Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  Fall back.

  Not this time.

  So much guilt. Guilt upon guilt. Guilt for failure, guilt for the things that I’d done, guilt for the things that I hadn’t. The pain of seeing my own men die on my orders. The agony of reading that my wife had thrown herself and my children from the tower. Guilt for Ezabeth, whom I couldn’t save, for Nenn, whom I couldn’t save, for Venzer and Herono and all the others who had paid the price for my failings. Hadn’t been strong enough, clever enough, brave enough. Adrogorsk had broken me, and I’d spent my life hiding and running, fleeing the fights that I couldn’t win.

  I loved Ezabeth because she made me see past that guilt. She gave me something to fight for. Something that I was willing to give my all to. I loved Tnota, and Amaira, and Valiya, even Maldon in some bizarre way. I looked at the blackening, oily smoke curling from my skin. What did I hold there but the guilt of a weapon? Crowfoot’s guilt, maybe, so purely distilled that it lingered on in physical form. It wraps us, binds us inside ourselves and makes us into something less.

  Black Misery-essence coiled within me, smoked from me, threading down into the earth. I could see them all around me now. Faces from the past, weapons shouldered, waiting. They’d been waiting for me all this time.

  ‘You understand, don’t you?’ Nenn had said. But I hadn’t. ‘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.’

  It would take an army to stop the drudge reaching us. But I had one.

  ‘I’m going to meet them,’ I said, picking up a spear. ‘Stay here. If anything gets past me, you’ll have to stop it.’

  ‘We need you here!’ Maldon said. ‘North has to be stopped.’

  ‘I’ll deal with North later,’ I said. I felt calm. Everything was as it should be. ‘But I’m needed out there.’

  His questions faded as I walked back towards the city walls.

  ‘You sure you like these odds?’ Nenn asked, walking alongside me.

  ‘I never like the odds,’ I told her. ‘But then, we never played fair, did we?’

  ‘Awful lot of them out there. You think you can handle them all?’

  ‘No. Of course not. But then, I won’t have to.’

  She grinned at me, a shit-eating grin that won my heart.

  ‘By the fucking Spirit of Misery, I think he’s finally getting it,’ she said.

  ‘About damn time,’ Betch agreed. Marshal Venzer nodded enthusiastically.

  I ran through the silent streets of Adrogorsk amidst the din of ghosts. They stamped and beat the butts of their weapons against the ground. I nodded to them as I passed by, returned their salutes. Faces I hadn’t seen in thirty years, faces that I’d forgotten, faces that had never grown old. They were me, and they were the Misery, and they belonged to us both in equal measure. I passed through the great, empty eastern gate and stood outside the walls to look towards the army that descended upon us across the horizon. A blanket of churning shapes, thousands of them, with lance and axe and sword and hate enough to tear through cities. This mindless, senseless devotion, the willingness to disregard thought and choice and to kill and maim and enslave was what awaited all of us.

  And so, it comes to this, I sent across the Misery. In the black iron palanquin, Acradius heard me. I felt the weight of his presence rise like the wave that had threatened to swamp the Deep Kings in their place of power, a rushing, roaring wall of destruction.

  I see you before your broken walls, Acradius intoned, his voice the silence of a supernova, the quiet of falling oaks. For all that you’ve worked towards, for everything you and your Nameless guardians have thrown in my path – this is all that stands against me now?

  He did not understand. He would never understand.

  I stand against you, I told him. And people like me will stand against you until their last breath. Until the battles are over, until the sky boils and breaks and tears the world apart. Someone will always stand against you. You will never have the dominion you crave. You will never be whole. You will always be nothing.

  I could make out individual riders as they drew closer. Their mounts were gasping, dead on their feet, ragged and pressed past the limits of their endurance, animated by will alone. Here and there, one of them crashed down, beyond exhaustion, spilling its rider. But while they may have been a ruined army, they were still an army.

  ‘Hope you know what you’re doing here, Captain,’ Nenn said.

  ‘You don’t have to call me that, Major,’ I said. ‘Or should that be General?’

  ‘I always liked it best when you were the captain,’ she said.

  The moons were so close now. Rioque, slowest in her orbit, began to cross the sun’s path. The world shone in bloody red magnificence, blood in the sky, blood on the earth.

  ‘Good times, weren’t they?’

  ‘No,’ Nenn said. ‘They were pissing awful, mostly. But they were ours. I’m going to miss you, Ryhalt.’

  ‘I’m going to miss you too,’ I said. ‘Again. I’ll always miss you.’

  We clasped wrist to wrist. I met Betch’s eye. Betch, whose life I’d taken with my knife when he couldn’t run from the drudge. He’d understood, but the guilt had weighed heavily all these years.

  ‘Look after her. Wherever you find yourselves when all this is over.’

  ‘Always intended to,’ Betch said. He put an arm around Nenn’s shoulders.

  The swarm came on. Faster and faster, urged by Acradius’ dark will. It was an energy, behind them, a tornado of spite and longing. None of the Misery’s poisoned ugliness could match the intensity of that inhuman hatred. Nothing but hate. That had always been the Deep Kings’ weakness. They had nothing else to fall back upon but their own eternal darkness.

  ‘Drink for the road?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘Hells,’ I said. ‘It’s about time.’

  I took out the flask that she’d given me. Had impossibly given me, when she was of no substance and, I’d thought, only in my mind. But our reality is shaped by our minds. There’s more than sand and water, skin and bone, iron and starlight. Without that which exists in our minds, there’s nothing at all, just an empty, desolate tangle of tiny particles that claim to be separate things, but in truth, are all one and the same. If the Misery had taught me anything, it was that our reality is not fixed.

  I tipped the flask to my lips and let the brandy burn down my throat.

  I smiled. Closed my eyes. Reached out all around me. Into the air, into the ground, I sent my Misery-senses out across Adrogorsk, across the Misery.

  ‘I feel it,’ I said. ‘I understand now. It’s time to make amends.’

  What makes a place? The rock, the soil, the trees? Buildings, sky, rivers? It is all those things, and it is everything that lives within them, around them, understands them, exists alongside them. And they were still here. They were me, and they were them, and they were the Misery as sure as anything was. The Misery was not just twisted magic and polluted rock. It was spirits, and sky, and the endless pain of what it had been, what it had been made to do, and what it had become. And it responded to my call.

  What’s this? Acradius thundered in my mind. Loud as a feather’s touch, booming like a summer smile. He had no subtlety. Too much arrogance, too much blinded pride. You summon old, dead magic. The power of the Heart of the Void was spent long ago. Look around you and see how it was wasted.

  Not wasted, I told him. Diffused. Scattered. But the core remains. It was terrible, and it destroyed countless lives, but it was put to a purpose, to save others while you are purposeless but to placate your own insanity. This soulless land is more capable of feeling remorse than you ever could.

  The riders had seen me. They beat their flagging mounts, and when those collapsed beneath them, crawled to their feet and began to run. On one side of the column, huge, screeching sandw
orms reared from the grit, dragging the drudge down into sand and jaws. From the other, sickly hands reached from clouds of drifting mist to pull riders from the saddles even as the mounts trampled the bodies of other things, unnamed things, that the Misery had thrown in their path as they crashed onwards. But there were still thousands. They would be upon me in minutes.

  The Misery-essence welled inside me, rumbling in my chest as it found new form, spreading through the black veins of Misery-essence that wormed through skin and flesh and bone. It coupled with it, intensified. My head rushed, my vision shook. It was power beyond that which any man should have consumed. Acradius had been right: I was the Misery’s voice. I was the one outlet through which it could feel, through which all the pent-up suffering and rage could be felt, could be exhaled in a titanic rush of raw fury. I was a conduit for both the living and the dead.

  Guilt, is that what you seek to wield against me? I could feel the immortal’s mockery in every word. It was beneath him to even say the word.

  I thrust the butt of the spear into the brittle earth, screwing it down into the sand. I drew on a string, and the bundle that Valiya had wrapped for me unfurled from the shaft, caught and blown by an eager, rising wind. A single silver fist on a field of scarlet flowed out, Valiya’s patient stitching bringing the torn pieces of my pride back into something whole.

  ‘You see this, Acradius?’ I roared. ‘You remember this banner, raised over the walls of this city? This city is mine. I said I’d be waiting for you. Well, here I am. Bring everything you have.’

  Acradius’ laughter was the roaring of an avalanche, the chittering of fledgling birds. No longer in my mind, instead it crackled across the Misery, warring with the howls of the broken sky. I saw a face in the dust cloud left in his army’s wake, narrowed eyes, a mouth contorted in rage.

  Your defiance is the last feeble show of power from the Nameless, Son of the Misery. Where are your masters now? You are just a man. You are nothing without them. You stand alone.

  I looked to my left. Nenn stood at ease, her sword resting on a shoulder. To my right, Betch gave me a nod.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never alone.’

  I plunged my fist down into the Misery-sand and unleashed. Not just raw, primal magic. Not just the Misery-essence, but the guilt that had plagued this broken land for ninety long years. The guilt of an ancient being, forced to destroy; my own guilt at all the lives I’d failed and lost along the years; and they coiled together like tangling serpents, wrapping and binding together as they pulsed through the sand. Black shadows flowed out of me, billowing, roaring as they spread across the desert.

  ‘Never alone,’ I whispered, my voice like knives. Louder then, ‘Rise up. Rise up, those that fought and died. Rise up, you that bled, and loved and were afraid. Rise up, you that were lost and broken before your years. Rise up with me now and stand against the darkness one last time.’ I straightened and raised a fist into the air, black energy coursing out of me, into the ground, into the air, blazing through the sky. ‘Rise up with me now, Children of the Misery.’

  The sky roared, an echoing howl of grief and rage and the white-bronze cracks shuddered and sparked with lightning in the bloody red light. The ground shook beneath us, stones skittering, jets of black steam bursting forth as a vast wind swept in. The dust swirled, a blinding red cloud all around me as shapes began to form from the poisoned dirt. Still I poured the Heart of the Void’s power back into the earth, still I threw back the agonised guilt it had borne all these decades, screaming, burning, unleashing it all.

  I opened my eyes.

  To my left and right they stood to order. Ghosts no longer, but carved from rock and sand, images of men and women from the past. Some I knew, others had died in this maniacal war long before I was born. They rode phantom horses of shifting sand, or stood in battalions with pikes shouldered. Shards of black Misery-stone made breastplates, eyes glowed with the light of the cracks in the sky. The spirits imbued within those bodies glowed with starlight intensity, bleeding out from their new forms, overlaid across them as they held them together. An army. A whole damn army of the dead.

  My army.

  The drudge pulled up a couple of hundred yards short, even Acradius’ driving fury faltering in the face of this spectral army.

  ‘We’ll take it from here, Captain,’ Nenn said. She glistened like she was formed of the white essence in the Endless Devoid. ‘We’ll buy you the time. And you need to be at the palace to see this through.’

  I hugged her.

  ‘This really is good-bye,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I bet there’s some fucking great adventures to be had wherever in the hells we end up. And besides. You gave me another chance to kill some drudge, and that’s all I ever really asked for. You coming, beau?’

  Betch helped her onto her horse. He took the reins of his own brilliant white mount.

  ‘Love her well, Betch,’ I said.

  ‘Always,’ he said. He smiled, and maybe in that smile, there was some forgiveness.

  ‘Alright, you fucking lot,’ Nenn called. ‘We’ve been dead for far too bloody long and it’s time for some payback. We’re going to hold this fucking line.’

  The drudge charged and the dead set their spears to meet them. Nenn bellowed her war cry, a perfect, ululating sound, taken up by thousands of roaring, ghostly warriors. With a crash, the two battle lines met.

  I drew my sword, leaving the spear to carry my banner on the wind as I ran back into the city. I staggered as a lance of pain ripped up the bone of my left arm.

  ‘Not fucking now,’ I said, but the heat was rising through skin and flesh and I felt the beak within, driving upwards as it formed. My master was coming. ‘Not fucking now,’ I said. I was so close, so close that the last thing I needed was Crowfoot on hand as a witness. But he was here, writhing beneath my skin, and he wasn’t going anywhere. I ran my sword blade across my Misery-hardened arm, sawing at it, barely feeling it. Black ichor and yellow fluid ran from me where blood should have been, as I sawed at myself. A small, black-feathered head emerged, sticky and slick with oil and mucus.

  ‘Galharrow,’ it whispered. A feeble sound, barely audible over the crash of spears on shields, of drudge screams and spectral battle cries. ‘The Lady’s captain will seek to present the power of the heart to her. You must be the last captain standing. I come now. When the heart is charged, I will be with you to consume its power. Do not let them take it first.’

  He’d come pretty late with that particular warning. I stared at the bird in my hand. I felt no anger. I was not even surprised.

  ‘There is no weapon,’ I said. ‘There was never a weapon. You don’t intend to unleash the heart on the enemy. You’re going to use it to replenish yourself. All of the Nameless have had the same plan all along.’

  ‘Did I know that the Lady would betray me? Of course,’ Crowfoot hissed. The baby bird’s head lolled on its neck, broad, milk-blue eyes unseeing. ‘Nall would have figured it out too, but he was gone before there was ever a need.’

  ‘Because you killed him.’

  ‘My hand was forced,’ Crowfoot hissed at me. For a moment I thought that there might even have been pain in his fledgling voice. ‘I need this victory at any cost, Galharrow. You of all people should understand that.’

  He was right, and it wasn’t like Crowfoot to try to reason with me. I understood then the utter depths of his powerlessness. He teetered on the edge of life, if what he had could be described as life at all.

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘Good. The Lady’s captain will attempt to take the heart. Stop him. Do not fuck this up.’

  37

  No time now. The eclipse was nearly upon us. I had to move fast.

  First stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the palace roof. His robe had been torn and shredded away, the milk-white flesh beneath hacked
and pierced by a dozen blows. Gunshot wounds raked his torso, but none of it seemed to bother the first amongst the Marble Guard. He carried no weapon. He needed none but his bloodstained fists, and a broken body lay at his feet.

  North must have put up a staggering fight. The number of blows he’d dealt to the Guardian were testament to that. His ensorcelled spear lay across the square, broken into pieces, discarded like driftwood. But no matter how fast he’d been, how skilled, the Lady of Waves had put her faith into a man, and Shallowgrave had put his into the hands of a monster.

  I was glad that I didn’t have to go up against North. Somehow it seemed calm here, even as the din of battle cascaded over the shattered city walls.

  First saw me as I crossed what had once been palace gardens. The moons were clustering over the sun, their alignment drawing closer, closer, and the world blazed in scintillating rainbow hues. North lay twisted in a way that told me his spine had been snapped in two like a twig. I could see the fight in my mind, North twisting and striking, spear leaping like a snake. And then First had got a hand on him, and in that mountain-weight grip, he’d been raised and broken in two. I remembered the impact of First’s fists as they’d smashed me to the ground.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ I said. My voice was a shadow-thing, a nightmare growl.

  I held Crowfoot’s pathetic avatar in my left hand, the right around the hilt of my sword.

  ‘He was a traitor,’ the Guardian said, his words forming with difficulty through granite fangs, a corpse-dust whisper of breath.