Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  Reality began to come back into focus. Two of Herono’s men had moved across to the furnace, had begun to load it.

  ‘Tell me where to find Ezabeth Tanza,’ Herono said coldly.

  ‘Fuck yourself in hell,’ I mumbled.

  The next blow from those brass knuckles was ill judged. I felt my brain bounce around inside my skull, and then Herono couldn’t ask me any more questions because the idiot had knocked me out cold.

  26

  Perception began to reaffirm itself. I didn’t want it to. The blow from those brass knuckles had set my head to screaming, a sharp and brutal pain digging into the left side of my head, the worst of it just above the temple. Getting punched in the face with a metal bar will do that. The initial acknowledgement of deep, aching pain was followed by a swell of nausea and dizziness. My eyes were closed and I realised from the pain in my arms that I was hanging forwards, my wrists bound taut against the post behind me keeping me upright. I’d blacked out. It was quiet but I could hear the light, soft sounds of somebody moving not far away. Just one person, I thought. I could hear the crackle of something aflame, smell the heat of the furnace. I remained entirely still. Seemed best to play dead and keep my head down. No point in torturing an unconscious man.

  Getting punched unconscious was the best thing that could have happened to me. Not many situations where that’s true. I’d have to thank Herono for that. The smell of vomit was thick on my clothes.

  ‘You can come in. I sent them all away.’ That was Herono.

  ‘This must go faster.’ A young voice. Childish even. I’d heard it before. My stomach did a double clench and I had to steel my limbs against movement. It couldn’t be.

  ‘Can you wake him?’

  ‘I could tear his mind open, but killing that Spinner cost me. Rovelle was strong. I need to gather my reserves. He’ll confess quickly enough. Galharrow’s all talk. Show him pain and he’ll spill.’ The voice was male but unbroken. A child. It was the Darling from Station Twelve, the same one that had chased us out of the Maud. You don’t forget a voice like that. It haunts your nightmares, sours your dreams, but there was something bizarrely familiar about it as well.

  It was worrying that the Darling had any kind of opinion about me at all. But I had other things to worry about just then.

  Herono was in league with one of the Deep Kings’ creatures. For all that she’d clearly had some kind of agenda against Dantry or Ezabeth or both of them, I hadn’t figured her for a sympathiser. She was a prince, noblest of blood, master of one of the richest city states in the Alliance. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘I need that girl,’ the Darling said again. ‘The master will not tolerate failure. You know that.’

  ‘I know,’ Herono agreed. ‘They aren’t going anywhere. They have no allies in Valengrad, I’ve made sure of that. I have men watching every gate. They are trapped here, and every resource I have is turned to finding them. Trust me.’

  ‘If she dies, her genius dies with her,’ the Darling said fiercely. ‘I cannot permit that. She may only be a Spinner, but only she can tell us for certain. She must prove whether the heart of Nall’s Engine still burns. If the way is safe for the Kings.’

  ‘The only true test is to access the heart itself,’ Herono said. ‘Without that all we have is an incomplete theory. But Venzer guards the heart even from me, and beyond his authority lie the wards Nall placed there. There is no way to breach it.’

  ‘Not yet,’ the Darling said. Its frustration simmered hot and low in the stagnant air. ‘But I will find a way, even if I have to bring the whole city down around me. Until I succeed, the master believes the girl’s theory will provide the proof he needs. Ensure that he receives it.’

  ‘You should have let me cut it out of her in the first place,’ Herono said.

  ‘No. If she is wrong, if the heart of the Engine is still afire then maintaining your position is vital. If this is not the hour for victory, it will come, eventually. The master is eternal. He is willing to wait.’

  They fell silent for a time and I heard something being moved around in the forge, the rustle of ash and the collapse of some burned thing. My time like this was limited. Someone would realise I was awake and start to hurt me again. Knowing that, and being able to do something with the information were two entirely different things.

  ‘My men are returning,’ Herono said. ‘You must go.’

  ‘Burn the information out of this man, and do it now,’ the Darling hissed. ‘My patience grows thin. So too does our King’s. She must be yours before night falls or we risk losing her altogether. I must go.’

  A door closed somewhere. The main double doors clunked open and then shut again.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘They didn’t go to the citadel, or back to Willows, your grace,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘Wherever they are, they’re staying low. I’ve got all your ears out listening but the network will take time to find anything. We gotta make this one squeal on ’em if you want to know it faster.’

  ‘You do it,’ Herono said with a resigned sigh. ‘I haven’t the patience to tease it out of him.’

  A bucket of water went over me. It stank as badly as the vomit, probably drawn from the gutter outside. It got in my nose, and though I tried to remain still, the soldier forced my head up.

  ‘He’s awake, your grace. Aren’t you, old lad?’ A familiar voice.

  Strong, calloused fingers gripped my beard and drew my head up. The first thing I saw as I opened my eyes were the roses. Roses and thorns, tattoos coiling around a strong forearm. I’d seen those before. An ugly face blurrily moved into focus. Stannard had got his face stitched together, the flesh angry, red, still weeping. He patted me on the cheek affectionately, gave me a wink.

  ‘You fucking idiot. Herono’s working for the drudge,’ I growled.

  ‘You know, your shit would be more convincing if I hadn’t found you and the witch trying to steal from Maldon’s place,’ he said. ‘We go there to make sure his blasphemy don’t fall into the wrong hands, and what happens? You turn up to rob the fucking place.’ He spoke from the corner of his mouth, wincing as the movement of his face tugged at the neat black stitches. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this.’ He moved off to plunge a poker into the fire. Stannard started humming to himself, music without melody, noises to keep his mind ticking over as he waited to deliver the pain. The doors opened and a troop of his cohorts showed up, nasty-looking old bastards ready for a show. A good crowd, twenty in all. A couple of them I recognised, men I’d seen around Herono’s house at the Willows or in the taverns. Two of them lounged nearby, a pottery jug passing between them.

  ‘Any chance I can get a hit of that?’ I asked, but they gave me a disgusted look and kept at it. I wondered how long these men had been serving Herono, how many dark alley jobs they’d pulled for her when the candles burned low. How many Otto Lindricks had they smashed around, just as I had? If it wasn’t for fortune’s turn, I could have been sitting with them. A worrying thought but infinitely less worrying than what they were about to watch happen to me.

  A cowardly part of me still said it was time to confess. I’d played this out for as long as I could but the glow and the stink of the forge as it devoured coals and turned the black rods red was putting one hell of a terror in me. I didn’t owe the Tanzas shit. I’d done my part by them already. I ought to give them up. Spill the address, hope that was enough to spare my flesh from being roasted. I’d smelled it too often, from cannon fire, from the spells of Battle Spinners, from my own black questionings.

  Stannard shifted the iron in the fire. Tears of abject terror began to well in my eyes. Only an idiot doesn’t feel their breath turn cold at the prospect of torture. There’s no holding out against it. I knew that I’d break, of course I would. I didn’t know how many thrusts of the poker I’d take before it wasn’t worth it any more. Maybe just one. In the milit
ary they don’t even try to train you to endure it. There’s no point. No strategy can be successful. In the end, everyone begs. In the end, everyone breaks. That’s just how it works.

  I should give them up. But I didn’t. Couldn’t have explained it any further than that.

  The poker was starting to glow red at the tip. Not quite hot enough, not yet. Stannard knew his business. Wasn’t his first time playing the torturer either. Prince Herono sat with a faraway look, deep in thought, somewhere else. Nice to know that my impending agonised destruction wasn’t the most important thing on her mind. I could smell the iron getting hot, giving the air that forge-baked hollowness, the dry, empty flatness of scorched metal. I didn’t have much more time for sanity. There was a good chance that this would break me completely. I thought back on what I ought to have done with my life. A lot of failures in there, but a couple of victories too. A lot of people had relied on me, too many for my own ability. I’d never been suited to lead, not as a general. I’d been too young for it, but I’d done my best. The dead didn’t care about my best. They littered the path of the rout from Adrogorsk, nothing but empty skulls and bones picked clean beneath the bronze of the sky.

  It was my kids that I had failed the most. In a sense, my failure at Adrogorsk had killed them too. Not straight away. Defeats happened. Adrogorsk had been a position of strategic importance back then, or at least we all thought so. We held it for four months, deep in the Misery, the ruins of a once beautiful centre of art and leisure, a city crushed to rubble by Crowfoot’s weapon. We held those ruins, started trying to build them into a fortification, something we could defend. The drudge didn’t want that, and they sent an army. We could have fought them, could have tried to hold. For three days we bore the cannon fire and the Darlings’ spells. The general took an arrow in the shoulder, into the bone, the infection turning black and stinking in a handful of fevered days. We lost a lieutenant general on the eastern wall to climbers, another to misfiring artillery. One by one the rankers dropped until I was somehow next in line, a brigadier risen to command the whole fucking force. Then word came through the communicator, a message from Crowfoot. Philon was coming in person, risking a confrontation between wizards. He’d called our bluff; the Nameless had no inclination to do battle with a King over a heap of rubble, so I signalled our retreat. I hadn’t known that a second army lay in wait for us, smashing into our columns as we fell back towards Station Forty-One.

  Nine thousand men weigh heavy on your conscience. But they were soldiers, and truth be told I hadn’t liked any of them anyway.

  It was the kids that weighed the most. I got back alive. Torolo Mancono called me an incompetent wretch so I killed the bastard for nothing more than his angry words and my pride. When my wife heard of my disgrace, she took those little lives out of the world and herself with them. Couldn’t bear the dishonour, couldn’t bear to live with the shame. I’d never even seen the boy, born after I returned to the front with high dreams of gilded epaulettes and cries of glory. Against the backdrop of the thousands I’d led to their deaths, against the dozens I’d led to their deaths since, with all the fucking blood that I’d felt splash against my face and every screaming bastard I’d severed from his future, it was the unseen baby that haunted me the most.

  The world is a cruel mother, a matron of darkness, selfishness, greed and misery. For most, their time suckling at her breast is naught but a scramble through stinging, tearing briars before a naked, shameful collapse as the flesh gives out. And yet in the bright eyes of every newborn there lies a spark, a potential for goodness, the possibility of a life worth living. That spark deserves its chance. And though most of them will turn out to be as worthless as the parents that sired them, while the cruelty of the earth will tell them to release their innocence and join in the drawing of daggers, every now and then one manages to clutch to their beauty and refuses to release it into the dark.

  I would never manage that myself, but someone else would. While the Range held, there was still that chance. No fucking way was I going to speak.

  Stannard stepped forward with his glowing poker, white and yellow and red, and I gritted my teeth and tilted back my chin and I stared at him with every bitter thread of hatred, every scrap of loathing that I held deep in the black echo of my soul. The mess I’d made of his face reminded him to enjoy his work.

  ‘Where is Ezabeth Tanza?’ Prince Herono asked from across the room. Her agent waited patiently. I had to refuse to answer before he was allowed to start burning me.

  The lights came on, casting the empty ironworks into the pale brightness of phos-tube light. There were still a few glass tubes running around the ceiling.

  ‘I thought the generator was gone?’ Herono said irritably to one of her soldiers. ‘Why have we been sitting in the dark all this time if there was a generator all along?’

  Stannard scratched at his quietly leaking stitches. His eyes followed the tubes along the wall, where they ran downwards to an empty space. The ends of the tubes were just broken glass, and the phos light was spilling out of them there. Phos moves like water, or smoke, or whatever else needs to stay in its pipes, but this light stopped there, curling back on itself like some lazy serpent. The would-be torturer chewed his lip, wondering, but Herono didn’t care enough to notice.

  ‘Where is Ezabeth Tanza?’ she asked again.

  ‘I’m here!’ she called, voice filling the room, louder than a trumpet blast. The prince’s guards started up from their positions around the room, hands going to hilts. Herono’s lone eye swivelled oddly in its socket.

  The doors exploded inwards, not just staved in but annihilated. Shards of splintered wood filled the room, a swarm of furious, stinging hornets. Stannard lost hold of the poker as half a dozen inch-long splinters speared the meat of his arms. He shrieked as he tried to shield himself from the blast, but his loss of dignity was mirrored a dozen times across the work floor. Daylight, easily forgotten in the seclusion of the ironworks, was blinding through the open portal, a white glare.

  An unmistakable silhouette appeared black against that brightness, Nenn moving fast and low in a fighting crouch. She sprang through the portal, a primed harquebus in her hands and the gunpowder roared in spite as she blasted one man from his feet. Before the smoke had cleared she was coming through it, fiercer than hell and spitting hate and fury as she slung herself at Herono’s men.

  The first soldier she met was a veteran. He’d fought in the Misery and he knew his swordplay but Nenn was a force of nature. She slashed with her cutlass, drawing a low parry before stepping in fast, hacking through the side of the man’s head. He went down screaming, not yet dead but not long alive either.

  ‘Protect me!’ Herono cried, her business with me forgotten. More men appeared in the doorway, men with primed harquebuses, and blast followed blast followed blast as they gave fire. At such close quarters it was hard for them to miss at first, four or five of Herono’s boys sent flying, ribs blown out of their backs. The discharged smoke held its place in the air, thickening and hanging, spreading as gun followed gun. I counted a dozen flash-pans fired, and then whoever had come for me rushed through with blades.

  The light beaming down from the tubes died as quickly as it had come, leaving the fighters in a half-darkness of smoke and red forge light. I was forgotten. Blades rang through the fog, shapes flitting this way and that, men screamed and bodies crunched as they struck the workshop floor. My would-be torturer had dropped his poker at the first blast and taken up a longsword, charging forward into the melee with broad strokes. He disappeared into the blossoming clouds of powder smoke as he roared and set about trying to dismember somebody.

  ‘Give us a hand, boss,’ Wheedle said, appearing behind me, grinning like the fucking idiot he is. He sawed with a knife and pain shot up my forearms as they came free. He threw me the dagger, laughed once and then was off seeking prey in the chaos.

  Time for anger. Time f
or vengeance. The treacherous bastards were about to understand why you do not, not with the backing of princes, not with the backing of Darlings or Kings or the spirits of hatred themselves, fuck with Ryhalt Galharrow.

  The first man had his back to me and I put Wheedle’s blade into his neck three times. As he dropped I took his longsword, a fine weapon which is as useless as a spun sugar kettle if you don’t see your enemy coming. Another of Herono’s veterans was locked up against one of my new recruits, each having grabbed the other’s sword hand as they struggled against one another. I delivered the stroke of wrath, the longsword hewing half of Herono’s man’s head away, giving the kid a good soaking. I was grinning as I cleaved him, and the boy grinned back at me, hungry for the kill.

  I sought Stannard out.

  His sword was bloody; he’d done for some poor bastard already, suffered a light cut to the forearm for it but wasn’t slowing down. The look in his eyes said he wanted to kill me. The look in mine said I meant him to suffer before he died.

  He came in hard, half technique and half power, the long blade shearing the air. I stepped right, struck across his blade and blasted it from its trajectory. The art of swordsmanship is to flow, to never stop moving, and my counter swung around in a blow aimed at his head. Stannard was fast. He responded instinctively, moving right and cutting at my overhand strike in a mirror of the counter I’d just used. Sparks sprang into the air as the metal struck a chime into the fog. As the blow came back at me I struck across, lateral and high with a thwarting cut and he barely managed to stop me taking the point into his face. His moment of hesitation cost him. I wound his sword down, drove forward and was rewarded with his breathless gasp as a foot of steel punched through his gut.