Crowfall Read online

  I knelt and put a hand to the grit. The Misery whispered her secrets to me, and I turned what could have been considered north. She told me where to seek, where to hunt. I no longer remembered when we’d started this strange communion, but the Misery didn’t hate me anymore. She got in my veins, my gums, and when I let myself grow distracted, my thoughts. She didn’t like my purpose, didn’t like that I wasn’t willing to join her completely, but I’d basked in her embrace for long enough that the corruption tolerated me. We were not one, but we coexisted. I held no greater place in her affection than the skweams and dulchers. I was just another thing; a thing that understood. That seemed important. The Misery’s Son. That was what the drudge had called me. It was true, after a fashion.

  I picked my way back to the site of the previous day’s ambush, though it lay before the dunes rather than beyond them now, and the distance had halved. The Misery’s tar lake had become a mere seam of the viscous liquid barring my way. It smoked, bubbled, and stank, sending me on a two-mile detour, but eventually I found the way. The bodies of the drudge and their mounts were gone, devoured by whatever lay beneath that glass-bladed foliage, but it was the navigator’s body I’d been interested in. In fact, it wasn’t his body I wanted, but the things that had come for him.

  They dozed, a pair of bloated, spider-legged maggots amongst the bones they’d picked clean. There were no names for whatever they were. For all I knew, they were the only two of their kind in existence. They’d chewed through the straps of the navigator’s bronze armour, pried it open as a fisherman cracks a crab’s shell to get at the soft white meat inside. I named them Scuttlers, lying in the afternoon sun, sagging white bellies grotesquely swollen. Senses dulled by satiation, they didn’t notice my approach, but they were too bloated to avoid me even if they had. I hacked what I figured to be their heads away, trussed them up like game, and turned for home.

  A few miles away, taunting me, a staircase rose up from the sand. Unsupported, it lifted up to a stone arch. I should have seen the sky through it, but instead there was darkness. It led somewhere else. It was not the first time that I’d encountered the dark archway. It had come and gone over the past months, and the Misery’s message was clear. It wanted me to enter. Wanted me to climb those stairs, step through into whatever lay beyond.

  I kept my distance. The Misery was not my ally. I did not trust her.

  I carried the Misery-creatures back to the Always House, then sat outside and went to work. Nenn said nothing as I skinned them. Nothing, as I gutted them, then disappeared entirely as I sat down to my meal.

  Nightmares followed. Dreams so vivid I could have painted them in oils if I’d had the talent. I saw the world as it had been before the Deep Kings had come, before Crowfoot had repelled their armies by unleashing the Heart of the Void. The fields patched a luscious country in green, gold, and tan. The wheat grew deep, the olive groves were heavy with fruit. The sun shone hot in summer, the rains came full in spring. The princes and queens who ruled the cities hadn’t been saints, and they’d fought hard when the Deep Kings led their armies to trample the wheat, to burn the groves. And when they’d fought with everything that they could, had given everything they had to give, Crowfoot unleashed the Heart of the Void in his desperation. Children looked up from their lessons and work to see the cracks tear through the sky. The energy that came down broke the earth and tore through the stability of reality. Towers crumbled, forests melted. The wheat hissed and spat and sizzled into clouds of poisoned fog, dogs merged with their masters into things that were neither, and they were the lucky ones. I saw the advancing armies of the drudge look up as the moons shivered and their light faltered, and the sky began to howl before they too were twisted, destroyed, and scattered. I lived a thousand hideous, agonised deaths.

  As I awoke, my whole body hissed with pain, but I had become accustomed to it. I crawled to the water barrel and tried to wash the foulness away but it lingered and remained, as it always lingered and remained. Sweat slicked my skin, even my fingers glistened. My nails had long ago turned black, my flesh hard and gleaming like polished copper. I lowered my head against my knees, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and crawled into the corner. I didn’t weep. I didn’t ever weep. To mourn took sorrow, and there was no more pity left in my husk. There was only a dry, steady anger. Anger, and the need for revenge.

  3

  I had to return to the Range. I hadn’t the shot, the powder, or the gun-oil to keep going. The rains came eleven days apart, always eleven days. They’d been regular as clockwork for the last three years, ever since the Crowfall.

  The earth had shaken. The sky tore afresh, and everything changed.

  We were not at the epicentre, whatever it was. Of that I was sure. Nobody knew for certain what caused it, but I had my suspicions. We only caught the peripheral wash, the ground shaking and the black rain falling upon us. It had begun as a day like any other, and then – madness. For a day and a night, nothing made sense. Colours flickered and blended together. Cold water boiled away into nothing, hot water froze into ice. Birds fell from the sky, trees burst into bloom before withering to dry, empty husks. There was no reason behind it. The effects were inconsistent even between one footstep and another. The Doomsayers who’d long since claimed that the world was ending had enjoyed being right for one insane, calamitous day. But the next, they were to be disappointed.

  Things did not return to normal but they stabilised. The geese remained different, the crows were gone. New things we’d never seen before crawled out of the dark to pester, to bite, to haunt. It was the deciding factor. What I’d planned with Dantry and Maldon was dangerous. Foolish, even, maybe. But when the world twisted and bucked and every part of reality ground against its own corners, we knew it had to be done. Swore it in blood. One last throw of the dice, before everything was gone.

  It would take me six days to make it back to the Range on foot, though it was nearer three weeks’ travel. The Misery would accommodate me in this, time and distance swirling like drops of blood in water, provided I was willing to pay her price. I’d learned her moods. Her ways. The passages and flows of change that ran between the fragments of what passed for reality out here. But to work through her meant expending the essence that had bled into me. Everything has a price, and to bend the Misery’s pathways to my will took from me the very essence that I’d been soaking myself in all this time. I would spend it only grudgingly, hoarding it as a miser hoards coins beneath his floorboards.

  I didn’t leave.

  I delayed.

  I followed my usual routines. Went out across the sands, or the salt flats, or whatever new terrain the Misery’s shifting brought to me. When I found things I killed them, and I took what I needed from them. I saw no more drudge, but the hanging archway appeared again, twice, thrust directly into my path. I looked up at the darkness beyond, and not for the first time felt a tugging curiosity to know what lay beyond. It passed as it always did, and I gave it a wide berth.

  The one luxury I had found in the Always House was a lonely cigarillo. It was poorly rolled, abandoned halfway. Maybe the owner had tossed it away, running outside to witness his demise as the sky broke asunder and chaos scorched the world. I’d discovered it between two floorboards. It was always a pain in the arse to dig it out, but I dug it out most days. I lit it from the stove and sat out on my porch to listen to the sky. It was red today, red and black and bloody as tar. The wails and howls had always seemed so random before, but there was consistency there, if you knew what to listen for. To say the song was beautiful would have been a stretch, but it was worthy of observation, perhaps.

  That was when I saw him. Distant. Just a speck on the horizon. I leaned forwards and squinted against the redness of the sky’s glare.

  It was a man. Or a man-shape, anyway. The things in the Misery sometimes look like us. The ghosts echo what they were. The gillings parody our beginnings. The limber-men scampe
r across the dunes on spindle-legs and the behemoths’ stony bodies cling vaguely to our shapes. But this was none of those things. It was a man, alone and on horseback. A soldier? A traveller?

  No ordinary man could have made it this far into the Misery alone. Not here, into the darkness, where the dread things lay.

  I reached slowly for my gun, loaded my last shot and lit the cord, and settled in to get the range. No need for me to go to him – only one place he could be headed. There only was one place, around here.

  I cocked my weapon, put my eye to the scope. The world leapt forwards into sharp, easy focus, dials rotating as the lenses settled. My eyesight had never been better. The Misery had turned my skin to copper and my veins black, but she’d also sharpened my edges. The rider had not enjoyed such benefits. His mule – not a horse after all – was limping, but without it the man would have been slower. He’d lost a foot, and one sleeve ended raggedly at the elbow. His head hung forwards, and he slumped in the saddle, only his balding crown and dirty brown hair visible. I sighted on him with the targeting bar, lined it up with his chest. It was my last lead ball. A shame to waste it, if he was a lost soldier, a scout, or some other unfortunate detached from his unit.

  But he could be something worse. Something that would erupt from its shell of skin in a flurry of teeth and hate. Something that exploded. Something awful.

  My fingers shifted on the firing lever. Put him out of my Misery? Even if he was human, there was no food here that he could take with him, no supplies to get him back home. I could live off the land, but I’d acclimatised slowly. Nobody else could. Better to send him on to whichever of the hells had collected his name and have done.

  My hands were steady on the stock. Seemed a cruel thing to see a man survive the Misery’s worst only to grack him here. Something nasty had taken his foot and his arm, but he’d got away anyway, and the Always House could keep him alive. For a time, anyway. But it was my sanctuary, and he didn’t belong here. I settled my aim nice and steady as he drew closer. With the scope’s help, a heart shot was possible at this range.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ I said. I lowered my gun, snuffed the match. Instead I fetched out my swords and placed them in easy reach on the table. Better not to waste the shot.

  As the mule drew closer, I realised, with the kind of discomfort that rises from blood-clogged drains, that I knew this person. Or whatever he was. ‘Person’ was a stretch.

  I walked out to meet him. The mule was blind and on its last legs. It hadn’t the energy to be unnerved by me as I took the small man down from the animal’s back and carried him the last ten yards to the house.

  ‘Not inside,’ he croaked. ‘Don’t take me inside.’

  His face was thick with dust, scuffed and bloody. The Misery had not been gentle.

  ‘Not refined enough for your kind?’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t go well,’ he said. He wasn’t smiling. Of all the people that I had expected to see on the back of that mule, Otto Lindrick was well down on the list. Or at least a man – or a thing – that looked like Otto Lindrick.

  Nall. One of the Nameless, here in the Misery, alone and bloodied on the back of a sorry-looking mule. This man – this being – had built the Engine that defended the Range. I had witnessed the vast power that his machinations had wrought, had seen him unpick a god from existence beneath the citadel. He had many bodies; this one had seen better days. I had not expected any guests at the Always House. In no dream had I expected one of the Nameless.

  I brought water from the barrel. Immortal wizard or no, the body this part of his consciousness inhabited was feeling the pain of its journey. It must, I realised from its damp clothing, have been caught out in the rain. That couldn’t have been easy, even for a wizard.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting guests,’ I said. I propped Lindrick up in the rocking chair on the deck. ‘The place is a mess.’

  ‘“The roads are a mess.” That’s what the bastard gillings were saying when I woke up,’ Nall said, showing me the ragged, chewed-off stump of an arm. ‘Nasty little things, aren’t they?’

  ‘Not at all pleasant,’ I said. My skin was crawling. I brought out a blanket, because Nall’s body was ruined and dying, and it seemed fair that a man ought to be given a blanket when he’s about to die. Not that Nall really died when one of his bodies failed. His apprentice had once stuck a fruit knife in him, but he’d been back soon enough.

  ‘It took me a long time to find you,’ he said. ‘Nobody would tell me where you were.’

  ‘They don’t know,’ I said. I felt a moment of cold. ‘Who did you ask?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Your sorts. Drunks and misfits. The Range Marshal. I even tried some of your fellow Blackwing captains.’ He cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘Not so many of you left, these days, are there?’

  He drank, spilling as much water as he took in. The body’s eyes were bloodshot. Pained. I reminded myself that it was all bullshit. The whole body was a lie.

  ‘You could have asked Crowfoot,’ I said. ‘He must know where I am. He always does.’

  Nall’s eyes glittered through the red streaks. Something of that old wolf’s cunning still in there, then. Something alien.

  ‘We both know he doesn’t. You’ve hidden yourself deep in the darkness out here, and the raven is not what he once was. None of us are.’

  I’d not heard from my master since before the Crowfall. That was nothing abnormal. He’d gone long periods without bothering me before. But this was different. In those brief, glimpsed flashes in the rain I’d seen things. Terrible things.

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘My own captain managed it. Winter found you.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Of course not. My agents don’t strut like you Blackwings. Crowfoot never understood the benefits of subtlety.’

  Somewhat rich coming from Nall. I didn’t think that there was very much subtlety about a towering edifice of iron and concrete spanning the length of the Range, or about a machine capable of wiping lives from the world in their hundreds of thousands.

  ‘You know, Galharrow, you’re not looking so good,’ Nall said. ‘And that’s coming from me.’

  I got up and leaned against one of the porch’s posts. Looked out into the Misery, where the sand was shifting, gliding, and reshaping at the passage of some great presence beneath. The Misery had tried to stop Nall from reaching me. Or maybe that was giving it too much credit. It tried to stop everyone and everything from getting anywhere.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Crowfoot needs you,’ Nall said. He coughed into his fist. Sounded like he had wet gravel rolling around in his lungs. ‘We’re been in disarray since the Fall.’

  ‘The Crowfall?’

  ‘If you wish to call it that. But if you think you’ve seen the Deep Kings make war on us before, what’s coming is going to rewrite the definition. It’s bad, Galharrow. We’re down to our last cards.’

  ‘When you Nameless get desperate you tend to make plays that don’t work out so well for the rest of us. What’s Crowfoot’s angle this time?’ I said it without bitterness. Nall accepted it without rancour. It was simply a statement of fact.

  Nall hunched over in another coughing fit, came away with red specks on his fist. His body didn’t have all that long.

  ‘What does Crowfoot always do when he sees a threat coming? He meets it head-on with all the subtlety of a stampede. He’s working on a weapon of some kind. Something new. That much I’m sure of.’

  ‘But you don’t know?’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to be the all-powerful Nameless, but you don’t feel like sharing with each other?’

  ‘Mortals,’ Nall said with disgust. ‘Always so caught up being irritable you can’t see the truth that’s right before you. Look at this body.’ I did, and remained unimpressed. ‘The Fall shattered me. This avatar was down on the southern
coast, selling berths to fishing boats. There were a thousand of me spread across the world. Now? I’ve less than twenty forms left. I’m not even sure how many of me I still am, or what Crowfoot intends. Or where he is, or how he survived.’

  ‘The day of the Crowfall,’ I said. ‘That was the day you fought the Deep Kings, to keep The Sleeper buried, wasn’t it?’

  The Deep Kings had tried to raise The Sleeper from the ocean’s depths: some kind of ancient demon even greater and more powerful than they were, in a bid to flood the world. The Nameless had all travelled to a distant place of power, a land of ice and biting wind, to stop them. I had glimpsed their gathering only briefly in a vision my master had sent me, but I remembered the terrible presence that had lived beneath the ice.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nall blinked. ‘My memories are full of holes. Torn, frayed, and unravelling. Perhaps another version of me knows what happened. I don’t remember much about you, Galharrow. Only that we used you to play the Engine ruse, and it worked. It is a sad state of affairs that I have come to rely upon mortals. But we failed. The Deep Kings are coming.’

  ‘You’re confused,’ I said slowly. ‘If The Sleeper had risen, we’d all be under a hundred feet of water.’

  ‘True,’ Nall said. He tried to grin, but the muscles were running out of energy. ‘Hah. Hah. You’re right. We fought them. But we only contained it. Partly. Deep King Acradius made a deal with The Sleeper. He took on the small part of its power that he could free, and in exchange they became one. Power for freedom. Acradius is something new, now. Vaster and more powerful than any king. Than any Nameless. We don’t know how, or why, but the other Deep Kings fought him, and it’s taken him three years to win. Philon, Nexor, Iddin, all of them – they’re vassals, now. Acradius styles himself emperor now.’

  ‘The Deep Emperor,’ I said. I’d been hoping it was arrogance amongst his followers that had given the drudge cause to use that title. A chill crept down my neck, across my shoulders. ‘And now he’s coming for us?’