The Stealers' War

by Stephen Hunt

  Cassandra spotted something on the ground to the west. That looks like a column of people on foot. A large group. She patted Alexamir on the shoulder and indicated the train of people in the distance. ‘What’s that?’

  Alexamir followed her finger and peered down curiously. ‘Nothing that belongs here my Golden Fox. No horses? Even the rice-eaters’ patrols have mounts.’ He swung the biplane slowly out of the armada, descending to a lower altitude for a closer look.

  People indeed. Thousands of them in the long snaking lines of a mass ragtag exodus. Many struggled under the weight of packs as though carrying all of their possessions on their backs. No carts. No horses or yaks she could see either.

  Alexamir frowned. ‘By Annayla’s milky skin, what are those cursed ugly things?’

  ‘I know them!’ said Cassandra, surprised. ‘They’re skels. One of the nations of the air.’

  ‘They seem to prefer our dirt well enough now,’ said Alexamir. ‘Where have those twisted monsters come from?’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ said Cassandra, puzzled.

  ‘Well, they’re heading for the territory of the coastal tribes and the riders of the Clan Menin. All fools who have defied us and refused to join the horde, so let these skels and our old enemies rip each other to pieces.’

  ‘But what if they are driven instead towards your territory?’ asked Cassandra.

  ‘Then pray Atamva sends us worthy enemies,’ laughed Alexamir. ‘Perhaps Atamva thinks that Rodal falls too easily to the Nijumeti. Perhaps the gods fear taking the fat, rich kingdoms of the Lanca will make the clans fat and lazy, and so sending us ugly monsters is the oil-stone on which our blade must be sharpened.’

  ‘You’ll certainly get that. They’re hardened warriors,’ said Cassandra. ‘The great houses of the Imperium hire skels as mercenaries.’

  ‘Perhaps they arrived with your people, offended your grandfather and earned banishment here,’ said Alexamir. ‘If I did not have all of Rodal to conquer, I would land right now and wrestle the ten strongest of their leaders into submission. Then I would claim all of their ugly hides as my thralls before Kani Yargul takes them.’

  ‘Better we fly on,’ said Cassandra.

  ‘You are right,’ said Alexamir. ‘If I spoil Atamva’s clever scheme he may not reward me as I deserve.’

  Cassandra knew exactly what reward the young man she loved had in mind. The night before they had flown out, Alexamir had confided in her what he’d learnt inside Rodal. How the Krul of Kruls had betrayed Alexamir’s father, tried to murder the warrior so he could steal Artdan Arinnbold’s wife. ‘Your leader is about to present the horde with the fall of Rodal and then open the league kingdoms to your people. Even if you challenged Kani Yargul and slew him, his captains would order you tied to the Great Krul’s horses and torn apart for the sin of depriving them of their conquests.’

  ‘Pah, you were born in Vandia. You do not understand such things.’

  ‘I understand vendetta far better than you think, Alexamir,’ said Cassandra. ‘In the Imperium even the emperor’s family must accept challenges and face rivals inside the arena. Assassinations and schemes and plots are the gruel we were served for breakfast.’

  ‘This is my blood-debt,’ said Alexamir. ‘To refuse to pay it is a crime far worse than cowardice.’

  ‘It is not cowardice to refuse battle against a vastly superior foe,’ said Cassandra. ‘That is the foresight of a wise officer. Your own father fled to the Burn and served as a sell-sword, rather than staying and dying in the steppes. Why should the debt fall to you to repay? At least bide your time and wait until the moment is right.’

  ‘I have waited all my life, though I knew it not.’

  ‘Yargul raised you as good as one of his sons.’

  ‘Out of guilt. Or perhaps out of my mother’s urgings,’ said Alexamir. ‘Atamva never tests a blunt blade and Atamva always remembers.’

  ‘I have chosen to stay with you,’ said Cassandra. ‘I have not chosen to see you die.’

  ‘The Prince of Thieves could not be killed in the rice-eaters’ capital. I crawled like a rat through their narrow mazes inside the deep rock while wearing someone else’s name and face. I survived traps and sentries and was given the truth as my reward. It is the holy text I copied for Temmell which allows us to outwit Rodal’s spirits of the air. It is not Kani Yargul who conquers the mountains, it is Alexamir Arinnbold. This blood-price is my due. I am owed victory by the justice of the gods and laws of the clan!’

  There’s no convincing him. ‘Then it falls on me to help you.’

  ‘You must not.’

  ‘Your victory won me back the use of my legs,’ said Cassandra. ‘Why have your gods cured me if I am not to aid you in this? Do you think that devil Temmell really cares who leads the clans? Put a sword through Kani Yargul’s heart and the sly sorcerer will support you as eagerly as he supports the current Krul of Kruls. The witch riders would come to your cause, too. I know it.’

  ‘I do not wish to be Krul of Kruls. I only wish my tent’s honour restored.’

  ‘You may not have a choice,’ said Cassandra. ‘The man who topples a crown takes a crown.’

  ‘It is no crown I topple. It is a treacherous dog who betrayed his own saddle-brother, then lied about his friend’s death in the hunt. And for what? A woman.’

  ‘I’m a woman. Just like your mother.’

  ‘You are the moonlight poured into my lake,’ said Alexamir. ‘You are my Golden Fox. I would steal all of Pellas to steal your heart, but I will not forsake my tent’s honour for you. Atamva would punish me by losing you forever. This I know.’

  ‘You have me now,’ said Cassandra. And as for the rest, we shall see.

  ‘Then how can I lose?’ grinned Alexamir. He pivoted the plane back to the vast armada above. The aircraft weren’t just slow from being cobbled together inside the sorcerer’s makeshift air-works; although, in truth, any Vandian squadron leader would question Cassandra’s sanity at trusting her safety to this primitive, ramshackle skyguard. Many of the planes made poor time with the weight of gliders tethered behind their tail-wings, two or three planes per assault glider hauled on a tangle of ropes. If there was one blessing Cassandra made to her ancestors, it was that at least she sat in a spotter’s cockpit, and not inside one of those flying coffins. No engines. Four stubby wings spread out in an X shape. Wooden fuselage that would splinter with the deadly force of a frigate taking a broadside if the glider didn’t find a clear valley with open terrain to land on. Each craft packed with terrified horses, warriors and supplies and a single dangerous chance to set down alive.

  It grew cooler as they passed over the Rodalian Mountains, turbulence increasing, the biplane shaking as though gripped in some malevolent spirit’s fist. Slowly the armada turned and set their course for the safe wind channels marked on their stolen aerial charts, the juddering abating as they found their haven. It was a twisting course at first, like navigating a maze, and at altitudes that tested their fuel reserves, but eventually they reached the snow-topped mountain range that served as a marker for the main route. Rapidly the squadrons began to rise, higher and higher until they needed to slip on air-masks inside the planes. Cassandra imagined the warriors having to fit air supplies on skittish steeds inside the gliders – at least donning their own would disguise the stench of manure and fear inside the cramped assault craft.

  ‘We are mounted on fast trade winds now?’ asked Alexamir, his voice muffled by the leather mask.

  ‘Yes. The Rodalians call this the Gtsang’brug,’ said Cassandra. ‘The Dragon’s Tail.’ She checked the chronometer on the instrument panel, using it to mark the timing of the wind dam openings shown on her chart. It wasn’t that Cassandra begrudged her healing, quite the contrary. But to have retrieved the master book of the winds from the capital’s temple . . . Alexamir should have been rewarded with leadership of a clan, not just her broken spine restored. Every nomad plane in the air carried a chart specific to their raid.
Cassandra and Alexamir flew for Hadra-Hareer itself. The greatest prize where the greatest struggle would no doubt be fought. ‘And this tail will carry us south to the heart of their land . . . where we’ll use the wind’s tributaries to scatter to every city worth taking in Rodal.’

  Alexamir hooted in triumph. ‘For centuries these mountains have been our corral. But from today the corral belongs to us!’

  ‘Rodal belongs to the victors,’ reminded Cassandra.

  ‘Pah, the rice-eaters are divided, fighting Weylanders who skirmish among themselves, a gang of sots squabbling around the campfire over the bone’s best meat. The Prince of Thieves could fly in here alone, take Hadra-Hareer by himself and not think himself too greedy.’

  ‘And what would you do with a city just for you?’

  ‘I will claim a foreign title. King or baron, and I will make you my queen. And all the rice-eaters will line up every morning in my throne room to kiss my toes.’

  ‘You would have very clean toes,’ said Cassandra. ‘Possibly extremely blistered and damp after a few weeks.’

  ‘That, sadly, is the burden a strong king must bear for his subjects.’

  And was that not more or less the fate I faced in Vandia? Cassandra sighed. At least here, her fate would be what she chose. Maybe that was difference enough.

  They flew on for hours, the bright high sun making Cassandra’s eyes water, even behind her tinted goggles. Gravity at so high an altitude was feather light and it made her feel weightless and queasy, but they were conserving fuel, which was the important thing. Once Rodal is ours, we will be able to set up skyguard stations to re-provision us. Until then, the armada was operating at the far end of its range. By journey’s end, it wasn’t just the gliders who would have a single chance to land inside Rodal’s valleys. Temmell’s new skyguard would be touching down on empty tanks too.

  ‘What is this sly wind’s speed?’ called Alexamir.

  Cassandra balanced the chart on her lap and consulted it. ‘Two hundred and fifty miles an hour during the day. The Dragon’s Tail dwindles to two hundred miles an hour during evenings and nights.’

  ‘Our wooden pigeon flies at three hundred miles an hour,’ said Alexamir. ‘With my engine block idling so low it might as well be resting back on the grass inside a carrier’s ruin.’

  ‘That can’t be right?’ Cassandra checked the chart again. If this is wrong, then what else is? Has Temmell made a mistake in transcribing the stolen holy text? It seemed unlikely. Temmell’s cunning designed and constructed this armada. His sorcery had permitted Alexamir to walk among the Rodalians disguised as one of them. But if not his mistake, then whose?

  ‘Atamva blesses us,’ chuckled Alexamir. ‘He wishes us to reach our cities with enough fuel left to give the rice-eaters a fight in the sky worthy of his name.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  But if the nomad’s gods wished the Nijumeti invasion a speedy conclusion, it seemed three hundred miles an hour was still too slow for them. Four hundred. Five hundred. Six hundred. Alexamir shouted their rapidly rising speed out.

  ‘This is insane!’ called Cassandra, her voice shredded by the gusting wind. This isn’t the Dragon’s Tail. This is the Dragon’s Gullet, and it’s going to end up consuming us all. ‘We were never built to handle this velocity.’ They were fast reaching the speed of a Vandian warship. A reinforced steel hull with crew positions designed to enable the Imperium’s sailors and soldiers to endure sustained periods of high g-force acceleration. Not cloth and timber airframes patched together by artisans more used to crafting yurt frames and ash-wood wagons.

  Some of the nomads’ aerial fleet had reached the same conclusion and attempted to roll outside of the Dragon’s Tail, but, however turbulent it grew inside here, at least they were flying inside the eye of the hurricane-force stream. Cassandra wanted to scream at the nomads. Warn them. But she suspected they wouldn’t have heeded her even if they had heard her warning. The instant the fleeing aircraft touched the walls of the wind the turbulence increased a hundredfold. The train of three escaping biplanes and their towed glider crumpled inside the wind, scrunched up into a fistful of splintering fragments. There was a brief flurry of cloth strips, fuselage and broken corpses joining the dragon’s body, scattered across hundreds of miles of sky before the disintegrated debris vanished as if it had never existed.

  ‘We have transgressed against the spirits of the wind,’ moaned Alexamir. ‘We thought ourselves cunning, but the Rodalians’ gods have gazed upon our invasion and raised their wrath against us.’

  ‘We have to stay on course!’ shouted Cassandra. ‘Stay and hold!’ Ride this demon to the end.

  Alexamir raised a gloved hand back to her cockpit and she gripped his fingers tight in terror as a glider tore away from its lines ahead of them and came cartwheeling back through the air, rudders torn off in the mad wind. She heard the screams of the Nijumeti inside as it narrowly missed them. Not our end, please, not ours.

  ‘Here’s your justice,’ said Holten, brushing a tear away from Willow’s cheek with the cold hard pistol barrel. ‘You will never escape me.’

  There was another noise as Holten pulled back the revolver’s hammer, a crash followed by a sharp sibilant hiss above the pistol’s click; then the woman screamed as something long and black wrapped around her hand. Her hand jerked up in agony, yanked with the force of—

  A whip!

  The woman wielding the weapon was framed in the doorway, a gang of rowdy brutes barrelling in behind her over the remains of the kicked-in door, a flurry of swords, rifles and pistols. Nocks instantly shoved Willow hard towards the intruders. She yelled in shock. Nocks reacted whippet-fast, grabbing Holten and flinging himself and the woman through the open window. Willow turned and ran to the window, just in time to see the two devils rolling off the boarding house’s canopy and into the street below. She tried to mount the frame and follow them, but at least four sets of hands seized her and yanked her back, turning her roughly to face the intruders.

  ‘Short one’s spry on his feet,’ said the woman with the whip, staring at the escaping servant. She had a silky voice to match her exotic face, wide eyes and honeyed skin. A touch of Rodalian mixed with Weylander blood and perhaps a few other distant nations blended in. Beautiful in a dangerously feline way. Her gang were armed to the teeth. Hard, sly, fight-beaten faces. Weathered clothes. They looked like a band of marauders and bandits. And if they’re walking freely around Northhaven, then they’re working for Bad Marcus, one way or another.

  ‘No room on his face for a second scar,’ grinned a bandit. ‘I’d be fast out of it, too.’

  ‘Well here’s the waste of a perfectly good ransom,’ said the woman, prodding Benner Landor’s corpse with her boot. She turned to her warriors. ‘Tell me that this isn’t one of the richest men in the province lying here with his windpipe crushed?’

  Willow tried to lash out at the ruffians restraining her. ‘Don’t you touch him!’

  ‘You think he cares now? Yes, you’re the rich man’s precious little daughter. I can see I’ve arrived at the right place, Lady Wallingbeck. Or are you back to your maiden name now that your husband’s planted in the ground?’

  ‘That was the bloody Landor wife who just went out the window, Aurora,’ snarled one of the bandits.

  ‘A family falling out?’ asked the woman named as Aurora, raising her eyebrows at the dead body.

  ‘Go to hell,’ snapped Willow. Who are these damnable raiders?

  ‘Just staying on the ground with you people is hell enough.’ Aurora patted Willow’s wide stomach with a sly smile. ‘Two to ransom here . . . with a pair of great houses willing to pay. And you can’t even run away from us. What do you say, boys?’

  The invaders hooted with pleasure.

  ‘A treasure ship low in the water with half her sails trimmed.’ Aurora secured her whip to her belt and raised a hand. A tiny gambler’s pistol lashed forward on a spring-arm, before disappearing inside her right hand’s bell-sil
k sleeve. She prodded Willow in the spine with a finger. ‘My little sting doesn’t make much noise. But trust me when I say you don’t want to feel it. You’re a free woman after your brother’s triumph at the trial, so let’s take some air together.’

  ‘The king’s soldiers are all over Northhaven.’

  ‘And we’re mercenaries loyally fighting by their side,’ said Aurora. ‘Besides, I don’t think the royal army gives a rat’s fart for what happens to Willow Landor, do you? A rebel sympathizer who contrived her way off the gallows at the cost of one of their own slain and a second officer close to death. The most interesting thing about you, my lady, is what you’re worth to the right people.’

  The wrong people. ‘I don’t suppose the fact that the trial went in my favour matters to you?’

  ‘Never appeal to a woman’s better nature. She might not have one.’ Aurora indicated the splintered doorframe. ‘Anyone you warn won’t live to repeat your pleas.’

  They dragged Willow towards the door and she fought to reach her father. ‘Let me say goodbye at least. Please.’

  Aurora nodded warily and the bandits pushed Willow to kneel by the body. She touched the uniform, unable to bring herself to stare at her father’s bloodied ruin of a neck. Benner had dominated and filled her life for so long, much as he had done to Northhaven and all the borderland’s farms. She couldn’t believe how easily he had fallen. It should never have finished like this. If only her father hadn’t believed his children dead and lost to the slavers. If only I had never been taken. Holten would have just been one more grasping aristocrat hoping to ensnare Benner Landor’s fortune, sent packing from Hawkland House with all the others. But she had caught the house’s patriarch in his grief and twisted it. Manipulated his hurt to supply Benner with a sham new family. But it was over before that, wasn’t it? The sad truth of the matter was that Willow had lost much of the father she knew after her mother passed away. The light of love had dwindled to be replaced by the burning, all-consuming fire of avarice and the self-justifications needed to keep the house ruthlessly expanding its reach. Leyla Holten had merely arrived at the end of the process like a fire-heated blade to cauterise the wound. And twist it inside me for her sadistic pleasures.