Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  Had to do this.

  Had to do this.

  I’d been doing it for years, focused so intently on the goal before me that I could excuse anything. Anything at all. Even this nightmare. In the brief moments of lucid clarity, I knew what I had become.

  I was laughing. I didn’t know that I was laughing. My mother scolded me as I stuffed more of the shuffling worm-flesh into my mouth, but she was comical, and I hadn’t listened to her when she was alive anyway. I wasn’t finished with this feast yet. There were hours until dawn, and I’d been away too long.

  26

  I knew that not all of them were real. Amaira, Nenn, Dantry, and Venzer were all real, of course. But there were others travelling with me that I knew to be shadows. Torolo Mancono followed us, crying that he’d been betrayed. My old friend Gleck Maldon was there, but he was a child now, blind and full of anger, and that didn’t make a whistle of sense. Shadows of the past, washing through my mind with the colours and the glare of the god-lights. I stopped talking to them when I didn’t have to. I began to worry that Valiya was really the woman that I’d once loved, and not some figment of my imagination, and somehow I’d let her come out here with me. And I saw Ezabeth, flaming hair and blank face, glowing beneath the god-lights that fell from the cracks in the sky above us.

  A horde of skin-shedders found us, undetected, while I was distracted watching a trio of ghostly women dance in a circle. The Guardians tore into them and broke them into pieces. The Misery had never felt safer.

  My companions tried to speak to me. My friends. Or so they called themselves. Had they really been friends, all this time? They weren’t the Misery. They weren’t part of me.

  When night fell, I went out, looking for a pool of the black, oily liquid that sometimes forms in the Misery, or the creatures that crawled through the grit. I found a series of tracks – small, clawed feet. But dozens of them, maybe more. They were gilling tracks, imprinted all over one another, almost as if they’d been walking in a line. The idea seemed grimly comical. I hadn’t seen any gillings in the past year, and no mention of them but for the one which had fed on Nall. As much as I hated the little bastards, I disliked the idea of them flocking even more. I would have killed and eaten one if I could, but the prints were old and the gillings, wherever they were going, were long gone.

  I found something that had been half-eaten by something else, and I finished it off. Strange, that I’d once found the consumption of these things repulsive.

  Ezabeth stood beneath one of the god-lights, watching me. I hunched my shoulders against her accusatory stare and chewed doggedly on a string of sinew.

  ‘You go too far,’ she said.

  I kept on chewing. The tough meat caught between my teeth, tingled against my gums.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ she said, and my name caused me to stop. I picked at a string of gristle, pulled it free, and spat it into the dirt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re losing yourself,’ she said. Her voice was hollow, an echo in a cavern of iron.

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you,’ I said.

  ‘I am nobody,’ she said.

  ‘You’re Ezabeth Tanza,’ I said. I didn’t want to have that conversation again, and she didn’t rise to it.

  ‘You’re letting go,’ she said. ‘But in the wrong direction. All this waste. This power around us. It’s not all you need. Humanity is the key.’

  I’d heard that before somewhere, but it felt like a long time ago now and I couldn’t place it. I put down the leg that I’d been eating and turned to face her. She didn’t look like my Ezabeth anymore. She was something unworldly, something harder, something that reminded me too much of the Nameless. Distant. Flames danced playfully at the hem of her dress, around her fingers.

  ‘Is that what you did?’ I asked. ‘You let go?’

  ‘I had to,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t be here if I’d not. But it’s cloudy. I don’t remember very much of it.’

  ‘And I should ask the sky, is that it?’ I said bitterly. I looked up at the spread of violent white lights breaking the red sky apart. ‘Tell me, sky,’ I said. ‘Tell me the answers. Tell me what you did to my Ezabeth.’

  The sky had fallen silent. It had nothing to say to me. In a moment of weakness I reached out for her. She no longer reached for me as she once had, and my fingers slid through her image, light playing across my fingers. Two worlds, one corporeal, one of aether, that could never touch.

  ‘Don’t let go,’ she said. ‘Not yet. There are those that still need you.’

  The light from the crack began to fade, the ray in which Ezabeth stood diminished, fading away until she too was gone and I sat alone with the remains of something that should never have existed. I laughed at it then, laughed until I couldn’t remember why I was laughing, and made my way back to the wagons.

  You’re trying to reach the focal point, Deep Emperor Acradius whispered into my mind with the crashing of an avalanche.

  A vision of a great black palanquin filled my mind, borne on the shoulders of dozens of drudge. They wore robes of high office, crowns, gowns sewn with glittering jewels. Great kings shouldered the burden alongside revered warriors, paint-stained artists, a lavishly tattooed high-courtesan: the elites of the east bore their god across the sands in praise-filled steps.

  ‘So are you,’ I said.

  What do you hope to accomplish, creature of the Misery? Acradius’ thought rumbled through me. I bring a legion. I bring The Sleeper’s wrath. Even alone, I could scrub you from the earth.

  ‘But you’re still afraid,’ I said.

  Fear no longer exists within us, Acradius told me. I am beyond such things. I am the power of the ocean’s dark. I am the fury of the storm. You stand close to ascension yourself. I could give it to you. All you have to do is bring me the ice fiend’s heart and fall to your knees and I will give you that rebirth. Immortality is not beyond you. You only have to reach for it, and you will find my hand open.

  ‘I will meet you at Adrogorsk. That is where this will end,’ I said. ‘It’s where it began.’

  Twenty thousand swift-riders will greet you there, Acradius said. You have nothing to bring against us, and you will not live to empower the heart. My riders will take the city before the moons align and your master is broken and powerless against me. If there is anything left of him, tell him. He should know that his plans are futile. Not even my own kind could stand against me. This world is mine again.

  Someone was shaking my arm. I blinked, and the palanquin vanished from my sight. Red-and-grey Misery-sands and cracked, broken rocks filled the horizon. I shook Dantry’s arm away. On his left, Amaira watched me with concern.

  ‘You were talking to yourself again,’ Dantry said. His face was drawn. The Misery did not sit comfortably around him.

  ‘No,’ I said. I did not try to explain. The Deep King’s voice echoed on in my head. This world is mine again.

  Dantry and Amaira shared a look and he put a hand on her arm. A gesture too intimate for the Misery, too intimate for a man his age and a woman of hers. There was nothing that I could say. They would do what they would do, and I couldn’t claim I’d ever understood the workings of the heart. Their closeness only made what was coming all the sadder. I knew the wrench that came with finding the thing that meant most to you and having it torn away in the moment of victory.

  ‘Captain Galharrow? Are we still on course?’ Spinner Kanalina called to me. She did it every couple of hours. I couldn’t blame her. Betch and Nenn kept trying to distract me, to pull us off in some other direction. Arseholes.

  I swung down from my horse and read the earth. Let myself sink into it, felt out through the gullies and cracks between places. There was something big over to the east, stamping huge feet as it pecked at the sand. I sent it a nudge of thought, pushed it away. The path I’d chosen would take us well clear of it.

&n
bsp; ‘We’re on course,’ I said. ‘Another three days and we should see the towers.’

  ‘Good,’ Kanalina said, as she always did. She was brief with her words. She had an astrolabe in her hands and turned back to looking up at the moons. Over the days their orbits had brought them closer and closer together. Great spheres of crystal, breaking the light, casting it back at us in blue, gold, and red. The Spinners we’d brought with us chattered away, excited at the purity of the phos they spun from the air. They kept apart from me and mine, as we did from the Guardians. Captain North rode alone. We were allies, a common purpose between us, but the divides showed in the distance between us and the sides of the wagons we chose to ride on.

  I knelt and quietly drew a knife, slashed a shallow cut in my forearm. Drops of heavy, blackish blood fell to bind me into the Misery’s sand. Set me there, as much as I was anywhere.

  ‘I’m looking forwards to it,’ Maldon said, riding up to me. ‘What are you doing?’ Of all of us, the Spinners avoided him the most. They didn’t understand why I’d insisted that a child accompany us, but they knew something was wrong with him. He might have looked ten years old, but there was something in the way he spoke that set an adult on edge. I ignored his question and tucked the knife away.

  ‘Looking forwards to what?’

  ‘To finishing this,’ he said.

  ‘Everything has to come to an end,’ I said. Maldon nodded solemnly. He tipped a hip-flask of brandy to his lips, then paused and brought it away without drinking.

  ‘We made some mistakes,’ he said.

  ‘Mistakes happen,’ I said. We rode in silence for a little while, but there was something heavy on his mind. He wasn’t one to spread his heart for others to see but, given time, the truth worked its way free of his lips.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About the Talents. It was my fault that they died. I got carried away. I should have been more careful at the mill. They didn’t need to die.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They probably didn’t. But you don’t need to talk to me about casualties in war. Not where we’re going.’

  ‘They weren’t warriors.’

  ‘No. But they were in the war nonetheless.’

  I doubt that gave him much comfort.

  ‘Have you been back to Adrogorsk since it happened?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But the men that died there did so under my command. Died for my bad decisions, and because I was out of my depth.’

  ‘They were soldiers. They knew the risks,’ Maldon said. ‘And they’ve been bones for thirty years. What I did was careless. I was impatient to prove the theory. I wanted to know if it was true.’

  ‘Did you know that they were inside when you caused the backlash?’ I asked. I had not wanted to know the truth of it.

  ‘I knew,’ Maldon said. ‘And I did it anyway. I didn’t care.’

  ‘But you care now.’

  ‘No,’ Maldon said. ‘That’s not it. I didn’t care about them at all. I don’t care about them now. I don’t care about anything, Ryhalt. This body, what Shavada did to me – I don’t feel anything for anyone. I don’t love anything. They took that from me.’

  I felt no anger towards him. Life and death, living and loving, how could I expect something like Maldon to experience them the way that we did? His body was practically indestructible, and even his attempts to end his existence had proved futile. But he was broken, trapped in an endless childhood, eyeless and so different from everyone else he might ever meet. It was a cruel and bleak fate for a man who had once been a hero to the Range.

  ‘They took something from all of us,’ I said. I looked down at the twin flowers on my arm, tiny and lost amidst the skulls. ‘It’s why we’re doing this. I know why I’m here. Who I’m doing this for. But tell me, Gleck. If there’s nothing in the world for you, then why are you here?’

  ‘Because I want to win,’ Maldon said, heat in his voice. ‘You don’t have to get your victory to win. You only have to stop someone else getting theirs. They left me hate. That much, I can still hold to.’

  I reached down and laid a hand on Maldon’s shoulder. He flinched at the unexpected touch, and though he trembled, didn’t brush it away. For a moment, he could have been an actual child, frightened, desperate and in need of a father’s hand. Ridiculous, really. He was older than I was, but maybe our hearts never stop craving the security of our youngest days.

  ‘We’ll win,’ I said. ‘We’ll win if we have to end the whole fucking world to do it.’

  Maldon shrugged my hand away and gave one of his bitter, Darling laughs.

  ‘That’s what they don’t realise, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’d never end the world. Not while your children are still living in it.’

  That hit me like a bucket of iced water over my shoulders.

  ‘My children died,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Oh, I know that they died,’ he said. ‘And I know that right after, you went to the Duskland Gate and sought Crowfoot out. You don’t like to tell it that way. You like to make out that Crowfoot came to you and offered you a deal. But I know you better than that. He didn’t come to you, did he? You went to him.’

  ‘So what?’ I said.

  ‘So there’s only one thing that you would have bargained your life away for,’ he said. ‘That’s you all over. You do whatever you want, but you never do it for yourself. You hate yourself too much for that. It’s why you couldn’t take Valiya’s love. It’s why you cling to the memory of a dead woman, a woman you couldn’t have. It was safe to love Ezabeth. She was never really within reach.’

  Painful words, but words hurt the most when there’s an undercurrent of truth to them. I had loved Ezabeth as much as I’d ever loved anything. More, maybe. I hadn’t loved my children. Not really, not as I should have. I’d barely paid them a moment’s thought when they were alive.

  ‘That’s all dead and in the past now,’ I said.

  Maldon laughed.

  ‘If that were the past then we wouldn’t be out here, riding towards the Deep Emperor and his army,’ he said. ‘I know. I feel him too. They’re all one, the Deep Kings, though they think they’re individuals. The remnant of Shavada in me feels Acradius approaching. Don’t worry. I won’t tell the others. They aren’t as hell-bent on destruction as I am, and if they knew what we’re going up against they’d probably turn tail and run. They’d look for some other way to end this. But this is the last chance, isn’t it? The most absurd and terrible gamble we’ll ever take. And we’ll take it, because somewhere out there, Crowfoot brought your children back. Didn’t he?’

  I sighed. I had never told another living soul what I’d traded myself away for. What I’d done countless awful things to people for, why I’d followed orders that, if I’d believed in it, I’d have said were as close to evil as things got.

  ‘Their souls,’ I said finally. ‘He took my children’s souls and put them into bodies that would have been stillborn, so that they might get a chance to live. I don’t know where. I don’t know who they are, what their names became. They might not have survived infancy for all I know. But I gave them a chance. They’ll never know me, never know anything of who they could have been. That doesn’t matter. It was enough to give them a chance.’

  ‘How do you know that he actually did it?’ Maldon asked.

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe everything I’ve done has been for a lie. Maybe he gave me this raven’s mark and spun me a sweet story. It’s not like I didn’t wonder, from time to time. But it was a chance, and that was worth more than I was.’

  We rode along in silence for a while, the wind pushing a film of fine sand around the horses’ hooves, the wagons creaking as they ground ahead across the uneven ground.

  ‘I’m glad that you shared it with me,’ Maldon said eventually. ‘Before you won’t be able to.’

  ‘What do you mean?�
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  ‘You’re slipping,’ he said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  But I’d lost interest in the conversation. A legion marched alongside the route ahead, aethereal bodies dressed in the uniforms of thirty years ago, weapons shouldered. The Third Battalion, warriors I’d led at Adrogorsk, making the final journey with me once again. I raised my fingers to my brow in a salute, and as I passed each man or woman they returned it. My men, back to watch our advance into oblivion.

  ‘What’s real isn’t fixed,’ I said. ‘Not for much longer.’

  A set of stairs, smooth cut stone, rose up over nothing, and at their peak, an archway ushered into someplace else.

  Sometimes the Misery is simple. There are things that will try to eat you, although they’re not really hungry. There are big piles of sand and rock, and there are chasms and seas of grass that want your blood. The sky is torn, and it makes a lot of odd noises, but you get used to that. The bad magic, the left-behind waste of apocalypse, ebbs steadily into you, turning your gums sour and your nostrils raw. But even though those things are strange, they come to be familiar.

  I signalled that the column should stop.

  The door stood out from everything, like a rook in a dovecote. I felt it pulling at me, tendrils of thought reaching out to brush against my arms and shoulders, drawing me towards it. My horse, who didn’t like me to begin with, whickered in discomfort.

  ‘What is it?’ Amaira asked. She was riding point with me. I knew what it was. I’d been seeing it for the past two years.

  ‘It’s a tomb,’ I said.

  I signalled a halt and the wagon train drew up behind us.

  The archway was stone, pale, the grey pillars as wide as old oaks. Unadorned, smooth. A triangular flight of steps led up towards it growing narrower as they ascended, where it hung suspended ten feet above the ground. Through the portal: darkness.