Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Lord,’ I gasped. The raven swivelled its black head. Birds don’t have expressions, but I thought I saw contempt.

  ‘Galharrow?’

  ‘Don’t harm her,’ I croaked. The air had turned dry, hot as a furnace. My breath burned in my lungs. ‘She’s the one you sent me after. The one to protect. To get out.’

  The bird cocked its head at me, my own blood dripping sticky from its beak, sizzling against the steaming wood of the floor. It flapped its wings out, once, twice.

  ‘What do you want? Don’t you have a wall to be standing on?’

  ‘Nall’s Engine failed,’ I said. ‘It failed and we’re all dead men. Help us. Please. Please help us.’

  ‘I never took you for a begging worm,’ Crowfoot said. The bird barked three chokes of laughter. I bowed my head, felt the hot blood coursing from the rupture in my arm and dripping down over my fingers. A bit of arm-meat decorated the raven’s feathers. It pecked it up, swallowed it down. Behind it, Ezabeth’s fit had subsided. She rolled over onto her side.

  ‘Have you abandoned us, lord?’ I asked.

  ‘Do I answer to you? To anyone? Just do as you’re fucking told, Galharrow,’ the raven glowered. ‘You impudent sot. You interrupt me for this, at this crucial moment? I should destroy you where you stand for your impudence.’

  I pushed back with my heels to sit against the wall.

  ‘But you won’t,’ I said. The air was so hot I had to close my eyes. ‘You won’t, because you need me for something. You need her for something.’

  ‘You presume to second-guess me?’ Crowfoot cawed. ‘Do you know why I despise you? You and all your snivelling kind? It’s your impudence. The sheer gall. The arrogance. I was old when your grandfather was sucking teats. I have been fighting the Deep Kings before your kind had language to name them. Do you know how long this war has been waged? You can’t even imagine.’

  ‘We’re all going to die if we don’t get help,’ I said.

  ‘Ants will be born, ants will die. The colony collapses but the species perseveres,’ Crowfoot said. ‘Your whole life, every experience you have had or ever will have, is just a gust of wind across the plain. Fleeting, momentary, barely more than a dream and less well remembered.’

  The raven turned away from me, shaking its black feathers free of the gore that clung to them. It stalked towards Ezabeth. She sat up.

  ‘Don’t you have work to be doing?’ it cawed at her.

  ‘My work is done. All it shows,’ Ezabeth said slowly, her voice trembling, ‘is that Nall’s Engine is a lie.’

  The raven had already swung its head back to me, its interest in her gone.

  ‘Shavada is coming for you,’ Crowfoot said. ‘But he won’t attack while he believes that Nall’s Engine can still harm him. Delay him for as long as you can.’

  ‘Shavada?’ I said. My heart froze in my chest, my jaw locked rigid. ‘One of the Deep Kings is coming here?’

  He didn’t answer. As though it had been stuffed with woodchips and left to blow over in a wind, the raven teetered to one side and then lay stock-still. It burst into unenthusiastic flames a couple of moments later, sizzling and popping with greasy smoke. I looked down, saw my arm was greasy with blood but the raven was back in his place, the torn flesh smoothed over. The heat of the room was sucked into that raven’s body, leaving a sudden chill in its place. My eyes were drier than Misery sand.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ezabeth said. She’d recovered better than I had. I could only sit and stare into space.

  ‘Shavada is coming,’ I said. ‘Shavada. Coming here. A Deep King.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We have to stop him.’

  ‘We can’t,’ I whispered. ‘We can’t stop him. He’ll come and he’ll take us. Mark us. Turn us into his creatures.’

  Ezabeth mopped blood from my arm with a bed sheet. Again she traced her fingers across the raven tattoo.

  ‘You ever think that maybe the Nameless and the Deep Kings are just two sides of a coin? Seems to me one of them already has you marked.’

  I couldn’t argue with that. She cleaned my arm while I stared off out of a window, watching the bright bronze scars flashing above the Misery. A few thousand soldiers, a weapon that didn’t work and one unnaturally powerful Battle Spinner. Not much to throw in the face of a Deep King. A frog would stand a better chance against an otter, a mouse against a lion.

  Bad odds.

  33

  Midday rolled around faster than I’d have liked. The drudge let us be and the blazing red letters across the citadel changed.

  NALL’S ENGINE TO FIRE AT NOON

  I wondered whether it was wise to advertise it. Decided it didn’t matter. At best it would send the drudge into a panic, maybe even make them back off. Not likely. From their current position they couldn’t have escaped the kill zone. At worst it would make them throw everything they had at us to try to take the walls before we blasted them all into the hells.

  None of it mattered. I didn’t care any more. I couldn’t find it within me.

  Ezabeth watched me from the stairs, her eyes dark above the veil. She clutched a sheaf of ink-smeared pages in one hand. Couldn’t read what she was thinking. I’d never been able to read what she was thinking. There was only so much bitterness that I could hold, and I let what I’d felt for her leak out like a slow fart. She’d used me because she’d needed me.

  I had no company left, just Nenn and Dantry. I told him to go help his sister – he was more use to us with a pen than a sword. Despite his annoying hair and naivety I knew that I’d be sorry when he got killed. Nenn couldn’t be dissuaded from manning the wall and went to join those that still fought. I wondered whether I would ever see her again. As the hour of our defeat approached, entering the heart of the Engine was our only chance. I didn’t have a good plan, barely a plan at all. If the Order’s best engineers had died in their attempts to breach the seal, what chance did I have?

  Any chance was better than none. I set out for the citadel.

  The city was silent save for the creaking of shop signs in a wind kicking up from the west. Somewhere a goat brayed, forgotten in its shed. Windows had been boarded up, as though that would stop the drudge from staving them in and taking beds and pans and drapes for their own. Did the drudge care for such things? I guess nobody really knew. They got changed, they became what they became and then they served their masters. I’d always assumed they had no real will of their own, pawns in the grasp of the Kings, like Herono had been. I scratched at my arm. Best not to think about it.

  I passed familiar places turned strange. The bath houses, a barber’s I had frequented a few years before, half a dozen taverns whose owners would serve my drink without asking, the big weaver’s, the small light mill on Time Row. None of them seemed themselves. Bricks, stone, wood and thatch, just bits of the earth. They weren’t what they had been. Without people, they were just shapes in mud and stone. Only the citadel retained its true identity, the great iron projector arms hanging out beyond the battlements. At this last dreadful hour, the only thing that stayed true to its character was the one crafted by inhuman hands.

  As I approached the citadel, something lay sprawled dead in the road. A man in uniform, gold-trimmed black. He was still, the city was silent, and my heart started pulsing faster in my chest, thump, thump, thump. I jogged to the end of the road, knelt. Something had cut him through the chest, ribs sheared through. His eyes stared blankly at the scudding clouds overhead.

  Sword in hand, I moved on towards the citadel. The body was the first of many. Civilians and servants dressed warm against the weather in oilskins and fur collars lay scattered like tiles struck from a board. A few lay crumpled with blood still slick on their lips and jaw, others had felt the bite of power more sharply, sliced in two. Half a dozen soldiers lay amidst broken matchlocks and pikes. The tendons in my neck had turned hard as wet
rope. Not many things in this world are capable of doing that kind of damage. The orderlies back at the Maud had been cut to pieces by the same power. The Darling was here.

  Only one place it could be going.

  I entered the citadel’s wide courtyard. The gatemen had tried to shut it out, but a hole had been melted through the iron portcullis and the guards had felt the bite of mind-worms. A severed arm floated in a trough; a soldier lay dead against a wall with her matchlock across her legs. I had to hurry. I hadn’t any kind of a plan, and when you don’t have a plan, killing something is usually a good place to start. I picked up the dead woman’s harquebus and checked it over. Primed and ready, but the soldier hadn’t got her slow match lit in time to discharge. Bloody useless weapons. I sparked the cord to life, blew it to sizzling and cocked the firing lever. Slow to load, clumsy to aim, I still couldn’t argue with the holes they could made in things, though.

  Thump, thump, thump beat the drum within my chest. Breath came dry and short, narrow draws of hard air. Sweat on the skin, down the back. My hand wasn’t steady on the firing lever.

  I didn’t need the trail of bodies to follow the Darling’s passage, but it had left one for me to follow. The bastard thing was burning power fast. Darlings don’t need to charge up like Spinners, but they had their limits all the same. Or at least I thought they did. This one was dispensing his indiscriminately. I entered the citadel, rounded corners, the barrel of my smoking harquebus nosing ahead. A few courtier types, a pair of noble ladies, a junior officer. The last clung to life, bloody bubbles on his lips, terror in his eyes. I left him to his death and hurried down the stairs. A couple of Order engineers lay with their hands around one another’s throats, choked the life from each other under the grip of mind-worms. I found another matchlock in the lifeless hands of a soldier, cord smoking but undischarged. I added it to my arsenal.

  The soldiers who should have been here were all manning the walls. Jonovech had taken command of the walls but he’d forgotten that the city was never the prize. It was the Engine that mattered and he’d left it defenceless. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Down, along corridors and through abandoned guard rooms and down again. I descended. Beneath me lay the operating chamber, and beneath that the heart of Nall’s Engine.

  The soldiers were all off facing the horde in the Misery, but even in times of desperation and war, the Order of Aetherial Engineers had maintained its elite guards at the operating room’s door. Blackened steel armour with intricate gold scrollwork, swords with gleaming lion’s head pommels, halberds with ornately decorated blades. The pieces of their grandeur lay strewn around the guard chamber. They’d done their duty and died where they stood. The door to the operating room lay open surrounded by shreds of muscle and entrail that told the story of the Order’s last failure to protect us.

  The Command Council had convened here. They had sought to activate Nall’s Engine. They had advertised the fact on the side of the fucking citadel and told the Darling precisely where and when to hit them. Fucking idiocy.

  The stench was worse than it had been outside. Thirty men in a cramped room, their insides opened to the musty air. Some, but not many, had drawn their swords. I stepped in amidst the human wreckage, the match cord sending ghosts of smoke into the wretched air. The operating room was silent as the grave, which it had become for our military elite. The panels of dials and levers were splashed red, speckled with lumps of brain and bone. The killings outside had been fast, efficient, single slashes of power to dismember and disable. In here it was different. I could read the glee the Darling had taken as it decimated the poor bastards. A fox let loose inside a coup, and the chickens had panicked and pecked and been torn apart.

  I glanced at the faces, the pieces of faces. The officer elite of Valengrad: majors, colonels, brigadiers, the robes of a half-dozen Order engineers amongst them. Some of them had been good men. Some of them had been arseholes. Now they were all just torn meat and bone, clutter for someone else to clean up. I didn’t see General Jonovech amongst them, but as I scanned the charnel house my eyes fell onto the largest of the levers. A great black iron arm protruding from the floor, six safeguarding locks around it unclasped. The knob was shaped like a golden hand, reaching out to be taken in a manly grasp. The operating lever that would activate Nall’s Engine at every station along the Range. A bloody smear stained the gold hand and I saw with a final disappointment that the lever had been thrown. They’d tried and they’d failed. What terrible knowledge that must have been to hold as the Darling moved in for the kill. The Command Council had been shredded, cleaved and burst apart knowing that all was lost. Life is cruel.

  I’d known it was over. It didn’t come as any kind of a shock, but seeing something always makes it worse. For a moment I thought the tear ducts were starting to work behind my eyes but I snarled them down and gritted my teeth against it. No time for weakness. Not now, not ever. I had a monstrosity to destroy.

  Amidst the devastation, the firearms I carried seemed pitiful things, snowballs against the avalanche. A voice I’d been ignoring said that I should turn back. Listen to the heat of your skin, the clenched muscles in your neck. Observe that churning in your guts and remember that this isn’t your responsibility, it told me. Run, it begged.

  I’d been good at ignoring my own best advice for a long time. Only one other archway led from the operating room, a dark stair falling deeper into the cold earth. The Engine’s heart lay below.

  Thump, thump, thump, said my own.

  Not a good idea to go up against a Darling alone, but I was damned if I was going to let it get at the heart of Nall’s Engine. It invaded my mind at Station Twelve. It tried to kill Ezabeth, tried to kill me, and even if hope was draining fast, there was still revenge. If I had to, I’d settle for that small victory. If I got lucky I could put a lead ball through its brain. Sometimes that was enough to kill one. Not always, but I had two tries at it.

  Wet red footprints guided me. One pair small, one large, together they had pressed on beneath the sputtering light tubes. A series of iron doors had impeded them only briefly. They hung from their hinges or lay in torn and blasted pieces in the cramped corridors beyond. Nall’s Engine had been designed to be guarded, protected. I wondered what Nall had envisioned, should this day ever come. Had he imagined corridors packed with soldiers and Battle Spinners? The winding passages and stairs formed choke points, easy for a lone man to defend against limitless opposition. But before he’d left us, Nall had failed to foresee the short-sighted greed of the princes. The great mistake of man is to believe that other men can live up to the ideals that we set them.

  I rounded another corner with a sweep of my gun. Nobody there. I’d grown so accustomed to the scattered bodies that their absence made me nervous. Had I reached the end of the trail? Sweat rolled down my brow, stinging into my eyes. I had no spit left, and the great cold lump of leaden fear in my throat was making very reasonable points. Suicide, it said. I knew it was right and still something made me go on. The fight was lost, the battle over. The drudge had won, and Dortmark was part of Dhojara, but somehow I couldn’t let it go. Not yet. I’d believe it when I was dead. Maybe not even then. As long as I could still spit I was going to fight. I owed it to Tnota, to Herono, to every man, woman and child who’d given everything before me. In the end we’re nothing but the impression we leave behind and I’d rather die screaming and defiant than sink quietly into defeat. And despite everything, I hadn’t given up on Ezabeth Tanza.

  Not dead yet.

  I swept around another corner and they were in front of me, their backs turned. One of them was the Darling that I’d first met at Station Twelve, the same that had chased us from the Maud, the same that had advised torturing me. Someone had shot it in the arm but it didn’t seem to care. A small, slight figure alongside General Jonovech. They both were looking at a great round portal, a round door covered with symbols.

  ‘H
ow can you not know how?’ the Darling muttered in a voice too wise, too bitter for the body it came from.

  ‘None of us knew,’ Jonovech said, voice strained, hoarse.

  ‘There has to be a way to open it,’ the Darling said. He gestured, just a flick of the fingers and Jonovech fell to his knees screaming. I saw his face then, the blood running from his nose, the corners of his eyes, his ears. The mind-worms had burrowed deep. He belonged to them completely.

  I ducked back around the corner, thump, thump, thump. I would only get one shot. If I missed, if I didn’t hit him dead centre of the brain then I was going down with all the rest of the Command Council. A shot to the body wouldn’t stop it, not even the heart. The Darlings didn’t need their organs quite the same way mortals did. Anywhere but the brain and I was going to get split in two like the rest of the poor fuckers back there.

  ‘Lord Shavada demands an answer!’ the Darling demanded and Jonovech shrieked in agony. I risked a glance, saw him thrashing around on the floor like a landed trout. Limbs flopped, legs bucked. The general’s crescent moon lapel pin fell from his shoulders and rolled across the bare stone tiles. ‘I must know!’ the Darling barked. ‘Tell me!’

  The cries subsided. Maybe the Darling had pushed too far.

  ‘A door is just a door, no matter what mysticism the Nameless worked on it,’ the Darling said. ‘There must be some trick to open it. There must be a sequence.’

  The circular door was covered with small discs. Each disc bore some kind of carved image: a sun, a rabbit, a clock. Maybe fifty of them, each a hand span wide.

  ‘What happens if I get the sequence wrong?’ the Darling asked. A rhetorical question, revealing its nerves. A locking mechanism this elaborate wasn’t likely to ask it politely to depart. The Nameless didn’t go for half measures.

  Thump, thump, thump in my chest, drip, drip, drip down my back. I drew a long breath, checked the match cord was properly aligned. Had to make this count. Had to give it one last shot. Not for Dortmark, or Venzer, or even the countless thousands who were going to get made into drudge. I had to do this because this was my fucking city, my fucking Engine, and the Darling was an invader, a cancer within my walls. I brought the matchlock to my shoulder as I rounded the corner. Aimed low to account for the recoil.