Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  Maldon was drunk when Tnota brought him out of the carriage. The soldiers had gone some hours before, and I was glad that they didn’t get to see the state of the little shit. I’m often half on a buzz, but I function on it, whilst he was long gone to that place where all things grow obnoxious.

  ‘It took me an hour to steal this bottle,’ the kid said. His voice rolled drunkenly up and down the words. ‘It’s harder when you don’t have any eyes.’

  He looked about ten years old, although with the scarf wrapped fully around the hole where his eyes should have been he could have been older or younger. His skinny form was clothed in garments I’d procured for him, simple stuff, the shirt hanging open at the front to show his scrawny, hairless chest. As an adult he’d possessed an awful lot of body hair.

  ‘You know you can just take it straight from my cellar, Gleck,’ I said. ‘The key’s under the clock in the hall. Anything but the southern white.’

  ‘Where’d be the fun in that? A man’s got to have some fun,’ he said. He gave a dry, mirthless smile. The expression belied the age that lay beneath that youthful skin.

  ‘Then stop complaining. I’ll owe you a bellyful of my best whisky by the end of the night. Nenn give you the score?’

  ‘Dead guards, broken vault, Crowfoot’s treasures at risk, blah blah blah,’ Maldon said. He tripped on a flagstone and wheeled around for a few moments.

  ‘You sure he’s in any state to help us?’ Nenn said.

  ‘I’m in the only state in which I can help anyone,’ the blind child crowed. ‘Which is to say it’s the state I plan on being in for the rest of my eternally long life.’ He took a long chug from the bottle, which seemed too large for his childish fists. I’d seen Gleck Maldon drunk more times than I’d seen him sober, but his boozing irked me. He’d had a great mind, once.

  ‘Come on. Just you and me.’

  ‘I can feel it from out here, you know,’ Maldon said, drawing a deep breath. Shivered. ‘Crowfoot’s essence. It lingers, like factory smog in the winter.’ He shuddered, and I wondered not for the first time just how different the essence of the Nameless might be to Shavada’s essence. The Deep King’s power had festered inside Maldon’s tortured form for months, before I’d cut a deal and set him free. What I was asking of him was not easy. Some might have said it was cruel. But then, I had a cruel master.

  ‘Now that’s familiar.’ Maldon sniffed and grimaced as we got to the remnants of people.

  ‘I’ll keep you from stepping in anything that will squelch,’ I said. ‘But I guess you never get used to the blood.’

  ‘Blood? No, not that. When you’ve smelled your own blood boiling inside your skull, blood doesn’t bother you. No, that other tang. Old magic, ancient power. It’s bitter in the air. Thick as mist. You can’t smell it?’

  I thought for a moment. Frowned.

  ‘Darling magic?’

  ‘Like that, but different. A Darling’s magic is like a river in flood, freezing but bursting with violence. This is like a glacier. Timeless. Colder. Steady.’

  Maldon knocked back the last of his own backwash and tossed the bottle away. It rolled through the red-liquid carpet. Gleck Maldon had been the strongest Spinner on the Range before Herono had betrayed him to Shavada, only when I’d severed him from Shavada’s influence and stripped the Darling magic away, his light-spinning abilities had gone with it. He’d once told me the loss of that power was worse than losing the eyes I’d shot out of his face.

  Spirits alone knew how he’d survived that. Darlings had always been hard to kill. In the days after the Siege, I’d contemplated running a knife over his throat a dozen times. Maybe I was overly sentimental, or maybe I was just sick of all the killing. Whatever had kept my blade in its sheath, he’d proved useful since. It was hard to tell whether his ordeal had driven him crazy, or just nasty. Tnota and Nenn both thought I should have ended him, but trapped in that remoulded child body, he wasn’t a threat to anyone.

  I showed Maldon the open vault. He stopped in front of it and even drunk as he was, I could tell he sensed something in the air. He breathed slower, shivered.

  ‘This was heavily warded. Strong. Whatever Crowfoot put on it, just the residue is making my balls shrivel back into my body. Such as they are. If someone had tried to force this without disabling the wards, they’d still be here. They’d be painted across the walls, but they’d be here.’

  ‘How the fuck could someone break Crowfoot’s wards?’ Nenn frowned.

  Gleck chuckled.

  ‘You’re asking me if I understand the Nameless’s magic, which I don’t. “Who” is a better question than “how”. Not many in the world that could unravel his magic. There’s the other Nameless, of course. I doubt that a few static wards would provide much impediment to one of the Deep Kings, but if they were here, we’d have bigger problems to worry about.’

  ‘But someone unpicked them,’ I said.

  ‘What about an ordinary sorcerer? A Spinner or a Mute?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘Doesn’t seem likely. Maybe a cabal – six or seven sorcerers working together, strong ones. Even then I don’t know where they’d begin. Their power isn’t the same as Crowfoot’s.’

  ‘Could a Darling get through them?’

  ‘Maybe. Depends how good he is. There were a few who might have been capable, but the Engine got most of them. Maybe they’ve made new ones since then, but who’d want to risk tackling Crowfoot’s wards just to get in here? There’s nothing of value in here anyway.’

  ‘There was.’ I’d put it there. ‘You think we can pass through without getting torn apart?’

  Maldon shrugged. Then he just walked through. The courage of a drunk, or a hope it would end his miserable existence. He almost seemed disappointed that he hadn’t been turned inside out. I’d brought Maldon in so he could tell me whether it was safe. Hadn’t planned on using him as a dummy.

  I stepped through the circular door. A backwash of something unclean passed through me, but it was brief and then it was gone. Even Crowfoot’s defunct magic left a calling card.

  The vault lit automatically. The phos tubes crackled and cast a flat blue light across rows of pedestals holding the things Crowfoot didn’t want the world to see.

  ‘What’s that?’ Nenn snapped, sensing movement in the shadows at the far end of the room. Something living. Struggling, pinned in place.

  ‘Ignore it,’ I said. ‘It’s not important. Don’t touch anything. The entry spells were broken but I expect there’s something nasty on each pedestal as well. Look and don’t touch. No matter how shiny it is.’ I said the last as pointedly as possible. Nenn scowled at me and spat blacksap onto the floor. Didn’t matter to her that we were standing in the Nameless’s own sanctum. I’d sooner have been able to teach poetry to a horse than manners to Nenn.

  It all looked much as it had the last time I’d been here. I’d paid a visit to deposit Shavada’s eye, and I knew, despite the strange oddities on their podiums, that was the deposit which had gone.

  The first pedestal held an old porcelain doll, one eye open, slowly swivelling to watch us. The second, a six-stringed musical instrument inscribed with foreign letters. Third, an old bronze sword, brittle and green, balanced miraculously on its point. Four and five held clocks, their hands both in sequence and impossible to read. Six, nothing but a pile of grey dust. The pedestals stretched back, twelve rows of twelve, and I knew that everything upon them was dangerous, mystical and not for our hands. Nenn couldn’t keep her eyes from the back of the room where the moving thing was.

  ‘What is that?’ Nenn asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Probably hasn’t stopped struggling like that since the last time I was here.’

  It was shaped like a man, swaddled with bandages from head to toe. Arms wrapped tightly across its chest, the figure wrestled against its straitjacket, seeking to free itself with a fr
antic energy.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Best not to think about it too much. Maybe something from the Misery. Maybe someone that really pissed the boss off. No idea. I don’t need to know.’

  ‘Is it a person?’

  ‘Best not to think about that either.’

  I walked between plants, held in vases both ornate and mundane, a bowl of blinking fish eyes and a dusty, tan-leather book that seemed to whisper my name as I passed. I stopped before an empty pedestal. It had not been empty before. I’d filled it myself.

  ‘It was there, wasn’t it?’ Maldon asked. He cringed away from the empty pedestal, teeth bared. ‘I can feel it. Like an echo of its passing. The same essence that he poured into me. Shavada.’ The taste of the canal rose stronger at the back of my throat. I nodded.

  ‘Shavada’s eye.’

  ‘Shit,’ Nenn said. ‘The one that crawled out of Herono’s face?’

  ‘The same. This is where we stored it. It was the only thing in here that really mattered. And now it’s gone.’

  6

  I tore Valengrad apart. I employed a dozen tough men and women, jackdaws as they’d come to be known. Casso was the most senior, a quiet, dangerous man who spoke seldom and scowled continuously. Beneath him were my lead thugs, Meara and Traust, employed more for their intimidating size than because they were really good at anything. I gave them all free rein to lean on anyone they could, and buried the complaints. They turned up nothing more than mud and attempts at appeasement.

  Marshal Davandein loaned me more manpower, but for all the marshal’s horses and all of her men, I couldn’t find the Eye or the thieves that had taken it. She stationed fifty good soldiers and two Battle Spinners at Crowfoot’s former home, because that open door was a problem. I suggested bringing the building down on top of it with gunpowder but the marshal wasn’t prepared to risk infuriating the Nameless, no matter how long he’d been absent. I consoled myself that Crowfoot’s remaining treasures would probably burn the skin from anyone that laid a finger on them, or that the would-be thief would find himself flopping around without any bones. The door was only a formality: it was the wards that held the thieves at bay.

  Only, one thief had managed to untangle some of my master’s deadliest spells. They’d known what they were doing, and disentangled magic on a level well beyond Maldon’s understanding. That was a deeply troubling thought.

  ‘Good morning, Ryhalt,’ Valiya said as she entered my office. Four hours past dawn, a slow grey rain draped the city. Eala’s crescent was the only colour interrupting the morning’s gloom, but the cloud banks kept the Misery quiet and the golden moon dim.

  The degrading truth was that reaching Crowfoot for more information wasn’t within my power. He was off doing whatever it was he did in his war. He’d stuck around briefly after the Siege, whilst Nall was getting the Engine back into shape, but not only had Shavada’s Eye now escaped him, his attempt to inform me – which I was confident the frozen bird had been meant to do – had failed. I didn’t know what to make of that. There was some small comfort in knowing that, for the moment, I couldn’t inform him that the Eye had been taken.

  ‘I’ve yet to find anything good about it,’ I grumbled. I had half a headache, and a need to eat something that dripped grease.

  ‘Cheer yourself up,’ Valiya said. She passed me a parcel of wax paper containing a couple of warm pastries, squashed flat in her coat but stuffed with butter and smoked bacon.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘What’s this for?’

  ‘You’re better when you aren’t hungry. And you’re always hungry. You just don’t realise it.’ I couldn’t argue with that as I chewed my way through the pastries. The bacon was on the tough side, but I wasn’t complaining.

  ‘Did you sleep last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Closed my eyes for a couple of hours.’ Valiya gave me an admonishing look. She had a pastry of her own, but she picked at it without interest.

  ‘Did you go home?’ she asked.

  ‘Too much work to do.’

  Valiya showed me an arched eyebrow, but she didn’t disagree. She got it. One of the rare people that understood. The struggle on the Range was too important to rest. Valiya’s battle was fought with words and papers. I’d never see her with a sword in her hand, but if she’d chosen to run a factory instead of fighting the Deep Kings, she’d have doubled its production within a week.

  ‘Well, there’s more work now. I have news.’

  When Tnota had news it usually meant that he’d found a sock he thought he’d lost, and when Maldon had news it meant he’d cleaned out my liquor cabinet or wanted to murder someone, but when Valiya had news, she had news.

  ‘The flarelock was made in Lennisgrad. I checked and the maker’s mark matches up to Besh Flindt’s workshop. He has a big operation, a whole team of apprentices putting them out.’

  I frowned.

  ‘Flindt’s a good gunsmith, but I thought he was out of business. Last I heard, he was in the debtor’s jail. Why the hell is Besh Flindt making flarelocks?’

  Valiya held her hands out toward the stove. Her sleeves had rolled up, displaying the flowers tattooed across her forearms. They were works of art, beautifully and brightly coloured, nothing like the mess of cheap soldier-inks I’d collected over the years.

  ‘Seems he managed to settle his debts, and now he’s doing well enough. My contacts in the capital tell me that he’s doing a roaring trade. Has been for the last year.’

  I studied the black pool of coffee at the bottom of my cup. People wanted flarelocks all of a sudden, though they’d been out of fashion – with good reason – since before I was born. Perhaps there was prestige to them now? City folk are nothing if not slaves to fashion. But then, Devlen Maille had been on the Range a good while. Not a city boy at all.

  I looked up to see Valiya smiling at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You stick your tongue out when you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘Don’t think too hard. That’s what I’m here for.’

  I returned her smile despite myself. She understood how I worked. That was another thing I liked about her. I liked quite a lot of things about her.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I know it’s hard to think of, sometimes,’ she said. ‘But you need to take some time. Just for you. Let someone else take some of the weight for a while. There are plenty of us here. You’re not Nameless, you know. There’s more to life than the struggle.’ She took a pen and wrote down an address. ‘Go here. Tell them I sent you.’

  Valiya left me, the tails of her longcoat sweeping behind her. I placed my fingers against my eyes and pushed them into my skull. Spirits, but I was tired. The morning may have been grey, but there was a heavier bank of cloud across my mind that fogged my thoughts. Two hours of cracked and restless sleep. I’d tried. I’d tried to drift off and instead my brain had churned and whirred, throwing up those same damn images. A woman imprisoned in a field of light. For a few moments, I let the nothingness of permanent exhaustion wash over me. Moments. Minutes. I don’t know.

  ‘You want her.’

  Maldon leaned against the doorframe wearing a cruel little smile. I could tell from the black stains on his lips he’d been on the bottle since first light.

  ‘You’re a real piece of shit sometimes.’ I sighed.

  ‘She’s a looker. And you like her. You always did have a thing for work-obsessed, damaged women,’ Maldon said. He was a nasty drunk, which meant he was nasty all the time. At times I thought that I should have put a lead ball through the right part of his skull back when I had the chance. This was one of them.

  ‘Show her some respect,’ I said before I realised that saying that would only make him smirk more. ‘What’s made you crawl out of the cellar?’

  ‘Hit a nerve, did I?’ Maldon sat down in front of the fire and chugged wine until it made him c
ough and sputter.

  ‘If you got nothing for me, fuck off back to your self-pity and let me work,’ I growled. I picked up a report from the desk and tried to focus. Reading was getting harder those days. Maybe I needed eyeglasses. Maybe I was just exhausted. I blinked at the bill on my desk. I’d read it already, twice or more, but it hadn’t been going in. I had to laugh at it now.

  ‘They’re taxing me because of you,’ I said. I held it up for him to see. ‘The marshal has created a child tax. Because of the public services you use up. A tax on children. It’s like Davandein is doing her abject best to make herself unpopular.’ I balled the paper and threw it at the fire. They could go stoke their own arses if they thought I was giving up money for that. I’d have to ask Valiya to draw up a bill of exemption for Blackwing personnel, only she didn’t like Maldon and I didn’t want her to have anything to do with him. Maera and Traust were no good for that kind of work and Tnota’s penmanship was worse than his swordplay.

  ‘I’m worth every grinny,’ Maldon said from by the fire. ‘I’m a blessing. That’s what they say about children, isn’t it? That we’re blessings sent from the Spirit of Joy. So be joyful.’

  ‘It wasn’t the Spirit of Joy that made you,’ I said, which was cruel, but he wanted a fight. ‘Write me a bill of exemption and I’ll give you the money instead,’ I said. Maldon was missing his eyes, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t write, or see. Magic. It makes no sense.

  ‘Tempting,’ he said. ‘But I can’t. I’m busy.’

  ‘You look real busy to me,’ I said, nodding toward the bottle he cradled. ‘I’ve been that kind of busy as much as you have, remember.’

  ‘I want to make you something,’ he said, and his nasty little expression became a still-nasty grin. ‘I need that.’ Maldon rose and walked to Tnota’s desk where the flarelock still lay. ‘And I need some other things too.’

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ he said. ‘But you’ll like it.’

  I wasn’t sure that I liked the idea of a drunk ten-year-old playing around with unstable phos technology in my office basement, but I also knew that if I denied him, then he’d just find a way to steal them anyway. Moreover, I always tried to remind myself that Gleck wasn’t really a child. He was over fifty years old, and had the mind and experience to handle himself.