Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘But we won’t live that long,’ she said. ‘That will be all, Captains.’

  My battalion crowded the streets. They nodded to me as I passed, or saluted. I kept them on their toes, wasn’t afraid of giving them a midnight kit inspection, or turfing them out to run three miles around the barracks. They admired me for that, I thought. Not to my face, and not in the gossip I heard behind whispered hands in the officers’ mess, but deep down they knew it was for the best. This was war, and look where it had brought them all. They’d be glad of those late-night runs when the drudge arrived. If they arrived. They probably wouldn’t. Adrogorsk wasn’t worth squat.

  ‘Get that pike sharpened,’ I said to a man who was too busy inspecting the arrow buried in his arm to notice that he’d let his weapon falter.

  ‘Of course, Brigadier,’ he said smartly, giving me the appropriate salute. A pair of women began to busily see to their weapons. I couldn’t help but laugh as I strode between them along these old, familiar streets. Their own bones lay at their feet, and what an absurd thing that was. I had a good mind to tell them to clear them up.

  ‘They were good lads,’ Nenn said, falling in alongside me. ‘Good lasses.’

  ‘They were,’ I said. ‘They are, I guess.’

  ‘Does it hurt? Seeing them here?’

  ‘In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure where we are, what we’re doing or who you are,’ I told her. ‘It’s all getting fuzzy. There’s more than just me in here, now. I’m not the Misery. Not yet. But I couldn’t tell you where I end, and she begins.’

  ‘Wasn’t that always the plan?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what the point of any of it was anymore.’

  We walked on. Nenn joined in chastising my men, though she’d barely been ten years old when they went into the ground. They didn’t seem to mind. She chewed aethereal blacksap which now seemed to come in the shape of chillies, and offered me some. I’d never liked the stuff because of the oily dark stains it put on your teeth, but my teeth, jagged and, as I probed with my tongue, in some cases serrated, were hardly a show. I took some and chewed as we walked. It had a gritty, bitter flavour.

  ‘Never understood why you liked this shit,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘It just used to really wind you up.’ She spat. ‘It’s not as much fun when you join in.’

  ‘I’m not even surprised.’

  ‘You do know,’ Nenn said. ‘You think you don’t, but you do.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Why you’re doing this. All of this.’ She gestured around us. ‘If you dig down deep enough it’s still there. It will always be there.’

  ‘You’re even more annoying dead than you were alive,’ I said.

  ‘Nah,’ she replied, spitting the rest of the blacksap at some unfortunate ghosts who were trying to hide their tile game from me. ‘I’m more or less the same.’ She put a hand on my shoulder and turned me. ‘You understand, don’t you? You’re here for her. But we’re here for you too. Not just me, and Betch and Venzer. All of us. We’re here, when you need us.’

  I shook her off, shook my head. She wasn’t even real. I needed more ghosts like I needed another spear through my leg – which was what I was probably going to get if I didn’t find North and make some kind of peace with him. Failing that I’d just have to take him out. He wasn’t important to the equation. A pragmatic part of my mind told me that a quick jab with a stiletto might make everything just that bit easier.

  I found Valiya moving rain-sodden sand about with a shovel in the palace grounds. She heard me coming, whirled about, and brandished the spade like she might do me an injury with it. The pain on her face cut through the ghosts and sent them back to wherever they went when they weren’t trying to drive me mad. She didn’t try to mask it. She was exhausted. We all were. It wasn’t just the trek through the Misery, it was the losses and the constant uncertainty of the future. That anxiety gnawed at you, whittling you down. Valiya’s hair couldn’t turn any greyer, but her face had.

  ‘There’s soldiers that can do whatever it is you’re doing,’ I said. I wasn’t sure why I’d sought her out. I didn’t know what her role was here. She believed that she had some part to play in all this, but she wasn’t in charge of the loom, couldn’t spin, and wasn’t a fighter. Maybe the echo of Nall’s fight lingered on in her, even though her eyes had bled silver and her calculations stopped flowing. She had some kind of a part to play in things to come, but what it might be, I didn’t know. I looked at the sand she was shovelling. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Covering the manholes that lead down into the sewers,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  She shovelled a couple more loads of sand onto the pile, then produced a map. Trust Valiya to have a street map of Adrogorsk. She led me along, looking for something marked on the paper, stopped before a huge temple with colonnades at the front. My first time here, some of the soldiers had set up a field hospital inside. Valiya watched her step carefully, but the old sewer entrance was easily visible.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ she said. ‘And don’t tell anyone about this. There’s nothing that we can do other than cover the holes and I fear we’d have desertions if they knew.’

  I heard the voices before we reached the hole. High and whining, a babble of nonsense.

  ‘Seventy-three, seventy-two.’

  ‘He’s a good boy, just don’t anger him.’

  ‘Evening, master, care for a good time?’

  I peered down into the darkness beneath the street. By the little light that reached down into the darkness, I could make out movement. Squirming, wriggling movement. There must have been thousands of them. Gillings by the spirits-damned score. The tracks we’d seen, their absence out in the Misery, they’d come here in tubby scarlet legions and now they clustered together beneath Adrogorsk’s streets.

  ‘Fucking gillings,’ I said. ‘Been looking for these little shits for months. I guess they knew they were coming here before we did.’

  ‘What are they doing here?’ Valiya asked. She was unafraid. The gillings weren’t able to clamber out and it was a six-foot drop to the writhing mass below.

  ‘Crowfoot is coming,’ I said. ‘They can feel it. When I was lost in the Misery, they flocked to the hooded raven. Called him “father,” once. They’re drawn to him. Like us, they’re here for the end.’

  Valiya went to one of the half-melted buildings and found a broad, flat drip of stone that had broken away under its own weight. Her hands were scuffed and nicked from dragging slabs around in other places. She laboured under its weight, trying to roll it into place, and I just stood there and watched, wondering why she was bothering. She gave me a scalding look. ‘You could help?’

  ‘It’s pointless,’ I said. ‘They found their way in there, and it’s not like they can climb out.’

  ‘They might,’ she said harshly. She got the slab up onto its uneven side and began rolling it over towards the hole.

  ‘They won’t,’ I said. It didn’t seem important. I peered down into the wriggling mass of misshapen, fat little bodies. ‘Why bother?’

  ‘Because it’s something I can do,’ she said with a sigh. She lost control of the stone and it fell back on its side. Valiya bent over, trying to pry it upright again, but it probably weighed more than she did. I heard one of her fingernails break against it as she clawed for purchase. I don’t know why that moved me, but it did. I reached down and lifted the stone up with one hand, taking hers in the other. Her hand was small, unreasonably small and pale in my copper-hued talons. The nails that had turned black a long time ago were looking suspiciously like claws, more so than ever since we’d re-entered the Misery. I looked down at Valiya’s far smaller hand, the veins blue beneath the skin, the bones stark.

  ‘You don’t have to keep going,’
I said. ‘You’ve done enough. You can leave the rest to me.’

  Valiya just shook her head. I couldn’t read her expression. I wasn’t so good at grasping the nuance anymore.

  ‘You really must be losing your mind if you think I will quit,’ she said. ‘Cover it, then heap some sand on it.’

  I did what she asked, although it was a waste of time. Valiya’s map showed that the sewers around the palace’s island had at least two dozen entrances. It would take a team of determined men a full day to cover them all, and the gillings would still get out if they wanted to and there’d be bugger-all we could do about it. They seemed happy enough down there in the dark, though, chattering their endless, whimsical nonsense.

  ‘I don’t do it because it’s essential, Ryhalt,’ Valiya said as I finished piling the bone-dust atop the stone. ‘I do it because I can.’

  I looked at her, and something inside me cracked, a frozen waterfall pushed by the glacier that consumes it.

  ‘I can send you back,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?

  ‘I can send you back. To the Range. If you want to go. To live.’

  Valiya glared at me.

  ‘How?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘My blood. Sand. All this polluted magic around us. They’re all tied up together, now. But I think that I have enough of the Misery’s essence in me to send someone back. Just one. If I can save someone, just one person – it should be you.’

  Valiya turned her back to me.

  ‘You never truly let go, did you?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I struggle to feel it. I struggle to feel anything, now. I know what I’ve become, Valiya. I’ve delved into hate, and rage, and selfishness. I’ve tasted what it means to be Nameless, or a Deep King, and that kind of contact leaves scars on your mind. But mostly I’ve drunk from the Misery, and the taste never quite goes away. My mind plays so many tricks on me, I don’t know who’s dead and who’s alive anymore. Are you real? Were any of the friends I saw along the way there? It’s all broken up inside me. I don’t even know who I am, sometimes.’

  Valiya took my absurd, clawed hand in hers and looked up at me with eyes that were no longer silver, but carried far more reflection than they had before. There was a spark of me, deep inside, that rebelled and kicked within my rib cage, that tried to reach outside me. But I no longer remembered or understood what it was.

  ‘No. Nall gave me a final command before he was gone. I’ll not abandon it now. Or you. There’s something else I found while I was walking around looking for something to do,’ Valiya said. ‘Come.’

  We didn’t have long. The swift-riders were closing fast. Whatever plans we put in place, there was no real chance of holding against twenty thousand drudge and I knew it. We were all pretty fucked if they made it, unless I came up with something pretty spectacular. But Valiya’s fingers, though I could barely feel them through the pebbled skin of my own, drew me on anyway. She led me across the broad, moat-spanning bridges to a building close to the palace. I recognised it in some way. We’d used it as … an armoury? No. A store of some kind. The memory was thirty years old, and hazy. She drew me inside.

  The Spirit of Mercy alone knew what had made Valiya enter that particular building, but something must have guided her. Maybe just luck. Blind, pointless luck. I felt a smile trying to fight its way onto my face, awkward now that my teeth didn’t really fit a human mouth properly. I hadn’t seen this in decades. A mark of pride. A mark of shame.

  But mine.

  Around the walls we’d retired the banners of the lords who had fallen in the defence. It was a mausoleum to the colours of those that had not come home. Their bones lay out there amongst the melted ruins, long picked clean, long ago bleached by the sun, stained red now by the rain. I saw the arms of houses that had died during the rout, symbols of bygone men whose names were no longer spoken. The general’s banner hung limp, a field of jade with three rampant, golden horses. He’d stood with the men, against an assault on a breach in the walls, and had died for it. They had all died for it, heroes every one. Dead heroes.

  On the floor, four tattered pieces of dusty red cloth lay where I’d dropped them, thirty years before. My banner. My own colours. A single silver fist on a field of scarlet. In the hour before we abandoned Adrogorsk to the approaching Deep Kings, I’d brought it here and torn it apart. I’d been so angry. Angry at the drudge, but furious at the dead men whose colours looked back at me now. I’d been twenty years old and they’d left so many lives in my hands. I’d been so full of fury.

  ‘I forgot myself here,’ I murmured into the dust and gloom, lifting a shred of banner from the floor. ‘This is where the man I’d been ended. Where Ryhalt Galharrow began.’

  ‘You know who you are,’ Valiya said. ‘You’re the same good man you’ve always been.’

  I let the fabric trail through my fingers.

  ‘You knew this was mine,’ I said. ‘Why did you show it to me?’

  ‘Because I need you to remember,’ she said. ‘I need you to know who you are.’

  ‘I know what I am,’ I said. I tossed the fragment of the past back into the dust. ‘The world doesn’t. But I do.’

  31

  ‘Has the Misery taken your mind? Attack twenty thousand drudge?’

  The eyes on me were disbelieving. It was raining again, a second downpour in just two days. The soldiers huddled in the ruins of twisted buildings as the black hissed down around them. I faced Kazna, Kanalina, North, First, and the officers in an empty chamber on the fourth floor of the palace. A strange Command Council, misfits and veterans side by side.

  ‘We can’t hold the city,’ I said. ‘There are no gates. There are holes in the walls. We have five light cannon, and our gunners will barely dent the numbers that the drudge can put against us. They’ll be here in two days, and when they arrive, they’ll pour through the walls like smoke.’

  ‘We’ve all held tough spots before, Captain,’ Kazna reminded me.

  ‘Not like this,’ I said. ‘We couldn’t hold against five thousand. We certainly couldn’t hold against ten. Twenty will wash us aside in less than an hour. If we defend here, we fail.’

  ‘So you want us to head out into the Misery and attack the drudge head-on? That’s madness,’ North said. I’d rather he hadn’t been there. He was a thorn in my hand, an irksome splinter.

  ‘Not head-on. We can’t break them or rout them. But we can stop them reaching Adrogorsk. If we strike out at them, we can buy the time that the Spinners need to enact the Nameless’ plan before Acradius arrives.’

  There was grumbling amongst the officers, but Kazna rested a curled finger against her lip, thinking. Her eyes were narrowed, her back straight. She wasn’t a big woman, but her mood set the tone in the room. Gradually the officers subsided into silence, even North.

  ‘I’m willing to hear you out,’ she said.

  ‘The drudge aren’t navigating their way here,’ I said. ‘Adrogorsk shifts and hides from them just as it did from us. But there are some things even the Misery can’t resist. The swift-riders are guided by Acradius. He’s ploughing them a furrow, straight through the Misery.’

  ‘Then we need to fortify,’ Kanalina said. ‘Defend the walls.’

  ‘Come.’

  I beckoned her over to where Valiya and I stood at the window, and reluctantly she crossed to us. Amaira still wasn’t talking to me, but North and First followed. The huge Guardian unnerved me more than his brethren. He seemed more human by the day, red eyes watchful. I didn’t turn my back on either of them.

  I gestured out towards the city walls, broken and jutting like the rotting teeth of a drunk.

  ‘The city walls have more holes in them than a beggar’s shirt,’ I said. ‘And we have fourteen Guardians, six Spinners, and a thousand men.’

  ‘The best men on the Range,’ one of the offi
cers grunted.

  ‘The best. But still only a thousand of them.’ I threw a careless, clawed hand out towards the walls. My voice sounded like gravel going through a grinder. ‘By my count there are sixteen holes in the city walls that the drudge could get through, including the three gates. We have no hope of holding them all. The Guardians might be worth a hundred men each in a pitched battle, but the drudge aren’t going to line up to fight. They only need to reach the loom and destroy it, and Acradius knows that. He’ll sacrifice ten thousand warriors just to breach the walls. Once they’re in, we can’t stop them.’

  ‘The palace is defensible,’ Kanalina said. ‘We can hold the bridges. Nothing could make it through that moat.’

  ‘How long for, and against how many drudge?’ I asked.

  ‘We can hold.’

  ‘No,’ North said. He frowned, resigned. ‘We can’t. Not against those numbers. We can put three hundred men at each bridge, but the bridges are sixty feet across, neh?’

  I’d not expected support from North, but I’d take it from any quarter.

  ‘Not only that, but we’d be surrounded and trapped,’ I agreed. ‘And if they’ve brought Darlings, they’ll cut our men to pieces in the middle of a bridge. Acradius is going to throw everything he has at us.’

  ‘How did you scout them?’ North asked.

  ‘There are things you don’t need to know,’ I said. ‘You trusted me this far. Trust me on this.’

  Nenn was trying to work out how to take two of Venzer’s tiles using a piece from a different game. For a moment I was absorbed in the game, and nudged one of her pieces into place when Venzer wasn’t looking. Nenn thought it was hilarious and Venzer managed to fall backwards out of the window in shock at seeing his king suddenly surrounded.

  ‘Are you even listening?’ Kanalina snapped. I blinked and refocused on her.

  ‘What?’