by Ed McDonald
The last thing he ever felt would be my hands around his throat.
32
How long had I been out under the broken Misery sky? As I wandered into the depths of the twisted land’s heart, time had turned tricks around me. It had been too long. Weeks. When I finally saw the Range ahead of me, the trees wore spring-green buds as if they’d been decorated to welcome me home. I saw blue sky, unruptured and unbroken. I could have wept.
As I stepped out of the Misery the air tasted strange. Without the poisoned tang it seemed alien to me, rare, even though it was the air I’d breathed for most of my life. Grass, and then trees appeared like beautiful statues, though by anyone’s standards the trees growing so close to the Misery were shrivelled and stunted things. But the sky above was blue and pure, almost cloudless, and the natural coolness of the early year felt like a gentle caress. I was out.
I just wasn’t the same as when I’d gone in.
I found a stream, deep enough that I could immerse myself completely, and the chill water was a balm against my sunburned skin and crusted wounds. The Misery filth flowed away, or at least, the filth on the outside did. I looked human again. Humanish.
My first priority was to find a Range Station. I wasn’t sure exactly where I was on the Range, but I was certainly south of Valengrad. I started up the supply road, and before long I ran into a patrol, the first people I’d seen since I killed Betch. They were wary of me at first and I couldn’t blame them for that, but I spun them a tale about getting lost out in the Misery on a close patrol and dropped Nenn’s name, and they agreed to escort me to Station Two-Three. There were eight men in the patrol and three of them were wearing the yellow hoods of the Bright Order.
It had taken me nearly three weeks to get back to the Range. I asked how Valengrad was faring.
‘The Bright Lady has protected the city,’ the sergeant told me, ‘and the drudge have given up. I saw her appear, one night. Beautiful she was, reaching out toward the Misery. That’s how you know she’s going to end the war with the Deep Kings. It’s a sight you wouldn’t believe unless you was there.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ a youngster muttered. ‘I think you smoked one pipe too many.’
‘There’s plenty think that, and I’d be one of them if I’d not seen it with me own eyes,’ the sergeant laughed. ‘You’ll see. The Bright Lady’s message is spreading. There’s a new order coming, and no mistake.’
‘So long as Prince Vercanti doesn’t slaughter them all,’ the youngster said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, appalled at the reptilian croak in my voice. The sergeant passed me his flask of small beer and I sank it.
‘You’ve a thirst, sure enough. You really did come out of the Misery, didn’t you?’
‘Why would Grand Prince Vercanti attack the Bright Order?’ I asked.
‘After she got kicked from her perch, that bitch Davandein went running to her kin. Colonel Koska got declared Range Marshal by High Witness Thierro, only the princes didn’t take kindly to that. The grand prince, he says it’s unlawful. He cancelled his expedition to Angol and he’s marching his army on Valengrad to take it back for his cousin.’
Thierro controlled Valengrad. If I was right, that meant Saravor controlled Valengrad. The city, the Grandspire, all of it. But he hadn’t been proclaimed king. There were good people at the citadel. The game wasn’t over yet.
‘The High Witness has no business interfering in military matters,’ a gruff old soldier growled. A couple of others agreed, but the followers of the Bright Lady were in the majority whether they wore hoods or not.
‘It was the High Witness who saved Valengrad in its hour of need, weren’t it?’ the sergeant reprimanded them. ‘Not that butcher Davandein. Fucking cream, got no regard for the common man. The prince will see when the Bright Lady comes.’
Even among these few men, the division was evident.
We stopped at the side of the road when a violent coughing fit took me. I nearly fell from the saddle, retched and hacked and spat poisoned blackness from somewhere inside of me. The shakes were on me something fierce, and the soldiers had no liquorice to offer. I couldn’t hold the cigar they gave me long enough to get it lit and one of them had to do it for me. Such long exposure to the Misery was going to take a heavy price.
Station Two-Three appeared and I’d never seen such a welcome sight. The jester’s-hat fronds of the projectors sat dark and silent over the brooding fortress. I thanked my escort after they checked me in at the gate and went about getting as much food and booze into me as I was able to get hold of. I hadn’t money, but the cooks saw my hands shaking and took pity on me. There was heavy dark flatbread, bowls of rice and beans, and best of all, roast lamb, pink and dripping grease as it fell from the bone. I ate more than my share, went back and took more. The gravy was pure luxury, the beer rich, dark and bitter. I found that I could only eat a little at a time, my stomach constricted, but I persevered. Never before or after would I eat a feast like that one, though it was simple fare served up and down the Range. Context is everything.
As sorry as they felt for me, the cellar man wouldn’t give me brandy. I managed to steal a bottle of it anyway. There was no point trying to use my rank. I hadn’t my seal to prove it, and the less attention I attracted the better. I kept to myself in a quiet corner of the barracks and drank until I could barely stumble to my borrowed bunk and crash into sweet, dreamless sleep.
When I woke it seemed that my presence had been noted, and a meeting with the station commander became inevitable, because she was sitting on the end of my bed.
‘I didn’t believe it when they told me, but it looks like they were telling the truth. You really did wander out of the Misery. I’ve seldom seen a man so affected and live.’
She was a dusky woman with a bold, hooked nose and hair like liquid obsidian. Her uniform was crisp and sharp.
‘Wasn’t a good time out there,’ I said.
‘Looks like you ran into some of the Misery’s less friendly inhabitants.’ Without my shirt on, the ridged black scars on my chest and face were all too prominent.
‘You could say that.’
She handed me a bundle of liquorice sticks tied together with twine. I practically jerked one out and began to chew.
‘You’re Captain Galharrow, of Blackwing. You won’t remember me, but we met briefly at one of Major Nenn’s demotions. She broke my brother’s nose.’
She said it matter-of-factly. I didn’t remember her, but I nodded anyway.
‘We heard that you’d been lost in action.’
‘The others, they made it back?’
‘Some of them. They lost a lot of men in the fighting. Your friend the major survived though.’
I nodded at that. I had known she would. I had done my best not to think about that betrayal. But if any of them had made it back, then Tnota must have got clear as well. They’d never have made it back across the Misery without his navigation.
‘Don’t let anyone know I’m back,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to Valengrad, but until I’ve put some things right, nobody can know that I’m here.’
The station commander raised an eyebrow at that, but she didn’t push me. I found that I rather liked her.
‘There’s a shitstorm of trouble heading that way,’ she said. ‘The citadel is barely sending us anything these days. They’re preparing for a siege. Grand Prince Vercanti and Davandein have raised twenty-five thousand men. They’d have been there sooner but they’ve brought up a cabal of Battle Spinners and an artillery train. They plan to take the city back by force.’
‘It’s madness,’ I said, and coughed to clear the croak from my voice. It wouldn’t shift. ‘We can’t fight each other for the Range. Taking the city with green, levied troops? Using guns against Valengrad? Damn it, the citadel’s our stronghold. It defends Nall’s Engine. They’re all insane.’
‘Where do your loyalties lie, Commander?’ I asked. ‘If it comes to blood, will you support the grand prince and Davandein, or will you back Koska and the Bright Order?’
‘My duty is to protect the Range,’ she said. ‘I’ll stand at my post and ensure that if the real enemy present themselves, we activate the Engine and send them to the hells again. I cannot intervene. But we’ve had desertions. Some of my men have gone to Valengrad to join the Order. We see others along the supply road all the time. Fervour’s got deep into them.’
‘The next time someone deserts, you need to catch them and hang them,’ I said.
‘Not a solution here. Half of the men here are believers. Count the hoods. If I start hanging their friends, next thing you’ll see is a yellow flag flying over the station in support for the High Witness and, more than likely, my head on a spike.’
‘They’re traitors. They should be punished,’ I said. I could see her point, but compromise has never been in my nature. She gave me a half smile but didn’t defend her position again.
We talked a while longer, about which rankers were supporting each faction. None of it boded well.
The commander was good enough to give me everything I asked for. A shirt and trousers. A waistcoat. A greatcoat, hat, belt and buckle, new boots. The foreign sword had drawn more than one eye, so I wrapped it up and requisitioned a decent, standard-issue cutlass, straight-bladed and a plain black guard. Lastly I was offered a horse from the stables. None of the horses liked being close to me – they could smell the Misery taint in my skin and they whickered and shied, but eventually I found one that would let me on her back, a docile, tired old nag only a couple of years from decorating a pie stall. She would do. I would have thanked the commander, but she had gone to oversee the shoring up of a bridge. I rode north.
Somebody had to talk some sense into somebody, and the first somebody would be me, and the second had to be everybody. Nobody had anything to gain from a clash between the citadel and the grand prince. Nobody except Saravor. Enough good people had died for that monster’s ambition already.
I entered Valengrad by a little-known way that avoided the main gates, the kind of route smugglers used when hoping to avoid paying the duties. Darkness had fallen just before I arrived, at which point I’d got through all of the liquorice and had half a drunk on me from the brandy I’d enjoyed on the road. Once I emerged into Valengrad, I saw the words on the citadel, fierce and neon red, proclaiming THE LADY BLESSES YOU. No longer a message to take courage against the fears of the night, the citadel itself had gone over to the Bright Order.
Saravor had Thierro, dancing to the whispers of his Bright Lady fantasy, and through him, the innocent people who believed his lies. Thousands of them. Saravor craved power, but he was willing to wield it through a more-easily-swallowed figurehead. He had Koska in his pocket, and worst of all, he had Nenn. I couldn’t go up against Thierro alone. He was a Spinner, and it didn’t matter that the voice urging him on was Saravor’s; he could ash me with a flick of his wrist.
I picked my way across the town, hood up and face down. There were a lot of yellow hoods in evidence, some of them a murky beige, and I guessed they’d run out of yellow dye. Doomsayers crowed on every corner, proclaiming that the Bright Lady’s return was imminent, that the portents grew stronger day by day. But despite the zealotry, there was a nervousness in the way that people walked, the glances that they cast toward their neighbours.
A hard spring rain was falling, not cold but insistent. I turned my face toward it, let it run across my skin. I had never appreciated simple water the way that I did then.
The Blackwing office was dark, locked up, nobody at the desk, and I had to force the back door to get in. It was my office; I could break it if I wanted. I picked my way up the stairs, the place so familiar and welcoming after so long away. Nobody to greet me, though my orders were that the desk be manned at all times. It didn’t bode well.
I lit an oil lamp in my office and sat down in the chair. My desk was empty, my cluttered papers gone, everything placed neat, unused. Tnota’s was the same. The whole place was shut down, closed for business. I hadn’t expected the strength of the sadness that gave me. We’d made something good here, something efficient, and I didn’t like to think that it had all been for nothing. They all thought I was dead, of course. It hadn’t really occurred to me that might change things here. I’d been too preoccupied with surviving.
I smelled something out of place then, the acrid smokiness of slow match. The creak of a floorboard outside the door. There was someone there, and they were armed. I was about to call out but the door flew open with a bang, and the wavering barrel of a matchlock appeared, nosing ahead of its owner. I stood as the little figure did her best to keep the heavy weapon pointed at me. She could barely keep it upright, let alone steady.
‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, angry, scared. She saw me and the gun was aimed right at me. I looked back at her, skinny and fierce as a furious puppy.
‘Hello, Amaira,’ I said, and my voice was a hoarse, croaking rattle, that sounded nothing like the man who had ridden out into the Misery. She stared at me, unsure what she was seeing. My skin was baked and peeling as the sunburn healed. Fresh tracks from Misery-claws ran across my face. I’d lost weight and bulk, and my eyes had turned an unnatural amber with a faint glow in the dim light.
‘A demon,’ she whispered, her eyes wide. ‘Are you a demon?’
It was brave of her, to converse with what she thought as a monster, although she did have the weapon and I was unarmed.
‘No, Amaira. You know who I am.’
She looked at me, not sure, maybe not wanting to believe it. I wasn’t the man who had left here. That man had died, and she had grieved for him, and here I was, ruining everything. I wasn’t even me, I was some other version of me that didn’t sit right with anything in her mind.
‘How do you know my name?’ she asked.
‘You told me your name when you first came to work here,’ I said.
‘Did the Deep Kings send you?’
‘No.’
I spoke soft, gentle, as I would to a skittish horse. She had a matchlock levelled at me, and after my fight through the Misery it would be an irony if I was shot dead by a child in my own office. She didn’t seem to know what to do next, and the gun too heavy for her to keep straight, but she knew that if I was a demon, she’d do well to shoot me.
‘How can it be you when you’re fuckin’ dead, Captain-Sir?’ There were tears in her eyes.
My voice caught in my throat.
‘Language,’ I croaked. ‘And don’t call me Captain-Sir.’
That decided it. Amaira dropped the matchlock and flung herself at me with a sob, and I clutched her tight. I pressed my eyes shut, or else I might have cried too, and you don’t let a kid see you crying when they need you to be strong. Her heart was thundering against me.
‘They said you was dead! They said you was dead!’ she sobbed on me. ‘But I knew you wasn’t! I told them you wasn’t, and I’d stay here and wait for you until you come back, and I was right!’ She de-clamped from me. ‘You look like you got shit on, Captain-Sir!’ she said. ‘What happened?’
So, I gave her a version of it, and it was a brief version which missed out most of what had truly happened. Much of it I struggled to remember. My time near the Endless Devoid was the most blurred, and I had questions I wanted to ask her, about where Valiya was, the jackdaws, Tnota. But her need for answers was greater than mine. She fetched me brandy and poured for me as I recounted it all. There was pressing business to attend to, but as the rain beat down against the window and the sky gave long, aching groans, nations and princes would have to wait. Children command every room they enter. There is something built into us that insists they come before all else, and I had only come to understand that too late.
&
nbsp; ‘Where are the others? Why isn’t anybody manning the desk?’ I asked, when she finally ran out of questions.
‘The jackdaws is all gone,’ she said. ‘There’s only me, Tnota and Valiya left now.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘They got better money from the yellow-hoods, went and joined them. There’s no money, now. That’s what Valiya said.’ She smiled at me. ‘I’m glad you’re back. Things can be back like they was. I liked it that way. We both cried a lot when we thought you was dead. Valiya tried not to let me see, but her eyes was all red and puffy. I think she got the liking for you, Captain-Sir.’
‘That’s not an appropriate thing to say,’ I said.
‘It’s true though. You should marry her. She’s clever, and kind, and she’s your age.’ She said the last with a certain finality, as though that decided it. ‘We could all live in a house together. I could be your servant, could do the chores while you were out doing work.’
‘It’s not for me,’ I said. ‘But you’re right about her. She’s good, and she’s kind, and she’s brilliant. But Valiya deserves better than me. She deserves love, and commitment and a man who can give her his heart.’
‘What’s wrong with giving her yours?’ Amaira said. She pouted as she refilled my glass, as though she had a plan to get me to agree whilst I was drinking and then hold me to it.
‘I can’t give her all of it. I made a promise to another woman. A woman just as good and kind and brilliant as Valiya, and I have a debt to repay to her. Nothing else matters.’
Amaira looked like she was about to argue when I heard the clang of the bell down below. Someone wanted in. She rose as though she intended to answer it but I put out a hand and stopped her.
‘You had anyone come knocking in the night lately?’
Amaira shook her head, frowning. The bell jangled again, clanging with an unfriendly abruptness. A few moments later a fist was pounding on the door.