Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  The prisoner could have been mistaken for the most unfortunate of beggars. His hair was long and tangled, at least half of its mass composed of grease and grime. His face was gaunt, the bones stark beneath the skin. If he’d seen a bowl of water in the last year, he hadn’t chosen to wash with it. But his clothes had once been fine. They were a uniform dirt colour now but the quality of the lace and silk had not been destroyed by whatever horror they’d put him through.

  ‘It needs to be a limb to bind him strongly. Galharrow has shown me his capacity for resistance before,’ the head breathed. ‘A right hand can cause problems with signatures. A foot always affects gait and draws attention. Take his left arm. The match won’t be perfect, but he can wear sleeves.’

  The grey child passed the saw to the goon.

  ‘What do you want, Saravor? Tell me. Maybe we can make a deal,’ I said. Desperate. Weak. Throwing two dice and hoping for three sixes. ‘There’s something you want. Tell me. Let’s trade. I’m good for it, you know that.’

  I sounded pathetic. I was pathetic. But then, everyone is when they’re about to lose a limb.

  ‘What does any man want?’ the head said. ‘I want to be great. To be stronger, bolder. To control, to ascend.’ The talk of power made the grey children smile. ‘You can offer me nothing that I cannot claim myself,’ the corpse-lips breathed. ‘What would you give me? Money? Sex? No, Galharrow. There is only one thing I truly want from you.’

  ‘Too much to hope that it’s my good opinion?’ I growled.

  ‘Your teeth,’ the head said. I swear that dead old woman’s head almost smiled at me. ‘What a prize they would be. I would wear them myself. The teeth that tore out Torolo Mancono’s throat!’

  ‘You’re fucking mad,’ I said.

  ‘If you lie still, I’ll get through the bone quicker,’ the man with the saw said. ‘If the angle is clean, the fixing won’t go on a wonk. Less pain. Be your old self faster.’ He smiled and pointed toward the stitching around his armpit. As though his enslavement was some glorious gift.

  ‘Galharrow …’ the filth-encrusted prisoner’s voice was weak, from the corner. He was staring at me like I was the Spirit of Judgment sent down to burn him. Horrified. His mouth hung loosely open and as I stared at him for a moment, I knew him.

  I thrashed again against my bonds again, the ropes biting deeper into my flesh, straining with all I had, the flax cutting and drawing blood, and I screamed and jerked and did what I could, and all of it was nothing. I fought until I was bloody and raw, panting. They let me exhaust myself. They had plenty of time.

  Dantry spirits-damned Tanza.

  ‘Hold him,’ the man with the saw said to the woman. She came forward and applied her weight to my elbows, tried to flatten them against the table. She hadn’t the weight to keep me down, but the ropes weren’t letting go. Saw-Man gave me a look. ‘It really will be easier if you don’t struggle,’ he said. For a treacherous moment my fear won through and I considered not battling with all my fight, but it was only a moment. I growled and spat, but she crushed me down and I was tired and still half-concussed. The jagged saw teeth rested against the skin of my inner left elbow.

  And drew back.

  I jerked my arm away as the teeth bit into flesh. The saw slipped, and instead of digging into my elbow, the jagged teeth tore across the raven tattooed across my forearm.

  I’d told Nenn that I’d tried to dig the raven from my flesh once. I knew the consequences.

  There was a crack, as though a hundred-year-old oak had been felled. A smell, of hot tar and burned hair. The raven fought back against the saw’s teeth and my arm burned as a splurge of liquid darkness flared out into the room, hurling Saw-Man and the woman against the wall. A nightmare spilled from my arm, a living blackness: Crowfoot’s fail-safe in case his servants tried to cut him from their own bodies. The corruption that spilled out was formless, a cloud of boiling, hate-filled ink in the air which lashed back and forth, mindless and volatile. An oily, stinking purple light filled the room.

  I saw Saravor’s grey children as I never had before. All pretence was flayed away, their true natures revealed. There were no children here. I have no name for what they were, but they were old, old as the mountains, wrinkled and impure. Rows of blunt horns rose from scaly brows, and their bony thinness came not from a lack of appetite but from never being sated. They hissed and shrieked, orange eyes wide as foreign magic flared out to burn them.

  Wild and uncontrolled, the corruption spilled from my arm. The wood beneath me sizzled and turned moist, and the ropes binding my arms dried and disintegrated. As I came free, the grey children gave a shrill shriek and fled. The woman was dead, the burst of magic having rotted her flesh from her bones, but the man had only been thrown back by its blast. He picked himself up as the poisoned magic sputtered out, the flesh on the side of his face sizzling and running in streams. Half-blind, he brandished the saw as a weapon, but I was free now. My vision wasn’t all there, but I got my hands on his saw and after we crashed down on the ground his neck got opened, and I got sprayed with whatever had been inside him.

  I grabbed Dantry and I didn’t give two shits about the pain shooting through my leg as I lifted him. When it comes to those you love, there is no pain that cannot be endured. I forgot the pain in my head and focused on getting him out of there, getting him to safety. I heard the grey children’s shrieks receding into the dark tunnels as I fled. They would be back with more men, and more saws.

  19

  I wouldn’t have fed what was left of Dantry Tanza to a starving dog. Or more accurately, I doubt that even a lean dog would have been terribly interested in trying to gnaw the gristle from his bones.

  When I had first met him, out in the Misery, he’d been thirty years old, but with a certain boyishness in both look and character. Soft skin, hands more used to pen than plough, and a lightness of heart that only came from having a bank account whose bottom he’d never had to acknowledge. Then there had been his willingness to believe, a refusal to accept that – despite his situation, despite the murder of his manservant Glost – anybody might have an agenda against him.

  Standing over his bedside, it gave me little joy to see he could not doubt it now.

  Dantry had always been slender, but now he was skeletal. The most wretched beggars in the Spills would have pitied him. His skin was milky-white as a maggot, his hair and beard grown into a damp, matted clump. He was filthy, and he must have been wearing the same tattered rags since he was taken. A single pearl button had clung to the front of his shirt, a last stubborn memory of its former finery.

  I had sent Maldon to bring Casso and Valiya. While I had washed the blood from my wrists and head, they’d stripped him down in the yard and dealt with the worst of the lice, cutting his hair and burning his rags. Dantry was in too much shock to acknowledge the indignity. I added it to the stack of grudges I held against Saravor on his behalf.

  He lay in my bed, in my house, a fever bringing perspiration to his brow, alternating between shaking and lying entirely still, silent as a corpse. I hadn’t seen him in over two years. All the resentment I’d felt that he’d gone sat like a traitor in my chest.

  Valiya and Amaira came in with a bowl of hot water, scissors, a razor.

  ‘Do you want to, or shall I?’ Valiya asked gently. My hand had a shake about it, so I nodded that she should go ahead. My skull was still pounding, and my leg would be biting me for days.

  ‘Why’s he so sick?’ Amaira asked. She was reluctant to go near to him.

  ‘Some bad people have treated him very poorly,’ I said. ‘This is why we do what we do, Amaira. Because good people like this boy are hurt and in pain.’

  ‘He’s a man, not a boy’ Amaira said. She was right, but Dantry would always seem a boy to me.

  Valiya worked quietly. She’d cut away the tangled beard in the yard, and worked quietly now with a razor t
o remove the remaining stubble. Dantry flinched and mumbled. He’d been fevered by the time I’d dragged him out of the sewer, as though he’d been holding it back with all his strength before. He’d let go now, and it had him under siege.

  ‘Who held him this way?’ Valiya asked.

  ‘Saravor,’ I said. ‘He had Dantry. He has the Eye. And he’s going to pay for taking them both.’

  ‘Do you know where to find him?’

  I shook my head, a mistake. The motion made my head swim, dizziness and nausea striking me. Determined, strong fingers pulled me down into a chair and Amaira stepped away as I thumped into it, flushing a cloud of dust from the cushion. The whole room had a neglected air. Of course it did – I was hardly ever here, and my housekeeper looked to have abandoned her duties after the sky-fires began falling. I was exhausted, frayed at every edge, worn through and out of reserves. The fight against Saravor’s puppets had taken what little I had left. I needed brandy. Or something, anything, to take the edge off. Let me get a little energy back.

  ‘Can I get you something, Captain-Sir?’ Amaira asked.

  ‘Why’s she here?’ I asked Valiya over her head. ‘She shouldn’t be seeing this stuff.’

  ‘You sent everyone else to the sewer, and I needed another pair of hands. Amaira, more water please.’

  The kid looked downcast. Hurt. She didn’t understand that I wanted to save her from this for her own good. The life of a Blackwing captain was nothing to strive for, no route to wealth, or family, or happiness. I was barely even an umbrella against life’s steady stream of piss. She was a good kid. She deserved a better life.

  I woke from the usual dream. Ezabeth, cold and lost in the light, reaching out to me. I reached for her but could never touch her maimed hand. Safely awake again, I shivered in the quiet, cosy room. Valiya had settled a blanket over me. Candles gave a soft light, and the fire had been stoked. Across the room, Dantry’s quiet breathing whistled in and out of his chest, but the smell of his sickness was masked by a scent in the candles. My head pulsed, and I wondered what had woken me.

  A jug of tea, many hours cold, sat on a side table beside some beef, winter greens and, best of all, a bottle of Whitelande brandy. I ignored the glass, settled back into the chair and drank hard. Whitelande brandy alone was worth defending the republic for. I wondered whether Valiya or Amaira had set it there, and finally decided that I loved them both in their way, and that it didn’t matter. I got through half of the brandy without rising from the chair, and then heard the thunderous crash far overhead as Thierro’s shield deflected a missile. The sky-fires were hammering down again. That was probably what had woken me.

  I winced each time I bent my wrists. The red weals the ropes had left were scabbed and sore, but there was nothing to show from where the saw had bitten into the raven mark on my forearm. Not for the first time I wondered where Crowfoot and Nall were, what schemes they were plotting, and why they hadn’t come to our aid. I thought of the frozen bird that had torn itself from my arm, deformed and failing in its ability to deliver a message. None of it was good.

  I was bone weary, my legs jittery and throbbing with exhaustion, but sleep had retreated back to its swamp. My mind swarmed with things I knew, things that I thought I knew, and inevitably, my worries over what I didn’t know at all. Saravor’s plans were more advanced than I had dared to imagine. Sending men into the Misery, stealing the Eye from Crowfoot’s vault – those had felt like the beginning, but I saw now that he’d been plotting against us much longer. Probably from the moment I bestowed Shavada’s power upon him. Alone with my regrets, time passed slowly. I heard the impacts of four sky-fires that made it past the Witnesses’ shields. After what I’d witnessed beneath the city, they didn’t even make me flinch.

  Dawn came and with it Valiya brought me hot tea and porridge.

  ‘Nenn’s back from the sewers. You’ll want to talk it through with her.’

  ‘Send her in.’

  Nenn looked like she’d had a rough night, which for her was impressive. I’d sent her in with her Ducks and every other kill-hungry bastard I had once we’d got clear.

  ‘How’s the city?’

  ‘In pieces. Four of the sky-fires made it through the shield. One of them hit a slaughterhouse, and there’re pork chops all over the neighbouring roofs. How’s Dantry?’

  ‘About the same.’ I rubbed at my eyes, pried the sleep from them. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘I thought I’d seen the worst the world had to throw at us in the Misery,’ Nenn said. ‘That was worse.’

  Nenn and the boys had stormed down there, but the grey children had disappeared and Saravor was nowhere to be seen. Maldon had gone down with them to be sure, but the Eye hadn’t been stored there. Saravor had more than one hideout, as I knew he would. He might well have more charnel houses set up beneath the city, dead bodies hung like slaughtered cattle ready to be harvested for parts. Their number made it clear. Saravor wasn’t just fixing people anymore. He wasn’t just taking the occasional client who wanted to make a deal. He was building a force of servants he could control directly.

  Maybe Nenn knew it too. She reached for the half-drunk brandy and I didn’t stop her. After a few swallows she planted herself beside me.

  ‘I was hoping you’d at least get those children of his,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what they are, but we’d be better off if they were dead.’

  ‘It’s Saravor I want,’ Nenn said. Her eyes focused on some imagined scene which, knowing her, meant hacking him to pieces. We’d left the worst fear unspoken, hoping that Saravor’s newfound abilities didn’t backdate to those he’d fixed up before I gave Shavada’s power to the grey children.

  ‘The book,’ a hoarse wheeze came from across the room.

  I got up, unsteady on my feet despite having slept for longer than I usually did in a week. I flexed my shoulders, a trio of knots in my spine cracking like crushed beetles. I was getting too old to be swinging swords at people and the fierce, abrupt action had pulled something in my shoulder and something else in my hip. I winced as I walked over to Dantry’s bedside.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked him. His shrunken, skull-face peered back at me. He’d taken on a reddish colouring, and the sheets around him had a damp-sweat odour.

  ‘Were my books there? Papers? Did they find them?’

  ‘No books,’ Nenn said, joining us. ‘Spirit of Mercy, Dantry. You look like a pig’s arse.’

  ‘Good to see you too, General.’ He managed a weak smile. It rose and fell like a ball tossed in the air. Nenn was about to explain that she was no longer a general on account of being unable to hold her fists in check, but there was time for that later.

  ‘What book?’ I asked. Dantry gestured that he wanted to sit up, so I propped him up on the numerous pillows.

  ‘The Taran Codex. It was there.’

  That damned book. Dantry had obsessed about it, before he disappeared.

  ‘Nothing down there now but the dead,’ Nenn said. She handed him a bowl. ‘Eat. Get some food in your belly.’

  I asked Nenn to get more brandy, wanting her out of the room. I’d sent her and her Ducks into the sewers on reflex, but after what I’d seen, it was better if she wasn’t party to our conversation.

  Between mouthfuls of nourishing oxtail broth, Dantry recounted what he remembered. He’d lost all track of time down there, and we both thought he’d been a prisoner for most of the two years since I’d last seen him.

  ‘I knew who he was,’ Dantry said. ‘Saravor. He looked like he was made of patchwork pieces which didn’t quite fit together. He knew I had a copy of the Codex. He lured me to meet him, claimed to be a linguistics expert, but there were men waiting for me. They took me belowground and into a cell. I haven’t left it until today.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He made me help him with the book. To understand it.’

&n
bsp; ‘But you couldn’t read it?’

  ‘I couldn’t. But Saravor translated it from the Akat. He knows things, Ryhalt. He’s so old. Or those children are. There are things in that book that nobody should know. Taran was Nameless, and he codified what he knew about how to breach reality a thousand years ago.’ He paused. ‘I wish that I could un-know what I learned, and Saravor only showed me glimpses. Only the parts that he couldn’t understand. He made me work calculations for him.’ The spoon trembled in his fingers. ‘He used the mind-worms on me, tried to scour my mind for information. But he couldn’t force me to think for him. They don’t work that way. He can make puppets of men’s bodies, can read their memories, but he can’t force them to think something new.’

  Astronomy and mathematics. They had always been Dantry’s gifts, and he had laboured at them, alone and in the dark. Sometimes his lantern would burn out, and they would forget him for days. Then one of Saravor’s minions would replace the oil and tell him to get back to work. If he didn’t work, he didn’t eat, that was the deal, and so he worked.

  ‘What did he want?’ I said. Dantry closed his eyes and laid his head back against the pillow.

  ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘To learn what Taran once knew, and unlock the secrets of the Codex. He wants to become like the Nameless. Or the Deep Kings. But he was always afraid. He feared the Nameless.’ He looked straight at me. ‘He feared Ezabeth. For a time, anyway. He kept bringing me details of the Bright Lady sightings. They were growing more frequent. He wanted to know what she was. But the more we learned, the less he was afraid. He started to believe that she was gathering power with each appearance, and when I threatened him, said she was coming back to save me, he laughed and gave me more of the Codex to read. Forced me to prove what he’d already deduced.’ He looked at the blanket in his lap. ‘I’m sorry, Ryhalt. You were right. It would take more power than the Heart of the Void ever held to reach through to her in the light. She’s trapped in another world and not even Nall’s Engine commands the kind of force necessary to breach that barrier. There’s no way to reach her.’ He looked so pained.