by Stephen Hunt
‘What limits?’
‘My point precisely,’ said the solider. ‘Taking the diamond throne is enough of a game for almost every schemer and celestial-caste nob inside the imperium. But for those two? Taking the empire is only the first part of the equation. The real question is what do you do with the empire once you hold it? When you can answer that, I suspect you will know what the good doctor is beavering away on.’
‘Helrena doesn’t want Apolleon to lay his hands on the doctor or his work.’
‘If the man had the doctor, maybe he’d change his tune about who should take the throne next.’
‘Well, at least Helrena doesn’t fully trust him,’ said Duncan. ‘That’s something.’
‘That’s a fine intuition. I’m going to make you a soldier, yet, lad,’ said Paetro, slapping Duncan’s back. ‘You learnt how to spot snares and poisoned plates and explosive trip-wires hidden under a mattress well enough. Let’s see how you do with legion training in as short a time as any trainer was ever given.’
It wasn’t going to be easy, but then, nothing worth earning ever was.
Jacob Carnehan wasn’t having a good start to the day. He looked at Sheplar Lesh, freshly arrived from the great forest with pine needles still clinging to his jacket. ‘So if you’re standing here, where the hell is the imperial brat?’
‘Tied up in a wagon outside Northhaven,’ said Sheplar. ‘Kerge watches her. We had no choice in our departure, even without the marauders closing in on Quehanna. The gask council did not wish her to remain in their city any longer. They scryed the future and concluded she is bad luck.’
‘They got that much right,’ said Jacob. ‘Don’t need their talents to tell you that. We need to get her stashed somewhere, quick. Northhaven is crawling with strangers asking too many questions. One of the king’s hands is here as well, a prefect, and I guarantee he hasn’t come north to sample the ice wine.’
‘I plan to take the bumo north,’ explained Sheplar. ‘To Rodal.’
‘Will your country offer you and Kerge sanctuary?’
‘Officially? I am not certain. They are not eager to become embroiled in Weyland’s internal politics, old ally or not. But I still have many friends in the skyguard and the temples. They will help me when they understand what is at stake. The key faction that would oppose us travels south to Arcadia in an attempt to broker a peace between Prince Owen and the usurper.’
Jacob nodded. It was the best of a bad lot, then. In the mountain heights of Rodal the king’s killers and assassins would stand out like sore thumbs. So would an imperial girl and a gask acting as her jailor, of course, but it had to be safer than hiding her in Northhaven farmland; where he’d need to protect Cassandra Skar from the vengeful locals as well as the ruthless forces looking to free her.
‘There is another option,’ said Sheplar.
‘Speak,’ said Jacob.
‘The bumo is no longer an effective shield against the king’s vengeance. She is like a young hare scrabbling around the bush, drawing predators towards our camp. We could simply release her. Let your king find her and carry her back to the empire.’
‘Then what?’ said Jacob. ‘We trust that crown-wearing viper to leave us alone? I didn’t bring back half of Northhaven’s children and cut Vandia’s chains off them, just to have them start turning up with their throats slit by “bandits”.’
‘They will keep coming for her,’ warned Sheplar.
‘Let them come,’ said Jacob. ‘As long as we have the emperor’s granddaughter as a body shield, their aim’s going to be off.’
‘Or be very careful,’ warned Sheplar.
‘I’m a careful man, myself.’
The aviator looked at him oddly. ‘Indeed. I can see that. There is no more to the matter than this? You have not concocted a plan with that devil Sariel which you have not cared to share with me?’
‘As if. I haven’t seen Sariel since he left town,’ said Jacob. He waved towards the window. ‘He’s out there, somewhere, chasing the lost memories of his old life.’ Always start a lie with the plain truth. Bait, not shield, was exactly what Lady Cassandra Skar was to Jacob. As large as the imperium lay, there weren’t nearly enough Vandians in their legions to begin to pay for murdering Mary Carnehan. Burning my town. Taking my son. And Vandia was millions of miles away. Only reachable with their own shockingly advanced ships … unless they chose to come to him.
‘I think I preferred the smelly one when he was half-insane,’ said Sheplar. ‘Sanity does not suit him.’
‘I reckon Sariel’s still mad.’ Mainly at our enemies, right now. Which is the way I’d like to keep it. ‘Come on. I’ll see you safe out of town.’
Kerge and Sheplar had parked their wagon on the road out to the river, smoke from the warehouses and docks visible in the distance trailing into a cold, clear sky. Jacob couldn’t walk this road without remembering the horrific sights he’d witnessed here during the raid. All the captured townspeople too old or sick to be worth their haulage costs beheaded by the slave traders, the children and young chained and marched out to the pick-up planes, ready to lift off for their carrier bird. His wife, Mary, had endured that sad sight too, before she’d been murdered by the skels. Lord but I miss you. The sight and sound of you. Having someone to talk to. The now empty cornfields the covered wagon sat in had grown higher than ever in the summer past, nurtured by the blood of the dead. That was a fair analogy, Jacob reckoned, to the present health of the kingdom. Never richer. Never poorer. And all of it nourished by the people’s blood. I’ll bring Benner Landor’s fields a fresh crop of fertilizer. All of it Vandian.
Kerge sat on the cart’s tailboard, ahead of a wagon bed with a cylindrical grey canvas cover stretched over arched wooden bows, two oxen in its harness. They had brought a horse along too, tethered to the wagon and tugging happily at the grass along the verge. The gask waved when he saw Jacob and Sheplar approaching.
Jacob drew to a halt in front of the wagon. ‘Where’s your little friend?’
Kerge reached back into the flatbed and pulled a blanket off a pile of woodchip crates. Lady Cassandra Skar sat there wedged between two boxes, glowering at him. Despite himself, Jacob smiled. ‘Take the gag off for a minute.’
The gask did as Jacob asked. The young Vandian indignantly shook her hair. ‘The empire has not forgotten about me! They will arrive to free me and you will be skinned alive for every humiliation heaped upon my person.’
‘Didn’t work out so well for you, last time. I left a couple of legions face down in the ash of that ore-spewing volcano your people value so highly. And this is my country, girl.’
‘It’ll be left as burned-out as the volcano’s dead zone once we’ve finished with it.’
‘I should hand you to that serpent sitting on our throne. The two of you deserve each other.’
‘The empire has provinces without end, armies without peer. We will be the tide that sweeps your people away.’
‘There is no tide that can reach Rodal’s heights,’ said Sheplar. ‘And the rocks of our peaks do not burn.’
‘If your savage hill tribes value silver, someone will be willing to knife you in the back and turn me over to my countrymen. It happened in the forests, it will be the same wherever you try to hide me.’
‘I got plenty of lead to trade them,’ said Jacob. He patted the brace of pistols under his coat.
‘You’re a fool, Weylander.’
‘Your people murdered my wife. Mary’s buried next to our two children. My old life’s buried down with her and all the townspeople you had butchered. Maybe I am a fool, girl, but that’s only because you took everything from me. I’ve nothing left to be.’
‘The empire will find something.’
Jacob raised his hands in the air. ‘You’ve hollowed me out. I’m empty, here. And a man without hope, that’s a man without fear.’ Jacob climbed into the wagon and re-fixed the girl’s gag. Kerge and Sheplar checked the wagon for the journey ahead, inspecting the hooves
of the oxen and the grease on the wheel axles. Lady Cassandra Skar glared silent loathing at him. Jacob pointed to the mountain range barely visible in the distance, beyond the river and the hinterland of hills and valleys that led up to the vast heights. The league’s stone walls, where the Rodalians kept out the nomad hordes that haunted the steppes beyond. He whispered to her. ‘You think those are mountains? They’re not, Your Highness. They’re an empire-sized snare, big enough to bury every legion you’ve got.’ Jacob smiled coldly at the Vandian and dropped the blanket over her, concealing her presence from the prying eyes of other travellers. ‘You’ll see.’
Sheplar called up to him from the side of the wagon. ‘Jacob, is that one of your horses coming down the road?’
He looked out. By damn, it is. And Carter slumped wounded across the saddle as the steed was led in by Tom Purdell, the young guild courier riding one of the hold’s horses. Jacob sprinted out as the pair crawled into town, grabbing the reins and halting the old nag, Kerge and Sheplar close behind him. ‘What the hell’s happened here? You’re meant to be working in the library … were you jumped by bandits?’
Carter was too hurt to do anything but mumble through swollen lips; but the state of his face was nothing compared to the blood-soaked shirt clinging to his back.
‘I found him like this in the saddle,’ said Tom as Jacob and his companions practically caught Carter and laid him out on the cart’s flatbed. ‘He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness. He didn’t show up at our hold last night, so I went out towards Hawkland Park to see if the house had seen him. Carter mentioned he might be passing by to see his lady before heading for the library. Best I can tell from what’s said so far, the staff at the mansion caught him trespassing and half beat him to death for it.’
‘Benner Landor,’ growled Jacob, angrily slapping his holster. By the saints, if the grasping landowner was in favour of hedgerow justice, two could play at that game. I’ll put a bullet in that ungrateful bastard’s heart for this!
‘Do nothing hasty,’ cautioned Kerge. ‘Your country’s laws do not stand on your side.’
When have they ever? ‘They’ve been bought and paid for, you mean.’ Rich man’s law. This was all too familiar to Jacob, a little piece of history repeating. And look how well it ended before when you caught up with the highborn bastards who murdered your mother.
Carter started to cough as Sheplar pressed a water canteen between his lips. ‘Willow,’ he spluttered. ‘Been drugged. Taking. Her south. This morning. Forced marriage. The airfield.’
So, that’s it. And a lowly book-botherer was no longer required on the scene, even if the man in question was the one who’d saved Willow Landor’s life. But of course, they’d both saved each other’s lives in Vandia. Which meant Jacob owed Willow as much as he owed her father for this.
Jacob mounted Carter’s mare. ‘I’ll bring her back if I can.’
‘I’m coming,’ coughed Carter from the wagon.
‘That would be ill-advised, manling,’ said Kerge. ‘You need to visit a healer in Northhaven.’
Carter shook his head, stubbornly.
‘Let him come,’ ordered Jacob. He ignored the shocked expressions Sheplar and the gask shot him. ‘He’s a man, now. He and Willow endured hell out in Vandia. He’s earned the right to make a man’s decision over the Landor woman; even if it’s a damn fool one.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Tom.
‘Hell if this is your fight,’ observed Jacob.
‘You saved my life on the road and Carter’s my guild brother,’ said Tom. ‘That makes it my business. This started in Arcadia when the guild sent me to meet Prince Owen and pick up your coded message. I promised him I’d deliver it to you safe, so this might as well finish in Arcadia. Besides, the guild takes a dim view of our initiates being seized and summarily beaten.’
‘And that’s official policy is it?’ Jacob shook his head.
Sheplar pulled an aviator’s carbine out of the wagon and mounted his horse, pulling at the reins to bring the steed close to the wagon. ‘Get Carter up behind me … he will not be able to ride unaided.’
‘We’ll head hard for the airfield,’ said Jacob, looking at Carter wincing in agony as he was propped up behind the mountain aviator. ‘After that, you’re going to the doctor.’ Unless things turned uglier than they had to, in which case the doctor might have to be coaxed out at the end of a gun barrel to wherever they holed up. Jacob nodded at Kerge. ‘Try not to sell the Vandian girl off to any slave traders who might pass by, however tempting that might be.’
‘You do not intend to send for your people’s court officials or constables, do you?’ sighed Kerge.
‘No more than Benner Landor did when his hirelings grabbed my boy.’
‘The tenets of your religion,’ said Kerge. ‘Do your saints and God not require forgiveness?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll forgive Benner Landor,’ said Jacob. Especially after I’ve beaten him to within an inch of his miserable life in front of his craven staff.
Jacob pulled the mare around and set it galloping down the road, the clatter of hooves from the others loud at his rear. He only spared the spurs for his son’s sake. The airfield had been constructed on the south side of the waterway, close to the piers where riverboats docked and the Guild of Rails’ railhead sat, paid for by government money but serving, like so much else, the commercial interests of the House of Landor’s warehouses. A quarter of an hour later and Jacob was looking over the field. Northhaven’s new airfield was a simple, unfenced affair. A long cruciform of flattened grass, its main runway ran parallel with the river, while aircraft sheds, hangars and a technical site for the maintenance staff squatted on the opposite side, its passenger hall and commercial buildings close to the riverbank. Most of the planes on the ground were small fighters, part of the nation’s freshly minted skyguard, their barracks, air-raid shelters and bomb and ammunitions stores buried under soil and sod as a series of artificial hills. It was meant to be a source of pride for their nation – Weyland’s newfound protection from aerial nomads and raiders, the state’s ability to claim sovereignty of the skies above. For Jacob, it was just another reminder of the blood money that had paid for it.
The pastor halted his horse by a worker walking along the perimeter track. ‘Where’s Benner Landor’s party?’
‘You mean Prefect Colbert’s party?’ said the field worker, watching the others cantering in behind Jacob. ‘They took off early this morning for the capital.’
Carter groaned in his saddle, the news not helping his injuries. Sheplar reached behind to help steady him. ‘Willow Landor, she was— She was with them?’
The worker nodded. ‘Daughter, wife, servants, old man Landor himself, the prefect and his aides. Had a bunch of Rodalian diplomats along for the ride, too. All bound for the court, I reckon.’
‘Too late,’ muttered Carter.
‘We might have missed their transport,’ said Jacob, ‘but we’re not too late. We can take another flight and follow them. We’ve still time to halt the sham of a marriage.’
‘It’ll be hazardous,’ cautioned Sheplar.
‘And Northhaven isn’t? Prince Owen is down south risking his neck among that nest of politicians, pitting himself against the usurper’s interests. If the boy can brave the risk of assassination, so can I.’
‘A noble with a claim on the throne going missing would be noticed,’ said Tom. ‘Even with half the nation’s press sitting pretty in the king’s pockets. Whereas any of us …’
‘I’m not asking you to join me,’ said Jacob. Although he doubted his ability to stop these fools from trying. He glanced at Carter. ‘And you’re heading for the doctor.’
‘Don’t leave … until I’m fixed up,’ grimaced Carter.
‘You’ll slow us down,’ said Jacob. ‘Wait until you’re patched up; then follow us.’
‘Can travel,’ insisted Carter. ‘Took worse than this … in the mines. And I was expected to work …
the next day.’
‘Work until you died,’ said Jacob. ‘I didn’t travel all that way to Vandia and rescue you so you could kill yourself at home.’
‘Won’t abandon her,’ said Carter. ‘If Willow was … Mother, what would you … do?’
Jacob sighed. Making another of those decisions. Just as foolish. ‘Carter, you’d charge hell with a bucket of ice water.’
‘I’m going after Willow.’
‘All right then. Hell if a drought doesn’t usually end with a flood. Sheplar, drag Carter to the doctor opposite my church. Tell the man I want good hard alcohol for the wounds. Make sure those scars stay clear of infection.’
‘You don’t wish me to help arrange passage?’ asked the Rodalian.
‘No choice how we fly out, this time. Only government birds – skyguard and merchant wing.’ More was the pity. When they had needed to get to Arcadia after the slavers’ raid, Sheplar’s friends had provided the aircraft. Now, the skies above Weyland were being treated as protectively as her land borders. Rodalian patrols, once a reassuringly familiar sight in the air, could only be glimpsed now, confined close to the mountains. Jacob noted an aircraft on the field being refuelled with corn ether, the House of Landor’s coat of arms painted on the fuel tank. He recognized the plane from the aircraft silhouettes being published by the jingoistic press, trumpeting the nation’s revived power and influence. A Culph and Falcke Berrypecker. A transport aircraft, far larger than the stubby single pilot fighters dotted around the field. The transporter was a wide 200-feet long wing mounted with ten forward-facing engines, stabilized by twin booms and a single large rear-push propeller at her tail. A pilots’ cabin jutted from the centre of the wing as proud as a warship’s superstructure, aircrew visible moving around inside, a conservatory-style canopy behind it stretching back spine-like across the wing to enclose a hundred or so passenger seats on the top deck, the lower being reserved for cargo. She sat on two massive underwing pods housing fixed landing gear and a gun turret apiece, the gunners’ positions open to the air, heavy calibre rifles mounted on swivel mounts. She looked unwieldy compared to the triangular air wings of the Rodalian skyguard and little more than a gnat compared to the vast city-sized six-hundred propeller carriers he’d travelled on after leaving Weyland in search of the slavers. But if she bore him safely to Arcadia, he wouldn’t complain. Sheplar cantered away with Carter slung behind him, across the field and towards Northhaven.
