Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  Witness Valentia had been my first target. As I clanged past her, up the steps leading to the Grandspire’s main door, I saw she wasn’t dead, despite losing both of her legs. She lashed out with a blast of light, that struck me square on and I staggered a few steps, only the weight of the armour keeping me upright. I turned the cannon back on her and drilled chunks of stone from the stair, stone dust billowing in cloud.

  The whining sound was louder, higher pitched.

  I didn’t have much time. The plaza was strewn with the dead and the pieces of the dying, but there were still men out there, men that could fight, and my armour was giving in. I pointed the weapon at them and a handful of shots flew into them, but then the rattle and crack died away, and the barrels spun without their deadly firestorm.

  My ten thousand shots were done. Smoke billowed from the gun barrels and poured from the joints of my battered, dented armour. The steel was hot to the touch and I was starting to cook inside it. Sparks spat from all parts of the weapon now, but my enemies seemed to have realised I had no more fire to give from the smoking red barrels, and they grabbed poleaxes and Saravor’s last guardians charged me. I yelled as I wrenched Maldon’s weapon free of the ammunition feed, heaved it toward them and then clanged into the Grandspire.

  The ground floor was aglow with purple light but the mill floor was silent. The Talents were slumped at their looms, chained to them, dead. The poor bastards had been worked until they were no longer needed, then their throats had been cut, carefully and methodically. Saravor had taken the power he needed and then made sure no one else would have access to it.

  His dupes were still running toward me, and Maldon’s overheating weapon was sitting in their path, screaming a high-pitched whine that I could hear even inside my enclosed helmet. I grabbed the Grandspire’s great open door and put my shoulder against it. The pistons screamed, the armour belched smoke and I felt my skin begin to sizzle as the phos machinery, overworked and driven past tolerance, began to buckle – but then the huge stone door grated across the ground and boomed into place. I staggered back into the midst of the looms, as my armour belched smoke and the heat began to sear me. I tore at the straps, ignoring the sounds of men trying to heave against the door from outside. I had a knife and I hacked at the leather straps, burned my fingers even through the leather of my gauntlets as I pried out the rivets locking down the helmet. It was halfway free when a huge thump roared outside, louder than any cannon. Dust rained down from above as the blast shook the Grandspire and pieces of the door cracked and fell inwards in a clattering of rubble … and then, nothing.

  There were no more voices. Nobody appeared at the hole in the door, through which steam and smoke and stray crackles of phos wafted. There were no more sounds from outside, only the hissing and crackling of the armour. The release lever Maldon had warned me of had been shot away, just a stub remaining. I hammered at it until it gave a whine, the bolts blew outward with trails of steam and a pile of hot metal clattered down around me. My skin felt raw, my clothes were scorched, and sweat steamed.

  Gasping, I sat on the workshop floor and tried to get my breathing under control. My leg, the old spear wound, throbbed. I pried myself out of the heavy gambeson, sodden and weighted with sweat and dumped it with the steaming armour. I hadn’t realised just how many of their matchlock shots had struck me. The armour was riddled with small circular dents. Maldon was a fucking terrifying genius.

  This was it. Alone now.

  I had a small, turnip-sized phos canister, taken from a flarelock and modified to be a grenade, in a pocket. When I tore out the control coil, I’d have seconds before it turned into a blast of light that might just be enough to rupture The Iron Sun. And maybe, if he was close enough, it could take Saravor with it.

  Everything in the Grandspire was quiet. Saravor hadn’t expected anyone to get past his dead-eyed legion. I coughed painfully in the smoky air, then realised it wasn’t the smoke that was choking me. I coughed and spat out more of the black Misery tar until my lungs felt like they’d been scoured with crushed glass, wiped my mouth on the back of a shaking hand. The black slime steamed on the floor, bubbled. No time to worry about it now.

  There had been guards in the Grandspire, honest citadel men. They’d been slaughtered, blades in the back and their weapons lay where they had fallen. I took a dead man’s sword, an honest weapon with a fully enclosed hilt. He’d taken little care of it, there were specks of rust across the basket. The blade wasn’t very sharp.

  Sharp enough.

  I looked at the stairs. Thousands of stairs. Too many for a man getting old, with a protesting leg, half a dozen wounds and all the worst vices. A well-lit doorway beckoned me instead. Thierro had got the ascending platform working, and there were rows of levers indicating dozens of floors. I threw the last one. Heading for the pinnacle.

  I could feel it, as I ascended. A weight, the depth of destiny. The air grew heavier, as a pressure grew the closer I got to the top of the spire. Pressure on the ears, weight in the chest. The weight of spirits. I could feel them as they were drawn in, drifting slowly through the stone, through the air, through my body. Out in the city, people were dying. Guns were fired, spears thrust, daggers rose and fell and the people of Valengrad screamed and died and wondered why, in this last damned hour, the Bright Lady had betrayed them. As the shadows of people’s lives drifted past, I had a sense of them. Here, a woman who’d died protecting her children. There, a boy who didn’t understand what was happening, they died one and the same, the echoes of their lives like wind against my skin. The disbelief, the sheer unfairness of their untimely deaths howled through them, along with the pain and the sorrow and a refusal to believe it. Each life had its own unique shape and song, flavour and colour, each one was drawn upward to the Eye, and to its master. Songs that ended, never to be sung again.

  The platform slowed. An iron rail door opened on a short flight of stairs and I stepped out into the night.

  The sky was vivid in purple, and the wind howled around us. The Misery’s taint rode thick upon it, its familiar venom and hate on the air. Here, even closer to the Eye, I felt the terrible force of the stolen lives, thickening the air and resisting being dragged toward an even darker fate. Was Thierro here? Had the fixed I’d torn apart already ascended?

  The Iron Sun was a globe of black iron, intense violet light shining through the cracks between the plates, enough power to send Davandein’s soldiers to hell, if that’s what Saravor wanted. But he didn’t, and I finally saw him across the rooftop.

  Saravor, in the flesh at last. He was just as tall as ever, but broad now, vast and swamped in a heavy robe. He held Shavada’s Eye, wriggling and squirming, wet and winding on its maggot-like tail. It was swollen, pulsing with power as it drew in the souls of the damned. A few yards away a figure in a yellow hood stood silently, an observer. Neither of them had noticed me. This was my chance. I drew the phos grenadoe from my shirt. I would have to time it carefully. The throw would have to be good. Too soft and it would only catch The Iron Sun in the edge of the blast, too hard and it might sail away, over the edge of the roof, and detonate harmlessly below.

  Fortune had smiled upon me. Saravor’s attention was on the chaos in the city streets below, playing out for him like warring colonies of ants. He’d have needed eyes in the back of his head to see me coming.

  I pulled the fuse, waited a second, and threw.

  Saravor turned, lazily, and flicked one gnarled hand. The grenadoe was cut from the air, snatched from its trajectory, and sailed out into the purple night sky. A moment later it detonated with a bang. A twinkling cloud of sparkling light hung in the air for a few moments, and then it too was gone.

  So.

  ‘A valiant attempt,’ Saravor said. He smiled, a broad, misshapen expression across his lumpy features. ‘But so obvious. That always was your failing, Galharrow. All the subtlety of a broadside.’

  �
��This ends now,’ I said. A stupid, futile thing to say. I was already drawing my sword. The blast Saravor had flung had been the same slash of air that Darlings could work and he was forty feet away across the roof. No chance of reaching him before he sent another at me. I drew my sword, set my nerve and my lips curled back across my teeth. I’d take it head-on. Saravor wasn’t the only one protected by magic, and the Misery steamed within me at his proximity.

  ‘You want to cut a deal?’ Saravor asked. He smiled at me and in it I saw the same old cruelty. He held the Eye out before him, showing me his prize. ‘No Bright Lady to save you this time. Your cards are all played. What would you offer me for this, Galharrow? What could you possibly give me to compare with the power I take tonight?’

  ‘The Nameless won’t stand for it,’ I spat. ‘They’ll hunt you down and tear you apart.’

  Saravor laughed.

  ‘No, they won’t. You serve them but you barely understand them. The Deep Kings will kick and scream against someone’s trying to become like them, but once it’s done? A ready-made ally who is willing to learn, to be guided by them? No. They will welcome me.’ He rotated the Eye before me.

  ‘What you’re doing is inhuman,’ I said. I pointed the sword toward him, pitiful threat that it was.

  Saravor gave a deep, throaty chuckle, strengthening as if he found that truly hilarious. The yellow-hooded attendant stepped forward and helped him shed the voluminous robe that wrapped him.

  ‘Of course I am,’ Saravor crowed at me. ‘Inhuman!’

  Saravor was not one person. He was several.

  One of the grey children stared out from his chest, blank-faced, half-absorbed into the great body. Forearms protruded from his gut, pale and cold as slate, clutching a brittle old book. The Taran Codex. A second of the creatures was melted into his back, its face the back of his neck, arms fused across his ribs. Short brown spines ran in rows down his chest, his back, clumps of tangled hair protruding at random from patches of discoloured skin. An eye blinked beneath his armpit. There was nothing human about him.

  ‘How do you think the Nameless are born but by seizing power?’ Saravor sneered at me. ‘You think that they were born with it? No. They bent the world to their will. They took their power. Look east, Galharrow. See the Misery your master wrought. You think his power—’

  I rushed him midsentence. There was nothing to gain by letting him finish his diatribe on why he, corrupt and twisted and fouler than the canals, ought to be applauded. I had forty feet to cover, and a handful of seconds.

  Saravor flicked his hand and a slash of power came at me. It hit me head-on, but it didn’t touch me. Sparks flew into the air as the Misery poison that filled me met the Darling magic head-on. Only Saravor was far stronger than a Darling and his blast threw me back, skittering across the floor. I gathered myself, winded, grazed. But still alive. Saravor’s many faces looked puzzled.

  The Misery coiled inside me, the magic rejecting foreign intrusion. Just as it had when Stracht had weathered the Darling’s blast.

  ‘Unexpected,’ he said. ‘It seems that there is much that I must learn still about this new power.’ He smiled.

  My body creaked and protested as I rose to my feet. My fucked-up leg screamed harder than the new cuts. Blood trickled hot down my arm, my chest. My skin had more slashes and slices through it than wrinkles now. Breathing came hard, painful in overstretched lungs.

  ‘Fight me. Fight me as the man you used to be, if that’s what you ever were.’

  Saravor shook his heads.

  ‘You overestimate your own importance. Major, deal with Galharrow. Let him live long enough to see. Long enough for his master to watch my ascension through his eyes.’

  The hooded figure stepped forward, and Saravor turned away, looking down on the city again. The woman was dressed in tough riding leathers, gloved hands, riding boots. She drew her sword, a sword that I knew all too well, a sword I’d given her when she first got demoted.

  ‘Ah, no,’ I said, as she pushed back her hood. Nenn had the same glassy expression as the men that I’d killed below.

  ‘She was ever my favourite,’ Saravor said, as my best friend presented her sword to me. He spoke through the mouth of one of the fused children. ‘You know why? Because when I worked on her she didn’t pass out. I took a handful of a dead man’s innards, I cut hers out and replaced them, and she didn’t scream, not once. That’s power, Galharrow. And power is all that really matters.’

  In a clumsy flapping of wings the raven suddenly crashed down onto the glass platform, frantic and spitting words in a dozen languages. The soul magic in the air was scrambling its brain, but the one word that I understood was all too clear: Hurry!

  ‘Don’t do this, Nenn,’ I said. ‘Look at me. Fucking look at me. Don’t do it.’

  She attacked through the soul-thick air.

  I had sometimes wondered, if it came down to it, which of us would win in a fight. I had the size, the reach, but she’d always had the spirit. I was method, strategy, she was fury and instinct, but there was none of that here, from either of us. She was a drone, mindless and taken, and she struck with single blows, lashing out and withdrawing, none of her skill. None of her deadliness. I parried with heavy sweeps of my blade, but my arms were leaden things and I didn’t think I could have struck her down even if I’d had the energy. She was fresh where I was worn to the bone. I staggered back, and then the raven launched itself at her face. She struck hard and swatted the bird from the air, a severed wing spinning away across the glass, and before I could react she drove at me again. First our blades clashed together, and then she caught me in the forearm and laid it open. I lost my sword and she stepped in, quick as a cat, and ran me through.

  It was a gut wound. A slow killer like the blow she’d taken herself, once. There was no pain, but I felt the damage inside. Felt what she had done to me. The point had come all the way out through my back. Just like I’d taught her. I went down like a rag doll, feeling nothing below the wound. Blanketing numbness seemed to be spreading upward from it. I’d done a lot of bleeding before, but this was different. This wasn’t a little flesh wound. This was my life falling out of me.

  I couldn’t feel my legs.

  Nenn sheathed her sword, drew a knife, laid it against my throat. I had nothing left. My body was failing me. My spine was severed. Nenn, or whatever now occupied Nenn’s body, grasped me by the hair and turned my head toward Saravor. To make me watch.

  The raven cawed feebly, struggled to rise and collapsed.

  In the pulsing light of the iron-bound globe, framed against the purple sky, Saravor drew on the death below. The popping of matchlocks had died away, but the distant screams continued, and I was helpless.

  ‘Nenn,’ I whispered. ‘Nenn, you have to stop him.’ She gripped my hair tighter, made sure I was watching. Made no sound. My vision wasn’t good. It was going hazy at the edges and there was a lightness in my head.

  There was a groaning in the air, and a sudden coldness as the souls that had gathered around us fled. The Eye shivered, filled with all the dark power it could hold, and Saravor held it aloft.

  ‘It’s done,’ he said.

  ‘Nenn,’ I said again. ‘You fought him before. He couldn’t make you shoot me. You’re not his. Not entirely.’

  I felt the edge of the blade prick the skin of my neck. Warning me to shut up.

  ‘You have to try,’ I said. Words were coming harder, harder all the time. Hard to remember what was going on now. Something hot and wet on my hands as I pressed them to my gut. ‘Fight, Nenn.’

  ‘What can … I do …’ Nenn gasped. The words escaped like gas from a balloon, expelled in a rush. ‘He’s stronger … than me. Than … anything.’

  Saravor carried the Eye reverently, fixed on his prize. The heads of the grey creatures melded into his flesh tried to twist around to see it, ten thousand so
uls bound into a vessel fashioned from a being of incredible power. He stepped slowly, the high priest of his own religion, moving to stand before the Grandspire’s weapon, directly in its path. He raised the Eye before him and one of his grey creatures emerged from the shadows, its face demonic, fingers clawed. It moved to the control panel, where the firing levers could operate the Iron Sun.

  ‘Nenn,’ I whispered. ‘You have to fight him. If you don’t fight, then he wins.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Nenn gasped. Her knife cut into the flesh of my neck, and her tears dripped down onto my face.

  ‘I know you can,’ I said. ‘You’ve always been strong. You’ve just never seen it. I saw it. Tnota saw it. Betch saw it. He loved you and he wanted you and he’d never met a stronger woman. You’ve always had the strength, Nenn. Fight him. He’s just some fucking monster. You’re the woman Betch loved. You’re the woman he gave his life for. Don’t let some fucking monster take that from him.’

  The grey child pulled the first lever down with a clank, and a distant rumbling began below our feet, cogs whirred, gears shifted. The first of the three shields across the firing point withdrew.

  ‘Remember the morning that you watched the dawn rise? On the veranda?’

  ‘I …’ For half a second her grip on my hair diminished.

  ‘He told me – yes. He wanted you to know: yes.’

  Her body tensed and now her fingers tightened in my hair.

  ‘He said yes?’ Nenn said, and her voice finally sounded her own. Her tears fell fast as rain across my shoulders.

  ‘He loved you,’ I said, nearly a snarl. The effort made my head spin. ‘We all love you.’

  The child pulled the second lever. Iron screeched against iron as the second shield began to rotate, the panels drawing back. I was forced to stare at Saravor’s gleeful, awful face. He was bathed in the violet light, exultant. The Iron Sun’s beam of power would strike directly against the Eye. I doubted I would survive the detonation. I doubted Valengrad would survive it. I felt the thrumming through the whole Grandspire as the power began to charge for release.