Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Write me a list of what you want,’ I said. Another wave of tiredness had just washed over me, as had the smell of Maldon’s wine. It was too early, I told myself, though I thought that often, and the thought seldom won. ‘But be sober later. I want us to continue with my lessons.’

  ‘You’ve no talent for languages,’ Maldon said.

  ‘And you’ve none for teaching. But you’re the one that knows the drudge language, and I’m the one that wants to learn, and as long as I’m risking my neck by letting you live in my house, you’ll make yourself useful.’

  ‘Teaching you is very frustrating. And boring.’

  I called him a shit-sucker in drudge, which was one of the first things he’d taught me. He laughed and swayed away.

  Maldon had learned the drudge language when Shavada had taken his mind. He’d learned other things, too, awful things. Some of them I’d glimpsed when I stole into his mind, and I had no desire to know more. There was a darkness within Gleck Maldon that would never leave him. Why had I spared him? I’d felt sorry for him. He’d been a friend, and now he was … this. The broken bones in his face couldn’t heal, as they would if he were still a Darling, and the matchlock shot had taken his eyes. It took souls, he’d told me. That was how the Darlings regenerated, stripping the life and vitality slowly from their victims to replenish any damage that they sustained. But Maldon had lost that power now, the damage was permanent. The one magic that seemed to have remained was the one that kept him perpetually young. His body had not aged in four years. That would be a problem, when Valiya or Amaira noticed.

  There was a larger problem, though, something that we both knew and neither had spoken about. Maldon had no eyes, but he could see. He could write, he could draw, he never walked into doorframes and always knew who had just entered the room. So there was magic in him. But of what kind, I could not be sure.

  7

  I am bad at taking advice, but it’s easier to stomach when you get all complex over the person that gave it. Maybe want to impress her, stupid as that thought was. I was Valiya’s boss. She wanted me functional because she was as committed to the Range as I was. That was all.

  I found the address she’d given me, a big, unobtrusive building on a quiet, unobtrusive street. It was a leisure house, the kind known for its closed curtains and quiet discretion. I felt like an idiot walking in there. It was the kind of place Dantry Tanza might have enjoyed. What would people think if they heard that Ryhalt Galharrow was getting himself sorted out in a leisure house? There is humiliation in letting other people see you at your most vulnerable, and I had built my sense of self around the fear I struck in others. I stacked enough money on the counter to ensure that the staff would keep to silence.

  A quiet, dignified young man led me to a private chamber with a tiled bath set into the floor. He started up a quiet little phos-driven water heater, which murmured ocean-wave sighs as it brought the water to steam. He lit candles, kept the light down low. I stripped off and got in, and the attendant seemed poised to add scented oils, flower petals and salts, but the water had darkened to grey after only a few moments. I felt ashamed. I didn’t look at the man as he quietly drained the water and refilled the bath without a word. He spoke only when he had to, letting me sink into this quiet little world of relaxation. Gentle music was being played in an adjoining room, mellow pipes and a slow, subtle drum. I smelled apricot and orange, soft and gentle aromas. Steam rose around me. I closed my eyes. There was nothing there.

  I dozed, or maybe I slept. Time passed.

  I got out when the water started draining, unsure how long I’d spent in the bath. It had been long enough that my fingers had wrinkled. The water had been hot, and my skin felt raw and scalded. I figured that I was done, but the attendant brought me over to a table and made me lie facedown. Lying prone and naked was an odd sensation, but I’d trusted him this far. He massaged my legs, working slowly from my feet and all the way up, calf, thigh, buttocks, back, neck. He knew his business, fingers pushing firmly, kneading, hard and focused until the knots relented. He murmured little comments about tension, always letting me know what he was going to do so that the cracks and pops from my joints didn’t come as a surprise. At one point it felt like he was going to tear my head off, and then my neck gave a huge crack and something hard loosened up. By the time he was done I felt hazy, distant from my own body. I didn’t want to speak and the attendant seemed to understand. He gave me towels to wipe the oils away before bringing out my clothes which, somehow, had been freshly laundered while I was bathing. I put them on, almost reluctant to return to life outside this quiet, gentle bubble of peace.

  I went to a second room where I was given a cold bottle of water, and was asked to sit while a cheerful woman took scissors and razor to my face and hair and another equally cheerful woman used a little file to shape my fingernails. I almost didn’t recognise the man who stared back at me in the mirror, less because of the haircut and more because it was a long time since I’d bothered with mirrors. My hair had gone to grey across the flanks, which wasn’t such a bad thing. If you fear getting older, then you’re losing every second of your life, and I was always determined to win the battles that I chose to fight.

  A bath, a massage and a shave. Nothing complicated about those things. Nothing that should make such a difference. But when I came to leave, something inside me had relented. I couldn’t have said what.

  The city had a brittle feel to it, and not just from the constant rain. Against the lavender bath-scent that lingered about me, I could smell the drudge-stink in the air, rising from the canals like mould and sickrooms. Preachers gabbled on the streets, but nobody seemed to be listening.

  ‘I had a thought,’ Valiya said, as soon as I stepped in through the door. She had a shadowy excitement to her, as she always did when she dug up new information. She’d come up with something good, and it was hot on her tongue. She looked me over, noting that I was clean and presentable, trying to keep a smile from her face and only managing to purse her lips. I frowned, abashed, and carried on past her. ‘I thought about what the navigator told you. This recruiter, Nacomo, was educated, unused to the Misery sky. Lots of ego. So, who’s going to be well educated, full of themselves and a recent arrival from Lennisgrad?’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. She started ticking items off on her fingers.

  ‘Probably not soldiers. Not labourers. Engineers? Possibly. But then I thought, who can you really count on to be halfway up their own arse?’ Valiya said. ‘Actors. I checked around. There’s an old stage performer called Marollo Nacomo, played a short run of The Tower of Leyonar, before it got cancelled. He was a big name in Lennisgrad, but fell on his face here. Only came to Valengrad a couple of months back. He’s your man.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Oh, please, Ryhalt,’ she said. Her eyebrows rose halfway up her face. ‘Have I ever brought you something that wasn’t worthwhile?’

  Valiya had a hard energy about her, knowing that she’d started the hunt for me.

  ‘I ever tell you how smart you are?’

  ‘Not often enough,’ she said.

  I rustled up my jackdaws and we swooped. Casso and Meara went in the back, I led four through the front, weapons bared and ready. The house was old, one of the many properties abandoned during the Siege, claimed by new tenants as the city repopulated. The front door stubbornly resisted the axe. When we finally got inside, we found Nacomo in a nightgown, shaking in bed. He was a handsome man, brown hair askew from sleep, surprisingly youthful for the age Valiya had put to him.

  ‘How dare you lay hands upon me!’ he declared. ‘Do you even know who I am? I demand a lawyer! How dare you!’

  ‘Are we sure that’s him?’ I asked Casso. ‘I thought he’d be older.’ My lead jackdaw shrugged, and then took a firm grip on the captive’s hair to get a better look at his face.

  ‘You have the wrong man!’ the prison
er declared. ‘My name is Nacomo and I’m fifty-three! You must want someone else!’

  That settled the matter, though not in the way Nacomo had intended. Casso shut him up by stuffing a rag into his mouth. Nacomo would be put to the question, but we’d do it back at the offices.

  ‘My wife saw him in that play,’ Casso said. I didn’t know he was married. He didn’t talk much, except to complain. ‘Stupid bollocks about a king, and a tower that fell down. She said the monologues went on for bloody hours.’

  ‘Didn’t take you for a cultured man,’ I said.

  ‘Me? Can’t stand that shit. Why do you think I didn’t go with her?’

  I set two of my men to tearing the place apart. They turned up a good stash of money under his floorboards, but there was a feeling in the air, down in the cellar, that left me unnerved, and a foul, lingering odour that I thought that I recognised. Excitement growing within me, I sent someone to fetch Maldon. He arrived looking pissed, his nightly coma having been interrupted. The scowl left his face when I took him down to the cellar. He wouldn’t go in, arching away like a cat being thrust toward a bath.

  ‘It was here,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Recently,’ Maldon said. ‘Shavada’s Eye was here.’

  There was no chance of Nacomo being the vault-breaker. Anyone capable of breaking through Crowfoot’s wards wouldn’t have been taken so easily. He was a middleman, perhaps, passing it along? Or just a man in possession of a big house to hide it in for a while. Had I thought that the Eye might have been here, I’d have brought in Spinners and Nenn’s boys. Instead I had my men dig up the cellar floor, just in case, but there was nothing to find. It had been here, and now it was gone.

  I smashed a set of expensively painted dinner plates in frustration. Had we missed it by minutes? Hours?

  Nacomo didn’t say anything during his interrogation. He seemed confused and couldn’t account for his recent whereabouts. He’d not been working: laid off by the theatre after the news sheets delivered scathing reviews, leaving him with a hefty debt on the house and no prospect of work. He knew that he was in it up to his eyeballs, and speaking would only lessen his chances of surviving the week. Questions about the Eye made him snap his mouth shut, refusing to look at me, or at anyone in the dark little room. He endured two hours of questioning. Traust screamed in his face, cuffed him around the head some. Repeated the same questions over and over. Who were you working for? Who did you lead into the Misery? How are they planning to betray the Range? Where is the Eye? He just stared ahead blankly. A change seemed to have come over him, like he wasn’t even there at all.

  ‘You want me to bring out the hammer?’ Traust asked. His ugly grin was a little uglier than usual out of frustration that his intimidation had yielded no results. Nacomo might as well have been a statue, staring into space, unfocused. Blank as a fresh canvas.

  I glanced over at Valiya. There was no judgment on her face. She knew that we’d do what had to be done.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Throw him in the white cells.’

  Traust manhandled him away.

  There is more than one way to break a man. The white cells were a hard place to endure for even a day: so narrow that a man could only stand. No food, nothing to drink, and the guards beat a cymbal every twenty minutes to make sure the prisoners didn’t sleep on their feet. Threw salt water over them if they managed to. Powerful phos lamps maintained a continuous, intense, brightness from all angles. The cells worked differently from a hammer. They broke the mind down, got it confused, muddled. Pliable. I’d never known a man able to resist questioning after a few days in the cells, but I was too eager to get at the information in Nacomo’s head. Every hour that I had to wait saw me pacing, drumming my fingers, snapping at the servants with impatience, but I had to leave Nacomo in there until he broke down. Weaker men lasted only hours. I hoped that a single day would see Nacomo’s tongue running loose. Letting him out too early would merely give him a reprieve. A week would have shattered him for certain, but I couldn’t afford that long.

  I was about to fetch him when Amaira announced a visitor. Governor Thierro, the old acquaintance that Davandein had reintroduced me to at the theatre, was dressed again in his long white coat, white gloves, tan belt, tan boots. Amaira admitted him, that obnoxiously strong cloud of cologne trailing in his wake.

  ‘I apologise for arriving without an appointment,’ he said. ‘But business never waits. Might we talk?’

  ‘I have to attend to something urgent,’ I said.

  ‘I’m looking for a noblewoman,’ Thierro said. ‘Lady Ezabeth Tanza.’

  I was already reaching for my coat, slung over the back of a chair, but Ezabeth’s name stayed my hand.

  ‘Amaira. Ask Valiya to go and pick up our friend from the cells. Bring him over here.’

  I mostly had Amaira make me coffee and clean my clothes so she was excited to be asked to convey an instruction relating to actual Blackwing work. As she reached adolescence, suddenly things that had never mattered before had become important to her. She scampered away with the message as I took Thierro through to a sparsely furnished reception room. It didn’t see a lot of use. The office’s visitors weren’t often exposed to comfort.

  ‘Hard to believe we were ever that young, isn’t it?’ Thierro mused. Bringing up our shared history. Drawing me closer, emotionally. Building a bridge between what he wanted, and what I had.

  ‘Feels a lifetime ago,’ I agreed. ‘You want something? Brandy? Wine?’

  ‘Herbal tea, if you have some,’ he said. I didn’t, so we didn’t have anything. I was going to light a cigar but remembered in time that Thierro’s chest wasn’t strong. It seemed needlessly cruel to expose him to the rough tobacco of the Range. I put the cigar case back in my coat.

  ‘What do you want with Ezabeth Tanza?’

  ‘I need her help,’ he said. ‘She disappeared four years ago and it’s widely assumed that she was killed during the Siege. That was where she was last seen. Or at least, that’s what people believe.’

  ‘Ezabeth Tanza is dead,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Thierro said. ‘I’m sorry if this is painful for you to talk about. In the course of seeking information about her, I came across a rumor.’

  ‘Rumours are dangerous things.’

  ‘It’s idle gossip, most likely. Rude speculation. But there was a suggestion that you and she were – you know. More than friends.’ We had been, briefly. But not many people knew that. Thierro’s diggers must have gone deep to unearth that, this long on. But then, he had the money to pay for the best.

  ‘Best not to insult the dead, Thierro.’

  Thierro nodded, solemn. ‘I apologise. I had to ask. Lady Tanza was an exceptional mathematician, physicist, lunarist and scholar. The Iron Sun is based upon designs she wrote about in her thesis on phos manipulation.’

  ‘What’s the Iron Sun?’

  ‘You’ll have seen the sphere of black iron at the pinnacle of the Grandspire,’ he said. ‘It’s a venting device, which can be turned into a weapon to defend the city if necessary. An astounding piece of engineering, based on Lady Tanza’s schematics.’

  He wanted to dredge the past out of me, tangled weeds dragged from a lightless riverbed.

  ‘Ezabeth Tanza died in the Siege,’ I said tightly. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’

  ‘That’s what people say,’ Thierro agreed. ‘But there was no body. No grave.’

  ‘A lot of people were crushed when the wall came down. She was likely buried under ten thousand tons of rubble. You’ll need someone else to help with your phos mill,’ I said. I’d never spoken of Ezabeth’s death to anyone except Dantry, Nenn and Tnota. She was our greatest hero, but just hearing her name was painful. To have it broadcast across the city-states would have been unbearable, so I’d kept her sacrifice silent. Selfish of me
, perhaps.

  ‘The Grandspire is so much more than just a phos mill, Captain,’ Thierro said. And for a moment there I thought that there was a spark of something more energised in him. Something he actually cared about. To men like him, a million marks was pigeon feed, the creation of wealth nothing but a game in which to rank himself against other merchant overlords. But this had engaged his passion. ‘The Grandspire is a symbol of hope to the people. They’ve had their share of terror. The Grandspire tells them, ”Here is the work of man, far greater than anything the enemy can ever dream of. See us reach into the sky.’’’

  ‘Not so far from the Bright Order’s teachings,’ I said. ‘Is that it? You’re a believer?’

  Thierro ignored my question.

  ‘Westland has invested more money in the Grandspire than most towns could scrape together in twenty years. It has risen over the city in just four years. No great work like this has ever been undertaken before, not in such a short space of time. Do you know why I ordered the project started, Captain?’

  ‘Phos makes a lot of money,’ I said. ‘You’re all about the profits, I’ll wager.’

  ‘Profits matter, I won’t deny it,’ Thierro said. ‘But no. Not in this instance. You remember how it was, back when we all joined up? You, me, the Eiderstein brothers, Pep, Salia, all the rest. Half of our class signed up to fight. And we believed in those days, didn’t we? Really wanted to make a difference.’

  ‘We’re none of us born smart.’

  ‘Serving your country isn’t foolishness. And I know you don’t believe it is, or you’d not be here, fighting the long fight. I always dreamed of making a name for myself here. Being remembered as a great soldier. Maybe even making marshal. We all dreamed that, didn’t we? But after Adrogorsk …’ Thierro’s cool visage faltered just for a moment. It’s never easy to relive the worst day of your life. His gunners had peppered a Darling with matchlock fire, blown its head clean off, but even that hadn’t stopped it casting sorcery at them. I’d have bet the memory of that low-hanging, brown-stained haze drifting toward him would haunt him all his life. The head had been laughing at them the whole time. ‘I was sent back before the real heavy fighting started. I never wanted to leave, but I couldn’t stay on the Range. I could barely breathe while the Darling’s magic lingered, and the Misery’s poison only made it worse. They sent me away, out to Valaigne, where the “clean air” did nothing for my health, but it did let me prosper. I bought coal mines, and they turned out to be diamond mines. I turned money into more money, and that into more. I am good at breeding coins. But I never wanted that life. I always wanted to be here. A fighter. I would have been, if not for that Darling’s magic.’