by Stephen Hunt
‘Was it not your dreaming that led us to the caravan halt?’ said Alexamir. ‘I followed the wagon, and it was exactly as you dreamt. An aviator of the skyguard and a forest man transporting a beautiful female prisoner. She is a fine little thing. Like a golden furred fox, ferocious and sleek.’
‘Try to drag me to your bed and I will snap your neck,’ swore Cassandra,
‘See,’ laughed Alexamir, winking down at his prisoner. ‘What could be better than her, Nurai?’
‘You carry back a foreign sow, a couple of horses and a single yak, and you count your trial complete? That is still a boy talking!’
‘I cut the wagon’s horses out and left her Rodalian guards snoring inside alive to spread word of Alexamir’s mischief and reputation. The skyguard’s prize is now my prisoner. We will eat yak meat until we return home. And my little golden fox will give me many sons. Your dreaming has proven true and you will surely be anointed as the High Witch Rider when old Madinsar passes. Is this not the perfect little journey into the mountains for us?’
‘I have dreamt false,’ said Nurai, scowling at Cassandra. ‘She will bring us nothing but trouble and death.’
‘Have you dream-walked this?’
‘No, but I can feel it by the power of the land. The bad omens that circle her sing in my very bones.’
‘Ha, it is the power of aged yak liver talking,’ said Alexamir. He crossed his massive arms and did a wild kicking dance, cheered on by the other brutes along for the raid. ‘By Joni, perhaps I should have cooked one of the foreign horses instead. The scald-crows wouldn’t carry word to the Goddess of the Night: she must forgive a great many offences in an unholy land like Rodal. I have a wife! The goddess loves a lucky rogue!’
Cassandra suspected it was the power of jealousy talking as far as Nurai was concerned. And the witch rider could keep her capering barbarian horseman and breed as many blue-skinned brats as her womb could stand before it broke. Cassandra would be having none of it. It seemed that trading Kerge and Sheplar Lesh for these brutal savages was a bargain badly made. Nurai obviously felt the same. The witch rider glared in hatred at Cassandra and fingered the handle of a curved knife hanging at her side. Her notched blade looked as if it had seen more use than just slicing herbs and berries for these barbarians’ ceremonies.
Carter stood alongside his father and Tom Purdell in a witness box inside the People’s Assembly of Weyland. A group of people called to testify earlier filed out past the three newcomers, most of them elderly ex-palace servants who had served Prince Owen and his brothers. The assembly sat perched on top of a hill in Arcadia, the largest domed structure in the country, so it was said. Inside the chamber’s vast circular space, the voices of hundreds of assemblymen rose past multiple galleries and levels held up by cast-iron columns and hung with crimson and gold drapery. The space was as bright as day inside, the large central skylight in the dome above encircled by twelve smaller circular skylights, their illumination augmented by dozens of gas-fed brass chandeliers.
Carter was still fuming at being held in police cells overnight, marched here in the early afternoon like a common criminal called to the dock. He waited wearily. Carter had hardly slept all night, tossing and turning in the hard cot, trying to banish the sight of Willow’s stupefied, drugged face; the anguish written across her features as she was dragged into the hotel and the brutal ‘care’ of her aristocratic new husband. Carter had tried to tell himself that there was nothing he could do. That even if the police hadn’t turned up to take him into custody, he would have been hard pressed to face down the company of royal guardsmen and Benner Landor’s servants protecting the banquet. And the staff of Willow’s new husband. Even the thought of the word made him sick.
‘We should hold our damn peace,’ said Carter, looking out across the amphitheatre-like arrangement of seats, all fully occupied for the nation-shaping vote. ‘Refuse to speak here. Prince Owen had no right to have us dragged into custody.’
‘The boy’s desperate,’ said Jacob Carnehan. ‘The vote is resting on a knife-edge and he needs the assembly’s support if he’s going to have his uncle removed from the throne.’
‘That’s no excuse,’ said Carter.
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘You need to speak here if you are called as a witness,’ urged Tom. ‘You must. Remember what Prince Owen said. When he’s king, he’ll help save Willow. If Benner Landor and Viscount Wallingbeck want any sort of preferment under Owen’s reign, they’ll bend to his will or suffer the consequences.’
Carter knew the guild courier was right. But damn it all, he just wanted to do something – anything. To shout and rail against the heavens for this unkind fate. All Carter needed was to have Willow with him, the two of them left alone, finally free. But now there were chains weighing down on them that were never forged in Vandia’s mines. The name and title of a Landor. A great house’s expectations. A marriage without consent. Right now, Carter felt like a leaf, powerless and unable to influence events. Blown compassless in the winds of war and helplessly caught up in the fierce political machinations of a man who would be king and his rival who would stay one.
A rumbling undercurrent of conversation rose and then fell as the speaker of the assembly stepped up from his podium at the front of the chamber. Unlike the neighbouring mahogany desks, the speaker’s platform had a fabric cover, and two Weyland flags on golden staffs crossed behind the awning – each a field of royal red behind a blue cross filled with the prefectures’ white stars, a silver crown and pelican in the flag’s upper corner next to the staff.
‘We have heard this day the testimony of many servants from the royal household, both current and retired, testifying that the man who calls himself Owen Hawkins is the true son of the old king. We now call Father Jacob Carnehan of Northhaven to give evidence in the matter of the succession and claims of precedence to the throne,’ intoned the speaker.
Carter watched his father advance to the wooden rails at the front of the stand and take the oath over a weighty leather tome. There was a similar stand opposite on the other side of the chamber, presently empty.
‘Augustus Sparrow shall question the witness first, for the Gaiaist Party,’ announced the speaker. ‘In favour of the claim of precedence made by Owen Hawkins.’
The assemblyman who stepped before the house had a long, gaunt face, a tall starched shirt collar covering his neck, dark receding hair curling around the back of his skull, leaving a high domed forehead shining in the light from the cupola above. Watching him walk forward through the graduated semi-circular platforms filled with politicians was like watching a strange bird strut around the grass, pecking. ‘You, Father, were a member of the expedition who pursued the skel slavers that raided Northhaven, seeking to liberate the Weylanders captured during that foul incursion?’
‘I was,’ said Jacob.
‘Tell us about the expedition’s route and the manner of your pursuit. Including where your hunt ended.’
Carter listened to his father’s long story. It was a tale familiar to Carter from many tellings back home, but the pastor glossed over many of the more outrageous elements and truths, while sparing nothing about the brutal conditions the rescuers had discovered in the Vandian imperium at journey’s end. They were conditions that Carter remembered all too well. He, Willow and a few others had suffered and finally survived them. Many of his friends had not.
‘And it was in Vandia that you liberated the slave we now know as Prince Owen Hawkins, returning with him to Weyland?’
The pastor grimly nodded his head. ‘Along with survivors from Northhaven and other towns and prefectures raided by the skels.’
‘Do you have evidence pertaining to Owen Hawkins’ claim of royal title or true identity?’
‘I cannot speak directly to that,’ said Jacob. ‘I lived in Northhaven and prior to the raid, my previous dealings with the royal family were wholly limited to newspaper reports and the features of monarchs past and present on coins
and bank notes. But I can tell you this from my time fighting alongside Owen. He is a good and true man, better, perhaps, than the evil times we find ourselves in. I believe he is Prince Owen Hawkins, son of the old king and our nation’s rightful monarch.’
There was a murmur of approval from the Gaiaist side of the house, a few hisses of disapproval from the massed ranks of the Mechanicalist party. Next, Carter found himself called to take the oath by the speaker, and questioned as witness by the assemblyman. Carter told the council about his time working in the mines and the terrible conditions he and the other Weylanders had struggled to survive under. And he talked of the clandestine circle of slaves who knew of Prince Owen Hawkins’ real identity, acting as his protectors in the sky mines, keeping safe the secret of his name and title from their Vandian captors, who would have surely executed him for it. Finally, Carter told to the assembly how he had heard that the other two princes taken as slaves, Owen’s brothers, had died in captivity before the slaves from Northhaven had arrived.
The speaker stepped forward again. ‘I now call Herschel Pharlann for the Mechanicalists to examine your evidence, their party declared in favour of King Marcus’s claim.’
An assemblyman rose from his party’s mahogany benches, of late years, dark hair, smooth almost oily skin, with shoulders so broad he could have sat a child on either one of them. ‘I will address the testimony of Father Carnehan first. I find many inconsistencies in your testimony, Father,’ drawled Pharlann. There was a self-satisfied tone to his examination that immediately irritated Carter. As though everyone should stop what they were doing and pay the closest attention to his deep well of wisdom. ‘Chief among them the nature of the buyers of those poor unfortunate Weylanders forced into slavery. Our country still suffers from periodic slaver incursions by sea and air, despite the league’s stance in stamping out this foul practice and the best efforts of our royal navy. Most Weylanders taken as captives end up transported west and thrown into battle as slave soldiers for the many pocket kingdoms of the Burn, is this not so?’
‘Not in this raid.’
‘So we are to believe that you led your pursuit to the south, against all logic, travelled further and faster than can be easily explained in such a miraculously short time, and amazingly found the near-mythical end of the caravan route where a mighty empire prospers on the back of human suffering?’
‘I’m standing here, alive, to give voice to the truth of it,’ said Jacob. ‘As are hundreds of freed slaves. Not just those taken from Northhaven, but men and women seized in earlier skel attacks.’
‘As you say,’ noted Pharlann. ‘And I haven’t been to Northhaven to examine first-hand the testimony of those supposedly rescued by your expedition, so I shall need to call one who has to the stand … Prefect Colbert of the upper house.’
Assemblyman Sparrow leapt to his feet. ‘I protest! We have not allowed King Marcus or Prince Owen onto the floor today to sway the vote, for neither king nor prince must play any part in parliament that is not defined by the royal binding. The appointees of the king’s council have no voice here. We are a free assembly elected by free Weylanders.’
‘The prefect is another witness, no more,’ said Pharlann. ‘Are our liberties so precious that they are threatened by the words of a single man?’
‘Admit the prefect and his delegation,’ ordered the speaker, sternly. ‘A prefect is as much a subject, humble under our nation’s laws, as the grooms, wet-nurses and country pastors we have heard testify here today; let the prefect speak to this issue as both a man and a Weylander.’
Hugh Colbert appeared at the witness stand on the opposite side of the chamber, clutching the wooden rails as tall and haughty as a captain at the prow of his vessel. The prefect spoke the oath over the tome of limitations of royal power before he submitted to Assemblyman Pharlann’s questioning. So, this was the man Carter’s father had met at home. It was a wonder he didn’t choke on his words.
‘You have returned this month from Northhaven, prefect?’
‘I did, sir, I did.’
‘And the purpose of your visit?’
‘To investigate the matter of the returned slave who calls himself Owen Hawkins, a man who claims to be the only surviving issue of King Jevan and thereby the rightful heir to the throne of Weyland.’
‘And did you reach any conclusion from your researches across the north as to the veracity of that man’s disputed identity.’
‘One: That he is indeed the only surviving child of Jevan Hawkins, our previous king.’
There were gasps of astonishment around the chamber, shouts of anger and catcalls tossed between the rival parties, but none was so shaken by the shocking admission than Carter. Can it be so easy? Prince Owen handed the crown, able to keep his word to Carter and free Willow from her cursed marriage; proud, querulous Benner Landor and his spiteful new wife forced to submit to royal authority. King Marcus tossed off the throne and unable to pursue his revenge against Carter and his father? Let it be so, saints let it be so.
The speaker had to smash his gravel into the mahogany surface in front of him to restore quiet back to the chamber. ‘Order in the assembly! Order I say!’
‘And what led you to this rather surprising conclusion, prefect?’ continued Pharlann as some measure of quiet returned.
‘I must beg the assembly’s indulgence to tell a wider tale. What I uncovered through the testimony of the poor devils returned from captivity is, I believe, no less than a conspiracy against every Weylander in the nation.’
At this, the chamber broke out in uproar, only quelled by the speaker’s mad hammering against his desk.
‘Continue, please, Prefect Colbert.’
‘Through careful interviewing of the escaped slaves, it became evident that what I was investigating was far more than the random raids of skel brigands. Those here today must prepare themselves to hear a most monstrous truth.’
‘Speak, Prefect, speak …’
‘It was not the skels alone who sold our poor people across the ocean to the warlords of the Burn. There were also many traitors from Weyland acting as agents of this foul slavery, profiting by it. Chief among them, Prince Owen Hawkins!’
‘Lies!’ yelled Carter, shaking his fist at the prefect’s stand. ‘We were never taken to the Burn.’
‘Witnesses called here for the Gaiaist Party will be silent!’ shouted the speaker, his breath growing short with irritation.
Prefect Colbert held his hands out beseechingly to the gathered assemblymen. ‘This whole monstrous scheme was set up by the previous king in return for generous payments from the slavers into his private account. When Marcus Hawkins – then one of our leading merchants – heard some outlandish rumours he investigated and discovered the evil truth. His own brother was auctioning off our people. Marcus naturally did not want to believe it and confronted the old king with his evidence but, forewarned, the majority of the conspirators escaped justice by fleeing into exile across the ocean, where they have been directing subsequent raids against our shores in revenge for being unseated from the throne. King Jevan chose to take his own life by suicide rather than flee, but the conspirators ensured his three sons were smuggled across the water to continue their father’s foul trade as slaver lords.’
‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered the speaker. ‘Why has the assembly not been informed of these facts before?’
‘King Marcus did not wish these revelations to undermine his efforts to bolster our defences against the skels and the nation’s traitors. Would King Marcus have been able to push through the skyguard’s formation to keep our acres safe from the skels’ predations with this deplorable scandal still echoing loudly through our land? In addition, our new ruler had to proceed warily. Who could King Marcus trust? The court and government was riddled with traitors complicit in the slavery ring.’
‘We never voyaged across the Lancean Ocean!’ called Jacob Carnehan, his voice boomed across the chamber. ‘We travelled south to Vandia! That’s
where the slaves were taken.’
‘No more than a clever half-truth,’ laughed the prefect. ‘There is indeed a powerful empire in the distant south called the Vandian Imperium. It is where the skel brigands’ homeland used to be, and the empire suffers more revenge slave attacks for chasing the skels into the air than any nation in the world. That is the price of their people’s defiance. The Vandians are why Prince Owen now has the barefaced cheek to stride the capital’s streets whining about his lost crown. Vandia dispatched an expeditionary force to the Burn to recover thousands of their citizens seized in skel slave raids. It was Vandia’s military power that freed our people, not some insignificant rescue party from Northhaven. Prince Owen and his skel-loving nest of traitors-in-exile were smashed by Vandia’s legions, forced to sail back to their old homeland. This black-hearted prince has cruelly been claiming to have been one of the very unfortunates he preyed on.’
‘None of that’s true, it’s all lies!’ yelled Carter. ‘I was there. I was one of the slaves snatched from Northhaven!’
‘Those poor unfortunates enslaved,’ continued the prefect, ‘did not know where they were held or taken. They had no compasses, no charts; they were locked up for months in cages inside a skel carrier. Slaves see only their chains and the degrading, murderous work they are forced to undertake under the whip. If the warlords of the Burn told any of our people they were held in some far-called land, it was merely an easy lie to deter them from escaping.’
‘You dare speak of working under the whip,’ called Assemblyman Sparrow, trying to break the spell the prefect’s words had cast over the people’s council. ‘You whose friends are sweeping the hungry and unemployed up from the streets and into their mills; forcing Weylanders to work as indentured labour? It is your class that should be charged with slavery, every bit as severely as our forces interdict the skels.’