by Matthew Ward
“What’s the matter?” Koldra replied. “Can’t find your way?”
“You’re joking, right? The only things I can see in this muck are things I’d rather not.”
“It’s because you ain’t one of us any longer, Vlad. Not a true cousin.”
Kurkas scowled at the back of his head. Was that true, or was Koldra simply better at covering up his fear? “That prizrak’ll eat us both just as gladly. And there’s more meat on you than me.”
“Ain’t nothing but a heartsick keelie,” Koldra replied airily. “Weeping her loss into the gutter.”
Kurkas shook his head and hunched his shoulders. Funny what folk believed, and what they chose not to. Prizraks were as much a part of Otherworld’s myth as the etravia and the shifting streets. Men and women hollowed out by the mists, leaving a gaunt, misshapen husk wracked by hunger pains so terrible it drove them to bloody tears.
It suited Koldra to pretend otherwise. Kurkas knew better, for he’d seen one. At Trennen Sump, before storms had breached the harbour wall and drowned the place. A glimpse of fangs beneath a tattered vranakin hood. Not yet seven summers old, he’d fled back home, breathless and weeping, only to fetch the flat of his mother’s hand for abandoning the precious vials she’d sent him to steal. She’d not believed either. Some things you didn’t, not until they were close enough to kill.
“Here.”
Koldra left the street and squeezed through a run of buckled iron railings. Kurkas followed, picking his way through the haphazard maze of moss-draped statues and headstones. Koldra halted where a second line of railings fell away across a collapsed embankment. Below, the brooding square-towered bulk of the Church of Tithes loomed over plaza and befouled fountain. Caged wagons waited in the mists, each flanked by a procession of grey-garbed vranakin and preceded by an elder cousin’s tattered, drifting form.
Kurkas’ heart sank. Westernport had been bad enough, but the Church of Tithes? The Parliament of Crows’ own bloody nest? It’d take an army to swing that, and the Republic hadn’t an army to spare.
The sonorous tolling of twin bells swept the plaza. Wagons creaked into motion, blinkered draught horses beginning the long, upward climb to the city above. Ravens flocked from the bell towers and swooped in pursuit. Hand bells clamoured across the fading echoes marked the pass of ritual advance. Too regal and deliberate for the departure of wagons whose duty had been done. This was something else. Koldra had lied.
“Where are they, Kolly?” murmured Kurkas.
“Gone. Long gone.”
Kurkas turned, unable to muster surprise at the long dagger in Koldra’s hand. Nor the dark shapes moving among the graves. No one to blame other than himself. Koldra hadn’t known he’d be coming, but of course he’d had vranakin watching from the shadows, awaiting instruction and opportunity. There were a hundred ways he could have signalled them during the descent.
“So they’re dead?” Kurkas replied.
“Their deaths appeased the Raven. They made this possible.”
“Made what possible?”
“I told you: the Crowmarket is rising.”
“Yeah, if you say so.”
Kurkas drew his sword. Below, the plaza had all but emptied, its denizens unaware or uncaring of what unfolded atop the embankment. Koldra’s vranakin were close enough now to be more than foreboding shapes. Four footpads in a half circle, knives and cudgels already to hand. Too many to fight.
Should’ve brought the plant pot.
“Mucky way to earn thirty crowns.” Kurkas let his eye rest on each footpad in turn, searching for the weak link. “Reckon it’ll be downright life-changing for at least one of you.”
Koldra chuckled. “Don’t be like that, Vlad. Could’ve slit you myself back home if that was what I wanted. We’re mates, you and me, and you were always a good leg-breaker. Pay up, and you can come back to the fold.”
“Generous. What if I choose otherwise?”
Koldra nodded towards the church. “Then we’ll sell you on to the Parliament. Crowfather Athariss will pay a pretty price for the captain of a Privy Councillor’s hearthguard.”
Ransom at best, death in the middle ground and something worse than death at the extreme. What, exactly, Kurkas wasn’t sure, but with Athariss’ reputation and the way his luck had been breaking…?
“All right, Kolly, let’s hear what—”
Kurkas broke off and flung himself past Koldra. The leftmost footpad’s sword came up too slow. A gasp, a tang of blood on the musty air, and Kurkas left him dying at the foot of another man’s grave.
“Stop him!” shouted Koldra.
A chorus of curses and the thump of running feet chased Kurkas past the railings. Leaving the graveyard’s muddy field behind, he headed uphill, threading etravia as he ran. Didn’t matter how jumbled Dregmeet’s streets had become. Up was out.
Kurkas’ lungs burned well before he reached the next corner. The Brass Crown’s sign screeched back and forth overhead. Light and mirth blazed behind the tavern’s filthy windows. He passed on the locked door and scrambled up a stack of crates and dropped down into the dray yard, skidded on horse dung, and ran for the far side. The rusted lock snapped under his shoulder, and he staggered out into the alley.
Now where? Uphill. Always uphill. But not predictable. Kurkas headed left, but veered right as the alley branched, then left again beneath a crooked firestone lamp long since shorn of glass. Another right brought him out onto a narrow, cobbled road that memory tentatively identified as Clipper Street. The glimpse of a caged wagon and attendants through drifting etravia sent Kurkas doubling back on himself, over a half-fallen wall and onto… Marshsea Street? Yes, Marshsea Street, with its sagging, timber-framed buildings and spireless Lunastran church.
Could have been worse. Halfway, or near enough. No sign of pursuit, nor a hue and cry like the one that had harried Lord Trelan’s expedition out of Westernport. Whatever profit Koldra wanted from the venture, he’d evidently sought not to share.
Kurkas propped his elbow against a wall and sucked air into aching lungs. The mists billowed, wafting heartsick sobbing into the street. Running feet drowned it out.
“There!”
Far from rested, but with limited options, Kurkas set off again. He leapt the flooded gutter at the street’s edge, and dived into an alley. This time, he passed the uphill turning, and ran on to the end. He took the corner too fast, shoulder striking brick and jarring badly needed breath from lungs. Fighting for balance, he thundered on to the alley’s end and out into the plaza.
Straight into the mist-haunted shadow of the Church of Tithes.
“Oh, that’s just not bloody fair.”
For a moment, Kurkas told himself it wasn’t the church at all. But no. The squared-off towers. The tatter-winged statue sitting at the heart of the fountain. Despite his uphill flight, he was back where he’d started.
“Can’t find your way Vlad? See? You’re no longer vranakin at heart.”
Koldra emerged from the alleyway, his footpads close behind.
“That mean the job offer’s done with?”
“From the moment you slit Ravald.”
The footpads closed in. Kurkas set off again, slower than before for want of legs and lungs thirty years younger. Giving the fountain a wide berth, he lurched up the slope so lately crowded with wagons and ducked into a muddy alley.
Water rushed at the far end, where the Estrina – whose artificial watercourse spilt from the Silverway to power the city’s mills – boiled away. An uneven, eroded towpath clung to the near shore; the far bank was a sheer cliff, too steep for a one-armed man to climb. Upriver, slatted millwheels turned on a squeaking axle, the patter of water dedicated to the vanished goddess Endala by the flowing script scratched into timber. In the ordinary run of things the Estrina gushed into the sea further west. Who could say where it ended now, with Dregmeet muddled?
A twitch of the mists brought wailing cries.
Kurkas spun about and swung the flat
of his sword onto his shoulder. “Tell you what. How about we all walk out of here, and find a bit of sunlight? I’ll even stand you a round or two at the Silverway tavern. Put a bit of colour in your cheeks.”
An exhausted Koldra stumbled closer. “Have some dignity, Vlad.”
“Got all I need, and plenty to spare.” Kurkas swung the sword off his shoulder. “Why don’t you come find out, for old times’ sake?”
“I don’t think so.” Koldra beckoned to his companions. “Take him.”
The footpads came forward as a trio. More than enough to block the alley, and the treacherous footing of the old towpath promised much the same outcome as simply diving outright into the rushing waters. Still, you ran the race as best you could.
Weeping heralded the arrival of a dark shape in the mists behind Koldra. It stumbled closer, head hanging and bloody eyes downcast. Skin pale as a fish’s belly and emaciated, clawed hands told Kurkas all he needed. It had been a lad of Altiris’ age, before the mists had hollowed him out. Not any longer.
Kurkas cleared his throat. “Kolly, old son, you might want to turn around.”
“Really, Vlad? That’s the best you have?”
“Suit yourself.”
Koldra narrowed his eyes. He turned in the same moment the prizrak bore him to the ground. Black talons opened his throat to sky. Two of the footpads turned at the gargling, spluttering scream.
“Queen’s Ashes…” hissed one.
The third held his ground, vainly trying to keep Kurkas in view while also seeing what had occurred behind. “What is it?”
‘It’, Kurkas decided, was the situation sliding from bad to worse. Sure, Koldra was down – and good riddance – but an alley packed with three vranakin and a hungry prizrak was hardly an improvement. Monsters needed silver, not steel. Or failing that, an axe.
The prizrak clambered to its feet and bore down. A footpad swung, the blade cutting deep into the prizrak’s arm. It staggered, a shrill cry parting its lips. Then it bore him to the ground and a new scream split the air.
Before he could change his mind, Kurkas leapt into the river.
Thirty
Of the many things Prazarov hated about the constabulary, sentry duty was the worst. Especially sentry duty on Dregmeet’s border. And more than anything, pointless sentry duty. The vranakin had so many sewers, tunnels and the like to make ingress into the city proper that they seldom bothered with the Drag Hill gate.
“Relief should be here by now.” Receiving no response, Prazarov raised his voice. “I said ‘relief should be here by now’.”
Sergeant Halledra – a ten-year veteran, and little given to indulging grievance – shot him a bored look from the other side of the archway. “Saying so ain’t gonna make them show faster.”
“The captain’s punishing me, isn’t she? Just because I looked the other way when that banker got his pockets cut in Beastmarket.” The memory stung as only a bad deed in good cause could. The Freemarker tellerman had coin to spare, while the keelie had been more rib than flesh. “Unfair, that’s what it is.”
“Yeah? And what’s my punishment for being stuck here with you?” Halledra softened her voice. “Look, Captain Darrow isn’t a bad sort. She’d have let the matter slide if you’d not made such a fuss.”
“I see, so now it’s my—”
The deep toll of a bell set Prazarov’s stomach growling. Shuffling footsteps gathered further down the mist-wreathed slope.
Halledra pushed away from the wall and cupped a hand to her mouth. “Gate’s closed! Order of the Council.”
A cawing torrent of black wings rushed out of the mists. Prazarov threw up a hand to shield his face as the ravens swept past, talons plucking at his tabard. Then they were gone into the city.
Other figures emerged, a loose escort of vranakin grey shuffling at either side of a wagon. To the right, an old man bore a rusted iron bell-frame tucked against shoulder and hip. A strike of his hammer struck the chime anew. Escorts stiffened in anticipation. Just Dregmeet scum. A handful of masked vranakin mingled among them. Nothing to worry about, bar the number.
A wagon creaked out of the mist, drawn by an emaciated horse in ragged caparison. Crooked iron bars formed an empty cage about the wagon bed. The driver hunched over slack reins, hooded grey robes wisping at the edges. Prazarov saw no face. His heart wavered before the hood’s empty gaze, overcome by the same nameless, inexplicable dread that set his knees knocking. Instinct screamed to run. Legs refused.
A pale Halledra drew her sword. Prazarov fumbled his own attempt. Numbed fingers reclaimed the falling blade halfway to the floor.
“The Council?” The driver’s voice trickled through the mist, scraping at Prazarov’s soul. “This city belongs to the Parliament of Crows.”
The kernclaw cast his cloak wide. The air filled with the screech of birds.
“Lumestra, bless this house with light.”
Grigorad set taper to the wick. The last altar candle blazed to life, banishing gloom from the apse as the Goddess had once banished Dark from the world. Her golden statue smiled down from above the east window, the interplay of candlelight and shadow animating the kindly face. Others preferred firestone lanterns to simple flame, arguing that they were more reliable – or perhaps more fitting as they were, like the foundry’s constructs, fuelled by the Goddess’ magic. But Grigorad favoured flame – a simple offering for a simple house, as all churches should be. Even a church tucked away in the gardened streets of Highvale, blessed with a congregation generous in size and munificence. Even on Saint Belenzo’s holy day.
He blew the taper out and set it aside. A few minutes more until bells chimed the hour. Time enough to open the doors and admit the evenhymn congregation. He retrieved his sun-staff from beside the pulpit – these days as much a support for aging bones as a symbol of office – and hobbled along the chequerboard tiles.
A scream sounded beyond the walls. Another followed. Shadows darkened the nave’s stained-glass windows, rippling back and forth across the golden friezes. Running feet. The clash of steel. A body fell against the north window, head and hands dark against glass before sliding away.
Grigorad hastened to the door and heaved it open. The clamour redoubled, driven by shapes running in unseasonal mist. Greenish-white vapour trickled over Grigorad’s feet and along the nave. The altar candles flickered and went out.
“What is the meaning of this?” he shouted.
A woman ran out of the mist; eyes wild, her velvet gown bloodied and torn. She fell to her knees on the marble steps and clutched at Grigorad’s vestments.
“The vranakin are taking the children! They’re killing anyone who objects!”
Rheumy eyes adjusted. Enough to make out bodies strewn across the church garden. Parishioners. Constables. Lazrin, the sexton, a sword used only for clearing beggars and vagrants close beside his lifeless hand. And beyond the lychgate, a caged wagon. Hands reached through the bars. Discordant, pleading sobs rose to prominence as screams faded. Grey figures moved through the murk, dragging or carrying children alongside.
Awash with horror, Grigorad stamped the butt of his staff against stone. The crystal sun at the staff’s tip burst to golden light. Mist recoiled like a beast from flame. Grigorad’s fear fled until only outrage remained; outrage, and a duty learned long ago on the Ravonn – one that made no exception for old bones. He pulled free of the wailing woman and strode for the gate.
A vranakin barred his path, cudgel raised. The sun-staff’s flash of light swept him aside, and then no one stood between Grigorad and the wagon.
“You dare?” he roared. “In Lumestra’s city? Beneath the walls of her church?”
Another vranakin came screaming from the mist. Her sword drove timber from Grigorad’s staff. A flare of magic cast her from her feet. Wailing, she crawled away, one hand clasped to her mask.
Grigorad’s chest heaved with unfamiliar exertion. His blood seethed with righteous fury and the magic’s backwash. “Set them f
ree!”
The sun-staff flickered. Grey robes gathered in the mists between Grigorad and the cart.
“Their old lives are done,” breathed the hooded man. “They will be cousins of the Raven.”
The mists grew colder. Grigorad’s breathing stuttered. Outrage ebbed. A seething presence swamped his thoughts, insidious as nightmare. His knees buckled, but the grip on his staff held him upright. Sunlight vied with the cold settling in his bones.
“Lumestra commands it!”
Shapes gathered in the mists. Masked vranakin all. A circle of blades held back by light’s glory.
“Lumestra belongs to the light.” Something black and insectoid scuttled across the hooded man’s robes and vanished beneath his sleeve. The mists shifted, carrying the sour stench of decay. “This city belongs to the Crowmarket.”
The sun-stave’s light guttered and died. Mist rushed in.
Thirty-One
“Reports are still arriving, but near as I can tell the mists have claimed everything between the Silverway estuary in the north and Wallmarch in the south.” Vona Darrow’s voice burned with frustration and, Malachi suspected, no little fear. But she maintained her ramrod-straight pose at the end of the table, helmet tucked under her arm and eyes clear. “It’s gone as far east as Three Pillars. If it crosses into the Hayadra Grove it’ll come rushing down Sinner’s Mile, and that’ll be it. And where the mist goes, so do the vranakin.”
Evarn Marest brought his fist down on the table. “Raven’s Eyes, but that’s half the city!”
She nodded. “Not the epithet I’d have chosen in the circumstances, my lord, but you’re about right.”
Marest’s eyes turned furtive, fearful. Leonast Lamirov’s expression was a good match, as was Messela Akadra’s. Rika Tarev had not yet uttered a word, though her eyes were haunted. Malachi suspected each wondered how soon the mists would reach their estates.
Only Konor Zarn seemed at ease with events, but that provoked little surprise. He was, after all, the Crowmarket’s man. Not that Malachi held himself blameless in that regard. Every breath was a challenge. His stomach was sour with the knowledge that whatever witchery the Parliament of Crows had loosed, he’d played his part.