by Ed McDonald
The pistol dipped with a boom and an eruption of smoke, and Falcon went down beneath me. He tipped sideways, crashing down atop Stracht and spilling me onto the broken ground. A piece of crystal gouged into my face, shredding skin. I was dazed for a moment, and when I looked up again, Nenn was galloping away from the drudge, for the cover of the crystal spires.
The first grenadoe thumped, blowing the Singer wide open even as the drudge drew down upon us. A few seconds later another, then another. The drudge slowed, caring less about us now as they saw their sorcerers detonating. Milky flesh erupted violently into the air as each of the Singers died. It was a new kind of music, filled with thunder and percussion.
A hollow victory.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘At least we stopped them.’
‘That’s something,’ Stracht said. He swiped thick blood from the blade of his cutlass. The drudge cavalry were far too close for us to hope to outrun them now. He stared after Nenn as she rode away, too confused and too lost in the certainty of death to even ask what had just happened.
‘How did you stop that Darling’s magic?’ I said.
‘Damned if I know,’ he said grimly. ‘Shit, Ryhalt. We’re dead, aren’t we?’
I looked at the approaching ranks of drudge. They had slowed, stopped to stare at their sorcerous leaders, perhaps wondering if there was some way that they could save them, but in truth the whole area looked like the floor of a butcher’s yard. Red and white, bone and meat, carpeted the ground.
I looked back toward the edge of the crystal forest. I saw Thierro there, a flarelock in his hands, and it was almost a relief. Nenn and the last of the horsemen were just reaching them. Thierro was staring at me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we’re dead.’
Funny, how it didn’t seem to mean that much to me.
I gave Thierro a nod. It was better to die than to be captured. The drudge would take us to their masters, and the Deep Kings would twist us, make us into weapons against our own people. But first, they would hurt us. They would hurt us for a long, long time. Life doesn’t flash before your eyes when you see the end coming as they claim. Instead, you’re hit by things left unfinished. Ezabeth, lost to the light. Nenn, lost to Saravor. Nothing that I’d done had made any difference. Distantly, Thierro aimed the flarelock at me. I took a deep breath, looked up toward the moons. Couldn’t see any tonight, but the cracks in the sky were there, glowing faintly white and bronze, and in their own way, despite what they represented, there was a degree of beauty in them. For a last look, a man could do worse. I knew that Thierro was a good enough shot to put the ball through my head.
I waited. The sky rumbled. I fancied that it mourned our passing, though of course, it was just the fucking sky.
A shot cracked out from our lines and Stracht staggered, his eyes rolled up in his head, and his game was played. I waited for the shot that would take me too, looked back to Thierro. He removed his hat, and then gave me that same two-fingered salute. Then he shouldered his smoking weapon and followed the others into the forest.
‘Bastard!’ I snarled.
I planted my sword blade-down into the sand, drew my last pistol. The drudge were closing in on me fast. Capture was worse than death. There was only one way out.
Pressed the barrel to my forehead.
Pulled the trigger.
25
The lock snapped home.
Misfire.
The drudge swarmed around me, spitting at me and jabbing with their spears. I threw the buggered pistol at one’s head, a futile gesture as it just bounced from his helmet, but then I roared at them and tried to go down fighting. I drew my sword, struck left and right. Melee is a dirty, sweat-drenched kind of hell. All that gentle swordplay they teach you in the fencing hall, the tactics and the thinking and the games, that all goes out the window and there’s nothing but instinct and speed. My blade sliced the air, struck sparks from a vambrace as I snapped it out to take a wrist.
‘What are you waiting for, you bastards?’ I snarled at them, but they were being cautious. A dozen of them circled me even as more arrived to and cut me off from any hope of retreat. I hacked at a spear shaft, but the drudge disengaged nimbly and it struck against my breastplate. Eight inches higher and it would have struck my unprotected face, but the bastard wasn’t trying to kill me.
I realised that I should put my sword through my own neck.
A spear haft cracked against my forearm, and white numbness rushed up my arm from palm to elbow. My sword fell from my senseless fingers, and the drudge swarmed me.
A fist smashed into my face, armoured and heavy with fingers. My lip split, my cheek tore. After that I didn’t get much of a count of how many blows rained down on me, but there were many, they were iron hard, and the drudge threw more than were necessary to take me down. Bam, I saw lights dancing before my eyes. Bam, the ground rose rapidly to slam into my face. Bam, something cracked with a snap. Half-blind, I made a grab for a big knife hanging from a belt, but the drudge knocked my hand away and went on slamming his fist into my head. Boots followed the fists, bam, bam, bam. The soldiers snarled and slobbered as they kicked and thumped.
It hurt. It really fucking hurt.
By the time my brain stopped bouncing around in my skull, they’d dragged me into the drudge camp, wrists and ankles bound. A persistent stabbing in the centre of my face said that my nose had been broken again. I could taste the blood that I’d swallowed. It filled my throat, my nose, gummed my beard. My face had locked up in rigid planes of swelling, one eye half-closed. I couldn’t have been pretty. Or at least, I was uglier than I’d been before.
I coughed up some of the blood that I’d taken down, spat it into the dirt. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Win or die, those had been the options. It was a struggle to think through the pain. I wished I had brandy. I wished I’d died. I wished for anything, anything than this.
And Nenn. The pain the drudge had dished out was nothing compared to seeing those red-tear tracks. I’d lost her to Saravor.
I’d lost her.
Two drudge sat nearby. They were old creatures, long since changed. Not a lot of human left in what they’d become, noseless grey faces and lidless black eyes. Looked more fish than man. One of them wore the mark of King Acradius right on his forehead. This was his operation, then, as useless as that knowledge was to me now. As the pain of the beating became bearable I took more stock of my surroundings. Not encouraging. The drudge had dragged me into their camp along with two other prisoners, a couple of our men who’d gone down wounded. One of them, a cavalry trooper, wasn’t going to last much longer – an hour at best, judging by the bloody wound in his side. The second, I saw with sadness, was Betch. His foot was twisted at an impossible angle, shards of bone jutting through his boot.
Life is merciless. She doesn’t care if you’re old, young, man or woman, loved or reviled. The only thing you can count on is that you’re going to be treated with as little fairness as everyone else.
‘We’re still alive,’ Betch whispered, his voice shaking. He looked at the wreck the drudge had made of my face but he didn’t see the blood and the blackening flesh. He looked for comfort, for some sign that this wasn’t the end, that we weren’t fucked beyond belief.
I had no such sign to give him. This was the end. A horror approached us.
‘We aren’t the only ones.’
The male Darling limped slowly across the camp toward us. It was burned, terribly burned, a stump of smoking tail dangling behind it. In places its skin was blackened and charred, in others red-raw and weeping. Its hand and forearm had been burned away entirely and I could see the bone of its leg where most of a muscle had been incinerated. It seemed to be having trouble closing its jaw and one of its eyes had melted down its face, but the one that remained was locked onto us. Nothing can hate like a Darling, and this one’s fury was hotter than t
he flames that had engulfed it.
Even the drudge kept well back as it hobbled slowly toward us.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Betch said, seeing it. ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck oh fuck.’
It stood before us. The Darling had been shot, it had been burned, and any mortal creature should have died from the punishment that it had taken. A huge gash cut right through its lower abdomen where its own power had backfired against it, but still, scarred and diminished, it was more terrifying than it had been before.
I wished that I had not come round. Being battered into unconsciousness or better yet, dead, were both preferable to this. Being at the mercy of the ire, the malice, on that half-torched face.
The drudge-Darling stopped a few feet away and looked us over, trembling.
‘Be assured that there is nothing for you but suffering, now,’ it said in Dort. Speaking made it cough and it collapsed to its red-raw knees. None of the drudge came forward to assist it.
‘Do any of you have rank?’ the Darling asked. The badly wounded cavalryman was shaking too much to form words and the fear had me bad, but any kind of movement sent my face into new agony, so I closed my eyes and laid my head back. The Darling coughed again, a string of bloody drool hanging from burned lips. ‘Your minds will answer, even if you will not.’
‘Please,’ the wounded cavalryman wept, ‘please, please, please.’
His mind was gone. Cracked. Hardly surprising, and probably a mercy. The man he had been was dead already, only the shell remained. That had to be better. We were surrounded by monstrosities, smelling the smoke that still rose from the Darling’s burned clothing and the rich roasting of his flesh, and it seemed pretty certain that this child-sorcerer was not going to let us die slowly after the damage that we’d dealt him. Slowly probably didn’t begin to describe it.
The drudge commander appeared, his heightened status evident in the quality of his armour, the goldwork and precious stones studded through his ears. He spoke to the Darling, sounding angry and gesturing wildly. The Darling spat back in the drudge language. The commander pointed at us, one by one, snapping away in slower clicks and buzzes. He was not afraid of the Darling.
They had no idea that I understood their language, or maybe they thought it was irrelevant if I did. I caught the gist, either way. The commander wanted it to steal our thoughts now. The Darling said that it barely had sufficient energy to keep itself alive. It needed time to recover.
The Darling looked us over, then turned its baleful eyes on the wounded man. He was not conscious.
‘I will search this one now, before it expires,’ it said. ‘He may know things. May have knowledge of the New King.’
‘Don’t fucking touch him,’ I said in Dort. My swollen lips warped the sounds and the words were feeble things. They ignored me.
The mind-worms came. The wounded Duck sat bolt upright, as though a wooden rod had been speared up along his spine. His head shook violently and his eyes opened wide. Then wider, and wider, and then blood began to leak from them, to drip from his nose. He made a gurgling sound, and a river of it flowed from his mouth. His ears bled and his shoulders shook.
‘Bright Lady watch over you,’ Betch whispered as the man died. He was shaking from the fear, but he couldn’t look away.
The wounded man’s body couldn’t take the pressure of the Darling’s presence inside his skull. His eyes remained wide open and he continued to sit up, but he was dead nonetheless. The interrogation didn’t end, though. The life was gone, but the brain was still fresh, and the Darling dug through it like a scavenging fox tearing through a pile of garbage. Minutes passed, the corpse staring, and then his body sagged, a crumpled bone heap. The Darling swayed and caught itself on its hands. Nobody moved to help it.
‘He was nobody,’ the Darling said to the commander. ‘His commander was a maimed woman. Not one of these.’
‘He was an enemy,’ the commander said. ‘He was still somebody.’
‘Just a soldier. A common man,’ the Darling said. ‘I will draw more from these two tomorrow, but I must regenerate. I need lives.’
The commander glared at the Darling. Its one remaining eye was wide in its grotesquely burned face.
‘The great one has already lost one of his Chosen. You would do well to ensure he does not lose another,’ the Darling said. The drudge soldiers all looked away, to the ground, to the moons, to the cracks in the sky. Anywhere but at their commander or the steaming creature before it. The commander’s face was old-drudge, almost featureless, grey and smooth, but I could see the reluctance there. He did not want to agree to whatever the Darling was asking.
‘Take the beasts,’ he said at last. ‘As many as you need.’
‘Beasts will not serve,’ the Darling said immediately. ‘Their lives carry little energy. You know what I need.’
‘Then take these people,’ he said, and gestured to us.
‘I cannot waste them when they may be able to tell us more about Shavada’s return,’ the child-creature said. His words tolled dimly behind the stabbing pain in my face, a distant bell that no longer called to me. They were important, but only to the man that I had been. I wasn’t anything, now. ‘I need lives now. Souls to strengthen me. Your men failed to defend the Singers. This is the price that they pay.’
For several moments the drudge commander just glared at the Darling, his flat lips chewing at themselves.
‘How many?’ he said eventually.
‘Ten. Choose whichever you wish. The sentries that failed us, perhaps. Have them brought to my tent. After that, we shall see.’ He broke into a coughing fit.
The Darling hobbled away, blood trailing across the sand. The commander watched him go, then turned and left us, his men following him. The drudge didn’t bother to leave a guard. They didn’t need to. Besides trying to spit at them, we had no capacity to cause them trouble, and given the state my face was in, even spitting wasn’t much of an option.
Betch wept. Couldn’t blame him, but the sound was just another grotesque reminder of how badly I’d failed. The Darling would return, all fuelled up, its power restored. I hadn’t known that they could feed from death magic, but it didn’t surprise me. Power comes in many forms, whether it’s the moonlight spun by Spinners or the colossal magic that grows within a wizard’s heart. It should have been no surprise that a Darling could siphon power from life.
‘It will come back, and it will rip our minds open,’ Betch said. ‘It’s going to turn us inside out.’ His lips were trembling. He was right to be terrified.
‘It doesn’t look good,’ I said. My face hurt a lot. All of me hurt, but my face worst of all.
‘It’s going to tear our minds apart,’ he said, and then the little coherence I’d got from him devolved into meaningless gurgling.
He was right. It would learn what it could from us, and then it would soak up our life energy. Not a good way to die, out here in this shitty place. Dying might have been the intention, but as deaths went, this was a bleak one. Even as it tore through our minds we’d be helping it, teaching it, sharing what we knew.
And then it struck me like a hammer.
When the Darling set its mind-worms into me, it could riffle through my memories, and it would take my greatest secret.
It would learn the truth of Nall’s Engine.
I would unwillingly spill the great secret upon which the republic depended. They would realise that the Engine would not last forever, that Shavada’s heart would run dry just as Songlope’s had. I was the only man in the republic who knew the awful truth about what powered the Engine, and I had placed it right into the hands of our deadliest enemies.
‘We can’t let them interrogate us,’ I said. Betch just shook and stared into space.
I tried to get my hands free of their bonds, but the drudge who tied me had known his knots, and he’d not gone easy on them. Dawn rose, cool and blu
e, dominated by Clada as the other moons chose to sleep beneath the horizon. Periodically a drudge soldier came to check on us, but they weren’t concerned that we might escape. A single bored old creature sat nearby, and they left our dead trooper bound to his post. Why bother digging a grave when you were breaking down your camp?
Midmorning, a battalion of five hundred drudge rode out on their hairy mounts, heading west. They were going to hunt Nenn and Thierro, try to catch up to our men. The commander wanted to have something to show when his Deep King master caught up to him. Creating those Singers must have cost Deep King Acradius significant power, and no wizard gave that up lightly. How long had they been nurturing them, growing them, training them? I wondered whether they’d been born to become those grotesque, lumpen monstrosities, or if they’d taken grown men and women and forced their bodies to adapt? Could they create more, if they had a desire to? I didn’t know. I probably wasn’t going to live to find out.
I didn’t think that the drudge had much chance of catching Nenn. Tnota would be skipping them home using every navigation trick he knew. There weren’t many navigators who could have kept up with him, and none that could catch him when he was given a head start and a damn good reason to use it. That was something.
I could smell cooking. The drudge were making breakfast. Some kind of meat, but nothing I recognised. Some animal that lived way out east, beyond the Misery. They didn’t bring us any. Didn’t bring us any water either. A warmth had risen out of the earth, adding thirst to my list of pains. My face was locked up pretty solid, swollen planes of flesh and drum-taut skin. The thirst was worse. They didn’t take us to the latrine trench either, but I’d sweated out most of my water so when I had to let it go there wasn’t much. Clada rose up, nearly made it to the top of the sky, began to fall again. The drudge ate lunch, and I worked the ropes against the post, over and over, wrists scraping against the coarse rope. They chafed away until they were raw and bloody, and then I tried again, though every twist was futile, stinging agony.