Authors: Simon Morden
He lifted the latch on the door, and to forestall any further qualms or questions, swung it wide. ‘Bring the lantern, Mama. Hold it high.’
They were in uncharted territory now, outside what any of them had seen. The light showed mainly shadows, and the glimpse of stonework, a wall, stairs up – and another door. It rattled on its own, making them jump and step back, but it was just the mountain wind, whipping cold around the ill-fitting frame.
‘This must be outside, yes?’ Luiza felt the door for the latch, found an iron ring, and twisted it. The door resisted opening, then eased ajar. More of the cold air swirled in.
Stanislav crouched and peered through. ‘No moonlight. We need the lantern, but we must keep it low so that it is not seen. Remember, we must be quick and certain. If someone sees us, they have to be silenced before they can raise the alarm. Afterwards is too late. Once we have crossed the bridge, we search every room in the tower for her. And we take no prisoners but her.’
‘What about her steward?’ asked Dalip.
‘What about him? He is part of this, so you know what to do.’ He took charge of the door from Luiza. ‘I will go first, Dalip will go last. Watch for the dragon.’
Stanislav heaved the door wide and took a moment to check the bridge and the sky above it.
The bridge itself was clear – it ran straight and flat across from the pit to the geomancer’s tower, where there was another door. The waist-high parapet either side was going to give them some cover, but the tower loomed tall, and there were narrow windows that overlooked the bridge: anyone so much as glancing down would see them.
The top of the tower, with its conical slate roof, was almost invisible against the sky. There could have been a dragon wound around it, and none of them would have been any the wiser. The side of the tower to the right flickered with firelight, so they’d have to keep down, but Dalip wasn’t so worried about that as he was by the prospect of that far door being barred shut from the inside. If he was in charge, leaving doors to the slave quarters open seemed not just averagely stupid, but lethally so. It was the whole reason why they’d been going to strike just after one of the fights.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘we don’t even know if we can get into the tower. Why don’t I go across first and check?’
It made sense, and Stanislav could tell by the shifting body-language that the others weren’t now going to cross until they knew the way was clear.
‘Mama, give him the lantern so he can signal. Go, then, and quickly.’
Dalip found himself at the front, the wind dragging at the candle flame inside the lantern. He squeezed the knife handle and took one last look. That he couldn’t see a dragon was no promise that there wasn’t one. The lights at the windows in the door stayed constant, and there was no better time – or at least, it would get worse the longer he left it – to run.
He held the lantern low, so that it almost scraped along the walkway, and crouched down. It wasn’t far. He covered the distance quickly and quietly, and nestled the lantern in the corner of the door recess.
He listened and, on hearing nothing, reached up and turned the iron ring. The latch lifted on the other side of the door, he could hear that, but when he pushed, the door moved only a fraction before pressing against something immovable.
Dalip’s stomach tightened even further. He tried again, to make absolutely certain, but he’d been right the first time. The door was barred or bolted, and they weren’t going to be able to shift it.
He took a step back and looked up. There was a window slit right over the door, the same height again above it. He might, if he could get up there, squeeze through it, then open the door from the inside.
It seemed their only option, and they were running out of time. Sooner or later, someone was going to check where Pigface and the other guard had got to. Then there’d be no hope of escape, and certainly no going back to captivity.
He left the lantern where it was, and raced back to the others.
She could see everything. Every last leaf, rock, blade of grass. Every fold of the ground, every lake, the course of the rivers and the line of the ridges. Everything, like it was the map she’d painstakingly drawn and then had stolen from her.
The crows had kept up with her as they’d taught her how to flap and turn and glide and land – how difficult that had been, when she would fill her vast wings with air and snap them almost in front of her to try and brake herself. She ended up pinwheeling into the ground, and then going backwards, and then almost hovering in flight as she tentatively dabbed at the ground with her coal-black talons, unwilling to commit.
As she circled higher and higher, she left the smaller birds behind, and as she spiralled upwards, Down became a sheet of beaten copper, lit by the dying sun. She watched the shadows lengthen, deep pools of darkness stretch out and cover the land like ink, then the last threads of light hung on the western horizon while the forests and mountains settled into slumbering dusk.
And she could still see, her preternatural vision catching movement far below: animals emerging from cover, the wind-waves on the crowns of the trees, the rising spire of smoke from a fire.
Her fire. She remembered. She’d set it, and lit it, and now there was a thin column of sooty smoke marking its place. She wheeled away. She didn’t want boiled grain any more, if she ever wanted it in the first place. Meat. Raw meat, running with blood, hot and vital. Only that would satisfy her. But she was huge. The crows she had flown with were like flies to her. She could crush them by the handful and still not be satisfied, and they were her crows, not to be slashed out of the air and broken on the ground.
She needed bigger prey.
She turned and spread her feathers wide, gliding like she had been born a bird, and started searching in the growing gloom for something to catch and kill.
Even though she spotted, and swooped low over, cattle the size of cars, they didn’t excite her or give her the same thrill that the discarded thought of catching crows had given her. Not some beast tied to the ground for her. Her quarry should be airborne, like her, so that she could dive on it from above, wings swept back and feet clenched like fists to break its wing and send it tumbling to the ground.
Where was she going to find such creatures, something worthy of the effort? She could almost taste them, the breast feathers torn out with her hooked beak, the puckered flesh beneath, the first burst of flavour.
She turned east to look across the hill country, and north towards the high plateau, south over the ocean and east to view the islands set in the darkling sea, but there was nothing. The sky was void and empty, and it would be hours before the moon rose. She turned for home, to the tiny red glow of the fire on the pavement in front of the castle.
She landed in a flurry of feathers, as disappointed as an unfired gun. Folding her wings, she strutted forward to inspect the remains of the cooking pot that was now a foul-smelling cinder on top of a whited-ash heap.
Her head turned sideways to look at it, her talons gripping the cracks in the pavement, and she was distracted by a flash of colour off to one side. She couldn’t walk – the motion was unnatural – so she hopped over, and found a circular pool. She pecked at the thing floating in the rippling water, a shed orange skin with a rent and stained back, and dragged it out to get a better look at it.
She knew it should mean something more to her than it did, because it was her skin, the one she’d worn before she’d spread her wings, and what? Jumped from the top of the tower, that tower above her, its edges ragged and unfinished, full of roosting crows.
There’d been a man, too, with skin as black as a crow’s coat. He’d helped her, or had pretended to do so, and then he’d stolen from her that which he considered most precious.
The door. The fire. The stepping into the surging sea. The cold saltwater washing around hot burns.
Mary. Her name was Mary.
This was Down’s doing, then. The wish first, followed by the act. That was the art of magic, and the danger of it too, because it could so easily destroy her: the transformation of her from human to avian almost had her lost in the now of flight, of hunting, of seeking. That was what Crows had warned her of, too much, too soon.
Where would Crows be now? He’d be making his way downriver, towards the place he called a portal. With that, the unbidden urge to stretch her wings again launched her into the air, flapping quickly to gain height, climbing over the growing wall and heading south.
The land was in darkness, and still she could see. There was the lake she’d swum in, half a day’s walk she could now make in a fraction of the time, there was the river, flowing out to sea, the broad, braided delta with its shallows and bars, there was the bay, curving like horns, where the waves tore in and broke themselves on the sloping shingle beach.
And there, there was the long ridge, looking like the spine of the world, except that when it reached the coast, its back was broken and beyond the cliff was a line of broken rubble extending as far out as a stack of rock, surrounded by the ever-moving sea.
She flew towards it, and a thin sickle of a moon had started to rise when she had proper sight of it, still miles away in the distance. Below her, the forest stretched out, and the river shone silver. There was movement there, and her sharp eyes picked out dark figures moving through the scrub and reeds.
Yes, there were wolves, but they were not all wolves. Two wolves, six men, in a ragged line, from the main, broad channel of the river to the edge of the forest. If any of them had looked up, they would have seen nothing. She was far above them, and travelling silently.
She circled them as they made their sweep towards the sea. They were looking for someone, someones, but didn’t have a scent yet. Perhaps there were more survivors coming through the portal, and the wolfman had been sent to collect them in the same way he’d come for her group.
Or perhaps they were looking for Crows. She thought she’d find him first, and depending on what he had to say, she might tell him he was being hunted.
The seas around the stack boomed and shook, the swell heaving against the broken rock around its base. She flew once around the pillar of rock, twice, three times, getting lower with each pass. She instinctively avoided the spray, but in amongst the flashes off the rock faces, she could detect something moving at the wave-washed base, clambering over the boulders.
It was no more than a pool of darkness, gliding from shadow to shadow, but she knew what that meant and who hid beneath it.
She swung back up to the top of the stack, contending with cross-winds and updraughts, and landed on the weather-struck rock. The wind continued to ruffle her feathers, and when she looked out over the ocean, she could see the lowest quarter of the moon blocked off by a band of black cloud.
The stack was larger than she’d thought: any bigger and she would have called it an island. To seaward, it sloped down to a rocky beach, but it rose from that low point to form cliffs on the other sides. She couldn’t climb, and she couldn’t talk. All that came out was a screech. Having found Crows, she couldn’t get close enough to him. Not as a bird, and even as she crouched low over the ground to stop the wind buffeting her, she wondered what she could do.
She hadn’t always been that way, even though it felt as natural as breathing. She remembered walking upright, swinging arms as she did so. She’d had hands that gripped, a strange flat face with a curious button nose and lips that could pout, and hair that fell from the crown of her head in black coils. She had a tongue, sharp and quick.
She was cold. She stumbled, and she steadied herself with a five-fingered thing that it took her a moment to recognise. She was still bruised and cut, and now she was also in her vest and pants, exposed to the strengthening salt gale.
The muscle in her mouth lengthened and thickened. She could taste copper and bile.
‘F… Fu …’ she mouthed. She had teeth, and tried not to bite herself as she formed the word. ‘Fuck.’
For a moment, she wrapped herself in the strange-angled limbs she had instead of wings and lay in a rough rock-bowl, rocking against the sudden pain and shock, trying to cushion her mind from the sense of howling loss.
She could no longer fly. She’d put it down and she didn’t know whether she could ever take it up again.
Slowly, she unwound, and had to relearn how to stand on feet, and how to use knees, and how to swing hips. Awkwardly, stutteringly, she started down the slope to the shoreline.
It came back to her. She could fumble her way around the base of the cliffs. Sometimes she had to cling on to the rocks as
the waves rushed up and tried to suck her down. From cold, she went to freezing numb, but she carried on.
‘Crows? Crows, you bastard. Come out.’ She’d lost her falcon’s sight when she’d lost her falconhood.
A wave drew down strongly behind her, and returned twice as hard. She gasped as the wall of green water hit her, and gasped again as her fingers started to tear free.
A hand came down and lifted her easily out of the surf.
‘Climb higher,’ said Crows. ‘There is a ledge.’
He half-carried her up, and set her down before shrugging off his sea-drenched cloak and wrapping her in it.
‘How did you find me? Where are your clothes?’
‘You stole my map,’ she said, drawing the edges of the cloak around her as tight as she could.
‘And you lied about the portal.’ The whites of his eyes and the white of his teeth as he hissed out his words were all she could see.
‘I did not. It was here.’
‘It is not here now, Mary, and portals do not vanish. They exist in both worlds: that is what gives them power.’
‘This one disappeared. It just went.’
Crows took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘They do not vanish,’ he repeated. ‘Where is it, really?’
‘It’s here. Here.’ She shook herself free and looked around. There was the headland, and the line of broken rock leading to the stack. ‘There. We stepped out into the sea right there.’
He left her and went to where she pointed, and she followed, still trying to hold his black cloak around her.
‘There is nothing here,’ he shouted over the boom of the waves.
‘It disappeared. It looked like the entrance to an Underground station, and then it disappeared, even as I was looking at it. What does it mean, Crows? Why did it go?’
Crows slapped at the rock with his hands and gave a grunt of frustration. The cliff was blank: no door, no brickwork, no faded sign. The sea swallowed up their feet, regurgitated them again.
‘The portal I came through is still there, though it is closed to me. I have seen other portals too. I have never heard of one just vanishing before.’
‘But it was here. Just … here.’ She scrubbed the spray from her face. ‘I thought they all did that, after you pass through. Fade away until they’re opened again.’
‘No. And the power that comes from them connects with other portals. With this one dead, the lines will have shifted.’ He hit the rock again, just to make sure. ‘Are you telling me the truth, Mary? Was the portal really here?’
‘Yes. It was right here. Now it’s not.’ She turned away and started to pick her way back to the seaward slope.
He was following her, but only when she was out of the surf and up on dry land did she face him again. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Why? Because I had to. Such knowledge is precious, and we each guard our own carefully. I told you as much.’ He reached out for his cloak, his long fingers snagging the hem and pulling it towards him. She resisted.
‘You could have copied my map, and I wouldn’t have minded.’
The thought seemed to confuse him.
‘You watched me do it. All you had to do was ask. I even owed you: you saved me from the wolfman, you took me to your castle, you fed me and taught me about magic.’ She was cold to the bone, and still she shivered at the realisation. ‘You did all that just to get me to tell you where the portal was, didn’t you?’
‘No. Not all. My motives were … confused.’
‘The fuck they were, Crows. I thought we were, I don’t know, friends.’
He looked away. ‘People like us do not have friends. We are kings and queens, Mary, and we are naturally rivals. We raise castles, we must rule alone: it is for others to obey us willingly or otherwise.’
‘Fuck you, Crows. Fuck you.’
‘You want it,’ he said. ‘You want to be your Red Queen. It is always what you want to be.’
‘Not like that.’
‘However else? There is only one way: seize power and keep tight hold of it. I have let mine slip away, so now I must take my leave and try my luck elsewhere: this portal has gone, and without it the castle will fall.’
‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t my fault.’
‘Sorry?’ He blinked. ‘Sorry? Do not be sorry. This is momentous. This will shake Down to the roots of its mountains. I can sell this knowledge, and it will make me rich. Do not be sorry, Mary.’ He pulled harder at his cloak, and gathered a handful in his fist. ‘Now, I have to go.’
‘You can’t,’ she said. She wasn’t going to tell him, but it just came out. ‘The wolfman is on the shore, looking for you.’
‘Is he? You managed to slip past him, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t … It wasn’t like that.’
‘The wolfman can howl at the moon until his throat is raw. He will not catch me. I doubt he will even see me.’ His expression softened slightly. ‘A geomancer – like her, like me, like you – does not suffer rivals. Stay away from the wolfman, yes?’
He walked towards the shore, and the cloak inexorably slipped from her shoulders. She was cold again.
‘Crows?’
‘Do you remember how you got here?’
‘I, I flew.’
He looked sad and shook his head. ‘I know. I know what you are, I know what you are becoming. I have done what I can to help you, but this has come upon you too soon, Mary. Far too soon. It will master you and leave you nothing but a beast, with a beast’s mind, and no memory of what you were. Even now you are struggling to remember.’