In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  Duncan returned his attention to Adella. And what father had achieved, so could the son, and all the easier with the right woman by his side. ‘Then you’ve thought on what I said?’ He indicated the tall mansion glinting in the night. ‘That doesn’t mean anything to me, it never has, and a lot less since I’ve known you. There’ll be a guild train loading up at the railhead in a few days. We can jump on it, travel someplace where my father’s not got the pull to stop us getting hitched.’ Duncan was so lost in the excitement of the idea that he didn’t notice the brief frown of alarm Adella cleared from her face.

  ‘This is your birthright, Duncan. I won’t have you throw away your life just for me.’

  ‘There’s no just,’ insisted Duncan. ‘We can start over, you and me. I don’t need Hawkland Park and an army of tenant farmers tugging their forelock to me every time I ride past, asking me how I am, when they don’t really give a damn if the answer’s good or bad. We can build our own life, free of all of this. That’s where the joy of life is… in the building of it, not the having of it. If it were any other way, my father would’ve slowed down years ago and be spending time with Willow and me. Doing something other than locking himself away in an office with nothing but a gaggle of clerks and a mountain of papers and schemes.’

  ‘You’re not a quitter,’ whispered Adella. ‘And what you’re speaking of, that isn’t freedom, it’s quitting. You walk out on Hawkland Park and everything would go to your sister – and if something happened to her, who then? Some distant cousin seven times removed; a stranger you’ve never even met inheriting everything that should be yours? I’ve seen you stand up for what’s right this morning, Duncan. It’s no time to stop now…’

  This is what Duncan loved most about Adella. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t fawn around him, and nor did she cower. Adella could see what Duncan was capable of and encouraged him with a passion. If only he could make her see how Carter Carnehan was playing her for a dupe, using her for his own ends. ‘Hell! You know nothing’s ever going to happen to Willow. We’re safe here and my sister would actually have to leave her library and lift her nose out of a book to get into a scrape. Listen to me, Adella, as long as you and I stay here, we’re never going to be together. The old man’s given orders I’m not to set foot in Northhaven market tomorrow, just on the off-chance that you might bump into me. I’m going to be kept buried all day counting barrels and checking they’ve been stamped with the correct order numbers.’

  Adella’s features crinkled in annoyance. ‘Then I’ll sneak out to the wharves to see you. There’ll be barges in for your oil as well as riverboats up from the harbour port, hundreds of travellers milling around. Who’s to spot me with a docker’s cap pulled over my head?’

  ‘I’d spot you,’ Duncan laughed. ‘Won’t be much of a disguise.’

  Adella’s hand moved up to tug his shirt playfully. ‘We could really be together, right now. Just slip behind the hedge and show Benner Landor that his son doesn’t take orders, that he’s his own man.’

  ‘What if I put a child inside you?’

  ‘It’s not my time for that.’

  ‘From what I’ve seen, those matters always move in their own good time, not any calendar you keep by your sideboard,’ said Duncan. Saint’s teeth, sometimes it’s almost as if she wants to get pregnant. ‘Don’t think that I’m not aching for it, Adella, worse than a furnace fire, but it’d be wrong. Northhaven is a Landor town and there’s no church here that is going to make it right without my father’s blessing. Besides, Carter Carnehan might not deserve a minute of your time, but until we do the proper thing, or Carter really does up and run for the sea—’

  ‘I’m not minded to throw Carter,’ said Adella, petulantly, ‘not until you can stand up to your father and make him give you what’s yours by right.’

  ‘What’s mine by right, well, there we are,’ sighed Duncan. There’s not often that I feel like I know what that is anymore.

  Adella stood up, brushing the hedge’s leaves off her skirt. ‘You’re as good a man as your father, Duncan. I know you’ll find a way to make him see what you want works, and do it without turning tail and ducking out of your house like a burglar caught rattling the windows.’

  Duncan watched Adella disappear down the slope, heading for the copse at the bottom of the slope where she’d have tethered her father’s old nag of a horse. Changing Benner Landor’s mind? That was quite an act of alchemy. Might as well ask Duncan to turn grass into blades of gold, for all the chances he stood of achieving that. The shadows of the staff moving around behind the dining room curtains told him that dessert was being served. Time to head back to my room before my absence’s noticed.

  Carter stalked angrily along the pavement of the North Road, ignor­ing honking geese being driven down the middle of the street by a pair of drovers. The drovers’ long walking sticks whirled like windmills; streams of curious geese trying to duck down side roads before the whirling canes dropped in front of them, encouraging stray birds to keep with the main flock. Heading for the central market and slaughter at dawn, not that they knew it. Behind Carter and his father a string of flat-bottomed carts creaked, loaded down with corn oil, the Landor crest carefully stamped into each barrel. Every one another pocket full of profit for their family. What’s Duncan done to deserve it? Except being born to a man with ambition in his belly, not a sermon in his throat?

  ‘You don’t have to come with me,’ Carter told his father. ‘I’ll be at the radiomen’s hold in time to catch their first message run of the day out to the library.’

  ‘I need to pass through the market, anyway,’ said Jacob. ‘I promised I would buy some fresh milk to take along to the Hanniels’ house. He’s nursing his wife and doesn’t leave her bedside as near often as he should.’

  Carter didn’t know what to say to that.

  ‘Be with the angels soon enough,’ continued Jacob.

  Carter grunted. There was no shortage of old people in Northhaven. Anyone young enough to still have some spark left in them usually jumped on to a train to look for work in the teeming cities down south.

  ‘Both of them, probably. Seen it before,’ Jacob added. ‘Get to that age and with half of you gone, the other half just ups and follows.’

  Carter said nothing. He noted the way shopkeepers opened their shutters and nodded towards his father, everyone with all the time in the world to exchange a friendly greeting. That’s all he would ever be here, the child of Jacob Carnehan. The preacher’s son.

  Northhaven was built on a hill, and the closer they came to its centre, the narrower and steeper the streets became. There had been a church inside the old town once, centuries ago. Now it was gone, the valuable land sold off and the churchyard relocated to the sprawl outside the old town’s walls. Carter found the forest of towering radio masts rising over the cramped streets, partially obscured by washing lines hung between buildings, the guild’s hold safely within the town walls. A central minaret concealed the main radio mast, the tower circled by booster spikes. Carter hadn’t even reached the top of the street when he spotted something was wrong. The radiomen’s delivery cart was outside their hold, a flatbed half loaded with message crates, but its two horses were off the train; being saddled up individually while a gaggle of radiomen stood around outside. The armoured entrance to the hold stood gaping open. They never left their door open! You’d think a person would go blind for glimpsing the guild secrets inside that sanctum. There was something you never saw in Northhaven, too… urgency and fear written across the faces of the guild’s members.

  ‘Why are you saddling outriders?’ asked Jacob, addressing a guildsman with gold stripes sewn onto his black leather radioman’s jacket.

  ‘We’re getting word out fast,’ said the radioman. ‘An aircraft’s been spotted heading our way, not answering any guild hails.’

  ‘How many rotors?’ demanded Jacob.

  ‘Three hundred, at least,’ said the radioman. ‘Maybe five, hugging the
coast before turning east. Blackwood Bay called it in, but the station there was down for maintenance. It took them two hours to get back up and pass the warning along the relay.’

  Jacob’s mouth drew into a thin line, as close as Carter’s father ever got to showing anger. ‘I’ll warn the wall’s western keep, you run your horses out to the other two gates. Have you sent runners to the lord mayor and high sheriff?’

  The radioman nodded.

  ‘What about transmitting word up to Rodal?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the radioman, growing irritated at the pastor’s questioning. ‘But it’s a waste of battery acid. Their skyguard squadrons are out with our fleet, dropping rocks in the sea and pretending target barrels are pirate galleons. Our luck’s as empty as the territorial army’s barracks.’

  Jacob shouted at Carter to stay where he was, before running down the same road they had just climbed. Carter ignored his father, sprinting down the hill after him. Damned if I’ll stay back there. Carter called after the pastor. ‘What’s this about? Just a plane in the air. Aircraft pass over from Rodal all the time.’

  ‘This isn’t a single-seater kite, boy. Even aerial nomads answer ground hails from countries they’re overflying. And you only travel wave-skipping over the ocean to avoid being spotted by radiomen until it’s too late.’

  ‘Bandits?’ said Carter, astonished at the alien sound of the word in his mouth. Bandit raids were something that happened to other people. Distant parts far away in the sparsely populated east, not boring backwaters like Northhaven, quiet boondocks nearly fallen off the map. Carter was growing short of breath, even sprinting downhill. He had never run through town so fast before. ‘What the hell we got that they might want?’

  ‘You mean apart from the entire harvest of corn oil filling the Landors’ warehouses along the river? The engines on a bandit’s rotors would drink Benner’s crop faster than a sailor downing whisky rye.’

  ‘We’ve got to warn mother,’ said Carter.

  ‘And I need to ring the church bells,’ said Jacob. ‘Warn everyone living outside the battlements to get up into the old town. Bandits like their pickings easy. They won’t be here for a siege. Just what they can pillage before the sea fort at Redwater sends frigates up the river.’

  Despite Jacob Carnehan’s protestations, Carter arrived at the battlement’s western keep close behind his old man. He watched his father put the fear of god into Constable Wiggins and the other policemen manning the customs gate. Wiggins might have been the oldest of the group, but he was faster on the uptake than the two younger constables, shouting at his men to fetch more officers to the wall and bring heavy rifles to drop on the rampart’s tripod mountings.

  Wiggins spat onto the cobbles under the portcullis. ‘Sitting here since sun-up, playing cloakroom attendant for all the traders and travellers coming in. Turns out I should have been handing out guns and swords, not collecting them in.’

  ‘Are the barrage balloons along the wall in any state to be raised?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ said Wiggins. ‘They only go up during the annual wall drill. More patches than fabric, and that’s if the cylinders to inflate them haven’t leaked. Well, we’ll find out, I reckon.’

  ‘You’ve got pistols collected in there?’ asked Carter, pointing to the guardroom. ‘Let me have one.’

  ‘As far as my son’s concerned, you keep your guns racked,’ ordered Jacob. ‘I know you, Carter. You get five rounds in a chamber and you’ll be charging the first bandits that hit the ground as though they’re no more than paper targets at a fairground stall.’

  ‘Your old man’s got a point,’ laughed Wiggins. ‘I’ve seen how that drunken sot of a sergeant in the territorials teaches you kids to shoot on cadet days. One hand on a bottle and the other like this—’ Wiggins formed a gun barrel with his fingers and clicked off shots straight up into the air ‘—when he gets overexcited.’

  ‘Stick it,’ said Carter, his temper flaring at both of them. ‘I’ll fight them with my fists and harsh language if I have to. This is my town; I’ll do what I need to defend us!’

  It was the distant droning that caught Carter’s attention first, like a flight of hornets stirred up and ready to swarm the dunderhead who’d banged their nest. Staring through the keep’s open gate, he could just see a black dot against the sun, little bigger than a coin. Have the radiomen marked the size right – don’t see that having a couple of hundred propellers?

  ‘No perspective that high in the sky,’ said his father, guessing what his son was thinking. ‘Their sound tells you the size of it, though.’

  ‘So far out, and she’s still humming like a flight of locusts,’ said Wiggins. ‘More like a goddamn flying city than any Rodalian flying wing; pardon my language, Father. Ten minutes and they’ll be on top of us.’

  ‘Keep the gate open as long as possible,’ Jacob told the constable. He was off, under the walls and sprinting towards the church with Carter following as fast as he could.

  ‘Stay inside the battlements,’ his father shouted back.

  ‘You got your congregation at church and I don’t know about it?’ asked Carter, ignoring his father and catching him up. ‘Ringing the bells is a two-person job at least.’

  ‘You take your mother out,’ hissed Jacob, relenting. ‘That’s your job. Just stay alive.’

  They fair flew through the streets, yelling warnings at everyone they passed to head up the hill to the old town. Given the size and noise of the approaching aircraft, their warnings were fast becoming irrelevant. The flying machine approached like a dark black dragon 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 its propellers – each a dozen times bigger than any Northhaven windmill – far more numerous than Carter could count.

  ‘Won’t be much left of Landor’s fields after they’ve landed that monster,’ panted Carter.

  ‘Doesn’t land,’ said Jacob. ‘That’s their mother bird up there, a carrier. See those dark oblongs running along the bottom of her fuselage. Those are hangars. They’ll launch gliders to land raiding parties, and it’s those that’ll come down in our cornfields. You need flats to land a glider. We’ll see their fighter kites first, though, looking to give us something to worry about other than bundling up the family silver and running for the forests.’

  ‘What, the saints wrote some passages on bandit tactics that I missed out on?’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me, boy. That’s the way it’ll happen. Don’t look to fight them. They’re not some pony-riding barbarian horde aiming to settle here. They’re raiding for the corn oil and any trade metals and valuables not nailed down or buried. They’ll hit hard and fast and brutal. Anyone that stands against them is a corpse. Their reputation is all the baggage they’ve got up there.’

  ‘What’s the point of me passing through the cadet force if I can’t take a stand?’

  ‘I’m glad the territorials aren’t here, boy. They’re good for scaring off wolves from the livestock in the winter, but bandits like those devils up there, if their raiders haven’t left a trading caravan looted and dead on the road at least once a week, they’re not pulling their weight.’

  Despite the chill in the air, Carter was sweating by the time they arrived home. His father banged on the door and got their mother out, pointing to the sky and growling out the town’s predicament in a quick, terse explanation. Mary Carnehan sucked in her cheeks, shielded her eyes with her hand, looking up at the approaching aircraft as if this was just one more thing sent to try her patience this morning. Might as well have been a cloud of locusts looking to strip the town of its harvest. Carter had to admit he was impressed; secretly proud, even. No hysterics. No flapping or cursing or tears. Just a couple of seconds to get a handle on the situation and then she was straight to business.

  ‘What tune will you be ringing?’

  ‘There’s only plague bells or fire bells,’ said Jacob. ‘
And people hear the former and they’re as like to lock themselves inside their house as scurry out for the old town.’

  ‘Ring them loud.’ She thumped Carter on the arm. ‘Don’t just stand there, boys, get to it.’ She started to go back inside the porch, but Jacob grabbed her. ‘Leave the cutlery and altarware.’

  ‘Stick the church’s finery,’ said Mary. ‘I’m going to grab my school bell and rouse the neighbours. The Littimer boys have just left for the distillery and Leanna Littimer sure isn’t going to be good for pushing her old man up to the gates in his wheelchair.’

  Jacob shook his head as she ran back inside. ‘Just once, maybe someone could do what I ask.’ He produced the key for the bell tower and they sprinted for the church. Above the woods where Carter had duelled Duncan Landor, the massive bandit carrier was circling slowly, lazily, clouds of smaller planes beginning to drift away from her black belly. Monoplanes with a single propeller up front, as larger gliders slid into the sky from their hangars – silent and gull-like as they rode thermals rising from the valleys. The attack was happening just as Jacob Carnehan had described, as if the saints had sent his old man’s predictions as a vision. From the north, a more familiar sight arrowed towards the city-sized bandit carrier, a tiny triangle, bright blue with two friendly red stripes on its fuselage, a single small rotor spinning at the back. It was a Rodalian aircraft, a solitary flying wing from the mountain people’s skyguard.