Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  Simultaneously, the big men’s eyes rippled, as though a stone had been dropped into a calm pool of water. Thin trickles of blood began to leak from the corners of their eyes, red tears tracking lightly down their faces. I resisted the urge to step back. I’d seen this before. It happened when a Darling got its mind-worms into you. Just like the soldiers who’d been killed back at Crowfoot’s vault. But a Darling had to be present to work its dark magic, and there were just the three of us. But whether a Darling was in my city or not, I’d not led the men into a trap. They’d led me into one.

  They were reaching for their swords when I aimed at the bigger man and fired. The flint snapped home, the heartbeat pause as the powder ignited, then the pistol roared and I hit him high in the left arm. Not my best shot. Not enough to put him down. Not even enough that he seemed to notice.

  There were three naked swords in the alley, just like that. I didn’t trust my bad leg enough to turn and run, and more to the point, they were already on me.

  The small-big man swung his blade at me overhead, a cut that would have sheared through my arm. I parried, wound his sword aside and thrust at his face. I drew blood, but now the bigger man was swinging. No finesse, no skill with the blade, blood in his eyes, I swayed back out of his arc and his sword sliced into the smaller man’s shoulder. Neither acknowledged the damage, and the blood pulsed from their eyes in steady, rhythmic drops. No pain, no care. Not even a will of their own.

  I backed away, trying to circle, to keep them blocking each other. The smaller man was bleeding from the deep slice his pal had put in his shoulder, but a fight rarely takes more than seconds, and I couldn’t wait for him to bleed out.

  The bigger man came in again, driving a swing from the shoulder. I parried it, no time for a riposte as the second man followed suit. Artless, clumsy strokes, with all the finesse of a buffalo’s charge, each of them aimed at taking my sword hand. I got out of the way and there was the opening I needed, one that could be taken quick and clean and still keep me moving. I took it, the cut savage, and the smaller man staggered back minus an arm. It nearly cost me: the bigger man was an inch from carving a chunk out of my head.

  There was no point in trying to talk to him. He wasn’t in his own mind. Moreover, my breath was screaming through me. Too many cigars, too many brandies. Too slow by far.

  My remaining assailant came at me with the same skill-less, disabling blows. I cut his forearm half-open, I cut him through the face, I left a bloody gash through the side of his shirt. Nothing slowed him. He came in close and hard and I parried, grabbed his wrist, but before I could put my own sword through his head he reached up and caught my sword arm. A big bastard, several inches taller, several inches wider and all of it was bearing down on me. I lost my footing, sprawled, and he came down on top.

  He twisted his arm, sweat-slicked fingers slipped and his elbow crashed into my face. Sight shattered as bright points of light stole the world. Something soft and wet crushed up against my face, and with it the sweet, powerful smell of a surgeon’s anaesthetic. The world was shaking but I locked my throat tight even as I felt the fumes trying to work their way into me. Chest screaming, half-blind, I tried to twist and lever him off me, but he was heavier and stronger than I was. I snapped my head to the side, freeing it from the stinking rag and tried to get a deep breath, my lungs snarling, but his weight was pressing down on me and I couldn’t get shit. The chemical odour reached into my nose, its poison reaching to take me down.

  The big man went limp, suddenly three hundred pounds of deadweight. There was a cutlass halfway through the back of his head. I heaved with whatever I had left and rolled him off me, gasping for breath, spitting and scrubbing the pungent wetness from my face with my sleeve. Maldon, blood-sprayed and grinning, let go of the cleaver, wedged deep into the dead man’s skull. The man whose arm I’d taken had fled, broken through the door of a nearby house.

  ‘You looked like you needed help,’ Maldon said.

  ‘Good time to get involved,’ I panted.

  ‘Time was that I could have turned him to ash in a flicker,’ Maldon said. He snapped his fingers as though expecting a result, but nothing happened.

  I looked down at the dead man.

  ‘He’s dead enough.’ The stench of the anaesthetic had faded, the light-headedness drifting away with it. My temple throbbed where the elbow had broken the skin. No time to gather myself fully. Low on his gut, the dead man’s shirt was stained black and a foul odour rolled off him, stronger and fouler than the chemical he’d tried to smother me with. I knelt and tore open his shirt. A patch of skin had torn open in the struggle. Congealed, putrid, brownish-black fluid seeped from the seam of a mismatched path of skin over his appendix. Like Marollo Nacomo he’d turned to the Fixer for help, only it seemed to me that when I’d given him that drip of Shavada’s power, Saravor had learned a few other things too. The dead man’s eyes were filled with blood.

  My heart hammered harder as I thought of Nenn. What lay inside her? What had I done to her when I bargained for her life?

  ‘Ryhalt, he smells like it. Like the Eye,’ Maldon said. His nose was working like a terrier’s, sucking at the air.

  ‘Think he’s been near it?’

  ‘Definitely. Or maybe it was used to do … this … to him.’

  I pushed myself upright. The battle-rush was fading, its heady spin draining out of me, only I had more work to do. I looked down at the severed arm: three of the fingers were at a slight angle. Slightly too small. Badly fixed together, maybe. When I’d cut it from him, the owner had bolted. Had that broken Saravor’s hold over him? I needed to find him if I wanted to find out. A trail of blood led from the abandoned limb and through a tenement doorway. I retrieved my sword, wiped it off and cursed that I didn’t have any more ammunition for the pistol. I’d carried it out of habit, hadn’t expected to need it. Certainly not more than once.

  ‘You’re going after the other one?’ Maldon asked.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  ‘No. Take Falcon. Get Casso to come and clean this mess up. Make sure his body gets back to our offices. Don’t let the citadel claim it.’

  I set off in pursuit.

  The blood made an easy trail to follow. He’d gone through the tenement, buildings too cheap and full of too little to bother with exterior locks, out the other side and then down a series of streets. Civlians pointed me in the right direction when the spatters grew sparse – it’s not often you see a man with a freshly severed arm. My old leg wound was making me limp but I kept after him, even after it started stabbing at me like a stitch. I’d worry about it after I got hold of the bleeding son of a bitch, dragged him back home and drank a couple of brandies. Nothing that wouldn’t heal.

  Keep telling yourself that, Ryhalt.

  As I jogged from street to street, the spatter slowed from regular to infrequent, and then maybe he’d managed to wrap it because I emerged onto a broad street and there was nothing. Asked an old man sitting smoking a pipe on his doorstep whether he’d seen anyone run by, but he hadn’t. Nobody unusual? Nobody. He looked bored enough to note every neighbour that went by, let alone a stranger with a missing arm, so I retraced my steps down the last narrow street. Had I missed a doorway? His good hand had to be properly bloody, but there was no sign of him forcing any doors and those I tried seemed well sealed. It was only chance that I noticed a dark sheen on a sewer grill which came away red when I wiped at it. I heaved the grill aside, and made my own descent down the shaft into the dark.

  There is nothing good that can be said about a sewer, but I was glad of three things. Firstly, that there was a walkway on either side of the stagnant slurry so I didn’t have to walk through the waste. Second, that I had a small cigar-sparker in my pocket, and the phos light it gave was enough to see by. Lastly, the cartilage in my nose had long been crunched into oblivion, leaving
my sense of smell about as impressive as Tnota’s piano playing.

  Saravor’s man had been here. He’d supported himself against the wall, his handprints smeared against the brick and his trail led me to a door. A new door, not rotting, not stained with age, but good hard wood, intended to keep people out. With a lock. A big, black-iron lock. Who locks something up in a sewer? Light seeped out around the frame and I killed the sparker.

  It was unlocked, ajar, a final red handprint across the edge. As though a panicked man had forgotten to close it. I went through.

  18

  It takes a lot to disturb me. An awful fucking lot.

  I’ve seen things most people wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen the ghosts of a carnival skip through the Misery, burned and skeletal. I saw gods unmake one of their own in the Engine’s heart, and I saw a woman unleash enough power to vanquish an entire army. But sometimes, it’s not about how fantastic or strange or fucking magical something is. It’s the humanity. Or the lack of it. When I went through that door I felt my world tilt.

  This shouldn’t have been happening in my city.

  I guess that it had been a temple of some kind, back before Valengrad was raised along the Range to protect the Engine. The columns were old, some of them carved from single pillars of stone, some of them built in stacks. There was phos light, a globe at each corner of the room rigged up to the network with crude cable-splicing. Whatever forgotten god had once been worshipped here, the space had been put to a more mundane use since. It was an abattoir. It just wasn’t hogs or cattle they were butchering here.

  Bodies. They were suspended on hooks and chains in ordered rows. Dozens of them, the phos light running between them in cold shafts, the badly sabotaged wires emitting a hissing crackle.

  Men. Women. Occasionally children. They hung from lengths of black-iron chain, meat hooks thrust through the shoulder. The taller ones had their feet on the floor, the shorter dangled. I’d seen dead in greater numbers. Had probably made dead in greater numbers than this. But the neat, ordered way in which they had been displayed, the way they all faced toward me, heads bowed, silent, pale or dark or golden – it was methodical. Precise. This wasn’t a cannon blast, spraying bodies around in the name of war. It was a practice. A choice. A decision.

  They were maimed. All of them, or near enough. They were missing limbs, or skin, or guts, or a face. All of them, from the white-haired old man near the door to the teenage boy three rows behind. Something had been cut away. Not ragged, hacked or bitten, but sliced. Surgically. Precisely. Old stains covered the floor beneath them, black and dry. Unwanted bones lay in piles against the walls. Saravor had been plying his trade down here in the dark for months. Maybe years. How many people walking the streets bore his handiwork on their bodies?

  I felt suddenly out of my depth. I’d never expected this, and if Saravor was here, then I’d made a grievous error. The Fixer had decided he wanted me gracked – or taken alive, given the attempt to disable and anaesthetise me – and had sent his biggest goons to do it. I’d survived them, but to survive this I should come back with a hundred men and ten Battle Spinners and lay waste to it all.

  Along the side of the old temple there were other doors, and there were workbenches at the back. The tables on which these brutal human tragedies took place. Hooks on the wall carried a variety of appendages, hands mostly, but there were scalps, a few feet, faces, and what I guessed was a heart. This nightmare was here, in my city, under my nose and my anger was hot, black and thumping in my head.

  I passed through the forest of bodies and found my quarry lying against one of the bloodstained workbenches. He was pale, his stump cradled up against his chest and he focused on me uncertainly.

  ‘Fix me,’ he wheezed. Didn’t understand who I was. He was delirious with blood loss. ‘Fix me again,’ he whispered, desperate to be made whole. That’s what this place was. A meat locker for Saravor’s vile work. There was little chance of his getting fixed, though. Not enough blood left in his system. I should go. Instead I grabbed him by the throat.

  ‘Where is Saravor?’ I demanded. ‘Where is the Eye?’ Shook him. Slapped him. Tried to keep some kind of light in those eyes.

  He couldn’t even see me. He could barely breathe. He died.

  I stood and turned, and knew I should have gone when I had the chance.

  A man and a woman, each carrying a smouldering matchlock, had crept between the rows of corpses and had their weapons trained on me. I froze. They’d approached from different directions and if either fired they’d put a hole the size of my fist through me.

  She was dressed in work overalls, like she’d ditched her job as a pipelayer and come to take up arms against me, but he was naked to the waist. Poor stitching formed a border between the tanned flesh of his chest and a cream-yellow patch beneath his armpit. Fixed, just as Nenn had been. More of Saravor’s creations. Beads of blood had gathered at the corners of their eyes, confirming my suspicion that Saravor no longer simply put men back together. He changed them. Owned them. The Darlings could take a man’s mind with their mind-worms. I’d given him that magic and he’d made it his own, woven it into his own power.

  ‘Drop the sword,’ the woman said. She was at the worst possible range. No chance I could get to her before she could fire. No real chance of her missing. Her hands were steady on the stock and I had no choice but to do as she asked. The blade rang against the temple’s stone floor like a funeral bell. The man came closer, never taking his gun from me.

  ‘Turn around,’ he said. ‘Face her.’ Their voices sounded flat and dead. I did as he asked.

  I guess he smashed me in the side of the head with the butt of his matchlock. I felt a massive impact. Confusion. Pain. Nothing really made sense. I wasn’t totally out – I knew they were moving me – but my brain had rocked around enough in my skull that it made little difference. I couldn’t move.

  My captors had laid me out on a table and tied me down. My hands were bound together, the rope fastened to a hook above my head. My feet had earned themselves a rope each. I was still dizzy and there was a milky nausea in my guts that made me want to spit.

  ‘The master wants him Bound,’ the man said. My head was swimming and I couldn’t get my thoughts to come out straight, but I got the impression that being Bound was not the same as being tied up.

  ‘Whatever deal you have with him, trust me, it’s not going to work out well for you,’ I said. ‘You think he’ll keep to his terms, now that he’s in your heads?’ Neither the man nor the woman responded – didn’t seem to notice me at all, in fact.

  ‘I never back down on a deal,’ said a dry, breathy, whisper from between the bodies. I closed my eyes, not yet ready to see the new speaker. My head thumped away as if a child were bringing a mallet down on it. I took a deep, steadying breath, and looked.

  Two grey children had arrived, blank and expressionless as desert sand. One of them held a severed head of the kind that Saravor had once delivered to me. Dry old leather for skin, the neck neatly stitched, the eyes rolled up into its grey face. This one had been an elderly woman, her hair as fine and white as silk. The grey child held it in the crook of an elbow, and the voice that ushered from the unmoving lips was dry as the rustle of fallen leaves.

  ‘Galharrow.’

  ‘Saravor,’ I said. The pain pulsed in my head in nauseating waves. ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘So calm, Galharrow. Good,’ the head breathed. ‘You cost me two very loyal servants today. Had I known you would come here of your own accord, I would but have asked. Perhaps we could have struck a new deal.’ The children came closer.

  ‘We did our last deal a long time ago, Saravor,’ I said. The head’s eyes slowly rotated down to look at me.

  ‘All deals come to an end sooner or later,’ the dusky voice hissed. ‘Our old association is, as you say, done, but new deal or no, I require your servitude. Blackwing will a
ssist me, in these last days.’

  I thrashed hard against my bonds in a sudden panic, understanding what he meant to do, and the man flinched, hand moving to a sword at his belt but the knots only tightened and dug deeper into my wrists. I was terrified. Really, deeply terrified. Saravor wasn’t here in person, but there were few living creatures that inspired as much fear in me as he did. The Deep Kings, the Nameless, the jellyfish thing under the northern Misery sands, and maybe my mother. But he was up there. Him and his creatures.

  He wanted to bind me to his will, like the poor fucker who’d just bled out on the floor. Like Marollo Nacomo, and whoever had worn Devlen Maille’s face. His power had grown, and if he changed me, I would become one of his creatures. A slave.

  ‘We need a part to attach,’ the male said. ‘Which one?’

  Silence followed for several moments.

  ‘Bring the prisoner,’ the head hissed eventually. ‘If I’m to keep Galharrow in his post, it must be a fresh part. The prisoner’s colouration will match well, and I have no further use for him anyway.’

  The grey child placed the head down, sideways, on the table at my feet, then knelt. When it stood again it was holding a saw. Rust speckled the jagged, blunt-looking teeth. No, not rust. Just something that dried the same colour. I went tense and cold all over and strained harder against my bonds but even if I was stronger than most, that didn’t mean that I could snap rope. My breath came fast. Hot, staccato pants. The saw did not gleam wickedly; it was the dull, practical grime across it that really sent dread through me.

  The grey children watched as the prisoner came meekly. No fight in him, whoever he’d been before Saravor took him. He was pushed into a corner, and cringed away from the hand that forced him.