by Stephen Hunt
‘Have no fear, you’ll reach the north long before the pastor and his vagabond friend,’ said the monarch. King Marcus appeared satisfied with the arrangements. ‘Carnehan cannot return by air. Thanks to your timely identification of the smugglers who trafficked you inside the capital, every contrabandist in Arcadia working with Black Barnaby is dangling from the end of a gallows. With the skyguard patrolling the ocean for the Plunderbird, there will be no quick and easy passage to the north for Father Carnehan and his mysterious tramp. Stay focused on your task after reaching Midsburg. I trust you will prove more adept at poisoning my nephew than the fool on the field marshal’s staff you paid to carry out the task.’
‘There are other ways than poison for your nephew to die,’ said Tom, tasting the doctor’s blood on his blade, before bending down to wipe it off on the Vandian’s corpse. Vandian blood tasted identical to Weyland blood to him; just like everyone he had murdered for king and country. ‘And I will be there to aid Owen’s cowardly exit from the hardships of the war.’
‘Excellent,’ said King Marcus. ‘Make it appear a suicide and I shall leave the fine details to you, Captain. I require the rebellion’s morale to be utterly broken by Prince Owen’s betrayal of their cause. The rebels are too well dispersed across the north and the east. We may rely on the Vandians to smash the bulk of the uprising at Midsburg but, in the long term, the imperium is nobody’s lapdog. Once the Vandians have recaptured their slaves, taken their revenge and extracted a heavy blood-toll, the empire will depart. The ruins will be left for me to rule over with little care as to how difficult the destruction may prove to govern.’
‘Let the Vandians sack Northhaven,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve been there. Nobody will miss it. Nor Rodal or the great forests … Nothing there but foreign mountain tribes and twisted gask-kind living as low as squirrels in the trees.’
‘You’re a pragmatic man, Captain,’ the king smiled. ‘You could always return to torturing enemies of the state; after the rebellion is over, there will be a surfeit of examples needed to be made. But I sense the butcher’s table would be a waste of your skills. I shall have to locate a duty worthy of your talents when these troubles have been quelled.’
Captain Purdell considered his answer. Taking a hot questioning blade to traitors was excellent sport and he had shown a high aptitude for such duties. He joined with his victims; became whole through them in a way he could never recapture after their suffering ended. However, infiltrating the guild had revealed a different side of the service’s work. Burying himself in a role and winning others’ trust, before arranging the dissidents’ disappearance. That yielded a different sort of sweetness. The look on his victims’ faces as they realized he’d betrayed them was something to treasure and keep him warm on long cold nights. But this last mission had been a long posting, slow, with limited opportunities to torment turncoats. And his current role as a rebel convict held even less appeal. ‘I will go where I am needed, Your Majesty. But if I never have to spend months inside a deep dusty guild hold again, I will count myself a happy man …’
‘Easily granted,’ said the king. ‘The long guilds will be an irrelevance in my new order, as immaterial to us as they are to Vandia; while the small guilds have sided with the prince and will be repaid with dissolution. There will be a fortune in confiscated property and titles available after the rebellion has been put down. None who have proven their loyalty to me will have cause to be disappointed, Captain.’
Now, there was news to warm his heart. Like the pretender Thomas was being dispatched to assassinate, Captain Purdell was an ambitious man, and this rebellion was full of opportunities to be seized. ‘I have never killed a prince before.’
‘I once believed I had successfully disposed of three of the pests. On reflection, it seems that I missed one. How careless of me.’
But Thomas Purdell would not miss. The failure of the king’s previous assassins would be the captain’s greatest chance. It was good to enjoy your work; to reach the top in your chosen profession. How much better if you grew filthy rich through murder, too?
TEN
UNDER A RODALIAN SKY
Cassandra turned, still half-mounted against the side of her aircraft as three Rodalian ground crew sprinted forward, armed with hand-tools, shouting above the racket of the fire bells at her and Alexamir to stand down, and then the men were upon the them. Two wrestled furiously with the nomad, ripping at his false priest’s robes, while the third, a serious-faced young engineer in stiff grease-stained overalls, rushed at Cassandra, attempting to brain her with an iron mallet. Her foot lashed out, catching him on the nose with a crunch as she drove the bone back and the man twisted down unconscious. When he came to, he’d feel the shattered bone and wish he’d stuck to fixing aircraft engines or whatever task had been interrupted by the alarm. Cassandra’s hand snaked down to the dagger Alexamir had offered as a token of his faith, about to toss it in his direction, but the nomad was deploying his muscular physique to good effect. His boot lashed into the larger of his assailants, winding him, before the nomad seized the second man and twisted him about in the air, driving the Rodalian’s head into the engine block at the back of the aircraft. The Rodalian jounced against the flying wing with a fearsome crack and joined Cassandra’s victim on the floor, insensible. The last of the ground crew recovered enough to swing a large metal spanner towards Alexamir’s skull, but the nomad swayed back, caught the tool and the man’s hands both, and then spun him like a child, tossing him high into the nearest wall. By the time the Rodalian crashed into a tool cabinet and tumbled off towards the turntable, he was well removed from the field of battle.
‘Those rice eaters will have a fine tale to tell their friends,’ Alexamir laughed as he approached the aircraft, ‘of how they were fed their hangar’s stone floor for daring to wrestle a hearty Nijumet thief.’
Cassandra vaulted into the cockpit, desperate to start the engine before better armed sentries showed up. ‘Get to the back and turn the propeller for me when I shout “contact”. Then make sure you’re standing well back, or you’ll be filleted by the blade.’
She pumped the fuel, engaged the ignition and sounded the cry, hearing Alexamir’s grunt as he spun the rear-mounted rotor and the engine growled into life. ‘Mount up! It’s bad luck to fly in a plane with no name, so I’m calling our bird the Lightning Gull.’ That was the emperor’s private flagship, and while Cassandra’s kite was a splinter of wood in comparison to such a leviathan of the skies, maybe some of her grandfather’s luck would rub off with the name.
Cassandra felt the shift in weight as the nomad dropped his heavy bulk into the rear cockpit. She released the plane towards the launch tunnel and checked behind to make sure they were escaping unaccompanied by their hosts, noting that Alexamir was wearing his wooden wind mask again. Not a bad idea. She tugged on the aviator’s cap and secured its goggles over her eyes. Cassandra nosed the jouncing aircraft through the twists and turns intended to cheat the gales of their power inside the dug-in airfield, familiarizing herself with the controls as they went, getting a feel for the responsiveness of the stick and bird both. Compass, altimeter, air speed, engine gauge, tachometer, climb-type and bank-and-turn instruments, everything she would need up in the air. Despite the familiarity of the dials, she quickly realized that flying a skyguard aircraft was to pilot a work of art, untouched by the empire’s impersonal mills and manufactories. The Gull’s dial glasses were hand-cut gems, the wood carved and polished by temple priests, and its fuselage’s canvas fabric had been covered with the elaborate calligraphy of dozens of prayers. The stolen kite was primitive in more ways than she could count. An elegantly curved dark-mahogany propeller rather than two symmetrical straight steel blades; a piston engine rather than an air-breathing rocket engine; the nose-mounted cannon’s trigger not set on the stick, but mounted as a separate wooden grip below the dials. No radio set, either. Instead, a set of chopstick-sized signal flags resting in clips to her left, no doubt backed up by
a complex battle code to communicate with fellow pilots in the air or their ground forces. Simply built means simple to fly. Come on, Lightning Gull, take wing and see me safe from my captors.
‘Command your pigeon to fly steadier,’ moaned Alexamir from behind her.
‘This isn’t flying; it’s taxiing for take-off.’ As she spoke, the maze gave way to a long straight launch tunnel with an oblong of light at its end, easily long enough to leave the mountain town with the fifty-five knots they’d need to start the climb. She felt the warmth of the oak engine throttle lever in her fingers and gunned the Lightning Gull towards the light, the tunnel widening before her as the piston engine’s idling hum rose into a full-throated roar. Cassandra approached the light and realized the tunnel’s ceiling sloped higher to accommodate the Lightning Gull’s final lift, so she raised the plane’s nose a few degrees, feeling the lift swell beneath their triangular wing, and then they broke into the cold, open air, and she immediately found herself straining against the insane pull and throw of the angry winds, ripping them left and right while Talatala’s dark heights shrank behind them. Cassandra’s arms already ached from clutching the stick, climbing for the mad fury of the trade wind marked on the charts. Gain it, and they would be riding an arrow shot straight against the north. Miss it and they’d be quickly cornered by the local skyguard squadron. She climbed to the sound of Alexamir’s wild swearing, his words muffled by mask and gales both. Promises to his pantheon of savage gods that he would make offerings every day if only he returned to the ground alive. All you have to do is gain altitude. Not scout the territory below. If that clown Sheplar Lesh can fly one of these kites nap-of-the-earth, then at the very least you can pilot it above the worst of the weather.
Her teeth rattled in her head, but the erratic turbulence began to diminish with every extra minute they climbed, the rudder pedals’ violent jerks against her boots growing gentler too. The weight on her body gradually eased as gravity’s hold grew lighter and lighter. It became warmer too, even in winter’s night, the heat of the radiation belt girdling Pellas replacing the sleeping sun. Cassandra mumbled a blessing to her ancestors that she wasn’t required to swoop low over Rodal, but she recognized there was little heathen magic to mastering these winds. If I had grown up flying in such atrocious conditions, I’d be an ace of the gales down below too. Pretty soon her breathing began to run shallow and laboured. Cassandra’s fingers quested under the wooden seat until she found a leather air mask with fur-lined ear covers, dangling tubes trailing away to a concealed oxygen tank. Cassandra brought the mask up and pulled the mouthpiece over her face, then turned to Alexamir and was surprised to see he’d spotted what she was doing and had copied her motions, swapping his climber’s mask for the plane’s breathing apparatus. He might be a boastful horse-stealing barbarian, but I shouldn’t underestimate him. Alexamir’s mumbling profanities sounded rudely against her ears, and she realized one of the mask’s tubes must be a primitive communication conduit between pilot and spotter.
Cassandra tapped the compass, fixing their direction. ‘I told you I could fly this kite.’
‘You spoke true, golden fox. But it is not such an extraordinary feat.’
Was that a nomad’s insolence, or just masculine wounded pride? ‘I’d like to see you try!’
‘My uncle owned a pterippus,’ said Alexamir, his words uncharacteristically wistful. ‘One of the magnificent winged horses of Persdad Beyond the Plains, a great and rare prize. It was an ancient stallion, but before it passed, my uncle let me ride it. That was an excellent way to take to the air. Not like this dead rattling wooden pigeon.’
‘You have yet to see one of my empire’s aerial warships,’ said Cassandra.
‘Hah, the Persdadians style their chief an emperor too, but his imperial scouts’ stables can still be raided for their expensive winged steeds. And the shadows of many of the great traders of the air pass over our grasslands, but they trouble us not.’
‘I don’t suppose they need to trade for grass,’ said Cassandra. ‘It grows free throughout Pellas.’
‘You may mock,’ said Alexamir, ‘but you will see, golden fox. I will show you the glory of the plains and what it means to be free. To own the land and never have the land own you. To wake up and follow the sun and the breeze with your family and clan by your side. We suffer no chains and pay no taxes and owe no homage to any chief we have not chosen.’
Cassandra glanced down and snorted. She saw the reflection of the moon on bodies of water stretched between the snow-topped mountains, pale against the darkness of the valleys and lower peaks, thin white blankets of cloud obscuring large tracts of Rodal. She glanced up to take a direction from the starry sky’s constellations and inspected her altimeter. If those charts had been marked accurately, they would be entering the northerly trade wind soon, and she would see how her little Lightning Gull stood up against the fierce Bdur’rkhangmar. You’ve no choice here. As soon as Sheplar and Kerge realize you’ve escaped, the gask will be on your trail like the twisted bloodhound he is, with half the skyguard in train. You’ve got a single tank of fuel and this six-hundred-mile-an-hour tailwind is your sole chance of putting Rodal far behind you. Cassandra would need to carefully navigate the turbulence gradient when entering the current, for if her entry proved too abrupt, she’d see the fine craftsmanship of the Lightning Gull ripped into a stream of gale-torn splinters and fabric. If there was any silver lining to such a cloud, it was that she and Alexamir would be buffeted into oxygen-starved unconsciousness long before their final impact against a mountainside ended this journey.
‘Pray that we don’t meet the glory of your plains nose-first,’ said Cassandra. The flying wing had begun to shake, the fuselage palpitating as though alive. ‘Hold on.’
Cassandra felt the force of the air currents lifting stronger against her elevator flaps and rudder, and suddenly she realized why the Rodalians crafted their kites as a triangular flying wing, fuselage and wing fused as the same beast. The force of shear against the ailerons would rip a pair of wings straight off! And their propeller was rear-mounted for the same reason. She imagined watching her twisting prop torn off and drifting away inside the intense trade wind, then blinked the defeatist vision out of her mind as she struggled against the stick and controls, attempting to angle the Lightning Gull safely into the force of the current. Whipping winds roared intermittently, the hump of raised fuselage behind Cassandra’s head directing airflow away from her in turns as their angle of ascent shifted, the best she could hope for, given an enclosed cockpit would have been ripped from any kite entering this maelstrom. Not so savage after all, the Rodalians. Clever. Damn clever. Everything about her little bird was designed to help it survive these dreadful conditions. Cassandra altered the angle of ascent, using the noise generated by the curve of fuselage behind her head as her guide. Quiet, good. Roaring, dangerous. Keep the roar to a minimum and follow the passage into the Bdur’rkhangmar just as the flying wing’s craftsmen had intended. Those sly priests of the temple. This was their magic and now she was making it hers.
‘Kalu the Apportioner spare us this one time,’ lamented Alexamir. ‘Do this for your brave son and I will steal a thousand horses for you and consider my toil only half done.’
And then they were in the main flow of the trade wind, the turbulence zone left behind. But still, Cassandra felt her cheeks quivering in the force of the warm blow; goggles and face mask biting into her skin. But slowly, that pain began to diminish. Cassandra watched an unexpected counter-current swirling around the plane, and it quickly became apparent that the strangely organic shape of the flying wing she had noted back in the hangar had been crafted to redirect and fold currents in ways that allowed the Lightning Gull to survive this velocity of travel. She held the flying wing in the centre of the trade wind, burning precious fuel with every hour, keeping a wary eye on the fuel gauge. Like flying on glass, every push of the stick or squeeze of pressure on the pedals skidding them across the fierce Bdur
’rkhangmar, the vast tunnel amplifying her flight controls’ movement. It was hypnotic, a false calm that lulled Cassandra and her unwilling spotter into silence, arrowing ahead for the best part of the night. Star-speckled darkness above them, clouds below like an endless sea, pierced irregularly by the tallest of the peaks, so high that no Rodalian could inhabit them. Cassandra dared not fall asleep though, however heavy her eyelids. A minute of delicious sleep and they might find themselves in the margins of the trade wind and snatched out of all control by the turbulence.
‘Sing for me,’ she demanded, stifling a yawn. ‘Give me a tune to keep me awake up here. If I grab a nap, it’ll likely be the end of us.’
‘I am no bard,’ growled Alexamir.
‘That canvas bag beside your feet is a parachute. Would you rather be a pigeon with a silk parasol?’
He took the hint and let loose with a number of coarse and lusty ditties – mostly involving the superior horse-riding skills of the Clan Stanim and the sickly breeding potential of many warriors’ mothers from the Clan Menin and other rivals. Alexamir belted out how the merchants of the Thousand Duchies were so dull-witted that a blind drunk horseman might outwit them without recourse to his dagger or bow, and warbled that the women of Persdad walked so proud that a wild stallion might be easier tamed. Cassandra was beginning to think the parachute might be a preferable fate after a few hours of his crudely unmelodic voice, when she registered the trade wind tapering away. The mighty Bdur’rkhangmar would soon be funnelling them towards the becalmed steppes. Its strength dropped off surprisingly fast. Her flight stick grew heavier, the drone of the engine roaring louder as it worked to keep the Lightning Gull powering forward rather than just holding them inside the fierce tunnel of wind. The sun was rising, fingers of light on the horizon, welcoming her to a new future. We’ve done it. Goodbye Sheplar Lesh. Goodbye stinking Weylanders and twisted forest men. Goodbye rebellious slaves. She’d suffer Alexamir’s overpowering boasts and nomad reek for a week or two and then hold him to his blood oath and ride for somewhere civilized enough to send word to Vandia’s foreign agents. Free by her own cunning, escaped with honour from her house’s enemies … no ransom paid. And best of all, Lady Cassandra’s return would be a cause for grave consternation among Princess Helrena’s numerous rivals, the young heir’s reappearance strengthening Helrena’s claim to the diamond throne when it came time for her grandfather to sadly join their ancestors. Circae would be utterly furious, while Cassandra’s friends in the house – Paetro, Duncan and Doctor Horvak – would be exultant and proud that Cassandra had conquered the punishing challenges of her foreign odyssey. The dreams of her victorious return were shredded by Alexamir’s warning yell. She returned to alertness on a rush of blood and spotted what had alarmed the nomad: two dark triangles, drifting and turning above the clouds. A skyguard patrol, and their duty up here no coincidence. Damn Sheplar Lesh. He must have reached a radio guild station and sent word to the border fields to watch for Cassandra riding the trade wind north. She’d hoped he’d think navigating the Bdur’rkhangmar beyond her, searching the south instead for a ditched flying wing. How far did Kerge’s tracking sense extend? No matter: she had to deal with the situation as it was, not as she wished it.