Blackwing: The Raven's Mark Book One

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Spinners?’

  ‘All dead except for the scarred bitch.’

  ‘What if we fall back to the citadel itself? Think we can hold out here longer?’

  ‘I guess we could try,’ Nenn said, ‘but if we lose the city walls, is there really any point? I know we don’t got fifty thousand men coming in to back us up. They can just starve us out if they want. We’re the rear guard while smart folks take ship and run like all the hells. Crowfoot has fucked off and the Lady of Waves won’t hold her island when there are Deep Kings in Dortmark.’

  ‘Got any better ideas?’

  ‘Send Lady Tanza out with canisters strapped to her and see if she can blow herself up like at Cold’s Crater?’

  We stared at each other across the office. The pretty communications officer pretended not to sense the hostility between us. This had been simmering away for a while. Nenn’s eyes were hard, the kind of look she gave men before she put a dagger in their hearts.

  ‘You have a problem with Tanza? After she saved us, time after time?’ I had to stay calm because Nenn was losing control. Stress was getting to her. ‘Never saw you speak two words with one another. What exactly is your problem, general?’

  Her face was hard. Severe. She wasn’t wearing her wooden nose any more. Gave it up when the fighting had got heavy.

  ‘You don’t want to know.’ Her eyes were hard. She met my stare unflinching.

  ‘Maybe I need to.’

  We stared it out. Eventually, Nenn narrowed her eyes and spoke.

  ‘I forgave you for maiming me,’ she said quietly. ‘Wasn’t your fault. Accidents happen. Could have been anyone. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so close behind you. Was trying to watch your back.’

  I nodded. I’d never apologised for it. Shit happens. I knew that I should have apologised.

  ‘But then she appears. She comes along and your wits are gone and you stare at her like she’s made of fucking starlight.’

  I said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say.

  ‘Tnota isn’t the best man. He’s a first-rate shit some of the time, but he’s dying for your new woman. Right now, in that dirty bed he’s dying for you, and he’s dying for you because of her. There wasn’t even no profit for him to make. You asked him for everything and he gave it. And for what? Some half-mad witch he never even spoke to.’

  ‘Tnota knew the risks,’ I said. ‘He was one of us.’

  Hopefully still was. Could have been dead by now. Probably was. I’d mourn him later, if there was a later for any of us.

  ‘I always wanted you to be like the rest of us,’ Nenn said. ‘You throw yourself down in the mud and you drink and curse and act like you understand us. But you aren’t one of us. You aren’t like us. You were born with silver flowing out of your arse and no matter how we bleed and die for you, you’ll always be sitting above us. Looking down. And she’s just a fucking reminder that despite everything we’ve been through together, you’d drop us all six storeys for the approval of your own kind.’

  I listened. Sometimes there’s a time for just listening. I plucked an old cigar from the ashtray, struck a match. Took a few drags. Nenn glowered at me over the table.

  ‘You’re right. You done?’ I offered her the cigar.

  ‘I’m done,’ Nenn said. She took it. ‘At least you can fucking admit it. Marshal.’

  ‘Good. Now let’s get on with defending this fucking country. General.’

  As we talked over our options, messages came in on the communicator. She was brave, the woman operating that machine. She bore the brunt of the despair.

  Scouts predict Dhojaran assault to commence in two days’ time.

  Dhojaran army camped three miles beyond Nall’s Engines’ maximum range.

  Banners suggest Philon, Balarus, Nexor. No sign of Crowfoot.

  We only had two real options, hold the wall or fall back to the citadel. I had little confidence in our ability to achieve the first. The second was a death sentence.

  Otto Lindrick’s apprentice, Destran, brought a message from his master. He asked me to go to him urgently, to bring Ezabeth with me. I figured he’d want to see me soon enough. I wondered what the treacherous bastard would say this time. He had to be the traitor Gleck had mentioned. Maldon had killed everyone else.

  Only problem was, Lindrick had genuinely helped us out, more than once. It didn’t make a brick of sense, but if someone had been reporting Ezabeth’s activities back to the Dhojarans it had to be Lindrick.

  The drudge had been slow to rise that morning, hadn’t sounded their war horns or advanced on the walls. They were waiting for something, and my message to Lindrick was the buffer holding them back. Shavada feared Nall’s Engine might work, but he’d get over it eventually when we didn’t activate it. I left a message directing Ezabeth and Dantry to meet me at Lindrick’s house.

  ‘You haven’t legged it with the rest then?’ I asked Destran as he led the way.

  ‘No, sir, don’t have nowhere to go, sir,’ the apprentice said. ‘Master Lindrick says the Order must stay. Work at the Engine.’

  ‘You think that’s a bad idea?’ I asked. He shrugged, the way that teenagers will. ‘What do you think, kid? Think we should surrender?’

  ‘Would that really be the worst idea?’ he said.

  ‘You have no idea how bad it would be.’

  ‘If they do win, we’d all become part of their empire, wouldn’t we, sir?’

  ‘We would. Best not to think on it.’

  Lindrick’s house was the only one with phos shining from its windows.

  ‘I found it!’ he exclaimed as I entered. He was brimming with excitement, a red glow to his doughy cheeks. ‘We can do this, captain. We can do this.’

  I tipped my hat back.

  ‘It’s Range Marshal, now,’ I said. But his words had kicked something in my gut. Something stirring that I somehow had been expecting. It was hope. False hope. He could only be misleading me. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Here.’ He passed me a small bundle of papers. ‘It’s the missing link. The information that Tanza needs. To activate Nall’s Engine. This is what will do it.’

  It wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d imagined he’d want to know about the Engine, about how we could activate it. Instead he brandished paperwork as though it were a sword to cut through the enemy.

  ‘Maldon’s papers?’ I said. ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Not Maldon.’ Lindrick beamed. ‘Nall’s originals! I had to translate them, but we have them, Galharrow. We have them by the balls now!’

  The writing of the Nameless? Not some half-mad deciphering, but the real deal. If we’d had these to begin with, all this could have been avoided. I would have been angry, if I hadn’t felt such a sudden urge to live. To survive.

  I had to calm myself. Reminded myself that Lindrick wasn’t on our side. Maybe he’d been laying false trails and misleading us the whole time. Was that what this was, a lie meant to delay us, deceive us and send us chasing rainbows while Shavada closed in to crush us?

  I walked to Lindrick’s liquor cabinet, poured myself a much-needed glass of brandy. Long, deep swallows took it all the way down. It was the same dismal, cheap liquor he’d stocked before. Almost like he kept it just for show, something to put the right colour in the decanter. I never should have paid so much attention to booze.

  I gasped and staggered forward as the blade entered my back. Crystal decanters shattered into a thousand glittering pieces as I fell into the table, sending it crashing over. I looked up, confused, to see Destran standing terrified with a vegetable knife in his hand. He was a puny little thing, but a blade equalises men. As I drew my sword he turned towards Lindrick, then charged at him. The little engineer tried to put up a defence, all flailing arms and panicked shrieks but it didn’t help. The kid stabbed at him over and over, casting red
arcs across the wallpaper. The knife got to the artery in his neck. Otto Lindrick went down.

  I’d managed to make it to one knee. The pain threatened to absorb all other thoughts. Every movement was an agony. Destran still had to go past me. Couldn’t let him. Couldn’t let him get away. I got my sword all the way out of its sheath but my whole body felt weak. Had to hold it left-handed. I was between him and the door. The papers were fallen on the floor between us. He couldn’t get to them without risking my sword.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ Destran said. He was terrified.

  ‘Why you doing this, kid?’ I winced. I could feel hot, wet liquid down my back.

  ‘The Deep Kings are gods,’ he said, and in his eyes I realised that there lay the madness of religion. He was a sympathiser, a fanatic. They’d sucked him in with the sex and promises.

  ‘Trust me, they aren’t any gods that you want,’ I told him. ‘Believe me. I’ve met one. Put that down.’

  ‘Lindrick said that Nall’s Engine can be activated.’ He didn’t seem certain.

  It was a strange standoff. Him with his little fruit knife, me with a sword I could barely hold. Things were starting to get dizzy. Had to stay bright. Had to keep him here. He thought about it a moment, the dark light of fanaticism burning in his eyes and I propelled myself at him. He’d misjudged what I was still capable of and I nearly cut him through the face. He jumped back, then realised that he didn’t need the door. I staggered to my knees, grabbed at him, caught nothing but dust. Destran had vaulted through the window, disappeared out into Valengrad. The little fucking traitor.

  I dragged myself to Lindrick, but it was too late. He stared blankly upwards, an inappropriate smile on his face. I tried to push the edges of his mouth down but couldn’t.

  Ezabeth and Dantry arrived. She took care of my wound, cauterised it with magic. Whatever she did sent warmth running through my back, repairing the muscles. I’d been lucky. The knife had been small and blunt enough that it hadn’t reached anything vital. They fed me cold meat and wine, a pretty good combination for treating wounds. We hadn’t the manpower to go after Destran. I had no doubt that he’d be off communicating his treachery to his masters. In a way, he might actually buy us some time.

  ‘Here,’ I said, passing them the pages. ‘Maybe you can make something of it. Get Nall’s Engine working for us.’

  Ezabeth looked the papers over, frowned. She and Dantry put their heads together, muttering and conferring while I drank more than I should have.

  By Dantry’s expression I could tell that something was wrong. He wore the frown of a man who finds every garment in his wardrobe inexplicably turned inside out while he slept. He was utterly baffled.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked. ‘Something about a mirror?’

  ‘No,’ Ezabeth said finally. ‘It’s nothing. Useless. Just that same nonsense song.’

  I shook my head in disbelief and she passed it to me. It was that same stupid rhyme that Maldon had been trying to use to open the Engine’s heart.

  ‘Why would Lindrick think that this would activate the Engine?’ I asked. ‘He already knew this stuff. It’s nothing. Just the same fucking rhyme over and over again.’ I leafed through. ‘And half these pages are blank.’

  ‘He had nothing for us,’ Ezabeth said.

  Otto Lindrick’s body made a sound like laughter, but it was just gas escaping from his body. Ezabeth knelt down and stroked his head.

  ‘He was a good man,’ she said sadly.

  ‘A lot of good people died already,’ I said. ‘And a lot more are going to. I can get you access into the heart of Nall’s Engine. It’s why Maldon left the rhyme for you. It’s the key to opening the Engine’s heart. It’s our last chance.’

  ‘It truly opens the heart?’ Ezabeth said. Hope, faint as distant starlight grew in her eyes. I saw her resolve draw up, pushing back her shoulders, lifting her chin.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’ll go alone,’ Ezabeth said. ‘Entering the heart could be dangerous.’

  ‘So is staying out of it. Only one of those things leaves us all dead for certain. We all go. At this stage, I’m willing to take any shot we have. One last throw of the dice.’

  ‘Can you be spared from the wall?’ Dantry asked.

  ‘Nenn’s got charge of it. She’ll do what’s needed.’

  I summoned ten men, left instructions for them to kill anybody who tried to follow us down to the heart. They kept their matchlocks smouldering, their swords close at hand and I figured I better try trusting them. Ezabeth and Dantry followed me as we headed down into the silky luminescence of phos light.

  Nall had been careful when he erected this weapon. His Engine could be activated from any of the stations, or at least it formerly could have been, but the heart was buried deep, one hundred feet beneath the fortress. This place was more than just the operating chamber for the greatest weapon the world had ever known: it was almost holy, a shrine to the power that gave us hope.

  At the great circular door, I saw that the discs I’d already pressed down had remained depressed. I checked through Lindrick’s papers to be sure I had the nonsense rhyme correct and finished off the last ones. It was easy enough. From behind the door came a loud clunk as a lock disengaged, a hiss of steam, sparks of light as the door moved back and then rolled out of our path.

  The stairway led onto a short corridor before opening out into a vast underground chamber that stank of iron and rust. The ceiling was domed, a half sphere covered with buttressing stripes of metal. It was filled with battery coils, vast things of decaying red iron, slick with growths of slime and moss. Some of them had the static fuzz of energy about them but just as many were drained. They were plugged into pipes that dived into the floor. I wondered how many tens of thousands of hours the Talents must have laboured to fill these coils with power. Useless power, maybe. We would see.

  How long had it been since anyone had entered the heart? I didn’t know whether anyone had since its construction. It felt like we strode into a lost world.

  Another archway led to another stair and we descended yet deeper into the earth. It was cold, unpleasantly so. My back was feeling strange and fuzzily numb.

  Dantry and Ezabeth talked about moon-things that I didn’t understand. We came to a vast set of double doors. The lock-wheel had settled into place over decades of immobility. Dantry struggled to turn it, and I had to put my own back into it with him before the mechanism began to grind and screech. It turned. We entered.

  The chamber beyond was even larger than the first. The length of a cathedral, tall as a tower, another vast dome with the webbing of steel pipes, iron ropes and bronze wires arcing across the rounded ceiling. Phos lights lit up all along it, casting the whole dank chamber into a muted, half-light glow. This was it: the heart of Nall’s Engine.

  It was empty save for a small stone basin on a pedestal.

  ‘What the hell?’ My voice bounced from the walls of the chamber.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ Dantry said and the chamber took his voice and cast it back at him. Nothing, nothing, nothing. ‘It’s empty. It’s not even a machine. Not anything. There’s nothing.’ Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  ‘It was a lie,’ Ezabeth said. Her voice, her strong, beautiful voice broke against the word. ‘All just a lie.’

  Nothing, nothing, nothing, lie, lie, lie.

  I walked out into the centre of the room. The smooth flagstones bore a spider’s web of inlaid bronze wires, incredibly intricate. I approached the stone basin. Maybe there was something there, something we hadn’t counted on. It looked like the bird baths the cream had in their gardens. No gears, no levers or wheels. Just plain, rough cut stone. Inside there lay a shrivelled little black lump of something that had probably once been organic. Fossilised and ancient, it sat in honour in its little tomb. I poked it about a bit and half of it flaked away into no
thing. It was not going to be our salvation.

  A few oddments sat around the cavern, but they were all just as strange and useless as that first. A barrel of salt water, black and stagnant. A bowl of crumbled bird skulls. A coffin filled with fine grey dust. I tried searching through each for anything that might be useful, that might be part of some greater design, but they were barely even the sum of their parts. Just a wizard’s cast-off junk.

  Tanza spoke with Tanza, searched around the edges of the great dome. There was nothing else there. They didn’t know what the wires were for. Couldn’t see any use for an old stone basin.

  Nothing.

  We walked around, looking for something, anything, for the better part of an hour. We pushed at the walls, looked for a lever, a button to depress, anything. At length, Dantry rubbed his chilled arms. He looked forlorn, broken. His stupid, fashionable hair was a matted tangle around his shoulders and he looked drained. He’d thrown his last die and not even come up with a one. It had fallen right off the table, exploded into pieces and then been devoured by dogs.

  ‘I’m going back to the wall,’ he said. ‘This is useless. It was all useless. All for nothing.’ He walked away up the stairs, footsteps echoing.

  I took out my hip flask. I’d filled it with the best brandy in the citadel, near enough the first thing I’d done after I found myself in charge.

  ‘May I?’ Ezabeth held out her good hand for the flask.

  ‘Thought you couldn’t abide a drunk?’ I said. I handed her the flask anyway.

  ‘What does it matter, now?’ she said. She turned away from me to lift her veil and drank. She coughed, sputtered a little. I guess she wasn’t used to drinking.

  ‘When did any of it matter?’

  ‘It did,’ she said firmly. ‘It mattered, and we fought because it mattered. You like to act as though you don’t care, Ryhalt Galharrow, but you did. You do. You always have. It’s why you’re still here.’