by Ed McDonald
Ghosts came and went. I saw my grandmother, and I saw Marshal Venzer, his neck broken and wrung like an old dishcloth. I saw old Kimi Holst, cursing me for taking his place. And then I saw Valiya, and she was still alive, and I knew that I wasn’t seeing ghosts anymore. My mind was collapsing. Whether through lack of sustenance or the creeping influence of the Misery, the core of my being had begun to deteriorate.
I staggered over something. I thought it was a rock, but it wasn’t a rock. Some kind of shelled creature, black and gleaming obsidian on top, long-haired crab legs beneath. It scuttled feebly away from me, its shell too heavy for its spindly limbs. Not all of the things in the Misery were dangerous. Not to touch, anyway.
I took out the book again. Tnota’s handwriting was awful. I looked up, used my fingers to track the distance between Eala and Clada, who’d only just made it over the horizon, and flipped to the pages of numerical tables at the back of the book. Cross-referenced them with the place where I thought I’d started. The bird was right. The land has moved, and though I’d been walking due east, now I was facing south. I adjusted, took another reading. I was on the right track. Maybe. I could have been completely, utterly wrong.
Did it matter? I was weeks deep in the desert. The drudge must have hunted for me, and not even they’d been able to find me. A lucky man might have made it a few days. I’d never been that lucky, and I needed more than a few.
Luck would have to step aside, and let the Spirit of Vengeance be my guide.
I pressed my hands against the Misery’s dark sand. I felt her whisper to me. Felt her gently tell me the truth. I didn’t know what that meant. Maybe just that exposure, dehydration and starvation were all conspiring to strip me of my mind before my bones give way, my flesh collapsed and the last rise of my chest left me out here to die alone in the dust and wind, unremembered, unknown, just another set of bones among the dead.
Every part of me hurt as I forced myself back to my feet. So weak I could barely drive my legs. I looked at the shelled creature as it slowly tracked away. There was a wetness in its wake, the hells knew where it came from. A vile odour trailed it as I stumbled after it. Everything in the Misery is poisoned. The bad magic that created the Misery lived in her creatures.
‘I won’t make it like this.’ It was my voice, become a cracked and broken shadow. ‘I’ve nothing left.’
I could see her before me. There was no phos network for her to come from, no power for her to steal. She wasn’t some Bright Lady. She was my Ezabeth, human, fragile, born of wisps of light and tricks of luminance. I reached out for her but knew that I mustn’t touch her. If I did, the illusion would end. I could die now, with her, and perhaps that would not be so bad.
‘Get up, Ryhalt,’ the mirage said, her voice stern with command. ‘Get up and be the man you always have been.’
‘I’m not strong enough,’ I croaked. Hardly even words.
‘Do whatever you have to,’ she said. ‘Win. Whatever the cost. Promise me.’ She reached out to me, and I reached back. If I could just touch her, just reach her, then I would drag her back to me, no matter the cost. My fingers passed through hers as if I tried to brush the wind. Lost to some other world in which I had no purchase.
‘I promise.’
‘I’ll stand with you,’ she said. ‘I’ll be your shield, when you need me to be, but the will to fight has to be yours. Fight for the people. You’re not alone.’
I blinked with dry eyes and she was gone. If she’d been there at all. Just a trick of the Misery. Just hunger taking the last of my mind. But she’d been right. My eyes turned to the crab thing as it crawled slowly away from me.
‘Don’t be a fool,’ the raven croaked at me, but I ignored it. I drew the stolen sword and approached the nameless creature. ‘Everything here is poisoned,’ the raven cawed. ‘Crowfoot’s magic lives in you. What will you become if you take the Misery into you? Abomination! Better to die!’
I raised the sword over the creature. I had to go on, whatever it took. The blow came down hard, split the creature’s shell apart. I struck again and it went still. Its trail had smelled bad; the stench of its insides was worse. Hot oil and sulphur. I retched, even as I clawed back broken pieces of shell. My stomach was empty but it still clenched, appalled at the suggestion of consuming that.
I could feel the bad magic like smoke against my fingers as I dug at the tough, moist white flesh. I hesitated. It was sustenance, but it was filled with the Misery’s poison. Soaked in it. Grown in it. Unfit for anything living. But I had nothing else left. This was the only choice that remained.
The raven swore it would destroy me as I raised hot, dripping flesh to my lips.
Whatever the cost.
30
White fire ripped through my veins as another fit took me. My muscles locked rigid and my body shook, spasming, out of my control. My face struck the sand. Sand in eyes that wouldn’t close, grit on my tongue, beneath my lip. Time lost importance and my mind drifted away, floating out of reach. I was aware of other things, things that were beyond my understanding. The drudge, the creatures of the Misery – I was easy prey for either. For an hour or more afterward I could not remember who I was, where I was, even language failed me. Then I blinked and it was all back. The acrid taste of Misery flesh lingered in my mouth, burning against my tongue.
I was not the same.
The Misery is as inconstant as the wind, but some scars lie too deep on this world for even the Misery’s treachery to budge them. Dust Gorge, Adrogorsk, the Crystal Forest: they were minor waypoints, even the ruins of our cities were of little importance compared to the Endless Devoid. It was a place unlike any other on the surface of the world, because it wasn’t a place. It was the absence of a place, a great and terrible nothingness. Now I could feel it, across the distance, across the miles. I knew it was there.
I stared at the remains of the creature that I had consumed. Madness had taken me in my hunger. What had I done? Better to die than to consume the Misery’s essence, to let it take hold within me. But it was too late now. I’d crossed an uncrossable line, and survived.
I wiped slime from my fingers onto the gritty ground and felt the Misery creature’s juices burning in my gut, its essence permeating me. I felt time differently. I could sense the Endless Devoid without seeing, though my eyes stung with grit and my body seared me with a sharp, knife-wound pain. At some point I began to walk, though any conscious decision to do so came long after I had started, and I stopped before I reached my destination. At times I collapsed to my knees in the sand, wracked with agony, my body betraying me with convulsions. Becoming something else. Knowing things I should not – could not – know. Ahead of me lay a sleeping creature that had seven names that it alone knew, and the sound of any one of them would shatter a man’s sanity; I knew which way was west, and that the sun was lying to me when it rose; I knew there would be Misery water beneath a rock even before I turned it. It was black, oily, shimmering with the Misery’s essence, but I knelt and put my face to it all the same. Even then I hesitated. It was liquid, but it smelled worse than corpses, even with the salt and sulphur taste in my throat.
‘Enough!’ the hooded raven shrieked, ‘better to die than this!’ It battered at me with angry beak and wings until I knocked it from the sky, and seeing it could not stop me it muttered dire threats instead as it watched me nerve myself to do the unthinkable. My throat was tight at the sight of the Misery water, constricted like two ropes twisted together and just as rough. The black water reflected my own image back at me.
No.
I turned away from it.
The bird did not seem to need sustenance. It was not a real bird, after all, and out here I felt its presence as I never had before: it was joined to me, part of me. The head in the bag at my side still mumbled curses at me, or at least I assumed that’s what it was saying, muffled as it was through the fabric of the bag.
I walked for days. What I saw, what I heard, much of it was lost from my mind the moment it passed into it, whilst as I drew closer and closer to the Endless Devoid, I began to know things. Impossible things, things beyond my understanding, through the Misery. Guided by the Misery. She was a mother, or a queen, or a goddess, and I was part of her now. She ran through me, and as the magic passed into the marrow of my bones I shrieked and cried and bit down on my belt so that I wouldn’t chew off my own tongue just to give myself a lesser pain to concentrate on.
But with the pain came the knowing.
The Endless Devoid called to me. It was the heart of the Misery, at the centre of the devastation the Heart of the Void had wrought. Not even the bravest of our scouts ventured there. Reality grew ever more tremulous as you approached, and I felt as if I was on a road toward it, where the light grew more and more intense until everything became white and silent, calm but racing. The Endless Devoid, the epicentre of the Misery. An error in reality, a fault line in existence.
‘Turn back!’ the raven cawed. ‘The tear will unmake us both. Turn back, you idiot!’ I ignored it and trudged on into the brightness. Perhaps I had finally learned my lesson about taking advice from carrion birds.
I approached something. Something of importance. A place that carried greater significance than the ordinary. The world grew brighter still around me, and the closer I came to it, the stronger the white glare became. Impossible to look at, too potent to ignore, a pure brightness, terrible in its purity, perfect in its corruption. White, marble white, ice white, stretching on and on into forever.
My footfalls were noted.
Along that road that was not a road I encountered other travellers. One of them looked like me, lost, desperate, his eyes aglow with yellow fire, but somehow I knew that he had died many years ago and was lost in time, his journey endless. He didn’t seem to heed me, but I saw that he had a canteen, and I murdered him and drank from it. It was good, clean water with the taste of the moisture extractor that had filtered it, and it hurt all the way down. I would have felt bad, but I met him again some miles on and his water was just as good the second time. I could have become like him, but I had purpose and he had nothing. That purpose kept me grounded in time. If I let it slip even for a moment I might find myself back along the road, thinking the same thoughts, taking the same steps. I had to wonder whether I already had.
A group of the Holy Sisters who had tended a shrine in Clear sang a song for the dead, though they were neither living nor ghosts, just a reflection. I had no fear of these shadow people, but I was careful to keep my distance from the behemoths, vast creatures of jagged stone. I was beneath their notice: their footfalls could have flattened houses, and the earth shook as they took slow, ponderous steps that sometimes lasted a day or more. I passed by them, and other Misery creatures, unseen and determined, and only once did a Misery creature come against me. Insectoid, buzzing with scythes and legs, we fought a pointless, bloody struggle. The drudge sword I had stolen proved its worth with great, dismembering, slicing blows which cut through armour plating. As we fought it cursed me for staying out with the other girls, scolded that people would disapprove now that I was supposed to be engaged.
When it was over the creature’s legs and heads were scattered across the ground, but my chest and arms were torn and slashed and burning with fizzing venom. For an hour or more I thought that I was done for as the wounds hissed and steamed, but either the venom wasn’t lethal or the Misery creature I had consumed had given me some kind of immunity to it because having blacked out for a while I came to, and my wounds looked grim but weren’t bleeding anymore. It seemed to me that it had been some time since I had eaten, and in the haze of misjudgment I tried to eat some of the dead insect. My mouth burned as though I had thrust my tongue into a patch of nettles, but the pain proved a good distraction from the burning of the Misery’s essence as it moved through my spine. I threw up what little I managed to swallow and lay on the ground for some time, wishing that I was dead.
Death would have been preferable to this. At any moment since I had been captured by the drudge, a shot to the head would have been a blessing. I should have opened my throat myself. But having escaped, and after what I’d done to Betch, I couldn’t give up now. I didn’t press further into damnation for myself, but because a lot of people back in Valengrad were going to be destroyed. A lot of bad people, some outright pieces of shit, but there were kernels of gold among the chaff. Valiya. Amaira. Tnota. And maybe I could give them a chance.
Ezabeth would not have given in. I owed it to her not to let my pain deceive me. It was just pain. I’d felt it before. I would feel it again. I’d made her a promise.
Maybe it was days, maybe it was weeks, maybe it was a cluster of heartbeats. My sense of time grew blurred, white, racing light all around, the void howling in my ears. The greatest of the cracks in the sky lay above me, radiating out from the impact point. The Endless Devoid. A vast, empty hole in existence. The sand had turned to obsidian glass, smooth and black, and it reflected the damage that my ruptured body had sustained in perfect detail, and the mild amber glow that shone from my eyes. I approached the edge slowly, but there was no wind, nothing dragging me in or tearing at my clothes. No sound, a silence so thick and deep that my own footsteps rang bright and clear as cannon fire. Whiteness, whiteness all around me save for the black glass below; and then, where the glass ended, nothing. A sheer drop, the crystal glass ending in a razor-sharp edge.
‘Well,’ I said to myself, and my voice seemed to stretch out, out into the blankness. ‘Here I am.’
I realised that I was talking to the bird, but it had not followed me this far. I sat down cross-legged for a moment and considered what I was seeing. Not even Stracht had made it this deep into the Misery. I sat at the heart of nightmare and it was more peaceful than I had imagined, but sad, because I knew that ultimately at the start and end of existence, this was what we would find: nonexistence. I had never been a great believer in the spirits but here lay Nihilism: Nothingness, Absence, Zero. Not even the Misery could endure it.
I sat for a time, and my thoughts were clearer than they had been for some time. I knew that the Misery had her claws in me, as she’d had them in Stracht. I had been a fool with no choices when I took her into my body. I looked at the greenish bruising beneath my fingernails, the faint, oily glimmer of copper across my skin. Stracht had soaked up enough Misery poison in forty years to take these traits. I’d eaten them into myself in days.
I dreamed without sleeping. First of home, not my Valengrad town house but my true home, the childhood home that never truly leaves you, which you call home long after you’ve left it behind. I hadn’t been back there for close to twenty-five years, the estate with its well-ordered rows of vines and olive bushes. In my dream I saw my father, my mother, proud of me as they once had been. In my memory we were happy, and I sought their approval as strongly as they delighted in my accolades, my achievements. I dreamed of my older brother, who I had not seen since that futile duel, but who in my memory was both a child and older than me still. But they were only dreams, and they meant nothing, and they were nothing, as all dreams turn out to be.
The head in the bag was making noises again, and woke me from my reverie.
I opened the bag, but pointed the head away from me, careful not to look into its eyes, as I still didn’t know what magic it might hold. It hadn’t died when I cut it from its spine, and I wasn’t prepared to underestimate it, no matter how drained of power it was. My own head held far too great a secret to risk that. But I held it up by the hair and took a step forward, holding it over the Endless Devoid, suspended above an infinity of nothingness.
‘Darling,’ I said in drudge speak. ‘I am going to ask you some questions.’
‘What place is this?’ The Darling did not speak loudly, but its voice boomed across the gulf of nothing, vast in the silence.
; ‘We are at the Misery’s heart, the Endless Devoid,’ I said. ‘I do not know what you call it. The place where the Heart of the Void struck the world. There is nothing below you. An infinity of nothing.’
I tilted his head forward in case he couldn’t see it. I didn’t know how a Darling’s physiology worked, but I wanted the point to be clear.
‘Move away,’ the Darling hissed.
I did not. ‘I have brought you here with a purpose,’ I said. ‘You will tell me what I need to know. I know what you are. I know that a shred of Acradius lingers within you. But I doubt that he has great influence here. Crowfoot wrought this place, and not even his creatures can enter. Don’t doubt my resolve. If I think you’re lying to me, I’ll drop you in.’
‘You would not.’
‘You will live for eternity,’ I said. ‘You need no sustenance. Not even air. And you will fall for the rest of time, alone with nothing but your thoughts and whatever power Acradius has poured into you, will be lost to him. Eternally far, far beyond his reach. I have nothing to lose by releasing you to this.’
‘Pull me back!’ the Darling growled. It had no capacity to struggle.
I did not.
‘If you answer me, then I’ll leave your sorry head here, on the edge. Perhaps something will eat you. Perhaps in a thousand years something will find you. Either will be better than an infinity of nothing. And if I find you’ve lied to me, I’ll come back and kick you into the emptiness. Do you understand?’
‘Yes!’ the Darling shouted. ‘Draw me back! Back!’
Immortality may not have been the gift it had once seemed.
‘Tell me your deal with Saravor.’
‘The patchwork man?’ the Darling spat. ‘He betrayed us.’
‘How?’
‘God King Acradius shared the secrets of ward-breaking with him. So that he might bring us Shavada’s Eye. But he took the eye for himself.’