by Stephen Hunt
‘We’re just simple travellers,’ said Jacob. ‘But I don’t think the head man wants us to get to where we’re going.’
‘And why would that be?’
‘The why, I’m still working on. The who, that I reckon I know.’
‘The grand duke rarely executes travellers,’ explained Zanasi. ‘He may be mad, but he is not a fool by any means. His revenues come from refuelling the aircraft which attempt the savannah crossing. He would not put his commerce at risk without good reason.’
Sheplar’s ears pricked up at this. ‘Attempt? The traders do not always make it?’
‘They do not. The wreckage of planes that ran out of fuel litters the plains. It is said that the founders of Hangel were originally the crew of a mighty carrier which crashed on the plateau after they rode the wrong trade winds.’
‘In our case, I don’t think our status as foreigners is going to provide much protection,’ said Jacob. Quite the opposite. I reckon it’s why we’re here.
‘Where do you travel to?’
Jacob pulled out the map from the library and carefully unfolded it. He’d borrowed it with permission, planning to use the chart to book passage in the right direction with the air merchants. There wasn’t much chance the mistress of the codex was going to see it returned any time soon, now. Jacob tapped the imperium’s territory. ‘This is the end of our journey.’
‘The Faraway Heart,’ said Zanasi. ‘A source of great wealth.’
Jacob nodded. If you squinted, the outline of the empire’s massive territory did appear a little like a sketch of a heart.
‘You seek treasure?’
‘I seek my son,’ said Jacob. ‘Slavers took him, but he’s all the treasure I have. Everything else I’ve already given away to reach my boy.’
Zanasi looked at them oddly. ‘It is strange. It is as though I have heard your story before. It seems familiar to me, somehow.’
‘Déjà vu?’ said Jacob.
‘Perhaps you carry the blood of a diviner within your veins?’ suggested Sariel.
‘I am no shaman,’ said Zanasi. ‘That I can promise you. I have none of their blood.’
Nor did Jacob. But his bad feeling about their future grew a great deal more tangible as the sound of marching boots approached outside. A clacking noise sounded as the vault-like door unlocked, and soldiers appeared, rudely ushering the dungeon’s prisoners outside, gads and visitors alike. With little light in the corridor, the torches the soldiers carried nearly blinded Jacob. He could hardly see to put one foot in front of another. Zanasi stumbled by Jacob’s side along the dark corridor.
‘Do you know what we can expect?’ whispered Jacob.
‘I fear we are to be the grand duke’s breakfast entertainment,’ said the gad. ‘He always digests his meal better after he has murdered a few of my people.’
They were shoved out of the tunnel and onto the sandy dirt of a bright open space. Any hopes that the expedition’s members were to be released faded as Jacob’s vision returned. They stood on the floor of a pit that resembled a bull-fighting stadium, the gads being shepherded behind a wooden stockade, leaving Jacob and his party in the open. There weren’t many seats in this arena. It seemed it wasn’t intended for the general public. If you discounted the soldiers corralling the gad prisoners, the sole spectators sat behind a raised balcony covered from the sun by a white canvas shade. Taking no chances, the viewers were protected behind a canopy of armoured glass. In the centre sat a stoutish, late-middle-aged man with a shock of red hair, presumably the grand duke from the elevated position of his throne. He wore a purple tunic with a yellow wisp of a neck cloth buttoned up to the throat. He might have been handsome once but he had run badly to seed, the ravages of age and obesity beggaring his appearance. An eager gaggle of courtiers bobbed up and down behind the nobleman’s seat, not quite able to see the proceedings as well as their master. Dogs leapt up around the throne, trying for a view of the proceedings as well. The grand duke cooed at them, stroking their heads affectionately. The man sitting to the ruler’s left needed no introduction. It was Major Alock, his hard, stony face looked straight at Jacob and he still wore the uniform of a Weyland officer, his spine as rigid as any block of granite.
Jacob, Sheplar, Sariel and Khow were shoved in front of the raised platform.
A voice yelled from one of the soldiers behind them. ‘Kneel for Grand Duke Pavlorda, most noble issue of the House of Bragin.’
The soldiers behind Jacob didn’t wait; they shoved him down to his knees.
‘Are these the dogs?’ demanded the grand duke, fair writhing in the chair as he spoke.
‘They are, Your Highness,’ confirmed Alock.
Jacob stared up in hatred at the traitor who should have been helping him. ‘You’re a long way from home, Major. I didn’t know the league kept embassies this far out.’
‘You’ve come a long way yourself, for a man who’s only travelling towards a grave.’
‘Got a way to go yet, before that.’
Alock shook his head, allowing a wry grin to crack his dark demeanour. ‘Well, you must have mumbled a Bible full of prayers to get this far. How the hell did you escape my men back in the forest?’
‘I convinced them that stealing is a mortal sin. And that betraying your king is the civil kind.’
‘Only one out of two,’ said Alock. ‘I’m here on official business.’
‘You’re meant to be helping us, manling!’ protested Khow. ‘That is your duty.’
‘You’d be surprised where my duty takes me.’
‘Like the Burn? Your men told me that you were a mercenary general on the other side of the ocean. Bad Justus. Ring any bells?’ asked Jacob.
‘Fully pardoned,’ said the major. ‘For any indiscretions, on both sides of the ocean.’
‘This isn’t about stealing our money, is it?’ said Jacob. ‘You’re meant to stop us getting to the Vandian empire.’
‘You see, that’s what worries me about you,’ snarled the major. ‘First you know the right direction to travel. Now, you actually seem to know where you’re going.’
‘So, this fool understands too much for his own good,’ said the grand duke twisting in his chair as though he itched from the heat. ‘But that is only a problem while he is alive. It is time to feed my beauties.’
‘What’s your game, Major?’ called Jacob. ‘Is King Marcus worried that the might of the imperium might be directed in Weyland’s direction if I reach their empire and start killing the right people?’
Alock sighed. ‘You really don’t know how deep you’re in it, do you? The king has been allowing the skels to raid the country for slaves. Paid a lot better than I am for giving the skels carte blanche. Or did you think it was an accident that every military unit which could have intervened was stationed somewhere else during the Northhaven raid?’
‘You are a liar!’ called Sheplar. ‘Rodal would never cooperate in such a dishonourable arrangement.’
‘Some of the league states know what’s going on, some don’t.’ He tapped the side of the grand duke’s chair when he said know and Jacob suddenly understood where the little city state was getting the money to fund its expansionary war against the tribes. Major Alock leaned forward on the viewing gallery above the arena. ‘Your country is even more backward than ours, pilot; and if it’s happy to stay like that, so be it. The raids don’t amount to much. The king only cares that he’s sent enough steel and iron to modernise the nation. That’s the thing about people… we can always breed more of them. But the metals that Vandia’s supplying us with, they’re a lot harder to come by.’
Jacob felt the anger boiling inside him. ‘He’ll be looking for another throne when the assembly finds out.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. There are many politicians in the mechanicalist faction who are only too happy to be given what they need to produce modern mills. But you can see the king’s dilemma: he needs to keep his little arrangement quiet. Where the people hear rumours about th
e raids, he needs our peasants thinking they’re just a few random slaver attacks. Nothing they can do about it, just one of those haphazard evils that fate throws their way. This should be easy. The empire gets the manpower it needs without any retribution missions, without facing a pitched battle every time a skel carrier’s spotted in the air. The king gets a modern state. But you, pastor, you’re making it hard. You should be out west searching for your son in the Burn slave markets. Instead you’re heading south, and far too well informed for your own good.’
‘So, Benner Landor’s hostage money was just a bonus for you and your men?’
The major shrugged. ‘A man’s got to eat.’
‘So do my beauties,’ said the grand duke, his voice growing impatient. ‘It is time! Yes, yes!’
‘Feed them in one at a time,’ cautioned Alock. He stared emotionlessly down at the prisoners. ‘Any time you fools want to tell me how you discovered where the Northhaven slaves went, you can go back to the dungeons and rot for the rest of your lives, rather than satisfying the appetite of the grand duke’s pets.’
‘They’re not slaves,’ snarled Jacob. ‘They’re family and friends.’
‘Not mine, pastor. I got rid of most of my family a long time ago. Now, before we move on to the main course, I’ll introduce the entrée and see if that changes your mind any.’ He snapped his fingers and a naked figure was dragged out and deposited in the middle of the arena by two soldiers. ‘Of course, the grand duke’s pets won’t eat dead meat. But it would have been rude of us to feed her to them alive when she gave us so much good sport during the interrogation.’
Jacob could hardly stand to watch as the soldiers rolled the badly scarred body over. It was Iaroia, the head of the local librarian’s guild hold. They had beaten her to death. ‘You murdering bastard! She didn’t know anything!’
Alock raised his hands, as though he had merely been caught in a breach of manners. ‘She was a librarian, of course she knew things. She gave you shelter for a night. You might have let something slip. How could I not ask her?’
Another poor innocent dead, because of him. Because of Jacob Carnehan, the voice inside whispered. When Jake Silver is the man who should have gone looking for his son. Quicksilver. ‘You’re crazy, Alock! The guilds will pull out of Hangel when they hear you violated their immunity.’
‘Let’s just say the authorities here have a superior source of intelligence. Now, who next?’ The major pointed Sariel out to the grand duke. ‘There! That one’s name I don’t know, although I have a feeling the coins shaken from his pocket came from the Landor moneybox which mysteriously went missing. I resent scum thieving my wealth; especially after I’ve gone to so much trouble to steal it in the first place. He can die next…’
Guards appeared with long lances and prodded Sariel, the vagrant waving his arms wildly as they jabbed him towards the centre of the arena. Jacob, Sheplar and Khow were driven back behind the wooden barrier where the gads stood corralled, the locals moaning and swaying, exposed under the hot sun. A series of iron gates rattled at the far end of the arena, a whitewashed wall splattered with blood and dust. Jacob and his two companions were protected by the wooden palisade from whatever was caged inside there. No such protection was afforded to Sariel, however.
The guards held Jacob at bay, their spears digging into his chest and drawing blood. ‘Your filthy scheme murdered my wife, Alock! You traded my son’s future for a handful of metal. I’m going to kill you, Major. You and your crooked royal master, both!’
‘Not today,’ sneered Alock. ‘I much prefer working for the state. It’s a lot easier to work when everything you do is rendered legal by royal warrant. I’ll leave you to last, pastor. Anytime you get tired of seeing your friends ripped apart, just tell me what I need to know…’
Jacob spat on the floor. The second he revealed the secret of Khow’s homing sense was the second Alock would order their execution. There was only one way for the major to keep the true source of the slave raids from Weyland, and that was to plant every member of the expedition in the ground. Jacob would have done exactly the same, once.
‘Your milk-livered animals will not attack me,’ shouted Sariel. He hobbled forward, shaking his walking staff in the air. His actions wouldn’t hold back a determined predator for longer than a second or two. ‘They know the prince of players too well.’
A roar of laughter emerged from the grand duke’s protected viewing station, the courtiers clapping and jeering.
‘I am sorry for your friend.’ It was the gad scout. He gazed up at the royal viewing platform with a curious expression that Jacob recognised only too well.
‘My beauties know what time it is,’ hooted the grand duke. He waved his hand. One of the poorly oiled iron gates in the wall began to squeal upwards, a frantic mound of fur trying to scrabble out from the holding chamber before the gate was fully retracted. It was joined by another shape, then a third, all competing and howling to be the first to be released. ‘Breakfast time!’
The gate rose halfway into the wall and the creatures had enough clearance to escape. They surged out, a trio of big cats – a similar patterning along their hides to the gads – half as tall as a man and at least ten feet long, with manes that made them seem giants from the front. Two hunters broke to Sariel’s left, a third prowling low along the right, working as a pack. The first pair was just a feint. It was the lone hunter that would make the kill.
‘Friends,’ shouted Sariel, jabbing his cane skyward. ‘My friends, you will not harm me.’
If that was the creatures’ intention, they had a strange way of showing it. The creeping predator leapt at Sariel, baring a set of white teeth as sharp as a phalanx of sabres; its roar so loud and penetrating that Jacob felt his heart shuddering inside his ribcage from the power of it. Khow moaned in horror. Even Sheplar, who believed the vagrant a thieving chancer, turned his head rather than witness this unequal slaughter. Jacob could not. He had led Sariel to this fate. As surely as he steered old Deputy Wiggins to a burning inside the forest by the major’s killers. As surely as Iaroia’s fate had been sealed by assisting him. I was the kind of man who would have questioned captives this way, once. Now I’m just the kind who leads them into the butcher’s pit. And I don’t know which breed is worse.
Sariel screamed as he flailed at the leaping creature with his staff, the wooden rod sent flying as the massive predator ripped his right arm off and continued the arc of its leap to land in a cloud of dust behind the bard. It began triumphantly shaking Sariel’s dismembered limb. The bard was spun around by the force of the attack, landing on the arena sand just as the other two cats hurled themselves on top of him, ripping his leather coat and tearing at his clothes, batting him with their clawed paws, and sending his mangled body rolling limply across the ground.
Duncan learnt his lessons well under the tutelage of the grizzled old Paetro. Paetro, it transpired, was one of the many janissaries who served in the legions. Foreign troops that took the empire’s coin on the basis that there was always so much of it to go around. They worked their way up through the castes, as best they could. Some would call them mercenaries, although many might consider them pragmatists. The imperium always won every war and always would, so if you had to fight as a career, better to fight on the winning side. Duncan and Paetro’s duties almost seemed to him like licensed paranoia. Gaming how to kill the girl and make it seem like an accident, then sweeping for each potential avenue for murder in advance. Accidents were the best method of assassination. Nothing to link an aggressor to the actual deed; hard to retaliate against through the legal channels of duelling or low-level warfare permitted by the emperor. Having a helo fall out of the air or a sky mine’s blasting powder detonate under an enemy’s boots would be an ideal kill. Stylish, even. Using a sniper who could be captured and tortured, that was counted as brutish: plausible mechanical failure, or a chance encounter with one of the island’s many varieties of venomous snake, sublime. The hardest part of Duncan�
�s training came when a surgeon in the Castle of Snakes administered low levels of poisons commonly used by assassins, peppering samples of food with toxins, so Duncan might learn to detect tampering well before it ever reached the lips of young Lady Cassandra. Duncan spent days throwing up, taking anti-venom injections and drinking purges to clear the filth from his body. By the time he finished, he could smell a table full of plates and identify the one which had been sprinkled with devil-dust or coated with poison mixed with honey to conceal its toxic aftertaste. The effects of that regime aside, he put on weight for the first time since his enslavement, sampling fare from the feasts served to Cassandra. The young noblewoman, by contrast, never seemed to put on weight. Partly through the metabolism of Lady Cassandra’s tender age, partly through the gruelling regime of weapons training she was expected to attend daily. Gymnastics to learn balance and poise. Weights to build strength. Combat practice of every sort – spears, tridents, knives, maces, sabres, foils, short-swords, bolas, pistols, ranged target shooting. Paetro supervised the combat, with experts shipped in from every corner of the empire to impart their talents. Once, for fun, Paetro let Duncan fight the young girl with wooden practice swords on the wooden slats of the training hall. Despite their difference in size, strength and age, Duncan barely walked away without his knuckles being shattered. She was like a little demon, whirling and swinging, using moves so quick and esoteric that few Weylanders would have been able to keep up. Maybe some of the trained swordsmen in the army would have been her match, but even then Duncan had his doubts. Or maybe that was just what he needed to tell himself after losing so badly to a young girl. The days were long, but after the sky mines’ gruelling regime, keeping up with the young noble was quite literally child’s play. And there was always the possibility, ever-playing through Duncan’s thoughts, that he might see Adella again here. The imperial siblings that Helrena counted as her allies were always showing up at the Castle of Snakes to confer on strategy and scheme their schemes. Surely Baron Machus would appear one day with Adella in his retinue? But that day never seemed to come, however much he hoped for it. Perhaps it was for the best. Duncan didn’t think he could bear to see Adella being pawed by another man, one of the mighty princelings who could order a slave’s execution just for spilling soup over him during a meal, let alone for punching him for stealing Adella away like a rustled horse. Like a slave. And it might have been cowardice – or prudence – but Duncan didn’t want to jeopardise his chances of getting Willow transferred to the castle alongside him as a house slave. All he needed was Princess Helrena feeling that she was in Duncan’s debt again. Life inside the castle seemed different from the station. There were still the distinctions of caste here; but there was also a camaraderie and a commonality of purpose which was distinctly lacking at the raw level of existence in the sky mines. It was almost as if having gained a place at the centre of the house, no higher position existed, irrespective of hierarchy. Better a beggar here than a prince at home.