Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  He meant to intimidate me, to show the strength of the warriors he commanded, but Acradius had misjudged my own abilities. I knew the Misery, I knew her currents and channels, the way the power flowed and changed. And I saw that Acradius’ power was stretched thin, thin as paper, just like the Nameless. He clung to existence in the face of The Sleeper’s influence and desire to dominate him. He fought down the Deep Kings he had enthralled by a tether of will alone. He should have swept us from the board, but he was as neutered as Crowfoot, as the Lady of Waves, as any of them.

  I laughed against the grit and dust and Acradius’ fury blazed from red to white. Hotter than a forge, hotter than the sun. No mortal had mocked him before. Not in all his long millennia.

  I will keep you alive. Alive for ten thousand years, flayed and pinned to the city walls, Acradius echoed from his iron tomb. My swiftest riders go ahead of my host. Twenty thousand of my finest warriors will bring you to me in chains.

  ‘But you can’t ride with them,’ I said. ‘It’s taking all your strength to maintain control.’

  You will never understand control, Acradius whispered. I am legions.

  The vision shifted, altering to show me a second force of drudge. A vast contingent, driving their mounts hard. Thick, white skin, unarmoured but carrying bows and lances, draped in long kaftans. They rode a leaner breed of hurks, rugged, horned creatures, whipping their mounts bloody in their headlong charge across the Misery. An umbilical cord of black energy drove the riders onwards, trying to forge a link between Acradius and Adrogorsk that forced the Misery’s changes out of their path. The magic pooled and centred around a throne-like chair, borne aloft by beasts of burden. Upon decayed velvet cushions, surrounded by gold and glittering stones, the desiccated, embalmed body of a long-dead sorcerer acted as the focal point for the riders’ magic, a tether point between Adrogorsk and Acradius, a bead sliding inexorably along a wire. They had no need of navigators, the corpse-link driving a boundless charge along Acradius’ corridor of thought. The swift-riders left dying, exhausted mounts in their wake on the dust-clouded track, twitching feebly. They were giving everything to reach Adrogorsk before the moons could align.

  They marched in their thousands. Drudge warriors, corpse-blue-skinned and heavily armoured, spears on their shoulders and shields on their arms. The banners of the Deep Kings flowed long and bright. A huge host, bearing down on us, ready to destroy.

  Do you not comprehend the powers I command? Acradius thundered. Loud as winter snow. Hard as a mother’s love. Your masters cower. They hold nothing. Their day is over, all of their schemes and pawns have achieved nothing. But I am the cosmos. I am the world. I cannot betray my worshippers, for I am all. Give yourself over to me. Save your people, and make them something greater than they have ever known. Their fate rests within your hands.

  Inch by inch, I raised myself from the dirt as his presence clamoured and bit.

  I forced him back. Repeated words that I’d spoken to him once before.

  ‘The rain’s about to hit,’ someone said, her voice distant.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if I stood here alone,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I was the last man alive. You’ll find me beneath the walls of Adrogorsk.’

  I scraped the sand from my hands and thrust my fury against him, beyond the blackness, the cold and the evil that sought to twist me to his will.

  ‘Bring your vassal Kings. Bring your drudge. Bring everything you fucking have, your whole damn empire if you need it. Bring it all. We’ll be waiting for you.’

  30

  The sky boomed hollow with thunder and a purple curtain swept across the Misery towards us.

  The city gates were a yawning, empty maw. Nothing organic had survived the Heart of the Void, and the soldiers rattled the wagons through, lashing the longhorns’ flanks to urge them on. The walls were pitted and scarred where drudge siege engines and spells had gouged chunks from the fused stone, but they still stood firm. Adrogorsk had been built to last. Beyond the walls the buildings still stood as they once had, even if they were twisted, melted things.

  It was all so familiar.

  ‘We need shelter,’ Valiya said, all too aware of the effects of the rain.

  ‘Where should we take the loom, Captain?’ General Kazna asked.

  ‘Kanalina wants it at the highest point in the city. That’s the sky-bath at the palace if I remember right, but for now just find a building and get inside.’

  ‘Can you direct the quartermaster to some suitable stores? I want our ammunition unloaded into the dry as soon as possible.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s been thirty years, General, and the city was full of men, gun smoke and bad sorcery the last time I was here. I remember the sky-bath because I can see it from here.’ I had to shout over the growls from the rushing clouds and pointed towards the palace, the tallest structure still standing. A tower rose from its domed roof, flattening out at the top in a shallow dish.

  The general fired off orders. Get the moisture extractors set up, find a decent building for a powder store, identify latrines, secure a perimeter, corral the animals. The messengers dispersed with well-practised haste. Their oilcloth cloaks would keep off a light fall, but not for long. The first drops sizzled across us, stinging where they found bare skin.

  ‘Everyone find somewhere to hole up,’ I shouted, unnecessarily. The soldiers weren’t stupid, and they’d seen the effects of the rain on their comrades firsthand.

  Valiya, Maldon, and I ducked through a door that had been half covered by a melted wall. The room beyond was dark, half-melted, the roof sloping down to the floor. Sand and grit had gathered in the corners over the years, but the bones lay undisturbed, three distinctly separate skeletons visible in the dim light. Tattered shreds of old clothing, belt buckles, and tin buttons lay amongst the human detritus.

  ‘This place is a tomb,’ Maldon said.

  ‘We probably used this to house some of the wounded brought down from the walls,’ I said.

  ‘And when you evacuated the city you left them behind?’ Valiya asked.

  I knelt beside the bones and picked up a scuffed brass pocket watch. It had run down long ago, the hands frozen in a final moment. Outside the black rain built to its full force, hissing as it doused the streets.

  ‘We left the dead,’ I said. ‘And those whose injuries were so great that they couldn’t be moved had earned a quick death from their officers. The drudge were going to claim the city. A quick knife was preferable to being taken. Mind-worms, or being turned into drudge – nobody wanted that.’ I brushed my fingers along the top of a skull. Maybe I’d known this soldier. Maybe I’d shared a drink or a laugh with them before the flames of war engulfed us. Nothing there now but bones and scraps of the past. We are all nothing, come the end.

  There was nothing more to say. We sat, as far from the door as the sloping roof allowed, and waited for the sky to exhaust itself.

  ‘What will you do, Galharrow?’ Venzer asked me. It was just the two of us, alone now in the dark, watching one another, cross-legged on the floor. I tossed a stone from hand to hand, or maybe it was a finger bone. It was hard to tell in the gloom.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you have to,’ he said. ‘When Crowfoot’s weapon is primed. When the power of the moons has been gathered and spun, and you stand before his new world-ending weapon.’

  ‘I’ll do what has to be done,’ I said.

  ‘What has to be, or what you want to be done?’ Venzer’s head flopped to the side, sagging on a broken neck that couldn’t hold it upright. His half-mouth of teeth had been worn down by time, but his eyes were bright.

  ‘I’ve learned,’ I said slowly, ‘that those can be one and the same.’

  ‘Blackwing, Blackwing, all the captains have flown away,’ Venzer said. His head slumped forwards, chin against his chest. He took it in
both hands and held it upright. ‘What happened to them, I wonder? Who killed Linette, Klaunus, Josaf, and Vasilov? Where is Silpur, the master’s attack dog? Why isn’t he here to pull the trigger?’

  ‘I did what I had to do.’

  ‘Would they agree?’

  ‘Most of them can’t,’ I said. ‘They didn’t have the strength to do what is needed. I don’t know how Linette and Josaf died, but in the final moments they would have buckled. I’m not sorry they’re gone. I don’t trust anyone else. Only me. At the end, the decision will be mine.’

  ‘And what of Amaira, Crowfoot’s new little crow? You let the count tell her. Let her into your little conspiracy. But what will she do, when the moment of your betrayal comes? Where will her loyalty lie, I wonder?’

  ‘Leave me to worry about Amaira.’

  ‘And have you done enough to be sure you can do it?’ Venzer asked. ‘Are you really strong enough to pull it off?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. I nodded at him. ‘But I will be. Yes, sir. You can count on me.’

  We lost two men to the rain, fools who’d run out to grab something, hoping that their cloaks would protect them. They convulsed, lost in the memories it forced upon them. Nall’s memories. I could hear their gibbering shrieks two streets across as I oversaw the unloading of the loom’s components. The settings were thick pieces of iron, woven with intricate lattices of silver and copper wire. The lenses were wrapped up as bulky parcels which the Marble Guardians had to be entrusted to move, as they were far heavier than our biggest men could reasonably manage.

  The wagon on which the ice fiend’s heart had been brought was a grim sight. The planks had warped, blackened, and the whorls in the wood had the look of gaping, screaming mouths. The longhorns that had been drawing it had been swapped out repeatedly, but even those that had only dragged it for a couple of days had some kind of sickness in their hindquarters, their fur melting away and fat yellow boils spreading across their skin. They’d been in proximity to the fiend’s heart for too long. Even through the box’s lead panels, the exposure had taken effect.

  I found myself standing by it with North on the opposite side of the wagon, leaning on that jade-headed spear. The Guardian, First, stood close by, watching the cargo.

  ‘You want to be the one to carry it up there, be my guest,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not get near the damn thing if I don’t have to.’

  As I looked at them, North with his eyes hidden behind the darkened lenses of his glasses, First with eyes the colour of blood, it did not escape my notice that I’d had to fight both of these servants of the Nameless in recent days. We had a common purpose now, but I didn’t like them. North gave a ‘hmph’ and sauntered away; he wasn’t planning on doing any heavy lifting. The box wasn’t large, but there were a lot of steps up to the sky-bath, and its weight went beyond its size.

  First turned his gaze from the box to me. The Guardians were impassive things, seemingly disinterested in the world around them unless there was blood in the air, but First was looking at me with a different kind of expression. Had I thought it possible, I’d have sworn he was trying to keep back a smile.

  ‘Captain Galharrow,’ a runner said. ‘General Kazna wants you up on the sky-bath.’

  I groaned inwardly at the prospect of those steps, and again for the perilous ascent.

  The old palace was the most defensible structure still standing in the city. The queens of Adrogorsk had wanted their visitors awed, and a deep moat surrounded it, spanned by three broad bridges. Stagnant black rainwater, slick and oily with Misery-pollutants, still half-filled it. A good deal of sand had blown into the moat over the years, making the liquid thick. Quicksand. I didn’t fancy anyone’s chances if they fell in. The moat was not intended as any kind of defence; once upon a time leisure craft would have given the queens a gentle trip around their great works. Half-fallen statues still lined the banks, generations of rulers brought low by Nameless magic and the ravages of the Misery. The toxins in the half-water would probably have eaten through any punts that tried to pole around it now.

  The sky-bath topped the roof of a palace that had once housed Adrogorsk’s elite. Where better to enjoy a warm communal bath than ten storeys above the ground? By Adrogorsk’s standards, ten storeys had been low. Many of her towers had stretched to twice that height, spires of luxury for a class of nobility that had made Dortmark’s princes seem like paupers. The lavish gardens that had once surrounded the palace were now dust-grounds and sandpits. An open-air staircase led up the side of the palace, crumpled lead pipes still clinging to the wall alongside it, which gave something to hold on to now as the railing had been torn away by the Heart of the Void. Ten storeys was no Grandspire staircase, but it was enough to get me sweating and set the old spear wound in my thigh pulsing.

  The bath itself had been a pool, a little more than waist deep for the average nobleman, and its round basin covered most of the rooftop. The drains were open and the rainwater that had gathered had all poured away, but dirty red streaks coloured the smooth, sloping marble. General Kazna and her officers were gathered on the lip that surrounded the bath, looking east. Amaira leaned against a wall. She was drained of all colour, dust in her hair. She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘I would like your assessment of the city’s defences, Galharrow,’ Kazna said. ‘And how best to employ the forces we have available.’

  I nodded. I had expected as much. From the palace roof we had a good view of most of the wall, except where the thin, twisted spires obscured it.

  ‘There are five major entry points through the outer wall,’ Nenn said helpfully. ‘The two main gates, which are broad enough to drive wagons through, the aft gate, which you can’t, and the two breaches where the drudge managed to bring large sections of the wall down. But there are a dozen other, smaller tunnels they bored through with sorcery.’

  I pointed to them as she named them.

  ‘Well?’ Kazna asked.

  ‘You heard her,’ I said. Kazna and the officers shared looks that I didn’t like and I scowled at them. Nenn was a major, and I didn’t take disrespect to her lightly. She rolled her eyes.

  ‘You tell them, if they ain’t going to listen to me,’ she said. I shook my head wearily. Her assessment had been as good as anyone’s. I repeated exactly what Nenn had just told them, and this time they paid attention.

  ‘You said an advance party of drudge are on their way,’ Kazna said. ‘How long before they arrive?’

  ‘I’d guess two days,’ I said. ‘But it could be less. It could be more.’

  ‘We only have to hold the ruins until Spinner Kanalina has completed her task,’ Kazna said, more for the benefit of the officers than for me. I wondered whether they could hear the hopelessness in her voice. She was putting a brave chin on it, but my assessment was deeply dispiriting. ‘After that we’ll abandon whatever we can and ride hard for the Range. The drudge will be weary after their forced march. We shall be rested, and should be able to stay well ahead of them.’ She glanced up at the sky as though the orbits of the moons told her the proximity of the eclipse. ‘Three days. That’s how long we need to hold out here. How many are we facing in the drudge’s advance force?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ I said.

  The officers were tough. They’d each ranged in the Misery more than once, and they had the lines around their eyes to show it. Their uniforms were armour, their weapons were practical. No delicate orchids these. I still knew my answer was going to hurt.

  ‘I can’t plan the defence if I don’t know what I’m up against,’ Kazna said.

  ‘I don’t have an accurate count,’ I said. ‘But if I were to guess? Twenty thousand.’

  Faces paled, greyed, greened. Amaira looked at me now. Her eyes were dark, her mouth a pursed, hard line.

  ‘Spirits of Fucking Mercy, we’re outnumbered twenty to one and that’s just the advance force? Ho
w are we going to hold against twenty thousand?’ a tough old Fracan man snarled.

  ‘You all knew this mission was dangerous,’ Kazna said. She pushed back strands of grey and indigo hair from her face. ‘It’s the Misery after all.’ Her voice was firm. ‘Let us prepare.’

  The discussions were subdued. I lingered at the edge, listening, half paying attention and half watching a detachment of the Third Battalion marching through the dusty former gardens. They all looked up at me, expectant, and I gave them a salute. It felt good to see my men again.

  I blinked and the Third wavered and disappeared from view. Only Amaira and Kazna remained, the officers heading away down the stairs.

  ‘Twenty thousand,’ the general said. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Not long,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t hold the city against that many.’

  I could have given her false hope. I could have lied. She might have respected me more for it.

  ‘I know.’

  Kazna shook her head, leaned against the wall that led around the edge of the roof. Amaira balled her fists and struck me a fair punch to the chest.

  ‘This was always a suicide mission,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  I debated telling her. She didn’t need to know the truth, but in the end I decided that certainty was more useful than desperate hope. Resignation can bring despair, or it can offer resolve. Harder choices become easier. Resources can be spent differently. It was a practical decision to tell them, not a fair one. None of it was fair on anyone.

  ‘Even if Kanalina spins the light, Adrogorsk won’t survive,’ I said. ‘The Misery might not survive. The Range? Dortmark? I don’t know. We’re not just here to charge some battery coils. We’re here to power a weapon. Look around. You’ve seen the work of the Nameless’ weapons. You’ve breathed it in. Our job is to hold long enough that we get to see that end. You must have known, Amaira. Crowfoot uses us, however he needs to.’

  Kazna nodded. She stared out to the east as though she might pierce through the heat haze on the horizon, stare all the way through the Misery to Old Dhojara, the subjugated kingdoms of the Deep Kings.