Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  One of the cracks was wider and deeper than the others, the same wavering blue light emanating from it. Pegs had been driven into the ground, and three heavy, knotted ropes trailed down into the glow. The ice around the rim was scuffed and it looked like a peg had torn free and broken a chunk of ice away with it.

  ‘You think Amaira went down there?’ Valiya asked.

  Silpur didn’t answer, busy testing the rope, feeling its weight. I knelt and put my hand to the faint blue light. It was warm, welcoming. As the colour flowed across my fingers I felt something in my chest loosen. The cough that had been building relented and settled back down. I looked down into the depths. The light was no more intense down there, if it was even light at all. The crack in the earth looked to fall a long, long way.

  ‘There’s something down there,’ I said. ‘I felt it, when I saw this place before. Something old. Older than the Nameless. Frozen for more than a thousand years.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t think that I wanted to. ‘But it looks like Amaira and Vasilov went down there.’

  ‘But there are three ropes,’ Valiya said. ‘And it looks like there were four at some point. Were they alone?’ Good question.

  ‘We must descend,’ Silpur said.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ Valiya said, looking cautiously over the edge. Valiya was amongst the most capable people that I’d ever met, but her strength was better suited to reordering the world than to mountaineering. The climb over the ice plates had already been hard enough, and there was no telling how deep that pit went. A young, fit man would have found it gruelling.

  ‘If you stay up here you’ll freeze,’ I said. I tried one of the ropes. The iron peg had been driven firmly into the ice and it seemed strong. ‘Hold on to me. I’ll carry you down.’

  ‘I may not weigh as little as you think,’ Valiya said. I shook my head. Everyone thinks they’re heavier than they are.

  ‘I’m stronger than I look. And you’re stronger than you know.’

  The sky gave a forlorn little squeal. It wasn’t the howling roar of the cracks in the Misery, but the tear here was small.

  Silpur was already on his way. He slithered over the edge and disappeared, the rope going taut.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Valiya asked.

  ‘Trust me. I can carry us both.’

  ‘Will the rope take the weight? Without meaning any offence, you have to weigh more than three hundred pounds. You’ve more muscle on you than I’ve ever seen.’

  It was a stupid thing to feel a spur of pride in. The Misery had altered me in the white cells, it wasn’t my doing.

  ‘We’ll have to hope so. There’s no other option.’

  Valiya climbed onto my back and put her arms around my neck. It wasn’t dignified, but I barely noticed her weight. I took off my belt, made it into a loop, and then tied it around her wrists. I didn’t know how long the descent was and if her strength gave out, she could hang on it, painful though that would be. I hadn’t climbed anything like this in a long time, but it was what it was. We’d not achieve anything sitting around up here, and Amaira’s message was still burned in my mind. I’d have climbed down into the hells for that kid. I was glad that Silpur had gone first. We’d heard no scream from him plummeting to his death, though I doubted that he would have screamed even if his rope gave out.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘I’m ready,’ Valiya said in my ear.

  I pulled the rope tight, slithered over the edge and we began to descend. The blue light absorbed us, insubstantial and gentle. Spirits, but I’d grown strong in the cells. My arms barely protested at their burden. My feet scuffed for purchase against the sheer ice wall as I began to walk us down, step by difficult step. Valiya clung fiercely to me, legs wrapping my waist, suspended out over the void. I moved slowly at first, making sure that each step was secure before taking the next, but there was little purchase on the ice. It wasn’t entirely smooth, but I didn’t put much faith in the few gritty protrusions. It was easier just to use my arms. Hand over hand, down and down. Valiya clung tight as I upped the pace, her arms locked around my neck. We were down ten feet, then twenty, more, motes of blue floating in the air like dandelion seeds.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s not hard.’ And it wasn’t. I had never been this strong. Had never known that anyone could be this strong. Maybe they couldn’t. It occurred to me that I was, thanks to the Misery’s influence, possibly the strongest man that had ever lived. I could have done this all day.

  The ice had other ideas.

  There was a sharp cracking sound from above and the rope gave a lurch. Just a couple of inches, but I suddenly knew with a horrible certainty that the peg was going to break free. I should have made Valiya calculate whether it would take our combined weight. I should have gone alone first. I should have—

  ‘Ryhalt!’ Valiya cried, ‘Move!’

  I looked down and still couldn’t see the bottom of the shaft. I swung a hand down, then the other, faster and faster and faster. A groaning sound came from above, stabbed through with the tinkling of splintering glass. Hand over hand over hand over hand over hand and my heart thundered in my chest. The groaning grew louder. Maybe it would have held Valiya alone. Maybe none of the ropes would have held me. The ice couldn’t take both of us together, that was certain.

  ‘Grab the rope,’ I said, stopping. I leaned forwards so that Valiya could get her hands onto it. ‘Don’t let go,’ I said. ‘Whatever you do, hold on to it. Take your legs off me.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said as she took her own weight on the rope and uncoupled her legs. ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was no time to think, to calculate. It was act now or we would both fall. The rope couldn’t hold my weight, and there was still nothing but murky blueness beneath us. We would fall and be smashed apart. I couldn’t allow that.

  I reached inside, felt for the Misery within me, and let go.

  Valiya’s sudden shriek disappeared in the rush of air. I fell, and then the blue haze cleared and I saw Silpur looking up at me for two seconds of hurtling descent before I met the ground with a crash.

  I should have been pulverised but the Misery roared through me. I felt her sending fire through my bones, absorbing, gripping, taking hold of the immense impact. Shards of floor-ice sprayed out around me as my body shuddered and strained with the terrible force. It screamed through me, hammered through bone and organs, vibrating in my skull and roaring in my ears. It was a vast power, and it was going to shake me apart.

  I roared, and the energy released all around me. Silpur was knocked from his feet, pencil-line cracks shooting up the ice cavern’s walls. The hard, black ice beneath me shattered into a mosaic of a thousand jagged pieces.

  I was alive. Alive, and whole and unbroken, and for a few moments I felt the black Misery-power coursing through me. I was invincible. I had saved her. The exultation of the power flowed through me, and then, from above came a crunch, and a scream.

  Valiya fell as the ice holding the peg gave way. She didn’t have Misery-strength, but the magic was still awake, fierce and dark within me. I saw her shadow falling through the blue and instinct took over.

  I willed strength into my legs, demanded it from the blaze of power that had awakened within me, and jumped for a spur three feet up. I kicked off it to reach another, higher, then another, hurling myself up with everything I had. Six feet up, ten, fifteen, each jump bringing me higher, higher than should have been possible. And then as she hurtled down towards me, out.

  We met in midair and I grabbed her tight. I carried her across the gulf, slammed into the wall, shards of ice flying as I slid down against it, Valiya clutched against me. We hit the ground hard.

  The light dimmed, all the warning that I got, and I pressed Valiya down onto the ice and co
vered her with my body.

  A block of broken ice, torn from the lip of the crevasse, hit me with the force of a sledgehammer … and shattered. Misery-energy writhed as it held me together, the blue-stained air around us filled with fragments of falling ice. I lay over Valiya, shaking as the magic sought to protect us from what should have been a second death in the space of ten seconds. The amber glow from my eyes blazed hotter, reflecting back at me from Valiya’s mirror-shine eyes. I gritted my teeth as threads of pain slowly spread across the skin and muscle, then sucked in a huge, cold breath. I rolled from her and lay on my back, expecting the damage to break through the barrier of magic in my flesh.

  It didn’t come. I breathed in, and the drifting blue light entered me. Calming. Soothing. An ally.

  I tried to rise and collapsed face-first onto the ice. I hadn’t enough energy left to lift my arm. New threads of black split and ran wider beneath my skin. My whole body was taut and stiff as the darkness took hold and cold spurs of pain moved across it. I couldn’t even muster the energy to groan.

  ‘That was impossible,’ Silpur said, picking himself up. He only looked at me, failing to consider, or care about, Valiya. ‘Should be dead. Like that man.’

  I focused on my neck, which was screaming that I’d fucked it beyond all endurance, and slowly, slowly managed to turn my head to look. A mangled wreck of splattered human lay beside a coiled rope. He was shattered and split open with the impact and putrid black ichor had leaked from the broken skin. No smell, not in this cold, but the rot was plain to see. My body was trembling, my mind whirled with strands of the Misery’s chaos, but I’d seen those damn rotten insides before. Only one of my enemies changed men that way.

  Saravor.

  17

  It felt like a long time before I found the strength to sit. My head rang as if an alarm bell had been trapped inside and the rest of me felt worse than if I’d run flat-out for fifty miles. The Misery’s power had saved me, but it had taken from me too. My darkened hands shook as I forced myself up from the ice.

  Silpur was poking about at the remains of whoever had fallen before us, but Valiya was in pain. She was shaking, and the terror of the fall hummed through her. The impact of meeting me in the air and the following crash back down to earth had hit her hard, and she clutched her shoulder. Metallic tears slithered down her cheeks, rivers of mercury. For a time I could do nothing but sit and listen.

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Everywhere,’ she breathed, strained as she fought for breath. I tried to fight my own pain down. She was in shock. She needed me calm.

  ‘I need you with me. Need you strong for Amaira,’ I said. ‘Be specific. I need to check how badly you’re hurt.’ There would be time for kind words and gentleness later, but I’d treated injuries before. Bleeding wounds first, broken bones second, and hope that I wouldn’t find anything worse.

  ‘I feel like I’ve been trampled by a cavalry regiment,’ she whispered, wincing. ‘My shoulder doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘I need to check to see if anything is broken,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to put my hands on you to do it.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How are you still alive? I thought that I’d lost you.’

  ‘Six years of Misery-poison,’ I said. That’s what I figured anyway. I didn’t know how it worked.

  ‘Your eyes are so bright,’ she said quietly. I snapped my fingers in front of her face a few times.

  ‘Stay with me. Don’t get lost in the pain. Tell me if what I do hurts. Think of Amaira. There’s no telling how long we have to reach her.’

  I started with Valiya’s head, then felt around her neck, but nothing was amiss. Her left shoulder had taken a great wrench and it didn’t feel right.

  ‘Hurts a lot?’ I said. Valiya nodded, sinking teeth into her lower lip. I felt around some more. Dislocated. ‘Your arm’s come out of its socket. I can fix it, but it will hurt.’ I continued my examination. Her hips had taken a wrench, probably from being swung around as we landed. I looked for Silpur. He was kneeling beside the broken body and the coil of rope abandoned beside it. We weren’t the only ones betrayed by the ice. I was about to ask him to hold Valiya still for me, but the thought of him putting his hands on her didn’t thrill me. ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘I always have,’ she said. ‘You’ve done this before?’

  ‘A few times. It happens all the time to soldiers in training. It’s going to hurt, but only for a moment. The pain will lessen. Try to stay still.’

  I wasn’t a surgeon, but I’d tended my share of battlefield wounds. I just hoped I had enough strength and precision to do what was needed. I put my foot beneath Valiya’s armpit to keep her still, then pulled on her forearm, slowly but with increasing pressure. Valiya went stiff, her eyes pressing closed. She balled her right fist, beat it on the ground. Slowly, slowly, and then there was a sliding sensation and the bone found its rightful place. She gasped and opened her eyes. I’d been wrong to write those eyes off as inhuman. I could see her suffering written in them, and I hated the pain that shone there. I felt along her shoulder to make sure that everything was as it was supposed to be.

  ‘All good now,’ I said, trying to give her a smile. She tried flexing her arm, her fingers. Everything seemed to be in working order. We’d been damn lucky. Aside from increasingly yellow eyes, I’d come away without a scratch. I looked around at the shards of ice that littered the cavern floor. Together, they must have weighed as much as a horse. I shouldn’t have survived the fall, or the impact after.

  It was this place. I could feel the bluish essence all around me, gliding around me like fireside warmth. First had smashed me around, but we’d been in Valengrad, away from the Misery’s embrace. Whatever this place was, it was similar. I was stronger here. Whatever power had smashed the ice plain, it was kin to the Misery’s pollution. I was steeped in it, and that had made me stronger.

  BECOME THE ANVIL.

  Valiya’s head seemed to be clearing, and I got her to sit up against a wall as I took proper stock of our surroundings. We were at the edge of a cavern in the ice, a frozen ceiling stretching high above. Pillars of ice, too square to be natural formations, kept it from crashing down on us. I didn’t know what it was, but it was old. Very old. Sometimes you just know. The cavern extended off into a deeper, midnight-blue haze. I got up to join Silpur. The old spear wound in my leg had awakened. A tonne of ice hadn’t scratched me, but that old complaint still made me limp.

  ‘Killed these before,’ he said, indicating the fallen man. His rope lay beside what was left of him. Where he’d broken open there was brown-black rot, lesions, and sores on his insides. I was glad that the cold locked back the stench. I’d smelled it too many times before.

  ‘A fixed man,’ I said. ‘One of Saravor’s puppets. You know about Saravor. I sent you a dossier on him.’

  ‘Got it, yes,’ Silpur said. ‘Insides are rotten.’

  ‘He’s been fixed up by Saravor at some point in the past. I guess that the rot has spread through him. It seems we’re not the only ones with an interest in finding whatever Crowfoot has down here. But Saravor should be dead. I thought the Grandspire had burned him out of existence.’

  ‘Just a figurehead. The grey children,’ Silpur said. ‘Fought them once.’

  ‘When?’

  Silpur blinked for the first time since he’d charged up to us. Tried to remember.

  ‘Shanasti was queen,’ he said.

  That was impossible. Shanasti had been the last queen of Dortmark some four hundred years ago. Silpur was bad at remembering things. He regularly forgot who I was, and if he was more than four centuries old then he’d also forgotten whatever he knew about conversational skills, or compassion. But since we were bathed in the blue light of mystical devastation, and I’d just survived falling eighty feet without a scratch, there didn’t seem much point in brin
ging up any doubts I had about how long he’d been around.

  ‘Where there was one, we’ll find more,’ I said. ‘Saravor would hardly send one man alone out here. Wonder how they got here.’

  ‘The Duskland Gate,’ Silpur said. ‘No other way.’

  It was plausible. Saravor had come into possession of The Taran Codex, written by one of the Nameless, long dead. What he’d learned from it could only be guessed at. Dantry Tanza had translated some of it, and he’d refused to write down any of what he’d learned.

  My longsword had survived the landing, thankfully. I had a feeling that I was going to need it. The dead man had a sword belt, but his weapon was gone. I helped Valiya up by her good arm.

  ‘We need to get going,’ she said. ‘Every minute we waste here increases the chance that Amaira won’t make it out of here.’ She dusted shards of ice from the thick fur cloak.

  ‘You want a weapon?’ I asked, offering her my dagger.

  ‘I have a weapon,’ she said. ‘You.’

  I gave her a smile that I didn’t feel. I looked down at the back of my hand and saw two black threads connect to one another beneath the skin. The exertion of Misery-power had furthered the spread of corruption.

  ‘I’ll take it anyway.’ She tucked it into a pocket of her coat.

  We started farther into the cavern. I didn’t want to think about how we were going to get out of there again. When Amaira had said she was trapped, we’d only been able to guess at what she meant. Now I was beginning to understand. Ascending the ropes seemed like a very bad idea. Valiya wouldn’t be able to make the climb by herself, especially not after dislocating her arm, and I didn’t want to risk my weight on the rope again either. We’d have to find some other way. If there was one.

  The cavern floor was perfectly smooth, too smooth to be natural. The blue incandescence gave us plenty of light to see by, and it was much warmer down here than it had been above, in the wind. For a moment I thought that I heard a voice, whispering my name, familiar but metallic, hollow. I looked around, but there was nothing there.