Crowfall Read online

  ‘Of course he’s coming. We are broken, and with the power of The Sleeper at his call, not even the Engine can deter him.’

  We sat in silence for a while. I went inside and dug the cigarillo out from the floorboards, lit it on the stove. Ate the meat from the pottage. Went back outside. I sat down beside Nall’s wheezing body.

  ‘You dying, Nall?’ I asked.

  ‘This body has seen better days.’

  ‘You know what I mean. The real you. Whatever the fuck you are.’

  ‘We come. We go. Sometimes it’s brief, sometimes it’s forever.’ He coughed, sounding like his ribs were just a tangle of bone in his chest, clattering about in an empty space. Maybe they were.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  Nall narrowed his eyes, glared at me. The fury of the cosmos simmered there, burning hard, intense. I was just some petty mortal, and here he was, doing the dying. I doubted that he’d ever been so close to death as this.

  ‘You want me to leave you alone until you’re gone?’ I asked.

  Nall glared at me, then shifted his eyes down, around, away. Embarrassed. Angry. Afraid.

  ‘No.’

  I finished the cigarillo and tossed the nub out onto the sand. The smoke curled slowly through the heavy air, reluctant to rise.

  ‘Can anything stop Acradius now?’

  ‘Crowfoot has a plan. Will it work? Not even the spirits know, Galharrow.’ He looked up towards the shattered sky, the glowing fault lines spreading in all directions, white-bronze light gleaming. ‘But even if it does, I fear for the world. I like this world. I’ve been here a long time. I’ll be gone, soon. But the world deserves to remain.’

  ‘Does it?’ I said. The words escaped before I could hold them back.

  ‘It’s cold and lonely, out here,’ Nall said. ‘But you’ve known love. It’s why you’ve spent six years hiding in the Misery. You can play the bitter old man all you want, but I know what you’re planning. Crowfoot doesn’t, but I do.’

  My muscles went rigid. The knife at my belt suddenly begged to leap into my hand. I’d sworn I would allow no threats to survive. Allow no one to interfere. Nobody and nothing could get in my way. But this was Nall, and whatever the condition of this body, killing it would achieve jack-shit. I forced my fingers to unclench.

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ I said.

  ‘I followed Dantry Tanza’s enquiries,’ Nall said breezily, as though it were nothing. ‘The research you’ve had him doing. The destruction of those mills. I reverse-engineered your plan from there. It’s insane, of course. Utterly mad, but that’s the brilliance of it. Tanza would be a revered genius, if every prince in Dortmark weren’t trying to hang him. It’s certainly a bold plan.’

  ‘Will it work?’ I asked. Nall laughed wetly.

  ‘No. Of course not. You’d have to be mad even to attempt it.’

  But then he smiled.

  ‘You want me to succeed.’

  ‘We all have our roles. Mine is nearly done. It’s humanity that matters, now. You can become the anvil all you want, but if you’re no longer a man, it won’t matter anyway. And I haven’t been human for a very, very long time.’

  Riddles and half-truths. It was Nall. I shouldn’t have expected anything less.

  His eyes closed, the wheeze of his chest died away. He lay quite still for a moment, and then his eyes flew wide open. His one hand reached out and snatched my wrist. Or tried to. His fingers were held back, an invisible force keeping us apart. The magic in me and the magic in him did not want to meet, skin to skin.

  ‘Crowfoot’s weapon is our last chance at survival. But do not trust your master,’ he hissed. His eyes had taken on a fixated intensity. Stared into me like he could see right into my heart.

  ‘Weapons,’ I said. I shook my head, turned away from that gaze. ‘We’re sitting in the aftermath of his last, flanked by the craters made by yours. Where does it end?’ But Nall had no answer for me. His breaths wheezed, rattled in failing lungs. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘The rain remembers, Galharrow,’ Nall croaked. ‘Ask the rain.’

  The body gave up and fell limp, the way the dead do. Empty, a boneless marionette with no operator. An analogy singularly fitting to that particular Nameless. I pulled the blanket up over his head. I’d have to burn the corpse. Wouldn’t be wise to leave bits of the Nameless lying around for the Misery things to find. I got up, rolled my shoulders. The raven was calling, and I had to answer.

  I’d been gone a long time. It was time to return to civilisation.

  4

  It is testament to the human spirit that people can not only learn to live with anything, they can usually work out a way to profit from it.

  A town that should not have been a town lay between Station Four-Four and Station Four-Five. In the summer it reeked of the Misery as the warm air blew in from the east, and in the winter, everything froze over with ice that bore a greenish tint. Over the years the Misery had crept closer, and if the people that dared to live in that semblance of a town had possessed any sense, they would have turned west and looked for something better. But times were hard, and the people had grown harder. There was something positive to be taken from that, I thought.

  I approached along the trade road from the south so that they wouldn’t see me coming right at them over the broken sands. The palisade-ringed cluster of two dozen buildings lacked any serious fortification and, officially, Fortunetown didn’t exist. There was a fine line between fortune-telling and doomsaying, and neither was permitted in the stations or in Valengrad, and so the tellers had started to settle in the shanty towns that grew up between the Range stations. Soldiers are a superstitious lot, and there was a thriving trade in chicken guts, card turning, and sleep readings.

  I walked up the dirt track, noted that the solitary watch tower was unmanned. The palisade gate wasn’t manned either, though darkness had already started to descend and there were things in the world that shouldn’t have been let in. They must have felt safe here, but since the Crowfall not all of the dark creatures were confined to the Misery.

  I was fifty yards from the gate when a coughing fit hit me. I doubled over at the side of the dusty track, feeling the sharp bite in my lungs. Blasting rips of air tore out of me. Felt like someone was jabbing a knife down my throat. I spat out a congealed lump of thick, heavy crap. Something like stewed tar. It had the taste of the Misery behind it, acrid and chemical, bitter and foul. It bubbled and made a feeble pretence at motion on the ground, steaming and staring back at me as I wiped my mouth. Not good.

  I did what little I could to hide the oddness of my appearance before I entered Fortunetown, which meant pulling up a hood and showing as little skin as possible. Night would help conceal me, but it was better not to take chances. There would be soldiers here, and it had been a long time since I’d been on good terms with the citadel.

  For a small place in the middle of nowhere, the night was lively. Fortune-telling coupled neatly with its sister trades: taverns to drink off a bad reading or celebrate a good one, pleasure houses for one last good time, and even a couple of shrines to the spirits of mercy and solace. Fortunetown drew the soldiers down from the stations and there were people out on the single broad street with cups of beer in one hand and verified certificates of good luck in the other. Neon phos lit the night declaring services to read your life, or ways to make you forget what you’d heard.

  ‘Read your fortune, just ten marks,’ an old woman called from a narrow doorway. ‘Read your fortune in the sky. University trained, all fortunes sure to pass. Check your luck before you head out.’ The lines around her eyes were set deep, her hands wrinkled, but she was dressed in bright silks and jewels sparkled on her fingers. Soothsaying was always profitable around men who risked their lives every time they went out to work. I didn’t believe any of it. I’d made my own luck enough times, and I didn�
�t want to believe that my life story was somehow written in the lines on my hands.

  For the Misery, though, it was about as cheerful a place as I’d ever come across. It didn’t seem like many bad fortunes were being told. Unhappy customers probably weren’t repeat customers. Some of the readers probably believed in what they were doing, others were probably charlatans, but I couldn’t blame them either way. They made people happy, and for a Misery-fronting town, Fortunetown was about as happy as anywhere got. I could see why Tnota had made it his home.

  The wooden buildings bounced laughter and high spirits back into the phos-lit night, but it was a desperate, stretched kind of laughter, and most of it was absorbed back into the sky. I kept my head down and my hands in my pockets all the way to Tnota’s house.

  It was bigger than the other residential buildings, if a lot smaller than the most prosperous ale-dens. I frowned to see that even in the shadows it was heading towards a state of disrepair. The little garden I’d ploughed out for him hadn’t been tended, and sickly weeds overran it. The windowpanes were clouded with dust blown in from the Misery and the whole place had a sad, neglected kind of look to it. Tnota had never been overly concerned with his living arrangements, but I’d thought that Giralt had been a good influence. Times must have changed, and if things had fallen apart on that score, then I’d be a sadder man by the time my visit was over. Tnota had found a good thing here – here, of all places, on the edge of a shattered sky with the hells on the doorstep.

  I knocked on the door, three rapid taps. A few moments later, movement within, and it opened.

  Age had caught up with Tnota quickly, overrunning him in a handful of years. I figured that he was halfway between fifty and sixty and though I’d known older men, I’d not known an older navigator. The little hair that remained to him had turned white, and though his Fracan skin was unlined, the years of drink had taken their toll. He opened the door to me half-cut, his shirt hanging open to display an overhanging paunch. He blinked, the earthenware jug in his hand and the glaze of his eyes showing he’d started drinking shortly after dawn and hadn’t let up.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ he said. He blinked a few times as if he couldn’t quite grasp who he was seeing, then stepped out and embraced me with his one arm. He smelled like a three-week-old sock. ‘Shit, Ryhalt. It’s been an age. Wasn’t expecting you. Haven’t cleaned the place.’

  ‘Can I get in off the street?’

  ‘Sure. ’Course. Make yourself at home. Grab yourself a jug from the pantry. Whatever you like. What’s mine is yours. You know that.’

  He was unsteady on his feet, deep under the fug of booze. A pair of long candles cast a bleak light. It was cold, and the smell of disregard hovered in the air like evening mist. Tnota settled into a chair. I’d expected him to be energised to see me, to throw questions my way. Instead he just started to rock slowly in the chair, creaking in time to the ticking of an old grandfather clock, the only other sound in the room. I went to the pantry cupboard. Not a lot that could be called food in there, mostly jars of fish paste. There were a few jars of beer, but it had been a long time, and it didn’t call to me the way it had once before. Tnota didn’t have anything to drink that wouldn’t potentially awaken that old demon. Empty handed, I went back and joined my friend in the dark sitting room. He squinted in the gloom as if focusing was hard.

  ‘It’s been a long time,’ I said. Tnota looked at me with bleary eyes.

  ‘Wasn’t sure you’d come back this time.’ He eyed my excessive growth of beard. Nobody to bother shaving for out in the Misery. ‘Doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘I always come back,’ I said.

  ‘Never been gone this long before, though.’ Tnota squinted as he performed some mental arithmetic. ‘Almost six months.’

  ‘It can’t have been that long,’ I said, frowning. But it had been late spring when I’d last left town, and winter was blowing in again now. I’d lost track of time. Lost track of myself, maybe. I was impressed that my ammunition had lasted that long.

  ‘Giralt not in?’ I said.

  ‘He’s away,’ Tnota said. They weren’t easy words for him to say. I wondered what they implied. Giralt ran one of the general stores that outfitted the miners before they went on their expeditions. A good man, honest and firm. He and Tnota had been of an age, and I’d liked him.

  ‘Gone far?’

  ‘Far enough. We won’t see him tonight,’ Tnota said. The weight of sadness in his words bore down on me and I chose not to press him. They’d had three years together here on the edge of the world. Maybe that was all that could be asked for. Tnota wasn’t an easy man to get along with. He was cowardly, and he drank like a reluctant bridegroom. But he was also loyal, and there was goodness at his core. Giralt had been a good man. I wanted to know what had happened between them, but with your last friend there are some things you don’t push.

  I stood awkwardly while I plucked up the guts to ask the questions that I needed answered. Tnota sat rocking in his chair, staring into the gloom. You wouldn’t have known that his oldest friend had just stepped out of the nightmare and into his home. He should have had questions. He should have cared.

  ‘Have you heard of any sightings of Ezabeth?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ I prodded. Tnota turned his yellow-crusted eyes towards me, blinking as if he were dredging memories up from beneath a mountain.

  ‘We don’t get news of that kind of thing down here often. It’s been years. If she’s still in the light, I haven’t heard of it. Gone, I think. I know, it ain’t what you want to hear.’

  He said it as though that weren’t crushing, but I just nodded. I’d studied my two impenetrable books. I knew that Ezabeth was fading from the world, even her half-existence destined to come to an end. Nothing lasts forever – except maybe the Nameless.

  ‘And Amaira? Any word of her?’

  ‘Not a whisper. Whatever she’s doing for your boss, it took her far away and she hasn’t been back. Dantry’s still loose, though. They’ve not caught him yet. He blew up a phos mill, a big one. An accident, I think, although after you’ve done it three times I’m not sure you can still claim that.’

  ‘Did anyone die?’

  ‘Probably. I don’t know. Talents, maybe.’

  Melancholy filled the house, so thick that it nearly had flavour. The last time I’d been here, there had been bright-tuned lamps and Giralt had been cooking a shoulder of lamb. There’d been bunches of fragrant herbs strung from the rafters, fresh bread under a chequered napkin. All the life, all the joy had been sapped away. Giralt had never liked me much and I couldn’t blame him for that, given I looked stranger each time he met me, and he knew that whatever I was doing, Tnota was mixed up in it and it probably wasn’t good. But he was polite, courteous, treated me as a houseguest for Tnota’s sake. I’d been happy, knowing that they’d found something worth treasuring.

  A knock on the door.

  ‘Expecting visitors?’ I rose, my hand moving to my sword hilt. It was paranoia, old caution. Nobody knew I was here.

  ‘It’ll just be the boy from the tavern, taking tomorrow’s order,’ Tnota said wearily. ‘Maybe someone looking to get led to the mine. I don’t take many jobs these days, but I still have to make a living.’

  Tnota pushed himself slowly from the chair, headed out to the hall. I heard a kid’s voice, briefly, before the door closed and Tnota returned. He sank himself back down into his chair and stared into the candle flame. Almost as though he’d forgotten that I was there.

  My own mood had sunk low as a mouse’s belly, seeing my friend in this state. I lived a bad enough way out in the nonsense, but Tnota seemed somehow to be worse. Maybe because he’d had something good before, and now it was gone. Maybe.

  I understood how the bleakness can take a man. You feel it in the exhaustion that follows you around, that presses down like a wei
ght just above your eyes, telling you to just sleep through it all. To blot out the world with dreams and closed eyes so that at least you don’t have to be aware of it. It tells you to be frantic, to elicit some kind of change to make things better, even as it tells you that there’s nothing you can do and no point in trying. It says you had something before, and that will never come back, and that the bottle will at least take it away for a few hours … though it never does. That bleakness was rooted through Tnota, and not just because he was drunk. One arm had curled around the jug of beer like a child clutched to his breast, and without realising it, he mouthed silent words to the candle flame.

  I got up from my chair, crossed to an old trunk. I opened it, poked around inside. Just some old tools, worn and tarnished from use.

  ‘Any trouble with the geese?’

  Tnota shook his head. No interest. He didn’t offer anything further. Just stared into the darkness.

  I shut the trunk, crossed to a dresser. The first drawer held dishcloths, clean and neatly folded. The sign that someone cared about their life, that they took pride in honest things. Giralt’s world, left untouched.

  ‘When was the last time you heard from Dantry and Maldon?’ I said. ‘No word from them?’

  ‘Not since you were here last,’ Tnota said. Said it like it didn’t matter. Like what they were doing wasn’t vital to everything.

  The other drawers contained silverware, an old bottle of cure-all tonic, dishes, licence papers. Tnota watched me rifling through his things without care or comment. I closed the drawers.

  ‘Citadel men came asking for you, couple of months back,’ Tnota said.

  ‘Any idea what about?’

  Tnota gave a one-sided shrug.

  ‘The usual, probably.’

  ‘Davandein can go boil her arse,’ I said. ‘You aren’t feeling talkative today. Thought you might be glad to see me.’

  ‘I guess,’ Tnota said. He put the jug back to his lips. He drank, and liquid spilled into his beard and onto his chest. He was sweating. His health was shot, but I’d seen him drunk, and I’d seen him down, and this was worse than either. Spirits knew, we’d been through the hells and back and we’d seen plenty to bring us low. But this wasn’t like him.