The Stealers' War

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘In you go, lad,’ said Paetro, standing aside. ‘Be it death or be it victory.’

  There was the ancient Vandian toast. I’ll settle for losing with a light wound. Duncan entered the square. Wallingbeck already waited inside, wearing the full dress cavalry uniform of a duty squadron: a blue shell jacket with stand-up collar, gold piping and twelve gleaming brass buttons, with the viscount’s dark trousers meeting a pair of tall black leather boots just below the knees. Duncan’s Vandian officer’s uniform felt simple by comparison. The only thing they shared were their empty pistol holsters.

  The loud voice of the court-appointed adjudicator called the spectators to silence. ‘This combat is subject to the rules of Trial by Ordeal under Conciliar Jurisdiction of the Prefecture. Neither party is to quit their positions under any circumstances, without leave or direction of the court. There are no seconds here. I, solely, will call combat to start, pause and to end.’ He flicked an officious finger and a Weyland corporal came trotting into the ring bearing a brace of officer’s curved steel swords, each steel with a wooden grip, metal hilt and a three-bar swept-brass handle.

  ‘You pick first,’ said Wallingbeck, graciously.

  ‘If I had my choice, I’d pick not to fight,’ said Duncan, grasping the nearest sword.

  The viscount took the remaining sabre, testing the air with its blade. ‘And then how we would amuse your sister and my wife, eh?’

  The viscount seemed in better sorts about this forced duel than Duncan. But he’s not the dupe expected to throw the fight. Duncan found Willow standing to the side of the judges, four soldiers as her escort. Her eyes looked curiously blank, as if she didn’t quite believe she had actually managed to coerce this little legal farce into being. You expect me to make you a merry widow, do you, Sister? Clear your name of all your dark treacheries in the process. Let’s see if I can’t live to disappoint you. He looked to locate Leyla among the crowd, but there was no sight of her among the bobbing mass of faces. Women and their delicacies. Leyla probably can’t bear to watch me locking swords with her old family friend. Still no sign of Nocks, either, but he spotted a group of privateers down from the Plunderbird, including an old dark-bearded man who looked a lot like Black Barnaby. Never expected to see him outside of the wanted posters. It’s a hell of a world. I’m expected to slice chunks out of my own brother-in-law, while it is Jacob Carnehan’s damned brother who saves me from being killed by Prince Gyal’s machinations. I wonder how much those pirates of his have wagered on the outcome of this? I could repay Black Barnaby for saving my life at Ganyid Thang by warning him this bout is rigged.

  ‘Remember your courage with every step,’ bid the adjudicator, raising an officer’s white glove into the air. He dropped his hand. ‘Commence!’

  Wallingbeck was well-trained in the art of fencing . . . no doubt the product of many years’ sweat inside Arcadia’s fencing halls. He stamped forward rapidly, keeping his sabre pointed outward in his right hand, left hand back loose in the air. Duncan had almost forgotten the manner in which duels were conducted inside Weyland, so long and thorough had been his Vandian training, Paetro drumming the legion’s skills into his thick head, borrowing spare time with Cassandra’s instructors. Vandia has a different sequence of stances and guards with names such as the Ox, the Fool, the Plough and the Roof. But then, duels in the Imperium are almost always fatal. The two men’s blades clattered loudly against each other. Wallingbeck was testing Duncan’s skills. A little prod, a little probe, getting a feel of his opponent. Duncan yielded but didn’t give ground, using a technique called the Waterfall. Wallingbeck quickly grew bored of the testing and started to make more decisive lunges, Duncan responding with lateral parries that warded off the worst of the blows’ energy. They circled each other, accompanied by the yelling of the crowd. Duncan noted that most of the calls seemed to be in favour of Wallingbeck. I knew I shouldn’t have worn a Vandian uniform. But he wasn’t here to toady his way into the crowd’s affections.

  ‘Let’s give the mob a show, then,’ snarled Wallingbeck, his sabre flicking forward towards Duncan’s face.

  Duncan side-stepped and turned the man’s blade. ‘Just remember why we’re here.’

  Wallingbeck pressed his attack again. ‘Be damned if it’s not a duel.’ Just how realistic does he want to make this?

  Wallingbeck lunged with real strength and Duncan broke the attack before responding with a quick riposte. Duncan’s style was blunt but direct, nothing theatrical about it compared to this southern gentleman’s.

  ‘You’ve picked up a thing or two while you were inside the Imperium,’ noted Wallingbeck.

  ‘I’ll let you into a secret . . . I wasn’t that shabby before I left.’

  Wallingbeck pressed the attack again and Duncan circled around, the steels breaking against each other in angry little explosive cracks. ‘But you fight like a soldier, not a gentleman.’

  ‘How does a gentleman fight?’

  Wallingbeck made a quick, intricate sequence of thrusts. Duncan barely turned his foe’s blade. Wallingbeck waved the tip of his sabre as though writing a message in the air. ‘When you no longer have to ask, you’ll know.’

  The tempo of their fight increased the longer it went on, crossovers, step-lunges, back and forth, lunge, parry, his clothes damp and tight. Duncan realized he was sweating, his arms aching. How long has this been going on for now? Ten minutes. Are we to fight into sheer exhaustion?

  Their swords sprung off each other, Duncan’s blade bouncing to the right. They locked eyes and Duncan saw what the viscount expected. This duel’s gone on for long enough. Honour has been satisfied. The mob have had their fun. Duncan saw the chance to let Wallingbeck put his sabre through his shoulder, and he slightly slowed his counter strike. It should only take a second. The aristocrat recovered his balance from the clash and lunged forward – that seems – just as someone shrieked from the crowd, ‘It’s a trick, Duncan – he’s going to skewer you!’ – far too low!

  Duncan twisted to the side and the blade missed his heart but sliced deep into his right side instead, an explosion of pain and blood from the biting wound. Duncan watched wide-eyed surprise distort the viscount’s face as the man realized his blade was embedded and trapped inside Duncan’s body and the young Weylander was still alive. The expression changed to shock as Duncan tumbled forward and drove his own sword through the viscount’s chest, taking Wallingbeck exactly where he had clearly been aiming to strike Duncan. Wallingbeck stumbled back, staring at the sabre driven through him, its tip emerging from his spine, and then he fell forward with a dying gurgle, hitting the grass. Duncan stared dumbfounded at his opponent’s sword left impaled inside his gut, blood gushing over it, then he too keeled over, trying to stay on his knees. That wasn’t meant to happen. And he’s killed me too. Grey circles expanded across his vision, obscuring the sight of surgeons running on to the field, the yelling crowd pushing their way through the makeshift barrier. The final confusion that passed through Duncan’s mind before blackness claimed him was that the shouted warning had come from his sister.

  ‘I swear I’ll take one of those carriers down with me,’ snarled Anna, pulling their plane around for a suicide run right down the throat of the nearest aerial leviathan.

  ‘Another day,’ said Jacob. ‘I’m not looking to destroy the carrier fleet.’

  ‘What—?’ The answer to the pilot’s half-formed question came from the walls of the valley and mountains, thousands of soldiers throwing aside camouflaged hides, sprinting madly down the slope before leaping into the air, cloth stabilizer fins flapping between their legs to balance the three-box kites strapped like wings above their shoulders. Suddenly the sky was filled with human darts riding thermals, entire regiments corkscrewing up towards the enemy carriers.

  ‘Because they’re of more use to me captured as prizes.’

  Land Master Namdak Galasang had taken quite a chance, pulling this many troops back from the fighting around Hadra-Hareer, stripping the
border forts facing the steppes of so many defenders. Let’s see if his new-found appetite for risk pays off.

  Anna gazed in shock at the troops suddenly filling the air. They couldn’t fail to have been spotted from the enemy carriers’ bridges, but with each carrier the size and weight of an aerial city they were already too well-committed to their descent. ‘What the hell do you call that?’

  ‘War kites,’ said Jacob. ‘The real kind, rather than the nickname for a flying wing.’

  Jacob remembered his first encounter with the cunningly crafted man-lifters. After he had found a quarter of the lead tiles missing from his monastery’s roof at Geru Peak, picked off during the night by thieves strapped under box-kites. Mastering the sky in a kite was something of a rite of passage for most of the youngsters in the mountain villages.

  Anna shook her head ruefully. ‘You son of a bitch, you planned this all along! Redwater was never the target . . .’

  ‘You should have checked your charts more carefully, Miss Kurtain. These valleys are called Heaven’s Ladder for a reason. When you attend a wedding around here, you write your blessings to the happy couple on rice paper. Release it into the wind and it ends up being carried north-west all the way back to the ocean.’

  ‘Our own port city raised to the ground. Thousands dead! For this . . .’

  ‘For that. There’s your prize,’ said Jacob, indicating a huge skel carrier filling the sky. Eight long wings stacked on either side at the front, another four wings towards the carrier’s rear, the spinning discs of at least four hundred propellers – each a dozen times bigger than any Northhaven windmill – a blurred promise of death. Never meant to land on the soil. An eagle of the upper atmosphere, raiding the ground for its succour.

  Anna’s eyes narrowed as she recognized the same carrier configuration that had raided her home and taken her as a slave. It probably occurred as frequently in Miss Kurtain’s nightmares as it appeared in Jacob’s. But this scum faced a simple pastor last time they visited. A pastor and streets full of terrified townspeople. My wife, my son, my town’s children and neighbours. Let’s see how you skels fare when we know you are coming. When we’ve prepared a proper greeting for you.

  ‘James,’ she whispered half in prayer.

  ‘Someone who knows their way around machines is a valuable commodity,’ said Jacob. Valuable enough not to be sold on as a slave to the Vandians. ‘Chances are . . .’

  ‘You think this squares us for what you did to me after the fall of Midsburg?’

  ‘Find your brother alive in that flying hell-hole first, then you tell me,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Sometimes I think Owen is right. You’re more dangerous than the slavers, the usurper and the Imperium lumped together.’

  ‘Your prince isn’t wrong,’ said Jacob. ‘But as long as that danger is focused on his enemies, I reckon he’ll stomach me.’

  Anna pointed her flying wing’s nose towards the carrier’s belly. ‘Is there anything you won’t do to win?’

  Jacob didn’t answer. Perhaps because he didn’t know the answer to that himself – and there was still a part of him that didn’t want to understand.

  The turn rate on the diving enemy squadrons was superior to the sluggish carriers, but as the skel fighters tried to angle away from the storm of thousands of kite-borne attackers, the bandit pilots discovered the valley’s thermals catapulting soldiers at them faster than they could shed drag. The skel aircraft were as gaudy as a traveller’s caravan, each fighter stained with rainbow bright bars, unfamiliar animals portrayed across the fuselage as elaborate as any sailor’s tattoos. The enemy faced three full regiments of war-kites reinforcing the massed skyguard, close to a thousand flying wings. These were Rodalian pilots. Rodalian soldiers. Born to the wind. Blessed by the wind. Embraced by the storm. They could fly in a hurricane that would strip the wings off another nation’s aircraft. They are the hurricane.

  The skyguard and the war-kites didn’t so much attack the lurid enemy squadrons as dance around them, Rodalian flying wings buffeted by turbulence while performing elegant barrel rolls and breaks, seemingly turning by magic on pursuit curves that sent skel monoplanes drifting in front of their wing guns. A brief chatter of fire, followed by explosions, bandit planes blown apart, falling from the sky on plumes of dirty black smoke. And there’s your disadvantage of flying heavy on full tanks. Cross-turns, defensive splits, roll-aways; there wasn’t a manoeuvre the skyguard pilots hadn’t mastered during their strict temple training to be considered worthy of a plane. The skels, free company and air pirates, by contrast, were used to strafing ground-based peasants in kingdoms where the only planes to be seen were merchant aircraft passing overhead; where a solid air defence was a cocked crossbow behind a log rampart.

  ‘I’m nearly out of fuel,’ warned Anna.

  Then so is everyone else on our side. ‘That’s fine and dandy. I said we were setting our compass for Salasang – never said we’d put in there. Our landing field is a tad closer to home.’ Jacob pointed at the closing carrier, her hangars built into base wings on either side of the massive aircraft. An eyrie for the enemy fighter squadrons. They won’t be needing it.

  War-kite-wearing troops dodged and ignored the duelling aircraft, for the most part, riding straight up into the carriers’ flight paths. A few soldiers disregarded Jacob’s instructions and weaved among the enemy squadrons, pumping pistol and carbine shots into skel cockpits. Enemy pilots slumped forward dead on the stick, fighters veering out of control and diving into the mountainside. Most of his force followed through in the agreed plan. There was obviously panic and confusion inside the carrier formation, their battle scheme thrown into disarray. Half the cannons in the leviathans’ gun ports and turrets didn’t open fire on the approaching cloud of soldiers. The ones that did open up failed to find their targets – warriors weaving in and out, too small, too fast. The skels would have had more luck emptying their magazines into a swarm of locusts. Then the war kites were upon the carriers, soldiers grabbing the fuselage, embedding themselves into canvas-skin with hand claws, drawing slender, curved sword blades – thirty inches of low-carbon steel – ripping their way through and surging inside the carrier’s corridors and cabins. For a moment, the nearest bandit carrier looked more like the dead corpse of an animal, her flesh crawling with ants, and then she destroyed the illusion by pulling up, slowly, slowly. The soldiers had been instructed to leave war-kites tethered to the fuselage in the event their boarding action failed and they needed to abandon the bandit carrier. In a display of courage and contempt, the sky soon fluttered with hundreds of loose box-kites, drifting free and empty on the thermals. They would win here or they would die. Saints help me; if I had commanded an army of these mountain devils I could have seized every feuding kingdom of the Burn inside a year.

  Anna flew a slow lazy pass around the hangars built into the lower wing. What Jacob had been expecting. A standard design; dozens of launch ramps and catapults on the hangar’s open right-hand side, a series of dark landing tunnels off to the left . . . as long as the carrier’s wing could accommodate, a series of capture lines inside to slow returning fighters and shuttle planes. Each a self-contained fire-break to prevent a crash landing from damaging the hangar. Anna selected a landing tunnel on the far side of the wing and dove for the entrance, angling up at the last second and throwing her propeller into full reverse as they jounced once, hard, on the deck. Lines fixed on counterweights caught around the flying wing’s undercarriage, filling the air with an almost human groaning as they absorbed the plane’s velocity. Slowed to walking pace, the flying wing continued rolling down the tunnel as it widened into a mechanic’s space.

  Three skel ground crew emerged from a hatch at the side, pelting towards the flying wing, rolling a fuel barrel in front of them, only braking as they realized this latest arrival was too pocket-sized to be one of their aircraft. They understood it well enough when Jacob vaulted out of the rear cockpit, drew both his pistols and gunned down the two ne
arest bandits. The engineers slumped to the floor still clutching wooden hooks needed to haul the plane on to a turntable. The third crewman stumbled backward, halting as Jacob raised his pistols towards the skel’s head.

  ‘What’s this carrier called – and the name of her master?’ ‘Am the Razored Smile – belonging to Duke Si-meliss,’ hissed the skel. We’re on the right bandit carrier. This crewman was of the same twisted pattern as the people who had attacked Northhaven all right, lizard-snouted with scaled skin and a short, thick tail protruding from the back of his trousers. So far from the common pattern it was barely worth considering them human. These workers inside the hangar weren’t particularly imposing, though. Not the same sizeable and vicious creatures that had raided Northhaven, carrying a quarter of the population away to Vandia as slaves. They obviously stash their runts away up here, out of the fight.

  Anna swung out of her flying wing and took a turn at questioning him. ‘There’s a Weylander on this bird, James Kurtain. Keeps the rotors turning for you.’

  ‘Am work for engineering,’ confirmed the skel, his eyes blinking in disbelief at the pilot. ‘A skin-of-night, same as you-woman’s skin.’

  ‘Take us to him,’ ordered Jacob, the pistol in his left hand twitching to indicate the hatch.

  ‘Weylanders am fighting together with skels,’ said the crewman, rather hopefully. ‘Fighting for king of you-people against mountain tribe groundlings.’

  ‘You’re fighting for blood and treasure,’ said Jacob, ‘same as you ever were. And the usurper’s just a shoe merchant who put the real king in the ground so he could loot the crown from the gutter.’

  The twisted man grunted as if the politics of the groundlings was beyond him. Not a warrior. Might never have left this plane to touch real land. Born up here to die up here. It was hard to believe that this people had once been masters of Vandia, controlling the immense bounty of the stratovolcano until their own slaves and subject nations had rebelled, driving the skels into exile in the air. Making them slave soldiers in turn. These vast planes were all that was left of their empire. And soon enough they won’t even have that.