Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘Look at this.’ Valiya beckoned me over to one of the pillars. The surface had been carved with rows of images, scenes depicting something that had happened long ago. I’d seen similar carvings on ancient columns in Karnun, the weathered remnants of civilisations that had collapsed in days of legend. The carvings depicted figures in profile, at work, carrying loads or dragging sleds. Some drew water, others were dressed as warriors with bundles of spears on their shoulders and primitive shields on their arms.

  ‘They aren’t human,’ Valiya said. ‘Look at their faces.’

  ‘Either that, or the artist wasn’t very good,’ I said, but that wasn’t the case. Plenty of the details were startling in their accuracy, down to the rings on the workers’ fingers. The figures’ eyes were overly large on noseless faces. Short, stubby horns pointed back from their brows.

  ‘They look like drudge,’ Valiya said. Maybe it was just because I had Saravor on my mind, but they reminded me of the glimpse I’d had of the grey children in their true form, revealed by Crowfoot’s magic in Valengrad’s sewers. ‘It’s a story,’ she said. ‘It scrolls all around the pillar. Look, they were building something.’

  ‘We don’t have time for history,’ I said. ‘Come on. We need to find Amaira.’

  ‘They were building something, but then it was torn down. See here, where the buildings are being destroyed. What’s this?’

  In one of the carvings something huge loomed over a city, smashing down towers. Six-legged, a huge maw filled with fangs. Valiya continued around.

  ‘The people were being destroyed. They sent envoys across the sea, to beg the help of some kind of great serpent. Six children, to beg the snake to help them. The snake and the destroyer fought.’ She tried to peer higher up the column. ‘I can’t see any farther.’

  Six children. A disturbingly familiar number. The number that had appeared when Maldon and Saravor had fought in my mind.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just a myth,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  Silpur had already gone on ahead. At the far end of the cavern, a great doorway was framed as if with pillars and a lintel, though they were all cut from the ice.

  ‘I don’t trust Silpur,’ Valiya said. ‘It’s like he’s not all here with us.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But he’s utterly loyal to Crowfoot. We don’t have to like him, and we can’t expect any compassion from him, but his devotion isn’t built solely through fear or debt like the rest of the Blackwing captains. He’s a fanatic. As long as we’re doing what Crowfoot needs, we can trust him.’

  Carved ice warriors flanked the door, horned and round eyed, looked down on us as we passed through into a tunnel that sloped down, the walls decorated with friezes like those on the pillars. Despite the bone-deep weariness, hunger began to strike a gong in my stomach, but we had nothing to eat. I thought of all the meat on the mule and wished that I’d had the foresight to carve a few pieces to bring with us. Raw flesh wasn’t appetising, but I’d consumed far worse in the Misery.

  The tunnel turned sharply to the left and we lost sight of Silpur. It turned again, then again. We were spiralling downwards into the ice. The friezes were more of the same that we’d seen before but covered the walls from floor to ceiling, odd-shaped people at work, life-sized. They were gathered around pyramids, looking up at mightier figures at their peaks – gods, I supposed. The gods did not resemble the people. They were geometric shapes, clouds, fire, or other nonphysical things. The friezes showed supplicants honouring their deities, prisoners dragged to the altars, knives slicing out hearts.

  ‘They practised soul magic,’ Valiya said. ‘Just like the Deep Kings. Spirit of Mercy, where are we? How old is all this?’

  Silpur reappeared around the corner, a finger pressed to his lips. He drew his sword, slowly, making no sound, then beckoned for us to follow. I drew my own and went after.

  The corridor opened out into another broad cavern, just as smooth and pillared as the previous one. But there were things here, human and imperfect in the blue stillness. Three bodies lay where they’d collapsed. No sign of anything moving or living. I hurried to them, fearing what I’d find, but none of them were the right size or shape for a slim young woman hitting twenty. They were burly men, or at least, they had been before being burned to a crisp. They were blackened, turned nearly to charcoal. A pair of matchlocks lay nearby, barrels warped by heat, and there was a long burn-scar in the ice in front of them. I recognised the blast pattern.

  ‘Vasilov’s doing,’ I said. Silpur nodded.

  ‘Must have been.’

  The charred bodies had to be more of Saravor’s fixed men, but there wasn’t enough of them left to examine to be sure. The intense heat of Vasilov’s sorcery had burned them away. He was as good a Spinner as they came and I was glad he was with Amaira. I’d taught her what I could about putting a sword through a man, but a Battle Spinner of Vasilov’s calibre was worth a whole battalion, until his canisters ran out. He’d not be able to spin a thing down here when they did.

  ‘Let’s move,’ I said. We went faster now, ignoring the carvings in the ice, and I limped as fast as I was able to. Lost works of art didn’t matter, but the one at the doorway on the far side covered the entire wall with a single vast and unmissable picture. To the left, the six-legged destroyer was wrapped in conflict with a dragon-headed serpent, six tiny children looking up from below. To the right, a vast tidal wave swept towards a city, rows of short-horned figures cowering away from their impending destruction. Their gods were numbered amongst them, geometry, fire, and clouds.

  ‘They asked the serpent for help, and the battle sank their world,’ Valiya said. Even with the urgency of finding Amaira hot around us, she couldn’t help but want to know. ‘Spirits. I think that— Ryhalt. Their gods fought and lost. They all drowned. The Deep Kings …’

  I heard it again. My name, spoken in that hard, iron-tinged resonance. I blinked and looked around, feeling as though a hand had reached into my chest and clamped around my heart. There was nobody else there but Valiya and Silpur, but I felt a presence. Speaking to me, through the cracks in the world. Ezabeth. Or what was left of her. It couldn’t be more than imagination. We were in a place of gods and demons, and there was no moonlight down here.

  Silpur pointed up, above the gigantic snake and the beast that it fought. I couldn’t make out what he was showing me at first, but then, I caught it. An innocuous little carving, almost like it had been scratched into the ice as an afterthought. A tiny bird, wheeling high above the titans. Silpur’s unblinking eyes turned to us. He smiled.

  ‘Four thousand years,’ he said. ‘The war continues.’

  ‘We’re not here for ancient history,’ I said. ‘Hurry.’

  More burn-scars decorated the walls as we went down, the murals carved into the ice had melted and distorted. We found another four bodies, two of them fused together. They’d pursued Amaira and Vasilov and paid a heavy price for it.

  Then, echoing along the tunnel, a sound. Tapping. We continued towards it, and the tunnel opened out again, and I gestured that Valiya should stay back and peered around the corner, looking out into a cavern almost identical to those we’d seen before. There were people ahead of us.

  There were ten of them. Wrapped up in furs, they had packs of supplies and materials stacked in a ring. They were formed up in front of a hole in the ice wall, not the smooth, sculpted passageways we’d encountered but a rough, mostly circular hole, big enough to crawl into but not much more. They had firearms on their shoulders, blades and hammers at their belts. One of them went unarmed, a young woman whose cranium seemed too large for the rest of her head, bald except for a ring of grey hair that became black at the nape of her neck. She had the look of the Karnari, pale, fierce, and she wore their traditional tribal charms, animal skulls and feathers, on a series of strings around her neck. A shaman. What they were doing around the hole wasn’t cl
ear, but they were fixated on it, paying no attention to anything else. None of them were moving, just staring towards it. Waiting.

  Trapped.

  They didn’t speak. Didn’t do anything. Still as statues, they had to be more of Saravor’s fixed creatures. There were a lot of them. More than Silpur and I would be able to deal with.

  ‘Ryhalt, look,’ Valiya whispered. ‘What’s that in the ice?’

  It couldn’t be seen clearly. A vast, dark shadow, deep behind the translucent, icy wall. I knew what it was. I’d felt its presence once, that first time Crowfoot showed me the place of power. I’d seen it carved in the ice halls above us, seen its downfall as it fought the Earth Serpent. Just a shadow, but here it lay, sealed away for thousands of years where it had fallen. The destroyer of worlds, an ice fiend, dead for millennia and yet still its power echoed through the chambers, casting the blue light. A primeval, ancient thing of immeasurable power, a beast from a forgotten world. The shadow we could make out could only be a tiny part of it.

  On the other side of the cavern, there was a crack in the ceiling. Three arms of equal length, perfect in their symmetry, imperfect in their existence. An exact mirror to the tear in the sky, far above. The damage had penetrated the ice. A beam of gentler white light within the blue descended to the icy floor where it met another crack, an exact mirror of that above it. And in that light, a figure.

  ‘Do you see her?’ I whispered. My heart wanted to shatter within my chest.

  ‘I don’t see anybody,’ Valiya said.

  It was Ezabeth, and it was not Ezabeth. She had the same stature, small and slight, and her face bore the scars that had made her. But she was changed. There was a hardness to her, her eyes blank and white, her upright posture no longer the determined set of a woman of purpose, but something colder. Ezabeth had never lacked for confidence, but she hadn’t been arrogant. I’d seen such arrogance only in a handful of immortals.

  Her hair was fire, a bright cascade flickering across her shoulders.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ she said, though her lips did not move. She looked squarely at me. My knees wanted to buckle. The force of the word was greater than the impact of falling down the shaft and the Misery-taint in me swarmed like a cloud of hornets.

  ‘What are you seeing?’ Valiya asked.

  ‘You are the Ryhalt that I remember,’ Ezabeth’s voice echoed in my mind, and I felt her words flowing to me on a wave of the broken world’s magic. The tear brought all worlds closer together.

  ‘Is it really you?’ I asked.

  ‘What is and what is not is undecided,’ the voice said. ‘I have been waiting for you.’

  ‘Ezabeth,’ I said, and it emerged as a moan. The burning figure’s head rotated slightly.

  ‘I am nobody,’ she said. ‘But I remember that name.’

  I shivered.

  ‘You are Ezabeth Tanza,’ I said.

  ‘Something of me was. A long time ago. But she is gone. She told me to wait for you. But I have been a long time in the light. Much of what I was is lost to me. But I remember you.’

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see her. Not wanting to hear the awful things that she was saying. Things that I’d felt as she slipped further and further away from me and into the light. As she diminished over the years, fading further and further from memory.

  ‘I promised I would save her,’ I said.

  ‘I do not remember,’ the apparition spoke silently into my mind. ‘The night is dark. The time draws near. The darkness grows greater every day. I am gone, but I am still here. You must know the truth of what happened here.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘I do not remember,’ she said. ‘But the sky remembers. Ask the sky what happened to me.’

  ‘It can’t all be for nothing,’ I growled. ‘Everything I’ve done. Everything I’ve become. Years of planning. It can’t all be for nothing.’

  ‘What is real and what is not real is undecided,’ she said again. ‘I am weary. The part of me that remembers is glad to have seen you again.’

  ‘Ezabeth …’

  The figure shimmered in its silent fire. It stood looking at me without emotion, without care. Nall’s words came back to me. You understand that humanity is the key, don’t you? But there was no humanity left. Ezabeth had burned herself from one existence into another, and it had claimed her. Ten years in the light, burning in the fire. She wasn’t my Ezabeth anymore. But then, we were all changed, and I was hardly the man that she had loved, however briefly, in those frantic, bloody days of the Siege.

  She stood still, bathed in the light of the crack above. The crack that mirrored the new tear that Crowfoot had put in the sky.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ a voice said, and this time it was a real woman’s voice. Valiya. I shook my head and felt something break away. A connection from one world to the next. Ezabeth remained, but she was no longer looking at me, only towards the shadow in the ice.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Valiya placed a hand on my arm, but I shook it off. I wasn’t alright. I didn’t think that I’d ever be alright again.

  ‘They’re moving,’ Silpur said.

  18

  ‘You kill two,’ Silpur said. And then he padded away silently into the cavern, moving swiftly to one of the vast carved pillars, a curved sword in each hand. I didn’t have time to drag him back, to plan. He wouldn’t have cared if I’d tried.

  ‘You can’t fight that many,’ Valiya said.

  ‘I survived falling down that shaft,’ I said. But the weariness had set in deep and I could still feel the Misery-taint thrumming through me.

  ‘You’re in no state to fight,’ she said. She drew back her sleeve. She’d plotted tables and graphs, and an anatomical drawing of a man right out of a university textbook sat proud amongst them. ‘You’re barely able to stand.’

  ‘Amaira’s cornered in there,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a choice.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling for the drifting energy in the air. I tried to breathe it in, to get back something of what the Misery had taken from me when it saved me. Focused on my bad leg, asked it to remember how to work properly.

  Two of the fixed men had primed their matchlocks, trails of smoke drifting upwards in the still air. They approached the hole cautiously. The shaman stood well back from it all, her bulbous head looking too heavy for her slender neck. She had to be the leader. I didn’t know much about the Karnari witch-shaman. I’d only spent a little time amongst them, and they were savages who preferred to stick to their traditions over accepting civilisation. They still ate their own dead. She would be dangerous, though. The men with the primed weapons looked inside the hole, then one of them hunkered down and began to crawl inside. He disappeared into the darkness, a red trail in his wake as he bled from the eyes.

  The tunnel lit up with a bang as something detonated. The fixed man tumbled out making animal sounds. His clothes and hair smoked and his face was red and burned, but he picked himself up. I could smell the phos in the air, but that blast had been feeble by any Spinner’s standards. The shaman snapped an order, her voice deep and harsh, and the second man padded towards the hole.

  Amaira and Vasilov were in there and Vasilov was running low on phos. If he’d had any more, that would have been a killing blast, like the ones that had finished the dead men we’d passed. As quietly as I was able, I limped to the nearest pillar. I gave Valiya one last look, and she nodded.

  From the hole, a brief flash and the crack of a matchlock shot bounced around the cavern. The shaman fluttered her hands and gave orders and the men took out powder charges and ramrods and began to load. She had sensed weakness. She was sending them in for the kill.

  Silpur moved before I was ready. He came out behind a pillar, silent as a ghost and his sword erupted from the chest of a startled man. He looked down at it as the bright, bloody steel punched through him, then made
a grab for it as it slithered back through. Silpur advanced on the next of them, walking, not charging. The nearest man brought his matchlock around like a club but he fared no better and went down gargling blood from one hole in his throat and another from the slash in his groin. Silpur struck at them without emotion, no haste as he passed between them, devastating speed when he struck.

  I didn’t have his finesse. I held my sword to my shoulder and charged.

  It wasn’t much of a charge. Bright flashes of Misery-skies ripped through my mind and the world lurched. My legs buckled beneath me and I crashed down to my knees with a curse, flickers and flares of light shredding my vision.

  Not now, not now!

  Men spun, saw me, abandoned their half-loaded firearms, and drew steel. I forced myself back to my feet, starbursts of pain spearing up my legs. The fixed men closed in warily. Even if I was already half beaten to death, I still looked like something from the second hell, eyes ablaze and teeth bared. The oddity of my appearance checked them only for a moment; they had the numbers and three of them began to fan out around me.

  I took a forwards, warding guard, and started to back away. So much for my charge.

  Silpur had cut his way through another two men but was being pressed by men with bayonets plugged into their matchlocks, and two of those are more than a match for a swordsman, no matter how good he is. My lips drew back in fury. That fucking arrogant shit had got us killed. The shaman had a knife in her hand but ran it back and forth across her palm, slicing shallow cuts. She smeared the blood across her face, and began to sing.

  No time to listen to her song. The first man came in, swinging at my hands, the only target he had with my sword point stuck out like that. I snapped them back, struck right back at his, but my step was short and he made it away. Another came in, and as his blade came down I swung a wild parry, snapping it aside. The shivering lights in my head redirected themselves: a sudden burst of energy stole through me and my enemy wasn’t prepared for my lunge, or to die, but both of them happened.