In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘That’s just your spit, you old fool,’ needled Sheplar.

  ‘I can feel moisture on the wind,’ said Khow. ‘It is like a meadow mist.’

  ‘Mighty impressive,’ said Jacob. He had taken a good look at the city-state on the way down. The waterfall cascading down the rocky plateau would have been impressive enough, even if the plateau hadn’t been the only landmark higher than a stand of trees on the whole journey here. Buildings had been constructed on both sides of the torrent of water, set in the rockface like mushrooms hugging a tree trunk. The entire top of the plateau had been urbanised, covered with onion-domed stone buildings and protected by a fortress-sized wall which appeared unnecessary given the height of the plateau’s escarpment. The cargo plane had landed the expedition in the outer city, itself divided into two concentric rings. An outer wall protected the farmland, its crops and fields a patchwork blanket from the air. An inner wall shielded the city nestling around the plateau’s steep rise. A river fed by the waterfall snaked through the enclosed land, wide enough to need bridges to cross it; silvery red, where the setting sun washed its surface with dying crimson reflections. You could tell where the money in this pocket-sized kingdom lived. The city on the plateau-top was lit up like a chandelier with electric lights powered by a crest of water turbines stretched out over the waterfall’s plunge. The city above looked bright and worthy of Sariel’s flattery. The wooden township below, by contrast, was dark and grim with only a few oil lanterns for comfort, hundreds of columns of smoke trailing out of crowded, bent chimneys.

  One of their cargo plane pilots dismounted from the cockpit and walked away from the airfield. Jacob and his companions followed her, catching up with her naturally slow pace, encumbered by the full weight of gravity on the ground. After so long in the air, Jacob felt the effects too. Being reintroduced to the dirt after just a couple of weeks at high altitude on the Night’s Pride was like climbing mountains with a pack full of rocks. His joints stiff and aching into the bargain.

  ‘Some hard bargaining back there,’ noted Jacob.

  ‘The grand duke is a little too used to having his own way,’ said the woman. ‘But we are not his subjects. He plays us for fools at his risk.’

  ‘You are carrying enough fuel to reach the next port?’ asked Sheplar.

  She merely smiled. ‘I would not trust passengers with that information. But you, I think, know the winds well enough. A good wind may carry an aircraft far.’

  ‘So it may.’

  ‘The city’s library is down below?’ said Jacob, pointing to the rickety wooden towers behind the lower ring of fortifications, ‘or up there?’ He indicated the constellation of lights burning high on top of the plateau.

  ‘The library’s entrance is in the upper city,’ said the pilot woman. ‘They call it the royal city. The lower city is known as the common city.’

  ‘I’m no royal,’ said Jacob.

  ‘You are a traveller with money? They will find you royal enough,’ said their pilot. ‘The lower city is mainly for gads, and those poor enough to have to live alongside them.’

  ‘Gads?’

  The woman pointed to a line of stevedores weighed down with cargo from the shuttle planes, workers struggling towards flatbed carts with their loads. On closer inspection, Jacob saw they weren’t fully common pattern – at least not the sort that wore fancy official uniforms in this kingdom. They had long necks and as they tottered under the weight of their loads by the warehouse loading lights, Jacob noted their skin was patterned, too… tiger striped yellow and brown and green. Perfect camouflage for a life in the plains beyond the city’s walls, Jacob realised.

  ‘They are natives?’

  ‘Tame ones,’ said the woman. ‘Serfs and bondsmen. The wild ones beyond the city walls, you would not wish to meet.’

  ‘You mean slaves,’ growled Jacob. The same damn evil that’s snatched Northhaven’s young away. That took Carter. He tried not to think what his son might be suffering right now. His fate as a prisoner.

  ‘We are visitors,’ shrugged the woman. ‘And if there is anything a trader of the air has to teach you, it is this: visitors should never judge. At least, not the kind who wish to carry on about their business, free and healthy.’

  ‘But this is all wrong,’ protested Sariel. ‘The gads are a proud people. Their tribes live in peace with the citizens of Hangel.’

  ‘Maybe they are, if you’ve been listening to the songs sung by caravan drivers whose ancestors last passed through here six centuries ago,’ said the woman. ‘The Grand Duke Pavlorda and his friends have been expanding the plantations beyond the outer wall for a long time. Into territory which the plains people claim as their own.’

  ‘All this fool’s stories are dubious,’ said Sheplar. ‘Please pay him no heed.’

  ‘Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,’ retorted Sariel, rubbing his beard angrily.

  ‘There is so much open space out there,’ said Khow, horrified. ‘Empty land! Why must you fight over it here?’

  ‘Be glad your people don’t understand the answer to that one,’ said Jacob. Blood and dirt intermingled until it becomes one and the same. We’ve been dying for the same thing as long as there have been people in the world.

  ‘I look at these gads and I struggle to tell the difference between your people and theirs,’ said Khow.

  ‘They were probably common pattern once,’ said Jacob. ‘You live long enough in a place and it changes you over the eons. Like water carving a passage through the rock.’

  ‘And a minor evolution in skin pigmentation is enough to make someone a slave? Enough of a difference to kill over?’

  Jacob shivered with the damp wind. And old memories. ‘Khow, old friend, oft-times we don’t even need that.’

  ‘I will be glad to return to the forests with Kerge. Glad! I will never leave the glades again.’

  ‘I’ll aim to take you that far, friend,’ said Jacob. If your homing sense leads us true.

  Trailing in the female pilot’s wake, they reached a line of taxis at the airfield’s edge; open carriages pulled by short, plump horses. Sharing the ride, they passed through flat agricultural land, unfamiliar crops and neatly ordered rows of bushes. It was too late for the land’s farmers to be out. They were probably inside the low white buildings at the centre of their fields, windowless walls like miniature redoubts. The expedition’s journey into town was accompanied by the sound of crickets, creaking carriage wheels turning and the gentle gargle of water moving across clay irrigation channels. They were at the tail end of the day, but Jacob still found himself sweating in the febrile evening air. He wouldn’t fancy labouring in the full furnace of the day in these fields. Or crossing the plains on foot without a good knowledge of the local waterholes. Occasionally, their carriage overtook a wagon piled high with sacks and crates. The drivers holding the reins were common pattern, tailboards at the wagon’s back crowded with sad-looking gads, sore feet in worn sandals dangling from the back as they swayed listlessly, recovering their strength ready to unload the cargo. After half an hour, the taxi reached the wall that surrounded the lower city. The gatehouse was manned by soldiers, functional padded wine-red jerkins and lobsterpot-style steel helmets protected by neck plates and cages for visors. There was none of the finery of the officers negotiating back at the airfield. Spiked mace-handles hung from their side belts, short carbines pushed into leather holster belts crossing their tunics like a sash. Jacob and Sheplar’s weapons were exchanged for a brass token apiece just as was necessary in Northhaven, and he watched his twin pistols locked away inside the guardhouse with a twinge of regret. So used to their weight already? whispered a voice inside him. He shouldn’t have missed the weapons. Not with the protection of a granite wall close to fifteen feet-high, the heavy tubes of four-barrelled guns visibly poking out of the towers and the heads of sentries moving precisely along the parapet. Jacob ran a practised eye along the fortifications. This w
as what you might call a business-like arrangement. No part-time militia here. The soldiers were brutes prepared for trouble and ready to handle it. Jacob’s opinion of the common city didn’t much improve upon closer acquaintance. Narrow streets with wooden lean-tos and tenements, everything damp from the spray of the massive waterfall. The main avenue had been cobbled with stone from the plateau, but the lower city’s alleys and runs-offs were mud and broken planking. Walls were black and brown and rotten, the gads shuffling along the narrow streets in muted colours, as if any dyes and splash of colour had long since run away. Threadbare cloaks, aprons and leggings the same colour as the dirt the gads squatted in, hands out reaching for a pauper’s blessing. Hangel’s beggars lacked even the warmth inside from chimneys spewing out smoke, the smell of burning tinder and horse dung. If there was a church here, care of the poor wasn’t high on its list of priorities. Jacob could imagine the advice of poor, dead Wiggins from beyond the grave. Not your fight. Going to see a lot more of this before we get to where we’re going. The pastor within Jacob didn’t agree. The person he was returning to – the killer who owned that brace of guns – was all too willing to agree the deputy had a point and walk on by. Which man’s coming for his son? Which one can survive out here to do it?

  They reached the bottom of the plateau and the pilot woman dis­mounted and stepped into one of the vertical ferries, wooden platforms winched up and down the rockface. Not an option open to four travellers who needed to conserve their gold and had good legs to walk up the steep switchback steps carved either side of the waterfall. ‘We’ll be staying at the library,’ called Jacob. ‘If your carrier master decides to keep on flying south of the plains, send for us, and we’ll book another passage on board the Night’s Pride.’

  She nodded curtly, and then the pilot was whisked away, rising out of sight with dozens of other passengers.

  ‘Her clan are a canny crew,’ said Sheplar. ‘I think they will be flying in circles for a while, waiting to see who blinks first… the grand duke or their trading master.’

  ‘Whoever needs the deal more, I guess,’ said Jacob.

  ‘Am I really to climb this rise on foot, Your Grace,’ asked Sariel, ‘when I have so much wealth?’

  ‘You have no money, you old thief,’ said Sheplar. ‘All that we carry belongs to the people of Northhaven. Maybe you can recount one of your tall tales to the platform operators, persuade them to carry you into the air for a song.’

  The skyguard pilot’s words proved prophetic. As they went towards the stairs carved into the cliff, shouts went up from the men operating the lifting platforms’ winching gear.

  ‘You can’t go up there. That’s for bearers and gads!’

  Jacob turned on the first of the steps, calling back. ‘Sure I can. Unless you’ve got a monopoly on a man using his legs, as well as the lifts heading up and down up this rise.’

  ‘You’re going to unsettle the gads,’ shouted one of the men. He might have had a point there. The workers going up and down the rock-hewn steps shied away in horror, as though they expected to catch the plague from the Weylanders.

  ‘Been cooped up in the air for two weeks. My legs need the exercise.’

  ‘Foreigners!’ yelled one of winchmen, circling a finger around his ear to indicate his thoughts about their sanity. ‘You’ll catch the mange off them dirty gads. There’s not a hotel up there’ll give you rooms.’

  Jacob and the others began their climb accompanied by catcalls and jeers from the workers manning the platform gear.

  ‘Every day I learn something new about you, Jacob of Northhaven,’ said Sheplar.

  ‘And what have you learned this evening?’

  ‘That the best way to get you to turn right is to order you to turn left.’

  ‘I guess there’s a little truth in that,’ said Jacob.

  They climbed at a quick pace, overtaking gads going in the same direction on the winding, switchback stairs. The indentured labour’s pace was lazy, or perhaps weary was the word that Jacob was reaching for. I reckon when your time’s not your own, you don’t value it so much. Like the gads at the plateau bottom, many of their fellow travellers shied away from the visitors, jumpy and nervous. Jacob had seen dogs like that back in Northhaven. But only the ones that lived with bad families. The hounds who felt the sharp side of a boot sooner than any kind hand or word. After the party had climbed the steps for a while, they cleared the tops of the lower town’s rickety wooden rooftops and caught a clear sight of the thundering white torrent of water falling to their side. The townspeople below might shiver and cough in the damp wash of the falls, but for the wealthy citizens above, it was clearly a delightful way to cool off from the heat of the day. He spied idlers on the balconies of their apartments, watching the fast setting sun as servants poured them drinks. The buildings resembled stone saucers embedded into the rock face so that only the front half of the structures was visible, as if giants had held a contest on the plain, throwing huge discs into the plateau walls. The manner in which the apartments clustered together put him in mind of toadstools hanging off bark. There was no way to reach the apartments from these stairs – an intentional omission. Sariel complained of growing tired, so they paused for a moment. Jacob rested against the stone palisade protecting them from tumbling over the edge. Gads slowly passed them in both directions, chattering in a language that Jacob didn’t recognise, low and high tones mixed in a lyrical, singsong tongue.

  Sheplar wiped the sweat off his brow. ‘I wonder what they’re say­ing.’

  ‘They wonder if it would be wise to offer to carry us up the stairs,’ said Sariel.

  ‘You are making that up!’ protested the flier.

  ‘I may take them up on that service,’ wheezed Khow. ‘Climbing a tree is one thing. Scaling a plateau this high is another.’

  ‘All educated men speak Gaddish,’ said Sariel, annoyed at being doubted. ‘I was once taken prisoner by the mighty diviner Unkulu, who lived in a palace of reeds next to the great river of the plains. He kept me in a cage like a parrot, and said he would only set me free when I had learnt fifty new languages, the last being Gaddish, as it is counted as being the oldest and the noblest of all tongues. For each tongue I failed to master, he said his warriors would chop a foot off of my height. Luckily for me, Unkulu kept fifty-five wives, each offered as tribute by a different nation on the plains. How I prayed that none of them would die before they taught me my final language. I am not so tall that I could spare a foot or more of my body for his soldiers’ sabre practice.’

  ‘If we had been lucky,’ suggested Sheplar, ‘they might have started at the top and removed your lying tongue.’

  ‘Pah, I always speak the truth – even when I let slip falsehoods.’

  ‘Given you’re still here,’ said Jacob, passing the old tramp his water canteen for a swig, ‘I’m taking it that you were up to the challenge.’

  ‘No, indeed, Your Grace,’ said Sariel. ‘One of the diviner’s wives, Zuri, was having a picnic by the river when she fell into the water and was crushed to death by a giant green serpent. She never finished teaching me the language of the nation of Kaaboyo. Thankfully, the next wife due to teach me was pretty Salinge, who had fallen in love with me. She stole a pair of reed wader’s stilts for me, and spent the night lengthening my trousers with needle and thread to accommodate the poles. When Unkulu’s bodyguards chopped a foot off my girth, I used a little road magic to make them believe that they had seen my legs regrow. After that, they treated me with a great deal more respect. Although their ruler still insisted I learn Gaddish, so that I might tell all that I meet of his skill at prophecy and foretelling. And he was uncommonly good at it. He even knew that his wife was going to die in the river, as he had sent heralds to his neighbours demanding a new bride two days before Zuri died.’

  Jacob shook his head at the outlandish tale. ‘Pity that diviner isn’t here now. I’d ask him when we’re going to catch up with my son.’

  ‘I think he woul
d say when we’re ready to deal with the slavers who took him.’

  Jacob grunted. I got two holsters full of ready racked at this city’s guardhouse.

  They continued their climb, until the landscape inside the city state’s walls became as small as a toy garden. Out beyond, Jacob watched the plains for a second. Endless rolling plains the colour of burnt sienna where the last rays of sunset touched the grasslands. Jacob lost sight of it along with his night vision when lamps flickered into life along the staircase. The city’s builders must have used the stairs at one point. I doubt the lights were put in for the comfort of their slaves. More lights glowed across the saucer-shaped houses built into the rockface. Electric lamps. A rare, remarkable thing to see. Only Khow didn’t seem impressed by the sight. Maybe his people counted the use of such power as party tricks, or maybe it was the simple life they clung to in the forests. They were a people full of contradictions.

  Finally, Jacob reached the top of the plateau. Stairs widened out into a public square, two stone statues of knights standing as sentinels. The upper city’s walls were absent here, making a viewing gallery of the open space. There were few people around, gad servants trudging away to their households, weighed down with whatever cargoes they had been sent to fetch and carry. The first pedestrians Jacob came across were a young couple, giggling and full of the evening, waiting by a rickshaw which had thrown its wheel. The gad driving it was on his knees, pushing the wheel back in place while the boy and girl nudged each other and laughed as though they were watching a piece of private theatre laid on just for them. The pair parted with directions to the library after a little persuasion, so greatly amused by this strange group of foreigners roving the city’s streets at night, that the pastor thought they might roll around on the paving stones and exhaust themselves before they bothered to answer his request. One of Brother Frael’s sayings came back to Jacob as they left the couple behind. When love is not madness, it is not love. Maybe what the party was doing here was a form of madness, too. Human specks of dust drifting in the infinite, trying to reunite with all that they had lost. Tell yourself that you’re following Carter for love. Not for revenge. You need to believe that. The royal city’s architecture was completely different from the ramshackle tenements leaning against each other below. No wood here, but whitewashed stone, tall limestone towers with proud helmeted cupolas and onion-shaped domes. Their few tapered windows fixed far higher than a man could reach, indicating a culture of privacy and secrecy. At street level, the buildings’ entrances were massive and wouldn’t have looked out of place inside a castle rampart. Harsh sodium light leaked underneath the portals’ cracks, giving the homes a ghostly air. Moths and insects swarmed around bulbous lamps pinned into the walls along both sides of the narrow streets. The city’s library, when they stumbled upon it, didn’t look that much different to the entrance to Lucas’s Northhaven guild hold. Its door armoured with a speaking grille set in the wall, the library building appeared little bigger than Jacob’s old rectory. When a guildswoman in a blue librarian’s tunic came to inspect them through the sally port, she was momentarily taken aback by these unlikely strangers carrying a guild seal. As Jacob had thought, after she admitted the expedition, they descended a circular staircase, the library closer to a mine burrowing into the hard heart of the plateau, the bulk of its chambers hidden safe underground. The reading room for guild guests was such a spit of the one in the Northhaven, Jacob half-expected Lucas to appear and inquire what had made the pastor change his mind about being far-called. Instead it was a middle-aged woman who came into view, silver-haired and stern-faced. She looked as though she wouldn’t suffer fools lightly – and probably didn’t take kindly to visitors turning up unscheduled with a call upon the guild for hospitality. Jacob realised that all the librarians he had seen so far in the centre had been women.