by Stephen Hunt
Bad luck for Densen’s brother to be serving on a ship declared for the south. The royal navy was the last of the nation’s fighting forces to fracture, the tradition of discipline at sea a strong anchor, but its ships and sailors had finally taken sides, the captain and officers’ decision – mutinies aside – depending on where a skipper called home. There was a loyalist fleet in Arcadia and a rebel fleet moored in Midsburg to oppose it. ‘Least ways you won’t be facing him across a northern wheat field, bayonet pointed in the wrong direction.’
‘There’s that. Might be that old tramp will return with word of how your family are doing?’
‘Here’s hoping, Sergeant.’ Sariel. Sariel’s surprise visit to the company in their Midsburg barracks had allowed Carter a brief glimmer of hope, but it seemed no sooner had Carter told the sorcerer about Willow and his father’s miserable fate, than the mysterious man had disappeared again. Among the vagrant’s outlandish boasts and unlikely anecdotes, there had been a vague muttered promise that he would do what he could to put matters right, but Carter had focused more on his rambling account. It had been half an apology and half bragging, that there were greater affairs of man and wider wars that needed to be fought. Wider than this? If there’s any more trouble in the world, I hope it stays well clear of my shoulders. I’m stumbling here as it is. Sariel understood how to open hidden portals in the ancient standing stones raised around Pellas and travel vast distances as easily as stepping through an open doorway, and the vagrant frequently used them to disappear for seasons at a time, fleeing the demons he claimed still chased him. Carter suspected Sariel was merely a hedgerow magician and itinerant medicine man who had come into genuine arcane knowledge at some point and been driven half-mad by it. Maybe wholly mad after Vandia? God knows, Carter could still feel the suppressed shadow of the strange visions which had plagued him. Sariel had cured Carter somehow, reclaiming the madness from his mind and absorbing it into his own; yet the bizarre residue still tugged within the young Weylander, a hidden tide dragging at his mind. Carter could still feel the dreams’ dead fingers clutching him, even though he was troubled less by insane hallucinations. It was Sariel who had changed after administering Carter’s ‘cure’, as though the extra madness he’d soaked up had shocked the vagrant out of himself. Sariel could still be wildly boastful, embroidering the truth into fanciful tales, but at times he forgot and something darker and more malevolent stared through the performance. I may not know which is the real Sariel, but I know the old dog abandoned us fast enough after we escaped from Vandia. ‘Judge a man by his deeds, not his words.’ That was something his father had often preached in Northhaven. Sadly, Jacob Carnehan had fallen prey to his own advice. Named as kin to a notorious sell-sword and a pirate. What does that make me?
Carter wished his mother was alive. He could have counted on the good-natured, ever-practical Mary Carnehan to counsel him. But she had been murdered by the slavers, along with her son’s chances of understanding who and what he was, it seemed. His mother’s absence still seemed unnatural, even after surviving as a slave in Vandia and a rebel at home. He’d walk into rooms in the rectory, expecting to find his mother standing there, before recalling she was buried in the churchyard outside, a cold wave of remembrance that seized him like a riptide. What would she say if she could see me now? Call me a damn fool for signing up, I suppose. Demand I abandon the fight and head home. But the fight was coming for him, wherever he travelled in Weyland. It’s already cost me my parents and Willow.
‘Lord, but I’d welcome the chance to happen across those raiders,’ said Carter. Anything to take my mind off what I can’t change. ‘You reckon they’ve passed this far west, Sergeant?’
‘My, but you surely are an eager one. Prince Owen promised you a bounty I don’t know about?’ Densen shrugged. ‘Hard to say where those bushwhackers are. Right now, planters no sooner spot a peddler’s silhouette on the horizon than they start hollering and ringing the church bells, lower storm shutters and bring down their crow rifles. So many alarms across the prefecture, it’d be easier to tell you where the frontier mounted aren’t than where they are.’
Carter thought he heard something and fell silent. He drew in the reins, stopping Peppercorn. An angry hornet buzzing somewhere beyond the enclosed ceiling of evergreen leaves, dull and distant. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Royal Sharps Greys, halt the line,’ ordered the sergeant, raising his hand in air.
The sound hummed again, clearer without the clatter of their hooves on the road. ‘That’s a duel in the air,’ said Carter.
‘I swear, Bad Marcus’s skyguard are growing bolder every week,’ said Densen. ‘We hold every airfield north of the river, and with fighting beyond the Spotswood so fierce, the usurper’s pilots can’t be sure the dirt they put down on’ll still belong to them when they climb out of a cockpit.’
‘Might be one of ours intercepting a long-range resupply kite looking for the King’s Mounted?’ guessed Carter. ‘Those bushwhackers can’t be finding too many bullets in their raids.’
Sergeant Densen rattled the half-empty ammunition pouch dangling from his belt. ‘If they are, they’re better at finding rounds than we are.’
Carter rested a hand on the gun belt with his father’s expensive twin pistols; their weight a memento every day of all he had lost, as though he needed an extra reminder. I’ll hand them back to you, one day, Father. Just stay alive. ‘Let’s ride clear of the woods and have a look. If we’re lucky the usurper’s plane will put down on pasture and lead us to that band of roof-burning bluecoats from Victorair.’
‘Not sure I’d call that luck,’ said Densen, ‘but the job needs doing, and we’re the only fools on the hunt for them in this forest.’
In truth, hunting any band of marauders in Weyland was tough work; there was so much empty territory for bandits to hide in while towns and villages had to stay put, plump poultry marked on the map for every fox with a hunger to steer towards. When you were dealing with professionals like the Frontier Mounted, you could take that work and multiply it tenfold. Carter’s Royal Sharps Greys put the woodland behind them, leaving the road and taking a direct path through the trees, cold dead leaves heavy with hoarfrost whirling around their steeds as they pushed on as fast as they dared across the frozen ground. When they broke the treeline they faced rolling flat land filled with prickly green shrubbery rising as high as a mounted rider’s boots, a log fence close to the woods marking where a local landowner’s territory started. Clear of the shrubs and further back the landscape sat broken by hills topped with more trees, thin stands of red and orange woodland, and above it all the aerial combat they’d heard. True to Carter’s guess, one plane appeared to be a fighter and the other a larger, slower transport kite. Their exhausts had left white contrails scratched against the cold sky, doodles on a sheet of paper pointing to the combatants. Carter pulled his battered brass telescope from the saddle and extended it towards the wheeling planes. The fighter was a sleek twin-engined monoplane, outsized compared to the Rodalian flying wings Carter had grown up watching in the air – maybe a fifty-foot wingspan. Someone had painted a leering wolf’s muzzle on the front of the plane and it was living up to its predator’s colours. Wing-mounted cannons blazed away at the transport kite, a slow, heavy five-engined triplane with a sealed cabin at the front, a few portholes for passengers along its length and an open cockpit gun turret twisting at the rear of the fuselage, trying to discourage the pursuing fighter with insignificant bursts of fire. The transport plane weaved from side to side while the fighter spun around it, swooping in and out to leave traces of flapping fabric holes after each attack. Wouldn’t want to be a passenger inside that bird. The triplane began to dodge erratically, a pair of engines on either side smoking as a matched set, leaving only three rotors to carry the large plane forward. Carter growled as he took in the planes’ insignia. Not what I was expecting.
‘Are we winning?’ asked Densen.
Carter passed him the teles
cope. ‘Hard to tell. Both kites are flying loyalist colours.’
Arick Densen looked through the eyeglass and nodded in surprise, seeing white tails with Weyland’s royal black boar on both fighter and transport plane. The north didn’t possess an abundance of squadrons, not when the skyguard owed its recent founding to the usurper’s coin, but those that did fly for Prince Owen had painted their tails red and displayed the national assembly’s flag as a token of support for Weyland’s lawful heir. ‘White on white, hell if that’s something you see every day. If one of those birds is defecting to our side, it must be the transport plane. The fighter could outpace it in less than a minute, no need to engage.’
‘Long guns to the fore,’ Carter ordered. ‘Let’s see if we can’t drive that loyalist hawk off our acres. Everyone else back in the treeline … the fighter doesn’t appear to be short of ammunition. I want pickets behind us, too. If we pitch a picnic blanket below these two jousting skyguards, might be Victorair’s bluecoats will join us while we’re watching.’
Three men smoothly separated from the company. They dismounted and removed the company’s precious Landsman single-shot long rifles, a separate holster on their saddles for extendable tripods that allowed them to shoot steady at a distance. The snipers needed tripods to bear the weight of the elongated, reinforced steel barrels designed for heavy powder charges and long-range ammunition. Against the polished red mahogany butts and furniture, the plates and barrel on their rifles glinted as grey as the company’s uniforms. Lacking the resources to mount a skyguard in Weyland, for centuries, the only carriers in the air had been nomads, traders and slavers, and the nation had grown expert in discouraging unwelcome aviators from its skies. His marksmen were careful and taciturn men, set up close enough to the treeline that they could retreat out of sight of an angered pilot. Carter trotted Peppercorn back towards the trees’ cover, halting just short of the pines. His three target shooters were all ex-hunters from the mountains, tough and stringy even for Sharps Mountain men, well-used to bringing back rare pelts for trade, as well as claiming farmers’ bounties on the lions that slunk down from the upper heights to decimate the cattle. This lion’s got wings, though. Carter reckoned they could handle the famous Landsman No. 3 Grade Long when it came to striking a target in the air.
‘Aim only for the fighter,’ barked the sergeant. ‘That fat pheasant it’s chasing might be carrying right-minded Middenharn boys flying the usurper’s coop.’
Carter heard the tone in the sergeant’s voice and he knew what the man was thinking. That if a lone kite dared desert the usurper’s command; maybe his brother’s frigate would mutiny for Prince Owen and sail north too. We cling to what we can in this war, however faint the hope.
No sooner had the marksmen raised ladder sights on the rear of their rifles than they began to bang out shots towards the wheeling fighter, swivelling barrels and making each shot count between reloading. Despite using the tripods, the recoil blasts were almost enough to throw the heavy weapons off their mounts. The long guns made enough noise to raise the dead, but it was impossible for Carter to see if they were striking the fighter at this range, even with his eyeglass fully extended. He and his troops were being ignored by the pilot at any rate, worms beneath contempt in this duel of angels. Whoever was in the cockpit, they would have to be blind not to see the drifting smoke trailing from the land below. It wheeled tight after the transport craft. Being mostly plywood and fabric; the troops needed to hit pilot or engine to bring this hawk down. The long triplane started to lose height towards the grassy flats between woodland and hills. From its erratic wobble and the streaming flames clinging to the wings between its engine mounts, Carter reckoned it didn’t have much choice in exiting the ill-matched aerial combat. If the transport plane didn’t land now, it wasn’t going to land anywhere except hell … and this kite was coming in hot enough that it might not make much difference. The skyguard fighter turned in fast behind the triplane’s tail, trailing the transporter, but then suddenly pulled up and began to angle away, setting its compass for south of the Spotswood River. South. Definitely not on our side, then. The few precious kites operating in Owen’s service were stationed north of Midsburg, away from the risk of being burned on their airfields by raiders paddling across the Spotswood. A lusty cheer rose up from the soldiers as the fighter dwindled to a dot in the sky, but Carter reckoned it hadn’t been driven off by ground fire. It had held back from an easy final kill of the descending transport plane. Out of ammo. The enemy pilot was heading home to re-arm, paint a crossed-out kite below his cockpit and feel a few congratulatory claps on his shoulder from the squadron’s officers. Carter turned his attention back to the triplane. Damn – it’s not going to make it. One of the engines exploded as its undercarriage bounced off the ground, showering the icy flats with fragments of wing and engine, rising weakly into the air again before the plane’s left wing started to fold in the final few feet of its glide, fixed gears collapsing as the kite’s wreckage ploughed across the plain. The whole aircraft spun around, engines disconnected and wooden propellers severed by the impact. If there was any mercy to the landing, it was that the transport plane looked to be operating at the end of its range, not enough fuel left for fires to turn the debris into a flaming comet. The triplane slowed to a halt along the lowland, a carpet of wreckage in its wake, the triplane’s body remade as a beached boat; the distant, desperate banging sounds carrying to Carter as whatever passengers and crew survived tried to smash their way free of the fuselage before they became engulfed in the final conflagration.
Carter stored his telescope. ‘Let’s go.’
Densen drew his rifle out of the saddle. ‘Keep the long guns set up and trained on what’s left. I don’t want to dig up more snakes than we can kill this fine morning.’
‘You’re a cautious man, Sergeant.’
‘Captains get paid for glory, sir. Mrs Densen won’t thank me if I return to Highbend Springs less a leg and up a crutch. More work for her at the inn.’
And I doubt if she’d like it much if you never returned at all. ‘Hell, most your customers are riding with us, aren’t they? Fan out. Let’s see who’s worth a whole drum of skyguard bullets.’
‘Those hares aren’t going coursing,’ someone hooted along the line of horses. ‘Not after a landing like that.’
Carter kicked Peppercorn forward, the horse deeply reluctant to approach the fire. ‘Less’n they’re friendly, we’ll skin them just the same.’
Horsemen from the Royal Sharps Greys galloped forward and surrounded the plane, rifles and sabres readied by the time the passengers desperately kicked their way through a broken door in the fuselage. Four men and a pilot, female, stumbled into the grass. The men all wore convict’s shifts, plain coarse woollen shirts and trousers with heavy boots, all of them ragged enough to put a vagrant to shame, unkempt beards hanging from chins and cheeks, with thin, hungry faces dirty from engine fire smoke. The woman wore a leather flying jacket, but it was pulled over the same convict’s clothing as the others; and she was standing next to a man … who Carter never believed he’d see again until war’s end. He barely recognized his old friend now, malnutrition and maltreatment having taken its toll. ‘Thomas Purdell!’
‘Carter, is that actually you up there? Thank the saints! I thought you were being held at the king’s pleasure. You look like a real soldier up on that horse.’
Carter dismounted. ‘I might even do some real soldiering, Tom. But I’d thank an empty drum on that kite pursuing you sooner than I’d thank the saints.’ Carter stopped. The gaunt man next to Thomas wheezed like a chimney, and he seemed oddly familiar too. Suddenly realization dawned. ‘You’re Assemblyman Gimlette!’ He had been a whole lot plumper when he toured Northhaven, campaigning in the hotels and taverns of the territory; never known to refuse any plate of food or cup of beer.
‘Charles T. Gimlette,’ coughed the politician, raising a weary hand. ‘Returned to the cause with a tale of travails on the way that wou
ld make a song fit to bring tears to the eyes of every true Weylander who hears it.’
‘I’m weeping already,’ muttered the sergeant.
‘The captain here is Father Carnehan’s son, assemblyman,’ said Thomas. ‘Carter Carnehan.’
The gaunt politician stared at Carter as though he was being presented with a ghost. ‘So this is the one, eh. I helped your father on his way to rescue you and the others taken from Northhaven by the slavers, that I did. And what reward did I receive? Cursed as a traitor by a mad king. Locked up and kept on rations so tiny they wouldn’t keep a street hound alive.’
Arick Densen glanced at Carter. ‘This crew are for Owen, then?’
Carter nodded. ‘Mister Purdell here is a courier for the Guild of Librarians. Mister Gimlette is Northhaven’s elected assemblyman. Both of them seized during the coup at the assembly building.’
‘And my two comrades are from the 13th Battalion, Humont Light Artillery,’ said Thomas, indicating the men in convict’s rags behind him. ‘Bombardiers Kimple and Oatman. Our pilot is Beula Fetterman, flying for the rebel skyguard squadron in Chicola until she was shot down.’
‘We were captured when the fort at Grand Valley was surrounded,’ said Oatman. ‘Didn’t even hear the national assembly had been dissolved until a loyalist bayonet was shoved half up my nose.’
‘Marcus ordered the survivors seized during the coup interned in a prisoner-of-war camp at Greealamie,’ said Thomas. ‘We were made to build it and then we were made to occupy it.’
‘Only those the king didn’t hang as traitors,’ added Gimlette. ‘I was forced to bury many an old party friend in ditches outside Arcadia before I was tossed inside that muddy camp, left to shiver in a tent in this foul cold.’