Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  Blackwing is a small organisation, if we can even be called that. There’s no coordination between us, no uniformity of purpose. I knew the names of seven others, but three of those names were false and I had no idea where any of them were. We were Crowfoot’s shadowed hands, his eyes and his enforcers. We were both beyond and beneath the military, operatives bearing the silent commands of the Nameless – when they bothered to give them. I’d gone five years without a real order. Free to work my own way with whatever resources I could scrape together. The men I’d taken into the Misery were hired hands, little better than mercenaries. Probably worse. Those clerks should have been stumbling over themselves to get me what I wanted, but during Crowfoot’s prolonged absence, fear of the Blackwing had waned thin.

  He was back now. Their fear would return.

  ‘What in the hells is he doing that can’t wait?’ I demanded.

  ‘See those carriages out front?’ an unintimidated captain asked, his uniform so clean it seemed he never went outdoors. ‘Commander’s in with some she-devil who’s been raising hell the last two hours. She’s some big cream Spinner, a count’s sister. Got connections to Prince Herono.’ He looked me over with a critical eye. Maybe I had the dark wings on my shoulder but they lay beneath the dirt of three days’ travel. I’d brought home a lot of dust and dried sweat, and my breath probably stank from all the liquorice root I’d chewed out there. He agreed he’d send someone to find me when the commander was done with the lady. Also suggested that I take a bath before presenting myself. I suggested that he could take his suggestion and shove it somewhere unmentionable.

  Expletives aside, I didn’t have any way to get to see the commander short of cracking skulls, and even Crowfoot’s instruction wasn’t a licence to grack folks when I got pissed off. At least if Crowfoot’s mystery woman was in there with the commander she was safe enough for now.

  ‘Who’s the cream?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody I ever met before.’ The captain didn’t want to engage with me, but he enjoyed knowing more than I did. He shrugged. ‘Lady Tanza, I think it was.’

  I felt the name like a sledgehammer to the chest. Nearly staggered. Swallowed hard and tried to get my thoughts into order.

  ‘Ezabeth Tanza? A woman about my age, dark hair?’

  ‘That’s her name. No idea what she looks like. Wears a veil, like they do in the south.’

  The Misery shakes were starting to get to me. I told myself it was definitely the Misery shakes, nothing more. I bothered the quartermaster for liquorice – better than beer for keeping the shakes at bay – and chewed a root as I headed towards the roof. Liquorice, half a bottle of brandy and cold night air, can’t beat all three together.

  I headed upwards, always best to head up if you need to clear your head. The glass light-tubes were running at just half power on the upper levels, leaving the stairwells and corridors depressingly shadowed. Some prince was slacking on his obligations. These days they put their silver into silks and vineyards, marble palaces and buying indulgences for their concubines instead of maintaining the stations they were responsible for. Memories are short. Away from the frontier it was easy to forget that the enemy’s desire to wipe us out hadn’t slackened just because we had Nall’s Engine to protect us. We had never defeated the Deep Kings, hadn’t even come close. They were the hurricane and we’d found a parasol. Eighty years of stalemate were nothing to them, they’d been ancient long before their eyes ever turned to our land.

  I passed a wide arch of double doors, heavy black iron chains strung across their face, heavier locks securing them. I stopped, an old commander’s instinct making me pause. This was the operating chamber from which the arching projectors of Nall’s Engine – what Nenn had called the jester’s fronds – could be activated. Dust lay in a light film over the chain. Nobody had been in to oil the machinery for a while. Nall’s Engine was our only real defence if the drudge or their masters ever came at us in force. Any child knew that.

  In the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, with the Dhojaran legions and the Deep Kings marching victorious against the last nine free cities, Crowfoot had unleashed the Heart of the Void. It was a weapon, or it was an event. Maybe a spell, damned if I know. Some things you never want to learn. Whatever it had been, it was bad. A weapon the like of which the world had never seen before, or, thank the spirits, since. He used the Heart of the Void to blast the Misery into existence. Tore cracks in the sky, choked the land with poisoned dust. Hills burned, fields boiled, rivers ran to stone. The cities of Adrogorsk and Clear were ours, and turned in a screaming instant from centres of learning and culture to collateral damage in a tempest of unleashed power. They melted and burned, their citizens warped and died. The Deep Kings reeled, wounded by the attack, but they were not defeated. When they regathered their strength the war continued across what had become the Misery, the Deep Kings hurling their numberless armies against our dwindling resources. We could not have held. But the lives of a generation of young men and women bought time for another of the Nameless, Nall, to raise his Engine along the border. The Engine destroyed King Nivias and threw the drudge back for a second time. Stalemate ensued. Peace, of a sort, ensured by the Engine and the stations: outlying control points from which our vigilant commanders could remotely activate the Engine should the Deep Kings ever send their forces into range. They’d only tried it once, well before I was born. The Engine had blasted new craters across the Misery. They had not tried again. And now it was dusty. Forgotten. The station commander was a fool to put it beyond easy reach. Just because the wolf pack fears your sling doesn’t mean you stop carrying stones.

  The warden had already pissed me off by not seeing me directly and my mood was blackening by the second. I’d report his laxness to the marshal when I got back to Valengrad. Nobody likes a telltale, but they like the city states being overrun by the drudge even less. The station commander was an idiot. It was a petty revenge to take for making me wait, but the older I got the pettier I found myself becoming, and the less I found myself caring.

  I breathed the night up along the battlements, knocking back warm slugs from my bottle and wishing I’d paid less money for better liquor. The sun had set, Clada’s sour blue light keeping the night cool and dim. Now and then the Misery made a click or a crack as the earth shifted and groaned. The fading light revealed the rims of the larger craters, testament to the devastating power that the Engine would unleash on any army stupid enough to enter the Range. It was here, along this line of fortresses, that a hundred years of war had been ground to a standstill. The blasts that had created that stalemate had left their scars deep in the earth. Nobody and nothing moved out there in the poisoned lands of the Misery.

  Are you out there, Gleck? I thought. Out there, somewhere? Did you lose that much of your mind? The smartest part of me, the part that had got me out alive at Adrogorsk and kept my head on my shoulders over two decades ranging the Misery, told me that I was speaking to a dead man. Gleck Maldon had got strange, maybe mad. It happened with Spinners, sometimes. He’d been a good man, as sorcerers went. He hadn’t gone north, hadn’t gone west. South was looking increasingly unlikely. I looked down at the liberal spread of inked skulls on my left arm, picked out a spot to remember him.

  Ezabeth fucking Tanza. Not a memory I’d wanted to dredge up again. Decades had crumbled away since I first sat across the table from her. I’d been trying to purge the memory ever since. Twenty years, a wife, children and years of stalking through the nightmare wasteland behind me and still her name could deliver an uppercut right to the balls. I had no doubt I had to escort her to Valengrad. If I’d thought Crowfoot had any kind of human emotion in him, I’d have thought it was some kind of sick fucking joke.

  A drinking song drifted up from the food hall. Off duty soldiers sang about a sailor leaving his bonny lass behind and getting himself drowned. We were a long way from the sea.

  I lit a heavy cigar, drew
and blew a cloud of smoke. Drink. Smoke. Chew liquorice root. Forget. Done and distant, a sour memory of something that never happened. Hadn’t heard a whisper of her since. She likely had a husband. Children. What she was doing out at a Range Station I couldn’t guess. Didn’t want to try.

  Sad fact was, she probably wouldn’t even recognise me. Twenty years. A different name. A broken nose, scarred cheeks, scarred jaw. She sure as hell wouldn’t be expecting that lace-frilled boy to be doing this crap for a living. I tossed the butt of my cigar out over the wall, had another swig.

  I looked down into the yard. The gate sergeant yawned, stretched. The last of the summer evening’s warmth had fled upwards, and he had a blanket around his shoulders. The singing had grown louder, even more discordant, which was incredible. The gateman sat down on a stool and shivered. A lonely, boring job on a cold night. If it were me, I’d have been drunk. Or asleep. Probably both.

  A little kid walked out of the keep and started rolling a small keg over towards the gateman. I wondered if it was the dying one. Didn’t look dying, if it was strong enough to roll a heavy-looking barrel. The presence of children was another thing I’d have to report. The Range stations were supposed to be military positions, but over the years things had got slack. First they started letting in the whores, then those whores became wives, and both whores and wives made babies and somehow Nall’s stations had turned into small communities. Was it really so long ago that we’d been fighting the drudge out in the Misery? Didn’t seem so long to me.

  The gateman got up, looked over at the child, who stopped some feet away. He stiffened slightly. The child spoke, pointed down at the barrel. The sergeant seemed to shiver, then he took the barrel, hefted it and set it down by the portcullis. By the weak light of the tubes above the gate, I saw the red rolling down the sergeant’s face, bleeding from nose, from eye, from ear. He hammered the keg open and dark sand spilled over his feet. His jaw hung open as the red dripped down his front and into the blasting powder.

  The chill of realisation struck me. The child – the Darling – was running. I started to run too as the sergeant reached up and smashed open a lighting tube. Sparks spat around him in a bright shower. I saw them descending, white and beautiful, almost lazy in their fall.

  I clapped my hands over my ears.

  The gate exploded.

  3

  Even through my hands the detonation was deafening. The rush of air bowled into me all the way up on the battlements, set me staggering. The immensity of the sound lingered, the shadow of something terrible passing into silence.

  For a few moments nobody on the battlements moved, and then we all snapped into action as if life had just been punched into us.

  A sentry ran to the alarm crank on the wall and began winding it. Rust flaked away as he struggled with the lever, but then phos hissed and the siren began to bray across Station Twelve. His companion was running for the stairs, leaving his weapon behind. I crossed to it, lifted the matchlock.

  ‘Powder and shot?’ I yelled at the cranking soldier. Everything sounded dim, distant. The soldier was green-white, too young to be in the military at all. He ceased cranking for a moment to unhook the bandolier around his neck and throw it to me.

  Down below I saw the little bastard come out to inspect his handiwork. He looked like a boy of ten years, but he would be far older than that. He grinned at the twisted portcullis, the remnants of broken wood hanging from twisted hinges. In the light of flames his face had a hellish cast.

  I loaded quickly. Tore open a powder charge, loaded black grit into the flash pan. Dropped a lead ball into the matchlock’s barrel, poured powder, spat paper, thumped the butt to secure it all. I broke open a light tube, used the hot rush of power from within to get the match cord lit. Far, far too long to load. Too slow. The kid was gone. That didn’t mean there was nobody to shoot.

  Drudge came in through the gate. Dressed for war, blank eyes and noseless faces, their spears were levelled and shields raised. The captain at their fore had crimson mottling to mark him out, and he slowed up as they pushed through the flames and smoke. They expected some kind of resistance. This was a Range station after all. There should have been soldiers. Should have been defiance. Instead they took the gate without a fight. Blank as his face was, I could see his confusion.

  They expected a fight. I’d start one.

  I aimed low, wanting to hit the thing in the head, but knowing the recoil would drag my aim higher. I sighted, prayed and squeezed the firing lever.

  The gun fired with a dragon’s roar of smoke. I waved it out of my way to see what damage I’d managed to do. The shot was good; the lead drudge staggered with a hole in its chest, and a bigger, fist-sized hole blown out of its back. Ribs splayed outwards, fragments of red bone scattered across the courtyard. Slow to load maybe, but a matchlock sure could make a hole in something. The drudge staggered a few steps before collapsing against a wall. Those that followed it looked up at me and raised crossbows. Half a dozen bolts hissed up as I threw myself down flat along the walkway. They sailed overhead but the green-white sentry went down squealing, a bolt through his leg.

  A trio of our soldiers emerged from the keep and rushed towards the drudge in the gate, got halfway to them and then turned and scampered back the way they’d come.

  ‘Fucking hells.’ What kind of soldiers were these supposed to be? ‘Fucking hells!’ Complacency, honed by months, years of inactivity, meant that the garrison weren’t even working shifts and there was nobody to respond as warriors began to pour in through the gates, dark shapes shedding heavy cloaks and drawing steel. My nerve threatened to recede before a rising wave of panic. I fought to stay ahead of the swell: it would drag me under if I let it. How many of them were there? They went after whoever they saw, soldier or civilian, they didn’t care. A dazed young man holding a pair of smelting tongs, a woman carrying buckets trying to back against a wall. She threw one at the approaching drudge with a shriek. The warrior swatted it out of the way and then they moved in quick as cats, got wet and red and turned to the keep. The drudge were clearing the courtyard.

  ‘Spirits of good, spirits of mercy, take pity on us poor souls,’ the sentry whimpered. I threw him his matchlock and started for the stairs that led into the keep.

  ‘Go! You have to retake the gate tower,’ I yelled at the dismayed-looking wall sentries as they struggled to load their weapons. I didn’t wait to see if they heeded me before I left the wall and entered the keep. I’d left all my gear with my baggage, but this was a fortress and the lords of castles like to hang weapons on the walls. I grabbed an old sword with a cruciform guard, tested the edge with my finger. Not very sharp.

  Sharp enough.

  I snatched a leather-fronted buckler from another wall mounting further down the corridor and then I was looking for staircases. There was shouting below, the tinny clicking of blades meeting one another.

  If Station Twelve fell, we’d lose control of Nall’s Engine but I’d moved beyond panic, like the terror was going to kick in at some later more convenient time. I imagined the enemy legions, tens of thousands of grey-faced, hollow-eyed things, streaming across the Misery towards Station Twelve. We could never match the drudge in the open field. It was only the terrors of Nall’s Engine that had held them back. Lose Station Twelve and we’d lose the war.

  This should have been impossible. Unthinkable.

  Someone lost a limb down below; I’d heard that kind of shriek before. I took the stairs three at a time, went too fast and bounced off a wall as I careered around the stairs and found myself in a corridor where the hells were breaking loose.

  Two men were dead on the floor, one of ours, one of theirs, each a mess of wounds that they’d inflicted on each other with knives. With the courtyard taken, the enemy were already cutting a bloody path to the higher levels. A pair of them, noseless faces slick and grey, were doing some work on a man they’d forc
ed up against a wall with short-bladed swords. He was already done for, they were just making a meal out of finishing him off. The drudge never show any kind of emotion, but there was savage enthusiasm in the way they were sticking him, over and over. I was about to slip into a side corridor, look for a way past when Nenn emerged behind them. She dripped with some other man’s red, the bared teeth below her wooden nose less fierce than the savagery in her eyes. My Nenn was a fighter to the core, the bloodiest and hardest woman this side of the hells. Sword in her right hand, dagger warding the left, if the drudge warriors underestimated her then only one was able to re-evaluate his prejudice, as she parried the first strike aside and split a head. The surviving drudge tried to make a duel of it but I came up behind him and between us he found himself full of holes. He slithered heavily off my borrowed sword.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘We’re in Shit City, that’s what,’ I said. ‘Where are the others? Where’s Tnota?’

  ‘Got separated,’ Nenn said. She was breathing hard, face red with exertion and slick with sweat. ‘I ran up the stairs. Think they fell back into a pantry.’

  ‘You get a count of them?’

  ‘Could be a thousand out there for all I saw.’

  I wiped drudge blood from my hands, ran my tongue over my teeth. Shook my head.

  ‘That many couldn’t have sneaked this close. My guess is more than fifty, less than a hundred. We haven’t lost yet. Come on.’

  The garrison was scattered through the halls, half drunk, half green, terrified and lacking orders. Most of them had probably never seen the drudge up close before. They weren’t pretty.