Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  So much for Saravor’s deals.

  ‘What did he want in return for it?’

  ‘To become a King,’ the Darling hissed. It could not keep the contempt from its voice, even suspended above oblivion. ‘He must have realised that such mortal filth as he would never be permitted to ascend. He kept the Eye for himself and found a new way. We could not act against him directly so we sought to destroy his means of ascension, but you fools killed the Singers. When the solar flare strikes, he will use the tower to ascend. The Kings will stand against him, but you have doomed yourselves.’

  Darlings have a poor grip on their emotions. He couldn’t keep the spite from his reedy voice.

  ‘The Grandspire?’ I said. ‘It’s just a huge phos mill. What does it have to do with Saravor?’

  ‘The Eye is an empty vessel which was once part of a god. Now that power is unmade, but it still aches to be filled. Saravor is filling it with the magic of souls, as a Deep King would, and when it is filled with death he will use the power of the flare, magnified by the tower, to unmake it. He will claim Shavada’s power and rise.’

  I should have seen it.

  Two colossal forces. Light and darkness, coming together to give Saravor the one thing he absolutely desired. Power. The butchered dead beneath Valengrad’s streets – not just spare parts but fuel for his masterwork. Nacomo’s desire to bring down the Grandspire after he escaped Saravor’s influence. Dantry’s abduction and use as slave labour. Pieces crashed into place, their implications deafening.

  I had thought the Deep Kings feared the Bright Lady. Hoped that, no matter what Dantry had found in his ancient book, there was a chance Ezabeth would return to me. My feeble dream had blinded me to the truth, no matter how I’d denied it. Thierro was wrong, about all of it. Whatever whispers he’d heard in his heart …

  … but of course.

  The Bright Lady hadn’t healed him. Ezabeth hadn’t given him a Spinner’s power. I’d been a fool not to see it. Saravor had seen the Grandspire, and its potential. He’d known about the Eye since he took Shavada’s power, had craved it, plotted with the Deep Kings to take it. He’d taken Thierro’s tormented lungs and replaced them with a Spinner’s, gifted him with a beautiful lie and a burn scar to hide the work he’d done. It was Saravor’s voice that Thierro heard, and the poor bastard didn’t even know who was urging him on. I’d been played from the very beginning, and if I hadn’t wanted to believe it so badly, maybe I could have put it all together earlier. It was all Saravor, and he had everything he needed to ascend.

  I’d been so blind.

  I thought of the bloody bodies beneath Valengrad.

  ‘How many does he need to kill?’

  ‘Tens of thousands,’ the Darling said, and I felt a moment of relief. And then a greater one of dread. He didn’t just have the Grandspire and the Eye: he had the city. He had an army at his disposal, zealous and eager to fight for the Bright Lady, and all the weapons and holy commands he needed to start a bloodbath. Like a key sliding into a lock, everything suddenly came together and made horrible, perfect sense. I heard the turning of that key in the silence of the Endless Devoid. My arm was growing tired. The Darling said, ‘You desire this no more than we do! In this, we should be united.’

  It was right. Even though we were enemies, even though his master was away trying to raise The Sleeper, and my master was trying to prevent exactly that, nobody except Saravor wanted Saravor to possess such terrible power. His capability for cruelty was spattered beneath Valengrad’s streets, and I’d endured his torture on more than one occasion. He was already as inhuman as the Deep Kings, and if he claimed such power, even if they would not accept him as one of their own, they might well propose an alliance. There were few enough immortals in the game that they could afford to ignore one.

  I had learned what I needed. I asked the Darling’s head a few more questions, and then I tossed it into the Endless Devoid.

  31

  I learned things there, in the Misery’s heart, that no man had ever known, or would probably know again. Thought and body were not so separate there as they seemed beyond the Endless Devoid, as though the lines between what constituted something and nothing were less distinct. Existence and time became relative concepts that whirled and changed and had done so since the dawn of time. For a time, I understood the tiny instructions woven throughout our bodies that tell us how to grow, what to be. I knew how the stars had been born, and the true name of the demon that the Deep Kings sought to raise from the ocean’s darkness. I understood how starlings arc their flights as they gather in their millions, and felt the pull of the force that keeps the rest of us strapped to the earth. But these were not secrets I could keep, and they blew through me as fleetingly as a spring wind. They were not true knowings and I had not earned them, and so they left as easily as they came.

  I looked for the time-lost man with the good water on my way out, but I had no chance to kill him a third time, and so my thirst grew.

  I left the Endless Devoid lighter by a head, but newly scarred and carrying a far heavier burden. I was the only one who knew. The only one who could try to stop him before it was too late for Valengrad. I staggered back out of the glare, beneath the dark sky and a lonely golden moon. I knelt, pressed a hand to the dark, bitter sand. I felt her, Misery, simmering just to the other side of existence. She was the essence of change. To allow anything to remain the same would have been foreign to her.

  ‘Hah!’ the raven cawed at me as it descended. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Still alive, though,’ I said.

  ‘Barely.’ There was no arguing with that.

  ‘I think I have a way out of here.’

  I was no longer blind. I still felt them, those fixed positions. Indistinct, but distant, and I only knew where the nearest of them lay, the way you can tell which way a sound comes from. Tnota’s book told me the proximity of one point to another. I figured I might make it to Cold’s Crater, if I was lucky, and if I was incredibly lucky there might be a static patrol there. As long as I could keep the fixed points in my mind, I could navigate without an astrolabe, without moons. But already the knowing, the infusion of Misery that I’d taken from the creature that I had consumed, was fading. The magic had entered me, but it was leaking out again, slowly, painfully, and I could not face taking more of it in. The clock was ticking.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ the raven asked.

  ‘Insect thing,’ I grunted.

  ‘And your chest?’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘And your arm?’

  My inner right forearm was a crust of bloody scabs.

  ‘It was something that I had to remember,’ I said. ‘Something that I learned in the Endless Devoid. I knew that I wouldn’t remember it later.’

  ‘Should have written it down instead,’ the crow said, as though that wouldn’t have been my first choice, had I possessed the materials.

  Whatever I had learned, I didn’t recall it now, not a whisper, not a glimpse of it. Only the words that I’d carved into my skin carried a shred of it. They were jagged, hastily cut, sliced deeply through the skin to make sure that they’d scar. Whatever it was I’d learned, I’d wanted to remember it.

  The words in my skin read: BECOME THE ANVIL.

  I wished that, whatever great and terrible knowledge I had drunk of, I’d thought to carve something I’d actually understand. But then, I’d probably not had a lot of time, and I probably hadn’t been entirely sane when I’d done it either. Maybe it would help against Saravor, but I didn’t think so. Problems like him were usually solved by pointing a barrel and pulling a trigger, but I didn’t think that would work on him any more than it had on the Darlings in the crystal forest.

  No matter. Inventing new ways to kill people was something I’d always been surprisingly good at.

  As I trudged away from the Devoid, I w
ondered if Nenn was still alive, and if she was, what had become of her. She must have felt him inside her mind, forcing her hand, but she’d resisted just enough to dip the pistol barrel at the last moment. Saravor must have purged Thierro’s mind or laid false memories to cover what he’d done to him. I hoped he wouldn’t punish Nenn for her resistance. I wondered what had happened to Tnota, to the Bright Order soldiers who’d fought for us, and the remnants of Nenn’s cavalry. The Misery was never friendly, and their losses had been heavy.

  Tiny gleams of red and bronze sparked beneath the skin along the veins in my hands. Pollutants, moving with my blood. I wondered whether this was how Stracht had finally taken on his coppery shine. Ingested something that he shouldn’t. I’d never get to ask him. Another comrade to avenge.

  I had a mission, a need to get back to Valengrad. I couldn’t afford to think about Nenn, or the voice that whispered through her lips. I had to focus on getting back and warning them about Saravor’s plans. He needed to kill thousands to fuel his mad ambitions and he would have no qualms at all about doing it.

  The sky stretched into forever.

  My mouth was drier than salt, my tongue rough as old bark. The Misery alternated between intense cold and the rising heat and pain rose in me as my body fought to expel the nightmare that had entered it, a pain biting hard in my guts, piercing and cold as a spear driven through me. I dropped to my knees, retched and heaved up an oily trickle of something foul and poisonous. It was black as treacle and just as thick, but my stomach had nothing else to give.

  ‘You’re dying,’ the bird said. Helpful fucking thing.

  ‘We’re all dying, from the moment we’re born,’ I said. ‘Only thing that matters is that we do some living in the ’tween time.’

  ‘I’m not dying,’ the raven that was not a raven said.

  ‘You’re not alive,’ I said. ‘You aren’t anything.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ the raven conceded. ‘Once my purpose is fulfilled, I’ll cease to exist.’

  ‘So Crowfoot didn’t just send you to annoy me, then,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ the bird said, seriously. ‘No, he didn’t.’

  I didn’t ask. The bird knew its business, and since Crowfoot had made it, it was probably best not to know.

  I walked the dark sand, and the sky hung angry, red, and howling overhead. Hunger haunted me, but it was nothing compared to the thirst, and I was taunted by mirages, hazy and shimmering patches of water in the distance. I pressed a hand to the ground, quested out, and the Misery acknowledged that they were lies. The sands stretched out, rising and falling in sweeping dunes, littered with charcoal-brittle rocks. I read Tnota’s book several times on that walk, and before long I had much of it memorised. I was navigating in a way that had never been done before and the Misery seemed prepared to tolerate our coexistence, while her creatures preferred to avoid me.

  I almost gave up. One morning, I barely had the energy to rouse myself. Hungry, thirsty, burned by sun and wind and moons, my resolve began to flag, and I wondered if I could simply lie in my shallow sandy nest and let the elements take me. But the bloody raven had changed its mind about my death, and was suddenly insistent that I continue, pecking at me until I remembered Ezabeth and her isolation within the light, and had no choice but to rise, and walk, and ignore the pain.

  The raven sometimes rode on my shoulder, but mostly it flew ahead, scouting for me and keeping an eye out for anything that looked hungry. It knew we were drawing near to Cold’s Crater before I did, and it saw no signs of life there. I didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad thing. Any men stationed there might put a crossbow bolt in me at a hundred yards. I didn’t just look like some horror dragged out of the Misery – I had become that horror. My clothing was torn, stained, hanging loose where I’d lost weight. I carried an alien sword, my boots were coming apart and the wounds that I’d taken had scarred blackly. But death did not hiss toward me. The fort was deserted.

  What remained of my heart sank. I’d rationed the little water I had and there were only a couple of mouthfuls left in the final canteen, but it was another three days to Valengrad from here. No way that I could make it with what I had, even though the fort offered some shelter for a night. The last time I’d been here was on a mission to bring Dantry back to his sister, when I’d approached it from the other direction. No flags flew over the fort’s walls. Abandoned. My best bet now was to be picked up by a patrol, and the chance of that was slim indeed.

  Not everything can go wrong all the time, though. I entered the fort, and saw that when the long patrol had packed their kit and left, they’d shirked the labourious task of deconstructing the moisture extractors. They were silent, no drilling whines disturbing the deadness of the fortress air, and there were no phos coils to power them, but when I pried away the storage-tank lids I could have cried. Precious, blessed, clean water. It carried the metallic tang of the extractor and it was stale, having lain stagnant in the tank for weeks, but in all my life I had never tasted anything better. Swallowing hurt, a thousand angry knives carving lines up and down my parched throat, but I drank my fill, and then sat, water-drunk and savouring the moistness on my lips. I wasn’t dead yet.

  While I sat there, a ghost appeared on the far side of the fort. Glost, Dantry Tanza’s man. He’d died here, collateral damage in a bungled assassination. The ghost was missing its lower legs, dragging itself on its hands as it called its master’s name. I watched him, resting against the iron extractor tank, until my eyes closed and I slept.

  I woke to the raven shuffling from foot to foot on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t move suddenly,’ it croaked in what might pass for a crow’s whisper. ‘But get ready to move very suddenly.’

  I opened my eyes to see them around me, hundreds of them.

  Two feet tall. Red as a burn. Yellow eyes. Watching me.

  ‘Evening master, care for a good time?’ one of them squeaked.

  ‘Seventy-three, seventy-two,’ said another.

  Gillings. Gillings by the score. I glanced down at my legs, checked my hands. I still had all of them. The gillings were clustered in jumbled ranks, row after row of them stretching back across the fort. I could see the gleam of the anaesthetizing venom on their jagged little fangs. Some of them looked starved, emaciated, but the closest ones were fat-bellied. Well fed.

  I took hold of my sword hilt, knowing already that there were far too many for me to fight my way out. I had never heard of a swarm forming like this, and I couldn’t possibly kill them all.

  ‘The roads are a mess,’ one of the gillings put in helpfully.

  ‘Seventy-three, seventy-two,’ a pair said in unison.

  All eyes were on me as I stood. My sword would scythe them down six at a time if I started to swing, but I would exhaust myself before I managed to kill them all, and just one bite could take the use of a leg. They stared at me, unmoving, as if there was something holding them back.

  ‘What should I do?’ I said.

  ‘I think this as far as we go together,’ the raven croaked in my ear. ‘If you can get out of this one, I’ll be impressed.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll be getting along then,’ the raven said, as nonchalant as if it were discussing the end of a tea party. ‘I still have to find a new Blackwing captain. Especially if you’re going to get eaten.’

  I was backed up against the extractor’s water tank, and behind that there was a high stone wall. A carpet of gillings filled the fort’s yard. No way forward, no way back. I’d come a long way only to find myself in this cruel situation. The raven cawed once more in my ear and then took flight, abandoning me to my fate. It flapped away west.

  The gillings’ eyes followed the crow as one, their heads rotating to follow it in flight. And as they did so, their high-pitched voices squealed in agonised unison.

  ‘Father!’

&nbs
p; It was a word filled with longing, with pain, with the torment of existing as whatever the hell they were. The word turned into a cry, then a squeal, high and shrill and dreadful in the Misery night. They clapped their hands to their heads as if in pain, shaking their fang-filled little faces left and right.

  Then their heads swivelled back toward me. Thousands of hungry stares.

  ‘No,’ I said. I held a hand out toward them. Beady eyes latched onto it. I drew back what was left of a sleeve, displayed the crow there. They didn’t understand the image. They hadn’t the intellect. But I stared them down, concentrating on the essence of Misery that I’d taken into my body. It coexisted there with me. I’d been battling it, holding it back. Refusing it. Now I gave up that fight, let it be a part of me. I embraced that it had guided me through the Misery, that it had showed me her heart and revealed her secrets.

  My heart thundered, and Misery wrapped me tighter.

  The gillings lost focus, blinking as though I’d ceased to exist. They had not come for me to begin with, I realised. They had come for the raven. And now the gillings were as indifferent to me as though I were one of their own. The ones farthest back began to disperse, and within minutes I couldn’t see a single one.

  I knew what I had done to myself when I ate one of the Misery’s creatures. Crowfoot had created the Misery with the Heart of the Void, but whatever ancient power had driven his weapon, part of him had infused the devastation he had inflicted. I now carried both Crowfoot’s debt, and the Misery’s taint. They were of a kind. The gillings’ savage hunger was not brought about by a need for sustenance – after all, they seldom found prey in the toxic wasteland – but rather a need to consume the uncorrupted. And now I found myself as corrupted as they were.

  Spirits. What had I done to myself?

  It didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting back to the Range, and revealing the black worms of treachery that had taken charge of my city. Saravor had to die, slowly and painfully, for what he’d done to Nenn. To me.