Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘We need to go down. Join up with the garrison,’ I said without enthusiasm. I don’t like fighting if I’m not getting paid, but we were all in the shit if Twelve went down. Nenn shook her head firmly, grabbed a heavy stairway door and pulled it closed, barring it with a dust-covered beam. All castle stairwells can be shut off like that if the builders are smart. This one had been.

  ‘Not that way. There’s ten or more down in the kitchen. Or there was. What the fuck are they doing here?’

  ‘Trying to take control of Nall’s Engine,’ I said. ‘What else?’

  ‘With fifty men? They’d never hold it. I’m no general, captain, but even I can see that.’

  The sound of feet tramping up the stairs rose behind the door. No telling whether they were friend or foe. Nobody was screaming any more, which did not bode well.

  ‘Worry about the “why” later. Let’s try not to get gracked now.’ We retraced my steps, but at the next stair I heard voices from below, the click-and-babble language of old Dhojara. We closed that door and barred it too, tried a third route.

  ‘Running out of options here, captain,’ Nenn said. I knew that already, so I ignored her.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘We’re not going down now?’

  I hesitated. My pulse was slamming against my half-deaf ears. The enemy held the gate and they were moving up through the fortress, killing everything in their path. I was separated from my crew, and they might all be dead already.

  ‘We don’t get paid if we’re dead,’ I said.

  We rounded a corner and came face to face with a bunch of drudge emerging from a stairwell. There were four of them, and we were just two. Bad odds. I don’t fight outnumbered and I don’t fight for lost causes. I would have started running if the first of them hadn’t charged straight at me.

  It hadn’t been long since the Deep Kings changed him. All the drudge were people before they were drudge, and he could still have passed himself off as one of us. The build of a farmer, the blank eyes of the enthralled. Little strips of prayer cloth around his forearms and calves fluttered out behind him as he came at me. Chop, whack, done. Two seconds of brutality and his story was over. I didn’t wait for him to realise he was dead, cut him twice more as he went down. I stepped back, crouching low and bringing my buckler up between me and the others, but they weren’t attacking. Nenn growled low in her throat, and then I saw the figure behind them.

  The boy. Just a normal-looking little boy, soft and small enough to be ten years old. Nenn cried out, the sound of her despair more terrible than the violence I’d just worked on the twitching, dying drudge. I turned to run but something speared into my mind, tearing the strength from my legs. I went to my knees. An ice that came from the child began working its way into my being, a creeping, burrowing maggot. It entered my thoughts, my will and, if I had one, my soul. Pressure began to build behind my eyes, blood ran from my nose and I sure as hell knew who’d done for the poor bastards we’d found out in the Misery.

  I screamed as he began to work through my mind, the ice worm driving into my memories. I convulsed with the pain, sending a puddle of brown vomit onto the floor.

  Absurd though it was, I regretted the waste of the brandy.

  The black evil that stems from the deep, dark cold beneath the ocean wrapped me, pierced the marrow of my bones. A marionette on the child’s dark strings, I rose to face my half-sized master. A Darling. Hair shorn close, face plump with puppy fat, it was dressed in a tattered doublet two sizes too large and breeches torn through at the knees like some kind of pauper prince. The awful malice around its mouth, the cruel hunger in its eyes told me that I was about to die. It was going to hurt.

  ‘I want the lady!’ the Darling declared. Precocious child tones, but the weight of command belied its true age. Its magic had me by throat and soul both. I growled. Tried to fight it, but there’s fuck all you can do against a Darling. Nenn was choking as invisible hands slowly crushed her throat. We were both well and truly gracked now it had its spells into us. The soul-worm turned through my brain, causing me to spasm and I went down in a heap of uncontrolled limbs, arms and legs just a tangle of meat sticks.

  It rifled through my memories. My first cigar. Getting sunburned. Riding a donkey cart to market. It pried through them, disordered, scattered, looking for something.

  ‘Where is she?’ The pressure grew tight around my balls. My spine protested as invisible hands began to twist me. Steam rose from the walls, hissing and spitting sparks as the worm twisted back and forth in my mind. Bones grated in ways that they aren’t intended to.

  I was glad I didn’t know. I’d have confessed anything just then.

  Some poor, unknowing heroes arrived along another corridor. A young lieutenant and a few stout hearts attacked with no idea what they were facing. They fired off their matchlocks, managed to down one of the drudge before the Darling turned its attention to them.

  The pressure released and the worm slithered out of my mind. I seized up my scavenged weapons and dragged Nenn with me, down a corridor and towards a stairwell. Behind us I heard the screams as our rescuers learned their mistake.

  Clashes of steel and shouting had renewed somewhere below us. That was good. We hadn’t lost yet, but I only had escape on what remained of my mind. We were heading back up now, away from the monstrous little creature and his magic. You can kill a Darling just like anyone else, but you need numbers, you need luck and you damn well can’t let them see you coming. Fight the battles you can win, run from those you can’t. Good words to keep you alive.

  We reached the Nall’s Engine operating room. Somebody should have been in there, firing it up and getting ready to throw the lever. This attack only made sense if there were a hundred thousand soldiers streaming across the Misery towards us, but whoever was meant to be operating the machine was probably dead already. We had to find the keys to those locks, get it into motion. When we threw the lever, everything twenty miles east of the Range would disintegrate in a firestorm that would make the hells look like a summer’s afternoon. I spent a few frustrating moments scraping skin from my palms before I gave up yanking at the chains. Whoever had chained the room was fucking dead when this was over, if he wasn’t already, which he probably was. I’d have to settle for giving his corpse a good kicking.

  The drudge weren’t far behind us. Seemed like they had the same idea that we did. The commander’s office lay close by, the door locked from the inside. Drudge piled into the corridor behind us, the child’s petulant orders bouncing from stone walls.

  ‘Let us fucking in! We’re not fucking drudge!’ I yelled, not expecting anyone to answer. I slammed the door with my palm once, twice. No way out. The drudge started moving down the corridor towards us, swords and axes ready for the kill. I tried kicking the door in. Hurt my foot.

  There was a scrabbling behind the lock.

  ‘Hurry up!’ The warriors approached, cautious. I fended away a blow, sliced open the arm that had struck it. They could only come at us one at a time along the corridor and my wounded assailant staggered back, but Nenn doesn’t like to let the wounded ones go. She nipped forwards, her blade sawed out and she took his leg above the knee.

  A voice from behind us.

  ‘Get down!’

  I didn’t see the source but a light flared up behind us. Years of experience told me that there was a Spinner behind me, charged up and ready to blaze. Nenn and I hit the ground and covered our eyes. Usually smart to do that with a Spinner. When we opened them again they’d done something terrifying, because the warriors who’d filled the corridor were lying in smoking pieces along its length. Half a drudge groaned in pain.

  We scrambled up and into the commander’s office. As I slammed the door behind us, more drudge crowded into the corridor.

  The office was all dark wood and polish, shelves of leather-bound books that nobod
y had, or would, ever read. An oversized padded chair, a vast mahogany desk, both too small for the blubbering whale of a man I figured had to be the commander. Clammy white skin and vast reams of flab adorned the idiot who’d let his station fall. He stared at me, mouth opening and closing like a fish, his extravagantly frilled shirt soaked through with pig-sweat. Fucking disgrace of a soldier. His companion, the Spinner who’d just gracked six Dhojaran warriors, was a tiny snip of a thing, five foot nothing. She was hooded and gowned in royal blue, but when I saw her face it was as if I’d been hit with a spell more potent than the Darling’s.

  Ezabeth Tanza. She looked exactly as she had some twenty years ago. Face smooth with youth, the slender lines of a girl no longer a child, not yet wearied by womanhood. She was stunningly, heart-rendingly beautiful, a face so perfect that it had to have been shaped for some holy purpose. She should have been greying, but she hadn’t aged a day. The hair that pushed out from her hood was still silk and shine. Despite the fact that we were under attack, that people were dying somewhere beneath us, I still stopped to stare like a complete idiot, mouth hanging open.

  She was looking at me uncertainly, but only for a moment. She glanced at Nenn.

  ‘I’d hoped there would be more of you,’ she said. A strong voice. Used to giving orders.

  ‘Just us,’ I said. Ezabeth turned away from me, and when she looked back she had drawn a blue cloth mask up over her face. Between hood and mask, only her eyes remained visible.

  ‘What do we do?’ the commander wailed.

  ‘You know the law,’ I snarled. ‘Range Marshal Venzer’s orders. Take no chances. First sign of attack, activate Nall’s Engine. Give me the key.’

  ‘What’s going on out there?’ the commander blubbered. He’d pissed himself. Can’t blame a man for doing that in times of terror, but it made me hate his guts even more. I had half a mind to run him through myself, but we needed him. I looked around. The office had no exits; we’d run right into a trap. So much for activating Nall’s Engine.

  ‘You got a sword?’ I asked him. He blinked, looked around as though the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. He saw an ornate weapon with a gilded hilt up on the wall, went and retrieved it. He held it like it was a turd. I doubt he’d picked it up since someone had gifted it to him. He was an administrator, a button counter, the kind of man you put in charge of supplies, not a spirits-damned Range station. Too much peace had turned our grit to jelly. I told him to keep out of the way. He’d be more likely to hurt himself than the enemy.

  Beyond the door I could hear a clamouring sound, a lot of footsteps. The drudge knew what they were doing, and my head was starting to clear.

  ‘It wants to take you, lady,’ I said.

  ‘It can try,’ she said. Defiant.

  ‘You got any canisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t have much light left,’ I said.

  ‘Almost nothing,’ she agreed. ‘I have no skill at this. I’m not a warrior.’ She stood by the window, her fingers tracing bright lines through the air, drawing the moonlight as best she could. It wouldn’t give her much. She needed a loom, hours to spin enough phos to charge herself up. That working in the corridor must have used most of her reserves but she gathered what she could in the seconds we had.

  I heard a voice outside, amongst the buzzing Dhojaran nonsense. The Darling was here. That was very, very bad for us. Even if she’d had charged canisters to draw from, a Spinner is not a match for a Darling. The sorcery is different, but the Darling is stronger. The standard Range manual for officers says that you don’t engage a Darling without three Spinners to take it down. We had one, and she was pretty much out of phos. About as useful as an empty scabbard.

  While I’d been asking pointless questions, Nenn had toppled a bookshelf behind the door. I helped her overturn another behind it. This hadn’t been the plan, but plans change from time to time.

  ‘We’re going to die!’ the station commander squealed. He was fanning himself with a sheaf of paperwork, streams of sweat like rain across his skin.

  I didn’t hear Nenn’s response. A great crash sounded against the door, fallen furniture shaking. The warriors had improvised a ram of some kind, and they wanted in.

  ‘Hope you’re ready for this,’ I said to Nenn. I tried to give her a grin, but it came out like a leer. Nenn’s expression wasn’t much more pleasant.

  ‘Can’t say I wanted to go out this way, captain,’ she said. She spat on an expensive book. Something hard and heavy smashed into the door again. The barricade held. ‘Always thought I’d die of something stupid, like syphilis or the shits. Or eating bad meat. Normal stuff, stupid stuff, you know what I mean?’ I nodded my agreement. There had always been an out before, always a way we could run for it. I’d abandoned my post in losing situations, or refused to charge into hopeless causes when I had to. That was how I’d stayed alive this long. And now we were going to get our minds prised open by some bastard child because we’d stopped in the wrong place for the night? Somehow that seemed unfair.

  Smash against the door again. The voices outside rose and fell, a quick discussion, and then the table and bookcase we’d stacked against the door began to smoke, little sparks pipping away.

  ‘Here we go,’ I said. ‘I want to take at least one of them with me.’

  ‘I’m aiming for two,’ Nenn said. She pulled off her wooden nose to breathe more easily. At least I got to be with Nenn when we died. That was something.

  The makeshift barricade began to dissolve, wood turning soft and gooey, melting from the outside. Fucking magical powers. The station commander began to weep, big fat tears on his stupid fat face. I almost punched him.

  Ezabeth strode across the room and whipped back a cloth, revealing an empty crystal prism atop a brass pedestal. ‘You have a communicator,’ she said, disbelieving and angry.

  ‘You didn’t send a message to the Command Council?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘It all happened so fast,’ the commander squealed. ‘I can’t operate it. I don’t know how. Only a Talent can operate it.’ If I’d wanted to smash him in his stupid face before, my fists were begging me now.

  ‘Don’t think we have time for messages,’ I said. Ezabeth shook her head. She was looking beneath the inert crystal prism at the base. Copper and bronze wires curled around the shaft.

  ‘No. But these things require a vast amount of light to operate. Can you remove the prism?’

  I walked over, jammed my sword under it, prised it away easily enough. Wild streaks of hot light began jetting out from the ruptured machinery. Ezabeth put her hand over the hole. Her hand lit up, then her arm. Phos flowed through her, brilliant, glaring.

  ‘If you got something you can do, best do it now,’ Nenn snarled. The bookcases were dissolving into puddles of cold liquid wood. The door was going the same way. Darling magic.

  No time to think on what Ezabeth was doing. The last of the bookcase abruptly turned to slop and fell away in a wooden puddle as the door collapsed inwards. Dhojaran warriors crossed the threshold, and we met them with steel. Nenn shrieked, hacked, struck. I thrust, cut and back-cut but they were many and we were two. I roared, cut, parried, struck. A drudge died and it meant nothing at all.

  Ezabeth’s light surged. The warriors were cast into brightness by the glow of the woman behind me, and as the light flared in intensity they shielded their blank eyes from the glare. I managed to hack halfway through a hand, smashed my buckler into a face. Nenn went down somewhere in the brilliant glow. Beyond the doorway I caught sight of the Darling, small and furious.

  It screamed something in Dhojaran that could only have been ‘Kill the woman!’ Its voice was so boyish and thin that for a moment I pitied it in its desperation, but the warriors could barely look in our direction now, the light too intense. The bravest of the drudge tried it and I sent him back with blood gushing from his
face, and the others cowered. The Darling raised its hands, sent its mind-worms towards us but whatever this light was it defied the child-sorcerer’s power.

  The Darling screamed in fury, looked left and right seeking an escape that didn’t exist. I caught its eye, saw some kind of black recognition there for just a moment before the world turned to searing white brightness.

  Sound disappeared. Everything went blank, all sense of balance disappeared and I felt my face land against a fallen book as I hit the ground. For a horrible moment I thought I was dead, and that I’d been lied to. Was this death, an eternity spent in whiteness, aware but unable to move, speak, nothing but the pale bright void around you?

  I knew that I was still alive when I smelled cooked meat.

  It wasn’t the first time that I’d caught seared flesh on the wind. I burned men at Adrogorsk with hot oil, and interrogations sometimes make hard demands of the men who perform them. This was worse, somehow.

  I rolled over. My eyes hurt, my head was worse. Shapes began to form in my vision. I pushed myself up against the table. Sounds, quiet and muffled, tapped around. Nobody was speaking, or screaming, or crying, so that was something. I fumbled on the over-bright floor, found the hilt of my pilfered sword, couldn’t see clear enough to stab anyone. I backed up against a wall. Waited.

  The commander was dead. The Dhojaran warriors were dead too, but the station commander was more dead than they were. The drudge lay fallen as men should when they get gracked, limbs splayed awkwardly, eyes staring blankly. Some of them had sword-holes that I’d put into them, some of them could have been sleeping if not for the blankness of their faces and the stillness of their chests. Whatever Lady Tanza had done, it was beyond anything I’d ever seen a Spinner accomplish before. Not even Gleck Maldon could have done that. The remnants of the commander were the source of the smell, though. He was a blackened, smoking skeleton shrouded in charred tatters of cloth and sat upright in a chair, though none would have recognised it for the man that had been there mere moments – minutes? – before. Whatever Ezabeth had done to glow like a candle had burned him up like one.