Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  As soon as there was decent light we saddled the horses and ate breakfast as we rode. The red moon had sunk away, her gold and blue sisters rising to take position in the south and the west.

  ‘Good moons for navigating,’ Tnota told me as he checked marks off against his astrolabe. He consulted a dog-eared notebook. No words in there, just lots of arrows and diagrams. Tnota had inherited it from a navigator who’d retired after twenty years walking these coarse sands. He was unusually sombre despite his assessment.

  ‘What’s tugging your dangler?’ I asked. He chewed the answer over.

  ‘Nothing in particular. Maybe just feeling the Misery more than I used to. We’re getting old, Ryhalt. Feel it in the bones.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Old my arse. I’m barely forty.’

  ‘Well I’m that, and half a ten on top of it. When’s the last time you saw a man my age in active duties? My back is kicking me after just one day in the saddle. Can feel it all the way from shoulder to the arse bone.’

  ‘The amount of action your arse sees I’d have thought it would be hard as saddle leather by now,’ I said.

  ‘Captain has a point,’ Nenn agreed.

  ‘Cock sores to both of you,’ Tnota grunted. He rolled his shoulders. ‘There was a lad up from Pyre, one of those amber-skinned types with the big wide eyes. Never been sure what he wanted before, just wanted to try some things out. I made him a convert, and if I weren’t riding around out here I’d be breaking him in like a wild pony. Just jump on and hold fast.’

  ‘A convert,’ I mused, finding a rare smile. ‘To the church of bumming and depraved fornication.’

  ‘Only fucking church I know, captain.’ Tnota grinned back. He looked over at Nenn. ‘You should try it some time. Heard you got a cock down there after all.’

  ‘If I did, I’d stick it somewhere cleaner than your stinking arse,’ Nenn shot back. Her retort lacked mirth. Tnota didn’t push it.

  We came to a sea of grass, as I’d known we would. The grass in the Misery is clear, made from some kind of glass. The tinkling chimes as it brushes against itself can be heard a mile distant, even though there’s little wind in the Misery. The grass is smooth and knee high, but to walk through it is to break it, and broken edges are sharper than razors. You won’t even know you’ve cut yourself until you feel the blood running down your legs. I remembered this grass sea well. We’d be skirting it for several miles.

  ‘Captain,’ Nenn called my attention. She took a swig from her canteen, pointed back the way we’d come. I squinted. Whatever she could see, it changed into a fuzz for me, just the blur of the land. ‘Could be riders. Some little dark shapes. Can’t make ’em out well.’

  ‘One of the marshal’s patrols?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Could be. Could also be drudge poking closer than they should. Could be something else.’ She shrugged. Tnota couldn’t see that far either.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Not many.’

  ‘No reason to imagine that they’re friendly,’ I said. ‘Let’s pick the pace up. Keep your eyes west and stay bright.’

  The grass gave way to the desert again, and then to a chasm. Tnota kissed his teeth, looked up at the moons and frowned.

  ‘Chasm shifted,’ he said. ‘Should be another hour east.’

  I peered over the edge. Two hundred feet deep. Hot, dry air rose from down below. There were chasms like this across the Misery here and there, great knife wound gashes in the land. We’d have to descend and then come back up, somehow.

  ‘How far to the southern end? We can go around?’

  ‘Maybe, but we’d likely have to go through the grass.’

  ‘Not an option then. Let’s look for the slopes.’ We rode north a way along the chasm’s edge. Nenn lost sight of whatever it had been she’d seen before. In my mind it was a dulcher, or maybe some of those insect things I’d skewered last night, grown to the size of horses. There were some things in the Misery like dulchers and skweams that had earned themselves names, but there were many others, one of a kind things that had no names. Kimi Holst, the man who’d held the Blackwing office in Valengrad before me, had once told me he’d seen a thing like a man, twelve feet tall and covered in eyes, that simply ran around shrieking, falling over, getting up and shrieking some more. According to Kimi it hadn’t been dangerous, just unnerving, and they left it alone to run and howl in its terror. I like to think I’d have killed it regardless. Everything in the Misery was something else before, like the drudge. They were men before they got changed. Some of them might even still be called men, they’re close enough. When the magic’s that deep into you, got its hooks biting that strong, it’s a kindness to send them on to the hells. Of course, Kimi was often as not full of shit, so he’d probably dreamed it up. He’d lost both legs out here. I snapped myself out of my pondering and tried to get bright.

  We found a way down into the chasm, then followed its floor for a mile until we reached the narrow ledge that would gradually lead us back up. We led the horses. As we went, I saw ghosts. That happens in the Misery too. I saw a pretty young noblewoman, a pair of beautiful children in her arms, standing atop the ledge ahead of us. She laughed as she flung the ghost babies off into the abyss, then hurled herself after them. I tried to ignore them. I learned long ago that the ghosts you see aren’t really ghosts, it’s just the magic inside you seizing hold of something and twisting it, making it play out for you. It had to be, because I hadn’t been there to see them die.

  ‘Not mine,’ Nenn said as the phantom children tumbled through the air.

  ‘Obviously not mine either,’ Tnota said. Any ghosts he saw were either dark like him or male. He had no interest in pale-skinned women and their brats.

  ‘My wife. My children,’ I said.

  ‘Shit,’ Nenn said. ‘Sorry, captain.’

  ‘Wasn’t your fault,’ I said. My heart felt heavy. I tried to keep my face impassive, but seeing that always hurt.

  ‘Wasn’t yours either.’ Tnota put a consoling hand on my shoulder. I shrugged it off.

  ‘You’re right, so stop looking at me like I just lost my kitten. Come on. We’ve still a long way to go.’

  It would be pleasant to be able to believe what I was saying once in a while. Lies, lies and more lies all compounded into some great pretence. The Misery might try to deceive us, but we also do a damn good job of deceiving ourselves.

  My eyes burned. Told myself it was just the dust.

  Lies upon lies upon lies.

  18

  ‘Gillings,’ Tnota said.

  Third day in the Misery. I’d expected them before now. We’d passed by a lake that stank like acid and shimmered with a silvery film, and the ghost of Tnota’s grandfather had followed us for a couple of miles, gibbering in his southern language of clicks and sucks, but overall we’d been blessed with uneventful sand dunes and black tar-rocks.

  ‘Hate the fucking things,’ Nenn said. Everybody who’d spent some time in the Misery hated gillings.

  We were riding through a gully when they emerged eagerly from burrows in the rock. Naked, pot-bellied and red as a raw burn, they toddled out. The biggest were two feet tall, but they were all hairless and yellow-eyed. Instead of five fingers and toes they had only two, wide and sharp.

  ‘Evening, master, care for a good time?’ one of them called in its comically high voice, only there was nothing comical about its twin rows of spiny teeth.

  ‘The roads are a mess, the governors take no care,’ a second called.

  ‘Evening, master, care for a good time?’ repeated a third. There were a lot of them, more than fifteen. A concerning number. Gillings were cowardly things, and they wouldn’t attack someone who saw them coming, but in numbers they could pose a threat.

  ‘Fucking weird things,’ Nenn said. One of
them had strayed a little close to her horse. She used the butt of her poleaxe to send it scampering away.

  ‘How many of the phrases have you heard them say, captain?’ Tnota asked.

  ‘Only five,’ I said. I had unslung my own poleaxe. The gillings followed along with us, most of them keeping a good distance. They wouldn’t cause real trouble until they thought we were sleeping. The yellow liquid gleaming on their teeth was an anaesthetic strong enough to numb whatever they sank them into. It was said that the most likely death in the Misery came from a gilling chewing off your foot during the night. That was how Kimi Holst had lost his legs.

  ‘I’ve heard “Evening, master” and “The roads are a mess”,’ Tnota said. ‘Then there’s “He’s a good boy, just don’t anger him”, and “Seventy-three, seventy-two”.’ He frowned. ‘What are the others?’

  The gillings all know exactly the same phrases. There are only six variations, but they speak them as though they understand them, which they don’t. Meaningless phrases stolen from another time. I believed that as the wave of power sent by the Heart of the Void tore apart the laws of reality, some poor bastards were caught and twisted, the words of the moment locked into the deformed little bodies of the gillings. Somehow the original words passed on to the rest of them. It was eighty years since the Heart of the Void had been unleashed, but who knew if gillings aged?

  ‘I’ve heard them say “If you don’t stack it on the lee side it’ll be no use come winter”,’ Nenn put in.

  ‘I never heard that one,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s the sixth?’ Tnota asked. I sighed. I’d only heard them say it once, on one of the nights after we began the retreat from Adrogorsk with the drudge snapping at our heels.

  ‘They say “Spirits be merciful”,’ I said. ‘They don’t say it much. And who knows why they say whatever they say? Fucking strange little bastards.’ I flicked my axe haft at one that had strayed closer to my horse’s leg than I was comfortable with. It scampered back, claiming that someone was a good boy.

  I hadn’t given the full quotation. They said “Spirits be merciful. The Nameless have betrayed us. Death comes.” Didn’t seem like a great time to be mentioning that, though.

  Before we made camp we caught and killed a few of the gillings and hung their fat little red bodies up on spurs of rock around our camp. It was an old method of keeping them at bay, and one that only ever offered limited success. We lay up against one another, partly for warmth but also because it’s easier for the sentry to watch over two people together than one. Clada and Eala both chose to stay high in the night sky, casting a soft ghost light. It’s never easy to sleep in the Misery, but we managed some. Can’t go on for ever without it. We woke to find that we all still had our limbs and appendages, which was a positive way to start the day. Breakfast was cold sausages and crunchy peas, washed down with vodka, small beer and finished with sticks of liquorice.

  I could feel it inside me. You soak it up. The magic, the wrongness. It gets into your clothes, your limbs. Your eyes itch with it and the world stinks of it. As though I were absorbing some kind of grease into my skin, taking it in. It was ever present, always teasing at the edges. You breathe it, you smell it, can’t help but exist as part of it. How had Crowfoot managed this? Nobody knew what the Heart of the Void had been, but we could all see what it had done. Had he found it, or had he crafted it? If the latter, why couldn’t he create another one now, in this dark hour when the Deep Kings resumed their advance? The Misery was testament to his callousness when it came to sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary people and soldiers alike. It was a reminder to the Deep Kings that powerful as they were, the Nameless had power too. Perhaps that was why Crowfoot had wrought it so.

  Four days in we saw Cold’s Crater appear through the mist. The hour wasn’t late but our breath was still steaming in the air. The depression appeared as a dark shadow, then as we drew nearer we could make out the edges.

  The crater was nearly three miles wide, maybe two hundred feet deep at its centre. The floor of the crater was coated in a gritty, silvery dust that reminded me of metal filings. We knew to keep clear of it. Men who’d touched that stuff would find their hands developing a painful weeping rash. Like most things in the Misery, Cold’s Crater was best avoided. I breathed deeply through my nose, drawing in the tainted air. We’d made it fast as I’d thought. I chewed on Misery-filth and spat it over the crater’s edge. After a few moments my spittle grew legs and scuttled off deeper into the crater.

  ‘Let’s grab this cream and get moving again,’ Nenn said. I nodded my agreement. I had no desire to linger longer than necessary.

  The banners of the Grand Alliance flew over the bastion erected alongside Cold’s Crater. It made little sense to try to build in the Misery, given the way that it could change from moment to moment, but some places seemed to be fixed. The crater never changed. The ruins of Adrogorsk and Clear were static, as was Dust Gorge. The Endless Devoid to the south was a landmark feature. It was between those static points that the lunar navigation could be conducted, fixed points amongst the madness. So it was that soldiers of Dortmark had managed to construct something akin to a small fortress along the edge of the crater. It was crude, not much more than rocks stacked up to form low walls, but in terms of Misery fortifications, it was artisan craftsmanship. The banners flew from long poles jutting up from the centre. I had no doubt that whatever sentries were watching had already spotted us and would be waiting with weapons cocked.

  Five soldiers came out to escort us in. None of them looked pleased to see a Blackwing captain. We rode into the fort, if it could be called that, to the high-pitched whirring of the moisture extractors. It was hardly well put together, crude lumps of stone arrayed into walls, the gaps packed with dirt and canvas roofs roped over. Not much to call home, but walls would keep the gillings and the scuttling things out at night. The whining sound was coming from a bank of metal drums, black steel cans with wide, paper-thin silver dishes drawing what moisture they could from the air. There’s no running water in the Misery, and I wouldn’t have drunk any even if there was. The extractors were powered by phos. Old technology they’d been using on ships for a few hundred years put to new purpose when the Misery was born. Annoying fucking sound, and it would go on all day and all night. The sooner we were gone the better.

  ‘How long you been stationed here?’ I asked the sergeant.

  ‘Nearly two months,’ he said. ‘Too long. Much too long.’

  ‘You haven’t seen a Spinner come this way, name of Gleck Maldon?’ The longest of long shots.

  ‘Gleck? Nah, he’s not been here. We had some new blood come up a few weeks back. We heard Gleck had got light-blind.’

  ‘I guess he did,’ I said. ‘Just wondered.’

  The fort had a stable, and we passed our mounts over there and went to see Major Bernst. He was young for his post, handsome with a well-waxed moustache. His eyes were bloodshot. Walls or no, he wasn’t getting much sleep. He just wanted to know why we were there, whether we’d be consuming any of his rations and whether we’d brought fresh orders.

  ‘Why hasn’t Venzer pulled you back yet?’ I asked. ‘Drudge are pushing hard in the north. Wouldn’t take much to overrun what you got here.’

  ‘Static patrol. Making sure the drudge aren’t pushing into our half of the Misery,’ Bernst said. He had the look of one of those academy kids, a paid commission that granted rank without experience. I would have bet that given the choice, he’d have ripped the crescents from his uniform and taken back his gold.

  ‘See much of them?’ I asked. I wasn’t there for strategy, but I couldn’t help but take an interest. Old habits, hard deaths.

  ‘More than leaves me comfortable,’ Bernst said. ‘Their long patrols seem to be coming closer to the crater. Not many, just ten at a time. We chased them off a couple of times. No engagements, but it’s never good to see t
he drudge.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘How are things back west?’ he asked, longing in his voice. I assured him everything was well. Gold grade bullshit.

  ‘I’m here for Count Tanza,’ I said. ‘If I can grab him and be gone before noon, that’d be for the best.’

  ‘Spirits of mercy know how he ended up out here,’ the major said, shaking his head. ‘You’ll find him and his man out by the crater. Does his own thing. It’s just as well you’ve come for him. He’d likely get himself eaten by a skweam or fall in the bloody pit if he stayed here much longer.’

  ‘You want my advice? Get your horses saddled and keep them ready to ride. Drudge will be here in force before the year’s out. Probably sooner.’

  ‘The marshal would hide my arse if I abandoned this post without a direct order.’

  He was right. I’d probably get commissioned to track him down.

  I left the gear with Nenn and Tnota and went to find Ezabeth Tanza’s brother. I vaguely remembered him, but he’d only been six, maybe seven when his family had visited my own. I had been dazzled by the spirit and vitality of his sister, had paid the kid no attention. Near enough twenty years had ground by since then. As I walked out towards the crater’s raised lip, I wondered what kind of man they’d have shaped. My first impressions were not encouraging.