Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘You call this surviving?’

  12

  Meals had come and gone, and some kind of time had passed. I lost track of how many times I’d eaten, how many times I’d shat in the bucket. I slept too deeply. I began to wonder whether they were putting some kind of tranquilliser in the food, since I was never awake when it arrived. The only person I ever saw was Kanalina, the only possible conversation revolving around what I’d been doing in the Misery, where Dantry Tanza could be found, what he intended to achieve.

  It is a dark thing to be locked away with your own thoughts. They revolve, around and around, questioned and uncertain until you begin to doubt what you knew in the first place. We are not made for isolation. The white cells began to take their toll.

  No day and no night, only the constant glare of the bright, stale light. When surges of power caused them to flicker I flinched, startled, and stared into them in the hope that perhaps I’d be given a glimpse of what I had lost. But it was a vain hope. Ezabeth was all but gone from the world. I knew how much it had cost her to protect me when Saravor attempted to ascend. She was little spoken of now, more and more a ghost in truth.

  My hip was healing. A break like that should have laid me up for months, but somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five meals, I wouldn’t have known it had ever happened. When there’s nothing to keep you occupied save your own body there are only two ways to keep entertained. The first would have been degrading, the second was to challenge myself. I challenged myself. It had been years since I’d worked my body as I’d done when I was young. I worked my muscles against my own weight, trying anything I could do alone with no tool but my body to work with. At times I did it to give myself something to concentrate on, at others because I wanted to exhaust myself. My arm was strong again. My fingers were stiff, but the bones no longer ached. I exerted myself until I lay face down in a puddle of sweat and my eyes were finally willing to close.

  I woke from some kind of tattered sleep and found myself in the Misery. I wasn’t, of course, but it looked like it. Redness, coarse sand, and black rock. A dream, but I knew it was a dream. Nenn sat on a rock, juggling a knife from hand to hand.

  ‘What’s happening to me?’

  ‘Fucked if I know. What’s happening to me?’ she countered. It wasn’t helpful.

  ‘You aren’t anything,’ I said. ‘You’re just a reflection. You’re more me than you are you.’

  ‘We’re all each other,’ she said. She spun the knife into the air and caught it by the blade as it fell. ‘We exist in each other’s minds as much as we exist in our own. You think you’re alone, but you aren’t. I learned that pretty late in life. You taught me that. Just before the – bleurgh.’ She mimed yanking her guts out.

  ‘I shouldn’t be seeing you here.’

  ‘Maybe you aren’t,’ she said. ‘Like I said before. You’re probably just nuts.’

  I blinked and the redness, the broken sky, and the Misery stink were gone and there was nothing around me but the blank whiteness of the cell.

  Day followed day, or maybe it didn’t. The moons might have stopped their rotations around the earth for all I knew. Nenn came and went, sometimes appearing in the cell between breaths, sometimes waiting for me when I woke, but most of the time the white cell was silent aside from the sounds that I put into it, the grunts, the gasps, the laboured breathing, the hacking cough that brought pain to my chest and tar to my lips. They’d need to rename this place ‘the grey cell’ with the amount of the stuff now smeared across the walls. Sometimes that pain defeated me, drove me to my knees. Other times it just made me more determined.

  When there’s nothing to focus upon, the little things begin to take on meaning. I counted the rows of white plastered bricks in the walls. I ordered the beans they gave me into little regiments, used them to re-create famous battles. I began hoarding them, armies of bean soldiers to create bigger engagements. They must have known, somehow, because they began giving me soup instead. Soup made for less tactically satisfying dioramas.

  I decided that the crap I’d choked out and wiped on the walls was doing nobody but me a disservice. The old adage that you shouldn’t shit where you eat seemed to apply, although since I had to shit in the cell where I ate, there was only so far I could pursue the sentiment. Still, I tried to scrape away the crap I’d smeared onto the walls but in some places it had hardened to something close to stone. In others it seemed to have eaten away at the brick, no longer a smear across the stone but a coloured stain, furrows eaten into the brickwork. If it was capable of doing that to dressed stone, I hated to think what it was doing to my insides.

  Day followed day. Or didn’t. Who knew? Tick, tock, tick, tock. No chance of a rescue. Nobody except my captors even knew that I was here. And Nenn, maybe, although she was dead, and probably wasn’t actually there anyway.

  Spinner Kanalina opened the door to find me with my feet up towards the ceiling, doing vertical press-ups against the wall. I’d just hit ninety-three, a personal best. I hit a new personal best every time I tried something. I was putting out numbers I’d never achieved even in the prime of my youth. The Misery-taint within me was responding to the stimulus, changing me. It healed me, and it answered my need for strength. She cared for me, even here in the glaring phos light of a cell.

  ‘How are you able to do that?’ Kanalina asked. She stared. I’d stripped to the waist and the hard lines of my copper-toned body were damp with sweat.

  ‘Want me to show you?’

  ‘Your hip was broken,’ she said. I kicked against the wall and dropped down onto my feet.

  ‘It got better.’

  ‘It shouldn’t have. Not this fast.’ She looked me over, and my ego gave a little spurt as she eyed the contours of my body. Age had given my gut a soft padding over the years but that had melted away in a handful of what could have been days, or hours, or weeks. ‘You’re changing,’ she said. ‘There’s less grey in your hair. Or more black, anyway. What’s happening to you?’

  ‘Damned if I know. Maybe this white room agrees with me. Maybe it’s all the static in the air.’ I rolled my shoulders, flexed muscle I hadn’t previously possessed. The changes to my body weren’t all natural but it had been many years since I’d been this hardened, this lean.

  Kanalina sniffed. She could feel the charge around us too. Like the vibrancy of air before a thunderstorm, the prickling of excitement before a duel.

  ‘Are you one of them?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘One of who?’

  ‘The drudge. Did they change you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Today is my last day,’ she said. She seemed frustrated. She looked at the black and green streaks I’d wiped across the walls, the floor. Did her best not to show any emotion, but couldn’t quite hold her face steady. ‘I thought you would come around, given enough time. Decide that doing what’s right is better than spending the rest of your life in a cell.’

  I shrugged, got down on the floor, and began to knock out some press-ups. I began using just one hand, then switched to the other. It was too easy. I pushed myself up onto my fingertips and did them that way instead. Kanalina watched me for a time.

  ‘Do you want to know what happens now?’

  ‘Will it make any difference whether I know or not?’ I said without breaking rhythm. Moving this way, holding up my own weight, shouldn’t have been this easy.

  ‘You’ll be racked,’ she said. ‘Heinrich Adenauer is the Chief of Urban Security. He’ll take over from me, since I can get nothing from you. He prefers the rack. Do you know what the rack does to a person?’

  ‘I’ve got some idea.’

  ‘Your knees will be torn from their sockets,’ she said. ‘Arms too. Your feet will break apart. When they rack someone, the remnant left behind never walks again. Barely sits up. Most likely they’ll break you, and when you don’t give them what they want, th
ey’ll cut your throat and cast a skin bag of cracked and broken bones out into the gutter.’

  Nothing I didn’t already know, though I’d never seen a man racked. In my day it was all hot irons and sharp knives. Those things are mundane, everyday tools that can be turned to black purposes. But when a man has a rack constructed he’s making a declaration: he intends to hurt people, formally and often. There were always plenty of spies and sympathisers to send down to the cells but when Venzer was in charge there had been limits. Heinrich Adenauer was no soldier. He’d been Prince Adenauer’s natural-born son. I’d met him only once, when he tried to goad Dantry Tanza into a duel to stop him freeing his sister from the Maud. I remembered him as a snivelling little bureaucrat and a turd.

  ‘Your concern is touching,’ I grunted. Forty-one, forty-two. ‘But really, go fuck yourself.’

  Kanalina looked neither impressed nor surprised.

  ‘Have you not wondered why you have been cast into this cell instead of being sent straight to the slots? You’re here because someone is protecting you, someone that doesn’t want you in pieces. I’ve done all I can, but they can’t protect you indefinitely.’

  ‘Great job of protecting me so far,’ I said. ‘If it wasn’t for your pet monster out there, I’d not be in here at all. Who is this friend?’

  ‘Whoever it is, they’ve blocked Adenauer’s requests to put you on the board so far,’ she snapped. ‘But today is your final chance, Galharrow. Give me something or I’ve no choice but to turn you over to Adenauer.’

  Fifty-five, fifty-six. Maybe it was true. Maybe I did still have a friend in the citadel. But, more likely, it was just another way to persuade me to give up what I knew. Offer the hope that one day I might make it out of here, give me a glimmer of light. Only Kanalina seemed angry, probably because she hadn’t got what she wanted, and she struck me as the kind of woman who usually did.

  ‘Ask them to turn the phos down to clear this static from the air,’ I said. I went back to my exercises.

  She left me alone with the stoked embers of fear. The white cells were bad, but they had not counted on my familiarity with isolation. Out in the Misery I’d lived for months with nothing but ghosts, and they were worse than silence.

  When the door opened the following day, I was ready to fight. Better to try something – anything, however futile it might seem – than to be led meekly to the rack. I’d endured my time in the Misery. I wasn’t going to go quietly, to be asked questions I couldn’t answer, and certainly not by that bottom-grubber Adenauer. But the soldiers who came to the door held flintlock pistols ready and trained on me. And there were eight of them. Nobody was taking chances with me. Competent men, men who knew how desperate the cells would have made me.

  ‘Turn around, and put your hands behind your back,’ one of them said.

  ‘No.’

  The soldier didn’t look like a cruel man. He looked like someone who has a family, who joined up because it was the right thing to do. But they make them tough on the Range.

  ‘I was told that if you don’t, then we’re to leave you here,’ he said. He shared an uncertain look with his second. ‘And to tell you that if you don’t, then tomorrow we’re to bring you the Fracan’s arm.’

  My will, clutched tight and hard in my chest all this time, crumpled a little.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means,’ the soldier said. ‘I’m just following orders.’ He must have known that it wasn’t exactly an ordinary, or legal, kind of message, and he looked pained to be giving it, but his pistol was aimed steadily. ‘My orders were stamped with the marshal’s own seal. I’d advise following them. Put them on.’

  Tnota was an innocent in all this. He was nothing to the citadel, just an old navigator past his best. I’d hoped that he’d have taken my diamonds and gone west. But, of course, he would have lingered when I didn’t return. Maybe eventually, desperate, he would have asked after me at the citadel. They could have been bluffing, but it was a terrible risk to take.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘Another cell, on the level above,’ the soldier said.

  I knew these cells. Above the white cells were the grey, and that must have been where they kept the rack. I looked down at the manacles. They were thick, joined not by a flimsy chain but by a single heavy link. I might have found a new level of strength in the white cells, but I wouldn’t break them once they were on. My wrists still bore the scars that drudge ropes had inflicted, years ago.

  ‘Do it,’ I said. I turned and presented my wrists. One of the soldiers approached, cautiously, but there was only one way out and it was full of men with pistols. Hurting one innocent soldier wouldn’t help me. The irons snapped shut around my wrists like the closing of a coffin lid.

  It was the first time in what seemed like a very long time that I had been out of the cell. They walked four ahead of me, four behind, pistol barrels in my back. I couldn’t try anything. We climbed the stairs – the only staircase that led up from the white cells – and onto a corridor. Doors with metal grilles housed political prisoners here, the cells intended to keep a man waiting for his death rather than to break his mind. It was quiet. A prison is a rowdy place, full of the jeers and noise of the incarcerated, but a dungeon is different. Those forced to abide in a dungeon know there is no way out save the gallows. We stopped at a thick door.

  ‘In here.’

  I was ushered in alone, expecting to find a leering man beside a contraption of wood and rope, ready to crack me apart. But the cell was empty except for a bed of straw and an all-too-familiar shitting bucket. Just an ordinary dungeon room, or at least as ordinary as any cell can be.

  The door closed behind me.

  ‘They’ll be here for you in the morning,’ the lead soldier said through the grille. Their footsteps receded away along the corridor.

  I looked around my new temporary home, wondering why the hell they’d have transferred me to this marginally more comfortable accommodation. It wasn’t much better, but a bed of straw is better than a cold stone floor. I sat down.

  Five minutes later the grille snapped back again and a new face peered in. Guards, more than one.

  ‘Alright there,’ he said. He must have dealt with dangerous, condemned men every day, but he grimaced at my appearance. ‘It’s your lucky day. You’re being transferred. On your feet, but don’t make any sudden moves. Fuck me, you’re an ugly one.’

  The door opened up, the men entered. Something wasn’t right. But I was still manacled and although these wardens didn’t have loaded pistols trained on me, their batons were studded with steel and my hands were firmly locked behind my back. I let them lead me out into the corridor and saw another prisoner, a fierce-looking man, missing an eye, his face covered in gang tattoos. The five badly inked daggers across his forehead were a classless show of front: one for each person he’d killed. The guards shoved him into the cell in my place and slammed the door shut.

  ‘He won’t be out of there in a while. You must have done the right thing, in someone’s book,’ the guard said. ‘Not many get up to the brown cells once they’re down in the grey, but they’ve been filling up like mad the last few days. Guess you told them something they wanted.’

  I didn’t answer. He seemed the kind that liked to talk, but didn’t want a conversation. Jailors all tend to come from the same stock. We were halfway up the next stairwell when we met another pair coming down from above, dressed in the black coats of citadel officials. The stairway was too narrow for us to pass easily.

  ‘Hold up,’ one of them said, spotting me behind the first guard. ‘Is that the prisoner from cell thirty-nine?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the guard said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You taking him to cell four?’

  ‘No. Cell fifteen, brown level.’

  ‘We just had to put a real bad one in cell fifteen,’ the
official said. ‘We’ve orders to move him to four instead.’

  ‘My orders came from the Office of Urban Security, so he’s going in cell fifteen,’ the guard said, annoyed to be having this conversation on the stairs.

  ‘Ours too,’ the official said. She produced a folded piece of paper, showed it to him.

  ‘That’s strange,’ the warden said. ‘My orders only came ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Bloody odd, that,’ the official agreed, frowning. ‘Maybe there’s a mistake, but all the cells are full. Leads have come in so thick the last few days we’ve bagged half the pollen dealers in the city. But we just put some guy in fifteen, so why don’t we stick your guy in cell four and speak to Casso. Get it sorted out?’

  ‘That Casso isn’t one to anger,’ the guard agreed. ‘So if there’s shit for it, it’s on your shoulders.’

  The official shrugged. She had her orders on paper. That was all the protection she really needed.

  Cell four was almost comfortable compared to thirty-nine, and positively luxurious compared to the white cells. The white cells didn’t have numbers. They were just the white cells. Now I had a bed and a chair, a table, all of them more basic than any you’d find in a barracks. I’d been locked in and sat on the chair for five minutes, when I heard the key turn in the lock again.

  13

  The uniformed soldier who opened the door was different from the others.

  She was short, with a broad round face and the distinctive features and coal-dark hair that marked her as hailing from the distant west, and her face was all seriousness. A heavy bag hung over her shoulder. Her scowl took me in quickly, but any surprise she felt was quickly bitten down.

  ‘You’re Ryhalt?’ she said. I nodded. ‘You’re meant to be fifty. You sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure.’

  ‘I guess there’s no mistaking that colour on you. Get up. I’m going to take off the shackles. A friend sent me.’