Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  Even he did not understand the power of The Sleeper, the meaning that lurked behind his words. He thought himself mighty beyond compare, but he was as much a puppet as I was. A mouthpiece for an entity that should never have been awoken. Not that I cared. The Misery would endure. Change is inexorable.

  ‘You had a purpose once,’ Nenn said. An annoying fly. She was part of the Misery, wasn’t she? She should have been with me. Should have understood. ‘You’ve lost it. You need it back.’

  ‘There is no fate,’ I said. ‘No purpose. No being. We are nothing but dust, blown on the wind.’

  You are a fool to think so, Acradius said. The Misery erred in creating you. By making you her own she has opened herself to frailty. Feeble human emotion. An attempt at understanding. An attempt for redemption. Is that what she wants, Son of the Misery? To make herself weak?

  I shook my head, rambling laughter spilling through whatever spirit form I had taken.

  Bow before me, the Deep Emperor growled. I will make you mine. I will make the Misery mine. Everything shall be mine.

  The mouth on the iron face of Acradius’ sarcophagus seemed to yawn wider, and a thread of sickly pink light emerged. It drifted through the air towards me. The thread of magic approached me, and I reached out to touch it.

  Our worlds collided.

  The depth of hatred was so strong that despite whatever strength the Misery had given me, I felt my being ripple, strain against existence. Not just one hatred, but four, all opposing one another, all screaming like furious children in incoherent rage, came together.

  I felt a presence stir in a lava-pathed tomb, felt something of a carrion bird’s old grandeur screech utter fury back through me. Crowfoot and Acradius saw one another as they never had before. Acradius met him head-on like a snarling hound, teeth bared, all pretence at dignity and godhood undone in his all-consuming rage.

  The third appeared like a rising headache, a sandstorm blowing across a desert floor. The Sleeper, bonded to Acradius but lying beneath the surface, the source of power that not even Acradius realised was biding its time, waiting to escape its confinement and return. The Nameless and the Deep King were spitting dogs, but The Sleeper was the slow encroachment of a malevolent tide, implacable as it moved to wash everything away. And then there was a woman of gold, who somehow lived within me, even after all this time.

  The loathing of immortals was a shallow thing. It served their feuding, the petty fucking feuding, that had cost so many innocents their lives. But mine was born from something much stronger. It hit me like a winter-flooded waterfall, a torrent of sudden awareness that spread my mind open wide.

  But it wasn’t magic. It wasn’t power. It was only hatred. A pitiful, dismal thing, less threat to me than a sick kitten. They seethed at each other across the gulf of space, seeing each other for the first time in more than a century. The hate speared deep through the world. And it was nothing.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I rejected them. Change, and change again. The pink light that had wrapped around me shattered outward, Acradius’ honour guard of Darlings went flying in their circle.

  ‘I see you clearly now,’ I said. ‘What you come from. What you are. You are hunger. You are emptiness. You reach for everything, because nothing can ever sate your lust to consume. But hunger is not substance. It is the absence of substance. It is nothing. For all your bluster, all your rage – you can’t hold me back.’ I snarled, more fury than sound. ‘Not you. Not the Nameless. None of you can stop me now.’

  You cannot resist me, Acradius roared. As the thought rang outward, his army of drudge collapsed in waves, clattering to the Misery soil in their armour as they clutched at their heads. Your resources are spent. I am not this voice alone. I am a million lives. I am armies. Even now they bear down on your last hope. You will serve me. All will serve me. Threats washed over me as light as a summer breeze.

  ‘I know what I serve,’ I said. ‘And it will never be you.’

  You are nothing! Even your own master betrayed you! Acradius screamed, dignity shattered, the falling of towers, the sundering of a belief held so long that it had nearly become a physical law. All had been forced to obey. Even his brother Kings had been made to submit. But here I stood. Defiant.

  ‘Crowfoot is an arsehole,’ I said. ‘But he’s still worth more than you. Than all this.’

  And what would Nall have said to that? What would your Bright Lady tell you of the loyalty of crows? Acradius sneered.

  I shook him off like a dog emerging from a black and stormy ocean. The world beyond the cave mouth whirled around me, lights dancing before my eyes, the cracks in the sky rippling with barely controlled fire. The Misery was reaching through me. Grasping me, filling me, and soon I would be as much a part of her as the gillings, the Dulchers, and all the other nightmares that I’d struggled so long to contain. I’d done this to myself, made myself part of her madness. I didn’t know whether I’d truly spoken to Acradius or whether it was just another hallucination, a random vision sent to blind me, bind me, bring me further to her side. What was real?

  I buried my head against my knees but the Misery pushed through, grasping my mind. Red-and-black desert stretched out on all sides, rising and falling in broken waves. Some directions were north, others were also north, still more were north again. Possibility and difference lay all around me, a chaotic miasma of radiant nothing that could be everything if only it were believed. There were tears on my face. How they had got there or whose they had been, I didn’t know. There was too much I didn’t know. I had so much understanding, I knew how all things worked and why, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. Knowledge without purpose. Without goal or reason. It was the essence of the universe; chaos and entropy.

  Clouds roiled across the sky. Dense and dark, purple and thicker and heavier than they had ever been before. I was safe within my cave. I could lie here and simply be, let my flesh waste away, my bones grow to be part of the rock. No need to fear, no need to venture out to where the world hurt, and burned, and torments of the past flocked to stab at me with barbed beaks like vultures tearing at a carcass.

  ‘You have to know the truth,’ Nenn said.

  ‘The truth?’ I almost choked on the word. ‘There is no truth. There’s nothing but chaos. Disorder. Nothing but endless living and dying and suffering. I don’t want truth.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she sighed. ‘But you need it.’ She took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet. Outside, the rain swept in, black and hissing as it struck the hot earth.

  ‘What if I don’t want to know the truth?’ I asked.

  ‘What we want doesn’t matter all that much,’ Nenn said. ‘It’s time you knew. You can’t finish this unless you do.’

  ‘The rain,’ I said. ‘It’s Nall’s memories. It’s the story of the Crowfall.’

  Nenn nodded. She was waiting for me.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. It was time to face it. ‘Yes. I’m ready.’

  The rain burned against my skin as I stepped out, into the deluge.

  33

  The first drops struck, and I didn’t even feel them. My skin had grown too crusted, too scaled, too hardened by the Misery-pollution. I spread my arms and leaned into it.

  There was pain. Stinging at first, then burning. For a moment I thought that I had made a terrible mistake. I stood shirtless, letting the fire of the black rain wash over me, head tilted back, eyes closed. Let it come, let it burn. Ask the sky, Nall had said. Some part of me had known what had to come. What I had to see. Was I strong enough to bear it? I’d learn that now.

  I was soaked in moments as the full strength of the downpour hit me. It was cold, but the pain that lanced through my skin and into the muscle beneath barely registered. Images began to flicker in my mind. An ordinary, everyday sort of face. The face of a man, one of many, one of thousands.
Nall, Nameless but dead all the same. I breathed the moisture from the air, scorching the inside of my mouth, my tongue. Endure, I told myself. Latched onto the word. Clung to it, though every other word seemed lost to me. I could not remember how I had come to stand here, why I was standing here, only that I had to endure it. It was only pain. And this would not be the worst of it.

  Minutes passed with nothing but uncontrolled, wild thought passing through my head. Thoughts so great and deep that I could never have contemplated them, visions of things so small that no man alive could have seen them, so vast that they defied description. The knowledge of a wizard, cast out into the sky to fall on the cowering mortals below.

  And then I was there.

  The place of power. Not shattered, as it had been when I had travelled through the Duskland Gate, but as I’d first seen it. An endlessly flat plain, the ice perfectly white, the sky above endlessly black in the night, a million stars bright as hope. The cold was intense, but while I was aware of it, it didn’t touch me. I could feel the power all around, a cosmic fog in the air. The body I inhabited sat cross-legged as one point of a triangle.

  Crowfoot sat close by, cheeks, nose, and lips black with frostbite. Shallowgrave made the third point, his indistinctness unchecked by the freezing cold. The Nameless were united, as they had not been in centuries. They were my brothers, alike in their uniqueness, and utterly unalike in every other way. I quested for the knowledge, to know what the Nameless truly were, in a moment of greedy thought. Nall’s memories did not respond to my wish. I was an observer only.

  They were engaged in battle, and it had lasted for months.

  It is easy to hate the Nameless. They seem to care nothing for us, and their motivations are self-serving. But they were here, locked in a struggle of wills against the Deep Kings, and it was only their fight that kept The Sleeper bound beneath the waves. That kept us alive. Chains of thought and power spread from them in invisible lines, driving into the ice, flaring away into the sky. Glittering, invisible webs held together by concentration alone.

  Nall drove along one of the chains, probing, searching. Through his thoughts I saw the Deep Kings, mustered together half a world away from the plain of ice. They sat beside a tranquil sea whose water was clearer than finest crystal, on an island of white sand, the sun bright above them. Five creatures, as unique as the Nameless. Iddin, a baleful cloud, eyeless and weeping. Nexor, old fire, burning and rolling back on itself. Philon, whose matted grey hair wrapped her like a funeral shroud, Balarus, a dirty smear of thought in the air, and Acradius, furnace iron and spite. Five points of a demonic star. For a mile around, the sand held intricate symbols that never shifted in the wind, each surrounding relics of the past, ancient artefacts imbued with great magic. Swords, crowns, jewelled cups. Mummified bodies, tattered shoes, a broken arrow. The Deep Kings had crafted their own place of power. Through the energy pouring out of them, I sensed The Sleeper. It was not awake, but it acknowledged them as they sent their collective energies towards it. Unified in purpose, just as the Nameless were joined against them.

  ‘It stirs,’ Nall said. Back to the ice plain. ‘We are failing. Even here, we do not have the strength to hold it.’

  ‘No,’ Crowfoot snarled without sound. ‘I will not allow it back into the world.’

  ‘All the same, we are failing,’ Nall said.

  I felt the weakening within him. He was taxed, drawn to his utmost. The well of power that grew within his wizard’s heart was depleting, day by day, hour by hour. Even speaking had cost him. The Nameless settled back into their working, unpicking the Deep Kings’ spells as fast as they formed them, setting obstacles in their path through the void, through the aether, through any measure they could. Everything was calm, but their thoughts worked frantically, scrambling three at a time to match their enemies’. The Deep Kings threw up barriers, tangled the complications into knots, then bound the Nameless’ channels to silence. Their spell continued.

  The cracking of an eyelid resonated through Nall’s mind. An eye, wider than a house, opened far beneath the ocean’s distant depths for the first time in millennia. Entombed deep beneath the biting ocean cold, it saw.

  ‘It awakens,’ a new voice rang out. It seemed too small to be part of these titanic events and it crashed against my heart in a way that no ocean demon’s rising could. Too small, too human. With an effort that seemed greater than all the magic that Nall was pouring into holding back The Sleeper, he managed to turn his head, shards of ice flaking away.

  Ezabeth stood in gold and blue light, a phantasm of gleaming energy. She was an island of beauty in the blistering cold. The wind did not touch her curling hair, didn’t stir the dress in which she appeared. The same dress she’d worn the day she burned herself into the light.

  ‘You are not welcome here, Bright Lady,’ Crowfoot growled. ‘Do not interfere.’

  ‘The Sleeper awakens,’ Ezabeth snapped. ‘I feel it, crushing me back against the light. It comes. You must destroy their working now.’

  ‘You are not one of us,’ Crowfoot intoned. ‘You are not Nameless but an abnormality. Begone from here.’

  He threw himself back into the webs of power, discarding her, but Nall looked on.

  ‘We need you,’ he said. ‘Join us.’

  ‘Tell me how,’ Ezabeth said desperately. She flickered, and through her insubstantial, shimmering form I could see the distant horizon, flat and continuing on into the sky. ‘You have never shown me how.’

  ‘You must become Nameless,’ Nall said. ‘That is all. You have the power. You have become the light. Committed yourself so greatly to a concept that it has sought to become one with you. But you still hold to the world. And while you do, it will never let you ascend. Join us.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ezabeth said. That frustration, that desire to succeed that I’d missed so much struck a hammer into my heart. I ached for her, as I’d ached through all those years. ‘I still don’t understand. All these years and still you keep it from me. Tell me the truth!’

  There was a shudder, felt through the plates of the earth. Almost unnoticeable, it was so far away, but the ice around Crowfoot’s frozen eyes cracked as they widened by the barest of fractions. I saw something in them that I had never expected to see. Terror.

  ‘I’ve told you all I can,’ Nall said. ‘It is for you to understand, or not.’

  ‘They raise it,’ Ezabeth said, her metallic voice breaking. ‘They raise The Sleeper.’

  I felt Crowfoot’s ire burn hot, so deep, so strong that it came from him in waves. He poured it into the magic.

  ‘We must act now,’ Shallowgrave whispered, the rustling of corpse-shrouds. ‘Act now, act now.’

  There were no flashes, no fires, no colours, as the Nameless committed their conjoined will against the Deep Kings, slamming down against them as though against the opening of a tomb. Red lines broke across Nall’s cheeks as blood vessels ruptured. Ice that had settled into the folds of his face cracked and fell away in jagged shards. The weight of magic crushed down.

  Distantly, so distantly, that sinister eye continued to open. The Sleeper’s long, binding slumber began to withdraw.

  The Nameless began to babble things that made no sense. Instructions to one another, spells maybe, explanations for the manipulation of forces that should never have been unleashed. They were old arguments, old plans brought back to the fore in sudden desperation.

  ‘We cannot hold them this way,’ Nall said.

  ‘Failure means annihilation,’ Ezabeth said.

  ‘There is only one recourse left,’ Crowfoot said. ‘We knew it might come to this. A direct assault. The Lady of Waves must act.’

  ‘Too dangerous,’ Shallowgrave whispered. ‘Too dangerous, too dangerous. In making such an attack even we would be vulnerable.’

  ‘There is no other choice,’ Crowfall snapped.

  ‘We can fall bac
k,’ Nall said. ‘There is always flight. Save what power we can. Retreat across the western ocean and beg an alliance with the Earth Serpents.’

  ‘I will not allow them to take this land from me,’ Crowfoot snarled. ‘Never. Retreat is nothing but a slow death, and I will not lose. Not ever.’ He sent out a bolt of thought that raced across thousands of leagues as if they were nothing, crossing seas, lands that I’d never known existed, to Pyre where the Lady of Waves lay in the depths of her lagoon. ‘Now,’ Crowfoot told her, though all the Nameless felt it. ‘Strike now. Destroy their relic field and, in the depths of their trance, we may succeed.’

  The Lady of Waves did not speak, but her savage glee raced back along the thought-line. Like some terrible kraken, she had been unleashed, and she had craved this for so long.

  The weight of The Sleeper’s slow rise towards consciousness groaned back against the Nameless.

  Out along the lines of power, so far away, ocean currents that had been manipulated for three long years subtly altered their course in perfect unison. Their directions barely had to change in order to create new swells, new channels of flow. Deep below the waves, in the night-dark cold, great pressures shifted. In the shallow waters around warm, distant shores, gentle tugs lessened. Choppy waters around headlands calmed, fishing boats on placid waves began to rock. Throughout the oceans of the world, the Lady’s power was felt. But it was not just her power. She was not just commanding the ocean, she was the ocean. This, I suddenly understood, was what it meant to be Nameless.

  A wave came into Nall’s mind. Just a swell, no different from any other that rose and fell, out in a stretch of ocean my people had never known existed. But unlike those around it, this wave rose, and it did not fall. It grew, gaining momentum as fifty thousand currents merged and met; a sudden rush of energy brought it higher. The Lady drove it on, and on, gathering tides, picking up momentum. A wall of water that would have dwarfed the Grandspire rose across the ocean, carrying whales and shoals of fish as tumbling passengers, kicking salt and sweeping a ship from its path like a toy. It bore down on the Deep Kings’ island, their relic field. Thousands of tonnes of roaring ocean. Enough to smite a kingdom. Enough to drown a mountain. I saw the Lady’s image in the foaming spray, savage glee at finally being allowed to release her greatest working.