

  Was I relieved by that? Disappointed? I didn’t know. I felt empty, mostly. Lost.

  ‘Fine. Let’s get back. I’m sure there’s a bottle in my cellar you’ve not opened yet.’

  We’d ridden back a few streets, Maldon seated behind me, when he dug his fingers into my ribs to get my attention.

  ‘I think we’re being followed,’ he said. ‘Don’t turn around.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘How do I know anything? You want me to explain how all this works now? Really?’

  ‘Fine,’ I snapped. ‘Who?’

  ‘Two people,’ he said. ‘Hustling along after us on foot. But one of them is big. Really big. Bigger than you. The other is just big.’

  Reassuring.

  ‘How long have they been following us?’

  ‘The Grandspire,’ he said. ‘I clocked them back there. But they’ve kept up with us even when we turned down Clatton Street, and stayed with us when we went back onto Barrello, and that’s an odd route to take.’

  It was. I took Clatton Street, a little used side road, because a year back I’d raided a tea shop on Barrello Street. It hadn’t gone well and people had been hurt – not abnormal when dragging a couple of Cult of the Deep practitioners out into the night – and had left sore memories behind. No need to grate the feelings of the innocents left behind. So I avoided Barrello Street when I could, and we’d cut through Clatton. A longer ride home. A strange route to take.

  ‘They armed?’ I was.

  ’Not sure.’

  ‘Let’s find out.’

  I turned Falcon down Nowhere Row, then immediately off the road and into a narrow alley. The big horse didn’t like it in there, a thin strip of nothing between badly made warehouses, the kind of alley the sun never reached and the rats grew bigger than badgers. I handed Falcon’s reins to Maldon, who had never liked horses, and had never been liked by horses, and got ready. At a guess they were probably Bright Order men posted to investigate anyone acting odd around the Grandspire. They’d not done anything but follow us, yet, so I left my cutlass in its hanger.

  The two men passed the end of the alley. Maldon had been right. They were both big men, unusually so. One of them must have been pushing six-ten, but the few men that I’d met who were that tall were lanky, mostly bone and
skin. This man was mostly beef, tremendously broad and wide. I felt an irrational surge of hatred toward him for being that much bigger than me. I shouldn’t have been proud of being born to be tall, but I guess that I was. His companion was about my height, which made him a lot bigger than most men in the world, similarly slathered in brawn. They wore civilian clothes, not a trace of yellow about them, and they were armed with proper swords, cutters, thick in the blade and nothing too fancy about them. Their steel was at their hips, for now, and they were unremarkable aside from their size. I took them in quickly as they went past the alley and down Nowhere Row. They’d turn right, as the road bent, and find themselves at a complete dead end. The road was named Nowhere for a reason.

  Which meant that I had them in a trap, of sorts. Of course, they were big and armed, but I had a pistol in my coat, which gave me all of the advantages.

  I left Falcon with Maldon and followed them, pistol cocked and held at my shoulder. When they stopped, visibly puzzled that I’d disappeared into thin air, I cleared my throat to get their attention.

  ‘Let’s not do anything that might make the cemetery wardens have to work harder than they already do,’ I said.

  The two men didn’t react as I’d expected. I don’t know what exactly I’d expected, surprised in this dead-end street, but I’d expected something. Unease, fear, maybe anger that I’d got the drop on them. But there was nothing. They stood there for a moment, nothing seeming to go on at all behind their faces. Thick necks, heavy shoulders. Not an inconspicuous pair at all. Bad spies. Good killers, maybe.

  ‘How about you toss down those swords down, your knives too, and we’ll practise the lost art of conversation,’ I said. I kept the pistol to my shoulder. Didn’t want to spook them by pointing it unnecessarily. You can really ruin a man’s composure when you aim a firearm at his face, and that gives people bad ideas.

  You get used to the way that men act under pressure. There’s denial, a natural human response to crisis. Talk your way out of it. But before that, in a group situation, a panicked man will look to his companions. It’s instinctive. We can’t help it. And these men should have glanced at each other, a split second to gauge their response. But these men didn’t care and the weapon at my shoulder didn’t faze them. Maldon’s instinct was right, they had been following us for a reason.