Read Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service Online
Authors: Stephen Hunt
Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service
To my wife.
The love we give away is the only love we keep.
THE FAR-CALLED
Volume One
STEPHEN HUNT
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
CONTENTS
THE ABACUS BOX
Northhaven Township.
The Kingdom of Weyland
Jacob Carnehan could tell there was going to be a whole mess of trouble. A hush fell across the crowded street, stillness as sharp as a razor. That was when the constable appeared sprinting around the corner, his silver badge clipped to a belt jangling with a pistol on one side and a long-knife balancing the gun. This trouble didn’t involve Jacob, but from the look of urgency on Constable Wiggins’ face, Jacob was going to be involved in it anyhow. Wiggins was old for the job, late sixties and running around after street thievery and sheep rustling at his age. No wonder he was sweating; rivulets of the stuff running down the skin of his shiny white skull, white tufts soaked at the side.
‘Jacob,’ the constable puffed, drawing to a stop and placing his hands on his knees as he recovered.
‘Constable Wiggins. You planning on taking retirement any time before the call of God puts you in a box before the congregation?’
‘What would I be doing then?’ Wiggins coughed, clearing his throat and spitting across the street. ‘If you are what you do, when you don’t, you ain’t. I finish with my job, I’ll be in that box by the end of the week anyway. We’ve got some trouble in old lady Kalem’s inn, the
Green Dragon
.’
Jacob sighed. End of the harvest season, naturally there was going to be trouble. Wheat and corn being shipped out along the train line, moved down the river to the port. Farm workers with money, dockers with money, sailors with money, just about everyone looking to spend that coin too hasty or steal someone else’s. Northhaven reaped a whole crop of aggravation this month, and if people were sitting in the pews of Jacob’s church with just a few black eyes by the end of the week, not lying at home with bandages covering stab wounds or worse, then he would consider himself a lucky man. ‘Who is it this time?’
‘Sailors up from the coast,’ said Wiggins. ‘From a schooner called the
Venture
. They were playing cards against a gask. He won of course. Sailors claim he’s cheating, using one of their people’s abacus machines to hoodwink them.’
Jacob had to stop himself from laughing. Gasks didn’t have much use for gods or preachers, given how they worshipped probability. It was a brave man who played cards against one of their people. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve heard how dangerous a gask can be?’
‘Reckon they’ve heard how almighty peaceful they are,’ said Wiggins.
Up to a point. And when push came to shove, that point could be damn efficient.
‘I’ve left that green-behind-the-ears probationer, Jay, holding the line,’ said Wiggins, raising a hand placatingly to encompass the simple black churchman’s tunic Jacob was wearing. ‘You’ve got a way of calming men down, Jacob, that’s rare to behold. If it’s not you settling the trouble, then it’ll be the high sheriff, and then there’ll be caskets at the front of your church for sure.’
That was true. The high sheriff was up for re-election soon. Coming down hard on rowdy out-of-towners was just the kind of crowd-pleasing that would be going on if the shallow, politically-minded dolt arrived in Northhaven’s new town district.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Jacob. ‘Where’s the sailors’ skipper?’
‘Crew’s captain stayed downriver,’ said Wiggins. ‘I’ve already been to the radiomen’s hold and sent word to the harbourmaster at Redwater to have him take a boat up here. His sail-tuggers have been creating problems in town all week as it is, but this is the first time they’ve actually pulled a knife on anyone.’
‘Do they speak any language I can understand, Mister Wiggins?’
‘They sure curse in trade-tongue well enough for a man to understand.’
Jacob walked fast, his long legs pacing as the short constable struggled to keep up
. I wonder if Wiggins knows the other constables call him Stumpy behind his back?
‘Sometimes I don’t know who it is I’m working for here. The church or the high sheriff?’
‘Hell, I could just shoot them,’ said Wiggins. ‘But then I’d be at the front of your church having to listen to you sermonise about the natural harmony of the universe and how it don’t include shortening another’s natural span.’
Jacob snorted. ‘You haven’t drawn that gun in years. You shoot, you’ll lose your fingers when the barrel blows.’
Wiggins patted a retractable baton belted next to his long-knife. ‘When I give my sermons with this, the cuss receiving the Word of Wiggins stays alive long enough to learn better. Weren’t we all young once?’
The constable’s philosophising reminded Jacob that this wasn’t the only predicament he was facing this morning.
If only rowdy sailors were the start and end of my troubles.
‘Never a truer word spoken, friend.’
They arrived where they needed to be. The
Green Dragon
inn was part of Northhaven’s outer ring, a sprawl of buildings spilling beyond the high battlements that protected the old town. It was a lot easier to apply for a licence from the city’s aldermen to sell liquor this far out. But
this
far out also meant visitors never reached constables on the gates into the town’s centre, where the ordinances to hand over weapons were enforced. An angry buzz resonated from behind the tavern’s open doors. Jacob noted the flow of foot traffic moving away from the three-storey tavern. Those were the sensible ones. Fleeing the trouble.
So, how come I’m the only one heading towards it?
Jacob stepped up to the entrance; brownstone bricks, half-covered by climbing ivy, sunlight on windowpanes obscuring the drama unfolding within. Jay stood inside the tavern, a contemporary of Jacob’s son. His blue constable’s uniform seemed a couple of sizes too large for his frame – someone at the station with a sense of humour pranking the cadet officer. His pistol appeared equally out of place. The Landsman five-shot as jarring as finding a timberman’s saw in the fingers of an infant – equally as dangerous to the boy wielding it as the patrons of the inn he was threatening.
The quarrelsome sailors had overturned the drinking hall’s tables. One of their number held the gask from behind, a second man in front had a dagger pushed up against the twisted man’s leathery brown neck. The gask looked young to Jacob. You could tell from the ridge of quills running along the side of his arms. Orange, not black, as a mature adult male’s would be. His fingers were coiled around a little silver box; which, apart from its illuminated dials, might have been a tinder-lighter. Jacob noted the ring of patrons, farm labourers mostly, standing nervously apart from the rowdy seamen. Behind the long serving counter, old lady Kalem’s staff crouched out of aim of the cadet constable. Old lady Kalem was as fearless in the face of the destruction of her drinking house as she was about anything else. The tavern’s owner hurled abuse at the sailors from behind the heft of her heavy scattergun, her weapon seesawing on the counter with the best part of a small cannon’s menace.
Jacob and Wiggins walked forward, the constable pushing down the cadet’s pistol while the usual patrons moved aside for Jacob. There was a stillness and calm about the pastor… the quiet before a stormfront. Some people called it a church aura, though not all the church’s pastors possessed it. You didn’t have to have met Jacob Carnehan before to feel it. There were many in the room that had never met the churchman before, but they fell aside with the same hesitant wariness. This pastor in his black jacket and his serious face and penetrating green eyes. No hat to cover his curly mop of dark hair. It was as though he carried an invisible lance before him, a space clearing, all eyes fixed upon him.
Jacob stopped just short of the puddle of spilled beer. He spoke to the mob of sailors, maybe twenty of them, his voice deep and resonant. ‘You’ve been out at sea a long time, I know. The Lancean Ocean, more than half a year’s sailing, with only the occasional island to steady your feet in between. Curled up so tight. A watch spring, ready to snap when it tries to unwind.’
‘This one cheated us!’ cried the sailor holding a knife against the gask’s neck, his indignant tone wavering in the face of the pastor’s still, quiet demeanour.
‘I assure you, I did not,’ said the gask, with the slight watery accent of all his people, his vocal cords jouncing against each other.
‘I know,’ said Jacob.
‘He was counting cards on that abacus machine of his,’ spat the knifeman.
Jacob shrugged. ‘Of course he was. But not to rig your game. When a gask gambles, he has to make sure he doesn’t offend against the laws of probability. If your friend here were winning too heavy, he’d have needed to fold his hand. Too much luck for him in the game would bring bad luck to the rest of his people out in the forests, right?’
‘You are learned,’ said the young gask. ‘It is not wise to offend the harmony of averages.’
‘And I appreciate your forbearance,’ said Jacob, ‘with these gentlemen of the ocean.’
‘I’m the one with a blade pushed up against this dirty card-sharping leather-skin’s neck,’ said the sailor. ‘Maybe you should be appreciating me more, here, in this arrangement?’
Seems like these fellows fresh off the boat don’t know how hard adult gasks work to teach their young kin to master their temper. Or why.
Jacob lifted up one of the cards spilled across the floorboards during the fracas. He nodded at the gask before tossing the card into the air. The muscles along the gask’s brown arm swelled taut and an orange spine flicked out from the quills along the twisted man’s forearm, impaling the card quivering against a wall.
‘That’s the reason gasks don’t boil over,’ Jacob told the astonished sailors, the man holding the gask from behind releasing his prisoner. The idiot had just realised how easily he could have been turned into a human pincushion. Jacob’s words and the gask’s demonstration both served their purpose. ‘There’s poison on a gask spine that’ll have you dead on the floor in seconds.’
All fight fled from the sailors. The mob believed they had been in control, but in reality, they had been balancing on a precipice, dulled by drink and anger and too blind to see the fall in front of them.
‘Set those tables back up,’ ordered Wiggins. ‘You lads can pay for any breakages before you leave.’ He patted Jacob on the arm as the pastor headed towards the bar. ‘They sure are as dumb as dirt.’
‘They’ve never seen a gask before,’ said Jacob.
‘You ply foreign parts, you learn caution,’ said Wiggins. ‘Or if it ain’t a gask to teach you better, it’ll be someone else.’
‘Like you said, they’re young and ignorant.’
‘Never seen a man talk ’em down like you can,’ said Wiggins. Behind him, Cadet Constable Jay glowered at the sailors. Probably disappointed that he hadn’t got to fire off a warning shot or bust some heads with his lead-weighted baton. ‘Not all pastors got the way like you have. Maybe that wandering monk that comes begging through here every few years with his rice bowl stretched out. He can talk up a storm, or whistle a tornado out of existence like you can. But have you ever heard the pastor out at Redwater sermonise? Dry as tobacco in a curing chamber.’
‘Better words than sharp steel,’ said Jacob. ‘Without words, people become wolves. Without words we forget ourselves.’
‘Them words in the Bible?’
‘All words are. All learning.’
Wiggins drew out a long noise at the back of his throat, something close to doubt. ‘You know, I warned you that your boy would buck. Apprenticing him to the Librarians’ Guild, sticking him in that windowless shelter below the hills. A boy like Carter, that’s the same as burying him. I could’ve got him onto the high sheriff’s rolls. If I can turn that young blockhead Jay into police, I surely could have done it for Carter Carnehan.’
‘My son needs to reach for words more,’ said Jacob. He tapped the grip of the constable’s holstered pistol. ‘I won’t have him treating
that
as a tool of work. Violence solves nothing.’
‘If you’d given the boy a little more of the back of your hand when he was younger, maybe…’ muttered Wiggins.
Jacob said nothing. It was too bad.
If my son had his way, he’d sign on with one of the captains in port as quick as a flash. But what kind of life would that be for Carter?
No roots in his life, years sailing the ocean, running short of drinking water and chewing on biscuits with more weevils than wheat. Storms flashing out of the immense waters, capable of ripping masts off a vessel and sweeping her crew into the depths. In exchange for what? Seeing strange lands? However far you travelled, wherever you landed, you always ran into yourself. Travel only ever offered the illusion of escape. A trick. A distraction. Human nature was the same everywhere.
Old lady Kalem had slipped her artillery piece back under the counter. The tavern’s owner manoeuvred her large bulk opposite Jacob and Wiggins. ‘Whisky, my dears?’
‘A little early in the day for me,’ said Jacob. ‘A rice wine instead, perhaps.’
‘I swear you must be part-Rodalian,’ laughed the
Green Dragon
’s proprietor, bringing out a bulbous pottery decanter alongside a bottle of the local firewater. She dropped them both on the counter.
Deputy Wiggins rubbed his hands together approvingly. ‘Sweet and warm.’
‘Just like my soul,’ Jacob smiled.
The young gask appeared at the pastor’s side, requesting a lemon juice. Alcohol was a pure poison to gasks. Poison for most common pattern people too, but then Jacob had never met a man half as clever as the stupidest gask. The gask brushed the sawdust off his simple white cotton toga before he leaned across the counter to drink.
‘You’re a little early in town, friend?’ said Wiggins. ‘The monthly caravan from the forests isn’t due in for another couple of weeks. You arrived early for the market tomorrow?’
‘I am called Kerge among my people and I’ve come here from Quehanna in search of my mean,’ said the gask. ‘I thank you for your assistance.’
‘Well, hell, you found a whole pack of mean among those sailors on shore leave.’
‘He’s talking about a spiritual journey,’ Jacob corrected the constable. ‘His people’s wandering as they pass from child to adult. Kerge is seeking to weigh himself against fate, against probability.’