Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t get off the stone.’ I dragged her down beside me and put my arms around her, still clutching the reins.

  Without a hint of preamble Silpur drew his sword and put it halfway through his horse’s neck. The stallion flailed its hooves, but only briefly. Silpur knew his work well and it crashed down, blood spraying the stones and flowing across the ancient carvings. He sheathed the blade and stood motionless, not a hint of emotion showing. Two of the mercenaries ran towards us. There were only five or six left and these two had given up the fight. First bounded after them, blood streaking his face as Kanalina, mounted again, yelled at him. He caught the runners, slammed them together in a meeting of shattering bones, and turned towards us. The mercenary commander had bolted from the fight, running for us now, as though we could protect him any better than his men had.

  A flock of starlings wheeled through the ruddy sky above, arcing in their looping, impossible formation. They came down on the burial mounds in their hundreds as the mercenary commander made it panting onto the stone. The starlings’ eyes winked redly.

  Valiya was shaking.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ I repeated, ‘don’t get off the stone.’

  Scared isn’t the right word for how I felt. I’d done this before and I felt the fear rising through me, even more afraid than Valiya. I gripped her hard.

  There are theories about what the Nameless are. They aren’t sorcerers, not like the Spinners, the Mutes, the distant Dryja, or those other people that command magic. Ideas about the Nameless ranged from calling them gods to abominations; all I could say for certain about Crowfoot was that for some fucking reason his magic always seemed to involve birds.

  As the horse’s blood flowed along the carvings, the starlings rose into the air as one, and then began to swoop around the clearing. A thousand thousand fluttering wings and hard buffets of air battered us. The pack mule brayed in terror, its instincts telling it to run, but there was no direction in which any of us could bolt. I crouched lower, my arms still around Valiya.

  The dark birds hurtled faster, faster, far faster than even a diving falcon should have flown. They blurred, no longer birds but streaks of blackness all coalescing together until we were surrounded on all sides by a whirling hurricane of darkness. The cacophony of birds cawing became a single abrasive note as powerful winds whipped around us, tugging at clothing. The mercenary commander screamed. Silpur stood silent.

  ‘Close your eyes and don’t listen,’ I roared into Valiya’s ear, though I don’t know if she heard over the roaring of the birds’ flight and their screeching song.

  Whispers came, soft hisses, but clear across the thunder of the wings. They said black things, dark things. They knew secrets they shouldn’t, and reminded us of everything we wished that we weren’t.

  Valiya gripped tight to me, eyes closed. Doing well.

  The rushing of wings intensified, a curtain of darkness all around us, and I saw them, out there in the blackness. Lighter shapes of grey, their limbs overly long, heads distended, orbs of light in the palms of their hands, over their hearts. The Long Men of the Barrows moved within the flow of magic, trying to enter our circle of stone. They came slowly but they knew we were there. They orchestrated the whispers of the dead, indistinct things from the world beyond, or beside, or whatever hell the evil dead lurked in.

  ‘You let them all down.’ One of the whispers stood clearer than the others. I gritted my teeth.

  ‘We died for your fucking promotion,’ an old comrade whispered from the past.

  ‘Got her killed, didn’t you? Got her killed. Even her.’

  ‘You could never stop the patchwork man.’

  I pressed my face into Valiya’s hair. We keep our fears and our doubts to ourselves and crush them down. The Long Men know them all.

  The mercenary commander was panicked beyond restraint. I made a grab for him as he fled the circle and plunged away into oblivion. The grey figures flocked to him the moment he left the stone and then he was gone and the Long Men were back in place, slow and purposeful in their movements. The magic roared around us.

  ‘Davan!’ Valiya screamed. ‘Davan, don’t go out there again, don’t go!’ She howled it through tears but she clung to me tighter and tighter. ‘Davan! Davan, stay here with me, Davan!’

  ‘Ignore it,’ I growled. ‘It’s not real. Ignore it.’

  Valiya gripped harder, her nails digging into the back of my neck as she buried her face in my shoulder. She continued to cry out for her lost husband. Her screams took on a pained quality as though someone drove a cold iron into her back but above them I still heard the Long Men whispering that I had failed to keep my promises, failed to stop Ezabeth burning, failed to save Nenn, failed to save anybody. It was all my fault, the blood, the sorrow, the dead children staring at me with empty, soulless eyes. I hadn’t been strong enough, hadn’t had the guts, hadn’t been sober enough to save any of them.

  Silpur stood as calmly as if the terrors of death were nothing but a light summer breeze, restraining the mule easily though it must have been five times his weight. He looked content. The black rushing around us built and built, and the whispers grew deeper, seeking out every nightmare that I’d ever felt and every regret I’d ever endured. It was too much, far too much. I was worthless. Nothing had any meaning.

  And then it was over, and we were somewhere else.

  16

  Silence.

  Cold crashed into me like a stampeding buffalo, and my teeth began chattering violently as my body responded to the shock. I couldn’t draw breath, lungs constricting. I felt my overworked heart do a somersault as it responded to this sudden new, painful stimulus. Had I not been so flushed from the terrors of the Long Men, the shock of it might have stopped me dead there and then.

  ‘S-spirits,’ Valiya chattered, prying her eyes open to peer over my shoulder. I held on to her as I surveyed the devastation all around us. We had emerged from the darkness into a new kind of chaos.

  I’d seen this landscape before in a raven-induced vision, but not like this. Then, the horizon had been a perfectly flat, empty line in every direction, an endless plain of featureless white ice beneath an endless azure sky. A serene place of power. No longer. Beyond the smooth, flat stone platform on which we still sat, the world was chaos. Great, sharp platforms of torn and tumbled ice rose and fell at vast angles, shattered in jagged discord. Above us, huge chunks of ice hung suspended in the sky, motionless, weightless. Everything was broken. Everything was wrong.

  None of that mattered. Only the cold.

  Silpur twitched but otherwise seemed unfazed. The mule honked its distress, hooves pawing the ground as the expressionless captain dragged heavy moose fur coats out of the pack on its back and threw them to us. I thrust shaking hands into the sleeves as fast as my cramping, cold-bitten body would go, then wrapped Valiya in one.

  ‘Get your arms in,’ I said, pulling the hood up over her head. I had never experienced cold like this. Our breath didn’t just steam in the air, it formed crystals on our lips. I had never believed such cold existed.

  ‘You are Galharrow,’ Silpur said, drawing out thick mittens and throwing them to me. He stared, overly intent, like a love-struck youth seeing his first possible dalliance.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ I said through chattering teeth. ‘A few times.’ He didn’t seem to register my words, his green-eyed stare unblinking. Our past encounters had been infrequent but there were three things I always reminded myself of. First: his seeming nonchalance didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention. Second: he shouldn’t be treated like other people. Third: never to turn my back to him. If ever Crowfoot decided I’d outlived my usefulness, he’d send Silpur to deal with me.

  ‘Who is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Winter,’ I said. I had never trusted Silpur. He didn’t need to know Valiya’s true name.

&n
bsp; ‘Not the woman.’ He indicated a frozen body lying on the ice nearby, or at least, a tangle of frozen guts, bones, and skin that had recently been a person. Probably, anyway.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Probably Captain Vasilov. Always was weak. Left the circle.’

  The winter furs were keeping the worst of the wind from my body and head, but my hands were still like ice inside my gloves. The air hurt to breathe. The stone circle beneath us was glazed with translucent ice and the birds on this platform were different.

  ‘It’s not Vasilov,’ I said. The little skin I could make out was fair, and Vasilov was Fracan. Silpur shrugged. He probably didn’t remember Vasilov either. Silpur had a boyish face that might have tickled a girl’s fancy, except for those big, staring, unblinking eyes. There was nothing appealing in the deadness that looked out of those.

  ‘It’s midday here,’ Valiya said. We’d lost time, or maybe gained it. Time moves differently when you travel through death.

  ‘Time to move,’ Silpur said.

  A powerful wind howled between the jagged thrusts of ice in the shattered place of power. The ice plain had been broken, smashed beyond the natural laws that bound us to the world. Great shards of ice had been hurled upwards, torn from the ground finding invisible, unconnected purchase on the air. Valiya looked up at the floating islands, unreadable. She shook her head, then knelt beside the tangle that had probably once been a person.

  ‘This happened because he left the stone?’

  ‘I’d guess so. There’s a reason the boss doesn’t send us through the Duskland Gate very often.’ I watched Silpur walk away. Most of us didn’t use the stone often, anyway. There were no normal people amongst the Blackwing captains, but he was the strangest of all.

  Valiya shivered, drew her furs more tightly around her shoulders. She still shook.

  ‘Poor Sang,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Maybe they’ll take her prisoner,’ I said, but it was a bleak hope. Faint words of comfort. First had gone into a blood-crazed rage. He hadn’t been looking to take anyone captive. Sang’s only chance would have been to hide. Maybe that would have protected her.

  ‘Where are we?’ Valiya asked, teeth clacking together. ‘Spirits, Ryhalt. We won’t last long out here. We have to find shelter.’

  ‘We need to go that way.’ I pointed after Silpur.

  ‘What’s that way?’

  ‘That’s where we’ll find Amaira.’ I struggled to find the right words. ‘And something else.’

  I felt it in my chest. It was the Misery, and it was Crowfoot, and some of it was me. But they were all linked together, all one now. We were part of a whole. Like called to like. The Misery-taint glowed within me, reaching for the magic that I felt in the air all around me. I reached out and pushed aside a shard of ice that hung suspended in the air. It floated away, slowed, and came to a stop a foot above the ground.

  The mule’s legs buckled and it collapsed onto its side, hooves scrabbling. Maybe it was the shock of the cold, or the horrors it had experienced as we passed through the Duskland Gate. Its eyes rolled madly in its head, and then it lay still, a last breath steaming from its muzzle. There was nothing that could be done for it. We rifled through the packs, picking out anything that might be of use. My feet were losing feeling, and I covered them with big moosehide slippers. I found an extra coat and put it over Valiya. She was skinny. The coat was made for a fighting man and it wasn’t hard to get her into it. There was no food to carry.

  Nothing for leagues around us but broken ice. I took a longsword that had been strapped to the mule’s baggage. I doubted there’d be anything to use it on here in this broken, desolate place, but a tool’s worth taking. Valiya bent and hefted her bundle.

  ‘Let’s get moving.’

  We caught up with Silpur. He was moving fast, climbing the rising planes of ice and sliding down those that descended. Valiya struggled along beside me, taking my hand when a shelf was too high to pull herself up. The going wasn’t easy, the peaks and troughs deep, as if the ice plain had been a massive dinner plate and someone had brought a vast hammer down upon it. Narrow ravines sometimes separated the planes but nothing that we couldn’t step over. Footing was treacherous, the unbroken ice smooth and slick. Several times we slithered back down a platform that proved too steep and had to find another way around and our hands and feet took the worst of the cold. The rise and fall of the ice planes sheltered us from the howling wind, the smallest of mercies.

  Silpur stopped at the peak of one of the rises and waited for us to join him. I pulled Valiya up the last difficult climb and we looked down into a perfect circle of flat ice, a mile wide. Millions of cracks radiated out from the epicentre, linking and blending into each other, and a pale blue light glowed upwards through them. There was a hum in the air, a static charge. A remnant of whatever had happened here. As I looked up, beyond the floating icebergs, I realised with a dark, sinking feeling, what I was seeing.

  A crack in the sky.

  ‘Fucking hells,’ Valiya swore. It took a lot to make Valiya swear. This was a lot.

  ‘He’s done it again,’ I said. ‘Broken the world again.’

  ‘No other choice,’ Silpur said. He paid the crack in the sky no attention at all. Nothing seemed to faze him, not the cold, not the floating masses of ice above us, nothing. He scarcely seemed human, which was rich coming from me. He pointed towards the centre of the devastation where he’d spotted something on the ice plain. He had better eyes than mine. It was small, just a dark lump of something – but where else would we go except to the centre? I’d been into the heart of the Misery and survived it, but I struggled to remember much of what I’d seen there. Some of it had been real, and some of it hadn’t, or at least I hoped not. I’d emerged with nothing but the knowledge I needed to take Saravor down and three words hacked into my arm. I didn’t want to contemplate what I’d left behind.

  ‘People have been this way,’ Valiya said, her voice caught and tossed by the wind. The broken ice was scuffed and marked by their passage, floating shards of ice had been pushed aside in the making of a path, forming a corridor around us. Here and there was an actual footprint, following the same line that we had. Perhaps they were fossils of Amaira’s passage, but there seemed to be too many.

  I looked up at that terrible crack, through which soft white light spilled down into our reality. Three threads of equal length radiated out, perfect in their symmetry, imperfect in their existence.

  Distance was hard to judge in the endless white. It took longer to reach the dark little lump than I had imagined, and every time I stepped over a crack I expected the cold blue light to scorch me, but it was a quiet, silent thing that gave no response to our passage.

  In the centre of the devastation a body sat, cross-legged, wrapped in heavy cloaks, frozen solid. I put an arm around Valiya’s shoulders at the sight. It was Nall – or one of his avatars, at least.

  ‘The master’s friend,’ Silpur said. ‘He is dead. We go on.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said through the scarf that I’d wrapped over my mouth. It had already hardened with ice. Valiya stood back as I approached and knelt before the body. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. The eyes are so important. We communicate more with them than we realise, and hers gave back nothing but reflections.

  Nall’s body looked similar to the avatar that had reached me in the Misery, but older, greyer, even less meat on its bones. The skin was blue-grey, hard. The heavy folds of its frozen cloak hung forwards as it hunched against the cold, but I saw inside them and icy breath caught in my throat. I pulled the fabric back to get a better look, and it cracked like glass. I felt inside, confirmed that my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.

  Nall’s rib cage had splayed open. There was a gaping cavity where his heart should have been.

  The heart of a wizard is a terrible thing. At the height of the Siege
, Crowfoot and the other Nameless had broken Shavada apart and used his magic to power the Engine. Before him, it had been Songlope, another of the Nameless murdered for their magic. I’d seen his heart deep within the Engine. Nall was broken, almost destroyed, but I had thought that he had been struck down in the silent battle of wills against the Deep Kings and The Sleeper, not destroyed by the other Nameless. I stared into the hard-frozen chest cavity.

  There was likely a perfectly insane explanation. Maybe when Nall’s power had been broken, his heart had burst out of his chest. Why not? What did I know of the Nameless’ magic, after all?

  Do not trust your master, Nall had told me.

  Do not trust the Nameless, Crowfoot had said.

  Back in Valengrad, sitting on the roof of Valiya’s hideaway, I’d heard a man screaming that his heart had been torn out. A victim of the black rain. Nall had told me to listen to the rain. The rain that brought madness, visions, and burning pain. And something else. The rain knew what had happened here. The rain remembered.

  Do not trust your master. The words had a sudden new resonance which raised hard, dark questions in my mind. I pulled the cloak back around his chest as best I could. There would be a time to share what I’d learned with Valiya – as his captain, she deserved to know – but it was not now. My feet had lost all feeling, and despite the thick mittens, my hands weren’t faring much better.

  ‘Crowfoot sat here,’ Silpur said. He had no interest in Nall’s body, and instead stood on a patch of ice where cracks radiated outwards in cobweb lines.

  ‘And Shallowgrave over there,’ I said, noting a similar pattern. Three points of a triangle. Only the Lady of Waves had been absent. The Nameless had worked in concert for a mutual goal: survival. Why had the Lady been absent? They were not truly allies. They had their own goals, their own agendas. It was only in the hours of desperation that they came together – or in Nall’s case, apart.

  ‘We go down,’ Silpur said. ‘As they did.’

  ‘Down?’ I asked. He pointed.