Ravencry by Ed McDonald

Author:Ed McDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-23T07:00:00+00:00

20

‘What is it?’ Maldon asked. ‘A crow?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a hooded raven. But you don’t see them around here.’

I reached up and pushed the window open. The raven ducked inside and fluttered down to perch atop one of Maldon’s brass-and-steel contraptions.

It stepped from foot to foot in a manner I’d seen before. That usually meant Crowfoot was laughing at me, and I had a bad feeling about where this was going. The noises it was making were becoming more coherent, some of them actually starting to sound like speech, though its attempts at forming words were closer to squeaks and whistles.

‘I don’t like it,’ Maldon said. His childish timbre made him sound fearful. Maybe he was. ‘We should kill it.’

‘I think that would be a bad idea,’ I said.

The raven flicked its head to one side, then seemed to suddenly switch from avian squeaks to a harsh, guttural language. Short, punchy syllables ran together in blocks. Definitely a language, but not one that I knew. Maldon shrugged. The bird flicked its head again and this time it made the click-and-buzz droning of the drudge. Some of it I caught, but not much, my grasp of drudge-speak being limited. The bird buzzed and hummed, but then it flicked its head sideways one final time, and said, ‘How about now? Can you understand me now?’

Maldon and I would have shared a look, except that he couldn’t look at anything. Mad as it sounds, a bird coming out of my arm was familiar. A talking bird didn’t seem all that strange.

‘I understand you,’ I said.

‘Good. I wasn’t sure which idiotic language you speak. I will stick to this one so it doesn’t wear out your brains.’

I bowed my head.

‘I am at your service, Master,’ I said. Gleck had started to shuffle back across the room. He’d escaped the Nameless’s notice following the siege. He feared them. Everyone did, of course, but there was a little bit of Deep King in Maldon that hadn’t quite been erased when Shavada’s power was stripped away, the part that kept him young and indestructible, and his greatest fear was that the Nameless would decide to dissect him to learn more about their enemy. The raven didn’t seem to have any interest in him, however.

‘Master?’ the bird croaked. It had a high, nasal, irritating voice. ‘I’m not your master, Galharrow, you worm-piss. I assume you’re Galharrow anyway, not the child? Hard to tell at this proximity.’

I didn’t know what the raven meant, but it was a raven, so it wasn’t going to make sense.

‘I’m Galharrow,’ I said. ‘What are you, then?’

‘I’m a part of his power, obviously,’ the raven said. ‘He shaved me off and sent me here.’

‘And you didn’t come through my arm because …?’

‘Too much magical interference from the wards the Nameless have placed around themselves. Too much cold. His last message didn’t come through properly, did it? He was furious about the Eye’s being taken from Narheim. Not going to be happy that you’ve failed to get it back, either.

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