Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘The drudge are here?’ Ezabeth said by my side.

  ‘Bloody well looks that way,’ I grunted.

  The end had begun.

  30

  The rain did not relent. My crew stood for an hour getting wet and cold, then wetter and colder. Not that anyone minded, save maybe Nenn. It’s less dangerous down in the gutters, away from anything that the drudge and their sorcerers might fling at the walls, but you also can’t see shit and there’s nobody to kill. Our guns might have been gracking thousands of the bastards, sending them scampering and scattering across the broken earth, or the forty-pound lumps of iron might have been like so many drops of wine spat into the ocean. No way to tell. The drudge could have stopped to draw up earthworks, or they might be coming on at full charge, ladders ready. We didn’t even have a remotely reliable estimate of their numbers, current guesses ranging between five and fifty thousand. The not knowing clawed inside my skin like itching little fingers, prising to escape my body. Only the constant thumping of the guns indicated there was anything going on at all.

  The bright little dragon coiled around my heart twisted painfully. A reminder not to get myself killed before I’d paid my debt. Thanks, Saravor. His profit was assuredly the prime concern on my mind.

  The cannon bleated their percussive blasts again, no volley fire, the gunners loading and firing as swiftly as they were able. I couldn’t be sure, but that didn’t seem like a good thing.

  ‘Nervous, captain?’ Nenn asked. She’d found a decent helmet somewhere, though it didn’t match the rest of her patched and often repaired armour. A layer of rust speckled the side of her breastplate, which she was trying to keep hidden from me.

  ‘Of course I am. I’m not an idiot,’ I said. I get terse when the action’s getting close. I wouldn’t mention the breastplate, not now when it might make her fearful. There’d be a full gear inspection if we repelled this first assault.

  ‘What the fuck are we doing here, captain? This isn’t our usual line of work.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘We’re standing in as reserves. You got somewhere else you need to be?’

  ‘I heard it’s a lot of ’em,’ she said.

  ‘Sure looked like it from up there.’

  ‘Looking forward to getting stuck into it, sir?’

  ‘As little as ever. But we’ll fight, if we’re needed. And we’re needed.’

  ‘Think that there’ll be danger pay for this, captain?’ Wheedle asked. He was running the edge of a straight-bladed sword against a portable whetstone, the grinding whine muted by the rain, the steel too wet to shed sparks.

  ‘There fucking well better be,’ I said.

  Drudge would reach the wall. It should have been unthinkable. Nall’s Engine should have been blazing in action already, blasting new craters across the Misery. Men muttered to one another that maybe it was a trap to lure in more of the drudge, even as they wondered if they were going to die over it. I knew the truth, and I was still standing amongst them, so I guess that made me the stupidest.

  Before long the cannon blasts were joined by the occasional, sporadic clap of a matchlock discharging. Not many gunners could fit under the cannon’s awnings, so their numbers were few. I guessed that the bows would have been spitting arrows the whole time. Women of the quartermaster’s division had been hurrying around the square with bags of extra shafts for some time, though now that flurry had thinned to a drizzle. That meant that either no more arrows were needed, or, more likely, that we’d sent most of our arrows north and there weren’t any more to bring.

  The cannon thundered their storm song, and still we stood cold and wet in the muster square, teeth chattering and feet turning numb. Water ran from helmet rims and sloped from fluted pauldrons. The stink of blasting powder mingled with the rain and a slick smog gathered in the streets as the wind brought the gun smoke back into the city, an ankle-deep mist driven low by the rain.

  ‘What’s going on up on the wall?’ Dantry asked me. I don’t know why he’d attached himself to my unit, but he’d found arms and armour and at least looked the part.

  ‘Not a fucking idea,’ I said. ‘Firing guns, I suppose.’

  ‘Is it always like this? War, I mean?’

  ‘Wet?’

  ‘The not knowing,’ he said. ‘I’ve studied the famous campaigns and battles between the princes when I was reading at university, but they all give so much … detail. Overviews. We’re a hundred yards from the action and I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah. It’s pretty much like that all the time.’

  ‘Seems like a foolish attack,’ Dantry said. He was asking for reassurance. ‘I mean, the walls are high and they’re gunned and manned. What can the Dhojaran commanders hope to achieve?’

  ‘My best guess?’ I exhaled cold breath into the wet air. ‘Valengrad is the heart of the Range, and it’s where the heart of Nall’s Engine is found. The Kings have always wanted Valengrad destroyed, but this is really them testing the Engine. Send an army, fifteen, twenty thousand men, and see if they can get up to the walls. The Deep Kings don’t give a shit about our guns, but they give a lot of shits about Nall’s Engine. They want to know if we can activate it and obliterate these men before they commit the rest of their boys up at Three-Six.’

  ‘Twenty thousand men as … as bait? A test?’ Dantry said, aghast. It was the latest estimate we’d heard.

  ‘You have to think like a King. They’re immortal, so they don’t gamble their chances like we do. They want to take Dortmark, but Nall’s Engine killed one of them, once. You have to realise how big a deal that is to the rest of them. They won’t come at us if they think we can fire it up.’

  I could see by Dantry’s expression that he and his sister knew full well the dire situation we were in.

  ‘Do you think that the drudge can take the walls, without help from the Kings?’

  ‘Depends how many they sent, and what gear they brought. To get this close without us spotting their advance, I’d guess it’s a few thousand and they don’t have heavy artillery. But I could be wrong.’

  Dantry looked down at the growing puddle we stood in. His face had lost it’s boyish cast in just a handful of days. He hadn’t hardened up enough yet to get immune, hadn’t the grit to put aside that sickening feeling that we were all going to die and there was nothing we could do about it. I patted him on the shoulder, though he’d have to take the comfort through layers of wool, leather and steel.

  I saw a junior officer moving through the muster yard with a scroll case, which I figured was being used to keep orders from getting soggy as they travelled between the citadel and the wall. I flagged him down and though he was keen to make haste, he paused just long enough for a shouted exchange over the pouring rain.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Idiots came up at us with ladders,’ the squawk shouted.

  ‘Repelled?’

  ‘Not one drudge made the wall. Must be a few thousand dead and wounded out there.’

  ‘All good then?’

  ‘A slaughter.’ He grinned at me, ‘We’re gracking them left and right. Cannon tore ’em to pieces!’ And then he dashed off through the rain. The men who could hear gave something of a cheer, although the weather had sapped a lot of their enthusiasm.

  It seemed too easy.

  The Dhoja weren’t stupid. Could they really have thought to take us by surprise because of a bit of rain? Didn’t seem likely. The Deep Kings and the Nameless might be willing to toss lives away to test a theory, but the drudge had their own commanders. When the Kings twisted them into warrior form they didn’t turn them stupid.

  A cloaked figure had joined my men. I could tell that it was Ezabeth without seeing her veil beneath the hood because she was barely taller than a child. When she turned I saw that her dress was strapped with a War Spinner’s battle harness. Ten
portable battery coils in iron tanks, each the size of a loaf of bread, were buckled to the leather straps. It looked good on her, and with that veil she looked more Nameless than Spinner, one of the freaks. Our eyes met for a moment, and I gave her a slow nod. She returned it. I didn’t know how many Spinners Venzer had kept in Valengrad when he sent most of the army north to Three-Six, but I’d seen her brought to bear against the drudge before. Ezabeth alone was worth as much as an artillery battery.

  ‘Lady Tanza,’ I called to her, ‘are those all the canisters they’ll give you?’

  ‘They have more. This is just what I can carry, captain,’ she said. Hard to hear her through both rain and veil. I thought on it a moment.

  ‘You all topped up?’

  ‘I’m holding as much as I can, but if I have to throw it at the Dhoja it won’t last long. Battle magic saps phos like nothing else.’ She looked down at her canister belt. ‘I have enough for maybe fourteen, fifteen good blasts.’

  ‘Not enough,’ I said. ‘If we get any action I want you burning them like bonfire mawkins. Nenn. Oi, Nenn, listen up.’ Nenn looked up at me, irritated.

  ‘Go to the store and bring a barrow load of canisters. Enough that Tanza can throw it all night if she has to.’

  ‘Send someone else,’ Nenn said. She took out her pouch of blacksap and broke off a piece. I felt a growl rising in my throat.

  ‘That’s an order, private,’ I barked. Nenn shot me one impudent look, then stalked off glowering, boots sending ripples through the growing lake around our feet. Some of the boys were looking at me as if embarrassed.

  ‘Next time I give an order, I want it done in fucking triple time and you don’t ask questions, you fucking hear me?’ I yelled at them. I looked at the Tanza siblings. ‘Goes for you two as well. I yell it, you do it. No exceptions.’ Ezabeth nodded; Dantry actually gave me a salute.

  The cannons had fallen silent. That meant one of three things: either the Dhoja were out of range, the guns were out of ammunition, or the Dhoja were packed so close to the walls that there wasn’t any trajectory to fire on them.

  ‘Fuck it, I’m going up there,’ I said. ‘Won’t be long.’

  I wasn’t strictly supposed to be going up on the wall, but nobody was guarding the stairwells so it was easy enough to get up. Soldiers in black and gold uniforms were mostly stood idle. The smoke was thick and eye-watering despite the rain, and the cannon barrels glowed with fierce heat. I pushed through to the crenulations and shielded my eyes to look out.

  The Dhoja had pulled back beyond the range where cannon fire would do serious damage. The broken ground beyond the walls was littered with bodies. Thousands of them, some dead, some in pieces, and some of those pieces buzzing their drudge buzz and getting no help at all. Greys and browns mottled the skin of what had formerly been men of the Dhojaran Empire. A battalion of drudge in outdated mail shirts with barbed blades on their spears lay twisted and red beside bearded men with dark skin and stretched ears, slashes of bright yellow across their flat-nosed heads. Helmets lay scattered where the artillery blasts had ripped them from heads, weapons and shields had been discarded as their owners fled. A leg lay here, a hand there, something unidentifiable wept scarlet fluid atop a rock. Furrows and dents in the earth attested to the passage of cannon balls, and arrows sprouted from both carrion and mudlike weeds.

  It had been a suicidal attack. Here and there lay ladders, some of them intact but just as many smashed to pieces. I tried to picture whether they would even reach the top of the wall. Probably not. The larger pieces of drudge corpses looked emaciated, half starved. Some had barely turned, others seemed to have become misshapen. None of them carried decent equipment.

  I reminded myself what this truly was. A test of Nall’s Engine. They’d thrown their weakest junk at us. Lives broken by fire and iron, just to see if we’d activate our weapon. For all that there must have been five thousand corpses along the length of the wall and not a single loss on our side, it didn’t feel like much of a victory.

  31

  The drudge sent their Darlings against us, and the bastard things melted holes in our fucking wall. The fighting went hard until Ezabeth unleashed her light against them. We plugged the holes with corpses.

  We piled bodies as high as we could load them, ready for the meat carts. It kept the living busy. Men moved slowly, wearily. I’d seen rocks in the Misery with more energy. Nothing takes it out of you like fighting for your life, when you give your all in every thrust and cut in case it’s your last.

  The wall had fallen quiet, or at least nobody was shooting. Squawks began to appear from the wall to gape at the freshly melted tunnels. Some of them hadn’t even known what was happening until it was over. Engineers assessed whether the wall above was likely to collapse, but for now it seemed to be happy enough supporting its own weight, even with all those men and cannon atop it.

  ‘We’ll have to pull down these houses and get the tunnel filled in with the rubble,’ a captain with a fancy plume in his helmet was saying. Funny thing about officers, the fewer men they command, the more sense they tend to have. I didn’t volunteer us.

  ‘The other tunnels?’ I asked.

  ‘Five in total,’ the captain told me. ‘Two to the north of yours both collapsed in on themselves halfway along. Maybe killed the Darlings that made ’em. The furthest south was held by the Black Swan Grenadiers. The other didn’t do so well.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘We lost two hundred men trying to push them back into it. Had to send three Battle Spinners to shut down the Darling, and it still killed two of ’em. Just a little kid, like it was ten years old. Same age as my boy.’

  ‘Those little bastards are older than they look.’

  ‘These all your boys?’ the captain asked.

  ‘Those that survived.’

  The waiting started again, like it always did. The tavern on the edge of the muster square looked warm and inviting. I bought a cask for the men. The sweats were back, so I took a mug of ale too and set about washing them away. It hit the spot. Nenn hit the beer like it was going to spoil in minutes. I just did a lot of sighing, a lot of regretting and tried to avoid thinking about how I felt about anything at all.

  Ezabeth and Dantry kept to a corner of the tavern. A lot of men tried to send drinks her way, thanks for what she’d done that day, but she refused them all. What in the hells had she done? I’d never seen a Spinner so powerful. I joined them. Dantry wore a long face. Ezabeth looked exhausted. She’d spread papers across the table in front of her, damp and running with ink, and had scribbled across them so fiercely she’d torn the page.

  ‘Keep your chins up,’ I said. ‘We’re still standing. After a day like today, there’s a lot of folks can’t say that.’

  ‘Dantry worked it out,’ Ezabeth said, looking up at me. Her eyes were glassy, only half seeing me. ‘Maldon’s thesis. All that work, and it came to nothing. Nonsense. He took a children’s rhyme, codified it and then buried it in half a dozen equations to mangle it until it was incomprehensible.’

  ‘Maybe we were expecting too much from a man who smeared his own crap on the walls,’ I said. ‘What’s the rhyme?’

  ‘The same one he sent me before. The heart is black, the heart is cold, only a child could be so bold. The heart is dark, the night comes soon.’

  ‘Only a child can reach the moon,’ I finished. Maldon’s faecal thesis hadn’t been much of a hope but it had turned out to be the literal shit it was written in. ‘Don’t discount anything yet. Maybe he’d lost his mind by then. But if not, he left that message for you two specifically. I doubt anyone else could have solved whatever puzzle he made of it. Stay bright. We’re not dead yet.’

  ‘Aren’t we?’

  We probably were, but I didn’t like it when other people said it.‘ Aren’t you supposed to be the optimist?’ I said. ‘Venzer gave you access to the Engine’s he
art. You’re the only one that has a chance to make this thing work.’

  She held up another sheet of paper on which she’d sketched the heart’s door and its mechanism.

  ‘If I could figure out the mechanism to open it, don’t you think I’d be there right now? But Nall locked it tight. There must be a mathematical sequence to it, but what? He didn’t tell us that. The door is unbreakable, and I wasted three canisters trying to blast it open. I …’ She shook her head. ‘Let me be. I’ll work it out. I have to.’ The pen started up again.

  ‘Let me know the moment you think you have something,’ I said. ‘I believe in you.’

  Ezabeth paused in her scribbling and turned sad eyes to me.

  ‘Yes. I suppose you do.’

  Nobody came with messages or orders. We kept informed by taking turns to run up onto the wall, take a look out and report back to the group. We’d given the Dhoja a real bloodying. I hated the drudge, hated them for what they were even if they hadn’t chosen their corruption, and even I felt sickened at the loss of life. Whoever had command out there was willing to pay a steep price for Valengrad, but while the twisted bodies at the foot of the wall were expendable, losing Darlings had to give them pause. Sorcerers weren’t as cheap as those poor brave bastards they’d funnelled to their deaths. Doubt they expected to lose them. At the foot of the wall the tangle of abandoned ladders started to resemble a forest blown over in a gale, long splinters of broken wood lying haphazard across one another, bodies for foliage and blood for sap.

  ‘Powder’s all gone,’ I overheard the hushed voice of a quartermaster. ‘Guns stay silent now. That’s come from the top.’

  ‘What are we meant to do, throw the gun at them?’ an artillery man fumed.

  ‘You want my advice? If they sound another assault, get your horse and ride west fast as you can. Who knows what tricks they got for next time?’