The Stealers' War

by Stephen Hunt

  Those words struck Nurai like a slap. ‘Fools’ gold for a fool,’ she growled and stalked off.

  ‘The witch rider is right,’ said Cassandra. ‘I am no prize worth possessing.’

  ‘Her words drip with envy,’ said Alexamir. ‘But then, what woman would not be envious? I am already a legend among the clans and my saga has only just begun.’

  While mine is doomed to end here, it seems. ‘And what of me?’

  ‘I gave you my word that you would be free to return to your people if that is what you wished.’

  ‘You gave your word to a different woman.’ One who could walk.

  ‘You shall be that woman again. I will talk to Temmell. Beg him to heal you. Offer him my life and loyalty if he heals you for me.’

  Cassandra felt her heart sink. This golden-skinned outsider, Temmell; he was clearly an itinerant medicine man whose wagon had been seized by the clans trying to cross the plains; an ex-clan slave who had used science and his canny knowledge of herbs and powders to bluff his way into a minor position of power. Not even the imperial surgeons attending the emperor and the imperial family could mend a broken spine. What chance did some travelling peddler who had landed on his feet here have? ‘You are wasting your time.’

  ‘It is my time to waste,’ said Alexamir. ‘Come, I shall take you to meet my family.’

  As if I have any choice in the matter. ‘I am sorry to hear your father is gone. Does your mother still live?’

  ‘She became one of the Great Krul’s wives and lives inside the palace. It is the way of our people. If your friend dies, you take in the wives of your fallen brother. My Aunt Nonna keeps my household. You will like her.’

  Cassandra suspected nothing would be further from the truth. Survival out here in the grasslands, cooking, cleaning, finding water, keeping the animals alive that helped feed mouths and give the clans their hides and wool for clothes, leather, saddles and tents . . . that was a full-time occupation. A pampered Vandian noblewoman, raised for power and made a cripple, that was only another burden.

  Cassandra glanced behind her to the palace. No sign of Kerge or Sheplar. It was strange, when that pair had been her captors, there hadn’t been a day as prisoner in Weyland when she hadn’t dreamt of escaping and making her way back to Vandia. But now the pair were thralls, slaves to the clan, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for them.

  She gazed out to the east, beyond the hills where acres of camouflage netting helped conceal the clans’ greatest secret. Perhaps this Kani Yargul would be the first war leader of the hordes to do what had never been done before. Conquer Rodal and push into the rich nations of the south. So, Vandia is now involved in Weyland’s civil war? The Imperium had come at last to punish the slave revolt in Vandia. Her people were across the mountains in force. Ridiculously close, given the scale of distances the Vandians must have flown to reach Weyland. Is my mother there? Paetro, Duncan, others from my house? Almost certainly. Cassandra knew her mother. Nothing in Pellas would stop Princess Helrena Skar from seeking out her kidnapped daughter, punishing the escaped slaves who had humiliated her by snatching the daughter of her house as a hostage. Lady Cassandra had to stop herself from laughing at the irony. All this way and did her grandfather’s legions but know it, it was only the indignity of the slave revolt they had left to punish. With me, there is nothing left to save. Only to avenge. Better she stayed here among the savage nomads. Lost to her house. Let Helrena Skar think her daughter dead. For I am. If I only didn’t have Alexamir’s affections to remind me that I’m alive.

  Alexamir lifted Cassandra on to a horse so she could pass through the camp with more dignity than being carried like a sack of meal.

  ‘You should have let me end my life,’ declared Cassandra.

  ‘Then you would have ended two.’ It was clear Alexamir would brook no interference with his plans for Cassandra, no matter what her wishes.

  There were thousands of similarly sized and shaped tents in the busy encampment, although there was no chance of the nomads getting lost. Each tent’s exterior had been dyed or embroidered with unique runes and symbols, prayers for success against rivals and protection against evil spirits. Children played outside while adults cooked on low stone ovens, cleaning weapons and brushing horses, picking stones from their steeds’ hooves. She reached a tent, or rather, three connected circular tents formed into a triangular formation. It had been staked on the top of a low hill. Down on the other side was a stream where nomads squatted by the side of the frothing water, beating clothes clean against rocks.

  ‘I return from the raid, Aunt,’ said Alexamir, pushing aside a woollen flap acting as a door to the tent.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I heard the cheers from the palace,’ said Nonna. ‘I shall cook their applause at once to make a fine feast from the great words of such heroes.’

  The nomad woman standing inside sniffed, irritated, watching Alexamir bear Cassandra in and laying her down on a simple bed of sheep skins in the corner. Nonna had the same blue tint to her skin as all the nomads. The same twisted blood that allowed Alexamir to walk around Rodal’s frozen heights bare-chested. Alexamir’s aunt must have been close to her sixtieth year, but she was still a handsome woman, with the muscled tone of a woman a third her age, dark leather riding clothes belted with twin daggers swinging on wide hips. To Cassandra’s eyes, Nonna appeared a gladiator born to battle, not a housekeeper. Perhaps that is the way with all the Nijumeti.

  ‘And what else have you carried back from your raid? Sheep with no pelts and a stallion that only gallops backwards? A sword hilt with no blade attached, perhaps?’

  ‘This is the Lady Cassandra of Vandia, granddaughter of a rich and powerful emperor,’ said Alexamir, a touch too haughtily. ‘She has been given my guest oath.’

  Nonna bowed ironically in Cassandra’s direction. ‘Then I live to serve. As always.’

  ‘She will be no burden on you. Not for long. Temmell will heal her. I know it.’

  ‘That one? That foreign degg? That golden-skinned spell-sucker? Promise him your soul for a saddle-wife if you must. He shall not have mine.’

  ‘My golden fox is to be no thrall or saddle-wife,’ said Alexamir, setting matters out clearly. ‘She has my protection and we will honour her with all the traditions of roof and salt. She is free to go among us as she wishes.’

  Cassandra couldn’t help but feel her heart soften at the young nomad’s words. Few men in this land or any other would have held to her in this state. But he has. Nothing had inhibited his yearning for her. Not being held as a prisoner in Salasang or being shot out of the clouds by the Rodalian skyguard. Alexamir was a savage, a reiver and a common thief, but he possessed the nobility of a prince of the plains.

  ‘How splendid. Then I shall be witness to a miracle of the gods . . . I shall see a fox walk,’ said Nonna. She waved her hand indifferently around the connected tents. ‘Welcome to your new kingdom, then, Lady Cassandra of Vandia. You will find we have fewer servants than an emperor’s offspring is used to, but what we lack in numbers we make up for in spirit.’ She snorted and picked up a leather drinking bottle, uncorking it and tossing it to the little-welcomed guest.

  Cassandra sniffed at the canteen and then took a gulp, swallowing a pale white liquid that tasted of almonds. It burnt her throat like acid before moving down her gut as a stream of liquid fire. She only just resisted the urge to spit it out again. The young Vandian woman experienced a strange, dizzying warmth coursing through her veins. ‘What in the name of the ancestors did I just drink?’

  ‘Cosmos,’ said Nonna. ‘Distilled and fermented milk of the mare. Only the finest. Sent by my sister-in-law from the leavings of the Great Krul himself. Milk of the mare gives a woman the strength to see out the day and work like a devil.’ She laughed. ‘Drink too much and I shall lose my legs as surely as you have lost yours. Or perhaps I shall go blind first?’

  Cassandra proffered the bottle back for Nonna to take. As Nonna reached over, she grabbed Cassandra’s wr
ist and turned it around, inspecting the guest’s fingers and hand like a palm reader. ‘An emperor’s granddaughter, you say? On whose word? These hands are hard and calloused, not soft and coddled.’

  ‘I speak the truth,’ protested Alexamir. ‘The rice-eaters and men of Weyland held her hostage in the kin war across the mountains. I rescued her. I freed her.’

  ‘Indeed. So, you could not resist stealing a burning brand from the fire,’ said Nonna. ‘Every day you walk into the tent and I glance up and see you and think you are your father, returned from riding the heavens. Like two peas in a pod, in bad manners, poor wisdom and fine features. Truly you are my brother’s blood, Alexamir Arinnbold.’

  Cassandra broke the aunt’s grip. ‘That he may be, but I am Vandian. The Imperium’s celestial caste does not have soft hands and fat chins. We are raised to battle and trained to rule. No house that carries weaklings survives long in the Imperium.’

  ‘Then perhaps your people are not so different from ours, after all,’ said Nonna. ‘You certainly show enough pride to be a Nijumet. But is it false pride? Never in my day.’

  ‘Your nephew would be dead without me,’ said Cassandra. ‘I flew the flying wing we stole from Rodal. It was crashing it which broke my back.’

  ‘Indeed? Well, even foul water may put out a fire.’ Nonna shrugged and lay a hand not unkindly on one of Alexamir’s boulder-like shoulders. ‘Yet, where would I be without my Alexamir and his hot air to warm my tent? Winter would have claimed me an age ago.’

  If winter tried, I suspect it would end up with a dagger shoved through its eye. This was Cassandra’s fate, her future. Worn fabric walls stretched over a wooden frame, her bones warmed by a dried sheep-dung hearth. Before, she had been a prisoner in Weyland. Now she was a prisoner inside her own body. Where is my escape to be, here?

  War hasn’t been kind to Midsburg , mused Duncan Landor, blackened rubble crunching under his feet as he strode toward the military headquarters with his friend Paetro. As sieges go, this city had seen a quick, decisive action. Even the Guild of Radiomen’s hold he and Paetro had just left had escaped largely undamaged. But it wasn’t the war that was troubling Duncan so much as what passed for a peace which had followed it. After a brief spell of looting, mostly by Weyland’s victorious southern army rather than their Vandian allies, both King Marcus’ regiments and Vandia’s legions had set up camp inside the city’s unaffected quarters. And very little that had followed had gone according to plan.

  ‘Have you heard that Captain Aleria’s section was posted missing yesterday?’ asked Duncan.

  ‘I hadn’t,’ said Paetro. ‘He was no greenhorn; there was a man who knew what he was about. Where was his section dispatched?’

  ‘A rebel artillery column was spotted heading for the Sparsnow line. The captain took a patrol ship out to investigate. The ship was found later, empty. No legionaries, no pilots.’

  Paetro grunted. ‘There is a road in Vandis where courtesans play the same game . . . Lares Shrine Street. Show a little leg, lure a man into an alley, a flash of knives, and the blockheads were never seen again. Not unless you count the rats in the sewer going after chunks of meat floating by.’

  ‘I hear that King Marcus has declared the rebellion over,’ said Duncan. ‘He’s leaving the capital and travelling on a royal progress through the pacified prefectures.’

  ‘He’s as big a fool as the dunces who went visiting Lares Shrine Street’s courtesans, then,’ said Paetro. ‘The northern army hasn’t disappeared, they’ve just scattered. The ones they can keep supplied are hiding out in the wilderness, the rest have buried their rifles in greased rags and are hiding in plain sight in the fields and towns, pretending to be farmers and shopkeepers.’

  ‘There’s a lot of wilderness in Weyland,’ noted Duncan.

  Paetro halted. A line of townspeople marched down the street, a sorry-looking, slowly shuffling rabble, their feet clinking from leg irons welded around their ankles. The group of men and women were civilians mostly, a few tattered grey uniforms that marked some out as parliament’s rebels; with a scattering of young children – presumably the prisoners’ offspring – following behind the line, weeping and mewling, shoved back by the legionaries’ rifle butts when they grew too close. This progression towards the giant Vandian ships landed outside the town was suddenly halted by a group of southern officers in blue uniforms. Duncan wondered if the king’s men were going to protest the emptying of Midsburg’s quarters by their imperial allies. Supposedly, rebel sympathizers were being resettled to disperse any further support for the exiled pretender, but Duncan understood the prisoners’ true fate all too well. Duncan, who had once been taken as a slave of the empire to serve inside the brutally hard Vandian sky mines. But I earned my freedom through wit and loyalty towards my owner. These fools supported the pretender’s rebellion. This is the just price of ending up on the losing side. Not all the slaves would end up dying inside the sky mines. Some would be put to work tending crops and bringing in harvests to supply the sprawling imperial cities. Others would find themselves toiling as house servants, or workers in the mills and foundries.

  Duncan and Paetro drew near to where the southern officers, a cavalry colonel, two majors and a captain, remonstrated with their Vandian allies.

  ‘You are taking too many,’ said the colonel. ‘You must have nearly two hundred head in this column alone.’

  ‘We have our orders,’ said the Vandian commander. ‘They come from Prince Gyal himself.’

  ‘And we carry out commands from our king,’ said the colonel. ‘I believe I know where the order of precedence lies between a king and a prince.’

  ‘A prince of the Imperium,’ barked the Vandian commander, ‘outranks a thousand raggedy-arsed local warlords. Prince Gyal speaks as the voice of the emperor here. Now move out of my way, before I decide to add you to the chain gang and ship you out.’

  ‘What is going on here?’ demanded Duncan. ‘What is the problem?’

  ‘Our trains stand half empty,’ complained the colonel.

  ‘What trains?’

  ‘The Guild of Rails’ marshalling yard outside Midsburg,’ said the colonel. ‘We have been bringing in wagons for days, but they wait half empty. I also have quotas to make.’

  ‘A quota for what?’ asked Duncan, the answer to his question hanging between himself and his moustached countryman.

  ‘Indentured labour,’ said the colonel. ‘The mill owners and great estates have placed fresh orders for workers. The rebellion has played havoc with the realm’s smooth running. Fields lie thick with weeds and foundries sit idle with cold furnaces after so many were pressed into army service. The rebels must pay for their crimes. Pay with grain from their winter stores and labour from their prefectures.’

  ‘They’re to be slaves?’ said Duncan. ‘In Weyland?’ The idea shocked him. There had never been slaves in the kingdom.

  ‘Twenty years’ service with full bellies and a dry roof over their heads?’ growled the colonel. ‘If you want to call these traitors slaves, let me march you out a thousand hungry soldiers fighting on short rations all too glad to head south for the peace of field and factory.’

  Duncan merely shook his head and left the officers from the two allied forces bickering over the spoils of war, screeching crows pecking at a corpse’s entrails. Vandia had always kept slaves. The richest nation in the world paid for its domestic peace by maintaining as much of its populace as it could in a state of idle distraction, importing foreign muscle to feed and work for the indolent citizenry. But Weyland honoured a different tradition. Its people free and wilfully independent. The wealth flowing into Weyland from the empire wasn’t just feeding the southern nobility’s coffers, it seemed. It was driving them to ape the empire in other ways. Well, it’ll be the locals’ problem, soon enough. Not mine.

  One of the children, a boy who couldn’t have been older than nine, tugged at the cloak covering Duncan’s back. His pallid face was smeared with tears and dirt and
he trembled as though he hadn’t eaten for days, which was probably the case. ‘Why won’t they let me go with my ma and pa, sir? I’ll travel with them. I want to.’

  Because you’re not old enough to sweat in the empire’s fields or mills, yet, and be glad of it. ‘They’ll be travelling a long way. The journey won’t be kind.’

  ‘I don’t care; I can travel as well as anyone.’

  The leg irons would slip off your stick-thin legs if you tried. ‘Wait until you’re older. That’s what you need to do.’ Duncan felt inside his tunic and removed a gold coin, tossing it at the boy just as a Vandian legionary marched past and made to cuff the young refugee. The lad sprinted away fast, a dumbfounded expression on his face as he regarded his unexpected bounty.

  ‘You haven’t done him any favours,’ said Paetro. ‘One of the older packrats in the ruins will beat him and steal that coin before he ever gets to spend it.’

  ‘The city’s had our steel; it might as well have our gold.’ The saints know, it’s all I have to give. What the hell’s happened to Weyland and its people? My family not least among them? This isn’t my country anymore. I lost my home the moment I left. ‘I hope the pretender and his rebels roast in hell, starting a war they couldn’t hope to win. This misery and devastation, it’s all on their heads.’

  ‘Civil wars are just like any other kind,’ mused Paetro as they walked away from the prisoners. ‘They start from many causes, but they always end with one winner and one loser. Oft as not, not much difference between the two.’

  True enough, old friend. Duncan thought of the corpses littering the land beyond the shattered city walls. Weylanders loyal to King Marcus mingling in the mud next to the pretender’s rebels, Vandians dotted around the thick artillery-churned mud, lying between the locals. Hard to tell them apart, now. Looters crept out after dark to fight the crows for what the dead soldiers had to give up. A few coins and keepsakes. Rifles and pistols had already been stripped by medical orderlies checking for anyone left alive. Wounded traitors were bayoneted where they lay, on the orders of the officers commanding the Army of the Boles. That was the price of treason these days in Weyland. Not that Duncan needed to be reminded when he reached what had recently been Midsburg’s rebel parliament building. Bodies still hung from lampposts more or less intact. The nearest wore a once-fancy grey uniform, its tunic’s yellow piping spattered with dried blood. Field Marshal Samuel Houldridge had once been supreme commander of Weyland’s forces, but he had made the equally supreme error of supporting the pretender’s claim to the throne, rather than King Marcus’. Houldridge’s corpse had been discovered bled out in front of the assembly building after the siege, unable to feel the rope around his neck when it hoisted him high for all to see. But the forms had to be observed. Duncan suspected the same couldn’t be said of the rebel assemblymen swaying in the wind on lampposts down the street. The politicians who had stayed; or the ones caught fleeing the city, attempting to reach Deersota in the east or the Sharp Mountains to the north. If King Marcus ever recalled parliament, it would be a long time before he faced what once used to be called the ‘loyal opposition’.