Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  The city smelled the same. People. Animals. Industry. Canal water. I almost missed the Misery’s tang. People hurried by, busy about their work.

  Sometimes I felt that everything I’d done in the last thirty years had been for Valengrad, its stones, its people, but if I was honest, I’d done it all for two little lives that I’d wanted to save more than anything, and a deal that had drawn me one step back from the brink. I wasn’t some altruist working to save others. I’d only met a handful of people in my life who were. Ezabeth had burned for it, and Dantry was the most wanted criminal in all the states, so it hadn’t got either of them far.

  It wasn’t until I could make out the citadel that I saw that my initial assessment was wrong. Things were not the same at all. A chunk of the citadel was missing. The western face ended in ragged, broken stonework. We stopped dead in the street and stared at the damage, open-mouthed and horrified. The broken neon letters across the citadel’s front read COURA, the letters sputtering weakly.

  Unthinkable. My jaw hung open.

  ‘Big Dog says, “What in the fuck could have done that to the citadel?”’ Tnota said.

  ‘First time I ever heard your Big Dog ask a question,’ I said. ‘First time me and him are on the same page.’ Tnota just nodded.

  Goggles on, dust-mask up, hood over my head, we rode into the city. The guards at the gate saw that we had nothing to trade so they waved us through without much concern. Gate duty is tedious at the best of times, and they had little interest in three old men. I pulled us up to talk to them.

  ‘What happened to the citadel?’ I asked.

  ‘No one’s saying,’ the guard said. He avoided looking at it.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Two days back. There was a crash in the night, and the west wing was gone.’

  He was an older man. He’d lived through Shavada’s attack on the wall, and the sky-fires raining down upon the city. And of course, the Misery. The damage to the citadel had still shaken him. We rode on.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Tnota asked. He looked grim.

  ‘Set up base. Rooms at an inn. Not a shit-hole. Not The Bell either. Nowhere that we’re likely to be recognised.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to recognise you these days,’ Giralt said. His sour mood had made him start jabbing at me. I hadn’t the heart to get pissed at him over it. Didn’t blame him, if I was honest.

  ‘But they’d recognise Tnota,’ I said. ‘I’ll hole up. I need you to go shopping for me.’

  Pikes was a soldier district and we found a decent-looking inn there which not only seemed free from vermin and bedbugs but boasted an impressive array of ales and spirits. We went for a soldier place because I figured they’d be less likely to care that I was covering my face up, and the small arsenal of weaponry I carried up to our room didn’t raise any eyebrows. Part of me had worried that Tnota’s name would have been shouted by some old acquaintance on entering, and from there it wouldn’t take a genius to equate the six-six man behind him with his old drinking buddy. I stooped low, trying to hide my height. Be less intimidating. The girl who got Tnota to sign his name in her book didn’t seem to care who we were, provided that we could pay.

  We took adjoining rooms. They were comfortable, the beds springy and the fireplaces freshly laid. I sent Tnota and Giralt shopping while I took a nap. I’d slept little on the journey down from the north and though I hadn’t seen any more riders in the night, I’d been on edge the whole time. I lay down and closed my eyes.

  I dreamed of Ezabeth. I seldom dreamed of her anymore, and the dreams didn’t hurt me the way they once had. Time will numb you to anything. There is nothing that a determined human being cannot come to cope with in time. It doesn’t mean that the pain of the loss is gone, or that its embers cease to burn, deep in your core. It just changes. It changes from the incapacitating agony of a gut punch to the solid, deep aching of a broken bone. It becomes familiar. You carry it with you, accepted, never to leave. When Tnota’s soft knock brought me back from slumber, the memory came with me, but I left the sting to some other, dreaming, me.

  They had done well.

  Cosmetics. Coloured powders, but mostly the thick white foundation that victims of rabbit-rash wore to mask their scarring. Spectacles with heavy, face-wrapping lenses shaped like teardrops. I’d seen phos-engineers wearing them, the yellow glass helping to protect their eyes from stray sparks and beams of condensed moonlight. And clothes, too. Some of them were tight – it had been a struggle to find castoffs that would fit me, but Valengrad had a roaring trade in dead men’s kit. They’d managed to pick up undergarments, breeches, socks, shirts, waistcoats, and, best of all, new boots. My boots had borne the brunt of the Misery. I felt like a child being presented with birthday gifts, and barely held myself back long enough to sponge myself off with a basin of water before I put them on. The water turned black. Then it steamed. More than just dust and dirt in there.

  My sponge-bath was only interrupted by one coughing fit. My lungs and throat felt like they were packed with shards of broken glass. When I wiped my mouth, strings of green-black tar clung to my lips. They carried the taint of the Misery, the familiar stench filling the room. My body was rejecting the Misery’s poison as soon as it was able. Either that, or I was dying. In both cases, I had more important things to worry about.

  I looked out across the rooftops, past the spires and columns of industrial smoke, to the broken citadel. No signs of fire, no fused stone or warped air that might indicate the aftermath of a magical catastrophe. The Engine and its projectors were far enough from the damage that, through either luck or design, it had not been afflicted. Did it matter, though? Nall was on his way out. I didn’t think that we could activate the Engine without him and, from what he’d told me, the Engine wasn’t going to protect us from Acradius anyway.

  ‘We need money,’ Tnota said, applying the last of the powders. My face felt thick and heavy with the cosmetics.

  ‘You running low?’

  ‘Didn’t have a lot to start with, and these rooms aren’t cheap. Only had enough for a couple more days in coin.’

  ‘I’ll sort something.’

  I’d brought no money of my own. I didn’t carry it around with me in the Misery for obvious reasons. Unfairly, I’d not even paused to consider it when I sent them out to buy me a disguise. I should have been thinking of them, but I wasn’t used to taking others into consideration. Tnota and Giralt hadn’t been flush with coin – Giralt had run a business. Everything he had was tied up in the stock I’d made him abandon. Little wonder he didn’t look at me as Tnota painted my face an off-white shade that resembled wall plaster.

  ‘We’ll get by, Captain. We always do,’ Tnota said. ‘You’re all done. You got less colour than milk, now, but the Big Dog says you’re mighty pretty. You don’t look normal with all this paint on, but you don’t look like something out of the Misery either.’

  The room had a mirror. I put the glasses on and checked myself out. I’d have laughed, but I might have cracked the paint.

  ‘Good enough,’ I said. I wore a head scarf and turned up the collar of the too-small greatcoat that Tnota had found for me. It was fine in length but the former owner had been far narrower in the chest and my upper arms were squeezed. I enjoyed the discouraging shade of matt brown more than I did the decorative gold banding across the breast.

  ‘What now?’ Giralt asked despondently. He stared out into the gathering dusk.

  ‘I need to find out who that guy North was, and who sent him,’ I said. ‘But first I need to make contact with the resident Blackwing captain.’

  I completed my outfit with a wide-brimmed hat that was, surprisingly, slightly too large, and hustled out into the city’s gloom. It wasn’t safe for me here, not entirely. I didn’t think there was much chance of running into anyone who’d recognise me through the paint, but Range Marshal Davandein hated me
. I wasn’t strictly an outlaw, but we were not friends and she had somehow pinned the blame on me for the devastating attack the Iron Sun had made on her army. I couldn’t forgive her for attacking the city, for butchering those poor idiots. Besides, there was my connection to Dantry to think about, and the Office of Urban Security might well decide that – Blackwing or not – I was the old ally most likely to know his whereabouts. I hadn’t been in contact with the citadel for years. They probably thought me dead.

  I ducked and slunk along shadowed roads and smog-stained streets, to a decent part of town that housed a bad sort of people. Lawyers are the worst. I have a deep hatred of bankers, but they at least pursue their greed with an honest kind of blatancy. The legal district was kept well swept and the wild pigs and dogs were hunted down by appointed wardens. It didn’t smell so bad which meant, being Valengrad, it still smelled bad.

  Nenn was waiting for me at a street corner.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I told her.

  ‘It’s my city too,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not what I mean. You shouldn’t be outside the Misery. You don’t exist outside the Misery.’

  ‘I don’t make the rules,’ she snapped. She started to walk alongside me, whistling my least favourite folk tune. She seemed all too real to me. Real enough that I could have reached out to poke her in the cheek, which I wouldn’t, because if she was real she’d probably bite my hand. ‘Maybe you’re just imagining me. Maybe all that sludge running through your veins has started getting into your head. You must have known it would.’

  ‘You telling me you’re a hallucination?’

  ‘Asking your own madness if you’re really experiencing it? You’re definitely crazy.’

  A broken clock tower loomed ahead of me, a black spire rising from a thick bank of green-tinged smog that rolled down from the glass factory. The tip of the tower had been destroyed by a sky-fire, and nobody had bothered to replace it. The clock itself still worked, sort of. It showed numbers, but they were generally wrong. I approached through the clinging, tacky green mist which clutched at me with long, tendril fingers before they inevitably snapped and returned to the fold. Klaunus’ decision to set up residence in this decaying monolith didn’t sit well with me. Blackwing relied on informants and the sinister chemical runoff around here hardly ushered them in. But if he wanted to keep prying eyes away then I supposed it had a certain sorcerous charm. And Klaunus was a sorcerer, after all.

  The smog ended as abruptly as it had begun, and I stepped clear into a ring of cold air surrounding the clock tower. Nenn hadn’t followed me through. Old beds of flowers had shrivelled and died, brown husks on black stalks, their vitality sapped away by toxins and a lack of light. A young man sitting by the doorway startled, disturbing the blanket that he wore around his shoulders. He had the look of a street thug from the Spills, badly inked tattoos across his fingers and beneath his eyes, his hair shaved into a single strip. He wore a sword, badly, but Klaunus had tried to dress him up to look like a doorman. The uniform might have seen better days, but he had a sparkly new timepiece on his wrist and a jewel in one ear. He still wasn’t convincing, and I took his measure in a glance. His childhood had been spent stealing, his teenage years running parcels of leaf and pollen, later on, fighting and intimidating. Bad nutrition as a kid meant he’d never be tall or carry much muscle, but he’d learned street-side savagery. Dangerous, unpredictable, a permanently cornered cat. He was proof of the problem with making captains out of the cream; they never really understood the world beneath their feet, and all the real work is done down in the mud.

  ‘I’m here to see Klaunus. He in?’ I said. The tough looked me over, didn’t like what he saw. I must have weighed twice what he did, but he was clearly used to making a show and a leap over everything. Showing his front, parading his dick. Probably why Klaunus had hired him.

  ‘Yeah? Maybe he doesn’t wanna see you. The fuck you think you are?’ he asked. Definite Spills accent.

  ‘Blackwing Captain Galharrow,’ I said.

  He started at my name. Then he nodded a bunch of times.

  ‘Oh, got you, yes sir I got you,’ he said eagerly. His head bobbed up and down and the front and bravado melted away to be replaced by something else. Probably not respect. Fear, maybe, if he’d heard the stories about me. Nobody spoke of my brief stint as acting Range Marshal anymore, it was the tales of night-time raids and broken men that lay in my shadow now. Survive the world long enough and inevitably you will be replaced, cast down and despised.

  The doorman stepped inside the clock tower, leaving his blanket in a puddle outside. I heard the whine of a charging communicator, then the tapping of the message. After a few moments he returned.

  ‘You can go up,’ he said. He flattened himself as he went past. ‘Is it true you stopped the sky-fires?’ he asked.

  ‘I was there. But it was Major Nenn and her boys stopped the sky-fires,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know who that is,’ he said.

  I sighed as I started up the spiralling cast-iron staircase. Six years ago, everyone in the city knew Nenn’s name. She and her Ducks had been popular. Maybe this kid was younger than he looked. Only her name was already flickering, wavering out like a candle flame in the inevitable wind of change. Her hard-won glory would be lost to the night with me.

  Klaunus’ residence was a cold floor near the top of the clock tower. Maybe some kind of flair for the dramatic had led him to reside here, being one of those sorcerers who took being a sorcerer way too seriously. It wasn’t my style, but then it was questionable whether I had any. The staircase creaked and rattled under my weight, loose bolts chuckling at my discomfort.

  Klaunus was waiting for me, standing, as was befitting for a meeting of equals. He was six-foot, fair, clean shaven, good bones, but there was a fleshless cast to his face that took away the possibility of his being handsome. He wore a fashionable purple cravat over his white silk shirt, pearl buttons catching the dim light making him entirely overdressed without company. He’d been a lord-farmer before Crowfoot had offered him a deal and his prestige – if it could be called that – had gone all the way to his head. All Crowfoot’s servants had all stared into the void and seen worse things than me, but his eyes went wide all the same.

  ‘I’d given you up for dead,’ Klaunus said. ‘I thought that I was the last of us.’ For an awkward moment I thought that he might try to embrace me.

  ‘The last what?’

  ‘Blackwing,’ he said. ‘Come in. Drink?’

  ‘I’ll pass.’

  Klaunus showed me into the room. One wall bore gears, tubes, and tightly strung ropes disappearing into the ceiling as they fed into the phos-driven clock above. The other walls were decorated with pinboards, pamphlets, posters, and handwritten sheets, all connected with pieces of string. Klaunus’ underfunded intelligence network. I thought back to how Valiya had run my own network of spies and informants and found his methods disorganised, even if his lodgings indicated an excessive need for cleanliness and order.

  Klaunus could be said to be fairly well adjusted compared to most of us. He was sad, dour even, one of those that regretted his debt the most. We all resented it in one way or another, except maybe Silpur, but Klaunus carried his regret like a cloud around his shoulders.

  ‘You’ve not heard from the others recently?’

  ‘You don’t know, then?’ he said. He assumed that I didn’t. ‘Captain Josaf was found face down in a ditch down near Station Four, a knife in his back. Captain Linette got herself garrotted in a tavern bedroom. Vasilov and Amaira haven’t been back for years.’

  ‘Silpur?’

  Klaunus was a sorcerer, and a strong one, but a tremor of discomfort passed over his face.

  ‘If I ever meet that creature again it will be too soon. If I hear he’s dead too then I’ll light a pipe and crack open a good vintage.’

  ‘
Have you heard from Crowfoot?’ I asked as I took a seat on a couch that had seen better days. Spirits knew how they’d got it up those stairs. Klaunus sat opposite me on a hard, wooden chair.

  ‘Not in eight years. Long before the Crowfall. Have you?’ There was yearning in his voice. Desperation, maybe.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have feared for some time that something terrible happened to him,’ Klaunus said bleakly. I knew what he wanted to ask. It was too terrible to say it. Or too hopeful. Maybe both.

  ‘If he were dead,’ I said, ‘we’d know it. I don’t know what would happen to you and I if Crowfoot perished, but I doubt we’d enjoy it. Cold’s captains all exploded when the Deep Kings took him out.’

  Klaunus nodded. I thought that he looked relieved.

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘Weakened,’ I said. ‘Broken, maybe. Wounded. The Crowfall cost all of the Nameless.’

  ‘Shallowgrave has been active,’ Klaunus said. ‘You’ve seen the damage to the citadel? That was his doing. An accident, as far as we can tell, though you can’t be too sure of anything where the Nameless are concerned.’

  ‘Shallowgrave took out half the citadel?’ I was horrified.

  ‘Trying to send us a gift of some sort, or at least that’s how it’s being told. Some kind of weapon. But Marshal Davandein has the place sealed up tight and won’t even talk to me about it. She’s not been friendly to Blackwing for a long time. I think we both know why.’

  Klaunus was an ally, but he was also his own man. We both served the crow, but that didn’t mean that I could trust him. Valiya had gathered intelligence on him and found his name whispered around a history of pregnant young women, all suffocated. Servants, labourers on his farm. But he was never on hand when they died. Crowfoot chose competent or powerful people to serve him. High morals were considered a disadvantage. Maybe Klaunus knew more about the citadel than he was letting on, or maybe he knew nothing at all. He had his own agenda, his own goals, just as I did. He watched me closely, took in my yellowed eyes, the cosmetic smeared thick over my skin. He could probably smell the Misery on me.