Crowfall Read online

  As the smoke cleared, I stood red and alone.

  Looking out over pieces of the men he’d hired, Dark-Hair’s face was unreadable behind black-tinted eyeglasses.

  ‘Wasn’t expecting something quite so monstrous,’ he said, jamming the barrel of a flintlock pistol up against the back of Tnota’s skull. His voice was calm, and thick with that southern inflection. The loss of the hired men was only an inconvenience. ‘The Misery made you like that?’

  Tnota grimaced, but Dark-Hair wasn’t going to pull that trigger. If he did, he’d point his weapon at me first. The hostage was a bluff, and I’d called it: if he scattered Tnota’s brains then he left himself defenceless.

  Blood dripped from my sword blade, across my hand, my wrist, my arm. Hot. Wet. Mine.

  Someone had shot me. A crossbow bolt stuck out, high on my chest, and I hadn’t even noticed.

  I reached up and took hold of the quarrel buried in my left pectoral without breaking eye contact. In the flickering neon phos light, the leaking blood had a bluish hue, crimson as it soaked into the un-white of my shirt. I snapped shaft and fletchings away. Didn’t really feel it, part from the battle-rush and part because the Misery’s working had made me different. Tougher. Harder. Better able to endure the dust-storms, immunised to the many poisons her creatures dripped with. And damn hard to kill. The bolt-head ground against a rib as I moved.

  ‘The Misery changes all of us,’ I said. ‘You want to do some talking before I finish this?’

  I casually threw the broken, blood-slick stump of the quarrel at him, and his hand flashed out to catch it. He said nothing. Not intimidated. He was thinking about going for it, trying to shoot me dead. The bolt in my chest and the lack of trouble it was giving me making him wonder if I could be killed at all. He could take me down with a head shot – I assumed that I wouldn’t survive my brain getting mangled, though I’d not tested that particular assumption. But if he missed even by a hairsbreadth then I’d get to him, and that wasn’t going to end well. He was a slim man, well dressed in a knee-length coat, ruffed shirt, eyes hidden behind darkened lenses even though it was night. His hair was oiled, black and curly, past his shoulders. Sun-bronzed skin.

  ‘You came all the way from the coast to find me?’ I said. ‘From Pyre? You got the look. Got the voice. Makes me wonder what brings you all this way. I don’t care much about killing you. Lot of offal lying in the gutter right now. But you didn’t come all this way because you don’t like the way I look.’

  Dark-Hair was weighing up his options. He was a professional. The little I could see of his pistol barrel showed me that it was expensive, a good flintlock. The cut of his coat said money, and the sword at his side said lots of it. But everything was practical. He kept Tnota between us as I circled. Smart move.

  ‘You’re a hard man to track down,’ he said.

  ‘The discovery must be very disappointing,’ I said. I gestured around at the bits that had once been people. Some of them were still making noises, but those would fade in time.

  ‘You look like something that comes from the Misery, neh?’ he said. ‘How did you get that way?’

  He was playing for time. The wound in my chest was bleeding and maybe when the battle-rush faded the pain would hit me. He knew his business, or at least, he was making fair assumptions. Only I’d been hit like this before. A drudge marksman had put a bolt through my liver a while back. After I’d dug it out, it had healed without a scar.

  ‘Time changes all of us,’ I said. ‘It’s not just the outside that’s changed. I’m different on the inside. I can read minds.’

  ‘You can, neh?’ He turned Tnota in front of me. My friend kept his eyes turned down. Good lad. Didn’t want to distract me from what I had to do. He’d taken his pain and fear and held it back. Keeping himself calm, though he had to be shitting himself. It would only take one squeeze of the trigger to end his game. Dark-Hair took a step back, pulling Tnota with him. ‘Alright then, mind-reader. Tell me. What am I thinking right now?’

  I shifted my feet in the dirt as I got ready to move.

  ‘First, you’re hoping this bolt in my chest is going to start slowing me down,’ I said. ‘It’s not. Second, you’re wondering whether, when I start ducking and weaving, you can still put your one shot through my head. You’re good with a pistol. The best shot you know. How am I doing so far?’

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ he said. Smiled like a fox. ‘I could hit a hawk in full dive.’

  I nodded like it was news to me.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But you’ve seen me cut through the men you hired. You aren’t surprised by that, you didn’t expect them to bring me down. Maybe to clip me. Maybe to get lucky. But what’s nagging at you is how easy it was for me to disassemble them. Look at you. You’re sweating just holding that pistol up, but me? You thought you were coming for a Misery-wrecked man of fifty. But I don’t even give a shit about a crossbow bolt in my chest. So now, you’re thinking, How’s that possible? Why didn’t they warn me?’

  Dark-Hair drew Tnota in closer against himself. His lips were set in a hard, bloodless line.

  ‘That sound like what’s going on inside your head just now?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re going to walk away now,’ he said. ‘You won’t follow.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re going to stay there and tell me who wants me dead. Then I’m going to cripple you. But if you tell me what I need to know, maybe I’ll leave one joint unbroken.’

  Dark-Hair reached up and removed his darkened glasses. Beneath them his eyes were the colour of broiling ocean tides. The wave-tossed eyes moved over me. He noted the pebbled, copper-bronze of my skin, the luminance of my eyes, the threads of black running through my skin like veins of gleaming obsidian. He was not afraid of me, but he was weighing up his options. Judging the odds. A cautious man.

  I very much wanted to walk up to him, take that one pistol shot head-on, and twist his head from his neck. But Tnota was under the gun, and I wasn’t about to risk him more than I already had.

  ‘Perhaps you should ask your own master about that plan. If he ever wakes up again.’

  I gritted my teeth. Tightened my fist around the hilt of my sword and flicked blood from the blade.

  ‘D’you know how I know you don’t really read minds?’ he asked.

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Because if you could, you’d know I have men on the roof.’

  I tried to resist the impulse, but my eyes betrayed me and flitted to the beer-house roof. It was all the opening Dark-Hair needed. He thrust the pistol over Tnota’s shoulder and he would have blown my head off if Tnota hadn’t thrown himself backwards. Instead the shot sliced across my cheek, split my ear. I looked up properly and saw two men on the roof. Their matchlocks were smoking and I ducked and threw myself in a clumsy roll as the dirt erupted around me with a roar.

  Tnota was clear. I drew the barman’s pistol in a smooth motion, levelled it at Dark-Hair, and fired. He might have been able to hit a falcon in full dive, but I evidently wasn’t half the shot that he was and I only managed to shoot out a window. Dark-Hair leapt for a horse, swung himself over, and spurred away into the darkness. My heart was pounding, blood thumping in my ears, and I could feel the battle-rush coursing through me as I went back into the bar and climbed the stairs, but the men who’d shot at me had already thought the better of whatever pay they’d taken and escaped into the night. Tnota was fine. He’d freed Giralt and they clung to each other, clung so tight that the world could never pull them apart again. I couldn’t share in what they had. Worse, I’d done this to them. For most of six years I’d dwelt alone in the Misery, and even so, my friends had suffered for it. I couldn’t allow them to bleed for me. I couldn’t let them suffer. More importantly, they were getting in the way.

  The only way I could pull this off was alone.

  6<
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  I felt like a child listening to my parents arguing. I’d shut myself away in a back room that was mostly being used to store Tnota’s collection of dog-faced statuettes. They peered at me accusingly from their high shelves as I cleaned my gear and got everything in fighting order. My sword had a new edge, my pistols were loaded and ready to spit. I worked my dirk against a whetstone, the grating squeaks doing little to drown out the row taking place farther along the hall.

  ‘If it wasn’t for him, none of this would have happened,’ Giralt said angrily. ‘And now you want us to follow him to the spirits know where?’

  ‘Ain’t so easy as just wanting,’ Tnota said. He might have been free of the Sapler’s influence but he wasn’t entirely recovered. Or maybe I’d just never heard him fight with a partner before.

  ‘I know this isn’t much of a place. Much of a life. But damn it, it’s mine. Do you know how hard I’ve had to work just to scrape this out? My father abandoned my mother—’

  ‘—and she had to work cleaning grease out of industrial drums,’ Tnota finished for him. ‘I know. You told me. A lot.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Giralt snapped back.

  I tried to focus on my knife. Keeping a good edge was important. I took pride in making sure that if anything went wrong when the crunch came, it was because I’d made a bad decision in the heat of the moment, not a bad or idle decision days or weeks before. You tended to win more often in life when you stacked the odds in your favour.

  The bandage around my chest was coarse, itchy, and annoying me. Giralt had dug the crossbow bolt out. He’d had to use a knife, and he’d had to cut into me to get at it. I don’t know what work Giralt had done before he set up trading to the Misery-diggers, but he knew how to work with flesh. It had not been an easy removal. The bolt-head had blunted itself against my ribs, bent back on itself. It had hurt, but not nearly as much as it should have, and Giralt’s knife had lost its edge. The smell that rose from the wound was worse than the pain; worse than turpentine and sewers. Giralt had done his best and I knew that I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist looking. I pulled back the bandage and looked at it. Nearly gone already. A few more hours and the scar would have disappeared entirely. The damage done by the pistol shot that had grazed me was already mended. The Misery’s gift was doing its work.

  I doubled over, a coughing fit taking me as vile black-green sludge fought its way inch by inch up my throat. It was hot in my mouth, and even more vile-smelling than the wound had been. I wiped it on the head of a statue that was giving me a particularly judging look. Perhaps vandalising Tnota’s religious curios was a shitty thing to do to a friend, but he was going to have to leave them all behind anyway.

  ‘For the last time, you don’t owe him anything!’ Giralt yelled, for what I suspected wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time.

  ‘We all owe him, Gir,’ Tnota said. He tried to be quiet enough that I couldn’t hear him, but without success. ‘More than you’ll ever know. But that ain’t the point. The point is, if we stay here then we’re dead men.’

  ‘You go,’ Giralt snapped. ‘Do whatever you have to.’

  ‘You know I won’t leave without you,’ Tnota said. ‘And staying isn’t an option.’

  I wiped the dagger down with a little oil and stuck it in my belt sheath. I looked over some other bits of kit, but I was only killing time. I didn’t think that my intervention in a lovers’ quarrel was going to be appreciated, but time was up. They’d argued through the night and dawn was rising. I’d no doubt that someone who’d lost a loved one – or perhaps more likely, someone who’d been owed money by one of the casualties – would have gone running to the commander at one of the two nearby Range stations. And while the citadel turned a blind eye to the Misery-diggers and Fortunetown, probably because some of those few valuable nuggets that came back from the wastes made their way into princely pockets, the commanders wouldn’t take kindly to a massacre taking place so near their fortresses, or to there being soldiers amongst the dead. Not good soldiers, but soldiers nonetheless, and pointing out that it was only a small massacre was a poor defence. Degrees of scale don’t seem to matter much where a massacre is concerned.

  I put on my swords, slung on my guns, gathered up the odds and ends that go with them. The gunk that I’d smeared on the Big Dog’s image had burned through the wood and he was now missing the upper part of his face. Not nice to think that I carried that stuff inside me, even if I was healing faster than any man had a right to.

  I stepped into the room where Giralt was glowering at Tnota, and Tnota looked embarrassed. The air was humid with anger and regret, and they fell silent as I stepped into the midst of their conflict. It was a small thing, compared to the bloodshed of the night before, but important in its own way.

  ‘I get that you don’t want to leave,’ I said to Giralt. Tnota saw the sense. I looked around at the dresser, the armchairs, the little depressions made by two old men sitting together in front of the fire together each night. ‘This is your world, and you don’t want to give it up. But you don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I do and don’t have. This is all your fault!’ Giralt snapped at me. His face was flush beneath his beard. He was proud, wasn’t military, wasn’t Blackwing, and I wasn’t anything to him. I could see his point of view.

  I walked to the dresser and picked up a dusty decanter of something amber hued. There were cups. I poured for the two of them and passed them out. They drank amidst the glowers and the bad feeling.

  ‘I want you to go,’ Giralt said. His face was flushed. ‘Go, and don’t come back. I told him you’re no good for him. You’re no good for him, and you’re no good for me either. You don’t even look human anymore.’ He thrust a finger at me, but he spoke to Tnota. ‘Is this what you want? Is it?’

  Tnota looked helplessly to me, caught between a stampede and the river it was driving him towards.

  ‘You’re not safe here,’ I said.

  ‘Soldiers will be on their way,’ Giralt said. ‘I know the commander, down at Four-Three. He’ll see we’re taken care of. He’ll have men hunt the bastard that did this to me, and if he comes back here, he won’t get away so easily next time.’ He indicated mottled black-and-purple bruising across his cheek bones. Tnota’s eyes were pleading. He couldn’t afford to lose this argument. ‘How could you understand?’ Giralt said bitterly. ‘You’re barely even human anymore.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. I leaned back against the dresser. ‘But I was, once, and even then I wasn’t like everyone else. Most people just want to live safe and quiet, do their work, drink a beer in the evening. Build something to stick with. They take their satisfaction from living their lives undisturbed. I don’t fit into that world.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Giralt snapped. He looked me over, jaw set. His barbs didn’t hurt. I’d accepted what I’d done to myself a long time ago. ‘Your world isn’t ours.’

  ‘True. But that man who hurt you? The man who imprisoned you, who hired men to kill me, who put a Sapler in your clock to break the man you love? He fits into my world. And he’ll be back.’

  I paused, and let that settle in as the grandfather clock ticked us slowly into the dawn.

  ‘Maybe it will be him again. Or maybe next time his employer will send someone else. It won’t matter. They’ll be the same kind of man. And when they come, they’ll ask around the town. They’ll find out that you were involved with me. And they’ll know I’ve moved on. I won’t be back. But there’s a chance – not a good one, but a chance – that you might know where I went. So they’ll come here, and they’ll ask.’

  ‘I don’t need to know where you’re going,’ Giralt said. ‘We don’t. So we’ll have nothing to tell them.’ He crossed over to Tnota, put an arm around his shoulders, making it clear that it wasn’t Tnota he was angry with. They were a unit, a team. I was the problem. Tn
ota looked uncomfortable.

  ‘The problem is, for all that he did to you, you don’t understand these kinds of men,’ I said. ‘They’ll ask, and you won’t have an answer. And then they’ll ask again, and maybe they’ll use their fists, and you still won’t know. And they’ll ask again, and they’ll ask harder still. They’ll ask with knives. They’ll ask with pliers. Maybe they’ll make you watch while they ask Tnota.’

  ‘You can’t know that,’ Giralt said, but my words had bitten through whatever thick skin he thought he wore.

  ‘I do know,’ I said. ‘It’s what I would do.’

  ‘He’s right, Gir,’ Tnota said. ‘I know these kinds of men. They won’t care about soldiers who might come for them, and they ain’t going to care what you know or don’t. Please.’

  There was dread in his tone. Fear in his eyes. Poor guy had it bad. Tnota wasn’t even thinking about his swollen lip, or the cuts and grazes speckling across his face. All his thoughts were for Giralt. Keeping him safe. Giralt’s fight withered as he accepted the truth of what he was being told. There was despair, frustration, overwhelming sadness at having to abandon the life he’d worked so hard to carve out for himself. Here, on the edge of the Misery, at the doorway to the hells, he’d made something of himself. What had he been before? A misfit, maybe. A criminal? A servant? Whatever he’d been, he’d since tied himself to this place and now it was roped with lead and sinking fast.

  I left him with Tnota to talk through what had to be done and went out into the cold, quiet dawn. The streets were empty. No need to rise with the sun, here. These were hard people, these diggers and their exploiters. A lot of them were probably exactly the type I’d just described to Giralt. I’d guess most of them had glanced out of the window once the shooting was over, given a grunt, and gone back to bed.