Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘I would have words with you, Servant of Acradius,’ I said. A formal way to begin, but the drudge like formality. When they get mind-fucked they tend to lose their sense of humour.

  The captain was surprised to hear me clicking and buzzing through its language. He shifted his feet in the dirt, a fighting posture, hand moving to the hilt of his sword. I made no move towards my own. I wasn’t threatened by one drudge, no matter how deeply its god had stamped his ownership into its head.

  ‘What are you?’ the captain asked.

  ‘I’m a man,’ I said. Since he was all nervy with his sword, I put my pack and gun down on the ground, though it wasn’t good for the canvas to be in contact with the sand. The Misery has a tendency to decay things, fraying them away a thread at a time until there’s nothing left. Cloth, iron, people, it breaks them down just the same.

  ‘You are the Misery’s Son?’ he asked. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’m just a man,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ the captain said. ‘You are something else.’ He was right.

  ‘I’m not like them,’ I said. ‘You understand that I have already killed you, don’t you?’

  The captain’s orblike eyes bulged from his flat face, but they swivelled across to the navigator’s bled-out corpse.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You were ordered to find me. Why?’ It helped to keep the drudge focused if you mentioned their overlords at every chance you got. They were obsessed with them.

  ‘You are an abomination. The gods will not permit your existence,’ the drudge said. He bared thick, square teeth. ‘I am honoured to die if it means the rightful rulers of this world will at last have their throne. There will be peace at last.’

  ‘You can’t kill me,’ I said. ‘That much should be obvious to you.’

  ‘You cannot defy the will of the Deep Emperor,’ he said with utter certainty. Emperor? I kept my face still, but the word rang hard in my chest.

  ‘Acradius styles himself emperor above his brothers now?’

  ‘He is the emperor,’ the drudge said, as though I questioned where to find the sky. ‘Your death is only a matter of time. Defend yourself.’

  We drew swords, and he was strong and skilled, but it was over in a matter of heartbeats. He staggered back a couple of steps as blood welled from his neck. Couldn’t believe that I’d hit him that fast. He fell to his knees.

  A lot about me had changed down the years. I was fifty years old, but I was stronger and faster than a man of half my years. Maybe too strong. Maybe too fast. I was different, now.

  As the captain fell onto his face to bleed into the sand, I felt a little tug at my consciousness. It was the grass. It wanted the captain’s body and couldn’t reach it. I was grateful that it had let me pass, so I rolled him up the slope until the glassy blades could began to spear and bite. There’d be nothing left of him before long. The grass wanted the navigator as well, but one trip back up the slope was enough. My leg was still prone to complaining if I exerted myself too much, and besides, I had other plans for the cadaver. I pegged it down using the captain’s sword and left it there.

  My work was done, but there were still the captain and navigator’s mounts to see to, as well as the hurks. They didn’t pose any threat, but they’d attract the bigger Misery things. As a general rule the smaller things left me alone, but the really big ones didn’t give a shit how much of the Misery I’d soaked up. Lately, I’d seen a heavy black shape in the sky, with scorpion tails, broad wings, and more than one head. It left a trail of black, oily smoke where it passed through the sky – a Shantar. However the Misery had changed me, I’d not last half a minute against one of those. Glancing up now, I could make out a trail in the sky, but distantly, towards what was probably south.

  I had a grim feeling that the drudge were not the only things looking for me in the Misery.

  The hurks would draw the Shantar, or anything else that came this way. I checked over the baggage for anything that I could use. My knife had suffered over the last months, pitted and growing brittle, and I was glad of a replacement. My boots were worse, but nothing the drudge had would fit me. Dealing with the beasts was simple enough. I got them roped together, then fired a blank into the air. Up close, the noise of it sent the simple beasts into a panic, and they stampeded off the same way that their former owners had gone. That grass owed me a thank-you.

  It was time to go home. I knew which way I had come from, but that didn’t mean it was the way back. I knelt and put a hand against the Misery’s gravel. The magic bled up into my palm like a contagion, a corruption seeking to enter all things and turn them to its darkness. I breathed in, tasted her foulness against my teeth, but I’d spent so long out here in the fume and the ache of it carried a bittersweet tang. I reached down into the earth, breathed out, and let the Misery tell me where north lay today.

  I became part of the earth. Not one with it, she was far too grand a thing for me to blend so completely, but we shared.

  Through her, I could feel him. Distant. Vast. Somehow both disconnected from the whole and intricately its essence, he was out there, somewhere, beyond. He was in torment, and he was agonised and weak after he and the other Nameless had gone head-to-head with the Deep Kings to stop the rising of The Sleeper, after they broke the world for a second time. Crowfoot. My master.

  The sky howled, an aching sob of suffering. Red clouds, threaded with veins of poison black, brewed hard in the east. The poison rain was a new enemy, even out here. It had begun with the Crowfall, bringing lurid visions and madness to those caught in its path. I had to be back under cover before it hit.

  I drew my new knife and sliced a shallow cut across my right forearm amongst the lattice of pale scars crossing the old tattoos. A few drops of blood fell onto the Misery-sands, and she welcomed the offering. A part of me, becoming a part of her. It was a bargain of sorts. I took, but I also gave.

  I dreamed my way down into the world, and I saw how the land had changed, how reality had shifted over the hours, the months, the moons. I found the Always House, and turned to head in that direction. It had only taken me two hours to intercept the drudge patrol, but it was going to be five hours back, past a lake of black tar that hadn’t been there before.

  2

  The clouds closed in faster than I’d expected. Bad colour covered the world, and I ran.

  The tell-tale trail of smoke that rose from the chimney of the Always House appeared ahead of me. It sat atop a rise in the land, a comfortable country cottage, splendid in its isolation.

  Little in the Misery survived the Heart of the Void, but the catastrophic discharge of corruption had obeyed no rules. Where it had levelled the cities of Clear and Adrogorsk, it had torn this one cottage out of time and left it there. Unchanging, a blip in the fabric of reality, an island caught in a temporal distortion that meant that every day it was restored to exactly the same state.

  I’d cut it close, and I was still a hundred yards from shelter when the sky opened. I pulled my hood up as the hissing drops fell, but the fabric soaked through quickly and the rain stung where it bled through, burning like nettle rash. Nenn’s ghost had buggered off, which was a shame since I sometimes thought that, had she lived, she might have enjoyed the stinging rain the way she’d grown to enjoy chillies. I ran harder, seeking a roof before too many of the venomous drops burned my skin, and the visions began to dance before my eyes.

  I thumped the door open. It stuck for a moment, as it always did, and then I was out of the rain. I hung my coat by the ever-lit hearth, used an old apron to wipe the stinging water from my hands. The sting didn’t matter. I had endured worse and more. The visions it brought were the real threat. Terrifying, maddening glimpses of impossible things. A flurry of dark images, little more than impressions, and the maddening sense of sand, slipping away through trembling fingers. A face that could not be seen. Distant lives, crumblin
g into ash one by one. I had thought it had meaning once, but it was overwhelming, senseless, a shivering flurry of warped notions and fluttering pain, echoes of unknowable things. Those that got caught in it were left gibbering for days. The black rain had begun with the Crowfall. Many had died. More collateral damage in Crowfoot’s endless war.

  No visions today. I wasn’t wet enough. I stripped off my sodden things, wedged the door shut, and went to the important business – making sure my matchlock and sword were dry. The little gear I had was too precious to risk rust.

  I had discovered the Always House a long time ago, back when I was just gaining confidence in my ability to navigate the Misery. Back then, my trips had still been short. A month, maybe two. Over time I had begun to regard the Always House as mine, though given its time-lost nature, ownership was impossible.

  Six years. I’d spent the best part of six spirits-damned years out here, alone but for the ghosts. It would be worth it, I told myself. When all was said and done, when it all came to a head and I could cast aside the deceit we had woven, when everyone that needed to die lay broken, it would be worth it. I had to believe that.

  The house had been a simple dwelling, a regular farmhouse in a regular village somewhere outside the city of Clear. The city had not survived the Heart of the Void, but this one house had. Standing alone, surrounded by a patch of grass that never wilted, never required water. While the elemental devastation had warped and reshaped the world around it, some random stray spiral of magic had taken this house and cast it aside. It still had walls, a thatched roof that was in need of replacing on what was usually the northern exposure, simple panes of yellow glass in the windows. Its owners had been farmers, that much I could tell by the bill hook, the shears, the threshing flail, and other tools left piled in a corner. When the cataclysm had come, someone had been cooking pottage with leeks, onions, and three small bites of mutton. One of those morsels of meat was slightly larger than the others, and a second had a shard of bone in it. I knew them perfectly; every day, shortly after dawn, everything reverted to the state it had been in before. The pottage was always cooking, always contained precisely the same bits of food. The bag of hard old oats was back in the pantry, the mouse droppings lined the wall. The house groaned and trembled just before it happened, creaking as time bent and twisted itself out. I had no desire to know what would happen to me if I ever stayed inside during its reversion. The water barrel had been full when the Heart of the Void struck. That was the discovery that allowed me to become self-reliant for longer periods out in the Misery. At first I’d wished that those long-gone farmers had left me a bottle of brandy or a keg of beer, but after all this time, I found that I didn’t miss the drink. It was a quiet, humble existence, but that’s what life holds for most folk. There were times when I even found a measure of peace.

  I cleaned my weapons thoroughly, treated them with a little oil, then wiped them down with a cloth. It was the last oil I had, my supplies spent. The distortion worked two ways. When the Always House reset what had been there before, it also devoured anything that was left inside. I’d learned that the hard way on my first visit, having left my supplies in what I thought was a safe place, only to find everything gone on my return. I’d tested it with rocks since then. I had no idea what happened to the things that were lost, but if I left the house, I took all of my possessions with me.

  Why didn’t it devour me? Damned if I knew. Maybe being alive tethered me to the world more firmly, but that was a guess, and in truth it’s probably best not to find out. You don’t try to understand the Misery, you just try to survive it.

  I barred the door. None of the Misery things came near the Always House, not even the big ones. Still, it would have felt remiss to leave them an open invitation.

  I dipped myself a cup of water. Cool, clean, fresh. Like farm life turned to liquid. Like life.

  Evening darkened the sky, but I had fire and food, water and warmth. All the things a man might need. The rain lasted for hours. The drudge’s words had unsettled me, and I brooded, alone with my thoughts. That the Deep Kings knew that I was out here was bad enough. They were hunting me, and would send more of their twisted servants. I only had to slip up once to find myself surrounded and brought down, and I hadn’t the supplies to last out here much longer.

  I needed to head back to the Range to resupply. Maybe tomorrow. I was out of ammunition, oil, pretty much everything. Station Four-Four were used to me coming and going, though every time they seemed less and less pleased to see me. I couldn’t blame them. The Misery had been changing me day by day, year by year. My skin had changed; so had my eyes. They could probably smell the taint upon me. None of it was good.

  All three moons had hidden, the only light ebbing from the glowing white-bronze cracks in the sky. When the rain passed I dragged a chair outside onto the decking and leaned back, looked out over what had once been a horror and now – somehow – had become a lonely kind of home. I couldn’t have said how long it had been since I’d spoken with anyone who wasn’t dead. Hard to chart the progress of days and seasons when there’s only the oppressive rising heat of the Misery and the wailing sky. It was a long walk to Valengrad. I seldom left the Misery at all now and it had been six months, perhaps, since my last trek back. The strange looks the civilians gave me hadn’t left me champing to return.

  Distantly, I saw the dark trail left by the flying thing, crawling so slowly across the sky that it had to be leagues away. Maybe there was more than one, but I didn’t think so.

  Evenings were long in the Misery. Long and tedious. At first, when I made frequent trips back to the city, I tried bringing books with me. The problem was, if I left them in the Always House they disappeared, if I buried them outside it the Misery might move them, and I couldn’t carry stacks of paper around with me. So instead I’d invested in just two small, tightly written little texts that Dantry thought were essential to the plan we’d thrashed out in the days after Marshal Davandein retook Valengrad. Preparations for what had to come. The first was a treatise written on the art of light spinning. The second was a guide to higher-level mathematics. They were dense, impenetrable, and joyless expositions of their respective sciences, but in my ignorance their logic wheels and energy rotations provided puzzles long and deep enough to while away the hours. I had read them over and over, until I could have taught them by rote. It wasn’t enough. I still didn’t know, not exactly, what I had to do.

  I thumbed the overthumbed pages again but couldn’t focus and found myself staring off into the cracks in the sky, as though I’d see the final piece I needed in those dim lights.

  ‘Thinking about her again?’ Nenn said. She propped her feet up on the decking’s rail, as was her wont. Her boots made no sound.

  ‘You seem to think I am, which means either I am, or that I’m thinking about thinking about her,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t help nothing to keep thinking about the dead.’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you.’

  Nenn gave me a spectral grin, her teeth translucent green-white where they should have been black as tar.

  ‘It’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? Ghosts. You out here. Her, dead but trapped in the light. Even this place. What is the Misery but the ghost of Crowfoot’s fury?’

  ‘Such a fucking poet!’ Nenn’s ghost stood up, stretched her arms, and gave a yawn. Her mouth opened too wide. Any real jaw would have cracked, real skin would have split. I didn’t pay it any heed. I’d seen it all before. She rounded it out with a bellowing ghost-fart.

  ‘I liked you much better when you were alive,’ I said. The ghost didn’t care. She wasn’t real anyway.

  ‘You’ll get her out of your system one day,’ Nenn said.

  ‘It wasn’t fair,’ I said. ‘She didn’t deserve to die. Ezabeth saved us all. She deserved better.’

  Nenn snorted. ‘In all the blades you’ve swung and bones you’ve cr
acked, all the arrows and the cannon fire and the disease and the gangrene, all the Spinners and Engines and Deep Kings, you ever know death to take those that deserve it first?’

  She had a point. The drudge I’d goaded to their deaths had been men, once, or at least their ancestors had been. Wasn’t their fault they were marked and changed by the Kings. They were just soldiers, same as I was. Same as all those dumb kids I’d got killed in the rout from Adrogorsk, same as the men I’d told to stand on the walls of Valengrad as Shavada tore it out from under them. I shouldn’t have hated the drudge for what they were. They were the same as us, but they weren’t like us and I did hate them for it. It was a prejudice I could live with. Truth was I’d have killed an empire of them if it would have brought Ezabeth Tanza back from the fire.

  What would she have made of me now? Not much. She hadn’t liked the old me a whole lot, most of the time. I couldn’t claim that the last ten years had done much to improve me.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I told the ghost. Exactly as I’d told her the last time she had come to sit with me. Nenn would come up onto the deck, but her shade never entered the house. Nothing of the Misery would enter the Always House. It was even proof against gillings, although I hadn’t seen any of them in a long time. None of the Misery’s creatures wanted in. They knew it wasn’t theirs.

  Night came and went. Dawn brought a fog with it, and I stayed inside until it passed. Fog’s never a good thing, but in the Misery it can do strange things. There are creatures that live in the fog and nowhere else, and the spirits only know where they go when the fog dissipates. Best not to tangle with them. There are worse things than being eaten in the Misery. Only when the sun rose alongside the moons, golden Eala and Clada’s blue coolness, did I venture out to hunt.