Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Tell me this: you tried to kill me at Fortunetown. How long before you try it again?’

  North shook his head. Smirked.

  ‘I’m a captain, Galharrow,’ he said. ‘We put down monsters. That’s always been the job, hasn’t it? But whatever it is you’ve made yourself into, you’re nothing compared to what’s coming. One fishes for minnows to pass the time, but only while the leviathans sleep.’

  ‘And Captain Linette? Josaf? What did they do to anger the Lady?’

  ‘I’ve plenty of blood on my hands,’ he said easily, ‘but none of it theirs.’

  I found it hard to believe that; but North was so blasé about having tried to kill me at Fortunetown, it seemed strange for him to get coy about that. I could not forgive him for what he’d done to Tnota and Giralt. We might be on the same side now, but when this was over, all bets were off.

  I looked over the people that I’d brought with me. The last hope for Dortmark. For humanity. Valiya, Dantry, Amaira, Maldon. People of rare and unusual talent. They were both the people I wanted by my side most, and the people that I wanted as far from it as possible.

  The soldiers arrived two hours later than planned. Davandein’s people had done well to mobilise in time, and that spoke of their quality.

  ‘How many do we have?’ I asked General Kazna as she drew her mount in. I’d known Kazna back when we were both brigadiers. Her career had gone somewhat better than mine. She was wiry, her narrow face pocked from Misery-worm, her armour scuffed and dented from a history of service. Her hair had gone grey a decade ago, but streaks of indigo dye running through it were a regimental reminder of time she’d spent serving overseas, fighting the savages in Karnun. She was a professional, a varied career behind her and soldier running through her to the core. She gave no indication what she made of me.

  ‘Nearly a thousand,’ she said. ‘They’re the best the citadel has. Veterans to a man. We’ve three hundred gunners, a hundred archers and the rest are mostly cavalry. I’ve a handful of engineers, and the Spinners.’

  We lived in a world of powder and shot, but archers trained from childhood could still put out four times the rate of fire of a gunner. I’d have taken any number of archers over gunners any day, but it took years to train a man to learn the bow, and just weeks to learn the matchlock.

  There were ten Battle Spinners, including Kanalina, and they’d loaded their first wagon with phos canisters. The second carried the loom, deconstructed into its parts and dragged by a team of six big longhorns. The iron mountings were thick and heavy, and the huge focusing lenses must have weighed a tonne apiece. The Marble Guard would be needed to construct it, under North’s supervision, when we got there. They’d brought two additional navigators as backup, but they wouldn’t be able to find Adrogorsk, not the way the Misery shifted around it now. A way home in case I got myself killed, maybe.

  ‘You’re late,’ I said to Kanalina when she stepped down from the wagon. ‘Where’s Klaunus?’

  She ushered me to walk a few steps away from the others with her.

  ‘He’s not coming,’ she said. Her face was hard, rigid as a statue. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Suicide,’ she said grimly. ‘Looks like he took a pistol up to the top of that clock tower of his and blew a hole in the side of his head.’

  Klaunus had not been a friend, but he had been a Blackwing captain. His death was a blow to Crowfoot’s plans. I shook my head.

  ‘You’re sure he did himself?’

  ‘The door was locked and bolted from the inside, and there’s no other way out of that tower unless someone killed him and then jumped out of a five-storey window,’ Kanalina said. ‘I had to burn the locks off. He was lying across his desk with a spent gun in his hand.’ She shook her head. ‘The selfish bastard!’

  Another captain gone, just when we needed him most. I had sensed his despair. I understood it. Perhaps I should have done more for him. I had killed Silpur and Vasilov. Klaunus had shot himself in the head. Amaira and I were the only Blackwing captains left now.

  ‘I’ve known stronger men to take that path,’ I said, thinking of my old friend and commander, Venzer. He was over on the roof of a nearby house chasing birds. ‘Better not to speak ill of the dead. His powers would have been useful out there, but we’ll manage without. Keep this between us, it won’t do anything for morale.’

  Kanalina nodded sombrely. She caught sight of Maldon. He was bored, having to pretend that he was as blind as the scarf around his face made out, so he was deliberately asking childish questions to which he already knew the answers.

  ‘What is that child doing here?’ Kanalina asked.

  ‘He’s how I navigate,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. He’s used to it.’ It was the best excuse I’d been able to come up with to explain why Maldon had to accompany us.

  ‘You can’t be serious?’ she breathed. ‘You take a child into the Misery with you?’

  ‘Hard times call for hard methods,’ I said. That was true, even if I was lying, but the disgust in her eyes was difficult to stomach all the same. I’d given everything for this. My body, my position, even my reputation. It didn’t matter. I told myself it didn’t matter.

  I felt the world change beneath me as I put my foot onto the Misery’s grit. Her welcome flowed up through my boot, filling me, a chorus of greeting at my return. Like a drink of iced water on a summer’s day, she passed all the way through, filling me, flooding the tiny particles that made up my body, greeting the magic she’d put into me like a long-lost daughter, exultant in reunification. Pains that I’d been trying to ignore evaporated, and a weariness in my soul grew light and heady. I walked into her clutches, breathing in her beautiful, exotic scent.

  ‘Good to have you back with us, Captain,’ Nenn said. ‘Where are we headed?’

  ‘Adrogorsk,’ I said. ‘Where else? That’s where this whole long journey began, isn’t it? It was never going to end anywhere else.’

  ‘Think you’ll do a better job than last time?’ Betch asked. Nenn’s beau leaned one arm on her shoulder. The thin, straight line of the knife blade’s cut across his throat glowed red in Rioque’s crimson rays.

  ‘We can only try,’ I said.

  ‘Got you something to commemorate the journey,’ Nenn said. I raised an eyebrow as she handed me a canteen – the kind soldiers carried, wide-necked, fat bodied – but made of silver. An inscription on it read Always with you, boss. I unscrewed the cap and gave it a sniff – brandy.

  ‘I never drink anymore,’ I said.

  ‘Never’s a long time,’ she said with a grin.

  Nenn and Betch faded into the wind as Valiya rode towards me. As I stowed the canteen away in my coat, I was caught by the way her hair caught the colours of the sky, a halo of indigo and violet. I blinked and the effect was gone. Valiya gave me a halfhearted smile but said nothing, only focused on matching the horse’s gait with her hips. She was not a natural rider, but it wasn’t the sway of the animal’s back that was bothering her. ‘It gets easier after a while,’ I said. ‘Don’t break out the liquorice yet. The longer you can leave it, the better you’ll do.’

  ‘I’ve lived beside the Misery for so long,’ she said. ‘I never knew what it was like to step into it. I can feel it soaking into me. In my nose, in my eyes, my gums. Spirit of Mercy, it’s like winter cold getting into your bones.’

  ‘You get used to it, eventually,’ I said, although that wasn’t true. You couldn’t get used to the Misery, not without changing. That, I had come to understand, was what she was: the essence of change. For change to occur to a subject, there has to be a reason, but the Misery was reason without subject. She twisted everything, made it different, a random, uncontrolled sluice into alteration. I could have written a philosophy book about it, but without living the way that I had, drawing the Misery into me day by day, I doubt that anybody could have un
derstood.

  The wagons rolled out onto the sands. The journey began.

  I knew, with a roaring through my bones, the very moment Deep King Acradius entered the Misery.

  The best of our scholars couldn’t say what the Deep Kings were. Their origins were known only through fragmented legend. They had been subjugated by the Nameless, or something else, something worse, and imprisoned beneath the ocean. They lingered there, trapped, isolated, powerless, and entombed for uncounted generations. Then they had risen, they had conquered, and their power was a match for the Nameless who supposedly watched over us. Behemoths. Gods. They compared to a man as a man does to an ant. I had come face-to-face with King Shavada, in the heart of Nall’s Engine. He had been darkness bound into something greater, but his mere presence had driven me to my knees. He had not even noticed I was there.

  Emperor Acradius was so much more than Shavada had been.

  If I was an ant, and Shavada had been a man, then Acradius was a mountain. His mind slammed into me and the Misery braced my legs and kept me upright as I felt a howling gale all around me, the screaming, roaring wind of ten thousand shrieking souls. I saw a second world, the shadow-world that lurks behind the first, but the Misery rose to bolster my spine, and the storm was nothing but a storm.

  The mountain saw me. Gazed into me. Baleful, glaring, so filled with his endlessness that to be the focus of that titanic stare was to feel the weight of the ocean above, and the darkness of it below. But ant or man, he felt my presence as surely as I felt his. We were separated by hundreds of miles, across shifting, inconstant, and corrupted planes of sand and stone, but he knew. He knew, and he saw me as an enemy. Something worth fighting.

  You have my brother’s heart, he said to me. Not in words, but in knowledge. It passed through the gulf of distance between us to hammer like falling millstones against my mind. As vast as he was, he was not just one entity. I felt that outsider, something that lurked around his edges, a mould creeping inwards, consuming. Acradius was not simply a Deep King. He was bound up with some small essence of The Sleeper and it surged towards the heart we carried in the iron box. Its kin.

  This is my land, I replied. Do you understand what I have become?

  A rush of dark presence surrounded me, whirred and snarled across hundreds of tormented miles. I was not afraid. Not here, walking within the loving arms of my mother.

  You are abomination, Acradius whispered. A mouthpiece for that which cannot be controlled. A vent for its flaw. You belong to the shattered sky.

  Then you know that I must stop you, I told him.

  I know you will try, Acradius said. But I see you, mortal instrument. Your leaders have betrayed you and fight bitter wars amongst themselves. They scramble for scraps of power, that they might take them and flee before my might. It will not avail them. All will submit. All will be ruled.

  ‘Tell him to fuck off,’ Nenn said helpfully.

  I stopped you once before, I said, and let the Misery flow within me. I showed him what I was, what I had become. And I’ll stop you again. The Misery drove deeper through my mind, angry at his presence, and with a snap she drove him out. The howling wind vanished, the shadow-lands faded. It was as easy as that, only the sharp chemical-metal taste remaining around my mouth.

  ‘Ryhalt!’ Amaira said, shaking my shoulder. I had not been aware of her. I felt hot wetness on my lips, reached up and wiped away the blood that ran from my nose.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. Amaira mopped my face. I saw that the Marble Guardians were watching me with a disconcerting level of intensity. Or rather, they were watching the bloody handkerchief that Amaira stuffed back into a pocket.

  ‘Is it affecting you that much?’ she asked.

  I looked down at the beautiful lights that shimmered beneath the sand, that sailed in the sky. I liked it here.

  ‘It doesn’t affect me at all,’ I said. I smiled at her. ‘It’s home.’

  Close to the Range, the navigation was easy. I pressed a hand to the ground, read how she’d changed and chose our direction. It was a wonder that nobody else was able to do it.

  The usual way to sleep in the Misery is two people, back to back, with a third watching over you. The carpenters who had put the wagons together had been clever. The tarps that covered the wooden frames were thick as sole leather, and it would take a determined predator to get through, and it wouldn’t be quiet. No gillings were going to chew their way through that, although I knew that we weren’t going to see any gillings. They had grown rarer year by year, where once they’d been amongst the most numerous of the Misery’s nasties, and I sensed none nearby. I sat outside the wagon I was supposed to share with Dantry, Maldon, and three of the Battle Spinners. I wasn’t tired, so I sat and stared at the trembling sky, letting the Misery’s wonders soak into me as I steadily smoked my way through a cigar. Now I was back in the Misery, the hacking cough had dissipated and my chest felt clean again. I didn’t even feel like I was dying.

  The soldiers had formed their wagons into a defensive ring. There were no sounds of chatter, singing, or levity within that circle. The first day in the Misery was always hard, but it was only going to get harder, and they all knew it. The Marble Guard walked the perimeter, tireless sentries. Sleep was irrelevant to them.

  Nenn, Venzer, and Betch sat opposite me. Ghosts of my regret. Shadows of my guilt. At times I’d forgotten that that was all they were. I could recognise that, distantly, only it didn’t seem terribly important that I did so. They didn’t speak tonight. Just sat and stared at me. Watching.

  Nenn, my courageous, kill-hungry warrior. She’d lived harder than anyone, killed faster, loved better. She hadn’t always made the best decisions, but that only put her down there with the rest of us. But spirits, she’d been loyal, and brave, and there was nobody that I could have trusted my life with more, no matter how I’d hurt her. It was my fault that she’d lost her nose. We were fighting a pack of limber-men that had stumbled onto us in the Misery and I swung my sword back over my shoulder, and she turned around and the point went right into her face. That shit happened sometimes, in the middle of a melee. She may have known it was my sword that took it, but in the press and the pain, probably not. We’d got her patched up, headed back to the Range, and she’d never spoken of how it happened. Like a coward, neither had I.

  Range Marshal Venzer, the Iron Goat, had been old before I got to the Range but he’d had a soft spot for me. Maybe he’d seen something in me that reminded him of his own distant youth, or maybe he’d just liked that I’d been determined. We hadn’t always seen eye to eye, but there was always respect there. He’d been a mentor of sorts, even if I hadn’t always followed his advice, and I’d been willing to learn from him, although I rarely did. He’d taken his own life when he saw that there was no hope. And there hadn’t been, and I couldn’t blame him for it, but I would always regret that I couldn’t keep him standing.

  I had not known Betch well. He’d loved my friend. He’d died a hero. We’d been prisoners, deep in the enemy camp, and his foot had been twisted up beyond any possibility of walking out of there. I’d cut his throat, and he’d faced it bravely. But of the three, his was the hardest burden to bear. Nenn had gone out fighting, and she’d saved us all. Venzer had lived eighty years and was honoured as a hero. But Betch had been a lowly captain, out in the Misery because he loved Nenn. He’d deserved better than my knife.

  Shadows of the past, watching me. Judging me. They were not unfamiliar.

  It was late enough that everyone else was either asleep or made out of stone, so I got up and began to walk from the camp. First watched me as I headed out into the night. The Guardians were all essentially identical, but I could tell him from the rest. Of all of them, he was the only one that looked at us like we were living things. Marginally more human than the rest. I preferred the ones that were clearly nothing like us. It made them easier to tolerate. But he watched
, and he said nothing, and he did not follow.

  I stopped, cut a shallow gash across my arm and let the blood drip into the sand. Put a little of myself back into it, from which I’d taken so much. A waypoint.

  I used the Misery to speed my pace. I had read the sand, I knew what lay nearby and there was a creature here. A long, worm-like thing that was burrowing slowly beneath the rock. It never ate. It never drank. It simply was. It wasn’t dangerous. There were things like the worm in the Misery that won’t threaten you. Nobody besides me would even have known that it existed. I found the point where it was trying, poorly, to circumnavigate a stretch of black, charcoal-delicate boulders. It was blind, without senses of any kind that we would have recognised, and I dug it up, its tube-like body as wide as my palm. I’d found these before. It wasn’t possible to kill them, not really. Chop them apart and all the parts just kept going.

  The only way to consume it was to eat it alive.

  There are some things that you wish that you could forget. The first time I’d ever eaten one, I’d felt that way. I’d wanted to get the taste of it out of my mouth, the memory of the writhing, wriggling flesh against my gums, my throat, the way bits of it kept on moving even in my gut. But that day was long, long past. The physical sensations I could ignore. They didn’t matter. Instead, as I gorged on the pulpy white flesh, I felt the bond with the Misery intensifying. Shimmering inside me, empowering me, repairing and changing me. I could have laughed, but I was slick with the brown, sludgy stuff that came out of the worm if you bit through the wrong tube inside it, and that wasn’t funny. Was it funny? I giggled to myself. Oh, but I’d missed this.

  It burned. It burned and stung my mouth, my throat, and then my gut. I felt as though I’d been stabbed and doubled over. A mouthful of churned, maggot-white flesh fell unswallowed from my mouth and I retched, then clapped my hands over my lips and pressed my eyes tight. I had to keep it down. I had to keep hold of what it gave me. Forget everything else. Forget what it was doing to me, forget the growing, hissing presence of the Misery in my mind. None of that mattered. I had to do this.