The Book of the Crowman Read Online Free PDF

with those.”
    The footsteps reach the door and a strong hand hammers against it.
    “Please,” Megan whispers. “I have something to give you. This can’t be a mistake. You need me and I need you. I’m sure of it.”
    The woman considers. The hammering comes again.
    “Fuck off!” she yells.
    After a pause a slurred male voice says:
    “The mistress said top room.”
    “The mistress is drunk. I’ve got my moon.”
    “I’m not fussed.”
    “Well, I am so fuck off like I told you.”
    After some indistinct muttering the footsteps clomp back down the creaking stairs and the hammering assails a different door. The woman’s gaze fixes once more on Megan.
    “So. What can a girl like you possibly do for me?”
    Megan closes her eyes and stretches into the weave around the woman knowing she has one chance to get this right and very little time in which to do it. Immediately she senses pain in the woman’s womb and bladder. She sees black spots there: years of untreated disease, the scarring from two abortions and several rapes.
    But this long-term physical damage is nothing next to the shadows that crowd the woman’s aura: dark spirits feeding on the degradation of leased flesh, drinking the woman’s shame and pain despite her efforts to maintain some sort of prostitute’s nobility. Megan is not frightened by the spirits. Far from it. She is incensed at their leechlike cling and the barefaced simplicity of their intentions. But she knows if the woman could see what attends her at every moment of the day she would be insane with terror.
    Megan can also tell that the woman’s true ability is that of a seer. But her profession and the shadows it has plunged her into are clouding her skills almost beyond use. The woman barely believes in her own gift, using it as a way to bring in an extra meal or two on the days when Shep Afon’s market is busy. There is only one thing to do, and Megan has never done it before.
    Using her hands in the weave, she reaches into the woman’s belly and strokes the scars with her fingertips, fingertips that begin to spark with white light. As the light grows she lets it blast away the decade or more of infection that has caused so much inflammation and discomfort. Guided only by instinct, Megan works fast inside the woman’s body and as she works she prays, calling in the only spirit being she knows she can trust to answer.
    The oil lamps in the room flicker and dim. The woman doesn’t notice. Her eyes stare ahead and her body is rigid, as though time has stopped. Megan prays harder, putting all her fury into her invocations.
    “Here’s a place for your darkness,” she whispers. “Here’s a place for your light.”
    From somewhere distant in the weave, Megan hears a familiar sound and nods to herself with a grim smile. The whine of huge black wings scything the air gains volume fast. The light from the two oil lamps becomes little more than an ochre stain as flitting shadows crowd the attic room. Their blackness is deep, sleek and midnight pure, astonishingly beautiful in comparison with the tainted darkness of the psychic parasites clinging to the whore like ivy.
    Time in the physical world stops. The woman is frozen, unblinking. Megan’s fingers work at speed, seeking out sickness and obliterating it with light, loosening gnarls of scarred vulval and uterine flesh, returning rosy health to abused tissues. The gurning, lasciviously fascinated beings that wait in the woman’s energy field draw back from Megan’s brightness and purity, scowling at the intrusion of anything that doesn’t feed their salacious appetites. Yet her light is enough to distract them from the pristine dark that now occupies every corner of the woman’s room, a dark that advances with a feathery whisper until it surrounds them. Obsidian beaks and claws extend from every direction and only then do the spirits notice the force that stalks them. They try to shrink away but the Crowman’s influence is