by Matthew Ward
Malachi closed his eyes and suppressed a shudder. There was an edge to the Emissary’s presence. Something not entirely human. The threats were bad enough, but to hear them uttered with what would otherwise have been a pleasing, sultry voice? No amount of brandy taken could prevent his blood turning to ice.
“He’d only have become more determined. This will keep him contained.”
“You should have done more.”
Was that a new note he heard? In another, Malachi might have taken it for uncertainty. Even regret. But while this Emissary lacked the open malice of her predecessor, he wasn’t ready to assume she was any more compassionate. But still, perhaps a little defiance was called for.
“I agreed to turn a blind eye to much, but abduction and slaughter? I won’t conceal that.”
“You’d rather my cousins took matters into their own hands?”
Again, she distanced herself from the threat. Interesting.
“Your cousins should instead consider returning those they’ve taken. Remove his motivation.”
She hesitated. “My cousins will not be dictated to.”
“I saw the reports of what was done to those people. What possible benefit can such cruelty bring?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“They’re my subjects,” he snapped. “Of course it’s my concern.”
“And your children? Are they your concern?”
Malachi reached his feet without conscious decision. He grabbed at the Emissary’s throat. She parted in a storm of rippling crow-shadows. Buoyed aloft by anger and the brandy’s aftermath, he barely felt the icy cold of her passage. As she reformed beneath the window, he spun about, finger stabbing at the air.
“If any harm comes to them, I—”
Her hand closed around Malachi’s wrist and twisted it up behind his back. Dark spots danced before his eyes. “What will you do, Lord Reveque?”
“I’ll set Izack loose,” he gasped. “And it won’t be Essamere alone. The other chapterhouses will join the hunt. Those of you they don’t burn, they’ll cast into the sea.”
The pressure increased. “Malatriant couldn’t drive us out. What makes you believe you can?”
“The Crowmarket of the Tyrant Queen’s time is gone. Your Parliament is only a shadow.” Malachi swallowed. “Why else would you need me? Why else be so worried about what Josiri might find?”
The pressure about his wrist vanished. A shove sent him sprawling.
Malachi grabbed at the table for support. Despite his throbbing arm, he swelled with elation. That the Emissary had made no direct concession didn’t matter. He’d won. His first such victory in many months. The Crowmarket had grown weak. Or else the Emissary had realised she’d overstepped.
“My cousins have another request,” said the Emissary. “They believe it would be in everyone’s interest if Konor Zarn ascended to the Council, and not Lady Mezar.”
Which meant Zarn was in thrall to the Crowmarket… or perhaps even a cousin himself. At best, he’d be an obstacle. At worst, he was being groomed as Malachi’s replacement. Either would be disastrous.
“No.”
The Emissary’s eyes glinted beneath her hood. “No?”
“I won’t do it. When the Parliament of Crows helped me remove Ebigail, I promised a sympathetic ear on the Council. But I am not their plaything.”
She held his gaze. Silent. Unmoving. Malachi held his breath. This was it. Had he imagined the Emissary’s reluctance before? Did his threats truly have purchase? If he was wrong, then the best he could hope for was that he alone would pay the price, and that his family would be spared. But if he was right, there might just be a chance of getting out from under a fool’s bargain.
The Emissary sighed. “Oh, Malachi. We’re all their playthings.”
She stepped into shadow and was gone. Loosing a sigh that stretched all the way to his boots, Malachi reached for the brandy.
It was only when the glass was halfway to his lips that he realised that was the first time she’d addressed him by name, rather than title.
Three
Everything of value flowed into Dregmeet, sooner or later. Coin. Goods. Life. Love. Hope. Tokens of trade, borne down through the crooked, sinking streets by those in need of a favour. As a girl, Apara had watched petitioners from the rooftops, sifting the proud from the desperate, the rich from the poor. Judging with a keelie’s practised eye those fit for plucking if bargains were refused. All were fair game as soon as they crossed from the sunlit city and into the unfading mists. All save those to whom the Parliament of Crows granted protection.
She pressed on through the narrow, cobbled alleyways. Vranakin watched from the shadows, peering through the gaping eyeholes of filthy cloth masks. Watching as she’d once watched, though in idle curiosity more than predation. The inky, ethereal feathers of the raven cloak marked her as a quarry beyond ready ambition. No one of any sense provoked a kernclaw.
All the more ironic, as Apara had never sought to be one.
She still remembered her first glimpse. No more than eleven or twelve years old – the year of Apara’s birth being somewhat nebulous, even to her – and still a lowly rassophore, a fledgling too young to be proclaimed full cousin to the vranakin. She’d done a grand trade along Lacewalk, dipping the pockets of bawdyhouse patrons, and them never the wiser. But she’d been too flashy with her pickings, and earned a jealous beating.
She’d tried to fight, but she’d always been wiry rather than strong. After the first snapped rib, she’d begged to be left alone. Even with her stolen coins in his pocket, Czorn had kept punching her. He’d been three years older, on the cusp of becoming a full cousin, proud and vicious with it. As he’d forced her face down into the gutter-filth for a third time, Apara had known with utter, paralysing certainty that he meant to steal away her life.
The beating ceased in a chorus of screams and a scuffle of desperate feet. The next Apara knew, a ragged cousin had hauled her upright.
You’re not cut out for this. Leave while you can.
The woman’s words had lingered. Apara had never decided if the cousin had meant them as instruction, or challenge – only that she’d taken them as the latter. What else could she have done? Dregmeet was her home, the Crowmarket her family. And so, her filthy face stiff with dried tears, she’d limped down to the shore. There, she scratched Czorn’s name onto stone, buried it with her last coin and a scrap of feather, and begged the Raven to settle her score.
Czorn had broken his neck two days later, scrambling out of a townhouse window. Just bad luck, many had said, to fail a jump any four-year-old could have made. Apara had known different. She’d spent the rest of her life paying off the Raven’s debt.
Shaking away old memories, Apara quickened her pace. It was always cold so deep into Dregmeet, even at Sommertide. And a part of her felt the chill deeper of late. The part of her that wasn’t really part of her at all, but had gripped her soul ever since Viktor Akadra had set it there. The echo of Dark that made her a puppet to his will.
She skirted the clogged fountain of Tzalcourt, suppressing the familiar shudder at its statue of a moulder-winged angel – half woman, half serpent, and with a frame of rotting crow-feathers for wings. The lopsided gate of the Church of Tithes yawned wide from amidst a field of moss-wreathed gravestones. Uneven, squared-off towers loomed above, and beyond them the jettied walls of timber-framed houses held aloft by buttress and chain. Just as the Dregmeet slums were the lowest part of the city, the Church of Tithes was the lowest part of Dregmeet.
There were no guards – or at least none readily observed – and no petitioners. Both would come later, when evening came, and the empty streets filled with those in search of food and fleeting comfort. For that was the bright truth among the cloying shadows: the Crowmarket brought sustenance to all who desired it… for whatever price they could pay.
The shadows of the archway drew together into a man’s form, raven cloak swept back and hood lowered to r
eveal nondescript garb and an equally unmemorable face. Lesser cousins might hide their identity, but kernclaws revelled in notoriety. Notoriety and fear. “Cousin. How does the life of a noblewoman suit you?”
Jealousy rippled beneath the mockery.
“Erad. I’ve business with the Parliament.”
He nodded. “As, I’m told, do I. But you may want to wait.”
They’d run together as children, learning their trade beneath old Inbara’s watchful eye. A strange pairing, what with Erad being vranakin by birth, and her come to the nest by abandonment. But the bond struck in tender years had endured.
“There’s a problem?”
Impassivity gave way to a knowing smile. “Depends on where you stand. For you and I, not so much, for Nalka…?”
Nalka, who’d ruled over the nest at Crosswind, and had barely slipped the veil into Otherworld before the constabulary had descended. Who’d through negligence exposed a sacred site to the Council, and lost valuable offerings alongside.
Offerings. Apara scowled away the word. Old rituals, practised anew out of growing desperation – hoping to draw an ancient eye with gift of blood and spirit.
She glanced past timeworn bas-reliefs to the church’s heavy black door. “What do you reckon to her chances?”
“Who knows? Used to be that a kernclaw could do little wrong.” Erad shrugged. “Now? With the mists receding and the Raven deaf? She’ll be fortunate to walk away. Unless you’ve tidings to warm withered hearts. That might save her.”
“I’ve no words to help Nalka.”
A familiar rush of guilt. One that wasn’t hers. It sprang from the shadow shackled to her soul. The price of old failures. Bad enough it existed at all, and with it the promise of servitude if Viktor Akadra crossed her path again. But even quiescent, the shadow wouldn’t let Apara be. Without its master’s guiding hand, it couldn’t dominate her will, but it delighted in sparking empathy where none was appropriate. Empathy was seldom appropriate for a kernclaw.
Erad grunted. “The only salvation is that which you steal for yourself. Is that it?”
Apara winced at the snatch of prayer-cant. The words underpinned all that the Crowmarket did. Nothing for nothing, and take from others whatever you desired. “That’s not how I meant it.”
“This morning went that badly?”
Apara closed her eyes, once again in the Privy Council chamber. “Enough that I’ll end in the mists alongside Nalka if things continue. Lord Reveque is stubborn.”
“I warned you not to take the position.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice, cousin.”
Was there anything less useful than advice after the fact? Erad didn’t know the whole story. He was ignorant of the shadow shackled to her soul and the bargain that bound Apara closer to the Parliament than ever. “I hope you’ve never cause to learn how wrong you are.”
He shook his head. “Whatever happened to the Silver Owl and her ready smile?”
Apara scowled at the old nickname, lost alongside the thief’s vocation she’d loved so dearly. “Everything has its price, dear cousin. Even a smile. I’ve no longer any to give away.”
A woman’s scream washed over her, shrill even through the mists and the intervening stone.
The door creaked open. A ragged figure filled the space. Garbed in grey wool-cloth, and all but its green eyes hidden by the folds of its hood, its form was broadly that of a man, but was as much something else also. As if its raiment were not the only thing fraying at the edges.
Elder cousins were nameless, interchangeable, with only the barest variance of form and voice to tell the women apart from the men. The Raven’s gift, by whose grace Apara walked Otherworld’s paths and commanded the restless spirits of her cloak, flowed like a millrace through their veins. A reward for service to the Crowmarket and its Parliament. Or it should have been. Now they seemed somehow shrunken, frail. As if the Raven’s distance diminished them. Not for the first time, Apara wondered how old they were.
The Parliament invited no such conjecture. They’d been ancient when Apara’s parents had been young. Grandsires-in-shadow, feared and respected. Let the citizens of the sunlit world consider the pontiffs’ endless existence the stuff of woven myth; Inidro Krastin, Karn Athariss and Endri Shurla – names handed down as title to deceive the credulous. Echoes of the crowfathers and crowmother of old. Apara knew better. You couldn’t stand in their presence and claim otherwise. Centuries clung to them like shrouds.
“Greetings,” breathed the elder cousin. “The Parliament of Crows calls you both.”
They followed, footsteps swallowed by the mist. The light of the outer world fell into cloying gloom. Thick, waxy candles guttered greasy radiance more green than orange, the tallow-scent thick with dust and old memories. Rotten pews framed walls of crumbling plasterwork and bare brick. Crooked pillars braced a sagging roof.
And at the end, where a triad of preachers’ pulpits clung to a bowing wall, and a feather-strewn altar sat silent beneath a vast, boarded window, a moaning woman knelt among the rubble, hands clasped to her eyes. Five elder cousins stood in silent semicircle about her, tattered robes writhing in a non-existent breeze.
The darkness within the centremost pulpit shifted about a cowled face and grey-mantled shoulders edged with faded gold. “Nalka.” Krastin’s voice held none of its usual kindness. “You have failed your cousins.”
“You have broken our first law,” Athariss added from the rightmost. Disdain and cruelty sought balance within his tone. As ever, disdain edged ahead.
“You have allowed us to be seen,” said Shurla from the left, her voice taut with a zealot’s disgust. “Heresy.”
Behind the altar, the discoloured planks across the window faded into white-green mist, and thence to nothing at all. Listless etravia spirits – their pallid forms clad in mockery of mortal dress, but their bodies vaporous beneath the waist – drifted through the space beyond, for ever searching for the path that would bring them to paradise. A broad, dark road gave way at either side to raised terraces, edged with tiles and hung with unfamiliar heraldry – all distorted by the curling mist and Otherworld’s greenish light.
But it was empty. The Raven had not come.
Athariss leaned closer. Even with his face hidden by the folds of his gold-edged robes, there was no mistaking his anticipation. “The debt must be paid.”
“You will wander the mists in penance until he finds you,” said Shurla.
“Farewell, cousin.” Only Krastin’s voice held any regret.
Two elder cousins hauled Nalka to her feet. Hands pulled clear of her face revealed mangled flesh where her eyes should have been. As a kernclaw, Otherworld’s paths were no secret to Nalka. Sighted, she might have escaped into the Living Realm before the Raven found her. But not blinded. Even if she evaded the Raven, her mind would fall to madness as her soul ran thin. Just one more flesh-hungry prizrak roaming a realm where all else was spirit.
Apara stifled a shudder as they led Nalka to the archway.
The first law that Nalka had broken wasn’t really a law at all. The light creates us; it does not reveal our purpose. It spoke to the conceit that the Crowmarket was a hidden force. Perhaps that was true in the eastern Empire or the quarrelsome south, but not in Tressia where, even in the Crowmarket’s waning days, a goodly portion of the city was overrun by Otherworld’s mists. Nalka met her fate not for sharing a secret that was no secret, but as caution to those who might yet fall short of expectation.
With a final wordless sob – Apara wondered bleakly if the elder cousins had taken tongue as well as eyes – Nalka was cast onto the dark road. The mists faded, and the uneven boards of the window returned to sight.
“Erad Nyzad,” said Krastin. “Step forward.”
Erad bowed low. “How may I serve?”
“A ship is due into Sothvane tomorrow from Selann,” said Shurla. “A vessel of the Fallen Council that nonetheless serves hol
y purpose. The Amber Tempest.”
“You are to see that its cargo is secured,” said Krastin. “And taken to the Westernport nest. The rituals are to continue.”
More death. All to draw the attention of the Crowmarket’s wayward deity.
“It shall be as you command,” said Erad.
“See that it is,” said Krastin. “You may go.”
Erad bowed and withdrew. He passed Apara without a glance and departed the church.
“Apara Rann. Step forward.”
Apara obeyed Krastin’s command and tried not to think about the bloodstains on the rubble. Worse were the unblinking gazes of the elder cousins, now arrayed in semicircle about her.
“Tell us of the Council, cousin,” said Athariss.
“What do they know?” said Krastin.
“I cannot speak to what they know,” Apara replied carefully. “But they seem unaware of Nalka’s true business. A matter of imprisonment and slavery, nothing more.”
A strange life where the disposal of folk as goods and chattels could be considered ordinary – even preferable – beside the truth. Then again, wasn’t that the way of the world? Especially in the Republic, where life was cheap, save where backed by good name and firm coin. Was there ever much difference between ritual murder in the Raven’s name, and in the pursuit of the Council’s false justice?
“Then the matter will be forgotten?” asked Shurla.
“Not by Lord Trelan. He worries for his fellow southwealders. He sought the Council’s authority to purge the dockside and give us all to the pyre.”
Silence reigned, and with it the first suggestion of wariness. The Crowmarket had flourished during the Age of Kings – had survived even the tyranny of Malatriant’s rule and her overthrow at the hands of Konor Belenzo and his fellow champions of the divine – but that had been with the Raven’s patronage. Without it, the outcome of open war with the Council was far from certain.
“Which of the heretics voted for this?” asked Shurla.
“Izack, Lord Trelan, Lady Beral and Lady Akadra,” Apara replied. “Lord Reveque overturned the vote, but granted permission for them to assist the constabulary, if they wished.”