Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘The Bright Order believes she’ll come back,’ I said. I had refused to believe it for so long. But somewhere, deep inside me, I’d held to the faintest glimmer of hope. With his words, that hope cracked in half and disintegrated into dust.

  ‘Her world isn’t ours anymore. She can no more bring herself back than we can reach through to her. The laws laid down in the Taran Codex proved that.’

  I thought of Dantry, alone and wretched, slowly doing the calculations to prove that all his hopes had been in vain. If I ever got a chance, I’d tear Saravor apart with my bare hands, piece by stitched-together piece.

  ‘Then why would she be gathering power. If there’s no way – why?’

  ‘I don’t know. Though Saravor proved that’s what she was doing. He found something else in the Codex that interested him more. The things in that book – Ryhalt, I know how stars are born. I understand how to split the tiniest particles that make us all. It’s staggering. I only know of a handful of academics in all of the city-states who could have worked those equations.’

  ‘But you did.’

  Dantry stirred his broth.

  ‘What choice did I have?’

  ‘No choice at all,’ I said. ‘I’d have worked them too. So what’s he planning?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not exactly,’ Dantry said. ‘But I deduced parts of it. He plans to pit two opposing magics against one another. I don’t know what, but colossal forces. He needed to know how to avoid being destroyed by them. Spirits save me, Ryhalt, I showed him. Whatever he’s planning, he knows everything he needed to. He ran out of uses for me.’

  Except as spare parts.

  ‘Rest,’ I said. ‘When you’ve slept, start writing down whatever you can remember. Anything that might help us. Whatever he knows, we need to know it too.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Dantry said. ‘Ryhalt – I’m sorry.’

  My mood had turned too dark for comfort. I hadn’t any kind words for him.

  I left him to his rest. Nenn had to get going. She’d worked through the night, but with Colonel Koska in charge in the citadel and Bright Order men running the show, I needed a steadying hand up at the citadel. Her soldiers were already on the streets, in the cold, tense air.

  Nenn and I bumped into Valiya at the door. ‘Unless you need me, I have to get some rest,’ Valiya said. She looked as worn as the rest of us. She hadn’t needed to stay all night, but telling Valiya to stop working was like telling me to stop drinking. ‘Major Nenn, could you put a couple of men on the door?’

  ‘Manpower’s stretched taut as rope right now, but I’ll find someone,’ Nenn said. Both of them hesitated, waiting for the other to leave. Nenn won the standoff, crossed her arms and watched Valiya walk toward a hired carriage. The sound she made was half grunt, half laugh.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Just funny. She’s been trying to get inside your bedroom for a while. Probably didn’t imagine it would happen like this.’ She took out blacksap, put the disgusting stuff between her teeth and began to chew.

  He words rankled. We’d talked this way for most of the last ten years, but I didn’t think it was respectful to talk about Valiya when she wasn’t around. She was proud. I couldn’t imagine that she’d have appreciated it. I told Nenn as much.

  ‘She’d forgive you soon enough if you lifted her skirts and went to town. You should do it, too. Might loosen you up a bit.’

  ‘And here I was hoping Captain Betch would fuck some sense into you.’

  Nenn niggled a bit of grit from her blacksap and spat it out into the front garden.

  ‘I’m not embarrassed to say that I like fucking, Ryhalt. It’s the way the spirits made us, and I’ll be damned if I’m ashamed to say that I enjoy it. That’s your problem, you know. You only want things that you can’t have. Only you can have her, you’ve just convinced yourself you can’t. I doubt you’re paying that woman enough to have her making you soup through the night. Read the news sheet, as they say.’

  ‘Piss off and stop bothering me. Go save the city or something.’

  We clapped hands together, and for all our jabs and insults, we were still close as pigs in the mud. That wouldn’t be the case in my next conversation.

  Maldon was down in my cellar, in what he’d turned into a workshop of sorts. He’d lit the place with traditional lamps, no phos to be seen, but I could smell it in the air even against the hot ache of smelted steel. He had a big workbench, a small furnace, and all kinds of metallic wizardry that simpler men like me couldn’t begin to understand.

  The blind child worked, alone, humming to himself. He wasn’t wearing his blindfold so I could see the hole in his skull, the wound that would never heal and never kill him. The rhyme he sang was an old one that chilled me. The night is dark, the night is cold …

  ‘You’ve been busy down here,’ I said. He didn’t look up; what would have been the point?

  ‘Busy is better,’ he said. ‘Pass me that spanner.’

  I found it on his cluttered workbench among a series of rifled matchlock barrels, the deconstructed parts of at least two flarelock firearms, gears, cogs, steel winches, leather straps, and other assorted metallic junk and tools. He took the spanner, adjusted it and tightened two bits of metal.

  ‘What are you making?’ I asked.

  ‘Weapons,’ he said. ‘That amateur Besh Flindt thinks these flarelocks he’s making are something to be proud of, doesn’t he? I’m going to show him what a real phos weapon can do.’

  ‘Can you make something more stable than the flarelocks?’ I said. I picked up a phos canister that had imploded, the iron shell crumpled inwards.

  ‘I’m not sure. I was working on similar ideas a long time ago, but I always ran into testing issues. Now it doesn’t matter if I make a mistake. I can blow myself up a number of times, can’t I? So far all my calculations show that there is a substantial chance that my weapon will explode after firing. But if it doesn’t, it would make one man worth an army.’

  I was confident that Maldon would probably survive any malfunctions that his project experienced. I wasn’t so sure about my house, but I’d allowed this, and it did seem to be keeping him out of trouble. He didn’t even seem drunk, for the first time in several years. Empty bottles still cluttered the edges of the room, but not as many as I’d expected.

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘I’ll show you when it’s finished. Did you want something, or were you just checking I’m being a good son?’

  ‘There was something.’

  I laid out what we’d discovered beneath the city. Maldon kept tinkering at first, but when Saravor’s name came up he put the revolving discs he’d been screwing together down and sat back in his chair.

  ‘I would have beaten him, if you hadn’t taken my power,’ he said. His voice was very quiet. I sensed a hint of resentment there, even though he knew that had I not taken his magic, he would have killed me.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Saravor had some raw power. It was strange, not like anyone or anything else that I’d encountered before. Not that anyone is generally the same, where magic is concerned. But it came from somewhere dark. Someplace that shouldn’t be touched.’

  ‘I gave him the power that Shavada had put into you,’ I said. ‘That’s how I beat you both. We made a deal and those creatures that serve him took it. How powerful could he be, now?’

  Maldon shrugged his bony shoulders.

  ‘How far is a Misery mile?’

  ‘He took the Eye, too,’ I said. ‘What can he do with it?’

  ‘The Eye wasn’t worth much after it came out of Prince Herono’s face,’ Maldon said. ‘Indestructible, like any physical part of a Deep King. Remember when we fired that cannon at it? And it just kept grubbing around on the floor.’ The memory raised a smile, but it didn’t last. ‘But when Shavada was destroyed, any power t
he Eye contained was lost. It’s an empty vessel.’

  ‘An empty vessel,’ I said slowly. ‘Could it be filled?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Phos?’

  ‘No,’ Maldon said. ‘I doubt it, anyway. When Shavada took me, I lost all of my spinning ability.’ He snapped his fingers as if expecting a spark. Nothing happened. ‘They’re different sides of a coin. You can’t put light into darkness.’

  It had been a wild theory. A layman trying to guess how forces beyond his control worked. Better to leave it to the experts and focus on finding the damn thing. I lingered in the workshop as Maldon went back to his work, not quite able to bring myself to say what I needed to. Maldon put down the screwdriver again.

  ‘Spit it out,’ he said. ‘Or go away.’

  ‘Saravor has changed,’ I said eventually. ‘He’s controlling people. I’d assumed that Nacomo was being paid, or blackmailed, but now I’m not sure. He’d changed his face and to free himself, he cut it off. He didn’t want to be Saravor’s puppet anymore.’

  ‘Hard choice to make, I guess,’ Maldon said. ‘Keep your face or your mind. He chose right, I guess.’

  ‘When Saravor takes them they seem clumsy, like someone else is pulling their strings. Others seem normal. Kind of. I’m not sure they even understood what he was doing to them. But Saravor fixed Nenn, four years back. You think he can get in her head?’

  Maldon didn’t have an answer for me. He picked up two pieces of metal, tried them together. Spun a little wheel on a greased axle.

  ‘I don’t know. That was before he took Shavada’s power and his puppeteering is a new trick that he learned since. Let’s hope he can’t. I like Nenn. She doesn’t look on me with pity.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I have to ask something of you.’ Maldon lifted his hairless chin, only I couldn’t bring myself to say it. Maldon understood, chewed his lip, then nodded. A slow nod. A killing nod.

  ‘If it comes to that,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it. The Range asks a lot of you, Ryhalt, but not even I’d ask you to do that. If she’s lost to us, send her here to collect my old journals. I’ll make it quick.’

  I’d asked him to do it, and he’d promised the right things. But in that moment I hated him nonetheless.

  We both jumped as a bird flew headlong into one of the high windows that ran close to the ceiling. It collapsed, dazed, beyond the glass. It was just a bird, and there was nothing unusual about that, only it was a raven, and I pay particular attention to ravens. It had a mantle of white feathers around its shoulders and running up the back of its head, and it struggled back to its feet. For a moment it examined us through the grimy pane, then began to peck and scrape its beak across the glass. Tap, tap-tap, tap-scrape. Tap-tap-scrape. Scrape.

  ‘Crash must have addled its brain,’ Maldon said. ‘It thinks it’s a woodpecker.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I stood and listened. ‘It’s communicator code.’

  ‘Sure it is,’ Maldon snorted. ‘What’s it saying? Give me a worm?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s saying “let me in”.’

  20

  ‘What is it?’ Maldon asked. ‘A crow?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a hooded raven. But you don’t see them around here.’

  I reached up and pushed the window open. The raven ducked inside and fluttered down to perch atop one of Maldon’s brass-and-steel contraptions.

  It stepped from foot to foot in a manner I’d seen before. That usually meant Crowfoot was laughing at me, and I had a bad feeling about where this was going. The noises it was making were becoming more coherent, some of them actually starting to sound like speech, though its attempts at forming words were closer to squeaks and whistles.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Maldon said. His childish timbre made him sound fearful. Maybe he was. ‘We should kill it.’

  ‘I think that would be a bad idea,’ I said.

  The raven flicked its head to one side, then seemed to suddenly switch from avian squeaks to a harsh, guttural language. Short, punchy syllables ran together in blocks. Definitely a language, but not one that I knew. Maldon shrugged. The bird flicked its head again and this time it made the click-and-buzz droning of the drudge. Some of it I caught, but not much, my grasp of drudge-speak being limited. The bird buzzed and hummed, but then it flicked its head sideways one final time, and said, ‘How about now? Can you understand me now?’

  Maldon and I would have shared a look, except that he couldn’t look at anything. Mad as it sounds, a bird coming out of my arm was familiar. A talking bird didn’t seem all that strange.

  ‘I understand you,’ I said.

  ‘Good. I wasn’t sure which idiotic language you speak. I will stick to this one so it doesn’t wear out your brains.’

  I bowed my head.

  ‘I am at your service, Master,’ I said. Gleck had started to shuffle back across the room. He’d escaped the Nameless’s notice following the siege. He feared them. Everyone did, of course, but there was a little bit of Deep King in Maldon that hadn’t quite been erased when Shavada’s power was stripped away, the part that kept him young and indestructible, and his greatest fear was that the Nameless would decide to dissect him to learn more about their enemy. The raven didn’t seem to have any interest in him, however.

  ‘Master?’ the bird croaked. It had a high, nasal, irritating voice. ‘I’m not your master, Galharrow, you worm-piss. I assume you’re Galharrow anyway, not the child? Hard to tell at this proximity.’

  I didn’t know what the raven meant, but it was a raven, so it wasn’t going to make sense.

  ‘I’m Galharrow,’ I said. ‘What are you, then?’

  ‘I’m a part of his power, obviously,’ the raven said. ‘He shaved me off and sent me here.’

  ‘And you didn’t come through my arm because …?’

  ‘Too much magical interference from the wards the Nameless have placed around themselves. Too much cold. His last message didn’t come through properly, did it? He was furious about the Eye’s being taken from Narheim. Not going to be happy that you’ve failed to get it back, either. He wants to commune with you in person.’

  That struck me cold. Crowfoot was bad enough through an avatar. The few times I’d been forced into his physical company had been worse. There was an evil gleam to the raven’s eyes. More of Crowfoot in it than it cared to admit, maybe.

  ‘Where is Crowfoot?’ I said. ‘We have death raining on us from the sky and chaos in the streets. What in the hells is he doing that’s so important?’

  ‘The hells, the hells,’ the bird croaked back at me. Its eyes were as black as the feathers across its head, but they gleamed like pools of oil. ‘Do you think that what’s happening here is the only thing of importance in the world? Do you? You humans think everything’s about you and your own lives. This war is waged on more than one front, you should know that.’

  ‘Valengrad is the heart of the Range’s defence,’ I growled. ‘Without the Engine we lose the war.’

  ‘The Engine? Everything of consequence is protected,’ the bird scoffed. ‘You’re talking about a few civilians. It’s a war, Galharrow. Wars are about killing. Your hands are stained enough to know that.’

  The bird looked around as if hungry. There was no food in the room. Birds can’t make expressions, they haven’t the faces for it, but this one managed to look annoyed. I took a deep breath. I wanted to get this over with. If Crowfoot wanted to speak to me, then he was likely furious at my failure, and I’d seen the price men paid for agitating the Nameless.

  ‘He can speak to me through you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ the raven said. ‘He wants to talk to you himself. Ready?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You should sit down for this,’ the raven said. He cocked his head toward Maldon. ‘And you should fuck off.’ Maldon didn’t ne
ed to be told twice. He was up the stairs faster than I’d seen him move in years. I didn’t like the sound of this, but I sat anyway. The raven cawed, maybe a laugh, maybe just a bird sound. But when I’d sat cross-legged on the floor it launched into the air, flew a tight circle around the room and then flew right at me. I raised my hands to stop him but it passed right through them and then everything changed.

  A cosmic rush. Light-headedness, a flurry of stars bending time and substance as I raced through the voids that lie between all things. A roaring, a gale between mountains.

  I was somewhere else. In darkness, alone with a silvery thread of insubstantial thought-essence. I groped along the link until I felt something, a huge and terrible presence at the other end. Big as a star, dark as a mountain’s heart. It was Crowfoot, I realised. I was seeing him, and seeing into him, and I never thought that there could be so much space in all the universe.

  I was myself, but not myself. No emotion. No feeling. Those things had been left behind in the body that I no longer inhabited. I became aware of more, not just Crowfoot but of the Nameless. A place, far away, so far it could have been another world entirely.

  He was beyond the reach of cold. Three of them, standing as points of a small triangle. Frost coated them, snow had banked against their hunched forms. There was nothing around them but grey snow and blue ice, and a screeching wind that carried more of the same out of the north. The pale blue ice stretched on and on into forever. Flat, featureless, a place of bright paleness, and yet everything there was dead. Through the thread that led me to Crowfoot I understood that I had been brought to a place of power. I had always imagined such places to be surrounded by standing stones, a forest glade, a holy mountain shrine. Something to mark the spot as unique. But there was nothing but ice and wind and echoing loneliness.

  Three watchers, three workers of power. My master had not moved in days. Maybe weeks, months, years. He didn’t need to. His eyes, mouth and ears were frozen over. His body was blue and cold, solid as the glacier on which it sat. A part of it. Across the cold air sat Nall, or one of him, looking as dead as carrion. His eyes were slightly open. Perhaps he could see me, frozen stiff though he was. Shallowgrave completed the triangle, but I couldn’t focus on him. He was a blur, a distortion against the eye; even while he was immobile my mind rejected him. Here were the Nameless. Our defenders, frozen, alone and locked in a silent war, immobile as they worked unseen, invisible violence. I was not the only one that made sacrifices for the war. We hated them, feared them, but we would be lost without them.