Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  Six heartbeats, maybe seven, was all it took. When the fire of hatred is hot, when there’s no time for circling and feinting because you fear the sword in your back more than you fear the sword before you, attack is all there is. Stannard looked into my eyes and raised his sword high. No point in defending now, so he sought to cleave me. I may have skewered him, but dying men fight on until they’re gone. I threw myself in close against him, got a nose full of unwashed armpit as I wrapped him in my arms and bore him down. We hit the ground and I rolled away as he continued to flail after me with his sword. He was gracked now, though, down on the floor, too fucked to rise again.

  Hands yanked me upwards and I had a fist balled and ready to throw when I saw it was Nenn. She wore a savage grin, eyes blazing. I threw my arms around her and crushed her against me.

  The smell of powder and slow match lingered in the air, masking the blood. The ironworks floor was wet with it, getting wetter as bodies bled out. Men were gasping and choking as they suffered, and someone was sobbing over a lost leg. I glanced over the victors, hazy through the smoke. Some were the lads I’d taken on, but others I didn’t know. I wondered where they’d come from. I wondered how they’d found me. Too many questions for now. Those answers could wait. Nenn was smiling darkly at me, Wheedle was hissing at a gash across his collar bone but it didn’t look too bad. Seven of my recruits were upright, but four had been killed and three more were down with wounds. No time now to assess how bad. Dantry Tanza was breathing hard, rapier in his hand.

  ‘Tanza,’ I said, nodding to him.

  ‘Captain,’ he said, nodding back.

  ‘How did you do?’

  ‘I killed two,’ he said without emotion. He shrugged towards a pair of bloody bodies. I figured that one of them had suffered a mortal wound from a matchlock shot before Dantry had managed to run him through, but a kill is a kill. The men were dead and that’s what mattered.

  Ezabeth stood in the doorway. She held a gun in her hands, the match cord smoking at each end, but it didn’t look like she’d fired it. A crow perched on her shoulder, cackling. Behind her in the street I saw dozens more of the big dark birds, a whole murder of them.

  ‘The birds came, and I knew he’d sent them,’ Ezabeth said.

  I looked down at the tattoo on my arm. I didn’t like to feel gratitude to Crowfoot. I guess I owed him even more, now. Nice to know he was looking out for me, somehow.

  ‘What do we do with her?’ Dantry said. His young face was more serious than a face that lineless has any right to be. He looked over towards Prince Herono of Heirengrad, who had retreated to the back of the ironworks. She was glaring towards the ragged-looking assortment of mercenaries, her single eye swivelling frantically as if trying to escape from her head.

  ‘Her?’ I asked as I picked up the poker. ‘To her, we do very, very bad things.’

  ‘Criminal or not, you can’t harm an elected prince of Dortmark,’ Dantry said with a frown. ‘And she is our cousin.’

  ‘She’s a traitor,’ I said. ‘She’s a bastard liar. The Darling was here, all cosy as hell with your cousin.’ I narrowed my eyes, my jaw trembling with the fury, the hatred that coursed through me. When fear is taken away it has to go somewhere. Most men use it on bringing down some other poor cunt. I am not so different from other men. I considered the smoking end of the poker. The world had turned upside down in a pair of stinking, blood and gun-thunder minutes, not even long enough for the iron to have lost its glow. I had an inclination to stick it as deep as I could up Herono’s arse and let her cook from the inside.

  Herono had not moved from the wall. She didn’t seem to be trying to escape, didn’t plead. Now that I started paying her some attention, she didn’t seem to be doing anything. She might have been dead, but that she was stood bolt upright, stiff as a post.

  ‘We don’t have long. Someone will rouse the aldermen and I don’t want those fuckwits getting involved,’ I said. I approached Herono, the longsword still in my hand, letting the point trail against the floor. It made a pleasant, tinny kind of grinding noise against the backdrop of the moans of the wounded. Dantry, Ezabeth and Nenn joined me. The others tended to the bloody or else stood well back. I guess Nenn probably hadn’t mentioned whose men they were going to hit, and they were only now realising that they’d wiped out the last of the Blue Brigade.

  ‘So,’ I said to the prince. ‘You’ve sold us out. You’re in it up to your fanny with a Darling. He went to prepare for something. What’s he preparing for?’

  Prince Herono said nothing. As if she didn’t even register that I’d been speaking.

  ‘Something is wrong with her,’ Ezabeth said firmly. The prince had turned a shade somewhere between grey and green. Her one eye twitched, seeming to strain against its own socket.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Nenn spat. ‘Captain, I don’t like it. Permission to grack that fucker right now?’

  ‘Denied, private,’ I said quietly. ‘Herono? Can you hear me? Wake up, you piece of shit.’ I stepped forward and raised a hand to slap her across the face.

  With a popping, sucking sound, Herono’s one eye pushed out from her face on a bulbous white body. It pulsed outwards once, twice, three times, an inch with each push until suddenly the rest of it slithered out of the socket and fell to the floor. The prince collapsed to the ground and we stared down at the fat, juicy grub worming its way around on the floor. Its body resembled a bloated maggot, but the eye at one end continued to see. Of that I was sure.

  A dreadful smell filled the air, far worse than the acrid burn of powder. It turned everything to nausea; the odour of things long dead, things long rotted, of things that decayed. Stagnant. Only one wizard’s magic carried that vile taint with it.

  ‘Shavada,’ Ezabeth breathed, and I knew it to be true. Nenn skittered back a few steps, but the Tanzas held their ground. That took guts. I was either too weary or too surprised to move.

  ‘Fucking wizards,’ I said.

  ‘I am free of it,’ the eyeless prince whispered. She coughed, a choking sound, hoarse and hacking. She brought her fist away speckled red. ‘Thank you. Thank you. At last.’

  ‘Cousin?’ Ezabeth said, kneeling beside her. I felt an absurd, irrational envy as she tenderly cupped the blind prince’s face. I would still rather have put my fist through it, and the jealousy that rose in me made me want to do so even more. Instead I picked up the old bucket and put it down on top of the eye-grub, which was trying to crawl away. It bumped against the side of the bucket, nudging at it in a bid to escape. I put a foot down on top of it to be sure. This wasn’t just sorcery, even of the Darling kind. This was powerful Deep King magic and I wasn’t going to let it escape that easy.

  ‘They caught me,’ Herono moaned. ‘Caught me in the Misery. Took my eyes. Put that thing in. Sent me back. I have been his creature for so long. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t speak,’ Ezabeth said. ‘We’ll find you a physician.’

  ‘No,’ Herono breathed. ‘Dying. Not long for me, I think. Can feel it. The magic that kept me alive is returning to its master. He has seen through that thing … has let it control me all this time. Since they caught me. In the Misery. Trapped me.’

  ‘Rest,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Herono said. Her blind hands grasped out, caught her by the hood. ‘The Darling. Planning an attack. Attack here. Soon. They believe … believe Nall’s Engine has failed us. Know that there is no power in it any more. They need you to prove it.’

  ‘How do they know?’ Ezabeth asked, prising the fingers from her hair.

  ‘Used me,’ Herono breathed. I could hear the pain in her breaths, the laboured draw. I’d heard it before in dying men. I tried to pity her. Somehow I couldn’t. ‘The Order needed me to falsify … to falsify supply records. Make the Dhoja spies believe it all still worked. To reduce the supply to a level that the Engine could still hold while … pretendin
g that it still functioned. Venzer … would not say why … But then you came. When you told the Order that you had proof that the Engine had failed … You told Shavada what he needed to know. That’s why they come. They’re coming. They’re coming. Tell Venzer that …’

  We never learned what Herono would have said to Venzer. She was dead.

  27

  I gave Stannard’s corpse a grin and a pat on the cheek before attending to more serious business. The Range Marshal was not best pleased to see me.

  ‘I thought you were killed at the Maud.’

  ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘You have made new enemies,’ he said coolly. The marshal’s hat hung limply over a deeply furrowed brow as he skim-read report after hastily written report.

  ‘The list might be somewhat shorter than you’re imagining,’ I said. I put the heavy, covered jar I was carrying down on the floor and then took the seat across the sea of purchase orders, requisition statements and contractor contracts plaguing the marshal’s desk. He stopped and looked up at me.

  ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t have you arrested, tried and hanged before sundown. I’ll give you five minutes of my time to convince me that you should not die today.’

  ‘Prince Herono has been Shavada’s puppet for years. Now she’s dead, there’s a Darling loose in the city, and the drudge are on their way.’

  The Iron Goat looked up over the paper chaos atop his desk, scowling as he lowered his monocle.

  ‘What have you done this time, Galharrow?’ Venzer sucked air through his missing teeth. I saw the remaining set had a light purple cast to them. It was still pretty early in the afternoon but he’d been drinking, an open bottle of liquorice spirit sitting guilty amongst the chaos of paper. The soldier in me wanted to reprimand him. The drunk wanted to join him. Neither won out.

  ‘I killed some people.’

  Venzer’s eyes had gone very cold. There was a button on the desk, a large, half-sphere of polished white ivory set in a bronze frame. It was an alarm. If he pushed it, his tame Battle Spinner would probably burst in and ash me before asking any questions. I don’t know why I flirted with fate that way, save that I was tired, my dry tongue ached for a sip of the good stuff and all my reserves of terror had been worn out. Neither of us moved.

  ‘You killed Prince Herono?’

  ‘Technically I think Shavada killed her. But she’s dead, and I’m moderately responsible for it.’

  ‘My patience is thinner than you might think, captain,’ Venzer snapped at me. ‘You may enjoy being cryptic but you only have seconds to explain why I shouldn’t clap you in irons.’

  I gave him the short of it. The Iron Goat sat licking at the purple stains on his teeth. He hadn’t been hitting the bottle for long. The first thing you do when you got a problem like mine is get cunning. You don’t sup shit that’s going to make it obvious, you do it quiet, invisible, so that nobody realises. Tell yourself that you can stop whenever you want to, that it’s just for today, just for the week, just until the bad time passes and you can get back to normality. Then one day you wake up and ten years have passed and you’re still running the shittiest, most pointless errands for the most dismal pay. Venzer was still an amateur.

  At the story’s end, I placed the jar on the desk and stripped back the covering cloth. The fat little maggot creature was writhing this way and that, trying to find a way out of its confines. For all that it was a big eye on the end of a grub, it seemed blind enough now. I wondered whether Herono had felt its tail worming around in her skull, tickling up against her brain. The thought made me sick. I’d sealed the jar with a cork and then melted wax around it. The dead odour had been contained so far.

  ‘This is Shavada,’ I said, placing a hand atop the jar. Even then, I didn’t trust the thing not to push out the cork and make a lunge for the marshal. It was a risk bringing it into the inner sanctum but I had to move fast. ‘Or part of him, anyway. Shavada had his claws into Herono for years, ever since her capture in the Misery. What Herono knew, he knows.’

  Venzer had seen a lot of weird shit in his days on the Range. The year of the witching fever, when men would laugh themselves to death, breaking their own ribs with their spasms. The cries of the gillings weren’t good for a man’s sanity, and dealing with Crowfoot wasn’t much of a party either. The eye in the jar didn’t cause him to shriek or cower. Instead he swallowed twice, then again, apple bobbing in his throat. The magnitude of the betrayal settled on him. When he found his voice he spoke in a dusty whisper.

  ‘Her body?’

  ‘My men have it in the Bell,’ I said. ‘Had to kill a lot of her boys. I guess they were as innocent as anyone gets out here, but we didn’t have a lot of choice.’

  Venzer got hold of himself, shook his head.

  ‘Cover it.’ I did.

  ‘Only thing I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is why you conspired with her to have Dantry Tanza gracked.’

  ‘An accusation like that could see you in the stockade. Or the stocks. Or dead,’ Venzer said coolly.

  ‘Yeah, I guess. But we both know you won’t. You like me too much.’

  ‘Spirits, Galharrow, but you’re a cocksure arse. It was Adenauer’s plan. Ezabeth Tanza was spreading her sedition and with the influence her rank gave her, people were willing to listen. We had to do something.’ He shook his head ruefully.

  ‘You wanted Dantry killed because his sister made too much noise?’

  ‘It was a bluff,’ Venzer snapped. ‘Don’t you see? We’ve been bluffing for years.’

  ‘You mean Nall’s Engine? It is down, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s been down since Nall left us. He had us build it eighty years back, but we never understood the science. We did what he showed us, pumping millions of marks of phos into the heart beneath this citadel, and the moment he disappeared, it started leaking back out. Rejected, you could say. The Order has tried but they don’t understand it. So they kept the failure secret. Only a select few had any idea. The head of the Order, the five most senior engineers. The technicians that discovered the failing were disappeared off to the west. And that was it. Not even the princes were informed. There are spies, Galharrow, spies everywhere.’

  ‘How did Herono find out?’

  ‘I told her,’ Venzer said. He stood up and walked across to the wall-length windows, looking out at the bloody bronze-bruised sky over the Range. ‘We needed her. Or needed her phos, more accurately. When we discovered we couldn’t feed the heart, we reduced what we bought. What could we do with so much raw power? So much congealed magic? Gleck Maldon was our answer, at first. He absorbed what he could and then released it into the Misery. Quantities of phos that no Spinner should be meddling with. I think it’s what unhinged him. What destroyed him.’

  ‘I’m beginning to have doubts about that. But go on.’

  ‘We had to cut the supply,’ Venzer said. ‘There were too many Talents spinning in the mills, not enough Spinners to make use of the power. Couldn’t sell it, or the phos companies would have realised there was a grotesque surplus. Questions would have been asked. Herono’s light mills produced a third of what the heart of the Engine had consumed when Nall was present. We feared that a spy may have infiltrated the Order, that Nall’s Engine had been sabotaged somehow. I brought Herono onto the inner circle of the Order’s council, asked her to falsify records, to divert her phos supply carefully, secretly, as though she were profiteering from it. Exactly as Ezabeth claimed. Indeed, some of the princes believe that they are profiteering. Lots of little movements, all secret from one another. Of course, Herono agreed to it.’

  Venzer sat back deeply in his chair. He seemed dwarfed by it, a tiny speck, a shrivelled flap of skin over bones that should have been pastured out years before. He had a core of iron, but the flesh grew brittle. I can’t be too harsh about the way he looked. Herono’s brass knuckles hadn’t left me looking pretty eit
her. The flesh of my face was swollen, purple and tender as calf meat. It was testament to life on the Range that Venzer hadn’t even questioned it when I walked in.

  ‘And the Tanzas?’

  ‘You do have a soft spot for the scarred, don’t you?’ Venzer asked. My bad news must have been sinking in, because he reached for the liquor and poured himself a tot. He didn’t offer me one. For once, I wasn’t in the mood. Somewhere in the hells the wind must have been cold.

  ‘Maldon spoke highly of Ezabeth Tanza, before all that phos drove him crazy,’ Venzer said. ‘But the two of them were more addled than anyone realised. It will do that, taking too much light, burns you as sure as staring into the sun. I feared for his sanity, so I brought in a few independents. Spinners and engineers from the Order, even an expert from the university. You know what they told me?’

  He paused to refill his glass.

  ‘Mad. Nonsense. Sheer, barmy craziness. Calculations that they didn’t understand, not one of them. And at the heart of it, some absurd children’s rhyme. Then Maldon began talking about the Engine, something he’d come to understand about the way that it worked. Sat in here one day and told me that we were all doomed. He claimed that he’d solved some paradox. It was ridiculous babble, of course.’

  ‘Herono’s man burned his house down. It took me a while, but I think I understand it now.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Herono wanted Ezabeth to prove that Nall’s Engine was failing, but she couldn’t risk her getting her hands on Nall’s original papers. Couldn’t risk anyone having them, in case they held the secret to getting the Engine working again. So she tried to destroy it.’

  ‘Herono actually had us believing that it had been Ezabeth who started that blaze. Losing control, just like Maldon did. That she had to be nullified.’

  Venzer shook his head. This time he didn’t bother with a cup and took his liquor straight from the bottle.

  ‘Herono always wanted Ezabeth to continue her research,’ he said in a low, cold voice. ‘Said it should be completed, but secretly and without fanfare. “Let her complete her work from the confines of the Maud,” she said to me. “Perhaps it will be useful.”’ He chuckled bitterly. ‘It is no wonder to me now. She’d thought it through so well. If Dantry were dead, Herono would become Ezabeth’s guardian. We could imprison her indefinitely, let her provide the proof that Shavada wants. But by that time, I already knew. I tried it, you see. Three years ago. I went into the control room and I threw the lever. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.’