Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

‘Stand with me now, Ezabeth,’ I whispered, and followed.

  The floor of the high court had been polished to a high sheen, the mosaics bright. There were even more soldiers inside, men and women by the hundred, wearing bright steel breastplates, the coats beneath them dyed a vivid lemon. They wore flarelock canisters, held their weapons to their shoulders, stood to attention. They crowded the tiered galleries overlooking the floor like the viewing boxes at a theatre. Among them I saw many who’d served under Marshal Venzer, Valengrad’s finest warriors. They had turned. Of course they had turned, when the shield rose to protect the city from the sky-fires. They’d seen the proof of their faith written huge and glimmering in the night sky. Why wouldn’t they believe?

  Thierro stood in the centre of the courtroom floor, waiting. I saw Witness Glaun seated like a scarred judge on the marbled dais.

  ‘I’ve come. Release the child,’ I said. My voice rang around in the room, echoed from the marbles.

  ‘Speak when spoken to, knave!’ Glaun roared.

  ‘Release the child,’ I shouted back.

  ‘Show him,’ Thierro said, and snapped his white-gloved fingers. Men emerged holding Amaira and Valiya by the shoulders. My chest lurched. They were both still alive. Valiya was stoic, but her lip and eye were swollen from fist-work. Amaira looked frightened, eyes wide beneath her fringe of dark hair. The worst they’d suffered seemed to be bruises. She didn’t struggle. There was no point.

  ‘You have me,’ I said. ‘Now let them go. They still have time to run before Davandein’s warriors get in here and slaughter the lot of you.’

  ‘Silence!’ Glaun shrieked. He had a wild look about him. His arms were bare, and there were signs that he’d been slicing at his arms with a blade. Amateur; he hadn’t even sliced any words. Fanaticism causes a man to excuse anything in the name of belief. His ends justified his means.

  Saravor smiled through Thierro’s eyes. A mocking smile. As though I’d missed some hilarious joke.

  ‘You hear that?’ Thierro called to the assembly. ‘He does not believe! Even with the portents, there are some that cannot – will not – believe. This man before you denies the rise of the new god, has committed murder to try to deny the coming of the new order. You are the chosen few, obliged to watch, and to record for all time, the ascension of a true ruler. When justice is served, destiny shall be realised, here, and now.’

  The soldiers cheered. They didn’t sense the mockery in his voice. Dupes. I looked to Amaira and she looked at me with terror in her eyes. I gave her a slow nod. She firmed her mouth, gave it back.

  ‘Stand with me,’ I whispered.

  There was a gasp in the assembled crowd and a spurt of light. I glanced up and sure enough, for a split second I saw it, just as they did. A figure of light. I blinked, the imprint lingering in my vision. A woman wreathed in flame.

  ‘She comes!’ someone in the crowd crowed. ‘She draws near!’

  ‘She needs him to die, for her justice!’

  ‘She pointed to him!’

  But she hadn’t been pointing. Her hand had been outstretched.

  The soldiers drummed their flarelock butts against the floor, a dry thunder. Thierro waved his hands for silence, and the soldiers around him were blind to Saravor’s darkness in his eyes. The flecks of blood in the whites.

  ‘You see, Galharrow? The lady comes to bear witness to the passing of a new age. The Nameless will bow the knee, and your death will send a message to them. You will die here, in the seat of their power, within their hall of justice, and they will know that the new order is coming. That their day is done.’

  Thierro was interrupted again by another spark up in the galleries. Another vision of the Bright Lady. Then another. They were coming faster, brief flickers of light.

  ‘High Witness! She draws near. It is time!’ Glaun declared.

  Amaira was shoved forward; the soldier had a knife to her throat. She shook her head at me. Amaira. Small, bony, disobedient Amaira. An orphan of the war. Nobody of note. Just a girl. A girl who had stuck poems to the bottom of a table, so there would be something beautiful if she died.

  ‘Saravor,’ I said. ‘You’re wrong. This is a game to you. You never understood that true power doesn’t stand alone, above men. It stands with and within us. These people deserve more than your lies and trickery. You offered a deal, and I came. But right here, right now, tell your man to get his hands off my daughter, or I swear by every black spirit of the hells that I’ll kill every last fucking one of you.’

  Thierro cocked an eyebrow at me.

  ‘She’s not your daughter,’ he said. ‘She’s some bastard from the oasis kingdoms you picked up in the ruins. Anyone can see that.’

  ‘You can’t understand it because you can’t see it,’ I said. ‘That much is clear.’ I counted the beats of my heart to keep time. Seven beats, eight. ‘You’ve not ordered him to stand down. Get ready to die.’

  Another gasp as the Bright Lady appeared in a momentary flash of raw light. One of the Order soldiers staggered away with smouldering clothes, clutched at a scorched hand.

  ‘The Lady comes!’ Glaun cried, ‘because the justice done here opens the path! Kill him, High Witness. Kill him and open the path for her!’

  ‘Stand with me, Ezabeth.’

  I rolled my shoulders, spat on the floor and drew my sword. I levelled it toward Thierro.

  ‘You think to come at me alone, Galharrow?’ Thierro smirked.

  ‘That’s always been your problem, Saravor. You’re surrounded by men whose hearts you’ve taken, and you’re still alone. I’m not alone. The Bright Lady isn’t here for you. She’s here for me.’

  I advanced on Thierro, point levelled.

  ‘Hear me, Crowfoot,’ Saravor said, his voice booming. ‘This one is just the beginning. I’ll erase all trace of you from our world.’

  Light blazed in front of me. The canisters at Thierro’s belt flared, detonated outwards as he absorbed a wave of power. It rushed through him, smoking and glimmering from his infused body. The soldiers cheered. And then he unleashed it against me, a blinding white blast of power.

  I didn’t even flinch.

  A wave of heat struck me as the power struck something five feet away and stopped, a beam of writhing phos light creating a screaming disturbance in the air. The power roared, blasts of lightning flaring wildly as the phos arced and cut away from me. And at its heart, she flared into being.

  Ezabeth.

  The Bright Lady.

  My shield.

  She stood strong. Magnificent. Five feet nothing, and she was still greater than a giant. A dress of flame billowed around her legs as she grew in intensity, translucent and golden, the blaze of power swelling around her as Saravor poured more of Thierro’s spinning into it.

  ‘The Lady!’ Witness Glaun cried, and the soldiers cheered. Ezabeth rippled, an illusion, a spirit, ethereal and so distant. She was still too far away. Much too far away for me.

  ‘I cannot protect you forever, Ryhalt,’ she said, and her whisper rang like a cannon blast in my mind. ‘Run.’

  ‘I’ll never run from you,’ I said.

  Her eyes were awash with pain, the agony of forcing herself into our world. This was it. She was no power-crazed sorcerer seeking ascension. She’d gathered power all along the years for some great purpose. The Bright Order had seen her reaching and thought she quested toward justice, enemies, anything they could have dreamed. But Ezabeth was not a god, she was a woman, and I’d only put it together when I’d asked myself, had I been her, what would I have reached for? This was what she had been building her power to all this time. Not for some mystic rebirth.

  She reached for me, her arm rising toward me. Offering me her hand.

  ‘How is he doing that?’ Glaun demanded.

  ‘You wanted someone to save you,’ I said. ‘But there’s no god co
ming to help you, Witness. We have to save ourselves.’

  I thrust my hand into the burning light. There was a wall there, a wall between worlds. Ours, corporeal, hard, flesh and bone and iron and sky. Hers, spirit and light, dream and magic. There was no way that a man of flesh could cross into that, and no way that a woman of light could cross back.

  But I was not just a man. I was soaked through with the Misery, with Crowfoot’s dreadful magic. It infused my body, driven like nails into my marrow. I’d absorbed the tiniest part of that power, and I was no longer just a man. I was no spirit in the light, either. I was something less, and something greater. A bridge between two worlds.

  I reached into the barrier, drove against it with all of my strength, my mind, with the black energy that the Misery had imbued me with.

  And our fingers touched with a roar like the crashing of thunder, the fall of empires, the breaking of rules long written in the bones of the earth.

  Thierro’s power winked out, his phos exhausted, and the spirit stood there still, golden and translucent, burning and fierce. Ezabeth’s eyes rippled with pain and with power, a ghost in the light become substance. Thierro – and Saravor – staggered back and collapsed. He’d thrown everything he had against me, and Ezabeth had taken it.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘She’s nothing! You told me she was nothing! Just some dead Spinner!’ And for the first time, I heard fear in Saravor’s hissing. I dropped to my knees. I’d thrown everything I had into reaching for her. Now the heat of Ezabeth’s presence, the fire that still surrounded her, seared my skin.

  Valiya elbowed the man holding her in the crotch, and as he doubled over she grabbed the hand of the man holding the knife to Amaira’s throat. The soldier backhanded her, sending her to the ground. As he lunged for Amaira she ran to me and hurled herself into my arms for whatever meagre protection they could give.

  ‘You have all been deceived,’ Ezabeth said. Her voice was hollow and metallic. Not a woman at all. Something greater than us. All around us, hundreds of eyes began to weep blood as Saravor took control of his army of fixed men, while Ezabeth spoke to the soldiers – the Bright Order believers. ‘I am not your saviour. I am of the light. I am the light.’

  ‘Kill them!’ Thierro screeched. ‘Fire. Fire!’

  ‘But High Witness, the Bright Lady …’ Witness Glaun looked from one to the other, utterly confused.

  Saravor’s puppet-men started to come to life, picking up the weapons they’d been pounding on the floor and cocking the rigging levers, a high-pitched whine filling the air as phos canisters connected to firing mechanisms, and five hundred gun barrels swivelled in my direction.

  ‘Run,’ I said to the girl at my side.

  ‘No!’ Amaira screamed. ‘Leave him alone!’

  There was no running from this, no dodging that many shots. I tried to give Amaira a smile. It hadn’t been a good run, all things considered.

  ‘Take aim!’

  ‘Run!’ I said again, trying to push Amaira from me, but she clutched tight to me and I hadn’t enough strength to shove her away.

  They took aim.

  I curled around Amaira instead, turning my back on Glaun; a pitiful shield. It was all I could offer her.

  ‘Fire!’

  All around us, the thunder of the guns.

  37

  Perhaps they had all started as believers. Perhaps all they had wanted to see was the Bright Lady born out of the light. They had got their wish, in the end. She was the last thing they saw as they squeezed their firing levers. Perhaps the first man to fire was happy in the split second between pulling the trigger, seeing the light-filled silhouette, and the explosion that tore him apart.

  The second man may well have got to experience the same thing. But by the third, or the tenth, or the hundredth, they would have seen nothing, blinded by the blasts as five hundred flarelocks detonated, one after the other.

  The roar of the explosions shook the building. The phos detonations crashed against each other in awkward, split-second screams as the light canisters tore apart. The galleries were obliterated, bodies fell like rain. The Bright Order men that had not pulled their triggers were caught in the explosions all around them or else fell to their deaths as the platforms beneath them collapsed, or were crushed by those falling above them. Standing in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of blazing bursts, the wave of heat bore down from all sides, but as the Bright Order died in their hundreds I stood immune. I closed my eyes against the glow, and, when I opened them, I thought that I might have died already.

  I paid no heed to the collapsing galleries, or the cries of the burned. Ezabeth blazed before me.

  Tears ran down my face. I groped forward on my knees, and we were nearly the same height. I reached out to her, but the walls between worlds were too strong. I had no more strength to reach her.

  ‘Come back to me,’ I said, and my voice was raw and broken.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ Ezabeth said, and my heart thrashed inside my chest. Her voice had a metallic resonance to it, as though I heard her echoing through a tunnel of steel.

  But it was her.

  She was here.

  ‘You’re here,’ I said. But she wasn’t. I could see the room beyond her, through her. She had no substance.

  ‘I have little time,’ she said, and her voice was achingly sad. ‘It has taken me years to build the impetus to reach out to you here. Ryhalt – ’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry that I couldn’t save you.’ I could barely speak. A gantry broke apart and fell to shatter against the courtroom floor.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ she said, and the name was an echo of agony through me. ‘I made my own choices. I always did. Nobody made them for me. I’m so sorry for your pain, but I don’t have much time.’

  My pain. She was the one who burned.

  ‘I need you to stay,’ I pleaded.

  ‘I am bound to the light,’ she said. ‘Part of it. Not even the Engine has enough power to undo what I did. But tonight, with the flare and the moons aligned, I have a few moments.’

  The spirit of light seemed to shudder, hunched for a moment, but then drew up to her full height.

  ‘I cannot bear it,’ I said.

  ‘I can. So must you,’ she said.

  ‘I love you,’ I said uselessly.

  ‘I love you too.’

  My vision was blurred with tears, but even so I saw the smoke-like wisps that had begun to rise from her.

  ‘You have to go, Ryhalt. You have to stop the grey children. I died to save Valengrad. Don’t let that be for nothing.’

  ‘How do I stop them?’

  The woman of light winced and her ghost-fists tightened into balls, an all-too-human action for a being composed entirely of flickering blue and golden light.

  ‘You’re holding it back, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘The fire. You’re trying not to show it to me.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ Ezabeth said, metallic voice urgent. ‘I tried to gather enough power to stop the grey children, but even tonight, in this realm, I’m too weak. I can’t stop Saravor, so I’ve chosen instead to save you. Stand for me, champion. If Saravor manages to use the Eye, he will become as terrible as the Deep Kings. You’re the only one I can trust to stop it. You cannot stop the war, Ryhalt. But Saravor is no true immortal. Not yet.’ She choked on her own words. The smoking coils rising from her intensified as though she were dry wood exposed to hot embers.

  ‘How can you bear it?’ I asked.

  The first flames began to rise from her body as one hand caressed my face.

  ‘Because you still care,’ she said, and her strange, light-spun face showed both sympathy and sadness as she looked down on me. ‘Because I know that no matter how hard it is or how much it costs you – if you have to beat down the gates to the hells themselves – you’ll find me and you’ll drag me out of here
. You’re Ryhalt Galharrow. All the hells together won’t stop you from reaching me.’ Her fingers seared my cheek without even touching me. They were hot, hot as a cannon barrel. I didn’t flinch from the heat. I raised my hand and pressed it against the back of her fingers. There was no substance to them, only burning pain which made the magic imbued into my body writhe and twist, rejecting the foreign power. The flames began to lick along her shoulders, her arms. Her face. The pain against my cheek was like a brand, but I couldn’t have dragged myself from it. If this was all that remained of her, then I still wanted it. Would endure it.

  ‘If I have to break the sky and shatter the earth,’ I said before the statues of Justice and Mercy, ‘if I have to tear the mountains from their roots and drown the fucking oceans. If it takes me a hundred years. I will find you. I will bring you back.’

  I could no longer see her face. The flames rose over her, stealing her back, but I thought I caught her voice one final time.

  ‘I know.’

  And then she was gone.

  38

  Thierro’s body lay twisted and broken on the floor. His chest had been torn open by shards of flying metal. The stench of rotting meat rose from inside him, black, rotting lungs exposed. No amount of cologne would hide it now. He’d been a good man.

  ‘She was real,’ Witness Glaun said. He lay slumped against the judges’ dais. He was not in a good way.

  Valiya was crouched beneath the skirts of the statue of the Spirit of Mercy. None of the debris seemed to have fallen around her. She met my eye, as surprised by her own survival as I was. I doubted that it was simply luck that had protected her amidst the devastation. Pale with shock, she gave me a trembling nod. I returned it, just before a small, spindly-limbed creature managed to throw itself at me. She nearly took me off my feet. Amaira was covered in soot and masonry dust. I looked her over for wounds, found none, and crushed her to me until she had to hit me on the back to let her breathe.

  ‘You came for me,’ she said, her eyes full of tears. ‘You came for me.’