Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Hit me.’

  ‘Remember when the Darlings animated dead bodies and sent them at us during the Siege?’

  ‘Hard to forget.’

  ‘Well, I got a man in the morgue that I swear I shot dead three weeks ago, but he was walking and talking two nights back. You think someone can do that without being marked by the Deep Kings? Think they can raise up dead men?’

  ‘Like a puppet?’

  ‘No. Like he was alive again.’

  Nenn thought on it.

  ‘Sorcerers can do all kinds of shit,’ Nenn said. ‘Spinners are the only common type and even among them, the tricks they pull with the light isn’t regular, is it? I got me a Spinner in my battalion that can make mirrors out of sand.’ She picked at her blackened teeth with a splinter of wood. ‘But raising the dead? Making a body move is one thing, but actually bringing someone back to life? Can even the Nameless do that?’

  I looked down at the raven on my arm. The deal that bound me hadn’t quite done that. Close, but not the same. The dead didn’t return. I grunted my acknowledgment. I’d come to the same conclusion, but a second opinion never hurt. The mystery wasn’t growing any clearer. Devlen Maille had gone into the dirt, and that’s where he should have stayed. The only thing I knew for sure about the men who’d murdered Levan Ost made less sense than the dance routine taking place down on the stage. I reached out to pick up my wine and winced as I tried to curl my fingers. They wouldn’t flex. I took my left hand in my right, only to find that my fingers were ice-cold. As I watched they turned white as bone, numbness creeping up my arm.

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I winced. I’d not been aware of the cold creeping up through my arm, but it extended from fingertip to elbow. Above that my arm was ordinary and warm. Below it, my skin had taken on an unpleasant, bluish cast and a painful ache rose from the back of my skull. And then I felt something stir within my flesh, close to the bone. Something foreign that had not been there before.

  ‘Shit,’ I said again. ‘You’ll have to excuse me.’ I moved quickly out of the box to find the bathroom. It was manned by a theatre employee in a fine red doublet, who offered me a scented towel as I went in, and I took it and shut myself inside a stall. I sat down on the bench as something grim and cruel stirred within me, bared my arm and rolled my sleeve as far back as it would go. This was a good shirt. It was going to get ruined.

  At least, I thought, the intense cold was going to numb the agony that inevitably followed.

  To some extent I was right. It still hurt, only in a different way. Usually there was intense heat, softening the skin and helping the bird to tear its way through into the light. Instead my skin was cold and hard and the bird struggled. Halfway through it seemed ready to give up. My blood was spilling from my arm, sluggish and cooler than blood ought to be, and I’d felt it flow often enough to know. But as it struggled to free itself from the hole that its beak had torn in my skin, I saw that something was wrong.

  Ordinarily Crowfoot’s messengers took a certain angry enjoyment from tearing through and cawing their message at me. This one seemed small, feeble, unable to pull its wings through the tear it had made. I took hold of it and with a cry dragged it out with a slithery sucking sound.

  ‘Sir? Are you all right in there, sir?’ the attendant called.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said quickly, though my mind was sparkling with pain and my chest constricted with it. ‘Fuck off and let me shit in peace!’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ the attendant said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  I looked down at the bird that Crowfoot had sent me. It was misshapen, one foot withered and small, lacking half its feathers and one eye was milky, blind. It sparkled as if with frost, little ice crystals locking its feathers rigid. It opened its beak to deliver its message.

  A hissing, crackling noise emerged, a sound like pine needles being thrown into a fire, spitting and popping.

  ‘Sir …’ the worried attendant tried again. I ignored him and gave the bird a little shake as though that might improve the sound. The crackling only intensified. And then, as though from a great distance, I heard that angry, hateful voice.

  ‘GALHARROW,’ it snarled. ‘… KINGS TRYING TO … OCEAN DEMON … WILL DEAL WITH …’ A wave of crackling rushed up, and the bird’s one good eye swivelled in its socket as though its brain rode a carousel. ‘… HAS TAKEN … THE VAULT.’ More of the message was lost to the interfering sound. And then finally, the crackling fell away and a frustrated, angry snarl said quite clearly: ‘GET IT BACK. DO NOT FUCK THIS UP.’

  Well. Not the most helpful message I’d ever received. I expected the bird to self-combust as they always had before, but this one just flopped, lifeless, head hanging at an uncomfortable angle. I gave it a shake, but it was unreservedly dead.

  ‘Sir, I’m going to get help, sir,’ the frightened-sounding attendant called.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I called, but he was already gone. I tossed the frost-speckled bird corpse into the shitter as I used the towel to mop up as much blood as I could. Now that the bird had gone the feeling was returning to my arm, and that was no good thing. I could feel the jagged edges of the tear in my skin, the torn muscle, the discomfort of the bones. I would heal up within an hour, but for now I needed more wine. I’d bled on the floor and all over my trousers. Once I’d turned the scented towel entirely red I tossed that down the hole as well. My head was pounding and my arm burned as the cold left it. My back was a mess of knots and tension, my eyes were dry. I was glad that the attendant wasn’t there to see me stumbling out of the stall. What he’d make of the blood on the tiled floor, I had no idea.

  I was shaking as I quick-marched back to the stall, a greasy sheen of sweat across my face. The message had been fragmented, but I already knew what had happened. Something had been taken from the vault. A shiver ran down my spine. It shouldn’t have been possible.

  ‘Unexpected visitor?’ Nenn said as I rejoined them. Concerned. I took the wine bottle and drank most of the contents as quickly as I could. My arm was jabbing at me with pins and needles as though I’d fallen into a pit of hedgehogs. Captain Betch appeared to have been briefed by his lover not to ask me any questions, because he stared toward the absurd puppet monster on the stage as though nothing untoward were going on in his box, artfully distracting Amaira by explaining how it worked. I could see why Nenn liked him.

  I was about to tell her when a man stepped briskly into our gallery box. He wore a frown over a sweat-soaked citadel uniform, cheeks flushed, half-breathless. He’d been running.

  ‘Captain Galharrow. I need you to come with me, urgently.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. But I already knew what he was going to say.

  ‘It’s the vault, sir,’ he said. ‘Crowfoot’s vault. It’s been breached.’

  5

  When you’re an immortal wizard whose power can level cities and tear holes in the sky, inevitably you pick up a few things worth keeping over the years. Sentimental keepsakes, souvenirs, weapons of horrifying barbarity – the usual things. Crowfoot had his own store of history’s most awful mementos, squirrelled away beneath the earth a few miles from the city. Heavily warded, heavily guarded. It should have been unbreachable.

  ‘I want to go with you, Captain-Sir,’ Amaira protested with a frown. ‘I’m Blackwing too. I should go with you.’

  ‘You’re not Blackwing, you’re a maid at Blackwing,’ I said. ‘There’s a difference, and you should be grateful for it. Stay with the captain, he’ll see you home when the play’s done.’

  ‘But you’ll miss the end,’ she protested.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know how it ends.’

  Captain Betch nodded to me. Then Nenn whispered something to him, and he laughed and she flashed him a wicked grin as we followed the citad
el man.

  A carriage waited for us outside. The sweating young officer didn’t offer us any further information. He’d obviously been told to keep his mouth shut and we rolled out of the city at a breakneck pace. Between the wine, the blood loss and a road ill suited to a city carriage, I was swaying in my seat with dizziness whenever the potholes weren’t trying to bounce me out of it.

  We were going to Narheim. I hated it there.

  During the fourscore years that Nall’s Engine had protected the border of the Misery, Crowfoot had been an infrequent visitor. He came and went, but for a span of three years, long before I was born, he’d been a semipermanent feature. He’d lived in a palatial mansion a short way from the city, a grand house whose design spoke of a staggering lack of taste. He never officially vacated it, but he stopped coming back to it and nobody knew why. For obvious reasons, nobody was interested in taking up residence in it after he had gone and not even the most desperate thieves dared steal inside to loot the candelabras and finely carved chairs.

  We rolled up and disgorged on the weed-choked gravel driveway. Other horses and carriages were gathered there and it looked like a whole cavalry regiment was standing to attention nearby. They looked nervous. Naked sabres rested on shoulders.

  ‘How’s the arm holding up?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘Hurts. Crowfoot was trying to tell me about the vault, but his messenger didn’t make it.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ she asked. Men saluted us as we passed by. Nenn knocked salutes back to them. I just gave nods.

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing good.’ Nenn snorted.

  ‘You should have cut that damn thing out of your arm years ago,’ she said. ‘Get me a knife, I’ll do it now.’

  ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t come away from that well,’ I said. Nenn raised an eyebrow but I didn’t want to say more. I’d tried it once, in the very worst days. Only, Crowfoot had measures in place to deter that, and Crowfoot’s preferred deterrent was usually destruction. In this case, of me.

  Guards had been posted at the entrance. The officer led Nenn and me past them and through the great double doors. Everything was just as it had been left, covered with thick layers of dust and cobweb, a grey shroud for a splendourous cadaver. The guard detail stationed here didn’t touch anything that they didn’t have to and it all smelled cold, stale. Dead. Footprints led through the dirt on the carpet alongside animal tracks. People might be too fearful to pry into an absent wizard’s affairs, but rats and foxes felt no such trepidation.

  ‘This place makes me want to shit,’ Nenn said.

  ‘You spend all your time in the Misery finding crap to give to Amaira, and an old palace gets your toes hairy?’

  ‘The Misery is simple. Shit’s weird. You stick it with sharp things and it dies. Narheim feels like it dropped right out of time. And there’s always the chance that he might come home and find us tramping about in his place. They say that when he left, all his servants died within a year. Fifty of them, housekeepers, gardeners, even the kennel boy. Just wasted away into bone and nothing.’

  ‘People talk a lot of shit,’ I said. ‘I heard a story about how you were the Iron Goat’s lover. Or his bastard daughter. Heard that you were some Iscalian princess too.’

  ‘They say that you’re funny as well. People really do talk shit.’

  We were talking exactly that because we were nervous. It wasn’t just the dust, or the darkness. The place felt dead, like we were stepping into the hells. I half expected my mother’s ghost to rise from the dust to curse me. Maybe see my wife throwing my children from a balcony, or maybe Levan Ost rising to ask why I’d not done a better job of protecting him.

  The young officer led us down a flight of stairs, corkscrewing into the ground.

  Range Marshal Davandein met us. Her blue-and-gold-brocade dress was much better suited to the theatre than this dead place; here, it was an affront to the stillness.

  ‘Captain Galharrow, good.’ She raised a well-styled eyebrow in Nenn’s direction. ‘I didn’t send for you, Major. Any reason you’ve brought her, Commander?’

  ‘The play was boring,’ Nenn said.

  ‘You ever tried stopping Nenn doing what she wants?’ I said, which wasn’t much of an apology. Plus it was an academic point since Nenn was already there, and Davandein decided it wasn’t worth arguing over.

  ‘Follow me.’

  She led us through the cellars. The tunnel was built for a person of mean stature so Nenn had to stoop, and I was nearly on all fours. The discomfort in my gut was taking on a hard, certain quality. I’d hidden something away down here, after the Siege.

  Shavada’s Eye. The one that had been living inside Prince Herono’s skull all that time.

  ‘Shit on a stick,’ Nenn said.

  The corridor opened onto a cellar with a vaulted ceiling and a huge door at the far end of the room. Getting to it would mean getting our feet wet, as the guards who had been stationed here were involuntarily creating a puddle. Or to be more accurate, the pieces of them were. It took a minute to let that sink in. There was an empty, chemical tang to the air. Something familiar about that.

  ‘How many men did we have here?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Davandein said. Her voice was raw, cold. Angry.

  ‘They all here?’ I asked. Davandein’s eyes roved across the butchered pieces that had been somebody’s father, somebody’s brother, uncle or son. The sight of congealing blood argued that the wine I’d drunk ought to see light again. There was an odd precision to the way that the bodies had been dismembered. Neat, orderly, cut into pieces like a side of beef being diced for a stew. I’d gracked enough unfortunates to know that this dismemberment hadn’t happened as part of the killing. Killing a man isn’t so hard. You stick him through or carve him up a bit and that’ll do for most. Separating an arm into three or four separate sections takes work. Whatever had done it, it had gone to some trouble to make this mess.

  ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘You count the heads?’

  ‘There are only nine heads. But there are twenty-three feet.’

  Nenn did the math on her fingers. Counting had never been her strong point and I let her catch up. She frowned.

  ‘What killed them?’ she said.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Davandein said. ‘But look here.’

  She indicated one of the brutalised heads. The eyes were rolled well back, blood had run in streams from eyes, nose, ears.

  ‘Reminds me of mind-worms,’ I said. She nodded, her angular face set hard.

  ‘A Darling, here?’ Nenn growled.

  ‘Maybe,’ Davandein said. ‘Whoever did this was in and out of the vault before we could respond to the alarm.’

  In and out. Beyond the bloody ground lay the vault. That left me even colder than the remains of the soldiers and the prospect of heads gone missing. The citadel maintained a squad of guards stationed at the vault, if only for posterity. Old boys mostly. It was easy retirement work to supplement a pension, if you could stomach Crowfoot’s old place, and I doubt they bothered to put on armour more than once per year. Probably should have, judging by how things had gone. Whatever had happened here had been fast, and brutal.

  ‘They got off a message?’

  ‘No. They managed to hit an alarm switch,’ Davandein said, pointing toward a lever on the wall. ‘Sends an alert direct to the citadel. That alarm hasn’t been touched in more than fifty years and at first, nobody was sure what the siren meant. Took the engineers twenty minutes to figure it out and when they did, the fourth cavalry charged over here, but whoever did this was already long gone.’

  ‘You keep sayin’ “who”,’ Nenn said. She stuffed blacksap into her mouth, chewed twice. Annoying fucking habit. ‘You sure you don’t mean “what”? I seen things in the Misery that could do this to a bunch of tough guys. Dulchers. That thing with all the heads. Sand-weepers.’
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  ‘Those things don’t break into vaults,’ Davandein said. She was in a foul mood. Taking it personal. Maybe she’d sent some old friends down here to see out the last few years of their career, rewards for good service. Best not to ask.

  It would have taken more guts than I had to try to break into Crowfoot’s vault. Not many things this side of the hells had that kind of nerve. Hard to imagine even a Darling would. I made sure my sword was loose in its scabbard, for all the good that would do me if one of the little monstrosities was lurking around somewhere.

  ‘What did they take from the vault?’

  ‘That’s what you’re here to tell us. You have a special relationship with the Nameless. I figured you were the least likely to get eviscerated stepping in.’

  Deadpan. Not a hint of a smile. Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be funny. She flicked a finger that we should follow and we squelched across the puddle.

  The vault had a great thick door of brass and iron, not wholly dissimilar to the one that protected the heart of Nall’s Engine. There was no discernible way to open it, no handle, no wheel to turn. Just a big plain disc. It stood slightly ajar.

  I stopped there.

  ‘These men were just tokens meant to keep the curious away,’ I said. I sniffed at that dry, acrid flavour in the air. ‘The real defences were the wards that Crowfoot left behind. I’ll need help if I’m going in there.’

  ‘You want a Spinner?’

  ‘I’ve my own resources to call on. Most of that new crop of Spinners are as likely to burn their own dicks off as disarm a trap set by the Nameless. I got someone else in mind. I want you lot to clear out of here. Get rid of the horsemen. They’ll draw attention where it doesn’t need drawing.’

  ‘You want to take charge of this?’ Davandein was a hard woman with the weight of the Range on her shoulders. She was used to giving orders to thousands. She still sounded relieved.

  ‘Want’ was a strong word, but I nodded anyway. Better in my hands than anyone else’s.