In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘They do?’

  ‘Oh yes. They often whisper to me during the long nights, recounting new stories to illustrate on my coat. It was the Duchess of Krinard, a courteous lady and a great scholar, who taught me how to communicate with the stars. She owned a telescope cut from a single great diamond and she kept two hundred ravens to drag it into position every night. Perhaps I could teach you the trick of communicating with the heavens, Mister…?’

  ‘Carter Carnehan. That’s kind of you, but I’ll pass. If you walk through Northhaven, maybe you can show my father. He’s a great one for watching the sky at night.’

  Sariel ran a hand through the hedge of wiry white hair above his wrinkled forehead. ‘The stars undoubtedly whisper to him, too. He must be trying to hear the heavenly orbs better.’

  Carter led the tramp through the most indirect route he could think of to avoid the other librarians. The Ledger of Salt and Roof was really intended for wandering monks, maybe merchants who had fallen on hard times and were reaching the end of their supplies as they passed the guild’s hold. It wasn’t meant for any lazy rascal who fancied a free supper at the guild’s expense, but here was Carter, using his ‘discretion’ in a way guaranteed to rile the Master Codex when he asked how Carter had dealt with the tramp. I guess I just like making mischief. Carter avoided the hold’s refectory, seating the tramp at a reading table in the corner of the nearest map room, leaving him there while he slipped into the kitchens – liberating a jug of water, flat bread, cold ham, cheese and a bowl of rice along with a glass vessel filled with soy sauce. It wasn’t the hearty stew the hobo had hinted at, but the librarians preferred rations as plain and bland as their lives. Balancing the food on a wooden tray, Carter carried it back to the map room.

  As Carter slipped through the doorway, he found Sariel leaning over one of the map tables, swaying from side to side and banging his temple with his left hand. ‘It’s so big, so large, so much of it. I remember the size now, how could I ever have forgotten? I’m no better than a fobbing, evil-eyed horn-beast.’

  Carter felt a twinge of nerves. Just how unbalanced was his unpredictable guest? Carter hadn’t swept him for matches or a flintbox, either, before allowing him inside the hold. Carter’s apprenticeship might be miserable, but he didn’t want to end his tenure with the first fire in the library’s recorded history. ‘I’ve got your meal here, old fellow. Sit down.’

  ‘I apologise. I suffer headaches sometimes. So many stories cluttered inside my mind, plotting and planning with each other. Which nation does your castle lie in, Lord Carnehan?’

  ‘Come south over the mountains, have you? Through Rodal? This country is Weyland, old fellow. We’re part of the Lanca, just like Rodal. You understand? Part of the Lancean League? You will be walking for a couple of decades before you’re free of the league. Every country south of here and a few more out to the east, all part of the Lanca, all as quiet and peaceful as a church social in the meadows with the picnic blankets laid out.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I recall mountains. Sea, there was a significant surfeit of sea. Waves as big as mountains crashing down on top of us… of those there were plenty.’

  ‘Worked passage on a vessel, did you? Shipped in from the west? Know how to rig a schooner as well as spin a yarn?’

  ‘A schooner? Twenty-five sails hung across seven proud masts,’ said Sariel, tugging his silver beard as if he could wring information out of the hair. ‘No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous. I crossed the ocean on a pod of whales, borne by the noblest of those great mammals of the sea, the Prince of Baleens. He was grieving for the loss of his favourite cow, what we would call his wife. He sang only songs of sorrow for the entire journey. So many tears shed, my lord, sometimes it was hard to know where the tears ended and the ocean began. I’m not embarrassed to say I wept for his loss.’

  Whatever sense of sadness Sariel felt, it didn’t seem to make much difference to the old beggar’s ability to work his way through the pile of food Carter had delivered. His gnarled old fingers tore into the bread, using the knife Carter had fetched to hack at the cheese and ham. Then he emptied half the soy sauce over the cold rice, letting it drown, before rescuing it with his spoon.

  Sariel raised a mug of water, regarding it suspiciously. For someone who’d supposedly crossed an ocean of it, he didn’t seem much inclined to drink the stuff. He tapped the mug. ‘Nothing stronger?’

  ‘Once a year, to celebrate the day when a whole year’s worth of radio messages have been entered in every journal, tome, history, codex and atlas racked on our shelves. Then we start again. Come back in eight months and I’ll be glad to serve you some rice wine. We’re holier than monks down here.’

  Sariel reluctantly swigged from the mug while demolishing the meal’s remains, chasing crumbs with his knife. As mangy as the down-on-his-luck bard was, Carter felt a surge of sympathy for the sly old devil. Is this what people warn about when they talk of young minds being far-called? Wandering without finish across lands that never ended. Bereft of friends and family. Letting empty spaces and the almost infinite wilderness fill your mind with madness, until the day came when you turned up at a town and all you could talk was nonsense about riding fish and your good friends the stag and the hare? No job, no prospects, no kin. Was Carter looking at himself in sixty years times if he abandoned his stultifying apprenticeship? No, surely not. I’d be stronger than Sariel. It isn’t a crime to want to see more of the world than the dust on top of the guild’s atlases.

  ‘What did you find out there, Sariel? Did you really cross the ocean? See anything of the war on the far shore… travel through the Burn?’

  ‘Oh, surely,’ said Sariel, wiping crumbs out of his wiry white beard. ‘All the countries and kingdoms of the Burn at each other’s throats, killing and murdering for longer than most empires have stood. Lands as black as night, the very ground murdered by continual combat, unable to push out more than a single stalk of corn from their field, and that a sickly weak-whore weed of a plant. Brigands for princes and killers for police and cannibals for judges. It was in the Burn that I met Oak-legged Andal, his legs so powerful he could vault into the sky with a single bound. He tied sails to his arms and loved to glide so high, where the world’s pull is less than the tug of a feather. Together we fought an evil warlord, the Sultan Gram. Ah, the sultan! Never have you met such an impertinent, fool-born bombast. Gram had enslaved a host of nations, setting them to building a massive firework as tall as a mountain, a rocket to carry him and his court far from the Burn’s ruins. But Oak-legged Andal and I foiled the sultan’s scheme and paid him back for the millions of peasants the devil had worked to death constructing his grotesque folly. We sabotaged the rocket’s mechanism and when he mounted the vessel, it kept on going straight up.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘The firework melted, of course. Turned to a slag by the sun, and he fell back, landing in one of the neighbouring states. There, refugees who had survived the sultan’s predations fell upon him, tied him to a spit and cut slices of him off to feed their dogs, just as the sultan’s soldiers had done to their families.’

  Carter felt a pang of disappointment. This old beggar probably hadn’t travelled further than the Marshes of Hellin.

  ‘There are no happy melodies sung in the Burn, only lamentations. Nobody in the lands is willing to honour the traditions of salt and roof to deserving strangers such as I.’

  ‘If you’re finished, Sariel, I’ll guide you to a cabin down the valley. If you’re found here by the others, I reckon it’ll be the tradition of salt and boot up the backside that’s offered to you by my guild master.’

  The mad old bard pushed his empty plate aside. ‘You lead, Lord Carnehan, and I shall follow. What did I say my name was again?’

  ‘Sariel.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. So much to remember, so much that’s forgotten.’

  ‘If you’re still here tomorrow, I’ll fetch you another meal to see you on your way.
But I’ll bring breakfast out to you, old fellow, understand? Better all round that way.’

  ‘Your nobility is a shining beacon to lesser men, Lord Carnehan.’

  ‘I’m no lord, old fellow. Not unless I’m lord of refilling humidifier boxes.’

  ‘An outrage!’ said Sariel, his voice growing dangerously loud, a magnet for any passing librarian to investigate. ‘But you are in luck. It was the Tsarina of Nera-ka herself who installed me as the Secret Master of the Grand Order of Protectors. I shall knight you forthwith, indeed, that is what I shall do. Kneel…’

  Carter sighed and dropped to one knee. Better to humour the old beggar than be found out and forbidden to bed him down in their guest cabins. Sariel lowered his walking staff on Carter’s shoulders, the left first, then the right. The wood felt heavier than granite, and for a second Carter had the oddest sensation he was being pushed into the ground. As quick as the strange feeling arrived, it fled. The old tramp incanted, ‘Carter Carnehan, you go to your knees as a commoner, but you shall rise as a knight of the order of the Grand Order of Protectors, lord of this hold, most beloved of the Tsarina Nera-ka. May her blessings straighten your aim and give strength to your arm in defence of her code most chivalrous.’

  Carter got to his feet and murmured an insincere-sounding thanks to the beggar. If my arm had been a bit stronger and quicker this morning, I could have taught Duncan Landor a fine lesson about poking his nose in another man’s affairs.

  Sariel leaned conspiratorially across as Carter led the bard back out through corridors and stairwells rarely traversed by the library’s journeymen. ‘Now you are a fellow brother of the order, perhaps I can tempt you to our cause? There is a wicked emperor who plots dominion over all things. And only those of good heart may band together to stop him.’

  ‘I’m afraid the duties of my hold are currently a little heavy right now, old fellow. The good people of Weyland need their knowledge transcribed, codified, copied and bound. But maybe another day…’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sariel. ‘Any noble who does not rule for the people hardly deserves their office. I believe the family of travellers camped outside will be only too eager to join me in my quest. I once did a considerable favour for the goddess of that particular clan, Lady Gameesh, and ever since, their descendants have held me in considerable regard.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Carter. Yes, no doubt.

  Carter led the beggarly bard to one of the guest huts outside, settled him and his impossible tales in for the rest of the day and started to walk back to the hold. He had just reached the hold’s entrance in the slopes when he spotted Willow riding fast through the valley on her favourite sorrel mare. Carter raised his hand in greeting, hoping that she might have forgiven him for this morning’s fracas with her brother. When Carter had been fast friends with Duncan, he had developed quite a crush on the boy’s sister, but a chance remark from Benner Landor when Carter had been visiting their great estate had made him realise that Willow was destined for better things than a dirt-poor pastor’s son. What had it been? Swans swim with swans, boy. Something like that. A simple enough remark, but at the time it had kicked the foundations out from under Carter’s feet, leaving him feeling miserable and wretched for weeks. He was older now. He knew how the world worked. Willow Landor would marry some rich landowner’s son – or maybe one of the southern mill owners. A dynastic match. While Carter’s family expected him to drown in boredom out here, little better than a monk taken a vow of poverty and chastity. Of course she wouldn’t look twice at him – what had he been thinking? He should have resented Willow and her wealth and her perfect future mapped out with such precision. But somehow, he still couldn’t. What Carter had once felt for her was a wound he had cauterised, bound and would never uncover again, its ugliness a reminder of how he had been a big enough fool for taking it in the first place.

  Willow drew the chestnut-coloured horse to a halt in front of him, its nostrils flaring with the excitement of the canter. Cornfed, of course, the best you could breed and as fast as lightning. Carter’s father kept one old nag in a rented stall in the new town’s stables, a gelding called Icabob, for the times when he needed to visit parishioners outside the town. Blind in one eye and well past its prime. Carter had learnt to ride on it but the other children had called out jokes when they saw him swaying on the elderly nag. He’d rather walk or hitch a lift with the regular message run to the library than be seen riding Icabob, now.

  Willow raised an eyebrow. ‘The Master of the Codex hasn’t cancelled your apprenticeship yet, then?’

  ‘I’d need to burn a few books to get booted out,’ said Carter, knowing the very idea would be sacrilege to Willow. ‘Hey, maybe that’s an idea!’

  ‘If you value learning so little,’ said Willow, rising to the bait, ‘maybe you could take off to the north and join one of the nomadic hordes beyond the mountains? Of course, you’d have to leave off burning an atlas or two to actually find the steppes.’

  ‘Oh, I can navigate well enough with a compass and the stars,’ smiled Carter. ‘It’d be a novel experience anyway, walking across an acre of land that doesn’t belong to your family. Nice afternoon for a bit of leisurely riding. Or are you off to count the full fuel stills over those hills?’

  ‘I’m off,’ said Willow, a little irritated, ‘to see why one of our land agents thinks a family should be evicted from a farm close to the forest. I’ve heard rumours that the father’s been ill out there and that’s why they’ve fallen behind with the rent. If I left such decisions to you men, then they’d be out on their ear without a second thought to what’s really happening on the farm.’

  ‘Well, there are always more tenants where they came from.’

  Willow scowled. ‘With an attitude like that, if you do get tossed out of the librarian’s guild, you should travel to Hawkland Park and ask my father for a job as a land agent. He’d be glad to have you.’

  ‘What and end up working for Duncan? That’s why I’m getting out of Northhaven, one way or another.’

  ‘And you don’t think I’m worthy enough to inherit the estate on my own terms?’

  ‘You wanted that job; you should have let me fillet Duncan with a sabre this morning.’

  Willow snorted. ‘Really? Do you think so? Good day to you then, Mister Carnehan.’ She put the spur into her mare and the horse galloped away.

  Carter exhaled slowly, trying to suppress his anger. That hadn’t gone quite as well as he had hoped. Oh well. Willow was her brother’s sister, that much was certain. Every month, Duncan Landor became more like his grasping self-important father. It was no wonder the heir to Hawkland Park wanted Adella so intensely. Duncan’s gaze had rested on something he didn’t have, couldn’t have, and it itched him like a bad shirt. Adella was about the only reason for Carter to stay in the prefecture, or was it the need to deny her to Duncan? Damned if he really knew. Or maybe he did, and he didn’t want to recognise the answer. Sadly, Adella had shown no interest in leaving Northhaven. But that was Adella for you. Home and hearth close to their family and the familiar was what she yearned for, not new sights out in the infinite. Carter knew exactly how matters would develop after he left the prefecture. Duncan would sweep Adella off her feet and everything would be fine for a year or two. But then some rich southern girl would show up, a match ‘worthy’ of a Landor, and poor Adella would be tossed aside like a rusty nail, bitter and broken as the Landor heir discovered a fresh itch that needed scratching. If Duncan was this competitive and hostile when the pampered pup was waiting in the wings to take over from his old man, how bad would he be when he finally sat on Benner Landor’s immense pile of wealth? It didn’t bear thinking about. You’ll be long gone by then, Carter Carnehan. It’ll be some other fool’s problem. Carter cursed his father’s intervention out on the field. Didn’t the pastor understand there were some matters that couldn’t be settled by prayer and good intentions, only blood? The two of them should have settled their hard business there and then. Car
ter could have skewered the rich young idiot’s leg and left Duncan Landor a limp to remember him by every time he hobbled across one of the House of Landor’s numerous holdings. That would have been the best way imaginable for Carter to sail away from Northhaven for a new life. Duncan Landor left lame and with a lesson in manners that would surely teach him a valuable lesson about the true nature of his fellow Weylanders. They were free men in the north, not vassals or serfs. The pockets that the House of Landor filled with their coins in the prefecture entitled the paymaster to an honest day’s labour, not the recipient’s life and soul. Who the hell did Duncan Landor think he was, ordering Carter around like one of his damn stable boys? They could stick it up their arse, the whole bloody house… the controlling patriarch, the haughty daughter and the arrogant prick of a son.

  Carter slapped his leg in anger, relishing the sting of it, something real as he watched Duncan’s snappish sister disappear over the hill on her horse, towards some poor unsuspecting farmhouse filled with tenants who were about to get a tedious lecture in proper economy and their own good business. ‘Goodbye, Willow Landor.’

  Back to wiping the dust off damned bookshelves.

  Carter lifted his fork, letting it toy with the pork crackling on the side of his plate. When his father said nothing, that is all it was. His father saying nothing: an absence of noise, maybe tinged with a vein of solemnity. When his mother said nothing, she could make the silence more intense and far worse than any shouting fit.

  ‘Maybe some more gravy?’ said Carter.

  His mother reached across the table and banged the hefty pottery jug down in front of him, still saying not a word.

  ‘What was I going to do?’ said Carter, giving in and breaking the uncomfortable silence. ‘I was called out. I didn’t start the duel.’

  ‘Walk on by,’ said Mary Carnehan. ‘When trouble comes, you just walk on by. Nobody that matters would think any less of you.’

  ‘Only everyone I know,’ hissed Carter. ‘My friends, all of our neighbours, even those dusty bookbinders buried under the hillside.’ He looked across the table at his father. ‘You told me that a man’s honour is like his soul – his to keep and no one else’s.’