In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Get up, Khow,’ said Jacob. ‘I think something’s happening. Better wake the others’

  They soon discovered the reason for their off-schedule halt. Major Alock turned up outside the compartment, his eyes serious slits under a kepi – the circular-topped cap’s peak throwing his granite jaw into shadow. Alock’s khaki uniform appeared as crisp as if the creases had been beaten flat with a hot sabre edge. The officer’s news was enough to wake Wiggins and Sheplar quick enough. They dressed fast, all four of them emerging into the cold morning air. And there it is. Another train sat in a siding to their right, three carriages long, a smoke-damaged engine car trailing a single carriage, another flatbed truck loaded with rails and equipment at the rear. Beyond lay the forest, every tree facing the siding with a blackened body tied to its trunk, the smoking remains of a bonfire by the feet of each carcass. The major’s troops filtered out warily across the treeline, checking the corpses. The dead soldiers wore a grey uniform Jacob didn’t recognise.

  Jacob addressed the major. ‘A track maintenance train?’

  Major Alock nodded grimly. ‘Those soldiers are crossbowmen from Ivah. Tree-stake burnings… I understand this particular execution is a dog-rider speciality.’

  Jacob turned his nostrils in disgust from the evil stench of burning. Too close to the smell of the devastation at Northhaven. ‘We’re travelling through Ivah, then?’

  ‘Have been all night. This attack creates a problem for us.’ The officer indicated the train’s staff swarming over the damaged locomot­ive. ‘The train master has examined the bodies and the rail guild’s men are missing, it’s only the military escort accounted for among these casualties.’

  Wiggins came up behind them, overhearing the exchange. ‘This is foreign soil, Major. Sure as hell ain’t our fight. Ivah isn’t even a league member and we can’t be more than a day from rolling back across the Weyland border.’

  ‘The train master has made his request officially, Constable. The guild would no more leave their people behind than the regiment would consider abandoning its own.’

  ‘Your job is guarding our two moneyboxes and going after Northhaven’s missing, not this,’ said Wiggins.

  ‘There’s a reason why the rail guild won’t run a full service across Ivah, and,’ said the major, pointing to the half-wrecked train, ‘it’s this. If you can’t protect the guild’s trains, then services don’t run through your country.’ He picked up a discarded crossbow from the grass. ‘No trains mean no goods moved around. No goods means less industry. No trains mean commerce slowing to the crawl of a wagon. If I ignore a formal guild request for military aid, then this toy is all the next major of the royal guards is going to have to defend the king. You want to try and keep the peace with no ammunition for your pistol, Constable?’

  ‘And going after them is the right thing to do,’ said Jacob. Though not for Carter or our people, damn it. He was torn between helping the ruined train’s crew and keeping fast on his son’s trail. Can you ever do the right thing by doing the wrong thing?

  Wiggins obviously didn’t share the pastor’s view. ‘This is unlikely to be the worst sight we see before this trip is done, Father. You aiming to help everyone we come across? We got to think about what’s important. Those poor devils on that train, they got to be dead by now. Just not dead here.’

  ‘Then we’ll cut them down from the trees and bury them,’ said Jacob, coming to a decision. It was painful and hard, but Carter wouldn’t want them to continue their pursuit by abandoning others. Nor Mary, for that matter. ‘These ashes are still hot. It shouldn’t add more than a day to our travels. You don’t have to come, old man.’

  ‘The hell I don’t. Your Bible’s just so much kindling to the beasts that did this. It’s my gun that needs to do the sermonising on this jaunt.’

  Jacob looked at Khow and Sheplar. The flier tapped the pistol hol­stered on his belt. ‘Two guns are better than one.’

  The gask looked uncertain. ‘This is not a good forest. Too much blood has been spilled across its roots.’

  ‘I know your people are peaceable. There’s no shame in it. You’ll be safe enough on the train. The major will leave half his force to protect the passengers.’

  ‘Where the bowers run dark,’ said Khow, sadly shaking his head, ‘you will need one who understands the paths and ways. I must come with you, though I would rather not. Our fates are linked by the mean.’

  ‘You just ask the trees where the dog-riders have put a match to these poor bastards,’ said Wiggins. ‘And while you’re about it, ask them if we’re a rescue party or a choir of goddamn missionaries.’

  Major Alock’s troopers assembled with full kit in front of the train, water canteens passed out to each of the party by a commissary. ‘Drink that down, then refill your canteen until it spills,’ ordered the major. ‘We’ll need to make our water last. Wait as long as you can for us,’ the major turned to the train master. ‘Should you need to withdraw, will you head for Talekhard or Brinkdalen?’

  ‘Back to Brinkdalen, sir,’ called the train master. ‘It’s closer by two days. We have to radio news of this massacre to the brotherhood as soon as possible.’

  ‘Remain on station here as long as you can. We may well be returning with wounded. Lieutenant Benteen, you have command of the barracks car and our remaining men. Mount heavy weapons on every port and keep the train, crew and passengers on a high state of readiness. The dog-riders’ scouts might well be watching us this very second. Withdraw if you come under heavy attack and you believe you can’t hold.’

  With a full water canteen, Jacob and others from Northhaven took position in the middle of the column of soldiers and moved out, following the trail into the darkness between the trees. What Jacob found was nothing like the woods back home; no trace of morning in the gloomy twilight, trees as silent as a cathedral around them. Nobody talked, not even the normally gregarious Sheplar, the soft crunch of dead leaves under their boots the only sound as they followed the army’s tracker. There was only one piece of luck about the guild of rails’ workers being taken prisoner, and that was their trail clearly written in disturbed foliage across the forest floor. There was no other sign of the dog-riders, though. They might as well be following a fog of malicious forest spirits. After half an hour of moving through the forest, Khow slowed in front of Jacob to whisper. ‘There are manlings ahead.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I can feel their presence. They do not belong to the trees, to this place.’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jacob turned to see where the major was in the line, but he couldn’t find Justus Alock, couldn’t focus on the soldiers’ faces, all of them blurred, all of them the same. Jacob’s tried to breathe, but found he couldn’t. The spray of leaves and dirt against his face was the last thing the pastor saw as a dark curtain slipped across his vision.

  Duncan Landor woke up as the suffocating pressure began to lift from his chest, the surface liquid of the well he sat restrained in flattening to calm stillness. How many times had the bruising strain driven him into near unconsciousness? It was hard to tell. Nobody to talk with, only the muffled moans of those nearby on his ledge of imprisoned slaves. The lights never dimmed inside the warship’s slave pens. Day as good as night and night no different from day. There were no portholes to contemplate the sky outside… sun, clouds and night’s canopy all hidden from him. If Duncan stretched his neck around, he could just see the chasm of space separating him from an identical wall filled with Northhaven’s human produce. Apart from the occasional faint cry of wretchedness, the only other sound to mark the tedium of Duncan’s imprisonment was the hiss from his feeding tube prior to it squirting out a gluey oatmeal-like gruel, the bland substance followed by a fountain of biting cold water. All Duncan had to mark the passage of time was the disembodied metallic voice that sounded twice a day, usually an hour or so after each feed, intoning ‘Muscle stimulation’, followed by a burning jolt of pain wh
ich left his trapped body quivering for an hour after. All around the chamber the distant, unseen cries rose at this unnecessary torture. At first, Duncan thought the shocks must be punishment for some infraction of the pen’s unexplained rules – the hours he’d spent yelling out for his sister and Adella, in the vain hope one of them might hear him and draw some small comfort from his presence nearby. But the regularity of the chastisement made Duncan come to believe there might be some medical purpose to it. People bathed in electrical waters in Arcadia to rejuvenate arthritic limbs. Perhaps this cruelty served the same purpose, keeping the slaves’ flesh fresh for market? With the two steel segments pressed around Duncan’s torso like a mould, he had to sleep in a sitting position when tiredness overwhelmed him. Tilting his neck back against the steel behind his neck – as poor a pillow as a rock on a camping expedition. He dozed off in two-hour segments, spinning back into a perpetual weariness every time the warship banked or changed altitude. If Duncan had fallen asleep when feeding began, he woke up choking and spitting, his mouth filled with gruel from the metallic teat. Days gave way to what must have been weeks, and even the open slave pens of the skels’ carrier began to feel like the finest rooms in a Northhaven hotel. How Duncan missed the luxury of speaking with fellow slaves, grubbing about in the food pit for supper, even getting into a fistfight with that scoundrel Carter. At times he drifted into self-awareness and realised the warm salty water falling down his face were tears. Not for me. Not for self-pity. For Willow, all by herself in this dark place. For Adella and all the others. For father, left alone in the echoing vastness of Hawkland Park, without his family. For all of them, not for me. This wasn’t living. It was existence. Not wounded. Warm enough. Fed and watered. Was this his tuition in what it took to be an acceptable slave? For surely anything that happened after this would be preferable to what had gone before. They have to sell us, don’t they? They have to have some labour for us to do, however unpleasant. That bastard skel slave master had hinted as much. You took slaves for a reason, not to torture them like this. Duncan’s chance to explore the next stage of his captivity arrived when a long metal gantry lowered down, clanking to a stop at the same level as his alcove. There was a draining noise underneath his feet; not the cleaning cycle disposing of his bodily functions, but the whole pit emptying of the viscous fluid that surrounded him. Duncan looked down at his legs, his flesh as wrinkled as a skinned beaver after being so long submerged. He felt as light as a feather, gravity’s clinging embrace reduced to half its normal force. We’re still in the air, then, and at high altitude too. Are we to be sold on, transferred to a third owner?

  A rattling sounded in the distance, growing closer and louder, until a metallic cart stopped in the gantry outside Duncan’s alcove, two house slaves pushing it along.

  ‘Male, size seven.’ One of the house slaves removed a pile of clothes. The garments looked identical to the suit the slave wore. White single-piece underwear covering crotch and chest, a grey skirt-like affair and a simple slate grey, armless tunic. Along with the simple uniform, Duncan was tossed a pair of sandals with cross-webbing to fix the shoes to his feet. On the house slave’s right arm lay an identical brand to the one burnt on Duncan’s own skin. An upside down triangle with two eagles’ heads facing away from each other.

  ‘Don’t jump,’ said one of the slaves.

  Duncan cleared his throat. It had been so long since he had last used his voice in conversation, it was as though he had forgotten how to speak. ‘Jump where?’

  The slave indicated the chamber’s void on the other side of the cart, no railings to stop a man from falling if he slipped.

  ‘I want to live,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Me too, brother. Me too.’

  ‘Put those clothes on after your restraints unlock,’ instructed the second house slave. ‘Dress quickly and move to the left. Follow this gantry to the exit at the front of the pen.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No talking with the other slaves,’ said the first man. ‘No questions. Obey all instructions instantly.’

  They pushed the cart forward towards the next alcove and Duncan could do nothing but wait. Outside of the warming fluid and sitting naked, he began to shiver. Eventually, the two halves of the frame that had trapped his chest unlocked with a loud clack, the metal prison withdrawing on crane-like arms. Duncan hauled himself weakly out of the now empty well, catching a glimpse for the first time of his seat and a circular well containing a metal faucet. Whatever the substance that had filled his well, its residue had already evaporated from Duncan’s wrinkled body, leaving him as dry as if he had been towelled down. Duncan fitted on the undergarment, then squeezed into the skirt, too tight until he realised there was a belt built into the side of the garment that could be adjusted. Lastly, he slipped on the sleeveless tunic. Simple clothes to cover his nakedness. Such a basic thing. He almost felt like a human again, not an animal. Outside Duncan’s alcove, the other prisoners were already shuffling past, house slaves on the gantry loudly repeating the same instructions given to Duncan. As Duncan turned to the left, he heard the scream from the other side of the chamber, someone casting themselves off one of the walkways, a flash of naked skin and then a crunch on the metal deck below. A slip? But there was another scream from his wall, a figure from a gantry below rushing out of their alcove and willingly hurling themselves into the open space. This death was close enough for Duncan to see that the prisoner had taken the trouble to get dressed. A woman, he thought, from the glimpse of long dark hair before gravity caught her and broke her body against the deck far below. Why did she get dressed, if she was going to kill herself?

  ‘You can always jump,’ noted one of the house slaves standing along the gantry. ‘That’s one freedom they can never take from you. Keep moving. Turn to the left. Keep moving.’

  ‘Don’t jump,’ whispered Duncan, understanding the instruction at last. Adella, Willow, please, stay alive, stay strong. He tortured himself, fretting that his sister and the woman he loved might succumb to the madness of being confined for too long. The two women had to stay alive. Even life as a slave had to be better than being dead, didn’t it? The mocking words of the skel slave master, Si-lishh, returned to haunt him. ‘Slaves think plenty lucky being spared fate of punishment cell, being spared to work for Princess Helrena Skar? Lucky would have been left to drop into sky. That would have been your luck.’

  The gantry ended in an open door, steel as thick as a safe vault. Stepping through, Duncan shuffled along a long metal corridor, nobody he recognised, although from the way some of the other townspeople were looking at him, a few seemed to know whose son he was. Duncan Landor. The most privileged slave in whatever hell we’ve landed up in. He had to stop himself from laughing maniacally. The Landor fortune would have been hard pressed to afford the metal in the decking he was walking down. Duncan kept his eyes open for his sister and Adella, glancing around even as he stumbled forward. But neither of them was to be seen, curse his luck. Eventually, he filed into a wider part of the corridor. A pair of house slaves sat behind a metal desk, its surface cluttered with unfamiliar machinery.

  ‘Name and occupation,’ demanded the house slave on the left.

  ‘Duncan Landor.’ He hesitated as he struggled for words to summarise his profession. Ex-landowner? Most disinherited man in the nation? ‘Farmer.’

  ‘Another hayseed,’ laughed the house slave, not bothering to disguise his disappointment. He fiddled with one of the machines for a minute, and then nodded to a large man standing behind Duncan. The giant seized Duncan’s left arm and shoved it inside a rubber circle on the bank of machinery. There was a brief sensation of heat on the underside of his forearm, and when Duncan withdrew it, he gawked. A line of numbers and black bars had been etched into his skin. The tattoo looked as if it might rub off, but his bare skin burned as he massaged the surface.

  The man behind the desk raised his own arm to indicate a similar line of script. ‘That’s who you are now.’

>   Duncan touched the tender area on his shoulder where the brand had been burnt. ‘I’ve already got one.’

  ‘That’s the brand of the Princess Helrena Skar – your mistress, fool. The number on your arm is your identity stamp. It gets you food, if you work hard enough.’

  ‘What if I don’t?’

  ‘You ever been hungry, boy?’ asked the house slave. ‘I mean really hungry, not just ready for dinner? Get out of here, idiot.’

  Duncan had to hold back a snort of disturbed laughter. Well, I’ve been trying to escape from the shadow of all that I was heir to. That much I’ve managed. And I’d trade it all back in a damned second, if I could. The processed queue of slaves continued to shamble forwards, heading down the long corridor. They marched until they reached another armoured door, a house slave waiting with a small box, clicking the trigger on the device and counting each slave out. ‘Eight more. Keep on moving.’

  Duncan ducked his head through the archway. Immediately the intense light blinded the young Weylander, his vision blurring with sudden exposure to sunlight. It was like stepping through a curtain of heat. The sun burned hot and prickly on his skin after so long in confinement. As Duncan’s sight returned, he saw that he stood on a platform docked to the outside of the warship’s hull, caged in by wire. It was some kind of aerial craft, a mobile cage. The deafening clamour of the warship’s jets kept her hovering in the sky, engines roaring, the smell of her exhaust overpowering. On either side of Duncan, similar platforms had docked, flying metal cages with an open pilot’s cockpit up front, their undersides a blur of turning rotors. The aerial pens filled with slaves, all of them prisoners offloaded from The Primacy of the Sky. Northhaven men and women, packed in tight inside the transporters. Steers in a cattle truck. Duncan pressed through the crowd to reach the craft’s side, trying to catch a glimpse of the landscape below. Squeezing through the rabble, Duncan’s heart hammered in his chest as he caught sight of… ‘Willow!’