In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  She prodded Duncan’s head with the tip of her boot, an even larger soldier crushing the heir to Hawkland Park. ‘What about you, slave?’

  ‘I figured I’d say as little as possible, on account of the boot on my back. ‘

  ‘There we are, Si-lishh. Arrogance and caution. They will need both to survive the work that my slaves are given. I believe I shall keep them… for now.’ She turned away, then wheeled back, the whip cracking out and cutting Carter’s face open, an ear-splitting snap chased by Carter’s yell.

  Damn, but that hurts. Carter moaned in agony, finding it difficult to fight for air with the weight of the brute bearing down on his back. What was the point in being spared if they were going to keep on treating him like this?

  ‘I liked your friend’s answer better,’ she said. She clicked her fingers and her brutes dragged Duncan before her. She knelt down, examining Duncan’s face like a horse broker checking the goods. ‘Yes, it would be shame to mark a face this handsome. Whatever would it do to the resell value? He’s a keeper.’ Carter had to suppress a laugh. Money obviously recognised money, even up here. Maybe rich people smelt the same? The woman cast the whip down in front of the slave-master. ‘Chain them all, Si-lishh, and have them transferred across to the Primacy of the Sky. How many slaves have you taken this time?’

  ‘More than five hundred, mistress.’

  ‘The wastage rate is still increasing in the sky mines. I’ll need far more slaves from you next time, even if you have to keep some of the older ones alive. Even if you have to start raiding larger towns.’

  His reply hissed towards the deck. ‘Your will shall be done, mistress.’

  She swivelled on her heels and departed, the guardsmen marching behind her. The slave master got to his feet, yelling orders at the skels to shackle the prisoners. He pulled Duncan and Carter off the corridor decking. Pain burned across Carter’s slashed face.

  ‘Slaves think they plenty lucky being spared fate of punishment cell, being spared to work for Princess Helrena Skar? Lucky would have been left to drop into sky. That would have been your luck!’

  Carter wiped the blood off his face with the back of his sleeve. ‘One day, friend, I’m coming back for you. And on that day, I’ll see this aircraft and every one of you thieving, raiding, twisted bastards burn just like you torched my town. You remember that. I’m going to kill you!’

  ‘Only if Si-lishh trips over your corpse and breaks neck,’ laughed the slave master. ‘What princess has in store for little slaves is better than punishment cell. Is very slow.’ Dozens of skels marched into the passage, accompanied by house slaves. They locked tight metal clamps around Carter’s ankles, chains with no more than a foot’s play to shuffle forward on.

  Si-lishh tapped the side of his pocket, the rattle of a handful of coins. ‘Sold!’ He walked away hissing in amusement as the survivors of Northhaven were dragged out of the pens and bound together in a long line. The skels roughly shoved Carter into the chain gang and shackled him to the others. James Kurtain arrived before Carter, checking the pins in the locking mechanism around his ankles. The house slave passed Carter a square of wet cloth to press against the blazing wound on his face. It burnt. Whatever the cloth had been soaked in, it sure wasn’t water.

  ‘If you had let me know you fools wanted to kill each other, I could’ve slipped the two of you engine cleaner for poison. Would have been quicker. Remember our deal, Northhaven.’

  ‘I’ll let your sister know you’re alive,’ said Carter. ‘Do what I can for her. Are those armoured sons-of-bitches the same ones who took your town’s people?’

  ‘Same ones.’ James glanced nervously down the lengthening columns of chained slaves. ‘Just stay alive. That’s the only victory we’re allowed now.’

  ‘I surely plan to.’ At least long enough to keep my word. ‘You look after yourself, James.’

  That was the last Carter saw of the house slave as the prisoners stumbled forward through the wide, wooden corridors of the aircraft. Wasn’t much of a guided tour – only skel crewmen to watch them being hauled to their new owners. The twisted men rocked and hissed in amusement at the sight of the bedraggled Weylanders. It was clear they felt only contempt towards their common pattern stock. Eventually, the passage opened out into an empty hangar. James’ words drifted back to Carter as he caught a glimpse of the incredible sight outside. Damn, but it’s true. There were no gliders or transport planes waiting with blurring rotors to carry them away from the skels’ town-sized carrier. The slavers’ huge aircraft still soared high above the clouds. Outside, matching the aircraft’s velocity and joined by a docking bridge, flew the miraculous warship that James had talked of. Twice as long as the skels’ carrier, hazing the air from hundreds of thruster nodules angled towards the ground, and, incredibly, every yard of the flying vessel composed of gleaming steel. It was clear to Carter that this behemoth was designed for war. Firing gantries had been constructed into the vessel’s hull, ant-sized soldiers moving along the ramparts, past turrets where cannons slowly turned and tracked from side to side. There was a Gothic ornateness to the vessel’s design, as if someone had ripped out the bell tower of the largest cathedral in the world and tipped it on its side. A cathedral devoted to destruction, burning more fuel than Benner Landor’s tenant farmers could grow in a season. What was it Princess Helrena Skar had called the craft back in the slave pens? The Primacy of the Sky. Well named.

  ‘Sweet saints,’ whispered Carter, despite himself. ‘Dear sweet saints.’

  Duncan Landor lurched behind Carter in the chain gang ‘There isn’t that much metal in the world.’

  ‘Reckon they’ve found it, anyway.’ Maybe that’s why there were no ores left to mine inside in the league. They had all been stripped out in the past to construct this hovering leviathan of the air.

  Slavers hauled Duncan aside into a second line while Carter was roughly pushed forward. The cattle were being lined up, readied for a stock transfer. Shouts sounded and the prisoners started moving; the astonishing warship their destination. Carter shuffled slowly across the gantry between the two vessels, the shackled clink of hundreds of prisoners passing across a mesh floor, as solid and immovable as the bridge over Mill River back home. Segmented metal railings stopped just shy of chest height. Carter felt giddy as he peered over the edge. Only clouds below, the distant brown smudge of land passing through gaps in the cover. There was no sign of the sea. No hint of where they might be. He glanced back across the gangway. So many faces he dimly recognised from Northhaven. He couldn’t see Adella, Willow or Kerge. Even Duncan Landor’s ugly mug would be welcome right now. For the first time since Carter had been taken, the abysmal reality of his situation sank in on him. This is my fate from here on in. Not Carter Carnehan, master of his own destiny. Just a slave to be traded like cattle in a market. Desperation overwhelmed him: the unfairness of this. If only he had left home a little earlier, he would have been safe inside the library when the attack began. His mother might still be alive, without the gunfight he had started. He could be enjoying a real life with his parents by his side. If there hadn’t been a wall of steel mesh between him and the sky, Carter might’ve jumped at that moment.

  The gantry ended with a large air lock. As Carter entered the warship, one of the plume-helmed soldiers encouraged him forward none too gently with a rifle butt. He passed into a semi-circular chamber, two levels high with large mounted guns on the second-storey gallery. More soldiers stood by, rifles ready, stationed in case the slaves became troublesome. They wouldn’t get much fuss today. Carter felt as broken and as hopeless as any man on Pellas, and he was as wild as any of them snatched from Northhaven. Everyone said so. Is that all it takes to break a man? To crush all the hope from him? A series of tunnels fanned out in front of the prisoners, each with a steel path leading into the warship’s interior – but there was something strange about the floor. As Carter stared, he saw that each walkway was moving. A house slave cut Carter out of the chain gang. His a
nkle manacles, he noted, were left locked. Silently, the house slave guided Carter to one of the walkways, preventing him from stumbling as he was led onto the sliding floor. Carter was propelled into the tunnel, a few seconds of darkness. He briefly lost his vision as a harsh light flared on. The moving belt beneath his feet had halted. Carter’s sight returned just in time to see three house slaves advancing on him.

  ‘Don’t move,’ one of them ordered, ‘or you’ll be cut.’

  Carter watched his crumbling shoes tugged off his feet by the closest house slave, while his two colleagues ran humming metal boxes over the Northhaven man’s body. Carter shuddered as he realised all his clothes, already ripped and blackened and falling apart, were being peeled away. It didn’t take them long to shear him of his dignity. He was left naked apart from his ankle chains. A hatch in the wall opened and the house slaves tossed his dirty rags into a blast furnace inside.

  ‘What are you—?’

  ‘Keep your cake-hole shut,’ barked one of the house slaves. He slammed a rubber button on the wall and the floor began trundling forward again. In the next section of the tunnel, Carter flinched as nozzles in the wall’s sides began squirting an oily yellow mist over his body, a fine layer of gel coating his bruised, bare skin. He attempted to rub the gunk from the burning scar on his face, but it just seemed to cling all the harder. He was still wiping it away when the gel was followed by a steaming wet smog that washed the grime away. The walkway kept trundling through into darkness. Carter yelled in shock as a cold metal vice pressed in on him from either side, clicking in place and locking around his body, forcing his arms down by his legs. What the hell are they doing? Trussing me for the oven? Are these devils cannibals or slave owners? Lights flared on again and Carter saw prisoners ahead of him on the tunnel’s moving floor; dripping water onto the walkway, metal caskets stamped around them concealing most of their nudity. They could no longer collapse. They couldn’t wriggle an inch, little more than living components in this bizarre mill. A metal arm swung down ahead, striking the nearest slave on the arm near the shoulder. A female screech sounded. Branding! We’re being branded, no better than cattle. Someone cried behind Carter, calling out words lost among the rattle of machinery. Carter stifled a yell as burning hot metal slammed into his side, a second of agony and then nothing. Compared to the cold lingering pain of being whipped across his face, this new discomfort was hardly anything at all. A whine of machinery deafened Carter as he was lifted off his feet, the moving walkway falling away like a waterfall’s edge. A rail carried him now, hanging, through the air and into a chamber so large it must have occupied a good part of the warship’s interior. Vast metal shelves filled the space. Carter had to stop himself from laughing when he saw people being racked below by the machinery. I’m a book. A human book. Back to being a librarian again after all. Carter Carnehan, a volume of meat stored in a library of slaves. Carter grunted as he was lowered into a cell, a blank metal wall in front and behind, only the distant, muffled whimpering to tell him that he was one of many prisoners being stored in this flesh-filled hold. Down he went, a wet slap as he plunged into a pool on the cell floor, a viscous jelly rising around his body, the impact of a hard surface beneath his bottom as he was forced to sit within the liquid. The well’s liquid stopped at his chest, lapping around his skin.

  ‘Open your mouth,’ commanded a tinny voice, echoing disembodied around his cell. Carter did as he was instructed. A small pipe rose up from the pool, snaking into his mouth and stopping an inch above his tongue. ‘Slave rations will be dispensed twice a day. Water, followed by nutrients. A sewage removal cycle will be triggered after each feed.’

  ‘Damn you to hell!’ Carter yelled, trying not to gag with the tube in his mouth. ‘Damn—’

  He fell silent as the pressure on his chest increased, the warship’s extreme acceleration blurring his vision, the cries from hundreds of stored slaves smothered as a red mist descended over his vision.

  Carter’s journey had truly begun.

  Jacob waited for the green-uniformed conductor to fold down the train’s stairs, dropping them towards the platform. He listened to his bones creak from weeks of confinement on the train as he stepped down. The sign on the station platform read Brinkdalen, over halfway to the commercial airfields of Talekhard. The expedition had left the main line that followed the coast, heading southeast now into the nation’s wide heartland. A landscape of spectacular scenery, high mountains and chilled alpine lakes; lush meadows and pine forests as deep and endless as the ocean. Towns were further apart now, the train’s refuelling stops becoming infrequent. Some days, all Jacob saw outside were royal cavalry patrols protecting the rail guild’s investment in laying down tracks within the kingdom. Six or seven soldiers on horseback, their packs jangling as they cantered alongside between army staging posts. Any nation foolish enough to allow thieves to rip up its rails would soon discover how hard it was to prosper without trains running through their territory.

  ‘One hour,’ the conductor reminded Jacob as he stepped off the train. ‘Then we depart Brinkdalen.’

  Jacob smiled in acknowledgement. And you can set your clock by that. Behind the pastor, Khow received a similar warning. Jacob felt for his wallet. It contained Weyland shillings, rather than the small fortune in platinum trading coins they had withdrawn from the House of Landor’s bank. Jacob was a thousand times richer now than he’d ever been, yet he had never felt poorer in anything that mattered. He glanced behind him. Their train ran three-storeys high. More like a ramshackle mobile township. Cabins mixed with exhaust manifolds and the windows of dining rooms, wooden viewing decks shaded by tarpaulin, long oak doors sliding open to expose cargo chambers. Animals driven off, goods rolled on, crane arms swinging over to pick up stacked bales, conductors trying to bring order to stevedores, porters and passengers moving in and out. A crowd of peddlers and merchants, trays of knives and matches and fruit and piping-hot chestnuts strapped to their chests, accosting passengers or attempting to board the train without paying. The whole train quivered on jet-black antigravity stones, the rail guild’s greatest secret. Big menhir-sized stones that buoyed the train’s carriages above the land, the train clutching the rails below with just a few curved clamps.

  ‘All this way and we’ve hardly even begun. It still seems like magic to me, Khow.’

  ‘Airflow acceleration, inducement and entrainment across an airfoil-shaped ramp with minimal drag,’ said Khow, ‘combined with magnetic levitation through superconduction. Such principles are known science, manling, not supernatural forces.’

  ‘And that’s different from magic, how? I never did understand your people,’ said Jacob. ‘Smartest men I ever met, and all you ever do is hide in the woods. Always seemed a contradiction to me. Simple lives and complex minds.’

  ‘To my people, our manner of existence seems the most intelligent way of living,’ said Khow, taking a deep breath of high clear air. He indicated the forest on the other side of the train. ‘I will return before the train’s departure.’

  ‘Do the trees ever reply?’

  The gask tapped his ears, more like a bat’s than a Weylander’s. ‘In very subtle ways, if you know what to listen for.’

  Jacob was hard pressed to tell whether the gask was pranking him or not. Major Alock’s troops were easy to spot as they dismounted from the military carriage coupled into the train. You just searched for caps raised a head higher than everyone else. The royal guardsmen kept themselves to themselves mostly; regarding, Jacob suspected, the two chests of coins they were minding and the civilian members of the party as a fool’s mission into the back of beyond. But then, they were pragmatic men. The troops had swapped the bright stiff uniforms of royal guardsmen for the practical khaki of the border riders they had once been. Green cloaks with grey edging that could be pulled over a crouched body as camouflage. Each soldier sported a modern Landsman-pattern sharpshooter’s rifle slung over his shoulder, its stock weighted down with the slim brass tube of
a telescopic sight. Good for more than opening holes in paper targets, Jacob reckoned.

  Sheplar Lesh climbed down the folding steps, tripped and stumbled forward into the crowd of peddlers, his fingers ending up in one of the boxes of steaming hot chestnuts. Withdrawing it with a yelp, he flapped it in pain and sent a pile of folded journals flying into the air from a stationer’s tray.

  Wiggins landed on the platform behind Jacob. ‘You tell me how a fellow that can find and hug the only updraft in the whole prefecture, soar on it like a hawk, becomes the clumsiest fool I ever did meet on the ground?’

  ‘Gills maketh the fish and eyes of night maketh the owl,’ quoted Jacob.

  ‘That they do,’ said Wiggins. ‘But I’ve a feeling that when it comes to the kind of scum who trade in human flesh, your good book ain’t going to mean a whole lot more than kindling.’

  ‘For the slavers we have Benner Landor’s money.’

  ‘I saw that woodland magic of the gasks back in Northhaven just the same as you: who’s alive, who’s dead, and where’s Auntie Mabel out a-walking today. But still, I don’t know… this pursuit. You’ve got to wonder if Khow knows what he’s talking about? Every piece of common sense inside me says that we should be sailing across the ocean to the slave markets of the Burn, not pushing south.’

  ‘Four points in the compass, old man. If one direction don’t work out. We can try the others in a few years’ time.’

  ‘You figure I’ve got a few years left in me?’

  ‘At least.’

  ‘How you doing, Sheplar?’ Wiggins called out as the pilot advanced on them, shaking and blowing on his wounded hand.

  Sheplar pointed to the snow-tipped peaks in the distance. ‘I see mountains, but this land still feels flat to me.’

  ‘Nothing ever feels like home,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Perhaps if I was in the air…’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be at Talekhard soon enough. We’ll be relying on you to find us a merchant carrier whose propellers won’t drop off while we’re in the air.’ Jacob indicated the soldiers disembarking across the platform. ‘Your nation would have needed to strip out every border squadron in the skyguard to lift these man-mountains. And as good as I know your people are behind a kite, even you’ve got to admit, your flying wings are short on range.’