Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘We can’t,’ Davandein said. ‘But the Nameless can.’

  ‘And do what with it?’ I said angrily. ‘Another Heart of the Void? The sky is shattered, and the rain sends men mad. Even the geese are trying to eat us. What the fuck do we have to gain by unleashing that kind of power again?’

  ‘These thoughts have kept me awake long into the night,’ Davandein said wearily. ‘And every time, I come to the same conclusion. We can’t win without the Nameless, and this is their play. We have no means to combat King Acradius, the Deep Kings that he rules, or The Sleeper without them.’

  ‘And you think it will be enough? Crowfoot is fucked. Nall is fucked, and I don’t trust the two that remain.’

  ‘It will have to be enough!’ Davandein snapped. ‘I won’t give up the Range. I won’t flee across the sea and leave the people of Dortmark to burn. And this conversation is pointless, because neither will you. We may not always see eye to eye, Galharrow, but we’ve never been at cross purposes. Not in the end.’

  That was pretty rich given that she’d been prepared to stick me on a rack only a few days ago – although a month seemed to have passed in my absence. Davandein’s view of reality always suited her own purposes.

  I had a lot of anger for Davandein. I would have seen her replaced, deposed, maybe even hanged for leading that attack against Valengrad. She’d done what she thought necessary to keep the Range safe, and she’d been completely, and irreversibly, wrong, but for all her pride, all her ambition, Davandein was a soldier.

  ‘Shallowgrave’s monster wiped out twenty-one good people trying to bring me in.’

  ‘The Guardians can be … difficult to restrain. There have been a lot of disappearances since they started to hatch. Adenauer sent them because he serves the law, but the casualties were … regrettable.’

  That was one way to put it. Valiya’s woman, Sang, had numbered amongst them. Collateral damage to the Nameless. They cared nothing for us, not even for each other’s minions. Each playing their own, long, games.

  ‘And you’ve managed to lose Adrogorsk.’

  Davandein laughed.

  ‘It was a fixed point in the Misery, as you know. But not anymore.’

  ‘It’s still a fixed point,’ I said. ‘It’s the land around it that changed, when the Crowfall took place. Most of the Misery changes over hours. Around there, it shifts in minutes.’

  ‘The Lady of Waves says that the triple eclipse will peak directly over the ruins,’ she said. ‘All three moons will align before the sun, the vast spheres of crystal filtering the light. The power they offer will give ten seconds of godhood to the Spinner that can draw it. The heart has to be there.’

  Of course it did.

  I’d fought at Adrogorsk, thirty years ago when I was still young and naïve enough to believe that there was glory to be won in killing over broken stone and fallen rock. The beginning of my failure, the start of my disgrace. One of my footmen had been honoured to carry my banner there, a great flag of red, the silver fist of my house gleaming upon it. Damn, but that kid had been proud to be the one to bear it. He’d fallen in the fighting, and in my despair I’d torn it into pieces. It was there that my pride had begun to crumble.

  Where else would it end?

  ‘The Deep Kings will try to stop us.’

  ‘They will. They’ll send everything they have,’ Davandein agreed. There was fire in her belly. This was her moment. Even if she’d managed to advance her position, her legacy would always be tainted by the massacre she’d presided over. She had an opportunity to lead the charge that would wipe that black mark from her past. ‘I’ve raised sixty thousand men. The biggest, best trained, best equipped army that Dortmark has ever put into the field. I have artillery, I have Spinners, and I have the heart. But it doesn’t matter if I can raise ten times that number if I can’t get them to Adrogorsk.’

  Fate turns, and turns, and her cogs and wheels grind the future inexorably into place. I almost smiled.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘But I’ll want something in return.’

  ‘If you get us there and it works, I’ll make you a prince,’ Davandein said easily. I smiled. The thought of me as a prince, surrounded by courtly hangers-on and fawning servants, had a certain appeal to it, if only because I could dismiss them all and watch their faces. Nenn’s shadow seemed to agree because she was mimicking a stately walk around the roof, giving dainty, rolling waves to imaginary supplicants.

  ‘I only want a pardon for Dantry Tanza. And he gets his lands back.’

  ‘The man is a criminal,’ she said. ‘A saboteur and a killer.’

  ‘That’s my offer. I’ll take his pardon with me today, or you can find someone else to navigate to Adrogorsk for you.’

  Davandein laughed.

  ‘You’re an arrogant, overserious prick, Galharrow. Fine. The ink will be dry before you leave, but tell me one thing first. If you want him pardoned, then you must know why he’s been causing so much destruction.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And will you tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  Davandein shook her head.

  ‘I suppose the world wouldn’t be right if you weren’t still keeping secrets from me. Go on then. And Galharrow.’ She paused. ‘I like Captain Amaira. Keep her safe.’

  Davandein offered me accommodation at the citadel, but I preferred to keep to myself and didn’t want to start feeling locked in. I’d grown used to having my own space, out there in the dust, so I headed back to Valiya’s safehouse.

  I got to sleep at last, or to try to at least. When I closed my eyes, bright lights danced across them and I heard whispers, coming to me across the distance. The Misery. I had a conversation with the Iron Goat, Marshal Venzer himself, at one point, but later I couldn’t remember whether I’d really been talking to him or if it had been a rambling dream. I didn’t recall the conversation.

  It had been a month since we’d left Valengrad, even if it had only seemed a day. I seemed to be hungry enough to eat a month’s worth of rations. I got through a whole string of blood sausage and half a loaf of bread, smeared with thick, grainy mustard. I could barely taste it through the Misery-taint that never left my mouth, but my belly welcomed it and as I ate I felt my mind growing clearer. The little lights that winked and glimmered at the edges of my vision receded. Even Nenn had gone away for a while.

  Valiya scarcely picked her way through a single sausage. She kept scratching at her arms, trying to get the numbers to work the way that she thought they should. She was always trying to order the world to her liking, and it wouldn’t do what she wanted.

  ‘Stop doing that. Please. You’ll hurt yourself,’ I told her.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she asked. ‘How can we win if we don’t have any answers?’

  ‘We can win,’ I said. I did a rare thing then. I knelt beside her chair and put my arms around her, but it was like embracing a statue. Her skin was cold, limbs tensed hard as if against an unwanted attack. I’d let some of my guard down, but hers was tight as a fortress.

  ‘Let me go, please,’ she said quietly. An uncomfortable moment for both of us. She pushed away from me and left the room. I looked across at Amaira. She may not even have been twenty – her exact age had never quite been clear – but there was understanding in the look that she gave me.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, wanting to avoid her gaze. ‘We’ve an appointment to keep.’

  Amaira smeared white plaster makeup over my face and fitted the teardrop-shaped goggles into place. I could almost have passed for human again. We raided Valiya’s small armoury and headed out into the day.

  ‘It’s not easy for her,’ she said.

  ‘None of this is easy.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean and you know it,’ Amaira said. ‘Wait a moment. Let me just go in here. Feels like an age since I had sweets.’ She du
cked inside a sugar shop. Someone had put up a poster outside: Reward for information on death of Finnea Stiegan, bitten and beaten. Six hundred marks. It was a paltry amount of money, but plenty if you lived day to day. That information would have found its way to my desk, back when I was taking care of this place. I wondered if Klaunus had it up on his wall of strings and notes. I knew I should go to see him, to involve him in what was coming, but he’d let me down once already, and I had someone more important to see.

  Amaira emerged with a jar of ice drizzled with red syrup. She offered me a wooden spoonful of sugary ice.

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ I said. She smiled happily and shovelled it into her mouth. I’d made Amaira a weapon, in some ways by mistake and some ways by choice, and it was easy to forget that she was barely more than a girl.

  ‘Love this stuff,’ she said brightly. ‘But where were we? Oh, yes. Valiya. You being back makes all this that much harder for her.’

  ‘She’s grieving,’ I said. ‘For Sang, and for Nall. She knows he’s dying.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But that’s not all it is, and you know it. Bloody hell, Captain-Sir, but you refuse to see what’s right in front of you. Tell me this: why do you think Valiya went to Nall for a deal?’

  ‘It’s just her way,’ I said. ‘She wants something badly enough, she’ll go whatever distance is needed.’ Something Amaira had said struck me. ‘Wait a moment. She went to him?’

  ‘Yup.’

  I frowned. Wordlessly I reached for the jar of ice and shovelled some in my mouth. It was unpleasantly cold, cloyingly sweet. Sucking on it saved me from having to say anything for a while.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Even for Valiya, that’s extreme. The Nameless take far more than they give, even if she can now map out the way a duck flies on her arm. Why would she do that to herself?’

  ‘Make herself inhumanly strange, you mean?’ Amaira said. ‘Yeah, why would she do that?’

  A parent-child relationship is hard to change, especially with the time that had passed, but sometimes I wanted to remind Amaira that I was older, wiser and knew better about everything than she did. I didn’t, of course, and I didn’t like her suggestion.

  ‘Not everything is about me,’ I sighed.

  ‘Not for most people,’ Amaira said. ‘But can you honestly say you’ve not dedicated your life to the love you hold for a woman?’

  We turned a corner and I was glad to see the familiar, misshapen timbers of The Bell on the street ahead, ending the conversation. I’d lived there once, for a bit, after the Siege. Nenn, Tnota and I had practically held the bar in place for a number of years. There was little to recommend it other than that the beer was cheap and they kept the barrels sealed so the chances of finding a happily drowned mouse in your pint were even lower. I found a toad once, spirits alone know how it had got there. I’d always suspected Nenn’s hand in it.

  Midday meant that there were only regulars on the benches, and regulars knew well enough not to poke about in anyone else’s business, even when someone as refreshing to look at as Amaira wandered in. She’d been fortunate enough to grow up to be beautiful, and in some ways that would bless her life. People would do things for her, think well of her for no other reason, and welcome her into conversation. Men would fall in love with her as easy as falling over. But good looks carried a second edge. She’d attract attention from every drunk, men in authority would seek to coax her into bed, and she’d go to sleep some nights asking herself whether people liked her for anything more than wide eyes and fine cheekbones. I thought of Amaira as a daughter, and in some ways wished she’d grown up to be plainer. A striking appearance wasn’t necessarily an advantage for a Blackwing captain.

  The people we were meeting were settled in at a corner table, killing time. A well-groomed man of forty, yellow hair that fell halfway down his chest framing a pale, narrow face. He was reading a book of philosophy. He looked handsome in a subtle but well-cut jacket of midnight blue, the slashed sleeves showing silver cloth beneath, and seemed entirely out of place amongst the midday drinkers in The Bell. Beside him, an undignified boy was scratching something into the table with a knife that he probably shouldn’t have been, given that he had a bandana all the way down to the end of his nose. The blind kid looked up as we sat down.

  ‘I’d offer you wine, but I’m afraid I only have the one glass,’ Dantry Tanza said, putting his book down. He held his hands out apologetically. ‘I had to bring it with me. They don’t have glasses here, and a tin cup spoils the flavour.’

  ‘The Bell’s wine doesn’t have any flavour,’ I said. I couldn’t keep a smile from my face.

  ‘I brought the wine too,’ Dantry said. ‘I’ve been paying them to let me sit here all day for the last two weeks. I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.’

  When I’d first met Dantry, out near Cold’s Crater, he’d seemed younger than his years should have allowed. Since then we’d been through a thing or two, and maturity was sitting well with him. Time in Saravor’s dungeon had beaten the optimism out of him, and while I’d never have wished that imprisonment on anyone, a little cynicism is good for the soul. He looked healthy. Flourishing. Being the most wanted criminal in the Dortmark states had suited him.

  ‘You weren’t worried that the Office of Urban Security were going to come pick you up?’

  ‘They’d never think to find me here,’ Dantry said easily. Maybe not all of his optimism had gone. ‘Nobody knows who I am down here anyway. Do you like the longer hair? It’s a disguise.’

  ‘You look like an actor,’ I said. Was it a compliment? Probably not.

  ‘You’ve not yet introduced me to your companion,’ Dantry said.

  ‘Captain Amaira,’ she said. ‘You don’t remember me? I brought you soup.’

  Dantry double-blinked at her. His face softened. Lightened. Took back some of that lost youth.

  ‘Well, good grief,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed so much. How wonderful to see you again. It’s been such a long time. You’ve, erm, changed so much.’

  ‘Oh, balls, not again,’ Maldon muttered.

  And I saw in that moment, with a dreadful sinking feeling, that Dantry Tanza had just fallen head over heels in love with a woman half his age, who had absolutely no interest in him whatsoever. She would no doubt mock his stumbling words and make sure he knew that she was about business and nothing else.

  ‘Thank you, I think,’ Amaira blushed. ‘I like your new hair.’

  Double balls. Time to change the subject and get on with business.

  ‘Things are moving fast,’ I said. I handed Dantry an envelope. ‘You’re pardoned. Keep this with you at all times. I have a copy kept safe in case you lose it, but there’s another in the citadel’s archive, and a fourth at the courthouse. They can’t touch you now, not legally. Congratulations. You’re an ordinary citizen again.’

  ‘Well, there’s a pity,’ Dantry said. ‘I rather enjoyed being a man of mystery.’

  ‘What happened at the Snosk mill?’ I asked. ‘I heard that people died.’

  ‘My fault,’ Maldon said. He was drinking what looked to be the The Bell’s strongest beer through a hollow reed. I had expected some kind of explanation from Dantry that it had been an accident. Maldon’s glib acceptance of what he’d done sent a jolt of anger through me.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘It was an error,’ Dantry said. He, at least, had the dignity to look pained.

  ‘I miscalculated the backlash,’ Maldon said. ‘You know how it works. When phos is used, there’s a backlash, getting bigger and bigger the more phos that’s burned. My calculation was off. But that’s why we’ve been working at this for the last six years, isn’t it? Trying to get the numbers right. It’s been a bloody nightmare travelling with this fop. Do you know how many times he bathes? Every day. And who ends up having to heat the water?’
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br />   ‘It’s to maintain the pretence that you’re my servant. But I’m no cruel overlord. You’ve gone off to conduct your fair share of “essential tasks,” and before you start, I have absolutely no interest in knowing what horrible things you’ve been getting up to,’ Dantry said airily, but there was a spark of humour in his eyes. ‘We did try to overload the Snosk mill. The Talents were supposed to be out taking their daily walk around the compound. They don’t treat them well down at Snosk, Ryhalt. They’re literally chained to the benches. We’d made the calculations for the detonation and the backlash, so that we could take the readings. It was going to be big. I even timed it for the Talents to be as far from the mill as possible. We didn’t know some of them had been left inside, though. The ones who were too far gone for it to matter, I suppose. It’s on my head.’

  I’d wanted an explanation, and I’d had one. Mistakes happened all the time, and I couldn’t blame Dantry for it any more than I could blame myself for leading a poor retreat from Adrogorsk. My mistakes had cost a lot more lives than Dantry’s miscalculation.

  ‘Not your fault,’ Maldon said. ‘I’ll take the blame. They can hang me for it if they want to.’

  ‘Probably not a satisfactory outcome there for them or for you,’ I said. But however serious the incident at Snosk had been, however much damage Dantry had done as he travelled the republic testing his calculations and theories, it was only preamble.

  ‘Tell me then,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘Will it work?’

  Dantry turned his wineglass in his hand.

  ‘No.’

  I was not deterred. I didn’t agree.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The backlashes have been hard to measure, but they still weren’t enough. Getting into the phos reserves within Nall’s Engine was always going to be hard, but even with everything that they’ve built up there in the last ten years … What the Taran Codex said about the Nameless – I’m sorry, Ryhalt. It’s not enough.’