by Ed McDonald
I was stunned. My mouth worked up and down like a fish. He’d known, all this time. Had held the secret tight against his chest. I’d seen him decaying, seen a great man buckling beneath an impossible burden. I hadn’t realised quite how much weight he bore for the rest of us.
‘It’s what they wanted all along. Proof that the Engine has failed. The Deep Kings won’t risk their sorry hides in range of it until they’re certain that it’s dead. But when they are certain …’
‘Yes. When they are certain.’ Venzer nodded. ‘When they know our great weapon lies silent, the Deep Kings will come in all their darkness.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We got a real fight on our hands now.’
‘A fight?’ Venzer asked with an unpleasant, hysterical grimace on his face. ‘No, Galharrow, there’s no fight. The charade had to stand, you see? We’ve lost. The game is over. Nall’s Engine was the only thing that held the Deep Kings back.’
‘We have walls, guns, blades and brandy,’ I said, turning my voice hard. ‘And fuck me but those are good ingredients to whip up a fight.’
‘Immaterial against the numbers the drudge can throw against us. They have their legions, they have their sorcerers. The Deep Kings are six, and we have just Crowfoot and the Lady of the Waves, if we can even count them. It was Nall’s Engine that held them back since the Heart of the Void first burned the land. Our only weapon.’
It appeared that my commander had given up.
‘Not our only weapon,’ I said. I wanted to shake some fight back into him. ‘We have a whole army stationed here. How many men do we have, including state retinues? Forty-five, fifty thousand men?’
‘Thirty-two thousand, spread along the Range,’ Venzer sighed. ‘Twenty thousand of them at Three-Six, four thousand here, and the rest at the stations. Oh, Galharrow. Dear boy. You don’t understand at all, do you? The Deep Kings come for us, and there’s nothing we can do to stand in their way. Thirty-two thousand men all in one place couldn’t put enough shot into the air to stop them. The communicators from the north count almost two hundred thousand Dhojaran warriors crossing the Misery. You want to know why they aren’t coming at us in a charge? Because they’re building a road across the Misery. A road, half a mile wide, paved stone, raised from the ground. There are as many engineers out there as there are soldiers. They believe they have us, they know it’s over. So, the Kings won’t send their men charging across blindly. Why bother? They were ancient before even Crowfoot was born. They can wait a little, be absolutely certain that the Engine has failed us. There is nothing holding them back but their own caution. The truth is, they’ve already won.’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Allow Ezabeth to access the heart. Let her see if she can fix whatever is wrong. It’s worth a try.’
‘I’ll give the order. She’s welcome to. You think I haven’t already? I lost sixteen senior Order engineers just trying to get in. It’s over, Galharrow. Even your master sees that.’
‘I don’t—’ I began, but he cut me off.
‘I don’t share all the reports. Don’t broadcast the worst of the news. Even if the walls at Three-Six stood up to them. Even if the princes raised another hundred thousand men and sent them to man the pikes, the Dhoja aren’t afraid anymore. The Deep Kings have come in person. Real wizards, on our side of the Misery. Shavada, Philon, and now they say Acradius and Iddin are joining them. They will sweep our forces aside, swatted like bugs from the air. We have cannon, and walls and one half-mad old Nameless who has disappeared off to spirits know where when we need him the most. All of those will mean nothing when the Deep Kings choose to take their revenge for the Heart of the Void.’
28
I had no idea how long we had left, how many useless, pointless weeks before the Dhojaran army rolled up on its new road and the Deep Kings reduced the walls of Three-Six to rubble. I thought about running, about heading as far west as I could get and taking a ship. Maybe if I could get out to Hyspia, the Iscalian states, even reach the savages of Angol, I’d get far enough away to never see another one of the drudge. Maybe I could go and join Crowfoot, wherever the hell he’d got to. I had no love for the Nameless, but they were still the only ones that could stand up to a King. The rest of us, we had to run.
But I didn’t. Instead I got set for a fight.
The Iron Goat offered me a commission in one of his battalions, like he always did. I brushed it off, as I always did, and set about finding work for my squadron of useless, flea-encrusted layabouts, vandals and eye-gougers. Tnota was sick. I paid him only one visit, finding him grey and unresponsive in a sweat-stained bed, though the surgeon said he came around from time to time. The fever had not diminished. I thought that he would die soon, and could not bring myself to see him again.
Ezabeth and Dantry were safe enough now. They took up residence at Otto Lindrick’s house, and together they continued trying to decipher Maldon’s equations. Between taking jobs dragging deserters back to be hanged, I tried calling in on them a couple of times. Only Dantry would see me, though I knew she was there as well. He said she was too deep into her studies to be disturbed, but we both knew that was bullshit.
‘Well, give her my regards,’ I said on one failed attempt, and turned to go.
‘Captain, wait.’ Dantry frowned, an uncertain look. ‘I don’t know what passed between you. I don’t understand it. But she cries. She cries all the time.’
‘That woman is harder than the hells.’
‘Even so. She cries.’
‘Things are bad.’
‘I know. But she never cried before.’
‘That supposed to make me feel better?’
‘I don’t know. No, I suppose not. I just thought you should know.’
Word came down from Three-Six. A scouting party had got close enough to Shavada’s contingent to get a good count of the numbers, and the communicators were hammering desperately to send more men. Send more men, more guns, more fucking Battle Spinners. Like we had any of those to send.
I stopped back home one night, fuzzy-headed and lighter in the pockets than I should have been thanks to a shitty run of tiles. A little kid was waiting outside the door of my apartment, a boy, his skin grey and his eyes orange as an owl’s. One of Saravor’s little helpers. He didn’t say anything, just held up a box about the size of a man’s head, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I took it, felt something shift inside.
‘This from Saravor?’ I asked. The child nodded. ‘Do I want to see what’s inside?’ He said nothing at all, as though he had no feelings either way, or else he didn’t understand the question. ‘You want to come in and sit down a while?’ The child shook his head. They were always mutes, these little ones that belonged to the Fixer. I felt a curl of revulsion as I wondered whether they were allowed to keep their tongues. The boy started walking away.
‘Hey, kid,’ I called after him and he turned towards me. He didn’t look me in the eye. ‘If I killed your master, would that make you happier?’
The blank-faced child stood silent for a moment, then shook his head. No emotion at all, not so much as a blink as he turned and walked off. I frowned after him. Maybe he had no frame of reference for what a better life would be like. Maybe he’d formed that strange bond that occurs between master and slave. Or maybe a life with that sick fucking creature was better than being an orphan out on the street. Hard to imagine how, though.
I carried the box inside, stuck it on the table and slumped into a chair. Whatever Saravor had sent me, it couldn’t make me feel much worse. You can always surprise yourself with just how much worse things can get, though.
The box contained a severed head. I opened it and stared down, barely surprised, not even impressed. I lifted the head and placed it on the table. It was quite dry, leathery even, the head of a man past his best years but the hair still dark and worn long like a younger man’s. He’d been clean-shaven whe
n he died, and the skin around the stump of his neck had been stitched neatly together.
‘What am I meant to do with this?’
The head’s eyes fluttered open. I’d half expected something like that. I sat back in my chair.
‘What do you want?’ I said. I wasn’t talking to the head.
‘I want my money, Galharrow,’ Saravor said through the head’s lips. The unwilling intermediary’s eyes swivelled in the sockets to look at me, but his jaw didn’t move at all. The sorcerer’s words hissed out, sighs of corpse-breath.
‘You’ll get your fucking money,’ I said.
‘I like you, Galharrow,’ Saravor said. ‘You bring me work. You bring me flesh to work and shape.’
‘I think you’re probably worse than the Dhoja,’ I said.
A hiss of air escaped the head. Maybe it was meant to be laughter.
‘I like you, but when I do business, I forget who I like,’ the sorcerer’s pet head said. ‘Time is ticking by, and word is that none of us might be here much longer. Since I do not intend to be sitting idly by waiting for the Deep Kings to invite me to their court, your deadline has been advanced. Get me my money, Galharrow, or it will go badly for you. I own you. Did you forget that?’
‘You don’t own me you fucking piece of—’
It is, without a doubt, ill advised to verbally abuse a sorcerer. The silver dragon in my chest stirred, reared its wicked head, and spat fire.
How to describe what he did to me? Imagine that all your skin has grown very loose, as if it were a great coat but still attached to you. Then imagine that some great giant grabs a handful of that skin and twists it around and around so that all of you is twisting, all of you is stretched and tearing and pulled in an excruciating twist, until you wonder how it’s possible that you can still be covered in skin. Lastly, imagine that instead of on the outside, it’s all going on inside, and it’s your heart that’s getting twisted and you suddenly feel the floor slamming into your face because you’ve blacked out for a moment and fallen over. It was like that, except the floor part which was actually that.
‘Pay me, Galharrow,’ Saravor hissed, the breath coming faint from the dead man’s mouth. ‘Pay me soon or I’ll have my due from you, spirit or flesh, either will serve. Come visit me soon.’
29
The rain kicked up fiercer than the second hell as I made my way up onto the wall. The wind caught my cloak, sending it snapping around my legs, water plastered my hair slick against my face. Distant peels of thunder set the broken bronze of the sky over the Misery to clamouring with whale song, the scars in the sky flashing with light.
‘You up here all night?’ I asked one of the luckless guards as he hurried towards one of the shelter posts along the wall.
‘Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be,’ he answered, stepping quickly and spitting rain water. ‘Get down if you got any sense, matey.’
Why was I there? The rain came down on me, seeping through my cloak, my doublet, my shirt, even chilling my hands through the thick leather of my gloves and soaking me through to the underclothes. I stared out into the fading light of day, leaned my hands on the parapet wall, and blinked rain water back from my eyes. At first, it was just rain water, and then, as I let everything build upon me, it turned to half rain and half tears. A rare sensation for me. I hadn’t cried in a long time. I’d wept for my children, I’d wept for their mother, or maybe that was all just for myself. Hadn’t had a lot worth crying over since. I’d hardened, turned my core to something tough and dry as old oak, tried to tell myself that I didn’t give a shit about anything or anyone, and for a long time I’d managed to do it. Worked hard in the day, beating heads and kicking pond-scum into line, drank harder in the night so that when I had to put my head down there was no space for thinking and the only hopes I had were for the room to stop spinning. I’d lowered myself far enough that dignity, pride, hopes for the future were all worthless things, so alien to my life than they were for other men. You can’t long for the impossible.
Ezabeth Tanza had undone me. It hadn’t been much of a hope, just a childish fantasy, but she’d shown me something that I wanted more than just another bottle. I’d never truly thought that I could have her, hadn’t allowed myself that delusion. But for a time it had felt good to dream of something, to long for something that was far out of reach. For a time, I had felt alive again. Now she had no use for me, and that was gone, and I stood on a dark wall in Valengrad, sodden through and crying a decade’s worth of pain and self-loathing and frustration into a thrashing storm that cared nothing for it. It had to come back. The emptiness, the void inside me. It had to fill the space that she had occupied. I needed that hole in my heart to be myself again. Part of me wanted her to hurt as I hurt. I hated myself even more for that.
It was as if my thoughts had summoned her. I didn’t know it was her at first, through the driving grey rain as she struggled along against the battling wind, cloak rushing out behind her like some wild, thrashing demon.
‘Captain Galharrow,’ she said, and I could barely make out her shout over the roar of the storm. She was veiled, regarding me over the soaked fabric.
‘What the fuck are you doing up here?’ I said. I had to shout across the rain.
‘Your men said I’d find you here. That you’ve been up here every day since we last spoke. I wanted to see you.’
‘I’m here,’ I said, ‘you’ve seen me. What do you want?’
‘I need to ask you for something.’
Ask me. Ask me for anything. I love you. No, you made me love you. I hate you. Ask and I’ll refuse. I wouldn’t give you an ounce of my spit. I’d give you the world.
‘What do you want?’
She watched me coolly for a few moments. She reached up with her maimed left hand and tugged her hood further forward.
‘Your forgiveness,’ she said. The thunder echoed through the sky, forcing her to shout louder over the rain. ‘I didn’t say it before. I was too proud, but I owe it to you. I’m sorry, for what I did to you. I had no right.’
‘I could have died because you put your light into my eyes,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Made me act like a damn fool.’
‘I understand.’
‘Yeah? How can you understand?’ I looked away. The rain seemed to be matching moods with me, and it got suddenly heavier, harder, though I’d not thought that possible. Drops the size of walnuts were crashing down across the wall. A few dedicated soldiers were moving around, carefully checking that the barrels of powder were well covered by oil cloths and that none were standing in puddles.
‘Maybe I don’t,’ Ezabeth said. ‘You’ve done a lot for us. You helped us when you didn’t have to.’
‘I got paid,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe that was your only motivation.’
‘Yeah, well around you, it’s hard to know what to believe.’
She fell silent and looked out with me over the Misery. The after-effects of her phos charm were still at work, even if she’d blown out most of her power fighting Herono’s men, because even knowing what I knew, however she’d deceived me, I still wanted to be around her. I was doubly a fool.
‘You aren’t him, you know,’ she said after a while.
‘Who?’
‘The man you pretend to be. The hard-hearted killer. The drunkard who feels no pain. The common soldier, friend to murderers and addicts. You try hard to be him, but it’s not you.’
‘You think that? Who the fuck am I then?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe nobody knows. You’re bitter, and you can be cruel, and you change your voice depending on who you’re talking to, as if speaking like your men makes you one of them, but it doesn’t. You’re strong, and brave and you hide your compassion behind glares and glowers. But if you were a bad man then I’d be sorry that we met
you, and I’d be more sorry still that I light-blinded you. But I’m not.’
‘I thought the point of you being here was to apologise to me,’ I said. I had to spit rain water from my mouth. It really was a bloody stupid place for a conversation.
‘It was. It is. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not as sorry as I thought I was.’
‘You just keep on brightening up my life.’ I turned away from her to glare across the Misery’s shadowed redness, and as I did a flash of lightning lit the wasteland.
Men. Thousands of men, cloaked and hooded against the rain. They were just black shapes as they trooped across the cracked plain, still miles from the walls, but they were coming. The Dhojaran Empire was here, and they were in range of Nall’s Engine, and now they had sent an army into its killing zone.
Broken hearts would have to wait.
I ran for the nearest alarm crank, released the safety bolt and began to wind it. Phos flared along power lines and a few seconds later the clamouring call rang out into the storm. It droned long and hollow, rising and falling. Lights appeared one by one in puffs of bright phos along the top of the wall and the citadel towers, shining out over the Misery. I looked towards the jester’s cap projectors of Nall’s Engine, but they remained dark and motionless. I hadn’t expected anything else.
The wall guards streamed from their shelters to stare out at the Misery. I heard curses, gasps, and amongst them a few chuckles. No doubt those finding mirth thought that they were about to see a demonstration of the Engine’s power. Those who’d been stacking gunpowder along the wall probably had a better idea of what was about to happen.
