In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘To glide on the wind without a flying wing,’ said Sheplar, as though in a dream.

  ‘I walk now,’ said Sariel, sadly, as they funnelled through the dungeon’s unlocked doorway. ‘I walk everywhere. It’s all I have left.’

  ‘But you walk with flesh that is anathema to local predators,’ said Khow, trying to stay with them in the press of gads that packed the chamber. ‘That is an adaptation as advantageous as my spines and toxin.’

  ‘I’ll take the uncommonly fast healing,’ said Jacob, not quite believing the storyteller’s explanation for what had transpired. All around them, the dungeon filled fuller with excited locals. ‘They have a saying in the army: that it takes a man’s weight in lead to stop him during a full charge with bayonets. It’s a lie, of course. But in your case…’

  ‘The prince of players is not to meet his end at the fangs of a handful of scabrous sabre cats,’ said Sariel, some of his old colour returning. ‘Nor at the whim of the much-diminished House of Bragin. Standards have fallen here, yes they have. Such foul inhospitality, I have rarely sampled the like.’

  Zanasi appeared from the crowd of prisoners, the half-breed scout shrinking back in the presence of the vagrant, Sariel recast by his people’s superstitions into a terrible figure of legend. The rest of the prisoners were not quite so bold. They held well back, nervously singing and keening. ‘You will sample it again soon, if you tarry here. The diviners the grand duke captured are held in cages, blinded with their arms and legs hacked away. Their wounds are sealed with tar and most of them have gone mad from the pain. But even a deranged diviner will eventually come to the conclusion that the best way of getting rid of Jok is to burn him at the stake and scatter his ashes before the Land Mother.’

  ‘I told you before, noble gad, I carry the title of King of All Stories. I am not Jok, although I believe I did have to impersonate him once to escape being torn apart by horses when I was a guest of the war leader of the northern tribes.’

  Zanasi merely shook his head, looking as unconvinced as Jacob, although for different reasons. ‘It is said that Jok always denies his name, in fear that the Land Mother might find him again. Your appearance augurs the fall of the grand duke and the dawn of a great new age.’

  ‘I haven’t seen many great ages, except in the memories of old men,’ said Jacob.

  ‘And I doubt if this old scoundrel is to usher one in,’ said Sheplar. ‘Truly, did you fly on your own wings? This is not just another of your ridiculous tales?’

  Sariel waved his white beard as if it might lift him high. ‘We do not fly, Rodalian. We soar.’

  ‘I have heard stories of such twisted people,’ said Sheplar. ‘But their kind has never passed as travellers through our canyons. Not in caravans or with the aerial traders.’

  Sariel rubbed his forehead roughly. ‘So many stories filling my head, I have forgotten what it is to ascend free. Trapped by dirt and gravity. Maimed by the skels. Is it any wonder my only comfort is my next stride, always another one to be taken?’

  It was a strange turn of events. Sariel rendered maudlin by the memories of what he had lost. Their fellow prisoners had formed a circle of veneration around the bard. If you were going to imagine a saviour heralding in a new destiny for your people, a beggarly old rascal who bathed little and boasted much wouldn’t have been Jacob’s first choice. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the fact that they were still prisoners, awaiting a fate highly likely to be fatal if Major Alock had anything to do with its outcome. Jacob brooded for half an hour before the dungeon’s thick door creaked open and a team of slaves entered with a fresh barrel of water, shepherded in by a semicircle of soldiers.

  ‘So, the grand duke wishes to keep us alive for now,’ observed Khow.

  None of the prisoners seemed particularly concerned by the water this time, and the soldiers fanned out, pointing their rifles in the mob’s direction. Behind them, the slaves broke open the barrel, and un­noticed by the guards, began dipping their arms in towards the bottom of the tub. Jacob felt Zanasi’s hand hard on his sleeve. He was being warned to pass no comment. It only took seconds… then a sudden flourishing of sharpened blades from the barrel, the slaves sealing the guards’ mouths with their palms at the same moment they plunged knifes into the startled soldiers’ spines. Soundlessly and almost gently, the guards were lowered to the stone floor while the prisoners kept up their racket, as unsurprised by the turn of events as if slaughtering soldiers were a regular feature of the dungeon’s routine.

  Zanasi was fast by the water bearers’ side, Jacob and the others rushing behind him. ‘So, we are to sacrifice our eyes inside the palace?’

  The slave he addressed finished wiping the blood off his blade on a guard’s uniform. ‘More than that, Zanasi. I have tripled the potency of the diviners’ drugs. They will be raving for hours, and by the time they have finished, they will be dead.’

  ‘Better to die free than live as they do.’ Zanasi clasped the slave’s arm. ‘Come with me.’

  The slave shook his head and indicated the knife-wielding gads. ‘We will stay here, and sing the songs with our brothers and sisters. When more guards come, they can join these on the floor. You must use your time well, every hour will be precious. When the Hangels follow, it will be with everything.’ He gazed over wide-eyed at Sariel. ‘I never thought I would live to see the day. The Age of the Seventh Sun!’

  For once, Sariel wisely held his peace.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of the palace beyond these cells,’ said Jacob. ‘But I’m presuming it’s well fortified and as tight as a drum.’

  ‘Very,’ said Zanasi. He walked to the doorway where one of the slaves kept watch, checking the passageway outside remained empty. ‘The word impregnable might have been invented for this citadel. Fortunately, we have long turned the paranoia of the grand duke’s descendants against the present regime.’ He didn’t elaborate, but quickly stepped outside the dungeon, indicating that Jacob and the expedition members should follow silently. Jacob glanced back towards the loud crowd of prisoners. None of the gads strung along. The guards’ bodies were dragged out of sight, their blood cleaned off the cobblestones. Once more, Jacob couldn’t help but be impressed by the discipline and purpose of this proud people. They were all sacrificing their lives, not a single argument or fistfight over who should stay and who should go. He could imagine exactly how badly matters would have run if a hundred or more Weylanders had been imprisoned down here alongside them. They crept away, following an exposed channel in the floor which carried away the prisoners’ urine and night soil. It led down a dead-end of a passage, a small rusted iron drain for the waste to trickle into. Zanasi knelt down. He reached into the drain and thrust his hand in deep, searching for something. Jacob reckoned it wasn’t a turd. Then Zanasi located what he was probing for. A click and a section of the stone wall swung back on a concealed metal cantilever. The stairs of a tunnel were just visible dropping away. Light so dim it was hardly perceptible, falling from a series of intermittent shafts little larger than a box of matches. Zanasi led the way, beckoning them inside. Once they had all climbed inside the narrow passage, he turned the counterweight’s handle and sealed them into near darkness. The smell inside was rank; it seemed they’d be sharing their travels with the dungeon’s sewer channel.

  ‘Follow me,’ instructed the gad. ‘As fast as you can, while bearing in mind we will be descending for the best part of an hour.’

  ‘In this vile darkness?’ asked Sheplar.

  ‘Consider yourself lucky you are leaving the plateau, rather than climbing up it.’

  Jacob began the long climb down the steep winding stairs. ‘Someone was expecting to be imprisoned in their own dungeon at some point.’

  Zanasi ran a finger along the passage’s rough-hewn stone. ‘The corpses of the builders who dug this secret passage were dumped in the lower city’s rubbish tip centuries ago. One of them wasn’t quite as murdered as the guards that had shot him believed. My people have
been using the passage to smuggle messages in and out of the palace from long before I was born.’

  ‘The grand duke doesn’t know about it?’

  Zanasi shook his head. ‘The House of Bragin’s family members are almost as proficient at murdering each other in their feuding for the throne as they are skilled at slaughtering gads. The ruler who commissioned this passage was poisoned a year later by his cousin. His cousin was smothered in his sleep by his sister, and so on and so forth, down the years. I suspect the current grand duke will uncover it now, though. He will search very hard to explain our curious disappearance.’ Zanasi gazed back at Sariel, the bard gently grumbling as he wound his way down the tight steps. ‘Another sacrifice. Will it be worth it?’

  ‘It is to me,’ said Jacob. It is to my son. ‘But I reckon your friends back there would have turned up in the dungeon with a barrel full of daggers without us.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You’re not just a scout. I saw the way you looked at the grand duke in the arena, Chike Bragin.’

  ‘You are sharp-witted, Jacob of Northhaven. I do not use my father’s name… it is washed with too much blood and dishonour. Among the gads, I am simply Chike Zanasi. Only the grand duke issues wanted posters with the name of Chike Bragin still printed on them.’

  ‘I remember how pissed my son was when I forced him to a trade he didn’t have the heart for. I know how a disappointed son looks at a father.’

  ‘You are the leader of gad rebellion!’ exclaimed Sheplar, stumbling behind the two of them. ‘You have great heart, to venture so close to your enemies.’

  ‘Among our people, a leader who will not share his people’s risks will not remain leader for long,’ said Zanasi. ‘And it is not a rebellion I lead. The grand duke does not rule us. The lands outside the city have belonged to the Gaddish since the rising of the first sun. It is not for Pavlorda Bragin to divide every league that may hold a head of wheat and parcel it among his favourites. It is not for the nation of Hangel to erect fences and shoot every creature that dares to cross the arbitrary lines they draw upon their maps.’

  ‘From what you say, I’m wondering if the grand duke might be distantly related to a man called Benner Landor,’ said Jacob.

  ‘When we exit the tunnel we will be inside the lower city,’ said Zanasi. ‘I shall pretend to be your guide. Many travellers hire one while they layover during refuelling.’

  ‘Unless you’ve got a secret passage under the wall, too, I’ll thank you to “guide” us through the same guardhouse we entered by.’

  ‘We will not need to scale the ramparts. As far as the Hangels are concerned, we are still held within their inescapable royal dungeons. And the soldiers that man the wall are dull-witted hyenas, only concerned with shaking coins out of gads passing through. But why should you care?’

  ‘I left a couple of friends in the wall’s guardhouse,’ said Jacob, touching the empty belt around his waist. ‘And I’d be right glad to have them introduced to our mutual acquaintance, Major Alock.’

  ‘The officer will follow you? Pursue you, even into the savannah?’

  ‘I’m counting on it,’ said Jacob.

  Zanasi sighed. ‘Then our fates are bound. For the grand duke will need to take back Jok, to prove to his people that our prophecy lacks the power to end his rule. Every soldier he commands will be thrown into the fray. And he will do it within the week. All the tribes will unite as soon they hear of Jok’s reappearance. The Hangels will want to crush us before we can train and prepare.’

  ‘Such adulation,’ said Sariel. ‘But why should I be surprised? I have long known the power of a well-told story.’

  Yet to Jacob’s eyes, the bard appeared to squirm in discomfort at the thought of being the centre of one he could not so easily weave to his will.

  ‘You are real, Jok. For all who have eyes to see,’ said Zanasi.

  ‘As is that treacherous bastard Alock,’ said Jacob.

  ‘We are not in the business of revenge, manling,’ Khow warned Jacob. ‘Think of your son, as I must think of mine.’

  ‘I’m not a vindictive fellow,’ said Sariel from the rear of the party, ‘but any hellhated stealer who thinks the prince of players is fit only to be served as a fine feast for a pride of sabre cats needs to be firmly disabused of such notions.’

  ‘For once,’ said Sheplar, ‘I am in agreement with the smelly one.’

  It wasn’t revenge if you didn’t seek it out. Isn’t that how it worked, when the time came for a man’s soul to be weighed? And one truth Jacob knew. Major Alock would track them into hell itself, and wouldn’t rest until every member of the expedition was silenced for good. He would never stop. Alock was the king’s hand, and the king needed his part in Vandia’s slaving raids to stay secret. The expedition wouldn’t be able to travel in safety until Alock and his troopers were put in the dirt.

  Khow moaned in disappointment at his companions’ barely suppressed violence. ‘How can you be so certain the major will not abandon his pursuit and return to Weyland?’

  Jacob didn’t respond. A voice hissed the answer in his mind. Because there’s only the thickness of a blade of grass between what he is and what you were.

  Duncan allowed himself to feel a frisson of apprehension; in the air in the helo with the young Lady Cassandra and Paetro, passing through the mountain-sized concrete dwellings of the capital. This time they were on their way to the imperial city’s heart, the Diamond Palace. Cassandra Skar had been ordered to attend her mother at an import­ant feast day in honour of the emperor. The family rarely travelled together, Duncan had learnt from Paetro, to avoid presenting too tempting a target to the house’s enemies. This way, someone would always survive to lead the house in its revenge; which in itself was enough to give most of their adversaries pause for thought. They dipped and flew through a particularly foggy day; the city’s towers cloaked with white haze, broken by illumination from screens showing highlights of the previous day’s gladiatorial combats. The crowd’s roar filtered eerily though the gloom, distorted by stone and concrete canyons. Warning lights flickered on bridges carrying monorails, aerial walkways and electric carriage-filled roads twinkling through the mist. The air smelt of the sea that surrounded the capital; Duncan could lick the sheen off his lips and taste the salt. Once he might have felt homesick for the Lancean Ocean’s similar spray, a day’s travel by river­boat from his mansion. But those memories faded. This was real… this great mass of people at the heart of the imperium. It felt like the giddy core of human existence. Operating at a scale and sophistication that made Northhaven – or any city in Weyland – seem like a collection of mud huts inhabited by nomadic savages by comparison. Lady Cassandra rode the helo robed in a high-necked white fur dress that made her look like a snow queen from one of Duncan’s childhood books. Below it, he noted, she still wore a belt with pistol and short-sword, despite Paetro being similarly armed. Always ready for a fight, even on a trip to visit the emperor’s home.

  Duncan could tell they neared the palace when the screens’ din dwindled away. A high-class neighbourhood. Propaganda and the constant distraction of violent entertainments were reserved for the teeming masses. Those in the higher castes needed little urging to cling to their power and position. The towering sides of the city fell away, a circle of parkland divided by walls tall enough to pierce the fog, battlements mounted by searchlights playing through the air. Duncan had to lean out of the side of the helo to get a look at the approaching structure. A great blue crystal needle rising ten thousand feet high, a sundial for the world’s centre. It split into spires knifing the sky, its top lost to the clouds above. Around this building – surely the Diamond Palace – rose three structures half the height. Each building made of multiple steel towers, their tops combined to form a steel ring-shaped runway that could be rotated to align against the winds. The surface of the rotary elevated airport was dotted with warships landing and taking off. The vessels looked like silver needles from this distance, b
ut when one passed overhead, he could see they were similar in size to the monster that had transported the Northhaven slaves to the sky mines. After the warships had landed, platforms retracted into bays below the airport’s surface, concealing the craft. With the amount of firepower that could be launched from this airfield alone, the emperor was taking no chances with his security here. It seemed inconceivable any other nation of the world could mount a threat to Vandia’s ruler, but then, perhaps it was intended as a show of force for any of the emperor’s relatives who might be tempted to raise themselves through the ranks of imperial precedence by more direct means. Their helo banked past the steel towers holding up one of the ring-shaped runways, gun emplacements in the tower tracking their progress. Any threat the helo posed to the palace seemed mostly notional to Duncan. Even if they had been loaded with explosives and flew straight into the spire’s side, they would only leave the slightest of black scratches along its glass surface, like an insect slapping into a helo’s canopy. The fog carpeting the parkland swallowed them as they sank lower. Their three wheels bounced down on the tarmac of a landing field filled with hundreds of stationary helos. They left their pilot, Hesia, with the craft. She sat in the cockpit playing with a jab-stick, a common street weapon in the capital’s streets. A blunt knife-sized rod that could deliver a paralysing burst of electricity into a quarry. Duncan, Cassandra and Paetro entered the base of the Diamond Palace through the closest entrance, an atrium filled with a wall of lifts at the far end of a marble-floored hall. Before they were allowed to go further, the three of them had to submit to identity tests – even Lady Cassandra. A needle nicked their arms, drawing blood; the results shown on a screen visible only to a group of soldiers manning the turnstile outside the lifts. It took a minute, but they were allowed through. Duncan found it vaguely amusing that he was on file somewhere with the imperial security apparatus and judged fit as a mere house slave to accompany the young princess. If he had turned up here as Duncan Landor, son of one of Weyland’s wealthiest landowners, he would have been shown the interior of a cell. As part of Cassandra’s retinue, he was allowed to enter even the heart of the imperium. That lesson wasn’t lost on him. A crimson-uniformed retainer in the lift took the three of them to a ballroom.