Ravencaller Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by David Dalglish

  Excerpt from Voidbreaker copyright © 2020 by David Dalglish

  Excerpt from The Ranger of Marzanna copyright © 2020 by Jon Skovron

  Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

  Cover illustration by Paul Scott Canavan

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Map by Tim Paul

  Author photograph by Myrtle Beach Photography

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Orbit

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  orbitbooks.net

  First Edition: March 2020

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

  The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dalglish, David, author.

  Title: Ravencaller / David Dalglish.

  Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2020. | Series: The keepers; book 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029889 | ISBN 9780316416696 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316416689 (e-book)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3604.A376 R38 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029889

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-41669-6 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-41667-2 (ebook)

  E3-20200128-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue: The Day of Viciss’s Arrival

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Interlude

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  A Note from the Author

  Discover More

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of Voidbreaker

  A Preview of The Ranger of Marzanna

  By David Dalglish

  Praise for David Dalglish

  To my twin wolves of anxiety, Fluffy and Bobo, and to Jeannette Ng, who helped me name them.

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  PROLOGUE

  The Day of Viciss’s Arrival

  Dierk knelt on the cold floor of his family’s cellar, the Book of Ravens in one hand and a dagger in the other, and stared at the man he’d killed. There wasn’t much to him, just bruised skin, stained slacks, and a faded shirt with multiple holes. The blood trickling from his punctured neck seemed clean compared to the rest of him. The ropes binding his wrists and ankles likely cost more than anything the ragged man once possessed.

  “Oh shit.”

  Dierk turned to the side and vomited up his breakfast. It left the muscles of his scrawny abdomen tight and his throat burning raw. All his well-crafted plans collapsed into disordered panic. He’d layered towels underneath the body but there was already so much blood. The smell of it mixed with feces. Sisters be damned, the man had defecated himself upon dying. Was that normal? Or had he done it to spite Dierk just before the dagger pierced his throat?

  “This was a mistake,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have, oh damn it all to the void, what have I done?”

  When he was ten, he’d trapped a cat in the cellar and come back a week later armed with a knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He’d spent hours cutting into that dead tabby, flaying off the fur, untwining muscles, and sliding guts out in long, thin loops. It wasn’t quite pleasure he’d felt, but something to the right of it. A satisfaction he’d unknowingly craved, each new cut or tear like a scratch upon an itch in his brain.

  Then his father found out, and Dierk had learned to be much more careful over the following six years. Dogs, cats, squirrels, and rats, all easily disposed of in some gutter alley of Londheim’s many disgusting districts. He’d bled, cut, and skinned all manner of creatures, but never a human. Never before today.

  The ground shook, and a bottle of wine rolled off one of the racks and shattered upon the floor. Dierk screamed in surprise. That was the third quake this morning, as if the world itself were angry with his arrogance. Or maybe he overlooked the obvious. For years he’d dabbled in practices considered heretical to the tyrannical Sisters. Perhaps they had turned their eye upon him, and they were not pleased.

  Dierk glared at his copy of the Book of Ravens as if it were responsible for his current predicament. One of his father’s guards, Three-Fingers, had given it to him as a secret present on his fourteenth birthday.

  “I know about your more ugly habits,” the scarred man had whispered, his breath heavy with the scent of alcohol. “This’ll give them purpose. Make it mean something.”

  It was the greatest gift Dierk had ever received, and it awakened a part of his mind he’d never realized was closed. What had been random cuts became runes and symbols. What had been sweaty silence became whispered prayers to the void. He’d cupped the severed head of a dog and pressed his lips to its forehead to breathe in its essence during the reaping hour. Each time he felt the tantalizing call of something greater. Fleeting ephemeral lives of animals could not compare to the eternal memories of the soul.

  He was licking dew off leaves when, just outside his reach, there awaited a river.

  Three-Fingers had brought him the homeless man that now lay before him. He’d given him the knife. He’d looked upon him with respect and admiration Dierk had never experienced from his father.

  “When you kill him doesn’t matter,” Three-Fingers had said. “The reaping ho
ur is when the magic comes. That’s when you’ll finally be a true Ravencaller.”

  A true Ravencaller. The sound of it had tickled his senses. He cherished the idea of his needs and impulses, always strange and discordant with society, leading him to something meaningful. A purpose to remove the aching loneliness he felt when watching others his age grow their wild interlocking relationships of love, loyalty, and respect.

  But right now he felt ready to lose his mind. Someone would find out, a servant most likely. This wasn’t something he could hide like a dead cat. Would he be banished from his home? All of Londheim? Or might he even be hung from the city gates and denied the dignity of a pyre?

  “Stop it, Dierk, stop it, stop it, stop it,” he cried, accompanying each request with a vicious punch to his leg. He had to get himself under control. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. Such a disgrace. Who ever heard of a Ravencaller bawling over some dead homeless man? Dierk curled his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth in the dark. The body was still bleeding.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late. He could come clean to his father. If he blamed the whole thing on Three-Fingers, he may have a chance. He could show him the Book of Ravens and claim it was thrust into his hands unwillingly. If—if he removed the ropes, maybe he could say the homeless man attacked him. Self-defense, you could kill in self-defense and no one would blame you, right?

  Again the ground shook. The Cradle was laughing at him.

  Cradle never laughs. Cradle is angry. Cradle meant to be a garden, not a prison.

  Every single muscle in Dierk’s body locked up. That voice, it wasn’t his, yet it slid through his mind as familiar as his own skin. It was as peaceful as a winter morning, and just as cold.

  “Who’s there?” he asked the dark cellar.

  Suddenly the cellar was dark no more. A light manifested in the air before him, taking the slender shape of a long-bodied reptile with tiny catlike paws. Instead of scales, its pale blue body rippled with soft fur akin to a rabbit’s. Though its face resembled that of a child, it bore only smooth divots where its eyes should be. From nose to tail, it was barely longer than his hand.

  Human is crying, spoke this hovering being of cold light with a voice that echoed inside his skull. Human is afraid. I come. I choose. Human gives doubt to choice. I choose wrong?

  “What?” Dierk asked. He quickly wiped at his face, trying to clear away the snot and tears. “No, I’m not afraid.”

  Human is a liar.

  Its mouth didn’t move but Dierk knew it spoke. It bore no eyes but he felt certain it watched him closely.

  “And who are you to call me a liar?” he asked, trying to salvage some semblance of pride.

  I am nisse.

  “Nisse?” Dierk said. “What—what are you, Nisse?”

  I am nisse as Dierk is human. I am many names. I, Vaesalaum.

  Nisse? Vaesalaum? Dierk had never heard anything of the sort. A wriggling fear in the back of his mind insisted he’d gone insane. This little creature did not hover and bob in the air in front of him. The murder had broken him. Surely this was his brain’s feeble attempt to re-create order.

  “How do you know my name?” he asked.

  Human mind is a book. I read pages.

  The creature, Vaesalaum, floated to the cooling corpse, traversing through the air in an S-like motion with its snakelike body. Dierk’s curiosity pulled him out of his shock.

  “Why are you here, Vaesalaum?” he asked. The name clunked awkwardly off his tongue.

  I seek an answer. I seek a promise. I seek a disciple. I offer much for all three.

  “A disciple?” he wondered aloud. “And you’re to be my teacher?”

  The nisse sank lower to the ground. Its bluish light shone across the corpse, granting an unwelcome clarity to the stiffening limbs, lifeless eyes, and drying blood. The otherworldly being turned its body into a circle and settled atop the dead man’s forehead.

  Teacher. Partner. Master.

  “And why would I accept?” he asked, trying to hide the fear growing in his chest. What if this wasn’t some cracked creation of his mind, but an actual being that existed? It shouldn’t. Monsters, faeries, and dragons weren’t real. They were stories, fables, and entertaining myths. Humanity had wisely disregarded them and moved on, except for the Sisters, which they still clung to in their naïveté. But who was he to challenge his senses? How could he deny the voice whispering in his head?

  Dierk desires what Vaesalaum offers. Dierk desired it since childhood.

  A glowing symbol appeared upon the man’s forehead, carved from the touch of an invisible knife. Dierk recognized it at once. It was the inverse of the symbol of the Sisters, that of a circle enclosed around a small, upward-turned triangle. Even wearing it as a charm or necklace could earn you a week of hard labor, for that was the symbol of the Ravencallers, and the Keeping Church had done everything in its power to banish them into oblivion.

  Come closer, Vaesalaum ordered. Do not fear.

  Light shimmered across the symbol. Dierk’s breath caught in his throat. No, it couldn’t be. It was only midday, and far from the reaping hour. That was not the light of the man’s soul shimmering into the air. That wasn’t his eternal memories and emotions licking the dark cellar air in thin, weblike threads.

  Power in purpose, that cold voice spoke. Life amid death. Come breathe.

  Dierk’s feet moved of their own accord. The symbol of the Ravencallers blazed upon the corpse’s forehead. Silvery threads waved an inch above the charred flesh, and they were growing longer. Dierk dropped to his knees. His eyes watered. The Book of Ravens had talked much of this moment, of the sacredness of the reaping hour and the separation of the body from mortal flesh. The Soulkeepers carefully guarded humanity from that power. They buried it in rituals and masks and forced separation and distance from the weeping and the mourned.

  Dierk lowered his face to the circle formed by the nisse’s body, put his lips to the blasphemous symbol, and obeyed. Lips parting, tongue trembling, he breathed.

  The cellar turned black. The body vanished, the nisse with it. He heard no sound, and he felt no sensations, not the cool stone against his knees, not the chill, musty air. Dierk knew he should be afraid of such sudden emptiness, just as he knew it was dangerous to put his hand to a fire, but he was not. The void encapsulating him brought sudden relief from an unknown pressure banding around his head. It was the removal of a dozen nails secretly lodged into his hands and feet. Dierk felt he belonged, this void a more welcoming presence than his pale, skinny physical body.

  The darkness parted before a sudden light. It hovered in the air, at first nothing more than a faint blue spark, but it steadily grew like a well-oiled fire. Human features distinguished themselves amid the burning haze, though they never lost the cold blue shade. At last a grown man stood before Dierk, and it took him a moment to realize who it was: the homeless man he’d murdered. Except now his clothes were neat and prim, and his skin and hair immaculately clean.

  “Where am I?” the ghostly man asked.

  Dierk swallowed down a sharp stone in his throat. The void’s comforting presence threatened to leave him. He didn’t want to talk to this man. He only sought the power of his soul. And whoever he was, how would he react if he realized who Dierk was, and remembered?

  “I don’t know,” Dierk said. “It is new to me as well.”

  The ghostly image didn’t seem too upset with the answer. He looked around, mildly curious as to his apparent lack of surroundings. Before Dierk could say more, Vaesalaum shimmered into existence, the strange creature circling above the homeless man’s head like a crown.

  Behold human, now an open book. Vaesalaum controls the pages. Dierk reads the words.

  A shudder ran through the man, and then he split in two, his front half cleaved off like a split log. The man shrieked even as his mouth elongated into an inhuman shape. Flesh peeled like smoke, and he screamed, still alive, still sentient, every piece of his essence swirling
toward Dierk, and Dierk was screaming, too, just as loud, just as horrified.

  A bright forest replaced the void. Dierk leaned against a tree, his arms crossed over his chest and a smile upon his face. Except his name wasn’t Dierk any longer; his name was Erik. He inhabited the memory, his identity superimposed over Erik’s. His movements mimicked history, his emotions echoed those of the previous time. A young woman swayed in a plain brown dress before him, shaking and tapping a tambourine as she sang. The sunlight seemed to touch her blond hair in such a perfect way that it shone like spun threads of gold. Dierk felt happiness eager to burst from his chest. He thought he knew what it meant to be happy, but this showed him how wrong he was. At best he understood contentedness. This was better. So much better.

  The forest shimmered, and now he made love to that same woman. His hands massaged her breasts as he kissed the woman’s pale neck, purposefully marking it with a bruise to playfully point out later. Dierk had never seen a woman naked before that wasn’t drawn in a book or painting, and the idea of having himself inside another person seemed weird in a way he could never verbalize… but while inhabiting Erik it felt so good, Dierk wanted to push harder with his hips, he wanted to send his hands wandering everywhere, but he was not in charge of this existence, Erik was, and Erik kept his movements slow and steady as his cock stiffened, harder and harder until it felt ready to burst. And then it did, and the waves of pleasure left Dierk exhausted and overwhelmed.

  As Erik rolled onto his back and put his arm across his forehead, Dierk saw Vaesalaum hovering near the rooftop of the cabin, and then the world changed again. Erik was older now, his wife (Lisa, her name was Lisa) rocking in a chair beside the fire. Her breasts were exposed, and a young infant suckled one of them. Erik stood in the doorway of the cabin, his feet frozen in place by the beautiful sight. He didn’t move. He didn’t want to move, only smile and laugh at her when Lisa glanced his way and asked if something was the matter.

  Though Erik was smiling, Dierk wished to burst into tears. By the void, this was water on a tongue that had known only thirst. The companionship, the love, it was so simple and easy, it hurt him, hurt him in a deep, confusing way that inspired sadness as much as it did happiness.