Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  The cup in my hand exploded in a shower of broken pottery as a matchlock roared. A second shot followed, blowing through a second window pane as we threw ourselves to the floor. Patrons ducked beneath tables, upsetting bowls and glasses. I threw my hands futilely over my head, waited for more, but the two shots had rung out and nothing further followed. As stillness descended across the room, gun smoke wafted in through the shattered windows.

  I was bleeding. Shards of jagged ceramics had nicked my chin, my fingers. Nothing that wouldn’t scab over in a day or two. The instinct was to draw steel and charge, find out who was shooting at us. But that’s a fool’s manoeuvre. Either they’d spent their weapons and run, or they had more and were waiting for me to do just that. I stayed low and made sure I could get steel in my hand quickly if I needed it.

  Against the quiet, a wail began to rise. Agonised. For a moment I pressed my eyes shut, not wanting to see. Not wanting to know how bad it was. The blackness could not last.

  Below the shoulder Tnota’s arm hung limp as a sock full of rocks, a tangle of shredded flesh and shattered bone. He collapsed screaming, spurting red. His arm was a mangled ruin of ugly white splinters amongst minced tatters of meat, the blood issuing from it in jets.

  Nenn worked fast. She pinned him, cut a tourniquet.

  ‘He needs a surgeon,’ she said.

  I sat, blank, numb. Part of my mind had recoiled at what it was seeing. There was no battle-thrill running through me. All I saw was the pain on my friend’s face. My brain was cold. It ticked slowly, gears wound down.

  ‘He won’t make it,’ I mumbled.

  ‘We fucking try!’ Nenn spat.

  ‘Try,’ Tnota gasped, eyes rolling wildly, ‘please, captain, try.’

  Men more foolish than I had ventured out the front to look for shooters, but they returned shrugging and shaking bewildered heads. We were regulars; they knew Tnota well. A couple of the boy whores brought liquor out, and a roll of bandage. Started trying to tend the mess that had been a functioning limb moments before.

  My heart plummeted like a comet. Tnota never hurt anybody. This wasn’t his fight. I’d dragged him into the murk and grime of court and this was how he’d been repaid. For some reason asking him to risk himself in the Misery wasn’t the same. Out there, the beasts only wanted to eat you because they are hungry. Here, those bullets had been meant for Dantry and me. We were only alive because the assassins couldn’t shoot for shit. Tnota met my eyes, questing, like there was something I could do for him.

  ‘Dantry. Lads. Get him to a surgeon. One of the good ones on Copper Street. If they won’t operate without payment, get violent.’ I drew my pistols and placed them in Dantry’s shaking hands. ‘Don’t stop for anyone. Make it happen. Nenn, you’re with me.’

  ‘What we going to do, captain?’

  I rose to my feet, feeling the passage of fate turning around me, a river of possibility and eventuality.

  ‘The tile board just got flipped on us. We don’t have to play by their rules any more.’

  22

  The Maud was old back when Dortmark’s biggest worries were the clan chieftains’ power struggles. Bits of it were still that old brickwork, grey and pitted, flints protruding bonily from cement. The matron paled as I stalked in on a wave of rage.

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ I said. ‘Bring out the girl.’

  She looked like she wanted to argue, claim I needed some official papers, like the sword in my hand wasn’t a sufficient mandate to act. Self-preservation won out over bureaucracy. The Holy Sister ordered a man with a big bunch of keys to go and open Ezabeth’s cell.

  ‘I ain’t bringing that mad witch,’ he said. His voice shook. Officials like to believe their uniforms give them some kind of authority, hide behind them, imagine that they shield them from the world. That only works if other people are playing the same game.

  ‘You’re talking about Lady Ezabeth Tanza, you fucking dog,’ I told him with a snarl. Then, just because I felt like it and because adrenaline and fury were overtaking everything else, I grabbed him by the coat and threw him across his own table. Papers scattered in the air as he went crashing down. I took his keys and we went to find her. I doubted he’d try to stop us on the way out. The matron said nothing. Truth was, she just wanted to run her hospital. Probably a good woman, most of the time. Just happened to be in the way of princes and angry mercenaries. She’d be setting her orderlies on us in no time, but Nenn was a hellcat and I’d wager on our swords over their cudgels even on our worst day.

  We walked fast. The outermost cells were for the gentle lunatics and those with the wealthiest relatives. Their rooms were mostly clean, the many residents free to wander about the place as long as they didn’t try to leave. In a common room an old man was playing a beautiful melody on a viola, while a woman who’d plucked out her hair until she had a bald crown sat listening at his feet. Along another corridor there were children, and I wondered how anyone could tell when children were mad, since they never made sense anyway. Maybe they were the kids of the lunatics. It was neither a frightening nor an upsetting place. Not until you went down a level, where they kept the really dangerous ones.

  If a lunatic was mad enough to hurt people, the law dealt with them the same way it would anyone else. Murder was murder, accidental killing was murder, and wounding someone so that they got infected and died was pretty much murder too, so there weren’t that many dangerous madmen. Instead, the noisy ones tended to be the ones that hurt themselves. One closed door partially blocked away shrieks that went on and on, and through another I heard a hoarse voice croaking that she wanted her babies, over and over. The subterranean tunnels held the sounds, sent them back to their owners, the echoes repeating their madness like some dismal prayer.

  Ezabeth was kept one level below the dangerous mad.

  Ezabeth’s room was only dimly lit by a single light tube running along the ceiling. I unlocked the door, not looking forward to what I was going to find. And it was bad. The room stank. I’d spent a lot of time in some pretty shitty places, had done my fair share of latrine digging in the ranks, and still that weren’t so bad as this. The floor was wet, walls streaked with filth.

  ‘Come in, quick,’ Ezabeth said with her back to us. Didn’t even turn her hood in my direction. ‘Lift me up.’

  Not exactly the reaction that I’d expected.

  ‘Time for you to get out of here,’ I said. ‘Come on. We don’t have long.’

  ‘Not yet. Quickly. Lift me higher. Closer to the ceiling.’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about?’ I said, my spirits sinking. Maybe I’d been wrong all along. Maybe she was as mad as they said, and I’d made enemies against a foolish hope.

  ‘I can see better with the door open. The light from the corridor helps. Do you have any more light?’ She adjusted her veil to cover her face and turned around, eyes glittering blackly in the weak light. I looked upwards towards the ceiling and it was only then I realised what she was looking at.

  From a distance it could be mistaken for simple dirt, but as I stepped closer I realised there was an art to it. The walls were covered in crudely drawn diagrams, lunar observances and charts, numbers and calculations, the occasional paragraph.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘This is where they imprisoned Gleck Maldon,’ Ezabeth said. ‘And he wrote his thesis across the walls. I understand most of it, but my eyes aren’t good enough to see this bit on the ceiling. Can you lift me?’

  ‘What’s it written with?’

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Mostly shit anyway. He must have mixed it with his urine, to make a kind of ink. Maldon must have had a chair to write on the ceiling. I imagine they saw him smearing faeces on it and took it away from him. Now lift me up.’

  Well that explained the smell. We were surrounded by verse after verse of human waste written across the walls.

 
‘Don’t imagine they let me down here voluntarily,’ I said. We were already on borrowed time. The law may have been on my side, but the law didn’t control the soldiers and I had no doubt that the matron had sent for them.

  ‘Captain, lift me!’

  I hesitated. A sudden fear came upon me, far greater than anything I’d felt in the Misery. Ezabeth’s blue gown was grime encrusted and it stank but that wasn’t the reason I swallowed hard before putting my hands on her waist. She didn’t meet my eyes as she asked me again to lift her. She hardly weighed anything and I raised her up. Not the first time I’d lifted her, but a shiver ran through my shoulders all the same. This was all of her, that I held now in my hands. I braced her up on my shoulder, seated like a pet bird. Nenn scowled at me and held up a lamp. The wails of the mad echoed down the corridors as Ezabeth examined detailed calculations written in crap across the ceiling. She read off numbers, repeating them back into her memory.

  ‘Someone’s coming, captain,’ Nenn said. I’d heard it too.

  ‘Time’s up.’

  ‘Yes, put me down. I have it. But … it doesn’t make sense.’ I could hear the hurt in her voice. The disappointment. ‘The algorithm breaks down. I don’t understand. I was sure it was going in the other direction. None of it works. There must be something I’m missing.’

  ‘Time to go,’ Nenn said again. ‘Come on, captain, leave the mad bitch if she won’t come.’ I could hear the tramp of boots in the corridor, lots of boots now. I suddenly realised I may have overestimated how long it was going to take them to come for us.

  We left the stinking cell. A group of the Maud’s staff had appeared with cudgels. They didn’t look friendly.

  ‘Can’t let you take the prisoner, sir,’ one of them said respectfully. He was a man of middle years, thin grey hair, a neat beard.

  ‘Didn’t know you kept prisoners here. Thought this was a hospital.’ I ran my eyes over them; there were nine men in all, most of them younger than me but none so young those sticks wouldn’t hurt.

  ‘I have instructions from Prince Herono herself that Lady Tanza can only leave the Maud with her express permission, and she hasn’t given that yet. I don’t mean to be in your way, sir, least not to take on the displeasure of a nobleman, but I don’t rightly have no choice. Please step back into your chamber, my lady.’

  It is the way of the world that good people try to do the right thing for the wrong people’s wrong reasons. The grey-haired man looked to be one of them.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ I said. ‘Nenn. If these men stand in your way, you have the order to cut them down. You have Blackwing’s full authority. Get out of our way, you fuckers. We’re working under Crowfoot’s direct orders.’ It wasn’t often I played my highest-ranking ally as a trump card. I doubted that he’d bother to turn up to a trial if it came to that, but it was the best I could do. I wasn’t letting them take her again. Nenn grinned as she bared her steel. The orderlies readied their sticks. I left my own cutlass sheathed, though. I could see that I wouldn’t need it. Nenn was a warrior, a killer, a bitch of steel and cold bloody murder. To her, cutting a path through these men was all in a day’s work; to them, even standing before her sword was terror. They might use those clubs against the mad and the senile locked away here, but fighting is not the same as bullying. They edged away from her.

  ‘Perhaps we can just all wait patient-like until the prince has been contacted?’ the lead orderly requested. Vigorous nodding from his colleagues. Nenn hissed like a cat.

  ‘’Scuse me, sirs, is this the low level?’

  A child had wandered down the corridor. Beyond the orderlies, standing at the foot of the stairwell. In the dim light of the flickering tubes, he looked strangely familiar. His hair was all close shorn up against his head, his eyes wide and oddly blue.

  ‘Off with you, lad,’ the lead orderly said. He paid the boy no heed and tried again to appeal to reason. ‘I’m sure that it’s just a matter of paperwork …’

  He seized up mid-word like someone had grabbed him by the throat. A spasm ran through his whole body, and then another man jerked in a similar fashion, like great puppeteer’s strings had suddenly attached to his shoulders and he were being pulled about. Another of the orderlies collapsed to the ground, clawing at his face.

  That was no little boy. Now I knew why he was familiar. I’d met him at Station Twelve.

  A lash of dark magic sliced the air of the tunnel and two of the orderlies collapsed in pieces, shrieking as they lost the use of legs and arms. The lead orderly and the other two front-runners came jerkily towards us, puppets swinging their sticks. Blood ran from their eyes and noses as they twitched forwards, bodies moving in the thrall of the creature that sought us out. Nenn beat a clumsy baton aside and opened an orderly up, her curved sword slashing deep through neck and collar bone. She kicked his twitching body off her blade, cut a hand from the leader, and growing confident as she cut a path through them, hacked the head from the third. His body went down twitching, still trying to swipe at her with the baton. I caught the handless puppet-man, hurled him back towards the others as a second blast of dark magic cut through the group, splitting another of the poor bastards in two. This strike had been aimed at Ezabeth directly but as it reached her the lash of unreality dissipated in a shower of bright sparks. She still staggered at the force of the impact. She might have saved what little light she had but it wouldn’t last.

  The Darling was panting; all magic took effort. I took out my knife and threw it straight at the little bastard but an orderly managed to get in the way. Those still able to give voice cried out, covering their heads with their hands and ducking, caught in a crossfire that they couldn’t hope to survive.

  As Nenn fended off another of the mind-wormed orderlies I saw a door further along the corridor. Beyond it, a stairway.

  Ezabeth sagged against the wall. If the Darling’s magic was costing it, then deflecting that blast had cost her more. I hoisted her over my shoulder and we dashed through the door. She was light as a field mouse, just skin and small bones. Nenn skittered through the doorway as the Darling launched another cutting blast; dust and chips of stone fell from the ceiling. My girl slammed the door behind her as we ascended damp stone steps. At the top another door was barred on the wrong side, locked. For a horrible moment I imagined us caught between a dead end and the creature coming at us from below. Without Ezabeth’s magic we didn’t stand a chance against the Darling, but Nenn shoulder-charged straight through the door in a shower of rotting boards. The lunatics on the other side gaped at us in wonder but they cleared a path before Nenn’s bared sword. I tried to tell them to run, but they stared blankly and gabbled.

  As we made it out into the courtyard, Prince Herono’s men had just arrived. An officious-looking squawk in a starched and pressed uniform had some kind of arrest warrant in his hands.

  ‘You there!’ he called. His eyes widened at Nenn’s bloody sword. His men had pikes, which they levelled at us but I recognised Battle Spinner Rovelle, a mustachioed man in a gold brocade doublet stepping down from a carriage. He’d been on the Range as long as I had.

  ‘Stand down, captain,’ Rovelle said. He let a flicker of light work its way around his fingers. ‘Drop the girl. Orders from Prince Herono herself.’

  ‘There’s a Darling in the fucking Maud!’ Nenn yelled. She flicked at one of the pike heads with her sword, causing the soldier to scamper back. A moment of confusion, a moment of doubt, and then there was doubt no more as a flash of sorcery whipped out and scattered the soldiers. At least two of them were strewn around in bloody pieces. It was only the Darling’s poor aim that was saving us now. Battle Spinner Rovelle looked from us to the demonic little child standing in the Maud’s doorway some thirty feet away. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing; sorcery smoked from the Darling’s skin like golden steam.

  Rovelle attacked, the Darling attacked, and the world exploded in
flares of light and darkness. As the magic blasted away flagstones and chewed bricks from the walls. The soldiers ran, and we ran, and we didn’t stop running until the sounds of the conflict had faded.

  I learned much later that Rovelle put up a good fight before the Darling took his head off.

  23

  Lot of things I would have liked just then. A fast stallion and enough gold to get me safely away from the Range for ever would have topped the list, but they weren’t forthcoming. I’d have settled for an old nag and a beer, but fortune’s a fickle bitch. We hid out at Nenn’s place long enough for Ezabeth to get herself together then risked the journey across town.

  The city shivered, cowered and played dead. Windows were shuttered, doors barred. Mounted soldiers pounded through the streets with sabres drawn and trembling hands as a siren wailed from the citadel. A Darling was loose in the city and the last thing those brave men wanted was to encounter it. They paused only long enough to ask whether we’d seen any children and then galloped away. Nobody was looking for us, not with a Darling on the loose. Venzer would have all of his remaining Battle Spinners together in a cabal hunting for it. I hoped they’d find it but I doubted they would. Tracking down something like that should have been my job. Losing yourself in a city is a simple affair. The horsemen were more show than effect.

  Otto Lindrick’s house was shabbier than I remembered it. The garden was overgrown, weeds routing the arrangements of the flowerbeds, paint flaking around the windows. I was surprised: he’d struck me as a man who cared about outward appearances.