by Ed McDonald
Two men stood beside a brass tripod mounted with a trio of devices. One of them held it steady while the second packed earth beneath one of its legs. The crouched man had twenty years on me, white-haired and skin baked brown by the sun, his tattered livery too large for his skinny frame. It had probably fit him when they entered the Misery. A few weeks of lean rations and not enough water does that to you. The younger man, who I presumed was the count, would have been right up Tnota’s alley. Or the other way around. Lithe and long-limbed, the kind of wavy yellow hair that would be fashionable in some place where people were idiots. Despite the ordure of the Misery, he was clean-shaven and handsome in an aristocratic way. The frilled lace around the sleeves and collar of a five-hundred-mark shirt had been torn, stained and ruined by working in the dirt and dust. He looked up as I approached.
‘Here, give Glost a hand would you, be a good fellow?’
Something about aristocrats makes me want to punch them. The enlisted officers are bad enough, but landed gentry without military rank seem to be demanding knuckles against their noses.
‘No time for that today, Count Dantry,’ I said. ‘We’re leaving. I have orders to bring you back to Valengrad.’
Not strictly true. Not entirely a lie either.
‘To Valengrad? Today? I don’t think so.’ He looked me over, a puzzled frown above his fine cheekbones. His eyes narrowed as he tried to work out whether he’d seen me before. From up on the pedestals, we all look the same below but my bulk makes me memorable. Or maybe it’s my ugliness.
‘He’s a new arrival, my lord,’ the servant said deferentially. ‘Not one of the stationed men.’ He got up from his knees. He winced at pain in his joints. Too old to be out in the hell-lands, but who wasn’t?
‘I can’t leave now, private,’ he said. ‘Too much work to do.’
‘It’s “captain”. And let’s get out of this wind,’ I said. Low sheets of grit and dust were blowing in from the south, the wind sending them into the crater. The wind only blows into Cold’s Crater, never out. Doesn’t matter which side of the edge you’re on. ‘We can talk in the fort. It concerns your sister.’
Dantry’s face changed. He blanked for a moment before actual human concern appeared there. Earnestness. I refused to speak further until we’d traipsed back over to the fort and got behind some walls. Over our heads, the cold song of the broken sky mocked our retreat.
‘Speak,’ Dantry said. ‘Is she well? Has she come to harm?’
‘In a sense.’ I didn’t like having the servant on hand, but what can you do? I gave him the bones of it. Ezabeth had been sent to the Maud for lunacy. He was the only one who could get her out.
‘Has my cousin, Prince Herono, not moved to resolve such nonsense?’ Dantry protested. I thought of Ezabeth’s writings, the childish rhymes amidst her impossible calculations. Only a song could be so bold. Nonsense was subjective.
‘The prince feels she is obliged to stay out of personal matters involving the Order,’ I said. ‘Her position won’t allow it. Or she won’t allow herself. Whichever the case, she isn’t going to do anything.’
‘She was so amiable, so helpful when I stayed with her,’ Dantry said, wounded. Like a first love who just learned his girl kisses all the other boys too.
‘Politics. Always a shit storm,’ I said. Dantry squinted at me.
‘Forgive me, sir, I have not asked you your name.’
‘Captain Ryhalt Galharrow. Blackwing.’
He hesitated only momentarily, then reached out and shook my hand.
‘Do you know what Ezabeth has done to get herself locked away? What is your involvement?’
I didn’t go into the details of either. No point getting things more complicated than you have to.
‘What matters is that I get you back there fast as possible,’ I said. ‘I know your sister. She wants you to get her out. Whatever you’re doing out here, ditch it. It doesn’t matter. She does.’ I took out her letter, passed it over. The count read it, breath ceasing and eyes growing wider as he did so.
He looked to the servant. Asked him to leave us. Glost looked pissed about it but he obliged.
‘Do you know what this says?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t read it, if that’s what you mean. But I could guess. Light. The Engine. The heart. Paradoxes. That’s about the thick of it?’
Dantry nodded. He read the letter through twice more, then began tearing it into tiny pieces, each shred no bigger than a fingernail. Very thorough. He sat looking forlorn, and to my embarrassment, a tear rolled down his face. He made no move to wipe it away, no move to speak. The feelings he was experiencing were writ plain on his young, noble face. No politician this one, for all that he had the rank. This soft man would be torn apart by the old beasts of the princedoms, the Heronos and Adenauers, even Marshal Venzer would chew him up and spit out the leftovers.
‘Dear me,’ he said softly. ‘As I feared. As I feared.’
‘Get your shit together and saddle up,’ I said. ‘The ride back isn’t short and it isn’t fun.’
Dantry rubbed at his forehead, pressed fingers into his eyes.
‘One more day,’ he said. ‘We must wait a day. Allow me to take the final readings. I’d hoped to draw phos readings for another week or two, but what I have might do. It might. But I must take readings tonight. It is the first time that all three moons will have a north-westerly ascension. It is why I am here.’ He looked at me very seriously. ‘I cannot leave without seeing this work done. My sister would agree, were she here.’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said.
‘She would, captain,’ Dantry said firmly. ‘My work here is but as an assistant to her. She is the genius. I am merely a mathematician and astronomer.’
He wouldn’t be argued out of it. I couldn’t exactly tie him up and sling him over a horse. One extra day in the Misery. I agreed. Men have died over less.
19
Night in the Misery. I grew up around the olive groves and vineyards of my father’s estates, where the cicadas never stop their endless chirruping, where the night was alive with sound and life. I don’t miss them in the city, but out here in the wild I feel their absence. There are insects in the Misery, black-shell beetles and redbacks and hovering things that’ll suck your blood, but none of them sing. By night the sky seems to want to share its pain more than it does in the light, the song tearing through reality’s cracks, the only companion to the dry rustling of the wind. I stood on the edge of Cold’s Crater taking slow, steady drags on a fat cigar between slugs from my hip flask. Nearly dry. Dantry and Glost worked with the brass instruments on the crater’s edge.
‘This the last one?’ I asked as Dantry began aligning the rods and lenses.
‘No,’ Dantry said. ‘One more after this.’
The old servant looked tired, worn through. Dantry didn’t seem to have noticed. He and his sister weren’t much alike. She was hard company at the best of times, but even though he was cream he wasn’t so bad. If there was one trait they did share it was the obsessive passion for their work. I walked over, parked my cigar between my teeth and offered Glost my flask.
‘Not while I am working, sir, my thanks,’ he said humbly. A lifetime spent on the knees will break a man that way. Damn stupid thing to turn away free booze when it’s offered, and thrice so in the Misery.
‘Why don’t you head back? I can help finish up here,’ I said. The old man looked keen. The master didn’t look up from his device.
‘The work is delicate, and Glost is well versed in its operation, captain,’ Dantry said.
‘Don’t worry. My fingers are more delicate than they look.’ I squinted at the dials on the instruments. ‘You haven’t corrected the lower lens to take into account Rioque being isolated. You’ll get a face full of red and nothing else.’
Dantry stopped, frowned. He looked over his appar
atus.
‘By grief. You’re right. I’d not taken you for a lunarist, captain.’
‘I’m not. I’ve just worked one of these a few times.’
Having demonstrated a degree of competence, Dantry allowed Glost to retire.
‘So how did you come to study the sky?’ he asked me as he picked up a heavy ledger and began sketching up a table. His penmanship was swift, quick, scratchy numbers beginning to fill the page.
‘I don’t. Just picked a few things up, here and there.’
‘Of course. You attended the university in Lennisgrad.’
I frowned at him.
‘How did you know that?’
Dantry flushed, or maybe it was just Rioque’s light catching the planes of his handsome face.
‘Just a guess,’ he said, but it wasn’t convincing. I decided it was best to move the conversation on. My past was like a cruel grandmother: nasty, lacking in wisdom and better off buried.
‘What are you and your sister trying to learn from all this?’ Easy to change the subject. Dantry enjoyed talking about his work.
‘Gleck Maldon wanted to understand more about this place. He thought it might be helpful to something he was studying. I volunteered.’
‘I’ve heard of smarter choices.’
‘You’re aware of Songlope’s Paradox?’ he asked.
‘The more phos you burn, the more backlash you need to contain, until the backlash is greater than the amount spent in the first place and an infinite sum is required to contain the repeated backlashes. Songlope’s paradox circumvents that by reharnessing the backlash as more power without creating a new backlash itself. Yeah, I think I got it.’
‘An educated man indeed,’ Dantry said happily. ‘Quite so. Well, look out there, captain, what do you see?’
Cold’s Crater stretched out across the Misery, a great silver-sheened bowl of nothing. Nothing to see. I said as much.
‘What made the crater?’ Dantry prompted.
‘Cold died here,’ I said. He nodded.
‘Yes. More than two centuries ago he led a glorious charge into the teeth of the Dhojaran horde and won time for his men to escape. He paid for it with his life. What is it?’ By his expression I could tell that Dantry objected to my chuckling at his story.
‘That’s what they teach you in Heirenmark?’ I asked. ‘That’s not how it went down. You should listen to the old soldiers out here, kid, they’ll teach you what the universities don’t. Cold was Nameless and he wasn’t some glorious, mustachioed cavalryman charging into the teeth of the enemy. He was a proud, arrogant fucking idiot who got caught in a trap.’
‘A trap?’
‘Aye. Cold had command of four thousand knights, the Order of the Open Door. This was back before the Misery even existed, the early days of the war. His scouts told him there were a thousand Dhojaran irregulars camped out here, so instead of waiting for the other Nameless he went after them himself. Only it wasn’t a thousand, it was ten thousand with four of the Deep Kings backing them up and he found himself trapped. The Kings butchered his men, spun a web of souls and then broke him down. Took them three days to get through his defences, but they did it. When they killed him, he left this crater behind.’
‘Well,’ Dantry said, frowning. ‘They appreciate his efforts at the military academy rather more than they do his failings.’
‘He was Nameless,’ I said. ‘We couldn’t afford to lose him then. We sure as fucking hell can’t afford him to be gone now. Somehow the Kings got to Songlope after Cold, and it looks like they knocked out Shallowgrave and Nall as well.’
‘Yes,’ Dantry said softly. ‘And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because Nall’s not here to run his Engine, and we don’t know how it can be activated without destroying everything in creation. If it even works. What a time we live in, to base our hopes around this awful thing. The Engine is no gift from the Spirit of Mercy. It is a destroyer. No more terrible and wicked creation has ever been wrought.’
I shrugged. I felt no sympathy for the drudge. Had I the power, I’d unleash a hundred Engines against their empire and light a cigar from the embers.
Dantry turned a small dial on the apparatus, cocked an eyebrow at the result as light filtered through the lenses, created a pattern on a brass plate that was engraved with numerous lines and circles. Dantry noted the readings down in his ledger, then looked back at the sky.
‘And we’re here now why?’ I prompted.
‘When Songlope or the other Nameless have died, there has been no detonation,’ Dantry said. ‘If there had been, we’d know about it. There would be other craters.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Well, where are they? When Cold was destroyed, there was a release of power. The biggest backlash of our age. It wasn’t phos, of course, the Nameless’s magic comes from some other source. Whatever it was, Ezabeth theorised that it might be comparable in some way. Perhaps the power of the Nameless shares common principles with phos spinning. Gleck Maldon had been out here. He believed that the light acted strangely around the crater, thought it worth more study.’ He stood up, stretched out his back. ‘Come on. I need to take readings from the last tripod.’
I picked up my poleaxe, mounted up and rode further around the crater. Within that devoid, the sand glimmered with a silky, silver sheen that bespoke magic and poison, unreality and wrongness. Even the Heart of the Void hadn’t been able to displace the grave of one of the Nameless. The scar was too deep in the earth even for that. How tragically small and pointless we must have looked to them, the great wizards of the age. How meaningless our lives.
‘Why did you choose this life, captain?’ Dantry asked as we rode.
‘Maybe it chose me,’ I said. He seemed to debate saying something, then thought better of it. Frowned. ‘Might as well spit it out, kid,’ I said. But he chose to change the subject instead.
‘I want to thank you,’ he said. ‘For helping us. For helping my sister. She can be difficult.’
‘I’m getting paid for it. That’s all that matters to me,’ I said. A half truth.
‘Of course,’ Dantry said stiffly. He straightened his back, sat taller in the saddle. Spoke formally. ‘Our house finances are not what they once were, but I shall see that one day we are able to repay you for your assistance.’
We reached Dantry’s instruments. I scanned around, made sure we were alone. The night was still, just the occasional weeping of the sky interrupting the slither of the wind.
‘I won’t be sad to leave this place,’ Dantry mused as he set to on the brass. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m choking on the air. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I get it,’ I agreed. ‘You’ll have the shakes for a week after you get out, the length of time you’ve been soaking this crap up.’
‘A supply train arrived at the fort today,’ Dantry said. I’d seen them approaching that afternoon. Probably the riders Nenn had seen coming up behind us. I hadn’t thought to check the supply schedule. ‘Do you know what they brought?’
‘Replacement filters for the moisture extractors, I should think,’ I said. ‘Misery rations? Jerky and biscuits. Maybe some vodka if you’re lucky.’
‘Beans,’ Dantry said. ‘Just a lot of beans.’ He shook his head, a look of incomprehension on his face. ‘The dangers of the Misery. The creatures and the magic and the cracks that open in the ground. Men passed through all that, risked their lives every step of the way, to bring us sacks of beans. It’s bullshit. This war, this suffering, all of it. It’s a madness, a blight on the earth. It has to end.’
‘Only two ways this can end,’ I said. I reached out and adjusted a lens. Dantry turned it back without reprimanding me for getting it wrong.
‘Does one of those ways end with us turning into drudge?’
‘They both do,’ I said. ‘The only difference is whether it’s in our
lifetime or whether we die first. The Deep Kings are going to win. Don’t make no mistake there. There’s seven of them, and we’re down to our last two Nameless. They’ve already won, they’re just waiting for the last of our defences to wear down. No point risking yourself when you’re a deathless god thing, is there? They’ve got an eternity to wait. They pushed their luck once before and Crowfoot punished them with the Heart of the Void.’
‘What was it? The Heart?’
‘Not a fucking clue,’ I said.
‘If they were beaten before, they can be beaten again,’ Dantry said, the heat of youth in his voice. ‘Someone, whoever it was in those ancient times, someone managed to imprison them beneath the ocean.’
I shrugged.
‘Crowfoot’s mad,’ I said. ‘The Lady of Waves won’t leave her island. Besides, we need her there or the drudge would just make ships and come over the sea. We’re just buying time. Buying time and hoping that we get old and die before we have to wear a mark.’
Dantry shuddered and looked back to his apparatus.
We got finished up and headed back to the dubious comfort of the fort. A man on a raised platform kept a watch over the moonlit land, a heavy crossbow on his knees. He called down to us for the password. Told him to go bugger himself, and he laughed and signalled to the gateman to let us in.
Nenn and Tnota had found a tile board game against a pair of soldiers, a gaunt man and a better-faring woman. There wasn’t much to gamble. Why bring money out into the Misery? They played for belt buckles, rations of whisky, tradeable duties and cups of dry beans. Nenn looked to be up on the game, a small cluster of tat sitting in front of her. Tnota seemed to have put in a couple of his rings and it didn’t look like he had much else to offer.
‘I’ll raise,’ one of their opponents said. He was thin, face like a starving mule. He unclasped an earring, just a cheap bit of tin but better than nothing. The woman joined him. Nenn sacrificed two of her tiles to avoid having to pay. Tnota looked at the board and glanced up at me. He was a shockingly bad tile player, but either luck was with him or his opponents had made some serious gaffs because by the positioning of his tiles I could see that he was two moves away from taking out all three of his opponents. He and Nenn had probably decided to play together and divvy the winnings. They were arseholes like that. He grinned, aware of my disapproval and put in a couple of hard-baked road biscuits.