Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  Darlings. Of course there were. But fish-faced and tailed? That sounded like the one Levan Ost had seen, the one Saravor had sent men to meet, shortly before he’d cracked the vault at Narheim. It was the first good lead I’d had to Ost’s Misery expedition since Nacomo blew himself to pieces.

  Not a lot to go on. No real chance of taking a Darling alive to question it. But if their assault was linked to what Saravor was trying to pull in Valengrad? Could it be one of his two colossal forces? I needed to see it for myself.

  That, and there were a whole lot of innocent lives to avenge.

  ‘I’m in,’ I said. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We are,’ Thierro said. He had a saddle over the shoulder of his starched white coat. There were insignia crescents on his sleeve now, equivalent to the rank of general. A man on the rise, for sure. He gestured at the troops preparing around us. ‘Fifty of my best marksmen, fifty of the citadel’s best cavalry. Colonel Koska’s two remaining Battle Spinners, Witness Glaun, Witness Valentia, and myself to counter the Darlings. We go in, grack their sorcerers and get out again.’

  ‘Range Officer’s Manual recommends three Spinners to neutralise each Darling,’ I said reflexively.

  ‘Six would be grand,’ Thierro said. ‘But we’ve only got five, so five it is.’

  ‘You running the whole show now, Thierro?’

  ‘Davandein’s desertion has left the citadel badly understrength,’ Thierro said easily. ‘Most of the Spinners went with her, and without Spinners, there’s no mission.’

  I had to hand it to him, he had balls volunteering to lead the mission himself. Only three kinds of people willingly enter the Misery. I didn’t pick Thierro for greedy, stupid or desperate. Unless overconfidence is a kind of stupid.

  ‘What do you need Tnota for? Stracht has his own navigator.’

  ‘Had,’ Stracht said. He looked weary, half-dead on his feet. I wondered whether he’d slept since he got back to the city. ‘He took a bolt in the side as we were trying to get out. He’s down in the infirmary now, dying. He’s made his last trip.’

  Tears glistened in his tainted, amber eyes. Stracht had been with his navigator a long time. You make a deep bond with a man when you ride together in the Misery. You trust each other, understand how little chance you got on your own. We’re none of us an island.

  ‘That doesn’t mean I can be forced,’ Tnota said angrily. ‘Tell them!’

  Stracht cut in before I could reply.

  ‘Far as I know there’s only two navigators alive that have been as far as the crystal forest,’ he said. ‘This one-armed git is one. The other has an infected gut wound, and I’m planning to offer him a loaded pistol before I go so he can spare himself the agony.’

  ‘I’ll be fucked if I’m going,’ Tnota said. He spat on the floor. ‘One hundred men against three thousand? Fucking madness. I’m not even military.’

  I wanted to support Tnota, to say he didn’t have to go. Tell him that it was OK. But I couldn’t. I stood thinking it through in the clatter and bustle of the yard. A small force would move quickly, strike hard and fast and get out. I had no doubt that Nenn had volunteered her Ducks the moment she’d heard about it.

  I placed a hand on Tnota’s good shoulder.

  ‘Sorry, old friend,’ I said. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘You can’t be serious!’ Tnota said, shaking me off.

  I recalled what Valiya had said to me.

  ‘The drudge have to be stopped,’ I said. ‘We’re bleeding out here, and I don’t trust anyone else enough to do it right.’

  ‘Glad to have you on board,’ Thierro said. He shook my hand and I was caught for a moment by the potency of that damn cologne that he seemed to bathe in. I pulled him in closer.

  ‘And with three Witnesses out of the city, what about the shield?’ I said quietly.

  ‘We’re nearly out of phos batteries anyway,’ he whispered back. A confidential acknowledgment between old friends. ‘We can’t maintain the shield for much longer. We have to end these attacks before the flare.’

  ‘So much for the Bright Lady.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘This is her will.’

  I was highly sceptical about that, but I wasn’t going to get into a theological debate in the middle of the muster yard.

  ‘You’re really serious about this?’ Tnota asked, sounding dismal and looking betrayed. I placed a consoling hand on his shoulder.

  ‘You really expect any less of me?’

  ‘I knew I’d get you lads back out there again someday,’ Nenn said. She grinned like a dealer that just heard you’re back on the pollen. ‘It’ll be just like the old days.’

  Only in the old days, I knew she’d always have my back. Now, I had to watch hers, in case she turned on us.

  22

  ‘The Eye is still in Valengrad,’ the raven said. It was trying to get into my carefully wrapped and stowed rations, without success. Falcon lashed at it with his tail. ‘Your duty is to stay here.’

  ‘I have to go out there because of the Eye,’ I said. ‘We’ve no other leads.’

  ‘What do you think you’ll find?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’d rather be out there killing drudge and ending this rain of fire than whistling to myself and waiting for some new piece of information to fall into my lap. Whatever he’s planning, Saravor needed to meet with that Darling. Finding it, and seeing that magic, is our best shot right now.’

  The raven squawked, either frustrated by me, or frustrated by how well I’d wrapped the dried meat in my pack. It flapped away in a rustle of black wings.

  Thierro’s marksmen were a different sort, but their presentation gave me confidence. They marched up in decent order, flarelocks shouldered. I didn’t like seeing those, but I’d had the argument and I’d not dented Thierro’s faith in them. The troopers wore brightly coloured buff coats of lemony yellow, a simple female figure depicted in black both front and back. They were an odd bunch, took themselves very seriously and didn’t speak to any of Nenn’s devils. They weren’t the usual Bright Order pilgrim types – Thierro had handpicked men who had served as soldiers before. They were tough, but they were also volunteering to be heroes. Didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.

  I hadn’t packed light. I was taking Falcon plus a packhorse to carry all my other crap. Falcon was a biter, the kind of horse that would sometimes throw himself out of his stall to get at passersby, and I liked that kind of spirit in an animal that you take into battle. I seemed to have readied enough weaponry to arm a small brigade, including matchlocks, a brace of pistols and a long cavalry sabre with a nasty curve. Then there was a poleaxe, a great double-handed war sword and a few others that had different functions for different situations. I was armoured in new steel, feeling excessively shiny compared to the scratched and Misery-worn armour that Nenn’s boys were packing. Fifty of her best, her meanest, and I had every confidence in them. Men and women with broken teeth and the right kind of evil gleaming in their eyes.

  I decided to give the first-timers a briefing on what to expect. Got them all gathered together. They listened attentively, solemn-faced. These men and women were the deepest of the fanatics. Thierro had assured me that each and every one of them had seen the Bright Lady appear in a vision, as though that was supposed to give me confidence that they could put out three rounds a minute.

  ‘You’re going to see things you’ve never seen before,’ I said. ‘Some of them are going to try to eat you. Some of them will want to kill you for the sake of it. Some of them will try to drive you mad. There are no people out there, unless they’re our soldiers on patrol. You think you see your wife, your lover, someone who’s been dead awhile? They’re ghosts. Don’t look at them, don’t listen to them. They got nothing to say that’s worth hearing. And definitely don’t try to fuck them.’

  It
was a speech I’d given to my new guys a dozen times down the years, and I usually got a laugh. None of them were laughing today. Bad audience.

  ‘At night we sleep with three bodies back-to-back, and a fourth watching over you. Most likely way you die in the Misery is for a gilling to chew your foot off. If that happens, and you can’t ride, we leave you behind. We’ll only have supplies for twenty days so we can’t afford to be longer. If you get left behind, you won’t make it out.’

  The Bright Order soldiers said nothing. It was like talking to a bunch of badly dressed statues.

  ‘Above all, you listen to me, and to Stracht, and the navigator. And listen to Major Nenn. If we tell you not to put your foot down, you fucking freeze in place. If we say don’t go beyond the rocks when you need to piss, you don’t go beyond the fucking rocks. It’s not just the things that live in the Misery you need to watch for, it’s the land itself. It hates you, and it wants you dead. You forget that, even for a moment? You’re gracked.’

  Still no reaction, save the one who coughed politely into his hand. I gave up, shook my head and stepped back down.

  ‘Twenty marks says we don’t get two miles before one of them cracks and cries,’ Stracht grunted at me.

  ‘You think they know how to cry?’ I asked. Nenn and Tnota decided to get in on the wager. I’d gone for three miles. Nenn optimistically thought that they would make it all the way to our first campsite before a mass panic set in. She frowned at them, though. Worried. I saw Thierro. He’d worn a cuirass of well-polished steel rigged with phos canisters, but even he had a flarelock mounted on his saddle.

  ‘These are your best?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re the best,’ Thierro said. ‘Don’t mistake their discipline for a lack of passion. They’re devoted to the cause.’

  Dawn was a rising purple blush out across the Misery. The sky was welcoming it with a dirge for its latest victims. It hadn’t been long since the sky-songs had faded. The Witnesses’ shield had been smaller and weaker than before, confirmation that Thierro’s phos supply was dwindling. One of the sky-fires had come down on a temple, and nobody knew whether the priests and holy sisters within were still alive in their cellar or whether it had collapsed onto them. I’d visited the site, gathered a few of those tiny crystal shards, let them fall through my fingers. Watching the workers dragging away rubble and broken beams only firmed my resolve. Not only would we end this madness, I’d get a chance to put my sword through the heads of those that had brought it.

  Tnota had shown up drunk. He hadn’t slept all night, had instead gone out and got himself washed through, as though this were his last night alive. I guess it might have been. He was busy throwing up in a horse’s trough.

  ‘You’ll come back safe, won’t you Captain-Sir?’ Amaira said. She shouldn’t have come to see us off, but she was there all the same.

  ‘I’ll do my best. Look after everyone while we’re gone. Do what Valiya tells you. And make sure you’re down in the cellar at night.’

  She snapped me a salute and tried to find a brave smile as she fought back tears.

  I reached down and hugged her. It wasn’t right that I did that. She wasn’t my kid, but she held on to me like she was, and she wasn’t the only one fighting to keep the mask from cracking.

  Never get close if you can help it. When I got back, I’d send her away. Servant work wasn’t hard to come by.

  ‘Be good, and stay bright,’ I said to her, then went to shout at people until I felt better.

  Nobody won the bet. The Bright Order were far tougher than I’d given them credit for. They didn’t complain about the baking heat when the warmth came up from the ground, nor the bitter cold that blew in on a dry wind, as sudden as a change of mind. They sat in their saddles and stared ahead, intent on the job at hand. Maybe I’d misjudged their mettle. Belief can be a powerful spur to courage.

  I hated being back in the Misery. Hadn’t had to chase anyone into the wastelands in some time. For a while I’d thought maybe my time here was over and done.

  Within fifty miles of the Range the Misery was still scarred by the terrible power the Engine had brought to bear four years ago. In some places the craters were vast, half a mile wide, in others they were just ten paces across. The Engine was not systematic in the fury it had unleashed. The projectors had sent out annihilation, blackening and charring the sands into grains so small they couldn’t be seen individually. There were marshes where the blood had soaked in and never dried, up near Three-Six, where hundreds of thousands of drudge had been ripped to pieces. The legacy of the Engine was written up and down the length of the Range. If the drudge ever got close enough to see what we had done, they would think twice about advancing farther.

  And yet, even as we rode through the depressions left in the earth, I could see that the land was reclaiming itself, erasing our touch. The craters had begun to fill with sand, their edges growing softer. There were no plants here, but there was a certain naturalness to the gradual erasing of man’s influence. Close to its edges, the Misery’s tendency to move around was much reduced. If we rode back the way we’d come, we might even ride through the same craters.

  The Misery stank of twisted corruption. I breathed it in and it was grimmer than sewage. Stracht, by contrast, seemed more comfortable once we’d got into it, the bad magic creeping in beneath the fingernails, soaking into the skin. Perhaps it was like the white-leaf that the addicts smoked, a thing simultaneously hated and craved. Misery addiction. It was a terrifying thought.

  Tnota took the readings, plotted us a course as straight and true as anything ever was in the Misery. He’d had a thick book, bound up in black leather as long as I’d known him and it was as tattered and worn as he was. The man who’d taught him to navigate had had it from the man who’d taught him. They taught Misery navigation at the military academy these days, but it was all bollocks. Some men just have the affinity for it. They look from moon to moon, measure them off and somehow they know where things are going to be in the Misery. Nothing of that can be taught in a classroom.

  A few hours into our journey and the hooded raven found us. It had followed me from Valengrad and I held out my arm for it to alight on.

  Nenn’s men wanted to shoot it. Normally, they’d have been right to. Shoot first is the best strategy in the Misery.

  ‘I never took you for a man who kept pets,’ Thierro said. He was not coping well with the Misery’s influence. His face was sheened with sweat, despite the cold, and he’d tied a handkerchief over his face. He’d remember that you can’t keep out the smell or the poison that way soon enough.

  ‘This one is hard to shake off,’ I said. ‘After a while they get under your skin.’

  The raven was smart enough to realise that speaking in front of these people was a bad idea, but it opened its beak and cawed. I guess it found my joke amusing.

  ‘At least we can eat it when the food runs out,’ Nenn said, and then raising her voice, ‘which it will if our navigator isn’t paying attention.’

  Tnota looked up from his hangover and waved her away. His charcoal complexion was tinged with green. So too were the Bright Order men. Nenn’s veterans were faring better. Wasn’t their first time out in the Misery.

  One hundred men is enough to keep a lot of the Misery’s things at bay. Some of them, like dulchers, are too fearless or brainless to understand that they’ll lose the fight, but the skweams won’t come out of the sand if they think they’ll lose legs. This close to Valengrad those things were both rare, though. I was keeping my eyes peeled for nugs and gritterlarks all the same.

  ‘No gillings,’ I said. ‘Something we should be thankful for.’

  ‘They’re getting rarer,’ Stracht said. ‘Haven’t seen so many lately. We blocked up a burrow a month back, but they used to be common as mouse droppings.’

  ‘Maybe the Misery is cleaning itself up.’

 
‘Maybe. Or maybe there’s something new in the food chain taking a liking to all those fat little red bodies.’

  Stracht wasn’t an optimist. That’s probably why he’d managed to stay alive so long out here.

  We made a camp. Some of the drag-sleds had tents on them. They weren’t much, more like canvas coffins that you could sit in, but they kept the wind off. I slept alongside Nenn and Tnota, like we used to back when it was the three of us doing this for shitty court-paid bounties. Tnota had just about recovered from his night of excess, but his farts were still worse than the Misery’s stench.

  During the night, one of the Bright Order men disappeared. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, no damage to his tent. He was just gone. His weapons were beside his tent, with his provisions and his canteen. Thierro wandered around shouting his name for a while, a confused look on his face, while the heavily scarred Witness Glaun scowled and muttered.

  Dawn brought a pall of cloud. The cracks in the sky could still be seen beyond them, too bright and bronze to be obscured so easily, but the moons hid from our view. Tnota cursed and I held the astrolabe up for him as he moved dials and clicked wheels into place. He could still navigate, but it would be based on his estimates of the moons’ likely positions, and that meant that there was a limited degree of accuracy.

  The second day saw the rising of the ghosts. Nenn’s boys were used to them, and they ignored them as best they could. Not always possible. A woman died in childbirth, over and over, reappearing every mile or two that passed. Eventually one of the Ducks let his friends blindfold him and stuff wax in his ears, led him along blind. That didn’t stop the ghost, but it spared him the brutality of it.

  She wasn’t the only one, and they were all distracting. They pulled at the mind and cost us our focus. We nearly rode into a nest of deformed, crab-like things the size of dogs, because we’d been watching two aged spectres tearing at one another. Stracht managed to pull us up in time. The crab creatures were slow and couldn’t cause much trouble, but we took our poleaxes and smashed their shells in and skewered them anyway. There was lots of white flesh inside their shells, and if I’d not known better I’d have thought they’d make a decent stew.