The Crow (59 page)

Frightened, Hem tried to mindtouch Ire again, but the city was howling with sorceries that burned his mind, and he couldn't hear him. The wind was picking up; the storm was almost upon them. He hesitated, then drew his shortsword and shook Nisrah violently, trying to wake him. The boy grumbled, pushing him away, but at last opened his eyes.

"Get up," said Hem. Nisrah opened his mouth to object, but Hem jerked his bonds roughly, and the boy groggily got to his feet, staring at Hem with a bewilderment turning rapidly to anger.

"What are you – "

"Walk." Hem pressed the point of his blade against Nisrah's back. "Do anything dirty, I kill you."

To Hem's relief, Nisrah sullenly did as he was told. He didn't know if he could struggle with Nisrah and still maintain a glimveil over both of them. They began to march down the alley away from the Iron Tower, into the darkening night.

It wasn't easy to keep his sense of direction. Quite often Hem completely lost sight of the Iron Tower, and sometimes he and Nisrah seemed to be wandering in circles, picking their way along alleys that were little more than black, filthy crevices between high towers, only to come to a dead end or, worse, to find they were closer to the Iron Tower than they had been before. The backstreets of Dagra were unsettlingly empty: they passed occasional figures who glanced up into the flickering sky as they hurried to shelter, but that was all.

Hem was past tiredness, past thought: he was a single intent, a determination to get to the gate, so he could meet Ire. He put out of his mind the question of what he would do once he was there; he had no idea.

Nisrah walked before him, not saying a word. Once he tried to escape, crying out to a man who was passing by and throwing his body to the ground and rolling to break Hem's grip. The thongs tore through Hem's fingers, burning them; he flung himself after Nisrah and covered his mouth, ignoring the pain as the boy bit him. To Hem's relief, the passerby simply fled, thinking perhaps they were haunts, as he could hear voices but could see nothing. Hem was so angry that he wrenched Nisrah to his feet with no thought of how his bonds might be hurting him, holding his sword to his throat so it cut the skin.

"I said, no dirty tricks," he growled in his ear.

After that, Nisrah marched passively in front of him. Hem began to hate the sight of his slumped, stumbling back: it was one with his own hopelessness and degradation.

As night fell over Dagra, a deep blackness relieved only by the increasing lightnings, Hem began to despair that he would find the gate at all. He was looking for the Street of the Weaponsmiths, through which the snouts had passed on their way to the barracks, but he seemed to be nowhere near it. Instead, they were wandering through an endless maze of many-floored brick buildings, smoke-blackened and foul with the smells of rotting food and human waste. The ground was now shaking continuously, like a shivering animal, and the weight of air was becoming unbearable. It seemed unbelievable that the threatening storm had not yet burst, so heavily did it hang above them.

At last they turned into a wider street, and then stumbled out into one of the broad thoroughfares that radiated from the Iron Tower. At one end the cruel spike of the Iron Tower cut a black wound into the mountains behind. Unlike the backstreets, this road boiled with people. Hem cowered, gripping Nisrah tightly. Everywhere were ranks of soldiers holding flaming torches that threw grotesque shadows: Hulls on horseback, dogsoldiers, infantry. They stood on guard, as if ready for battle, but none moved; and their eyes shone redly through the shadows.

Hem squinted, hoping to see the gate, but it was so dark he couldn't see the road's end. Gasping for breath in the dry air, he thought rapidly. The quickest way to the gate would be down this road: dare he risk creeping along in the shadow of the walls, under the very noses of the Nameless One's forces? And yet, if he went back into the tangle of alleyways behind him, he would at once get lost again, and might never find his way. He wavered, irresolute, for a long moment; then, taking firm hold of Nisrah, who stood dully beside him, plunged into the main street, hugging the shadows of the walls.

He went as fast as he could, steering Nisrah in front of him. It felt too slow: he was encumbered by his prisoner, and despite the cover of the glimveil he feared being sensed by a Hull, and kept as far as possible from those he saw. He worried that Nisrah might try to escape again at any moment; among so many soldiers and Hulls it would be disastrous. He looked up at the sky desperately hoping that the storm would break; if it rained it would cover them more effectively than any glimveil. But the rain did not fall: the very walls seemed tense as strung wires, humming with unreleased power, and still the storm built up, still the city shook with its coming.

At last, panting, he looked around to see where he was, and to his disbelief saw that the city gate was straight before him, not more than two hundred paces away. There were fewer soldiers there than farther up the road; his task would be easier now. By sheer blind luck, he had run into the road that led to the gate. For a moment he went limp with relief; then he took a deep breath, preparing to shepherd Nisrah to the gate, to find a place where they might both be hidden from Hulls and look out for Ire, who must have been waiting there for ages.

It was then that things began to go wrong. He noticed that Nisrah was no longer slumped in front of him, but before he could think what that might mean the boy turned, and Hem saw, with a sudden chill, that his eyes had gone blank. The snouts must have been woken by the Hulls, and Nisrah was not beyond their sorcerous thrall.

Hem was taken off guard as Nisrah snarled and kicked him in the shins, knocking him down. He was straining to burst his bonds, the muscles cording out on his shoulders with the effort, and he took no notice at all when Hem threatened him with his shortsword. Hem shouldered him forward roughly, but Nisrah stood his ground, still struggling to break the leather thongs. With a sudden snap they burst, and then, his wrists bleeding, Nisrah swung a fist at him. Cursing, Hem ducked the blows and tried to knock Nisrah over, so he couldn't get away: but the boy lashed out with his hands and feet like a maddened beast, and Hem was knocked against the wall and winded.

Screaming for help, Nisrah got up and started running. He burst out of the glimveil a few paces in front of an astounded Hull that snapped to attention, grabbed Nisrah by the arm, and then glared straight at Hem, its red eyes burning through Hem's concealment. For a moment Hem was trapped by the Hull's malign gaze and stared stupidly back, like a rabbit at a fox, utterly unable to think or move.

Before the Hull could move toward him, however, its attention switched away from him, and it turned sharply toward the Iron Tower. Involuntarily Hem followed its gaze and saw that the entire tower was sheathed, from its base to its bitter summit, in a ghastly flame, first shimmering with the decaying green of a corpselight and rapidly growing brighter, until the whole tower blazed brightly as an infernal, frozen lightning. The soldiers yelled and stamped and clashed their weapons against their shields, and at first Hem thought the ground shook with their noise, until he realized it was shaking by itself.

The flame died as suddenly as it appeared, but the interruption was enough for Hem to free himself from the Hull. His glimveil was now broken. Nisrah was standing by the Hull, its bony fingers clamped around his upper arm: he took no notice at all of the Iron Tower. He was screaming obscenities at Hem, his face distorted with fury and anger, his face a mask of blood where the scar had broken as they had struggled. Even in that flash of time, Hem wondered if he could still rescue him; but the Hull was turning again with deadly intent, and he panicked.

Hem heaved the breath back into his body and took to his heels, dodging and weaving through ranks of soldiers, too fast for those who reached out to clutch him. At first he ran in sheer panic; but once he had escaped the burning chill of the Hull's gaze he remade his glimveil with a word and began to work his way determinedly toward the gate. His only thought now was of Ire, that he might see him before he died. He had no expectation left that either of them would survive – even if he made it to the gate, even if he managed to meet Ire. What could they do then? He was long beyond hope now.

Out of nowhere, it seemed to Hem – though they must have burst from the side streets in an ambush – the road was suddenly swirling with the bloodguard, the giants of Imank's personal forces, and he found himself at the edge of a raging battlefield. Driven by sheer instinct, he twisted and ducked around struggling knots of fighters, trying not to trip over bodies that were writhing on the ground. Then, as if they obeyed an order that Hem couldn't hear, the Dagra soldiers began to run away from the giants, toward the Iron Tower, screaming and howling. There was a noise like the screech of stone in terrible anguish, so loud that Hem thought his ears would burst, louder even than the soldiers and the rising howl of the wind and the great crashes of thunder that might not be thunder at all, but the sound of towers falling. For now the ground was shaking so much and buildings were bulging strangely, their walls rippling as if they were curtains of silk: surely that was a turret falling out of the air and smashing into the road, arcing eerily like a slow fountain of stone, crushing the soldiers in front of him before they could even throw up their hands or cry out...

And then at last the storm burst over him in bolts of hail and freezing rain, and out of the sky came cold things of winged flame whose livid, undead faces made Hem utterly lose his mind with fear. He ran like a witless insect through a chaos of rain and stone and wind and blood, not knowing where he ran, not knowing anymore even who he was.

When Hem came to his senses, he found he was lying on a mess of rubble, in a silence that seemed as deafening as the noise that had preceded it. I must have tripped, he thought with wonder. He couldn't remember how. He opened his eyes, which had been jammed shut, and at first thought he must be blind: it was so dark that he could see nothing. Water fell on his face from the sky, and he was shivering with cold.

His body ached all over. Slowly he checked his arms and legs. Miraculously nothing seemed to be broken. He sat up and tried to see where he was. He was in some kind of pit. Maybe, he thought, that's why it's so dark.

On his hands and knees he crawled up the rubble, making little landslides of pebbles and rock that made no sound at all. He peered over the edge of the pit.

At first, all he saw were blobs of red flame swimming in darkness. He shook his head, blinking, and tried to look again. Where was he? He could recognize nothing around him. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he made out the jagged mass of the Dagra mountains against the lighter clouds, and then the spike of the Iron Tower; but he couldn't recognize anything else. The Iron Tower seemed to be on fire. Other points of flame moved about crazily in patterns that made no sense: he blinked again and realized they were people carrying torches.

Still nothing made any sound.

I lost Nisrah,
he thought emptily. He ran away. It was all for nothing...

And then: Why is it all so quiet? Why can't I hear the rain?

He struggled out of the pit and found himself on top of a mound of rubble. His hands were torn and bleeding, and it hurt to touch the stone: but when he began to retch, he realized the stones were scorching him with sorcery. He began to scramble awkwardly off the pile of rubble, down the side farthest from the Iron Tower. At once his head began to clear a little, freed of the fog of sorcery. He looked ahead: the ground before him stretched out level and wide, and moving columns of flame were streaming toward him. Soldiers, he thought. The armies camped on the plateau.

He realized that the pile of rubble must have been the Dagra walls. He was outside Dagra. He had escaped. But where was Ire?

His mouth felt as if it were made of dust. His pack was still on his back, so he fumbled for his water bag, and took a long gulp.

It made him feel slightly, very slightly, better, and he began to wonder what he should do. His ears were no longer stuffed with silence: they were ringing with a high, irritating noise, and underneath that, he could hear a faint patter of rain falling on stone. He was wet through with the rain. He shook his head again, trying to get rid of the ringing in his skull; he must have been deafened by the noise.

His first thought was to find Ire, if he was still alive. If he was still alive. How could anything have survived those creatures he had seen in the sky? Or had he imagined them in his terror? There was no sign of them now. If Ire was dead, Hem was on his own.

Screwing up what little energy he had, he sent out a feeble summoning.

Nothing.

If he didn't move, someone would trip over him and he would be captured and put to death. But where could he go?

Doggedly he began to crawl away from Dagra, out of the path of the marching soldiers. His only thought was of Ire. He must be dead. Ire was dead, and he was alone on a plain of nightmare, already a haunt, some spider thing that was no longer human at all. But still, he didn't want to die. He kept on crawling.

You're going the wrong way, pebblehead.

The voice lilted into his head as clearly as the bar of a song. He looked up in a daze, squinting through the darkness.

Not ten paces away, Ire stood on a spike of rock. Something dangled from his beak.

Hem froze in shock. Then he staggered to his feet and ran toward Ire, who launched himself off his perch and glided toward Hem. He caught him, gathering the big, clumsy bird in his arms, pressing his cheek against Ire's feathers, which were filthy and smelled of scorching. There were no words for what he felt.

Crooning, Ire pressed against him, rubbing his head against Hem's temple. But then the bird flapped his wings, demanding to be let go. Hem opened his arms, and Ire perched on his shoulder and spoke into his ear.