Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  A pair of enterprising young men approached me, all smiles and bright eyes, but the trays of soldier-trap goods they carried were thrust prominently before them. Trinkets to ward off misfortune, erotic pamphlets, remedies for blisters, none of which did the job they were supposed to.

  ‘Long journey, friend?’ one of them asked me. I guess he saw me as a soldier from the road. There were a lot of soldiers about. The market seemed to be stuffed full of them.

  ‘Long enough,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not surprised. The roads are a mess, the governors take no care,’ he said brightly. ‘Must be you’ve need for a spot of refreshment?’ He fished around on the jumble on his tray for a small flask of amber liquid. But I had frozen. I caught his hand, and he looked at me fearfully.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked.

  ‘A spot of refreshment?’

  ‘No. Before that.’

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it? The governors don’t look after the roads, do they?’

  I let him go and pushed him away. I blinked and shook my head. What was I doing here? Was any of this even real? Maybe the others were right. Maybe this was the price that I paid for the Misery-poison I’d allowed into my veins.

  I delved further into the market. Beyond the stalls, a wagon sat alone and uncared for. A huge sarcophagus of black iron rested on the wagon’s sagging bed. From inside it, whispers tried to reach towards me. No words, but a greeting. Impossible, but then, what meaning did that word have for me now? I’d seen too many impossibilities to consider the term relevant anymore.

  ‘Hot cakes going fast!’ a man with a loaded tray brayed. ‘Going fast! Only seventy-four left!’ He handed out steaming buns, took back money. ‘Seventy-three, seventy-two …’

  A sultry young woman, eyes dark as coal and lips red as winter berries began to sidle along the edge of the crowd, beautiful and sensual in a way that turned the stomach. She wore a one-shouldered robe, the kind that hadn’t been worn by working girls in my lifetime, but everyone knew as shorthand for prostitutes anyway. She spotted me, lifted an eyebrow, noting that I’d been paying attention. I retreated back towards the children, a sudden fear on me. They sang a new song now:

  Chop, chop, chop the wood,

  Make it break and splinter,

  If you don’t stack it on the lee side,

  It’ll be no use come winter.

  ‘You’re out of time again!’ the teacher snapped at one of the children, a lad bearing a furious scowl. The child clenched his fists and threw an apple core at the teacher, who brandished a cane in response.

  ‘He’s a good boy, just don’t anger him,’ an apologetic sister said in appeasement, trying to calm the red-faced kid.

  I staggered. I’d heard these words before. Many times. I knew them all. A young soldier caught me by the shoulder.

  ‘Whoa there!’ he said. ‘Looks like you need to take a rest, sir. Maybe take a seat?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, not knowing whether I spoke to a real man or a hallucination. This was all a lie. None of it was real, none of it existed. I was going Misery-crazy, not just imagining my old, dead friends, but now whole towns of people. The prostitute sidled up alongside us.

  ‘Evening, master,’ she said, her voice low and sultry. ‘Care for a good time?’

  I clapped my hands over my ears and shut my eyes. When I opened them again, night had turned and undone itself, and dawn was breaking on the horizon. The people were gone, but a pair of figures sat on the edge of the load-bearing wagon. A spectacularly handsome young man who looked like he never used his looks for anything good, and a woman much too young for the crow tattoo that covered most of her face. He looked small, frightened. She looked resolved, but so sad.

  Blackwing Captain Narada. Here she sat as the dawn broke, ninety years ago, before there was a Misery. I knew what lay inside that huge iron coffin. The name of this nowhere town didn’t matter. The people in the market were nothing, just echoes of the past, voicing the same sentiments that the gillings uttered, over and over, stripped out of time and pressed into the voices of the unmade.

  ‘Help me open it,’ Narada said, and she and the young man pried away the lid, letting it fall away with a clang. They settled down again on the edge of the wagon, fingers steaming gently, turning rotten and green where they’d touched the iron.

  The sky above began to buckle and twist. This was it. The moment that the Heart of the Void had been unleashed. The birth of the Misery. A woman, dressed in too many rings and second-best silks, staggered into the square and caught my arm to keep upright, just as the first crack began to tear through the sky.

  ‘Spirits be merciful,’ she whispered. There was terror on her powdered face. ‘The Nameless have betrayed us.’ She stared upwards, mouthing silent words. ‘Death comes.’

  The howling of the sky rose to a shimmering roar, and then everything turned to bright whiteness. And then it was gone.

  I stood in a rough, damp cavern with a low ceiling. The town, gone. The market, nowhere. The people, disappeared. The shadows were deep around the edges, but the cavern was barely bigger than a tavern’s common room. I had barely stepped inside it, the pale tunnel stretching back up behind me. The sloped, uneven floor was covered with the shells of things that should have lived in the sea, and some things that should not. Floating without support of any kind, something for which I had no name emitted the sickly light that illuminated the cavern. The size of a horse chestnut, its light the colour of a desert sunset.

  It was not the Heart of the Void. Not entirely. But it had been part of it. A tiny fragment of a voidling’s heart, blasted here when Crowfoot had enacted his plan. Its fury had been spent nearly a century ago, but some dark energy lingered inside it still. There is power inside every heart, whether it be wizard, fiend, voidling, or man, but this thing had nowhere to expend it, no direction in which to continue. It was paralysed by its own actions, and its own agony at what it had done.

  The Misery had brought me here to pay witness, to observe what it had been forced to do. The obliteration of the cities of Clear and Adrogorsk, the destruction of a million lives. Repeatedly the land had forced the dark archway into my path, maybe seeing that in our newfound bond, finally, finally, someone might understand.

  I understood. It wanted what we all quest for, what I’d been seeking ever since I’d cost those brave people their lives in the rout from Adrogorsk. What I’d needed ever since I’d stood in the courthouse, with Torolo Mancono’s blood running down my face. What I’d drowned beneath drink after drink when I’d learned that my wife and children were gone.

  It wanted to be forgiven.

  The Misery had no mind of its own. It was change, unbridled and rampant, a constant shifting miasma of possibilities. But here, the last vestige of the weapon that had created it had built a sanctum and wrapped itself in memory. It could not release that memory, maybe didn’t even know what it was. Guilt is a powerful thing. It wraps you, weighs you down, breaks your connection to the truth of the world, and yet, we cannot relinquish it, because in letting go we betray those that we failed. The ghosts of the Misery were not just my guilt. They were the Heart of the Void’s bleed-through, its aching loneliness and desire to relinquish the pain of what it had done. That Crowfoot had made it do. And in our coupling, it had found an outlet. A way to feel that which had plagued it for ninety long years.

  ‘Is this what you want?’

  Ezabeth had appeared before me, caught in a beam of light that filtered through a crack in the ceiling. Flames licked at her feet and hands.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘None of this was ever what I wanted. But we don’t get to have a summer. You told me that.’

  ‘You know how this will end,’ she whispered, her words rolling like steel. ‘With torment and death.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  I reached out, reverently, and closed my hand
around the point of light. I felt its heat, not some gentle summer heat but the hot cough of contagion and sickness, brought forth from the throat, heavy around the eyes. The Misery inside me sizzled. This wasn’t just her power: this was her maker. And in turn, she was mine.

  ‘You are already too far gone to do this,’ Ezabeth said. ‘Whatever power you hold, you’re just one man alone.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never alone. You taught me that.’

  The light flowed along my wrist, my arm, my elbow, and then on into my chest. I felt it within me. A sense of cold, a sense of endless anguish at what had been done in its name. My fingers buzzed where I’d touched it, but the sensation was not unpleasant. I was its keeper: I would guard this secret, this guilt. I would carry it for both of us, if that was what it needed. That was the deal we made.

  I went back to the stairs and headed upwards, back towards the light.

  She had been leading me here, all these long years. Every lover wishes to offer you their heart. The Misery had given me hers.

  29

  When I stepped from the archway, the world had changed.

  The towers of Adrogorsk rose from the dust like the fangs of a deep-sea fish, less than a mile to the north. It was daytime, a moonless sky indicating early morning, and the towers were red and gold beneath the rising warmth of the sun. Narrow, crooked, warped and fused where stone had melted and run in the wake of the Heart of the Void, they remained as a reminder that great minds and strong hands had worked here to create something of beauty.

  There was nothing beautiful about what remained of the city. The spires were a stark testament to their own demise, vast gravestones for the hundreds of thousands who had died here, spearing the sky in search of a vengeance that would never be fulfilled.

  I had been a brigadier when I first came here. A sharp uniform, polished buttons, moon insignia on my shoulder displaying a rank that I was both proud of and chafing at the bit to surpass. What a fool I’d been. I returned here now, the commander of nothing.

  The soldiers were already mobilised and heading out towards the city, wagons rattling and beasts lowing. Valiya stood at the foot of the stair, looking up. Her face was drawn, arms clutching a shawl around her shoulders, though it wasn’t cold.

  ‘I knew you’d return,’ she said. ‘When the land began to change around us. I knew.’

  ‘It worked,’ I said.

  ‘It worked,’ she agreed. ‘What lay beyond the portal?’

  ‘Memory,’ I said. ‘Guilt. Regret. The usual things you find out here.’

  ‘A price, then.’

  ‘There’s always a price.’ I looked up at the cracks in the sky, wide and flaring. Rioque was passing by one of them, its image distorted, like looking through your own fingers when you hold them in front of one eye. Like sadness, hope, or understanding, the cracks were both real and they weren’t. A truth, but only in our minds.

  Valiya turned away and walked to our horses. She’d brought mine, saddled and ready for the last mile into the city. I helped her up onto hers, then swung up onto my own. Not so easy as it had once been. I was bigger, heavier, and the horse didn’t like me at all. We rode towards Adrogorsk. I caught Dantry watching me with bitter eyes, a weight of heart about him that sloped his shoulders and stole the handsomeness from his face. Amaira rode on the other side of the column, staring straight ahead, adrift.

  It had been necessary to break them apart. I needed them both. I found that I kept repeating that to myself, even as I refused to meet Dantry’s eyes.

  Adrogorsk had been a great city, once. Not in my lifetime. Not for ninety years. Not since the Heart of the Void. She was a ruin in every mortal’s living memory, a testament to something that had once been teeming with commerce, art, and culture. In her shattered bones lay the proof, if proof had ever been needed, that there was nothing that the Nameless wouldn’t sacrifice to survive.

  A long boulevard ran towards what had once been the Garden Gate, wreathed in creepers and baskets of flowers so that it glowed with colour. There is, perhaps, nothing that silences the heart more than fallen giants. The people of Adrogorsk had been proud of the warrior-queens that had once battled with bronze for their fertile lands, erecting great stone statues along the route, towering wonders of the world. Only plinths remained now. Feet endured and in some lucky cases, ankles. Inscriptions ran around the bases of what had once been the greatest sculptures in the known world. They were written in Elgin, a language that had passed from common knowledge long before Crowfoot’s weapon had torn them down, but Maldon knew it. He translated them happily.

  ‘Here stands Shinestra, Queen of the World! View her Majesty and despair!’ He looked to another. ‘Here stands Vinova, Queen of the World! Her beauty entrances, her strength destroys!’ He laughed. People don’t laugh in the Misery, not if they have sense. Maldon didn’t care, or maybe just didn’t have any sense. Soldiers cast him worried looks as they marched by with shouldered pikes. Maldon had a scarf over his face, so they knew he wasn’t reading it, and they knew more about Darlings than most. I told him to cut it out, as soldiers began to line the way.

  There were legions of them. Some faces I recognised, many I didn’t. Their uniforms were thirty years out of date, their weapons things of the past, and they formed ranks to either side of the cracked and broken road-stones, aethereal, strands of vapour curling away from them. Ghosts of my past. People who’d died on the walls, or beneath them, or during the hellish retreat back to the Range. Some still carried the wounds that had laid them out, others looked fresh and healthy. A man saluted with a handless wrist, jagged bone protruding from the stump.

  ‘Sir,’ he said.

  ‘Carry on, Private,’ I said.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Valiya asked.

  ‘You don’t see them?’ I said. I looked out across the ranks, where ghosts stretched back across the desert plain. Rank after rank of ghostly troopers with aethereal weapons stood silent. Watching me pass. I shuddered.

  ‘I don’t see anyone,’ Valiya said.

  ‘There are thousands of them,’ I said. My voice had fallen to a whisper. ‘Far more than I had at Adrogorsk. Hundreds of thousands.’

  Familiar faces mingled with the unremembered. Nenn had taken a position in the ranks, one of the few not standing at anything like attention. She was surrounded by her Ducks, the brave cavalry we’d led out to the crystal forest. Some of those who’d died in defence of Valengrad’s walls stood alongside them, and here and there a man I’d hired personally and taken out onto the sands in pursuit of bounties. A young face spurred a memory, long forgotten, of making a young man stand sentry duty all night because he’d kicked sand over my freshly polished boots. Another, a man I’d sent to carry a message up to the wall just before a Darling’s killing spell had torn across the ramparts. So many dead. All my doing. My fault.

  Mine, the Misery pulsed through me. Not as a word, but a sense of possession. Of claim on me. On them. I pressed my eyes tight and hoped that they would be gone when I opened them again, but they weren’t. I have always said that the Misery’s ghosts were nothing but reflections of our own guilt, that if we have souls at all then they go somewhere else entirely. But with thousands of pairs of spectral eyes following me, now I wasn’t so sure.

  As we approached the crumbled city walls the Third Battalion, my own men, stood shoulder to shoulder as they had when I’d ordered them to form ranks and fight the rearguard action. They turned to face me with easy smiles, bringing their fingers to their heads in salute. I had not seen their final, heroic stand. I didn’t deserve their respect.

  ‘You go on, sir,’ Major Gil said as I passed him by. ‘We’ll buy you the time. You do what needs to be done.’

  I stopped for a moment and looked at him, at the exposed bone of his scalp. He did not look at me directly. He was speaking the words of another place, another day. Just an echo, but one that b
it hard all the same. Gil had been ten years older than me then, an old soldier, but that had been thirty years ago. He looked so young to me now. They all did: these children of the Misery.

  ‘You shouldn’t have had to die for me,’ I said. The first apology I’d ever made to them.

  ‘You didn’t do wrong by us, sir,’ Gil said. ‘You may have been a stuck-up little arsehole, but you were our stuck-up arsehole. We’re still here, if you need us.’

  I nodded to him, though I wished they would just dissipate. The Misery could have shown me their deaths, but somehow their respect was worse.

  The world spun around me, and my balance pitched as though I’d been hitting the rum since daybreak. A roaring sounded in my ears as a dark wind roared and billowed and the black iron palanquin filled my thoughts, so cold as it reached across the twisted miles and wrapped itself around my mind.

  Reaching the city will avail you nothing, Son of the Misery, Deep King Acradius said softly. Soft as an avalanche. Soft as the collision of planets. Bring my brother’s heart to me and you shall be spared. Your allies shall wear my mark. None of you need die in futility.

  ‘You wouldn’t waste your divine breath on me if you didn’t think that I could beat you,’ I said. I tasted blood and Misery-oil as it bled from my gums. I spat. But I still saw them.

  They marched in their tens of thousands. Drudge warriors, ghost-skinned and heavily armoured, spears on their shoulders and shields on their arms. The banners of the Deep Emperor flowed long and bright above them. Beyond that huge host, I sensed another driving will. Older, far older even than Acradius. The Sleeper, biding its time.