Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (38 page)

Willow should have been glad that the manipulative woman had judged this an auspicious time to throw Duncan over in favour of Carter Carnehan. Instead, it niggled at Willow that she had swapped the targets of her dubious charms. Of course, Duncan was well shot of the trophy-hunting tigress. The very thought of having Adella Cheyenne swanning around Hawkland Park being coldly indifferent to the servants while insisting on being called Mrs Landor was enough to make Willow shudder. Willow had hoped that Adella would find some amiable overseer on the station to transfer her transparent attentions to. Some clod of a man with muscles where his brains should be. Maybe Carter Carnehan fitted that model to a degree. Carter surely acted like a fool around Adella – although Willow couldn’t hold that against him specifically as a crime. Almost every male in Northhaven above the age of fourteen could be wrapped around her fingers with a similar degree of ease. But Carter didn’t deserve to have Adella Cheyenne stringing him along. It wasn’t any more than that. Any hot flushes she felt in Carter’s presence were surely the result of her annoyance at his bull-headed ways. There would never have been a more unsuitable match than one between the heiress to half the prefecture and the wild, uncivilised, penniless son of a churchman.
You’re just a slave now
, a voice within Willow reminded her. Same as everyone else here… including Carter.
Shut up
. She pinched herself, annoyed.
Even slaves have standards
.
Carter Carnehan means nothing to me. Nothing.

‘They’ve speeded up the belt again. I don’t know how they expect us to sort this mess with them running the line so fast,’ said Adella, her voice as sour as vinegar.

‘I believe they expect us to get faster as we work longer on the line,’ sighed Willow.

‘It’s fine for them,’ said Adella, her head nodding towards the slaves sitting down the line, quick hands dancing across the grading belt. ‘They’re used to paupers’ work in the mills and barns back home. You need to apply the right tool for the right job… but I’m wasted here. Haven’t they got a bureau that needs organising? These ores have to be shipped somewhere, and the rocks are going to need dockets and requisitions to be on their way.’

Willow swept the scanner over the rubble in front of her. Its display indicated lutetium deposits and she seized the rocks before they disappeared, tossing them into the appropriate bin behind her. Yes, this must be a far cry from the council rooms where Adella’s father had secured a nice cushy sinecure for her. No men to wheedle into doing the bulk of the work for her. Adella probably wouldn’t be satisfied in the sky mines until she was sitting on a plump cushion with a couple of slaves standing over her with palm leaves, fanning her useless carcass. Unfortunately for Adella, the grading line already had a supervisor. One of the old hands who had survived the last sky mine’s destruction – a tall woman called Kassina Hedgepeth. She must have been fat in her previous life; only loose jowls left as a reminder of where plump flesh had once hung. In Kassina’s case, her flat face, a bulbous nose that really
belonged
on a fatter woman, didn’t improve her looks. Well, beauty wasn’t a great deal of use for a slave: didn’t stop cave-ins burying you, didn’t help you sort faster, or earn you better rations.

‘Grab the largest rocks first!’ Kassina called towards Willow and Adella, not pausing from her slow promenade around the hall. ‘I only want to see rock dust and crumbs reaching the end of this line. And yell long before your bin gets filled up. Give the runners time to wheel you empty bins before you have to halt work.’ She didn’t stop to make sure she had been heard and understood, marching down the line and calling for an oil can to fix a roller jamming under the belt. It would be a few minutes before the line supervisor returned into earshot, and all around them, hushed voices started talking as they worked. The men had it easier in that regard. Willow had even heard singing coming out of the tunnels. Their supervisors only cared that the quotas were met.

‘Dust and crumbs,’ spat Adella. ‘That’s all we get to eat here anyway.’

A slave walked down the line with a leather drinking sack, pushing its nozzle into each woman’s grateful mouth, allowing them to take a gulp or two before moving on to the next slave. Willow tried to keep working when it was her turn, fighting back a coughing fit as the metallic-tasting liquid flowed down her throat in pulses. Then it was Adella’s turn, the woman complained bitterly: how the water was too warm and was making her feel sick.

‘I’ll make sure yours has ice in it next time,’ snapped the slave on hydration duty. It was all too easy to feel queasy here. The heat. The thin air. The light touch of gravity at altitude. The rations that never seemed to fill the hole left by the long, back-breaking work. But everyone on the line felt the same, and having to sit next to some imbecile whining about it didn’t help alleviate the symptoms
. No, not one little bit.

Adella looked daggers at the slave as she carried her water down the line. ‘It doesn’t matter. Carter has a plan to get back home, and then the overseers and their stupid sky miners can grub around to their heart’s content after every rock that comes out of the volcano.’

‘Show some caution,’ warned Willow. ‘Lower your voice. You need to put a brake on Carter’s foolishness, or you’re going to get him, yourself and everyone involved tossed off the station minus a parachute.’

‘Caution won’t do. We’re getting out of here.’

‘Adella, you have to face the facts of our situation.’

‘What facts do you know?
None
.’

‘I know we were on that Vandian warship for over two weeks,’ said Willow. ‘And I discovered from the hangar crew that the average speed of one of those metal monsters at high altitude is five thousand miles an hour. That’s straight from the Vandian who trained our transporter pilots to fly.’

‘So? So what?’

‘Haven’t you got half a brain? Take the speed and the time in the air and do the sums,’ said Willow. ‘That puts us at least one and a half million miles away from Northhaven. Even if you escaped the mines and hitched a ride with a caravan that was heading in the right direction and willing to harbour a runaway slave, it would take you four hundred years to reach Northhaven. Travelling by aircraft, it would be more than twenty years in the air. Can you fly? If you stole a plane, have you got a line of friendly fuel dumps along the way?’

Adella’s face turned pale. ‘You’re wrong! That’s just horseshit talked by the empire and the supervisors to put us off from escaping.’

‘I know how long it takes to move a cargo around,’ said Willow. ‘By barge, by wagon, by train, by air.’ She angrily grabbed one of the rocks in front of her. ‘I may not be much good at
this
, but I know the average speed of a caravan. Lord knows, I had to plan the freight often enough for the house’s harvests.’

‘But Carter’s got a plan…’

‘Then I hope it involves boarding the huge battleship that carried us here. I hope it involves overpowering the close to two thousand sailors that crew her decks. Because that’s the only way you’re returning to Northhaven in this lifetime.’

From the look on Adella’s face, Willow almost regretted bursting the woman’s bubble. But wishful thinking and an absence of planning wasn’t going to achieve anything other than throwing them down a worse hole than the one they already found themselves stuck in.

‘But he’s getting ready,’ said Adella. ‘Stealing a transporter; getting off the station. Carter has the others from the town raring to go. Eshean, Joah…’

‘Well, you’ve got to talk sense into them. Because by the sounds of it, all they’re going to do is get themselves dead. I understand how Carter thinks. Not a wall he comes across that won’t fall with a good hard kick. But this wall has a canyon-sized drop hiding behind it.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ protested Adella. A genuine look of fear settled across her features as the reality of their situation began to sink in. ‘We’re being worked to death on the line. Just cogs in a machine grinding us down. You saw the corpses of our people dragged off the new rock – how bust up Carter was left. Duncan too. They’ll die before we do; leave us here alone with nobody. I couldn’t bear that. In a couple of years we’ll be old hands, no different to Kassina over there. Everyone we know dead, our body chewed up by work. And that’s if we’re
lucky
– if we survive!’’

‘Well, it’s not a pretty thought,’ said Willow.

‘Any life has to be better than that. Even if we don’t get home. Just living in the wilderness, not trapped inside the sky mines.’

‘Maybe. But we don’t know much about life in the imperium, beyond the fact they’ve paid for us and branded us.’ She tapped her shoulder. ‘The Vandians will know we’re slaves wherever we go.’

‘I need hope, Willow. I need hope to live.’

Yes, I could do with a helping of that myself.

‘You’ve got to think of something,’ begged Adella. ‘If you know how far we’ve been taken, you can work out a way to get out of here. It’s your brains that Carter needs.’

Not that he knows it.
Despite herself, Willow couldn’t help feeling sorry for Adella. How desperate must she be to consider enlisting Willow’s help in escaping? But there wasn’t much of use Willow remembered from her library. Maybe some platitudes by philosophers who had been imprisoned for most of their lives. About how your mind always remained free, however bad your external circumstances grew. But Adella Cheyenne didn’t want to hear truisms. It was plans for a warship and the means to build it that she wanted.

‘It’s a miracle we need,’ sighed Willow. Her brooding was interrupted by a commotion outside the front of the grading hall, a runner entering the structure and calling for the overseer. Old Kassina rushed back like a shot. A brief, hurried conversation, then she strode down the line and called orders to the workers, exhorting them to work harder and faster.

‘Not any quicker,’ groaned Adella. ‘We’re new to this.’

‘New to
real
work, perhaps,’ barked Kassina, overhearing the worker’s complaints. ‘At least
pretend
to look like you’ve done a full day’s graft in your life. Princess Helrena is coming to inspect the initial deposits. The mistress is accompanied by two of the house’s allies – her cousin Baron Machus, and half-sister, Elanthra Skar.’ She strutted down the line, clapping her hands and shouting warnings about looking tardy in front of the visitors.

Princess Helrena.
The bitch who put a scar across Carter’s face.
It was the imperial noblewoman’s fault that they had ended up here. Willow felt a deep loathing rise within her. Willow wasn’t used to hating, but she could learn the skill when it came to their cursed
mistress
. At the mere suggestion they would be encountering the ruthless princess again, Adella seemed to find a newly discovered reserve of speed. Her fingers flickered across the rubble, scanning, sorting and filling the bins behind the belt. ‘Why us?’ moaned Adella. ‘Why us? With all the countries closer to Vandia they could have raided for slaves.’

I swear, if Adella were twice as smart, she’d be a half-wit.
‘If you’re going to play the highwayman, you don’t stand outside your own house to rob travellers. Weyland’s far enough away that the imper­ium’s not going to find an angry skyguard squadron turning up looking for revenge.’
And their taste for slaving aside, we must be savages compared to them.

When Helrena Skar swept into the hall, the noblewoman looked little different from her appearence in the bandit carrier, arriving to purchase her new labour force. A retinue of guardsmen followed Helrena, two fellow nobles accompanying her at the front of the party. One of them was a woman wearing similar finery to Helrena. Princess Elanthra, presumably, her face as cold as a block of ice. Hard edges that might have been sculpted from porcelain, a short black bob of a haircut that gave her an androgynous quality. A brooding hulk of man trailed after them. Baron Machus – his brutal features only made less dangerous by the dim look of comprehension he wore on his face. If the distance between the three of them was any guide, Willow pegged the hard-looking man as the closer of the princess’s two allies. There seemed to be a tension in the air at odds with a mere tour of the spoils. The slaves who worked the line might as well have been invisible. Their contempt set Willow’s nerves on edge; her toil superfluous to whatever machinations were these nobles’ concern today. Was that how tenant farmers had felt back at Northhaven? Willow and her father riding past in a sleek carriage and Willow with as little care for their names as these three?
How the tables have turned.
There were doubtless more than a few working beside Willow secretly pleased to see a Landor heir brought low… made to toil at this drudgery. Willow stared at the group. She spotted a girl of around thirteen of fourteen years standing next to a bald retainer in grey robes. It seemed an age since Willow had seen someone too young to survive the sky mines’ labour camp. She had forgotten that children even existed in the world. This one was no slave or servant, though; not if the luxurious cut of her uniform was anything to go by. She wore her blonde hair in elaborate curls, cascading down the side of an elaborately engraved breastplate. The young girl peered curiously around the sorting hall, as if this was the first time she’d seen it. The man whose hand she was holding looked like a slave, though. Albeit one far better fed than any sky-mining vassal. Willow was curious about the girl’s presence, so out of place here, but she concentrated on working the conveyor belt instead. The three visitors halted near enough for Willow to eavesdrop on their conversation over the grading line’s clatter.

‘You!’ snapped Princess Elanthra at the local overseer. ‘Bring me the tally for the day’s sort.’

Kassina returned with a sheet detailing how much had been separated. Princess Helrena made a point of receiving it first, only then passing it across to her half-sister.

‘A tonne of terbium, another of samarium and cerium. Very good. That will bring in over seventy thousand taels at the next market release.’