Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Yes. Princes and marshals most of all. But I need his research. Prince Herono has vowed to investigate the phos supply discrepancies, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me. I did not know she had been raised to the inner council of the Order of Aetherial Engineers and now I don’t know how far I can trust her. I’m hitting dead ends. I need the original papers Maldon was working from. When my brother returns from the Misery we can pull it all together, maybe show the princes and … Well, I don’t know what, then. But they have to be shown.’

  ‘Haven’t you already argued your case to the Order?’

  Ezabeth’s brows drew in like battle lines.

  ‘Something is not right amongst the Order. They aren’t Spinners; they’re bureaucrats and accountants. They think that so long as enough battery coils come in from the mills they can forget about everything else. When I insisted that they provide me access to all of Maldon’s work they told me it was the property of the Order, that “No university wench is going to come and take over years of investment.” They are fools. They have no grasp of what they’re dealing with.’

  ‘You’re asking me to do a lot on faith, here,’ I said. ‘You’re asking me to help you subvert the Order. Go behind even Venzer’s back. That’s a lot to ask just because …’ I almost said it aloud. Because we’d known each other a lifetime ago. But that was only my side of the deal. I may have been an agent of the crow, but I was little more than a mercenary to her. Whatever she’d felt for me, if she’d ever felt anything at all, it was buried behind years of dust and a handful of madness.

  Ezabeth shook her head.

  ‘I ask nothing on faith. I’ll pay before we go. Take me to Gleck Maldon’s house, help me break in quietly and act as my lookout while I’m in there. It won’t take long.’

  ‘You know the marshal has men following you?’ I said.

  ‘Not tonight. I sent those clod-footed hogs following an impression of me down towards the walls.’

  Not many Spinners could weave that kind of illusion. She was rare all right.

  ‘And you chose me for this because … ?’

  She took out a small but heavy purse and counted out heavy coins. Ten gold discs, fifty marks a piece, gleamed salaciously in the phos light.

  ‘Because I have the money, and you’re the only person I know with a history of breaking into people’s houses at night.’

  Cat burglary wasn’t amongst my usual skill set, but for her it seemed I’d make an exception.

  Maldon’s huge wooden mansion rose three storeys over the moat of dirty streets and alleys that kept polite company at bay. He could have chosen to live out in Willows if he’d been able to stomach his peers, but he couldn’t, so he’d set himself up amongst the down and outs, the night soil lying in the street, the flickering phos lights and sleazy neon signs advertising girls, guns, gambling.

  ‘And you’re quite certain there’s no night watchman?’ Ezabeth asked.

  ‘Certain? No, but I doubt it. A couple of the old house staff come by in the day. That’s all.’

  We walked past the front looking for signs of life but the street was dark, tranquil in moonlight. Getting in quietly was going to be the problem, or so I’d thought. Fortune favoured us: one of the servants had left a window slightly ajar. It was high in the wall, but I boosted Ezabeth up. I hadn’t expected her to have such agility. She was light on her feet, dropping down gently into the room beyond. I’m a big bastard and although I can say without ego that I’m stronger than most big bastards, heaving my weight noiselessly through small spaces wasn’t a skill I intended practising. I flinched at a noise along the alley, but then Ezabeth appeared, waving me in through an unlocked door.

  ‘Lucky they left it unlatched,’ I muttered.

  ‘They didn’t. Someone forced it,’ Ezabeth said. I scowled, a wasted expression in the dark. If anyone was going to be breaking Gleck’s stuff it should have been me.

  Light emanated dully from a portable phos globe in Ezabeth’s three-fingered hand. I had never been in Maldon’s observatory before. A large, square room with a tower-height ceiling far above, into which a number of huge glass lenses were set. A phos loom rested on iron runners set into the floor.

  ‘Amazing,’ Ezabeth said, her voice filled with wonder. ‘It’s a modification of the Timus Sixth model. What do these nodes do? Something to do with impurity filtering maybe. And these extra straining wires … there should be nine, but he has twelve, and this cross wire here? Why?’

  She babbled on about the eight-foot-tall phos loom. I didn’t understand much of it. I expected some folk felt the same when I got energised explaining the differences between brandy from Whitelande and brandy from Lennisgrad.

  ‘… and this track it’s on. The whole loom can be moved around the room to sit beneath the different lenses, depending on which moons are in ascendance on any given night.’ She caught a breath, put a hand to her chest. ‘This is remarkable.’

  ‘Yeah. Only it’s not what we’re here for. Let’s do this quick.’

  Ezabeth seemed reluctant to leave the magnificent loom and its fireproof cut-stone chamber, but I got her moving. We went through the wood-panelled hallway and then a reception room that led to a back staircase. I eyed a half-empty bottle of finest Lennisgrad brandy on the table.

  There really was a difference.

  I doubted Gleck would have begrudged me. If things looked really bad with Saravor then I might be able to come back and rob the place. If he was dead, Gleck could hardly complain, and if he wasn’t then he owed me for all the time I’d spent trying to find him. Mercenary logic.

  ‘What was that?’ Ezabeth whispered through her veil.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said, but I’d not been listening. She bade me be still and I heard it then. The gentle creak of a floorboard, somewhere above us in the house.

  ‘Maybe there is a night watchman.’

  ‘Or maybe whoever got that window open is still here.’

  Ezabeth drew down her veil and sniffed the air. I didn’t have much of a sense of smell; my nose had been rearranged too many times and the cartilage up there was more twisted than a priest’s conscience. Strong as it was, I got a whiff of what she was picking up. Something like the jars of rancid fish the marketeers sold for a pittance at the end of a day baking in summer’s heat.

  I don’t like things that don’t make sense. Not until I’ve put a knife in them.

  ‘You want to get out of here?’ I asked, dropping my voice to a hush. Ezabeth looked at me pointedly as she rearranged her veil.

  ‘Do you?’

  I almost grinned at her.

  We climbed a second staircase to the upper storey and that’s when I heard the telltale whoosh of flame taking bite. That’s when I smelled burning paper and the acrid tang of fuel. That’s when I realised that the fish odour was whale oil, and we’d stumbled into an act of arson.

  Smoke was already pouring from the doorway to Maldon’s library. Many folk didn’t have a house as big as his book-room-cum-study, which occupied most of the upper storey. I skidded to a halt against the door frame. Books had been dragged down and dumped in piles, and the discarded oil flasks lay scattered around them like primitive tribesfolk, worshipping the pyres. Between the two largest piles, two man-shapes were shrouded in smoke and shadow.

  They saw me. I looked at them. A mutual feeling that we were not friends asserted itself.

  The flames crackled and hissed, the orange light throbbed across the books. Backs to the fires, the men were just dark shapes but one of them grabbed the silhouette of a heavy military crossbow from a table. Not a hunting bow, not a gentleman’s duelling bow, it was a charge-stopper, the kind of bow that punches a hole through an armoured horse. I wasn’t close enough to stop him and at that range, if he had any kind of skill, he couldn’t miss. I started moving but I knew it was already too late. The bolt that thing
could launch would pin me to the wall and I’d go up in flames with the house.

  I figured he was going to put it straight through me. I was the threat, sure enough, not tiny Ezabeth Tanza, and I threw myself down behind a desk as he wheeled it around.

  He swung it on Ezabeth and pulled the lever. There was a solid thwack as the pent-up energy in the string released. At that range, dodging it was impossible. A breastplate of finest Whitelande steel couldn’t have stopped it. I closed my eyes, couldn’t look. I expected a shriek, a cry of anguish.

  There was nothing.

  I opened my eyes.

  The bolt had stopped, rotating in the air a couple of feet from Ezabeth’s chest, but it trembled as the crossbow’s string thrummed. Her eyes were wild, her body shook and fizzing sparks blazed at the bolt’s point, as though the tip was pushed up against a sharpener’s wheel. She had directed her light against the bolt and it was pitted up against the full energy of the crossbow’s release. The amount of light she was focusing to counteract the full force of the crossbow must have been colossal. Her assailant, a man wearing an executioner’s hood, seemed frozen on the spot in disbelief.

  ‘Well fuck me,’ he said.

  The bolt burst. The metal head shattered, spraying the door frame with dozens of tiny, glowing red shards. The shaft detonated from within in a cloud of sawdust and splinters. Ezabeth flew backwards, striking the wall with a meat-on-wood thud and collapsing to the ground.

  Speed, training and a policy of relentless savagery are what make a man dangerous. I was on my feet before she dropped. I ignored the man with the spent bow as his pal made to draw his sword like an amateur. When you draw a sword you do it away from your opponent, or smart men like me do what I did and grab hold of your arm before the blade clears the scabbard. I barrelled into him, forcing his sword arm away from me, and my dagger was out and doing its work. I drove him against the bookcase and stuck him twice in the side, a third in the meat of his shoulder, more. He never got his sword clear of the scabbard.

  The hooded man had more instinct than his dying companion and hurled the heavy crossbow at me. There was no question of him loading it for a second shot before my knife work was done. The heavy wood frame smashed painfully against my elbow. When I looked back, the executioner had drawn a rapier, long steel blade held out across the desk to ward me off. I let the first man sink to the ground. By the sound he was making, the soft, wet whimpering, I’d got him in the lungs at least once. Goodbye, shitbag. Hood-Face had hesitated, maybe unnerved by Ezabeth’s magic or maybe by the brutality his partner had just died of, but his eyes were narrowed and his hand didn’t tremble. He moved like a man who knew the sword, wasting no breath on needless words. I took his partner’s weapon, a cutlass with a hand guard shaped like a clam shell. It was a half-foot shorter than Hood-Face’s rapier, but I always preferred a heavier cutting edge.

  The rapier against the cutlass is a brief and lethal game. The rapier has the advantage in the thrust and if he was fast enough he could strike and retreat before I could bring my own weapon to bear, but if I got my blade against his then his long, slender weapon had no leverage to win in the bind. I danced my sword in the air, kept it moving, couldn’t let him know when I was going to come down against his sword. He snarled against the growing fog of paper-smoke, blinked away tears as it stung his eyes, kept his point low, away from my blade. All I had to do was get our blades together, and I’d be able to step within his guard, let my heavier edge bring about its devastation. We prowled across the floor of scattered books, short steps and long as we each sought to draw the other from his guard into a false and deadly range. Some men will tell you the rapier has all the advantages, but then men say many stupid things and I’ve killed a lot of them for their mistakes.

  Couldn’t see for shit. The smoke was growing thicker as the piles of books sent bright yellow flames higher, towers of fluttering gold.

  ‘Who sent you?’ I demanded, but the hooded man said nothing. He waved smoke from his face, kept his rapier point moving. A steady man, a cautious man, a man of experience and those are always the deadliest. It’s not the loud and ostentatious fighter you fear, it’s the man who bides his time, waits for his opening.

  Down on the floor, the man I’d worked on with the knife was making wet, dying sounds. His friend paid him a glance, his lips drew back in anger for a fallen comrade. His bare forearms were worked with detailed tattoos, roses and thorns coiling about them in circles. I saw the tensing of his shoulders and then he came for me.

  I parried the thrust but he was fast and before I could make real contact he’d rolled his wrist to cut at me from above. My deflection was skilless and frantic but I made it. As I dashed his sword aside, I launched forward in a full lunge, cutlass carving a trail in the black fog but either he was fast or I was half blind because somehow I didn’t manage to hit him.

  ‘We don’t both have to die here, captain,’ I heard him say. Heart drumming in my ears I realised that the fire had taken across the carpet, the curtains framed the windows in arches of flame, and the bookshelves were taking. I felt the heat on my skin, through my breeches.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Only you.’

  ‘Whatever pay you’re on, it can’t be worth this.’

  ‘Not everything’s about the money.’ I wasn’t just showing grit. Ezabeth lay back by the doorway somewhere, and this man had tried to put a crossbow bolt through her chest. Stopping it had taken everything she had. Back behind where my heart should have been I harboured a fury hotter than any pile of burning literature could ever produce, a rage born of fear and pain and longing. I needed to see a head roll across the floor, and I needed it to be his.

  Fate conspires against us constantly, never satisfied to provide that which she owes us. The arsonist realised that a room as large as the library had more than one exit, and he ran for a second door leading to a different wing of the house. I’d have followed, but Ezabeth was still prone as the fire crept towards her. The man in the mask glanced back at me once, and then he was gone.

  ‘Captain, the fire,’ Ezabeth wheezed. The flame was crawling over every surface, eating across the desk, devouring paper.

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ I said. I bent to lift her to her feet but she pushed me away.

  ‘Save whatever you can,’ she wheezed. ‘Do it!’

  My first victim had begun to make louder death rattles as the flames began finding purchase in his oil-wet clothes. He probably had a family somewhere. He probably had a girl. Probably hadn’t envisaged ending up this way. Not my problem. He’d made his bed, and it was one of blades and fire.

  Getting burned for paper is stupid but the look in a woman’s eyes is another thing. It was all I could see of her face, but the panic, the need in her eyes was too great to ignore. Damn, but I can be a fool for a face.

  That she was a half-mad, tart-mouthed bitch who had no respect for me didn’t enter into it.

  I raced the fire across to the writing desk and scooped up as many leather-covered notebooks and papers as I could. Beneath the notebooks were sheets of crumpled old wax-paper covered with faint blue lines. They were yellowed, old, probably totally useless but I didn’t have time to be picky. I tossed everything out into the hallway, and shut the door on the blaze as the black smoke clawed at my eyes. I lifted Ezabeth, books and all, and headed out of the house by a different door than we’d entered. I kept the sword in my hand until we were clear in case the hooded bastard had stayed around for another pop at us, but he’d scarpered. His work was done, and as we left I could see the roof was beginning to burn. It might spread to other houses nearby if the wind scattered enough embers.

  Soon as she was recovered enough to walk I took Ezabeth back to my grotty little apartment, somehow feeling more ashamed of it than ever. I put her in a chair as I washed the blood from my hand and cleaned my dagger. I dried it carefully, wiped it down with an oily rag and tossed the sword i
nto the cupboard. It was standard military issue, which told me nothing about its former owner. There were thousands like it floating around in the hands of the retired and the pawn shops.

  ‘It’s all gone,’ Ezabeth said. She sounded as though she were crying, but her eyes were clear. That frightened, frantic look she’d worn back at her residence was back.

  ‘Maybe there’s something in those books,’ I said, though the chances of anything worthwhile appearing in a few random notebooks seemed unlikely. I took her a cup of water, even filled one for myself. I hate water.

  ‘They were there to destroy them,’ she said. I didn’t admit the obvious. ‘Don’t you see what this means?’ I shrugged. She said, ‘Someone doesn’t want me getting my hands on Maldon’s research. There has to be something to it. There must be.’

  ‘Well, it’s gone now.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll go to the marshal directly,’ she said. She meant to speak with force but her exertions had robbed her of strength.

  ‘What you did with that bolt. That was pretty impressive,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Too tired for more.

  I felt awkward. Stupid, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

  ‘Come on. You can sleep here tonight. You need rest.’

  She protested, but I lifted her like she was a kitten and slid her into my freshly laundered sheets. She tried to protest but her words grew indistinct, and then she was making an absurdly loud snoring sound for such a small body. I’d chosen, I realised that now. Against my better judgement, against the law, against my bargain with the raven. I’d chosen and somehow the recklessness of my actions didn’t taste as bitter as I’d anticipated. The choice had only been illusionary. Call it sentimentality, call it intuition, but whether she was right or wrong I’d been on her side from the moment she came back into my life. It had just taken me this long to admit it. Ezabeth’s opposition wasn’t just some theorem. Tonight, her enemies had tried to stop her. If they could get to her, then they would kill her.