by Stephen Hunt
The airfield worker pointed out a two-storey building where tickets could be purchased. Jacob and Tom rode for the wooden structure, tying up next door to a six-wheeled spring wagon operating between the field and the riverboat pier. A couple of beggars sat outside, calloused farmworkers’ hands reaching out to rattle cups, while a green-liveried doorman eyed them suspiciously, barring the entrance. He opened the door for Jacob and Tom, albeit with an arched eyebrow. Travelling by air was still an expensive novelty. For humble pastors and penurious couriers, the guild’s train service was still the style. They entered a hall lit by tall glass windows, rows of seats upholstered in padded green leather; warm and luxurious compared to the bitter cold outside, iron pipes creaking from the weight of heated water. This was the first time Jacob had been inside. Apart from the porters and staff moving luggage around on hand carts, it was only quality inside, the moneyed cream of the prefecture – women in expensive day dresses and long gloves and men in brightly patterned waistcoats and frock coats. Even their servants were expensively attired. The ticket desk was a polished booth manned by a worker in the same stiff green uniform as the porter, the glimpse of a room through the wooden grille hung with wall-maps of Weyland.
With no queue at the booth, Jacob walked to the front and addressed the ticket seller. ‘Does that ten-engine bird on the field count Arcadia as one of her layovers?’
‘Certainly,’ said the seller.
‘I’ll need tickets for tomorrow morning,’ said Jacob.
‘I’m afraid we’re all sold out, Father Carnehan,’ said the seller.
‘Is that so? Funny thing is, I don’t recall introducing myself,’ said Jacob. ‘Tickets for the day after, then.’
‘Sold out that day, too.’
‘And when will you have tickets available?’
‘Try coming back in a couple of weeks,’ advised the seller.
‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Tom, banging the counter. ‘Our money is as good as anyone else’s. We need to travel to the capital.’
‘I’m sure the Guild of Rails will sell you tickets to Arcadia, if you’re in a rush,’ smiled the seller.
‘Travel overland by train? That’ll take months!’
Jacob laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder and eased the angry courier back. ‘Our money might be as good as anyone else’s, but our pockets aren’t quite as deep as Benner Landor’s, am I right?’
‘Try the Guild of Rails,’ repeated the seller.
Jacob strode out of the hall, Tom stamping behind him. ‘This is completely contemptible.’
‘The fix has been put in,’ growled Jacob. ‘Landor’s city, Landor’s fuel. Benner was counting on me and Carter following after his party. Don’t waste your breath railing against fate. Even if that fool in there sold us a ticket, our flight would develop engine problems before it ever left the ground. Or maybe get diverted in the air, leaving us stranded even further away than Northhaven.’
‘He can’t stop the Guild of Rails selling us tickets south. They’re neutral.’
‘Maybe. But you’re right about travelling overland. Too damn slow. I don’t think Carter is fixing to interrupt his sweetheart’s honeymoon,’ growled Jacob. He stopped by a luggage desk and picked up a discarded customs form and pencil, scribbling a message on the paper’s blank reverse. ‘You’re the courier. Run this to the radiomen’s hold in the old town for me … tell them it’s official business for the Guild of Librarians. Then find me at the doctor’s.’
Tom took the sheet and read the note. ‘Why transmit a message to a shipping office in the Rotnest Islands? That’s in the middle of the Lancean Ocean, isn’t it? Faster to catch a train south than board a clipper ship, surely … and the Rotnest Islands aren’t exactly the kind of place I’d trust to book a safe passage anywhere.’
‘They operate real fast clippers out of the islands,’ said Jacob, trading the hall’s warmth for the freeze outside.
‘Yes they do. Primarily to escape being sunk by all those pirates and freebooters.’
‘Have a little faith, Mister Purdell,’ said Jacob.
‘If you think I’ll be put off coming with you just because the journey south is dangerous, you’re wrong,’ said Tom.
‘Oh, it’ll be dangerous enough for sure,’ said Jacob, mounting his horse. There wasn’t much he could promise, but he could certainly promise that.
SEVEN
THE KELPERS’ BOAT
Carter’s fever ebbed and flowed, leaving him disoriented. His nausea had grown stronger since being enveloped by the rolling of a vessel on the waves, the toss of spray through gaps in the wooden hull leaving a sheen of salt on his lips whenever he licked them. He tried to find the sleep his body craved, but the timbers creaked noisily as the vessel bobbed in the swell. Was he really travelling by sailing ship? It didn’t seem likely. What had happened to his flight to Arcadia?
Carter had started having visions, like faint afterimages that he could barely remember; but they still interfered with what was real, lending much that was mundane a dream-like quality. Willow struggling against her stepmother’s servant. Nocks making good on those sordid threats he’d taken such pleasure in whispering to Carter during his beating. Then Willow being dragged down a cathedral aisle, screaming for help as hundreds of nobles cheered and applauded. Just fever dreams from the darkness. Please. The medicine which Tom helped Carter sup when he was awake didn’t help, a brown glass bottle without a label, but surely laced with opiates. The saints know, he needed it when that clear spirit was poured across his wounds, like acid against his flesh. Hopefully like fire against gangrene, too. His medicine stole the pain across his spine but replaced it with hot hallucinations that had to be sweated away. Carter dimly recalled swaying on his horse while he and his father said goodbye to Kerge and Sheplar Lesh before they rattled away in their wagon towards the mountains. That must have been real, surely? Lady Cassandra Skar’s choice, colourful curses before she’d been gagged and covered weren’t something Carter’s mind could have reasonably been expected to conjure.
He remembered a boat ride down the river towards the coast. But this wasn’t a riverboat now, surely? You didn’t experience swells like this on the White Wolf River, nor the taste of salt. The truth of his location was only settled when Tom Purdell came to Carter’s cabin and helped him out of his hammock, feeling the wet canvas as he helped lift Carter to the floor.
‘Salt damp,’ said Tom. ‘Good for your wounds. You’re healing well.’
‘Damned if I feel like it,’ coughed Carter. ‘Have we arrived?’
‘Maybe. But nowhere we need to be,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve been travelling west, towards the Burn.’
‘Willow’s been taken south.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ Tom explained how their aerial passage to Arcadia had been stymied by Benner Landor’s machinations. Carter tried to take the news in his stride, but it was harder than ignoring the agony clinging to his back. Every hour that passed was another hour nearer to losing Willow for ever. ‘Your father’s acting as though he knows what he’s doing, but I’m fast coming to the conclusion he’s a little bit cracked. He got me to send a radio message to a shipping office in the Rotnest Islands for him. Now he’s asked for you up on deck. I reckon we’re due to rendezvous with a clipper, because this old tub doesn’t have the range to travel much further.’ Tom shoved the unlocked door open with a boot and Carter saw what the courier meant, drizzle whipping in his face. They had emerged onto the ship’s slippery deck. The vessel was a three-masted schooner and a line of burly men and women worked along the length of the main deck under furled sails. Beyond the ship the horizon stretched green and infinite with oarweed, a massive floating forest of it. Each of the sailors worked a long hooked staff, pulling the green vegetation on board where children and kelpers so old they should have been retired heaved it into wooden tubs. Dried and rolled, the oarweed made ready-seasoned noodles: a staple diet along the coastal towns. It could also be fermented into a raw, salty alcohol
. Carter twisted his aching neck around. No sign of land, but he spotted his father talking to a sailor on the quarterdeck. He shivered. It was every bit as cold here as it was on land, raining to boot, and he wasn’t wearing a sailor’s oiled leather raincoat.
‘What did the radio message to the islands say?’ asked Carter.
‘It didn’t make too much sense,’ said Tom. ‘It was about selling a couple of tonnes of kelp in port and the cargo’s purity after it was fermented for sea-grape rum.’
‘A code, then?’
‘That’s what I figured. All kelpers are smugglers on the side, aren’t they?’
Carter grunted. So it’s said. He grimaced in pain. His back crackled like dry leather every time his feet shifted across the deck’s damp planking.
‘Your face looks like Master Lettore’s after I told him I was travelling south with you.’
‘That I would have paid good money to see.’
‘He came around,’ said Tom. ‘Reckon he’s getting used to seeing you far-called. And two brothers can travel more securely than one.’
Jacob Carnehan climbed down to where Carter and Tom waited. ‘Good to see you up on your feet, Carter.’
Carter nodded towards the ocean. ‘If we can’t fly to the capital, how is it we’re not taking a train?’
‘Officially we are,’ smiled Jacob. ‘I booked tickets south with the Guild of Rails. The station master told me that an hour after I paid for passage, a whole gang of strangers showed up demanding tickets for the same train.’
‘The king’s assassins?’
‘His silver in their pockets, at any rate,’ said Jacob. ‘Hopefully they’re on the train now, wondering why we never emerge from our locked cabin. I paid the train guards to deliver meals to our empty berth and a little extra to scoff the food down themselves.’
Carter sat down on a grating. Emerging from his hammock had left him exhausted. ‘And you trust this crew?’
‘This isn’t a crew, it’s a clan. One of the families which supplies my old monastery in Rodal. These good folk are as tight as a deep-reef clam.’
‘A “family” that doesn’t just use the mountain coves to land kelp?’ said Tom.
Jacob shrugged. ‘My old monastery at Geru Peak is the church’s last outpost in the north, not a branch of the revenue service. I reckon you can say we’re both fairly good at turning a blind eye.’ He pointed to the air. ‘And that, Mister Purdell, can be a mighty useful talent.’
An antiquated flying boat appeared out of the grey clouds, almost a galleon with wings, four large propellers droning above the fuselage, wing-tip floats on either side which wobbled as the aircraft circled, before skipping down across the waves. This aircraft flew no flag or national colours, but it clearly didn’t belong to the Rodalian skyguard or Weyland’s new air fleet. As soon as the ungainly flying boat landed, the kelpers launched a series of long boats from their schooner, rowing out for the plane, drums of kelp-derived ethanol in their keels that were carefully winched through a cargo hatch opened along the plane’s fuselage.
‘More smugglers?’ observed Tom. ‘Does that antique even have the range to reach the shore?’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Jacob. ‘And sharpish. There’s a storm brewing, I can taste it in the air.’
‘I’m not sure you’d ever make much of a guild courier,’ said Tom. ‘Your ideas of transportation …’
Jacob gave a taciturn smile. ‘You might be right, Mister Purdell. And our journey’s hardly even started yet.’
Carter’s father and his guild friend helped him climb down into one of the longboats, the wind and rain picking up as they approached the plane across the water. As weak as a kitten, Carter ignored his nausea as the boat crawled towards the sea plane. Tom hurled a rope to a man standing in an open freight hatch in the fuselage, their boat’s six oarsmen drawing the line as tight as possible to make the perilous crossing between pitching longboat and aircraft possible. His father and Tom crossed first, and then he leapt for the plane. Carter felt as a light as a feather as he flopped into his father’s hands inside the flying boat.
Jacob rested his son on a crate inside the hold, airmen tying wooden fuel barrels down for take-off. The crew – two men and a woman – wore no uniform, just a patched collection of fur-trimmed leather air jackets that had seen better days.
‘You know who we are?’ asked Jacob Carnehan.
‘We’ve been told,’ said one of the airmen, looking at Carter. ‘Is that one going to live?’
‘I’ll survive,’ wheezed Carter.
‘We’ll roll you out if you don’t. No dead weight in the air.’ The airman chuckled at his own observation before the three fliers exited the hold.
‘They’re real charmers,’ said Tom. He turned around and gazed out through a porthole in the fuselage, waves lapping angrily against the glass, their flying boat rocking against the breakers.
‘These people believe your spirit flies free in the air after you’ve passed,’ said the pastor. ‘Your flesh is just so much worthless freight.’
‘Must make for cheap funerals,’ said Tom.
Carter was fading as they waited for the cargo hold to fill up with fuel barrels; then the flying boat started to pick up speed, crashing against the waves and jolting Carter back into consciousness. He could hear their engines struggling against the dead weight of the transport plane. She had taken on enough ethanol that she could probably make the journey to Arcadia without touching down to refuel once.
‘You need to rest,’ said his father.
‘Every time I go to sleep, I see Willow. Not dreams, more like visions. Evil visions.’
‘I thought that old sorcerer Sariel had drained your mind of those.’
‘So had I,’ whispered Carter.
‘Try and rest. We’ll get your girl back. Benner Landor might have a head start on us, but there are trade winds high above the centre of Lancean Ocean, fierce and fast. Merchants call them the Spear. That’s what we’ll be riding south. A spear.’
The cargo hold spun dizzyingly around Carter’s head, fears his only anchor. ‘What if we’re too late? I can’t face the rest of my years without her.’
‘One way or another,’ promised his father, ‘we’ll make this right.’
Grey clouds disappeared, leaving streaks of water across the porthole, sunshine visible, glinting on the haze below like another sea. Gravity’s hold lightened as the flying boat climbed, the engines’ roar dimming as their workload eased. So light. It grimly put Carter in mind of his time on the sky mines. No good memories, there, apart from finding Willow.
‘Sweet saints!’ shouted Tom.
Carter tried to focus through the porthole to see why Tom had suddenly gripped the fuselage so tight his knuckles were turning white, angling his head for a clear view outside. Then Carter saw it – a city-sized carrier in the air above them, four fat stacked wings coming out of the sun, rated at least six-hundred rotors large, squadrons of smaller aircraft circling her like flies on a turd. She sported a blue and white camouflage pattern on her ground-facing fuselage, while painted as dark as night on everything above the keel. All apart from the tail, where a severe white skull and crossbones scowled out of black. There was only one free carrier that matched this sight, and it was a description written in blood across a hundred lurid newspaper reports of shipping raids on the open ocean. The Plunderbird. Commanded by the scourge of the Lanca – the vile pirating butcher known as Black Barnaby. It suddenly dawned on Carter why so few aerial merchants braved these fast, fierce trade winds, the answer bearing down on them as inexorably as God’s own judgement. Then the black of the approaching carrier expanded across his sight as fever plunged him back into darkness.
Willow glared at Nocks and Leyla Holten from the opposite side of the coach compartment as they rattled along the road. Even with the window blinds down, Willow could tell from the coach’s speed and lack of noise outside that they had left the crowded streets of the capital behind about half an hou
r ago, just the calls of the coachmen outside as he drove his train of eight horses on. It was a good thing Nocks had bound her hands behind her back with rope, or she would have stuck him with the sharp carving knife she had slipped unseen from the dining room and hidden under her dress. After days drugged out of her mind, eating the saints knows what if anything, she had fallen on the small feast they had allowed her in Arcadia like a starving pauper. Now she was suffering the after-effects, unsteady from both the sedatives and dropping half a table’s worth of nourishment into her empty stomach.
‘Where are we going?’ demanded Willow.
Holten sighed and looked at her manservant. Nocks leaned across and slapped Willow hard across the face. ‘Where are we going, mistress.’
‘Where are we going?’
Nocks went to slap her again, but Holten raised her hand, wearily, and her lapdog stopped short of a second strike. ‘Let’s not mark her too much. We need her looking half-respectable.’
‘For what?’ demanded Willow. ‘You can’t keep me captive like this. I’ve reached my majority, you have no right!’
‘She’s a right little barracks-room lawyer,’ grinned Nocks.
‘You were kept as a slave before, my dear. What right did your captors have? Only the right of those in authority to do what is necessary.’
‘My father will have you whipped for your effrontery.’
‘We’re doing this with my husband’s blessing,’ said Holten. ‘This, my dear, is your introduction to high society in the capital. Do try to keep your whining mouth shut and mind your manners. I want you to create a good first impression.’
‘You do? Then stay behind in the carriage.’