by Ed McDonald
‘Who were they?’ I said.
‘I don’t know.’ Ost said it slowly, as if I’d missed that detail. ‘They gave false names. Blue, Pikeworth, Dusky – sometimes they forgot what they’d called each other. They didn’t try and explain nothing, just kept telling me that there was more money than I’d ever need waiting for me back on the Range. They repeated it far, far too often. But after what I’d seen, I knew they wouldn’t let me live once the walls were in sight. Only needed me to navigate for them, right? So I abandoned them a day from the walls. Left them there to rot. Maybe they’ll die out there. But I ain’t often that lucky.’
‘So you can’t tell me who these mystery men are?’
‘No. But if they make it back, I can point them out to you. There aren’t that many Spinners.’ He shivered. ‘Only if I spill on their boss, he’ll get to me. The only time they showed any kind of emotion was when they mentioned him. Terrified of him. No doubt about that. And anyone that can terrify a Spinner sure terrifies me too. I’m a corpse on legs, Galharrow.’
‘Makes me wonder why you haven’t run.’
‘I’m going to run, believe me,’ Ost said. He sucked on his cigar, coughed a little when he took it down by mistake. ‘Far as I can, long and hard. Maybe I’ll get clear, who knows? I lasted this long.’ He sucked on the cigar again, quick, tense puffs. Even talking about it scared him.
‘So who’s the boss?’
‘A deal for Pol. Then I give you the name,’ he said. The cigar smoke drifted between us, catching the phos light, gleaming like oil.
‘I can pull strings, get your girl and her kid on a ship to one of the western colonies. They’re always crying out for women. If your information is good then you got my word on it.’
I was glad that in his final moments, I was able to give him that small amount of relief. He looked grateful, for all that he still hated me for killing Torolo Mancono.
Ost’s abdomen exploded outwards. Bits of offal and bone spattered the deck. It took me a moment to realise that he’d been shot. A small river of blood and pulped organs ran from his gut as he staggered across the deck. He looked up at me once before a flash from my left heralded the second shot. Not the crack-flash of matchlock fire but something else, something blue and gold, paired with the sound of a lightning strike. A second hole appeared between Ost’s ribs. He stumbled to his knees, mouth agape, eyes wide.
My arm stung where the shot had grazed me. That one had been meant for me.
I saw them coming as Ost collapsed, broken. Two men on the north bank, one more from the south. They had firearms, two with matchlocks, one packing something with a long silver barrel. That one took aim at me.
The battle-rush came on hard.
I hurled myself down between stacks of fruit crates. A matchlock boomed, and then chips of wood and pulped citrus fruit rained down around me. The bastards had me surrounded. I reached into my coat and produced both pistols, flintlocks, primed and loaded.
I heard voices as the assassins came closer, risked a glance out. They wore masks, simple things made from canvas sacks cut with eyeholes. Their military buff coats were standard issue, but that silver-barrelled weapon wasn’t. It was a flarelock, a handheld phos cannon, long made obsolete by matchlocks. Never expected to see one of those again. The military hadn’t commissioned a flarelock in fifty years. Who were these people? A single glance at Ost confirmed he wasn’t going to do any more talking.
Me, alone and pinned. Three killers with firearms, closing for a kill.
Bad odds.
Voices. Too hard to make out with those muffling bags. I tried to make a move for the cabins and the flarelock roared again, spraying me with splinters as a crate exploded. I stayed put.
‘I am Blackwing Captain Ryhalt Galharrow,’ I yelled. ‘Throw down your weapons and surrender yourselves to me, or by order of the state you are fucking dead.’
I heard the muffled voices again, but they seemed in no mind to give up.
‘Give yourself up and you will be spared,’ a man called back. His voice was flat, emotionless.
I couldn’t leap for the bank. There were men on both sides and I’m a big, heavy target even when I’m not full of cheap ale and cheaper wine. No way I’d survive a dash down the street, either, if any of them were even half-competent marksmen. Nor was time on my side and as soon as one of them had a clear shot at me I was a goner. I thought it through, then took the only remaining option. Hunkered up to a spring position, counted one, two, three. Go.
I swung the pistols out and opened up, blasting off a shot in each direction, and then I ditched them and ran for the barge rail. The flarelock returned fire as I launched myself in what I intended as a graceful dive, but probably just meant slinging myself belly-down into the reeking canal. I punched through an inch-thick layer of rubbery shite on the surface and then I was down in the ink.
The cold hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest. Freezing, bitter as deepest winter, and utterly dark. I went in with a lungful of air but the moment I hit that icy blackness I knew that it wasn’t enough. I kicked, tried to get myself turned around and suddenly had no idea which way I was facing. The water was slightly too viscous, a gravy of rotting drudge corpses and an echo of bad magic.
Which way was up? I opened my eyes and the filth-dark water burned them, so I closed them again and kicked hard and thought to myself, spirits of fucking mercy, the fucking indignity of it if I die like this. My head banged against something, maybe the barge, maybe a bank. It was there one moment and then as I thrashed around, gone again.
Air. You take it for granted until it’s gone. Then you’d trade everything you’ve ever owned for just one more lungful. My chest screamed at me, and I couldn’t blame it.
The cold gathered around me. The weight of the water bore me down.
Blind, flailing, certain to be shot the moment I poked up into the night air I started to see lights dance before my closed eyes. Something hard met my foot and I stopped caring if I was shot. Anything was better than choking on this toxic slime.
I pushed away only to meet a hard, flat surface. No air that direction, and it wasn’t the bottom of the canal. I was trapped beneath something. Beneath the barge. My lungs convulsed as they fought to keep me conscious. My chest was collapsing in on itself, ribs aching to implode in an ignominious, silent death, out of sight of men and spirits.
My hand caught an edge. On reflex I punched up, through the filth and into clear air.
I broke the surface, gasped in a grateful, piercing breath.
Not dead yet.
I was in a dark room, dim light around the frame of a door. My eyes stung, the bad magic that had leaked from the drudge corpses burning like lime. I could taste the Misery at the back of my throat, like sickness, and salt, and suffering as I bobbed in the narrow hole, confused, until I realised I’d somehow gone under the barge and by sheer luck had come up through a privy in one of the cabins. The former owner had been too fine to shit over the side like a sensible man. I’d never been so grateful to be neck deep in a shithole.
Heaving myself from the water was not easy. I was a strong bastard, but I was also big and heavy and the hole was small and the water was reluctant to let me go. The black filth clung to me like a great shiny leech, reluctant to retract until I undid the buttons on my coat and let it slide away into the darkness. Some kind of fortune was still with me: my sword was still in its sheath and with a blade in my hand, I never counted my luck done altogether.
No time to waste. Ost was dead, but the bastards that shot him surely knew what the fuck he’d been talking about. They also had to assume that I’d perished in the canal after I didn’t come up. I could hide out. Go unnoticed. But the raven tattooed on my arm peered up at me impatiently. Crowfoot would boil my blood in my veins if I let a plot this big go. Spinners negotiating with Darlings. It was unthinkable. And while he may have let me be f
or some time you do not, under any circumstances, fail a wizard who can melt mountains. Time to get moving. Time for answers.
Past the shitter was the barge’s storeroom, dried sausage hanging in coils from the rafters, stacked crates of flour, only one way out. I listened, heard nothing, then slid it open and peeked into the next room. No bag-heads. Maybe they were fishing for my body. I advanced as stealthily as my three hundred sodden pounds could, looked outside. The three bag-heads were standing around Ost on the barge’s wide platform, relaxed, weapons slung over their shoulders. They weren’t expecting me to come back up out of the obsidian sludge.
‘Kick him into the water,’ one of them said. A Range accent, that amalgamation of every known language all coming together to make something unique. ‘Get him under the boat. Long as he’s in there a few hours, nobody’s going to recognise him. That water will eat through anything.’
‘Thought that big guy was going to give us a fight,’ another said. Different accent. Hard-edged, city speak. Lennisgrad.
‘Glad he didn’t.’
There were three of them, and there was only one of me, and those are bad odds. I don’t fight for losing causes and I don’t fight outnumbered. I’d done my share of heroism and the only thing I’d earned for it was a leg that stabbed at me when the temperature dropped and a never-ending headache. But Ost had said enough to get me worried, real worried, and those men were my only link to the Darling, and the threat to the Range. Like any gambler, I know that when your luck’s in, you run with it.
Surprise is a powerful thing. We fall into bubbles of calm and become sluggish. The kill in our brains gets turned off and the fight-or-flight response gets clouded. These men weren’t professionals. Opportunists, maybe. They wore city-swords, the kind of spindly things that have a fancy hilt to impress at parties and a blade that wouldn’t cut cheese. I doubted that they had ever been charged by a big, angry, determined man with a cutlass in hand.
Life is all about new experiences.
The first of them had just shoved Ost’s body into the murk when they saw me, started yelling. One bag-head grabbed the firearm slung over his shoulder and had nearly brought it round to parry when I cut him from shoulder to hip. He was dead before the pieces joined Ost in the muck. The others bolted and I went for the closest. He threw down his spent matchlock and drew his duelling sword, the blade narrow and thrusty. He got a parry in and sparks spat across his bag-face but he couldn’t drive back against my heavier blade and I whipped his sword out of the way and took his wrist with the back edge. He shrieked, stumbled back, tripped on a coil of rope and followed the first man over the edge.
The canal would finish him. Turn and kill and move and fight and don’t stop for anything less essential than breathing. The last of them had leaped for the bank. Turning, I realised that he’d reloaded the flarelock while I was swimming and now, with range, he drew back the cocking lever and sighted down the silver barrel, past the phos canister and the protruding copper wires. At that range, he couldn’t miss.
Shit.
He had me. He might put me down in one shot. Head, heart. Failing that I might reach him, make him pay before I succumbed. He looked at me calmly, neither anger nor panic in those eyes, and I heard the click of the firing lever.
A high-pitched whine rose from the phos canister attached to the weapon. For a fraction of a heartbeat I saw a shape behind him in the darkness: the outline of a woman, radiant in flames, a black silhouette within the fire. And then the flarelock’s canister erupted in a blaze of flaming, hissing moonlight. Sparks sprayed thirty feet in all directions. I covered my face with a hand and ducked as the embers sprayed me, a thousand wasp stings sizzling as they struck.
As the fireworks faded, peace descended over the canal, disturbed only by the barking of distant dogs, still riled by the quake. I was burned, and my lungs were blazing like I’d inhaled a sack of bees, but I was still alive.
There was no sign of the man who’d fallen into the water. I guess he wasn’t a swimmer.
No sign of the woman in the light either. She was burned into my vision until I blinked and then she was gone, and I was left wondering whether I’d really seen anything there at all.
No. Of course not. Wishful thinking. That was all.
The man whose weapon had misfired was making the last sounds he’d make in this life. He probably didn’t understand what had just happened. Flarelocks were unstable things, with a delicate backlash-venting system to handle the discharge of phos energy. When those systems failed, the results weren’t pretty. In this case the steel phos canister had detonated, spraying him with white-hot shrapnel, his body torn and bleeding from dozens of bloody tears.
He made a few hopeless noises. Then he was dead and everything was quiet save for the wheeze of my own heavy breathing. I was getting as out of shape as dead old Levan Ost. Still. Four men had just died, and I was still standing.
I made the leap to the bank and looked down at the tangled, ruined man who’d put his faith in the light and been punished for it. I stripped the bag from his head. Odd. He looked familiar. An ordinary-looking kind of man, brown hair, a moustache, his only distinguishing feature a large mole beneath his left eye. And yet, I was sure I knew him.
I did, I realised. I’d killed him three weeks ago.
2
Devlen Maille had spent most of his life raising pigs on a farm someplace where mud was plentiful and money was not. Then had come a wife, and with her, gambling, drinking, and putting his fists to work. It was fair to say that Devlen had been a grand piece of shit long before he realised that his wife’s brothers were planning to throw him down a well, and he was still a shit when he fled to the Range and got a job mopping the floors in a phos mill. Steady work, but paying little more than the pig shit he’d only just escaped. So, when a plucky profiteer suggested he settle his debts by stealing battery coils and selling them on the black market, Devlen Maille had leaped at the chance. My jackdaws had busted him red-handed, he resisted arrest, and I shot him dead.
Nobody had mourned him the first time I killed him, and I very much doubted that they would mourn him the second time either. I very clearly remembered shooting him, and just as clearly recalled my jackdaws slinging his body onto a cart, so it was surprising that he’d just tried to shoot me back.
The river water stank, congealing on my clothes as I dripped through the streets and spent a solid half hour puking my guts out in the alley behind the Blackwing offices. I’d done my part in the Siege, and after seeing Valengrad nearly destroyed, the princes had finally realised that adequately funding both the citadel and Blackwing should have been higher on their list of priorities. As a result of the money they’d thrown my way I could now at least afford a decent building to throw up behind.
‘You look like the hells, boss,’ Meara said, yawning at the desk. One of my best jackdaws, she was the biggest woman I’d ever met, and she filled the space behind it. ‘You find your man?’
‘I did. Anyone else in yet?’
‘It’s ain’t yet six, sir,’ Meara said. If she had questions about my being soaked through on a dry night, or what the terrible smell was, she had the sense not to raise them. ‘Biggest quake so far, neh? The clock in the hallway fell down and broke.’
I found the strongest coffee I could get my hands on, empowered it with brandy and tried to scour away the taste of the canal. It was right up there, behind my eyes, chemical and sour and putrid. I finished my coffee, and shortly found myself back in the alley to see it emerge again.
The streets were still dark. There was no phos network in this part of the city, and nobody was paying to have the old lamps lit. I liked it dark. The lack of phos tubes was one of the reasons I’d settled on this location.
In the few minutes between my staggering outside and finishing heaving out strings of oily grime, someone had tacked a yellow paper flyer to the office door. Spiritual nonsen
se proclaiming that sightings of the Bright Lady heralded a new era of justice and freedom. They saw visions in the light, or at least they claimed to, and had attached the usual promises to it. There’s no hour of day too ungodly for the servants of religion, and they were everywhere now. I scanned the street for the culprit, but there was no sign of them save for the same yellow papers tacked to every door in the street. I tore it down and tossed the crumpled paper ball away. I wasn’t about to let that nonsense into my office, even if the toilet rags were running out.
The stink wasn’t going to fade without help, so I stoked the kitchen fire and filled a metal tub. It was intended for dishes, comically small to fit me, but better than nothing. I scrubbed my head with soap, tried washing out my eyes, and the water quickly turned dark, took on an oily glimmer. Whatever bad magic the Deep Kings put into the drudge, I’d managed to soak myself in it. Couldn’t tell whether the nausea inside me was because of the magic or my reaction to it, but it was best to imagine the latter. My servant, Amaira, had laid out a fresh uniform for me, assuming that I’d end up working late and sleeping in the office again. I had a big house that I seldom visited, and the office felt more like home. Amaira had guessed that I’d end up here again come dawn. Maybe there was hope for her yet.
Dawn hadn’t yet worked her way into the sky but Blackwing had come a long way in the years since Shavada’s doomed assault on Valengrad. I had men on my payroll around the clock, so I sent a cleanup crew to deal with the mess over at Canal Six. The team would cart the bodies over to the morgue for an examination, what was left of them anyway. Dead men don’t do a lot of talking, but if they were marked by the Deep Kings, then we’d find out.
What a fuckup. I should have taken a team with me. I’d let sentimentality interfere with my better judgment and I’d very nearly died. Ost had been part of my past, and I preferred to clutch that close. Keep the shame hidden away, as nothing to do with the man I’d become. Couldn’t afford that kind of mess again. I wasn’t as young as I’d been and I had responsibility now, people who counted on me. I had to be smarter than that.
