Ravencry

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Good to see you haven’t given away all our secrets yet,’ the raven squawked at me. It was a big bird, and it hopped over to the drudge. It seemed to sniff, though I don’t know whether ravens can smell anything. ‘Not dead. Move fast. Move fast anyway, I think.’ The bird took hold of the drudge’s dagger in its beak and drew it out from his belt. It was a slow and awkward process. Ravens are not designed to carry things. It managed to drag the blade through the dirt toward me.

  ‘What the fuck is that thing?’ Betch asked. Then he decided that he didn’t care, as he began to whisper, ‘Get us free. Get us free!’

  ‘What took you so long?’ I asked. The raven dropped the knife behind me and I began to saw awkwardly at the ropes. It was not easy to get the angle, and the skin-stripped weals around my wrists burned with every movement. My shoulders were stiff, rigid, protested at the motion. But I felt the strands of the rope beginning to fray away. Everything is weaker, more brittle, in the Misery.

  The drudge on the ground made a groaning noise, his hand began to grope around on the floor and I sawed faster. The bird spoke in a staccato as it pecked away at the rope, tugging at threads to assist the process.

  ‘Took … a long time to find … a rock that I … could pick up … that was heavy enough … Only had one chance.’

  ‘It was a good shot,’ I said.

  ‘Was aiming … for you.’

  I wasn’t even surprised.

  ‘Your compassion is overwhelming.’

  ‘What do you expect? Crowfoot made me. Didn’t he tell you not to fuck this up?’

  ‘What did that bird just say?’ Betch asked. I ignored him. With a snap the last of the rope came free and I sawed away the rope around my ankles. That was much faster work. The drudge had enjoyed keeping his weapons sharp, and the knife was the same smoky steel as his sword.

  I looked up to see that the soldier had pushed himself up onto his knees. Blood ran down his face and he clearly didn’t know what was happening or where he was. The rock had left him disoriented, dazed. The way his eyes struggled to focus, the hand pressed to his brow. He could have been just another man. But he wasn’t a man. He wasn’t anything.

  I got my hands around his throat and crushed down. He was slender, not a lot of meat on those twisted bones and his windpipe collapsed when I drove my thumbs in. He didn’t make a sound. I could have used the knife, but in my anger I wanted to feel him die. In the time that I’d spoken with him, I’d found that he was more human than I’d expected, and that drove my spite. Had he been mindless, a slave to the whims of the Deep Kings, perhaps I could have forgiven him. But he had a mind. Or at least he did until I strangled the life from him.

  I sat in the dust and the new quiet. We were shielded from the rest of the camp by the square tents around us, a curtain of canvas that was for now keeping us alive. But for how long? I pried my fingers free of the crumpled neck and hung my head. Everything still hurt like a kiss from the Long End, but freedom had brought with it the crashing truth of our situation. I’d solved one problem, and now a much greater one presented itself.

  ‘Now me,’ Betch said. ‘Free me.’ I didn’t move, just sat for a moment, thinking.

  If the Darling got his mind-worms into me, then the secret of Nall’s Engine was done. The drudge would know, and no clever deceptions would keep them at bay. That information was too vital to fall into the Deep Kings’ hands.

  The hooded raven was pecking at the discarded dagger.

  ‘You know what you have to do,’ it croaked.

  ‘Free me,’ Betch said, but he was a dull little voice at the back of my mind.

  The bird was right. I realised with a grim finality that it was not here to help me escape. It was here to ensure that I was dead before the Darling could get to me.

  I picked up the knife, turned it in my hand. Wasn’t so long ago that I’d put the barrel of a pistol against my head. Now the knife was my way out. I’d opened other men’s throats often enough; how hard could it be to cut my own? Betch was still talking behind me. He didn’t understand. Throat, or heart? Maybe a quick, hard insertion between the ribs. Would that work? I couldn’t risk wounding myself to incapacity without making it certain.

  ‘Get on with it,’ the raven cawed.

  ‘How’s the master going to get by without me?’ I said.

  The raven just stared at me, and I knew the answer. He’d find some other fool willing to trade his life away for a favour. He’d grant it and that poor bastard would take my place, live my life. I positioned the point of the blade against the raven tattoo. I could drive it home, hope that Crowfoot’s safeguard would be enough to rip me apart. No. It was too risky. I didn’t know what would happen and the magic might just tear my arm off and leave me too weak to finish the job. I placed the cold edge up against my neck. Betch thought I’d cracked, but the steel felt very bright, very final against my skin. Bitterly, I thought that to press it home would be a relief.

  It was the uncertainty that stayed my hand. Even after the Darling killed the cavalryman, it had been able to pry through his mind. If I was certain I’d take my secrets with me, maybe I’d have had the strength to drive the blade home. But to die without knowing if it would work? To end myself and fail even so? I couldn’t. I couldn’t give Amaira to a world in which that monster held power. Not when there was a chance.

  When I lowered the blade I was panting hard, sucking in heaving gasps of poisoned Misery air. I struck my head against the pommel.

  ‘Get on with it,’ the raven croaked. ‘If the Darling comes back, you know the price we all pay. All of Dortmark will pay it, not just you. End it.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Think, Galharrow,’ the raven said. ‘You’re deep in the Misery, no navigator, no friends, no supplies. They haven’t waited for you, they’re thundering back to the city. You don’t have a future. Die a hero, not the coward that cost the Grand Alliance its freedom. If the Darling gets into your mind, you end us all.’

  The raven’s voice annoyed me, which made me all the more certain that I should ignore it. The hooded raven was an impression of Crowfoot, but it was not my master. I did not have to obey, and I had a job to do. The fate of the republic rested on how far I could get my brain away from the drudge. The people I loved needed me to suffer this last crawl through the dust. I owed them every ounce of fight that I had. They could flay me, they could scald me, they could send a thousand scorpions to madden me with their agonies, and I’d still have fought my way through seven hells and beyond to die knowing that Amaira would grow up safe and free. No. No giving up. Not now. Not ever again.

  I slowly dusted off my hands.

  ‘Come on, free me,’ Betch insisted.

  I had to leave, right now, but I owed Betch some kind of explanation. He thought that we were being rescued, and he was grasping for that chance. Taking anything that he could get. He didn’t understand.

  ‘Betch,’ I said gently. ‘I can’t take you with me. This isn’t a rescue. Nenn, Thierro and the others – they’re gone, and they took our navigator with them. We have no way out of the Misery. I’m not a navigator. Neither are you. Even if we had supplies, or mounts, the land will turn us around and around until we either wander into a skweam hole or die of thirst. Equal chance which. We’re dead, Betch. I’m not going to escape. But I know things. Things that will destroy everything we’ve ever cared for if the Deep Kings learn the truth. I can’t let that happen. I’m going to head out into the Misery as far as I can in the hope that they can’t find me and drain my mind. Maybe if I make it far enough, something will eat me.’

  He deserved better than this. He’d come all this way, he’d offered his life to his country. He loved my best friend. He was a brave man.

  ‘Just give me the chance to run,’ he said. ‘Together we might …’ He looked at the twisted wreck of his leg and slumped a little. ‘There has to be some
chance.’

  He couldn’t walk. He certainly couldn’t run. If I tried to bring him, he’d be in agony, he’d slow me down, and we’d be caught. If we even made it out of the camp, he might be able to endure the pain for the first mile, but when the agony was too much he’d beg me to help him. I’d carry him for a mile. Maybe then I’d drag him. And when the drudge caught us we’d both beg for death.

  ‘You fought bravely,’ I said. ‘Nenn would be proud. You lived a good life.’ Betch looked down at the knife in my hand, noted my proximity. Tears filled his eyes, spilled down across his cheeks. He let out a strangled moan of grief, fear, pressed his eyes tight shut. He shuddered.

  ‘If somehow you make it,’ he said. ‘If you ever see her again, tell her “yes.”’ He stared at me very intently, pouring his will into me. Gave me what little he had left. ‘What she asked me, on the veranda, on the morning we watched the dawn rise. Tell her that I said yes.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. I didn’t blink from his gaze. It felt an important kind of promise. ‘Close your eyes.’ Betch blinked away the last of his tears, then gritted his teeth and put his head back against the post. Muscles strained in his bared throat as he forced the words.

  ‘Do it.’

  I hadn’t known him well, but doing it hurt all the same. I wiped the knife against a jacket he no longer needed.

  ‘Galharrow, if you run, they will catch you,’ the raven snapped. It flapped up at my face in a flurry of wings, demanding. ‘You can’t navigate, you’ll leave tracks, and the Darling will devour your mind. Once it is rested, you’ve nothing to bring against it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Once it’s rested.’

  ‘You can’t outrun it after it regenerates,’ the raven cawed.

  ‘I’m not going to run,’ I said. I straightened the collar of my coat. ‘And it’s not going to get to regenerate.’

  27

  The wind had not abated, and a cloud of dust rolled in just when I needed it to. Sometimes the Misery hates you, sometimes it comes around and slackens the noose. Not by much, but a little. A storm of Misery dust wasn’t something that I’d ever welcomed before, but I did then, as the stinking, blinding grit flowed into the drudge camp like noxious steam from a factory runoff, darkening the air and sending the drudge into their tents. Even the cracks in the sky were dimmed and muted.

  I searched the guard, found his face mask and hooded myself against the clouding dirt. The mask not only protected me against the gusting wind and flying grit, it concealed my face from the enemy. I shrugged the drudge’s cloak around my shoulders and pulled it tight. Through the storm, I might pass for one of them.

  Betch was slumped forward, slack, deadweight. He was a hero. He had deserved a better death.

  ‘Now yourself,’ the raven croaked.

  ‘I’m Blackwing,’ I said. ‘And I refuse to go down.’

  The raven was having a bad time of it in the gusting wind, feathers getting ragged with dust.

  I took the guard’s sword, stuffed it through my belt, the dagger beside it. His canteen was full, and I took that too, and the dried meat. No time to make a rational inventory of what I had, and it was there so I took it. Hunching my shoulders, I set out into the camp.

  Campfires had been smothered by the dust or doused so embers didn’t go flying into canvas walls. The sky had grown loud as the storm picked up, growling and rumbling. We were deep-Misery here, halfway between us and them, and the heavens had more volume, more vim, than I was accustomed to. Some strange part of me felt that the Misery was on my side. If so, she was my only ally. The raven that struggled to flap alongside me certainly wasn’t, reminding me over and over that the best option – the only sensible option – was to slice my own throat open. I told it to stop attracting attention, but the few drudge still braving the storm didn’t even spare me a glance.

  Past experience had taught me that my enemy’s tent would be separate from those of the ordinary drudge. The Darlings kept themselves apart, or the drudge stayed away from them, one or the other. The Darling would have a pavilion, larger, stronger than those of its minions. I had to pick my way around the camp carefully as I looked for it, and it was a big camp. I saw bottles of what looked like wine, stopped and loaded them into a cloak that became a makeshift sack. Might not have been wine, might have been anything. Doubted that I’d have a chance to drink them, but better to take them than not.

  As I passed one tent I heard grunting sounds coming from within. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. Drudge voices came from another, a heated conversation. I saw the blurred shadows of figures through the thin cloth. In so many ways they were like us. In so many ways, not.

  There were two Darling tents next to one another on the outskirts of the camp. Bigger, made of dark cloth bearing crudely painted glyphs of praise for King Acradius. I wondered if he’d send his creatures any thoughts tonight. Wondered if he was capable of sending a warning. I didn’t think so. The Deep Kings were vast and powerful, but they were not all-knowing and all-seeing. That’s what the drudge were for, to be their hands and eyes out in the world. Besides, Acradius was far away, trying to sink the world beneath the icy seas. The Darling would have no help tonight.

  I needed that Darling out of action. Needed to take away its capacity to tear the thoughts from my skull. If I ran straight into the Misery, it might still catch me, and in open ground I’d stand no chance.

  The Darling tents were a good hundred yards away from any others. There was no cover, and there would be guards. I had to assume that the surviving Darling, weakened as it was, wouldn’t risk that a few gillings might find their way inside and take off the other arm. A worse thought struck me, one that threatened what little sense there appeared to be in this plan. If the second Darling had survived our attack and been brought here too, things could fall into the hells a lot sooner than I intended.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the raven choked through the billowing dust. ‘What can you possibly hope to achieve?’

  ‘I need that Darling,’ I said.

  ‘Then what?’ the raven croaked. ‘You’ll run into the Misery? To what end?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Believe it or not, this is not the worst situation I’ve ever found myself in. When you’ve faced down against a Deep King, a walk in the Misery isn’t as frightening as you might think. And I have a debt to pay. Ezabeth gave everything to protect the Range. I can’t ask less of myself.’

  ‘You’d risk the security of the Range for an imagined debt to a dead woman?’ it snarked.

  ‘The debt’s not imagined. And she’s not dead. Not entirely,’ I said.

  ‘Did those Witnesses get into your head? You think that the solar flare is going to bring the Bright Lady back into the world so that you can breed pink little babies?’

  ‘I know the flare won’t bring her back,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t owe her.’

  ‘Tenacious bastard, aren’t you?’ the raven snarled. ‘I should have dropped the rock on you instead.’ It glared at me with nasty little raven-eyes and took up residence on a post. I’d do the next part alone.

  I hunched low against the wind as it threatened to knock me down and ran for the tent. No need to worry about the sound. I was counting on the Darling still being weak enough not to pose any threat. If it had already replenished its power, then this would all be over fast.

  The bodies of ten drudge soldiers lay outside the tent. They were bound hand and foot and their eyes were opened unnaturally wide, mouths hanging open, gathering sand. Their throats had been cut with the same precision that I’d offered to Betch, red crescent moons mirroring Rioque above. It was one thing to give your life for your country. It was quite another to have your throat slashed to help regenerate a monster that didn’t care for you one way or another. I wondered how they’d felt as they were led here, lambs to the slaughter. Crowfoot was a callous master, hard
and cruel in his punishments and ruthless when he used men in his schemes, but this was worse. I couldn’t put my finger on why that was, but it was.

  The Darling had taken those lives to speed its recovery. Death magic, the foulest of all the black sorceries.

  The entrance flap to the tent was weighted down on the inside, but it opened easily enough when I ducked through.

  The Darling had lived in some sort of luxury here. The floor was covered with carpets, and there was furniture – small, portable items, but more than I’d seen even our highest rankers bring into the Misery with them. At Adrogorsk I’d had a portable writing desk, polished walnut, legs carved like lion paws. I’d been terribly proud of it, back in the days when things like that seemed to matter. The Darling had apparently enjoyed something similar here. But it was not enjoying them now.

  The room had two occupants. The Darling, maimed and burned, clean white bone showing through the charred flesh of its face, lay wheezing on a cot. Its breath was a hoarse grind, slow and dry with pain.

  The second occupant was slender as a willow, a woman of middle years whose changes were subtle, lightly begun. She was reading a book as I entered. A servant or a nurse, not a warrior, dressed in a light, flowing robe. Her hair was curly, shiny and rich beneath her head scarf. She looked up at the intrusion, at the drawn sword in my hand and her presence stymied me for a moment. I had expected a couple of bruisers with big axes and meat for brains, not this rare display of femininity in the Misery. And because I’m flawed and not as hardened as I wished I was, I didn’t launch in and cave her head in as I should have.

  I must have looked like a drudge with the dust mask and one of their cloaks, and she had no reason to suspect otherwise.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘How fares the Chosen?’ I asked in their tongue.

  ‘He has consumed. He recovers. But much hurt.’

  I walked across to look for myself. I steeled myself for what I had to do, and realised I didn’t want to do it. A rare strand of weakness burned up through me. Maybe because she was a nurse and her job was to heal rather than hurt, or maybe her gentle concern reminded me of Valiya, but I felt a moment of unease. I was fully aware that if the Darling opened its eyes, then I would be in a lot of shit.