Far Called Trilogy 01 - In Dark Service (57 page)

On top of the practical business of learning the house’s estates, there were also Lady Cassandra’s academic lessons. Doctor Yair Horvak supervised these. On first meeting the tutor, Horvak looked little like the scholar Duncan expected to find teaching Cassandra. A large belly that made a waddle out of every step, a wild silver beard and big bushy eyebrows that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a nomadic tribesman. His one academic affectation was a monocle pushed into the bulges of flesh on his right cheek, a lens which sat there glinting over the tributaries of red veins that flushed his face and large, bulbous nose. The doctor’s voluminous girth would untuck the silk shirt he wore, flapping out of a waistcoat lined with pockets, each filled with instruments jangling like a watchmaker wherever he shuffled. It was clear that Yair Horvak also worked on great scientific endeavours for the house; but whenever he tried to delegate his duties tutoring Cassandra to one of his assistants, the young noblewoman would create such a stink that Horvak was forced to return to the education of the house’s heir. For her, this seemed good sport.

The first time Duncan got to speak properly to the doctor was one afternoon when Cassandra studiously occupied her desk, poring over a pile of books she had been set to read and copying out notes. Paetro cleaned a pistol at another work surface in the doctor’s laboratory; his weapon carefully laid out in pieces as if his task was to learn how to reverse engineer the gun’s mechanism.

‘Here,’ commanded the doctor, ‘over here. Make yourself useful, Duncan of Weyland.’ He indicated a rail above his work bench where a series of miniature antigravity stones floated, connected to each other by a crown of wires while the arrangement gave off steaming icy cold vapours. It had been assembled on the other side of the lab. Duncan walked over to the bench, and the doctor passed him a pair of steel tongs, their handles lined with cork. ‘Grasp the largest antigravity stone with these and hold the circle as steady as you can. They are going to start vibrating when I increase the power into the circuit.’

Duncan did as he was bid, while the doctor moved behind a nearby bank of equipment, running his fat fingers over the controls. It took less than a minute for the stones to start shaking fiercely, the icy cloud surrounding them growing bitingly cold. Duncan used all of his strength to keep the circle of stones flying away from the surface. There was a slight cracking noise from his tongs. ‘Your superconductor field’s about to snap my tongs.’

Horvak worked his control panel and the shaking subsided. ‘Superconductor field, eh?’ chortled the man. ‘And what does an unassuming barbarian have to teach me of science?’

‘The rail guild operated trains in my country,’ said Duncan. ‘They run their trains above antigravity stones not much different from these.’

Horvak raised a podgy finger in the air. ‘And no doubt a hold controlled by the librarians close by; stuffed with books full of blueprints to build such devices, if only you had more than wood and corn oil to construct their components. That was a rhetorical question, young fellow. Inside the imperium a “barbarian” is anyone unlucky enough to live at the far end of the caravan routes. It is the curse of extreme distance.’

‘And is your nation counted among the ranks of the “barbarians”?’

‘The curse of distance, inverted,’ said Horvak. ‘My country, Gankana, directly borders the imperium to the east. We have been under the imperial yoke for so long that I fear we are all evolved towards servility, now. My people are rarely taken for mill or field or mine-work, though. We are valued for our minds. Mathematicians and scientists and philosophers comprise my people’s human sacrifices to the great Vandian dragon.’

‘And so here you are.’

‘Yes, here I am. It is not much of a choice, is it? To live far enough away to be free of the empire, yet doomed to a life of resource-starved simplicity – a living hewn with stone axes and supplied by wooden carts. Or close enough to the imperium’s borders to be made a serf, yet free to exploit the imperial bounty by advancing the boundaries of science.’

Duncan indicated the circuit of antigravity stones. ‘With this?’

‘Further, faster, better,’ said the doctor, enigmatically. ‘The only science that ever interests the imperium – extending the emperor’s reach.’

‘Of course,’ said Duncan.

‘And your tone of voice tells me that you disapprove. Let us say, one small side-effect of this work will be to understand the world a little better. And that is always a worthy endeavour.’

‘I understand the world just about as well I want to,’ said Duncan, tapping his slave’s tunic.

‘Curiosity has not yet been beaten out of my people, for all of our many faults,’ said Horvak. ‘This is proper, given we should judge a person by their questions rather than their answers. Why, for instance, should we experience gravity as a variable force, able to crush a man as flat as a pancake at modest depths underground, while leaving us floating like a leaf on the wind at quite modest altitudes? Why should that be?’

‘Because that’s the way it always has been?’

Horvak grunted. ‘You would make a most excellent Vandian, sir. Only concerned with more rapidly loading cannons and how fast and far your war craft may fly. No, no. That will not do. I am certain the answers to the questions which have been puzzling me lie in the stars.’

‘You are also an astrologer?’

‘An
astronomer
, dear fellow. The radiation belt that surrounds Pellas is another mystery, as well as the bane of taking accurate astronomical observations. But we shall see, yes we shall. I shall push and prod and seek whatever revelations there are to be wormed out of nature’s anomalous weft, warp, and weave. There is nothing that exists so great or marvellous that over time mankind does not admire it less and less.’ He walked towards a wall of books, removing a tome. Then he pulled out a pencil from his waistcoat, ready to make notes inside the book. ‘Now, given that you are the first Weylander to serve in the house I have come across, I shall thank you for your people’s creation myth.’

Duncan stared quizzically at the doctor, not sure what he meant.

‘I have yet to meet a people who do not have one. In Gankana, our priests tell of a time when our ancient ancestors were formed from clay in the image of the gods, to act as their servants. But when the god Porida’s son died fighting his evil sister, Porida grew lonely, and ordered a great oven to be constructed. Into that vast oven, he marched all of his servants and borrowed the organs from his dead son, giving a gift of blood and flesh to each slave. Then he baked his servants with a holy flame until they emerged from the oven as true humans. The Gankanese were the first people on Pellas, but when the other gods saw what Porida had done, they grew jealous, and set up their own ovens to convert their servants. Thus other peoples emerged. Eventually all of the gods passed away, despairing of their foolishness in recasting base flesh to resemble their glory. Your people have such a myth that explains your beginnings?’

‘Of a kind,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s told in our Bible. Mankind was full of sin and living in cities that knew only gambling and whoring and violence. So God sent a great darkness across the land to warn the people to mend their evil ways, but the fallen men and women, busy with their revels, barely even noticed his warning. Despairing, God began to drown the cities, one by one. When it came to the last city, his angels – the ethreaal – whom God had sent to destroy humanity, took pity at the sight of the children’s weeping faces. In their mercy, the ethreaal secretly bore twelve of the gentlest children away to a paradise, far across the sea drowning their homes, where they were commanded to start anew. Twelve female angels stayed with the boys, and from their children we are all descended.’

Doctor Horvak nodded; satisfied, as if he had known this would be the case all along. ‘Yours is one of the more common tales. Salvation from a great calamity – there are hundreds of nations in these pages that possess an almost identical creation myth.’

‘And this is part of your research?’

‘More of a hobby,’ said the doctor. He winked at Duncan. ‘Let us say that if you want to know where you are going, sir, you must first begin with where you began.’

‘It’s just a Bible tale,’ said Duncan. This man was eccentric, that much was certain. Blinking too much while he talked, constantly wetting his lips with his tongue as if he was sizing Duncan’s frame up for the dinner plate. ‘If there were any gentle angels in my people’s bloodline, Doctor, I didn’t come across too many of their descendants back home.’

‘Nor will you here,’ Horvak chortled. ‘No, indeed.’

There was a clanging from outside the steel door into Horvak’s laboratory. Paetro got up to open the door, revealing a steel cart from the castle’s kitchens pushed by a servant – but it came accompanied by a most unusual escort. Two soldiers waited by its side; not house troops, but crimson-uniformed – without the usual armour, their faces covered by leather masks that were a simulacra of the human visage. In front of them stood a man that Duncan might have taken for the pair’s officer, apart from the fact that he wore expensive civilian clothes. A dark tunic with a wolf-like emblem over his right breast, a velvet cloak lined with crimson in its interior to match his bodyguards. The leader’s pale white face was round and dandyish, at odds with the stiff, high collar from which his neck emerged.

‘Look now, I have brought your food,’ said the man, staring intently at Yair Horvak. Duncan knew this was a person of account from the careful way that Paetro stepped aside. Paetro always moved cautiously when Helrena’s upper-caste allies were about. The guardsman had a special wary stance, just for them.

‘You are too kind,’ coughed the doctor, the strain in his voice matching Paetro’s alertness.

Lady Cassandra glanced up from her mess of books. ‘Apolleon, this is my time with the doctor.’

‘Ah, the acquisition of knowledge,’ said the man, entering while his two bodyguards took up positions by either side of the door. ‘Where would a young mind be without it?’ He ruffled the young noblewoman’s hair as he passed, a little too roughly to be considered fondly. ‘But the emperor is growing eager to know how his projects here are progressing. So I must ask for a little of your tutor’s time.’

It did not sound like a request to Duncan, and the lack of argument and ease with which Cassandra grumpily began to clear her work away reinforced Duncan’s view of the stranger’s high position. Apolleon halted before Duncan, examining the slave with mock amuse­ment. ‘Pon my honour, this must be the new pair of eyes arrived to watch over our young lady. The sky miner adept at the prevention of mining
accidents
. Well played.’ He tapped the tunic covering Duncan’s stomach. ‘And a fine tongue to taste what may sit ill with our young lady’s constitution. Will you sample the fare I have brought along for the good doctor, slave?’

‘I am sure I would be beaten for tasting another’s meal,’ said Duncan. ‘When my orders are to safeguard Lady Cassandra.’

‘Quite so,’ said Apolleon. He threw his head back and laughed coldly. ‘And as you can see from the doctor’s gut, he is as far ahead of us in his appreciation of food, as his mind is in the application of his genius. No. No, let’s not deprive the doctor of his supper by sharing it so rudely. And now—’ his hand encompassed the antigravity stones ‘—how fares our endeavour?’

‘Slowly,’ said the doctor. ‘I am having issues with superfluids and their tunnel barrier limits.’

‘As I said you would. But there are ways to overcome your difficulties…’

‘Suggestions from your
other
researchers?’

‘Is that jealousy I detect, Doctor? Our future glories are far too bright to share with a
single
house,’ said Apolleon. ‘Even one with the great Yair Horvak ensconced within its citadel.’ He waved perfunc­torily towards the others in the room. Their time here was at an end. The two guards stepped forward, expecting the young lady and her retinue to comply immediately. The cook left first, abandoning his cart and the room a little too eagerly.

Duncan glanced back towards the laboratory as they exited. ‘Is the doctor safe in there? Those two are not house troops.’

‘No,’ said Paetro, ‘but that is rather the point. Apolleon’s guards are
hoodsmen
– officers of the secret police.’

‘He’s not just another princeling, then?’

Cassandra sniggered at the notion. ‘Ha! He’s far beyond that. Apolleon is chief of the secret service and the house’s most valuable ally. When my grandfather dies, the secret police’s support will be pivotal in deciding which of the emperor’s children shall ascend to the diamond throne.’

Duncan thought of asking if Cassandra’s mother would seek that position for herself, but he bit down the question. He might as well have asked if a fish sought water to swim in. ‘I’d have expected him to be older.’

‘Apolleon’s rise has been the very definition of meteoric, lad,’ said Paetro. ‘As counsel to the emperor, his guidance is more valuable than anything your sweat ever dislodged from the sky mines. His advice is gold and that’s the truth.’

Duncan gazed curiously back towards the now locked door
. So what in the world’s he doing back there
?
Giving scientific counsel to one of the supposed greatest philosophers of the age?

TWELVE

PUNISHMENT DUTY

Carter was surprised to discover that facing the disdain of most of the labourers on the station could lower his servitude even further. Carter might have wriggled out of being executed, but everyone on the station knew that he was as guilty of trying to escape as the workers who had died in the attempt. Now, he had been ostracised within the sky mines for having dared attempt an act everyone else was too cowardly and timid to try. Banished into internal exile for having brought collective punishment down on his barracks; he was a walking, living reminder of their cravenness. At times, it was only the slow smouldering hatred Carter felt for the people who had betrayed him that kept him alive. He was watched like a hawk now, in case he should attempt to escape again. He felt eyes on him constantly. Especially the supervisors among the old hands, the ones who had the most to suffer from losing face in front of the Vandians. The people for whom his persistence and ornery courage was the biggest slap in the face; a living rejoinder to their base survival in the mines for so long. And hiding among those ranks, Carter reckoned, were his traitors. They must suspect Carter knew his escape attempt had been betrayed. Maybe they were making their own plans to settle with him before he got around to taking his revenge. Carter grew careful, paranoid even. Trusting in no one, confiding in no one. He tasted his canteen for poison before he swigged his water. He swapped his bowl in the food hall with others when nobody was watching. He opened the blasting caps that were passed to him, checking they hadn’t been overcharged to ensure a nasty tunnelling accident. Sometimes, it was only the kindness of Kerge and Willow that gave him the strength to continue. The gask still examined walls and searched chambers for listening devices; machines that Carter knew he would never find. Betrayal in the sky mines walked on two legs, mouthing platitudes about sticking together and seeing the job done as best they could while they lived. No more trips to the surface to check the seismic sensors for Carter. He served his time at the dirty, dangerous end of mining work – blasting fresh tunnels and digging passages, praying cave-ins wouldn’t bury him. When Carter wasn’t putting his life on the line, he was given a grim new burden to fill his time. If there had been a caste lower than slave, his new duties would’ve been perfect for that status. Carter was ordered to retrieve dead miners’ bodies where they were killed, mangled, buried, blown up, or sometimes just dropped dead of sheer exhaustion – all hope bled from their existence. After their remains had been recovered, Carter wrapped the corpses for burial and then rolled them off the station’s roof, their bodies sent flapping towards the mist-covered ground below. Sometimes the dead had barrack mates who would attend, holding a simple, quick ceremony. More often than not, the slaves had nobody, and Carter would drag the shrouds to a rocky ramp raised on the roof for the express purpose of launching the dead into the fiery, smoke-filled void below. It felt to Carter as though he was consigning corpses to hell, but he knew that nothing that came after
this
could be as base and meaningless as the existence they’d endured prior to their deaths. A deliveryman for devils and stealers. That was what his life had become. One morning he arrived at the fever room to remove a body, a woman who had passed in the night. She had already been wrapped in the simple hemp sack flannelling the station’s grain was delivered in. Carter didn’t recognise her ancient withered face, staring lifelessly out from a circle of cloth. An old hand. Not one of the Weylanders. There was one other occupied bunk in the chamber; a wiry, thin man, his tattered slave’s tunic repaired so often that it was hard to tell where the original fabric began and the patching ended. He had been here the last few times Carter had visited; not getting better any time soon. He rose like a ghost, helping Carter lift the corpse by her wrapped legs.

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘I knew her,’ he said, simply. ‘Nobody else left to stand for her here, now, apart from me.’

‘I can do the job,’ said Carter. ‘I’m used to it.’

‘One more thing,’ said the man, wheezing as they manoeuvred the shroud through the fever room’s door. ‘There’s always one more thing in the sky mines.’

Carter knew how he felt, so he resigned himself to having company for what would pass for a funeral up top. It was strange, but he preferred ceremonies where it was just him and the body. Being alone seemed peaceful, almost as if he had known the deceased. As though the corpses were his friends. Wasn’t there one of the ethreaal who was meant to attend to souls as they passed from the mortal world to heaven? He couldn’t remember the angel’s name. His father’s sermons were lost in another time. Maybe Carter had missed his true calling back home? He should have been an undertaker’s apprentice, rather than buried out in the library hold.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Carter. ‘I’m the reason why half the station is on short rations. They say I tried to escape.’

‘You did? Well, good for you. But you went around it all wrong.’ He brushed the falling ash off the shroud. ‘This is the surest way to escape the sky mines.’

They climbed the steep stairs to the station roof. ‘Nobody ever made it out then, the other way?’

‘Not in my time. Too few of us, too many Vandians in the miles between here and freedom.’

‘So how would you do this back home… burial, a cremation?’

The man rested the body for a second and scratched his face; as though it had been so long it was hard for him to remember. ‘Sometimes a cremation. More often than not, if you knew it was your time, you just left your village and walked off into the winter wilds to lie down. What you left behind was a gift for the trees and the grass and the creatures that forage among them.’

‘That sounds lonely.’

‘No. It’s travelling. It’s how you arrive in the world and it’s how you leave.’

That almost made sense to Carter.
Just travelling
.

‘You know how you can tell you’ve been in the sky mines too long?’ said the man.

Carter stepped outside into the heat. Ash was falling, a thin layer of it kicking up with every step of his sandals, hot against his toes. Marker flags flapped in the wind. ‘How do you tell?’

‘You last just long enough to see a different country being raided to fill your station with slaves. It was Persdad the skels used to attack, once upon a time. Our land’s north of the league by a few decades, along the caravan routes. Everyone in this station used to be Persdadian. But we were the last of them. Her and me. Just me, now.’

They carried the body over the stone burial ramp. It was flat on top, a steep incline down to the rocky edge of the station. A metal plate to hold the body in place until it was time to commit the corpse into the sky. ‘Why did the skels stop raiding you?’

‘Started getting organised, I heard, from the last slaves to be taken. People watching out for skel carriers in the sky. Alert beacons positioned every fifty miles. Setting up ballistae in the big towns, manned day and night. I think the skels are leaving Persdad fallow, now, like a farmer sets aside a field. We had an empire too; at least, we obeyed our emperor’s couriers when they rode in. Just chariots and carts and spears. Nothing like Vandia here. They really do have an empire worthy of the name, don’t they?’

Carter lifted the body to the top of the burial ramp. ‘They’re human, same as us. They can bleed and die.’

‘You’ll see, one day. There’ll be just a handful of Weylanders left. And then a Vandian slave ship will show up with a hold full of fresh meat; green workers brushing dust off their robes from a nation on the other side of Pellas you’ll be lucky you’ve even heard of. That’s how you’ll know you’ve overstayed your welcome in our floating paradise.’

‘Based on how many enemies I’ve made so far on the station, I doubt if I’ll be around that long,’ said Carter.

‘You’re a good man. I’ve seen how well you treat the bodies. Not like the others, just like rubbish to be tossed over the side. It’s a pity nobody will remember that, when the time of your reckoning comes. Our memories have already faded in the people we left behind. One day our family will pass, too, and the dark time when the skels raided will wane into legend. Eventually, even those legends will vanish. All into dust, all of it.’

‘I’m not a good man,’ said Carter. ‘People die around me.’

‘Open your eyes,’ said the man. ‘That’s what we’re in the sky mines for. That’s why we were taken. To give our lives to make the imperium eternal. To die in place of the Vandians who would have otherwise worked the mines. None of this is on you. What happens here would have happened with or without your personal misery swirling in the mix.’

Carter made sure the shroud was tightly wrapped around the body. ‘What was her name?’

‘Jicole. You should have seen her back home. Quite a beauty. Cleverer than me, tougher too, in her way. She was going to be a harpist at the music academy. To hear her play was to think you had gone to heaven. I used to compose for her, on and off, and she would surprise me every time. Never was so much talent wasted in our sky-borne hell as the gifts of this woman.’

‘You got any words for her?’

‘Those will do.’

Carter gripped the lever to lower the piece of iron at the top of the ramp. ‘Goodbye, then, Jicole. You’re well out of here, now.’

He released the barrier and the body went tumbling down, propelled off the side, white smoke billowing around her, and then she was gone from sight.

‘She’s travelling, now,’ said the old man. ‘Travelling again.’

Carter’s head began to throb, another of the cursed hallucinations that had been plaguing him since he’d escaped the stratovolcano. Mad, impossible visions of Vandia’s distant past flashed through his mind. Was he going crazy, or was this a mixture of hunger, overwork, and too long exposed to the strange, rare gases of the volcano?
Perhaps I’m going insane? Could anyone blame me?
He removed his hands from his forehead. A pair of rings had been left behind on the burial platform, simple wedding bands. The old man was gone. Carter looked over the side of the station’s edge; but billowing clouds had claimed the second body as readily as they had the first. There were no more of his people in the sky mines, now. Only Weylanders.

Carter slumped by the burial ramp, gripping the rings tight enough in his palm to draw blood. The pain was real; reminding him he was still alive and this wasn’t a nightmare. He began to cry.
Just travelling
.
That’s all. Just travelling
.

Jacob felt sick and guilty in equal measure, watching the massive cats tear into Sariel’s broken body, the bard’s corpse played with as if he was no more than a rag doll. From the grand duke’s viewing platform there came the sound of polite applause, as though the old vagrant had just finished one of his tall tales, rather than been savaged for the predators’ feast. The big cat which had ripped off Sariel’s arm discarded it in the sand, pacing restlessly while it growled towards the wooden palisade holding the prisoners. Well-fed, the creatures were all too similar to their human masters. This pride killed for amusement, not food.

‘I think the leather-skin can go next,’ called Major Alock from his chair beside the ruler. ‘With his poison spines, he might make more of a fight of it. Although I believe most gasks tend towards a pacifist disposition. What do you think, pastor, will your leather-skin friend give us a contest worthy of the name, or have you taught him to be a good little God-botherer? Is he going to turn the other cheek for you?’

The major looked like he might renew his taunting, but his voice dropped away. Below in the arena, Sariel picked himself up. The bard’s clothes were badly ripped by his mauling, the stump of his right arm pumping blood. But not nearly enough of it, given his terrible injury, and what little there was of it as white and thick as cream. If his miraculous resurrection provided an implausible sight, it was as nothing compared to what Jacob saw below his torn clothes. Two broken white stumps protruded from his spine, as though he had once possessed a pair of massive wings crudely amputated from his back.

‘They have no taste for me!’ called Sariel, swaying, as though he had merely been pelted by rotten fruit by another unreceptive audience. He stumbled towards his missing limb, and picking it up with his left hand, re-attached it to the broken stump, where his skin appeared to ripple and seal around the wounded limb. ‘I warned you hell-hated popinjays! The prince of players’ delicate flesh makes for an unpleasant repast.’

A fierce howling rose from behind the wooden palisade, the gad prisoners going wild in a way that Jacob had never seen before, wailing and shaking the barrier, flinging their bodies about and leaping into the air. But this reaction was as nothing to the grand duke’s. He leapt out of his seat, screaming and pushing his bodyguards forward from their formation behind his chair. He shoved them in front of the viewing gallery’s armoured glass as though he expected Sariel to vault up and assassinate him.

‘Take them away!’ yelled the grand duke. ‘Lock them up, all of them, before that mangy devil’s flesh poisons my beauties! Bring me the diviners from their cages. Bring them before me now. NOW!’

‘Kill them all!’ argued Major Alock. ‘I don’t care what twisted people that thieving scoundrel belongs to. A couple of volleys into his skull will finish him off.’

‘It is the prophecy!’ yelled the grand duke, pushing the officer away. ‘I need to consult with my diviners.’

‘Prophecy?’ The major looked shaken by the sudden turn of events.

‘You fool! That mangy devil is Jok, the fallen angel. Can you not see it? Blood of milk, and wings that have been hacked away by the Land Mother as punishment for leading his kin in their unholy rebellion.’ The grand duke’s hand jabbed down towards Sariel, who was busy collecting his staff and ignoring the storm his unexpected survival had created. ‘Your arrival is not my end. I tell you this! I am the house and the house is
me
.’

‘Listen to me,’ Alock barked at the panicked ruler and his entour­age. ‘Kill them now! If you value the supply of resources provided to your country…’