by Stephen Hunt
‘I have friends who generously offer food to those who are hungry, provide warm cots in clean new barracks for citizens made homeless through no fault of their own. Is it too much to ask that those accepting such charity work in return? Or are the unpaid apprenticeships of the little guilds only to be gifted through nepotism to the friends of the Gaiaist Party, now? I know my friends, Assemblyman, how well do you know yours?’ He cast an accusing finger towards Jacob, Tom and Carter in the opposing witness stand.
‘I know you, Hugh Colbert, for what you are,’ retorted Jacob. ‘King’s man.’
‘You do not know me, Father, for if you did, you would know that I am remorseless in ferreting out the truth. Is it not true that you were in league with the slavers, acting as one of their paid informants? You sent word to the skels after Northhaven’s territorial regiment left on manoeuvres with the fleet. You told them that here – now – was the perfect time for the slavers to attack your town.’
‘Those skel bastards stole my son and murdered my wife.’
‘The wages of sin, Father – an irony that has not escaped me. It is very hard to control the direction of a fire after you have set it, isn’t it? Did you not think people might wonder how conveniently your son returned? Sadly for the nation, the company of royal guardsmen King Marcus sent to assist Northhaven’s rescue mission did not survive your journey. You arranged for the skels to ambush Weyland’s soldiers, did you not? You betrayed your military escort and had the slavers kill them all.’
‘The only traitors with the rescue mission were those damned troopers of yours.’
‘Is that the best lie you can come up with, Father?’
‘You want the truth? King Marcus is the beast behind the slave raids! Your highborn hound murdered his own brother and family; he climbed over their corpses to reach the throne.’
‘Murdered, you say? Well, perhaps we should trust the word of a simple country pastor when it comes to such fancies. After all, churchmen are known to be universally reliable and virtuous, are they not? Mister Speaker, will you allow me to call forward a witness of my own? One who can offer key testimony uncovered during my investigation of the Northhaven raid.’
The speaker nodded and Hugh Colbert ushered forward a woman Carter had never seen before – or at least if he had, he had forgotten their meeting. She was in her early fifties, a handsome proud face still littered with freckles, her cheeks obscured by a bonnet set above a conservative grey dress. She took the oath and gave her name as Miss Minerva Paulet, current mistress of a place called Mounteagle Manor in one of the southern prefectures.
‘Do you see the man in the stand opposite you wearing the churchman’s shirt?’
She nodded, solemnly.
‘You know him?’
Again Minerva Paulet nodded gravely.
‘Is that man Jacob Carnehan, the pastor of Northhaven?’
‘He may wear a pastor’s collar, but his name is not Jacob Carnehan. It is Jake Silver.’
‘And how do you know him?’
‘His family were tenant farmers on my family’s land in Mounteagle. But they ran into hard times during a famine when I was sixteen years of age. Jake Silver ambushed my father and an estate worker while they were out riding, murdering them both.’
‘If only the murders had stopped there,’ said the prefect, his voice rising in righteous fury, throwing an angry hand out towards the stand opposite. ‘Jake Silver and his younger brother fled an arrest warrant for the murder of Lord Simeon Paulet and twelve other men, taking passage across the ocean where they served as mercenaries in the Burn for many of the most unpleasant rulers on that bleak, misbegotten continent. Jake Silver grew very proficient at murder and brigandage, but then, his education had an excellent start in our own acres, did it not? This vile villain became known as Quicksilver and secured a position as a warlord in his own right, one whose crimes and cruelty became legendary. Eventually Jake Silver was defeated, as all such tyrants must be, and escaped back home across the ocean to the hinterlands of the north where he adopted a new trade and name. One that would place him beyond reproach or suspicion … a simple country pastor.’
‘Simeon Paulet was a filthy killer and a rapist who murdered my mother so he could steal our family’s water rights,’ called Jacob. ‘Putting him and his killers in the dirt wasn’t a crime. It was a reckoning he wouldn’t have got any other way, not with his wealth and power.’
‘Please! You cannot but open your mouth and the lies spew forth. Nothing of your testimony is true, Father,’ said the prefect. ‘You impugn a good man’s memory even as you try to launder an evil one’s. You helped your slaver paymaster Prince Owen find exile in Weyland after he was chased out of the Burn by the Vandian military; you even helped him abscond using the same escape route you yourself had fled by.’
Jacob Carnehan shook his head. ‘I found Prince Owen as a slave. Only alive because he’d escaped assassination as a child by your master, Marcus.’
‘Is it not true that your own brother flew you down here to Arcadia? Your brother, who keeps the family trade of brigandage going … Black Barnaby, that cursed scourge of all honest mariners? As much a pirate of the air as the skels. Barnaby Silver to use his family name. Yes, your murderous brother, Jake Silver.’
There were gasps around the assembly at the infamous pirate’s name, then a rising clamour as both sides of the assembly began throwing furious insults and curses at each other, some of the assemblymen aiming punches at rivals from opposing parties, assembly guards trying to intervene as the speaker smashed his hammer almost unheard.
Carter swayed on the stand, rocked by the revelations he had just heard. ‘It’s not true?’
‘Barnaby’s your uncle,’ said Jacob. ‘That much is no lie.’
‘What the prefect said about fighting in the Burn, your name? Are those the things I saw back in the sky mine’s fever room when our minds were joined? The blood – the battles?’
‘Leave,’ whispered Jacob. ‘Find the prince. Things are about to turn as ugly they are going to get. You suffered as a slave in Vandia for long enough to know the truth of matters. Marcus has laid his own crimes on his nephew. No amount of talking or voting will see justice done here now.’
‘What about you, Father Carnehan?’ asked Tom Purdell.
Jacob nodded towards blue-uniformed troops appearing at the entrances to the great chamber. ‘This was obviously planned some time ago. You two haven’t been directly accused, yet. Run. Find the prince. If you can’t find any regiments still loyal to his cause, perhaps the Guild of Librarians can help you escape.’
‘I won’t leave you and I’m not going to abandon Willow.’
‘You can’t help her escape if you’re a corpse or a prisoner at best,’ growled Jacob. ‘If you love Willow, if you can still love me, then leave.’
‘I won’t,’ said Carter, a surge of unsettling anguish rising inside him.
‘You’re one of the few people who can speak to the truth, boy; that makes you dangerous. If I try to leave here with you, they’ll arrest us all.’
‘They’ll kill you.’
‘I was called here as an unarmed witness,’ said Jacob. ‘Recover my pistols and your arms from the assembly’s guard post. You’re going to need them before the day’s out. See him safe, Mister Purdell.’
Carter grabbed his father’s arm. ‘They’ll try you for the gallows.’
Carter Carnehan gazed sadly over the assembly – royal guardsmen shoving politicians down to the floor with their rifles; his father staring across the chamber towards the daughter of the man he had slain. Assembly guards struggled against the king’s soldiers, but they were only carrying ceremonial daggers and slightly more practical billy-clubs. Carter could hear Assemblyman Sparrow yelling that this was an unlawful coup while many from his party fled for the numerous exits, trying to scuttle to safety. ‘Jake Silver was a killer. That’s the only truth that escaped Colbert’s lips today. A man has to answer sometime for what he’s don
e.’
‘You’re not him. You’re not! You’re my father.’
‘Save Willow, Carter. Whatever else happens will come about whatever you or I do. The tide is coming in now, and it’ll sweep away all before it. Keep safe what matters.’
Tom seized Carter’s arm and started to yank him down the steps, through the scrum of brawling assemblymen. Circling troopers came sprinting down from the chamber’s walls towards the witness stand. A rifle butt drove into Jacob Carnehan’s gut, winding him, troopers seizing the pastor and forcing his hands behind his back, locking wrist chains on him. A sudden surge of brawling assemblymen sent Carter stumbling back, Tom Purdell lost among the cascade of humanity. Carter tried to drive forward but a wildly swinging rifle slammed hard into the side of his skull, sending him tumbling across the wooden floor, dazed. He rested on his knees for an unknown time, his head aching as angry politicians, chamber staff and soldiers pushed back and forth, toppling mahogany desks and chairs; until a pair of arms lifted him back to his feet. It was Assemblyman Sparrow. ‘Follow me, son. There are still a few ways out, left over from ages when the kings used to regularly dissolve councils and send troops in for recalcitrant assemblymen.’
Carter clutched his pounding head and let himself be led through the melee by the politician. There was no sign of his father on the stand or of Tom Purdell.
‘How much of what the prefect said was true, son?’ asked Sparrow.
‘I don’t know,’ moaned Carter. Far more than either of them wanted to be, he suspected.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sparrow, shoving and squeezing through the struggling mob. ‘The truth will be whatever King Marcus says it is, and he’ll even provide the ink free of charge to his newspaper-owning cronies to print it for everyone to read. Let us hope that Field Marshal Houldridge’s regiments prove loyal to the assembly, or our struggle for freedom will be over before it has begun.’
Sparrow fell against the curving oak-lined walls of the chamber and fiddled with the door of what looked like a service cupboard, the door swinging inward on to a long narrow corridor. Carter risked one last look back at the near riot erupting behind him. Still no sign of his father or friend. Carter suddenly realized how alone he was here in the far south. His father dragged off by King Marcus’s soldiers, the usurper only too glad to pay the pastor back for returning alive with his troublesome nephew. Willow forced into a loveless marriage with a highborn bully and king’s man. Carter realized he was terrified by the future. This was only the start of a war and already Carter had lost everything that meant anything to him. What was left for him, now? Only to fight.
Cassandra had been travelling for days. Travelling didn’t prove particularly exerting in the nomads’ company. Not when Cassandra was strapped across the horses stolen from her wagon with all the dignity of a grain sack, trussed up alongside the young Rodalian women, their numbers now swelled to five females thanks to the raiders’ continued attacks along the way. They usually trekked by night and hid by day, stretching camouflage nets across boulders in the valleys and passes. The bloody yak meat would be cut into thin slices and buried in the thin soil inside a mirror-lined wooden box which acted as a solar oven, the meat baked by the fierce light of the high altitude sunlight. These Nijumeti weren’t quite as simple as their appearance suggested. The witch rider Nurai acted both as a living map and compass; the heights, twists and inhabited regions of Rodal committed to memory, bypassing valleys where the distant roar of the winds sounded like thunder gods smashing away at each other. Leading them to easy pickings; small villages away from the skyguard’s main patrol routes.
‘The Nijumet will make us climb down the heights to the steppes,’ said Dolki, bemoaning their fate under the netting as they rested. ‘They will have left a boy in a ravine to guard their horses. They will strap us across their saddles and ride into the plains. We will be lost to the world!’
‘Your soldiers never pursue the raiders?’ asked Cassandra.
‘Not far. Nobody crosses the steppes but the riders of the Nijumeti,’ cried Dolki. ‘Not even the guilds. The Guild of Rails tried to build a line along the coast centuries ago, but their trains were attacked and the rails torn up for blade metal. The radiomen keep no stations there. You will find no librarians’ holds across any of the hills of the Arak-natikh. Trading caravans bypass its shores by taking ferries along the ocean or travelling overland far to the east. Once we are taken there, we are lost. I will never see my father and mother again. If I should ever meet my sisters, I will feel only sorrow, for they will have been snatched by the hordes too.’ Dolki brushed her ears and then yelled in fright as she realized someone was blowing softly against her lobes.
Alexamir rolled off a boulder behind them, roaring with laughter. ‘I thought you Rodalians worshipped the gusting wind. Do you not regard me as a god now?’
Dolki muttered something in her own language and shrank away from him.
‘What, not even a small god? Joni the Trickster, perhaps? I have always felt a powerful affinity for Joni. I have a taste for shenanigans and guile that would make even the trickster blush.’
‘How can anyone tell when you blush, you blue-skinned savage?’ spat Cassandra.
‘I grow a horse’s tail and it swishes coyly behind my arse,’ said Alexamir. He patted the front of his trousers, fondly. ‘Or is that something else that swishes down there, I never can remember.’
‘It is so small you must lose it constantly.’
‘You are a tiny creature, golden fox. That thought must cheer you somewhat, even though it is wrong.’ He reached down and scooped her up as easily as his knapsack, tossing her over his back and howling with laughter as she struggled like a fish in an angler’s net. Alexamir strolled across the heights for a few minutes before he swung Cassandra down off his shoulder and slid her body along the frost-covered granite. ‘I am only sorry that you cannot see the steppes from here. We are still many weeks from the cliff-edge. Why anyone should want to live in this high, rocky storm-maze when the steppes lay beyond is a mystery beyond even the understanding of our witch riders and sorcerers.’
‘Perhaps the Rodalians prefer the company here,’ said Cassandra, struggling along the rock. ‘Even among barbarians, I can tell that your kind is benighted.’
‘Ha, to be Nijumeti is to be blessed by the Goddess. When the greatest warriors of Pellas die, they are rewarded by having their essence poured into the flesh of Nijumeti babes. When warriors’ champions die, their souls flow into our horses’ foals. That is why we have never been conquered. That is why there is nothing freer than a Nijumet.’
‘You confuse having a quarrelsome nature with nobility.’
‘Well, we even have nobility this season. Our clan is pledged to follow a king, now. A lord of clans called Tragmass. I do not think I like kings. The Weylanders call their nobility blue blooded … but all Nijumeti bleed blue. No, even a great horse king is a king too much for the Clan Stanim. But I am not yet lord, and so my words do not bear the true weight of my extraordinary wisdom.’
‘Then you should cut me loose, for I am the granddaughter of an emperor. If the ancestors smile upon my house’s strategy, my mother will be empress one day. And even kings must bow before an empress.’
He growled with amusement and sat alongside her. ‘My land is too big for kings or emperors. They are too quick to develop a taste for taxes over a raider’s honest spoils. You should never steal from your own people, only others, or however will you take your fun? And taxes can only be paid by tying yourself to the land and making the dirt your master. What man should be slave to another? What man should be kept by the dirt, rather than keep the dirt for his cattle and his horses as he wanders?’
‘Said the nomad stealing a woman for a slave.’
‘Stealing? To be a thief is a high calling. Kingship is the whore’s trade. Those who call themselves kings will sooner or later demand you invade some country or another and trick you into believing their ambitions are your own. W
hen you want to steal a fleece, it is best to leave the sheep alive to grow a fresh coat for the following year. Even the most stupid goat rustler knows that. Kings usually fail this test at the first hurdle.’
‘I will never be your slave.’
‘You misunderstand your position – you will not. I shall elevate you, golden fox. You were born a mangy royal in some ugly far-called land. But you will die a Nijumet wife with many fine healthy Nijumeti children around your tent weeping for your passing. You may thank me later. In fact, I will probably insist upon it.’ He leant across and pressed his lips to hers. Despite Cassandra’s best intentions, she felt her heart racing. His skin might look like he had expired of cold in the night, but his kiss was hot and passionate. In a certain light – one that didn’t make him look like he was dying of hypothermia – he might even have been considered handsome, in a ridiculously blocky kind of way. ‘There,’ grinned the young nomad. ‘I have stolen a kiss from you.’
‘Lay me down on the rock,’ said Cassandra, ‘let us see what else my sly blue thief can steal.’
‘Ah, you see, these charms rarely fail me. Please me eagerly and I will venture out in search of new wives only occasionally.’
‘Only occasionally? Truly my ancestors have blessed me,’ teased Cassandra.
‘Many wives make light work for the camp. Does your nation not have this saying? But you do not need to fear you will go unattended in later years. I could tup twelve women a night and not think it too much. I may be young, but already I am a legend among my people. I strangled a lion in the long-grass when I was twelve. When I was thirteen, we were attacked by the Clan Menin and I cut down twelve riders fighting on foot. My stallion Astultan was probably one of your emperors in his last life, for he can gallop for two weeks and sleep while we travel.’
