Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  Valiya woke as the rain abated. She stared at me with wide, silver eyes. And then her brow drew in, her mouth opened wide, and she let out a despairing sob. I pulled her to me and let her bury her face in my chest as she wept for the passing of a legend. I held her there for a long time, saying nothing, having no words for what had just transpired.

  ‘I saw it all,’ she said.

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘The Crowfall,’ she said. ‘I know what they did.’

  She didn’t say any more, and I knew that I couldn’t ask. I’d seen the start of it too, I thought. Ezabeth, standing over the Nameless, berating them. I could have smiled if I hadn’t been stung, and afraid, and mourning the death of a god.

  When Valiya pulled away, my chest was streaked with lines of gleaming mercury. They ran down Valiya’s hollow cheeks like the branches of winter trees. When she opened her eyes again, they were blue, beautiful, and human. She drew back her sleeve to look at her arms. The numbers had stopped moving. They were static, locked into figures of impossible complexity. Valiya stared at them, eyes working across from left to right. New letters appeared there now, written in the silver that had been in her eyes. She pressed her arm against her chest, hiding it from me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a final message,’ she said. ‘From Nall. His last thought.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I know my role now,’ Valiya said. ‘I know what I have to do.’ She wiped a smear of silver from her face onto the sleeve of my coat and spoke between gritted teeth. Her eyes had never shown more determination. ‘Nall is gone,’ she said. ‘But we can still win. You and me, Ryhalt. It’s not over yet.’

  24

  In times of crisis, Valengrad pulls together. Those unfortunate enough to have been outside when the rain hit found strangers opening their doors to them. But the Maud was still overwhelmed by the unfortunates carried to its doors.

  Davandein’s sixty thousand men had fared far worse.

  They had their waxed tents and had been coping with the rain as it swept the land every eleven days for years. Routine creates security. But they’d been drilling when the rain struck, a mile from their camp, and thousands had been unable to find shelter.

  Some were dead. Others were completely, utterly mad. I stood alongside Davandein as we looked out at the makeshift field hospital, a vast canvas canopy packed with weeping, jabbering men.

  ‘The greatest army the city-states of Dortmark has ever raised,’ she said bitterly. ‘The best soldiers money can buy, turned to nursing twenty thousand gibbering wrecks.’ She was pale, and her jaw was clenched.

  ‘Some of them will recover,’ I said. ‘At least we can hope so.’

  ‘And then what, Galharrow? Do we venture out in the hope that the rain doesn’t come again? We’ve taken a massive blow from that one fall of rain. What do we do, walk out into the Misery and hope that the weather stays on our side?’ She shook her head in anger as if trying to eject her bitter thoughts. ‘It’s not even the enemy striking at us. It’s the bloody sky itself. Is this what it looks like? The end of the world? Is that the edge we stand upon?’

  ‘We always stood at the end of the world,’ I said. ‘That’s what makes this so important. We’re the last defence, Marshal. We always have been.’

  We walked down into the hospital. The canvas was all heavy, wax-treated tarpaulin that would keep the rain off when it inevitably came to torment us again. Inside, men and women, proud soldiers and camp followers, were tied down to their cots. Their comrades had done what they could to lessen their pain and had padded the ropes with cloth, but those that struggled against them still scraped their skin raw. Some lay staring upwards, immobile, mouthing silent words. Other cried, or gibbered, or begged.

  ‘I don’t want to see,’ a young gunner whispered over and over. ‘I don’t want to see. Take it away. Take it away.’ His face was scratched and blistered from exposure to the rain.

  ‘He tore my heart out,’ a woman said, trying to claw at her chest. ‘Give it back! Give my heart back!’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, she’s mad,’ someone said. It took me a moment to realise that he wasn’t speaking to us but arguing with the empty air beside him. ‘What does she know? Nothing. Ignore her. She’s lying.’

  ‘The Sleeper,’ an older man croaked. ‘It’s coming. Surrender to it. Surrender to the Kings.’

  ‘Is there any hope for them?’ Davandein asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t.

  We walked through the rows of cots. It was important that Davandein be seen here. Not for the patients – they didn’t know her anymore – but for those treating them. It showed that she cared, that she knew their plight. Compassion builds loyalty, and she needed that.

  The sheer scale of it was horrifying. I’d defended Valengrad with fewer men than now wept and spouted nonsense. I spotted something beneath one of the beds, a small, claylike figure no bigger than my finger. A Sapler. I pulled it out and stamped on it. The orderlies checked for the little monstrosities daily, but they sensed the despair and it drew them, or they formed out of air, or however they got there. Davandein was right. The world was ending. Even if we could stop the Deep Kings, how could we survive when the sky itself tore down everything that we tried to build?

  ‘My plan won’t work,’ Davandein said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘One storm like that out in the Misery and the army will die on its feet. They’d never make it to Adrogorsk. We’d be asking them to walk into death.’

  ‘Then we’re lost,’ Davandein said. ‘We have the Nameless’ weapon but we can’t empower it.’

  ‘We can,’ I said. ‘We will.’

  ‘How?’

  It didn’t look good. But there were few choices left to us.

  ‘We need covered wagons,’ I said. ‘Animals don’t care about the rain. It only affects people. Wagons with tarpaulin covers, so that if the rain hits, we can shelter inside. One wagon per dozen people.’

  ‘We’d need five thousand of them,’ Davandein said in horror. ‘Even if we had the means – and we don’t – then a wagon train that long would crawl.’

  ‘I’ll take whoever we can outfit,’ I said. ‘If needs be, it will be me, Captain Amaira, Captain Klaunus, and a Spinner to work the loom during the eclipse. Winter will insist on coming with us. And I want every soldier you can outfit.’

  Davandein’s expression resolved into something harder. She forced her despair aside, soldier that she was.

  ‘I’ll put people on it right away. But it won’t be many. Maybe not enough to handle the Misery.’

  ‘I’ve survived longer in the Misery than you can even dream of, Marshal,’ I said. ‘I’ll worry about the Misery.’

  ‘And what if the Deep Kings get their warriors to Adrogorsk ahead of you? You need soldiers.’ She nodded to herself. A desperate plan, but all we had. ‘I’m sending the Marble Guard with you, and anyone else that I can muster.’

  ‘I don’t like them,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust them.’

  ‘When the Nameless send us weapons, we’re better off not turning our noses up at them. They aren’t like us, it’s true. But they’re each worth a score of soldiers. You couldn’t ask for better protection, and the rain doesn’t affect them at all. They endured the whole storm. You’ll take them, because this mission is more important than what you do or don’t like. I’ve Spinners to send with you as well.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll take the Guardians and all the Spinners and soldiers you can muster. I want your best.’

  ‘Very well. Captain North will accompany you as well,’ Davandein said.

  ‘I don’t trust him either.’

  ‘He’s the one who brought us the eclipse-loom schematic from the Lady of Waves. You’ll need him. He says the Deep Kings have an army of
ninety thousand drudge about to enter the Misery.’

  I might not like it, but I needed that loom.

  ‘I have some idea of what Crowfoot intends,’ I said. I was interrupted by a heaving in my chest. More Misery slime made its way out of me. Davandein looked on with voiceless eyes. ‘Some of it,’ I continued, when it passed. ‘But the Lady of Waves and Shallowgrave – they’re unknown quantities to me. They want to empower the fiend’s heart, but what then? Which of them gets to use it? I worry, Marshal. I fear their apparent unity isn’t what it seems. We give them the power of the eclipse, bound into a fossilised heart, and then what?’

  Davandein shifted uneasily. Her face was grim.

  ‘Then we learn whether we were right to trust them.’

  ‘The Deep Kings won’t wait around to let us. We both know that. I don’t want to get to Adrogorsk and find them waiting for us. I doubt even the Guardians could cut a path through that many drudge.’

  Davandein nodded.

  ‘I’ll have the wagons rigged for you. How long do you need to get ready?’

  ‘The eclipse won’t wait on us,’ I said. ‘We’ll go tomorrow morning. I’ll meet your people at Station Three-Four. That’s the best point to head out from.’

  As we passed by, one of the patients tried to sit up.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry I have to do this. I’m sorry I can’t wait for you. I can’t hold on anymore. I have to let go.’

  Her voice had a hollow, metallic echo to it. A lump rose up in my throat, hardening, constricting.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ I asked.

  ‘We have to act now,’ she said. ‘Whatever it takes, whatever it costs. What are you waiting for?’

  She wasn’t speaking to me anymore. She stared off down the endless rows of beds, and then she began to laugh, struggling and thrashing against her bonds. Her cries set off a series of groans and sobs from the nearby patients until the whole place was ringing with their madness. It had been nothing. Maybe I had misheard.

  Nenn and Venzer knelt on the other side of the bed and began rolling cigarillos. Strange that they could be so calm when everyone around them seemed to be going crazy.

  ‘We go tomorrow,’ I said. Valiya nodded without looking up. She’d laid out schematics across the table and I looked them over. It was the loom that we’d be dragging across the Misery, unique in its design. The pages themselves had a strangely metallic sheen. The Lady of Waves had designed them to be indestructible.

  I poured myself a cup of water and sat opposite her.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve been over this before. There’s really no option.’

  ‘I don’t want you to come,’ I said.

  Valiya looked up from the metallic paper.

  ‘You’ll need all the help you can get,’ she said. ‘Did Davandein agree?’

  ‘She’s sending the Marble Guard with us. And North.’

  ‘We knew that she’d insist on the former, and I feared the latter,’ she said. ‘It can’t be avoided. Who is she sending to work the loom?’

  ‘Kanalina,’ I said. ‘I don’t like her either.’

  ‘She’s good enough,’ Valiya said. ‘She follows orders. And she didn’t rack you when she had the chance.’

  ‘Maybe I just don’t like other people,’ I said. ‘Where’s Dantry?’

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ Maldon said, emerging from the wine cellar with a bottle in hand. ‘He’s with Amaira.’

  I felt a moment of intense unease. Valiya studied her shiny papers with unnecessary intensity. Maldon gave me a shit-eating grin from beneath the scarf that covered the hole in his face.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  Maldon began to make perverse hip-thrusting motions around the room.

  ‘Stop that,’ Valiya said. ‘He’s telling her about the Misery. What to expect out there.’

  ‘I taught her about the Misery when I was training her,’ I said with a frown.

  ‘Oh. Then I don’t know what they’re doing. Ryhalt,’ Valiya called to me as I started for the stair. ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No, you’re not going to check what they’re doing. If Amaira wants to pretend that she needs Dantry to tell her all about the Misery, then she’s quite welcome to his wisdom. Isn’t she.’ She did not make it a question.

  ‘You shouldn’t come with us,’ Maldon suddenly said to Valiya. ‘Tell her, Ryhalt. Tell her that she needs to stay here.’

  ‘I’m going,’ Valiya said.

  ‘You can argue with her if you want,’ I said. It would be a losing battle for him, just as it had been for me.

  ‘We’ve a mission. You’ve no role to play in it,’ Maldon said. ‘I’m necessary. Dantry is necessary. Ryhalt is essential. But you aren’t. You’re a distraction.’

  ‘I have a role to play,’ Valiya said. ‘I know what I’m needed for. I’m as necessary to this as any of you. It was Nall’s last message.’

  ‘Really?’ Maldon snorted. ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me,’ Valiya said. ‘I’ll not get in the way.’

  ‘You get in the way just by being around,’ Maldon said. ‘You make Ryhalt all confused. And he can’t be confused when we get there.’

  ‘Leave it,’ I warned him. ‘Go and drink your wine and stop bothering the adults.’

  ‘That’s low,’ Maldon said. He turned his back and headed off to be someplace else, but as he went he snapped his fingers and the phos tubes all died.

  ‘Put those back on!’ I called after him, but he didn’t bother. ‘That little shit,’ I grumbled as I headed down into the cellar to crank the primer and get the lights going again. A few turns of the handle and the phos-flow re-engaged and the place got back to brightness.

  I got back to the workroom to see Amaira and Dantry coming down the stairs.

  ‘Was that Maldon again?’ Dantry asked. I raised one annoyed eyebrow in his direction, but he didn’t seem to grasp that I was more annoyed with him than I was with the small, extremely annoying immortal. Amaira looked happier than she had any right to, given that we were heading to the end of the world in the morning.

  I looked around at this strange little family. We’d spent six years apart from one another, doing the things that needed doing, and now without any time to rest and get to know one another again, to learn how we’d changed over those years, we were being thrust straight back into the skweam’s jaws. Had I been able to choose, I would have left them all here. I would have sent them west, far away, to lands where they’d never heard of Deep Kings and the hearts of ice fiends were nothing but stories with which to frighten children.

  ‘Get ready,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow we step back into hell.’

  25

  A subdued procession travelled alone with their thoughts, heading north along the supply road and up to Station Three-Four. The longhorns drawing the wagons couldn’t keep pace with the tireless Guardians, whose long legs and steady march saw them pull ahead frequently. They said nothing, but they understood my orders and were always waiting for us at the arranged overnight stops. They had no need of shelter. Since they emerged from their pods, the Guardians seemed to have no need of anything. On the first night they stood outside Station Three-One in ordered rows around the box that contained the ice fiend’s heart, long glaives resting on their shoulders, waiting to start moving again the next day. Their weapons were engraved with ancient sigils, and nobody knew where they had come from. I didn’t doubt that a sweep of one of those glaives would cut through horses three at a time. The Guardians unnerved me, but nobody doubted that they would be effective. The box that the shred of heart had been stored in was a huge thing of black iron, and the Guardians allowed nobody near it. Not even me.

  We stood on the edge of the Misery and looked out into ma
dness.

  The cracks in the sky had broadened and splintered. New branches spread in jagged, delicate paths. Rays, called god-lights when they spilled through clouds, fell from the heavens across the Misery’s black-and-red expanse, spotlights falling to the bleak and dangerous stage below. The sky crowed, squealing with restless torment.

  I was just as restless to get back out there. This was my land. Vast, sprawling, more fickle than luck – but mine.

  ‘Just waiting on the soldiers, neh?’ Captain North said. He’d tied his long hair back in a tail, but he’d chosen to forgo any armour. My own was stowed on one of the wagons. I’d been able to claim it from a man of my size who’d been struck down by the rain. It was a lucky fit; not many suits of lobstered steel were made for men of my size. But while North wasn’t wearing harness, he’d acquired a new weapon: an eight-foot-long spear, the shaft black and inscribed with oceanic sigils, tipped with a head of what looked like jade. There was something unsettling about the weapon. It seemed oddly familiar, though I’d never seen its like before.

  ‘They’ll be here shortly,’ I said. The dawn had risen cold, the Misery-taint blowing towards us from the east. ‘That spear. What is it?’

  ‘Your master isn’t the only one who bestows gifts,’ North said. I didn’t like his smile. ‘The Lady looks out for her captains. She crafted this from the crystal gardens on Pyre. It’ll bring down the worst monster the Misery can offer.’

  ‘Shame she didn’t send more,’ I said.

  ‘Captain Klaunus is coming with the soldiers?’ North asked. I nodded.

  ‘Should be.’ I turned to meet his eye. ‘When we’re out there, you’re going to do what I say. You get that? The moment I think you’re doing anything but what you’re told, I’ll send you walking into a field of razor grass. I don’t like you, North. Don’t forget that when the time comes you get sick of being told what to do. This is my expedition.’

  ‘You’re the navigator, neh?’ he said easily. ‘But it’s the Nameless’ plan we’re following here. When we get to Adrogorsk, I’m setting the loom up. I don’t have any tender feelings for you either, but we both need this to work. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.’