Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘No …’

  White-paint letters reading TRAITOR were fresh above the door.

  She had locked and barred it, and an axe had overcome that simple impediment, pieces of red-painted wood scattered into the hallway. I didn’t want to go in. I sagged against the doorframe instead, for just a moment willing some unknown attacker to emerge behind me and put an end to all this. It was too much. It was all too much, and I didn’t want to see what they’d done. But nobody came, and I owed it to them to see.

  The house had been ransacked. Chaos, clutter everywhere. Not the ordered rifling of searched drawers either, but a furious, savage flurry of destruction. Axes had hewn holes in the neat little sofas, had smashed delicate landscapes from the walls, shattered the lights, the coffee table, the dresser. A neat, ordered life had been left in ruins.

  No sign of Valiya. No sign of Amaira. My breath sat stagnant in my chest, a hard, morbid lungful that I dared not expel for fear that the next inhalation was the one in which I found their bodies. They hadn’t fallen in the sitting room, hadn’t been cut down in the parlour. Amaira would have hidden. I checked the cupboard beneath the stairs, the privy, beneath the beds, but as I searched I found room after room was empty and my heart began to thump louder and louder in my ears. She wasn’t here. They weren’t here. Not here.

  A noise from the hallway.

  I tore into it, sword raised and ready to take my revenge, but it was just an old woman, grey and fearful. She walked with a stick, bent-backed and frightened as she cowered away from me.

  Terror widened her eyes, but she didn’t try to hobble away. Wouldn’t have got far. I must have looked like a devil to her, copper-skinned and yellow-eyed. I lowered my sword, sheathed it. Held out a hand as though she were a skittish animal.

  ‘You’ve nothing to fear from me,’ I rasped. ‘The woman who lived here. Did you know her?’

  ‘I did,’ the woman said, drawing her shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘And she weren’t no traitor.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Is she … did they …?’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.

  ‘They took her. Her and a child, though the child weren’t hers,’ she said.

  Relief hit me like a stampeding bull. I staggered against the wall, choking on the gasps that escaped my shaking chest. My eyes burned and my shoulders locked tight. Oh, spirits of mercy, spirits of fucking mercy sweet and good and fuck you all. They were alive.

  The old woman let me get it all out. The elderly know loss and she understood the shudders of exhaustion that now rocked me. Absolute terror will take it out of you. But they weren’t safe. They weren’t dead, but they weren’t free, so now my fears turned to darker places. Would they have hurt them? A waste of time fearing it. They had or they hadn’t. But while they were alive, there was hope.

  ‘You’re her employer,’ the old woman said. ‘I saw you come in, from across the street. Valiya said you were a big man.’

  She’d spoken about me to a neighbour. Described me. A small, meaningless detail amidst all this chaos but somehow it shined a spotlight on my failure to protect these people that had trusted me.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was those bastard Bright Order men,’ she snarled. ‘They came and they kicked in her door and set about with the axes. Took the child too. Dusky little thing, only so high. Kicking and biting them she was, or trying. Valiya went quietly. They hadn’t roughed her up none. Been praying that they’re safe, though I don’t know that they can be.’ The woman looked past me into the house. ‘Truth is, someone comes grabs you like that, they probably don’t mean to treat you kind.’

  I looked at the splintered remnants of the door, lying cracked and hewn where they’d fallen. Amaira must have been terrified. They both must.

  ‘She spoke highly of you,’ the woman said. Wistful, as though Valiya was already lost and gone. As though being taken was being dead. But if my ordeal in the Misery had proved one thing beyond all others, it was that captured isn’t dead. The old woman had grown uncomfortable in the presence of my seething anger. It bled from me like summer heat.

  ‘I didn’t do well enough by her, that’s for sure,’ I said. ‘They’ll pay for this.’

  ‘Miss Valiya never struck me as the kind to go wanting revenge,’ the old woman said. Truth in that. Revenge didn’t serve her purpose. She’d only ever cared about getting the job done. Saving others. It was one of the things that I could admit, now, that I had loved about her.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But first I’m going to find the men who took them. And then I’m going to take it all the same.’

  35

  Tnota’s house hadn’t been hit. It was locked up good and tight. No sign of entry, no sign of a struggle. I was calmer now. I’d let the anger fill me, turn me to ice.

  I ran on. My feet sent Misery-pain into my shins with every footfall and my chest burned, but I couldn’t slow. I was in no condition for this, the weeks in the Misery had taken everything from me, only there was no choice. I ran and I ignored the pain as my old leg wound pulled tight and the barely healed injuries on my chest pulled open and spilled hot blood down my chest.

  A man gave out yellow hoods as a Doomsayer explained that at the height of the flare’s brightness, the Bright Lady would be born into the world and the princes would bow the knee to her. There was a desperate, ragged look to him, as though he sought to convince himself as much as he did the people he was preaching to. I took a hood, the better not to be seen. Since my arrival the message on the citadel had changed to read DETAIN ALL YELLOW-EYED MEN. Saravor’s command, filtered through Thierro. The hood distributor gave me a squinting appraisal, but maybe he decided that his five-and-a-half-foot frame had little chance against my six and a half feet, and he went on with his life without looking back.

  ‘The Bright Lady’s enemies approach,’ the Doomsayer declared, wild-eyed. ‘These last weeks she gestured east toward the old enemy. But today, our friends have seen her offer her hand west toward the new enemy. She reaches out to them, offers the hand of friendship. She walks among us, walks with us! Stand strong with us, good people of Valengrad. Stand strong and see the dawn of her new order.’

  Caution would have had me wait, watch the street outside my house, assess the chances of an ambush. There was a strong likelihood that I was running straight into a trap. I was low on gear. I’d have welcomed a brace of pistols, a full harness and a poleaxe if they’d been on offer but I couldn’t trust anyone at the citadel, and I had no other means to acquire half an army’s worth of equipment, so it was just going to be me, a sword and whatever was left of my nerve, checking if there was anything left here. Caution could go fuck itself: I threw the door open.

  The door swung open cleanly – it had not been locked when the Bright Order came – and I could smell phos. A lot of it, the odour of burned energy soaked into the walls. Weapons had been discharged here. Upstairs, Dantry’s sickroom smelled of sweat and grime, but he wasn’t there. Down the stairs, and down again into the cellar, and the smell grew thicker, almost misty in the air, its residue providing a dim phosphorescence by which I made out the ruin of Maldon’s workshop. The walls were painted black with soot and two of the chairs were reduced to charred lumps. A trio of bodies were fused together in the doorway, a misshapen, blackened tangle of indistinct, melted limbs, teeth and fingers. No sign of Maldon, but there was a clear child-shaped silhouette in the soot that coated one wall.

  He’d detonated a phos charge of some kind and taken the blast head-on. I wondered if it had given him the release he had been searching for, but if it had killed him, then some remnant of him should still have been there. It wasn’t.

  I looked across the workbenches. A heavy cloth covered a gleaming contraption of steel tubes, a crank, and a long, coiled belt. I didn’t know what to make of it, so decided not to touch it. As an additional kick to the balls, it seemed that Ma
ldon had requisitioned my parade armour from upstairs and ruined it. He’d welded on extra plates of heavy black iron, and added purposeless hooks and belts in various places. The welding he’d done meant that the plates would be much too thick and heavy for any man to move in, when I’d been hoping it was one bit of kit that would still be available to me.

  Fuck. No guns. No phos charges or grenadoes. Not even my archaic armour. Nothing of use.

  I was about to leave when I noticed it. A finger had scraped a crude message through the soot coating the wall. Blue door opposite my old house.

  It seemed an unlikely trap since nobody else knew that Gleck Maldon was still alive, so I beat a path across town, dodging down alleyways whenever I saw anyone that looked like a soldier coming my way. Maldon’s former house was close to the Spills, though an arsehole called Stannard had burned it down four years ago.

  I found the blue door and struck it twice with the heel of my fist. I slid my hand into my coat and took hold of my knife. Take no chances. Behind the door I heard the click of a weapon being cocked and pressed myself flat against the wall, to the side.

  ‘Who’s there?’ a voice called. It was comical in a way, a child trying to make his voice deeper.

  ‘It’s me, darling,’ I said back. Not a very good joke, but it made things pretty clear. A bolt was drawn back, then another, another. Good. I was glad he was keeping bright.

  ‘It’s open,’ Maldon said, and I pushed through, found he was standing several feet back, a pistol trained on the door. As I stepped in and shut the door, he kept it sighted on me.

  ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ he asked. ‘Valiya said you were a mess but … Spirits, Ryhalt. You look more fucked-up than I do.’

  ‘We could argue about that,’ I said. Maldon was not in a good way. His left arm was in a sling, and I could see what looked like a pair of flarelock wounds in his chest, patched and stitched by an inexpert hand. His skin was burned and blackened, either raw and red or crisped like bacon fat.

  ‘You look like a monster,’ he said, uncocking the pistol and tossing it down on a sideboard.

  ‘You are a monster,’ I said. Maldon grunted his acknowledgment.

  Dantry emerged from a back room. He still looked gaunt, half-cadaver, but his face broke when he saw me. I went straight to him and threw my arms around him. He was a good man. It might have shattered what was left of my hopes if he’d been dead.

  ‘OK,’ he wheezed, and I let him go. I’d crushed all the air from him. He was all skin and bone, no strength to push me away. ‘Valiya told me you were alive. I didn’t believe it at first. How did you survive?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘Those Bright Order bastards came,’ Maldon said. ‘Burst in whilst I was in the cellar. They shot me but I managed to detonate a phos canister right on top of them. They didn’t think I’d be suicidal enough to pull the control wire out. Should have seen their faces.’

  ‘I saw what’s left of them,’ I said. ‘You got anything to drink?’

  Maldon did, of course. It wasn’t clear whose house this was, but I got the impression Maldon hadn’t much liked the neighbour who’d lived here. Wherever he’d gone, and whoever he’d been, he’d kept a decent enough wine cellar that even Maldon hadn’t managed to get through it all in the last few hours.

  ‘It’s a shitstorm,’ he said. The fire had burned down low, and we’d spent a pair of hours drinking and trading news while I got my strength back and ate my way through a couple of legs of ham and half a loaf of bread. I told them about the raven’s unintentional rescue and the trek through the Misery, though I sanitised it and spared the worst details, which was most of it. The more I ate the clearer my mind seemed to get. I had to pause halfway through to cough and hack out more of the toxic black sludge that seemed to be inhabiting my body now, but I’ve had worse meals.

  ‘They made Tnota move his shit over to the citadel,’ Maldon said. ‘Told him he’s conscripted out of Blackwing and into the army. They got him training navigators there.’

  ‘So he’s safe?’

  ‘Safe as anyone,’ Maldon said. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

  I looked down at the words that I’d carved there and didn’t have an answer for him.

  ‘Saravor has to be stopped. If Davandein – when Davandein attacks the city, there’ll be carnage. Her guns will bring down the gates sure enough, and those mercenaries won’t be put off by whatever the Bright Order can muster. They’ll go after anyone wearing a yellow hood and gut them, and as they do, Saravor gets the power he needs to feed the Eye. He’s going to do it. He’s going to become one of them. A Deep King, or maybe something worse.’

  ‘You think he can do that?’

  ‘I think he’s been working on it for four years,’ I said. ‘Ever since he got that shred of power. He saw the potential in the Grandspire, so he took control of Thierro, and through him the Bright Order, while making himself an army of fixed men beneath our feet, ready to take control of the city. Spirits know how many people he’s controlling through his fixing. All he needs now is the flare, and for the fighting to start.’

  There was a pecking at the dirty window glass and I let the hooded raven in.

  ‘You need to hurry your arse up,’ the raven cawed.

  ‘Is that thing Crowfoot?’ Dantry asked.

  ‘No,’ the bird said, ‘just a simulacrum, built to achieve a task. What the fuck are you supposed to be?’

  ‘What task?’

  As usual, the raven ignored the question.

  ‘You need to get a fucking move on, Galharrow,’ it croaked. ‘Whatever you’re doing here with this little boy – or whatever he is – can wait. Find Saravor.’

  I took a long swig of wine. It probably wasn’t a good idea to be on the third bottle already, but we’re nothing if not a combination of our worst habits.

  ‘Finding him is going to be hard,’ I said. ‘Killing him will be harder.’

  I rested my forehead on my knuckles and closed my eyes. The impossibility of the task stretched out before me. You don’t just walk up to a sorcerer and put your sword through his chest. Or at least, you don’t expect that to kill him. Maldon was walking proof of that. But I had limited means at my disposal. If I’d had Ezabeth Tanza at my side, I could have relied on her to send him to the hells, but I was all out of Battle Spinners.

  ‘They have Valiya,’ I said eventually. I could barely force the words out of my throat. ‘They took her and they took Amaira.’

  Neither Maldon nor the raven said anything. No quips, no snide remarks, no mockery. For once they both shut the fuck up.

  ‘They have Nenn too,’ I said eventually. ‘Saravor has her bound to him and I can’t fight her. Not Nenn.’

  I was crying. My tears were driven by sorrow, and anger, and the knowledge that there was so little I could do. I couldn’t turn back an army.

  ‘Unacceptable!’ the raven cawed. Maldon said nothing, his face impossible to read through that blindfold.

  ‘We’re down to a goblin-man, a boy, an invalid and a bird,’ I said. ‘Against a city. Against an army, and a sorcerer who was strong enough to break Crowfoot’s wards. He may not have the power of a Nameless yet, but he’s only one step away, and I couldn’t even protect a woman and child. The game’s over.’ I sagged back into the chair. ‘You were right. We’ve lost.’

  ‘The visions of the Bright Lady have gone berserk,’ the raven said. ‘She’s appearing all over the city, faster and faster, pointing all over the place. If some ghost in the light hasn’t given up, then you damn well shouldn’t.’

  I shrugged. Ezabeth was powerless to intervene. She was dead.

  ‘You’re no good to anyone exhausted,’ Maldon said, and it was the first time I’d heard gentleness in his voice since the day I shot his eyes out. ‘How long since you slept, Ryhalt? There’s a bed
in the room over the hall. Go and sleep. I need to go out and finish something.’

  The raven opened its beak to squawk something, thought better of it.

  The bed had a sour, unwashed look to it, but I could still feel the Misery in my gums, in my nose, feel her bleeding from my eyes and so the relative distastefulness of unwashed bedding was lost on me. I lay down and closed my eyes and thought of Valiya and all she had done for me over the last few years. I thought of how Amaira must have cried, must have screeched and fought when they took hold of her. She was out there now, somewhere, surrounded by enemies. Another child I had failed.

  As I lay there, resisting sleep, I thought of Ezabeth, and what she would have said to me. That I’d done my best, that I’d tried my hardest? Even picturing her face hurt, still, after all this time. When I thought of her it was not as the ghost in the light, but of the woman that she had been. The scarred woman behind the veil. Hers was a face that I’d known only fleetingly, but it had stayed with me more clearly than those of men I’d known for years, imperfect and scarred and beautiful and perfect.

  She’d have said I couldn’t give up. That surrender was not an option. That losing was never going to be the answer. That she’d rather have died trying to save the republic than fled in defeat. I wished I had her courage, and I wished that when I imagined her reaching for me from that impossible distance that I could draw on her strength. Dead and lost, but still she reached out to me, though light and flesh could never touch.

  Sleep came, and with it bad dreams of unpleasant things I’d done to people in the past, but dreams are neither prophetic nor something on which to base your decisions. It felt strange to wake up in a dirty peasant house that wasn’t my own, and to find that Maldon wasn’t there and neither was the raven. I groped around in the kitchen and found some preserved fruit in jars which I ate whilst I sat and wracked my brains for anything that might stop Davandein from attacking, or Saravor from rising to godhood, given that one seemed inevitable and all the pieces were in place for the other.