Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Nenn’s out of it,’ Tnota told me. ‘Fever delirium. Talking bullshit. She got an hour at best. Then she’s gracked.’

  ‘Then we better hope Saravor is home,’ I said. I took my end of the stretcher and, doing my best not to inhale, began to carry Nenn through the open door.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Tnota told me. He fixed me in the eye with his yellow whites, always trying to needle and play counsellor to my conscience. ‘Big Dog says if it’s too late it’s too late. Some prices shouldn’t be paid.’

  It was the same discussion we’d had a dozen times on the three days spent whipping the carriage back towards Valengrad. I’d thought about it. Sometimes you just got to stop thinking and act.

  ‘She’d do the same for me,’ I said. Tnota snorted at that.

  ‘She’d have looted the gold from your teeth before you were cold,’ he said. It was a joke, just not a funny one. We lugged Nenn into the reception room. This had been a merchant’s house at one time. The reception room was dim, smelled of mould. Didn’t look to get a lot of use. Saravor wasn’t the kind to entertain visitors.

  ‘Set a limit. Don’t go higher,’ Tnota said. I shook my head, put a finger to my lips. The walls might have ears in this place. It’s not often you can say that and mean it literally.

  The blind child returned and indicated that I alone should ascend. I wasn’t sure whether the kid had genuinely lost his eyes or whether it was just some ploy of Saravor’s to curdle my guts before we talked shop. He probably knew we were coming. Just because he wasn’t Nameless didn’t make it smart to underestimate him; a knife may not be a longsword, but the edge will cut you all the same.

  Saravor’s workshop was on the first floor, dark and bitter with the stink of white-leaf smoke, though none burned now. Work surfaces lay cluttered with instruments and stains better left unnoticed. Stacks of shelves lined the walls but long velvet curtains hid them from sight. One curtain had been intentionally left open. I saw jars of ageing meat in greenish-yellow fluid, a tub that may have contained fingers. Where there were no shelves, delicately drawn canvasses showed the internal workings of the human body, anatomy as taught at universities. Saravor was not there, so the boy bid me wait. I drummed my fingers. Didn’t have time for these theatrics. I took a seat at one of the work benches and did my best not to look at anything that I wouldn’t want to remember later.

  The sorcerer came down eventually, sniffing the air like a hound.

  ‘That’s phos residue,’ I heard him say, even before he rounded the corner, ‘I can smell it on you thicker than dung.’ He emerged from the stairwell grinning like a circus jester. ‘You’ve been involved in some serious mystical fracas!’ Bare-chested, a towel hanging around his shoulders, Saravor’s ribs showed through the mottled skin of his torso. Part black, part white, part golden skin, nobody knew where Saravor had come from originally. One of his eyes was summer-sky blue, the other a darker shade, as though he’d tried to find a match and come up short. His lean torso was entirely hairless, his skin a patchwork of different racial colourings, a pale northern shoulder, night-dark biceps, stomach the amber of Pyre. I was half a foot over six, but he was well over seven.

  ‘Had a run-in,’ I said. ‘I have a problem.’

  ‘So you do. Care to share a drink with an old friend?’

  Saravor wasn’t an old friend, but this wasn’t the first time we’d done business. He seated himself on the opposite side of the workbench and selected a bottle and two wooden beakers. He gave them a sniff, decided that whatever he’d put in them before didn’t need cleaning out, and poured for me. I hadn’t the willpower to resist once he uncorked the brandy. The cup he pushed towards me looked to have teeth marks in the rim. Everything in a sorcerer’s house is strange.

  ‘You really do stink of phos,’ he said. ‘Must have been some strong stuff. Been poking around in the Nall’s Engine control chamber?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Had some trouble down south.’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Darling trouble,’ I said. ‘But we lucked out. There was a Spinner with the garrison. She did something. Something I hadn’t seen before. Whatever it was, it fried a lot of the drudge.’

  ‘Dhoja across the Range? Attacking into Dortmark?’ Saravor said. He tried to put an expression of shock onto his patchwork face, but it seemed like the muscles on one side weren’t well connected and he only managed to look deranged. The sinews could probably only be blamed for half of that.

  ‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ I said. ‘I figure the marshal will probably keep it close to his chest until he has time to summon the princes for a formal council. This wasn’t just some poke. They have something planned.’ Saravor’s smile was a bitter thing, the colour of autumn cold.

  ‘But you share this information with me?’

  ‘I need a favour. The information is a gift. Good faith.’ Saravor nodded. Sorcerers might love gold but they like knowing things more. We knocked our brandy cups together and I took a drink. It was good. Times were good for the sorcerer, to afford wash like that. All-out war had rescinded in living memory, but there were still plenty of men in need of a fix – a pierced arm, a mangled hand.

  ‘Ryhalt, we’ve done good business before,’ Saravor said as he refilled the cups. ‘I already know what you’re going to ask me. You have a woman with a soured belly. I can smell it even above the light-stink all over you. That’s not easy work, even for someone as skilled in the healing arts as I.’ Healing arts. That was rich. I kept my face impassive. I’d had to deal with Saravor twice before, but never in as bad a strait as this, and I’d had coin on those occasions. Hadn’t been worth it either time. Molovich took an arrow in the throat not two weeks after the sorcerer meddled with him. If Nenn survived I’d do a better job of keeping her upright than I had him.

  ‘I need this on credit,’ I said. Saravor’s half-gold, half-cream mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile.

  ‘Oh, come now. You didn’t truly come to beg for help, did you?’

  ‘I’m not begging. Asking. You give credit, and you know I’m good for it.’

  ‘Hmph.’ Saravor didn’t blink. Those eyes, mismatched beneath hairless brows, didn’t falter. ‘And here you are telling me that you’re getting mixed up with Darlings and Light-Spinners. Suppose I do credit you. You aren’t some butcher who lopped off his finger with a misplaced cleaver. You breathe Misery dust and go first into the breach. Suppose I front you, and you get yourself killed. This is not an attractive proposition.’ He shook his head. ‘I do not work for free.’

  ‘I don’t have time to argue,’ I said. ‘You know that as well. Cut to it. What will I owe you for fixing her up?’

  A sound on the stairway drew my attention. Another grey child, hairless, spindle-limbed, eyes over-wide, wandered down the stairway. This one wasn’t blind, but there was a grotesquely empty look to his face. Maybe eight, nine years old. Saravor looked around and garbled something at the boy in a language that I didn’t understand. The boy didn’t look at him, but slowly turned and walked back the way he had come.

  ‘Your son?’ I asked.

  ‘I was responsible for making him, after a fashion.’ Saravor’s lip twitched as though he intended to smile. I wasn’t smiling. For a moment I almost walked out. Whether the boy was his servant or something else, that wasn’t why I was here. I wasn’t some lawman out to change the world for the better. I just wanted Nenn to live.

  We haggled. I tried, anyway. Saravor laid out his terms. I tried to argue them down, he refused to budge, and I agreed. By the time he was done, there were no smiles around the table. The pretence of friendship had dissipated into the odour of white-leaf smoke clustering at the edges of the room. There is not a worse human being in Valengrad than Saravor, of that I was sure, but since I wasn’t sure that he was still human, that thought was worth as little as piss in the wind. I agreed to leave Nenn in his care unti
l he got a message to me. I didn’t ask how he’d do that, and he didn’t ask where to find me. Fucking sorcerers.

  6

  I woke in the grey haze of a fading afternoon. Fatigue had stolen any memory of how I’d got to my apartment. If elves had carried me there, then they certainly hadn’t decided to tidy the place. I’d left Valengrad in enough of a hurry not to have emptied the bucket of night soil, so it stank, literally, like shit. As I threw open the narrow windows I dimly recalled telling Tnota to deal with the carriage and team. I’d probably meant that he should stable it up somewhere, but knowing Tnota he’d have sold it for a couple of jars of ale and a rented arse.

  I’d slept a whole day. Factory smog crawled through the damp streets as I stepped briskly into the gloom. I’d already lost time.

  Lady Ezabeth Tanza had been gone when we emerged from Saravor’s hovel. On the journey she’d seemed barely able to prop herself up, had sipped at water and eaten nothing. Then right there in the Spills she’d just disappeared. Felt like a blow to the gut. Maybe I’d imagined that we’d talk of old times, the few brief months when we’d been barely older than children. She clearly didn’t share my sentimentality. Probably for the best.

  The open doors of taverns called longingly to me as I crossed the city, sirens trying to lure me from my purpose. I hardened my heart against them, and the scent of dark ale that would sing me to the rocks. The citadel rose through the murky sky ahead of me, her neon words telling me to keep heart.

  I rented a small office on a dismal street not far from the citadel. I called in on my way, the key stiff in the lock, the door frame stiff. The roof had been leaking and the floor was wet. A damp miasma rose to greet me, but I’d smelled a lot worse the last few days. A few items of mail had been shoved through the door, damp and ink-smeared. I sat in the beat-up chair and leafed through them.

  When I’d first struck my deal and Crowfoot marked me, I’d known that a captaincy in Blackwing was not going to be sunshine and daisies. Why did he pick me? I had skills that he wanted, and I didn’t die easy. That mattered to his kind. Crowfoot was a wizard. Not a common sorcerer like Ezabeth or Gleck Maldon, or even a rare freak like Saravor. He made them look like children – no. Like mice. A hundred Ezabeths couldn’t have made him break a sweat. Gleck explained it to me once. How sorcerers had to draw power from something but wizards had the power inside them, always growing, swelling. They hoarded it jealously, never used a drop they didn’t have to. It built to colossal levels, let them work miracles. Or cataclysms. It was for the day-to-day brutality that the seven captains of Blackwing came in. I and those few others foolish enough to accept a wizard’s bargain.

  On rare occasions he remembered that tossing me money was useful. A decade back he’d left a pair of gold bricks on my doorstep in a dirty old sack. Money was a human concern too far below his notice to matter. He wouldn’t even have noticed the roof was leaking. Wouldn’t have grasped why it would bother me.

  I reported only to Crowfoot, if he ever showed up, and his mandate was a simple one: protect the Range. Sniff out the bad seeds, the profiteers and the officers who took bribes. Locate the silver-tongues, shut down the Brides, silence the doomsayers. While I was waiting for Crowfoot to throw me another priceless artefact, the courts paid good money for the heads of the traitors I brought them and asked no questions as long as they were marked. A Blackwing captain held no military rank, but The Range Officer’s Manual required that all officers below the rank of colonel should concede the road to me. Those who got in my way didn’t stay there for long.

  I leafed through the papers that had come through the door in my absence. First up was a request for me to lead prayers at a meeting of the Avian Brotherhood. A cult of idiots who wanted to believe that Crowfoot was some kind of incarnation of the Spirit of Mercy, which I guess made me their prophet. It was no secret that Blackwing did Crowfoot’s work, but even these fools didn’t know the depth of his hold over its captains. Even to the soldiery the Nameless seemed half myth, distant as emperors of old. It was the Avian Brotherhood’s third request. The only reason I’d not stamped on them yet was that my master would probably have thought they were funny. Second was an anonymous note informing me about potential sympathisers and cultists in the mercantile district. I got a lot of those. Most were nothing but spite and envy. Still worth checking out. I pocketed it for later.

  Last was a bill saying that I owed money for the rent of the horses we’d had to leave at Station Twelve. I scowled at it. That was all I needed. I crumpled it, tossed it into the cold fire grate and headed to the citadel.

  ‘The marshal’s not here,’ the reception clerk told me. I’d washed and put on a clean white shirt and my best leather waistcoat, but by the disdain on her face she didn’t appreciate the effort. Her uniform was immaculate, buttons gleaming. She probably thought that she was doing a better job of being a soldier than I was, but I’d go and prostrate myself before Shavada and beg him to mark me before I’d wear a uniform for Dortmark’s Grand Alliance again. The clerk didn’t ask to see any identification of my rank, but given my height and the muscle that sits along my bones, even prissy clerks tend not to want to upset me.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Gone south along the Range.’

  He’d gone to see Station Twelve for himself. Of course he had. Our marshal had come up through the ranks, and no matter what authority and golden medals they pinned to his bony old chest, he was still a soldier. But Venzer was an old man and he’d be taking a canal barge, not the potholed, bone-jerking carriage ride by road. It would be days before he got back. I asked the clerk for a pen and ink and settled for writing a lengthy report on the events at Twelve. There was nobody else I was prepared to trust the information to. Some idiot part of me had started to believe that Crowfoot and his commands were over. Had hoped he might have let me go, finally. Scraping an existence out of other men’s blood wasn’t much of a life, but it was what I had, and the taverns never turn you away. Not like the ungrateful bitch who hadn’t even thanked us for transporting her to the city.

  She’d survived. The order had been given and I’d done what had been asked. If Lady Tanza chose to go wandering off into the city alone now, that was her business. She had the means to look after herself. My work was done, and that had to be for the best.

  Thoughts of Spinners got my mind back to the sympathisers we’d found at Dust Gorge. She’d been a Talent, one of the barely capable Spinners who worked one of the big light mills. It was one thing for some cartwright or cutler to get himself a case of Bride-fever and decide that joining the Deep Kings’ thralls was a life ambition, quite another if they were getting their hooks into our Talents.

  Crowfoot had been silent for five years and no part of me was glad he had returned. I’d have preferred to crawl into a tavern with whatever bottle was cheapest and do my best not to think about what I’d done to Nenn, but the inked bird on my arm demanded that I get my arse moving. It reminded me of the fate of the last Blackwing captain who’d failed in his duty. Crowfoot had made it last for days. He’d only made me watch for one.

  It was time to go pay the phos mill’s owner a visit, and that meant paying a call on a prince. Corruption doesn’t take root in isolation, it embeds itself where the soil is fertile. Without a hard-working army of Talents spinning phos to pump into its heart, the Engine was just so much iron and oil. I’d never known a Talent turn sympathiser before, and since I’d brought her head back to Valengrad in a sack she wasn’t going to be talking. Her name had been Lesse, a Talent of no special accomplishment. She and her husband had been reading illegal verses, a heretical book of lies called The Deep Songs. There’s a change comes over people when they start getting a head full of darkness. Erratic behaviours, strange moods. The mill’s owner, Prince Herono, should have noticed it sooner. Lesse might have brought other Talents into her sedition and that put everyone in danger. Herono might have had royal blood, but she’
d answer my questions all the same.

  The phos mill in Valengrad was not particularly bountiful. From what little I understood of light spinning, there were certain places where gathering light was easier, or more efficient. It was all related to lunar orbits and atmospheric pressures, but what that ultimately meant was that the spot chosen for the phos mill was the best for some hundred miles, which was why when Nall had erected his Engine he’d anchored its heart here, and founded Valengrad to surround it. The heart of the Engine might have been well protected beneath the citadel, but the phos mill lay on the outskirts of the city. While some factories clank and grind and make a lot of noise, they kept the mill aside because it required quiet. Spinning was an art, best kept distant from the rest of the city.

  The light was fading as I approached the mill’s broad domes. Two flags wavered limply, one bearing the nine-pillared temple that signified the Grand Alliance of Dortmark’s city states, the second bearing the personal arms of Prince Herono of Heirengrad. The Alliance had come together in the days when the Deep Kings had brought the armies of the empire to crush the west. There had been nine cities once, before Crowfoot’s weapon destroyed Adrogorsk and Clear. The seven remaining states each nominated an elector prince, by whose votes the grand prince was selected. The number of votes each prince could cast was based on the number of men and supplies they fed to the Range each year, the alliance only serving to provide communal protection. The Grand Alliance was as corrupt and empty as most political systems, and the grand prince was always elected from Lennisgrad since they could afford the best bribes and supplied the most soldiers. For the most part the princes were self-serving, cowering in the west in their pale marbled estates, thinking of sunny days dodging bees in the vineyard or buggering some poor concubine. And yet, amongst the crap and the crud, some like Prince Herono rose as a beacon of what a prince could be. She, at least, understood the darkness that encroached onto our world and, for as long as I could remember, had put herself directly in its path.