The Stealers' War

by Stephen Hunt

  Benner Landor glanced about the street, sitting a little too stiff and proud on his horse. Duncan’s father appeared unsettled. You’ve noticed how many of your tenant farmers are absent, too. No rents, no crops, and perhaps daggers in the dark creeping towards Hawkland Park. You’ll need to hire a lot more sentries at the estate, Father.

  ‘You’ve done a fine job of restoring order, William,’ said Benner Landor.

  Wallingbeck patted his sheathed sword. ‘No sand left in ’em. All their fighting spirit’s fled. But that’s the best you can expect when you set copse-cutters, cattlemen and shepherds against a gentleman in the saddle with a foot of sharp steel and a carbine, eh?’

  ‘They’re a disgrace to the prefecture,’ said Benner. ‘I would hardly credit it. I travel away to stay at the court for a season, and in my absence the whole territory is wrecked by treason.’

  ‘It is not your fault, my darling,’ called Leyla from the carriage. ‘The people here were led to ruin by our traitor of an assemblyman, Charles T. Gimlette.’

  Duncan held back a snigger. And is he by chance related to the same plump fool whose votes were purchased with Landor money for decades? From the sound of it, the politician had found himself on the wrong side of the conflict purely by dint of his party membership, ending up as one of many arrested when the king sent his guards to disband parliament. Gimlette had escaped, only to die ignobly in the siege of Midsburg. The only thing Charles T. Gimlette led was his way to the nearest restaurant with an expensive menu. Who’d have thought being a paid lackey of the House of Landor would turn out to be such a dangerous profession? Certainly not their ex-assemblyman.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ demanded Adella. ‘There should be more people out on the streets to welcome us.’

  The lack of citizens on the streets wasn’t the only disquieting thing about their victory procession. It was a chilly day. Half the town’s chimneys should have been giving out smoke, but they were largely standing cold and still. Either Northhaven didn’t have wood chips to burn or enough people who needed to stay warm.

  Leyla gave Duncan a sly look from the landau that seemed to suggest she found the company of the baron’s mistress as irritating as Duncan did.

  ‘I think they’re a little shy today,’ said Duncan. ‘Bayonets and rifles can be terribly off-putting. Especially to copse-cutters and shepherds.’

  ‘They’ll need to get used to it,’ said Benner, failing to acknowledge his son’s sarcasm. ‘The Army of the Boles is to be garrisoned here until the pretender and the remaining few bandits are captured and executed.’

  Peace isn’t anything the Landors can buy with our money, Father. Luckily for Benner Landor, the house could rely on brutes like Viscount Wallingbeck to pay with steel. They reached the old city’s main gatehouse at the top of the slope, its heavy wooden doors left open and a metal portcullis raised, the ramparts of the high stone wall patrolled by southern soldiers. An anxious committee of notables awaited them in the gate’s shadow, flanked by royalist troopers, but no faces Duncan recognized. Not the old mayor or high sheriff or anyone from the town council. The most senior of the party was a weary-looking man wearing a bishop’s vestments, a white circular cape and tunic and a heavy mitre on his head. He must have come with the cathedral. In Duncan’s day, the only churchman in the town had been Pastor Carnehan. I don’t know these people and they don’t know me . . . not even as Benner’s son. A visiting traveller would receive more welcome on market day. I’m as good as a stranger here now.

  ‘Bishop Kirkup,’ said Benner Landor. ‘I am glad to see that you at least have survived the rebellion unharmed.’

  The bishop seemed to understand well enough who had paid for the heavy stone of his cathedral and the living of the new seat. ‘The saints be thanked for your arrival. You have liberated us from an unholy terror, Squire Landor. I preached for peace, passing on every urging from the church authorities in Arcadia, but there were too many hotheads here ready to declare in favour of Prince Owen.’

  ‘The pretender you talk of is no true prince,’ said Prefect Colbert, coldly. ‘Only an outlaw traitor who conspired against the nation with raiders from the Burn. Owen Hawkins was cast out by the royal family for his crimes and, as his revenge, the pretender led the realm to rebellion and ruin to satisfy his malice. Rule has now passed to the upper house. In Northhaven, to me.’

  ‘Then the day I prayed for has arrived,’ said the bishop. ‘You must cast aside your general’s uniform, be our prefect once more and the north shall again know peace and serenity.’

  ‘And my husband is no mere squire, nor a colonel of the royal army,’ said Leyla. ‘King Marcus has elevated Benner Landor to the peerage for his help in crushing this treason.’

  Leyla wore her pride on her sleeve like fresh lace, but Duncan suspected her words wouldn’t do Benner Landor any favours. Tales of old man Landor’s ‘succour’ would find their way back to everyone conspicuously absent from these streets. She was unwittingly painting a target on her husband’s back for every disgruntled peasant with a birding rifle to take a shot at.

  ‘Then Lady Landor, we await your return to the prefecture with eagerness.’

  ‘Do not count on our presence at too many of your services, Bishop,’ said Leyla, grandly. ‘The court in Arcadia awaits our return equally as eagerly.’

  ‘But my dear,’ said Benner, ‘the business of the house and our wealth resides in Northhaven.’

  ‘We shall talk about it later,’ said Leyla. ‘In more private surrounds.’

  ‘It is the business of Northhaven which worries at me, Lord Landor,’ said Bishop Kirkup. ‘Our people have gone hungry for months now in the town and district. We were hoping—’

  ‘The supplies that follow the army are reserved for those loyally fighting for the king,’ said the prefect. ‘If there is any insufficiency of crops from the farms, it is because too many traitors have been clutching rifles in their hands the last few seasons instead of seed drills and hoes.’

  ‘Our winter stores have been stolen by soldiers from both sides and the Guild of Rails has not shipped supplies in, even where they are bought and paid for.’

  ‘We will deal with the pretender and his bandits . . . there will be no more thefts of goods. Now that Northhaven has returned under lawful rule, contracts and shipments will be honoured once more. These hungry people you speak of need to tend to the business of making an honest living and their living shall return to them again. If any family starves here, it is because too many of its members are filthy rebels. The same cowardly dogs who set upon us as we approached the town. This was a prefecture of farmers before the rebellion. Only a fool fertilizes weeds in his field. Do I look like a fool to you?’

  ‘No, Prefect, clearly not,’ stuttered the bishop.

  ‘Excellent. Then I trust my headquarters will not be troubled by beggars while we root out the last of the brigands here. We shall treat panhandling as an admission of service with the pretender’s rebels.’ Hugh Colbert reached out to seize the boot of one of the executed men and set the corpse swinging from the lamppost to indicate the fate of such disclosures. ‘This is how a farmer deals with a weed. He yanks it out of the soil that nurtures it so it no longer threatens his fields. It was the assembly’s failure to make this clear which led to their corruption, demise and the blight which swept the realm. Better that weeds die rather than the harvest.’

  ‘Then we shall work the soil together in humility,’ said the bishop, hesitatingly accepting the lack of aid. He appeared less than happy about it, despite his words.

  Working the soil together. ‘That I’d like to see,’ muttered Duncan. It was clear that neither the prefecture’s new master nor the prince of the church knew the front end of a sickle from the back.

  Adella recognized one of the welcoming committee. Duncan remembered she used to help her father, the chief clerk of the town council. ‘Mister Gilbert, an officer from the Army of the Boles visited earlier to bring word of my arrival to my mo
ther and father. Where are they?’

  ‘Word arrived, Miss Cheyenne,’ said the councillor, ‘but I fear there was nobody to deliver the happy news of your safe return to. Your parents haven’t been seen inside the old town for a few days, now.’ He raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘When the royal army was heard to be advancing north, many people feared a conflict with the—’ He paused a second to find the right words. ‘That is to say, between, the rebels and the king’s forces. Plenty have relatives and friends in the countryside where they can expect a welcome. They fled the city for fear of being caught up in a siege.’

  Well, that’s a polite way to say they left terrified of meeting with the king’s rope. It wouldn’t have taken much to spook her parents. Duncan remembered Adella’s father as permanently on nerves, a highly strung disposition hardly helped by well-warranted fears that Adella’s plans to marry Duncan would bring the House of Landor’s wrath down on his family. Despite everything, Duncan couldn’t help but feel sympathy for Adella, the crestfallen look on her face. She might have sold us out to escape from the sky mines, but her folks were okay. The parents deserved to know that their daughter had not only survived the slavers’ raid, but prospered, in her own stony-hearted way.

  ‘The chief clerk is not my main concern,’ said Benner Landor. ‘Where is the mayor, where is the high sheriff of the district police?’

  ‘All gone, my lord,’ said Gilbert. ‘The mayor disappeared a couple of days ago. The sheriff died at the outbreak of the – the rebellion. There was fighting between the territorial regiment and the constables over who the town should declare for. Fighting between the services and fighting between factions inside them. It was only settled when the fort at Redwater joined the rebellion and sent ships with marines up the river to assist the–’

  ‘Spare me the minutiae of this region’s lapse into treason, man,’ barked Prefect Colbert. ‘Fled and dead. That’s all I need to know,’

  Mister Gilbert shifted uneasily on his boots. ‘There’s a ballot scheduled to elect a new sheriff as well as a new assemblyman.’

  ‘No longer necessary. The upper house rules alone. There will be no reformed national assembly; that ground has been well and truly poisoned. I am appointed prefect by the grace of King Marcus, and all local positions are to be within the gift of my office.’

  Viscount Wallingbeck hooted with laughter from his mount. ‘General, I fear you’ll struggle to find an honest Weylander to appoint inside this nest of vipers.’

  ‘Please, do not even consider my husband,’ called Leyla from her carriage. ‘Benner is burdened enough as one of the new peers of the realm. He does not need to be bothered by any additional piffling duties. I do not wish to spend my days watching petitioners arrive at Hawkland Park to beg for mercy for their drunk, incarcerated cousins, or whining about flour shortages and broken drains in the old town.’

  ‘Quite so, my lady,’ said Prefect Colbert. He looked at the old clerk. ‘You there. Gilbert, was it? You at least have demonstrated manners and a small measure of moxie in emerging from the town hall to greet us, rather than bolting off like a startled jack-rabbit. You shall be mayor.’

  ‘Me? But my lord, I’m just all who’s left.’

  ‘A more than adequate qualification, Mayor Gilbert. Keep the leaves out of the drains and the business of the town hall inside the hall rather than irritating people of quality, and you will hold your job for life. Fail in your duties and it will be a very short tenure. Now, for a sheriff. An outside appointment would be best.’ Colbert looked over at Viscount Wallingbeck. ‘What’s the name of that large lump you keep to flog deserters?’

  ‘That would be Lieutenant Donald Blood of the provost-marshal’s staff,’ said Wallingbeck.

  ‘Still alive is he? Yes? Excellent. He shows the making of a fine law officer, and holds an amusingly suitable surname for the post, to boot. Tell Blood he occupies the post when you next see him. I shall retire to consider all other appointments. Any of you with a living supplied by the state who wishes to keep their trade will be expected to inform on at least one known rebel sympathizer inside this district.’

  ‘The bishop declares his parishioners need food,’ said Leyla. ‘Why not offer a soldier’s rations to anyone who turns in a rebel sympathizer inside Northhaven? A week’s worth of rations for information leading to the capture and execution of any bandit plaguing the territory’s highways.’

  ‘An inspired suggestion, Lady Landor,’ said Prefect Colbert. ‘Mayor Gilbert, I expect to see posters promoting the army’s generosity on every street corner by the end of the day. Are you certain you’re not minded to accept the position of high sheriff of Northhaven yourself, milady?’

  ‘I regret that King Marcus requires my advice more than the constables of Northhaven,’ said Leyla.

  ‘And who are we to deprive the king?’

  Duncan looked up at the pale dead faces swinging from their makeshift gallows as the procession rode through the city gate. Like statues. Cold, dead, marble. He didn’t recognize any of the dead and he was glad of it. The sooner I return back to Vandia, the better. This wasn’t his town, his people, his family anymore. They were as dead as every hung rebel.

  Cassandra could see Alexamir was excited about something beyond the household’s normal routine. She turned to watch the nomad from her seat at the small wooden table, its surface covered with chopped root vegetables for the elderly mistress of the tent. Usually Alexamir entered the tent at this time of day to carry Cassandra out, hauling her up into a horse’s saddle. Then they would go riding across the plains. It wasn’t easy to control a steed by reins alone, without the use of her legs to reinforce control, but Cassandra managed. In truth, she lived for their daily rides. It was the closest she came to being mobile again, able to travel where she wished, a tug on the reins in any direction she cared to head. In the saddle she wasn’t half a woman any longer, she was part woman and part horse, living in the traditional Nijumeti manner, just as they had for centuries. She could race, halt, touch the horizon and speed through the wavering grasslands as fast as a crossbow bolt, the wind on her face and the rain in her hair.

  But today, just seeing Alexamir’s expectant expression, Cassandra knew a canter through the endless steppes wasn’t to be her lot. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Temmell has said he will give us an audience today.’

  Despite Cassandra’s broken back, she felt a shiver pass down it. There was something she didn’t like about the trickster. ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Temmell has agreed to take a look at your spine, to see if there is a healing he might work on you.’

  Is it impossible? No. ‘I wish there was,’ said Cassandra. ‘But I fear you will be disappointed. Your clan sorcerer is little more than a travelling medicine peddler. What your people see as sorcery I see as tonics purchased in far-called lands, where the state of medical advancement is higher than the herbs picked by your own healers.’

  ‘You are wrong, golden fox. Temmell is a true sorcerer. The Great Krul has risen to be chief of all the clans by relying on his magic and counsel.’

  ‘But he’s a foreigner. He arrived in a travelling doctor’s wagon, didn’t he?’

  ‘Temmell wasn’t born in the saddle, that much is true, as anyone may see from his golden skin. He came to us as a traveller, half-mad from the journey and the long sun and the dry winds. Those sotouched are holy, their minds stirred by the gods. Gods who sometimes choose to mix their souls with common mortals so that we may hear the tales of heaven on the plains.’

  Cassandra grimaced. It was no wonder the witch riders of the clans resented the interloper. Magic that was considered more powerful than theirs? ‘And Temmell believes he can cure me? Something that would be beyond even the best imperial surgeon?’

  ‘He says he will examine you and see what he may do.’

  Well, that at least will be free. Cassandra was fairly sure there would be potions available to work their magic on her. But only to be had ver
y far away and at great cost, so she and Alexamir would have to wait an age for them to arrive. Long enough for Temmell to make his fortune and clear off to lands where his face was as fresh as his new marks’ gullibility. This was a strange predicament. Cassandra needed to humour the clans’ superstitions for Alexamir’s sake, but she feared whatever hopes he harboured would only be used to pick his pocket. ‘So then, let’s see the man. It won’t do to keep the great and powerful Temmell waiting.’

  Alexamir picked Cassandra up from the table’s seat and began to walk to the tent’s entrance, but she faltered. He put her back down on the bed furs.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Alexamir. ‘Speak your mind.’

  ‘This is hopeless. Me; my injuries. Bad enough that I am a foreigner here. Now, a cripple as well. My situation is not one that you should be risking your reputation for. I have seen the way the other warriors look at you. And me.’

  ‘It is my reputation to risk.’

  But Cassandra didn’t want that. For him to tie his fate to such a forlorn hope. To me. ‘What price will that trickster ask of you for healing me?’

  ‘I have told you, Temmell is a mighty sorcerer, not some travelling conjuror. I have seen him call upon the gods and work miracles.’

  Yes, but miracles are even more expensive than healings. ‘How can you want me like this?’

  ‘The wind blows because it does. The sun rises because it does. The nights are cold because they are. You Vandians think too much.’ ‘Perhaps that is true.’

  ‘Thoughts are clouds; fulfilment is rain,’ said Alexamir. He rested himself by her side in the warm bedroll and kissed her.

  ‘Is there a rainstorm brewing now?’ asked Cassandra, returning the kiss.

  ‘Yes, I sense a mighty storm.’

  Indeed, it was a hurricane. One that almost lifted the rafters off the nomad tent, as their clothes fell across the rugs of the dry mud floor. Cassandra might not be able to walk, but she felt the warrior’s body like the weight of boulders as they rolled in the bedding furs. Her body was so soft in comparison; she might as well have been warm clay on the potter’s wheel. Even at the height of her training in the Vandian fencing rooms, she would have been pliable in contrast. That was one of the differences between Vandian and Nijumeti anatomy, but not the most interesting one by far. Though perhaps that was just the more basic difference between male and female, whatever their nation and race. It was a difference she was determined to enjoy. Luckily for Cassandra, for a people who could ride a week in the saddle and then fight a pitched battle at the other end, stamina was not an issue. By the time the storm abated, she was soaked in sweat and not fit to crawl to the tent’s entrance, let alone visit some grass sorcerer to plead for her health.