Crowfall Read online

  I needed horses. There was a communal stable under a flimsy roof off the main street, but I didn’t feel like bartering for mounts, and I didn’t have anything much to barter with anyway. When I stepped in there was a young lad sleeping behind a curtain, who pushed back the corner to check who was there. When he saw me his fingers gripped the edge of the fabric, scrunched it good.

  ‘You run this place?’ I asked. He nodded, head bobbing rapidly.

  ‘My uncle’s,’ he said. Scared. Couldn’t keep his eyes from me. Couldn’t really blame him.

  ‘You know who I am?’

  He nodded.

  ‘You killed them folks outside Sav’s place.’

  ‘That I did,’ I said. ‘You don’t have anything to fear from me. I don’t kill kids. You know that some of them that got themselves killed were soldiers? They must have ridden down from one of the stations and I doubt they need those horses anymore. Want to point them out to me?’

  He was brave to come out and show me, but then he probably had to be brave to sleep alone in a stable in a place like Fortunetown.

  I ended up with five horses, and most of them were pretty good beasts. Black or brown, a few white socks. I led them back to the house where Tnota and Giralt hadn’t wasted any more time. They’d thrown the things they needed into big military packs.

  ‘You can’t come back here. Not ever. If there’s anything you’ve left buried, anything you think you might want one day, you need to get it now,’ I said.

  Giralt sighed and looked back at the wooden building. It wasn’t anything special, but I guess it was to him. It wasn’t fair. Of course it wasn’t. It never was.

  ‘Where to?’ Tnota asked.

  ‘Where do we always end up?’ I said. ‘All roads lead to Valengrad in the end.’

  7

  The ride south along the Range wasn’t comfortable. The horses didn’t like me, and the company was even less comfortable than the saddle. The easy camaraderie that Tnota and I should have enjoyed was being squatted on, his relationship with Giralt a blockade between us. Tnota wanted to appease us both, I wanted to focus on the objective at hand, and Giralt wanted his life back and for me to fuck off out of it. I couldn’t blame him for that. I’d spent so many years with Tnota, and we’d lived through nightmares together. Giralt knew he could never be a part of that. Ezabeth’s ghost had come between Valiya and me the same way.

  I took us west, away from the Misery and the supply road that ran along the Range. We followed a disused canal instead. Where laden supply barges should have fed tonnes of cargo up and down between the Range stations there were only ducks and weeds now. Old, abandoned barges littered the banks, some of them home to otters and red geese, others to vagrants. It would have been prime scouring ground back in my Blackwing career, and I would have bet that most of the grubby faces that peered out from the barges had abandoned a contract of service given to them by the citadel.

  ‘What do you want to do when we reach the city?’ Tnota asked. He didn’t ride well these days. His back was giving him gyp, and a single hand on the reins didn’t help. Giralt wasn’t much of a rider, but he managed. I was just out of practice, but while you remember these things quick, your thighs and balls remember them slower. Nobody ever reminds you to wrap your tackle up good and proper before getting on a horse, but after a day of feeling like you’re being punched in the balls over and over, you remember it quick enough.

  ‘I need to make contact with Captain Klaunus and find out if he’s heard from Crowfoot lately,’ I said. ‘Whatever’s coming, I need to be ready to meet it.’

  ‘Never liked Klaunus much,’ Tnota said. ‘Not after what Valiya found out about him.’

  I nodded. It was a poor reflection on Blackwing that of its seven captains, most of us had a stain in our past.

  ‘Tell me everything you know about the man with the dark hair.’

  ‘He gave his name as North,’ Tnota said. ‘He came to Fortunetown about two months back. Stuck around for a week without doing much, talked to me a couple of times about making a Misery trip. Digging, nothing unusual. I was done with navigating by then. Retired.’ He glanced guiltily across at Giralt.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then one night he came by the house,’ Giralt said. ‘And he shoved a pistol in my face, and he had some thugs rough Tnota up. And he said if I didn’t come quietly, they’d feed me his kidneys.’ He glared at me, as though that were my fault. ‘I didn’t know why. They took me to a house with a cellar and kept me there. He didn’t tell me anything.’

  ‘Then he set up the visits from the boy,’ Tnota said. He was morose, hurting over what they’d done to Giralt. Anybody would have been. ‘I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know if they were watching me, watching the house. Would have got a message to Amaira if I’d been able, but she’s been gone a long while.’

  ‘Better that she was kept out of it,’ I said. That made Tnota chuckle. I arched an eyebrow.

  ‘She isn’t some fresh-hatched chick needs shielding from the rain,’ he said. ‘Not anymore. She toughened up fast, after she made her deal. You should know – you trained her.’

  Amaira. Small, bony, foul-mouthed Amaira, who’d wanted so much to be Blackwing, who’d cut a deal with Crowfoot to save my life. I’d done what I could for her. She learned fast, like all kids do. I taught her the sword, the dagger, wrestling, shooting, everything that a teenage girl needs to survive the Range. I tried to carry on teaching her the letters that Valiya had given her, but I taught her about people too. The way their minds worked, their weaknesses, their dreams, the way they make decisions. How to find them. How to silence them without bloodshed, how to make them talk with it. She learned fast, and no matter how much I taught her, in two years it wasn’t nearly enough. I wasn’t there the day the raven delivered its first message to her, two days before the Crowfall. I was out in the Misery, and those days I only dipped in for a couple of weeks at a time, a month at best. That was before the Always House, before the rains came.

  The rain was due now. An old lock keeper’s cottage sat dark and soulless along the bank and a glance towards the Misery showed that the poisoned clouds were crawling in. The cottage was bleak and depressing but at least it had a roof. We even managed to lay a fire in the hearth before the first drops fell.

  ‘Always something cosy about being indoors when it’s pissing down,’ Tnota said, trying to rekindle some of his usual cheer.

  ‘What was it Nenn used to say? “Rain is the spirits’ way of telling you it’s time to hit the bar.”’

  We shared a shallow smile, enjoying the warmth of the memory before the inevitable pang of loss turned it cold.

  The rain beat down.

  It was all Crowfoot’s fault. The rain, the whispers on the wind, the Saplers: he had done this. Not intentionally. It wasn’t that he would have been incapable of it, it was just a waste. A waste of power. A ricochet, an accidental side effect of the Crowfall. Whatever the Nameless had done, it was vast, and terrible, and beyond anything that they had tried before.

  I didn’t understand all of it. Not yet. But the Nameless, their bodies frozen solid in the faraway north, had done what they could to hold back The Sleeper. The Deep Kings would have sunk the world already if they’d raised it from the ocean’s depths, and the Nameless had done whatever they’d had to. But in the aftermath, the world was burning. Poison fell from the sky and every year, the crops were smaller. Feebler. Blander, and some plants soaked up the black rain and were no longer edible. Apples were off-limits. Pumpkins were so bitter they were uneatable. Corn grew black on the stalk.

  The Nameless had sacrificed much to put The Sleeper back in his icy bed, but it hadn’t been enough. Nall had said Crowfoot was brewing some kind of plan, but with Nall himself crippled and dying, the future had never seemed less certain.

  As I watched the rain hissing across the darkened land, I thou
ght about what Crowfoot had done to our world. The Misery burned into existence against reality, such abomination that the sky itself tore open and the land boiled and burned. The citizens of Clear and Adrogorsk had melted into monsters beneath the fury of the Heart of the Void. Crowfoot had driven the Deep Kings back, but the cost had been vast. And, given what Nall had told me, it still hadn’t been enough.

  Real company felt strange. I’d grown accustomed to hearing nobody but the ghosts, and they’re just reflections of what you’re thinking anyway. When it got late, I settled myself into a corner. Tnota and Giralt had been separated a long time as those things go. They needed time together without me and I couldn’t blame Giralt for his hostility. I gave them some alone time by trying to rest in the cottage’s small second room. The reunion was going pretty well from what I heard.

  The night was thick when the door opened and Tnota crept in, shutting it quietly behind him. He put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Best keep it down. He’s sleeping,’ he said. He tried to keep his brutalised face impassive but couldn’t fight his grin.

  ‘Nothing keeps you down for long, huh?’ I said, but while my smile wasn’t quite as wide, it was there. Been a long time since I’d felt one of those on my face. It didn’t sit right, like a child’s hat being forced onto a head that had outgrown any realistic possibility of fitting into it.

  Tnota took a seat opposite me at the table. He was toying with the idea of making a pun, I could see it on his face, but then he decided that he didn’t have long, and that business was pressing. He didn’t want Giralt to wake up and find him gone. I could read Tnota easier than a book.

  ‘You look worse, Ryhalt,’ he said. ‘There’s black in your veins. And your eyes don’t just give off that light. There’s some kind of fire in them. Liquid fire, moving. Like I can see into the past, see the world burning in them.’

  I could already see where this was going.

  ‘I made a decision, a long while back. We all made a plan.’ I bared my right arm for him, showed him the old scars, the ones that I’d cut so deep that no amount of Misery healing could erase them. BECOME THE ANVIL. ‘We always knew there’d be a price.’

  Tnota sat silently. He knew I was right. He knew I was too far gone for it to matter anyway. What could I do now? Go back to an ordinary life in society? I had changed too much. The damage was already done.

  ‘Damn, but it’s good to see you,’ I said, and meant it. Out there in my isolation I’d not realised just how much I’d missed him. ‘I wish we could just chew over old times, but we have work to do. Someone on our side of the Range wants me dead. The Deep Kings want me dead. Acradius has set himself up as the Deep Emperor, and he’s coming for us. It’s all connected.’

  ‘We still have the Engine,’ Tnota said. He knew I’d not say those words lightly. ‘Don’t we?’

  ‘With Nall so depleted … I don’t think so. Crowfoot had a plan for a weapon that he could use against them, but he’s hurting. He sent Nall for me, to get his plan into motion.’

  ‘You won’t have heard about Captain Josaf and Captain Linette,’ Tnota said. ‘I should have mentioned them sooner.’

  Josaf had been one of the worst people I’d ever met. A violent, coldhearted killer who would have been hanged for a bunch of crimes far worse than many I’d put men down for, if Crowfoot hadn’t given him a raven tattoo. Linette had run a pirate galley before she’d taken on the debt, but she’d had a certain roguish charm. Amaira had liked her. There were seven of us in total, and while the Range had often made hard demands of those that protected it in the shadows, those two had brought their petty cruelties to play more than I liked to think about.

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘Don’t know details, only that they’re dead. And if this North had got you, that would have made three. Maybe someone knows what Crowfoot’s going to try, and is taking out his captains to stop him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. I felt nothing for their deaths. They’d earned them, and I didn’t need their help. What was coming would be easier without them getting in my way. ‘Whatever happens, I think that these will be the last days of the Range.’

  ‘I think we know it, Captain,’ Tnota said, gesturing to the rain outside. ‘The world is burning. Bleeding out. We’re just waiting for the death-stroke to finish it off.’

  ‘I’m not your captain anymore, Tnota,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll always be my captain, Ryhalt,’ Tnota said gently. ‘Even when you’ve grown a tail and start breathing fire, you can rely on me. I’ve been at this too long to give up on you now.’

  They were kind words and he meant them. But I knew I couldn’t keep asking him to involve himself in these affairs. He wasn’t getting any younger, and I didn’t need him to navigate for me anymore. He wasn’t a fighter and he deserved better than to spend his last years following me around. Doing so had already cost him an arm and a leg. Well, an arm, anyway.

  Or maybe, selfishly, I just didn’t want him to see what I’d become.

  ‘You asked about Amaira,’ Tnota said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you asked about Maldon.’

  ‘Best to keep track of him.’

  ‘And Dantry.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. I didn’t say anything. I knew where he was going and I didn’t want to go there with him. Tnota could be a cock sometimes. ‘Anyone else you want to ask about?’

  Of those few of us that had survived the battle around the Grandspire, the only other that I cared for had been Valiya. I hadn’t seen her since that day, six years ago, when she left that borrowed house for the last time. She’d chosen to go her own way, and I respected that. It hurt more than digging out the crossbow bolt had, but there was nothing to say. I had no way to contact her, she had no reason to want to contact me, and truth be told I’d only ever caused her pain.

  ‘She’ll be doing her thing, trying to control the world, wherever she is,’ I said. ‘I made the choices that I had to.’

  ‘Not doubting that you did,’ Tnota said. ‘Nobody could. But you aren’t concerned that you might run into her once we reach Valengrad?’

  ‘Is she in Valengrad?’ I asked without thinking, then wished that I hadn’t.

  ‘Don’t know. Haven’t seen her since we burned Nenn’s body. I had messages from her, sometimes. Don’t know how she found out where I was hiding, but she did. She always was too clever by far.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Not a lot. She told me Amaira said she had to go away for a long time, couple of years back. That was the last any of us saw of the kid. And she passed me info on what the princes were up to a couple of times. But that’s about it.’

  I tried to still the grinding discomfort that rose when I thought of Amaira, out there, following Crowfoot’s orders. She was good: fast, cunning, tough. But she still seemed so young to me, would always seem the little girl that I’d sat with under a table in the dark. Perhaps all parents felt that way about their children. She was not my blood, but if I did one thing right in my life it would be to stand as her father, if, or when, she needed me. I pushed it down, tried to remind myself she had a life of her own to live.

  ‘Good. Whatever she’s doing, she’ll be doing it well. She’s good for the Range. They need people like her to run things.’

  Tnota got up, put a hand on my shoulder. It felt unnatural. I’d carried him home a bunch of times when he’d been too ratted to stand, but the familiarity was unfamiliar now. Too close. Even through the swelling and the scuffs and bumps on his face, concern showed through.

  ‘It’s alright to be sore about things, sometimes. You don’t always got to be made of granite,’ he said. He patted me on the shoulder once, then went back towards the other room. Giralt would wake and miss him soon enough.

  I saw light through the window. Moving steadily, not rapid and bouncing around but not going slow ei
ther. Horsemen with phos lanterns mounted on their horses’ tack trotting along the edge of the canal.

  The fire had died low and we had no other lights. No reason for whoever it was to come calling. I untied my matchlock’s bag and fixed the viewing scope in place. I didn’t load, but I sighted on the riders. They wore ordinary civilian clothing, men and women wrapped up against the winter cold. Armed, but on the Range a lack of weapons would have been stranger, and if they were soldiers they were not proclaiming themselves as such. There was no reason to be suspicious of them, none at all, other than that they were riding hard along the canal path at this time of night.

  I loaded the matchlock slowly, taking my time, not wanting to disturb Tnota and Giralt unless I had no choice. I sparked up the match-cord, fixed it into position, got the flash pan primed, the powder and ball loaded. Stoked. Went back to watching. There were five riders in all, three women and two men. Tough-looking people. The world still smelled of rain, and they wouldn’t sniff out my match unless they came in close. I watched them carefully through the scope. They glanced towards the old cottage but didn’t come any closer, then pressed their horses on, further up the Range. Once they were past I snuffed the match, laid the gun down, and settled back against the wall. If they’d been looking for me they’d have checked out the house, or at least that was my thought. No reason to assume that they were. Just some riders trying to make time through the night.

  Sure they were.

  8

  If you’ve ever seen a neglectful parent sucking on a wrap of white-leaf while their toddler plays with cutlery on the floor, you’ll have some idea how I felt about Valengrad.

  The smoke from the factory chimneys was blackening the sky long before she came into view, drifts of pollution suspended like the world’s most depressing bunting. The Grandspire thrust high, majestic and domed now with a great shell of black iron that could be opened or closed to manage the acquisition of phos. The Engine sat silent, but there seemed to be something mournful in the curve of the jester’s-hat projectors. Their droop seemed too knowing, as if their demise had been communicated to them, and they knew.