In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘A bombard?’ wondered Sariel. ‘No! That thing is no mortar?’

  Jacob knew exactly what the device was. After all, he had drawn a sketch of it in the dirt for Zanasi. And the war leader’s followers had managed to find a few rotting among the ruins of crashed carriers. ‘A plane-to-plane signalling lamp,’ said Jacob. ‘What aircrews call a Morse-maid. You can use one to transmit more complicated messages towards the horizon than firing smoke arrows.’

  ‘A fire arrow calling for retreat would suffice,’ complained Sariel.

  Having set the tripod up, the gads rotated it, and then worked the shutters mounted in front of the lamp. A distant flash of light from oil-fired mirrors answered their signal, far out in the savannah. Jacob and his allies only had seconds left. Officers riding tanks down on the village would realise that this was something new to the tribes. And they would wonder what the signals meant. Jacob didn’t want to puncture their overconfidence until…

  A line of fire erupted along the length of the advancing tank line, explosion after explosion sending the massive vehicles careening off course, the air filled with steel fragments and smoking tank tracks. Sariel glanced wildly around him, trying to locate the artillery that had launched such an impossibly coordinated bombardment. But Jacob knew the bard wouldn’t find what he was looking for. Such accuracy was beyond cannons, even if the natives had come into possession of a battery of big guns. The entire armoured column stalled, and where vehicles were still moving, gads rose from the grass, sprinting towards the tanks with iron spheres, fuses burning, leaping up ladders and hurling grenades into the ramparts and tossing them through open hatches. Explosions and screams echoed inside the grand duke’s galleons of the land. Companies of warriors rose up in front of the checked vehicles. These gads carried spear-bows, but the tribes’ traditional weapon remained strapped to their backs for close quarters’ combat. Instead they clutched modern rifles, steel barrels bucking as they emptied their magazines towards the invaders from Hangel. The brutes had never faced fighters as well-armed as themselves. Startled infantry companies crumpled, turned and ran as a wave of warriors charged the halted invasion force. Unfortunately for the invaders, they were now fleeing into a wall of warriors advancing from behind, more gads armed with rifles. The same fighters who had come crawling out of the grass behind the artillery crews to slit their throats. Every tribe that had arrived to marvel at their reluctant saviour, Jok, was there. Every clan tired of being hunted and chased from their own lands as though they were little better than rodents scavenging from a grain bin.

  ‘Mines, grenades and rifles!’ said Sariel, shocked by the scale of the sudden turnabout.

  ‘The tribes put the signal lamps to use before the battle,’ said Jacob. ‘They made our old friends on board the Night’s Pride a better offer for their cargo.’

  Sariel glanced up at the sky, as if he might still see the propellers of the great merchant carrier turning in the heavens. ‘What have you promised the gun runners?’

  ‘Nothing our people will miss,’ said Zanasi. He raised his spear-bow at the broken, burning wrecks littering the savannah: a small fortune in metal salvage for the brokers that feasted on the ruins of battle. ‘Not once the House of Bragin has fallen.’

  ‘Is this victory what you saw in your vision?’ asked Sariel.

  ‘No,’ said Jacob. I saw the death of my son. Jacob stalked towards the burning tanks.

  Sariel called after him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Got to make a start.’ By making an end of Justus Alock.

  Sariel attempted to catch up with him. ‘You do not defeat your enemy by becoming him.’

  ‘It’s a little late for that,’ said Jacob, stepping over a gad’s corpse. Of all of the bard’s stories, that was the greatest lie of them all. It’s exactly how you win a battle. How could Jacob ever have forgotten? ‘We need to do this. We have to. For my son.’

  It wasn’t only the beggarly bard who lied to himself. Jacob started to sprint, joining waves of howling tribesmen. Identifying Hangel’s command vehicle wasn’t difficult. Twice the size of the others and with enough flags and pennants tied to the top to do a market fete proud. Tank-men hung limply out of its hatches, entrances spouting smoke, corpses being checked by warriors who carefully stripped the dead of pistols, blades, ammunition and personal possessions. What was the value of such trinkets among the tribes? Everyone who had taken part in the battle would be going home to their villages rich. Zanasi and two of his bodyguards followed hard on Jacob’s heels, and for much, he suspected, the same reason as the pastor. Jacob climbed up a ladder in the command tank’s armoured side. The metal was hot. Flames burnt below, crackling in the dry grass where mines had detonated and destroyed the vehicle’s tracks. Victorious gads danced on top of the tank, bounding excitedly around the ramparts and hanging off the turret cannons as though the guns were part of a playground.

  On the floor of the rampart a soldier lay against the metal, his body twitching as he bled out. Not quite dead. His body had absorbed the best part of a grenade used to clear the top of the tank. The man tried to raise a hand towards Jacob. ‘Am I — going to die?’

  ‘I reckon you are.’

  ‘Help me!’

  Jacob stepped over the expiring man. ‘You’re way beyond it. Just look at the sky, don’t think about the pain. Look at how the sky’s clear and blue.’

  Zanasi followed after him, stepping over the dying soldier with his bodyguards. The war leader exchanged words with one of the gads who had taken the tank before returning to Jacob. ‘Inside.’

  A hatch was thrown open and Jacob climbed down into the interior, following the war leader and his people. A passage lined with rifle slits, more dead soldiers and then, in one of the compartments off the walkway, a room as richly appointed as a boudoir. Tapestries hung on the metal walls, a table filled with crystal decanters and drinks. A couple of gads stood sentry outside, keeping its single occupant quiet. They hadn’t needed to work very hard. There wasn’t much fight left in the man – not now his regiments had fled and fallen.

  ‘My son,’ mewled the grand duke, seeing Zanasi. ‘Dear Chike. My long-lost flesh and blood, tell me this is a dream. The diviners told me they saw the tribes breaking and running, your village burning. This can’t be my end, it was never foretold.’

  ‘Our village has been burnt to the ground,’ said Zanasi. ‘Your artillery’s incendiary shells proved more than effective. And many of our spears did break and run. As they were instructed to, to entice your forces onto our minefield.’

  ‘And you, you’re alive?’ said the grand duke, noticing Jacob for the first time. ‘You’re meant to be dead; your body obliterated in an explosion!’

  ‘I guess even a soothsayer can make a mistake,’ said Jacob, ‘or tell a fool a lie.’

  ‘We can rule together,’ whimpered the grand duke, extending a hand towards his son. ‘You by my side. You have proven yourself worthy of my name.’

  ‘Your name is worth the handful of ashes you can scoop from my village. Hangel has fallen,’ said Zanasi. ‘The gad servants you left alive forced the city gates early this morning, before dawn. Your secret police and the dregs of the army defending the plateau proved inad­equate when faced with slaves carrying the same weapons as Hangels. The great diviner Narlrem now sits on your throne. He will make a far wiser king than any who carry our cursed blood in our veins. Our peoples shall live together in peace, as we did in ages past; the gads of the plains and the Hangels of the plateau.’

  ‘No!’ The grand duke was clutching the cushions spread across the floor, his body twisting and turning in agony.

  One of the warriors by Zanasi’s side grunted and raised his spear-bow, but Zanasi rested the flat of his palm on the weapon and pushed it aside.

  Grand Duke Bragin stared up incredulously at the war leader. ‘Mercy? You mean to show me mercy after all I have done to you?’

  ‘Your regime is finished. Your laws discarded. You shall live in t
he slums where your slaves were quartered. Your sceptre will be replaced with a hoe. Your crown will be exchanged for a ploughman’s straw hat, and you shall live among the ashes of all that you have lost for the rest of your years. That will be my mercy, Father.’

  ‘You dirty half-breed!’ Grand Duke Bragin’s hand came up from below the cushion, a tiny sleeve pistol no bigger than a fire-lighter clutched in his fingers. The gun barked and its single shot struck Zanasi, sending him tumbling backwards into the compartment’s tapestry-lined wall. Both Jacob’s pistols were out, five shots walked across the grand duke’s chest before the pastor was even aware of the guns’ cold jolting weight in his hands. Hangel’s ruler shuddered for a second, and then the small pistol pitched out of his hand. He lay motionless, the floor of cushions absorbing his pooling blood. Jacob pulled the seal of the Guild of Librarians from his chest and tossed it contemptuously onto the body. ‘Pass that to Iaroia when you see her.’

  ‘His life was not in your hands,’ groaned Zanasi, trying to pick himself up.

  Old instincts. It had not even been a conscious decision. Jacob examined the war leader alongside his men. Zanasi had taken the grand duke’s bullet in the lower shoulder. They began staunching the blood with a tourniquet and Jacob reckoned the gad would live if his wound didn’t become infected. ‘You have my apologies. That’s the thing about wars… once they’ve begun; the solution for everything starts to look like a bullet.’ Jacob looked over at the two bodyguards. ‘Take the ball out with a spearhead heated with flame; seal his wound with a clean blade made even hotter.’

  The two warriors lifted Zanasi up as Jacob opened the door to explore deeper into the command tank’s interior. ‘Let my spear search inside, Jacob of Weyland. You may yet keep your soul.’

  Jacob shook his head as he stepped out of the compartment. ‘Lost most of that the first time I died.’

  ‘Ogan the twice-born,’ moaned Zanasi, as though he incanted a prayer, or recognised the presence of a dark deity.

  And you can’t murder a dead man, an old voice echoed inside his mind. But was that for Jacob, or the killer he was hunting down?

  He found what he was looking for in the tank’s main map room, the smell of cordite overwhelming in the confined space, bodies from both nations lying across each other, united in death. Major Justus Alock was one of them – but he’d not quite met his end yet. Two natives had fallen across his legs. Alock hadn’t needed their weight to trap him – the spear-bow bolt pinning his chest to the wall had proved adequate to that task. Tough bastard, though. Still clinging stubbornly to life. He might even live if he was dragged to a surgeon’s station. Jacob let his hand drop where it had been hovering above his gun belt. The major’s pistol lay out of reach where he had cast it, empty of shells, towards the gad who had left his spear-bow bolt embedded in the Weylander’s chest as a dying gift.

  ‘I didn’t believe in the shamans’ powers,’ coughed Alock. ‘Damn them for witch-doctors. But you, you knew exactly what we were going to do.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve seen you do it before,’ said Jacob. ‘Wasn’t magic. Out in the Burn. Six hundred heavy cavalry, a perfect trident formation, coming down on us like thunder. You were leading them against the free companies hired by that fat idiot King Merara.’

  ‘You’re lying! You’ve never travelled further than the pew of your church.’

  ‘I didn’t recognise you at home, either, when we met in the palace gardens. We both had working names back in the day, Bad Justus. Just two dots at opposite ends of the battlefield, hidden in the smoke and the horror. Wading through corpses and making more for the warlords. No, I can’t say we ever met face to face.’

  ‘You’re only a pastor!’ protested Alock, moaning as he leant weakly on the spear shaft. ‘A hick local. You’re a churchman. Show me a little of God’s mercy.’

  Mary’s voice sounded in his mind. Mercy always bears richer fruits than justice. But then, she had never been pursued by Bad Justus. ‘Do you believe we can change, Major? Men like you and me?’

  Alock looked up at Jacob, the only answer the barely veiled hatred in his face, cold and hard. That was one emotion he could feel just fine, even dying.

  ‘No. I didn’t think so either.’

  ‘You’re no better than me,’ spat Alock, blood pooling from the corner of his mouth. ‘You’re no holier than a stealer.’

  ‘There’s one real crucial difference,’ explained Jacob, easing one of his guns out from his belt. ‘Your pile of corpses isn’t going to get any higher.’

  The single shot from his pistol echoed loudly around the tank’s interior. Then he slowly holstered the pistol and shut the door on the tank’s map room. For Jake Silver, for Quicksilver, by the time that man had finished with the people who’d murdered his wife and destroyed his home, he’d need wings to fly higher than the mound of bodies left behind.

  Jacob climbed down to the prairie grass. Sariel had caught up with him, waiting in the grass, staring in revulsion at bodies scattered around the destroyed tank. Dead gads, blown apart and shot to pieces. Infantrymen from Hangel pincushioned by spear-bow bolts and filled with bullet holes from Weyland-bought rifles. There wasn’t much to distinguish between them once they were gone. Just meat for the hyenas. And damned if any beast would taste the difference and complain.

  ‘Nothing except a battle lost is half as melancholy as a battle won.’ Sariel rubbed at his eyes as though he could blot out the sight of carnage. ‘My mind is burning. I’m not sure who I am, anymore. And I’m not certain who you are, Your Grace, if a churchman you ever were.’

  So who the hell am I? ‘I’m back.’

  ‘Sweet mercy, I wish I were.’ Sariel fell to his knees and threw up over the ruined caterpillar track lying broken across the ground, his stomach heaving in the uncaring heat.

  Carter couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol barrel in Anna Kurtain’s hand. He heard the old female overseer’s exhortation to gun down Carter and his two friends and toss their corpses off the station.

  ‘Don’t kill Willow,’ pleaded Carter. ‘You want to shoot me, go ahead – but Willow isn’t going to betray you. Kerge won’t snitch either… his people are so strange, no worker would listen if he did.’

  Carter felt Willow squeeze his hand. ‘Don’t you make promises for me, Carter Carnehan, not to these filthy traitors.’

  ‘Nor on my behalf,’ said Kerge. ‘If I can talk plainly enough for you to comprehend me, manling.’

  ‘It’s ironic isn’t it?’ said Anna. She turned the pistol towards Carter’s head. ‘You arrived here having promised my brother you’d take care of me, and here I am going to take care of you. Nothing personal in this, Northhaven.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ barked Owen. He pointed towards Willow. ‘Why did you call us traitors?’

  ‘What else should I call you?’ said Willow. ‘Selling out your own people to the Vandians for extra rations and light duties.’

  ‘Or maybe you’re the Vandian infiltrators people in the barracks whisper about,’ spat Carter. ‘That wouldn’t make it treachery – you’re just doing your bit to make your foul, fat emperor even richer.’

  ‘We’re not traitors!’ said Owen.

  Carter raised his fist at the man. ‘Maybe you’re a knitting circle after all, then? Crawling into the dark to swap tunic patterns? I’ve been following you for weeks; seeing who you meet and how you operate. You overheard me talking about the escape. You made sure a tracking beacon was hidden on my transporter. And when we ran for freedom, your masters in the slave patrol were waiting to gun us down in cold blood. Good Weyland blood shed, so you and your friends survive while the rest of us waste away. I’ve buried our people, one body at a time. So it really doesn’t matter to me if you were born in the imperium or born back home.’

  Anna’s pistol trembled in her hand. ‘You said you knew who Owen is. What’s going on here?’

  ‘Damn fools,’ swore Owen. ‘They’re not here to claim the reward. You really don�
�t know what’s going on here, do you?’

  ‘You always did like the sound of your own voice,’ said Carter. By his side, Willow appeared equally puzzled. ‘But damned if I know what you’re talking about. What reward?’

  ‘The reward on bushy tail’s head here, if someone snitches on him to the Vandians,’ said Anna. ‘Hands him over to the imperium.’

  The other conspirators shifted uneasily, even the sorting line’s overseer, Kassina Hedgepeth. She spoke up. ‘Every few years we have to get rid of someone who works out the truth and decides that there’s a deal to be done if they head to the radio room and blab to the imperials.’ Kassina pointed to one of the men holding a club. ‘That’s why Burnet is in the circle. He works in the radio centre. Sending out supply requests and monitoring what the snitches are broadcasting back to the empire.’

  ‘I frequently find myself confused by your nation’s irrational beliefs and unpredictability,’ said Kerge. ‘But in this matter, you have truly surpassed my understanding.’

  ‘I’m with him,’ said Carter. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’

  ‘Maybe we should kill them anyway,’ said Burnet. ‘How do we know they won’t talk?’

  ‘The same could have been said of you, once,’ said Owen. ‘We have fallen far, but not so far as to take innocent lives.’ He stared at Duncan, Willow and Kerge and sighed deeply. ‘Sit down. We will talk of why we are here. You and I, and all of the slaves from Weyland working and dying in the sky mines.’ Carter did as the man ordered, Willow following hesitantly along with the gask. He noticed that Anna still kept her ancient pistol to hand, though.

  ‘Years ago, when I was a child, agents of the imperium arrived in Weyland,’ said Owen. ‘They had a deal to offer our king: large amounts of metal and other resources in return for the one thing our country had in abundance… human flesh. Slaves. The pact had to be secret to prevent the king from being strung up by mobs of his understandably disappointed subjects. Weyland was to be treated like a chicken coop, the empire’s licensed raiders dipping their scaly hands in for fresh meat whenever the imperium needed labour. The pact would last for twenty years. Slave raids would be unopposed by the military and news of the attacks kept as quiet as possible. Then the slavers would move on to another nation that had been bribed to offer human sacrifices in return for a tiny sliver of the imperium’s vast wealth. Weyland would be left rich… if slightly poorer in population.’