Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  The thrust had left me vulnerable. A sword arced down and in desperation I threw my arm up in front of my head. The impact was mostly deflected by the thick moosefur coat, but not entirely. Some of the edge bit through. There was no pain, not with the rush on me, and my attacker had to scamper back out of my longer sword’s reach. The cut barely bled, and what trickled from my sleeve was sluggish, steaming, black. The disorientation was gone. The energy that rippled through me was warm. Laughing.

  Moving, moving, keep on moving. I couldn’t pause, couldn’t stop or I’d give them the ground that they needed. Circle around, get them walking into each other, hope that one of them tripped.

  The noise that the shaman was making rose, driven high from the back of the throat, undulating up and down. The air got heavier as she emanated magic in primitive, tangled pulses. The Misery-taint in me rebelled against it, but only weakly. It wasn’t being directed towards me. She’d seen that I was the lesser threat and went for Silpur.

  I’d been wrong about the bayonets. Somehow Silpur had got past one of them and taken a man’s arm off and now he parried a bayonet thrust down and hammered a sword into the man’s head. Effortless, efficient, exquisite swordsmanship. But the shaman had him in her sights, blood spitting from her teeth as she wove her tribal sorcery around him. Silpur tried to advance on her but he stumbled and crashed down, his legs failing. He looked down at them in puzzlement, wondering why they weren’t working for a moment, then back to the shaman. The man whose arm he’d taken off was picking himself up, dragging a heavy dirk from his belt. Tracks of blood wept from his eyes.

  Another sweep of my sword drove my assailants back again, but keeping the weapon moving between them was stripping the fight from my already exhausted muscles. One of the men feinted and I whirled the sword through the air to push him back again and that cost me. The blade stopped its spinning and the point sank towards the ground. My chest was heaving, my leg almost ready to give way.

  Amaira burst from the hole in the ice. Dusk-skinned, hair like night, and taller than I remembered, she sped towards the men who had their blades to me. She came in low, cutting through the first man in moments, turning his sword aside on her buckler and slashing him once, twice, a third time and then turning to the last. I summoned what final strength I had and made to part him down the centre, but he managed to parry it aside. The distraction was all Amaira needed to drive her sword through his back. He went down silently.

  Somehow Silpur was on his feet again and the rest of the fixed men were all on the floor too. A few last gasps from dying men, and then it was all over. Somehow that pale, green-eyed shit had taken out six armed men. I let the sword fall from my fingers and slumped down onto my knees.

  There was a time when Amaira would have thrown herself into my arms, but childhood had passed. The woman who stood before me was somebody else now. She was still narrow and the bones in her cheeks were hard, angular panes and her nose would always belie her heritage, but her eyes said it all. I’d left her as a child, and now she was a woman. A deadly woman, at that. She looked me over for wounds.

  ‘Just in time, Captain-Sir,’ she said with the hint of a smile, and maybe she hadn’t changed as much as I’d feared.

  ‘Took your time, you mean,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I meant you, of course. Thank you.’ The smile died away. ‘Vasilov’s shot.’

  She glanced towards Valiya, sorrow beyond her years passing over her face, then hurried back to the tunnel while I took a look at Silpur. He was covered in blood, but none of it was his. I turned to the Karnari shaman. There was a knife in her back. My knife. Valiya leaned against one of the pillars, trying to wipe the blood from her hands onto the furs, scrubbing at them over and over.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said. ‘Good work.’

  She shook her head, a troubled look on her face. It was probably the first time she’d ever hurt somebody. Knowing that she’d had to wouldn’t make a difference. I crouched beside the shaman’s body, and was not surprised when her eyes slowly opened, beads of blood welling at their corners. It wasn’t the woman who looked out at me.

  ‘You usher forth the day of your own destruction,’ a dry, corpse voice hissed from unmoving lips. Saravor, speaking through the dead.

  ‘Seems to me that we’re winning,’ I said.

  ‘Look around you. Look at the breaks in the world,’ it whispered. ‘Does this look like victory? If Crowfoot empowers his weapon and unleashes it on the Misery, what then? How far would he go not to lose?’

  ‘You’re an altruist now, is that it? Fighting to save the rest of us?’ I spat. ‘You’ll understand my doubts about that.’

  ‘What victory lies in being an emperor of dust?’ Saravor hissed. ‘The sky is broken. The black rain maddens the world. Crops fail, creatures rise in the dark. The Nameless war with each other, your Bright Lady fades to nothing and the Deep Emperor comes with The Sleeper at his call. Can you honestly claim, Galharrow, that you chose the right side?’

  I stared down at the twin tracks of blood running down the shaman’s cheeks.

  ‘I choose to be my own side,’ I said.

  ‘This world belonged to the grey children long before your kind walked it,’ Saravor breathed. ‘They understand the price of Crowfoot’s betrayal. Look for me, Galharrow, when the moons align. The children will not allow the raven to tear the world apart simply to be the last one standing before the sky rips apart and unmakes us all.’

  The blood flow stopped, and the eyes rolled up behind closing lids.

  ‘Your own side,’ Silpur repeated. His unblinking green eyes gave me a sterile, pointed gaze. For him, there was the crow and nothing else. I let him stare.

  Blackwing Captain Vasilov had served his time well. He’d come into Crowfoot’s service around the time of the Siege of Valengrad, and he was a rarity amongst the Nameless’ servants. Well adjusted to social situations, admired and loved by the soldiery, he even brought princes and the cream to his side with his easy manner and handsome smile. On top of all that he was a Spinner of considerable strength. His complexion marked him as Fracan, and Vasilov was probably not the name he’d been born with. He’d spent most of his time working around the states, rooting out the seeds of Bride lairs and cultists where his manners, charm, and wit were put to best use. He was comely, good natured, and in a really bad way. He held a lead box that he wouldn’t relinquish.

  Amaira helped him out of the tunnel and Valiya made him a bed out of things she’d dragged from the fixed men’s packs. He was sheened with sweat, and there was a hole in his side where a matchlock ball had punched right through him. I helped the women to cut strips of bandage and stuff the wounds front and back, and Vasilov put up with what must have been considerable agony with grim stoicism, but the sweat ran from him in rivers. He’d seen enough injuries in his time to know the truth. He must have known he was done for.

  ‘We didn’t think help was coming,’ Amaira said, ‘And we couldn’t spare much phos for a longer message.’ She wiped sweat from Vasilov’s brow. There was fondness between them, friendship. She talked to distract herself. ‘Been stuck in that hole for nearly three days. After we cut the tunnel, we were nearly out of phos canisters. It was the worst kind of luck. We’d gone to try to read the friezes while we waited for Crowfoot to tell us how to get home when the witch and her men came on us. They cornered us here, and we had no way out.’

  ‘How did you get down here?’ Valiya asked.

  Amaira looked up at her sadly. She saw what had become of Valiya’s eyes and couldn’t keep the sorrow from her face. She looked back to Vasilov’s wounds, though they couldn’t have been an easier sight.

  ‘There’s a stairway in the chamber above that leads to the surface.’ She indicated a door on the far side of the cavern.

  ‘You used the Duskland Gate to get here?’ I said.

  ‘You know any other
way to this place? We’re a thousand miles and an ocean away from any other living people. Saravor’s men must have used it too,’ she said.

  ‘We can use it again if we climb out.’

  ‘You have beasts with you?’ Amaira asked. I shook my head, and her expression crumpled to darkness. ‘Then no,’ she said. ‘We can’t.’

  ‘I should try to stitch Vasilov’s wounds,’ Valiya interrupted. She and Amaira shared a look. Amaira took my hand.

  ‘Walk with me,’ she said, and led me away from the other captains. We walked across the hall to Ezabeth’s ghost, immobile and uncaring under the crack in the world. The spirit didn’t notice us, seemingly engrossed with some flames running up and down her arm.

  ‘You see her?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. You can too?’

  ‘Of course. But Vasilov can’t. I don’t know why I can. Maybe because he doesn’t remember her. That’s all that’s left of her, isn’t it? Memory. Her time’s running out. When she appeared to us that day in the courtroom, she seemed so strong.’

  ‘The others can’t see her either, but Valiya saw her once.’

  ‘Perhaps she chooses not to. I don’t know. Do you still dream about her?’

  ‘Sometimes. But it’s not the same, and they’re just dreams. Back then she was asking me for help. I don’t think that she’s there anymore. Not as she was.’ It was painful to look at Ezabeth, or what had been Ezabeth, long ago. I didn’t want to talk about her. Amaira took that moment to put her arms around me, and there was warmth in her arms, and comfort, but not much.

  ‘I’m glad he sent you.’

  ‘We can’t use the Duskland Gate to get back,’ I said.

  ‘We can, if we find something to sacrifice,’ she said. ‘The gates are powered by the dead. Something has to draw the Long Men out. Look around you. Do you see anything living here?’

  ‘Why would Crowfoot send you here with no way back?’

  ‘We had animals with us,’ Amaira said. ‘But they went wild and broke free when the Long Men came out of the barrows. If I’d tried to hold them they’d have pulled me in after them.’

  Ezabeth’s ghost stood on its tiptoes and turned a lazy circle. Lost and trapped beneath a world-bridging crack in the sky. Forever, or until she faded from memory altogether.

  ‘I hope you got what you came here for,’ I said.

  ‘We got it,’ Amaira said quietly. ‘It’s in that box Vasilov has. He used up most of the canisters we’d brought burning the hole through the ice. After that we had to use an axe. But we got through, and cut what we could away.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Same thing it always is,’ she said. ‘The fossilised heart of the ice fiend. It’s always a heart, isn’t it?’ She shivered. ‘Try not to touch it, Captain-Sir. You’ll see things you don’t want to see. Things from the age when that thing walked the earth. Nothing you’ll want to remember.’

  ‘And that’s Crowfoot’s weapon?’

  ‘Not on its own,’ she said. ‘It’s a vessel, the same way that Saravor used Shavada’s Eye as a vessel for soul magic, only that was part of a Deep King and the thing in the ice … it’s so much more. The same type of thing the Deep Kings tried to raise from the ocean. Its capacity to absorb magic is a million times greater than theirs. The Deep Kings might be immortals, but the ice fiend in there is something worse. This heart is why the Nameless are sending Davandein to Adrogorsk. They think they can use it there, somehow. The master didn’t tell me how.’

  ‘I don’t like where this is going,’ I said. Amaira didn’t either.

  There was a hiss across the chamber. We hurried back. Silpur drew back his sleeve, displaying the raven tattooed across his forearm. Except that it didn’t look like any raven that I’d ever seen: featherless, with batlike wings and an elongated beak.

  ‘Tourniquet,’ Amaira said, stripping off her belt, but Silpur put out a hand to hold her off. The raven came slowly, a sickly, withered thing missing half of its feathers and barely able to force itself free. A tiny shred of Crowfoot’s power, or at least it would have been, if he’d had anything left. Silpur didn’t even flinch as it ripped through the flesh of his arm. It spoke to Silpur only, in a language that I’d never heard in all my long years in Valengrad, where every culture under the sun came together. I had never seen Crowfoot’s avatar emerge from anybody else before, and his usual rage was subdued, withered in the feeble creature’s throat. We watched the shrivelled thing give its instructions. There was no anger in them, and Silpur stared blank-eyed, asking no questions, only nodding occasionally to show that he understood. When the withered bird had delivered its message, it collapsed, and smoke drifted from its burned-out eyes.

  ‘Time to go.’ Silpur said.

  ‘We can’t move Vasilov yet. The wound will tear open. He’s in no condition to travel,’ Valiya said. Silpur’s green eyes seemed somehow less human than her silvered ones.

  ‘Time to go.’

  19

  There were a dozen questions still unanswered, but the sooner we got out of there, the better. I had guessed what Crowfoot’s message said. I didn’t need to ask Silpur. I just had to follow where Crowfoot’s chain of thought would have gone, what would have suited his needs best. I knew the master better than I knew myself, maybe. It was a chilling thought but despite his potentially vast powers, Crowfoot was simple. Take everything. Give nothing. Win at all costs, refuse any compromise. If I wanted to know how he thought, I only had to watch a carrion bird.

  I couldn’t look at Vasilov, though. He was injured. Weak.

  Expendable.

  I needed time to rest and Silpur allowed that we could take an hour. He didn’t help with Vasilov at all, just sat down on one of the fixed men’s packs and stared straight forwards, his hands on his knees. Motionless as a statue. How long, I wondered, had he been doing Crowfoot’s bidding? How many people had he killed, how many missions had he undertaken in my master’s never-ending war? How casually he’d accepted the master’s demands. How little he cared for what they entailed. The Blackwing records said Captain Narada had been the one to convey the Heart of the Void out to what had become the Endless Devoid, the centre of the Misery. She must have known what she was doing, must have suspected how many lives Crowfoot’s weapon would take. I wondered whether she’d been like Silpur, as dry and free from outward emotion as a stone, or whether she’d regretted what she was doing. I guess that her deal had been important enough to her to go through with it. Or maybe she’d just been weak.

  There was no weakness in Silpur.

  The hour passed to grunts of discomfort and pain. The cut on my arm had healed even before I looked at it, drawing in the motes of blue light. I watched the semblance of Ezabeth, tried to talk to her more than once, but she didn’t notice me again. Years ago, I told her that if it took me a hundred years, I’d see her free of the light. Looking at her here, eaten away by pain and time and the split between our worlds, I had to wonder if fate would make a liar of me in that too.

  ‘I lived without you this long,’ I said quietly. ‘I’ll see you again soon. When it matters.’ I gave her a salute, but she was too busy watching flame drip between her fingers.

  I left her behind. I was no use to her here, and she was no use to me either.

  ‘Time to go,’ Silpur said. I was feeling a little recovered, certainly not back to my former strength but I could walk around easily enough and I had enough in me to assist Amaira in getting Vasilov to his feet. He couldn’t walk easily, and it was going to be a long way for a badly wounded man. Amaira led us towards the stairway.

  ‘You look like shit, Ryhalt,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even recognise you at first. You look younger too. Like young shit.’

  ‘Language,’ I grunted at her. She gave me that old catch-me-if-you-can grin, insolent, wild but now that she had matured there was a depth to it that said that I wouldn’t cat
ch her, and her wildness was a choice, not a lack of upbringing. She’d have turned heads in any playhouse, but she was strong with it, hardened and fierce. Smart, resilient, and powerful; I was proud of what she’d grown into, even if I could claim only a fraction of the responsibility for shaping her.

  We went through into another of the chambers, no longer giving a damn what crap the ancient people had carved onto the ice. I could feel the presence of the monstrosity in the ice, dead but still simmering with old, terrible magic. I wanted to be away from it as soon as possible. Silpur carried the box that contained the fragment of its heart and walked ahead of us, frequently outpacing us all as Vasilov winced and grimaced. The gunshot hadn’t killed him outright, but it didn’t look good.

  We all knew. We didn’t have to say it, but we knew.

  It would have been helpful if Crowfoot had informed us that there was a way down here that didn’t involve falling nearly a hundred feet and surviving only due to years of eating Misery-magic into myself, but wizards are arseholes. We left everything that we didn’t need at the foot of the stairs. The portable communicator that Amaira had brought with her was worth a small fortune, but that joined swords, emptied phos canisters, and all the other crap that wasn’t needed for the ascent. We were all drained, exhausted, and only Silpur still looked fresh. He didn’t remove his swords, seemingly as full of energy now as he had been when he swung down on the rope. Implacable, resolute, uncaring.

  ‘You can open the Duskland Gate?’ I asked him.

  ‘It will open,’ he said. Like I’d asked about the weather. Like it was nothing.

  The stairway spiralled around, up and up it went, and with each step Vasilov clenched his teeth. I’d been hurt that badly before, and worse, and understood what he was going through. Poor bastard. It didn’t seem fair.

  ‘We’ll get you the best surgeon money can buy back in Valengrad,’ I said. ‘You’ll have matching scars front and back.’ He tried to offer me a smile, but it turned into a groan halfway through, and his eyes pressed tight.