Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  After the door clapped shut, I lay panting and trying to retain consciousness. I couldn’t quite work through what had just happened. Back at Fortunetown I’d taken a crossbow bolt to the chest and shrugged it off, but that pale monster had smashed me around like I was a rat in the jaws of a terrier. I thought that I’d made myself strong. Strong enough to do what had to be done. I was supposed to be an anvil. The broken bones were saying otherwise. The only consolation as I lay gasping and wheezing was that they would heal. The Misery-taint would do that for me, but it was going to hurt all the while. I would survive, though bones took longer to mend than the soft bits. But the first thing I had to do was make sure they set straight. I had to move fast, before they knitted themselves at some awkward angle.

  I couldn’t make a fist with either hand and my right forearm was broken, but the break wasn’t jagged and the pieces weren’t misaligned, so far as I could tell through the immense swelling. The fingers of my left hand weren’t in such good shape. I set them against the floor, put my foot down on top of them, and waited for the wave of dizzying pain and nausea to pass. Then I drew up, keeping them trapped as I rose. I pitched forwards and vomited my breakfast over the dusty white floor as searing bright pain rushed through my hand and up my arm. I lay there panting, then looked them over. About as good as they were going to get.

  It was hard to think. The pain commanded all of my attention, but I forced myself to focus.

  I’d delivered a lot of men to the white cells. I’d recruited men out of them too. The cell was divided into two sections by a row of close-ranked iron bars. In a way I’d been fortunate – most of the white cells were only a couple of feet wide, and the six square feet of space I had were practically luxurious. Once you went into the cells you didn’t get out of them unless someone let you out. There were no windows, no sewers, no vents and the floors above were occupied by soldiers. Only fools and madmen tried to break out of the white cells, and no one succeeded.

  I pushed my back up against the wall, pressed a hand against the sharp pain where my hip had broken. The stabbing sensation was about all I could think on for a time. There was no way to ease it, no narcotic on hand to dull it. No shift of posture lessened it. It was the kind of hard, cold pain that makes breathing hard. My chest hurt where the huge man’s foot – assuming he was a man – had crushed down on it but I didn’t think he’d cracked any of my ribs. That was something.

  They only left me alone with my pain for a short while. I was glad of the distraction when the door opened and the Spinner stepped through into the area sectioned off by the bars, but even so she left the door open, and a pair of guards lingered outside. The woman looked at me as though she ran a finishing school and I were some dirt-encrusted orphan thrust in front of her.

  ‘You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up,’ I said. Speaking elicited fresh pain.

  ‘You may stay on the floor.’ She gestured, and the lumpy Urban Security man, Tate, brought in a heavy wooden chair. He gave me a pleased sneer, then left. She sat.

  Spinner Kanalina was a hard-faced, heavyset woman. Her features were elegant without being ostentatious, and only the hints of crow’s feet around her eyes and the grey threads amongst the blond hinted at her age. She wore a modest dress that flared towards the knee, and beneath it the high laced boots that had been a staple of Valengrad’s fashion for over a decade. She appraised me, taking my measure. She was smart. Sometimes you can tell that about a person without ever having a conversation. Done looking me over, Kanalina opened a satchel and took out a stack of papers and a pen.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘You know my name.’ I coughed. The motion sent another spur of pain through my hip.

  ‘I’d like you to state it, for my record,’ she said. She had a rural accent, all the sounds coming from the back of her throat.

  ‘I’m the Goblin Man.’

  Spinner Kanalina looked up at me with an unimpressed stare. Definitely something of the school matron about her.

  ‘I am not here to make your life difficult, only to ask you questions,’ she said evenly. ‘If you seek to make that harder, I can make things harder for you in turn. Do not misunderstand the situation. You are in a deal of trouble. Talking to me may be your best chance of returning to’ – and there she didn’t quite know what to say – ‘… to whatever life you had.’

  She was probably right about that. I’d had better days.

  ‘I’m Ryhalt Galharrow,’ I said. ‘Blackwing captain. Hero of the Range. Formerly acting Range Marshal during the Siege. Formerly a brigadier serving beneath Range Marshal Venzer. Formerly son of a count. Killer of drudge, and victor against Torolo Mancono. You need me to go on?’

  She watched me for a few moments, then simply pursed her lips and went to writing. She might even have been writing all that down. Made me regret having given so much of myself away.

  ‘How do you know Count Dantry Tanza?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him for years.’ It was true. Not since the night we’d set our plan into motion. Not since we shook on it.

  ‘That isn’t what I asked.’

  She was shrewd. Direct. In other circumstances, I think that I would have liked her.

  ‘I know him because I met him a long time ago. Before the battle for Valengrad, where I acted as Range Marshal. Hero of the Range. Killer of drudge. Remember that?’

  ‘Hm.’ Her pen swished side to side as she wrote. I doubt she believed me. That particular aspect of my past had been buried by those that came after. I’d been forgotten even faster than Nenn. ‘How did you meet him?’

  There seemed to be no harm in telling her things that could easily be common knowledge. That I’d gone into the Misery and fished him out, that I’d tried to help his sister. That after Ezabeth had been killed we’d lodged together at The Bell for a time. I didn’t tell her of rescuing him from Saravor’s slaughterhouse beneath the city, but Casso knew all about that, and therefore so did she. Spinner Kanalina didn’t need me to give her those details. She was asking easy questions because doing so made giving answers familiar. Established a rapport. Standard interrogation technique.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘To be honest, I haven’t been keeping track of time that well lately,’ I told her. That was true. ‘But a long while. Five years.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is, if that’s what you’re planning to ask.’

  ‘Why do you think Dantry Tanza became an enemy of the state?’

  ‘I didn’t know that he has.’ That wasn’t true. Spinner Kanalina seemed weary of asking me questions already, or maybe it was that I was only giving her the answers that she had expected.

  ‘Three years ago, Dantry Tanza went into the phos mill at Heirengrad and did something that overloaded the battery coils. They exploded. Nobody was killed, but millions of marks’ worth of equipment was destroyed. The mill belonged to Prince Herono, a kinsman of Dantry’s.’

  ‘I killed the previous Prince Herono, did you know that?’ I asked. The position had been filled by a young man of no great ambition who had no mind for matters either military or economic. For all that his aunt had been possessed by Stale’s maggot living in her brain, she’d probably still have been a better prince than he was managing to be.

  ‘Why did he destroy the mill?’

  ‘I have no fucking idea. Maybe his mind cracked. Ask your dog Casso.’

  Kanalina finished writing down my answer and then fished through her papers. She drew out a missive, written in a familiar hand. I tried to keep my face neutral. She held it up for several seconds.

  ‘We took this from the spinning wheel shop. Fortunately the new owner thought these messages might be between sympathisers and reported it,’ she said. ‘There’s not a great deal in this letter. But it’s clear that there were others, and that you’ve been corresponding with Count Tanza across
the years. Doing so with a great deal of secrecy. Why would a man who can survive alone in the Misery be exchanging communications with a saboteur? You were a hero during the war. What changed?’

  I chuckled, an unpleasant sensation as it sent fresh pain lancing up through my side.

  ‘During the war? You people can’t help but repeat the same mistakes, over and over. You think the war’s over? You think that ten years ago the Deep Kings decided that we’d smashed them so hard they might as well give up? That’s how we nearly lost everything the last time. You know the biggest change in Valengrad since I left it? A new opera house. A symphony hall over at Willows. Now they broadcast prayer times instead of the reminder to keep on fighting, to keep on living. I’m not the one that fucking changed.’

  Spinner Kanalina had stopped writing. She rested her pen on her papers, her hands upon crossed knees.

  ‘When Dantry Tanza destroyed the second mill, at Snosk, we knew the first had been no accident,’ she said. ‘His research was forbidden by the Council Academia Superior when he started chasing the same nonsense his sister had pursued years before. But he was determined. When he overloaded the coils at Snosk, the ensuing blast killed fifteen Talents working at the mill. Fifteen people murdered, because one obsessed nobleman can’t resist trying out his theories.’

  I frowned. People died all the time. I was the cause of it as often as not. I’d always known that there would be collateral damage. We were at war. But I hadn’t known he’d killed so many. I’d thought Dantry would be more careful. It was an accident, sure enough. Or at least I hoped it had been. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t tell the Spinner that.

  ‘I was a Talent at the Snosk mill, before I realised I could do more than simply draw the light into looms,’ Kanalina said. That explained her accent. ‘There were former colleagues of mine amongst the dead. I could have been amongst them. So you see, Captain, I have forgotten nothing. For me, Dantry Tanza’s crimes are all too real.’

  ‘So go and find him,’ I said. ‘You got nothing on me. I’m a spirits-damned captain of Blackwing. Do you even have the slightest idea what that means? No. You’ve forgotten, all of you. Crowfall happened, and the black rain started, and you forgot everything that went before. Everything. But I’m still fighting. Keeping the mills secure is your business. Not mine.’

  She ignored me.

  ‘In this letter, Dantry Tanza mentions something he calls the Anvil. What is it?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Is it a weapon?’

  I said nothing. I wanted to see that paper.

  Spinner Kanalina narrowed her eyes, trying to read me. Maybe the amber colouring of my own was off-putting, because she couldn’t hold my gaze long and I gave her nothing.

  ‘I’ll have food and drink delivered. You’ll receive medical attention if you decide to help us. You’ll need it, and you might lose that arm if you don’t get it. Think on what I’ve asked you. Perhaps it’s time to find your conscience, Former-Captain Galharrow.’

  She stood up.

  ‘Wait. Tell her this,’ I said. ‘If Davandein wants to trade information, then she needs to come to me in person. She’s already let half the citadel be destroyed. If she wants to know how to stop the rest of it falling, she has to talk to me.’

  The door shut, a definitive series of locks sliding and clicking into place signalling that I was well and truly incarcerated. The room was suddenly quiet save for the dry buzz of the phos light. I would have stood up and smashed it, only it was beyond easy reach and the pain in my side wasn’t making the idea of jumping up and down seem plausible. An unpleasant numbness had spread down my leg and the flesh around my hip had swollen, the dark shade of ruptured blood vessels beneath the skin. I had to settle for the only darkness I could find. I pressed my eyes closed.

  Time does not move in the blankness of the white cells. They were playing nice, because this cell wasn’t two feet wide. I’d not always put people in the nice ones. In fact, I’d once argued to convert them all into slots. My captors might have acted like professionals, but by comparison to me they were amateurs.

  Nobody returned for what felt like a very long time. At some point I slept, and when I woke somebody had left a plate of cold duck, bean paste, and flatbread beside a cup of water. Thoughts ticked past leaving me with nothing but the pain of broken bones and my own fears. The breaks had settled down to an unpleasant ache. Standing still proved difficult but I could get myself upright. I sat, I coughed, I wiped the blackish slime on the lime-white walls. I thought of Gleck Maldon and how he’d written his thesis in shit across the walls of his cell. His captivity had ended when Prince Herono betrayed him to the drudge and to Shavada. I had to wonder whether my own prospects were any better than his had been.

  No. I wouldn’t end down here. There was work to do.

  I slept again, though I wasn’t tired. A plate of cold food and a jug of weak tea appeared. The phos tubes were never dimmed, the blank, sterile light ever present. I managed to hobble around the room, which was a surprise because I’d figured my broken hip was going to keep me down for longer than that. I took off my shirt and examined the black-and-purple bruising that the giant’s foot had left across my chest. The discolouration reminded me of the Misery sky, the broken threads of red and blue spiralling amongst the gold and the green. Oddly, I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing it. I missed the jagged cracks running through the heavens, the sky’s sonorous wail.

  Of course I missed it. I’d been soaking the Misery up for years. That was the point, wasn’t it? I missed it like a fish misses the water. It was home.

  I knew what they were doing, of course. Isolation and silence bring a man around in a way that the urgency of a threat doesn’t. They wanted Dantry Tanza badly enough to grab me, but they’d been hunting him for years. A few hours wouldn’t make much difference. When the door finally opened and Spinner Kanalina stepped in, I had no idea how long I’d been alone in the cell for. I’d eaten four meals and felt hungry twice, but it could have been two days or four.

  Kanalina brought a chair again, and I kept my place on the floor. They hadn’t provided me with any furniture save a bucket for shitting in.

  ‘What is that on the walls?’ she asked.

  ‘Shit from the Misery,’ I shrugged. The wall beside which I most commonly sat was a mess of oily tar smears. Kanalina seemed less fazed than disapproving as she sorted her papers into order and took out her pen.

  ‘I am coming under great pressure to move things along swiftly,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘Do you think I can make it otherwise?’

  ‘Well, I guess that makes you my hero then.’

  She ignored me and instead began to run through her questions about Dantry Tanza again. Some of them were different. She was trying a new angle, trying to work out if I knew anything about Dantry’s foray into light-spinning theory. I made the same unhelpful, terse responses. I could have just stayed silent, but there’s something within me that likes to give smart-arsed answers instead.

  ‘What I don’t understand is why a mathematician with no ability to spin light would become so interested in working on ideas that even Spinners find difficult to grasp.’

  ‘That must frustrate you.’

  Kanalina put her pen down. She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, but she removed them now to look at me. I liked her face but it was undeniably sharp in places; a pointed nose, angled brows.

  ‘I have been learning more about you,’ she said. ‘At first I thought you to be some kind of simple loon, a hermit living out in the Misery. I knew about your Blackwing past, but the rest was true as well. You killed Torolo Mancono in the courthouse, and led the defence of Valengrad, for two days at least. Which makes your betrayal even more disappointing.’

  I had nothing to say to that. She tapped the end of her pen against her pap
ers. I stared back, blank faced.

  ‘Did you see the Deep King?’ she asked.

  ‘Shavada? I saw him,’ I said. It was hard to remember what he’d looked like. I recalled a great darkness, deep black shadows, and the sound of clanking iron but that was it. His presence in my mind had become hazy over time, as though with his passing, reality were trying to erase every trace of his existence. Sometimes, though, when I put my hand against the Misery-sands and felt out into the distance, I could sense the Deep Kings and amongst them, some trace of his being still lingered. Even after the Nameless had torn his heart out and used its power to fuel Nall’s Engine, a being of such cosmic importance could not be erased utterly.

  ‘The marshal once told me that we all owe our survival to you and Dantry Tanza’s sister.’

  ‘Davandein talks a lot of shit,’ I said. ‘But she’s right about that. Maybe you should go talk to her again and see what she thinks about me being in chains.’

  ‘You were a defender of the states,’ Kanalina said. ‘What changed?’

  ‘Everything changed,’ I said. ‘Davandein turned on her own city. Blackwing was reduced to a shadow of its former power. And I realised something. The Engine, the Nameless, the citadel? None of them matter. There’s just me. I’m the only one fighting this fucking war the way that it needs to be fought. All I want is to be left alone. Why the fuck do you think I’ve been living out in the Misery all these years?’

  ‘I don’t know. Tell me.’

  ‘I like the solitude.’

  ‘I’ve been out there, Captain. The ghosts don’t rest quietly. If you wanted solitude there are safer places to find it. It’s amazing you’ve survived out there all this time. Alone. How do you do it?’

  I raised a bronze-tinted hand, callused, threaded with green and red, old scars stacked atop tattoos for the dead. I turned it in the hard phos light.