by Stephen Hunt
‘There are a people called skels,’ said Jacob. ‘Big ugly twisted brutes that survive as raiders and bandits. Do you know if they have dealings with the Vandians?’
‘Let us see.’ Iaroia waited for her staff to come back, returning twenty minutes later with a third cart, this one piled with leather-bound volumes. Everything the library contained on distant Vandia. Iaroia inspected an index tome, followed the trail through a handful of other volumes, and finally settled on one particularly heavy-looking history book. ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ She turned the book around towards Jacob for him to read the dense text hand-written inside as she talked. ‘See here. The skels were the previous rulers of the Vandian territory… masters of the mines that fund the imperium. The Vandians’ ancestors were the skels’ slaves, tribute from the nations surrounding the mines. But the bordering states grew tired of being forced to pay tribute. The countries rose up and overthrew the skels, turning their old overlords into refugees and nomads of the air. From the date here, that was over sixty thousand years ago. I wonder if the skels still nurse a grudge against their old workforce for usurping their seat at the feast.’
‘I may speak too much for that,’ said Sariel. ‘Skels are cold-blooded devils and they resent all not of their nation.’
Jacob scanned through the entry, hundreds of additional volumes cross-referenced. Details irrelevant to his mission. Long histories of the states that had struggled and fought for possession of the mines, empire after empire. Vandians and skels merely the most recent masters of these riches. That was the guild of librarians for you, always taking the long-term view. He felt a stab of regret. This should have been Carter’s life. In a hold like this. ‘This says the skels are often found working as privateers for the imperium.’ That’s a polite term for damn mercenaries. Licensed to plunder at others’ expense.
‘That’s the link,’ said Sheplar, excited and grinning.
Jacob was about to question Iaroia further, but she and her staff were called away to take delivery of the first batch of updates from the radiomen, leaving the four tired travellers alone, surrounded by a sea of maps and piles of tomes.
‘Don’t piss on your own doorstep,’ said Jacob, tapping the chart of Vandia. ‘The imperium has its mercenary brutes flying out to capture slaves from so far away that the raided nations will never be able to band together, repeat history, and unseat the imperium. A land army marching from the Lanca would take centuries to reach Vandia.’
Khow clucked unhappily as he tapped at his calculator. ‘Bad numbers. A closed branch of the great fractal tree. In a world without end… for this to have happened to my son.’
‘Had to happen to someone’s son,’ said Jacob. The words were cold comfort to him. To Mary Carnehan. To Carter and the taken. To distant Northhaven lying burnt with its crops fed by the ashes of the dead. Weyland would be raided for a few years or so, picked over, and then the slavers would move on. Choose another country from a thousand distant lands that wouldn’t have heard of the empire attacking them. Mere primitives compared to the forces assaulting them. Leave Weyland like a fallow field for millennia before returning again. Just bad numbers and the random roll of fate. Jacob smashed his fist on the map table in frustration. ‘Damn them! You know what this means, don’t you?’
Khow rolled one of Benner Landor’s trading coins between his leathery fingers. ‘The rarity value of the funds we carry will be close to worthless in our destination. We cannot bargain for our children in a Vandian slave market. Not with this metal.’
‘It just has to get us there,’ said Jacob. ‘Then I’ve got something else to trade. We’ll be dealing in lead.’ He looked at the others. Four of them. Against the weight and power of something so large and powerful, he could barely wrap his mind around the might of what they faced. Iaroia was right; they were a travelling circus act. Just dust blowing in the breeze compared to what they needed to accomplish. ‘None of you signed up for this. We don’t need all of Benner’s money now. We can divide it among us and you can travel back home.’
Sheplar shook his bushy head of hair. ‘Act well your part, there all honour lies. However strongly my heart is called back towards the mountains, I would count myself already dead if I flew for five minutes fleeing in the direction of home.’
‘Spoken like a true Rodalian. And you, Khow?’
‘I fear for what you are becoming, Jacob Carnehan. You are losing yourself in the vastness of the world. But I cannot abandon my child to the caprice of his captors in the imperium. I shall press on, come what may.’
Jacob sighed. Against all the odds the gask’s homing instinct had been proved correct. Was Khow’s estimation of the struggle within Jacob just as accurate? A dark splinter of his soul, long suppressed, whispered the answer. Whatever it takes. Just like the good old days. Except they had been anything but good. How could he remember the past now? How could he ever have forgotten?
‘There then,’ said Sariel, banging his gnarled old wooden walking staff on the stone floor of the map room. ‘Anywhere I sit is where my home shall be. These odds are nothing. I have faced far worse a hundred times and considered my enemies nothing but mere spit in the wind.’
Spit in the wind? That was what the four of them were. But then hell if Jacob had anything better to do with his time.
Jacob was permitted to keep some of the volumes on the Vandian imperium to read inside the dormitory, and he fell on them with a vengeance. Long after the others had gone to sleep, the lantern above his bunk flickered with the strange artificial light generated by the plateau’s waterfall. To understand your enemy was to know their weaknesses and strengths. All the volumes came with a warning on the front sheet. Vandia did not tolerate the guild system on its soil. The imperium had no need of the librarians’ knowledge; not when every neighbour approached them on bended knee, offering science and learning in exchange for whatever resources the empire deigned to trade in exchange for that knowledge. They had no need of rails to cross their land when they possessed far faster methods of traversing the vast distances of empire. They suffered no network of radiomen to disseminate information which the imperial state could not control. The imperium was a vast void in the librarians’ archives. Everything that was said of it or about it, ancient lore passed down second-hand by traveller caravans which crossed through the empire’s territory. And they spoke of a warrior society. A highly stratified elite constructed with only one aim in mind. Keeping the riches that the Vandians had conquered solely under their control, allowing only enough resources across their borders as was required to keep foreigners from banding together. To attempt what the Vandians’ own ancestors had once achieved – seizing the mines. Ruthlessly choking off resources to anyone who threatened them. Playing one country off against another. There were plenty of warlords in the Burn who knew that game. Rotating the top dog’s favour among far more lieutenants than were needed for the job at hand, each allowed their moment in the sun, then cast aside or destroyed when they grew too powerful. The more Jacob read, the more he realised that there was little difference from life in the empire and life in the Burn. Only that across the ocean they killed for dust and ashes, and in the imperium they murdered to hold onto untold riches. Opposite ends of the scale, but very little difference in existence for the average inhabitant. Oddly, that thought comforted Jacob. He had survived beyond the ocean, once… had prospered in blood and war without end. Jacob was coming home. Or was it Jake Silver who was returning?
He slept fitfully, the weight of rock above him pressing against his soul as he tossed and turned. He was buried beneath the plateau, buried with the gathered knowledge of the world. The tomes whispered to him, speaking of the power of an empire ancient, large and beyond opposition. Mary came to him in the dark of the night, calling out to him from the street outside the rectory. He pulled on his breeches and ran down to find her crying outside.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The children are sick, there’s a plague in the town.’
‘There must be a cure!’ There is, whispered the books scattered across his bunk. You just have to find it.
‘My three boys,’ sobbed Mary.
‘I’ll protect them.’ His hands reached down for his pistols, and they coiled around his fingers like snakes.
‘Not like that,’ said Mary. ‘That’s who you used to be. Before we married and you took my name.’
‘You’re meant to take my name.’
‘But it was so black,’ said Mary. ‘So washed with blood.’
‘I’m a pastor now.’
‘The monastery couldn’t clean your old life away,’ warned Mary. ‘Nothing could do that.’ But it wasn’t his wife in front of him anymore; it was his mother, stretched out wounded across the wooden floor. The local landowner had forced his cruel affections upon her one last time, despite all her protestations. She had struggled too much. Furniture and crockery lay smashed across the floor of the simple three room farmhouse. He knelt down beside her. ‘Go,’ she wheezed. ‘Leave here. There’s nothing for you on these acres.’
‘There’s one thing.’
‘This soil isn’t worth it,’ she coughed. ‘It’s taken your father and now it’s stealing me. Forget revenge. Just leave. Travel to the harbour. Let me go to heaven knowing that one true thing lives.’
He held his trembling mother until she moved no more. She had been holding something tight inside her palm. When he prised open her fingers he discovered the little metal-jacketed bullet she had been trying to locate as she heard her door being broken down. He hadn’t inherited his pistols yet, so he took down the single-shot rifle from the house’s wall. Good for human wolves as well as the kind that crept out from the woods on four legs. ‘There’s one thing.’
‘A one-shot percussion cap pattern?’ laughed the landowner, large on his giant horse. He must have been confident, riding out on his land. Only a single man on horseback, hanging behind him. ‘Little boy, go home.’
‘I don’t have one anymore.’
‘You won’t have a life. You shoot at me with that rabbit gun, my man here will drop you in a heartbeat.’
‘I wasn’t fixing on shooting you.’ He put his mother’s bullet into the skull of the horse, watching it rear, roll and fall. A heartbeat. His first knife he left embedded in the guard’s throat, the man falling to the side, caught dangling in the saddle as his steed bolted past. It was a good thing he had brought along a second blade. He wouldn’t be seeing that one again.
‘Don’t!’ shouted the landowner, trying to escape the terrible weight of his quivering collapsed stallion. ‘I own the law in this prefecture. They’ll hunt you down! I can pay—’
‘Exactly what I had in mind.’
‘You’re just a boy, just a peasant.’
He knelt by the thrashing horse. ‘You’re the only thing I’m sorry about.’ He quickly put the creature out of its misery. Then he turned to the trapped landowner. ‘I’m the son of two peasants. So here’s what I’m aiming to do. I’m going to plant you in the dirt. Not next to them, because your blood would poison the soil. Out here, where your kin will never find you. All that will be remembered is how much you were hated and feared by everyone in the prefecture. But first, you’re going to tell me which of your soldiers came with you to my house.’
‘The stealers take you, you little devil.’
‘Good. I don’t want you to make it too easy.’
‘They’ll come for you. All of them will.’
‘I’d appreciate it. I would consider that uncomplicated.’
The landowner yelled as he tried to pull at the pistols trapped below the dead weight of the horse. But the expensive twin Landsman repeaters came to the boy, instead. Eventually. As slowly as he could make the time last. One true thing. His hand was on the shovel, pushing dirt into a Northhaven grave. Two true things. His children’s graves in a rectory that was all they had known as home, wrapped in sheets inside the coffins. Shrouded to hide the swollen red lumps of the illness which had claimed their young lives. Mary’s tears coming down as the shovel’s head crunched down into the soil.
‘They should be burying me, not them.’
‘Don’t talk like that, please,’ said Jacob. They should be burying me.
‘You’re already buried out here,’ said Mary, reading his thoughts.
‘He doesn’t exist anymore.’
‘Yes he does. He never went away.’
‘Listen to your woman,’ called Sergeant Nix, from behind the churchyard wall, leaning on it with his hat at a jaunty angle. ‘Blood follows after you: death just can’t help it. Your children, your wife. Murdered by you, same as though you pulled the trigger. You should let your kid die alone out in the imperium, worked to death like a pack horse. Why help a slave live? Boy’ll just be like you. Kill everyone he should have been protecting,’
‘I never regretted killing you.’
‘I’ll let you into a secret, later,’ said Nix. ‘Sure is an honour, chewing the fat like this with you. Not often I get to meet a bigger bastard than I was. Jake Quicksilver.’
‘Jake Silver!’
‘Oh no, you earned the Quick. Nobody as fast as you, to reach for your pistols and kill anyone who stood in your way. You’re a legend. The greatest mercenary commander ever. Battle after battle. War after war. You could have crowned yourself Emperor of the Burn. Duke of the Dead. Baron of Blood. Hell, I would have followed you before you got soft. Would have been an honour. Me and Major Alock, we were always fans of your work. A fellow Weylander abroad, making good in bad times. What wasn’t to admire? Only thing I never understood, is why you left? You had the Burn trembling at your feet. So why did you up sticks and leave? Just disappeared into the night. Why?’
‘Why?’ called a little boy. For a moment, he thought he was the boy. But he was on his horse, uneasy at being surprised in this canyon by a thin young wretch dragging a spear after his bony body. Emaciated even by the standards of the hand-to-mouth living in the destroyed lands of the Burn. Jacob’s guard reached for the rifle in his saddlebag, but he waved at him to stand steady.
‘Why, what?’
‘Why did you kill her?’
‘Who are you talking about, boy?’
‘My mother.’
‘I haven’t killed your mother.’
‘You came to my village last week. You took everyone you could; my mother, my friends, my cousins. You lashed them to the sides of your wagons with rope. You said if any of us wanted to ambush the food supplies going into the palace again, we would have to put an arrow through one of our family first. Our people were hungry enough that’s just what they did.’
He looked back towards the soldier on horseback, who nodded imperceptibly. Just another day’s work. Didn’t even remember it.
‘Little boy, go home.’
The spear came up. It was easy to tell someone who was going to charge, by the look in their eye. ‘I don’t have one anymore. You burnt it to the ground before you left.’
He raised one of the shiny pistols he kept holstered. And he knew whose guns they were. And why they weighed so much.
The boy’s corpse was cradled in his arms. Just like his mother’s had been. Just like his children were to be in later years. ‘You’re me. You’re me.’
‘No,’ said the corpse, the boy’s face twisting into that of Sergeant Nix. ‘Because here’s the surprise: you never killed me well enough, not old Trixy Nixy.’
‘Manling!’ It was Khow, at last, in the darkness of the dormitory, buried under the weight of the plateau. He didn’t think he could be imagining Sariel’s irregular snoring – this was real. To Jacob’s regret, so was too much of everything he had dreamt. ‘Did I wake you, Khow?’
‘You were calling for someone called Jake.’
‘Yes, I knew him once.’
‘Was he a friend?’
‘Not much of one to anybody, if truth be told.’
‘I thought perhaps it might be one of your children who have passed.’
‘Not one of mine, although the man should be dead, right enough. Go back to sleep, Khow.’
‘I have been trying, but I find it hard to bring my mind to rest… what we have learnt today about where Kerge has been taken. I worry for his future.’
‘Knowing the future: isn’t that the point of your prayers? That damn abacus machine you carry around with you?’
Jacob could just see the gask raise the fingers of his leathery hand. ‘There are infinite branches on the fractal tree, manling. Every decision we make leads us down a new one. It is not that my people seek to scry the future like the diviners living beyond the city walls. More that we attempt to navigate towards the kindest alternative probability available. That is why we always meditate facing in the direction the universe is moving.’
‘I didn’t realise. What did you do for a living, Khow, back in the forests?’
‘I was an artificer, a maker of such devices as my calculator. My son was apprenticed with me; even though we always knew his fate was to be larger than our craft.’
‘If you even suspected any of this—’ Jacob took in the dark dormitory with his hand ‘—why in God’s name did you let Kerge leave home in the first place?’
‘That you ask such a question… you have never visited the great forests?’
‘Passed by its fringes once, travelling from the monastery in Rodal.’
‘Kerge was in search of his mean. That is not a task that can be denied. Among my people, open paths on the fractal tree are judged to be a good thing, closed paths considered adverse. If Kerge had stayed, his path would have grown narrow and dark, for us all. There are many shadowed paths that must be avoided. This, I think you know.’
‘I’m just a simple country pastor.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the gask, but he did not sound convinced.
