Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  The black tether of power that bound the sorcerer’s corpse to Acradius swelled with energy, and then ribbons of twisting night blossomed around it. They lashed out, finding two Guardians that had managed to draw close. The warriors went rigid, their hacked and pierced bodies shaking as the energy bore into them, and then they began to tremble. A further surge of power, and they detonated, bloodless fragments scattering in all directions. Wasted corpse-lips, long since drawn back from yellow teeth, flexed in what might have been some kind of a smile.

  They were not the only Guardians to have fallen. Those that had lost their heads fought on sluggishly, then slowed, their bodies gradually losing spirit until they collapsed. Sheer weight of numbers began to bring them down, one after another as they tried to batter their way through the drudge’s elite. A second lance of dark energy tore another Guardian in two.

  Our soldiers were nearly surrounded, and hadn’t got as close to the corpse-anchor as the Guardians. They were doomed.

  Amaira.

  ‘Do it now!’ I told the Spinners. ‘We won’t get a better shot.’

  Dovroi straightened her jacket collar. She shared a look with Vurtna that said more than I should have seen, and they clasped hands as they stood.

  ‘For the republic,’ Vurtna said, and Dovroi nodded. The light coiled around them as their working began. The warmth of the day was replaced with a new kind of heat, hard and bright, unnatural and metallic. I fell back from them as tendrils of clutching phos snaked towards me. The Spinners’ remaining canisters whined and a sudden rushing sound preceded their implosion, metal shells crumpling as the power was sucked from them.

  The Spinners unleashed and the air around the sorcerer’s corpse shimmered with sudden heat. Bands of pure white light appeared around it, overlapping, forming a sphere. The corpse’s eyes glowered in our direction as the bands took form, and then, contracted. It was a deadly binding spell, more than enough to turn a husk into ash.

  Something went wrong. Whether it was the magic that Acradius had bound within it, or the long-dead thing held power of its own, a series of wards rippled in the air around it, glimmering glyphs of fire and smoke. The Spinners’ power caught on them, tangling, catching on insubstantial gleams of long-forgotten words, and then their casting came right back at them.

  I had no time to scream a warning. No time to do anything at all.

  The power redirected between heartbeats, the bands of energy rushing back up the slope. The sand beneath the Spinners’ feet superheated, liquefied, and Vurtna and Dovroi plunged into the white-hot quagmire as though a platform had been ripped out beneath them. It was sudden enough that they didn’t scream, hot enough that they were gone in an instant, nothing more than bubbles in the boiling pool of liquid glass.

  Below, only a handful of Guardians battled on, their limbs hewn and splayed open, trying to wade towards the cadaver through a mounting wall of bodies. Five left. Four, as a pair of drudge hammered axes down into the skull of one of the Guardians. Another had gone blood-mad, its teeth locked into a drudge corpse, drinking greedily even as hammers and blades rained down blows.

  The bubbling pool of liquid sand hissed and from within, a skull rose, wrapped in liquid glass, features forming into a drudge-like semblance of humanity. It rose on a sinuous, shimmering neck.

  Is this all? Is this everything that the Nameless can throw against me?

  It made no sound, but it was laughing at me.

  The awful truth was, it was. It was everything I possessed to stop the drudge. Shallowgrave’s elite warriors, the citadel’s Spinners, and for all the Misery that I’d soaked up I was still just a man with a spear.

  We had failed. Bodies littered the canyon floor below, the cries of the wounded ringing against the screams of the dying and the clashing of steel. The brave horsemen fought in a tightening circle, hemmed in on all sides as countless drudge swarmed around them. They were doomed. All of them. They had died for nothing.

  The matchlock gunners and archers around me knew it. Squadrons of mounted drudge had wheeled from the main line and were coming at us from east and west. The officers desperately tried to form them into volley-lines to meet the enemy.

  The liquid glass collapsed, the skull falling back to be swallowed once more. In the midst of the fighting, the last Guardian hurled back the drudge that were hacking at it. It was missing an arm, half of its head and half a dozen crossbow bolts protruded like spines from its back, but with a bellow it swung a drudge-warrior like a flail, gaining itself a clear space. Blood ran from its jaws, and its one remaining eye spun wildly as it looked for prey and saw an opening. It ran straight for the mummified sorcerer.

  The wards met it, engulfing the Guardian in flame, but that didn’t stop it. With a bellow it reached for the cadaver and when its fingers gripped the sorcerer’s skull the flames leapt across to it. A deathless shriek rose up, above the battle, above the cacophony of swords and death throes, and the dried husk of the sorcerer went up in flame, even as the Guardian disintegrated, flesh burned away, bones charring to ash. The drudge bearing the throne collapsed, deadly magic spilling from the sorcerous corpse in waves, melting eyes and boiling blood in their skulls.

  ‘Fall back,’ I shouted. ‘Fall back!’

  The gunners did not heed me. They were settled into their lines, weapons primed and ready to meet the charge. I grabbed a sergeant’s arm, yelled that we had to move, to get away now before the drudge swamped us. There was no fighting our way out of this, only running.

  ‘We’ll not leave our men behind, Captain,’ the sergeant said. ‘Not while they might still win free.’ There was no hope in his voice.

  ‘Everyone who stays here is dead,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Just have to hope we done enough, sir.’

  I was about to turn away. About to abandon them to their deaths, when I saw her. Amaira, my little crow, struggling across the slope on a dying horse. Broken spears jutted from its side, and despite her heeling, it staggered sideways and then crashed to the earth. Amaira tried to roll clear, but I saw the horse come down on her foot. She screamed. I screamed. The fastest of the drudge were right behind her.

  I tried to go to her but the sergeant and another man grabbed hold of me. My eyes were locked forwards, and I was stronger than they were. I began to drag them towards her.

  ‘We need you, Captain!’ the sergeant cried, ‘We need you to get back. No!’

  Another two men piled onto me, pulling, dragging. Their bodies swamped me. I stared helplessly as the drudge came towards the woman I’d helped to raise.

  Amaira rose, sword in hand, unable to put her weight on the foot that had been caught beneath the falling horse. She was already red from head to foot, and the first drudge to reach her took her sabre through the centre of its head. She let rip a banshee scream as another swung an axe at her, batting it aside and ramming the sabre’s point into its mouth. Her ferocity checked them, but it would only be moments. Four quick-footed drudge circled around her as she tried to yank her sword free. Her teeth were locked, her eyes wild. I was going to watch my daughter die.

  A huge horse ploughed back towards them from the retreating line. The drudge saw it coming, tried to ready themselves, but like a black thunderbolt the warhorse smashed two of them to the ground. The armoured man hacked down at them, his bladework artless, frenzied, killed another. A drudge-spear punched into the horse’s neck, and as it reared he fell from its back, hitting the ground hard.

  The Deep Kings, the Nameless, they all saw love as a weakness. But to need someone on your side doesn’t make you weak; it makes you strong.

  I was screaming Dantry’s name. I was screaming Amaira’s name. The sergeant and the soldiers pulled me back, farther and farther, my feet skittering against the sand as I tried to throw them off. I had no purchase, no way to bring my strength to bear.

  Amaira cut through th
e last of the drudge, her skill far beyond anything that I’d ever mustered, then fell to her knees beside Dantry, alive but struggling to rise. Tears cut pale tracks through the blood spatters across her face. She got an arm under his shoulder, managed to drag him, stumbling, to unsteady feet. Concussed, or broken by the fall, but she forced him up.

  Drudge-riders charged up behind them. They could never outrun them. I could never make it to them in time.

  Dantry had been right. We’d given up everything. We’d become what we despised in order to see it done. And still, amidst all that, they wouldn’t let each other go. I couldn’t let them go either. I wouldn’t let them go. Nothing was worth that.

  I hurled the sergeant from me, let my weight take us all to the sand.

  ‘I’m asking this thing of you,’ I growled, though the Misery did not need my words to understand. ‘I entered your shadow-gate. I gave you what you needed. You’ll do this for me now.’ I felt the broken earth beneath me shifting, the currents and flows of energy that passed beneath us in their ever-hungry quest for change turning to my will. I’d marked the Misery with drops of my own blood, and the Misery remembered them.

  I looked back at Amaira and Dantry, limping towards us, knowing their doom closed in behind them.

  ‘I love you both,’ I whispered. ‘Be good to each other.’

  I surged down into the Misery, power I’d taken coursing back into the ground. My waypoints lit up in my mind like a beacon and I gripped them tight, ordered them into a line no more than ten feet long as I moved everything between them out of the way. I channelled distance and rock and stone, I reordered the world to my own making. The world shifted and changed, forced into a blood-road of my design. Dantry and Amaira felt it, felt the turning of the earth beneath their feet.

  Amaira locked eyes with me, her mouth falling open as they took another step forwards—

  And were gone.

  One hundred miles to the west, the path I had forged finished. Three feet to run, a vast distance crossed, and Dantry and Amaira would blink and stagger and find themselves no more than a mile from the Range. They wouldn’t understand. Would never know what I’d given up for them. But they would live.

  Pain ripped through my head as so much of my Misery-strength tore out of me. The sky blazed for me in fresh colours as reality convulsed against me. With a snap it bounced back to what it had been and the impact smashed me onto my back. Blood sprayed from my nose, my mouth. The world rotated around me, spinning, spinning.

  Drudge closing in from the north. Drudge closing in from the east and west. Those still fighting would make their final stand here, as we all must in the end. Parts are played, and when the final lines are spoken, the cast retire back beyond the curtain, there to fade from memory until their performance no longer means a thing to the world. Maybe the gunners would have chosen to run if they’d thought they could get away, but they didn’t. They couldn’t.

  I couldn’t shift the world again. I hadn’t enough strength left to do it again. The desperate soldiers dragged me to my feet, pulled me along.

  I spared a glance for Acradius’ sorcerer-king. It was a blackened thing now, charred and smoking. Teeth, exposed where the wrappings around its face had burned away, seemed to grin upwards at me. It wasn’t done yet. Not entirely.

  I stumbled towards my horse. It was not my time to die. Not yet. I still had a part to play.

  32

  A handful of gunners broke rank and followed me. Maybe thirty men in all. The sounds of matchlock volleys cracked behind us as we booted our horses on. I didn’t have time to take a reading and my mind was scrambled, flaring bursts of light and colour threatening to throw me from the saddle; we simply rode, hard and fast, south and away from the numberless drudge. Four times the volley fire sounded, and then they too were done. I glanced back, and what I saw sat sour and heavy on my heart.

  I’d known I was leading those men into death. They had known it too. That didn’t make it any easier. General Kazna had led the charge and she’d been as good as they come, cut from the same stone as Marshal Venzer. There would be no state funeral for her; but then, there probably wouldn’t be any states left soon.

  I had saved those that I could. A paltry thing, in the face of so much slaughter.

  The soldiers looked to me to lead them. Nenn was absent, and I missed her. I figured she’d be waiting for me back at Adrogorsk, but there were plenty of other old friends to keep me company. Some of those who’d died during the failed ambush were riding in circles around us as well, performing carnival tricks on their horses. I enjoyed that. It was good to try to keep things light in the Misery. The cowardly gunners who’d run with me gave me worried glances, but they should have tried to enjoy the show as much as I did.

  I felt emptied, hollow. I’d hoarded the Misery-power for so long, only to expel it. On what? I couldn’t remember. I found something to eat. It tried to turn into liquid as a defensive measure, but it was too slow and I got most of it down. My lips burned, my throat burned, and I laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. The pain did not last long. I wasn’t sure why I was eating the things in the Misery. There had been a point to it, once upon a time. A purpose. But it was confused and lost beneath layer upon layer of the Misery’s burying silt, fossilised beneath mounds of time, pressure, and rust.

  The fields all around us were lush and golden with the summer’s bounty. Wheat, crisp and golden bright, stretching out to the river. My father and mother were bathing down there. It was good to be out from beneath their gaze. It wasn’t often that I got to ride as I wanted to, pushing my horse harder, faster. I loved the animal beneath me. I could have ridden him forever. Ridden him on and on, into the vineyards, through the olive groves, all along the sea coast. It was a beautiful day to be a boy without cares in the world.

  I blinked and somehow the sun was starting to set. I crouched, apart from the soldiers, rocking on my heels, my arms wrapped around my knees. There weren’t as many gunners as I’d thought there were. I saw bodies laid out in a row, six of them, and I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t remember. The gunners wouldn’t speak to me, other than to throw fearful glances in my direction.

  I let myself soak into the Misery. The headache that had been plaguing me for days loosened, the flickering lights at the edge of my vision drifted away, the tightness in my chest dissipating. Like my parents taking their bath, I relaxed in it. Lay down against the sand, ran my blackened fingers through the grit. I could taste it in the air, in my gums, everywhere. I could feel it, working through my veins, spidering through the muscles in my arms and shoulders. Relaxed.

  I was drunk. Vicious drunk, and looking to start fights. The tavern, if it could be called that, stank of all the piss soaked into the walls and the dogs that roamed beneath the tables. I looked across the men at the tables, looking for someone big enough to be worth fighting. I didn’t care why we fought, I was just angry and hell-bent on doing some damage to something, someone, anything, anything to give me some pain to focus on so that I didn’t have to be so damn alone in all the misery swirling around inside. Disgraced, rejected, fallen from a lofty commission down to nothing and nobody.

  Ezabeth stood before me, golden and resplendent, but we were in another time and another place. She was not my Ezabeth. She was something else, something infinitely vaster and yet somehow emptier. Marble pillars lined a great hall, framing her soot-blackened throne. A queen, a goddess perhaps. I knelt in supplication. We all knelt. She was glorious.

  When I finally remembered to take a reading, I found myself alone, crouched in a shallow cave. I don’t know what happened to the gunners. My horse was gone. I didn’t know where I was until I reached down and sent myself pulsing out into the world.

  Deep Emperor Acradius saw me. He was closer now.

  A small, hardened fragment of my mind shivered and squealed in terror. I had given too much of my strength to send Dant
ry and Amaira away. My mind was reeling, torn and billowing like a ragged, storm-sodden banner. My defences, stacked together over years, had collapsed around me. I knew what I was doing was wrong, that it was madness, that I was not myself any longer. But like a drunk, reaching for yet another bottle when he knows there is no coming back from it, I went on anyway.

  The black palanquin was borne in the middle of the column. Horned and spurred, a weight of great iron that contained the essence of the one true god. Acradius saw me before him, though the sides of the palanquin were solid iron. We existed outside the spheres understood by mere mortals. The enormity of presence within the palanquin bore down on me. Not a carriage, but a sarcophagus, fronted with a vast metal face. He had become so great that whatever physical part of him lay within, it did not merely have to be borne aloft: it had to be contained.

  Son of the Misery, Acradius said. His voice was the rushing of waterfalls, the splintering of ships upon the rocks. Do you come to bow in supplication at last? Have you understood the true futility of resistance? Will you bend the will of the Misery to my purpose?

  ‘There is no purpose,’ I said. ‘We are the essence of instability. Change, and change again, she says. Never stop changing. Never end the flow of possibilities. There is no purpose. There is nothing. We are all nothing.’

  ‘This is bullshit, Ryhalt,’ Nenn said. She drifted alongside me. Acradius didn’t see her, didn’t sense her. She was a flicker of my old life, come to haunt me. I ignored her. I was something so much larger than I had ever been before.

  There is but one true purpose, Acradius thundered, the weight of the aeons carrying through each word. And it is mine.