by Stephen Hunt
Cassandra sat on her cot and pulled the blankets around her. It was never warm here, this close to the town’s overhanging exterior. Why couldn’t they have made her a captive in one of the chambers deep inside the mountain? She imagined feeling the corridors’ warmth again, as she marched from the aircraft hangars. It would be superior to her present accommodation, at any rate. Her last visitor of the day was due shortly. Eventually Sheplar Lesh arrived and came into her quarters bearing a wooden plate of food and a jug of cold water. Nothing like the tasty fare she had seen the locals enjoying. More dried fish and tofu. Military rations, she suspected, designed to make sure those consuming them never turned too soft. No danger there. If Cassandra never saw another helping of the revolting curd-like food again, it would still be too soon. And the fish was so salty it had almost ossified on its plate.
She moved to the table and balanced on the stool. ‘It is cold here. Why is there no fireplace?’
Sheplar placed the food on the table, crossed to the cupboard, opened its door and indicated three thick crimson robes hanging there, piped yellow around their edging. ‘There are fire spirits who would be delighted to show you what they might do with hot cinders this near the wind, bumo. Besides, why would you need a roaring fire when you have these to wear? Put on one and if you are still cold, pull on the other two.’
‘They look like the cassocks worn by the priests I saw chanting in front of your temples,’ said Cassandra, suspiciously.
‘Skyguard pilots spend at least a year studying alongside our priests,’ said Sheplar. ‘Otherwise, how could they read the winds?’
‘Keep your priests’ robes. I would look absurd in them. What if I give you my word not to escape?’ said Cassandra, tugging her leg at the uncomfortable manacles around her ankle, making the chain links clink where they were fixed to the wall.
‘The chains are for your protection, bumo,’ said Sheplar. ‘The winds which bide outside Talatala are known as the Shi’pa, the spirits of the fallen ones. There are stories here of parents walking into their children’s bedrooms and finding babies floating in the air, being sucked towards an opening by malicious shades, their babe only saved by the chains of their cot. The winds of Talatala call many ghosts to the slopes outside, ghosts that may make the living dead too when they grow cruel and bored.’
‘Ridiculous man! I can’t even get my face through this slit of a window.’
‘The Shi’pa possess ways of squeezing a soul. That is what is said.’
Cassandra snorted. ‘Spare me your crude barbarian superstitions.’
Sheplar pulled up a single leather strap dangling from the end of her cot. ‘This is what a pilot uses to secure one leg while they sleep here. It lacks your chain’s lock, but serves the same purpose. Tightening if a sleeper is dragged from the bed while deep in sleep.’
‘You lie!’ said Cassandra. ‘That’s for securing a spare bedroll.’
‘It is the truth,’ said Sheplar. ‘I was posted to the skyguard station at Talatala for a year. I slept in a room down this very corridor, and was long warned by a temple priest of the ghosts here. Once, when I was walking back alone to my bunk after a day’s hard duty, every shutter on the corridor’s windows banged open behind me, in perfect order, as though turned by an invisible hand. I fled into my room and bolted the door. I have never since known the terror I felt trying to sleep that night, not even when I flew against an entire skel carrier squadron. I would sooner face a sky full of slave raiders than encounter whatever I sensed that night.’
‘Your phantoms would not find a Vandian soul to their taste,’ said Cassandra. ‘I am protected by my ancestors, the blood of emperors and empresses counted among my line.’
‘A rich delicacy, perhaps,’ smiled Sheplar, ‘compared to the life that pumps through our thin mountain veins.’
‘You are trying to terrify me into submission with ancient campfire tales,’ said Cassandra, struggling to ignore the uneasy feeling she’d become so familiar with before the Rodalian ventured in bearing her supper. ‘You should know me better than that by now.’
‘In truth, I scare myself when I remember my time here.’ He left the meal on the table for her, opening the door. ‘Be glad of your chains, bumo. And be glad we fly you to Hadra-Hareer tomorrow morning.’
Cassandra heard the clack of the latch as the mountain man secured her inside her cell. She moved the stool around and sat with her back to the door, keeping a wary eye on the window as she crunched into the over-salted fish. Cassandra doubted if a stall selling hot Rodalian food would prosper inside one of the imperium’s covered markets, but the cold had a way of firing her appetite all the same. She finished the meal, left the plate largely emptied, and began to return to her cot. Cassandra was halfway across the room when a sibilant hissing drew her attention towards the window slit. She froze, fighting down a rising sense of dread. I am Vandian, heir to an imperial house. Foreign spirits will not paralyse me with fear. There was the sound again, accompanied by scratching and scrabbling. Her hands flashed to her ivory-handled chopsticks, one for each palm. Not exactly a brace of matched duelling daggers, but she might put out the eye of any vampiric shade that was corporeal enough to do her injury. As she had the thought, a hideous bleached face came into view, its malevolent features filling the gap outside.
NINE
ROYAL HOSPITALITY
Jacob Carnehan paced the windowless confines of his cell, a substantial space large enough to hold twenty prisoners, his boots scraping granite flagstones covered with a scattering of dirty straw, a couple of tattered old blankets in one corner to serve as cot and cover, both. He was penned in by three featureless stone walls with a line of thick iron bars as the fourth. As best as the pastor could tell, these were the dungeons beneath the palace at the centre of Arcadia. All the jailors he had seen wore the blue dress uniforms of royal guardsmen, a single yellow stripe down their trousers. The troopers wouldn’t talk to him, and only visited to pass plates of food and jugs of water through a flap in the cell door twice a day. No news of his son or the prince or the progression of events in the wider world. Only rodents for company. Little grey mice exactly the same shade as the rock floor, which streamed out of nowhere when Jacob’s back was turned, heading for what few crumbs he’d left of his meagre rations.
His captors left him to stew here for days, imagining the worst of what might have transpired in the capital. With no other prisoners in the adjoining cells along the chill stone corridor to distract him, Jacob’s imagination was prey to his worst imaginings. He hated himself for it. It was exactly what his captors wanted. He was given time to let his fear and apprehensions build. Like leaving a blade resting in the coals to make it malleable when the smith finally beat it with his hammer.
It appeared that Jacob was being singled out for special attention; a suspicion that was confirmed when King Marcus appeared beyond the iron bars, maybe a week into the pastor’s captivity. The usurper looked little changed from when Jacob had last met him, petitioning for his help to chase down the slavers. The fastidious grey man still seemed anonymous, even in the military-style uniform he now sported. A blue tunic with brass buttons, braid, medals and a patent leather cross-belt with sabre on one side and pistol on the other. The usurper didn’t wear it comfortably. Marcus looked like a clerk forced into a uniform for a wager. Sadly, the fate of the kingdom hinged on this particular bet.
‘Father Carnehan. It seems like an age since you first arrived at my palace, begging me for a company of royal guardsmen to rescue your friends. And here we are again, in much altered circumstances.’
‘Your troopers didn’t prove to be much use,’ said Jacob. ‘I had to let them go.’
‘Yes, the imperium’s agents in Hangel sent word about Major Alock’s sad fate before the city fell. Wherever you go, trouble seems to snap at your heels.’
‘Alock met the same fate as the Vandian’s puppet king in Hangel. Puppet kings are never missed much.’
‘Is that what yo
u think of me?’ smiled Marcus. ‘I am no puppet. I’m using the imperium as much as they use me.’
‘To get rich by selling your people into slavery.’
‘Personal riches?’ Marcus snorted. ‘Is that the dreary limit of your vision? I may be king now, but I was a prosperous industrial lord long before I rose to the throne. Did you by chance pass a vast stone tomb in the capital raised to contain my corpse, gold-plated ziggurats as large as mountains to honour my reign? No, of course not. That is not how I have used the crown. I have old-fashioned vices which I have always had ample means to indulge, although I dare say the imperium might serve as an example. Do you know the Vandian emperor keeps a harem filled with hundreds of wives? How economical, to store all your mistresses under one roof. I will have to introduce something similar after I’ve crushed the pretender.’
‘Well, why the hell not?’ said Jacob. ‘You’ve already screwed the country. Bad Marcus.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ The usurper lost his temper with the yell, before recovering. How quickly the mask could slip. ‘And how, pray, have I done that? With thousands of new roads; trade metals flowing towards us for engines and machines and girders; freshly raised mills; newly constructed hospitals and schools; our recently formed skyguard’s contrails trailing proudly across the heavens? This is where the imperial largess has been invested. Weyland is being remade as a modern, prosperous nation; the most powerful force in the league. Able to withstand the worst that nature and our enemies can throw against us. That will be my legacy to this land.’
‘Blood and suffering and war are all you’ve given us.’
‘They should make you head of the Gaiaist Party, Father. Live within the circle of existence on Pellas; prosper alongside nature and accept life as it is. I’ll tell you what nature is, Father. It is sickness and poverty and early deaths and hard, heavy lives. It’s the need to have seven children because two thirds of your young ones won’t survive into adulthood. As you noticed during Prefect Colbert’s performance in the assembly, your carefully concealed past has been exposed. You might have lost one child to slavers, but you lost two more during the epidemic. Those sums are writ large across the realm. My wife blessed me with eight children. Only four are alive today, and I am the bloody king for the love of the saints. Who is the real enemy? The imperium, your king, or the cruel randomness of the world and its blind, uncaring nature? Everything we possess, everything that separates us from beasts, has been laid by the ingenuity of our minds and hands. All I demand is that we build better, further, faster.’
‘You pious bastard! You had my wife murdered, my town burnt and my child sold like a sack of wheat.’
‘A handful hurt so that many thousands more may prosper. That is the arithmetic of morality when you rule. You’ve frustrated my schemes so adeptly. Bringing the taken back from the sky mines when you should have been left a corpse out there. Returning with my cursed nephew in tow. I expected better of you. I expected you to have a plan, a vision, something greater than revenge.’
‘I’m happy to disappoint you. Sinking my blade through your throat is all the legacy I need carved on my gravestone. Jacob Carnehan. He once slew some useless sack-of-shit usurper.’
‘Carnehan was your wife’s family name,’ said Marcus. ‘Your tombstone should read Jake Silver. Aren’t you curious how I unmasked your criminal past? How I was always one step ahead of you?’
The king’s commanding voice echoed down the dungeon corridor and two figures approached; both of them men that Jacob knew. Tom Purdell, the guild courier. The second a figure that Jacob recognized despite the new scar splitting his ugly face; but this man should have died in a dark forest a long way from Weyland. Jacob’s palms went white as he gripped the metal bars, desperate for a way to reach his tormentors, imagining squeezing the life out of their throats.
‘Captain Purdell is an officer of the army intelligencers,’ laughed the king. ‘Placed inside the Guild of Librarians long before their dusty order declared for the pretender’s cause. My other comrade I believe you also know, although not by the alias he adopted in Northhaven.’
‘Nix!’ spat Jacob. ‘I left you for dead.’
‘Nocks, more recently,’ grinned the royal guardsman. ‘I’ve been serving as loyal retainer to Benner Landor’s wife … That little hellcat’s one of His Highness’s mistresses. Your son has good cause to know my new name. I gave your lad a few stripes across his spine to make up for this …’ The soldier ran his hand down his disfigured face. ‘As for my still being in this mortal coil … That last bullet you so generously left me to end my life? I used it. The shot passed through my head and left me looking like this. But it didn’t finish me. Nor did those twisted forest cannibals when they captured me and tried to cook me. The dog-riders couldn’t kill old Nix. You couldn’t. Seems like nothing can.’
