In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Two minutes left,’ laughed the slave master. ‘What Weylanders think? Did Si-lishh set two or three hatches to open this afternoon?’

  Carter smashed his fist against the door. He felt the same burning anger he had back at the fall of Northhaven. A desire to break free and crush the eyes out of this twisted man’s skull with his bare hands. ‘Why?’

  Si-lishh bent forward, close enough that only Carter could hear the reply. ‘Why? Why not, am better question. Common pattern scum overrun skels’ motherland age ago. Driving survivors into sky. Make nomads of all skels. Am not fitting that skels now make their living from people on ground? Most proper that Si-lishh send Weylanders back to it.’ He checked his watch. ‘One minute left.’

  Inside Carter’s cell, the other slaves ran at the walls, trying to hang on for dear life before they met the same fate. Carter slammed his fist into the wall. ‘You’re going to kill me, do it and get it done, but don’t bore me to death.’ Carter slipped to the floor and stared up at the slave master, his face a mask of cold hatred. Si-lishh did not break his gaze, but just stood there, tapping his watch every few seconds. Carter tried to keep calm, each passing second as long as a full day. After an eternity, the cell door cracked open and the guards stepped forward. They smashed back the wave of desperate Northhaven men trying to flee, the spark of weapon prods filling the air.

  ‘Slaves lucky today. Yes,’ said Si-lishh looking down at Carter, the man’s legs still folded, ‘Si-lishh get fine price for this Weylander.’ He turned to the slaves carrying hoses. ‘Clean Weylanders’ piss out of punishment cells.’

  Carter left the cell. Sometime over the last few minutes his body had stopped trembling, but inside he was still shaking. Carter took deep, controlled breaths to still his pounding heart as the skels shoved him back along the passage, laughing. A small, useless victory. He was alive, but he might as well have been flushed into the open sky rather than face the fate waiting for him beyond the slave market.

  Back in the main pen once more, Carter squatted on the cage floor opposite the gask. Kerge had run out of paper and was scratching formulae across the wooden planking, concepts that went far beyond Carter’s understanding. The gask hadn’t seemed much amused by Carter’s suggestion that they could use what was left of his charcoal for a game of noughts and crosses. Behind the Northhaven man, slaves stood pressed up against the mesh, silently gazing at prisoners in the cage opposite. Slaves weren’t allowed to call across the gantry to neighbouring cages. That was classified as a fracas, drawing a beating from the slavers’ pain rods. At least the skels hadn’t thrown anyone else in their transparent-walled punishment cells. As far as small mercies were concerned, nobody was foolish enough to try to attack Carter again. The slave master’s meals were, Carter suspected, going to be uninterrupted by his captives in future. Behind Carter, people gazed silently at friends as though they were statues that had been sculpted opposite each other… family at family, cousins at cousins, separated by chance, keeping vigil over the familiar, hanging on to anything they could from their old life. Carter had already played that game, spotting Adella in the press of the cage opposite, her usually mischievous face dull and blank, hardly seeing him at all. And then she had turned and slipped through the press towards Duncan Landor, leaving Carter kicking the mesh in anger. Even here, even here. Landor’s heir had to prove he could take anything that mattered to Carter. How the hell was Adella taken anyway? Adella should have been protected behind the walls of the old town, nowhere near the slavers. Somehow, I can’t imagine her leading the charge against the raiders.

  Joah lounged across from Carter, sweating inside the hot, humid cage. The man misread the cause of Carter’s brooding face. ‘Caleb just needed someone to blame for this. He was always like that. Any shit he pulled, it was always somebody else’s fault. Never his. He could run into a wall and blame me for laying the bricks. Nobody who grabbed a gun from the guardhouse back home had any right to think bandits were handing out picnic blankets and lemon drinks for us on the slope.’

  ‘What Caleb was, he was,’ said Carter, raising a tired hand. ‘Don’t matter much now, does it? The skels dropped him and the others like they were goddamn rocks.’ Carter tilted his face back to the mesh, searching for Duncan Landor in the cage opposite. ‘He had one thing right, though. Beating on the right person makes you feel better.’

  Across from Carter, the gask muttered something about incomplete sets, setting Carter’s nerves on edge. Carter reached out and stilled the charcoal the gask was using to sketch numbers across the floor. ‘Trust me, Kerge, as someone who used to sit in a maths class with his brain pounding and his ears aching, some equations just don’t have an answer.’ Blinking rapidly, the gask stared at Carter as if he was mad. Well, one of us is, anyway. The gask’s presence only added to the surreal atmosphere in the slavers’ pens.

  There came a commotion by the cage wall, but not another brawl this time. House slaves had appeared in the corridor outside, thin and rangy and wearing simplified grey versions of the slavers’ leather uniforms. They carried bag-like water bottles, and unstopping the sacks, the house slaves pushed drinking spouts through the cells’ mesh. Eager prisoners pushed and jostled for water like so many swine at a sow’s teats. Skel guards unlocked the cage door and allowed six house slaves into Carter’s pen, tall men, all of them dragging full hemp sacks. They approached a circular depression in the centre of the cell’s floor. Into this hole they emptied their sacks.

  One of the slaves raised his hand as well as his voice so that everyone in the cage could hear him. ‘These rations need to last three days. Water will come once a day. If you hoard food and water, if the strongest steal food and cause deaths – wastage – among the weakest here, then the slave master will issue his soldiers a set of scales. They will weigh everyone once a week and the fattest ten among you will be placed in the punishment cells. So share these rations fairly.’

  Carter crossed to the house slave emptying his sack, his shining black face sweat-beaded in the heat. Joah followed, gazing at the food with disgust. I know how he feels. Their rations appeared to come in two flavours. Fist-sized domes of stale biscuit and small pellets that might have been chipped-off tree bark.

  ‘And which day do you bring the steak?’ asked Carter.

  The house slave shrugged. ‘The day you die and end up in paradise, friend.’

  ‘That’s a Weyland accent,’ noted Carter. ‘You’re an easterner?’

  The house slave nodded. ‘James Kurtain, like curtain, but with a “K”. Been stuck here three years, ever since the skels raided Heshwick by the lakes. Sold most of my people. Kept me. Used to be a clockmaker so the skels set me to stripping and cleaning their engines. Skels are as sharp as flint but as dumb as dirt – wouldn’t get very far without their house slaves. Best I can tell, they’ve been keeping us common pattern types as vassals since records began.’

  ‘Well, James,’ said Carter, ‘when you’ve finished emptying that chickenfeed out, how about you leave your sack here?’

  The house slave laughed. ‘Right, so you can make a parachute, smash the head and slide down out of the shit pipe. You’re not the first person to think of that. It feels light up here, but it gets real heavy, real quick, nearer the ground. You want to stay alive, let the skels sell you off, Northhaven boy.’

  ‘Sell us down south?’

  ‘Guess rich people like having folks to do the fetching and carrying as much as the skels do.’

  ‘And it’s common pattern people doing the buying?’

  ‘Same as you or I,’ said the house slave. ‘Same set of people doing the purchasing, too. Skel order-book is always full, even when their slave pens are sitting empty… what they’re about, you see, is raiding to order.’ James finished emptying the sack and moved in between the foraging mob so that none of the guards would spot him idling. ‘The skels’ customers turn up in a craft twice as long as this carrier; looks like a large firework. No rotors on her wings, just rockets at
her rear, smaller jets on the side. She can hover like a hawk hunting above a meadow.’

  Carter looked askance at the house slave. Perhaps too long in captivity’s unhinged him? ‘And the rockets don’t set fire to the fuselage, how?’

  ‘Because she’s made of metal, brother.’

  Joah laughed at his outrageous claims. ‘Solid gold or solid silver?’

  ‘Steel, if I had to say. I shit you not. But I guess it’s something you’ll need to see for yourself.’

  Carter shook his head in disbelief. The house slave had to be wrong. What the hell kind of nation could produce something like that? He turned his mind to more practical matters. ‘How easy would it be to send a woman from over there—’ Carter pointed to the cage opposite ‘—and get her in here?’

  ‘A lot easier than sewing a parachute out of sackcloth. Only the slave master down here has a practised enough eye to tell any of us common pattern types apart. But,’ the house slave warned Carter, ‘a word to the wise. Wherever it is our people end up, the slavers require everybody fit to work. Men and women alike. Not too young. Not too old. And definitely not sick or pregnant. Your lady arrives with a bun in the oven, and it’s not light duty for her, it’s a one-way trip out of the hatch. That’s why the slavers never touch any of the Weylanders they take. A skel half-breed kills a common pattern woman on the way out of her womb.’

  ‘I just want Adella released from that cage and across here with me.’

  ‘Okay, Northhaven boy. You point her out to me and I’ll see what I can do. In return, you get to wherever they’re taking you, keep your eyes peeled for a woman – she’ll be two years younger than me. Anna Kurtain. My little sister. You look out for her, maybe. Do what you can for her.’

  ‘That’s fair.’ Carter stuck his hand out and James shook it. He pointed Adella out to the house slave and then the man left, still calling warnings to the packed pen about fairly distributing the food.

  ‘What you think about him and his talk about a massive metal aircraft?’ asked Joah.

  ‘I’ll hold judgement. Sounds mad, but if you’d told me a few days ago I’d be caged like a hog in a slavers’ carrier, I would’ve said you were crazy too. James is lying about one thing, though. Passing out the food fairly is his idea, not that bastard Si-lishh’s. The skels might not want their slaves cracking horns unnecessarily, but culling the weak out? They’d probably think it was good herd management.’

  Joah stared despondently at the dry rations in the pit. ‘You’re not planning to get killed over Adella, are you?’

  ‘I’m getting out, Joah. One way or another, I’m getting out. I’m just not slave material.’

  It felt cold outside, colder than it should do; Jacob was a ghost moving through a town he barely recognised. Houses burnt and broken, whole districts reduced to ashes. Jacob wasn’t the only phantom drifting through the landscape, plenty of others were wandering around – locals lost in their own home, so many familiar landmarks removed. Some were just standing still, faces wan and shiftless, looking as though they were trying to remind themselves that this was where they lived. From a town where nothing ever happened to a town where nothing was left. Companies of blue-uniformed marines marched in columns through the wreckage. More troops still arriving down the river from the coastal port. Nothing they can do now, though. No bandit in their right mind would be heading for this town… filled with soldiers, plucked of most of what was worth plucking. Everywhere the smell of old burning drifted. A charcoal stench left in the wind, until a man’s nostrils were filled with nothing else. Acrid veils of it clinging and following Jacob around – sleeping, waking, eating; no difference. The men of the town’s territorial regiment were returning now. Back from the fleet, after looking for pirates when they should’ve had their eyes turned to skies closer to home. Their houses gone. Livelihoods gone, families gone. Not much of anything left for anybody.

  Flying wings drifted overhead, arrow-like formations of triangular aircraft. The Rodalian Skyguard trying to reassure the nervous survivors below. Wiggins hobbled along on Jacob’s left, his old eyes sweeping across the ruins without comment.

  ‘How is Benner Landor taking matters?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Frankly,’ said Wiggins, ‘you’re lucky he’s made time to see you. With Duncan and Willow missing, he’s only living for the honour of the house. Rebuilding wharves along the river, getting his tenants to try and lay in a late-squeeze crop to make up for what’s been stolen.’

  ‘People react to grief differently.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth. I hear there are fine ladies from down south showing up again at Hawkland Park, sniffing around for a wedding sometime down the line. Maybe the wharves aren’t the only things he’s looking to replace.’

  ‘Don’t judge him too harshly.’

  ‘Just saying, is all. Before Lorenn Landor passed, Benner was a better man. Money and power and prestige are all he’s been left with, so he figures he might as well fill up on as much of it as is going.’

  Jacob traded a stony look with the constable.

  ‘Hard to open my mouth without putting my foot in it. Can’t even say good day to a fellow without checking for a mourning band on the arm first.’

  ‘The saints carve the course a river must flow. It’s different for each of us.’

  Up ahead, a party of marines stood stripped to the waist, hacking at the broken remains of the royal free school, cutting it into tinder and filling cart beds with the rubble. At least there was enough of a school left standing for classes to be opened after they’d cleared the wreckage. Children needed the comfort of routine more than anything else. On the other side of the school was a single fresh grave, a boy and a girl tending it, laying a ring of flowers around a simple wooden cross driven into the mound as a marker. Hamlet. They’ve got that much right. The archer’s tradition. Buried where his last arrow fell.

  Jacob detoured towards the grave. ‘Do you know how many skel bandits the archer took with him?’

  ‘Seven, as I hear it,’ said Wiggins. He held up his hand, measuring a couple of inches between thumb and finger. ‘The young’uns’ practice arrows mostly, too. Strangest-looking bow you ever did see. The other lumber folk down from the woods insisted we bury it with him. Undertaker took enough lead out of that man to re-roof your church.’

  Jacob stopped a second by the grave, resting a hand on the marker, watching the two children lay a ring of flowers around it. ‘I heard your arrows,’ Jacob whispered to the dirt. ‘I remember you.’ Jacob could no longer pass a grave without thinking of Mary, or worrying that Carter might soon be heading for his – if Carter wasn’t dead already and everything he was about to attempt, everything he was planning, could just be written off as the long, slow suicide of a grieving father? The uncertainty of his son’s fate, not knowing whether he was truly alive or dead, ate at him like a cancer, a slow jabbing burning. He couldn’t clear his head of it. As much a part of him as the perpetual stench of his sacked town. Jacob had a feeling that the reek of burning would fade a lot sooner than his pain.

  ‘We’ll bring flowers to his grave every week,’ announced one of the children.

  ‘Hamlet saved us,’ said the other.

  Jacob patted their heads. ‘Yes, he did. He lives through you, now. You remember that when you tend his grave. You live your life in a way that brings honour to his soul.’

  ‘That was a man’s death,’ said Wiggins, as they left the mound. ‘Damned if I’d want any less when it comes time for me to pass.’

  ‘You’re too ornery to die, old man.’

  Jacob and Wiggins walked wordlessly down the river road. Halfway to the warehouses on the waterway, they came across a strange sight. A large pit had been dug out in the cornfields, and the wreckage of a Rodalian flying wing was being lowered into it with ropes, a dozen burly men that Jacob recognised as wind chanters down from one of the Northerners’ mountain temples. Heard about this ritual, but never seen it before.

  ‘There’s t
hat flier… Sheplar Lesh,’ said Wiggins. He pointed to a pilot in a purple aviator’s jacket. ‘He came to try and see you twice when you were laid up in the dark, feeling sorry for yourself, but you turned him away both times.’

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember doing that.’

  ‘Shoot, are they actually burying what’s left of his aircraft out there?’

  ‘To ride with the winds is a holy thing to them,’ said Jacob. ‘They believe their planes have a soul, given to it in a temple blessing after it’s built.’

  ‘Hell, now I have seen everything.’

  Noticing the two observers by the side of the river road, Sheplar Lesh detached himself from the funeral party and marched over. He gave a deep stiff bow towards the pastor and Wiggins. ‘Our second meeting, sir. With the first, you save my life. With the second, you see my shame.’

  ‘I know you’re meant to die with your kite,’ said Jacob. ‘But I am glad you’re standing here with eyes to weep for your flying wing. There’s been enough death in Northhaven, don’t you think?’

  ‘I stand unworthy before you,’ said Sheplar Lesh. ‘My soul should be protecting your family on their journey through the afterlife.’

  ‘My wife has passed,’ said Jacob. ‘My boy is still alive. And Mary, well, if there’s a wind demon fixing to ambush her on the way to paradise’s gates, then I hope it’s brought a pack of friends to protect its tail.’

  ‘Alive! ’ Sheplar’s narrow eyes widened in surprise. ‘Your son is alive?’

  Jacob reached out to touch the aviator’s arm. ‘My son called you the bravest man in Rodal and I don’t think he was wrong. I know how your people feel about a life debt and I’ll be coming back shortly to give you a way to repay it. You and the skyguard, both.’

  ‘What honour I do not bury here is at your service, Jacob of Northhaven.’ The pilot bowed again and walked back to the chanting Rodalians casting silk streamers into the pit.