by Stephen Hunt
‘You’d find a way,’ said Carter. ‘Everybody here has to find a way of going on.’
‘They discovered another dead slave this morning in the barracks,’ said Adella. ‘Loretta Popham. She died of poison. She was from Northhaven, too, just like us. I knew her back home. She worked as a maid in the hotel.’
‘Where the hell did she get her hands on poison up here?’
‘Mogo tubers,’ said Adella. ‘You can unearth them from the soil at the foot of the volcano. Slaves dig them up and bring them back to exchange for food rations, or lying down with the people that found them.’
‘Sweet saints!’
‘You get to travel down to the surface to run eruption checks,’ said Adella. ‘I was going to ask you to dig around for some tubers for me. Just in case it gets too much.’
‘Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to do that.’
‘You can’t stop anyone checking out from all of this, Carter. I could climb the steps to the top of the station any day I wanted and leap. But boiling those roots and drinking it down is meant to be painless. You go to sleep and you never wake up. That has to be a better end than falling.’
‘We’re going to get out of here!’ protested Carter. ‘You and me both.’
‘They’d hunt us down,’ said Adella. ‘All the guardsmen and their warships. Nobody has ever escaped alive from the sky mines. That’s a record the Vandians don’t want to see broken.’
‘They wouldn’t come after us if they thought we were dead,’ said Carter.
A brief flash of hope crossed the woman’s face. The emotion was so rare here that Carter had almost forgotten what optimism looked like. ‘You’ve got a plan?’ asked Adella.
‘I do.’ Carter explained the bare bones of his scheme in hushed tones, watching her face light up as she dared to believe there could be an existence beyond this floating hell they had been imprisoned in.
‘That could work!’ she said, after he’d finished.
‘Nobody’s ever escaped from here?’ said Carter. ‘Sure people have. They must have. It’s just the Vandians aren’t exactly going to encourage workers to carve statues of all the slaves clever and courageous enough to break out of their damn mine.’
‘How can I help you?’
‘Lend me a hand sounding people out. See who wants to go with us. We’ll need five or six people. And someone with experience flying transporters… that’s essential. People we know from back home – they need to be strong, mind and body. It would be fine if Duncan agreed to join. Only people we can trust. You know the rumours about informants among the miners? Maybe even Vandian agents pretending to be slaves?’
Adella nodded, eagerly. ‘I can do that.’
‘You can. And you forget about hiding those filthy tubers under your mattress. That’s no way to think. Once you start considering that path…’
Adella appeared abashed. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
‘The Vandians think we’re savages. To them, we’re no better than those spear-carrying wild men that live north of Rodal, raiding the fringes of the league. The empire underestimates us. That’s their weakness. All we need to do to escape from this floating hell is be smarter than they believe we’re capable of.’
‘Clean those bandages carefully,’ said a voice behind them. ‘Now we’ve got a new sky mine tethered to the station, you’re going to find out how much a man sweats at this altitude.’
Carter swivelled around. It was Owen. How long has he been standing there? ‘Seeing as how we’ve done such a stand-up job of taking the claim, I thought Helrena Skar might give her hitters the rest of the week off.’
‘We’ll see deliveries of working rations dropped off by the supply ships,’ said Owen. ‘That’s as much of a holiday as I’ve ever known in the sky mines. Unless you count coming close to starving when there’s no claim to work, which I don’t.’
Adella removed the last of the bandages and left to wash the blood off her hands.
Carter pulled his tunic back over his wounds. ‘No feast days for the Vandians, then? Don’t they believe in God – not even a temple filled with heathen gods?’
‘No hell full of horned stealers or heaven packed with winged ethereals. Best I can tell, the Vandians revere their emperor first and their ancestors second,’ said Owen. ‘A living god and a bunch of effigies to their grandparents in their shrines.’
‘Hell of an ego, there,’ laughed Carter. ‘Vandians taken to worshipping themselves!’
Owen pointed at Adella, cleaning her hands in the basin at the far end of the barracks. ‘You might want to tone down your own ego, Mister Carnehan. Hope can keep you alive up here for a little while. But once a person realises it’s a false hope being dangled in front of them…’
‘I have high hopes for the future, Mister Paterson,’ said Carter. ‘Don’t reckon I’ve got false ones.’
Owen shook his head, sadly. ‘I hope you survive for long enough to be disappointed, then.’
Carter snorted as the man walked off. Just long enough to get off this bloody rock.
Adella returned and asked him to help her get new bandages from the supply chambers. They were on the far side of the station, ten minutes’ walk through the passages. He was becoming far too conversant navigating the maze of old tunnels. It really is time to get out of here. After they found the chamber, he pulled open the door and switched the light on inside. Canvas-covered crates piled high against all three bare stone walls. He pulled covers off, and as he turned, he saw that Adella had dropped her slave’s robe to the floor, was standing there pale under the dim electric light. She pushed him gently down against one of the crate’s canvas tops, her mouth pressing against his, brushing his upper lip.
‘We can’t!’ protested Carter. ‘You know what they’ve said they’ll do to any woman who gets pregnant on the station.’
‘But we never do,’ said Adella. ‘You must have heard the noises coming from the showers late at night. Everyone’s doing it. The water here’s laced with something that prevents women becoming pregnant, a chemical. I’ve heard as much from the old hands.’
‘But it can’t work all of the time.’
‘It works,’ she said, untying her hair and letting it fall behind her. ‘They don’t want trained miners too weak to work, pleading their belly. And what’s the point of waiting? There’s hundreds of ways we can die in the sky mines. This is the only way I know we can be happy. The Vandians can’t take this away from us.’
‘I don’t know…’
She moved closer to him. ‘I trust you, Carter. You’re the only man here who has what it takes to lead a breakout. And I know you’re going to take me with you when you do. We’re not back home anymore, are we? All the rules and the way things should be while courting… they don’t count for spit out here. We need to live while we can. Why should I die without knowing you properly?’
Adella had a point, and Carter was moving beyond the time he could resist her entreaties, the heat in his blood swelling to match hers.
‘Nobody else here understands you like I do,’ said Adella. ‘You’re the only one who deserves me. Who deserves… this. So this is what I would like you to do…’ She whispered in his ear.
Carter did as he was bid until his head spun. He felt guilty and foolish… flirting with danger, but the lust inside him was too overwhelming now. Carter could as much stop what was happening here as he could halt breathing. It might be wrong; but there were a hundred worse acts when they were both imprisoned to a lifetime of labour, and none of them under his control.
The next day Carter came across Kerge in one of the equipment bays, a large chamber filled with machines, devices covered by tarpaulin, others stored in wooden crates on beds of slugs made of a white substance he couldn’t put a name to. The gask lay in the shadows of a large drilling unit, tinkering with the machinery, a crescent of tools spread out across a leather blanket as if the twisted man was a surgeon about to operate on his patient. A couple of slaves worked at the
far end of the chamber, moving the components of a conveyor belt onto antigravity stones to carry them across to the new sky mine. Nobody was close enough to hear their conversation, which was just the way he wanted it.
‘You got a minute?’ asked Carter.
The gask pulled himself out from under the drilling unit, sitting down beside his tools. ‘Are you here to help construct the new sorting lines on the station roof?’
‘I’m about a little mischief,’ said Carter. He pointed to the little silver machine only just visible poking out of a leather tool satchel. ‘Like stealing parts to rebuild yourself a new abacus box.’
‘I only took components from machines beyond repair,’ said Kerge. ‘They were of no use to anyone except me. I do not consider that theft, only the optimum use of resources.’
Carter raised his hands openly. ‘You’ll get no complaints from me. I like a little initiative. Only thing that’s going to keep us alive up here. Is it as good as the box you had back in the forests? You can use it to tell the future?’
‘I am not a fortune teller, manling,’ complained Kerge. ‘This merely helps me study the boughs of the great fractal tree. The future is what you make of it. It is free will which navigates the branches. Free will is the true substance of the universe.’
‘But if something was going to happen,’ continued Carter, ‘and it was significant enough, it would register on your sums?’
‘Only in the near-term,’ said Kerge, ‘and even then, those events wouldn’t be guaranteed.’
‘Back in Northhaven, if there was a drought, we’d send people out to the forests to speak with your elders. They’d tell the farmers when the best chance of planting seeds was, so crops could make it to harvest time.’
‘This is not the point of our studies. I am sure the elders were merely being polite to your emissaries. We are polite to everyone.’
‘But they weren’t guessing, were they?’ said Carter.
‘Guessing,’ spluttered Kerge, as near to indignation as Carter had ever seen the humble gask get. ‘Do you know how long it takes to master probability science? How many hours of study a gask must spend before he or she is considered even a neophyte of the greatest of disciplines?’
‘Kerge, I know you’ve got a brain that would make the brightest engineer in Weyland weep like a fool at his own stupidity. And I’ve got a good use for your smarts. I need to know when the next eruption is due, when that monster of a stratovolcano is next going to blow.’
‘Please tell me you are not trying to curry favour with the overseers here?’ said Kerge. ‘Attempting to buy your barracks extra rations by using foreknowledge? The Vandians will not free you for it, they will hold on to you all the tighter, like a prized pack animal.’
‘You might not want to know how I’m planning to use what you tell me.’
‘I am straining to maintain a low profile on the station,’ said Kerge. ‘Apart from myself, there is only one other slave here who is twisted far from the common pattern of manlings, and I am only tolerated as a useful tinkerer of machines. If the Vandians realise the true extent of my differences from the common pattern, I will end up in a zoo or on an imperium dissection table.’
‘The Vandians won’t hear about your talents from me,’ said Carter. ‘And if you like, I might be able to solve those problems of yours with a little passage out of the sky mines in the near future…’
‘I can discern no path ahead of us where an escape attempt leads to anything except death and disaster,’ said Kerge. ‘We must stay here and conserve our strength.’
‘Hope for the best, but plan for the worst,’ said Carter. ‘Help me out. I just need your best guess on when Old Smoky down below is going to start spewing again. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’
Kerge sighed, but reached for his abacus box all the same. ‘So be it. But I see no good coming from this, and I do not need to contemplate the branches of the great fractal tree to tell you that. If this foreknowledge is for use in some hasty escape attempt you are concocting, I beg you to reconsider.’
Carter shrugged noncommittally. Fine for you to talk about sitting around and contemplating matters. If Adella and I had a snug place in the repair bays fixing the Vandians’ toys for them, maybe we might bide our time for a while too. But we are where we are. And whatever my future is to be, it sure won’t be dying in a tunnel with a pickaxe in my hand.
EIGHT
CITY OF THE AIR
Jacob walked back down the corridor in the Night’s Pride with Sheplar Lesh. Like the rest of the enormous aircraft, its interior was formed from some kind of hardened paper. As strong as oak, but weight for weight, as light as the wax-paper a butcher wrapped around his wares. Jacob was lucky he had managed to convince the carrier’s captain to permit Sheplar and himself access to the carrier’s navigation chamber to check the course of their journey against Carter’s travels. Naturally, the ‘convincing’ had come in the form of a generous transfer from Jacob’s dwindling stock of trading coins. This crew could give old Master Lettore a run for reticence when it comes to guild secrets. Their merchant carrier was heading for the Kingdom of Hangel. The only thing Jacob knew about the nation was that someone out there needed a hell of a lot of firearms, shells and ordinance. They would be in the air for four weeks, covering nearly sixty thousand miles, yet barely making a dent in the distance that they needed to cover to catch up with Carter. Most of the ground they passed over was lightly populated. A few tiny settlements. Grass plains that stretched forever like a vast yellow ocean of scrub and dirt. It made him glad he was flying over it, not riding through it. And it gave him feelings of insignificance. Not for the first time, Jacob felt doubts well inside him.
Jacob looked at Sheplar. ‘What the hell can have happened to Carter and Northhaven’s taken to have travelled so far in such a short period of time? It doesn’t seem possible.’
‘You must have faith in Khow’s ability to track his son,’ said Sheplar.
‘Faith? Sad to say, friend, that vessel’s been leaking ever since Mary died.’
Jacob rested a hand against the hull. Beyond a porthole, Jacob could see the carrier’s main wings stacked above each other triplane fashion, connected by struts each the diameter of a lighthouse. The aircraft’s hangars were visible too, slung under the lowest wing, the tiny black dots of scout planes landing and taking off. You learnt to tune out the constant humming from hundreds of propellers after a few days on board, but the rotors’ vibration was always there running gently through the fuselage. The town-sized carrier was rarely quiet. Children playing; the honk of livestock in pens; orders being called between aircrew. The Night’s Pride wasn’t anything like the decks of any nautical vessel Jacob had trod. Her interior had been divided into two areas – functional sections like the bridge and the cargo holds and the navigation rooms, and open neighbourhoods where walls were painted with frescos, surfaces decorated with colourful engravings of unfamiliar gods and totems. They even had chambers where plants grew… miniature vegetable gardens flooded with light from cathedral-tall stretches of glass. Other vaults where hundreds of market stalls sat arranged across stepped levels, ladders on the walls leading up to family lodgings where passengers could glimpse vignettes of family life through open doorways. Men and women taking tea together on ornate rugs, children studying and scratching across blackboards, arguments between spouses, games of chance. A society in the sky, paying its way by transporting goods and passengers across the vast distances of the world below. There were people born in these corridors who had never been on the ground and had little desire to go there, either. The locals were polite enough towards Jacob, Sheplar, Khow and Sariel, but they talked of life on the dirt as if it was another world. To them perhaps, it is.
‘I know it sounds contrary coming from a churchman,’ added Jacob, ‘but I never was that comfortable taking on faith those things which I can’t explain.’
‘There are many things with which I am uncomfortable, Jacob of Nort
hhaven. The strangeness of being on an aircraft of this size. Not being able to pilot her. Not being able to grapple with the crosswinds and feel the spirits of the wind. But the rightness of the direction in which we travel, that I do not doubt. It is a true wind that carries the Night’s Pride. As far away from home as we are, that much I know. It is a true wind.’
‘Not much of an aircraft as far as your people are concerned, I guess,’ said Jacob. ‘Sure wouldn’t be able to take this bird down onto a landing field in one of your canyons.’
‘She is the right size for what her crew require,’ said Sheplar. ‘As is a flying wing for what the skyguard needs.’
‘When I was living at the monastery in Rodal, Brother Frael and I would watch your flying wings skim past. He would say that you were flying with the angels. He’d use the ancient name for them, the ethreaal, and declare they were the same as your wind spirits.’
‘There are many spirits in the wind.’
‘There’s quite a few angels mentioned in the good book, too.’ Maybe one from the heavenly host to look after us up here. That would be nice.
‘You have evil spirits in your faith?’ asked Sheplar.
‘Fallen angels, you mean?’ said Jacob. ‘Devilish spirits? In our church we know them as stealers, for the way they steal their way into the hearts and minds of men, and cause all sorts of wickedness.’
‘We say much the same about the evil spirits of the wind,’ said Sheplar. ‘Although I think that is often too easily an excuse for a person’s lack of honour. To blame your actions and omissions on the wind.’
‘I reckon you’ve got a point there.’ Maybe one that’s a little too close to home.
‘Your friend the monk sounds much like my uncle,’ said Sheplar. ‘He raised me inside the temple at Yundak. He was a powerful wind chanter and rose high within the order there.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘My mother died giving birth to me. My father was a skyguard pilot. He perished when I was seven, driving off an incursion of nomads from the north. A ballista bolt struck his plane.’
