Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  She sniffed the air, squinted at me over her veil.

  ‘Have you been drinking?’ she asked. Shook her head disdainfully. ‘At this hour? How preposterous. What were you thinking, captain?’

  I stared a hard moment. She didn’t have to see the faces. Didn’t have to smell the blood. Didn’t see the Misery raise up the shade of a wife and children only to show you their dying moments every time it thought your guard was down, a ghost play repeated, over and over. She hadn’t seen that.

  I’d drink whenever I fucking wanted.

  ‘Just small beer, lady,’ I said, but I’d already lost her attention. I was lying, of course. It had been a dark beer, and then a brandy to round out the shakes. Still getting the Misery shakes, three days after we got out. Told myself that’s what it was, anyway.

  ‘I can’t abide a drunk,’ she said, shaking her head. She began to write some kind of mathematical formula alongside the observations she’d made, sketching in what I guessed represented lines of light weaving. The complexity was far beyond any calculations I could make. Ezabeth finished her page, stopped and stared at it for several moments. Then she made a snarling noise, feral as a wildcat, and tore the paper to pieces. She threw them in the air, let them rain down around her.

  ‘I had them and now they’re burned,’ she declared angrily. ‘I can’t remember them. I don’t remember them. So what now?’

  Mad, then. Mad and angry with it, and powerful as a Battle Spinner. She was dangerous. They locked people in the Maud, Valengrad’s asylum, if they posed a danger. Like Gleck Maldon, though it hadn’t done much of a job of holding him. Maybe she’d end up there too. Time plays cruel games with us all. The carefree girl I’d once courted, my summer love, had been treated no kindlier by fate’s hand than I, slapped this way and that and ending up bruised and broken. My heart leaned towards her. The little wisdom I possessed held me back.

  ‘If I can offer a word of advice? You’ve been through a lot. Take some rest. Maybe have a drink yourself, get calm. Whatever you’re working on, it can wait.’

  She looked at me like I was mad, made a slightly crazy cackling sound, shook her head.

  ‘Lessons from the drunk,’ she said. ‘I must make a point to write them down. Publish them in a memoir. Thank you, captain. If I need to know where to buy cheap brandy at this time of day, I shall be sure to ask.’

  An angry retort swept to my lips ready to slam back against her. I caught it, trapped it in a held breath. In the end I just looked away in shame.

  Ezabeth didn’t seem to notice as I got up to leave. She said nothing, fixated on her papers, their equations and diagrams. I’d done what Crowfoot had asked of me, got her to Valengrad. I didn’t see what use she was supposed to be, but he’d have his reasons. The Nameless don’t share their plans, they just strike the tune for us to dance to.

  I glanced back once. Shreds of angrily torn pages surrounded her, a good couple hundred marks worth of white scraps. I had nothing to say to her that she might want to hear. Whatever strange surge of boyhood fantasy had barked into my mind, the young girl who’d sung for me, who’d danced in the meadow, she was not this woman. A little piece of me retreated into the dark edges of my mind, let me harden up, raise my shield again. She was just another Spinner, and a mad one at that. My mission for Crowfoot was over.

  Of course I knew, deep down, that it was never over. It never would be.

  8

  The sky was sobbing, long purrs of sharp, cold nightmare as the dawn broke. At least the rain had abated. I headed across town, cold beneath the great dark shadow cast by the Engine and set to getting the office back into shape. I had errands to run and bills to pay, so with the money I’d made from the sympathisers’ heads I paid a carpenter and a few street kids to sort it out for me while I went out to mollify the banks I owed the most money. The money I’d taken from Herono was a guilty weight in my pocket that they wouldn’t see any of. I’d asked the prince my questions but I still felt like I’d been bought off. It didn’t matter. I owed Saravor half a fortune and I couldn’t afford to get all righteous about it.

  When I got back one of the kids had run off with a pewter candlestick, but it was worth less than I’d been planning to pay him. The carpenter fixed the leaks, the kids scrubbed the mould from the wall. Cheap labour. I paid out shares to Tnota and Wheedle, who’d I’d left behind at Twelve. Nenn’s I kept. The court had paid well, but even with Herono’s silver I was still a long way from making my first payment to Saravor. Most of what I kept I’d need to invest into another job.

  I was drinking coffee. Coffee. Not even anything stronger in it. Just coffee. It didn’t feel right.

  Saravor was a problem. I didn’t regret my choice, but the consequences were suddenly pressing. The banks could hang for what I owed them as long as that monster was getting paid. With Nenn out of action and most of my usual hired hands in a mass grave at Station Twelve I needed manpower. I’d picked up a job, a dangerous one, but it needed the right kind of people.

  I passed by the taverns frequented by out of work soldiers first. There tends to be a reason that a man can’t find soldiering work in a place like the Range. An old man approached me for work, but he couldn’t have restrained a puppy let alone a panicking deserter. I felt bad for him and bought him a drink. The next was a strong-looking woman but she was hiding a broken foot. If a woman can’t run, she can’t fight, and I told her so. She got angry and started fingering her dagger. When the blade came out things got ugly, furniture got broken and it was time to try a different tavern.

  I ended up hitting the debtor’s gaol to find fresh recruits. Doesn’t seem fair to hire prisoners when there’s free men looking for honest killing, but soldiers take on debts more often than they take on an enemy, and gambling breaks a man’s fortune more often than it makes it. I found ten men with experience willing to have their shares paid against their debts. Some of them even had experience in the Misery.

  ‘We have work to do,’ I told Tnota as the week drew to a close. He was carving a little image of his god into the table in my office. ‘Gather everyone up. No firearms. Ready to ride in the hour.’

  ‘Where are we getting the horses?’

  ‘Prince Herono is providing them but she wants Blackwing arses on the saddles. She’s keeping the citadel out of it.’

  ‘She doesn’t trust the Iron Goat’s men not to squeal?’ Tnota grouched.

  ‘It’s a big fish and she wants it landed properly. They’d only fuck it up.’

  I shrugged the dust jackets from a suit of half armour. Considered putting it on. A close inspection showed me that a couple of the straps needed replacing. Poor-fitting armour is worse than no armour at all in most situations.

  ‘We need new kit,’ I said.

  ‘Ask your boss for another aid parcel,’ Tnota said. ‘Maybe a diamond tiara, or a priceless vase. A prize concubine. Whatever he thinks we can sell.’

  ‘I will if he ever shows up.’

  ‘Big Dog says he paid you a visit not long ago. Maybe diverted us to Station Twelve, when we should have been headed home and clear,’ Tnota said. He didn’t look at me, kept on scratching at the table. ‘Think it was worth it?’

  I thought of Nenn. Thought of what I’d bought her and the price that I’d yet to pay for it. I had no idea how I was going to find one hundred thousand marks.

  ‘What’s anything worth? Come on. We’re going to marry a Bride to an axe.’

  When going into a job that might prove dangerous, a prudent captain sends the new boys in first.

  The sledgehammer smashed the padlock from the trapdoor, splintering the boards. Two new recruits kicked the bar aside and clattered down into the brightly lit cellar as startled shrieks and fearful cries rose from below. I let six men and women go down ahead of me, a noble vanguard leading the way. The steps creaked beneath my weight, but I didn’t draw the cutlass from my belt. Too m
any naked swords down there for my liking already, and not the kind I enjoyed holding.

  Twelve worshippers squealed, naked and frantic as they cowered back against the cellar’s gloomy walls. Light tubes running around the ceiling were set low, but phos light is always pale, waxy and never sensual. They wore prayer charms wound around their arms and legs, hiding nothing. Some of them were still upright, though the abrupt arrival of heavily armed soldiers was wilting them to flaccidity. The women tried to cover themselves, save one who sprawled languorously across cushions and rugs in all her flabby splendour. She dominated the cellar with her vastness, skin tiger-striped with stretch marks as it sought to contain its pulsating contents. She smiled. My nose was plugged with wax and cotton but I’d still have been stupid to look into that smile.

  Sexual appetite rose in me at once. The Bride’s size spoke of health and fertility rather than gluttony and morbidity. The sweat dripping beneath her heaving arms was sweet and energising, the rolls of flesh around her neck guarded a throat from which a sensual, droning buzz began to emanate. She’d singled me out as the largest, the most powerful of her assailants and she wanted me. If I’d been able to smell her sugar and cinnamon odour I’d have been well in her grasp. It was a struggle not to throw myself onto her as it was.

  The Bride’s head exploded into halves as Wheedle hewed through it with an axe. She flailed her sausage-finger hands at him and he got angry as he cut one away. The babbling droning sound continued until he fully decapitated her, but her body kicked and swung its weeping stump around a good minute longer. As her death throes subsided, Wheedle, red and wet, grinned at me and raised up the largest bit of head by its lice-ridden hair. I adjusted the problem that had been developing in my trousers and gave him a nod. He’d earned an extra share by taking on the most dangerous job, but with Nenn laid up he’d really been the only choice.

  ‘By the spirits, what right have you to be here? What have you done?’ one of the men demanded, feigning panicked fury as he tried to drag the prayer cloths from his arms. He was tall and lean, his beard elaborately curled with oils and ribbons, black hair receding halfway across his head. There were six other men and five women, most of them tanned the amber of Pyre. There were a lot of sad guts and saggy tits on display. None of them would have fetched more than a few grinnies in a brothel.

  ‘You’ll be Count Digada,’ I said as my men hemmed the cavorters up against the brickwork. I pulled the nose plugs out, but regretted it at once. The Bride’s smell was still thick in the air, though it was rapidly turning sour. There wasn’t much in the cellar, a collection of old furniture had been pushed up against the walls to make room for their antics and some kind of sigil inscribed across the floor. The count tried to grab some breeches but Wheedle backed him up with a poke of his sword. Everybody not in my employ looked set to shit themselves. I hoped they wouldn’t, if only so I wouldn’t have to smell it. The cellar had a hot, sweaty stink, too many human juices mixing. It was nauseating and, sadly, not the first time I’d broken my way into this kind of cesspit.

  ‘What in the name of the Alliance do you think you’re doing? Who are you? I shall have the marshal drag you all up in ropes and hanged from the Heckle Gate, I tell you, hanged!’

  He was a tall man, but I was taller and broader by far. The steel I was wearing probably didn’t hurt my powers of intimidation either and he cringed back away from me.

  ‘Threats would be more impressive if we hadn’t just had to cut a Bride into pieces. You’re all under arrest as Dhojaran sympathisers, and for practising rites of the illegal Cult of the Deep. I count a dozen hangings coming up, unless anyone wants to save us the bother and just get it over with now? Count, how about you?’

  I hooked my thumbs through my belt, let him see how absolutely few fucks I gave about his threats.

  ‘We couldn’t resist! The marshal will grant mercy, won’t he? I only did it for the sex!’ A southerner sobbed his bullshit to uncaring ears. There are always more sympathisers amongst the southerners. The Deep Kings hadn’t managed to get their armies down into Fraca yet, but they had missionaries there proclaiming their rule was the true coming of divinity. The Deep Kings sure as the hells weren’t human but they understood what bent men to their will.

  ‘Yeah, you’re just a poor victim of a cultist sex party,’ I said. ‘Far as Venzer’s concerned, cultists are traitors. And traitors get stretched.’

  They knew they’d fucked themselves good and proper, but it was hard not to feel sorry for them. Without the Bride’s influence they were just so many sweating, middle-aged fools. But once the Bride got her passions into someone, they could never truly go back. Eventually, they’d start seeking out a new cult, a new Bride to fulfil their longing.

  The Brides were the Deep Kings’ favoured way of recruiting spies within our cities. They started out looking like young women – had probably originally been young women – and slowly they built their network of lovers. The magic of the Bride is more addictive than white-leaf, the draw stronger than pollen. The men brought their friends, and she gradually became part preacher, part sexual predator. As the Bride’s influence grew, so she swelled in body. This one had been fat as a house – she’d been operating a while. Long enough to get hold of a count.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Count Digada protested. But I could, and we were.

  ‘Cry it to the marshal, if he even turns up to watch you swing,’ I said. One of the women hissed at me, but she made me sad, not angry. The Bride was only part of their ruin. The men she took knew what she was, but even in her grasp they needn’t have brought their wives, their daughters into this. I could hate the men who could warp a woman’s mind this way, but the women just seemed like victims. I shook my head as I gave the orders. ‘Don’t clothe them. Leave the prayer strips on their arms and legs. March them through the streets. The marshal wants examples made.’

  My crew of killers rounded them up and began to lead them out one by one, a trail of wasted human life. What an irony that I’d found most of my new recruits in the city gaol.

  Prince Herono and Stannard were waiting for me as I came out of the cellar last. The prince leaned on her cane, her man on the haft of a poleaxe. We were two miles from the city, a short ride out into the countryside, a big old farm house the count had purchased for his orgies. The naked cultists were going to get cold on the walk back to Valengrad, but it wasn’t an unpleasant evening. The midges rising from the long grass were probably going to trouble them more.

  ‘I trust that you are happy with the result, captain?’ Herono asked. I gave a bow, and for once, I meant it. I owed Herono a mental apology. The half-empty mill had made me suspicious. I didn’t doubt her loyalty any more. Taking down a Bride was a huge win for us. My only regret was that Herono would be claiming most of the bounty. Maybe I’d been doing this too long if I’d started seeing enemies amongst our greatest heroes.

  ‘We got the big fish. Where did you get the information?’

  ‘I had some of my people investigate Lesse’s husband, an artilleryman. He’d come up from Station Four just a short time before Lesse left my employ. I found his connection to Count Digada.’

  ‘Had to put a couple of his maids to the question to get it out of them, but they squealed in the end,’ Stannard said. He slapped his fist against his palm, a man who enjoyed his work. Herono’s scarred face was as blank and dry as the Misery.

  ‘A cruelty, but one that has yielded great results.’

  ‘It’s good to see the circle closed. Doesn’t often feel like we’re winning out here on the Range, but today we took something back.’

  Money is money, whatever the cut you take. I was scraping my way to making the first payment to Saravor. If things continued this well I’d not only still have my eyes at the year’s end, but Blackwing might just keep the Range standing a little longer as well.

  9

  Tnota lived a handful of streets over fr
om me in Mews. The rain soaked me through as I half dragged, half carried him along the road, feet stumbling, swaying left and right with half a keg of brandy inside me, the other half inside him. It wasn’t late, but I tried to look alert all the same. Through my staggering and Tnota’s stumbling I doubt it was convincing. Still, I got him home, found another Fracan man in his apartment who didn’t speak Dort, and he helped me carry Tnota inside. Tnota often had one or more of his countrymen staying, whether they were family passing through or casual fucks I didn’t know and he never spoke about them. We laid him out in his bed, surrounded by dozens of long-faced wooden statues that had a roughly canine cast to their features. He collected them, these reminders of his far-away southern country, buying them up wherever he found them as if he intended to return them all to their rightful place in Fraca one day.

  ‘No buggery while he’s asleep,’ I warned the young Fracan man, but he didn’t understand me, and I figured I hadn’t much choice but to leave him there.

  I swaggered off home, finding that the rain had driven all of the late-night pie hawkers inside and I couldn’t get any ballast for my stomach. I climbed the stairs to my own third-storey apartment, noting the small, damp footprints on the stairs that preceded mine. It looked like some kid had gone up ahead of me, but there were no kids living in the tenement that I knew of. If that Darling had shown up again I’d box its ears and put a blade between its eyes, said my drunk brain, quite incapable of worrying about my capacity to do that sober, let alone drunk, and so I put a hand to the hilt of my ten-inch knife as I tried to move quietly up the stairs. Creeping isn’t easy when you’re my size, and once you put a bottle and a half of Dortmark’s worst brandy behind it. I might as well have strapped kettles all over my body and danced a jig. I made it to the top of the stairs making slightly less noise than a volley of cannon fire and found that all my words had left me.