On November 12th, Tor Books is due to publish WITCH QUEEN OF REDWINTER by Ed McDonald, the third novel in the Redwinter series. To mark the upcoming release, and to whet readers’ appetites for the novel, the publisher has allowed CR to share the first two chapters! Before we get to the excerpt, here’s the synopsis:

Having been saved from execution at the hands of the Draoihn — powerful magic users Raine used to count as allies — Raine finds herself in the Fault, a vast magical wasteland, which is falling apart before her eyes.

Alongside her two closest companions, they are searching for the only person Raine believes can help them get back home: the enigmatic and infuriatingly elusive Queen of Feathers.

But what home are they trying to get back to? Ovitus LacNaithe, power-hungry traitor that he is, has taken control of the Draoihn and is unwittingly doing the bidding of a darker master. He is soon to take control of the Crown of Harranir and plunge the land into unending darkness.

The fate of two worlds hangs in the balance. The stakes have never been higher. It’s going to take Raine’s dark, terrible powers, as well as the unbreakable bond of three friends, to ensure everyone lives to see the dawn.

*

1

The stories of this age begin and end with monsters, and mine is no exception.

His skin was grey, mottled as if he’d rotted from within. Mail had rusted away entirely in some places, exposed beneath the patterned breacan of a clan that had died centuries ago. Perhaps he’d been a husband once, a father. Maybe he’d been a farmer and worked the land, tilling dark earth, scything wheat. He was none of those things anymore. Whoever the corpse-man had been all those years past, he had lingered in this place of blood-red sky and broken nature, caught between life and death, observing the tedium of centuries, purposeless and lost. Half-living, half-dead, he became all dead as I put my boot against his wheezing chest and wrenched my glaive clear. It gave a slight hiss as the old iron escaped bloated flesh, a wheeze of lost essence. The creature’s stare remained locked onto me, wraith-like eyes lit from within. Its shade began to flutter free. One fewer deathless monstrosity haunted the Fault now, but we were not done. It was far from over.

Around me, the battle continued.

Metal on metal. The hideous, life-hating cries of the half-dead. The sound of feet against the stones as more of them forced their way up from their dark dreams beneath the mud. Around the courtyard, the half-dead warriors of another time engaged in battle, and we smote them down again for it.

‘Up top!’ Esher shouted. On the courtyard battlements more of them scuttled, one dragging a leg that ended in a stump. The half-dead emerged from cracks in the black stone walls and forced their way into the blood-sky’s light from trapdoors that had long since rusted shut. They emerged loping from cavernous archways in the outbuildings. They forced their way from compacted earth, unnatural, twisted things who had lost all desires but those that seeped into them from the rancid earth. Kill. Devour. War.

They made war on me now. A creature that might once have been a mother, a scribe, a sailor, charged across the courtyard with a great, rusted axe held high. There was only hatred in the inner lights that glowed within her half-rotten face. I cut the axe from its path, twisted the glaive’s haft in my grip and hacked the blade through her neck. She teetered, head half-severed, and a second strike put her down.

This was life for us—for me, Esher and Sanvaunt—in the Fault. Just another day cutting a path through the detritus of long-ago defeats.

One of the half-dead that would have been indistinguishable from a clan warrior skipped forward one step, two, and hurled its spear. It was a clumsy throw, his arm stiff. Esher brought down one of her curved swords, striking the spear from the air before it reached me. The half-dead hissed, unused throat trying to flex and curse. They’d slept here a long time. We’d woken them. Or something that didn’t want to be disturbed had, anyway.

‘Nice catch,’ I said. Another of the half-dead warriors ambled towards me, stooped as if its back had set into a rigid arch during centuries of sleep, but the rusted, curved swords it held before it were serrated with jagged teeth. I readied my glaive, a five-foot pole with a thick, reaping blade at the killing end, over my head and dared it to come on. The decayed, joyless monster was manic with hate, and it swept its weapons towards me in clumsy, half-blind arcs. Bent over and slashing like mad, it was easy prey. I slid back from its erratic assault and made a great parting cut downwards. It died for the last time. After seven hundred years of banishment from the world, perhaps it would be a relief. Its ghost erupted, greenish white, thin and insubstantial, as if time had watered it down.

‘They keep on coming,’ Sanvaunt grunted. He’d dealt with five of them. Esher cut the arm from another, kicked it back against the wall and ended its hissing decisively. She flourished her twin blades, crouched and ready for the next.

‘Too damn many,’ she said. ‘We need to move.’

Overhead, the sky rumbled, the thunder turning into a shuddering, high-pitched shriek of rage. The land hated us here, but it was the sky that voiced its ire.

‘Then let’s move,’ I said. ‘Into Gaskeiden. This has to be it.’ When in doubt, head towards the yawning, gargoyle-adorned archway leading into the darkness. The keep reared up above us, a lightless block of history against the blood-bruise red of the sky.

Something thumped against the back of my cuirass and fell away. Another spear. It was definitely time to go. There had to be twenty or more of them now, and by the distant shrieks and trills, more on the way. You’d think that these warriors, cut off from the true world for more than seven hundred years, might have wanted more than to cut us apart, but empathy seemed to be a finite resource. Perhaps we’re only born with so much of it, and age and defeat gradually siphon it away until there’s nothing left but malice.

Sanvaunt and Esher led. They cut a path through the half-decayed, age-bent creatures between us and the keep’s main entrance as I warded the rear. I took another one down as we retreated forward into the keep. How many was that now? I’d stopped counting months ago.

‘Doors,’ Sanvaunt barked. As I backed up, he and Esher took hold of the half-arch doors and put shoulders to them, driving forward against centuries of accrued dirt. The half-dead’s approach faltered as they formed a semicircle around the doorway. I levelled my glaive towards them, but their advance had ended. Jaws hung open, poisonous breath steaming beneath the crimson sky, glowing eyes watching. Lurking. I stepped through and the doors drew closed with a dull boom. Those twisted enemies, the outer walls and the cracked sky beyond were shut away, leaving us panting and alone in the quiet of a time-lost hall. Esher heaved at a beam on an axle and it slammed down into brackets. Locking them out. Locking us in.

We listened.

‘They’re gathering,’ I said.

‘But they stopped,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘For now.’

‘Makes you wonder what’s in here that they’re reluctant to follow,’ Esher said. ‘They didn’t come from in here. Just about the only place they didn’t.’

‘It shouldn’t surprise us anymore,’ Sanvaunt said. He ran a rag along the edge of his longsword, wiping away thick, congealed black slime. ‘There’s always something worse around the corner.’

‘Always something worse,’ I agreed. ‘But we made it.’

‘Getting out might not be so much fun,’ Esher said. ‘We got through by taking them by surprise.’

‘One thing at a time, I guess,’ I said. ‘But let’s move fast. They’re hungry. The hate keeps on building. They’ll find enough of it eventually.’

The snarls, half-word curses and breathy hissing of the half-dead lay, for the moment, beyond a solid door. I looked around the hall we’d made it into. Small glass globes lined the walls, filled with chips of the blue mineral cadanum, which somehow knew we were there and gave off its waxy blue-white light. We figured this place had been a border fortress once, somewhere far from Harranir judging by the unfamiliar architecture. The columns were square and decorated with zigzagging geometric shapes. Like everything in the Fault, time had eaten away at anything that had once spoken of grandeur. A dead hall, a corpse castle lying in the midst of an endless, red-skied swamp.

‘Anybody get hurt?’ Sanvaunt asked. His hair, grown long over six months of fear and endless threat, was tied back from his face. He’d grown leaner, cheekbones like cut-marble bricks. It was his eyes that worried me the most. He’d hardened on the outside, but that wasn’t the only place the Fault was affecting him. Esher shook her head.

‘I think I took a spear in the back,’ I said. ‘Check me?’

Esher ran practiced fingers over my armour.

‘Didn’t penetrate, thank the Light Above. You’re good.’

‘The Light Above didn’t bring us here,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think she sees into this cursed place either.’

‘Might as well thank her anyway,’ Esher said. ‘You never know who’s watching.’

‘Where now?’ Sanvaunt asked.

‘Where do we always go?’ I said. ‘Forward.’

‘Technically sometimes we go back even when we’re going forward,’ Esher said. There were few smiles to be had in the Fault, and that was one of the least funny of its aspects, but eventually you have to smile about things that will otherwise drive you mad. ‘And sometimes we seem to go sideways. The only thing we never do is get any nearer to the City of Spires.’

‘True enough,’ I said. I rested my glaive against my shoulder. ‘But onward anyway.’

The city was ever out of our reach. It had to be the key, had to hold some kind of answer to the nightmare world we’d found ourselves trapped in. Little made sense in our cursed prison. There was nothing you’d want to eat in the Fault, no clean water, but we didn’t need to eat, or drink here. There was no hunger, no thirst. We sweated, but didn’t need to replenish water. We exhausted ourselves, but time recharged us, as if the land wished us to return to our former state. It had not taken long to realise that we didn’t need food or water to exist here, that our bodies simply kept on going regardless. For a time we’d wondered if we’d died, if this was the Afterworld, but things could still die here. What passed for weather followed no routines, no regular patterns that we could tell. The land was a ruin. Echoes of bygone days littered the endless marsh, but the city stood tall. If there was a way out, that’s where we’d find it. That’s where we’d find the prison that bound the Queen of Feathers.

Through everything that had happened to me, from the very first, she’d been there, haunting, watching, saying the maddening things that passed for her advice. Sometimes she’d been helpful, at others I’d thought she was leading me by her own unknown agenda. The little information we’d dragged from the creatures of this place told us that she was there, in that unreachable city. Maybe she was as much a prisoner as we were, but if anyone might know a way we could attempt to break free and return to our own world, it had to be her.

We’d thought of Gaskeiden as a border fortress, because it was squat and square and that seemed in line with military design, but that had only been an assumption. As we headed deeper into its vaults, it became apparent that Gaskeiden had been a temple. The trio of Cainags who’d sent us this way had been muddled, time having eaten away their memories as it had their hunger, and their wails were tired things, dried up through centuries of neglect. That was the story of the Fault, told in broken stone, fallen idols, decayed castles and ruined things that crawled through the murk.

Six months of wandering, of searching, of trying to find a way to the City of Spires that always lay on the horizon but never in the same place twice, had taught us a great deal about the things that had been banished here. Some of them were familiar, like the half-dead, but we’d long ago agreed that if some of these monstrosities had come from our world, history must have forgotten them. The Cainags had appeared like three sisters, though they faded to nothing below the knee, but through our brief conversation I’d figured they’d been just one person once—one of the Faded, or a demon of the Night Below, or some combination of the two—but endless, unmoving time, the toxic magic that infused this whole place, or maybe just their own despair at their endless, joyless existence, had caused parts of them to grow weak and thin, and there had been three of them, whispering and breathlessly trying to summon their lethal scream as though they were one. They’d not been keen to give us the information we needed, but we’d asked them hard, and eventually the three mouths had given us the route to Gaskeiden, and told us who lay beneath it. There was something down here, something old and powerful, and it was the powerful ones that still remembered, and could still give us answers.

The spirits and half-dead we’d interrogated called her the Dryad, but the Cainags had known her true name. She’d been called Hazel, once, or the universe had marked her so. An unassuming name for what I assumed was likely to be something fairly grotesque.

This was our life, now. We figured it had been six months, though there was no way to tell. Esher, Sanvaunt and I had ridden a moon horse right through the veil between our world and this place—the Fault. Numerous histories agreed that when the once-mighty Riven Queen was defeated by the great hero Maldouen at the battle of Solemn Hill, her enemy had activated the five great Crowns across the world and sent all the evil she’d summoned here, into the Fault. Sometimes history gets things right, but there were things here our world had never known. Or at least for our ancestors’ sake, I hoped that was so. We trudged through swampland, day after day, seeking answers. Seeking a way home.

The bloody moon horse had ditched us here and vanished. They said never to ride one, beautiful as they were. That had proved true as well.

We made our way through dead halls, the hollow sounds cast by our clanking footfalls bringing more life to this place than it had seen in generations. The Faded avoided these places. The half-dead had been people once, but they’d been dead before they were banished here. We were giving them second deaths. The Faded were different. For all the passage of centuries, they’d retained their wits and their power, and we avoided them when we could.

At times we found evidence that one of the more powerful, one like the Remnant Sul, had visited. Footprints last a long time when there’s nothing else to disturb them. But we were yet to see one of their lords. Where the half-dead were pitiful things, half-sentient, maddened by their long confinement, we all knew that the Faded Lords were things to be feared. But there were none here now. What lay here was very possibly worse. None of us could move stealthily through those halls. The armour we wore had been scavenged from another of these decayed sites, months back now, as we tracked time. It had a bronze-coloured cast to it, engraved and spell woven, harder than any bronze had a right to be, but it still clicked and clacked as we made our way through halls of dead memory.

‘Ward room,’ Sanvaunt said as the light globes lit a large chamber ahead. ‘Has to be.’ Esher nodded. I nodded too.

The walls were lined with carved figures, reliefs cut into the black stone. They showed people, some human, others less so, all dressed in a way that told us that they were not from our time. The carvings had been old even before the Faded were banished here by the hero Maldouen, eight centuries past. They’d been our enemies since time began, and this bitter place was their defeat, a plane of containment that lay between the world of the living and the demon realm of the Night Below. In the centre of the room, a vast table was dust-coated, but old colours showed through, maroon and white ivory inlaid against the stone. This had been a grand place once. The creatures that crawled through its bastions and beneath its buttresses were shadowed, withered remnants of the once-proud creatures who’d walked its halls. Seven hundred years and more of starvation and pain will do that even to those once thought fair.

Back down the corridor, something threw itself bodily against the door. A series of hisses and grunts sounded, muffled, beyond.

‘Their fear didn’t last long,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘Go on, Raine. It’s you who needs to find the Dryad. It’s your question needs asking here.’

‘I don’t want to leave you,’ I said.

‘Sanvaunt and I can hold the doorway,’ Esher said. ‘Besides. We’re the better fighters, and you’re the better ghost caller. Only thing that makes sense.’

There was no ego to what Esher said. They were both better than I was. You get over things like that fast when your lives depend on it daily. Mostly get over it. I didn’t like that it gave Esher and Sanvaunt something to share, something that I didn’t have with them. They’d been in each other’s lives far longer than I had, but before—back when such things mattered—I’d been bonded to them separately. Esher had been my best friend, the kind of friend I’d never hoped to have. Sanvaunt and I had never been friends, he’d been ranked above me, but there had always been a hot ember waiting to catch. Maybe I’d felt that with Esher too, and just hadn’t seen what was right in front of me. Now there was something new growing between them, a thing I’d cast away, denied, stamped on. It shouldn’t have mattered, here in this nowhere land, but too often the ember rose to burn me.

‘All right,’ I said. But I looked to Sanvaunt. ‘Try to save your strength. Don’t go fire-beast if you don’t have to. We might need that strength soon.’ Sanvaunt gave me a curt nod.

‘Go.’

I headed on past the decadent table, where forgotten silver goblets sat tarnished with age and draped with cobwebs, deeper into the temple. The statues watched my passage with unseeing eyes. This was not a place like any other. Nowhere in the Fault was. Each step I took seemed to smudge the floor, as if I were something altogether alien, not of this plane. Which I wasn’t, I supposed.

I could hear the half-dead scratching and banging at the door as I reached the head of a stair. I glanced back over my shoulder at my friends, my beautiful, hardened, warrior friends. Esher gave me a smile and mouthed Go at me, and all I could do was nod and descend into the dark. I had seldom been alone since we’d found ourselves here, six months of battle, fear, and growing despair turning us harder and leaner. Taking away our fear of the strange and unusual, reforging us, scarring us, binding us together.

When we awoke here beneath the Fault’s cracked red sky we’d thought we’d been through the worst. I’d killed hundreds at the foot of Redwinter’s slopes. I’d been run through the chest with a sword. We’d fought Sul, the Faded Lord, we’d betrayed the Draoihn. We hadn’t known that we’d only been at the beginning.

Egg-sized cadanum lights lit my path as I descended rough steps. The ceiling dripped. Everything was marsh here and little of the world seemed dry. But as I descended, quick steps carrying me further below, I smelled a different kind of wetness. It was cleaner somehow. Down and down, and I had no idea how many steps I’d descended. But she would be down here. The Cainags could not have lied to us. The creatures of the Fault were twisted and ruined, but they had rules. Laws that had to be obeyed. Some of them had come to fear us.

As I reached the base of the stair, an underground lake stretched before me, an impossible, artificial cavern whose ceiling reached up into darkness. My armour-capped footfalls cried out across the space in diminishing, rattling echoes. I couldn’t see the far side, but then, the cadanum light wasn’t offering me much. Just enough to make out an island across the water, and on that island, an ancient tree. The island was man-made too—or at least something had made it, with cut-stone blocks and a little jetty reaching out towards me, eighty, ninety feet out across the still black water.

Horizon to horizon, the Fault was a stinking, pernicious swamp. Endless, roiling hummocks of earth jutted from murky water, water that reflected the red light of the sky above. Even the light felt like betrayal, cast erratically by three moons, one red, one gold, one blue. Nothing felt real. In the right combination, splintered cracks could be seen marring the blood-bruise sky like a shattered pane of glass, or the broken surface of a frozen puddle. Sometimes the sky grew loud. Sometimes it was practically screaming. But no matter the pain in the voice of the damaged heavens, the land was still. The water held its silence. It was a dead place, endlessly dead, unless the things that lurked within the water, the things unburied, the things that had hungered for life and sound and flesh for seven centuries and beyond, emerged to enact their violence. The lake was like that too. Not a ripple marred its surface. The tree stood alone in the darkness as though it had been waiting for me for decades.

‘Guess I’m in the right place,’ I muttered. I could have tried shouting across the expanse of dark water, but I didn’t think any ancient being was likely to holler back and forth across its own moat. I stepped out towards the surface.

Since the day that Sul had run a sword through my chest, things had changed considerably. Back then I’d drawn in a hundred dying souls and used them to fuel my failing body, to keep it moving, forcing myself to live when even I didn’t want me to. But things were different now—I was different. Six months—despite the lack of day and night, Esher and I could measure time through our cycles—had changed us all. What I’d had, what I’d needed, was practice. I could never have practiced in our world. Too many doubts, too much fear of what I was doing and what I was. Too aware of the judgements of my own kind, and the fate that awaited one such as I who saw the dead, and worse, commanded them. But it was different here. Here in the Fault, I was free.

I called forth souls that I’d taken, drew them up from the cage inside. I needed fewer of the half-dead’s souls than I had when I’d needed to hold my failing body together. They were denser, more potent, but I’d grown more skilled at pressing them to my will. The souls hated me with an intensity that should never have been, and that made it easier. I drew on one, a creature that had risen from the ruddy water to attempt murder with a scythe. I’d cut it down and sucked its life into me, and now, I put it back out into the world as something I could step on. Not a dignified way to be used in death, but then, death is the final indignity we all have to face. The sooner one accepts that, the less one cares.

I made stepping stones of a creature’s life, and walked out across the surface of the lake. I could have kept that one as I reached the artificial island, but I felt it had served its purpose, and let it go. There were far more souls to take above anyway. My cage was already close to its capacity.

There wasn’t much on the island. The tree rose stark and jagged, thirty feet tall, leafless, bark long turned grey, just as dead as everything else. A handful of offering bowls lay around its trunk, their contents long withered away. And yet, despite its deadness, the tree held fruit, shrivelled, leathery things I had no name for but definitely didn’t want anywhere near my mouth.

Time was not waiting on us. Esher and Sanvaunt were dealing with the Light Above knew what up in the temple. I wasn’t here to gawk.

‘Dryad,’ I said. ‘Whoever you were. Come on out of that tree. I doubt it’s more interesting in there than it is out here.’

I’d found it paid to be irreverent with the named creatures of the Fault. They didn’t like it, and that made them curious at least.

The tree trunk shivered and creaked, and then midway up its trunk, something began to unfurl. A torso, its waist blending seamlessly into the tree’s trunk, flexed up and towards me, horizontal with dangling arms and a face that seemed to have the semblance of a woman’s with ears like a fox and spiky pine needle hair. Perhaps ‘woman’ was a strong term for her. She was eyeless, knife-blade gouges cutting across brow and cheekbones where the Dryad had been blinded, her hard flesh solid grey wood, but flexible enough to give her a little motion. Her fingers trailed away into thin, whippy tendrils, slithering as they unwound from the tree trunk.

I have not had a visitor in a long time, the Dryad mouthed, but the words flowed straight into my head, through the six-circles within six-circles that

I moved in at all times. I seldom released my grip on the trance of death in the Fault. The tunnel that had once filled my mind seemed little more than a backstage door. Practice can make anything seem normal.

‘I am Raine Wildrose, Sarathi of the Sixth Gate, and I don’t belong here,’ I said. ‘I’ve come for what you know.’

I cannot see you, the Dryad hissed.

‘Do you have a name?’ I asked.

No true name should be given so freely, she murmured back. What is yours, I wonder?

Spirits and fey beings were always going on about true names. I’d been asked for mine before, and I hadn’t known it then, and I didn’t know it now, if I even had one. Raine was as good a name as I needed.

‘You don’t need my name,’ I said. ‘But I know yours, Hazel.’

She hissed, a foul stench emanating into the air in a cloud of spores. I had her now. She couldn’t resist me.

‘I don’t have a lot of time,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot of killing going on upstairs and I need to get back up to it. But I need some information, and I’m told you’re the one to provide it.’

Treacherous Cainag daughters, the Dryad hissed, and for a moment I felt her anger. Her fingers spread, the drooping, whip-like tendrils brushing the smooth dirt around her roots. But there was something behind that anger as well. Anger and fear are two sides of the same coin; twist one in the light and you’ll see the other clear as day.

‘They’re unharmed,’ I said. ‘Mostly. They all live, as much as anything here is living.’

You live, the Dryad said. Live and dead as one. I sense the tunnel. I sense what you carry within you.

‘Good, excellent, well I’m glad we understand each other,’ I said. There had been a time when a thing like this would have terrified me. Today it was just another twisted creature of the Fault. She had not always been like this, I knew that. But she hadn’t been anything else for a long, long time. ‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said. ‘She’s imprisoned, just as you are. She’s been here even longer than you have. I need to find her.’

The Fault is a twisted place. Directions were seldom what they seemed, and no amount of walking could bring us to the City of Spires that always lay on the horizon. By the time we got closer, the light would change and it would be gone, sitting distant in some other location. But always in sight, always reminding us that it was there. Unreachable, but there.

Time means little here, the Dryad said. Infinite time. We have always been here. But why should I help you, child of the world above? What do you bring me in offering?

Hunger. Need. Thirst. There it was. Behind the scabrous bark, behind the timeless existence, there was always a desire to consume. It is what we exist for. Nobody, not woman, not man, not the things that dwell in the Night Below or the Fault, can pass through the world without desiring to take from it.

From above us, there was a detonation of some kind. The mildest of tremors rippled the surface of the water. That would be Sanvaunt. He was having to draw on that life-fire after all. There were even more of the half-dead than we’d thought if he was resorting to that already. My friends needed me. Time to cut to the chase.

‘I’ll trade,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a soul in exchange for telling me how I can free the Queen of Feathers.’

It was the bargain of a madwoman. I’d been a sweet child once upon a time. I’d wondered how people could fear me so much just for seeing the dead, how they could believe that such a simple gift—simple to me, anyway—could be dreaded as something worthy of stoning, hanging, burning. But I’d had my third death, and the depth to which I could delve into the tunnel had multiplied tenfold. Sul had killed me, and I’d refused it. I understood the fear now. It wasn’t just some misunderstanding. I’d made life and death a cheap commodity, one that I dealt in. One that I made into stepping stones to get to what I wanted. Souls were the only currency of value to these nightmare creatures.

I had become the dealer in death people always feared me to be.

Ten souls, the Dryad demanded. Her torso flexed left and right, worming as if she sought to pull herself from the trunk, to close the distance. But she was well and truly bound. Ten!

‘I’ll give you five,’ I said. ‘That’s the final offer. You tell me which edifice the Queen of Feathers is bound to, and that’s two. Tell me how I can get there through the swamp, and that’s three more. You won’t get a better offer.’

Another tremor ran through the earth. To reach us so far down here, it had to be big. Something massive was happening up there. Sanvaunt didn’t unleash like this for the half-dead. I ground my fingers together, trying to read something from the Dryad’s face, but it was an eyeless, wooden mask.

The Queen of Feathers is gone, but remains. She is born and dies in the Fault’s heart, and you will rise until you see, but break before you understand, the Dryad said. The path is clear, but only one can show you the way to her. The child provides the means. Seek him at Avangrad.

‘A child?’ I said. ‘Here?’

I have answered, the Dryad said. She reached towards me, training fronds. My reward!

One of the difficulties with rampaging through a hellscape like the Fault is that even when you get the information you want, it seldom makes sense to you. It’s not like we had a map, and even if we did, the Fault didn’t respect the concept. But a deal was a deal. I reached out and took one of the Dryad’s extended fingers. It was cold to the touch, brittle. I reached for the soul-cage in my chest and opened its gate a little, choosing the first soul to brush against my awareness. I remembered it dying. Esher had killed it, a squat, fat little creature with too many eyes and backwards arms. An inefficient form for something that had rabidly tried to hurl its aggression against us. After Esher split its head open and I ate its ghost, I’d felt there’d been more to it than mindless aggression. It wanted to feel something, anything. It had lain unmoving in the mire for forty years, and had been mad long before that period of torpor began. Just to feel something, anything, was what it had wanted. And it had, in a way. It was a pitiful thing, and I wasn’t sad to give it up. There is no room for pity in the Fault. I’d made that choice a long time ago.

I passed the tormented soul out of the cage, which I envisaged as somewhere in my chest but obviously wasn’t; down along my arm and into the Dryad’s tendrils I saw the wispy green-white spirit energy flowing into her. I gave her another; I didn’t remember where I’d got it from. The Dryad shivered as something long denied her rippled through her branches.

‘This place, Avangrad. How can I get through the Fault to find it?’

The Fault did not believe in directions. I had come to think of it as a place alive, with an intelligence behind its changes, twists and turns. Sometimes they were too cruel not to be. We’d walked two days to reach one of the edifices, only the next morning to find it back the direction we’d come from. Maybe it was just random chance. We see meaning in coincidences because we believe ourselves to be the pinpoint around which the six circles of existence rotate. Self, other, energy, mind, life, death. That makes us creation, I suppose, the theoretical seventh sphere. Or at least it seems that way. But the Fault cared nothing for the normal rules, and we’d learned that movement, change, took different forms here.

A great palace, apart from the corruption that haunts this place. It lies on higher ground, beyond the fog. Appease the iron child, and the city will come to you. She lurched forward, stronger now with her meal of soul energy. Tiny little buds had formed across her brow, around her fingers. Give me more now!

I was having none of that, and I’d been ready. I twisted my glaive around and sawed across her fronds.

‘Back!’ I barked. ‘A deal’s a deal, but get control of yourself or I’ll take you as well.’

That calmed her down. She retreated from me, hissing softly, leaving only one six-foot whip of finger out for me to touch. She was greedy, but in the Fault, a deal was a deal. I took the finger and fed her three more lives. Monstrous, empty, violent, tortured lives. Usually when I used up a soul it fled on into the tunnel. I didn’t know what she did with them, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

‘It’s not the first time I heard that name,’ I said. ‘The iron child. What is it?’

But I knew the answer already. I’d fought him before, in another life, as another woman. He’d destroyed me.

More questions, more souls, the Dryad said. She was growing stronger as she absorbed them. Too strong to be questioned, maybe. The ash-grey bark was growing warmer, turning red like apple skin. She was softening, but sharpening at the same time. Souls were not a currency to be traded lightly. I teetered on the edge of making further deals and wondering just what she’d become if I fed her another ten, curiosity, some fear, but then a great blast of heat and smoke erupted from the tunnel I’d entered in through.

‘Next time,’ I said, and burned through another soul to make a path back across the lake. The Dryad wailed, reached for me, but I was too fleet. Now I had a name, and a direction, as strange as that direction sounded.

‘Don’t worry, your annoying highness,’ I said as I took the stairs three at a time. ‘I’m coming for you.’

2

Everything that could burn seemed to be on fire, but that was nothing new.

The half-dead had breached the temple’s doors somehow and the bodies were piled atop each other in the corridor, but it was the millipede that had brought Sanvaunt to call on his trance. With a body as wide as a bull’s, it lay in several segments in the room with the table, leaking scorched yellow ichor across the floor. Sanvaunt had calmed down now that it was dead, just the odd drip of fire from his eyes signalling the power he’d drawn on. He was breathless, and the blade of his sword was a crooked mess, ruined by the heat of his life-fire.

‘Where in Skuttis did that thing come from?’

‘Not sure,’ Esher said. ‘It just came in through the window. Did you get what we need?’

‘I got it,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

The millipede had no ghost. It wasn’t human, and never had been. Animals had spirits, but a spirit and a ghost are different things altogether. I’d wondered sometimes whether animals had ghosts of their own and I just couldn’t see them. Maybe there were sheep out there somewhere who saw the spirits of dead sheep. They wouldn’t have known that other sheep didn’t see them, which was a weird thought.

‘There are more of them out there,’ Sanvaunt said. He leaned against one of the pillars. ‘I can do more of this if I need to.’ He gestured around at burning carpets and wall hangings, but he looked tired. No wonder. We were all tired. How could we be anything but? Finding ourselves in the Fault had changed us, but I felt it, deep in my bones. We weren’t built for this place. It both wanted us, and it knew we were alien. The charred remains of a giant millipede were a stark reminder that this land hated us.

‘No more fighting if we can avoid it,’ I said.

‘The half-dead retreated when the bug came down,’ Esher said. ‘But they’ll find their nerve again. Do you really think they want to eat us that bad?’

‘That’s what this place is, isn’t it?’ Sanvaunt said. His voice was raspy. He straightened himself against the wall, took a deep breath. His Fifth Gate made him powerful, but even the Gate of Life had its limits. ‘Hunger. Everything here is hungry. Everything lives on without food, without water, just endless existence. They’re maddened by it.’

‘Maybe they can eat this thing,’ I said, nudging a segment of segmented carapace. The millipede looked like it had been tough to cut through. No wonder Sanvaunt’s sword was a wreck.

‘They don’t want to eat the things that are trapped here with them,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘They want us because we’re something else.’ He closed his eyes for a moment as the last burning tears dripped down his cheeks. Light Above, what a jawline. Maybe it wasn’t exactly healthy that watching my friends fight woke me up in all the wrong ways, but there was something raw and primal about it. All that was in the past now. We were warriors, we were trapped here together, and there was no time for anything else. But the feelings hadn’t gone anywhere. Not mine at least.

Sometimes when I looked at Sanvaunt and Esher together, if she laughed at his joke or she congratulated him on a kill, I wondered if they remembered me at all.

‘Even if we’re just as trapped as they are,’ Esher said, ‘maybe there’s a back way out. Something they’re not expecting.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There was only one way in. How many do you think are out there?’

Esher wiped a grim fist across her mouth. The fighting had taken it out of her even more than Sanvaunt. She had her First Gate, and she was lethal with a sword, but she didn’t have Sanvaunt’s Fifth Gate, or my Sixth. It was hardest on her. In all the time we’d fought and tricked and lied and bargained our way across the Fault, she hadn’t complained once. I loved her all the more for that, even if I just had to keep my dumb mouth shut.

‘A lot,’ she said. ‘Really, a lot.’

I loved them both so much. Not just some puppy-love attraction, not just that glamour that comes from staring into the eyes of someone who makes your knees weak. It was the love that comes from fighting side by side with someone, depending on them, knowing they’re at your back, that you’d give anything for one another. I’d seen the same love between Sanvaunt and Esher too, strange to see from the outside. It was like being born from the same forge. It wasn’t romance, and it wasn’t sibling comfort. It was something that few people will ever understand, and I was glad they didn’t have to.

‘Then we aren’t going out that way,’ I said.

‘You don’t have a Banshee’s Wail in there to clear a path?’ Esher asked. She didn’t sound hopeful.

‘I have the souls, but I’d rather not waste them,’ I said. The creatures of the Fault had proved somewhat resistant to my death-powered magic. Throwing souls directly at them had yielded few positive results. ‘Those bone hags actually got stronger when I hit them with it. I’d rather not make things any worse.’

‘Incantation,’ Sanvaunt said, his head rising and his eyes opening. They were just ordinary eyes again now. I’d grown accustomed to the fire that grew within them when he summoned his Gate; it was returning to normal that caught my breath every time.

‘Here? Now?’ I asked.

‘Travel through fire. Like the grandmaster used to,’ he said. ‘We don’t have to go far. I don’t have anything like her skill, or her knowledge. But maybe I can take us outside of this place.’

‘Do we have time?’

‘We better,’ Esher said. ‘Sounds like the half-dead are realising the bug didn’t get us. Or else the hunger is just getting too much for them.’ She flexed her shoulders, the pauldrons of her scavenged armour clanking. Her hair hung in six interwoven braids down her back, its golden lustre dimmed by months without a single wash, but she looked good. She looked right. The one thing we consistently failed to scavenge were helmets. The most important part of any armour, and we’d yet to find any that fit well, and a poorly fitting helmet that slips over your eyes is no protection at all. The armour we wore had mostly come from another edifice, mismatched. Esher had started with a suit of her own, but armour gets battered and dented and piece by piece she’d been forced to replace it.

She moved across to the doorway that looked down the hall towards the piles of bodies she and Sanvaunt had made. The half-dead hovered some distance back in the gloom. They growled and slunk about, fish-like eyes swivelling and peering, but they weren’t ready to cross the mound of dead to take a bite at us. Not just yet.

‘I’m doing it,’ Sanvaunt said. ‘It won’t be pretty but I’ll try it.’ He swept the last clutter free from the surface of the large table and took out a dagger. It was a wicked thing, made with cruelty in mind, but beauty as well, its edge serrated, its hilt the bone of a beast long since in the earth. He breathed out. ‘Never was my great talent, but I’ll try it.’ He applied the knife’s point to the marble-and-ivory tabletop and began to carve. I’d never had much talent for incantation; the pictograms I crafted more frequently went wrong than right, like the time I’d rotted the insides of a pie and terrified our teacher, Palanost. Sanvaunt moved with more confidence, but this was a new trick for him to try. Moving by fire was a big ask. Incantation rewrote the truth of the natural world around us. One wrote it into paper—metal or stone were even better—then infused oneself into it through Eio, the first trance—or in this attempt, the fifth, Vie. The incanter became one with the world, not separate, but part of the essence and fabric that made up reality. To travel by fire was not a skill I could ever learn, no more than Sanvaunt would ever learn to rip out the souls of the dead.

He really had got the better half of our heart bond deal. When we’d faced the demons my enemies had summoned against me, as my Sixth Gate opened Sanvaunt had chosen to stand his ground to protect me. That love, that selfless act, had awoken the Fifth Gate within him. We were two sides of a coin, the light and the dark, the powers forged from trust, and hope.

I moved to stand beside Esher. She was spattered with the blood of the emaciated, grey-skinned things out there. They watched her back with luminous, protruding eyes. Some of the half-dead hadn’t been people at all, they’d been something else.

‘Let me take them,’ I said. ‘Rest some.’

‘No,’ Esher said fiercely. ‘We fight together. Don’t put me to the back of the class, Raine. Just because I don’t have the Gates you and Sanvaunt have, it doesn’t make me any less part of this team.’

Her words spat with fire. It was a conversation we’d had often.

‘Without you I wouldn’t be here,’ I said. ‘Alive, I mean. I didn’t mean the Fault.’

‘Both are true,’ Esher said. ‘I’m not sore over it. I’d rather we were all here and you alive than back in the real world bowing to Ovitus and laying flowers on your grave.’

‘Ovitus,’ I said. ‘It seems so impossible that everything—all of this—can come from the spite of one sad, self-absorbed man.’

‘Find me a trouble in the world and I’ll show you a frightened, self-absorbed man behind it,’ Esher said.

I hated Ovitus with a hot, dry fury. He’d won. He’d beaten me. Not only that, but he’d taken power, taken Redwinter, even our country was as good as his. I might have escaped him at the last, but it was a meagre kind of victory. When I’d killed before, it had seemed a necessity, but if we ever escaped the Fault, I’d take my time with him.

Behind us Sanvaunt’s dagger scraped against the stone as he drew. He was creating the concept in pictures and sigils, runes and symbols, but they were no particular language. I’d learned that much about incanting, at least. The language of the incantation was the caster’s understanding of the world. It didn’t have to make sense to anyone else. Whatever he was doing, it was complex. It was taking time; it needed more. The stone he carved it into would make it more powerful and was more likely to hold the power needed for the incantation to work, but it was slow going.

‘Look! They’re leaving,’ Esher said, snapping my attention back. The decayed wretches outside skittered away. ‘Shit,’ we said in unison. Things in the Fault only flee when something bigger comes along.

‘Heads up for more millipedes,’ I said. I tossed Sanvaunt my glaive and drew my sword. She’d been notched and well-used before I found her, but her core was strong. Better a shorter blade in these close confines, and she hadn’t let me down yet. Esher and I fell into fighting stances. I could feel the presence of something out there. The bloody sky visible beyond the portal gave a sudden howl, the cracks spanning it flaring white for a moment. And then a figure stepped into view. Not a bent-backed, rag-wearing, broken thing, but a slender figure, hooded and robed, silhouetted black against the shattered sky.

The howling ones, the scrabbling ones, the ones whose limbs had bent and twisted, the ones who’d grown new limbs where they shouldn’t, the ones with foam around their mouths, the ones with wild eyes and desperate stares—they were simple. They were all so simple. And yet in its calm, dignified, neat silence, the figure out there brought fear down like a curtain of ice. Me, with all my power and all my newfound practice, me with the souls of a hundred or more of the Fault’s creatures gathered within me, I was the one who was afraid.

‘Sanvaunt,’ I called back. ‘Time to hurry.’

I set my feet, grinding dust and spatter beneath worn boots.

‘Little morsels, little sparrows.’ The voice came as a slight, soft whisper. ‘What lovely little things you are.’

Impossibly, it sounded like Ovitus, the LacNaithe heir, the traitor to Redwinter, and the one who was largely responsible for us being here.

‘Sanvaunt?’ Esher added.

‘Nearly done,’ he called back, dagger point scraping and scoring.

‘Pretty things don’t belong in a temple,’ that soft whisper came again in Ovitus’s voice. ‘Not when they have such naughty thoughts. Such confusion, such . . . feeling. It flows from you like a spring breeze.’

‘Do you want to put a sword in it or should I?’ I asked, but my usual vim was missing. I could hardly get the words out.

‘That voice isn’t making me want to kill it any less. If it comes down the corridor we take it together,’ Esher said. ‘Love you, Raine.’

I just nodded.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ the figure said, black shadow against the dim light of the outside world. A slight ripple of purple played across, as if we looked at a reflection in a mirror. ‘Looking here, looking there. Looking just about everywhere.’

‘Well, you found us,’ I said. ‘Want to find out what we have?’

‘A little steel,’ it said. Giggled. There was a grimy, childlike quality to its rolling whispers. Some of the dark things of the world hold their poison deep, a well filled with their breaking. But this thing—whatever it was—its poison dripped from its words. It didn’t move. Not at all. It could have been made of glass. ‘I do not fear a little steel, young ones,’ it said. Amused. ‘Nothing can hurt me. Nothing has ever hurt me. I am everywhere, and I am all at once.’

‘Light Above, not this shit again,’ I growled. ‘It’s one of those things that wants to tell you all its allegorical existences. Honestly I’ve had enough for one day.’ Glib words, but sweat rolled down my cheeks. The ones that rage, that snap and tear, those were easy. This thing was different. Had it reached into our minds, plucked out Ovitus’s voice to use against us? My breathing was up and down, staccato pants. ‘Sanvaunt, how’s that incantation coming?’

‘Soon!’ he called back, hacking at the table with his knife. Scrape, clack, scrape.

The shadowed figure finally moved. It stepped forward into the waxy blue-white light and pulled back its hood. I was ready for a pale, rotten head, eye sockets filled with worms, teeth exposed through rotten cheeks. But it was just a man. He was thirty, perhaps a couple of years younger. Unkempt, curling chestnut hair, a day’s growth of stubble. He smiled, a genuine kind of smile, missing one of his incisors, but that was nothing to write home about. Unarmed, unscarred, just an ordinary man.

‘I can see I frighten you,’ he said, and his voice had changed. It was so different, his accent strange, the words angular, but not harsh. The giggling, sick child voice was gone. ‘That’s only fair. This is a frightening place.’

It was his normality that was worse. We hadn’t seen a living soul—not a person anyway—not in all those months. And that displacement of expectation, that anomaly in the mix, that was worse than any thousand-legged insect. Whatever this man was, he’d frightened away the half-dead.

‘You’re one of the Faded Lords,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m far, far more than that. This small part of me is awake in this world now. I have your friend to thank.’

‘Wasn’t me,’ Esher said. ‘I didn’t wake him up.’

‘Nor me!’ Sanvaunt called as he gouged at the stone.

‘I hate these riddles,’ I said. ‘I am so sick and tired of riddles. Do you have a name at least?’

‘The horses brought you here, didn’t they?’ he asked. He cocked his head at the slightest angle, his open-lipped smile showing the gap in his teeth. ‘They were bound to this place, as we all were, but somehow retained the power to slip momentarily into your realm, fleetingly and painfully. That glimpse of freedom has ever caused them to seek to break their bonds. You would be wrong to place your trust in those self-serving beasts.’

‘I don’t feel they’re the least trustworthy things here,’ I said. Keep him talking. Buy Sanvaunt time.

‘Their whims matter not,’ the chillingly ordinary figure said. ‘The days of the Fault are numbered. It’s all breaking down. It’s all going to change. And when it does, we’ll all be right back where we started.’

‘Are you mad, or just tiresomely cryptic?’ I said. It seemed an attribute of everything that dwelled in the Fault that they just couldn’t say anything plainly.

‘I thought I was being very clear,’ the man said. ‘I just wanted a look at you. I thought I’d cut off any paths to this place long ago, but it seems I was wrong. I’m impressed you made it here.’

‘You cut off the paths?’ I said. ‘Then you have some control over this place?’ A mad stab of hope shot through me that this man might be able to send us on the way to Avangrad. But there was a pretty good chance it was just another creature of the Fault ready to devour us. His eyes seemed normal. Plain old human eyes, nothing to read in them. But that voice from the entryway . . .

‘Some. I isolated this vestige of the past as best I could,’ he said. ‘In another land I was named Iddin. I’m king here, I suppose. King of the Fault. Not that there are many who care.’

‘We don’t care,’ I said.

‘That’s a shame,’ the man who called himself Iddin said sadly. ‘It’s rare I get to converse with anybody new. But my body will be here shortly, and it doesn’t play well with others.’

‘Your body?’

The man-like shape giggled.

The earth shook. Tremors weren’t uncommon here. They came and went and fed the land up into the hole in the sky, but this—this was different. Closer. The earth heaved beneath our feet, shifting one way, then the other. I fell against Esher and she caught us against the wall. The flagstones of Gaskeiden buckled beneath us.

‘What in Skuttis?’

Beyond the doorway, one of the walls surrounding the keep collapsed. A foul stench filled the air as the soggy ground bucked and heaved then burst like an erupting boil. Smoke boiled forth, black fog dense and opaque, but within it crackles of purplish lightning flickered as it spewed from the ground. The earth heaved again as the bulk of a creature of unimaginable size forced away earth that could have covered a village and the walls came crashing down over it.

‘I’m hungry,’ the shadow that called itself Iddin said, and there was dark, joyous malice in its voice.

‘Twenty seconds!’ Sanvaunt shouted. Esher and I staggered back along the corridor as even the foundations of the temple heaved beneath us. A block of stone crashed down, shards of sharp stone ringing from our armour.

‘Where do you think you can go?’ Iddin asked. He mirrored us, step for step, advancing into the temple’s corridor, picking his way across bodies as we retreated. ‘I’ll only find you again.’

I glanced behind the shadow-man, the self-named king of the Fault, and the crackling, oily fog began to fill the corridor. There was something bigger, something within it, and the doorway lost its support as the behemoth cracked through the ground below it, and the arch crashed down atop it.

‘Ten seconds!’

‘Well, I guess the chase is on then,’ I said.

Iddin smiled, and there it was, not the physical but the essence of worms in eye sockets, of teeth showing through rent cheeks, of slopping dead flesh. Whatever gargantuan monstrosity was beneath us unleashed a terrible roar that was at once deep, mountainous, and hollow, but trilled with high, unsuppressed loathing.

‘Then run. There is no escaping this place for you.’

Fire bright as the sun erupted around us, and for a moment I was weightless, and then it all came down.

*

Ed McDonald’s Witch Queen of Redwinter is due to be published by Tor Books in North America (November 12th) and Gollancz in the UK (November 14th).

Also on CR: Interview with Ed McDonald (2017); Annotated Excerpt from Ravencry; Review of Blackwing

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