In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  With Adella still in Duncan’s dreams, and his sister’s fate in the sky mines filling his mind, he distracted himself by packing his days with the routine endured by his charge. In addition to Lady Cassandra mastering arms, there were the many practical lessons of learning the house’s business. Not far removed from the demands Duncan’s father had once made upon his time. Attending metal brokerages and auctions in the capital, the vast wealth of the sky mines traded for scientific advances and other commodities and resources. Visiting the house’s mills processing the ores that slaves gave their lives to obtain. Mile upon mile of metallic plant separating raw materials, vast glowing furnaces tended by thousands of lower caste workers, glowing ingots rolling out of the other end in a sea of steam and metallic vapour. Passing work parties in leather suits and steel helmets, battered and burnt from molten spattered metal. Walking across gantries with nervous managers reeling off lists of figures and targets, treating Cassandra and her retinue with a seriousness Duncan worked hard not to find comical. Back home, the Landor staff would have sent Duncan away with a flea in his ear if he had made similar demands on their time – not that he’d deigned to work a quarter as diligently as this solemn young girl seemed determined to. When Duncan realised that losing employment in one of the houses’ great commercial concerns meant demotion through many layers of the imperial caste system, he understood a little better the managers’ fawning obsequiousness. Caste was everything here. Advancement was everything. To belong to the wavering-lower caste was to only be allowed to travel on foot along the moving walkways of Vandis. Promotion to the wavering-upper caste meant travelling through the capital by bat-like trains hanging from aerial rail lines. Advancement beyond that meant you were permitted to drive an electric carriage, as well as live above the eighty-storey level in one of the great granite-lined towers; and that offered a view of something more than fog, the multitudes and the clamour of the streets. And above them all, the emperor’s many children ruling the imperium like bandit chiefs; everything of worth concentrated in their hands. Farms, factories, land, the lives of the lower orders, all just numbers tallied against the ledgers of Princess Helrena and her relatives. There was no national assembly here, as in Weyland, to keep the rulers honest. The emperor was a god, and his word and whims were absolute. All of the emperor’s children lived in fortresses along the massive city’s coastline, circling the urban masses with their forces like a ring of siege-works; the islets in the sea beyond providing airfields and naval bases that could be brought to bear on internal rebellions.

  Cassandra rarely mingled or mixed with the people she ruled, passing over the crowds’ heads in her helo as divorced from their pedestrian concerns as an angel in the wind. Duncan was glad of it. From what he could see of the packed streets and roadways, Vandis was more crowded than anything he could have imagined before his arrival. The capital itself an unnatural arrangement; the population breeding and expanding, never once checked by natural concerns such as how the city could possibly feed another hungry mouth. Beyond the empire’s borders there was always another state dependent on the stratovolcano’s resources, sending grains and food into the empire in return for whatever Vandia would trade, however one-sided the terms. And the imperium required its neighbours to pour food down the throats of its teeming, hungry, restless masses. Many inside Vandis lived without employment, subsisting solely on the empire’s basic dole, made clients of whichever imperial benefactors controlled their district. Such citizens were nominally many tiers above Duncan’s lowly status, but in practice these people too were slaves. Packed into the capital’s concrete mountains, living without meaning or hope, distracted by vast screens hanging from the buildings; glowing picture radios showing blood being shed. Organised combats in arenas and duels between citizens. The unwashed masses had become a force within the empire, a slumbering dragon easily roused to violence; citizens descended through a hundred generations without a single ancestor having known work or purpose. Duels among the lower castes were as commonplace as the violent manoeuvring for power among the celestial-uppers; jostling in the street frequently leading to knives being drawn. Duncan had seen such duels from the safety of their helo… a circle formed in the crowd along the raised walkways; shouts and jeers of encouragement, two people in the centre warily circling each other, blades flicking out to test their opponent. There was a sudden brutal flurry and one of the men withdrew, his victim left spread-eagled in a pool of blood while cheers rose into the air. Duncan shivered. From his altitude the duels were something desperately savage and feral. That was me and Carter back in Northhaven, in another life. Didn’t seem like any affair which should have the word honour attached to it. Closer to rodents tearing each other to pieces in a gutter over crumbs of bread. Duncan came to the point where venturing out from the castle made him uneasy. Pellas was so big, its expanses vast and endless and green. Yet here, humanity teemed and bred without limit or good sense, suckling on the tit of the stratovolcano and the riches it vomited out. In many ways, this land’s riches were its curse. Overpopulated to an unnatural degree, ceaseless masses of people, and yet the imperium still relied on foreign soldiers to aim the guns that held its capital in check; spent fortunes importing slaves to do the unpleasant labour which its own teeming hordes refused to lay their revels aside to consider. There were so many feast days in the imperial calendar, honouring the holy deeds of past emperors and empresses, that Duncan had to rely on the castle’s staff to tell him which ancient emperor they had to bow their knee to in the shrine of a morning. Such devotions were as far as Lady Cassandra went in paying lip service to the imperial cult. Pieties were really intended for the lower orders. Beyond the castle, the hovering presence of helos and clouds of riot gas rising from the streets would indicate that another drunken mob had taken the daily entertainments to excess again and were being dispersed by the legions.

  On top of the practical business of learning the house’s estates, there were also Lady Cassandra’s academic lessons. Doctor Yair Horvak supervised these. On first meeting the tutor, Horvak looked little like the scholar Duncan expected to find teaching Cassandra. A large belly that made a waddle out of every step, a wild silver beard and big bushy eyebrows that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a nomadic tribesman. His one academic affectation was a monocle pushed into the bulges of flesh on his right cheek, a lens which sat there glinting over the tributaries of red veins that flushed his face and large, bulbous nose. The doctor’s voluminous girth would untuck the silk shirt he wore, flapping out of a waistcoat lined with pockets, each filled with instruments jangling like a watchmaker wherever he shuffled. It was clear that Yair Horvak also worked on great scientific endeavours for the house; but whenever he tried to delegate his duties tutoring Cassandra to one of his assistants, the young noblewoman would create such a stink that Horvak was forced to return to the education of the house’s heir. For her, this seemed good sport.

  The first time Duncan got to speak properly to the doctor was one afternoon when Cassandra studiously occupied her desk, poring over a pile of books she had been set to read and copying out notes. Paetro cleaned a pistol at another work surface in the doctor’s laboratory; his weapon carefully laid out in pieces as if his task was to learn how to reverse engineer the gun’s mechanism.

  ‘Here,’ commanded the doctor, ‘over here. Make yourself useful, Duncan of Weyland.’ He indicated a rail above his work bench where a series of miniature antigravity stones floated, connected to each other by a crown of wires while the arrangement gave off steaming icy cold vapours. It had been assembled on the other side of the lab. Duncan walked over to the bench, and the doctor passed him a pair of steel tongs, their handles lined with cork. ‘Grasp the largest antigravity stone with these and hold the circle as steady as you can. They are going to start vibrating when I increase the power into the circuit.’

  Duncan did as he was bid, while the doctor moved behind a nearby bank of equipment, running his fat fingers over the controls. It too
k less than a minute for the stones to start shaking fiercely, the icy cloud surrounding them growing bitingly cold. Duncan used all of his strength to keep the circle of stones flying away from the surface. There was a slight cracking noise from his tongs. ‘Your superconductor field’s about to snap my tongs.’

  Horvak worked his control panel and the shaking subsided. ‘Superconductor field, eh?’ chortled the man. ‘And what does an unassuming barbarian have to teach me of science?’

  ‘The rail guild operated trains in my country,’ said Duncan. ‘They run their trains above antigravity stones not much different from these.’

  Horvak raised a podgy finger in the air. ‘And no doubt a hold controlled by the librarians close by; stuffed with books full of blueprints to build such devices, if only you had more than wood and corn oil to construct their components. That was a rhetorical question, young fellow. Inside the imperium a “barbarian” is anyone unlucky enough to live at the far end of the caravan routes. It is the curse of extreme distance.’

  ‘And is your nation counted among the ranks of the “barbarians”?’

  ‘The curse of distance, inverted,’ said Horvak. ‘My country, Gankana, directly borders the imperium to the east. We have been under the imperial yoke for so long that I fear we are all evolved towards servility, now. My people are rarely taken for mill or field or mine-work, though. We are valued for our minds. Mathematicians and scientists and philosophers comprise my people’s human sacrifices to the great Vandian dragon.’

  ‘And so here you are.’

  ‘Yes, here I am. It is not much of a choice, is it? To live far enough away to be free of the empire, yet doomed to a life of resource-starved simplicity – a living hewn with stone axes and supplied by wooden carts. Or close enough to the imperium’s borders to be made a serf, yet free to exploit the imperial bounty by advancing the boundaries of science.’

  Duncan indicated the circuit of antigravity stones. ‘With this?’

  ‘Further, faster, better,’ said the doctor, enigmatically. ‘The only science that ever interests the imperium – extending the emperor’s reach.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Duncan.

  ‘And your tone of voice tells me that you disapprove. Let us say, one small side-effect of this work will be to understand the world a little better. And that is always a worthy endeavour.’

  ‘I understand the world just about as well I want to,’ said Duncan, tapping his slave’s tunic.

  ‘Curiosity has not yet been beaten out of my people, for all of our many faults,’ said Horvak. ‘This is proper, given we should judge a person by their questions rather than their answers. Why, for instance, should we experience gravity as a variable force, able to crush a man as flat as a pancake at modest depths underground, while leaving us floating like a leaf on the wind at quite modest altitudes? Why should that be?’

  ‘Because that’s the way it always has been?’

  Horvak grunted. ‘You would make a most excellent Vandian, sir. Only concerned with more rapidly loading cannons and how fast and far your war craft may fly. No, no. That will not do. I am certain the answers to the questions which have been puzzling me lie in the stars.’

  ‘You are also an astrologer?’

  ‘An astronomer, dear fellow. The radiation belt that surrounds Pellas is another mystery, as well as the bane of taking accurate astronomical observations. But we shall see, yes we shall. I shall push and prod and seek whatever revelations there are to be wormed out of nature’s anomalous weft, warp, and weave. There is nothing that exists so great or marvellous that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.’ He walked towards a wall of books, removing a tome. Then he pulled out a pencil from his waistcoat, ready to make notes inside the book. ‘Now, given that you are the first Weylander to serve in the house I have come across, I shall thank you for your people’s creation myth.’

  Duncan stared quizzically at the doctor, not sure what he meant.

  ‘I have yet to meet a people who do not have one. In Gankana, our priests tell of a time when our ancient ancestors were formed from clay in the image of the gods, to act as their servants. But when the god Porida’s son died fighting his evil sister, Porida grew lonely, and ordered a great oven to be constructed. Into that vast oven, he marched all of his servants and borrowed the organs from his dead son, giving a gift of blood and flesh to each slave. Then he baked his servants with a holy flame until they emerged from the oven as true humans. The Gankanese were the first people on Pellas, but when the other gods saw what Porida had done, they grew jealous, and set up their own ovens to convert their servants. Thus other peoples emerged. Eventually all of the gods passed away, despairing of their foolishness in recasting base flesh to resemble their glory. Your people have such a myth that explains your beginnings?’

  ‘Of a kind,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s told in our Bible. Mankind was full of sin and living in cities that knew only gambling and whoring and violence. So God sent a great darkness across the land to warn the people to mend their evil ways, but the fallen men and women, busy with their revels, barely even noticed his warning. Despairing, God began to drown the cities, one by one. When it came to the last city, his angels – the ethreaal – whom God had sent to destroy humanity, took pity at the sight of the children’s weeping faces. In their mercy, the ethreaal secretly bore twelve of the gentlest children away to a paradise, far across the sea drowning their homes, where they were commanded to start anew. Twelve female angels stayed with the boys, and from their children we are all descended.’

  Doctor Horvak nodded; satisfied, as if he had known this would be the case all along. ‘Yours is one of the more common tales. Salvation from a great calamity – there are hundreds of nations in these pages that possess an almost identical creation myth.’

  ‘And this is part of your research?’

  ‘More of a hobby,’ said the doctor. He winked at Duncan. ‘Let us say that if you want to know where you are going, sir, you must first begin with where you began.’

  ‘It’s just a Bible tale,’ said Duncan. This man was eccentric, that much was certain. Blinking too much while he talked, constantly wetting his lips with his tongue as if he was sizing Duncan’s frame up for the dinner plate. ‘If there were any gentle angels in my people’s bloodline, Doctor, I didn’t come across too many of their descendants back home.’

  ‘Nor will you here,’ Horvak chortled. ‘No, indeed.’

  There was a clanging from outside the steel door into Horvak’s laboratory. Paetro got up to open the door, revealing a steel cart from the castle’s kitchens pushed by a servant – but it came accompanied by a most unusual escort. Two soldiers waited by its side; not house troops, but crimson-uniformed – without the usual armour, their faces covered by leather masks that were a simulacra of the human visage. In front of them stood a man that Duncan might have taken for the pair’s officer, apart from the fact that he wore expensive civilian clothes. A dark tunic with a wolf-like emblem over his right breast, a velvet cloak lined with crimson in its interior to match his bodyguards. The leader’s pale white face was round and dandyish, at odds with the stiff, high collar from which his neck emerged.

  ‘Look now, I have brought your food,’ said the man, staring intently at Yair Horvak. Duncan knew this was a person of account from the careful way that Paetro stepped aside. Paetro always moved cautiously when Helrena’s upper-caste allies were about. The guardsman had a special wary stance, just for them.

  ‘You are too kind,’ coughed the doctor, the strain in his voice matching Paetro’s alertness.

  Lady Cassandra glanced up from her mess of books. ‘Apolleon, this is my time with the doctor.’

  ‘Ah, the acquisition of knowledge,’ said the man, entering while his two bodyguards took up positions by either side of the door. ‘Where would a young mind be without it?’ He ruffled the young noblewoman’s hair as he passed, a little too roughly to be considered fondly. ‘But the emperor is growing eager to know how his proj
ects here are progressing. So I must ask for a little of your tutor’s time.’

  It did not sound like a request to Duncan, and the lack of argument and ease with which Cassandra grumpily began to clear her work away reinforced Duncan’s view of the stranger’s high position. Apolleon halted before Duncan, examining the slave with mock amuse­ment. ‘Pon my honour, this must be the new pair of eyes arrived to watch over our young lady. The sky miner adept at the prevention of mining accidents. Well played.’ He tapped the tunic covering Duncan’s stomach. ‘And a fine tongue to taste what may sit ill with our young lady’s constitution. Will you sample the fare I have brought along for the good doctor, slave?’

  ‘I am sure I would be beaten for tasting another’s meal,’ said Duncan. ‘When my orders are to safeguard Lady Cassandra.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Apolleon. He threw his head back and laughed coldly. ‘And as you can see from the doctor’s gut, he is as far ahead of us in his appreciation of food, as his mind is in the application of his genius. No. No, let’s not deprive the doctor of his supper by sharing it so rudely. And now—’ his hand encompassed the antigravity stones ‘—how fares our endeavour?’