Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  But my mind had cleared. The rain had washed through me, burned me back into myself. The Misery was part of me, was threaded through me, but I was not the Misery. I was a man.

  ‘There was never anything for me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Valiya said. She had never shown me her bitterness before. It rose to the surface and boiled over, and eyes that had once been silver shone brighter with pain than they had with any magic. ‘There was a future. And you chose the past. But there is no past. It doesn’t exist, it’s dead, it’s done. So look forwards, damn you. Look forwards and find us a future that doesn’t end with drudge spears and the world bound and cowering.’

  ‘I’m just one man,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. She drew up her composure again, the outburst retreating back beneath her skin. ‘You’re not a man. There’s barely any humanity left in you. You’ve gone this far. So go further.’ She gestured at the wagons, the boxes of provisions. ‘I sealed up every sewer tunnel I could find, to keep the gillings below us. I searched the buildings for anything useful. And I’m going to ensure that every fighter we have has the very damn best in our inventory.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For everything,’ Valiya shouted. ‘It’s all for everything. Not you, not me, not Her. It’s for the millions of people back in the republic. It’s for the land that they walk on, and the sky that’s above them. But you can’t see it. You won’t see it.’

  ‘Everyone dies,’ I said. ‘Everything falls. Look around. This city was once home to thousands. I brought men here to defend it and watched them die. They’re still here, ghosts, reliving their last days in eternal silence. In a thousand years, nothing any of us have done will matter.’

  Valiya couldn’t bear to look at me any longer. She turned back to the wagons and began counting through the sad jars of pickled fish. Fish that had swum, died in nets, been stripped down, and bottled up, never to be eaten. Their deaths had served no purpose either.

  ‘And that’s why it matters all the more,’ Valiya said. ‘Because time is brief. Because life is brief, and if we don’t make the most of it, then it really is for nothing.’

  ‘I can send you back,’ I said. ‘Just as I did Amaira and Dantry. If you want to go, I can get you there.’

  ‘No,’ Valiya said. ‘You can’t expend any more of your strength on something so meaningless. And besides. I’m needed here. Get us past this next hurdle, Ryhalt, and I’ll get us over the last. I know what I have to do, even if you don’t.’

  I watched a line of long-dead soldiers marching along the street. Two of them, young lads, were out of rhythm, struggling with their halberds. I caught myself before I called out to their officer to get them in line. Just ghosts, I reminded myself. I had to keep focused now. I couldn’t afford to let the Misery get in my head again and send me sliding back towards oblivion.

  ‘Here,’ Valiya said. I’d not noticed what she was doing. She held out a wrapped bundle. ‘You should have this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A reminder. And here’s another.’

  She reached up and put a hand on the back of my neck, drew my head down, and kissed me on the cheek. It was awkward. My skin was raw and still stung from the rain, and I felt a sudden surge of humiliation at the taste of the Misery that was ever present. But her lips were warm, and something that had long lain shivering inside me came to life. It did not last long. Just a kiss on the cheek. It left me more breathless than any fight had in thirty years.

  She smiled at me, foxlike, and wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve. I couldn’t have tasted good.

  ‘Remember who you are, Ryhalt,’ she said. ‘Blackwing captain. Leader of men. Shavada’s bane. Saviour of Valengrad. Friend, father, and, most of all, human, acting for love. Be that again for me now. Do what you have to do, and I’ll do what I have to do. I know that this isn’t over. You should know it too. Find a way to buy us the time we need. This isn’t over.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I won’t let this be the end,’ she said. ‘Now go. Solve this. We’re so close. And I need to get these kits distributed to the men we have left to us.’

  As though she’d not just turned my whole world upside down, Valiya turned and went back to work.

  Fate is a spinning coin, balanced on an edge so fine that the slightest breath of wind can set it spiralling away from you. But sometimes, in a moment of utter certainty, you have to slam your hand down upon it and make the call.

  35

  The black thread that brought the drudge screaming across the desert tightened. The Misery railed against such order and control. Dulchers ploughed into the column of drudge, goring and tearing. Great skweams appeared in their path, insect legs slashing. Sinkholes erupted before them, clouds of finger-long Misery flies descended on them as though the Misery herself tried to bring every terrible thing she’d ever made to bear against them. Still, the enemy ploughed forwards, ignoring the moans of their wounded as they left them to bleed out in the dust. We had hours before they arrived to destroy us.

  Three moons tracked together, distorting the light as they caught it and cast it down on us below. The world took on rainbow hues, shimmering and changing, ghost-colours and flowers of sunlight mottled across broken walls and avenues of sand, the red-stained bones dancing in brilliant splendour. The eclipse edged closer.

  We would all likely be dead before it happened. A coal-hot anger seethed within me at the injustice. After all we’d done, after every life given and drop of blood shed, the drudge would arrive an hour before the eclipse. North had said it would be close, and he was right. It couldn’t have been closer. But close is not victory. Nearly alive is not alive.

  The soldiers moved with purpose around the palace, raising barricades, digging pits, creating killing zones that would force the drudge to face our guns head-on. If they reached us before the heart was ready, it still wouldn’t be enough. The palace gave us the best chance of holding the drudge, slim as it seemed.

  We were pitifully few, atop the palace, waiting. First stood with his arms folded, impassive and blank as marble. He was alone in the world now, his ancient brethren torn apart out on the sand. If he felt anything at all at their passing, he gave no sign of it. Six of us looked out across the desert. Four captains, a citadel Spinner, and a blind child.

  ‘We can make it,’ Kanalina said, resolve forced into her voice. ‘Just four hours more and the moons will reach their alignment.’

  ‘Is the loom ready?’ I asked. I glanced over to the huge contraption of iron and brass plates, glass lenses and copper wire.

  ‘Everything is in place,’ she said. ‘The light’s so pure. I could charge a canister in minutes. But during the eclipse it will be magnificent.’

  The loom sat ready on the platform, tall, dark iron and polished lenses. One of a kind. Once the light began to flow through it, it wouldn’t stop.

  ‘I could start now,’ Kanalina said. Eager. ‘It wouldn’t be much, not compared to the full eclipse, but …’

  ‘The heart will charge in less than a minute once the moons get in order,’ I said. ‘I don’t want that thing out of its box for any longer than is absolutely necessary. You saw what it did to the longhorns.’ Reluctantly, Kanalina nodded acquiescence. ‘Have the heart ready,’ I said. ‘We’ll begin as soon as we can.’

  ‘When the heart is charged,’ Kanalina said, running a hand across her brow. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then the Nameless do their part, whatever that is,’ I said. ‘Crowfoot says it’s a weapon. He’ll make use of it.’

  ‘And us?’ Kanalina asked. I just shook my head. The drudge would get us. Or, if Crowfoot activated the heart, then I doubted that any of us were going home. ‘I suppose I never expected to come back from it. A suicide mission all along. We came out here to die.’

  ‘Not to die,’ Valiya said. She
took Kanalina’s hand, causing her to flinch, but the Spinner didn’t pull away. ‘We came so that others will live. So that children get to grow up, to love and laugh and grow old.’

  ‘To grow old,’ Kanalina said. A wan smile found its way across dust-chapped lips. ‘What a beautiful thing that would have been.’

  ‘Four hours,’ North said. There was bitterness in his voice. ‘We don’t have that long. Look.’

  He pointed out into the Misery where dust and dark shapes swarmed on the horizon.

  They were here.

  Exhausted, mounts broken by their mad charge across the desert, torn and bloodied by the Misery’s defiance, they would not last long. They were driven past the point of collapse by Acradius’ roaring will, past the point where thought was necessary. A single, indomitable purpose drove them like a hurricane, forcing them onwards, tumbling over themselves, slipping and sliding on bloody feet. A ragged, ruined army. But still they came.

  I’d hoped that it wouldn’t come to this. I’d prayed to the Spirit of Mercy to grant us the time we needed. She hadn’t listened. She never listened.

  ‘How long?’ Valiya asked.

  ‘They’ll be at the walls in under three hours,’ I guessed. ‘A little more before they reach us.’

  ‘There must be something we can do,’ Kanalina muttered. She didn’t like me, but I’d come to admire her resolve.

  ‘There’s one last defence we can try,’ I said. ‘Get everyone together.’

  We gathered in the sand-garden around the palace. They all deserved to hear it. The soldiers who’d been left behind looked ashen. It wasn’t just that they were the last. They’d lost a lot of friends. Hundreds. And they were probably next.

  ‘It had better be a damn good plan,’ Kanalina said. The blood had drained from her face, dark shadows around her eyes. ‘We’ve fifty men, a few light artillery pieces, one Guardian and me. We have nowhere to run. If we can’t prevail we need to keep it out of the enemy’s hands. I’ll not deliver them a weapon of this power. I’ll destroy it before I allow that to happen.’

  ‘If that’s even possible,’ I said. ‘But no. Without the heart, Acradius wins anyway. We’re here to the end.’

  ‘Empowering the heart is the only hope,’ North said. He gave me a knowing look. The Nameless had spent everything they had trying to keep The Sleeper beneath the waves, and he knew it as well as I did. North seemed to be backing me up more and more often and I didn’t like it. I could never forgive what he’d done to Giralt and Tnota. Some men you just hate at a basic level.

  ‘Your last plan ended in disaster, and now there are thousands of drudge bearing down on us,’ Kanalina said. She forced her desperation back behind gritted teeth. ‘We’ll never survive this.’

  ‘Our mission was never to ensure our survival,’ I said. ‘Just to give you enough time to spin the light into the heart and let the Nameless act. That will have to be enough.’

  The soldiers shifted uneasily. They knew the situation was rough as sandpaper, but that didn’t mean they favoured a plan with no way out.

  ‘We’ve done what we can to make the palace defensible. But we’re too few to hold the bridges,’ the captain who’d been left in charge of them asked. He was an older man, one ear long since chewed away by something or other.

  ‘We don’t try to,’ I agreed. ‘We fall back into the palace, then blow the bridges.’

  The moons sparkled overhead as they approached alignment. Rays of startling colour, wild and bright, fell like spotlights across the city. It would have been beautiful if we weren’t all doomed.

  I had no more to say.

  ‘If we blow all the bridges … we’re trapped,’ the captain said. I nodded. He didn’t understand. Didn’t realise that it didn’t matter if we were trapped or not once the light had been drawn into the ice fiend’s heart.

  ‘Yes,’ I rasped. ‘We can’t hold even one bridge. But that sludge in the moat – that’s death to the drudge as sure as it is us. It’ll suck them down sure as quicksand, and that’s not water it’s mixed with. It’s Misery-poison. We can cut them off from the palace, and if anything tries to get across the moat, we sink it. It’s not much of a plan. But it’s the best we have.’

  ‘At least we get to go down fighting,’ Kanalina said.

  ‘Yes.’

  I kept my face hard and empty. No coercion, no games. No words of hope, no suggestions that there might be some devious method of escape. I’d held this last back from them until the hour of fate was upon us. I couldn’t risk them deserting, or refusing. Sometimes I thought that I’d changed, but no. Treating people like tools, just as I always had. I wasn’t just asking them to believe me. I was asking them to decide how long their lives were going to be.

  ‘I’m in,’ North said. ‘It has to be done.’

  ‘It’s the best chance we have,’ Kanalina agreed, though she still looked angry about it.

  ‘We’ll talk it through,’ the captain said. ‘Way I see it you’re not giving us a lot of choice. But I’ll not order my men to their deaths. Those that would rather take their chances in the Misery get to.’

  I nodded. It was our strongest plan. The drudge wouldn’t have siege equipment to cross the sludge in the moat, but their leaders could be inventive and I wanted armed men ready to meet anything that made it across. Valiya came to stand beside me.

  ‘Desperate times,’ she said.

  ‘The most desperate,’ I agreed. ‘You don’t have to join us.’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Nall gave me a final command. I made my bargain with him, and I’ll see it done.’

  ‘Nall,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Gone, but still pulling the strings. What did he ask of you, Valiya?’

  ‘Not so very much,’ she said. ‘And everything.’

  The soldiers’ discussion didn’t take long. The captain returned, his face dark.

  ‘We’ll start unloading the munitions from the wagons, sir,’ he said. He didn’t meet my eye, but he saluted me as though I were in command. I nodded to him. Maybe I was.

  Bringing men across the Misery had been the hard part. The rain had prevented us marching in our thousands, but munitions in wax-sealed barrels hadn’t been an issue. Marshal Davandein had outfitted us with blasting powder for a thousand men. Six wagons, each one holding a dozen barrels. Potent stuff. I’d set half the men to smash holes in the centre of each bridge. We’d load as many barrels into whatever they could dig before we detonated them. If we simply heaped the barrels on top of the bridge, I doubted that the explosions would bring them down. Most likely we’d just have some scorched and broken flagstones, and we couldn’t afford to waste anything. But a detonation from inside would send the impact all the way through the structure, destroying the keystones and collapsing the whole span. Positioned between the legs that held the bridges out of the toxic quicksand, I hoped that it would be enough.

  We’d find out soon.

  The quartermaster – long gone, when the majority of our Spinners had abandoned us – had not unloaded. He’d simply rolled the munition wagons into an open-faced temple to keep them from the rain. It had been smart thinking at the time, but now the powder wagons were backed in by two dozen wagons of weapons and food supplies. To hitch teams up and move them all would have taken too long. We moved them by hand.

  I heaved barrels down from the cart. I could lift them easily enough, handing them over to teams of three or four men who struggled with the weight. This was no time to stand back and let other men do the work. Once we’d unloaded we’d split up, roll the barrels onto the bridges, and hope that five-hundred-year-old, Misery-blasted architecture wouldn’t stand up against what we had. Each of the bridges was roughly the same width. Valiya had assessed how much powder it was going to take. Even Maldon had made himself useful for once, cutting fuses for grenadoes.

  ‘This is a mad plan, neh?’ North said. />
  ‘Mad as everything else out here,’ I agreed.

  ‘Once the spinning starts, you’re expecting more instructions?’

  I looked down at the tattoo on my arm. It had been silent for a long time. But when it came to it, Crowfoot would be there. He’d put every last resource he had into getting us this far. This was the final turn of the cards. A desperate play, but it was what he had. The Lady of Waves too.

  ‘I doubt he’ll miss the climax,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is. We might not want to be here when it happens, but he’ll come.’

  The captain gave directions and the barrels rolled away down the streets.

  Davandein had provisioned us well, and the men who’d been digging holes had attacked the bridge’s stone with frantic energy. They’d managed to dig a good five feet down. No need for the barrels themselves; we staved the wax-sealed lids and poured the grainy black blasting powder like wine. The soldiers were as good as I’d been promised, quick and efficient. When the fuse had been laid we packed earth back in over the top of the powder. The more contained the explosion, the better.

  ‘Everyone back,’ Valiya ordered when it was done.

  ‘You’ll want to cover your ears,’ I said. ‘This is going to be loud.’

  The captain lit the fuse and we ran for the cover of a nearby ruin. For nearly a minute there was nothing, and I started to wonder if the fuse had gone out. And then, past the hands clapped over my ears, a terrific growl echoed through the city. The ground shook, dust sifted down from the melted ceiling above us. We ran to see the result of our work. I found a grin. A huge cloud of dust filled the air over what had once been a bridge, the midsection of which was now a gaping chasm. Pieces of stone were strewn across our side of the moat’s bank, and pieces of rubble poked sharp edges up from the sludge.

  ‘Well, it works then,’ I said.

  ‘You weren’t sure, neh?’ North asked.