In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  Wiggins limped after the pastor, spitting into the corn as he caught up. ‘Why do I get the feeling I’m out walking with the biggest fool in Northhaven?’

  ‘Because it takes one to know one, old man.’

  Wiggins glanced back at the bizarre burial being conducted. ‘The pilot; I think I know what you will be asking him for. But what of Benner Landor?’

  ‘Only what he’s got to give,’ said Jacob. No more than that.

  The wharves by the river hadn’t been intentionally burnt, that much was clear. Where damage had occurred, it was the incidental sort caused by Benner Landor’s warehouse guards fighting it out with the bandits. But numbers hadn’t been on the locals’ side, and the House of Landor’s two-storey warehouses, where they stood at all, now lay empty and looted, a few carpenters tearing out smoke and battle-damaged walls and re-planking them with fresh timber. Landor’s staff. Brave or foolhardy, depending on your take. The warehouse guards were only armed with swords, but still they had resisted hard against the raiders. Luckily, the piers hadn’t been touched. Riverboats from Redwater still landed, bringing travellers up from the large coastal town. Distant cousins and kin disembarking with food and supplies for relatives. Mingling with troops from navy barges and a couple of shallow-draught frigates, four masters with single rotating turret cannons up front, a line of eight pounders in gunports along the sides of their hulls. Benner Landor stood amidst the empty halls of his warehouses, a table laid out in front of him, filled with contracts for corn oil he no longer held and plans for resowing, rehiring. Schemes for everything except what Jacob was here to propose.

  ‘Father Carnehan,’ said Landor, extending his hand to shake Jacob’s. He had aged since they had last met at the duelling field. Still as tough as granite, but weathered stone now, crumbling around the edges. ‘I was going to come and see you next week. I’ll be needing a plot in your graveyard to put up a monument to Duncan and Willow.’

  ‘They’re not dead,’ said Jacob.

  ‘I hope you’ve not been talking to those leathernecks from the forest? You’re not putting your faith in their superstitious woodland sorcery, are you?’

  ‘Carter, Willow, Duncan, they’re alive,’ insisted Jacob. ‘Because all this—’ he indicated the warehouse ‘—wasn’t what the bandits came for. Every headless corpse we’ve buried speaks for what they really were. Slavers.’

  ‘My children are dead,’ said Benner. He paused a moment before gathering his thoughts. ‘You’re right, in that I don’t know if their ashes are in that warehouse behind me, or mingled with dust on the town’s ruined slopes. I don’t know if my children are among the blackened corpses that your monks are burying nameless. I don’t know if their bodies are packed in some slave pen on that bandit carrier… fading from thirst, starvation and dysentery, living only to be put to work in some hellhole thousands of miles away for the scant couple of years they might survive. I don’t know that!’

  ‘But you’ll know if you’ve got any love in your heart left for Duncan and Willow?’

  ‘Love!’ spat Benner. ‘Is that the love of the God and saints and angels that lets this foul shit happen to us? Did you get an answer on that when you buried your first two kids from the plague, or when Mary was gunned down? I know I didn’t when Lorenn died. I didn’t when Willow and Duncan were snatched from me. I haven’t got time left for your God or your leatherneck fairy tales. What I do have are thousands of workers who won’t get paid again this season, half of whom are still grieving for the murder of their family and friends. The House of Landor stands, you understand? Our name still stands and it counts for something in this prefecture. There’s not a bandit crew big enough to steal that, or to break us.’

  Jacob grabbed the landowner by his lapels and shoved him against the table. ‘This is your lucky day, Benner Landor, because I’m only here for what you’ve got. I want your money! Enough to buy every one of our people back, one slave at a goddamn time if I have to. And I want that tame assemblyman you’ve got sitting in your pocket. I want Charles T. Gimlette’s support when I arrive at the capital and beg King Marcus to give us a company of the meanest, hardest bastards he’s got in the national army, to make sure we arrive alive at wherever we need to get.’

  Benner pushed the pastor back angrily. ‘You’ve lost your mind! Every Northhaven man and woman will be dead decades before you catch up with them. You’ll be dead before you travel half the distance they’ve been taken.’

  ‘Man’s got to die of something. I need your money and I need your tame politician for my pursuit to work. Do I have them?’

  ‘You write me that letter you’ve always refused to write,’ hissed Benner. ‘The one where you agree to the synod’s plans to build a cathedral in Northhaven. I’ll be reconstructing the town at twice its old size and we’ll need a cathedral here. You write me that letter and I’ll give you two in return – one telling the assemblyman to support you at court, another ordering my bank to make funds available to you.’

  ‘Is that all you feel for your children?’ asked Jacob in disgust. ‘A cathedral?’

  ‘I feel they’ll be better honoured by a tomb in a cathedral’s crypt than a plot in the back of a rickety old church.’

  ‘You’ll have your letter,’ said Jacob stalking away. Leaving the landowner to his name and his glory and his empty sheds.

  ‘I’ll build a crypt inside for you,’ called Landor, ‘next to my dead children’s. The last pastor of Northhaven, right next to an empty one for the first bishop of Northhaven.’

  ‘You figure he’ll put one in for me too?’ said Wiggins, chasing after the pastor. ‘Here lies the biggest fool in the prefecture. Lost, presumed missing in parts foreign.’

  ‘Only the biggest fool gets a crypt,’ said Jacob. ‘The second biggest? That’s an urn in the wall, at most.’

  ‘Shit.’ Wiggins spat against the side of a wagon. ‘Figures.’

  Brother Frael moved through the graveyard, homing in on the sound of digging. Dusk made the vastly extended field of mounds an even sadder place. But Jacob Carnehan wasn’t digging a fresh grave to go alongside the hundreds recently dug by the marines. He was unearthing one.

  The monk stopped by the pile of dirt thrown up from the oblong pit where the pastor worked hunched over. ‘I know I told you we were going to have to triple the size of the churchyard, Father, but excavating old graves?’

  Jacob looked up, slowly wiping the sweat from underneath his mop of dark, curly hair. ‘This’ll be a bishop’s problem soon, Brother, not mine.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Some self-assured politician of a priest dispatched from the synod in Arcadia. One who will no doubt regard our monastery in the hinterlands as part of their domain and be only too keen to flex their newly minted authority. Are you really going to attempt this mission? Try to buy back those who were taken? Fight their owners if they will not sell?’

  ‘In the Bible, Brother, the three saints gave their life as martyrs for God the Father. Isn’t it time a father gave his life for his son?’

  ‘The saints sacrificed their lives for peace, lifting not a fist in violence towards those advancing on their pyres with lit torches. What you’re digging up here is not peace, is it?’

  ‘It is… what it is.’

  ‘But nothing of what I’ve taught you. When I found you on that beach amidst the planking and sailors’ corpses, as near to death as you were, I told the others in the monastery at Geru Peak that it was not your body we must heal, but your soul.’

  ‘You’ve saved me twice, Brother, once in the mountains of Rodal, the second time when you brought that gask to my room.’

  ‘I wanted you to hold out hope for your son, not this. Do not exchange your body with the one in that coffin.’

  Jacob’s spade struck the wood of the lid. He knelt down to brush dirt off it. ‘There’s no body in here. This was my first funeral service at Northhaven, a pauper’s grave – not even a name.’

  ‘It’s what is in there that worries me, and
I think we both know the name of the man you buried.’

  Jacob clicked open the cheap rusting clasps along the side of the coffin. Before he opened the lid, he glanced up at the monk. ‘To get my child back, Brother, I will crawl through every black yard of every circle of hell. I will swim through a sea of tortured souls. I will shed every pint of pumping blood in my veins. There is no distance I will not travel, no enemy I will not face, until Carter is back where he belongs. He will not die as a slave. I promised Mary this. I promised myself. I promised God!’

  ‘Mary is dead, Jacob. Please. If you have made a promise, make sure it is not one of vengeance.’

  ‘I will not break. I will not let my son down.’

  ‘Think how far our people are being taken,’ pleaded the monk. ‘Our world is endless.’

  ‘Then that will be my journey. I shall travel to the very edge of Pellas if it has one. If all I have left is the pursuit, then that is what I shall do. Pursue. Nothing will stop me. Not even death.’

  The monk gazed sadly at the old grave being violated. Not even death. Could a man die twice? Brother Frael sighed. ‘There’s an old saying, Father. It’s not found inside the pages of the Bible. I have a feeling it’s much older even than the good text. When you seek revenge, you must dig two graves. One of them should be for yourself.’

  Jacob levered the coffin’s lid up. There were no bones, no rotting flesh. Just a small blanket wrapped around something pillow-sized. A shroud to conceal what should have stayed buried forever. The pastor lifted the bundle out, then re-sealed the coffin and picked up the shovel, ready to refill the plot. He was trembling with an unholy fever. ‘Pray for me, Brother Frael.’

  The monk nodded curtly and turned away, saying nothing as his boots carried him far from the sound of dirt being flung down onto faded pinewood. He would pray for the pastor, but there weren’t enough monks in the monastery to pray for the slavers who’d burnt Northhaven. To the untutored ear, it sounded like the pastor was refilling the hole he had excavated. In reality, Jacob Carnehan was digging deep. He was heading down for hell’s own ceiling, and Brother Frael trembled as he imagined what might emerge from that pit.

  FOUR

  THE SKY ON HIS BACK

  Jacob gazed around Rake’s Field. It seemed like only yesterday that he had arrived at the woodland to stop his son’s duel. The crowd here today weren’t rakes and rowdies, just families waiting to see the departure of the town’s sole chance of retrieving their kidnapped loved ones. The pastor could tell from their grim, worried, pallid faces what Northhaven’s survivors really thought of his chances of success. With Jacob, Khow and Wiggins all arrived at the field, the pilot Sheplar Lesh broke away from the line of parked Rodalian flying wings, the pilots practising their empty fist fighting art in front of the aircraft. It was a hypnotic thing to watch, the line of aviators in their purple flying jackets turning slowly, gently in unison; a single living organism of mirrored reflections moving softly, without pause. A slow dance that, when speeded up, would result in snapped bones and burst sinews.

  Jacob bowed to Sheplar, then indicated Wiggins and the gask mystic. ‘Why four aircraft, Mister Lesh? There are only three of us that need taking to the capital.’

  ‘The additional plane is carrying two pilots,’ said Sheplar. ‘The pilot in the spotter’s seat will fly my kite back to Rodal so that I may travel on with you.’

  ‘It’s a hard road we’re embarking on. May only be travelling one way.’

  Sheplar’s artless grin only grew wider. ‘So it may prove. But those that are missing are also my responsibility. It was my failure to repel the slavers that allowed them to land and take captives.’ He stared at the gask and the two Northhaven men. ‘Have any of you ever flown before?’

  Jacob looked around. None of the party had. ‘Hell,’ spat Wiggins. ‘If Weyland had its own skyguard, that bandit carrier wouldn’t have dared attack us in the first place.’

  Clearly the constable wasn’t looking forward to taking to the air. Jacob, by contrast, was curious and felt no nerves. Flying wings had regularly swept past Jacob’s old monastery high in the mountain peaks, riding storm winds strong enough to rip a shutter off a window. There wasn’t a weather system in Weyland that would prove a threat to the Rodalian skyguard. Sheplar checked the weight of the three travellers’ backpacks, and judging them light enough to be stowed, left to fire up his triangular-winged craft’s rotor.

  ‘This will be a new experience,’ said Khow, his fingers nervously clutching the box of his calculator.

  ‘Just ain’t right,’ said Wiggins, ‘that’s all I know.’ His grizzled eyes scanned the crowd. People waved handkerchiefs towards the aircraft or held up lockets with portraits of their missing family members. ‘Already said my goodbyes to my daughter and her young’uns. You can imagine what she thinks of this foolery. Don’t see Benner Landor over there, or your monk.’

  ‘Brother Frael?’ shrugged Jacob. They began walking towards the aircraft. Well, the church never did smile much on suicide. As for Benner, I reckon this is just another business deal for the landowner. The port at Redwater was already shipping stonemasons in from far and wide to begin construction on the new cathedral. Jacob felt inside his pocket. I’ve got what I need. Benner’s draft instructing his bank to pay Jacob’s expedition a tidy sum. A second letter instructing the prefecture’s assemblyman to extend every assistance to the rescuers.

  Wiggins limped after the gask and Jacob, the vibration of spinning propellers filling the meadow. ‘What are our odds then, Khow?’

  ‘The future is fractal, manling Wiggins. Too many branches for me to scry true.’

  ‘Well, I’d say our future’s something that begins with an “F”, all right, but fractal it ain’t – nor anything else that’s fit to say in front of a churchman. At least I’ll get to see the capital before I die. You ever journeyed to Arcadia, Pastor?’

  ‘First time for me,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Always meant to take the train down there one day, when I’d retired. Me and the wife both. When she passed first, I never saw the point of travelling to the capital by myself. Guess I’ve got the two of you, now. And by air, too. Never did think that day would ever dawn.’

  The flying wing carrying its pair of Rodalians pilots had already turned around on the grass, taxiing towards the Northhaven Road to take off. It bumped along, perched on three tiny rubber wheels, one apiece under the wings with a larger third wheel at the rear – the layout of a child’s tricycle reversed. Jacob approached Sheplar’s flying wing. He stopped short of the aircraft to admire it. A cigar-like fuselage made into a triangle by the curved sweep of its wings, its single rear-mounted wooden propeller a blur; an engine coughing out cooking-smell smoke from a pair of exhaust pipes. With the pilot’s cockpit forward of the spotter’s position, there was nothing to protect either of the aircraft’s occupants from the elements. It sported something well capable of preserving them against enemies in the air, though. Two steel guns protruded from its wings, an empty cage either side of the spotter’s hole for the passenger to launch small bomblets towards the ground. From nosecone to rudder it couldn’t be more than twenty-four feet. ‘She seems too small to carry even one of us.’

  ‘This is the largest kite in the skyguard,’ laughed Sheplar, affectionately patting its wooden fuselage. ‘She carries two! A Tomlar Brothers Nomad. Produced by the finest craftsmen in my country. People travel months to a temple to see a new Nomad given life during her blessing ceremony.’

  Jacob dropped himself into the spotter’s cockpit, just enough space behind the seat to stow his backpack. Once inside, his only cushioning was a parachute. Two belts hung off the seat to cross over his chest; all that was going to hold Jacob inside the plane if Sheplar had to manoeuvre suddenly. After Jacob belted up, Sheplar turned around lifting a leather facemask connected to an air tank, large goggles built into the apparatus. ‘When I tell you, Jacob of Northhaven, pull on your mask. You will find one similar to this under your seat
. We travel a long way, yes? We must travel high to minimise gravity and drag. You will need to breathe through the mask.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Yawn frequently as we climb. Otherwise your ears will ache as if you are being beaten. Also, try to keep your skin covered at all times. Sunburn at altitude is very bad.’

  ‘I used to live in a monastery up in the mountains,’ said Jacob. ‘I know about covering up when you’re exposed on high.’

  Sheplar laughed and gave him a thumbs up. ‘Then we fly, Jacob of Northhaven, we fly.’

  Jolting and bouncing over the grass, the kite rolled past the town’s crowds, a ragged cheer rising from their throats. The huzza had a surprised quality to it as it emerged from their throats, as though the townspeople hadn’t been expecting to cheer. Khow’s flying wing bumped along in front of Jacob’s aircraft, Wiggins’ to the rear, and the small squadron picked up speed down the slope of the simple dirt lane, leaving the woodland behind, the distant spread of Northhaven in front. Trees on either side flickered past, faster and faster, the engine’s drone becoming a roar, and then the flying wing in front began lifting off, Sheplar’s aircraft tilting back as it followed suit. How peculiar. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to watch the landscape falling away, cottages and orchards shrinking to a toy-like patchwork, cold air rushing past Jacob’s head. He sank lower in the seat to cover himself from the whipping draught, but as Sheplar’s kite climbed higher, so the heat increased, while Jacob felt the weight of his body lightening. How flat and infinite everything looks from up here. It was no wonder Rodalians boasted that even the priests of the wind temples envied their skyguard’s pilots. As the squadron gained altitude so the temperature climbed. The higher they flew, the hotter it grew. Jacob looked up at the blue heavens. There was no sign of the radiation belt that circled the world like a girdle during the daytime, but if you looked up after dark you could clearly see its distant crimson shimmer, obscuring the middle section of a night sky. Pilots told tall tales of aircraft that had ascended so high that their engines melted while their frames caught fire. Jacob doubted the stories were true. You flew that high; you’d pass out from heat-stroke long before you burnt up like a struck match head. At one point in their ascent they passed a flock of honking geese, Sheplar careful to stay clear enough from the birds to prevent a stray goose running through their propeller. What would Mary have said about this sight, I wonder? Her fool of a husband flying with the angels. Jacob had to remind himself that she was gone. He kept on expecting to see her appear and berate him for how ill-prepared he was for the pursuit. Their four aircraft locked into an arrow-shaped formation as though they were imitating the geese, two abreast in a ‘V’, Sheplar’s flying wing at the head. It’s tidy flying. As good a start to their journey as could have been hoped by Jacob. When would the point come when that would change? Sooner or later, it was inevitable. Things would get real chaotic real fast.