by Stephen Hunt
Wiggins pulled a signalling mirror out of his belt pouch and left to flash a message towards the battlements. He returned a few minutes later with a crooked grin on his lips. ‘Right on the money, damned if he ain’t. One of my boys saw the lady gask outside the general store at the eastern end of the outer circle.’
‘If you wish,’ said Khow, ‘I can sit here with you, and at a time of your choosing, I will show you again where Khbar is travelling.’
‘I believe you’re not selling us a confidence trick,’ said Jacob. ‘Forgive me my surprise. I have seen enough lies in my time to know the truth.’ Even though it makes no sense. Flying south? Travelling that far? Well, I’ll travel to hell without a compass if it means saving Carter.
‘I know what that look in your eyes means, Father,’ said Lucas, the librarian’s hypnotic gaze fixed on the pastor. ‘I might fold you into a frequency wave and have the radiomen fling you across their relays, and you would still have a job catching up with the bandits’ carrier. And even if you can overtake the raiders, what then? Will you convert the skels into sainted followers of the church; have them renounce brigandage and make a gift of our kidnapped people back to you?’
Jacob pushed his now empty plate aside. ‘What do you say, Khow?’
‘That what a father feels for his child has a distance that cannot be measured. You are a manling and I am a gask, but in this matter, as in many others, the equations of our existence are bound together.’
Jacob nodded in agreement. The gask’s words reflected how he felt. But there was a faint voice of doubt within him, too. One that said that setting out to rescue Carter and the others was as much a death wish as walking into the ocean. But he had nothing else to live for, now. Only this. You always were a stubborn mule, said the voice in his mind. Now you’re going to put that to a purpose, you hear me? The old librarian leaned across the table, passing Jacob a piece of engraved stone set in a rectangle of soft black leather.
‘What’s this?’ asked Jacob.
‘If you truly are set on this madness… your son is a member of the guild, pastor, albeit reluctantly. Show this at any hold of ours, however far you need to travel, and you shall be given any and all assistance our libraries can provide.’
Jacob was touched. He had a feeling he was going to need all the help he could get. ‘Thank you, Lucas. I don’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t need to say anything. In this matter, actions speak louder than words – and that is from someone for whom words are his business.’
Jacob pocketed the seal. ‘Carter never was going to be much of a librarian, was he?’
‘That which he has been sent will help him understand who and what he is to be.’
‘Troubles do have a way of doing that.’
‘That’s something to be afraid of,’ said Wiggins. ‘A stubborn fool with a plan. You want to let me in on it?’
Jacob lifted up the newspaper, a long list of dead across its pages. ‘Here’s my plan. It’s time I started thinking of people who have suffered other than myself.’
So light, floating in heaven. Carter groaned as pain flared across his ribs, his face a crackling web of agony. Not paradise, after all. He pulled himself up from a warm wooden floor, into a dim, crowded pen stinking of sweat. Joah was there, the young stonemason’s face a bruised swollen mess. A mirror of Carter’s own? ‘Where are we?’
‘Slave hold of that bandit carrier,’ said Joah. ‘You were banged up pretty hard. Still, reckon we’re lucky. One of the bandit officers stopped his soldiers kicking us to death; figured he might as well turn a profit from our sorry hides.’
Carter focused on their surroundings. They were inside a mesh-walled cage in a gloomy, cavernous chamber packed with hundreds of young Weylanders. One of many cells in the sizeable space, all filled to capacity with produce for the slave block. Only two portholes in the wooden fuselage inside Carter’s pen, people crowding around both viewports for a chance to see something other than the dirty bodies of their fellow unwashed prisoners. A walkway crossed outside their cage, dividing them from an identical pen opposite.
‘Who else is here?’
‘Hell, Carter, might as well ask who isn’t here. Most of the people in your graduation year, most of the people in mine. Eshean and Caleb are about somewhere. Nobody much older than us, though. No one young enough to need coddling, either. Only prime meat. The rest, I hear the bastards left as fertiliser in the fields out to the river.’
Then it came back to Carter, the terrible memory bursting like a dam. His mother dying. His father blown apart by a bandit mortar. The fuselage shifted slightly and Carter choked, his stomach heaving. His family was dead. How could he go on, now? You don’t have a choice, fool. You’ve been taken for a slave. His gut retched again and he shut his eyes. Even with them closed he couldn’t take away the image of his mother dying of her horrific injuries; the mortar shell exploding where his father stood.
‘Hold it down if you can,’ said Joah. ‘Nothing to mop up puke with in here except our own clothes.’
‘My mother and father, Joah, they’re dead.’
‘I know. We’ve got to be strong for each other now. That’s all we got left, one another. They left the new town as ashes after we flew away from home. Us here, we’re all that’s left of Northhaven now.’
Carter could hold down his gut, but not hold in his tears. He lay down and sobbed for what might have been minutes or hours, until finally he drew himself up. Joah was still there. How long had the man been waiting? Carter hadn’t even noticed. ‘I’m done now, Joah. Where are the guards? I’m going to kill—’
‘Anyone enters the cages, it’s usually other slaves,’ said Joah, holding up a placatory hand. ‘The slavers are called skels. They’re as ugly, twisted and mean up close as they are at a distance. And escape? Well, take a peep out of the porthole. We’re way above the clouds. That’s why it’s so hot up here – the radiation belt is cooking us. And do you feel how light we are? Maybe a quarter less than we were on the ground. Unless you can pilot one of the slavers’ gliders, only way we’re getting off this carrier is when they sell our hide.’
‘Then we take the whole damn carrier,’ said Carter. ‘Stick a bullet in the skull of every twisted bastard on board until we find one willing to land us.’
‘Sure,’ smiled Joah. ‘Maybe then you can run for assemblyman when you get back home, catch the eye of one of the king’s daughters, marry her, and accept the crown when he passes over. If we’re going to stay alive as slaves, Carter, I think we’re going to need to inject a little realism into our schemes.’
‘I’ll be a corpse before I’m a slave.’
‘Well, at least that’s realistic. You want a victory in this hellhole? I reckon staying alive will do.’ Joah pointed to a wooden box-like affair in the corner. ‘That’s the only head, just a hole down onto the sky. Try and reach it if we hit turbulence and you’re feeling delicate.’
Carter was about to reply when a gask in a dusty white toga came up to him. ‘I beg your pardon, but might you have some paper upon your person you could spare me?’
Carter looked into the gask’s green, bearish eyes, as if the twisted man was insane. ‘Paper?’
The gask flourished a charcoal-burnt needle of wood he must have scavenged from the fall of Northhaven. ‘Our captors have stolen my calculator, manling, but they cannot imprison my intellect.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I can evaluate probabilities solely with my mind, but I am faster with a pencil and paper.’
‘Kerge here’s been asking everyone inside the cage,’ said Joah. ‘You might as well check.’
Carter emptied his pockets, coming out with his half of the receipt he had given the travellers at the library for their trade data. Sure had been meaning to archive that. ‘It’s not much, but it’s blank on the other side.’
The forest man’s leathery face bobbed in appreciation and took it from Carter, his hand juddering as if the receipt was electrified. ‘I know you.
You are the child of Jacob Carnehan, one of the priests of your people’s faith.’
‘Yes, I’m his son,’ said Carter. ‘How the hell can you tell? Sure didn’t see you in church!’
‘Your father preserved my life on the great fractal branch, along with the manling Wiggins. Our means are bonded by his actions. Your father is a noble soul.’
‘He was that, before the bastards flying this slave carrier blew him to pieces.’
‘I do not think that is so,’ said the gask. ‘I could make a truer reading if my calculator was returned, but I do not think the threads between us would appear so heavy if your father’s weight was missing from the world.’
‘You’re saying he’s alive?’
‘It may well be so.’ The twisted man waved the receipt. ‘Your presence here is significant to me. I must see what I can determine using pencil and paper.’
Carter watched him push his way gently through the crowd of prisoners to the other side of the cage, squatting against the fuselage and scribbling across the paper. Could it be true? No, the gask’s mistaken, as much as I want to believe him. I saw father’s building take a direct hit from a mortar. My old man might have been a pastor, but if God provides those kinds of miracles, I haven’t seen many of them so far. Carter listened to the distant drone from hundreds of propellers muffled by the fuselage. Every hour, they put more and more distance behind them. Carter felt a well of desperation surge inside his chest, as though he was choking. He wanted to run to the cage’s walls and shake it free. Do something. Anything!
‘The gask’s a little mad, isn’t he?’ said Joah. ‘I wouldn’t put too much faith in that woodland magic of his.’
‘I saw my father die, right after my mother…’
‘You saw what you saw,’ said Joah. ‘You know. Hell if I do. My family might be holed up in the old town, weeping over me. They might be stretched out in the fields minus their skulls. Like as not, we’re all going to our graves not knowing what happened to each other. Odd thing, though…’
‘What?’
‘Check the sun outside. We’re flying south, have been ever since we left home.’
Carter stood up. ‘You sure? Not east? Not north?’
‘Might be flying higher than eagles, but the sun still sets and rises in the same place. Straight south, I swear it.’
‘Sweet saints, but that makes no sense?’
‘Well, they’re slavers, right? Must be a slave market out where we’re heading.’
Carter’s stomach sank further without the need for gravity’s light touch. We’re going to be travelling further than anywhere I’ve ever heard of, right off the map. And Joah was right, damn the man. The chances of their ever coming back were slimmer than pine needles. His eyes drifted to his right just in time to see the fist coming towards him. Carter side-stepped by instinct, the punch swinging wide, revealing Caleb at the head of a gang of young men – many of them the recently deputed irregulars he’d led out from the town’s battlements. He backed off as far as he could, bewildered by the sudden attack.
‘This,’ shouted Caleb, raising his other fist, ‘this is on you, Carter Carnehan!’
‘You’ve got to be pranking me…’
‘Get back,’ Joah shouted at the mob, trying to shove them away. ‘What did he do? Invite the slavers to Northhaven? Sell them the blasting powder to burn it to the ground? You followed Carter out of the old town, and nobody had to hold a pistol to your head to make you do it.’
‘You stand aside, Joah. This isn’t on you. Without this fool, I’d be back safe inside the old town.’
Joah tried to stay in their path, but the mob was too strong, flinging him aside. Then they were on top of Carter. He lashed and punched and kicked at them. But the mob shoved Carter into the mesh, giving him the sort of pummelling fit to finish the job before the slavers had taken their turn. Carter could smell the stench of smoked clothes, punch after punch landing. Suddenly there was an abrupt brightness, as if someone had turned on a sun inside the slave pen. This was no natural illumination. Long arclights activated along the chamber’s roof, blinding Carter after the cage’s murky half-light. It had blurred his attackers’ vision too. They stumbled about, all animosities briefly abandoned. Then something Carter struck in the back, flung him forward in a tsunami of water. As Carter slid across the soiled floor, he blinked water out of his eyes to watch a team of leather-clad slaves standing outside the cages wrestling with high-pressure hoses, knocking brawling prisoners down in the torrent. Tall skel guards waited behind the newcomers, well-armed and hissing orders at their house slaves. The servants turned their hoses off, leaving Carter and the others soaked and bruised from the pressure gunning. Carter watched a bandit officer step forward, a large coiled whip tied to his belt. His cruel snouted face turned to either side, examining his produce with contempt. Words came out, mangled by a forked snake-like tongue flickering through his twisted throat. The length of red flesh quivered back and forth over serrated teeth. ‘Me am Si-lishh, slave master of this most noble vessel. Weyland vermin now have the honour of belonging to Duke Si-meliss. Blessings be upon the duke.’ He raised a gloved fist towards the Northhaven mob sprawled in the lake of water. ‘Weylanders young, full of vigour. That is why you selected to serve. But mob cannot be allowed to cull itself. That am job of Si-lishh.’
At his command, a gate in the cage was opened, and a line of the skel guards moved in. As they entered, they lashed out with black rods twice the length of a constable’s truncheon, oily-looking batons sparking as the weapons connected with slaves. Men were flung back, landing writhing on the deck in agony.
The officer raised his voice loud enough for every crowded cage within the chamber to hear him. ‘Some Weylanders grow sick and die. Weylanders weak… they always perish. Skels allow for natural wastage. But skels not allow for bad discipline. Not allow slaves to be fighting each other. This too wasteful. And now, Si-lishh must also be wasteful to demonstrate Weylanders not wild anymore. You am property!’
Carter moaned as he was picked up from the floor by a couple of slavers. The ugly twisted soldiers loomed a foot over his height, muscles as solid as the flanks of a rhino. They pulled Carter and his assailants out of the cage, not a word spoken by the guards as angry, sibilant breaths rasped over their forked tongues. In the cage opposite Carter’s own, he glimpsed faces he recognised pressed against the mesh. Duncan and Willow, Adella! Shocked faces and eyes opened wide in recognition at the beaten, bloody form being dragged away before them. What a sorry sight he must appear. Pulled down the chamber’s central gangway, Carter was lugged in front of three cells. Unlike his previous lodgings, these pens couldn’t accommodate more than a handful of slaves inside. The stalls weren’t mesh-walled, but formed from some transparent substance – translucent but as thick as a farmhouse wall. The skel guards threw Carter into the middle of the three cells, then tossed struggling Northhaven men after him, each cell soon packed to capacity with miscreants. Transparent doors slid shut, the voice of the slave master carrying through tiny air holes dotted across the walls. Carter swayed on his feet, steadying himself against the enclosure – cold and oily to the touch, like fish scales.
‘Set timers!’ boomed Si-lishh. His soldiers jumped to it, laying gloved hands on some kind of clockwork mechanism embedded in the wall. Si-lishh turned to face the prisoners caged in the rest of the chamber. ‘Normally Si-lishh set timers to a day or two, to keep things interesting. But slaves’ fight has interrupted meal of Si-lishh, so slaves only going to stay inside punishment cells for five minutes.’
Carter glanced around his cell. Punishment? For only five minutes? They were packed inside a little more crowded than they had been in the main cages, but with the air holes, Carter wasn’t about to suffocate any time soon. He glanced to the cell on his left and saw Caleb staring at him in hatred from the other side.
‘You’re a dead man, Carter Carnehan!’ Caleb yelled, banging the enclosure. ‘There’s not a cage thick enough to protect�
��’ Caleb’s words were cut off as he stumbled back, the wooden floor opening up beneath him like a bomb-bay hatch. One second he was here, the next he wasn’t. Falling away, a tiny black dot tumbling towards the clouds below. Just like that… maybe seven prisoners sent plummeting into the sky. The man was an idiot, but he didn’t deserve that!
Carter’s face snapped up when he heard the laughter hissing from the slave master. ‘Guards set punishment cells’ timers. Two hatches open at random. Third cell will stay closed. But even skels do not know which one. This gives guards of Si-lishh something to wager on.’ Si-lishh leaned back rocking with amusement outside the enclosure. ‘Of course, sometimes Si-lishh set all three cells to open. Just for change.’
Carter began trembling. He tried not to, but it was as though he just walked out into a winter night wearing only his underwear. Carter tried to get a grip on himself. He wasn’t going to give the slave master the pleasure of seeing how hard he had to work to keep terror and panic at bay. Around him, men went wild in the two remaining cages; banging on the armoured walls, flinging themselves at the doors.
Si-lishh pulled out a watch on a chain fob from his belt. ‘Three minutes am left. But is it to be one cell or two today?’
Twisted alligator-faced bastards. Punishment cells. You might as well load a single shell inside a pistol, roll the cylinder, point it at your head and squeeze the trigger to see what happens. Northhaven men threw themselves up the wall in the adjacent cell, fingers digging into the air holes. But the gaps were no bigger than a pencil lead, not enough purchase to hold a piece of paper, let alone a man’s weight. One of the men inside Carter’s cell lurched back at an imagined crack appearing in the floor – his screams mirrored from the cell on their right. Carter dragged his gaze across. Their neighbours had been flushed. Whistling wind from outside beat through the air holes. He could see white clouds through the open hatch; hear the distant humming of hundreds of vast rotors keeping the city-sized slave ship in the air. And then there was one.