by Scott McKay
The antics and tragedy of the Latham family were a national obsession for weeks, and H.V., at the tender age of sixteen, was unprepared for the circus his life had become. Taking his inheritance in a dossier case of notes from the Mercantile Bank of Principia, he secured early admission to the new Engineering College at Seton Grove far to the south and left the capital without so much as a goodbye. His sister similarly made off, convincing her boyfriend to elope, and the two settled in the Far West city of Vinland to pursue horticultural endeavors in Ardenia’s wine country.
Putting as much distance between himself and his troubles was the right tonic for the young Latham. He finished a three-year curriculum at Seton Grove in only two, and was recommended for an internship at Raines & Co. Engineers of Port William. While there, he became a favorite of the proprietor Laudun Raines, under whose tutelage Latham flourished.
He earned his keep. Just three years after joining the firm, Latham had become an assisting engineer in the construction of the rail bridge at Aldingham, which finished the locomotive line connecting Principia to Port William. He would then become the lead engineer building the state-of-the-art hydroelectric plant at Port William two years later. That plant supplied power to the entire city using water wheels to charge rows of dynamos along the bank of the Sornan River. It was a revolutionary design when Latham came up with it, and lots of newer hydroelectric plants were still copying his blueprint.
At 24 H.V. married Raines’ young daughter Astrid, which very shortly turned into a problem.
The boss’ daughter wasn’t quite the spoiled brat the clichés would make her out to be, but Astrid was less than the companion H.V. needed for the quiet, un-outrageous life he sought following the fame and misfortune of his parents. Specifically, she was possessed with a thirst for whisky and a predilection for the frequent use of the cannabis pipe, and these habits manifested themselves in less-than-decorous behavior at the Port William Society Club, where the city’s influential citizens shared membership.
Raines blamed H.V. for the frequency of Astrid’s missteps, to which the young engineer reacted negatively, but he got nowhere in his demands that she curtail her self-destructive behavior. Latham went so far as to commit her to the alcoholics’ asylum at Greyhill, only to see her return, stumblingly drunk, on the locomotive three days later with the explanation that she disapproved of the accommodations at the facility.
At last, there was a row involving an inebriated and combative Astrid and a flying plate at the Society Club, which was worse than any preceding event. This kerfuffle led to the firm losing a proposal to the Port William Transit Rail Co. for the construction of a trolley-car line servicing that city of 300,000. At that point Latham saw he had no option but divorce – a scandalous and extreme solution frowned upon by all in Ardenian society. The Chancery Court granted his suit and discharged him of his marital obligations, solely, the decree read, on the fact that no children were produced of the union.
Raines, however, fired his protégé on that very day.
Virtually penniless, with his good name in tatters and his personage the subject of cruel, twittering gossip, Latham strode into the Army recruitment office at Port William and signed up as a cavalryman at the questionable age of 30. Astrid, meanwhile, landed on her feet. She took up with a rather aged, thoroughly childless and rip-roaringly dipsomaniac shipping magnate and married him within weeks. Within months the old man had expired of liver failure, leaving Latham’s ex-wife the richest woman in Port William. Her scandalous and embarrassing behavior had in no time become delightfully eccentric to the city’s society; for Latham, climbing aboard a government-issued sorrel and riding off to the wild frontier to shoot Udar seemed like a far safer and more prudent proposition than sticking around town to endure Astrid’s social revenge.
Latham’s five-year tour of duty wasn’t spent mostly on horseback, however. He and his regiment, commanded by, in Latham’s view, an estimable major named Alfred Terhune, did patrol the new territory south of Port William won in Dunnan’s War, from the south banks of the Tweade west all the way to the newly-built coastal citadel at Strongstead. Along the way the regiment encountered enemy raiders and the horrors of Udar depredations more than once in the first six months of his tour. Following that, Latham’s regiment ventured into The Throat, the heavily-contested narrow valley cut into the massive Rogers Range to the west, for the next four months for even more dangerous contact with the Udar, including a major scrape at a place called Stone Lip, which Latham would never forget.
Suddenly, less than a year into his tour it was noticed that he was the Latham of engineering repute, something he hadn’t advertised but didn’t deny. At that moment he was plucked from his mount and put to work in the Engineering Corps at the army’s base at Barley Point.
Latham didn’t much complain over the rather radical change in his assignment. After seeing the enemy on several occasions, he felt as though he’d done enough duty and penance for screwing up his life with the boss’ daughter, and he was grateful for an opportunity to camp behind a desk and do what he was trained to do. Latham resumed his former profession, designing ad hoc upgrades to the army’s chain gun, supervising the construction of the military bridge over the Tweade at Battleford and performing other work.
Over time, though, Latham’s interest in engineering faded along with his desire to work for anyone else. So when his time in the Army ended, he returned to Port William and opened an office as an architect. And of all the moves he’d made, career-wise, this was the one which served him best. Over the ten years that followed, Latham designed a few houses and apartment buildings in Port William, though nothing in the fashionable areas of the city. He would draw plans for much of the new construction at Dunnansport’s wharves. He would designed several of the mansions in that new port city’s fashionable Tweade Landing district. More recently he received commissions for designing new and improved construction of many of the manor houses on the plantations in Dunnan’s Claim.
The planned addition at Hilltop Farm, where Latham was headed on the morning of the sixth day of the tenth month, was to be a spectacular undertaking and perhaps his architectural masterpiece. After spending the previous day riding the rails from Port William to Dunnansport and from there taking a steamboat up the Tweade to Barley Point, at dawn he led his horse onto the ferry across the river, with plans for the manor house and outbuildings, including a dormitory for the farm’s caretakers and hired hands, in a leather case slung across his shoulder. At the south ferry landing Latham led off at a trot down the road into the barley and wheat fields for Hilltop Farm and a date with architectural destiny.
But while Latham had successfully reinvented himself from a professional standpoint, at least enough to earn a living if not emerge as rich, Port William certainly hadn’t welcomed his return to city society. He’d turned into something of a loner of minor means, and a thorough workaholic with a quite limited and plebeian circle of friends: dock foremen, enlisted Marines and tavernkeepers. As to romance, Latham had gone fifteen years without prospects, and following the experience of Astrid and the social curse she had laid upon him in Port William, he’d more or less made his peace with the permanence of his condition.
But Latham wasn’t in quite the rut it might have appeared to his few remaining upper-crust acquaintances. Dunnan’s Claim being in the midst of rapid growth and accelerating wealth accumulation compared to the rest of the country, Latham figured, he stood to gain significantly from the expansion of Hilltop Farm. The Stuarts were the best-known family in the new territory, and the largest single landowners to date. Winning renown for having built an architecturally-significant structure on that site could lead to things H.V. had been planning since his Army days. He wanted to move his office from Port William, away from his former wife’s continuing gossip about him, down to Dunnansport and ride the new city’s growth to fortune and fame on his own terms. There wasn’t yet enough population or business to fully support that move.
The rich expansion of Dunnan’s Claim, he expected, would change all that. Over dinner at an inn at Barley Point the night before, Latham had reconnected with his former cavalry commander Terhune, now a colonel in charge of the base in that town. After a lengthy rant about the insufficiency of the troop strength of his command and the thoroughly disgraceful quality of their armaments and provisions, which Terhune said were inferior enough to their former materiel that he’d been scrounging relics to properly kit his regiment, the Colonel had told him of the plans to incorporate a new county south of the Tweade which would run the thirty miles to the seacoast along Watkins Gulf.
Those plans would mean founding a new county seat, which Terhune said was several years overdue, and it would mean the potential for years of lucrative and substantial architectural work for a renowned professional operating in the area. The rich lands being settled and the needs of those settlers could well make Latham wealthy beyond his dreams. Little wonder the plans for Hilltop Farm in his travel case would rival those of the grandiose estates in the Morgan River Valley west of the capital.
Latham was a veteran horseman, but his 45 years were beginning to take their toll. As he spurred his mount ahead down the well-lain gravel road to Hilltop Farm, he noted the discomfort in his back and knees. You’ve grown fat from too much time in inns and ale-houses, he thought. You look like a tomato with legs atop this horse. No wonder you’re already in pain.
Latham considered Terhune’s advice from last night’s conversation. “Take a wife, and have her bear you sons and at least one daughter,” the colonel, happily married with four grown children, had said. “You need sons to carry on your business, and until you’re in the family way that trouble in Port William will never be behind you.”
But who will want a fat old man with a balding pate like me? wondered Latham. My economic prospects are improving, but my name is twice cursed. No one of quality would consider my hand.
Latham knew the Colonel was right, though. Inns and ale-houses would be his death in shorter time than Latham wanted to consider, and he needed to press his marital options.
About two-thirds of the way to Hilltop Farm, an hour after starting his journey from the ferry landing, Latham’s reverie was broken when he saw smoke rising on the hill. He spurred his horse forward as his heart sank. Just my luck, he thought. They’re ruined from a faulty wire from the generator or a random spark from the fireplace, and my prized client is literally up in smoke.
But maybe, if he couldn’t help himself, he could help others if something had really gone wrong. Latham rode ahead, ascending the hill at a trot as the magnitude of the calamity befalling the Stuart estate began to manifest itself. He could see smoke columns from at least four – no, five – sources on the estate as he approached, and as he passed the stand of trees just north of the manor house near the top of the hill, he saw that the entire property lay ablaze.
That’s no electrical fire, Latham thought. This is something far worse. And I’ve seen it before.
The manor house was more ruin and smoke than an active inferno. But as he approached Latham saw something more telling than just the charred timbers of the newly-exposed roof.
Blood. Trails of it dotting the grounds outside the house.
Latham knew what that meant. Udar raiders had come.
He’d seen the handiwork of the Udar before, including in the aftermath of similar pillaging – though never of a prize like this. But that had been as part of a regiment of 100 cavalrymen armed with rifles and pistols against a war party of 30 to 40 brigands; the odds of battle were typically stacked heavily on the Ardenian side in those engagements.
Here, he was alone. And unarmed. Against what could be a murderous enemy in strength.
It was damned foolish to remain long. But Latham couldn’t come all this way without rendering what aid he could to any survivors he could find. See what can be done, then get out on the triple-time, he thought. The alarm has to be raised at Barley Point.
In designing the expansion, Latham had memorized the floor plan of the manor now ablaze in front of him. Seeing no one alive or dead on the premises, he felt safe enough for some rapid exploration and knew where survivors might be if there were any.
He knew there was a trap door leading to the hiding space in the cellar, hidden in the flower garden by the front porch. Latham moved a planter box from its spot over that door and there it was. He turned the latch and pulled it open. “Is anyone there?” he called down.
No answer, but he could hear whispering, as though from children.
“Don’t be afraid. I’m coming down,” he said, as he quickly descended the narrow ladder into the hiding space. At the bottom, he saw two terrified young ones – a boy and a girl – huddled together in one corner of the small space.
“You must be…Hannah and Ethan?” Latham said. “I’ve met both of you. Do you remember me? I was here some weeks ago to discuss expanding your house. Ethan, do you remember I showed you the plans for the dockyard in Dunnansport?”
The boy nodded.
“I know you’re scared, but I’ve got to get you both out of here right now. Will you come with me?”
“Sarah said we’re supposed to wait for her,” Hannah said. “She told us.”
“I know, sweetheart, but I don’t think she’s here right now. The house above you is burning. I think we need to go. I’ll get you to safety first and then I’ll come back and find your family. Is that fair?”
Ethan was the first to agree. He gathered, with difficulty, a heavy box and approached the ladder. “Here,” said Latham. “Let me carry that for you.”
Latham went up the ladder, carrying the family strongbox. Ethan and Hannah followed.
Now he was faced with a dilemma. The horse could carry him, and it perhaps could carry the two children as well. That box wouldn’t survive the journey.
“We’re going to have to leave this,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“No, we have to take it,” Ethan said. “Father said it has the family’s entire fortune in it.”
“I understand. It’s papers and files?”
“I think so,” said Hannah.
“Then we’re going to open it and put everything in my bags. But we’ve got to be quick. The bad men who did this could be coming back any minute. Fair?”
The children agreed, and Latham looked around for something to break open the strongbox.
What he found was a hoe standing against the northern wall – that and a curved Gazol sword laying in the grass a few feet away.
This was an Udar raid for sure now, he knew. No question left.
Returning to the box, Latham swung the hoe down on its hinges, earning a disinterested clank! from the box and no other result. A few more desperate swings and he abandoned that effort, taking up the Gazol instead. He noticed that he could just wedge the tip of the curved sword into the crease of the iron box at its back between the hinges, and then with some difficulty worked the box into position where he could attempt to pry it open. The lock at the front would not be budged.
Nor would the back.
But Latham had an idea. He’d use the hoe as a wedge and attempt to break one of the hinges, and maybe then the contents of the box could be retrieved.
It was worth a try, and as he drove the hoe’s blade into the crease, he felt one hinge begin to give way. As he leaned in, the other did as well and the box popped open, spilling papers everywhere.
“Quick, let’s gather these up. Stuff them in this bag,” he said, producing his travel case first to fit half the contents and then jamming the rest into a saddlebag.
Latham then mounted the horse, and brought first Hannah and then Ethan aboard – the girl behind and the boy in front. He carefully navigated through the gate to the road, and set off slowly to the north for fear of jostling the children too much as he attempted to take them to safety.
So far, there was no sign of the Udar or anyone else, but looking to the west Latham could see more smo
ke.
“That’s your neighbor to the west, right?” he asked.
“Right,” said Ethan. “Grayvern Farm. The Forlings live there.”
“It’s burning,” said Hannah. “They’re all burning.”
“Was it burning before Hilltop Farm,” asked Latham,” or do you know?”
“I don’t think it was,” said Hannah. “They must have come to us first and now they’re killing our neighbors.”
“We have to go,” Latham said. “Hold on tight. I want to get away from here as quickly as we can.”
He set the horse to a trot and made a quick exit from the ruined manor, without knowing the fate of the Stuart parents or older siblings who may have been on the estate at the time of the attack. Latham was loath to speculate as to the outcome of what he’d seen.
Either dead or carried off, he thought. The former is better.
Latham knew from experience. He’d seen the Udar in action.
…
THREE
In the South of Dunnan’s Claim – Noon (first day)
She came to slowly, with the sensation of blood running across her cheek and a scorching headache occupying her entire consciousness.
As Sarah strained to open her eyes, what she saw was the ground passing beneath her and what she felt was the intense pressure of having her head at the lowest elevation of her body. Her hair, which she’d pinned up while dressing that morning, was now a jumble and hung all about her face.
She was tied, bent and slung across a horse, and painfully jostled as it traveled at a full gallop. The Udar rider just next to her, she surmised, was the same demonic man she’d shot before her lights had gone out.
He murdered my sister, she thought, and the Lord of All knows what he’s going to do to me.