by Ed McDonald
‘Commander wants to know if Chosen will recover,’ I said.
The drudge woman frowned at me, as though I’d said something wrong. Probably just some inflection in a word, or I’d used an insulting synonym. Or maybe I’d made no sense at all, or maybe there was no possible way that I could have come from the commander. It was a hell of a gamble to take.
I murdered her as quickly and quietly as I could, and she did not fight. The sword slithered clear of her chest and I turned to the sleeping Darling.
It did not look like a child. It was already half-gone into its drudge changes, and the Spinners’ light had taken what little humanity remained. It looked like a demon from the darkest of hells, an inhuman thing, which I guess it was, really. I did not waste time. The sword was clean and sharp and I brought it down on the Darling’s neck with one wrist-jolting chop.
The Darling’s half-milk eye flared open and for a moment I was sure that I was dead. Its hand reached upward, clawing at the air, and I thought that somehow I’d failed to sever the spine, but then the body jerked upright and I realised that no, I had indeed managed to part one from the other. But neither seemed to be dead.
The body rolled off the bed and began to grope about, debilitated by its missing limbs and blind to anything around it. The head posed the greater threat.
‘Who are you?’ it croaked. I don’t know how it croaked since it had no lungs or airway to make words, but Darling anatomy never did make any sense.
The raven flapped into the tent, eyed the Darling’s severed head and cackled appreciatively. The Darling began to shriek, an impossible, high sound. But impotent. It was far too weak to use any power against me, all of its focus and energy had been on repairing the damage it had sustained. I’d taken a big gamble, but I’d been confident. Self-preservation comes before everything else. I could see little threads of worming muscle were pushing down from the severed neck, seeking tendrils that groped upward from the body. Trying to repair itself.
A mad idea struck me. I’d come into the Misery to learn what Saravor was planning, had come looking for this thing. I’d never expected to stand over its impotent, shrieking head. The plan was to break out of the camp and walk, and walk, and die. A solid plan. But if I could break this creature, if I could learn its secrets, then maybe there was a chance to stop him. To save Nenn. To be a spirits-damned hero.
New plan.
I needed to shut it up. I yanked its jaw open and stuffed a balled-up towel into its mouth, then stuffed it into my makeshift sack and tied the sack through my belt. The Darling’s muffled protests continued, futilely.
Bad odds.
My heart was drumming, but the only other sound was that of the wind gusting against the tent. I’d accomplished my first task; I’d killed an ally, a nurse and then a demon in its bed. It was not a story that I’d ever want to tell another living soul, and as days of my life went it had been at the shit-stinking end. Now, all I had to do was get out of the drudge camp without being seen, trek back ten days through the Misery without a navigator, without being caught, without adequate supplies, and without a mount. And if I did all that, I might reach Valengrad, where something terribly, terribly dark was manifesting.
28
The dust storm was a double-edged, blood-hungry sword. It gave me the cover I needed and drove the drudge into their tents, turned their eyes down and away from the stinging grit, but the tracks that I could have followed out of the camp were swept away by the stinging wind. I needed those tracks. Scuff marks in the sand were worth marginally more than a banker’s smile, but with no skill at Misery navigation and no equipment, I was willing to clutch to any driftwood that might keep me afloat. Crowfoot’s simulacrum hadn’t lied. I was fucked up to my eyeballs.
Odds be damned. I wasn’t giving up until my last tile got flipped. The overwhelming likelihood was that my first plan – to get far enough from the drudge that they’d lose me and my secrets in the Misery – was still going to be my life’s final destination, but I was angry and I’d promised Betch that I’d tell Nenn what he’d told me. I owed him that. No giving up. No surrender.
The shattered stumps in the crystal forest that had become our battlefield were the only place I knew. I headed there, hunched low and ducking my head against the swirls of dirt. The drudge had removed the larger chunks of the Singers: those bodies were imbued with magic. They’d be ground down into something to feed the next batch of sorcerers that the Deep Kings sought to breed. The enemy lacked sentimentality. Our men lay where they’d fallen, stripped of arms and armour. I didn’t see any sentries, but I didn’t see much of anything through the storm. The drudge had no reason to watch the crystal pillars now that the Singers had been blown to pieces, but I went cautiously all the same. I’d been hoping to find a stray horse, but they’d all been captured or had bolted to die in the Misery. Or maybe something had eaten them already.
‘Faster, faster,’ the raven croaked.
The cost had been high. Thirty-two of Nenn’s brave Ducks were carrion, dead and staring. Some of them had been decent enough types. I came across Stracht’s body. Thierro had put the shot right through his chest. He’d had to make a choice, and he’d made the wrong one, but there was no way he could have known that. Only his salute bothered me – a mocking, cold gesture to an ally certain to perish. Why had he given it?
The second Darling had not survived the point-blank volleys of pistol fire and trampling by thrashing hooves. Do enough damage to them and they will die, eventually. But it takes a hell of a lot to put a Darling down for good so when you manage it, there’s not much left to look at. The head in the sack tied to my belt was testament to that.
My looting turned up just one useful item. One of the soldiers had possessed a hip flask of Whitelande brandy and I necked most of it as I limped back through the faintly glowing crystal spears. The old wound in my leg was playing up, nipping at me as though I’d been stitched up too tight. Now was not the time. I needed to be better than this, stronger than this. I wasn’t going to get far if I listened to an old complaint in the muscle. Keep going. Keep moving.
The hooded raven guided me. I’d not have found our old camp at all without its caustic little comments, delivered each time it chose to swoop down and tell me which way to walk. It struggled against the gusting wind, but a pair of eyes in the sky was worth more than I’d thought.
Not much left of the camp. I could see where we’d dug the trench to shit in, and the moisture extractor had left a shimmering white residue on the earth that the dust hadn’t managed to cover or displace. Discarded ammunition cases, torn powder charges, fodder bags, an apple core. My friends were long gone, and I knew that was a good thing. I still sagged down to my knees in the middle of the deserted camp and let my head hang forward. I’d got this far, but what now? This had been the easy part.
No. There was always hope. When all had seemed lost and Shavada brought his forces down upon us, Ezabeth had not given up. Backed by her will, I’d not given up. We’d stood, and we’d fought and it had been enough. We hadn’t known what we were doing, but we had made it work. She wouldn’t have let me quit now. I spat, wiped my mouth. Get bright, Galharrow. Not dead yet.
I looked across the Misery’s shadowed dunes. I could walk in any direction and it would always be wrong. Even if the Misery didn’t shift, it would only take one skweam, or maybe the gillings would take me in the night. Maybe the ground would just open and swallow me whole. The hardest part was over. Only the dying remained. Perhaps I should have taken some satisfaction from that. I recognised the lunacy that had driven me to bring the Darling’s head with me for what it was, a battle-rush-inspired surge of hope that there was something left for me to do in this life. But staring out over the barren, empty sandscape I saw the futility. Hopeless.
‘Over here,’ the bird croaked.
A small cairn of stones had been built, a couple of dozen fist-sized rocks, ca
refully stacked in a pyramid. Tnota had written the word ‘Ryhalt’ across a flat rock that lay across the top. At least, that’s probably what it said. His writing had been bad even before he lost his right arm.
‘Guess they made me a grave,’ I said. Some of the hope I’d been trying to fill myself with seeped away. They’d given up on me. ’Course they had. Damn Tnota for a sentimental idiot. He’d wasted time making this when he should have been running. I felt a sudden wrench of loss that I’d not sit with the old bugger again, chewing the shit and drinking worse. There had always been a line of competitive desperation to our drinking. I looked away. No point getting all damp-eyed about it. But there was a bleak disappointment in the way Tnota inflected his letter ‘Y’ and the tail of the last ‘T.’
‘You should be in a fucking grave,’ the raven snarled. ‘Killed by your own stupidity. It’s not a grave, you fuckwit.’
No. It wasn’t.
’Course it wasn’t a fucking grave. Tnota was a southerner out of Fraca. His people believed in the Grand Wolf, some kind of eternal alpha being that lived in the sky and watched over his pack. The Big Dog. Fracans didn’t bury their dead. They believed life ran in cycles, mistakes repeated, glories renewed. I hadn’t been listening properly when he explained it, and he’d not been that interested in explaining it in the first place, but he seldom bothered to attend funerals, and he told me once that when he died I was to stick him outside or feed him to some pigs. He’d been facetious about it, but it really was what he wanted.
This wasn’t a grave. It was a marker.
I scrabbled rocks out of the way, my breath catching in my throat until I saw the glint of bronze, the dull brown hue of old leather. I pulled the items clear. His navigation book and his spare astrolabe. A navigator’s tools.
Spirit of Mercy love him for throwing me the smallest shred of a chance.
‘Saw that one-armed sot leave this behind for you,’ the raven croaked.
‘And you still tried to persuade me to kill myself.’
The dark bird preened its feathers and niggled at something with its beak.
‘It’s still the better option. What do you know about lunarism and Misery navigation?’
Good point. I didn’t know how to navigate. I understood the basic principles. I’d seen Tnota and other navigators do it hundreds of times. But knowing how to draw a bow, and watching a champion archer ply his trade, doesn’t mean you can hit the gold. Doesn’t mean you can even hit the target, and you’ll probably injure yourself trying.
‘Any branch in a flood,’ I said.
I leafed through the pages. The book had been passed down to Tnota by the men who’d gone before him, the early sections written in their easy, tidy penmanship the latter in Tnota’s gambolling affront to calligraphy. He’d left it here, for me, on the crazy off chance that I might get away. It was a mad act, to abandon something so valuable out here on the possibility that he wanted me to escape. But he’d guessed where I’d go and he’d made a fucking present of it. Spirits watch over me, I’d have to buy him a whole fucking brothel for this. If I could learn to navigate before I ran out of food. Or water. Or got eaten by gillings. Or fell down a hole and broke my legs. I could go on.
‘So what now?’ the raven asked. ‘You’ve got a book you can’t read, a bag containing a head that keeps muttering to itself, and you’re still going to die out here. Nothing has changed.’
‘That’s the problem with you, Crow,’ I said. ‘No creativity. You’re just Crowfoot’s spite and malice in feathered form. Now shut your fucking beak unless you got something helpful to say.’
I took a quick inventory. A sword. A knife. Good start. A small bag of rations: some kind of dried meat and hard, flat bread. Not a lot, not enough for nine days, but it was something. Going hungry wouldn’t kill me. Two water canteens, one half-empty. Three bottles of what I figured was wine. I uncorked it and gave it a sniff. It wasn’t wine made from anything that I knew, but fuck it, I’d drunk stuff that smelled worse.
‘It’s not enough,’ I said. ‘Not for nine days. Not unless I can work the Misery to my advantage like Tnota could.’
‘Can you?’
We both knew that I couldn’t.
‘Maybe I don’t need to get to the Range,’ I said. ‘What if I could get to one of our static patrols?’
The bird didn’t seem impressed by the idea, but I leafed through the book all the same and found a section that listed coordinates for fixed points. The crystal forest was there. Cold’s Crater. The ruins of Adrogorsk, the fallen pillars of Clear. The Endless Devoid. There were others, places and things I’d never heard of. The Spark Flats. Locust Walk. Eame’s Stage. But I didn’t know what they were or how I would find them. Numbers, strings of them, stretched neatly across the page. Tnota had crossed some out and added his own notes. Some of them were in Fracan, which wasn’t helpful since I didn’t speak it.
I went back to the beginning. The original author had indicated that he’d copied out the basics from some other navigator’s book. The basics. I could start there. Learn Misery navigation as I was doing it – why not? Someone must have been the first to do it, once.
I looked up at the sky, sensing mockery from the glowing cracks. Clada was high, Eala sat fat and low. Rioque slept.
I was on a clock. I didn’t have time to sit down and read my way through this. When my water ran out, I was dead, so I needed to make it somewhere – anywhere – before I died of dehydration.
‘Stand with me now, Ezabeth,’ I whispered. ‘I need you now more than ever.’ But only the wind answered.
I started walking, opened the book, and read.
29
My head hung heavy on my neck, too heavy, nodding toward the black and red sands as they passed, slow step by slow step, beneath my boots. What was left of them. Piece by slow piece they were collapsing, tattered shreds of leather and string. Something corrosive in the Misery sand was eating at them. I’d never walked so far on foot before. How long had I been walking now? Three days? Five? I didn’t know. Time is rarely your ally. In the corrupted land, it never is.
My throat was a gargled clutch of razors as I tried to swallow, and liquid was too precious to waste on soothing it. I was making a hoarse, wheezing sound and tried to force my throat muscles to remember their purpose.
Dark heat, white cold. The Misery shifted between them. Everything but the pain had grown distant.
A single thought remained. I focused on it, let it envelop me, become me. Easier to function if I clung to a single determined thread of thought.
Keep going. Whatever the cost.
Every step was pain. The blisters had long since split and dried, filled with sand and grit. I hadn’t removed my boots for days. Didn’t want to look at my feet for fear that they’d worn away. No time, anyway. Had to walk, had to keep going. Had to press on. Back toward Valengrad. But I knew I was done. Walking without a future. Nothing to eat, not enough water. No navigator, no friends. Just a head bumping along in a sack at my side making occasional, muffled demands to be freed, and a shadow of power in the sky.
Step followed grinding step. The Misery’s heat rose all around me, draining the perspiration to salt stains before it could form. No hope of making it to Valengrad, only torture and death left. I hated everyone and everything, for leaving me to die without a drink on my lips. Irrational laughter rose within me, but the laugh didn’t come out right. It was an ugly, dying sound from a dying man.
So confused. My own name seemed distant. Starving to death. Alone, but for the crow. Alone would have been better.
Not alone. I took the head out of the sack, face away from me. Croaked questions at it. It said nothing. Why would it? I had nothing left to threaten it with, and even if I got my answers, I’d die out here before I could use them. I kicked sand in its face and stuffed it back into the sack.
As long as I could resist
the last of my water, my will to keep going remained. My head was full of shards of glass, and every thought was like a foot stamping upon them. My energy was spent. My gut rang hollow as a bell. Never knew hunger could hurt with such intensity, or make things cloudy. Make me forget.
I thought of Ezabeth. Trapped, alone in the light. Four years of torment. If she could endure that, I could endure this. She never gave up and I couldn’t let her down.
The hooded raven circled down toward me in lazy spirals.
‘Land shifted!’ it cawed as it alighted on my shoulder, the croaking voice too loud in my ear. I had to think about those words, to work out what the fuck it was talking about. To remember what ‘land’ was. I staggered and went down on my knees. The wind bit at my dry eyes.
Dunes of coarse black gravel rose in every direction. I looked back. More of the same. It had been the same all day. More than a day. Or less. The distance was lost in the shimmering haze of the heat. My arms and legs had turned to lead. So fucking weak. This was it. This was as far as my body could take me.
Blackness, for a time.
I woke to a new pain, sharp and insistent, jabbing at my eye.
‘Oh. You’re not dead,’ the raven said, sounding disappointed as I blinked away grit.
‘You trying to eat me already?’
The raven ignored the question.
‘Need a new reading,’ the raven cawed. Was it a little embarrassed to be caught in the act? Sleep had restored something of my mind. Enough that I could remember who I was and why I refused to lie down and die. I said Ezabeth’s name, a talisman to keep me moving, and it gave me heart. I opened my last bottle of water. Took a mouthful. It hurt all the way down. I went on.