Foul Tide's Turning

by Stephen Hunt

  Willow glanced at Paetro, but he just spat on the floor again, staring in hatred at the guild courier. For nothing. So this was all for nothing? Willow felt sick to her stomach. She had been betrayed and duped by her own family. And not just me. My unborn child, too. How could they do this to us?

  ‘If you’re really one of King Marcus’s hirelings, then you had better let us go,’ said Paetro. ‘Haven’t you heard, man? Emperor Jaelis and your King Marcus are allies now.’

  ‘Do I look like I care, imperial? I was dispatched to the north to find and free Lady Cassandra,’ said Purdell, pacing between the prisoners like a cat choosing which mouse to devour first. ‘You might say we are hunting the same stolen treasure, although only one person can claim the reward for finding it. If it is any consolation, you had failed in your duty from the start. The emperor’s granddaughter was never here – she was packed off to Rodal by Father Carnehan.’

  Willow groaned. ‘Then Sheplar and Kerge aren’t prisoners in the city?’

  ‘Your two mongrel friends never even set foot in Midsburg,’ laughed Purdell. ‘After my agents failed to capture Lady Cassandra in Northhaven, Jacob decided to move the girl to safety in Hadra-Hareer. The brat the pretender has imprisoned here is some northern maid masquerading as the imperial for the benefit of the king’s spies. Prince Owen recently dispatched Carter to retrieve the Vandian brat from Rodal; Carter doesn’t know he’s bringing Lady Cassandra back to me. He was walking out of Midsburg when your caravan came rolling into town. If you hadn’t been hiding under your cloak you might have spotted him. How differently might things have worked out for you, then?’

  Willow sobbed in frustration and impotent rage.

  ‘Don’t give this bastard the pleasure of your tears,’ said Paetro.

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled Willow. ‘You and my brother tricked me into this. Everything you told me was a lie. I expected as much from Holten and my father, but you, I helped you—’

  ‘Helped me?’ snarled Paetro. ‘How did you do that? You lied to me in Vandia, Willow Landor. I allowed you to escape from the Castle of Snakes for just one reason, to take my daughter to safety with you. And in return you got Hesia killed.’

  ‘I didn’t know Father Carnehan had shot Hesia, not until Duncan came home and told me,’ said Willow. ‘I thought she had chosen to stay in hiding in Vandia.’ It was the truth, but her words sounded like the feeblest of excuses, even to her ears.

  ‘She died true, at least, attempting to protect the little highness,’ grieved Paetro. ‘Hesia is at peace with the ancestors, her betrayal of her house forgiven. Lady Cassandra was under my daughter’s protection, as she was mine, as precious to me as one of my own. I’d cut a deal with a thousand demons if it meant saving the little highness.’

  ‘Then fate smiles on you, Vandian, for this day you only have to deal with one,’ said Purdell. He lifted up a hand-sized radio. ‘Your people possess such amazing crafts. An entire Guild of Radiomen’s hold squeezed into a single device as small as a tinderbox. I require you to surrender your pass phrases to arrange your escape from the city. When your soldiers come for me, I will tell them how valiantly you died trying to free the fake hostage, and how the real Lady Cassandra will shortly be returned to your people from Rodal’s peaks. Both our assignments will be complete.’

  ‘Yet only one of us will be alive to benefit from it,’ Paetro snarled.

  ‘Quite so, but the manner of your departure is still under your sway. I understand that employment as an imperial torturer in Vandia gives the practitioner great status. Shall I show you how the craft is practised here? We must seem like savages to you, but I may yet surprise you with my talents.’

  ‘I’ve already glimpsed your foul handiwork. I caught sight of my soldiers’ bodies before you rolled them into the vats. They knew nothing you needed, did they? Does your king pay you more to skin enemies alive before you murder them? I knew creatures like you in the legions,’ said Paetro. ‘No honour, broken in every way a man can be broken. You’ll take what you want and carve us up anyway. Die in the siege, you hound; you’ll hear no secrets from my lips.’

  Purdell shrugged. He didn’t seem bothered by the soldier’s defiance. ‘A challenge given is a challenge accepted.’

  There was a noise from outside the hall of vats and two thuggish-looking men in grey uniforms entered, dragging a body between them, an old woman hobbling behind. Willow cursed. It was Mrs Sackville, the landlady of the accommodation Purdell had arranged for Willow and the raiding party. The man the soldiers clutched swayed as they dragged him, and Willow groaned out loud as she realized it was Jacob Carnehan. This at least, had been no lie on the part of the treacherous courier. The father’s really here, not in Arcadia. What Purdell said about Carter is likely true, too. They were free in the north all this time. I could have escaped the viscount and joined Carter. Damn them all: my family, the king, Holten and my so-called husband.

  ‘It’s getting hairy outside,’ announced one of the bruisers, a short, stout soldier with a long ginger moustache. A large hunting knife hung from a leather holster across his chest and Willow guessed it had never been used for the tanner’s trade. ‘A mortar shell nearly landed on the wagon during the ride over here.’

  ‘You’ll be deserting soon enough,’ said Purdell, ‘along with a crown agent’s warrant to guarantee you safe passage from the royalists tossing those shells. Secure the pastor well in his chair.’

  ‘I think I’ve harboured my last crown agent in Midsburg, dearie,’ said Mrs Sackville, watching the soldiers bind the unconscious pastor in the seat.

  ‘You’ll be well provided for,’ said Purdell. ‘You can buy another house to run soon enough.’

  ‘Such a pity,’ said Mrs Sackville. ‘It was convenient owning the tannery next door. Cattle blood and traveller blood: identical when it’s flushed down the drains.’

  ‘Help me,’ Willow begged the old woman. ‘Don’t leave us here. Please, send word to Prince Owen.’

  Mrs Sackville turned her gnarled face to the wooden roof above, eddies of dust falling down as the structure trembled with the bombardment. ‘Not today, dearie. The pretender and what’s left of his staff have more pressing things on their mind. They’re somewhat distracted by the guns of the south, and the Vandians’ peculiar hovering aircraft landing legionaries inside the city.’

  ‘Please, this madman is going to kill us.’

  ‘Oh my dove, kill isn’t the word I would use. Thomas Purdell is the finest torturer I ever trained for the service. Would you believe that our skills were almost a lost art when King Marcus took the throne? But I’m keeping the flame of the old ways alive now, passing them down through the generations. You should be honoured to help us.’

  ‘Prepare my tools,’ Purdell told the old woman.

  ‘Yes, it’s time. It must be good for you to have worthy quarry on the slab again, dearie. All those guests I drugged for you, I fear you were growing jaded practising on travelling merchants and foreign caravaneers.’

  ‘Quite true,’ said Purdell. ‘But these three will more than make up for my lack of sport.’

  Willow watched in horror as the despicable old woman shuffled out of the hall like a living corpse. But she’s not the corpse. We are. She’s killed us all. Purdell crossed to a stone washing sink and drew a bucket of water, returning to toss it over Father Carnehan’s head.

  The pastor struggled awake, groaning. ‘Willow.’ Jacob turned from her to take in Paetro. ‘You. So you came to Weyland after all. You took your time about it.’

  Paetro shook his chair in rage. ‘I’m going to kill you, Carnehan.’

  ‘You have missed your place in that queue,’ tutted Purdell. ‘Give me the details of your escape plan, empire man, and I promise you’ll live long enough to watch the priest die in agony.’

  Paetro merely spat at the guild courier’s feet by way of answer. A shell fell close enough to blow out one of the tanning hall’s windows. Willow raised her head and heard the distant t
hud of the southern batteries loud through the broken glass.

  ‘It seems a fair proposal, Vandian. You help me, and in return I’ll show you how much pain the man who murdered your daughter can endure? No? Duty before pleasure, then.’ Thomas Purdell sighed, allowing a hint of irritation to slip through his easy demeanour. He signalled his two thugs. ‘Drag the Vandian to the cattle skinning room and make sure he’s well strapped, then hold him down for me. He looks as strong as his brutes, and one of the imperials nearly slipped his restraints before I stuck a scalpel through his forehead.’

  ‘I’m sorry about Hesia,’ Willow cried to Paetro. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save her.’

  If Paetro heard Willow’s words, he didn’t acknowledge them. Purdell’s lackeys dragged the Vandian away, the soldier cursing and thrashing and still bound to his chair, out through a doorway into another part of the factory.

  ‘Better he had heard that from me,’ muttered Jacob.

  Thomas Purdell turned and slapped Jacob in the face, not particularly viciously; more like a butcher gauging the toughness of the meat he was planning to tenderize. ‘Except that from you the words would have been a lie, wouldn’t they, Quicksilver? You deprived me of my sport with the pretender and his woman, so you owe me two bodies. I’ll take yours and Carter’s little sweet-meat in exchange. Willow went to some trouble to save you, so you obviously care for each other. She will be next, I think, after I’ve finished with the Vandian. You deserve to watch my artistry so I shall save you to last.’

  Jacob glowered at the king’s man but refused to give him the satisfaction of answering.

  ‘Silence can be a challenge too. Before I’m finished with you, you’ll be more than willing to speak. And we have so much tittle-tattle to catch up on. Wait until you hear how I’ve arranged for your idiot son to die, you’re going to love that. Poor Carter. Had I realized you’d be joining us, Father, I’d have considered allowing Carter to live long enough to be reunited with his girl. Then you could have watched me work on both lovebirds together before I send you on your way. I would have enjoyed giving Carter the news that his girl has a bun in the oven from the noble dolt we bred her with.’

  Jacob’s eyes opened in shock. ‘Willow, you’re pregnant?’

  Willow could only nod in confirmation.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ exhaled Jacob, ‘none of it matters.’

  ‘It matters to me,’ smiled Purdell. ‘King Marcus had a pregnant woman in the dungeons he wanted questioning once. But one of my rivals drew the interrogation, I’m sad to say. I don’t mind telling you that I’m fascinated to learn if there’s any appreciable difference in such a novelty. What do you think, Lady Wallingbeck? Will you suffer enough for two?’

  ‘I think you’ll discover a demon’s torment in hell one day.’

  ‘Discover it? I expect to be running the place!’ Purdell hooted with amusement and strode away.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to be here for this, Willow,’ said Jacob, watching Purdell exit the hall. ‘This is a just end for the man I was. But you deserved far better with Carter.’

  ‘No,’ said Willow. ‘My family traded me off like a cow to be bred before tricking me here to aid their advancement. If anyone is to blame for this, it’s the much vaunted glory of the House of Landor, not you.’

  Screams started a few minutes later, from outside the vat room. Willow shuddered. The treacherous Thomas Purdell had started his foul work with Paetro.

  ‘You don’t understand. I planned for this. I wanted this,’ moaned the pastor. ‘Not you here, Willow, but all the rest. The Vandians, they were too far away. The imperium had to come to Weyland so I could avenge Mary. That’s why I took the emperor’s granddaughter as a hostage. Not to use her as a shield, but as bait to draw the imperium’s killers down on me.’

  ‘Vandia’s legions would have come anyway,’ said Willow, ‘to punish the slave revolt.’

  ‘Who’s to say that’s true? It was in the hands of God and fate. I should have left it there, been the man Mary married, not the devil that washed up on Weyland’s shores half-dead. I deserved to die before, and I deserve it twice over now. Thomas Purdell is only my due.’

  ‘Weyland doesn’t need a pastor to pray for our souls,’ said Willow. ‘It needs the man you once were to fight for us. You must have known that when you left Northhaven to find us, when you set aside your prayer-book and picked up your pistols.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Jacob shuddered in the chair as though he was already feeling the turncoat’s blade against his skin. Jacob Carnehan began to speak to Willow of the acts he’d perpetrated as a mercenary officer across the ocean in the Burn. Fleeing over the water as a fugitive murderer alongside his young brother, serving with mercenary companies until they had both fully mastered the fighter’s trade. Hundreds of nations wracked by bloody warfare which had endured for centuries: nation against nation, region against region, then finally town against town and family against family; until all that was left was hatred and feuds and warlords and the ashes they fought over. Everything else forgotten … no cause but death without end, purpose or sanity.

  Jacob’s tale, his terrible choked confession, came out between Paetro’s stifled screams. Until Willow had to close her eyes, trying to will away visions competing in her mind, choosing between Paetro twisting in agony just beyond the hall and peasants slaughtered by a warlord nicknamed Quicksilver. Starving farmers’ flayed for hiding crops. Please stop. Innocent women raped with every village sacked. End this. Children pressed into service and marched against enemies just as young. No more. Battle after battle and victory after victory until the skies danced dark with crows. No more. So much blood that even Jake Silver’s own brother abandoned him and found greater peace in piracy. It was all true, the king’s lies. Not propaganda, but the truth. How can this be the man I grew up with? The acid drip of the tale continued until everything she had ever known about Carter’s father had melted away. And by the time the confession had finished, Willow drifted as hollow and light as a leaf blown on the winter wind.

  ‘Is that what Weyland needs?’ pleaded Father Carnehan, his eyes as wild and fierce as a wolf.

  Willow could hardly speak. The choice is mine. Why should the choice be mine? Haven’t I done enough? How can this possibly be Carter’s father?

  ‘Tell me, Willow Landor. The countries west of the ocean weren’t much different to the league of the Lanca once. Shall I remake Weyland as similar ashes?’

  ‘You never lost?’ asked Willow.

  ‘I lost everything I had,’ cried Jacob.

  She forced herself to look into the pastor’s eyes. ‘You never lost a battle?’

  ‘Quicksilver never lost a battle,’ admitted Jacob.

  Sweet saints forgive me. ‘Then the man the north needs is here.’

  Jacob Carnehan’s head lolled back and a tearing scream escaped his lips – a horrible, unholy mix of agony and pain and primeval rage. Willow had never thought such a torn sound could issue from anything human. Perhaps it hadn’t. Slowly the sound died away and his tired crazed eyes focused solely on her. ‘How will I know when to stop?’

  ‘You must know.’ You must. Tears spilled down Willow’s cheeks, but she was no longer sure who she wept for. Myself, Carter, his father? Maybe even the Vandians. Vandia’s slavers hadn’t murdered poor Mary Carnehan, nor had King Marcus sold Willow and her friends into slavery. No. They had just broken the lock on the cage, and the imperium and the usurper had stepped into the trap. And I opened the door for them.

  Jacob rocked and scraped his chair back towards the end of the hall, inch by inch, shaking the wooden frame and his bonds, and then he shoved back and overturned the chair, landing in the litter of broken glass with his arms tied behind his back, choking down a cry as it sliced his back, head and hands. They’ll have heard the chair scraping, surely? But the thud of the distant guns and yells of the tortured Vandian were too loud. The pastor writhed on the floor, trying to clutch a shard of glass with his
fingers, cutting at his rope even as blood from his wounded hands slicked across the floor. He was silent with his pain, working to Paetro’s screams. Willow watched the scene in horror, waiting for the moment when Purdell or one of his lackeys would return and discover Jacob and Willow trying to escape. And then two did, the pair of bruisers in northern uniforms, probably released from holding Paetro by the fact the Vandian was no longer in any fit state to struggle. Jacob still lay bound to the chair, thrashing on the floor among a wash of his own blood.

  ‘There’s a rum sight,’ hooted the ginger-haired soldier. ‘Trying to slit his wrists before Mister Purdell takes his entertainment.’

  ‘That’s a pastor for you,’ said the other soldier, ‘ain’t no fun a man can make that a churchman can’t come along and spoil it.’

  They moved across the hall. The ginger-haired soldier knelt down to haul Jacob’s chair back up while his comrade just stood and shook his head sadly, eyeing Willow, a look of lust burning in his eyes. ‘Don’t reckon the God-botherer will approve of our turn with his pretty little parishioner, then. You ever tidied it up with a lady viscount?’

  ‘Don’t reckon I’ve had the pl—’ The soldier’s banter gurgled to a halt, a shard of glass embedded in his throat, collapsing to the floor as Jacob seized the hunting knife from the soldier’s chest holster and hurled it into the other man’s face. The second soldier almost turned a cartwheel with the blade’s impact, his arms flailing in the air like a marionette with severed strings, and then he thumped down on the floor with the knife’s hilt quivering deep inside his right eye socket. Dead, just like that. As easy as breathing for him. Willow gagged and barely held down her retch. Jacob Carnehan brought a fist down against the chair’s frame, splintering wood. He released the ropes around his ankles and lifted a revolver from the closest corpse’s belt, before rising, as a shadow might rise. He walked over, drawing the knife out of the second soldier’s skull, wiping the blade carefully on the corpse’s grey tunic before using it to slice away Willow’s ropes.