In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Sweet saints,’ coughed Jacob.

  ‘The slavers stayed here a night and a day,’ said Wiggins. ‘Ambushing everyone coming in for the market. They left in the afternoon of the second day, an hour ahead of a couple of river frigates packed with royal marines from the sea fort at Redwater. The bandits’ carrier flew straight over their sails, heading back towards the ocean.’

  Jacob limped to the plot at the back of the rectory where he had once buried two of his three children, finding a freshly-turned hump of dirt. Unlike the other two mounds, its marker was staked in simple wood rather than marble. The town’s masons were probably dead, tools looted and destroyed. Jacob stumbled forward, numb with cold and exhaustion, sinking to his knees by the freshly turned dirt. He read the jolting words. ‘Mary Carnehan, mother of three.’ How many funerals have I presided over as the pastor of Northhaven? All those words, all those people. ‘This is my family.’

  ‘Get up, Jacob,’ said Wiggins. ‘This isn’t any good for you.’

  ‘I should be with them.’ He wanted to be. This was a terrible wound. Being gut-shot would be a mercy compared to this pain. Losing an arm, losing a leg, they would be nothing. Scratches he would trade in an instant to bring his family back. Mary dead. Carter dead. ‘I’m dead, too. My body just doesn’t know it.’

  ‘On your feet, Father,’ said Brother Frael. ‘Your son might yet be alive.’

  Jacob’s eyes cleared of tears enough to look up at the blasted ruins of the city on the hill. ‘No, he’s up there; his ashes are in the new town, where mine should be. I’m cursed, all I’ve ever loved is here, on this plot.’

  ‘It’s time to rebuild,’ said the monk.

  ‘Not for me,’ whispered Jacob. He could travel to the ocean one last time. Find the shoreline and keep on going. Let the waves cover his body, claim him. Their weight was the only peace he would be able to find. ‘Leave me here. Just going to be with them.’

  Wiggins knelt down beside the pastor. ‘You saved my grand­daughter the other day, Father. It’d be on my soul mighty heavy if I was to repay you by letting you freeze to death here tonight.’

  ‘Mary saved them, not me. All that I am was her. What am I now? Not even the right words to speak here, over her body. There should be more than five words carved on her grave. ’

  ‘Father, I’ve got a platoon of royal marines fifty feet from here digging fresh graves in the grounds of your church,’ said Wiggins. ‘Damned if I’m going to let one of those holes become yours. So you can get back on your feet and tuck yourself under your blankets, or I’m going to order a company of those blue-coated man-mountains to come over here and carry you back, as undignified as that’ll be.’

  Jacob rose to his feet and let the monk and Wiggins lead him back inside the rectory. So tired now. Sleep. Sleep was a form of death, the little death. Something other than cold to numb him and carry him away from this.

  Brother Frael came into the bedroom, a look of irritation creasing his normally calm features as he saw that Jacob had his hands on a newspaper, the Redwater Post. ‘Who gave that to you, Father? There’s nothing inside but lists of the dead and missing.’

  ‘The woman you’ve been sending to force a spoon in my mouth passed it to me,’ said Jacob.

  ‘You saved her child, Father. Her little boy wouldn’t be alive without you.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why she passed me her newspaper, even though you’ve forbidden it.’

  ‘You are not an easy man to get along with, Father Carnehan.’

  ‘Guess that’s why I’m here and not in the monastery.’

  ‘You have a visitor, Father.’

  ‘I don’t want to see any more parents, Brother.’ Let me be, just let me wither away here in peace, in silence.

  ‘This one, I think you will want to meet,’ said the monk. He turned and opened the door, admitting a broad six-foot figure. Jacob took in the leathery brown skin of a gask – a fully-grown adult man, the black spines along the backs of his arms as taut and proud as an oiled porcupine’s. He placed a hand over his chest, resting his fist against his white toga and bowed slightly. His sad, bear-like eyes met Jacob’s. There was something knowing in that gaze, expectant.

  ‘The manling Wiggins told me you would be here.’

  ‘And here I lie.’

  ‘My name is Khow,’ said the twisted forest man, producing one of his nation’s metal abacus boxes, the green light of its screen washing across his face with the bedroom curtains closed. He presented Jacob a book with his other hand, laying it down on the blanket above Jacob’s chest. It was a tome the pastor recognised. The novel had been taken from Carter’s room, one of the few he and Mary had got the lad to love out of so many brought home from the stationers. Tales of the Overland. A couple of centuries’ worth of outlaw tales committed to paper.

  ‘Khow is a mystic of his nation,’ said Brother Frael. ‘He has come to Northhaven with three of the forest men. Their presence here has been… useful.’

  Khow was drifting the silver box up and down above Jacob’s blankets.

  ‘What are you doing?’ growled Jacob.

  ‘All things are weighed in numbers,’ said Khow. ‘Time, events, people, all of them bound and described only through maths – and that influence can be traced and felt.’

  ‘I don’t understand?’

  ‘Of course not. The minds of common pattern men do not resemble ours. I did not need my calculator to lead me to yourself or the manling Wiggins. I followed my son’s thread to yours.’

  Son? ‘You’re the father of that little gask, out on his wandering? Kerge?’

  ‘I am,’ said the twisted man. ‘Kerge, son of Khow. He has been taken, Jacob Carnehan. The slavers have snatched my son.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe he’s here? His ashes scattered in what’s left of the new town?’

  ‘I know,’ said Khow, ‘because my son has a weight on the universe. A pressure. And that weight is undiminished, even as it rolls further away from us with each new hour. All gasks know where their children are, and can follow the trail with their heart, their instinct and this—’ He held up the silver box. ‘Your son too. My child’s life is bound to your son, as your life is bound to my son since you rescued him.’ The gask pushed down on Jacob’s chest with his long fingers. ‘And I believe your child’s weight is still upon the world. Even with your manling minds and strange lives, my calculator’s results indicate that much.’

  Could it be true? Jacob could barely dare to hope. So many strange tales circulating about the forest people and their superstitions and legends. It sounds like madness… clutching at straws. Is this just a herb-induced vision spun from their woodland magic… encouraged by this damn monk to give me a glimmer of hope to cling to?

  ‘The four of them have been doing this all over town,’ said Brother Frael. ‘Survivors bringing in things that missing family members were fond of… flutes, books, hats, anything that wasn’t destroyed during the raid. Most times, the gasks have been able to tell our people whether their loved ones are dead or alive.’

  ‘Where is Carter now?’

  ‘That I cannot say with certainty,’ said Khow. ‘Only my child’s soul may I track with accuracy. The bond I have with your boy is where his threads cross with those of Kerge. It would be logical to assume they are still together, as prisoners of the slavers. They were taken as a group. They will in likelihood end up sold at the same slave market.’

  ‘Do you believe this?’ Jacob asked the monk.

  ‘I have faith that the gasks believe it,’ said Brother Frael. ‘You live closer to their forests than I do. But even up in the mountains, there are things to be seen that make little sense to the rational mind. You remember your time with us in Rodal? The way that spirits guide the skyguard pilots… fliers riding crosswinds ferocious enough to tear a flying wing into tinder. I cannot explain that. I cannot explain how gasks know where their children are.’

  Jacob pushed the coffin-like shroud of blankets away from h
is sweating body. ‘Where is your child, Khow? Where is Kerge now?’

  The gask raised a spined arm and pointed to the wall. ‘That way.’

  ‘I’ve sent Wiggins to the library,’ said Brother Frael. ‘He’s coming back with the master librarian and a large-scale atlas. Gasks don’t seem to have much sense of distance. But Khow here believes he can indicate where the snatched people are on a map.’

  Khow steepled his brown fingers together, the back of his hand covered with a soft down of fur. ‘Time and distance are closed together, like this, perception and reality. When you are of the flow, you can never correctly perceive the flow.’

  ‘If you’re fixing to follow your son,’ said Jacob, ‘the existence of those miles will seem a mite realer to you.’

  ‘I was in two minds as to whether to tell you about this,’ sighed Brother Frael. ‘You needed to know about Carter. But following? Have you ever heard of success in such matters? You will die an old man out in the infinite world and never return to us.’

  ‘A man’s got to die of something,’ said Jacob. He held a hand out to Khow, and the twisted man helped him sit up. Even that made him feel dizzy. ‘How far you figuring on travelling, Khow?’

  ‘Only to my son,’ said the gask.

  Only to my son. That’s as good a way of looking on it as any other. All thoughts of allowing the ocean to take his life had fled from Jacob’s thoughts. Carter could be alive. There was a chance he was alive, survived along with hundreds of other frightened, terrified Northhaven townspeople. Taken as human beasts of burden. Part of Jacob hated how easily he grasped at this single, measly thin thread that had been thrown to him. How easily he could believe in the forest man’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo. God, tell me that this is real. Tell me that this isn’t just some survival instinct kicking in, looking for an excuse to go on living, living for nothing but a fantasy? He heard a voice answer inside his mind. ‘Mister Carnehan, you damned fool. If our son is alive, you can drag your carcass out of bed and bring him back home. I don’t care if he’s one mile away or ten million. You haul yourself after him and keep going until you’ve brought our boy back home again. Him and every other man and woman that was taken from our town. There is no distance too far; no force too strong to stop you.’ That voice sounded a lot like his dead wife’s. Jacob brushed the tears out of his eyes. Damn his self-pity. Those would be the last tears he would allow himself until Carter was safe once more. Jacob shoved the weight of blankets away. He might as well have been sliding the lid off his coffin.

  Brother Frael tutted and Jacob caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the sideboard, a skeleton swaying in white underclothes. ‘I’ll have some real food now, brother. Not chicken broth.’ Jacob limped downstairs, ate and waited for the librarian to arrive. Filling up on meat and cheese and bread and milk and everything that had been dust in his mouth until a few minutes ago. He was still eating when Wiggins came into the rectory with the library’s guild master by his side, a leather tube bulging with maps tucked under the old man’s arm, along with a large book. Jacob realised this was the first time he had ever seen Lucas make a house call. He was probably violating half a dozen guild oaths in carrying his precious maps beyond the hold’s security.

  ‘Shoot,’ grinned Wiggins, seeing Jacob out of his bed and sitting at the table. ‘Always said Northhaven needed a cathedral, the size we were getting to. And here we are… a gaggle of monks moving around the church and a walking corpse crawled out of his coffin and stuffing his face fit to be a fully titled bishop.’

  Jacob ignored the constable’s sardonic humour and nodded to Lucas. ‘Master Codex. I was happy to see that none of your people were listed among the dead and missing, apart from Carter, of course.’

  ‘Not for a lack of trying,’ said Lucas. ‘Seventy bandits turned up outside the library with barrels of blasting powder for our gate – intent on looting the hold of its works. There are, I am sorry to say, plenty of libraries outside the guild that would pay handsomely for contraband titles plundered from my shelves.’

  ‘They couldn’t get past your metal doors?’

  ‘It was the strangest thing,’ said the librarian. ‘As the bandits arrived, a mist fell over the valley. It turned so thick that an aircraft circling in support of their raiders flew too low, destroying itself against the valley’s slopes.’

  ‘I have heard that can happen in battles,’ said Jacob. ‘The fires from Northhaven, the weapons smoke. It can play games with the weather.’

  ‘When we came out to check, there were bandits’ corpses scattered everywhere. Reckon the explosion from the plane’s payload must have taken them out. The rest had fled.’

  ‘It was surely the hand of the saints,’ said Brother Frael.

  ‘Perhaps. When Carter was small, I always used to tell him that there was nothing God loves so much of an evening than settling back in a comfortable chair and reading a little.’

  ‘Poor Carter,’ sighed Lucas. ‘I certainly am sorry the way things have worked out. And for your wife, may the saints watch over her treasured soul.’

  Jacob lifted a fork towards the window of the kitchen, the crunch of the marines digging fresh graves carrying over the rectory wall. ‘How much sorry have we got to go around for this?’

  ‘Always enough,’ said the monk.

  ‘You’re a better man than I, Brother,’ said Jacob. He pointed at the librarian’s tube next to the red leather-bound tome he was carrying. ‘The map holder I recognise, what’s the book?’

  ‘Volume seven hundred and twenty-six of the Bestiary Physicallis,’ said Lucas. ‘The one where the raiders’ nation is referenced.’

  ‘You’re sure you’ve got the right people?’

  ‘Indeed I am,’ said Lucas, tapping his volume. ‘The hospital has already dissected a corpse. The physical drift of their internal organs matches the people recorded inside this volume, as does their physical appearance. The bandits are called skels. Millennia ago, their nation lay millions of miles southwest of here. It was destroyed and overrun when their neighbours tired of the skels’ continued brigandage. Since then, they have lived as aerial nomads. Slavers, as we know to our cost.’

  ‘How up-to-date is that entry?’

  ‘It was recorded three thousand years ago,’ said Lucas. ‘But the devastation of Northhaven indicates their society is still based on brigandage and blood.’

  ‘A long way from home,’ said Wiggins, pulling up a chair at the table. ‘Never heard of them before.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Weyland has,’ said Lucas. ‘Three years ago, a town out in the east by the great lakes was attacked by slavers. No bandits’ bodies were taken, but the raiders’ description matches that of our attackers. And this is only what my archivists have managed to turn up in the archives with a few days of searching. There may have been many similar attacks across Weyland. On other league nations, too, perhaps.’

  Jacobs scratched the stubble on his cheeks. ‘If there’s a pattern to their raids and we can spot it…’ Our soldiers can be waiting for them next time.

  ‘If the assembly and the king know of this, then they wouldn’t want panic,’ speculated Wiggins.

  ‘I’ll take informed caution over a slaughter,’ growled Jacob. If they knew, they should have told us. Warned the prefecture.

  Lucas lifted up his map tube and removed an old parchment from inside, unfurling it over the tabletop. A patchwork of a thousand thumbnail-sized nations and countries, all squashed together so tight there wasn’t even room to fit in their names – only numbers: an index on the side to identify each nation. Down the middle of the map lay the long boot-like shape of the Lancean Ocean, the feuding nations of the Burn on the western shore, the countries of the Lanca along the eastern seaboard.

  Khow leant over the table. ‘Where are we on your representation?’

  Jacob reached out and touched the Kingdom of Weyland.

  ‘Then my son is here,’ said the gask. His hand stretched out, a finger coming down on th
e border where the last nation of the Lanca lay.

  ‘Heading south?’ said Wiggins, not able to hide the surprise in his voice.

  Jacob felt the disappointment rising within him, crushing his heart. Nothing but woodland magic and mystical nonsense after all. ‘I think you’re mistaken.’

  ‘I am not. He is here,’ said Khow, tapping the map again.

  ‘I do not think that is likely,’ said Lucas, gently. ‘As a rule, the nations of mankind grow more civilised the further south you travel.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Wiggins. ‘Out west, across the water, they’d sell your hide in a second. Don’t have slave markets out in the Burn, just markets, you understand? And north of Rodal, well, you go far enough north and they ain’t even got swords to beat on each other, just bows and flinthead arrows. Slaves are as good as horses and cattle to the nomad hordes.’

  The gask shrugged his shoulders. ‘We have never kept slaves among the gasks. But where I have indicated… that is where my son is. He is still being moved away from us, I fear.’

  ‘It’s possible, theoretically,’ said Lucas, as much to himself as the others in the room. ‘If you flew far enough south and travelled past the rumoured origin point of the trading caravans, resources would grow scarcer again. You’d eventually end up flying over countries where keeping slaves could be considered an economic proposition.’

  ‘Years of flight, half a lifetime to travel that far,’ said Jacob. ‘All that time… the bandits feeding and watering their slaves, fuelling their carrier’s weight as they travelled. It makes no sense? The skels have to be looking to sell Northhaven’s people as slaves in the Burn. Only a week’s flight across the sea; plenty of demand out west for slaves to bear spears and muskets for some Burn warlord.’

  ‘Do you have a representation of Northhaven similar to this document?’ asked Khow.

  Jacob walked to his shelves in the parlour and returned with a local map. Khow examined the layout of the town for a second. He tapped the outer circle of the old town by the walls’ eastern keep. ‘One of the gasks in my party is my niece, Khbar. She is presently here, in the middle of the street, and is walking towards here.’ He placed a finger on the end of the road.