Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  I knocked ash from my cigar and wished Lindrick stocked better brandy. I was drunk enough to be maudlin, but not so bad as to lose control. I wanted to be.

  Destran had prepared comfortable rooms for us, but sleep didn’t come easy. I wrestled with my conscience a good while before getting up to find what was left of the brandy. Before I reached the stair I saw that the door to Ezabeth’s room was open, her bed empty. When I found she was not at the writing desk, I knew where she would be: up. The city was sleeping, but the night was a time for Spinners and people with dark minds, and she was one and I was the other. I found my way to the roof and stepped out onto the terraced surface.

  Ezabeth sat at the far side, but her whole body was a white incandescence, a silhouette of intense light against the dark night. Her hands worked left and right, trailing through the air to draw bright strings of coloured light like feast day ribbons. Rioque was at her height, but Clada and Eala were half showing and the light pulsed green, purple, gold and crimson through her fingers, the streaming lines lingering on the eyes even once they’d faded from the air. She was spinning, but like nothing I’d ever seen before. Always I’d seen Spinners drawing phos and storing it into battery coils, but Ezabeth’s whole body seemed to be afire with brilliant energy. Stunning. Inhuman.

  When I was twelve, my parents took me to the symphony house in Frosk. The boat trip had taken two weeks, and by the time we arrived I and my brother had been frothing with excitement. When Lady Dovaura came onto the stage she wore a gown of bright white diamonds, thousands of stones glimmering like stars as she turned in the phos light. She had worn a collar like a peacock’s tail, crowning her in emeralds and sapphires, and when she raised the viola to play, a silence had descended upon the assembled lords, ladies and princes. Within minutes she had half the audience weeping, and the other half trembling to retain their composure.

  I relate this now only to say that by comparison to Ezabeth’s spinning, Lady Dovaura’s performance had been a tawdry circus act. I had never known the true meaning of beauty until I stepped out onto that roof top and saw the woman of light drawing colours from night air. Like a blazing ghost, a fae spirit that did not belong in the physical world but only in dreams and longings, she stopped my heart for a beat and I was felled. There was no contrivance there, no reliance upon stones cut from the earth and shaped and sewn, but a delicate display that was both utterly unnatural, magical, displaced from reality and at the same time the truest display I had ever seen.

  ‘Ezabeth,’ I said beneath my breath, and I did so not to call her attention but only to praise her, to worship. I don’t know how she heard me, but she did. Her light-blank head turned towards me, and then darkness suddenly came down as the streamers of light scattered. Her radiance dissipated, I was left night-blind and blinking away the after-image. I heard her scrabbling around and by the time my eyesight came back to me she was clothed and veiled. The light had all but gone from her, save a very soft luminescence emanating from her skin. She glowed in the night.

  ‘What are you doing up here?’ she asked, voice faintly metallic.

  I sought out words but found them scrambled and gone. More breathless than if I had run a dozen miles. ‘Forgive me. I didn’t intend to intrude. Your spinning – it was like nothing I ever saw before.’

  ‘A technique I devised last year.’ Nervous, embarrassed to have been seen. I felt more of a voyeur than if I’d spied on her bathing. She said, ‘I have drawn all the phos that I can without battery coils. We should go down.’

  I was suddenly aware that it was cold on the roof, that summer’s end was upon us and the last months had not retained their warmth. A cold wind was blowing in from the Misery, where the spidering cracks in the sky glowed a pale bronze-gold through the night. Ezabeth turned to look with me and we stood in silence. Distantly in the night a drunk was singing. Somewhere a child cried.

  ‘I missed you,’ I said at last, the only words I could think of. ‘When they locked you away. I missed you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You owe me nothing, captain. Certainly not an apology,’ she said. Her voice was as straight and solid as a steel bar, betrayed no emotion. ‘You have done more to aid us than could have been asked. I will repay the debt, one day.’

  ‘You owe me nothing, lady. Not a thing,’ I said, and I wanted to say it right then, to tell her, and to let it all spill out, and I couldn’t. Too many years of bitterness and curled lips, too many cups of bad whisky, too many lives running across my hands. I wasn’t the man to say the words that I wanted to. Wasn’t fit to own them, to let them be my own. To force them upon her, to let my failure cast its shadow over somebody else.

  ‘I will see you both safely through this,’ I said. ‘I promise you. In that, let me serve you, Lady Tanza.’

  ‘Call me Ezabeth,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have the rank, lady.’

  ‘Only because you gave it up. Why did you?’

  Old memories, some of them my worst, reached up to me like a sea of clutching fingers. They wanted me, would have dragged me down into their darkness if I’d let them. I’d spent a long time keeping my distance from those grasping claws. Somehow I found myself lowering back into them.

  ‘After the disaster at Adrogorsk, after what I did to Torolo Mancono in that duel, I wasn’t fit to be one of the noble born,’ I said. ‘My family had no choice but to disinherit me. I don’t blame them.’

  ‘So you took a new name. Tried to start again.’

  ‘You say that like it was a decision, but I just kept on living. Things happened around me, and I lived with it. I rode out to Adrogorsk a nobleman. There was nothing noble about me when I came back.’

  ‘You think you’ve changed so much?’ she asked. Her eyes were bright. Spirits alone knew what her expression was beneath her veil.

  ‘I did,’ I choked. ‘I have.’

  ‘I’ve changed too,’ Ezabeth said. ‘We were children when we knew one another. I am glad I knew you then. Summer is a time for children. It is not meant for those like us.’

  ‘Like us?’

  ‘The scarred ones,’ she said.

  ‘You mean your hand?’

  At its mention, Ezabeth tucked her three-fingered hand behind her back and stepped further away from me. The gap between us was growing, when I wanted it to close. We dealt in words that were meant to comfort but somehow they only brought bitterness.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not just my hand. All of me. I am nothing but scars beneath this veil. You don’t understand.’

  ‘I know that’s not true,’ I said. I remembered her clear as day, even now, standing beautiful and fresher than youth. Defiant, lovely, powerful. Slowly the realisation began to seep in on me. I didn’t want to say it, didn’t want it to be true. It was like being spun around until the dizziness gets in your eyes and nothing makes sense. Like being punched in the face by a boxer, like drinking until the world heaves you onto your side and leaves you sprawled in the gutter, desolate and alone. It was like all that, and worse.

  ‘You saw a lie,’ she whispered. ‘A crafting of light. An illusion. I panicked when I saw you in that corridor. The drudge were so close … I thought that if I showed you that face, a face I thought you once loved, that you would help me. That you would protect me. Save me. I needed your help.’ She turned back to me. ‘Don’t be angry with me. Please. But I’m not what you think. When the light first came upon me, my first radiance burned down half the manor. I was abed for two years, my skin burned away, my body weeping. Father bought every surgeon, physician and apothecary he could find to keep me alive. No Fixers. He hated the magic, what it had done to me. So they kept me alive, feeding me through a funnel. All I knew was pain. Half my hand burned away entirely when I drew the light. The rest of me is not something that anyone would wish to see. This veil is not for modesty’s sake. It is for yours, and everybody else’s. Nobody should have to see the horror th
at lies beneath.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said.

  ‘You would, if you saw me as I really am.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I stood silently, and so did she.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said at length. ‘Your accident. That’s why it was called off? Us, I mean. Is that why we were called off?’

  ‘The radiance came upon me the month after I travelled home,’ she said. ‘Nobody knew if I would live, but they knew that if I did then I would be hideous. It wasn’t fair to ask you to take me then. You would have refused.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. For a moment I thought her voice would break on the word, but she took the pain and bound it tight against her backbone. ‘You would. And you would have been right to. They found you a real wife. A proper wife with whom you could be happy.’

  ‘I wasn’t happy,’ I said. ‘I was never happy.’

  ‘They said you were. You had children.’

  ‘They died.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They made me take a wife, a girl of sixteen. My family had the name, hers had money. I barely knew her. Back then all I cared about was making a name for myself as an officer, climbing ranks and polishing medals. Proving that I was worth the commission, the uniform my parents bought for me.’ I shook my head. ‘I should have seen what I held in my hands. Instead I let them fall through my fingers.’

  ‘Nobody lives without regret,’ Ezabeth said. ‘Least of all not here, under this sky.’

  I carry many painful memories. On my right arm, nestled amongst the green-ink skulls there were three small flowers, half bloomed. I put them there so that I would remember. So that I had to remember, even when I didn’t want to.

  ‘She gave me children and I was too young, too self-absorbed to appreciate how much they were worth,’ I said. ‘She jumped from the high tower on midsummer’s eve, but it was the shame that killed her, long before that. You know the story. Everyone knows the story.’

  ‘That blame isn’t yours to claim,’ Ezabeth said. ‘You weren’t the one that demanded the duel. Only the spirits can judge you.’

  ‘There’s times that I’ve thought it would have been better if I’d let Torolo Mancono run me through. I was the one that survived but my name died that night. Our name. My children’s name. When she jumped, she took them with her as revenge, I think. Revenge for making her an outcast, wife to a monster.’

  ‘You’re no more to blame for her choices than you are for mine,’ Ezabeth said. A few sparks crackled from her fingertips, drifting lazily in the night. She wasn’t the first to say that to me and she would not be the last that I didn’t believe. Ezabeth reached out, hesitated, lowered her hand. ‘It was a cruel ending and the children were innocent. But you didn’t choose it.’

  ‘I’ll always do what I must,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t trade to have them back. But it’s not their deaths I regret. We’re born, we run and we die, and Death always wins the race in the end. It’s the years they were running that I regret. The years that I could have been a father and a husband, but instead I cowered away on the Range. I found it easier to face the broken sky than to see the hope in her eyes. Because whenever I was with her, I wanted her to be you. Wanted what we’d shared. Wanted that feeling again, and it was gone.’

  ‘We were just children,’ Ezabeth said. She sounded so much older, so much wiser, and free from the bitterness that coloured my every word. ‘We were just babes. Children in the summer,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t real.’

  ‘Then why does it feel like it still is?’ I snapped.

  Ezabeth tilted her veiled chin up, straightened her back. Steel ran through that spine, firmed up her posture. She radiated strength as strongly as she had light.

  ‘I am not that girl. You are not that boy. We changed, the world changed. You remember a girl in skirts who chased butterflies and named the rabbits in the field. I remember a young man who was so pleased to show me how he could ride a horse, and who brushed his hair whenever he thought I wasn’t looking. What are we now? A scarred, light-blind freak. A sodden drunk with more blood on his hands than the Spirit of Death. Life was cruel to pour our youth into such bitter moulds, but we are what we are. There is no summer for us. Not any more. The end is coming, and we both know how this will finish. With terror and death and Dhojaran soldiers trampling the fields, the marks of the Deep Kings upon the people. Harden your heart against such soft longing. We can neither of us afford it.’

  I stood silent as three-week old death, new insults scraping open the old wounds. She was right, of course. I wasn’t that optimistic, blind, joyous, foolish kid. I’d changed my name and become someone different. She’d changed her face and become someone else. Give a lie enough time and maybe the lie takes over the life.

  Our masks were our real faces now.

  Ezabeth looked at me, eyes defiant, daring me to say she was wrong. I couldn’t.

  I let that foolish dream of love turn hard and cold as black iron inside me. Let it crumple, shrivel and die. A fool’s dream. Better to go back to my old self. There were still plenty of people needed killing.

  25

  I thought I was done with it all. The dreams of military honours, the glory of the charge, the adulation of the nobility. That pile of goat shit had been buried in the dirt with my wife and children long ago. I’d spent ten years crawling through the muck with men I’d rather have gracked than greeted, taking the easiest, most tedious work. I’d scraped by making just enough coin to maintain a steady inebriation beneath a leaking roof and little more. I didn’t want to be mixed up with the greater schemes of the generals, the plots of the nobility or the bloody front lines against the drudge.

  Sometimes, we don’t get what we want. Usually, in fact. In my case, pretty much never.

  Dantry had slipped out at dawn and returned to tell us that Tnota was still alive. After the surgeon had removed the tangled mess of his arm, he had fallen into a fever. He would die, or he would live, and there was fuck all any of us could do about it.

  Bring him to me, Saravor’s silver serpent whispered through me, or maybe it was just my imagination.

  ‘No,’ Nenn told me plainly, a shadowed look in her eyes as she traced fingers across her belly. ‘I won’t let you. No.’ And I gave her the final say on that.

  I had to see Venzer. I’d known the Iron Goat for long enough to know that no matter what Herono and Adenauer might stoop to, no matter how they manipulated the river of coin flowing through the city, he was the shield that held back the Kings and their countless legions. He was a man of honour. I might have spat mine at his feet and broken his own law, but there wasn’t a better man in the states. I had to believe that. Had to cling to something.

  That only left Herono. She was the only other with the power to pull this many strings against us. I didn’t want to believe it, but there it was. She’d blocked Ezabeth when she went to the Order’s council. She’d sent me to hunt Ezabeth when she disappeared. She’d sent Stannard into the Misery and it had been her soldiers that turned up at the Maud. She didn’t need money and this had never been about profiteering, and she didn’t want Ezabeth dead. No. She had wanted Ezabeth to continue her research within the Maud.

  There was an army approaching Three-Six, an army like we hadn’t seen in four generations, and she was seeking proof that the Engine would not activate when they came.

  Was she seeking to make a deal with the enemy? The first rat off the sinking ship? Or was she just misguided? She was a damned hero. I felt polluted just thinking it, but I saw no other option.

  I had to go to Venzer and make him see the truth. Make him take Ezabeth into his protection. The Darling’s assault on the Maud surely proved that. I had to stand before him and insist that he believe me, a drunkard who refused to even wear a uniform, as I threw accusations at the most decorated prince of
the republic. I had to tell him that he’d been blind, that one of our greatest commanders had tried to murder her own kin, had killed innocents in the process.

  I had to tell him that somehow, beyond sense and reason, Prince Herono of Heirengrad was working against the Range.

  I’d be lucky not to be thrown in the white cells.

  But if I succeeded? Ezabeth had to have access to the heart of the Engine. The Lady of the Waves was on Pyre and we might get a communicator message through to her. Implore her to come, implore her to save us. I already knew that she would not respond. But damn it to the hells, I was going to try.

  I was running on fumes and blind hope now. Blind hope that the last card to turn was the one to complete the trick. An awful lot to gamble on, but I was all in at this point.

  A trio of mule-drawn carts plodded slowly and inexorably away from the Misery. The familiar drab green of body bags crowded for space within the carts. A pair of soldiers drove with drawn, wan faces.

  ‘Who got gracked?’ I called to them as they grumbled along the cobbles.

  ‘One o’ the big patrols,’ the lead soldier answered me. ‘Lieutenant Mirkov. Fifty men. They were only twenty miles deep. Nearly in sight of the fucking walls.’

  ‘Which battalion?’ I called, but they were past me now.

  ‘Eleventh,’ he shot back over his shoulder.

  The eleventh were rookies, green as algae and younger than hell. I felt more than a chill as I watched the wagons of dead pass by. The corpses were packed in tight, side by side like food in a larder. If the Kings were sending hunting patrols that close to Valengrad then things were worse than I had figured. They were practically daring us to come out for them.

  Maybe they were.

  Venzer only had four thousand men in Valengrad, the rest having marched north to Station Three-Six. Spirits, but we were in the shit now.

  I stalked blackly towards the citadel. A light summer rain had begun to fall, a welcome relief from the humidity. I couldn’t keep my thoughts from Tnota. He was one of my oldest friends, one of my only friends. That matchlock ball had been meant for Dantry, but it was my fault he was mixed up in this. I was too engrossed in my own thoughts, didn’t keep myself bright.