by Ed McDonald
It was midafternoon when one of the drudge, slender and young, came and relieved our bored old guard. He planted himself down on a stone near to us. He was vaguely human, his changes far less pronounced than most of the creatures in the camp. He still had a bump for a nose, and nostrils, and his eyes had an equal ratio of pupil to white. He even had a straggling line of brown hair running down the centre of his scalp. He drew the sword from his belt and placed it across his knees as he watched us. It was a drudge weapon, a design entirely foreign to us, but I was a connoisseur of swords and so I paid attention. It was a mildly curved blade, a hilt that could have taken three hands and a small round guard that offered little protection. It didn’t look all that practical but there was a certain aesthetic beauty to it. I wondered if he meant to use it, to take revenge for what we’d done to his Singers, because there was something in the way he was looking us over. It took me a moment to place it, but then it came to me: he didn’t loathe us the way that the Darling or the commander had. He almost seemed curious.
‘They put you to watch over us?’ I asked. He flinched. Hadn’t expected me to speak, and my voice was croaky, dry as old leaves. ‘Not much point in that. Where are we going to run?’
He didn’t understand me. I was speaking Dort. Weren’t many drudge that understood it. I could have spoken to him in his own tongue, but if I did, he’d probably go running off to his commander and the schedule for my torture and interrogation would be significantly stepped up. The torture and interrogation was inevitable, but later had to be better than sooner.
My wrists were stinging fire against the ropes. My mouth was dry as a desert wind. Betch had cried himself to sleep, and I sat bound and prostrate awaiting the coming of a furious, spite-filled Darling who would force me to reveal the Grand Alliance’s greatest secret and cost us a war that had raged for more than a century.
Fuck it. Roll the fucking dice. When you’re down to your last tile you play it blind and pray that the fates give you sixes.
‘Your Darling consumed the lives of ten of your friends,’ I said in what was probably terrible drudge. Clicks and snacks, buzz and drone. If a bee had a voice, it would sound like a drudge.
The young drudge flinched again. He had tabby stippling across his brow, and the shapes warped and moved as he frowned.
‘You know talk us?’ the drudge asked. In reality, he was speaking his language correctly and I was mangling it with my atrocious pronunciation, but I didn’t get much practice.
‘I speak your language. Yes. Lots of us do,’ I said. Lying, but then I needed to get him to talk. Needed to make him angry. Needed him to take that delicately curved sword and cut my head from my shoulders. Needed him to use it to split my brain in two. I had to die before the Darling could get to me. It wasn’t much of a plan, and I didn’t particularly want to die, but I didn’t want to be tortured and betray the Range either and maybe if I died sooner rather than later, the Darling would find it harder – maybe even impossible – to dredge out old memories of Kings, hearts, and Engines.
‘You first one I meet, can speak us,’ he said.
‘Have you met many of us?’ I asked.
The drudge smiled. It was odd to see a drudge smile. The changes that happen to their skulls and muscles tend to prevent it.
‘I was one of you,’ he said. ‘Before glorious master, praise be to majesty, King Acradius, gave me gzzzrt.’
He didn’t say ‘gzzzrt,’ but it was a word that Maldon hadn’t taught me and I had no idea what it meant. The drudge saw me struggle with it.
‘Ascension,’ he said in Dort. ‘Is hard me remember old speak. It mean “ascend”.’
‘You were a soldier from Dortmark?’ I asked.
The drudge nodded.
‘Before glory. Yes. Soldier like you, across Misery. Long-ago time, now.’
‘How old are you?’
I don’t know why I asked that. It wasn’t relevant, and I needed to get him to kill me, not make him like me. It was no time to be practising race relations.
‘Not measure life that way,’ the drudge said. He thought for a few moments, contemplating something. ‘Measure life in thoughts of master. Make sense?’
‘No,’ I clicked. He shrugged.
‘Not can explain, then. Master think big thought. All know big thought. Not like that for unborn.’
‘Unborn’ was what the drudge called the rest of us. Maldon had taught me that. They regarded us like a larval form, caterpillars or grubs. Perhaps that was why they were so indifferent to us.
‘You talk like them,’ Betch said. He had woken up and stared at me in horror. ‘You speak like them. You’re one of them!’
‘I’m not one of them,’ I said. Betch began to thrash against his bonds, as though this was too much for him to take, and the need to free himself became all-consuming. The guard got up and walked across to him. A solid kick to the face saw Betch’s struggling die away, his head lolling. Satisfied, the drudge went back to his rock. He was almost smiling, as though he had cleared an irritating inconvenience from our attempt to converse.
‘Recently, god have big thought,’ the drudge said. ‘Confused thought. Not understand why unborn raise Shavada from death.’
He looked at me as though that were supposed to mean something to me.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Unborn build sky-reach tower. Sky tower for harness moon power. Very strong. Need destroy.’ He cocked his head at me as if working through something very complex. ‘Gods not like that. Moon power beyond gods. No work for them. Work only for unborn.’
No surprise there. Valiya had sussed their intention to bring it down. Thierro had demonstrated just what the Witnesses could do with just a few tanks of phos. When the Grandspire was complete and the solar flare hit, could he take the war to the Deep Kings?
No. It wasn’t Thierro and his Witnesses that they feared. The Darling had mentioned Shavada, and Saravor had wanted the Singers stopped. I was looking at the hound without seeing the lion behind it. Unless …
‘Your god fears that the Bright Lady is going to return?’ The words escaped on a treacherous little surge of hope. I knew it was false.
‘No understand,’ it said. ‘Sky tower bad for world. Is truth.’
‘You believe everything they tell you?’ I asked. ‘Even when they take ten of your friends and siphon them into a Darling?’
‘“Darling” is unborn word,’ he buzzed. ‘We say Chosen. Chosen special. Need lives. Give gladly, for Chosen and god. You unborn, no cause. Give life gladly for nothing. What point then in life? Life only have value if you give for other.’
That sounded like a lot of old horseshit to me. Easy to see why the Deep Kings wanted their subservient thralls to think like that, though. They were brainwashed to their very cores, not even their thoughts their own. At least, I thought that they were. Only this drudge had something like a spark of personality. I’d never expected that. Were his changes just not so far gone, or was it that his face could still move enough to convey his feelings? I doubted that anyone had ever conversed with a drudge for as long as I had with this one. Not without hot irons and jagged knives. Perhaps we should have.
‘Your life is your own,’ I said. ‘Staying alive is all that matters.’
‘Better to give willingly,’ the drudge clicked at me. He shrugged. ‘If all that matters, sad end for you. Not much time left. Chosen come, use mind-worm. You die then.’
He was right. There wasn’t much that I could say to that.
26
Winter days are as short in the Misery as they are anywhere else, no matter what warmth seeped up from the poisoned earth. The guard changed, darkness fell across the world. Clada slunk away and Rioque peeked half her face across the distant horizon. A colourless night.
‘You bastard traitor,’ Betch hissed at me. He’d come round sometime during
my conversation with the drudge. ‘You’re one of them.’
‘I was one of them, you’d think I’d be strapped to this post?’
‘You talk like them.’
‘I can speak their language,’ I said. ‘Can teach you, if you want. It’s all about buzzing in the back of your throat and slapping your tongue against the roof of your mouth. I reckon we have at least a few hours before the Darling’s done eating his own drudge and ready to mind-worm us. Want to learn?’
‘Fucking bastard traitor,’ Betch growled.
He’d latched onto something that he could hate. Something that he could direct his anger toward, something that could feel it. The guard had changed again, and there was no point directing his anger toward her. She was white as milk, skin almost translucent over smooth planes of bone, and had no interest in us whatsoever. I’d not tried to speak with her. She was too far gone, too deep into the change, and it hadn’t done much good with the last one anyway.
‘What do you remember that was good in life, Betch?’ I asked. I turned my head to look at him. I’d twisted my neck something terrible during the fighting, and to look around that far hurt a lot. Sitting up against the post wasn’t doing much for my back either.
‘What?’
‘Life. Back home. What made you happy?’
Betch’s face was all sinew and fear and his eyes were wide.
‘What the fuck does that matter?’
‘It’s worth thinking about now. Probably won’t have much time later.’
Betch turned away. He didn’t want to talk to a traitor, even though it was pretty clear that if I were a traitor, I wasn’t getting a good deal from it. I blew out a heavy breath. I was done trying to work the ropes against the post. My wrists were swollen against the ropes, and now my bonds bit even more painfully. I looked up at the glowing cracks in the sky. If one of them could simply open and swallow me, the Misery, even the world, that would be better than what lay ahead. I was going to be the man who betrayed the Range. Not some drudge sympathiser, but a Blackwing captain. For everything I’d done, for all the bastards I’d put to the sword in defence of a country that reviled me, I was going to be the one who cast us down.
A shadow wheeled through the sky, across one of the cracks. Odd thing that. Don’t see birds in the Misery, not without six heads and a scorpion tail. With any luck it was some kind of new terror readying to dive down and tear our hearts out.
‘It’s not fair,’ Betch said then, quietly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing ever is.’
‘I always expected the Range to take me, one way or another,’ he said. ‘It gets us all, in the end. Breaks us. Takes us.’
‘I guess we’re the proof of that.’
Betch had moved through the terror, the panic. Now he was heading into melancholy. Next would come confession, then defiance, and lastly, he’d go back to pleading. A cycle that the mind went through as it tried different methods to cope with the nightmare. I’d seen it with dozens of prisoners over the years. My prisoners, usually.
‘You’re close with Nenn. There was a way she’d talk about you,’ Betch said. ‘I didn’t get it at first. It made me envious. Jealous, even. I thought, here’s a man she’s loved all these years. That she’d rather have you than me.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was never like that.’
‘Realised that,’ Betch said. ‘But I was still jealous.’
‘She got out,’ I said. I wasn’t going to mention that her mind had been corrupted. Warped. What was the point? I thought about her fears, that Betch only wanted her to climb the ranks. They seemed so small now. Life is like that. ‘You love her, Betch?’
He gave a dry, dusty laugh, but it was streaked with the pain that his mangled foot was sending up through his leg.
‘I never understood how you didn’t,’ he said.
A wind had picked up, and it sent the growing smell of the dead cavalryman in my direction. A bad smell, that. The corpse was only a day old, but things go nasty fast in the Misery.
‘I would have married her. Maybe. I don’t know,’ Betch said. He looked up at me, his face as bruised and dreadful as mine. ‘She’s safe, now, though. We did it, didn’t we? We stopped them throwing the sky-fires. They can’t hurt anyone else. That’s what we set out to do, and we did it.’
‘We did,’ I said, and though it was no consolation to me whatsoever, it seemed to offer Betch some. He didn’t know that I would let the republic’s most vital secrets fall into the Deep Kings’ hands. Not even death was certain to take me beyond the Darlings’ reach. I’d doomed us all, with one misfiring pistol.
‘What about you?’ Betch interrupted my thoughts. His voice was shaking. Maybe it was the undiluted pain from the broken bones protruding through the leather of his boot, or maybe he was trying to hold on to his sanity. He’d have been better off letting it go. ‘What was good in your life?’
Not an easy question. ‘Brandy’ wasn’t much of an answer, but there hadn’t been as many good times as I’d have liked, not ones that I remembered anyway. A few victories here and there, but there’s only so loudly you can cheer about scrubbing away mould.
‘I had a woman, too,’ I said eventually. ‘She died. In the Siege.’
‘A wife?’
‘No.’ I couldn’t help but choke out a laugh. My throat was dry and stiff, and the laughter hurt. ‘It never would have worked out. She was far too good for me. Didn’t really matter, though. She made it worthwhile. So yeah. A woman.’
‘That’s all it really comes down to, in the end, isn’t it?’ Betch said. His voice drifted away.
I slept. Hadn’t intended to, but exhaustion finally got the better of me. I dreamed about Valiya and Amaira. One of those dreams where nothing is happening, but you feel the closeness. I’d spoken of Ezabeth to Betch, but Valiya was there on the edge of my mind as well.
My dreams were broken by the young guard pushing a metal canteen against my mouth. I didn’t want to drink it. I knew that I shouldn’t drink it. I could try to die of dehydration, and only the spirits knew what was in the canteen. But my body was a treacherous piece of shit, and it drank. It was just water, stale and metallic with the taint of the moisture extractors.
It was full dark now. I wondered how long it would be before the Darling was rested and came to chew through our minds.
The camp had grown quiet. Drudge went to sleep just like anyone else. They’d loaded everything up on the wagons, would be moving out with the coming of first light, provided there were enough visible moons to take a reading.
The drudge sat down on his rock again.
‘Strange sword you got there,’ I said while he was screwing a cap onto his canteen. ‘Not seen one like it before.’
The drudge took the scabbard from his belt, showed it to me. Good clear metal, ghosts in the steel forming a wavering pattern along the blade’s edge.
‘From faraway place,’ he said. ‘Went there, fought unborn. Now sword mine.’
He seemed pleased with himself as he stowed it away on his belt. He had a packet of some kind of dried meat, wrapped in paper.
‘Want?’ He offered it to me.
‘No,’ I said. He held it out to Betch, but he turned his head away. The drudge shrugged, chewed on another strip. His mannerisms were so familiar. He could have been any one of a hundred young soldiers, bored on guard duty, looking for a way to pass the time. I’d known thousands like him, only they’d been human beings, not some kind of monster. I wondered what the man had been like before he was twisted into this thing. Probably just an ordinary man looking to make his living from soldiering. Maybe there’d been a bad harvest and he’d found his family starving and poor, had gone to make his fortune. Maybe he’d dreamed of promotion and medals. Or maybe he’d had no other skills of worth and somebody had put a matchlock in his hand and said it made him a man. Soldiers’ stor
ies were seldom flush with hope.
A pebble dropped from the sky a few feet to the left, kicked up a little cloud of grit. The drudge glanced up at the dark sky, but it only winked at him from its white-bronze cracks. He wandered over and picked it up. It was a little shard of the crystal that the drudge had been pulverizing to make their sorcery.
‘In Misery, sky rains stone,’ the drudge said. He turned the shard in his hands. ‘Strange land. Kings of unborn make so. Is bad magic. Should not be rocks in sky.’
I couldn’t argue with that. There definitely should not be rocks in the sky.
‘Do you love?’ I asked the drudge. Maybe it was a strange thing to ask.
‘All things love,’ he said. ‘Love gods. King Acradius ascends me. Must love for that.’
‘Do you love one another?’ I asked. ‘The other …’ and I faltered as I nearly called him drudge to his face, ‘ascended. Do you love any of them?’ The language failed. Perhaps Maldon had not known the word for love that didn’t refer to a divine being of awesome power. The drudge word for love had connotations of obedience, servitude, worship, adulation. All the worst parts. It carried nothing of kinship, of affection, of respect.
‘We know how is for unborn. Like that? No, not that,’ the drudge told me. He approached and knelt close in front of me. Stared into my face as though he were looking for something. A memory, maybe, of what he’d known before.
A raven cawed overhead. It was a solitary call, a lonely bird in a place that it should not have been. The guard looked upward, frowning. And then a rock the size of my fist smacked right into his head. He crumpled in a sprawl of awkwardly angled limbs, blood running from a gash on his forehead.
The hooded raven fluttered down after it, swivelling its head left and right to see if anybody had seen.
‘About fucking time you showed up,’ I said.
Hope. It surged. It roared. Here, in all of this, it was the last thing I’d expected. Spirits-damned hope.