Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Remember that spiral stair we found?’ Nenn asked. ‘That was a fucking mess.’

  ‘We lost Jennin there,’ I said.

  ‘Here?’ Amaira asked. She hadn’t been listening to Nenn and thought I was talking about the archway.

  ‘No. The spiral stair,’ I said.

  ‘What stair?’

  Nenn rolled her eyes, and Betch shook his head.

  We’d run into the spiral stair fifteen years back now. Riding a mission, we’d seen a solid, straight line ascending skywards on the horizon. We’d found a winding stairway, the kind that castle designers had been so fond of a few centuries ago, but detached from any castle that had once housed it. It stretched up, up into the air. I’d sent Jennin up to get a look at the lie of the land. Down near the base, someone had carved ‘privy’ into one of the steps, an arrow pointing up. Jennin had gone up, braving the gusting wind, and then she hadn’t come back down. After a while we’d shouted, and still she hadn’t come back. Nenn and I went up after her. We’d climbed twenty feet when I saw the word ‘privy’ and that same arrow in the stone. I’d stopped, and then down came Jennin.

  ‘There’s a great view up there,’ she’d said. She’d gone down past us, and we’d headed after her. But when we reached the ground, Jennin wasn’t there. There was no other way that she could have gone, so back up we went. Down she came again, commenting on the view, and I took her arm and tried to lead her back down, but my fingers slipped and after she went on around the corner, she didn’t make the ground again. I tried to get her back a bunch of times, but she’d crossed over. If I’d stepped over the privy stone, I suspect I’d have joined her there, endlessly descending, lost to an error in space and time. For all I knew, she was still there, checking the view and coming down to meet us, over and over.

  The Misery had more than one way of making you its own. The archway was dangerous. It had appeared to me time and again, asking me to enter.

  I dismounted and knelt on the rock. I quested outwards, thinking I knew the Misery well enough. I could feel the general directions of Cold’s Crater, of the ruins of Adrogorsk and Clear and of course, the Endless Devoid where I’d cut my fate into my arm. But this door was not a fixed point. It was something different. The earth told me nothing, and the Misery lay silent. It was as if she didn’t want me to know how she felt about it. Hid it from me.

  ‘We should go around it,’ Valiya said.

  ‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a wide berth.’

  ‘What do you think’s through there?’ Amaira asked.

  ‘It won’t be anything good,’ I said. ‘Maybe nothing at all.’

  ‘What are they doing?’ North asked.

  The Marble Guardians had lined up near to the doorway. They bowed their heads as one, which I took to mean that they were communing in their silent way, and then Seventh stepped out of line.

  ‘Hold back,’ I said, but for the first time, a Guardian ignored my order and began ascending the stairs. ‘What does it think that it’s doing?’ I muttered. The broad steps were easy for the Guardian’s oversized legs. It reached the top of the stairway, and tried to step through.

  There was a howl, the same cry that the sky was so fond of emitting, and a rush of air ripped through the doorway. The Guardian was lifted from its feet and bounced down the stairs, pale limbs cracking against the steps until it rolled into the sand at their base. A cold light had grown in the doorway, but it died away quickly.

  ‘Told you it was bad,’ I said. ‘Let’s get on.’

  The Guardian picked itself up, apparently unharmed by its bone-breaking fall. It would take more than that to stop one of them.

  Something worth remembering.

  27

  Two miles on, the door loomed ahead of us again.

  ‘What happened?’ North said. He squinted at the pale grey stone, then turned a frown in my direction. ‘Misery getting the better of you?’

  ‘We’re going in circles,’ General Kazna growled. She glared at me as though I were doing it on purpose.

  We’d left it behind an hour ago, but somehow we seemed to be right back where we’d started. The landscape around us was all the same, red and black, sand and dust. There was no sign of wagons passing by here, but we could have come at it from any of three hundred and sixty degrees.

  ‘It might not be the same door,’ I said.

  North snorted, unimpressed.

  ‘The Nameless have put their faith in us, Captain,’ he said. ‘We’re working their will here. Get your shit in order.’

  I rode on away from them.

  ‘It’s the same door,’ Valiya said as she joined me. ‘It’s exactly the same.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. I didn’t think that I’d been turned around, hadn’t sensed anything shifting beneath us. But here we were.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Means I’ve fucked up,’ I said. ‘Hasn’t happened in a long time, but I guess that I still can. It doesn’t matter. We’ve not lost much time. I’ll just take a new reading and we can go on.’

  I was distracted momentarily by the singing of a choir of children. Valiya didn’t seem to hear it, but I joined in with them as I put my palms onto the sand. The Misery’s poisons tickled as they contacted my skin, bled upwards into me, but so slowly. Slower than they ever had before, but also clearer, more obvious to me than the air passing into my lungs. I felt ahead and around us, breathing myself out into some vaster space. I felt Adrogorsk, its tall, square towers still off to what was currently the northwest. The same direction I’d felt it before. Just as far as it had been before. I must have let myself slip, had let the Misery loop us around. The door stared down at us, dark and empty.

  ‘Look here,’ Valiya said. She pointed at some marks in the dirt a little way off. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Gilling tracks,’ I said. Little three-clawed feet, like chubby bird-prints, overlapping each other as if they had been walking in a line. There were a lot of them.

  ‘Should we be worried?’

  ‘We’re in the Misery,’ I said. ‘We should always be worried. But they’re only gillings, wherever they’ve gone. We’ve seen worse.’ I found a smile, pressed it onto my face. ‘General Kazna is annoyed at you for taking over the camp organisation. And organising the grooms. And the way you’ve reordered the ammunition carts. And the latrine-digging duty. She fumes about it when you’re not around.’

  ‘Well,’ Valiya said, arching an eyebrow. ‘She hasn’t told me to stop.’

  ‘She probably knows you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Are you coping, Ryhalt?’

  Valiya’s question took me by surprise. We’d not talked much as we crossed the dunes. Since Nall passed from the world she’d been reserved, looking inward. The Misery didn’t seem to be affecting her as badly as it had some of the others, but she’d not been out here before. It was never easy for anyone, except maybe me.

  ‘It’s this way,’ I said. ‘We’ve still two hours of light left and we need to push on.’

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ she said. ‘I know what you have to do. I know what Crowfoot is asking of us all. But I need to know if you’re coping.’

  I shrugged. I would, or I wouldn’t, and talking about it wasn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference.

  ‘You know where we’re headed now?’ North asked. He was cross with me, but there was a hint of worry behind the snark.

  ‘Carry on straight,’ I said. ‘Leave the navigating to me. You can take a turn if I fuck it up again.’

  The wagons lurched forwards. The longhorns pulling the wagon on which the heart’s iron box rested were always at their happiest when they were moving. Their primitive brains seemed to think that doing so would take them away from the burden they dragged. I’d noticed that those at the back of the team had lost some of the hair on their hindquarters, and the leathe
ry skin beneath looked raw. The Spinners were taking turns driving the wagon, but nobody wanted to be near to the ice fiend’s heart for long.

  I knelt against the dirt and put my hands against it.

  You’ll let me through, I told the Misery. Wherever this door leads, I don’t need it. I’ve done what I had to. Taken everything I need. I’m strong enough without it.

  Not strong enough, she whispered back. Not until you understand. Or maybe that was just my imagination.

  I sat beside the fire and watched the flames dance in careless waves.

  ‘You’re keeping something from me,’ Amaira said. She looked fierce in the firelight, black hair bound back, cheekbones sharp beneath her skin. Dantry sat close to her, saying nothing. He was always present around her now. I didn’t like it.

  ‘There are things you don’t need to know,’ I said. ‘I have to keep you safe.’

  ‘Look around you, Ryhalt,’ she said. ‘We’re as deep in the Misery as we can get. Nothing is safe out here.’

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me,’ I said.

  Amaira did not blink as she stared at me.

  ‘There was a time that you would have told me,’ she said. But she was wrong. Dantry knew the plan. Maldon knew the plan. A crazed, impossible plan formed from pain and desperation. But I’d kept it from Amaira. That had always hurt. I let the fire crackle an answer in my stead.

  A lone figure stood a little way from the camp we’d made within the circle of wagons, outside the perimeter. Valiya stared upwards towards the three moons, clustered in a line as they edged closer day by day towards the triple eclipse. The red, gold, and blue cast scintillating colours across the silver of her hair.

  ‘You should go to her,’ Amaira said. She spoke with the confidence of command. I’d made that natural confidence part of her, taught her how to give orders veiled as advice. She was turning my own tricks back on me now.

  ‘I don’t know what there is left to say,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it is that you say,’ Amaira told me. ‘It only matters that you say something.’

  ‘It’s too late for that to be worth anything,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Amaira told me. Not even twenty and she had all the confidence that I’d been so assured of at that age. The world takes us, little by little, dream by dream unpicked until you reach the hard stone at the bottom and realise there was never anything else anyway. The illusion of possibility is a trick played on the young. Amaira reached out and took my hand. ‘It’s never too late. Not for you. Not for her. Not for any of us. Look at that brave, courageous woman, Ryhalt. What’s she doing out here? What does she bring to the battle? She’s no warrior, no tactician. She has no magic. Yes, she may have practically taken over half the running of things, but that’s not why she came. Nall’s passing stripped her of her advantages, and this isn’t her world. She’s here because she still has some measure of hope for you. Even if you can’t understand it, you need to respect it.’

  ‘It’s too late for that,’ I said.

  Amaira slapped me hard in the face. She winced and pulled back her hand, shaking at the sting. Her blow hadn’t even turned my head, and I’d barely felt it.

  ‘I’m not saying I don’t deserve that,’ I said. ‘But don’t do it again.’

  ‘Never. Too. Late.’ Amaira snapped the words at me, then rose, brushed the sand from her breeches, and stalked away to take out her frustration on the Spinners.

  ‘She’s right, you know,’ Dantry said. ‘There’s always time.’

  ‘Time for what?’ I asked. I could feel my own bitterness rising like bile, hot and scalding as it hissed in my throat. I’d been this way a thousand times, usually dead-drunk and shuffling my own failures around like game cards.

  ‘For whatever it is that you want,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you some advice?’

  ‘Everyone else has. Why not you too?’

  ‘You loved my sister,’ he said. ‘For whatever short time you loved her, you knew right then that there was something else. Something other than’ – and he gestured around us – ‘whatever this is supposed to be. Do you remember it?’

  ‘It was ten years ago,’ I said.

  ‘And you recall it clearer than the dawn,’ he said. ‘Humour me. Tell me how it felt.’

  There is a part of you that never gets old, never fades, never dies. It’s not memory; those warp, twist, and turn and become their own stories in your mind, but the feeling remains. It is that that I clung to.

  ‘It felt real,’ I said. ‘It felt like there was a point to all of this. It felt like I’d found something that I could hold in my chest and not let go. I felt that I was winning. That after everything that had happened, even if we were going to die, I had what I needed.’

  ‘And then you lost it,’ he said gently.

  ‘I lost it. We only got to say it once. Once, in a whole lifetime. And then she was dead.’

  ‘If you had heard it a hundred times more,’ Dantry said, ‘or a thousand, or if every star had been shining the words down upon you, would that have made it more real? If it’s said more often does that give it more worth?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What you’re saying only works in the reverse, doesn’t it?’ Dantry said. He wore bird’s feet around his eyes, his beard was full and nobody would have thought him a boy anymore, but there was energy in his voice. For everything that had happened to him, the fear and the torture he had endured at Saravor’s hands, his light had not died. It burned as bright as ever. ‘Let me speak plainly. I love Amaira. I feel it hard, right here.’ He put a hand to his chest, too high, where most people think their heart is.

  ‘Dantry. I’ll say this just once. Amaira is not for you.’

  ‘Or what?’ Dantry said. ‘You’d beat me? Kill me? Try, Ryhalt. I don’t know how long I’d last against you, but it would be worth it, just to know if she felt the same. And that’s the point, isn’t it?’

  ‘You really think that you love her? You barely know her.’

  ‘There’s no “think” about it,’ he said. He laughed, an alien sound in the Misery. ‘Listen to someone who’s better at this than you are, even if your self-absorption makes it hard to accept that. Some love grows like fruit on a tree, growing slowly as it soaks up the earth. But sometimes it just takes you, and there’s nothing you, or I, or anyone else can do about it. It’s a storm. It’s an ocean wave, swamping you. If you love someone, it’s not about the time spent. It’s about what you had in the moments that you had it. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the Nameless.’

  ‘Not even the world,’ I said. I sighed and reached out my hand, then thought better of it and pulled on a glove. The second time I offered it, Dantry shook it. It was as much of a blessing as I was prepared to give him.

  ‘Don’t cock it up,’ I said. ‘You know, you’re wiser than a pup like you should be.’

  Dantry smiled as he got up to follow Amaira.

  ‘And you’re less stubborn than an old grouch like you ought to be.’

  As he walked away to stop Amaira from fighting with one of the Spinners who had failed to tie down one of the tarpaulins, Torolo Mancono sat down beside me. Blood was running from the rent in his neck where I’d bitten his throat out.

  ‘You’re in a bad mood today,’ he said.

  ‘You can fuck right off,’ I said, shaking my head to try to clear him from it. I looked over to Valiya, standing alone, where I had put her, watching the stars, which I couldn’t give her. In another life. In another world. But not this one.

  This one was about to end.

  I’d known what I had to do all along. Dantry’s words played in my mind, and I watched the way he and Amaira walked together, spoke aside from the others, found subtle, gentle ways to touch when nobody was looking. Her, helping him tie a knot. Him, lifting her up onto the wagon bed when there was
a perfectly good step. It shouldn’t have worked. He was much too old for her. But it was what it was, and maybe we all had a right to take whatever we could get from this existence.

  I caught a scent of something on the air then. A foul, sewerage smell, wet drains clogged with rotting meat. There were plenty of foul things in the Misery, and they all had their own acrid, chemical tang, but I knew that one all too clearly. I sprang to my feet, looking all around for signs of threat, but the soldiers were going about their duties, alert but without tension.

  ‘Saravor’s here,’ I growled. ‘He’s changed something. Someone. He’s here …’

  ‘Saravor is dead, Ryhalt,’ Nenn said. ‘You saw him die. Remember?’

  ‘But I thought …’ I shook my head. I’d seen him burn up in that double helix of phos energy, but the smell had been so sharp. So close. It was gone now but it had seemed so clear. I shook my head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s just your mind playing tricks on you.’

  We travelled onwards. The beasts pulling the heart wagon were getting weaker, sicker. One of our navigators disappeared. Whether he decided to take his chances alone or something silently took him beneath the sand, nobody knew.

  The world rotated around me, and my balance pitched as though I’d been hitting the rum since daybreak. Black roaring filled my ears and a dark wind roared and billowed around me. The black iron palanquin filled my mind, so cold that its chill reached across the twisted miles and wrapped itself around my mind.

  You have been foolish to defy me, Son of the Misery, Deep King Acradius said softly. Soft as an avalanche. Soft as the collision of planets. What can you hope to achieve with your pitiful band of mortals?

  ‘You wouldn’t waste your divine breath on me if you didn’t think that I can beat you,’ I said. I tasted blood in my mouth and the black oil of the Misery as it bled from my gums. I spat. But through Acradius’ mind, I saw them.