Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (13 page)

‘I was in two minds as to whether to tell you about this,’ sighed Brother Frael. ‘You needed to know about Carter. But following? Have you ever heard of success in such matters? You will die an old man out in the infinite world and never return to us.’

‘A man’s got to die of something,’ said Jacob. He held a hand out to Khow, and the twisted man helped him sit up. Even that made him feel dizzy. ‘How far you figuring on travelling, Khow?’

‘Only to my son,’ said the gask.

Only to my son. That’s as good a way of looking on it as any other.
All thoughts of allowing the ocean to take his life had fled from Jacob’s thoughts. Carter could be alive. There was a chance he was
alive
, survived along with hundreds of other frightened, terrified Northhaven townspeople. Taken as human beasts of burden. Part of Jacob hated how easily he grasped at this single, measly thin thread that had been thrown to him. How easily he could believe in the forest man’s superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
God, tell me that this is real. Tell me that this isn’t just some survival instinct kicking in, looking for an excuse to go on living, living for nothing but a fantasy?
He heard a voice answer inside his mind. ‘
Mister Carnehan, you damned fool. If our son is alive, you can drag your carcass out of bed and bring him back home. I don’t care if he’s one mile away or ten million. You haul yourself after him and keep going until you’ve brought our boy back home again. Him and every other man and woman that was taken from our town. There is no distance too far; no force too strong to stop you
.’ That voice sounded a lot like his dead wife’s. Jacob brushed the tears out of his eyes. Damn his self-pity. Those would be the last tears he would allow himself until Carter was safe once more. Jacob shoved the weight of blankets away. He might as well have been sliding the lid off his coffin.

Brother Frael tutted and Jacob caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the sideboard, a skeleton swaying in white underclothes. ‘I’ll have some real food now, brother. Not chicken broth.’ Jacob limped downstairs, ate and waited for the librarian to arrive. Filling up on meat and cheese and bread and milk and everything that had been dust in his mouth until a few minutes ago. He was still eating when Wiggins came into the rectory with the library’s guild master by his side, a leather tube bulging with maps tucked under the old man’s arm, along with a large book. Jacob realised this was the first time he had ever seen Lucas make a house call. He was probably violating half a dozen guild oaths in carrying his precious maps beyond the hold’s security.

‘Shoot,’ grinned Wiggins, seeing Jacob out of his bed and sitting at the table. ‘Always said Northhaven needed a cathedral, the size we were getting to. And here we are… a gaggle of monks moving around the church and a walking corpse crawled out of his coffin and stuffing his face fit to be a fully titled bishop.’

Jacob ignored the constable’s sardonic humour and nodded to Lucas. ‘Master Codex. I was happy to see that none of your people were listed among the dead and missing, apart from Carter, of course.’

‘Not for a lack of trying,’ said Lucas. ‘Seventy bandits turned up outside the library with barrels of blasting powder for our gate – intent on looting the hold of its works. There are, I am sorry to say, plenty of libraries outside the guild that would pay handsomely for contraband titles plundered from my shelves.’

‘They couldn’t get past your metal doors?’

‘It was the strangest thing,’ said the librarian. ‘As the bandits arrived, a mist fell over the valley. It turned so thick that an aircraft circling in support of their raiders flew too low, destroying itself against the valley’s slopes.’

‘I have heard that can happen in battles,’ said Jacob. ‘The fires from Northhaven, the weapons smoke. It can play games with the weather.’

‘When we came out to check, there were bandits’ corpses scattered everywhere. Reckon the explosion from the plane’s payload must have taken them out. The rest had fled.’

‘It was surely the hand of the saints,’ said Brother Frael.

‘Perhaps. When Carter was small, I always used to tell him that there was nothing God loves so much of an evening than settling back in a comfortable chair and reading a little.’

‘Poor Carter,’ sighed Lucas. ‘I certainly am sorry the way things have worked out. And for your wife, may the saints watch over her treasured soul.’

Jacob lifted a fork towards the window of the kitchen, the crunch of the marines digging fresh graves carrying over the rectory wall. ‘How much sorry have we got to go around for this?’

‘Always enough,’ said the monk.

‘You’re a better man than I, Brother,’ said Jacob. He pointed at the librarian’s tube next to the red leather-bound tome he was carrying. ‘The map holder I recognise, what’s the book?’

‘Volume seven hundred and twenty-six of the
Bestiary Physicallis
,’ said Lucas. ‘The one where the raiders’ nation is referenced.’

‘You’re sure you’ve got the right people?’

‘Indeed I am,’ said Lucas, tapping his volume. ‘The hospital has already dissected a corpse. The physical drift of their internal organs matches the people recorded inside this volume, as does their physical appearance. The bandits are called skels. Millennia ago, their nation lay millions of miles southwest of here. It was destroyed and overrun when their neighbours tired of the skels’ continued brigandage. Since then, they have lived as aerial nomads. Slavers, as we know to our cost.’

‘How up-to-date is that entry?’

‘It was recorded three thousand years ago,’ said Lucas. ‘But the devastation of Northhaven indicates their society is still based on brigandage and blood.’

‘A long way from home,’ said Wiggins, pulling up a chair at the table. ‘Never heard of them before.’

‘Unfortunately, Weyland has,’ said Lucas. ‘Three years ago, a town out in the east by the great lakes was attacked by slavers. No bandits’ bodies were taken, but the raiders’ description matches that of our attackers. And this is only what my archivists have managed to turn up in the archives with a few days of searching. There may have been many similar attacks across Weyland. On other league nations, too, perhaps.’

Jacobs scratched the stubble on his cheeks. ‘If there’s a pattern to their raids and we can spot it…’
Our soldiers can be waiting for them next time.

‘If the assembly and the king know of this, then they wouldn’t want panic,’ speculated Wiggins.

‘I’ll take informed caution over a slaughter,’ growled Jacob.
If they knew, they should have told us. Warned the prefecture.

Lucas lifted up his map tube and removed an old parchment from inside, unfurling it over the tabletop. A patchwork of a thousand thumbnail-sized nations and countries, all squashed together so tight there wasn’t even room to fit in their names – only numbers: an index on the side to identify each nation. Down the middle of the map lay the long boot-like shape of the Lancean Ocean, the feuding nations of the Burn on the western shore, the countries of the Lanca along the eastern seaboard.

Khow leant over the table. ‘Where are we on your representation?’

Jacob reached out and touched the Kingdom of Weyland.

‘Then my son is here,’ said the gask. His hand stretched out, a finger coming down on the border where the last nation of the Lanca lay.

‘Heading south?’ said Wiggins, not able to hide the surprise in his voice.

Jacob felt the disappointment rising within him, crushing his heart
. Nothing but woodland magic and mystical nonsense after all.
‘I think you’re mistaken.’

‘I am not. He is
here
,’ said Khow, tapping the map again.

‘I do not think that is likely,’ said Lucas, gently. ‘As a rule, the nations of mankind grow more civilised the further south you travel.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Wiggins. ‘Out west, across the water, they’d sell your hide in a second. Don’t have slave markets out in the Burn, just markets, you understand? And north of Rodal, well, you go far enough north and they ain’t even got swords to beat on each other, just bows and flinthead arrows. Slaves are as good as horses and cattle to the nomad hordes.’

The gask shrugged his shoulders. ‘We have never kept slaves among the gasks. But where I have indicated… that is where my son is. He is still being moved away from us, I fear.’

‘It’s possible, theoretically,’ said Lucas, as much to himself as the others in the room. ‘If you flew far enough south and travelled past the rumoured origin point of the trading caravans, resources would grow scarcer again. You’d eventually end up flying over countries where keeping slaves could be considered an economic proposition.’

‘Years of flight, half a lifetime to travel that far,’ said Jacob. ‘All that time… the bandits feeding and watering their slaves, fuelling their carrier’s weight as they travelled. It makes no sense? The skels have to be looking to sell Northhaven’s people as slaves in the Burn. Only a week’s flight across the sea; plenty of demand out west for slaves to bear spears and muskets for some Burn warlord.’

‘Do you have a representation of Northhaven similar to this document?’ asked Khow.

Jacob walked to his shelves in the parlour and returned with a local map. Khow examined the layout of the town for a second. He tapped the outer circle of the old town by the walls’ eastern keep. ‘One of the gasks in my party is my niece, Khbar. She is presently here, in the middle of the street, and is walking towards here.’ He placed a finger on the end of the road.

Wiggins pulled a signalling mirror out of his belt pouch and left to flash a message towards the battlements. He returned a few minutes later with a crooked grin on his lips. ‘Right on the money, damned if he ain’t. One of my boys saw the lady gask outside the general store at the eastern end of the outer circle.’

‘If you wish,’ said Khow, ‘I can sit here with you, and at a time of your choosing, I will show you again where Khbar is travelling.’

‘I believe you’re not selling us a confidence trick,’ said Jacob. ‘Forgive me my surprise. I have seen enough lies in my time to know the truth.’
Even though it makes no sense. Flying south? Travelling that far? Well, I’ll travel to hell without a compass if it means saving Carter.

‘I know what that look in your eyes means, Father,’ said Lucas, the librarian’s hypnotic gaze fixed on the pastor. ‘I might fold you into a frequency wave and have the radiomen fling you across their relays, and you would still have a job catching up with the bandits’ carrier. And even if you can overtake the raiders, what then? Will you convert the skels into sainted followers of the church; have them renounce brigandage and make a gift of our kidnapped people back to you?’

Jacob pushed his now empty plate aside. ‘What do you say, Khow?’

‘That what a father feels for his child has a distance that cannot be measured. You are a manling and I am a gask, but in this matter, as in many others, the equations of our existence are bound together.’

Jacob nodded in agreement. The gask’s words reflected how he felt. But there was a faint voice of doubt within him, too. One that said that setting out to rescue Carter and the others was as much a death wish as walking into the ocean. But he had nothing else to live for, now. Only this.
You always were a stubborn mule
, said the voice in his mind.
Now you’re going to put that to a purpose, you hear me?
The old librarian leaned across the table, passing Jacob a piece of engraved stone set in a rectangle of soft black leather.

‘What’s this?’ asked Jacob.

‘If you truly are set on this madness… your son is a member of the guild, pastor, albeit reluctantly. Show this at any hold of ours, however far you need to travel, and you shall be given any and all assistance our libraries can provide.’

Jacob was touched. He had a feeling he was going to need all the help he could get. ‘Thank you, Lucas. I don’t know what to say.’

‘You don’t need to say anything. In this matter, actions speak louder than words – and that is from someone for whom words are his business.’

Jacob pocketed the seal. ‘Carter never was going to be much of a librarian, was he?’

‘That which he has been sent will help him understand who and what he is to be.’

‘Troubles do have a way of doing that.’

‘That’s something to be afraid of,’ said Wiggins. ‘A stubborn fool with a plan. You want to let me in on it?’

Jacob lifted up the newspaper, a long list of dead across its pages. ‘Here’s my plan. It’s time I started thinking of people who have suffered other than myself.’

So light, floating in heaven.
Carter groaned as pain flared across his ribs, his face a crackling web of agony.
Not paradise, after all.
He pulled himself up from a warm wooden floor, into a dim, crowded pen stinking of sweat. Joah was there, the young stonemason’s face a bruised swollen mess. A mirror of Carter’s own? ‘Where are we?’

‘Slave hold of that bandit carrier,’ said Joah. ‘You were banged up pretty hard. Still, reckon we’re lucky. One of the bandit officers stopped his soldiers kicking us to death; figured he might as well turn a profit from our sorry hides.’

Carter focused on their surroundings. They were inside a mesh-walled cage in a gloomy, cavernous chamber packed with hundreds of young Weylanders. One of many cells in the sizeable space, all filled to capacity with produce for the slave block. Only two portholes in the wooden fuselage inside Carter’s pen, people crowding around both viewports for a chance to see something other than the dirty bodies of their fellow unwashed prisoners. A walkway crossed outside their cage, dividing them from an identical pen opposite.

‘Who else is here?’

‘Hell, Carter, might as well ask who isn’t here. Most of the people in your graduation year, most of the people in mine. Eshean and Caleb are about somewhere. Nobody much older than us, though. No one young enough to need coddling, either. Only prime meat. The rest, I hear the bastards left as fertiliser in the fields out to the river.’

Then it came back to Carter, the terrible memory bursting like a dam. His mother dying. His father blown apart by a bandit mortar. The fuselage shifted slightly and Carter choked, his stomach heaving. His family was dead. How could he go on, now?
You don’t have a choice, fool. You’ve been taken for a slave
. His gut retched again and he shut his eyes. Even with them closed he couldn’t take away the image of his mother dying of her horrific injuries; the mortar shell exploding where his father stood.