by Stephen Hunt
‘I reckon he would have been proud to see you following in his footsteps.’
‘It’s a hard thing to live up to a father’s name,’ said Sheplar. ‘Shamar Lesh was renowned as one of the greatest pilots in the skyguard. My family always expected me to follow in his path. In truth, I would rather have been a wind chanter like my uncle. A simple, ordinary life, helping those who make pilgrimages to the temple.’
Jacob nodded. Perhaps it wasn’t only Sheplar’s honour that the pilot was chasing on this pursuit into the infinite. It was his dead father’s. Maybe that explained why a single mountain pilot had seemed so eager to take on an entire bandit squadron over the skies of Northhaven.
‘A name’s something you can find yourself running from, or hiding behind.’ Or something to bury in an empty coffin. ‘You shouldn’t regret your choice to be a flier. Your mountains are the walls of the league, keeping us safe from the hordes and nomads beyond.’
‘Walls that we live on,’ said Sheplar. ‘Not that we begrudge our duty. The spirits gave us rocks to live on so that we may grow hardy, and powerful winds that we may breathe pure air, and savages to the north for neighbours so that we will never grow lazy. That is what my uncle taught. What of you? Do you have family back in Weyland?’
‘Carter’s all I have left,’ said Jacob. ‘I was an only child. My father died in an accident on our farm. My mother passed soon after, not in any good way.’ No, not in any good way at all.
‘All winds must wane,’ said Sheplar. ‘We must live while we can.’
As the local sales agent for the Landsman Weapons Works, Hayden Gant knew a few things about guns and the men who used them. As he was bundled into his own dark warehouse and had the hood pulled away from his face, he realised that the ruffian pointing a pistol in his direction was not a novice in their use.
‘I don’t have keys to the safe,’ spluttered Hayden. Three men stood in the dark open space, all bigger than a fella had a right to be. The moonlight through the skylight painted them in pale, admonitory colours. Two of the cut-throats lounged against a stack of rifle crates, while the third’s face was almost invisible under a military cap.
‘It’s not your money we’re interested in,’ growled the man with the pistol.
‘Well, if it’s arms you’re after, you’re already standing in my damn warehouse.’
‘No, we’ve got enough of them too.’
‘Then why the hell have you snatched me up?’
‘Your cargo that left yesterday. You shipped it to a crew of Tourian traders on an aircraft called the Night’s Pride.’
‘That sounds plausible.’
‘It should do, since it happened. I want to know where those traders are heading with your shipment?’
‘I wouldn’t last long as an agent if I was to go running my mouth off about my clients’ business, would I?’
The man leaned forwards with the pistol and slapped him hard across the face with it. ‘How long you’re going to last, that should be a pressing concern for you. And right now, it depends on whether you’ve got a destination for those guns you sold. Where are they going? Who’re the weapons being shipped to?’
To give Gant his due, his concern for his reputation lasted until the strangers put a bullet in his left knee to match the one they blasted into his right. His worries about how he would walk again… those disappeared right after he spilled his guts, telling his captors everything they wanted to know.
Major Alock waited by the body of the warehouse’s night watchman, the guard’s throat expertly slit from behind. His three troopers carefully locked the warehouse behind them, leaving the salesman’s corpse lying alongside his crates and cargo.
‘Guns are going to a country called Hangel for the local monarch, some grandee called the Grand Duke Pavlorda. It’s southwest of here… a couple of weeks in the air to reach it.’
‘Well, lieutenant, the king charged us with looking after the pastor and his expedition. It’d be remiss of us to leave him travelling all alone in the world, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes sir.’
Willow sat uncomfortably on a stool behind the grading line; a conveyor belt carrying a never-ending stream of rubble from the tunnels the slaves bored into the new mine. Their station lay moored to the fresh strike by a lattice of chains and swaying rope-walks; close enough to make the vertiginous crossing in a minute. After all, the slaves’ time was a commodity now, and the Vandians were wasting none of it in the efficient stripping of resources from the new rock. It was a pity, Willow mused, that their owners’ concern didn’t extend to making the slaves more productive by introducing a few comforts – like cushions for hard seats. Or masks to hold back the choking dust that seemed to coat everything in the hastily erected structure where she had been set to work. Willow had watched the mill assembled with unbelievable speed. Metal ribs laid down like the supports of a barn, a fine metal mesh draped over it. Then the mesh sprayed with something that looked like porridge, but set as hard as stone. A couple more hours to move in the conveyor lines and the grading machinery, before running out rails from the mine head into the hall. And, just like that, Willow had the first manual job of her life. It wasn’t work she could have ever imagined doing. What would Benner Landor have thought, having forbidden her any avenue of employment except occasionally helping him administer the family estate? And that only as a sideline when she wasn’t being tutored in the gentle world of female accomplishments intended to bring her a suitably titled husband. Willow had been allowed to dabble in the estate, but not to do anything that interfered with her father’s management. How that had eaten at her. She was every bit her brother’s equal, and had shown more application and stomach for the smooth running of the family’s holdings than Duncan ever had. While Duncan had been out drinking with his friends, Willow worked in the office, studying which lands suited which crops. Mastering the business of trade contracts and exports and duties, which unions were important, which tenant farmers were open to modern methods of farming and which too traditional to consider any of the excellent suggestions documented in the annals of the Royal Farming Journal. Yet when Willow stood in the same room as her useless brother, the only suggestions solicited, the only person that seemed to matter to her father, was Duncan. Her father had forgotten that he had built the house up in partnership with the help of Willow’s mother. He worked hard to forget, that much Willow could see. Perhaps that was why Willow wandered the estate half-invisible to Benner Landor. She had too much of her mother in her; from her freckles to the rich curls of her crimson hair. Maybe Benner found too much of his wife in his daughter, and Willow’s old existence had been her punishment… sidelined and forever destined to be the spare to the heir. As good a breeder as any mare in their stables, or sow in their pens. Well, fate had surely found a way to remind Willow that a life of indolent luxury was not the worst thing that could befall any Weyland woman. What would Benner Landor say if he could see his fine, cultured daughter now? A human cog in a mining machine, sweating alongside hundreds of other slaves. Sorting rubble, scanning it with brick-sized machines and then tossing rocks back into the appropriate metal bin. One for neodymium, others for erbium, promethium, samarium and lanthanum. These were the rare ores the slaves sorted for. All the basic deposits such as iron and lead were hauled off the station for smelting. The women in Willow’s grading hall only looked for the gems – quite literally.
No, Benner Landor wouldn’t have been impressed to see Willow coughing from the dust, swigging greedily from a canteen to replace liquids she sweated like a pig, her nails torn and broken from handling rocks. Her simple slave’s tunic streaked with dirt and grime and smelling ranker than the lowliest farmhand working the Landor fields. Her throat dry and gritty, her muscles aching from fourteen-hour shifts, her belly grumbling from the lack of food. Willow had started out from a lower base than the other slaves – women who were already used to the demands of hard manual labour. Even working in a Northhaven store meant early rises an
d lugging stock about; a whole day on your feet – and that was easy work compared to the farm labour which provided the bulk of employment back home. Willow had experienced none of it. Lacking a dozen servants with nothing better to do than follow after her, she struggled with the physical demands of the work. If there was one consolation, it was that at least she could set herself to the task without whining or complaining about everything she had lost. In stark contrast to Adella Cheyenne, who was trying everyone’s nerves with her continual histrionics and dizzy spells as the workload got on top of her. If Adella hadn’t noticed, there was a hall’s worth of slaves new to the same hard labour. Swaying on the line, trying to ignore the throbbing in their heads from the sun beating down on the grading line’s roof. Working in heat so thick you could slice it with a knife and ladle it alongside the thin portions of barley gruel slopped out here for sustenance. What Willow’s brother and Carter Carnehan saw in this manipulative little hellion, she would never know. Sadly, for Willow, the damn woman’s lack of productivity was similar to that of a Landor heir unused to anything more strenuous than a little light docket punching. So Adella had scored a seat right next to Willow. If that isn’t an inducement to up my piecework rate, I don’t know what is.
Willow should have been glad that the manipulative woman had judged this an auspicious time to throw Duncan over in favour of Carter Carnehan. Instead, it niggled at Willow that she had swapped the targets of her dubious charms. Of course, Duncan was well shot of the trophy-hunting tigress. The very thought of having Adella Cheyenne swanning around Hawkland Park being coldly indifferent to the servants while insisting on being called Mrs Landor was enough to make Willow shudder. Willow had hoped that Adella would find some amiable overseer on the station to transfer her transparent attentions to. Some clod of a man with muscles where his brains should be. Maybe Carter Carnehan fitted that model to a degree. Carter surely acted like a fool around Adella – although Willow couldn’t hold that against him specifically as a crime. Almost every male in Northhaven above the age of fourteen could be wrapped around her fingers with a similar degree of ease. But Carter didn’t deserve to have Adella Cheyenne stringing him along. It wasn’t any more than that. Any hot flushes she felt in Carter’s presence were surely the result of her annoyance at his bull-headed ways. There would never have been a more unsuitable match than one between the heiress to half the prefecture and the wild, uncivilised, penniless son of a churchman. You’re just a slave now, a voice within Willow reminded her. Same as everyone else here… including Carter. Shut up. She pinched herself, annoyed. Even slaves have standards. Carter Carnehan means nothing to me. Nothing.
‘They’ve speeded up the belt again. I don’t know how they expect us to sort this mess with them running the line so fast,’ said Adella, her voice as sour as vinegar.
‘I believe they expect us to get faster as we work longer on the line,’ sighed Willow.
‘It’s fine for them,’ said Adella, her head nodding towards the slaves sitting down the line, quick hands dancing across the grading belt. ‘They’re used to paupers’ work in the mills and barns back home. You need to apply the right tool for the right job… but I’m wasted here. Haven’t they got a bureau that needs organising? These ores have to be shipped somewhere, and the rocks are going to need dockets and requisitions to be on their way.’
Willow swept the scanner over the rubble in front of her. Its display indicated lutetium deposits and she seized the rocks before they disappeared, tossing them into the appropriate bin behind her. Yes, this must be a far cry from the council rooms where Adella’s father had secured a nice cushy sinecure for her. No men to wheedle into doing the bulk of the work for her. Adella probably wouldn’t be satisfied in the sky mines until she was sitting on a plump cushion with a couple of slaves standing over her with palm leaves, fanning her useless carcass. Unfortunately for Adella, the grading line already had a supervisor. One of the old hands who had survived the last sky mine’s destruction – a tall woman called Kassina Hedgepeth. She must have been fat in her previous life; only loose jowls left as a reminder of where plump flesh had once hung. In Kassina’s case, her flat face, a bulbous nose that really belonged on a fatter woman, didn’t improve her looks. Well, beauty wasn’t a great deal of use for a slave: didn’t stop cave-ins burying you, didn’t help you sort faster, or earn you better rations.
‘Grab the largest rocks first!’ Kassina called towards Willow and Adella, not pausing from her slow promenade around the hall. ‘I only want to see rock dust and crumbs reaching the end of this line. And yell long before your bin gets filled up. Give the runners time to wheel you empty bins before you have to halt work.’ She didn’t stop to make sure she had been heard and understood, marching down the line and calling for an oil can to fix a roller jamming under the belt. It would be a few minutes before the line supervisor returned into earshot, and all around them, hushed voices started talking as they worked. The men had it easier in that regard. Willow had even heard singing coming out of the tunnels. Their supervisors only cared that the quotas were met.
‘Dust and crumbs,’ spat Adella. ‘That’s all we get to eat here anyway.’
A slave walked down the line with a leather drinking sack, pushing its nozzle into each woman’s grateful mouth, allowing them to take a gulp or two before moving on to the next slave. Willow tried to keep working when it was her turn, fighting back a coughing fit as the metallic-tasting liquid flowed down her throat in pulses. Then it was Adella’s turn, the woman complained bitterly: how the water was too warm and was making her feel sick.
‘I’ll make sure yours has ice in it next time,’ snapped the slave on hydration duty. It was all too easy to feel queasy here. The heat. The thin air. The light touch of gravity at altitude. The rations that never seemed to fill the hole left by the long, backbreaking work. But everyone on the line felt the same, and having to sit next to some imbecile whining about it didn’t help alleviate the symptoms. No, not one little bit.
Adella looked daggers at the slave as she carried her water down the line. ‘It doesn’t matter. Carter has a plan to get back home, and then the overseers and their stupid sky miners can grub around to their heart’s content after every rock that comes out of the volcano.’
‘Show some caution,’ warned Willow. ‘Lower your voice. You need to put a brake on Carter’s foolishness, or you’re going to get him, yourself and everyone involved tossed off the station minus a parachute.’
‘Caution won’t do. We’re getting out of here.’
‘Adella, you have to face the facts of our situation.’
‘What facts do you know? None.’
‘I know we were on that Vandian warship for over two weeks,’ said Willow. ‘And I discovered from the hangar crew that the average speed of one of those metal monsters at high altitude is five thousand miles an hour. That’s straight from the Vandian who trained our transporter pilots to fly.’
‘So? So what?’
‘Haven’t you got half a brain? Take the speed and the time in the air and do the sums,’ said Willow. ‘That puts us at least one and a half million miles away from Northhaven. Even if you escaped the mines and hitched a ride with a caravan that was heading in the right direction and willing to harbour a runaway slave, it would take you four hundred years to reach Northhaven. Travelling by aircraft, it would be more than twenty years in the air. Can you fly? If you stole a plane, have you got a line of friendly fuel dumps along the way?’
Adella’s face turned pale. ‘You’re wrong! That’s just horseshit talked by the empire and the supervisors to put us off from escaping.’
‘I know how long it takes to move a cargo around,’ said Willow. ‘By barge, by wagon, by train, by air.’ She angrily grabbed one of the rocks in front of her. ‘I may not be much good at this, but I know the average speed of a caravan. Lord knows, I had to plan the freight often enough for the house’s harvests.’
‘But Carter’s got a plan…’
‘Then I
hope it involves boarding the huge battleship that carried us here. I hope it involves overpowering the close to two thousand sailors that crew her decks. Because that’s the only way you’re returning to Northhaven in this lifetime.’
From the look on Adella’s face, Willow almost regretted bursting the woman’s bubble. But wishful thinking and an absence of planning wasn’t going to achieve anything other than throwing them down a worse hole than the one they already found themselves stuck in.
‘But he’s getting ready,’ said Adella. ‘Stealing a transporter; getting off the station. Carter has the others from the town raring to go. Eshean, Joah…’
‘Well, you’ve got to talk sense into them. Because by the sounds of it, all they’re going to do is get themselves dead. I understand how Carter thinks. Not a wall he comes across that won’t fall with a good hard kick. But this wall has a canyon-sized drop hiding behind it.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ protested Adella. A genuine look of fear settled across her features as the reality of their situation began to sink in. ‘We’re being worked to death on the line. Just cogs in a machine grinding us down. You saw the corpses of our people dragged off the new rock – how bust up Carter was left. Duncan too. They’ll die before we do; leave us here alone with nobody. I couldn’t bear that. In a couple of years we’ll be old hands, no different to Kassina over there. Everyone we know dead, our body chewed up by work. And that’s if we’re lucky – if we survive!’’
‘Well, it’s not a pretty thought,’ said Willow.
‘Any life has to be better than that. Even if we don’t get home. Just living in the wilderness, not trapped inside the sky mines.’
‘Maybe. But we don’t know much about life in the imperium, beyond the fact they’ve paid for us and branded us.’ She tapped her shoulder. ‘The Vandians will know we’re slaves wherever we go.’
‘I need hope, Willow. I need hope to live.’