In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I wanted to see if you really were mooning after a fool,’ said Carter.

  ‘And what’s your verdict?’

  ‘Well, I’ve certainly been a fool.’

  ‘That, I find hard to disagree with,’ said Willow.

  ‘It’s not because you thought we were going to die back there?’ asked Carter.

  Carter sounded as though the answer might actually matter to him. Maybe he had changed more even than Willow had realised. ‘No, Carter Carnehan. I believe I know myself well enough to say I’ve been in love with you a little longer than that.’

  Carter looked as though he was about to cry. It seemed to be a good evening for surprises. ‘Are you sure you’re the real Carter? You’re not some peculiar fire goblin who swapped bodies with him down by that volcano?’

  ‘I can’t protect you,’ said Carter. ‘I can’t save you from any of this. I don’t think I can bear knowing that. We’re trapped here until one of us ends up in the fever room, or dragged out broken from under a rock fall, or plummeting into the heavens from a shattered sky mine, or—’

  ‘Or something real in your life for once?’ smiled Willow. ‘Of all the things to be scared of – not the empire or their guns or their whips. Here, or at home, nobody ever knows how long they will have together.’

  ‘For me, it might not be that long,’ said Carter. His eyes were red and wide, as though he was about to confess to a terrible crime. ‘I don’t know about fire goblins on the surface, but I saw some things during the escape attempt. Mad, impossible things – a labyrinth where time moves slower; with a portal of fire, discarded angels’ wings, and water and short-swords that seemed to appear when you will them into being. And ever since I was found on the slopes I’ve slowly been going mad, my head filled with visions and nonsense. Vandia’s past, the nations that have fought and died to seize control of the stratovolcano. It’s like all of the world’s been packed inside my head and is wrestling to get out. All the souls of the millions of slaves who’ve died out here in the sky mines. There are so many bones across the plains, and I’ve been adding to them every day, rolling the corpses of our dead into the sky.’

  ‘Your mask was damaged and your filters exhausted during the escape; that’s all,’ said Willow. ‘There are tunnellers who end up in the fever rooms like that; they’ve breathed in a little too much volcano gas.’

  ‘What happened on the surface was real,’ said Carter. ‘And the sights I see in my visions seem real too when I’m experiencing them, as real as you standing here.’

  Willow kissed him again. ‘Well, I’m probably the mad one to feel like this about you. So there it is… we deserve each other.’ In truth, she never thought she could feel so happy. If she could travel back to the cells of the skels’ slave carrier and tell herself she might one day feel like this, she wouldn’t have believed the words coming from her own lips. The sky mines and the imperium and their internecine struggles, they could go to the devil for all that Willow Landor cared. She had everything she needed right here.

  ‘I don’t deserve you,’ said Carter. ‘But maybe I will, one day.’

  ‘And what day would that be?’

  ‘The day after we escape,’ said Carter.

  ‘How?’ asked Willow, fighting to keep the scepticism from her voice. They passed through the station’s main tunnels. Workers moved about, stowing equipment and heading for the canteen chambers and their barracks. She lowered her voice so that only Carter could hear. ‘You heard what Owen said. Nobody has ever flown out of the dead zone on a transporter, no matter how much extra fuel you load onto it.’

  ‘My plan didn’t just involve a transporter flight,’ said Carter, his old reckless confidence seeming to return. ‘And I was thinking too small, before. I should have taken everybody. Seized the radio-room, smashed the equipment and to hell with any snitches. The empire can’t chase everybody at once!’

  ‘Please tell me that you’re seeing things now,’ said Willow. What rash plans rushed through his mind? Maybe he is slowly going mad?

  ‘I’m seeing the way things can be. All I have to do is get Owen and his knitting circle on our side.’

  She glanced around the corridor, watching the slaves walk past them; every one of the workers potentially the informer who had wrecked the first escape attempt. Maybe. ‘You need to be careful.’

  ‘I’m taking you with me,’ said Carter. ‘That’s why I failed the first time. My plan wasn’t honourable.’

  ‘Honour is a poor shield against an empire’s bullets,’ warned Willow. Someone called out along the passage and she turned as she realised it was her name being shouted. By Thomas Gale, the head of the station. He came down the corridor towards her and Carter, but it was the company of Vandian soldiers behind the old man that caught her attention. Her heart missed a beat. What if they were here to punish Carter again? Maybe some officious imperial bureaucrat had judged the number of strikes taken during the slave’s flogging too lenient and increased them. It was obvious Carter was still wracked with pain and turning feverish at times; he believed the gibberish he had just told her. How could Carter possibly survive a second whipping?

  ‘He’s too weak!’ she cried, practically throwing herself at the station coordinator.

  ‘Who’s too weak?’ asked Gale.

  ‘Carter,’ said Willow.

  Gale seemed to notice the man behind her for the first time and his face creased into a snort. ‘Good, maybe he’ll make a little less trouble for the rest of us in future. But I haven’t come on fever room duties; it’s you I’m looking for.’ The closest soldier stepped forward with a small steel machine and scanned the tattoo on her arm. ‘This is the one!’

  Willow gasped as two of them seized her and started to drag her along the corridor. Carter shouted something and tried to stop them, but one of the men slammed a rifle butt into his gut, felling him. It was all happening too fast.

  Carter tried to get up. ‘What are you doing?’

  The soldier with a rifle forced him back down. ‘Obeying orders, slave. Not questioning them.’

  ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘How would I know?’ snarled the soldier. ‘This station is behind on its quotas. She your sweetmeat, is she? Maybe she’s going to be fed into a smelter to encourage the rest of you to get off your lazy arses and swing the lead.’

  Carter leapt for the soldier, but one of the guard’s friends drew his pistol and cracked its handle across his face. Willow winced at the cruel sound of the impact. He went down to the ground again and looked like he would stay there.

  ‘Leave him alone! He’s done nothing!’ Willow shouted at Gale.

  ‘Everyone’s done something, my dear,’ he smiled apologetically, indicating this was all outside his control. Which, in truth, it probably was.

  Willow struggled, trying to look back towards Carter. No, no, this isn’t happening. Not now. She just managed a glimpse of Carter, collapsed on the bare stone floor of the passage, one of the guards giving him a sound kicking in his ribs for daring to intervene in their business. Then she was dragged up the stairs towards the surface. This wasn’t how it was meant to end! She had waited most of her life for this moment, to be with Carter, and now it was stolen from her. The moment belonged to the imperium; her body and life, the empire’s possessions.

  It was warm inside the castle infirmary, a constant temperature, but Cassandra’s hand felt cold to Duncan. Her eyes fluttered open. ‘You’re still here?’

  ‘I am,’ said Duncan.

  ‘I asked one of the nurses to collect something from my rooms. A gift for you. Reach under the pillow.’

  Duncan did, finding the cold steel of a heavy circular medallion. ‘Is this a campaign medal? Paetro had something similar. In fact, he has quite a few.’

  ‘This was gift to me from my father, before he left the last time. You wear it over your chest. It’s for luck.’

  ‘If I take it, where will your luck come from?’

  ‘My luck sent
you to me,’ Cassandra smiled. ‘So I suppose I don’t need it anymore.’ She drifted back into a shallow sleep. Duncan sensed Cassandra’s mother standing in the infirmary’s doorway before he saw her, a brooding silent presence behind the respirator’s hiss next to the bed.

  ‘How is she?’ asked Princess Helrena.

  ‘Doctor Horvak believes she will be fine.’

  ‘Perhaps you were right, Duncan of Weyland. I should have sold my holdings and fled as far as the money would take us.’

  ‘No. I was wrong. If your enemies can reach inside your castle with all its defences and soldiers, then they would come for you and Cassandra anywhere you ran.’

  ‘Circae might forget, given enough time and fresh distractions. When you live in the heart of the imperium there is always another enemy stalking you, a more immediate threat to deal with.’

  Duncan noticed that the princess’s clothes had brown powder burns. ‘You were in the fight?’

  ‘Five companies of assassins landed in addition to the cadre that attacked you. Three were diversions, two tried to assault my allies at the gathering. We are still sweeping the castle and grounds. Give a murdisto an inch of shadow and they can hide in it for days, as still as a stone. I wouldn’t wish to greet one of them in a week’s time when I am resting in my bath.’

  ‘Find them all and kill them,’ said Duncan, the venom in his voice surprising him even as he spoke the words.

  ‘Apolleon says you fought like a tiger to save my daughter. The doctor tells me he saw you dispatch two assassins with an electrical cable. You were not trained to face murdisto, you were not even armed.’

  ‘It was my duty.’

  ‘I might accept that from Paetro, but not from you.’ She leant in to kiss him. It wasn’t like before. There was none of the passion, but little of the cruelty either. If a kiss could be said to be sad, then this was such a caress. ‘Cassandra is all I have in the world. All I have left of what once mattered most to me. When you saved her from abduction in the sky mines, you were protecting your life and all of your countrymen on the station. But this time you shielded her when you could have run, when you had every excuse to take flight.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure that makes me a fool,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Then perhaps I am, also.’ Helrena passed him a small silver tube.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Your second gift of the day. It contains your papers of freedom. You are now listed on the imperium’s rolls as a citizen. There is a second set inside for your sister, in the sky mines. A ship has already picked her up from the station and is flying her here.’

  ‘Willow!’ Duncan was stunned to silence. He was free, and so was Willow? He could hardly believe this wasn’t a dream. Perhaps he was actually inside the infirmary, wounded and made feverish by the assassins, and this was the result? But it wasn’t imagined. He knew reality, and this felt like the most real thing that had happened to him since the skels turned up to raid the town for slaves. He had his freedom and so did Willow!

  ‘I hope you will stay here with us,’ said Helrena. ‘To help protect Cassandra. We can find a position on the staff for you sister, too. If you really wish, you can wait for a ship to head out in the direction of your homeland. That may take six months and I would not recommend staying in the capital outside of my house’s protection. Circae is quite vindictive. She will certainly hear of your part in the castle’s defence and seek to pay you back for it. She’d order your sister garrotted in front of you just to revel in your pain.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Then you might as well tell me you will stay. It is a curious turn of events. My cousin, whose family owes everything to my house and my rise in the empire – who would be nothing but backwater traders without me – has chosen Circae’s faction. Yet you opt to stand with me. With such insanity, saying you will remain will create some small semblance of balance in the world.’

  He gazed at Cassandra. She seemed so peaceful at sleep. ‘That’s not why I saved her. For my freedom, I mean.’

  ‘I realise that. By rights you should be dead.’ Helrena snorted. ‘Facing murdisto with a loose cable? Send me lucky generals over sensible ones – which emperor was it who said that?’

  ‘Doctor Horvak will know.’

  ‘I am sure he will. He knows almost everything else.’

  ‘You should free the doctor, too.’

  ‘I would gladly send him to have his slave tattoo removed, but he might return to his country. I could allow that, but Apolleon most certainly would not.’

  ‘He’s not… right. Nothing good will come from dealing with that man. Not for you, your house or Cassandra.’

  ‘Be careful you don’t notice too much,’ said Helrena. ‘There are many things you don’t understand about what my house is planning; and you will sleep better and safer for your ignorance. Besides, I don’t have so many allies at court that I can afford to be selective. And the only thing worse than calling the head of the secret police your partner is calling him your enemy.’

  ‘He’s evil. Can’t you sense it?’

  ‘Let us say that he does bad things for a good cause. Better he is that way, than the reverse.’ She brushed Cassandra’s hair out of her eyes and stood up to go. ‘Let me know your intention after your sister arrives and you have talked matters over with her. For my daughter’s sake, I hope you will find that Duncan of Vandia has a better ring to it than your barbarian backwater.’

  ‘And for your sake?’

  ‘There are things I cannot say or promise anyone,’ said Helrena. ‘That is how matters are and how they must be, whether you are a slave or a citizen. You are younger than I, but you are an adult. You understand this.’

  ‘And if I was a prince of the imperium?’

  ‘Then one of us would probably end up getting killed,’ Helrena sighed. ‘That is the way matters usually end.’ She shut the door to the medical bay, leaving Duncan alone with his thoughts. He had a world more to think about than when she’d come in.

  Jacob and the other expedition members halted, their gad hosts indicating they had reached the place that they had been travelling towards; a thick stand of trees on the prairie the only landmark aside from the ubiquitous tall dry grass. Jacob wasn’t sure what to expect. The great diviner Narlrem had told him the travellers were to be rewarded for their help in ushering in the gads’ long prophesied new age. Jacob had hoped that meant Hangel’s new rulers had paid for air passage south on a merchant carrier. But this was too far away from the plateau’s airfields for anything but a forced landing in the grass. Now Jacob suspected this was merely another ceremony where they would be honoured with crowns of dried flowers and fine words. He should have guessed from the number of shamans and tribal chiefs accompanying their parade out of the city gates and into the wilds. He tried not to let his disappointment show. He was itching to be in the air again, closing the distance between him and Carter.

  ‘This way,’ said Zanasi. He led the four travellers towards the trees. ‘If you leave here,’ said Zanasi, talking directly to Jacob. ‘What will you do?’

  Jacob didn’t like the way the war leader had intoned if. ‘You know what I’ll do. Find my son.’ You’ll do whatever it takes, said the voice within him. Kill anyone and everyone who gets in your way. He reached inside his duster. The pistols were both there; and the travel pack’s weight on his back, too. Maybe the expedition would be better off heading away right now, and let the gads sing to the sky.

  ‘And what if you find more than that?’

  ‘My son. The rest of my people taken in the raid if I can. That’s all that matters to me.’ You’re a liar. You’re going to kill them all. Everyone who played a part in Mary’s death.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Zanasi.

  ‘We’re all still friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘In this life, twice-born.’

  ‘That’s good, because any other way at least one of us would have cause to regret it.’

&nbs
p; As they got closer, Jacob saw the glade had grown up around another of the stone circles, dark stones brooding under the leafy canopy’s shade. Jacob felt the same sense of foreboding he had back in Weyland when coming across these ancient structures. Vines circled the trees, surrounding them as thick as coiled rope, but none dared touch any of these menhirs laid long before the memories of man. The stones stood untouched, remote and alien, beyond the reach of entropy.

  ‘This is another one your ceremonies?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘It is,’ said Zanasi. ‘Although none of our diviners have practised this ritual in living memory.’

  ‘Prophecies are not rendered tangible every week,’ said Khow. He examined his abacus box, tapping the screen. ‘Most unexpected. It has stopped working.’

  Jacob pointed at the cover of the tree. ‘No sun.’

  ‘I do not understand how its battery can be drained of charge?’ The gask shook his metal device, annoyed.

  Natives entered the space and sat down, surrounding the standing stones, forming a larger ring around the glade’s fringes.

  ‘This ancient place is a map of woe,’ protested Sariel. ‘Why have we come here, noble gads?’

  The great diviner Narlrem appeared in the clearing, his people clearing a path for the recently crowned ruler of the land. ‘We promised we would help you, Jok. And for the gads, nothing weighs heavier than a promise given. Ignore your fear. Embrace the stones.’

  ‘I remember these circles,’ said Sariel, reluctantly laying his hands on the nearest stone’s runes. ‘Such rocks sing to me, sometimes. I do not care for them or their idle chatter.’

  ‘It is a song you helped to create, Jok,’ said Narlrem. ‘But your mind is so occupied and broken that the part of you that remembers their rhythm lie buried deep.’

  ‘Do not speak of them! They are very dangerous. They call foul things.’

  Sheplar leaned in to Jacob, whispering so that only the pastor could hear. ‘Well, they certainly called us here.’

  ‘Dangerous they may be,’ said the new ruler of Hangel. Narlrem appeared uncharacteristically grim, his eyes wide and sad. ‘But we are to help you remember the many paths and the infinite maze.’