Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  Valiya drew back her sleeve, and her fingers flickered lightly over her arm. The flower tattoos that had once sat there were gone. Instead, her skin crawled with numbers, lines, and symbols. Mathematics, physics. She swiped an equation to the side and it tracked across her skin, her fingers sliding a series of numbers into an array of circles. She added lines, which appeared faint and grey, solidified as they performed calculations for her, then faded out to be replaced with answers, answers that Valiya moved into tables that expanded, changed, and were swallowed by an ever more complicated array of figures.

  ‘What is that?’ I whispered.

  ‘Nall gave it to me,’ she said, switching to her other arm. She glanced between them as if checking her working. ‘It accesses everything. The way it all works.’

  ‘The way what works?’

  ‘The universe,’ she said, as though it were no more important than the weather.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I said. I had always thought Nall was the best of the Nameless. Perhaps I had been wrong. This wasn’t right.

  ‘Put your hand on it,’ she said. ‘That will force the link. It’s Amaira’s bird, but you’re all joined together through him. Are you ready?’

  I’d evaded Crowfoot’s notice for years, steeped out in the concealing taint of the Misery. I’d hidden, while the world burned and the black rain fell, and while I’d known that this reunion was coming, I approached it with the relish of a man about to lose a rotten limb to the surgeon’s saw. No. I wasn’t ready. But the communicator had tapped out its message, and I couldn’t set it aside any longer. I let my resolve harden.

  ‘I’m ready,’ I said. Valiya swiped the numbers one more time, dotted them, and then drew down her sleeves. I was glad to see her hide them; the numbers disturbed me even more than the mirrors in her eyes. I put a hand on the bird’s carcass and Valiya threw a switch.

  Phos hummed to life and flowed through the copper pipes. The icy body warmed suddenly, then twitched, spindly legs kicking against the restraints. The smell of wet feathers and phos filled the room, and I felt something flowing out of me and into me at once. A channel, opening.

  I saw another place, a vision overlying the room. A hot place, hotter than any man could withstand. A crack in the earth, deep and sheltered, lit by rivulets of glowing orange magma that leaked down the walls or lay in pools on the jagged black rock. Choking smoke filled the air, sulphuric and toxic. I could not see Crowfoot, but I felt him there, his presence vast but at the same time diminished. Hollow.

  ‘Galharrow …’ Crowfoot’s voice was a black whisper within the illusion. ‘Where have you been, Galharrow?’

  There was pain in his voice, the ache so heavy and deep set that I knew it resonated through his entire immortal being. Despite the anger, despite my deep resentment over all he had made me do, how he had used me, I felt his pain. Pain greater than any that I’d known, more than a living man was capable of. The bitter agony of defeat, defeat that came after a thousand long years of toil and strife. The abyss of his shattered pride fell deeper than the cavern into which he had fled.

  ‘My lord,’ I said. I was aware of Valiya, aware of the heating bird carcass beneath my fingers. ‘Captain Amaira is in trouble. I need to find her. Where is she?’

  I had ignored his question. His fury should have shaken my body inside out, but there was so little left to him. Everything that Crowfoot possessed was invested in his foothold in reality, in holding what remained of him together. He was fallen, a broken thing that had once been mightier than the stars. I should not have, but I pitied him.

  ‘Amaira and Vasilov must be protected,’ he whispered into my mind. ‘I sent them to the place of power where the Nameless fought the Deep Kings. But I am blind. I do not see them. The world is shadowed. I cannot afford to expend power on anything but my existence.’

  I remembered that lonely place. Crowfoot’s simulacrum had shown him to me, sitting frozen solid with Nall and Shallowgrave when they gathered to work their magic against the Deep Kings.

  ‘They are gathering my weapon,’ Crowfoot’s voice came soft. ‘They must not fail.’

  ‘I won’t let them, lord,’ I said.

  ‘If they fail, we have nothing to use against the Deep Kings,’ he muttered. ‘Find them, and bring back my weapon. Take the Duskland Gate to the top of the world.’

  The bird beneath my hand was hot, and I was distantly aware of the smell of charring bone. The second world wavered, and I blinked as though the clouds of toxic smoke stung my eyes.

  ‘The Duskland Gate,’ I said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘There is no other way,’ Crowfoot said. ‘And Galharrow.’ I was sure that he was about to tell me not to fuck it up, but instead he gave me a far more chilling command. ‘Do not trust the Nameless.’

  With a whoosh of flame, he disappeared, and I snatched my hand back from the burning raven’s body. Crowfoot was gone.

  Valiya had questions, but I needed a minute. I sat in a chair and breathed slowly. I had known the Nameless’ battle had cost them all, but I had not imagined the damage had been so great. A wizard’s power is like a basin, slowly filling from a dripping tap, the magic building drop by drop over decades. They relinquished it only in the greatest of need, never carelessly. It accumulated too slowly for reckless expenditure. At the height of his power Crowfoot had crafted the Heart of the Void and broken the world. But now he was empty. Less than empty. He clung to his existence by threads of will alone. He possessed less power than I did.

  It was like learning that your father isn’t the terrifying brute that you’d feared through your childhood, seeing him for the first time as a broken old man, wasted by age and fed with a spoon. I had hidden from him for years and seeing him firsthand, so shrunken, was hard.

  ‘It worked, then,’ Valiya said solemnly. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I know where Amaira is,’ I said. I would not share the truth of my master’s condition, not even with her. ‘Captain Vasilov is with her. That’s good. He’s a Spinner. One of the best. But fuck me, they’re far. I’m going to need some things if I’m to get her.’

  ‘How many men do you need?’

  ‘As many as you can spare. But they need to be tough. Men who aren’t easily surprised, and who won’t run when things get strange. The journey is going to be fast, and it’s going to be bad.’

  Valiya nodded once, the amber glow of my eyes reflected back from the mirror-steel shine in hers.

  ‘You’ll have them,’ she said.

  ‘I need to ask something of you.’

  I had found Giralt in the kitchen while Tnota was taking a nap. The stove hummed softly, warming a pan of water for tea. He stirred the leaves suspiciously. It was the first time we’d spoken since Valiya spirited me out of the cells.

  ‘Say your piece,’ he said. ‘But I’m making no promises.’

  ‘I need you to stop asking Tnota to abandon me,’ I said.

  Giralt looked down into the tea, as if looking for something in the brown water. He was a gentle man: calm, steady, but strong. Just the kind of man that Tnota needed.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he said. ‘As long as he’s caught up following you around, he’ll run into trouble again and again. You might want him—’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I agree. He’s too old for this work, and he’s a hindrance to me. He wants to help, but he can only slow me down.’

  Giralt eyed me with suspicion.

  ‘Then why do you want him with you?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘But as long as you’re telling him it’s a choice between you and me, he’s going to choose me.’

  Giralt threw the wooden spoon down into the pan and turned his back on me, putting his stare into the fire. His shoulders worked up and down. There was a lot he wanted to say. He’d probably rehearsed this conversation over and over during my long periods of absence. />
  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘And it kills me.’ He turned around and showed me the tears in his eyes. ‘You’re taking him from me. He’s yours, and I can’t win. Whatever we have, whatever we build, you’re always there between us.’

  And there it was. Whenever I doubted my course, when I hung my head at the things that I’d done, the things I knew I would have to do, it all came back to this. The love that a person holds for another. It’s what we live for, what we fight for, and when fate calls to us, what we’re prepared to die for. It wasn’t my love. It was theirs. But it was worth fighting for just as strong.

  I shook my head.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ I said. ‘What Tnota and I have is history. We’ve shared things that nobody else on this earth has ever seen. I walked beside him for a thousand Misery miles, and every step of my survival was down to him. He walked into every kind of hell you can imagine with me, and I kept the Misery’s worst from destroying him. We’re blood-bound and spirits know, there’s so much love in me for the man that it tears my soul to lose him. But you need to understand the truth. Tnota loves you. It’s a different kind of love. Stronger. Better. But the more you tell him to make a choice, the more he’s going to choose me.’

  ‘He shouldn’t,’ Giralt said angrily.

  ‘You aren’t giving him a true choice,’ I said. ‘I see the way you look at each other. Whatever we went through together, what you’ve built in a few years goes deeper than everything he and I did in over twenty. And because of that, he knows that you’ll follow him. You’ll wait for him. You’ll be here if, or when, he comes back to you. Because you need him, and I don’t. As long as you tell him not to choose me, he can have us both.’

  Giralt wiped his eyes.

  ‘Do you want me to say that I’m grateful?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t need your forgiveness. I just need you to get your things ready, and prepare to leave the Range tomorrow. Forever. You have the Misery diamond money. Use it and change your story. He’ll follow you.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’ Giralt demanded.

  ‘I’ve walked a thousand miles with him. I know which way his feet turn. Let him make the decision for himself.’

  The world was truly broken if I was giving relationship advice. I left him alone then, hoping that I was right, and not sure that I was. But it was all I could do for him.

  Choices are made and unmade, and the wheels of life drive us forwards towards an ending that will never be of our making. I hoped that whatever the future held for Tnota, I had steered his dotage towards something more worthwhile than where I was going.

  I sat alone on the roof terrace, the wooden boards still slick and pungent with the rain. Somewhere nearby I could hear somebody raving, an unfortunate who for some awful reason had not managed to find shelter before the downpour struck. He cried out about betrayal, about having his heart torn out.

  I was dying. As much as my body had changed down in the white cells, regenerating and renewing itself into something of its former warrior-glory, I knew that I was breaking down. The cough was worse than ever, but it went far beyond that. It wasn’t the Misery that was killing me, it was its absence. Feeling it soak up into me from the earth, the wind. All that I had consumed lingered within me, volatile and questing through veins and marrow. But like an addict, I’d grown accustomed to getting my fix. I wanted more. Needed to bask in it. I knew, sure as the moons would cross the sky, that I did not belong here, and without the Misery refilling me I would dissolve away into nothing. A slow death, driven by a lack of poison.

  I had stood on a Valengrad roof much like this one and watched Ezabeth spin the light, a decade ago now. It was all so long ago. The big events of our lives, the ones that define us, stay to haunt us long after the facts have ceased to be remembered. She’d been incredible, spinning the moons without loom or goggles, using nothing but her own mastery. I’d loved her then, as I’d always loved her, but I’d seen her anew. I’d known, maybe, that she was something else. She was out there still; I had to believe that. But what was she now, after so long in the light, ten years away from our flesh-and-blood world? I knew in my heart that she was no longer the Ezabeth I’d dreamed of, the carefree summer girl who’d catapulted me from boyhood into manhood, any more than I was the youth that had wanted to show her how well I rode a horse. But she was still something, whatever that something was. I was changed, riddled with the black taint of the Misery. Tnota was changed, his arm lost to a matchlock shot and a surgeon’s mercy. Valiya was changed, to whatever it was Nall had needed her to be. And Ezabeth was little more than a rare whisper in the light and the memory of a once-lofty ideal. None of us get to be what we wanted. We are, in the end, what the world makes of us. It would have to be enough.

  ‘Tnota is packing his things,’ Valiya said. I had not heard her join me. ‘He’ll leave in the morning.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I like it up here,’ she said. The city’s lights danced in her mirror eyes, the reds, blues, and greens twisting as she scanned the rooftops. The three moons had drawn close together, almost aligned. They’d been circling closer and closer in recent days, forming lines in the sky. ‘From above, it looks peaceful, doesn’t it?’

  I didn’t know what to say to her, so I didn’t say anything. She came and sat in a chair beside me. Not close enough to touch, but close enough to scent the jasmine that still trailed her. I found I couldn’t bear to look out anymore, and my gaze drifted down to the stones. It had been easy out in the Misery. There was nobody to speak to except the ghosts, and when you know that they hold nothing but your regrets, they grow easy to ignore. Valiya was a different kind of ghost. She still resembled the woman that she had been, save that her hair had turned grey, her eyes to steel. There had always been steel in her, though.

  ‘The moons are drawing towards one another,’ Valiya said. ‘There will be a triple eclipse before long, all three of them, lined up in front of the sun. It only happens once every nine hundred and eighty-two years. We’ll get to see it.’

  ‘Doubt we’ll see much of anything with the moons blocking out the sun.’

  ‘The moons are just spheres of crystal,’ Valiya said. ‘The light will pass right through them all. It should be spectacular.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough odd shit for one lifetime,’ I grunted.

  ‘You’re angry with me,’ Valiya said.

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  ‘You haven’t changed as much as you think,’ she said. ‘You’re angry. You don’t like what I’ve done.’

  ‘There’s a difference between being angry, and not liking an outcome.’

  ‘I’ve done a lot of good while you’ve been away, Ryhalt,’ she said. ‘I understood why you had to go. Why you had to do what you’ve done to yourself. But the war didn’t end because you went off on a personal crusade.’

  ‘It’s not my war,’ I said. ‘It was never my war. I just have to fight it.’

  ‘But it was mine,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that was the difference between us.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t the difference. Do you really want me to go into it?’

  ‘You’re free to think that it was whatever you thought it was,’ Valiya said. ‘I don’t need a man to tell me who I am. We each chose our paths.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘If nothing else, we did that.’

  We sat and watched the city lights as they winked out or flared into life.

  ‘You want to ask me something,’ Valiya said eventually.

  ‘I do?’

  ‘I worked it out. I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to know. Why you left. What you’re going to attempt.’ Her sleeves were drawn down, but I could guess what she meant. I wondered how long that kind of calculation would have taken, or how anyone could have attempted it. The answer was right before me. Valiya would work on something for as long as it neede
d to be worked upon, and difficulty had never deterred her.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you come after me?’

  Valiya frowned and drew back her sleeve. She played with the numbers, the graphs and charts as they flickered and rolled over her skin. She became engrossed, pushing things aside, bringing in new variables. Eventually she swiped her palm across it all and drew her sleeve back down.

  ‘That’s not what I expected,’ she said. ‘You know why.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You do. Ezabeth.’ The name hung heavy between us in the night. As it always had. ‘You were meant to ask me why I dealt with Nall,’ she said.

  ‘I can guess why you made your deal,’ I said. ‘You wanted to fight harder. You wanted to protect the Range. You wanted to be more efficient. I’ve been away a long time, but I didn’t forget who you are, Valiya. Even if you did.’

  It was awkward. Painfully awkward, but only for me. Valiya’s face remained impassive, calm and serene. I’d barely seen it crease since we’d been reunited. She moved on from hurtful words as though they were nothing but reflections in her mirror-bright eyes.

  ‘I’ve found a mercenary troop with the right reputation, willing to take good pay without details. They’ll be ready to travel tomorrow.’

  ‘And you can get me out of the city?’

  ‘That was never hard.’

  ‘Good. Things are too hot here. Davandein won’t stop looking for me, nor will whoever tried to kill me at Fortunetown. It doesn’t matter. I can make it work, one way or another, as long as I’m not in the white cells.’ I looked at Valiya, maybe hoping to see some of the damage in my own heart reflected back at me. ‘There’s something that you want to ask me too.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I know all that I need to.’

  ‘No,’ I disagreed. ‘You want to know why I didn’t come back. Why I was willing to give up everything.’

  Valiya smiled, the warmth hitting her face for the first time. Her eyes caught the red letters of the citadel, and for a moment the word COURAGE hung there.