Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  We suffered no losses on the second night. I guess that was something.

  23

  By night we saw them pass overhead like shooting stars, crystal missiles hurtling through the sky. Their song was more distant, softer, and since there was no chance of their coming down upon us with a boom and a roar, it was possible to see beauty in their flickering lights.

  Nenn and I lay looking up at the cracks in the sky, counting the sky-fires that went by. The camp was quiet. They always are in the Misery. I’ve heard that in other places soldiers will sing songs, or someone has a fiddle, or there’ll be laughter and stories. But almost all of my soldiering was done in the Misery, and there was never enough levity to bring out a song or a joke.

  ‘Do you ever wonder why the cracks don’t move?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess they’re just some kind of imprint. A reminder of what happened here.’

  ‘These things the drudge are throwing at us seem pitiful in comparison, don’t they?’

  I grunted.

  ‘Depends if you get hit by one or not.’

  Nenn went silent. The cracks were a fierce bronze-white, pulsing softly, soundless. They webbed through the sky, jagged, cruel. We lay on a bed of rock, our heads close together. The stars were out, bright between the cracks. They were one of the few glimmers of beauty that could be seen in the Misery. No light from the city to push them back, and we didn’t light a fire out here. Fire attracted things better left unattracted.

  Nenn glanced around, checked where her man was.

  ‘Betch wants me to stop taking linny tea,’ she said quietly. The change of subject was abrupt. Must have been on her mind a while, as she slowly worked up toward telling me. I’ve never claimed to know much about women, but I knew enough to know that I needed to step as cautiously here as though I were creeping about in a nest of skweams.

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Scared, I guess.’

  ‘It’s a scary thing,’ I said. ‘How long have you been drinking it?’

  It wasn’t like Nenn and I talked much about this before, but I assumed that any sensible fighting girl was brewing linny seeds a couple of times a month. They were easy to get hold of, let a woman control her own life. But there was a price.

  ‘Since I was sixteen,’ she said. ‘And I know, it might mean that I can’t bring them to term anyway. It’s a long time to be on seed. I never thought I’d want children, though.’

  ‘And now you’re feeling happy with your man, and you aren’t sure?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she agreed. ‘But I’m not getting any younger. I just don’t know what it would mean for me if I had one. Most career soldiers choose not to.’

  I didn’t have any good advice to give, so I kept my big jaw shut. I’d not been a good father, as the Misery so often chose to remind me. I would never rid myself of that regret. I didn’t want to. In some ways I thought that if I didn’t hang that burden around my neck, I’d be making myself less human. We are defined by our guilt as much as our pride.

  ‘And Betch – he wants children?’

  ‘Yes,’ Nenn said, and though she was the hardest, most foul-mouthed officer in Dortmark’s army, her voice was hesitant. ‘What if I … What if I can’t? What if we try and find I’m barren?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’re worried he’d leave?’

  Nenn didn’t say anything. We looked up at the stars, those tiny dots of light, whatever they were. Problems come and go, and we solve them or we don’t, and then new ones come along and take their place, but the stars don’t change. I wondered if they had problems of their own.

  ‘Do you want them?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nenn said. ‘My life never had much purpose, before I met you. It had been first-grade shit, in fact. I had an unhappy childhood. My family weren’t worthy of the name. Life got worse once my tits came in. So I did a bad thing, and they’d have hanged me for it, so I ran away. Then I ran into you, and you gave me a chance, and I thought, “this isn’t much of a life, but at least I’m free.” Feels like I spent my whole life fighting someone or other. Never saw a place for children in that.’

  Hard questions. For most folk it’s easy enough. They see their dull futures spreading ahead of them and think that having someone else to look after will liven things up on the farm, or else it happens by mistake, or they want someone to train up to run their business when they’re grey. Some just want something to love. Lots of reasons, and I had no easy answers. Nenn wasn’t done though.

  ‘And then I got rank, and I got power that nobody in my line ever dreamed of. Would I want to give this up? This Misery walking, the fighting, the drink?’

  ‘Only you can know that,’ I said. I was determined not to get involved in whatever Nenn had going with Betch. She’d make her decisions one way or the other, and there were fuck-all ways that I could help.

  A ghost was walking the Misery, approaching us. It was one of mine. I sat up and watched him walking in toward us.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Never thought I’d see that face again.’

  ‘Handsome guy,’ Nenn said. She didn’t pay much attention to the ghosts. She only ever got one, a heavy man with an axe in his head, whose eyes looked too much like hers for it to be coincidence. I had lots. I once wondered whether each ghost was just a different shade of our own guilt. My grandmother had died years before my disgrace, and she’d scolded me for my dirty shoes more than once in the Misery. I should have cleaned them before I saw her. A small guilt, but small failures matter when someone’s gone.

  ‘He was handsome,’ I said. ‘He was a good man, really. A friend, before it all went to shit.’

  ‘Torolo Mancono,’ Thierro said. He didn’t look at me. He’d known the man, before he had to leave the Range.

  The ghost was tall, if a good few inches shorter than me. He was limber, athletic. His eyes were bright, his hair slicked back from his face. He wore the shirt and fencing breeches he’d worn on the day that I killed him, bells on his shoes tinkling gently as he approached. Thierro stood with Witness Valentia a way off, watching the ghost approach. Valentia looked queasy, staring at the ghost as it staggered aimlessly about. One hand was pressed up against its neck.

  ‘They say he beat you,’ Witness Valentia said. ‘That he was the finest swordsman in Dortmark. He challenged you to single combat because of the rout from Adrogorsk.’

  I prickled.

  ‘Adrogorsk was no summer fair. Thierro will tell you that. Mancono challenged me out of pride,’ I said. ‘And I accepted for the same.’

  ‘He challenged you because you sent men to their deaths to secure your own retreat. That’s the way I heard it.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Thierro defended me. He rubbed at his chest as if it pained him. Maybe seeing Torolo reminded him of that hazy brown cloud of Darling poison, drifting into his lungs. He was a brave man to come out here to face Darlings again. ‘I never believed the rumours.’

  The Misery was getting to him. The businessman’s mask slipping, by the slightest of degrees, but enough for me to see the resentment there. Thierro hadn’t been there when I killed Mancono, but that didn’t mean he lacked an opinion. He just wouldn’t let it get in the way of his goals.

  A grim smell had been following us all day, the stench of rotting meat. It seemed appropriate now.

  The ghost walked past me, ghost blood running from his hanging mouth, ghost blood soaking the ruffles of his shirt. He ignored me entirely and staggered to a halt before Thierro. He mouthed silent words, and toppled over. A few moments later he was gone.

  ‘He saved me, you know,’ Thierro said sadly. He couldn’t look at the ghost. ‘At Adrogorsk. He pulled me out of the poison.’ He scratched at the burn across his chest again.

  ‘No, Thierro,’ I said gently
. ‘Mancono wasn’t at Adrogorsk. Pep got you out. It’s just the Misery playing tricks on your mind.’

  Thierro blinked hard. Looked confused. Shook his head to clear the Misery’s fuddle. He said, ‘Was he not there? I would have sworn that … no. You’re right.’

  Witness Valentia shook her head in disgust.

  ‘You tore his throat out,’ she said.

  ‘This place,’ Thierro said, staring at the spot where the ghost-corpse had been. ‘This awful place.’

  He was not wrong.

  ‘How are you keeping, Thierro?’ I asked.

  ‘Surviving,’ he said. He took out a bottle of cologne and daubed it liberally on his chest and neck. He smiled a flat, joyless smile. For once I was glad for its potency as it overcame the stink of rot. ‘If I’m going to get eaten, at least I’ll make a pleasant meal.’

  ‘It can’t get worse than this,’ Witness Valentia said. Nenn and I chuckled at that together, though it wasn’t funny.

  ‘Lady, we’ve barely started.’

  ‘Give fire!’

  Another volley screeched out. Spits of light roared from the flarelocks and the skweam reared backward as pieces of its carapace rained outward like wet confetti. It bellowed, a dry insect screech as it reared up, confused by the new and sudden pain.

  ‘Give fire!’ Nenn yelled, and the matchlocks boomed. The skweam staggered back as lead balls smashed into it at a thousand miles per hour. The eight back legs dug deep into the sand as it whirled its forelegs through the air as if it were beset by stinging insects. Finding nothing in the air before it, its eight eyes locked on the twin lines of humans before it.

  Bluish ichor pumped from two dozen wounds. It opened its mouth and howled a demonic riddle of pain.

  ‘Now!’ I yelled and we charged it on foot. I was roaring as I swung my poleaxe, hard as I’d ever swung anything, and chitin cracked and scythe-like limbs drew sparks from my armour.

  We lost three men.

  I’d never seen a skweam that big before.

  ‘He says you started it,’ I said.

  ‘I left my rum ration right there, and now it’s gone. He fuckin’ drank it,’ one of Nenn’s men growled. He was looking toward one of the Bright Order, who stood nearby with a bloody nose and a spreading red fist imprint across his face.

  ‘Major! I need you over here.’

  Nenn limped over. She was wiping blood from her hands after tending one of her wounded. Her leg had taken a swipe from something that had looked like a tree, but wasn’t. The langets on her armour had stopped it from drawing blood, but she had a terrific bruise there.

  ‘Durk, calm it right down,’ she snapped, and her angry soldier strove to rein it in.

  ‘Witness Thierro, you too. I want you and Major Nenn to get this shit sorted, right now. We got enough to worry about without the men fighting one another.’

  I left them to it and planted myself down next to Stracht. It wasn’t my job to keep order and they’d respond better to their own officers. Mostly the Bright Order soldiers had kept well out of the way of Nenn’s Ducks, holding themselves aloof like some kind of monks. They seldom spoke, never laughed, ate separately, pissed out of sight. They’d been reliable though, even brave. They hadn’t flinched, not one of them, when they had to hold the line. They’d just cocked their flarelocks and given it hell.

  Stracht was the only one out here who looked content. With his yellow eyes and copper-veined skin he almost looked like he fit in. He stared off into the distance, murmuring to himself, as though he were party to some conversation that nobody else could hear.

  The hooded raven perched atop my shoulder. Its head swivelled, looking to see who was near. I was riding out front, an unpleasant job that made me the bait for anything that was lurking camouflaged within the sand or behind a rock.

  ‘When you reach the crystal forest, do you have even the beginnings of a plan?’ the raven croaked.

  ‘Don’t see how I can have a plan until I’ve checked out the lay of the land,’ I said.

  ‘You need to be careful.’

  ‘I didn’t know you cared,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t,’ the raven said. ‘I’m incapable of feeling anything. I was created to make sure that you don’t let things go too badly while the master is off saving the world from the Deep Kings.’

  ‘How am I doing so far?’

  The raven cast itself into the air, flew up high, did a circuit around me, then returned to its perch on my shoulder.

  ‘How do you think? Fucking terribly. You’ve let religious fanatics take over the city in preparation for some kind of cosmic-power ritual. You’ve let a lot of Valengrad’s defenders get run out of the city, or killed by things coming out of the sky, you haven’t recovered the Eye, and there’s a dark sorcerer poised to subjugate the Nameless. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say you’re in deep shit.’

  ‘When are we not in deep shit?’ I said. For all it claimed not to feel anything, I was sure that the raven was laughing.

  ‘There’s a sea of faces coming up,’ the raven said.

  As we went forward, a sound grew louder on the wind. Whispering, dry and steady as the rustling of autumn leaves, and then I crested a rise and saw that the bird was not wrong.

  It takes a lot to turn my stomach. I always think that I’ve seen just about everything that there is to see in the Misery, and then one day you go a little farther and run into something that’s even worse.

  The grit and gravel gave way to a plain of faces in the dirt. Old faces framed with strings of grey hair, young faces with pimples. Men with beards, women with ritual scars on their cheeks and jaw, as they had practised in the city of Clear. Yellow teeth, clean white teeth, broken teeth. Blue eyes, brown, grey. Faces baked brown by the sun, faces pale from a life indoors with books and ledgers, here and there a dash of red hair, now and again the glint of gold from a false tooth.

  I bent over emptied my breakfast out onto the sand. A waste of good brandy.

  It wasn’t just the sight of them, blending together in a big, fleshy expanse. It was the sounds they were making. What had seemed like a general murmuring on the wind was a blur of individual words. I nudged Falcon forward, and he snorted and pawed the earth, disturbed by the sound.

  ‘I need more milk,’ a woman whispered, over and over.

  ‘I’ll be glad when this is all over,’ an old man said, his voice so matter-of-fact that I knew that these were words from another time, another place.

  ‘What’s that in the sky?’ a child said. ‘What’s that in the sky? What’s that in the sky?’

  He was so insistent that I looked upward, but there was nothing there save the tears in the fabric of reality.

  ‘Ah. This place,’ Stracht said, grimacing as he rode up alongside me. ‘Don’t worry. They’re not alive. The faces are only a couple of inches deep. There’s just rock underneath.’

  ‘You tried digging?’

  ‘Came across this place a few years back. It was farther south, then,’ he said. ‘There’s a theme to what they say. Like that little boy there, asking what’s in the sky. Lots of them ask that. I reckon that this was a town, back before Crowfoot used the Heart of the Void. I reckon these folks gathered out in their market to look up at something, and then, zap. Heart of the Void happened. This is what it left behind. Some kind of echo.’

  ‘I thought that the Endless Devoid was the epicentre.’

  ‘It was,’ Stracht agreed. ‘There ain’t nothing in the Devoid. I mean nothing, in a way you can’t understand without seeing it. I never got far in. This, whatever it is, was on the periphery.’

  ‘When you see this, you wonder whether we’re really the heroes in all this.’

  ‘Heroes? Hah.’ Stracht spat. ‘“Heroes” are the excuse we made to explain why we don’t hate all men who carry swords. Pretend there’s some grand and noble rea
son that his head was the one that needed splitting, not yours. But it’s all piss and shit in the end. It’s one of the reasons I’d rather be out here. Less hypocrisy.’

  ‘But a lot more shit,’ I said.

  ‘Aye,’ Stracht agreed as he signalled the rest of the party to halt. ‘But you can get used to anything if you walk with it for long enough.’

  24

  Ten days in the Misery feels like ten months.

  The crystal forest finally appeared as a glimmering, sparkling miasma on the horizon. Stracht led us around to the east, costing us half a day, but ensuring that our angle of approach would put the crystal spires between us and the drudge encampment.

  ‘Can you hide us?’ I asked the Spinners. They conferred, but it was beyond them. Ezabeth could have done it, I thought, but she had been the rarest of the rare. I didn’t think any of our Spinners particularly able. They weren’t weak, but they did lack finesse.

  A dust cloud rolled in, not as fierce as some of the storms that gathered this deep in the Misery, but it turned the air hazy just when we needed it. Stracht and three of the Ducks went on ahead, picked out a path.

  We wouldn’t see what we were up against until we were going in, but we would have the element of surprise. The men set about fixing dust masks over their faces, cut loose any unnecessary gear. As I waited for them, my thoughts wandered. Out here, the night was calm. There was no phos light to be afraid of. No flinching at sparks, no fear of seeing a ghost trapped in the light. There was no auburn-haired woman slowly unpicking the damage that had been done to my heart, and no child to force her way into it. I found that I missed all of them tremendously.

  There was a truth that I had avoided admitting to myself. Another reason that I’d chosen to come all this way into the Misery. When you’re poised on the edge of doing something stupidly dangerous, the lies we tell ourselves melt like ice in the thaw.